Authority or Opinion

That’s Slieve Donard, the third highest peak on this island, snow capped as it was this morning.

Picture That

It’s 120 kilometres north of my home and in a different country, a country that’s just become a country within three jurisdictions.Some days it’s part of the The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland. Former English sovereigns held onto England, Wales, Scotland and various islands plus a large chunk of Ireland. These days, should you ship a cow across the country from Wales to Belfast, it will go over the sea crossing an international border within the UK to arrive in a version of Northern Ireland within European paperwork. The farmer who imports the animal may well identify as British. The entire family might be holding Irish passports just in case the kids want to study in Germany or another European country now rendered foreign to UK citizens by recent treaty.

The exit has created a conflict of interests, dissents smouldering just below the surface, where dissident horrors lurk, zombie-like, potentially preparing to terrorise us all yet again.

Johnsonian, Govian, Faragian, English; you can chose who to blame but remember that the narrow margins might have been changed if every elected official had turned up for work in Stormont or Westminster.

Picture This

The ship in the foreground sails to what some northern folk call their mainland. But this ferry has to cross the new political border to enter sovereign UK from the European nation of Ireland. Containers of paperwork now accompany the containers of food and goods going in either direction.

I took my picture today without paperwork. I assert that the image I took is mine despite importing the photons to Ireland from the other sovereign nation. They say that we don’t own our views but sometimes our views can’t be suppressed.

Picture 2030

‘Although this book focuses on the amount of knowledge we still have about our past, one of the most gaping holes is our language, or even awareness, of the medicinal plants and fungi that were once used. The most powerful women healers were protective of their wisdom, and this was compounded by the fact that the scribes, who were almost all men, may never have thought to ask them.’
– Thirty Two Words For Field by Manchán Magan (2020)

According to an article by David MacWilliams in today’s Irish Times, ‘there will be more female millionaires in the world in 2030 than male ones.’ This seems to be based on his read of 2030 by Mauro Guillén which he calls a ‘clever book’. I might add that to my reading list so I can see how Guillén estimated that the 15% of the world’s wealth held by women in 2001 will rise to 55% in 2030.

It may be that more than 55% of the readers of this daily journal are women. My subscription list suggests this but I may be wrong since those who read but don’t subscribe are identified as gender neutral.