Venetian sun

Storm Arwen visited today, it was quite lively but I think Cambridgeshire got off lightly. Just up the road in Norfolk the first snow of the winter fell and further north certainly had the full experience. So what better to cheer the gloom than the warm glow of the Venetian sun? This is a plaster wall mask bought on our last visit to the golden city in about 2012, maybe before. S/he sits on my kitchen wall beaming on my daily activities. 

Like many of you I've been thinking a lot about refugees lately and despairing at the public discourse that paints these desperate fellow humans as undeserving of our compassion and certainly unwelcome in the UK as if they're a burden and we have no responsibility. I listened to Michael Morpurgo's devastating piece about refugees aired on Radio 4 this morning 

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-59443569

and then came the sublime Soul Music (perhaps radio's finest hour) that featured Massive Attack's goosebump inducing Unfinished Sympathy. One contributor was the war photographer Giles Duley who worked with Massive Attack in 2016 using his images of the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East to raise awareness of their stories. Duley described his feelings of shame and rage when he realised how families and communities in peril had been abandoned by governments across Europe: "I don't think any person if they'd visited those countries and they'd seen what war does would not have wanted to reach out and save those people". That's why people risk everything to come here, which is meant to be a place of safety and welcome. Tell that to Priti Patel...