Poetry Parnassus

Since getting back from London on Wednesday evening I have been spreading the good news in my village and nearby town.

Everyone I meet gets an intro to this fabulous and inspiring event which is still underway.

Actually I started my mission after a night of too much reading and too little sleep after the Migrant Resource Centre event to launch the book of poems from the 204 poets from around the world. The book was on the table as my mother had her weekly cafe meet up. One of her friends read out Jo Shapcott's poem, then Seamus Heaney's. We agreed that we didn't really get it, but that wasn't the point.

I opened the book to the Soloman Islands poem on 'Praying Parents' for my mother's other friend who I thought might be more attune to this one. She read that one. I was glad to have been able to flip through to it, knowing it was there.

Then I thought I saw one of the poets from the night before, Nikola Madzirov, walk right past our table, but was too slow/shy to shout out 'Hallo' to him.

Later I went into the Northern Line Train tent on the South Bank and enthused before sitting down to write my first poem for a while. It has been an extremely difficult week, family-wise, so this was the only medicine suitable.

I ran into an old aquaintance in Sainsbury's and told her I wished I could transplant her to London for all this, she would sprout leaves. I explained how this was all happening right here, right now and was within reach, even walkable (in theory).

My sons know all about it, my cleaning lady, my friend I do the Artist's Way with and her lodger. I told her partner about it too while he was digging the front garden!!

What I love the most is watching and hearing the YouTube clips from the events. Then I look up each poet's name and country in the book and they come to life. There is a set of 3 interviews about it, including the other poet I heard in person, Shailja Patel.

A man I sat next to at the book's launch on Tuesday wondered if anyone would read the poems. I suggested that the collection was not just for us now, but for people in 200 or 300 years' time. We were both flipping through to find particular countries which were most important for us, Iraq, France, Serbia, Bahrain.

I was unable to find the UK or England and felt sad that being the host country meant we were not important. Eventually I found Great Britain by chance and felt better, though I wondered what had become of Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland.

Video of the Rain of Poetry and photos of the EnglishPEN event. A 2nd Rain of Poetry video.

Curiously on the Casagrande website there is a video of a man talking about the bombing of London during the war. This was exactly one of the topics I mentioned to the man I sat with at the Poetry event, how the new buildings in the middle of streets in Pimlico mark the spots where there used to be bombsites. I explained, waving with my arms, how the brick walls on each side of a bomb site used to be supported with these huge wooden struts and how there used be to hoardings all along by the pavement with the deep hole hidden behind it.

Nigel Rodley and the BICI report

An interview with Sir Nigel Rodley has just been published on the Bahrain Justice and Development website. He was one of the 5 commissioners of the BICI report, published in November 2011. I do not know who conducted the interview.

First part.

Second part.

Third part.

Interestingly Nigel Rodley used to be a UN Special Rapporteur on Torture from the 1990's until 2001, but was not able to visit Bahrain in that capacity during that time.

A YouTube clip of just one minute covers one exchange on the prospect of future prosecution of those responsible for extrajudicial killings/homicides.

His words are carefully chosen, partly very open, but also deliberately silent. He seems to be taking care to stick to his remit precisely. I guess this is in order to enable, or rather not hinder, future developments in Bahrain in a direction I would imagine he would prefer over a time scale the participants can handle independently and safely.

I recognise the hands off and separate view point of a person working to change things over many years, the slow pace of institutional and cultural change. It is in direct contrast to the present suffering of each individual person involved.

When I was involved in breastfeeding support and promotion I saw this for the first time. So many mothers being let down during the slow years needed to train people and change attitudes.  I could not take the psychological distance needed to continue with this. The home education debate is taking decades, so too the autism one. I can't even think for too long about the denigration of women, it has gone backwards in my recent life time.

I have been to London, now I am full of data

I had an important email on Sunday night, hardly slept, received the news of the all clear, drove to London on Monday afternoon, stayed with my mother, switched off her light after she'd fallen asleep, went head first into the Poetry Parnassus, wrote my own poem and feel as if I have been away for a month.

My head is spinning.

Richard O'Dwyer - Time to sign

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (I first typed Wikileaks!), has written in support of the non-extradition of Richard O'Dwyer.

This piece includes a link to a petition for Richard. Sometimes people use just their first name and a generalised place name like Scotland if they do not like putting their full name out across the internet. That is ok. Don't let shyness or whatever stop you from signing something.

I love playing at being a book shop owner

Our village fete was this afternoon. I helped on the bookstall. My patch was the hardback fiction and the dvds and videos.

We organised it all in alphabetical order and laid out interesting books so the fronts showed. I also stood some books vertically to catch people's eyes. After a bit I saw that my judgement about which books might appeal bore no resemblance to what was picked out and bought. From then on I rotated the highlighted books randomly. This took all the decision making out of it.

