Entangled

The Guardian newspaper has entered a period - shall we call it Lent - of breast-beating mea culpa about its associations with slavery. This is prompted by the realisation - during research as a background to the celebration of its bicentenary a couple of years ago, I think - that its wealthy founders had made most of their money in the Manchester cotton industry. Ninety percent of cotton imported into UK at the time was produced by slave labour in the Americas. QED

One of their responses has been to commission long articles looking at the historical impact of slavery and cotton on UK at the time, in the development of British society since then, and its continuing impact now, in the age of statue-toppling and woke-hunting. I already love the writing of Gary Younge and David Olusoga, so they were very easy reading, thoughtful and thought-provoking. I recommend it

Two interesting morsels that I did not know caught my eye. First, when the American civil war broke out, the north imposed a naval blockade on the export of Confederate cotton. The cotton-based prosperity of Manchester was threatened. The response of the business owners was to fund warships to join the southern cause and try to break the blockade. The response of the factory workers was to hold mass-meetings and express their solidarity with the enslaved workers and support for the north, notwithstanding the impact on their livelihood

Second, when British demand for cotton made it so much more profitable than sugar, tobacco and other plantation crops, the demand for slaves rose in the deep-south cotton estates and fell in the more northerly states where these other crops were grown. Many slaves who has established lives - albeit oppressed ones - in the central states were, once more uprooted en masse, and forced to move south, overland by forced march, by sea passage, or in steamers down the Mississippi. This second enforced transport, like much of our complicity in the slave economy, is largely forgotten in Britain, and we don't even think to question why we talk about people being "sold down the river"

A wet walk to the church for the funeral of a village stalwart, who died soon after her 100th birthday. She came into the church to Bladon Races and left to The Entertainer and Je Ne Regrette Rien. Good for her. This was on one of the paths, beaded by the rain. A nest, we assume - or perhaps the remains of one from last year, discarded to make room for a new one. A little further on we came across men fusing together optical fibres, ten at a time, to build the next generation telecoms network. It didn't look so much different to this