Grim thoughts

Cool and cloudy with a few showers. I woke up on time to post today's Morning Prayer link to YouTube then dozed for an hour before getting up to make breakfast. On 'Thought for the Day' Angela Tilby spoke about being in Hiroshima forty years ago on the Feast of the Transfiguration, our wedding anniversary, for the annual ceremony of commemoration for the victims of the first nuclear bomb on the city. With nothing urgent needing my attention I whiled away the morning pondering.

Tilby observed how the dark threat of nuclear holocaust had receded from public consciousness in recent decades, though the world was as unstable and plagued with conflict now as it was back then. Putin has mentioned the threat of nuclear arms being used if he doesn't get his way over Ukraine. Nuclear weapon launch rehearsals are said to be taking place, and there are now several more nations which have their own. China, India, Pakistan, Israel. Iran is said to have the capability to build its own nuclear bomb and deliver it within a few years at their current rate of programme development. 

Women camped in protest outside Greenham Common air base in eighties and nineties against the deployment of American tactical nuclear weapons at the base. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament still exists and holds commemorative events. There was even one at the National Eisteddfod in Pontypridd this week, but these get little attention in the round of news preoccupied with civil disorder from anti-immigration mobs rioting in cities around the country. 

Britain's conventional defence forces are now smaller, less well equipped than they were forty years ago. The nuclear deterrent is still there as a last resort, but if it were used, the environmental catastrophe added to global warming could see an end to us all, sooner than later. With growing tension internationally, the risk of escalation and accident rises. Population shift and migration crisis are driven both by war and environmental degradation impoverishing people in underdeveloped countries of the South. Nothing we do at present will stem this tide of human need. I wonder if we're fully aware of how dangerous are the times we live in, globally? As long as human beings strive to compete for power and wealth, rather than co-operate and share resources equally, the complex web of problems facing the world entraps us. How to break out of it? How to turn problems into opportunities? That is the question in search of answers.

Clare went shopping in town, and I cooked rice and veg with prawns for lunch, which was ready just as she came through the door, more by luck than judgement as I started cooking late. Mid afternoon I made my way to the Cathedral by a longer route, through the park to arrive in time for HTC choir rehearsal, before their final Choral Evensong again with superbly performed modern music much of which I didn't know and a Bach prelude and fugue from organist Keith Dale to conclude. I took my leave of Keith and the few friends I still have in the choir then got wet walking home as earlier drizzle turned into persistent light rain.

After supper I read a chapter of 'Marina' and half an episode of another McDonald and Hobbs, followed by a walk in the dark around the block to get some fresh night air in my lungs before bed.