Hot Monday

Hasn't this been a balmy Monday? If you live in my little quarter of England, you'll know what I mean.
By Muhammed! I DO love the heat! It gets to my core, warms my bones and my joints move freely; my skin reacts only positively to the Sun's agency (when I burn, I know I'm alive). I really ought to be living in Mallorca or Malaga, with all those ex-pat Brits with lapsed pension contributions and negative equity; or the Canaries; or decamp to one of those cruise-liners, such as The World, that follow our star around this planet (I realise this is scientific inaccuracy, but everything is relative!), satisfying their passengers' every need, with only a minimal risk of endemic disease.
Pending our lottery win, however, in a few weeks we're off to Turkey. Neither Dr Sam nor I have been there before, but we've heard only good reports, Midnight Express and some Kurdish disabuse notwithstanding.
I went to Washington DC one late summer and it was fucking hot in a humid kind of way. But I guess the best experience of heat and its beneficence was a couple of trips to the Red Sea on vacation during successive summers a few years ago: 40ºC? Bring it on! We came back, however, to a Heathrow Airport at over 100 Fahrenheit, the hottest day in Britain's history apparently since it fell away from Pangaea, which somehow deflated our buoyant sense of accomplishment.
One might select today one's summer holiday from a broad church of packages premised on sightseeing, hedonism, watersports, camping, etc., but every couple of years we decide on the necessity of a relaxing beach holiday, where we can offer our bodies to Helios and damn the consequences. The most a la mode scare stories since AIDS are to do with skin cancers (sorry if that's glibly offensive to some), yet I'm of an age group that can remember a specific kind of Ambre Solaire sun lotion, which was probably a simple admixture of olive oil and lemon juice, with no pretensions to 'protection'. We lay on the beach or swam there or frisbee'd there or beach-bouled there, without an inkling of the risks involved from overexposure to our planetary system's energy source. We lay there on our bunks at night, hot, sleepless, dehydrated and on the verge of heat exhaustion, but we LOVED it. Between us (κοσμος or maybe γαια), we have lost the ozone layer and with it our cocooned existence, yet we were always aware of the unforgiving nature of relentless sunshine.
I dream of the bleached, rocky shore of the Mediterranean, the turquoise, the aroma of the pinaceae, the fruit vendors on the beaches, the sense of bounty that, yes, is purchased and is material, yet is humble and which should be available to all. Indeed, who knows, were I doomed to roam this green and pleasant England two centuries hence, after climate change and sea-level rises have done their worst, might I be able to walk among olive groves and fruitful vineyards, where watermelons embiggen on a daily basis and figs ripen on their boughs, where every kind of malaria-vending creature might lurk?
But damn the risks... give me the heat!

Wormwood and rocket

Today in the garden I'm mostly contemplating rocket (Eruca sativa). Why? Because, sometimes we are impotent to do great works, solve others' or our own problems and, if we are blessed with any sagacity, resign ourselves to dealing with that with which we are able to deal i.e., the gardening. If there is another crisis about which to tell, it's not going to be related here, today, because my refuge from the problematic is the garden and a few tins of beer. 
Anyway, we sowed a packetful of rocket seeds in springtime and we've been harvesting and enjoying tasty salad leaves for a few weeks now. I'm allowing a few plants to go to seed and I've noticed that some bloom yellow while others produce white flowers, with the latter tending to offer relatively less spindly foliage. The subtleties of any difference in taste between white and yellow would require a more discerning palate than mine, but it is generally recognised that the maturer leaves are bitterer.
Consequently, in contemplative mood, I have been put in mind of the Passover meal of the Judaic tradition (which tends to coincide with the Christian Holy Week) and at which lamb and unleavened bread are consumed with bitter greens (wormwood (Artemisia absinthium)) and sometimes wine. Yummy, I imagine. 
Notwithstanding the festivities associated with Passover, its symbolic notions are founded in the story of the Israelites' leaving captivity in Egypt circa 1200BC and the last of the biblical plagues associated therewith: the passing over the houses of the Egyptians of the "angel of death", which visitation we are told impartially killed all their firstborn. In the Christian tradition, the sacrificial Lamb of God, is killed at Passover and is memorialised at Easter. 
You'll in all likelihood recall the Chernobyl incident of 1986, in which a nuclear event occurred in Soviet Ukraine, the full consequences of which are still unclear but which, one imagines, have been destructive at all conceivable levels. Chernobyl is Ukrainian for 'wormwood'  and I'm not the first to reveal that the oft-presumed prophetic Christian bible book of Revelation (8:10-11) reads, “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” 
Coincidences abound, of course, but this was one of the more intriguing prophecies to test the curiosity of the unbeliever. Indeed, interpretations of prophecies are legion, with apocalyptic dates proffered, arriving and passing without incident, there always being someone arrogant enough to explicate what is written and impress upon others the import of their own idiosyncratic interpretation.
For now though, there's a chicken roasting in the oven, some new potatoes to boil and a nice salad of bitter leaves to prepare. Wasn't it yesterday that I remarked that the best things in life are the simplest?

