Ali's blog

As I type, I'm listening to Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini on Classic FM. (Apparently. So the internet tells me.) The orchestral strings soar over the richly chunky piano chords, coming to a pitch and then subsiding to let the piano's more delicate melody emerge again. There's just time to finish this paragraph as the piece comes to a beautiful, poignant close. On to something from 'Romeo and Juliet' by Tchaikovsky, now. The melody lifts. I type on. From my window I can still see fireworks bursting in my peripheral vision. Stars and flowers, spraying and sparkling in the darkness. A vivid flash of light and colour flies every which way, an exploding pattern of shattering, bejewelled beauty, impressed on the senses for a moment, falling, dying, then gone. Earlier this evening, the children delighted in the few sparklers we found in the storage passage from last year, twirling and waving the spitting, sparking sticks, captivated by their tiny blazes...

I toggle back and forth between the BBC news pages about the new lockdown – 'Lockdown 2.0' – in the UK, the incoming results of the US Presidential election, and the World news section. There I read about terrorist shootings in Austria, school shootings in Cameroon, violence in Mozambique and Ethiopia, gold-smuggling and money-laundering in Zimbabwe and South Africa... a veritable flood of every kind of human corruption and violence, the whole world over. Ugly words, ugly actions, ugly hearts, bubbling up and threatening to overwhelm any remnant of order, goodness and peace. The plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Darkness and suffering, displacement and destitution, abuse of power and the violence that follows inevitably from political and social unrest. Tropical Storm Eta 'battering' Central America. Even the natural world is in turmoil, rising up in a literal whirlwind which mirrors the restless and destructive impulses of the human lives on this teeming plane...