Blogging has been a little light recently

There are a number of reasons for this - I always have plenty to say but I don't like to write blogs when I am away and have been doing a fair amount of travelling recently. 

Secondly and more importantly, I haven't been able to decide what to write about. This sounds a bit pathetic but the news over the past few months has been relentlessly awful - from the Middle East to the Ukraine (except who hears about what is going on there now) from Ebola to politics in Africa.  It has either been too awful and/or too complex to write about and conversely everything else has been too trivial so I have been seated at my computer, stymied.

Just today the news is awash with the sentencing of Pistorius in South Africa. A beautiful young woman was killed by a well-known and complicated man - she is one of many people who have been killed in South Africa (most of whom are not beautiful, young and blonde) and while this is a horrific personal tragedy for her family - did this warrant wall to wall coverage?  Is this the modern electronic version of the rabble gathering to watch a hanging?

There are a number of reasons for this - I always have plenty to say but I don't like to write blogs when I am away and have been doing a fair amount of travelling recently. 

There is a war in the Ukraine - I haven't seen anything on the news channels recently but it rages on.  And then there is Ebola.  I heard someone from the Centre for Disease Control in the USA interviewed on the BBC World Service a couple of weeks ago - his opinion then was that screening in the USA was probably a waste of time and resources but the government was responding to "Don't just stand there, do something".  Of course, until white Western people took ill there wasn't much interest.  There still seems to be little interest from the countries of the world - some, including the UK and USA, have sent significant resources but last I heard $100 million had been pledged out of $1 billion asked for by the UN.

I mentioned Africa – in Zimbabwe the wife of President Mugabe, Grace, was recently awarded a PhD - not an honorary one but the sort you study for seven plus years for. She apparently acquired this after only four months and without publishing a thesis or being independently reviewed. Wow!  She is now heading the women's group of the ZANU(PF) party -  read The extraordinary political rise of Dr Grace Mugabe – is she going the way of Eva Peron and is this the next President?

If you are still reading this now you will have a flavour of just a few of the awfulnesses of the past few months - at the moment I can't bring myself to write about the upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe and how that makes me feel.