Crawling out of LA in slow traffic and heading up the coast, there was a road sign to the Museum of Tolerance. We didn’t go because… the queues, the screaming, ice-cream kids and their pushy parents….intolerable. Tolerance is there to be tested – the very word implies how much stress can be, well, tolerated. We have already touched on the idea of this year as a potential arena for tangible change and the last week has brought one or two…
Splendid isolation was the splendidly-titled foreign policy that did so well for the dear old British Empire in the late 19th century – the high cost to other countries notwithstanding, of course. That separatist nerve is clearly still twitching in the British organism; it may be island mentality or post-imperial depression, but it also has global application. Protectionism, in whatever form, may have a practical, defensive function in the short-term but is ultimately insular and self-defeating. You might say that, as…
All nature resists change. We know we know the devil we know and we know we prefer it to the one we don’t. We also know that something is seriously up. We’re not quite sure what, except that many of us would rather not think about it. But it’s happening anyway and, as was the case with 2020, things will look very different again by the time 2021 has finished with us. We are, apparently, getting a thousand years education condensed…