Nimbys Two

A few weeks ago I wrote about our area having been ‘discovered’ by one of the big estate agencies, catering to foreign buyers and rashly assumed that we would not probably be affected.

Famous last words!

Not that we are now besieged by frantic buyers waving cheque books….though the view from the balcony this morning would be worth any amount….

No, local enterprise has struck!

I thought that the small fincas downhill of us would be too small to interest a developer and clearly their owners thought so too as they had joined together in a scheme, which would, I was assured, interest us.

The oleaginous Don Luis outlined the project over the ‘phone.

The three properties are on the other side of the stream from ours and are reached by a road, which while legally classed as a ‘calle publica’ – public road – would more accurately be described as a series of potholes divided by rocks. Our finca lies on one side, the finca owned by The Neighbour on the other.

According to Don Luis, the council is preparing to upgrade the back road into town – a vertiginous three kilometres closely resembling a river bed – and he asked if the road to the three properties could be included, as it is classed as ‘calle publica’ and leads off the back road. No, it could not. The council did not recognise it as ‘calle publica’ thus could not spend public money on it.

The council is adept at not recognising inconveniences.

However, the council could lend its roadbuilding equipment and lorries to assist on the weekends if the people concerned would find the materials and labour themselves. How this squares with the council’s insurance goodness only knows, but what the insurance eye does not see the council’s heart does not grieve over.

Accordingly, Don Luis was sure that we would like to help out- as our finca bordered the road. He would send over the details.

The details arrived, with an estimate of the number of lorry loads of lastre required and the names of those promising to buy one or two of the loads….there was, of course, a shortfall, which he hoped we would like to make up.

Now I trust Don Luis no further than I can throw him and The Neighbour even less, so there must be a catch somewhere.

As always, if in doubt, consult Don Freddy.

There were certain factors to bear in mind, he said. Did we remember that, when we had just moved in, Don Luis had approached us to contribute to making up the road and installing electricity for a tourist project he had, namely putting up wooden cabins staffed by women who would provide massages.

Indeed we did remember and also his chagrin at our refusal. In any rural area, foreigners are regarded as stupid enough to come up for anything, so we had failed at the first hurdle.

Further, did we remember that The Neighbour has a source of lastre on his land, conveniently close to the road.

Given this, it is unlikely that he would be contributing to buy lastre from another source.

Looking at the estimate for the amount of lastre needed, Don Freddy reckoned that that would be more then three times what would be needed for the job, so his conclusion was that Don Luis and his associates planned to obtain the lastre from The Neighbour with the money we would be coughing up.

Win win all round – except for us.

I called Don Luis to explain that we would not be contributing and that his best bet was to ask his lawyer to oblige the council to recognise the road as ‘calle publica’.

He was disappointed at our lack of solidarity – so highly prized in Costa Rica – and indicated that the mayoress would be somewhat offended at having her offer of help rejected…it might even affect the works on the back road….

I communicated his disappointment to Don Freddy.

‘I wouldn’t worry about the mayoress. I’m her husband’s cousin.’

Time to Make Mango Chutney

Locally known as the Yiguirro, which, if asked, it would probably prefer to its somewhat unfortunate latin name, this bird has been singing its heart out all last week, and that is my signal to make mango chutney.

Why now? Because the Yiguirro is the bird which calls for rain, that’s why. I can’t say it has been very successful so far…about three drops of rain yesterday evening….but you never know your luck and if it does rain then the maggots will be in the mangoes before you can say ‘knife’ and bang goes next year’s supply of chutney.

We’re talking green, unripe mangoes here – not the luscious ripe beauties which are just arriving from Oratina on the Pacific coast – and are usually consumed as a snack, peeled to remove the hard skin, stone removed, then sliced and served with salt and chili.

My best tree for chutney mangoes is on the lower part of the finca and has already been robbed – I suspect by the man who sells fruit and veg door to door. Not that this is robbery, of course. As an indigenous gentleman explained to me some years ago when caught red handed with a hand of plantains – ‘it’s not as if you planted them….they grow naturally so they are for everyone.’

I thanked him for the explanation and said that I would be round at his place the next day to pick the naturally growing peach palms on his property,

and, while there, would cut the naturally growing flor de itabo.

