31 August 2010

Autumn

We are rapidly approaching my favourite time of year. I felt it today for the first time. All of my immediate family have summer birthdays, my mum is the last on 31st August (happy birthday Mum!) and once this date passes it's like autumn suddenly rushes up to meet me. The days are growing shorter, the evenings are still warm but there is a crispness to the air. It's about now that the memories of some of the best times of my life start to kick in and the anticipation of the forthcoming holidays and festivals starts to set my pulse racing. I always seem to reconnect with music at this time of year too. I listen to music all year around, but it seems to be a background thing most of the time these days, unlike pre-Jack when live music and clubbing were a big part of my life, but around this time of year I start really listening again and listening to different bands and artists, more rock and less of the pop and dance that I tend to go for in the summer months.

We're only 3 weeks from Mabon and I find myself feeling a little sad that we won't be at Avebury this year, which had become a little tradition when we lived in Bristol. I don't recall missing it last year, but we were busy with Jack hitting the six month mark and all of the challenges that came with that. Mabon is not my favourite Sabbat, but it is the one that I always get a little more excited about, perhaps because it marks entry into the festive season, where the next two Sabbats, Samhain and Yule, seem to come in such quick succession and everyone else gets excited about their secular or Christian counterparts.

I love the way we all get swept along with the season, like the golden leaves dusting the ground and the build up to its inevitable conclusion - winter. Don't get me wrong, the ridiculously long and drawn out build up to Christmas annoys the hell out of me. "Festive" goods and songs in shops from September is ludicrous, decorations and lights going up in October completely misses the point of the holiday to me. But what I do like are the simple things, the human aspect. I love the way people start grinning and wanting to talk about the holiday and I love the weather turning cool and crisp, the frost and even the first snow (when we get some before new year that is). But long before that, just the little buzz in the air, the sense that the seasons are changing, I love it and I felt it today.

24 August 2010

Free stuff for Home Educators

One of my HE contacts has a fab blog here and is giving away free stuff in celebration of HE kids NOT going back to school! So just check out her blog and leave a comment about why you love HE and get yourself an entry into the prize draw :)

09 August 2010

French Police Brutality

Captured on film in July, French police have shown themselves to be a disgrace to the law enforcement profession. African immigrants were forced to leave their council housing earlier in the month and had set up camp on the streets in the area. Women and children were the main occupants of the Parisian streets, with no where else to go, they stayed close to their friends and families. Many of the immigrants were there perfectly legally and had been living in France for more than a decade. Police arrived to move the campers along and the video, published on YouTube by French news site Mediapart, depicts the African families sitting peacefully on the pavement, arms linked together, being assaulted by the authorities.

Women were dragged away from their friends and families, babies ripped from their mothers' arms and wraps. One woman was pulled from the group by her legs, dragged over the ground on her back, where her baby was wrapped, she was pulled across her child, apparently squashing him into the ground. A pregnant woman is shown lying on the ground, her head perilously close to a concrete bollard. It is unclear whether she was injured or "playing dead" to make it more difficult to be moved, but the police were making a good go of shifting her.

I have never seen anything quite like this in my life. The brutality involved is shocking. To manhandle people in this fashion is bad enough but when you consider that it was women and children, who had done nothing more than attempt to sit it out when being forced to leave their homes, this is troubling indeed. I don't know if it is even worse to know that this did not take place in some obscure dictatorship, but right here in Europe, in Paris no less.

We live in troubling times indeed.

Here is the video, please be warned, this clip depicts police brutality upon women and children and viewers may find it distressing: