Category Archives: Blog
The Boys in the Park
Nothing like watching football played in the times of Covid to help one reflect on the sport and what if anything we might learn from it. My local beloved Battersea Park was earlier this afternoon alive with the sound and sight of young boys enjoying an outing in the glow of a gentle autumn sun, their teacher half-heartedly trying to impose some rhythm and order on their young charges’ play. Hard as the track-suited sports master tried to channel the ball and encourage a decent combination of a pass or …
London Diary 6
In these times of Covid , I woke or rather decided I couldn’t get to sleep so better get up. It was still dark. I looked out at the pavement. It was covered in gold leaves, reflected in the glow of the street lamp. And then as the wind stirred and the leaves danced- I realised that this was it-my day of being let back into the outside. For two weeks I had been without moving from my home, sticking to the quarantine imposed by government after returning to London …
Swans in Time of C19
London Diary : Swans 21 May Two months on from C19 lockdown.A wonderful early morning in Battersea Park with the appearance of the first cygnet to hatch this year. For us regular park users the swan colony and its evolution across the seasons and the years has always had pride of place among the wild life that inhabits this historic green space near the River Thames in south London. But with the park providing a mental and physical life-line during the C19 lock-down, the bonding, mating and hatching of these …
A Test of Our Humanity
News of the evacuation at the end of January from coronavirus-hit Wuhan including 83 British and 27 EU mainly Spanish citizens was largely overshadowed, in the British and Spanish media at least, by coverage of the UK’s official exit from the EU. Nonetheless reports focused on the evident sense of relief felt by some of the evacuees at getting out , as well as a sense of uncertainty about their health prospects.. The only certainty about the coronavirus itself is that it has affected not inconsiderable numbers in China, enough …
A necessary friendship
In 1954 When I was a one year old , my Spanish mother took me to see a bit of Royal pageantry near Buckingham Palace on the occasion of Emperor Haile Selassie’s state visit to the UK. So my mother told me many years later, she arrived to find that the crowds had built up, led by a line of uniformed English nannies with their young charges occupying the first row giving on to the main square from the side of St James’s Park. Undeterred, my mother gently moved her …
El sentido liberal
El sentido liberal Es estos días que avanzan las fechas de elecciones en España y el Reino Unido, dos países que por sangre de madre y padre me unen en un compartido sentido de patriotismo, quería reflejar sobre aspectos que me llaman la atención ya que tienen que ver con algunos valores de conducta cívica además de política. De los recién acontecimientos, quería remarcar en dos que se vivieron por separado en ambos países a principios de esta semana y que por algunas horas dominaron la cobertura mediática nacional. …
Encounters with the Common Good
I know I am not alone in struggling not to be overwhelmed at times by all the negativity in so many words and acts, a sense of despair about the state of the world from Brexit to Trump, via massacres and other man-made disasters. So let me share three shared encounters in recent days that reminded me that our spirits can be lifted if we allow other less binary, less visceral and conflictive human narratives to give us direction and a sense of common purpose. The first was a silent …
Falklands War-History & Legacy
The Falklands War, following the Argentine military occupation of disputed British territory in the South Atlantic, involved the biggest British naval deployment since WW2, lasted 74 days and cost the lives 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three Falkland Islanders . It ended in British victory, the collapse of Argentina’s military regime, and contributed to Mrs Thatcher’s reelection as prime-minister. To a new generation of young European adults, the Falklands War not only barely features in their collective memory, but is largely ignored as a subject worth …
The shame of Argentine Football
In the Paraguayan Capital of Asuncion , hardly an icon of historic accountability, a group of South American football executives will meet tomorrow (Tuesday) to decide when and how, if at all, the second leg of the continent’s club championship Copa Libertadores final between River Plate and Boca Juniors of Argentina will be played. This is no routine meeting. It comes after the match initially scheduled for last Saturday was cancelled twice over the weekend as a result of a violent attack in Buenos Aires on the Boca team bus …