He was not impressed. These naturally grown goodies were for the indigenous…the inheritors of the earth…not for dirty gringos who just bought it.

Being a dirty gringo I relieved him of the hand of plantains and told him to sling his hook before I introduced him to Einstein and Bunter.

However the indigenous spirit is strong and my green mangoes have done a bunk, so Danilo picked a couple of sacks from the tree behind the stables, which, while the flesh is not quite so fine, will do the job.

I had the first sack prepared the same afternoon…peeled and sliced, then sprinkled with rough salt to draw out the liquid overnight.

The next day I was in San Jose, using the bus service which is by no means so efficient as it was when we were first here…though at least on this trip I did not have a cockroach as a traveling companion.

On my return I was surprised to find two buckets of mangoes…..Higher Authority had hijacked the cleaner into doing the peeling and slicing…..and was equally surprised to find the pot of table salt empty. What had become of it? It was in the second bucket of fruit.

Well, it had certainly drawn the liquid from the mangoes….they were happily floating in their very own Dead Sea….so I had both buckets of fruit ready to go.

I have a basic system….which mostly works by eye.

To a kilo of sugar, 2/3rds of a litre of white vinegar – proper vinegar, not the synthetic stuff. Chopped root ginger, garlic. A handful of raisins, some turmeric and garam masala. Let the sugar dissolve over a low heat, add prepared and drained mangoes until the pot is almost full, then heat and stir until the mixture thickens.

There are all sorts of recipes around, but that is the mixture which suits me.

So, thanks to the Yiguirro, I’ve beaten the maggots to it and the chutney is made for the year ahead.

I must remember to buy salt….

‘Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

Thus General Wolfe reading Grey’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, before the attack on the Heights of Abraham….for whom indeed the paths of glory led but to the grave….

In his mention of the occupants of the graves Grey notes ‘some village-Hampden’ and ‘mute inglorious Milton’…..their station in life excluding them from fame…. and I was thinking of this when reading Michael Graeme’s ‘This Writing Life’ in the ‘Rivendale Review’ about the urge to write and the lack of paying outlets for such work, with the determination to just carry on writing for your own sake, for what you have to say ….whether it is gardening, cooking, travel, family, history….your own voice.

And that voice varies over the years, as he points out.

With that in mind I looked back at the blog posts I wrote about our life in France…I was much more engaged then – they are full of people met, places visited and history…it started as a substitute for a round robin for friends keen to know how we were coping and turned into an antidote to ‘A Year in Provence’.

Starting out again in Costa Rica, the tone was similar, but as Higher Authority’s illness became more of a salient feature in our lives the focus has steadily changed for what goes on around us…the close to home that – especially in the aftermath of the Covid scare – we have come to adopt.

Though there is still one path by which outside contact and stimulation enter….the daily pleasure of pulling up the list of blog posts and settling down with tea – or gin, depending on the hour – to hear someone else’s voice from another world.

Few of those voices are well known…but a fair number should be were excellence to be the criterion, rather than networking, influence and bawdy.

Just for sheer writing power I look forward to the arrival of another post of La Tour Abolie….my word, can that lady write! I can hear, see, feel what she is describing!

Go and take a look and be delighted in your turn.

So, ‘headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile’, I wonder if you would consider giving your readers a suggestion of just one blog to discover….one you value for good writing as well as the content. Let some mute inglorious Miltons loose on the blogging world!

‘And if ever you betray what you are entrusted with…you forfeit my malevolence for ever.’

      

Buddy Holly and Weapons of Mass Destruction

It was a warm summer evening in the early sixties when my mother suggested taking Sandy the dog down to meet my father at the station, a walk of about half an hour at Sandy’s sniffing pace. I was in my teens, and Sandy had been my best friend since he was given me as a puppy when I was four, with the strictures as to how to treat him and the information that should he bite me it would have been because I had annoyed him.

I did not annoy him and he never bit me, though his investigation of shopping baskets in search of chocolate could be decidedly robust, and should he rise from his mat and leave the room at a leisured pace it was time to don the gas mask.

