28 April 2026

 Walking - slowly, carefully with an injured ankle - around Cambridge this week, these were moments of Spring beauty that caught my eye

while reflecting for the millionth time on how to deal with the privilege of a peaceful life in the full knowledge (we're bombarded with it daily on our news feeds like a toxic intravenous drip that can't be pulled out) of the horrors, suffering and destruction being inflicted needlessly and calculatedly on so many.

As well as the fragility of this peace I enjoy, given the terrifying greed, stupidity and evil of the most powerful of our world leaders at this moment.

This quote comes to me: 

the world is heartbreaking every day

and the world is beautiful every day

and we have to pay attention to both

The challenge is not to look away from the hellscape, but stay present with it, without letting it swallow us alive. 

Make whatever small actions of support or resistance we can, yes (donate, protest, boycott), but also choose to focus on the beauty of nature and the beauty of kindness, generosity, empathy, love.

I think of Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where are You? and Maggie Smith's poem 'This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful'. Auden's 'We must love one other or die'. I've also thought a lot in the last couple of years about what it could mean to be a beautiful person.

What I feel the need to do on this page is pay attention to the beautiful. 

Is getting older making me sentimental, soft in the head? Or maybe, is choosing to notice, record, and focus on beauty not ignorance or denial, but a determined act of resistance and hope for this beautiful world?