Enter Owen

The Capacity for Love

It’s not an original experience, I know, but I did spend some time feeling bewildered about whether or not I would be able to love a second grandchild as much as the first. Bewilderment is now in the past, faded to nothing, evaporated into a faraway haze. Reader, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the chambers of the heart expand mightily when love comes a-knocking.

Hello there, Owen Thomas                                                      

Fortune has smiled upon this baby. He arrived and we learned his name, second son to Harriet & Chris, brother to Samuel Miles, nephew to Emily, grandchild to Sally & Tony. Plus he has another family of cousins, an auntie and a grandma in the Midlands. And there’ll be a whole tribe of neighbours and friends around to create “Owen’s village.”

The basics

It’s easy to forget how, for a good number of weeks, it’s all about the food, the poo, the wee, the comfort, the sleep. Oh, the sleep, please Grant Them Sleep! And this time around there’s a 2-year-old to care for, keep entertained, and integrate into the newly fresh routines.

The future – the hope and the promise

Eleanor Roosevelt said “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” I know I can be irrationally sentimental, but it is hard not to see Hope and Promise in the presence of a little baby – no cynicism, no worries, no knowledge of evil, no pressures from social media or society – just survival and growth. Potential.

Two brothers

Sam has already shown tenderness to his younger brother, talking to him, reading to him. What kind of relationship will Sam and Owen develop as they live together in the same house for at least sixteen more years? So much potential for silliness, skirmishes, support and love.

Reach for Shakespeare

Sam can already identify the image of Shakespeare and he has a couple of books with characters from the plays. So far he has enjoyed Extracts from The Sonnets, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet (minus the stabbings.) What came into my heart when I held Owen for the first time was Ophelia’s line from Hamlet:

"We know what we are but know not what we may be."

Learning to dance in the rain

GQ’s Men of the Year

Lists of “Top Ten” or “Best Of” regularly appear in many places in the media to spark debate and highlight trends. I’d have to endorse Mr William Shakespeare as a Man of the Year in every one of my lists, as he was “not of an age, but for all time” (© Ben Jonson) and he inhabits my soul every day. But I’m also happy to concur with some of GQ’s Men of the Year:

• Russell T Davies (thanks for your TV series It’s A Sin and past creativity)
• Captain Tom Moore (thanks for your past service and current inspiration)
• Marcus Rashford (thanks for your tenacity and courage)
• Josh O’Connor and Riz Ahmed (thanks for all your performances, in particular recently in Romeo and Juliet and Sound of Metal, but formerly in God's Own Country and Nightcrawler)
• And Prince Phillip, HM Queen Elizabeth II’s “constant strength and guide” and “strength and stay.” 

Falling within a bell curve

Prince Phillip’s recent death (9th April) produced much broadcast material and many column inches about whether he was the last of a particular kind of man. Such dogmatic reasoning always falls flat in my head, maybe because I’m a Libran and can usually see an alternative argument for everything. Prince Phillip was not unique despite his context and background; stastical probability (given the planet’s billions of people) suggests there will be other Prince Phillip types in decades to come. The one we’ve recently lost was remarkable, I agree, and I liked his daughter, Princess Anne’s, quotation about him – “a life well lived and service freely given.” Shakespeare has Hamlet say, of his late father, “I shall not look upon his like again” but he idolises the memory of the late king and is in a profound state of grief. More empirically truthful, I think, is Tim Minchin’s lyric in If I didn’t have you (somebody else would do):

I mean, I think you’re special

But you fall within a bell curve

Outlaw’s Cave

Robin Hood, now there’s a man! Steals from the rich and distributes to the poor…. possibly? Any road up, on the day Prince Phillip died, we met Michael and Janet to complete an undulating walk in the secluded woodland of Conjure Alders in the twin valley of the Rivers Maun and Meden, at the edge of Sherwood Forest. We walked across fields with huge horizons, through woods filled with birch and alder trees, picked over tangled roots by the river and marvelled at the sandstone cliff outcrop concealing Robin Hood’s Cave. No sign of Maid Marian or the merry men (or a reduction of income inequality) in early April 2021…. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him the most?

