It's a small world ... but not small enough, yet.

This all started with the Libyan stalemate.  I watch scenes from Misrata with growing horror - the children evacuated this week with appalling injuries and obvious fear in their eyes got to me, and so did the desperation of those so-called 'rebels' (freedom fighters?) darting with their guns through the rubble in the streets of the city.  It quickly brings to mind other catastrophes around the world too, man-made and natural: Yugoslavia, Palestine, Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti, Japan, Ivory Coast ... the more I think, the longer the list becomes.

The very happening of these calamities is bad enough but it seems compounded by the trouble we have in responding to them - to the extent that it often seems we do nothing at all.  Take Libya.  First-off, nobody did anything, except for polite calls for restraint and eventually some slightly harsher words.  That was ineffective, but by that point the situation there was already in free-fall.  (Perhaps time was needed to warm up for the next step, but that seems a pretty damning indictment on the workings of the world.)  Next, the United Nations stepped in, but the politics of the Security Council (a threatened no-vote here, an abstention there) and the precedence of other recent UN-sanctioned actions (Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously) resulted in a diluted resolution, the interpretation of which seems to have been left open to debate ever since.  At last, the world took action 'to protect civilians', but it has hardly been decisive and now the coalition appears divided, the slaughter goes on and no-one seems to know what to do.  Of course, Libya also brings into sharper focus the other places around the world where we actually do nothing, in spite of our equal horror: Bahrain in recent months, Lebanon in 2006 (when Israel invaded), Georgia in 2008 (when Russia invaded) and Gaza in 2009 spring to mind.  Our failure to act makes it seem that we have double standards that are infuriating and embarrassing; I'm not sure if we do, or if sometimes we just don't know what to do.

In terms of communication, our world now is so incredibly small.  The bare fact of happenings from all over  the world scrolls across the bottom of our television screens and flashes onto our mobile telephones as a 140-character tweet, followed quickly by the first photographs and the growing details on news websites and twenty-four hour television news services.  The pace at which the world has shrunk in this regard is startling.  The virtually-instantaneous news coverage we have at our finger tips did not exist when I was a child - just fifteen to twenty years ago - neither did twenty-four-hour news programmes.  We might catch a brief radio news bulletin during the day and we tuned in dutifully for the six-o'clock or the nine-o'clock news to find out what had happened around the world.  It's not so long since the sketchy details of news from far-flung countries arrived a day or two after it had happened nor even really since people in remote parts of Britain would find out an event in another part of their own country days (conceivably even weeks) after it had happened.  I wonder if our politicians sometimes wish we weren't as clued-up today as we are about the goings-on around the world!

The challenge for the politicians, I think, is that they must know from the moment we see something awful happening somewhere in the world (basically, as it happens), we want something done about it.  In the same scenes we watch on television they must hear our questions: What will we do as people's livelihoods and their very lives crumble away in the aftermath of this earthquake or are washed away in that freak storm?  How will we put a stop to genocide on the other side of the world?  How will we ease the suffering of the refugees from conflicts in several different countries at the same time as feed the starving in another famine-struck region?  How will we help end the rule of a corrupt despot?  The problem for us is that for all our world has become a place small enough to see and hear events ten-thousand miles away as they happen, it is still too big for us to do very much about them, certainly not with the speed we wish.

It seems to me that we haven't even started to adapt to our smaller world; the workings of our world are out-of-date, built for different purposes and they can't keep up with the global challenges of the modern world - the way a town's medieval road network is not built to cope with the twenty-first century rush-hour.  Religions can no longer answer our questions as easily or with the same confidence they used to.  With its watered-down and sometimes unenforced resolutions, the U.N. is left wanting.  NATO is constrained by its history and exclusivity.  Collectives of countries like the E.U., the Arab League and the African Union are weakened by their weaker, less-committed members.  Financial mechanisms buckle.  Perhaps even the idea of nationhood is increasingly irrelevant as goods and peoples and monies and ideas and languages flow through old borders with ease - those borders seem restrictive.

The hope I think is in the continued shrinking of the world.  I'm very conscious that I am writing this blog from the perspective of a westerner, living comfortably in a highly-developed country; the world must look different for someone else living in a developing country without a television or mobile telephone or internet access.  Yet we refer to those countries as developing rather than 'stuck' or 'backwards', which says something about our humanity and our optimism and our determination that the world will go on shrinking.  These are countries for which the world is shrinking too.  And as it goes on shrinking, we will, of course, carry on caring and wanting to do more to address the problems of the world.  As the world shrinks and develops therefore, it is inevitable that we will adapt the workings of it to meet our global challenges.  The two go hand in hand.  Perhaps even the pace of change in the workings of the world will speed up soon - to better meet the demands of people living in this small world.

Maybe that will be the global revolution of the twenty-first century, or the twenty-second century.  Either way, there is hope.

Incy-Wincy

He's less than a quarter of the size of my little finger nail.  (And I chew my finger nails!)  His legs are thinner than ... they're as thin as thin can be.  And he's got eight of them!  Eight legs!  From even this distance of just a few feet, he's tiny enough to be just an odd smudge climbing up the wall.  He can walk up walls!  And across the ceiling!  I must look huge to him, through all eight of his eyes.  Microscopic, little eyes; all-seeing.  And when he slips from the wall he can cast his own lifeline; a lifeline that he can weave to become the most intricate masterpiece of art - better than anything I could create with a lifetime's practice.

What an odd world mine must be to him; from his perspective.  I wonder what this room looks like to him, if he even imagines what the other side is like.  Is the outdoors frightening when you're barely bigger than a pinhead?

A huge life - no less than mine, no less than a whale's - all wrapped up in the tiniest, most perfect little body.  How amazing is that?!  How special.

