Foraging

Another mild night and hot sunny day. Clare had a hospital appointment mid morning and decided to walk there so we I didn't need to take her by car. Instead I went to the park and picked blackberries along the edge of the allotments and the footpath through the woods along the river. In two hours I collected three pounds. By the time I returned home Clare was already cooking fish pie for lunch. While I was recovering from my foraging effort after lunch with an hour's extra sleep, she acquired some free apples from a neighbour, to cook with the blackberries and produce blackberry and apple jelly.

I drafted a sermon for next Sunday after my siesta. As we'd run out of bananas I then walked to Lidl's and shopped for fruit, a chorizo and some smoked mackerel as well. Both these products are suited to my taste and reasonably priced, so the extra distance on an unpleasant noisy road was worth the effort. Clare went to meditation group leaving me to my own devices to make supper. 

Then I removed several big albums from one of my Google Photos accounts and backed them up to a hard drive to free space rather than renting storage space for stuff I want to keep but rarely look at. Then finally, an hour reading about the Spanish Civil War. It's taken the thoroughness of a well respected top British historian to write a comprehensive and balanced account of a brutal chaotic conflict which has taken sixty years for the majority of Spaniards to discuss, as the generation of survivors reach the end of their lives, haunted by what they witnessed. 

It's giving me disturbing insight into what a complete breakdown of law and order looks like, and furious hatreds are unleashed. With such deep social division, poverty and a sense of powerlessness felt by many people in Britain I wonder, could it happen here? When you think of what happened in Northern Ireland fifty years ago, triggered by the events of Bloody Sunday, what sort of crisis could lead to a similar catastrophe closer to home?