Waiting for the storm to pass

Spring continues to springeth and daffodils to bloometh. No-one knows exactly how Covid-19’s infection rate will spread, nor how severely, so time and tide wait for no man…. so now seems a good time to hook up (safely) with other Men (and Women) of the Year…. Thank you, Brian and Sue, for the fish finger butties and chips under your verandah in Tollerton and the inspirational message:

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass,

It’s about learning to dance in the rain

Once the pandemic is endemic and (hopefully) as ubiquitous and controlled as ‘flu, I imagine many people will continue to value nature and lobby decision-makers to tackle the global climate crisis and the over-exploitation of precious resources. Thank you, Nick and Graeme, for giving us a glimpse into the future with our proxy experiences of an electric car.

Sites opening up again

So if we live long enough to be in the market for a new car, electric will be the way to go. In the meantime, the pleasures of bread-making, flower arranging, table setting and dining at home are not to be abandoned lightly when the economy “opens up.” Buy locally? Travel locally? Save the planet? It’s been a pleasure to return to the (local-ish) Bolton Abbey Estate, and re-adding it to our repertoire of beauty spots, alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the River Aire. A Man of the Year from the early 19th Century, Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” expressed my feelings about walks and nature perfectly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more….

River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey, River Aire near Saltaire and Leeds-Liverpool canal

 

Talking Shakespeare Neljä (Four)

Dense, Juicy, Layered

David Oyelowo, speaking from Los Angeles, remembered a dusty (and intimidating) copy of Shakespeare’s plays in his family’s Islington council flat. He was later surprised to discover Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V was also written by Shakespeare, having watched it as a movie, not caring about the language. The real breakthrough for David, though, was seeing a live production at the National Theatre – the visceral production of Robert Lapage’s mudbath Midsummer Night’s Dream with Timothy Spall as Bottom. David started acting accidentally when he tried to impress a girl by joining a youth theatre and then standing in when another young actor couldn’t attend because of a tube strike. His Theatre Studies teacher, Jill Foster, encouraged him to consider acting as a profession and helped David audition (successfully) for LAMDA. His father fully expected him to “get it out of his system” when he was given small roles (seven lines in Antony and Cleopatra) at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But the bug had bitten and seeing someone like Mark Rylance in his fourth incarnation of Hamlet at The Globe deliver the language with “dexterity, musculariy and elasticity” further reinforced David’s conviction that Shakespeare is the “Everest of Acting… so dense, so juicy, so layered.” 

Greg Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Talking Shakespeare with David Oyelowo, Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen

Vulnerability and Frailty

He gave a very funny account of getting the role of Henry VI and loved “the journey” of his time on Michael Boyd’s production but became weary of the “pioneer” emphasis placed on him by the media wanting to interview him about being the first black actor at the RSC to play an English king. He detected a similarity between Dr Martin Luther King in the movie Selma and Henry VI where the abiding motivation for both characters, as he played them, was religious faith, leading to vulnerability and frailty. David felt that both MLK and Henry VI fully expected everyone around them to be imbued with the same values and were both destabilised when the. His other major Shakespeare role was playing Othello with Daniel Craig and Rachel Brosnahan (as Iago and Desdemona) in an intimate production in New York in 2015. Like Greg Doran, I hope he can be tempted away from Hollywood for more UK stage work in the future.

Selection of David Oyelowo roles: as Henry VI, Othello, Orlando in As You Like It and the movie Selma

Queen Helen

Helen Mirren is a multiple award winner: she has carried home an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy and has famously played a line of queens: Queen Margaret in the Henry VI trilogy; and on TV and film: Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. She also has the distinction of playing Cleopatra three times, first at the National Youth Theatre in 1963 and then later playing opposite Michael Gambon (1982) and Alan Rickman (1998) as her Antonys. I was lucky to see the 1982 Adrian Noble production (in The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon) and for me it became a benchmark production of how epic plays can be staged in small spaces. Helen’s early memories of working at the RSC include watching the generous Ian Richardson from the wings in Coriolanus.  She reminisced about working (warily) with the mercurial Nicol Williamson (on both stage and in the film Excalibur) and played Lady Anne, Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Ophelia to Alan Howard’s Hamlet. She also vividly recounted the touring production of Troilus and Cressida which many argued brought the play back into favour in modern times and she described working with Peter Brook in the legendary project Conference of the Birds which toured the Saharan regions of Africa in 1979.

Helen Mirren as Cleopatra (three times), Cressida, Prospera in The Tempest and Rosalind in As You Like It

Sir Ian ("You shall not pass....")

