Tuesday, May 09, 2006

cold change



I hoped to go for some long walks this past weekend and take some more pictures of the Wild Dod Road while musing some more of its history but.....
we were rained in and hailed in. It felt as if there was a giant outside flinging ice blocks at the house.
While we were hemmed into the house, kind of enjoying the extreme weather apart from ther fact that our new wood heater didn't seem up to the task of keeping the house cosy and enjoying the antics of four eagles hunting in the cold, I read the news of the slaughter of an Iraqi journalist- Atwar Bahjat.


It seems impossible that we can be enjoying our quiet and relatively uneventful existence when such appalling events are taking place. I know that life is, as my teenage step-daughter would say, random, but this particular act of horror on a young Iragi journalist, cut me to the bone. It seems that the situation in Iraq is beyond hopeless when a half Sunni, half Shi'ite young woman can be so callously and horribly killed for reasons that are not even clear to most Iraqis. Beyond the fact that the American, British and Australians have made an extreme mess of a situation that they neither planned or thought could eventuate. Yep, we'll just roll in and give im a bit of democracy and by the way take control of all your infrastructure and leave the politics of these actions to curdle and destroy the fabric of Iraqi life. I am aware of how bad life was under Saddam but I do not believe that getting rid of one tyrant has done one bit of good for the average Iraqi. Atwars' death is just one more terrible example of how not good it is!

I did just a bit of playing around with a picture a friend sent me a lond time ago and it seems a fitting way to finish up. She had been making some landscapes from a home made pinhole camera. I was just playing around with the idea of viewing the landscape from behind a curtained window...

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