Aside from the poem for the new "king", I see it is almost a year since I last posted here. Many has been the time whilst out and about on my doings that I started to compose in my head some comment of a topic of the day, but somehow I never got round to writing them done. Life intervened and things moved on. Even writing in my head can be quite cathartic though.

 Basically I have taken an extended sabbatical from practical activism and focused on more immediate things. We did join the Big Ride for Palestine again in the summer, but I don't seem to have written it up either here or on my cycling blog (also dormant). 

I've been pretty annoyed about the situation with regard to the way Russia's operation in Ukraine has been misrepresented and lied about to the extent that most people seem to uncritically accept the official narrative. That would be fair enough if you had actually bothered to find out the other side of the story and balanced the two to make a judgement - but very few people seem to have bothered. Those that have generally seem to find the Russian narrative more convincing that the Western one - that is certainly my conclusion from the channels I follow (which include both the Guardmi6ian and the Russian MoD as well as everything between).

Anyway I have remained pretty silent on the matter as I've better things to do than get into arguments and upset about it.

However I am now finding the situation in Palestine-Israel extremely troubling, to the extent that I feel I must do what I can. Three weeks ago we responded to PSC and StW's call to London for a show of solidarity with the Palestinian people - we took our flag u by train for the day. The atmosphere was good, as was support on the streets. We were not able to go back for the net two progressively bigger Saturdays (100k when we went, then 300k and then 500k) but we have planted the Palestinian flag outside and a poster in the front window attracting only favourable support from passers-by. 

This Saturday we are holding a minute of silent for Gaza in the Town Square

I also wrote to our MP, not expecting a serious response, but at least it was showing our representative that not everyone agrees with his government's position. The reply arrived within 10 days and was much as expected - I will post my original, his (assistant's) reply and my response in the next post...