Ian McKellen has had recent experience of remembering his distinguished acting career as part of his touring one-man show which raised considerable funds for small venues throughout the UK. (Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and You.) With Greg Doran he shared early memories of seeing and loving theatre and getting involved in amateur and school productions. He always thought Shakespeare seemed fun and enjoyed travelling down from Bolton for school Shakespeare camps in Stratford-upon-Avon. He saw Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft and Charles Laughton in their prime (but also confessed to sleeping through Olivier’s Corialanus – it was a school trip, after all.) At Cambridge he joined the Marlowe Society and came under the influence of George Rylands who has mentored many of today’s great theatre directors as well as John Barton who persuaded young McKellen he could play the ancient Justice Shallow in Henry IV Part Two. He gave a moving account of working at Nottingham Playhouse with Tyrone Guthrie who gave McKellen confidence about becoming an actor and credits Maggie Smith with recommending him to Olivier to join the Old Vic. He was waspish about Franco Zefirelli and had insights into the impact of Olivier and of touring Shakespeare in the provinces and abroad with Prospect Theatre. I’ve seen many of his stage performances and been lucky to meet him both backstage after Waiting for Godot and at a UK showing of the film Gods and Monsters at Bradford’s Pictureville Cinema. Always gracious and always energetic, with a significant place in popular film history with his portrayals of Magneto and Gandalf, Sir Ian continues to be an astonishing creative force for good in the UK.

Ian McKellen as Romeo, Macbeth, Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (which I saw in Doncaster!), Coriolanus, Richard III, King Lear (twice) and Prospero in The Tempest at Leeds Playhouse

Maggie's bar

Hoops of steel
All most people want to know in the Covid-19 lockdown is when you can mingle freely with loved ones. I’ve had the revelation during recent months that meeting friends to chat and drink and eat is more important to me than cinema or theatre, both of which I miss mightily. So this week’s easing of “lockdown rules” found me gathered round a garden fire pit…. with folk who readily dressed up as Shakespearean characters for a Zoom chat on the great writer’s birthday. Aristotle said that a true friend is “another self” and Shakespeare, of course, has the perfect quotation about friendship:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel
So it was a deep, abiding pleasure to drink wine, eat smoked salmon blinis, sausage pasta and homemade brownies – beneath the lights of Maggie’s bar, twinkling in the twilight, warmed by the coals, with
companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Who souls do bear an equal yoke of love

Socially distanced meetings between Julius Caesar, Juliet's Nurse, Portia, Emilia from The Comedy of Errors and Lady Macbeth

Lockdown Shakespeare

Clockwise from top left: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest - all currently on BBC iPlayer

April 23rd
Every year (from 23rd March which is my Mum’s birthday) I start to anticipate 23rd April – yes, St George’s day, but more profoundly for me, the day when Shakespeare died and the day when he was likely born (given that he was baptised on 26th April 1564 and the common practice in Elizabethan times was to baptise three days after the birth.) In the front room in my childhood home there was the family Bible, a set of encyclopedias and a Complete Works of William Shakespeare, complete with Fuseli plates. I never thought to ask my parents (and it is now too late) how Shakespeare got into our house. But the book proved, for me, a doorway to a surprising, inspiring, mind-bending landscape of love, friendship, murder, passion, betrayal, pride, violence, jealousy, redemption, tenderness and magic. Every story was told with memorable language, sometimes exquisite poetry, sometimes impenetrable jokes or confusing grammar; but, despite some difficult bits, on every page, certain words and phrases bounced out and tickled my fancy….  What a pleasure it has been to revisit some of the productions I’ve seen on the BBC iPlayer (Shakespeare in Quarantine) or as part of the NTLive YouTube broadcasts.

NT Live screenings of: Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra

Cursed Child

The Palace Theatre and the walk to Top Withins

All is well

“The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.” Thus ended the seven books of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, a set of books I cannot praise too highly, as a retired teacher, for their readability and cultural impact during the time of the rise of mobile devices. My daughters “grew up” with the series paralleling the school years and troubles of Harry, Hermione and Ron (and Luna and Neville and Ginny and Draco and Dobby and Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks and Sirius Black and Albus Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall and Severus Snape….) and the cavalcade of characters, good and bad, complex and straightforward that continue to exercise the loyalties of readers the world over. It was inevitable that one day we would end up seeing “book 8” in its stage form and patience paid off as Harriet secured tickets for the two parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Armed with Alex from Badby, a Younger Muggle for protection against interference from the Dark Arts of the railway system, we spent the last Saturday of June at the Palace Theatre.