Rare things.

Contemplating whether to write anything today, I came close to concluding that nothing notable had happened and it wasn't even worth firing up the laptop.  A scan through a few websites did nothing to inspire me either.

Yet today, rare things crossed my path - things I am ashamed to have almost dismissed as forgettable.

Firstly, this morning a Cornish chough flew so close over my head as I walked the cliffs at Lizard Point that it seemed I could almost reach out and touch it.  I'm lucky enough to see a chough or two on most of my fairly regular visits to Cornwall, but I am always reminded of the significance of seeing one by all the other visitors here who stand and wait in hope of a sight of one and then share their excitement with each other when one appears.  Then, as dinner was nearing readiness this evening, a hen harrier flew into the field behind the house and landed for a time on a post by the hedge.  I'd never seen one of them before.  At almost the very same time, a barn owl flew across the neighbouring field, turning several times, hunting in the hedgerow, close enough to almost fill the view through the binoculars.  I've caught fleeting glimpses of barn owls before, but nothing like the display today's put on.

I actually hesitate to confess that I know what a chough and a hen harrier look like (everyone knows what a barn owl looks like, don't they?!), much less that I would stand and watch them through binoculars - albeit borrowed binoculars - as if bird-watching like this was akin to train-spotting or stamp-collecting, a bit geeky, something that might attract derision.  In fact though, I still feel a real thrill each time I see a chough or a peregrine; I can't believe other walkers don't even notice them and I want to stop them, hold them still and make them watch!  Thanks to my mum, whose knowledge of the local birdlife is seriously impressive (she can distinguish a whitethroat from a dunnock just by its song), I knew there was a barn owl nesting nearby and that the hen harrier made occasional visits.  Secretly, I hoped to see them as much as I hoped for sunshine, and I would have been bitterly disappointed to have left Cornwall without having seeing them.  The excitement of seeing them was not at all unlike that of opening a brilliant Christmas present.

These things are quite wonderful.  They sing (crow and hoot) about the beauty of the world and the remarkable diversity in it, which is something that is so easy to overlook and take for granted.  I don't know why it should be a secret that I would want to see them and I'm glad I've taken time today to stop and watch and wonder. 

By the way, the swallows are back too.  I love their sleek blackness, their flash of red and the way they dart through the sky with such incredible agility and joy - heralding and celebrating the arrival of summer.  They are my favourites!

In the beginning ...

I've thought of myself as a writer for a long time and then thought so much about writing that it hasn't really happened.  There have been snippets of this and that over the years - attempts at poetry, quickly-aborted diaries  and even the beginnings of children's stories, but nothing shared (not seriously) - certainly nothing published.  (Newspaper articles and pamphlets for work don't really count, no matter how proud I was of them when I wrote them all those years ago!)  Now this blogging-business intrigues me.  People say it's easy and it's been easy so far, assuming I've done everything right.  I want it to get me writing again.  And I'm writing now, so it's working.  I want to express myself - to explore my own ideas by writing about them - and I want to dare to put my ideas out there; to open them up for examination by other people.  I've got things to say.

Now I wonder: am I really that interesting?  Will anything I say be of the slightest interest to anyone else?  Are my thoughts valid, or are they laughable?  Is my style of writing any good?  Will my blog attract any attention whatsoever?

Where to start?!  Perhaps a minor realization from a weekend conversation with my aging grandparents.

Over breakfast on Sunday, conversation turned as it often does with them to the second world war - they'd recently been to a 40s-themed weekend away.  They were pleasantly surprised when I told them that primary school children learn about the home front during the war - about rationing, the blitz, evacuation, the role of women, the land army, etc.  (I'm a teacher, by the way.)  They were eager then to tell me about the hardships of rationing and of their own memories of evacuation.

It never takes long for Grampy to get on a roll and start reeling off his stories from the past and, like all good grandsons, I let him tell them, but it's rare for them to be new or (to be frank) for them to be very interesting.  From time to time though, it happens that they are.  On Sunday, I learnt for the first time about the boy who was evacuated to Devon from London to live with my Grampy - about how he had lived at first with a different, posher family that couldn't get on with him, about how he had been scared of thunder and lightning until Grampy watched it from the bedroom window with him and about how his mother had visited them and had turned out to be 'a proper tart'!

I was already thinking then about blogging - about what I would write - and wondering if anything I could write would really be very interesting.  Grampy's memories of Frank (I think that was his name) brought to life for a moment a person who had been through an experience I can not imagine.  Had Frank listened to the drone of German bombers over London, their bombs exploding and the crackle of anti-aircraft fire before he departed London?  Had he seen the fires and the destruction?  Did he know people who died?  Was he afraid of more than just the thunder and the lightning?  Did he miss his home, his mum?  I'll bet he never forgot his time in Devon.  I wonder if he remembered my Grampy.  I wonder if he is still alive.  I wonder how his war changed his life.  Grampy's memories brought back to mind the experience of all those evacuated children.  I remembered too his other war-stories, and suddenly they carried more meaning, more weight.  I thought (as I think I was supposed to a long time ago) about people in Libya and Ivory Coast and Haiti and Afghanistan and Palestine and about the refugees from all those countries and so many others.

Grampy had things to write.  Frank did too.  Their diaries would be worth a read.  I should look up the blog of someone living in Libya or Palestine or Afghanistan right now.  (So should you!)  I reckon theirs would stir up more than mine can.  I might find it hard to think of something worthwhile to write - something that could appeal to any sort of readership - but I should be glad of that.  My blog can offer a relatively bland commentary on a privileged education system, far-off conflicts, our democracy and my indulgent social life.  Better that though than the fears of an evacuee, the plight of a refugee or the terror of the oppressed and bombed-upon.

My thoughts tonight are with them.