Follies Of 1943

 Welcome to 1943!

Not my words, but something I got off Lee Carroll.

And not his words either, but something someone said to him in a conversation about Ukraine...

Welcome to 1943.

You can hear the resignation, the verbal shrug, the despair that's not so deep it can't rise to the saving grace of a witticism....

Because here we go again. Same old ideologies, same old ambitions. Some wars are fuelled by new ideas- for instance the revolutionary wars of the French Republic- and some- like this one- by very old ones- by ideologies and ambitions that have had to be dragged from their graves. "If burning down my neighbour's house was good enough for my great granddaddy it's good enough for me."

Welcome to 1943.

But it ain't 1943- it's a whole lifetime later- and we're better than this!

Tiger, Tiger...

 I don't know why my grandfather joined the Leicestershire regiment. So far as I know he had no prior connection with the county and was living in Surrey at the time of his enlistment. I suspect officers were allocated to regiments on the basis of the army's needs not theirs. "I say, Allen, the Leicestershires have an opening for a sub-lieutenant (the last one got himself shredded.) Would you mind awfully...."

My grandmother was a wood-carver. We have three things she made during the War- a mirror, a box and a wall plaque- all of which feature the Leicestershire tiger. The regiment was awarded its tiger in appreciation of its leading role in the conquest of India. By one of those pleasing ironies that the muse of history amuses herself with Leicester now has the largest population of people originating from the sub-continent (by proportion if not overall numbers) of any English city. There's a massive Hindu temple- all made out of icing sugar- just up the road from where my daughter used to live.

It's odd that my daughter should have wound up in Leicestershire. Like her great grandfather she had no prior connection. The way she tells it, she was at a loose end and a friend of hers who had moved  to Leicester invited her down- and she has lived there ever since.  I don't suppose it actually means anything but I sense a pattern.

The universe likes patterns.

Here's another. As I was going into Tesco this morning there was woman,  stood in the entrance talking on her phone, who had an enormous tiger's head on the back of her T shirt...