Ball mobiles are on hold at the moment. I’m currently working on aluminium and brass wires supporting flat aluminium paddles or end pieces, attached by rivets. Like most worthwhile activities, all it takes is time, focus and application. Irritatingly, these tend to elude me. I need to get a grip and create a more disciplined daily schedule. Even so, it’s still difficult to fit in. I’m spending more time running, walking and going to a great gym. My health is good and I can even afford to pickup a calf injury, stopping me running, because of some reckless gym work. Sitting and inactivity are the new smoking equivalents. You gotta move to stay healthy and alive. It’s all about balance, literally.

I’m also spending perhaps too much time thinking and arriving at conclusions, an activity in many countries that is fraught with risk. Many people do this publicly and thanks to the internet and social media we are inundated with information and perspectives which can feel compelling and convincing as well as alarming and anxiety provoking. It’s a minefield. How do we make sense of it all? By what we encounter in our lives. Our experiences, relationships emotions, our upbringing and by persuasion rather than logic, reason and the general public good. Right wingers excel at perceiving threat or condemning. They tend to have a narrow focus on personal liberty, and self and class interest. Left wingers look towards the interest of the larger community and also of minorities within it. Consequently the left is vulnerable to mockery and demonisation when they champion groups whom the right regard as undeserving or illegitimate.. In the UK. as in the USA, the popular politics of emotion and feeling currently garner huge swathes of support, entirely untouched by common humanity or compassion for the vulnerable except for the purposes of lip service. The Christian/Evangelical Right, surely a clear oxymoron, have more in common with Fascism than the teachings of Jesus.

Whether it’s the UK Tory government or Trump’s America, their politics are addressed to the peoples’ basest fears and prejudices. Where’s the humanity? Where’s the compassion?