Too Many Names

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
And the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
With your exhausted scissors,
And all the names of the day
Are washed out in the waters of the night.


No-one can claim the name of Pedro
Nobody is a Rosa or Maria,
All of us are dust and sand,
All of us are rain under rain,
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and Pargaguays;
I have no idea what they are saying,
I know only of the skin of the earth
And I know it is without a name...

Pablo Neruda

Sunday morning

Sunday morning, praise the dawning

I've got a restless feeling by my side

Early dawning, Sunday morning

It's just the wasted years so close behind

Watch out, the world's behind you

There's always someone around you who will call

It's nothing at all



Sunday morning and I'm falling

I've got a feeling I don't want to know

Early dawning, Sunday morning

It's all the streets you crossed, not so long ago

Watch out, the world's behind you

There's always someone around you who will call

It's nothing at all

Sunday morning

Lou Reed

A time for change? A new voting system

Our present system of voting makes it difficult to oust the party in government, because that objective is coloured by where to place your vote. If you place it with any party other than the main opposition party, there is a danger that it will not be effective.

I propose a system that would address this problem.

Each person has two votes
The first is a direct vote to say if you wish the present party to remain in power or not. A straight yes or no.
This is counted as a total, nothing to do with the local candidate, and thus voters in constituencies where there is a big majority will not feel that their vote is wasted.
The second vote is for your favoured candidate.

Scenario 1
If you vote to oust the present government you can then proceed to vote for your chosen candidate, safe in the knowledge that the vote will not be wasted.
The new government would be made up of MP's from all the other parties, and government posts allotted in a proportional way.

Scenario 2
If you voted to keep the government you would then vote for your candidate in the normal way.

Zimbabwe? or ... oh my goodness

Not since women were denied the vote has Britain's electoral system been so "breathtakingly undemocratic", says The Business. If Labour and the Tories win exactly the same share of the popular vote on 5 May, Labour will still end up with 140 more MPs. This is because boundary changes have failed to keep up with demographic trends. People are moving out of the grimy inner cities (traditional Labour strongholds) to the suburbs and shires (Tory strongholds). The average Labour constituency now has 6,000 fewer voters than its Tory counterpart; yet the declining inner cities are still massively over-represented, and the growing suburbs under-represented. The Tories "have largely themselves to blame": when the electoral boundaries were last redrawn, ten years ago, Labour fielded a crack team of lawyers, while the complacent Tories put up a B-team. As a result, the electoral system was redrawn in Labour's favour. Combine this with the risk of postal fraud, and it looks like Britain is "becoming one huge rotten borough".

Driving us to .... death?

Letters to the Daily Telegraph:

Sir,
On a trip from London to Bristol, where there is about 100 miles on which the speed limit can be ignored, the difference in journey time at 80mph instead of 70mph is 11 minutes. Is the wear and tear on the nervous system, the increased chances of an accident and the 20 per cent additional fuel worth it?

Derek Evans, Chippenham, Wilts

Sir,
The answer to the question posed by Barbara Davy (Letters, Apr 15) - to name a piece of machinery other than the car implicated in more than 3,000 deaths every year - must be, according to the recent figures for deaths from MRSA, the hospital bed.

Bernard Mahan, Edinburgh

CAN YOU READ THIS?

Men who use Viagra may put themselves at risk of permanent blindness, experts warn.
Researchers say there have been 14 known cases in which men have suffered a 'stroke of the eye' shortly after taking the drug used to cure impotence.
A stroke of the eye occurs when the blood flow to the optic nerve is cut off, leading to irreversible loss of vision. Experts at the University of Minnesota Medical School in the U.S. said the number of cases supported the belief that there may be a causal link between Viagra and the condition.

source: The Daily Mail

Educate the masses

To the Daily Telegraph
Labour hoardings ask "Who do you want to run the country?". I would like someone educated enough to write " Whom do you want to run the country?"
David Lucas, Cornwall

Ruby wedding 3

I'm still eating the chocolate cake left over from the pre-Ruby do at the J&B's guest house. If any one wants some there's still loads in the freezer.

Esref Armagan

Esref Armagan is a painter. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things. He is totally blind. From birth. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much "seeing" does a blind person actually do?

Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods. One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other is stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision as an infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain detects no light now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were formally educated, and like them, he spent his early years playing in the streets. But Armagan's blindness isolated him, and to pass the time, he turned to drawing. At first he just scratched in the dirt. But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper. At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on canvas with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.
“He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he's never seen any of these things”

His paintings are disarmingly realistic. And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades," says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I have never seen a performance like his." Kennedy's first opportunity to meet and test Armagan in person was during a visit to New York last May, for a forum organised by a group called Art Education for the Blind. Armagan, who is something of a celebrity in Turkey, has become used to touring with his canvases to the Czech Republic, China, Italy and the Netherlands. What made this visit different was the interest shown by scientists - both Kennedy and a team from Boston.
Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524841.700

View his paintings at: http://www.anatolia.com/anatolia/Gallery/armagan/paints.asp
BUT BE WARNED: THERE IS A NASTY FLASHING ADD ON THE SITE. I SUGGEST YOU DO NOT CLICK IT

Abortion

Sir - If life begins at conception (and, indeed, there is no other logical point at which it can be said to begin), then any deliberate ending of life is wrong. It does not become "more wrong" the closer it approaches to the time when a baby, if born, could survive.

On the contrary, it seems instinctively more wrong to remove from a place of safety a baby who would not otherwise be able to survive.

It has been suggested by Michael Howard and others that the upper limit should be reduced from 24 to 20 weeks. This is misleading, because in fact the upper limit is not 24 weeks for all abortions. For babies diagnosed as having a disability, and for some others, there is no time limit, and abortion is allowed up to the moment of birth.

In ignoring these abortions, a strong message is sent out that disabled babies matter less than those aborted for other reasons. I have spina bifida, and 90 per cent of babies with my disability are now aborted - a fatal discrimination against those with disabilities.

Any upper-limit Bill will always exclude the most vulnerable of the unborn - for instance younger babies and those with disabilities, who are most in need of the protection of the law.

The only logical amendment to the law would be to legislate against all abortions, and put support mechanisms in place for women with crisis pregnancies. This would be just towards both the unborn and women facing difficulties. Anything else sells both groups short.

Alison Davis, Blandford Forum, Dorset

April 10th

“April 10th” from a Poem for the Day Edited by Nicholas Albery

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still we keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er darkened ways
Made of our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away from the pall
From our dark spirits

John Keats from Endymion Book 1



Also on this day

1791 Robert Burns’ third son was born
1794 Coleridge discharged from army as insane
1818 John Keats dated his Preface from Endymion
1909 Algernon Charles Swinburne, reformed Bohemian, died from pneumonia at the home of Watts-Dunton
1952 Liverpool Pop Poet Adrian Henri was born
1965 Sue Taylor married Barry Thomas
2005 they celebrated their 40th anniversary
mid 1940s Geoff Hopwood was born

Ruby Wedding 2

Poem by Elinor Thomas for our Ruby wedding

Riding on horses
Umbrellas in April showers
Bottles of Champagne
Young love for ever

Ruby Wedding 1

A poem wriiten by Robert Thomas for our Ruby wedding when all our sons and their partners and children were present

For a Ruby Wedding

This poem is your poem
It was written when you first kissed
And it is spoken today by each of us
Whose lives are its fabulous lines.

Robert Thomas