We walked down through what was at that time a village turning into a suburb and waited on the high railway platform, watching the cricket club members practising in the nets on their ground below us…’.rus in urbe’…the little bit of country in what was becoming the town.

Father descended from the train, Sandy bouncing with pleasure, and it was ordained that we would drop into the railway pub…the Huntsmans’ Hall….to enjoy the calm of the evening.

The pub name supposedly came from the time of Henry VIII who would hunt in the forests surrounding his palace of Nonesuch….forest long gone and the palace sold for building materials to pay for the debts of one of Charles II’s mistresses.

Given the then licensing laws, the parents would enter the pub and Sandy and I would sit outside in the beer garden…actually a lovely spot…being supplied with, for Sandy, arrowroot biscuits, and for me a ginger beer shandy, with crisps to be shared. Two for Sandy, one for me…

None of your multitude of modern day flavours…crisps were crisps. with salt in a blue paper twist.

And in another twist, on getting to know Leo it happened that , as a little boy in Wales, he had had a Saturday job which entailed filling the little blue paper packets…child exploitation no doubt these days, but not seen as such then.

It was the period of the Cold War….and I had all the teenage angst of my contemporaries, furious at the prospect of being unpleasantly annihilated because someone in Washington or Moscow lost their nerve in their game of brinkmanship – with Britain, the U.S.A.’s unsinkable aircraft carrier, becoming a prime target.

I remember it felt all the worse in that garden, so lovingly tended and respected by the pub’s customers…the cricketers in the nets across the road… a peaceful life at risk of ending by the decision of people far removed from that culture, people who had other interests, other preoccupations, which we were powerless to control.

From an empire…a colonial power… Britain had become a client of the U.S.A.

Not that being a client of Stalin would have been better, just look at Eastern Europe in that time…but Britain, having been forced to shed its empire, could have gone it alone, an unaligned nation, especially with its ties to the Commonwealth – had it not been for its debts to the U.S. A. for two world wars.

A number of my classmates joined the Young Communists …all of them from comfortable middle class families….I was not tempted given father’s experiences.

A Communist agitator in the inter war period in Glasgow he went to fight in Spain in the civil war…what he saw there of how Stalin’s regime treated their own valiant soldiers turned him into an enemy of Communism all his later life.

I heard my friends singing the Red Air Force song

‘Propellers roaring roaring to the battle

High in the clouds above the clouds we speed

Our bombs are ready, machine guns rattle

Against the world’s imperialistic greed

Fly higher and higher and higher

Our emblem’s the Soviet star

And every propeller is roaring ’Class Front!’

Defending the USSR!’

Had they no idea that had they exercised the British right to free speech should their regime have taken over they would have been carted off for ‘rehabilitation’?

So despite Sandy’s company and the arrival of another ginger beer shandy complete with biscuits and crisps, I was down in the dumps. Typical teenager.

Above the shops lining the road into the centre were a number of flats…windows open in the warmth of the evening…and from one of them came this – at top volume, blasting the peace of the garden.

Wow! Such energy, joy, passion!

Of course I had heard of Buddy Holly, and was sort of aware of his music, but that evening in the pub garden it blew me away! Life need not be nasty, brutish and short…it could be full of joy – if you put in the energy!

Someone in the flats shouted, the music was turned off and my parents emerged from the pub with a couple of friends. Time to go.

Sandy had had his own moment of joy….he had eaten his biscuits and the second packet of crisps as well while I was otherwise occupied. He left the blue packet of salt.

Why does this come back to mind?

Because Leo had had a bad day, I was tired and the world seemed to be once more on the brink of nuclear war. Depressed, I found BBC Sounds – what used to be called the radio – and fell on a programme about Buddy Holly and his influence on so many musicians.

Wow again! There came the songs, the music, the joy and the energy….I forgot being tired and fed up, I forgot the state of the world, life was, after all, worth living!

Oh boy!

Nimbys

Our little town has just been taken up by one of the big estate agency firms with a north american clientele…..and the local north americans are not too pleased.

So far, immigrants – well heeled ones that is – have gone for two main areas.

The first being the Pacific beaches, awash with exploitative ex hippies, where you can’t move for surfboards, yoga mats, vegan cleansing spas, singing bowls and self awareness camps up in the woods complete with tantric sex and blackmail photographs.

