Need to get back to regular posting on this blog. All the stuff I want to say piles up in my head and then I don't make the time to write it down and it sort of dissipates, gets lost somewhere, floats into some sort of interweb ether...

sooooo firstly I need to have a little rant about car adverts... why is it that manufacturers think they can fuse the use of cars with nature in such a integral way...cars and car-use destroy the natural environment!!!! roads kill off biodiversity, the fuel that we use casually floats off into the atmosphere and destroys the natural balance of things and they are, old or new, ugly unsightly mechanical heaps!! and yet a car advert has a single glistening vehicle in some distant rural setting zipping around as if it was the only 'creature' on the planet... there's a new one that amazed me.. it leaves a vapour trail behind it and people are looking at this polluting smog in wonder as if it was something special??? now what is that all about?????????

ok rant over... that one has been wafting through my brain cells in need of release for some time now and well yes that is what blogs are for is it not????

and so the search for the london bombers continues, the return to a sort of normality takes place, we had a two minutes silence across Europe on Thursday... and my head swims with thoughts.... we have not had any minutes silence for any civilian deaths in Iraq.... perhaps we should??? I was in a little woodland with 10 eleven year olds on thursday and we stopped what we were doing and I found it quite a special moment... just being silent, thinking of the connection of all of those others also standing silent... and it really makes me ponder human connectivity and the power it gives... maybe it brings out the old hippy in me but I am sure there is something beyond individuals and there is 'something' that connects us in ways beyond present day understanding????

Anyway stepping aside from weird new agey ponderings... to the people that planted the bombs... I thought it was very good that good old Ken (Livingstone)did not speak of revenge, eye for an eye type rhetoric but was calm and spoke of the need for understanding and peace... this is not a time, in fact there is never a time, when violence can be answered by violence... it just escalates the whole situation....I truely feel for the bombers families as much as for the victims families... it must be terrible to discover that one's child could be involved in something so awful, to be so committed to a violent ideology that they actually killed for it.... ??? another thing beyond comprehension.... but but but....

listening to R4 the other morning when they announced that it had indeed been British citizens that carried out the bombings, the next news item concerned American officers in Guantanamo Bay being accused of abusive and degrading activites to their 'prisoners', the final main story was about British soldiers possibly being charged with war crimes for their activities in Iraq... and the injustice of it all reminded me of some angry young Irish men that I knew in the 70's who felt so strongly about other acts of injustice that they considered violence as an option...and although I could never condone any act of violence I could understand their anger, (thankfully the IRA have (sort of) come to understand that violence does not help any cause).... it is possible to have some level of empathy with angry young muslims today..... hopefully they too will come to realise that violence just isn't an answer????????