Skip to content

The Welcoming Committee

Saturday 8th May, another beautiful clear and bright spring day; not only International Woman's Day (whatever that means) but highly significant as this year's inauguration of the frog conservation nursery. The spawn in the ponds and in my holding pens (so to speak) is fertile, and today I moved one mass into the plasterer's tub, reserving a small clump of inhabited jelly to bring indoors; and rear as pets, if all goes well. How amazing it is to see the tiny round black balls first becoming oblong, and then developing that little fat bellied curly tailed embryo shape, so universal; so ancient. There's also a smooth newt in the smaller pool, lovely to see. Hope it's not alone. We have never, to our knowledge, had any live efts in our water features. What a first that would be!

But since it is International Women's Day (whatever that means), and since, on the strength of my Aleutian Trilogy work, I've spent most of this afternoon talking about how to greet the unknown I thought I'd share with you my answer to one of the questions, comprising my wishlist for the welcoming committee, should they ever arrive. (After having pointed out that if the visitors arrive the way I think they would, first contact will be made with whoever they choose; maybe just through happenstance.

Anyway, assuming we're going to do this : the welcoming committee.

The Political Leaders
Angela Merkel. Obviously
Christine Lagarde. Because there are bound to be global financial angles to sort out
Joyce Banda, President of Malawi, educator and human rights activist. A steadying influence.
Caroline Lucas, My MP, but that's not why. I felt I really ought to include a representative of the UK parliament, and she's the pick of the bunch. Honestly. Ask anyone.
And then for the arts
Angelina Jolie. I think we have to have a famous face, and I like her. She's a good communicator.
Arundhati Roy. A terrific novelist, and staunch outspoken defender of civil society.
for science
Fabiola Gianotti. She leads (led) the ATLAS Large Hadron Collider experiment team at CERN. If you've read White Queen, you'll know why someone from the great Collider had to be involved.
And then, since we must face facts and there might be trouble, my security council:

Noorzia Afridi (SAWERA)
Lydia Mukami (Mwea)
Berta Cáceres (COPINH)
Three women I know for sure to be very, very brave. As women's human rights defenders on the front line, they know how to stand and fight, how to face death daily; and keep a cool head under fire. Whatever other qualities our chiefs of staff might need, that's got to be a good start.

I did consider Susan Rice, but she makes mistakes and gets found out (not good), and I don't know if she's personally brave at all, so I crossed her out.

And finally, but equally important, the "wives", so to speak. I'm choosing:

Pope Francis
Desmond Tutu
The Dalai Lama
And Bill and Melinda Gates

I think that "covers all the bases".
(Not sure what that means, but probably to do with Baseball)

The keynote image says We Are The Spring, in Arabic; I hope I got it right. An image from the video Husam Helmi (editor of Enab Baladi) showed us, when he came to Brighton last year, about the Syrian Non-Violent Opposition Movement. In the video nb, it was written on a shard of white concrete, in a destroyed city; destroyed, and still insisting things could be different. It seems appropriate for IWD, somehow. We are the spring. The primroses, however, are from King Death's Garden, and will be my March calendar picture.
Many thanks to Mr Olsen Wolf and his team, who asked the questions.





Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA 1CAPTCHA 2CAPTCHA 3CAPTCHA 4CAPTCHA 5


Form options

Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.