Refugees

A Mission In Spain

/ aspinalllucy / Leave a comment

I do like a mission in life.

I would now like to be able to say that I was off to Lesbos to help care for refugees and support the over-stretched, very over-stretched, Greek people, but I am not. (Not least because I am not sure they need a middle-aged do-gooder who speaks no Greek, has no Arabic, no medical skills etc etc.)

So on the absence of a proper mission in life, I set myself small ones.

When we lived in Paris and the best beloved was at work all day and I had no friends, I used to walk across the city on small missions after small missions.

I might be going to buy a new wooden spoon and new there was a great cook shop by the canal, or I would create a trail based on Jewish shops and synagogues, or I would find yet another circuitous route to Shakespeare & Company, the amazing bookshop on the left bank.

That way, I learned a lot about Paris, and it kept me sane.

The best beloved hates British winters and wants to spend a month in Southern Spain in say February next year.

I don’t mind the winter, and have Oxfam, pilates, upholstery and other Sussex housewife things to keep me amused.

He wants a blast of sun and to write his book.

So, we went for a week to Seville to think about it for next year.

I really like Seville, enjoyed the tapas, nice apartment, Cordoba, sights and scenes and etc etc but I did wonder what my mission would be if I was there for a month.

Learning Spanish is not going to do it – before you, dear reader, suggest that.

He has suggested that, and indeed bought me a Spanish CD course from Lidl, but no, that is not going to do it.

I need something to get me out of bed early and cheerful with a sense of doing something purposeful and I am just not sure what it would be.

Before anyone berates me for having the problems of the rich, I would just like to admit that indeed it is a problem for a rich person but it doesn’t mean that I will be able to spend a month counting my blessings and doing bugger all.

A brief un-banal moment

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There are times when writing banal stuff about an easy life seems not quite to the point.

This week an agreement (of sorts) has been made with the Greeks – and you should listen to Tim Hartford’s More or Less Greece Special on Radio 4 for good stuff about the numbers and allegations. I have to say I feel for the Greek people but definitely not their political class – and if I was Lithuanian or Irish, I would not be that sympathetic to their current government. And I am not. I agree with Guy Verhofstadt and you can see a great video of his arguments on Facebook.

And then, there is an agreement with the Iranians – which will please the Israeli young woman and Iranian young man in my group of international PhDs last week (they were wary of swapping email addresses in case their governments found out) – and which pleases any right minded thinking person, so that won’t apply to the US Congress or Israeli government.

Meanwhile, our government plans to make any trade union member opt in to paying a levy to the Labour Party but does not feel the need to make every shareholder or staff member vote as to whether their big boss should donate to the Tories.

And in a continuing saga of misery, more than three million Syrian refugees are in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq – I understand by February this year we had taken 187. Another six million are internally displaced which is a nice way of saying they are not in any sense at home and safe.

So, I just wanted you to know that even here in Deepest Sussex, we do get the news and we do care about it.

But, as any reader will have gathered by now, we don’t talk about it much.

If you feel that banal stuff about an easy life should not be on the same page as serious issues, don’t worry you can stop here.

I am hoping that you are doing great stuff with refugees or politics and have better things to do, and there is a lot of me that wishes I was too – but I am not, so back to banal.

But for those of us in Deepest Sussex who are not doing anything amazingly useful with our lives, three issues this week – a new laptop, some alarming dog-sitting and the new computer till at Oxfam – you get the point.

So, anyone who has not got better things to do can read on for the next blog in which all will be revealed.