Letter from A. Broad

But like many others I return to poetry and found renewal with a program from the Wigmore-at-home series. I settled in to listen and watch a performance by Alice Coote, Christian Blackshaw and Ralph Fiennes as they wove together the music, letters and poetry of Tchaikovsky and Pushkin. They gather artists and audience together bringing us solace and strength for this time.

Howard, long retired as a tennis coach in Regent’s Park, totters through, making his way to the new Morrison’s supermarket. I like to believe that as he sits at his kitchen table, a mug of tea and the crumbling shortbread biscuits at hand, he enjoys writing a verse to deliver when he next ventures out.

Inspired by the ‘chain of Solidarity’ in neighboring Belarus the Russian women found their way around the restrictions of mass protests this weekend. They gathered in home gardens lighting candles, placing them in hearts, and they stood, joined together by white ribbons in lines along the streets and around the government buildings in Moscow’s city squares. In homage to Navalnaya, Alexei’s wife, t...

Meanwhile throughout England the snow keeps falling, though in London it is unsure how to land – as snow flakes or rain drops. The wind chill is keeping the temperatures low, the snow in flurries and ministers hurrying from their cars to Westminster or their Zoom-rooms where attention is all turned inward to the Covid virus, its variants and the vaccines.

Today I am thinking about an anesthesiologist’s story of his first two intubations, back to back, on young women bedded in the same unit, both mothers with young families to care for. He writes of the panic in their eyes and in his heart and the moment when he has to switch from compassion to competent – and carry on.

But today as the UK death toll from Corona virus tops 100,000, there leaks news of petty behavior from Boris Johnson to João Vale de Almeida the ambassador sent to represent the European Union in England. This rolls back to past behaviors and slights between brief-cased men and women over the last painful years of the Brexit negotiations and now rumbles on into questions of who holds how many dose...

On Wednesday, as this program airs on WWMR.org the United States is inaugurating Joe Biden as their 46th president and with that act completed the United States and the world stage will change and a new act begins. While Putin may shrug off concern for world opinion the question still remains, ‘What to do with this constant festering thorn in his side'.

The small hamlets and villages that surrounded my childhood are dotted with Covid virus cases and death. Old names – Ash Vale, Frimley, Bagshot, Camberley, Farnham, Elstead, Tongham, and Guildford, all a part of my childhood – are now saddened with a startled grief.

This was aired on KWMR.org Wednesday morning Pacific time. And then there was Wednesday Morning East Coast time – and you know the rest. With Love from London.

And the fishermen and women? Ah well, they have been pushed down river, and out with the tide, a knotty problem to be revisited in 5 more years. The draft agreement stating that: “Sovereign rights being asserted on both sides for both the purpose of exploring, exploiting, conserving and managing the living resources in their water,” sounds like a load of old herring to me.

Between Brexit and the new mutant strain of COVID-19, the rest of Europe is firmly closing its doors on trade and travel with England. Albeit ‘closing the barn door after the horse has bolted’.

“Russia. I am from Russia, then I spend several years in Switzerland but they let me come back here and I am (she repeats) so grateful.” She is smiling all the time, and rocking from side to side and I wonder at her story. So many Eastern European women came to Great Britain, and America, looking for a refuge, a better life an escape from what? I wondered. They were all working women in one way or...

The vaccines were made by the husband and wife team of Professor Sahin and Özlem Türeci at their German firm BioNTech. Professor Türeci’s father had come to Germany as a refugee from Turkey and found work as a mechanic at the Ford factory. When Sahin was four years old the family followed and the immigrant refugee family settled in Germany.

It was with grim pressed lips that the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, reportedly by an Israeli ambush team, was broken last week. Countries watched and remained silent – for the most part – for there is movement on the chess board. While President - Elect Joe Biden says he intends to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal, Jared Kushner has taken up the baton from Michael Pompeo and is very busy flyin...

Seeing all this harsh political power-playing behavior, being isolated in COVID quarantine, and feeling powerless has been countered by the human kindness we met this week.

It has been many years since we heard the weekly cry of a man pushing his barrow while ringing his bell and calling out, “Any old Iron, Any old Iron.’ Now for those who do not make it to the recycling centers there is always the canal at nighttime.

The days and dates you remember come from childhood, and the important moments in our personal lives and country’s wellbeing.

Ralph strides onto the stage and loudly places his props on the table, claiming the table and the props as a supporting cast. He is the magician who will hold us in David Hare’s mind with his fears of the disease, his anger at the government’s handling of it all, and his heart’s rage at the treatment of the NHS nurses.

Politeness, calmness in the face of such needless suffering and death and a gentleman holding his own. Tears come to my eyes at the sight and sound of him.

“If carefully negotiated terms are not honoured and laws can be ‘legally’ broken, on what foundations does our democracy stand?” The Internal Market Bill would ride roughshod over the Withdrawal Agreement signed with the EU last year – and potentially put peace in Northern Ireland at at risk. It’s a gamble, by a gambling man, who doesn’t seem to know the odds and is unclear for which team he is ba...

In this time of Covid restrictions people remain wary of indoor galleries and museums. Every year I find one piece that speaks to me. This year it is Kalliopi Lemos’s ‘The Plait’ A very tall braid of wire signifying a chopped-off braid of hair.

At first it seemed there was a restraint on Marr with his questions about the misplaced 16,000 cases, and then, as sometimes happens, the Scot in him rose to the fore. It takes a half squint of my eyes to see him strip off his Sunday suit, toss his shawl over his shoulder, twirl in his green plaid kilt and brandish his sword – at Boris.

One of the privileges of reaching a certain age is the grounding of your collective wisdom and the ability to commit to what you know is right.

In trying to be stern, he repeated again and again “We must obey the rules”. But the rules keep changing and Hancock was ill equipped, and nervous. Monday morning we found out why.

The natural world is in deep fury and sorrow and has serious indigestion from humanity’s greedy excesses. For support or solace some people return to their religions, some look to science, hardly anyone looks to their politicians. In this house there are books and charts from the I–Ching, Runes and Astrology.