Gove and Marr (revision with 28/6 update link)

Sitting in the garden on what could be one of the best sunshine days of the English summer (should that be a capital S for summer?) watching the runner beans grow, one feels that the best things in life are the simplest. 

I'm pleased to be relaxed once more (in the background is playing Q Radio, which isn't plagued by too many advertisements, but on the down side is playing Snow Patrol. This is considerable progress, since my heart rate was dangerously raised by watching, earlier, Education Secretary Michael Gove on the Andrew Marr(ed) Show, spouting off in oh-so reasonable terms about the upcoming strike action by a small selection of public sector workers on Thursday next. As a foil to the argument, Marr did all that was required of the BBC (read, Tax Payers' Alliance) to thrust forward questions that Gove might parry with ease, whereas an interviewer with a different agenda might have pierced that pouting lip of the Tory (who in his misspent youth actually went on strike, he admitted!). Bully for him! But, what an enlightened turnaround by Gove in the face of reason and the greater good, one is led to believe!

Gove's Sunday-morning claim is that the British public won't look too kindly on the strikes, which will possibly require one of the parents of unschooled and unsupervised offspring to stay off work or do something parentlike to arrange cover for their kids who are damned to be deprived a day's schooling. Oh, what disruption... the British public barely knows the meaning of the word! 

The Marr & Gove Show this morning was the perfect example of how the BBC (counter to any claims made to the contrary that it is peopled by Grauniad-reading and Tribune-contributing lefties) fulfils its role as mediator between public opinion and the Government/Establishment. Gove went to bottom-lip quivering pains to suggest that Britons popularly want more anti-union legislation to stop such future disruption to their routinised existences (almost Stepford and, indeed, alienated), endured under the 'benevolent' canopy of capitalism. Militancy, apparently, is not what we're about in England (Gove used "the English way," as a phrase, quite unabashedly for someone from Edinburgh.).

It is disgraceful how this sort of performance is expedited. Where were the incisive questions, Andrew Marr? Is this the state of political interviewing today?; a friendly sofa'd chat, bound merely to stimulate the sense of injustice of aspiring families whom, for 30 years, Gove claims, have suffered from an education system inferior to the up-and-coming go-getting nations (a list of which he reeled off, as if we needed to know what a country actually is). Bizarrely, those darling Canadians were grouped in with the nasty Chinese as peoples that will be advantaged ahead of British youngsters in an increasingly global marketplace. There are, of course, many problems in the education system, much to do with under-investment, and perhaps Gove, in a world without briefed statements on party policy, might have some reasonable thoughts on the subject.

As for the imminent strike action, taken reluctantly by a few lap-dog unions (the TUC's Brendan Barber and the Government are in league here) it will, as always, be a flash in the pan. The opposing parties will come to agree terms after the one-day event (mark my words (although Long & Walker are more optimistic)), which will presumably stimulate the appetites among the general public for more legislation against those angry/militant/threatening (choose your own adjective, which might ignore the wonderful work that our union representatives quite often do in defence of individuals bullied and harrassed by aggressive managers and employers) unions.  The meda will be abroad in an effort to interview the least articulate of the protesters so as to undermine the cause. The red-top dailies and the increasingly Marvel Comics-like Telegraph and Times and, indeed that Silver Surfer of a newspaper The Daily Mail will rouse their  uncritical readership into accepting yet another assault upon the working classes, whom I would wager most of you readers should count yourselves amongst, even though you might aspire to something greater. Indeed you are the proletariat, the mass with the voice, should only you care to make it heard.
As for me, I shall continue to enjoy the rays and wish that you all enjoy your Sunday, too. I'm sure those runners have grown an inch in the time it's taken me to type this!

Archer on the Archbishop

The BBC is reporting at length on the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's comments, published in New Statesman, criticising the coalition government's policies.  The 'bish has a brain the size of a planet and occasionally makes newsworthy comments on a number of issues, most of which are either incomprehensible or of no consequence to the indigenous masses in the UK, most of whom have only a tenuous hold on the Church of England label that periodically affiliates them to a religion of sorts (usually by accident of birth) and which buries them, marries them and occasionally baptises their kids.
Williams sits in the House of Lords, is ensconced in an organisation still utterly entwined in the British Establishment, is elitist of education and attitude and, with the best intentions in the world, is caught ridiculously, if metaphorically, with his cassock hoisted to his hips to facilitate his pissing in the wind, especially when he speaks meally-mouthed about the privations of the poor in modern Britain. His ministry is a nonsense, with dwindling congregations, wishy-washy adherence to the Articles of faith and a cowardly impotence when it comes to defending the Deity's scriptural purpose or, indeed, pursuing that which the Christian godhead demands of its Church, i.e., evangelising among non-believers and ministering to the congregation and those in need. The Church of England remains trapped in the paradox of its origins which were indefensibly, then as now, expeditious of regal aims and opportunistic in the disappropriation of others' money and property.
If you're sincere, Rowan, resign in protest. Are you not a little bit like the rich man who wanted to know how to attain the kingdom of the heavens and to whom Jesus said, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of the heavens"?