Author: nananoyz

Once I saw Sandra Bland’s smiling face in the news reports, I didn’t want to watch the video of her arrest. It was going to be a level of wrongdoing and injustice that would be intolerable to watch, burn my eyes.

What had to have happened between her joyful look in the photographs probably supplied by her loving family and the reports of her alleged suicide in jail would be outrageous, assault everything I keep wanting to think is true about America. We are mostly good and fair. Do I still believe this? I don’t know.

What I believe but can’t fully face is this: it’s so much worse than we think it is.

We only really get what has been going on, what we have been told has been going on forever, because now there is video. Before, when we heard the stories, we might have thought the descriptions…

Miss Marple doesn’t live in our village, but she’d be bored silly if she did. We’re short on murdered vicars and poisoned husbands.

What would she have to make do with?

Before I tell you about crime in the village, here’s my disclaimer: After drawing your attention to crime on the Scilly Isles and to the guy who was arrested for charging his phone on the London Overground trains, some of you were left thinking Britain’s a land with no serious crime. That’s my fault. The police really do have better things to do than arrest disoriented seals who wander into town. Or at least other things to do.

Marginally relevant photo: fog stealing the top of the cliff

But for you non-Brits out there, the point is this: Britain’s a real place and part of the same world you live in. That’s another way of saying that it…

Dear Elizabeth,

Forgive the intrusion of this long overdue letter.  How many years has it been? Fifteen at least I’m guessing and not a word exchanged twixt the pair of us in all that time! How very young and foolish we were to allow that little incident of the wretched jelly fish sting in St Topez to come between us. Naive as I was back then how was I to know that pouring a 10 litre bucket of balsamic vinegar over your infected torso was no ‘cure all’, indeed was an old wives’ tale and would cause you so much additional agony.  On reflection maybe it would have been better had you kept your bikini top on when you went swimming!  I do trust those scars eventually healed though. Still what is done is done. Plainly I should not have posted the snaps I took of you at the time…

I watch from afar. A grandmother does that.

But as I watch, I remember the formation of my own family. I remember when my own daughter went from being one to one of many. She was graceful and helpful about it but looking back I can remember her fatigue with the new job of sharing everything that had previously just been hers. Like me.

One of my granddaughters is taking a crash course in going from one to one of many. Her father is with a wonderful and kind woman who has two children. So suddenly my granddaughter’s weekends have stopped being singular and focused on her, a child orchid blooming with many admirers. Now she is one of many, other children like other things, want to be awake when she is sleeping, inside when she yearns for the playground.

Everything in her life, her weekend life anyway, has to…