Jorge

Atirah, Brendan, Chiara, Dennis...

The next name in the sequence of storm-names agreed on by British and Irish meteorologists is Ellen- but instead of Ellen along comes Jorge- breaking the alphabetical sequence and the alternation of genders- so I can only suppose he was born and raised in the USA- and acquired his name there.

He hasn't been as fierce as his brothers and sisters but he's been carrying a lot of rain with him. Our front path- which had all but dried out- is once again a water feature.

So have we learned our lesson about building on flood plains? One of the sites earmarked for development round here is a field in Capel over which some intrepid wild swimmer was pictured doing the crawl. Surely that scheme has been knocked on the head. Surely, surely...

Greta Thunberg was in Bristol yesterday. The rally had been organised by six-formers. The police had said "Please don't," but they did anyway- and to judge by the coverage on the news it went splendidly. I think Thunberg is irrationally apocalyptic and her science questionable but I'm all for pushing ecology to the top of the political agenda- and thrilled to see the authorities moved to one side by schoolkids. Reporters from the BBC and Channel 4 scoured the streets in the interests of balance- looking for naysayers- and came up with one, two, three very ugly, all but inarticulate old men.

P.S. Ailz tells me Jorge comes to us from Iberia not America. Either way he's an interloper.

The Wisdom Of The Young

"As you grow older you become an immigrant from a vanished country, a country some of your peers may remember but the young may find unimaginable or incomprehensible."

That's not me, that's Rebecca Solnit in this morning's Guardian. She's talking about the expansion of consciousness that has occurred in her lifetime- especially in the field of women's rights- and how things that couldn't be discussed when she was young- simply because the language didn't exist- have now become sayable. She throws out some new words I didn't know the meanings of- himpathy, intersectionality, misogynoir- so I looked them up. Himpathy is what President Trump felt for poor Justice Kavanagh when the women from his past were nasty to him, intersectionality describes the complexity of social identity- how a person is never just rich or poor but poor and white and female or rich and black and male- and misognynoir is the combination of sexism and racism that consigns black women to the bottom of the social heap. I write these definitions down in the hope that I'll remember them. It behoves us survivors of an older, stupider culture to pay attention to the wisdom of the young- and keep up, keep up, keep up...