The secret Life of Bridges

Are we ever to know what is on the other side of this ocean?

It is humid today. They said there would be thunderstorms but they are not here yet. It is like swimming through the shower at the moment. I know there are plenty of places with worse climates but for me at the moment, this is horrible. I just want to go and lie in the long grass in the shade of tall trees and think things into my blog. I know it is not possible but it will be. Boeing are researching antigravity at the moment so everything we thought was impossible may not be.

Hiding in the long grass in the trees is a calming visualisation, like "Under the Ivy". Sometimes I think of all the places in the country where there are no humans, all the shady clearings in the forests, the acres of open grassland on the hills and mountains and the quiet river-bank paths. It almost has me believing in the things I usually dismiss as rubbish, the fairies and the other little people, or the wisdom of the non-human living things. I am drawn back to hanging on the bridge rail looking up at the sky and pretending I was flying high above some tropical ocean, the small clouds as islands and the vapour trails or aircraft as the wakes of ships so far down below. At that age nothing matters beyond the next five minutes. There must be a correlation between how far you look ahead and how old you are. I suppose that this is why our confidence is lost as we get older. My daughter has NO worries about anything long-term. She loves everything about herself and is of course the most important person in the universe. Sometimes I just want to curl up and revert to that feeling but all the bad-stuff creeps in as soon as I think about it. For me it started with the B52s bombing Vietnam and Cambodia. That is my first memory of TV from about 1968 and it annoys me that my life was stolen by me seeing that image. I don't need to put a link to it do I? If you are my age then it must be in your head too. The man who put it there won a Nobel Peace Prize. I can be thankful that I never saw anything about Mai Lai; maybe my Father carried out some judicous censorship or I blanked it out or something.

Someone wrote to the BBC talking point about Landmines the other day. Her name is Anne just so you know which entry to look for. She said

'People don't see the benefit of landmines. Granted, some civilians get hurt by them, but they are a great weapon against infantry. The landmine business also creates lots of jobs in this country so to close it down would be wrong'.
Anne - USA

Now this maybe an adolescent boy writing just to be stupid but I doubt it. "The benefit of landmines"!!!!! I remember the first time I became aware of the evil that is landmines. I was in a pub in Chester reading Scientific American when I came across an article about mines. I cried in public at what some supposedly decent person in a supposedly civilized western country can develop to kill people who he will never meet or even come within a thousand miles of. Let us hope that the people who make these things become too pre-occupied with sueing corporations for their own lack of personal responsibility. Maybe we should set up a fund to bring the manufacturers of landmines to court so that the thousands of people affected by them can sue. There are people who are sueing fast-food outlets because they have too much flesh when there are people in the world who SHOULD be sueing because they have lost limbs. Ludicrous. We are all idiots. I know some people say that all this idea of banning the most terrible of weapons is Utopian but it is the work of only a minority which creates this mayhem. Most people want a quite life, under the trees in the long grass in the forest. Unfortunately, the forest is mined.



landmine action

Do the board at the landmine manufacturers punch the air whenever they make a new and better mine? I bet they do. I bet they sleep at night as well. Sometimes I don't sleep because of thinking about all this and I have no responsibility other than living in a Country which has a mild support for a Country which makes the bloody things.

We live in a world with 1 million different models of Training Shoe.