It seems remarkable to me as I flip the calendars to the next day as part of my early morning routine that we are now entering the second half of the month of September. The year seems to be racing away with us but fortunately we still have the prospect of some fine autumn days in front of us and we still have some five or six weeks before the clocks go back towards the end of October. Last night, I watched the ITV programme ’70Up’ which was tracing of a cohort the progress of people who had born in the late 1950’s through their lives and many of them were now hitting the age of 70. So, the great experiment begun by Granada Television in 1964 is over. That year, Seven Up! introduced the viewing public to 14 primary school children – 10 boys and four girls from a range of backgrounds – who would become part of an ongoing documentary project that returned to film them at regular intervals and interrogate the truth of the Jesuitical motto ‘Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man’. As people reflected upon their lives, I was struck that many if not most of them had experienced some divorce or family disruption in the course of their lives and as they had lived their lives some of the doubts and insecurities they had experienced in their very early youth had persisted with them throughout their lives. From what I can gather from an interrogation of national statistics on the internet, only about 6% of couples stay successfully married for 57 years which is the happy position in which Meg and I found ourselves before Meg’s death in 2025 so I need to feel especially thankful for this when I am in a reflective mood. A fairly busy day is in prospect today because I am particularly pleased that the ‘chatty table’ in the Methodist Centre should be resuming its normal role in my mid week routine after the summer break and then some weekly shopping needs to be fitted in followed by an early lunch and then a Classical Musical Group UA meeting in the early afternoon. I have also been supplied with the topic that the Philosophy Group is to consider in about ten days time and that s to explore the extent to which society can tolerate intolerance itself. The two eminent philosophers in this field around which the discussion will run are Karl Popper and John Rawls but a quick consensus view is that if intolerant groups refuse to listen to reason and choose to use force or violence instead of argument, a tolerant society has the right to suppress them. I am sure the discussion will be a fascinating one and I suspect that most of us will form the view that a ‘line must be drawn’ but how and where to draw the line is a very knotty problem to which there can be no complete answer. But this question is not a purely academic one because we are seeing the rise of the right wing interest groups practically every weekend in our communities so we have the practical problem of determining at which point and how do the police protect free speech and the right to demonstrate on the one hand with the prevention of harm and distress on the other. These are often questions of judgement – for example is the wearing of black clothing including face coverings a threatening happening (as I personally think) or is the expression of a democratic right? Watching the film on the depiction of events commemorated in the Bayeux tapestry, I reflected upon the fact that a concept like ‘Freedom’ would be interpreted very differently by the Anglo Saxons of 1067 (one year after the Norman Conquest of 1066) than it would today and even in contemporary America.
During the morning, I visited the Methodist Centre and had a chat with two of the people that I know there, one of them dating back to the days when a group of us used to meet regularly to have coffee in Waitrose but times have moved on, Afterwards I did my weekly shopping remembering to buy a good supply of parsnips and some curry powder because I intend to make a parsnip soup this Saturday afternoon. I have bought some extra flavour enhancing ingredients such as creme fraiche and some coconut milk so I think making the soup this weekend should be fairly easy. After I done the shopping and put everything away, I was a little pressed for time so I had some of the carrot and coriander soup that I made for myself last weekend. Then I needed to go off and attend the Classical Music group which took up the whole of the afternoon. We listened to a piece first broadcast on the radio about the development of the piano and then using whatever technology was available to us (mobile phones, Bluetooth, Spotify) played to each some of our favourite piano pieces. Then we had as a discussion point the ways in which female composers and performers had very often had to hide their light under a bushel and did not get the recognition to which they were entitled, Fanny Mendelsohn and Clara Schumann being two of the best known examples. We also shared information with each other about craft fairs and other concerts in the next few weeks. We learn this afternoon that some of the tectonic plates of the worlds global system seem to be shifting. The president of the European Commission has backed proposals for Canada to become the EU’s first associate member. Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament on Wednesday she wanted to work on opening the door for Canada, which would involve closer ties on various key sectors. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week spoke of seeking a unique alliance with the EU. The country currently faces tense relations with the US, compounded by an intensifying dispute over trade. Without mentioning US President Donald Trump by name, von der Leyen said offering Canada some sort of EU membership was “not a partnership against anyone else, but for our common strength”. Actually, strange tough it might sound, Canada and the UE do share a minute border as Canada shares a small land border with Denmark (via Greenland) on Hans Island, which was officially divided between the two countries in 2022. So although no one is sure what an ‘associate status’ might mean, it is now evident that Canada shares a cultural heritage with Europe which is fast vanishing n the relationship between Canada and the USA under the Trump presidency.