2024 and 2025 - at the turn of the years

This post has been written on either side of the New Year.

Janus From Walltham Abbey

 There's a certain sense of frustration in being confined to a wheelchair as well as being physically cautious - a quality acquired after too many occasions lying on the floor after falls waiting for assistance. Fortunately we have great neighbours whom we have learned to call on, as the prescription, "Ring 999," usually entails long waits. The frustration is compounded by having the world mainly mediated through a screen or by radio. One doesn't need an algorithm to detect a certain uniformity of news narrative. I've observed that journalists often derive their news from other journalists' stories. As my father used to recite to us:"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum." (De Morgan, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes, 1872).

Looking back at my year, I consider this to have been vividly exemplified in the treatment of Archbishop Justin Welby. On Monday I commented:

"On 29th December, the Church remembered Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. In TSEliot's play, Thomas preaches his last sermon on Christmas Day 1170. '...it is fitting on Christ's birth day, to remember what is that Peace which He brought; and, dear children, I do not think that I shall ever preach to you again; and... it is possible that in short time you may have yet another martyr, and that one perhaps not the last.' Four days later he is murdered in his cathedral by four knights who thought they were carrying out their King's wish - mistakenly." That couldn't happen today, of course, could it? No. Today it would happen by social and mainstream media (plus petitions) seizing uncritically upon a convenient pretext to impugn a good man's integrity and oust him from office in, as the admirable Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin described it, "the lynch-mob effect".

Looking back over my blog I see I was also much preoccupied with the debate about assisted suicide - which eventually came to the much altered House of Commons (following Labour's landslide victory in the July General Election). In the event MPs voted in favour of the second reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by a majority of 55. I concluded that it was one step on the road to a state-sponsored National Death Service. It remains to be seen how far its proponents will try to extend its boundaries.

2024 was trumpeted as the year of elections, and it was. Perhaps the largest in terms of population was in India where the party of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, lost its absolute majority. In the UK the Conservative Party which had been in power for 14 years was trounced having made itself almost terminally unpopular.

Entering Notre-Dame Cathedral

In France President Macron, despite a successful Olympics and a magnificently restored Notre-Dame Cathedral, in effect received a thumbs down when both the far left and the far right oustripped his centre party - and lastly came the big one: in the USA ex-President Trump won a whopping victory over his opponent, Kamala Harris, who was the Democrats' last minute stand in for President Biden, who had been deemed too elderly for another four years in office. If there is a trend in all these, it seems to be that incumbent governments had lost their voters' confidence.

Joanne Froggatt in 'Breathtaking' (ITV)

Highlights of 2024 for me were watching the Paris Olympics, celebrating a significant wedding anniversary with friends and family, and going to see Sheridan's The School for Scandal at the RSC in Stratford. We've usually hugely enjoyed their Shakespeare, but how would we like their Restoration comedy? As it happened, we loved it. Clever, colourful and great fun. On the small screen, along with half the country, I was gripped and appalled by Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Shocking that the post office masters and mistresses have still not received their due redress. I was disappointed that ITV's mini-series, Breathtaking, with its searing exposé of the treatment of healthworkers during Covid, has not received similar attention and that the cost and sacrifice of all the NHS staff who were at the front line of the battle on our behalf have not been recognised or compensated as they surely deserve. On a lighter note I've enjoyed Return to Paradise - an Australian daughter of the comedy Caribbean detective series Death in Paradise. It stars Anna Samson as Detective Inspector Mackenzie Clarke, who seems to be on the "spectrum" but, and probably because of that, is a brilliant if uncoventional detective. I'm glad to read that a second series is "under development".

Casting a long shadow over 2024 was the expanding conflict in Gaza and the even more protracted invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, plus civil wars in Sudan, Myanmar and doubtless other countries about which we never hear. Last year I wrote a poem on Holy Innocents' Day. 12 months later, I wrote another one on the same subject. I wonder whether I'll be doing the same in another 12 months.

Father pulling dead son after missile attack In Gaza - Channel 4

Searching the rubble after missile strike  - Democracy Now

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

The rabbi whose mother escaped death                                                 In the kinder transport comments,
‘We need to have compassion.’
His voice is full of sadness.
In only two months more than a year
Fourteen and a half thousand slain
And nearly a million homeless
Seeking refuge.

‘Children,’ he says, ‘should never be collateral damage.’
Yet here we are, ending December,
Gaza destroyed and the children
Crying from the blood-stained ruins
Of their once happy homes,
Hospitals raped of life-giving medicines,
Fatherless, homeless, no escape
From the invader’s insane juggernaut.

With privileged forewarning you escaped
To Egypt; while all the other mothers wept
Did you hear the wailing? Does your Son
Now hear? Or does he recline unmoved, no crying,
Away in a heavenly manger?
With the One who wailed, yes groaned at a grave,
Surely now together you both walk and weep
Among the desolated people whom he loves.

And where’s the old carpenter? Is he not
Unseen among the fathers and brothers
Where they heave the beams and throw aside
The smashed family treasures seeking loved ones
Crying cursing loudly their Herod of today
Who in his fury commanded this catastrophe?
No flight to Egypt now for them
The healer, builder, the mother are here.

As with your Son you walk unseen among the ruins
Surely now you tell him of the pain and the joy
Of carrying a child within you, and the protracted pangs
Of birth, and the agony, oh the agony as he dies,  
Surely you do not tell the mothers and fathers
Searching the rubble now that all will be well
That a joyful resurrection day will come
But with him and them you sit and weep. (Holy Innocents' Day 2024)

From Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris

Like a beauty pageant contestant, I could wish for world peace in 2025. I suspect that is too big an ask, although it remains something I pray for because it's certainly proved to have been beyond the ingenuity of human politicians. I'm not sure whether the likes of Mr Elon Musk do anything to promote peace and justice (which of course go hand in hand). And so, beside removing myself from X which I have done in a vain gesture of protest, my wish for that rich overly ambitious man is that he himself would take a ride on one of his rockets to Mars and stay there incommunicado. Another associated wish is that all the newly elected politicians, at least in this country, would prove themselves different from their predecessors and do better than their promises. As for the good old CofE, my wish is that a worthy successor to Justin Welby is appointed and that it should be a woman (from south of the city of Newcastle). 

Riccardo Muti's New Year message

Finally, the New Year's Day concert from Vienna was particularly good this year. The conductor was the 83 year-old Italian maestro, Riccardo Muti. The orchestra clearly like and respond to him. After the traditional orchestra wishing the audience a happy new year in unison, Muti's speech was short and to the point: "In my own Italian language on behalf of the Vienna Philharmonic I wish everyone three things: Peace, Brotherhood, and Love - in the whole world." To which a member of the orchestra responded, “Si!" And so do I.