Badby Barbecue

Who is the Cursed Child?

Since we faithfully promised at the theatre that we would Keep The Secrets, there will be no answer here to the question of Who is the Cursed Child but in typical J K Rowling fashion, the answer’s debatable. I managed to steer clear of the script, all reviews and any spoilers, so when the lights went down, I confess I was expecting something tourist-friendly and a bit theme-parky but within minutes I was hooked. By the twists of the narrative, the depth of characterisation, the connections to the Wizarding World’s canon, the bravura theatricality, the commitment of the cast (Jamie Ballard as the grown-up Harry Potter! – working every bit as intensely as when I’ve seen him before on stage as Antonio, Angelo, Hamlet, Mercutio, Flute and in Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean.) Given the huge fan base, the production was way better than it need have been and the themes perfectly in keeping with the Harry Potter universe. How do parents shape the characters and destinies of their children? It was a profound climax to Harriet’s “birthday season” in 2018, the other highlight of which was tramping up to the cobweb-blowing meaning-of-life moorlands at Top Withins.

Here at the palace I will rest awhile

Afternoon tea and a shock for George III
En route to Salisbury Cathedral (see previous blog) and before the ecstasy of Stonehenge (following blog) we rested for afternoon tea at Blenheim Palace. As you do. Apart from the glory of the treat, we had a guided tour round the State Rooms, a virtual tour round a weird “Untold Story” with ghostly projections giving a flavour of Blenheim’s history (and in fact on the return journey we stopped again to peer into the Duke’s rooms.) At times like these, I usually feel like Heathcliff must have felt staring into the windows of Thrushcross Grange, expecting at any moment to be thrashed and sent back to Wuthering Heights. At Blenheim the guides were in fact very welcoming, impressively knowledgeable and were able to motormouth through the chequered history of battles, wars, loveless marriages, tragic events, bitter legal disputes and architect tiffs that went into the creating of the only building in England called a Palace that’s neither royal nor connected to the church. Although the construction began during Queen Anne’s time, it was George III who cemented Blenheim’s reputation as being too big for its non-royal boots by gasping “We have nothing to equal this!”

"Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail"
In John Donne’s poem of witty poetical advice To Sir Henry Wotton he remarks that “Life is a voyage,” “Cities are sepulchres,” “Courts are theatres” and “The country is a desert” unless you can look within and “Be then thine own home.” No amount of luxury or power will satisfy your soul if you fail “to thine own self be true” as Shakespeare had Polonius say in Hamlet. Donne admires the snail who carries “his own house still, still is at home” and the fish who glide by “leaving no print where they pass.” Seeking fame or fortune means nothing without loved ones. I’m sometimes puzzled by my own politics of liking big houses and estates (and supporting the Monarchy as an institution 100%) – when I’m instinctively liberal and hate entitlement and the unfair distribution/hoarding of wealth by the few. Could it be that my “view within” (as E M Forster put it in A Room With A View) recognises that the “gorgeous palaces” can be seen as prisons, trapping those inside whose souls can never truly be free?

Women who Dared

Badby bound
Regular readers will know I consider an “egg-shell” in Northamptonshire a second home – and so we were there recently, snuggled in village living, bathed in hospitality, chitty-chattering away and rummaging through nature prior to the explosion of Badby Wood bluebells which are on the brink of blooming. When we are fully assembled, there are six women to three men – the elder stateswoman was gallivanting on another trip on this occasion – so, with double the oestrogen, it was an apt time to visit the Bodleian library exhibition about the women’s movement. 100 years since The Representation of the People Act allowed votes for (some) women!

Badby Woods

Sappho to Suffrage: women who dared
Bodleian staff members regularly delve into their archives for artefacts to display. If you haven’t visited, I’d recommend checking out their website’s What’s On. Until February 3rd 2019 they have an imaginatively-presented collection showcasing the achievements of women who dared to do the unexpected. You can see fragmentary scraps of poetry by the remarkable poet, Sappho, engravings of pirates like Anne Bonny, accounts of cross-dressing female soldiers getting military pensions; records of explorers, scientists, mathematicians, writers (a manuscript of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for goodness sake!); photographs, banners, musical scores, medieval book-bindings and even a Suffragette board game!

Oxford, Badby, Women who Dared....

