40 years ago

After the depressing food group lunch I depressed myself even more by watching (Mr C’s choice as I knew it would affect me adversely) the C4 3-parter on the Miners’ Strike, on for the 40th anniversary. This is my badge which I wore at fund-raisers. We lived in Suffolk where there was little sympathy for the miners so it was hard going but I had so much respect for the wives who really got behind fund-raising for the striking families. Of course the strike was doomed from the start. The first programme focussed on a pit village which was split, then the next was on Orgreave and the police brutality and how the government media tried to cover it up. The third was about how the Tory fixer, the Dominic Cummings of his day, manipulated things. I’d have liked to hear more about what happened to the communities lost after the pit closures.

Today the woman who talked about her holidays for most of the lunch sent an email saying she thought we should talk more about food and not the stuff we were talking about as that’s not what the group is for!

I had a haircut in Morpeth and we went to Dobbies for seed potatoes.

Now I must crack on with the Tunisia book before the Blurb discount runs out.

Jo and I are having a FaceTime chat later. She’s going on a trip to Afghanistan this year and Turkmenistan later with Young Pioneers. You can be a young pioneer till you are 70. Wild Frontiers are being helpful about our Kazakhstan ideas for next year. We’d wanted to combine it with Turkmenistan but there’s no flights between these countries so we’d have to fly back to Istanbul which is not something we’d want to do. However there is a direct flight from Almaty to Dushanbe in Tajikistan so that would be interesting to us. Food for thought for 2025.