The second is the Central Valley, between the capital, San Jose, and the said Pacific beaches. Working immigrants, those well paid by big companies, crowd into San Jose’s expensive suburbs, while the retired tend to go further out, to two towns up in the hills which have long boasted a spring like climate all the year round after some article in the National Geographic magazine in the year dot.

The big estate agencies have been pushing these for years….gated communities sprawl in all directions around them, even to areas under threat should the local volcano start up again….but the limits seem to have been reached so fresh woods and pastures new have been sought. Thus the big agency featuring our little town.

It seems that the town has everything to attract the would be buyer…..supermarkets, nail bars, beauty salons, hairdressers, chemists, dentists, butchers and bakers, not to speak of coffee shops and restaurants, with a farmers’ market on the weekends….if it’s not here, you don’t need it.

Just like the well known towns, it is mid way between the capital and the Pacific beaches and – pause to draw breath – from some of the hills round the town you have distant views of the sea!

Unlike the well known towns, however,it still has large fincas to be bought and developed into gated communities, with a co operative town council who prefer facilitating housing to providing jobs for the local community….just think of the taxes on new luxury properties! Hands will be rubbing in the Municipalidad!

But hands are wringing among the existing north american immigrants, however.

One of their number is the agency’s local representative and already the local Facebook page has been rumbling with dissatisfaction….usually on the lines of ‘we don’t want all these newcomers here and what is more I wanted him to sell my place and he hasn’t featured it’. Things seems to have become even more heated than I realised as the ‘discussion’ has been removed!

I suspect the root of the problem is fear that the the established pecking order will be upset….the ‘queen bees’ will no longer reign, the ‘experts’ disregarded…and, horror of horrors, the newcomers’ houses might be more expensive than their own!

Would You Pay Two Thousand Five Hundred Dollars To Spend The Night With A Prostitute?

Now there’s a prompt you won’t be finding on WordPress’ Bloganuary! Answers under plain cover…..

Of course you would not….but you are paying for someone else to do so at Davos, where the private jet set have gathered again for a week of self congratulation.

After all, remember, everyone there is there on your money, either on your taxes or on the goods and services you pay through the nose for.

Those ancient enough might remember the fall of John Bloom, of Rolls Razor washing machine fame, who when the sales fell through the floor went from owning a luxury motor yacht laden with lovelies to having to be content with a rowing boat and two old oars.

Without us…they are nothing.

Who is attending? The ultra rich, business leaders, politicians and the numerous bum brushers who accompany them.

Why are they there…apart from the parties? Supposedly to ‘rebuild trust’. Some hope there! I’d rather trust a pack of hungry wolves to look after a lamb.

And to discuss

1. Achieving Security and Cooperation in a Fractured World
2. Creating Growth and Jobs for a New Era
3. Artificial Intelligence as a Driving Force for the Economy and Society
4. A Long-Term Strategy for Climate, Nature and Energy

Since most of the politicians present are those responsible for the fracturing of the world one wonders how positive their contribution might be….

The aim of big business seems to be cutting jobs and replacing people with artificial intelligence, so not much input there either….

And the aim of both groups to rely on windpower to fuel electric vehicles while the populace freeze in unheated homes makes one wonder just what that strategy might be!

One area to be discussed is ‘overtourism’. Not theirs, of course…ours.

I would suggest that they set an example by not littering Zurich airport with their private jets and do their get togethers by Zoom ……though I do wonder if AI can reproduce caviar and champagne for them…and in respect of their climate change agenda, which seems to involve doing away with farming, perhaps they could study the ancient method of controlling active volcanoes by way of human sacrifice.

Themselves?

No, no, they are too valuable…and anyway volcanoes demand virgins.

Not a problem, give the tarts a hymenoplasty and drop them in…the volcano will be none the wiser.

A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

A Bean field full in blossom smells as sweet
As Araby or Groves of orange flowers 
Black eyed and white and feathered to ones feet
How sweet they smell in the mornings dewy hours
When seething night is left upon the flowers
And when morns bright sun shines oer the field
The pea bloom glitters in the gems o’ showers
And sweet the fragrance which the union yields
To battered footpaths crossing o’er the fields.