Billy Connolly didn't get picked up once! Oscar Wilde had to wait til the end, but then was found by someone who had him on her Amazon Wish List. Hammond went while Clarkson was left on the shelf/wooden bench... Handling the books so often to rotate and keep them tidy meant we knew our remaining stock amazingly well.

I bumped into an acquaintance and recognised all the books she had bought!

The best bit was seeing the little children sitting down on the grass at the back of the tent looking at books they really liked. If I am involved next year I might suggest a bigger floor space dedicated to children to relax and read in.

What do I do now? This is my town!

A large islamophobic slogan appeared on a wall in Didcot today, late afternoon to be precise, by a road I use every day while driving into East Hagbourne. I am very cross about this, but don't know what to do.

Either the property wall is privately owned, in which case the owner would want to remove it asap, or it is owned by the council, who presumably have a duty to remove insulting slogans. 

I want to report it to the police, but that is pointless as the police must have noticed it within a couple of hours of it being done. There aren't that many roads round here to drive along!

I feel like taking 2 garden chairs and a thermos of tea down there in the morning to sit and scowl in front of it and complain/commiserate with passersby. 

As a driver I feel offended. Part of me wants to drive along a different road so I don't see it, but another bit of me wants to know exactly when it has been painted over, to know that tolerance has been restored.

Telling One's Story - Eva Schloss, #eye4freedom, Anthony Graves,

Jemima Khan has done an interview with Eva Schloss in the New Statesman. For her, telling and retelling the story has been helpful. Ken Livingstone was the person who asked her to speak and she did. Before then she hadn't spoken to anyone.

My French great aunt wrote several pages about her time in Ravensbruck, near Berlin. As far as I know this was near the end of her life, so in the late 1990's. I was sent a copy, which I read. My French grandmother or my great aunt told me that after liberation and time in Sweden the two sisters spent several days in their parents' flat in Paris. They slept in the bedroom they had shared as children and just talked and talked. So maybe my great aunt was able to process it out of her system more easily in part due to this listening time.

There is a hashtag going on for Bahrain at the moment, #eye4freedom. One tweet states that the person concerned, Jaffar Salman, was not able to speak of his experiences to anyone apart from one fellow prisoner.

In the US a now freed death row inmate, Anthony Graves, has been explaining to Senators what solitary means, putting into words sights he has seen, witnessing to others' pain as well as his own.

Both my hearing aids have broken now! Drat!

This will be an interesting couple of weeks. One aid broke a while ago when I dropped it on the hard kitchen floor. I had just got round to making an appointment to hand it in to be repaired. I didn't think I needed to hurry. I assumed the other one would be fine.

Now the second one has died. All I did was take it out to wash my hair. I can hear the cat meow and the water run when I turn on the tap. I can just hear the keys as I tap this out. Any conversation and taking part in groups will be a joke. I turn up the tv high at the best of times and can't cope if the frying pan is on and/or the kettle is boiling. The loud microwave overrides everything else too.

H and I will have to be very patient and imaginative to get round this one. There goes a plane, that's nice to hear. S and T are both away from our household, in Guernsey and Wales respectively, so there are fewer conversations to go unswimmingly while they are away. The cat won't mind in the least. My mother in law is also away for a few days, so that's another set of difficult dialogues out of the way for a little while.

I will have to be extra careful when I am out in the car, drive with the windows open and simply take no risks at all.

Do you work?

I bet no male is ever asked that question. I wonder what exactly it means.

It could mean, where does your money come from and how much comes your way? Or, what is your current speciality for which you receive money? Or do you go out of the house every 8am and stay away until 6pm every weekday evening, ie where exactly do you go between these standard hours? Or with whom do you share jokes and office rituals, are they this sort of person or that sort of person? Or, do you deserve status respect and what sort shall I accord you?

As you can see, I do not like answering this question. I quickly reply with 'I am at home.' Then the conversation moves on, bypassing work related discussion, to more happy topics.

A long time ago I used to ask all sorts of questions when I met someone. It would be a form of grilling to find their weak spots. So now I can spot when someone else is trying to examine me and I aim to derail the process!

Chokolit - Home Ed Entrepreneur

I had a look at Making It Up, a home ed blog I read from time to time.

There I found out about the person behind this chocolate company called Chokolit.

Sentimental

This is taking me back to last year, Tribute fm is now online. It used to be broadcast from Benghazi. I remember those early discussion shows about what people wanted to happen. All those outages! The number on the screen showing how many were listening, 48 or so! Now it is based in Tripoli.

'Evidence free policy making'

What a great phrase that is! I have chuckled out loud over that.

After all these years of seeing the phrase 'evidence based practice' this is the first time I have seen the reverse.

Interestingly it is in a blog post about economic and political matters.