How’s your Dad these days, Lizzy?
The object that startled me most was Elizabeth I’s prayer-book embroidered (when she was a child) with her step-mother’s initials, KP – Katherine Parr. Astonishing! Poignant! If you could only visit Elizabeth when she was stitching those initials and ask her about her dad, her mum, England at the time, her hopes for the future…. 

The First World War
Until you see material assembled like this it is easy to forget that the achievements of women have often been left out of the history books and the national memory. A significant contribution to victory in Britain during the 1914-1918 war was the willingness of women to enter the laboratories, factories, hospitals and services that were essential to keeping the Home Front going and feed the engine of war abroad. The authorities had no choice, after the war-time contributions of women, other than to allow property-owning women over the age of 30 to vote in 1918, a step towards equal voting rights in the UK.

Suffragists and Suffragettes
The courage and determination of the women of a century ago should never be forgotten. The recently-erected statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square has been a welcome addition to the cavalcade of bronze throughout London. Fawcett was a suffragist (one of those who advocated peaceful protesting and constitutional campaigning) but more controversial were the suffragettes who escalated from banners to marching to being chained to railings to smashing windows, to setting fire to letter boxes to attacking government ministers. Without their courageous violence, would change ever have occurred? (History suggests not….) The exhibition makes clear that the boundary between suffragists and suffragettes was blurred with many women belonging to groups taking dual approaches.

Force-feeding in prison
Lady Constance Lytton gave a sobering account of her own experience of force-feeding in prison:

Two of the wardresses took hold of my arms, one held my head and one my feet. One wardress helped pour the food. The doctor leant on my knees…. he explained the steel gag would hurt and the wooden gag would not….he broke into a temper as he plied my teeth with the steel instrument….the pain of it was intense and at last I must have given way for he got the steel gag between my teeth. Then he proceeded to turn it more than necessary until my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they would naturally go. Then he put a tube down my throat which seemed much too wide and about four feet in length…. the horror of it was more than I can describe….

Feminist men
I’ve written about this idea before but don’t apologise for writing it again: anyone of any age, any gender, any ethnicity, any class or any creed who doesn’t self-identify as a feminist doesn’t share the same definition as me. I’ve heard Juno Dawson explain succinctly that if your answer to the following two questions is “yes” then you are a feminist. Should a woman have the same equality of opportunity as a man? Should a woman and a man be paid the same salary for the same job? If you can’t answer “yes” to those two questions, then you have different values to me.

Mother, brothers, sister.... impossible not to be a feminist if you've half a brain....

Mothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters, girlfriends, wives, colleagues
Everyone has had a mother. Not everyone experiences the other range of relationships you can have with women. But as a tutor in a secondary school I tried to transmit to teenage boys that they shouldn’t treat girls or women any differently than you would want your mother or sister or daughter to be treated. (The same applies, of course, to fathers and brothers and sons.) As humans it’s nigh on impossible to avoid interaction with both genders and mutual respect has to be the future for the next stage of evolution. Thank you, Suffragists and Suffragettes from history and all who continue to fight for a better civilisation.

There is a world elsewhere

Productions during the 2017 summer school

70th anniversary of the summer school
I’ve just finished attending the 70th anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Summer School. There are some attendees who remember seeing Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh perform in Stratford in Titus Andronicus in 1955. Four years later delegates saw a season including Paul Robeson in Othello, Charles Laughton in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dame Edith Evans in both All’s Well That Ends Well and Coriolanus (the latter also with Olivier.) Imagine.

Faces of the RSC summer school 2017: Janet Suzman, Katy Stephens, Ray Fearon, Tony Byrne, Nia Gwynne, David Troughton, Erica Whyman, Chuk Iwuji, Dr Elizabeth Sandis, Miles Tandy, Penny Downie, Suzanne Burden, Michael Billington, Jacqui O'Hanlon, Dr Maria Evans, Matthew Tennyson, Prof Michael Dobson, Prof Russell Jackson, Gavin Fowler

31st anniversary for me….
My first summer school was in 1986, the year I married Sally, and the year The Swan theatre opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. I haven’t been every single year since then, but more years than not and, like with Shakespeare himself, there are surprises every year.

Roman season
This year it’s all about Ancient Rome. So all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays are being staged: Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus at the moment and  Coriolanus later in the year. There is a spoof new play based on Plautus by Phil Porter, charmingly titled Vice Versa (or the Decline and Fall of General Braggadocio at the hands of his canny servant Dexter and Terence the Monkey) which can only be described as the love child of Carry On – Up Pompeii – Panto On Weed. Sitting between these offerings was a gay-focused version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé with a male actor in the role of the dancing princess.