John Clare ‘The Bean Field’.

No scent today, as I opened the freezer in Pequeno Mundo…a sort of ends of line shop on the outskirts of San Jose…but, my goodness, packs, kilos, of frozen broad beans!

Broad beans…the beans of the old world before those of the new world took centre stage…the beans, dried, that kept you alive through the winter, the beans we loved to eat fresh with gammon….and here they were, finally, in Central America!

I remember sowing the over winter varieties with my father…the scent of the flowers and the never ending fight against black fly – soapy water applied every day to control the blasted things.

In later life I learned to pick the pods when tiny and enjoy them whole with sharp young cheese and a glass of white wine…but the sublime appearance of the beans themselves was at at the table of our friend Madeleine in the next village in France all those years ago.

Long dead, but I can still conjure up her voice, see her face, feel her enthusiasms….and all this brought back by a banal packet of frozen beans in a supermarket thousands of miles from her home.

Funny things, we humans.

Here is Madeleine…

She had grown up in a small village, had liberated herself by education and gone to run a bookshop in Paris. In the great days of 1968 she had fallen in love with an electrician who, with his colleagues, had welded himself into the car factory at Boulogne-Billancourt as part of the workers’ protest and they had married. They ran a bar at Nantes for years and then retired to her native village where they lived a quiet life behind their shutters, reading, gardening and listening to music.

She was a firm republican and anti clerical, though the local priest was often to be found taking an aperitif at her hospitable table, and introduced me to that stream of life which now seems to be totally submerged….that battle for supremacy between church and state over the minds of French citizens. For her, the struggle for non religious education was still alive and she thought that the heritage of the ‘black hussars’ – the schoolteachers who inculcated republican values in the children in their charge once the state had introduced universal free education – had been squandered by the existence of ‘private’ schools in almost every commune. These schools run alongside the state schools and offer a Catholic education, but most parents use the dual system to play one school off against another to get what they want in terms of how little Johnny is treated at school. She thought it was scandalous that local councils gave grants to these institutions, and was distinctly vocal on the subject every year when the budget was discussed.

She had even been a ‘godmother’ at a Republican baptism…something lost in the mists of time, but revived by her and her friends on the occasion of a birth in the family. Growing up as she did in a period when if a man was not seen at mass with his family on Sunday, he would not be employed by the pious exploiters of the area, the Church disgusted her as an institution and she would not set foot in one of its buildings, even to admire the architecture……not that she was missing much in that respect in our area!

She let me loose on her book cupboard, gave me reading lists, discussed books, authors and…of course…politics! Politics national, politics local, politics international, nothing escaped her interest and sharp analysis and I would regularly turn up at her kitchen door to be greeted by an arm waving a newspaper and the cry of

‘Pardi, you’ll never guess what has been happening!’ in her deep, enthusiastic voice.

She was, to all outside appearances, the classic rural frenchwoman. On market day she went to town with her husband and left him playing cards in a cafe while she did the shopping, the terror of stall holders as she enquired into the freshness, age and quality of everything that caught her eye. I was taken once to her favourite cheese stall, where the owner had rashly offered her some Cheddar the week before. Fixing him with an Ancient Mariner eye she told him that she had brought someone British with her in order to test this unknown quantity and I had to describe what a mature and semi mature Cheddar should be like before I was allowed to taste his offering and give judgement. In one of the Lord Emsworth short stories, P.G. Wodehouse describes the butler laying something on the table before his employer as if it had been a smoked offering and his lordship a tribal god. Lord Emsworth eyes his butler sourly with the manner of a tribal god who considers the smoked offering not up to sample, and that passage describes my friend to a T when faced with spending her money on something she could not produce herself from her garden or kitchen.

Generosity itself, she could not bear to be cheated. With a family celebration in mind, she had gone to a distant cousin in the next village to buy wine. She had tasted and chosen, and the wine was duly delivered. On the morning of the great day she decide to taste the wine again, as being the only thing on the menu not under her control, and found that the cousin had fobbed her off with an inferior wine to that which she had chosen. The wine was packed in the back of the car and she took it back, interrupting her cousin when he was busy with a group of prospective buyers. Well, suffice it to say that the prospects melted away in the heat of her displeasure and she came back with the wine which she had ordered plus a case of dessert wine in lieu of the petrol.