Demonstrating in Riyadh

Gosh, see this, a fast moving demo in a mall in Riyadh, held after dark, when it is cooler I imagine. The men are in front, then the women follow in good numbers, people documenting the march by walking alongside filming and recording sound with their mobiles.

The chants are apparently "Release the oppressed" and "Freedom". To the point and also, pointedly, the first is quoting from a Hadith from the Koran.

Cornerview: Imagine (Bahrain version with lots of links!)

Imagine if I woke up tomorrow morning to hear that the Constitutional and other changes many people inside and outside the country want were being set in motion in Bahrain;

that an election day had been set for a new Prime Minister (think of all the candidates' debates on tv);

that those in prison for expressing opinions and assembling were on their way home (Twitter would crash with photos and videos);

that those medical professionals in prison were instead preparing to start work again and catch up on the latest research (can you imagine the amount generated over a year?);

and finally that the brave policeman, Ali Al Ghanmi, who resigned in response to the killing of protesters and is still in prison, was freed and celebrating by doing an impromtu cartwheel down the street like the young verger on the red carpet after the Royal Wedding last year.

Nostalgic for the Sea

'On the bridge, a warm competent calm prevails....From here the icebergs ahead look like a jumbled barrier, as if there were no way through, but the radar shows otherwise. I like to look at the radar screen, and I like to watch the ship's captain and officers as they consult it...The officers move calmly between window and radar, radar and window, studying now one, now the other, checking one against the other, determining a course. In an alcove behind the bridge, screened at night by curtains, is the desk where the charts lie, with compasses and pencils, under an angle-poise lamp; a digital readout gives the ship's latitudes and longitude, as transmitted by satellite. It's quiet on the bridge, like a public library, but for the constant faint reassuring drone of the heating or ventilation.'

From the essay 'Aurora' in 'Sightlines' a books of essays by Kathleen Jamie, published 2012, by Sort Of Books.

Ahmed Oun

I made the call to the Bahraini Embassy this afternoon. First I faffed about, walking round the kitchen, wondering if the info from Twitter were true. Then I reminded myself that Amnesty International had had an Urgent Action which included him, so I looked through my file and saw it was the first one of 2012.

Then I faffed some more, then reminded myself that I have made 2 two calls before to different Governors' Offices in the US, so this wasn't quite so hard. It was only a call to London! It was about someone who is not due to be executed, and what's more is only a year older than one of my sons.

Then I thought that I was an outsider and maybe one cool, calm and collected call from a stranger might have more weight and therefore be worth trying. My name is not that strange to the embassy though, if they open their mail.

I also thought that if fellow prisoners were doing their bit to try and get some treatment for this young man then I could try from my carpeted drawing room with green lawn outside.

When I was put through to someone and gave my message politely I thought I heard a faint sigh, the lady in the office had most certainly heard of Ahmed Oun. So that was a good feeling.

I was nearly driven into on a roundabout a bit later, so I reflected that if I'd gone at least I had made that call and had tried to help beforehand.

Bahrain UPR at UN leads me to read Swarthmore lecture 2012

One thing leads to another very quickly these days for me. Only a few days after watching most of the Bahrain UPR on livestream, then watching the UK UPR only 3 days later, guess which book is brought to Meeting the day after publication?

My take aways are: the lunches; the long termism; the 100 or 200 years of work necessary to move on collectively from an injustice; the letting go; and the importance of writing laws/conventions and declarations.

Lunches: They invite only who they wish to and with a specific purpose in mind. Asking 2 people from each regional group makes it easier, no one is literally isolated. A self service lunch is better and when someone chooses to have pudding first the writer knows they are relaxed! (pages 37-44)

Long termism: Workers at Quaker House in Geneva often stay for many years. They have a memory and familiarity with the UN work based in patience. The local Quaker Meeting meets there so the house is always a spiritual centre.

"Sometimes results are obvious but often we work for years with no apparent progress." pages 4-5, I'd like to quote the whole passage really, so much insight.

The 100 or 200 year time scale: I cannot find the right pages, but for example abolition of slavery took a very long time. Abolition of the death penalty is still very much a live issue. (Sorry about the appalling pun, I only noticed it a few days later! This is a family trait, blame my genes.)

Letting go of an area of work: Once a topic has been taken up by several other groups and is accepted as a mainstream issue QUNO relinquishes it to focus more closely on other concerns.

Importance of writing laws and standards which can then be relied upon and used as accepted yardsticks by others in their times of need: 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and think of all those many agreements quoted in the BICI Report by Professor Bassiouni.


Snakes and Ladders - A personal exploration of Quaker work on human rights at the United Nations
By Rachel Brett
The 2012 Swarthmore Lecture
Published 26th May 2012 by Quaker Books

Breastfeeding in Mongolia

For old times' sake here is a lovely blog post about super helpful breastfeeding practices and supportive attitudes in Mongolia.

I don't think I will ever tire of reading good things about this topic!