Decapitations, songs, stabbings, dances, neck-breakings, love scenes….
They say variety is the spice of life and the theatrical sights veered between grisly shocks and tender vignettes. All of the productions offered a new angle or fresh perspective on the characters or themes. Over it all soared the language of Shakespeare and Wilde (and the thumping doggerel of Phil Porter, acting like a satyr dance or bergomask to the season.) During the day lectures by people like the rigorous Dame Janet Suzman and the visionary Erica Whyman commented on the season, the plays, the RSC and the state of theatre and the world in 2017. As Coriolanus himself says, “There is a world elsewhere….” There were no overt attempts to make the plays relevant to today’s political upheavals but it was impossible to ignore the parallels and hear echoes of our current world. As Ben Jonson wrote in the First Folio,

“Soul of the Age!....
He was not of an age, but for all time!”

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Exhibition

All time and all places
As if to underline the Shakespeare Everywhere theme, a new exhibition at The Birthplace explores active involvement in Shakespeare in a group of Asian countries. To some Shakespeare is all about the overthrow of tyrants; to some he is the epitome of justice and mercy; to others he is the key to unlocking the freedom of the imagination and creativity. He is, to me, all these things and many more – a body of work, a fascinating point in history, an explosion of language and dramatic situations.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Shakespeare Imagery: to Bard or not to Bard....

Solidarity, determination and love

Love beats hate
Last night there was another series of pointless murders on and around London Bridge in the capital city, following hard upon the recent murders in Manchester. These types of cowardly attack can in no way be attributed to mainstream religious belief. The brainwashed simpleton who perpetrated the brainless atrocity at the Ariana Grande show – and the chicken-hearted imbeciles who were shot last night in Borough Market – did not believe in the Islam that the majority of peaceful Muslims do.

Muslims for Manchester

One young Muslim guy stood in Manchester city centre with a sign saying “I’m Muslim and I trust you. Do you trust me enough for a hug?” (Video click here.) And guess what? He got plenty of hugs. Muslims for Manchester quickly raised over £25,000 for the victims, and the total is still growing. North Manchester Jamia Mosque in Cheetham Hill organised a We Love Manchester march, which included over 500 children, to walk from the Woodlands Road mosque to the Manchester arena. The Media finally seem to be waking up to covering the Muslim opposition to terrororism and hopefully this will go some way to counteract the rise in hate crime that inevitably follows a terrorist attack.

Astonishing reminder of love

We were in Manchester last Thursday to see a play and catch a train and we didn’t expect to spend so long in St Ann’s Square reading the tributes and admiring the quiet strength of feeling. Outpourings of personal poetry in poignant testimonials captured honest and raw feelings. The fragrance of thousands of flowers filled the air. Balloons dreamily hovered, fluttering and crackling gently in the breeze.  Everything in unison spoke of love and potential, togetherness and solidarity, memory and homage. Homage to love, not hate. All ages, creeds, colours, professions and types of people were there. As we ate our dinner at a window table overlooking St Ann’s Square, we heard and saw the crowd applaud and welcome the latest procession of Muslims arriving and laying flowers and carrying We Love Mcr signs.

Tributes to Manchester's unity and love in St Ann's Square, including Rob Lewis's statue

22 remembered

And what struck me again and again was how pointless the bomber’s actions had been and how unintelligent he must have been because the outpouring of love for mankind and determination to unite against evil has been the outcome. A few blogs ago I wrote about keeping the fear of terrorism in perspective and, despite the horrors unleashed into the lives of the relatives and all who knew the victims in Manchester, the message in St Ann’s Square is powerful and supports my perspective – these were 22 good humans who will be remembered and loved forever and their deaths have not advanced the cause of the bomber one speck. We should fear many things, but not dwell on the fear of terrorism. Focus on the victims. Focus on the solidarity, determination and love.

John Atkinson, Courtney Boyle, Kelly Brewster, Georgina Callander, Olivia Campbell, Liam Curry, Wendy Fawell, Martyn Hett, Alison Howe, Megan Hurley, Nell Jones, Michelle Kiss, Angelika Klis, Marcin Klis, Sorrell Leczkowski, Lisa Lees, Eilidh MacLeod, Elaine McIver, Saffie Rose Roussos, Chloe Rutherford, Philip Tron, Jayne Tweddle-Taylor