‘So everything was O.K. in the end?’

‘No, the wine was shaken up and hadn’t had time to settle.’

I was then made privy to startling revelations about the private life and family history of the cousin which made even my straight hair curl. And I’d thought he was so respectable!

She cooked with the same attention to detail which characterised her entire life, and demanded the respect due to her work. Her husband knew that lunch was served at one o’clock and that if he were to be late, his meal would be given to the dog. He loved playing cards and while going home for one o’clock was no hardship if he was losing…his wife’s reputation providing any excuse necessary…if he were to be winning, the tussle was hard. However, he knew his duty and by two minutes to one, there would be a sound of feet pounding the pavement outside and the clang of the bell as he flung himself through the front door which he had had the foresight to leave unlocked before departing for the bar.

One of her specialities was a broad bean puree which she had taken from a recipe by Paul Bocuse. I don’t know what his was like, but hers was sublime! She was particular about the variety of broad bean and the variety of potato and kept a close eye on her pans to ensure that the texture was right..melting without being sloppy. It sounds trivial, but, to me, that puree summed up a lot about her. It was worth taking time and thought to obtain a worthwhile result, in cooking, in politics, in life.

My frozen beans will be nothing like…but I owe them a debt for bringing Madeleine back to me.

Breaking Up the Happy Home

We may not see life any more….but we certainly hear about it.

A police patrol car passes most days, but on Saturday it stopped at the gate and the crew disembarked, to the intense displeasure of the dogs who had been sunning themselves on the drive. All went hell for leather to the gate…..with Auntie’s eldritch screeches alerting the army of dogs from the finca across the road who came pouring out to add their contribution.

You have to say something for the police – the Fuerza Publica – as unlike most callers they did not get back in their truck and drive off, but threw stones at the neighbours’ dogs and sounded the horn for us to rescue them from ours.

Once in the house and settled on the balcony for a coffee we learned the reason for the visit.

We have a couple of small properties in the area, which we are wishing to sell as part of our slowing down campaign, and the police had been called to one of them where a child had complained of being kidnapped and held against its will. A full scale operation had been launched as a child was involved with everything from police dogs to a negotiator under the command of the local police chief.

It is a quiet residential area where most of the neighbours are from one family, having inherited land from an ancestor who split his finca into several plots, and nothing much disturbs the even tenor of their lives, but the shouting from the house and garden had gathered all who could walk into the lane outside to enjoy the spectacle, joy being unconfined at the arrival of the police.

The chief seized upon one of the older neighbours, Dona Ofelia, to give him an idea of what had been happening before deciding what measures to take.

It appeared that our tenant – without telling us – had sublet the property and moved back in with his mother – the same Dona Ofelia – to make economies.

He is a gentleman who earns a vast salary as a civil servant, and also produces bread – made on his premises. He bakes because this brings in the only income which has not been embargoed by the courts to pay his stupendous debts, incurred in the pursuit of wine, women and the payment of pensions to the offspring consequent upon the combination of the two.

His tenant was a gentleman who had moved in with a lady companion and all was well for some months…they both worked, they played a little music quietly in the evenings…ideal neighbours.

Then things changed. He returned from work after lunch every day, bringing with him a lady from Limon.

Limon is the Caribbean facing province of Costa Rica where the population is mostly of Jamaican origin and whose inhabitants were forbidden to enter the rest of Costa Rica until 1948. Costa Rica is hardly politically correct by today’s unfortunate standards but the euphemism of ‘being from Limon’ is used as a racial marker.

The sweet smell of marijuana spread on the afternoon air and loud music was played until the lady from Limon would leave on the bus later in the day…before the arrival of the lady companion, who must have been posing more and more questions as some time later, after a violent dispute, her brother collected her and her traps from the house….and the lady from Limon moved in.

The neighbourhood was agog……whatever next!

Well, whatever next was what had summoned the police.

