The Breadth of our Humanity

Stopped off at the causeway on our way to Évora to get a Blip, as neither of us had got a photo yet - light almost gone (not that we had much today), but liked the two geese flying past, Bengt's house in the dip on the right, and the winding road we drive up on the left.

Went to Évora for some shopping, but mainly to see a Portuguese/Angolan film, The Englishman's Papers - stunning photography in the Namibian desert, but we both felt a bit mystified as to what it was about - not helped by not understanding all the Angolan Portuguese. And, as often happens, we were the only ones in that showing.

So grateful that Ju's three (or four) month scan showed a healthy baby.

Capon, ch 5, "Wave Breast and Heave Shoulder", where he tackles the fact that "Man not only dines; he also kills and sacrifices." This chapter alone would also warrant the price of the book; I can't do it justice, but here, a quote that gives a flavour of his argument:
We come home:
       to butchered lamb and ox, headless chicken, stuck pig; to deaths not         alien, to agonies unkindly kin, to our own screams echoed, our own           eyes mirrored, parts nearly human pierced, and blood as plainly red           as any man's.
It is a world easily protested,
       easily left for vegetarian schemes, dull apocalypses where the saints        eat pills:
But it stands despite the antiseptic dreams,
Recalling us to what we are.
This blood,
This universal convulsion of twitching death,
       insists upon the breadth of our humanity, animal among animals;               breaks the angelic pretense, the paltry pre-millennial hope by which           man turns his back on flesh, and leaves himself too little to be saved.