A gentleman from Limon descended on the house, bringing with him a backpack and a boy from Limon of tender years. After a noisy altercation with the lady from Limon he pushed boy and rucksack into the house and legged it in his car – which may or may not have been from Limon.

Some hours later, the police received the call from the child, claiming kidnap and sequestration and descended on the house.

Now in possession of the narrative, the chief decided to take matters in hand himself. He went to the house, was admitted and the door shut behind him.

His audience waited in patience…..and eventually he emerged with child and rucksack, followed by the lady from Limon, loading them into a police car which took off for the town centre. Dog van, negotiator and assorted policemen followed.

However, he felt that the neighbours deserved an explanation.

It appeared that the lady from Limon had abandoned companion and son when moving in….said husband was not bothered whether or not she returned, but was determined not to look after the son on his own, so had come to dump the boy on her.

The boy was equally determined that he was not going to stay one moment with his mother’s new companion and after being shut in his room when trying to run away, called the police.

Mother and child were being taken to a refuge run by social services where there would be some attempt to sort things out.

That was all, it was all over, and they should return to their homes.

Poor little boy….what must he be feeling!

So why had the police called on us? Apart from giving us information with which to descend on our tenant with fire and the sword and to have a coffee?

‘Ah. If the house is for sale, my cousin is interested. can I give him your number?’

A Happy New Year To You All…..And Lang May Your Lums Reek.

Here we are, between the old year and the new, a time to reflect and a time to resolve. We are making changes to try to ensure a more peaceful life in the time we have left together – no doubt there will be glitches, but we are doing what we can. ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ comes to mind here!

I just wish our governments would do a bit of reflection too….in Ancient Rome the doors of the temple of Janus, the god of transitions and beginnings, were open when Rome was at war, and closed when at peace. When an emperor could close the doors, he could congratulate himself…the spirits of discord and fury were imprisoned, the world was calm.

It would be better if modern leaders could consider peace as a virtue for which to strive….not playing lip service while selling deadly weapons from behind the curtain…but they won’t do it unless they are made to do so and who, in the words of Archibald Douglas, will bell the cat?

I would like to thank all of you kind enough to read this blog for your time and especially for the comments which are usually the best part of it all!

Now, knowing I shall never see Scotland again, forgive me the indulgence of this piece before Hogmanay is upon us in a riot of whisky and black bun.

Here’s tae us…wha’s like us…damn few…an they’re a’ deid.

December 28th – The Holy Innocents Day.

Matthew 2 16. ‘Then Herod, when he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.’

An appropriate day to bring to mind the massacre of the innocents taking place before our eyes in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than twenty thousand people, more than half of them women and children, and show no sign of stopping.

The Pope has said that this is not war, but terrorism…but the Pope, as Stalin observed, has no divisions.

People have been protesting across the world….but we have no divisions either.

The U.S. and its satraps are complicit in this genocide which is why I very much doubt that the International Court of Justice will accept referrals, despite the clear breaches of the

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A referral would be bound to succeed, in which case the International Criminal Court would be issuing warrants…but not only for Israeli politicians and members of the armed forces, but for those complicit in the genocide, having provided arms and support…notably the President of the U.S.A. and his advisors.

So no action will be taken. These are people too big to bring to trial , but the slaughter of the little people will continue.

The Hamas breakout of October 7th has provided the excuse for this appalling action….but what could Israel expect?

Since 1948 Israel has conducted a campaign of removal of Palestinians from their ancestral lands…read Ilan Pappe ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’….and dumping them in Gaza.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 foundered on mutual suspicion…Israeli land grabs on the West Bank being responded to by terrorist action by Palestinians….the land grabs continue while Gaza founders.

Blockaded for years, no hope in sight, people do become desperate and desperation begets violence.

Drive the people of Gaza into Egypt, and Israel is free to develop the Gaza oil and gas fields…..and control of oil and gas is big global business.

Western governments value business interests above people…not only the people of Palestine, but their own people too. Our only value is that we validate the rule of whichever patsy is put up for election by our votes…after that it is ‘thank you and up yours.’

Protests are met with cries of ‘antisemitism’. The horrors of the holocaust are prayed in aid.

Absolute nonsense.

These protests are about the value of human life….and its right to live.