Celtic Influences in the North of Spain

The story of the Celts in Spain is a long and detailed one. My own research suggests that there was not one simple migration from the north west but rather two separate one, one of which was much earlier and came from north Africa. Over the next few weeks I hope to convince you that this is so.

And if you are Irish you might be in for a surprise!

The story of Spain begins somewhere in the confused muddle we call pre-history. Somewhere in the Peninsula, perhaps in the place we call Altamira, an artist picked up a piece of cold charcoal from the ashes of his campfire, and scratched a few lines on the wall of a cave. With a little practice, he produced a rough outline of a bird, a fish, a horse. He sat back, pleased with his work, and went to ask others to come and see what he had completed. The first art exhibition was a complete success.

As generations and aspiring artists perfected their techniques they began to experiment with other materials. Charcoal, they found, did not last, and so they replaced it with flint tools, and mixtures of ochre, blood, animal fat, plant extracts and minerals. Simultaneously, through the peninsula wherever there were caves, other works were in progress. In Altamira, the paintings are vivid and realistic: bison stand proudly: many of them painted on the cave's ceiling; horses gallop. In order to depict the muscles of these animals, the artists used the irregular relief of the rock's surface, and the colours are bold. Cave painting had been born, and with it, Art. More than 15,000 years ago, humankind learned to tell stories in pictorial form, and sometimes simply to dream.

The end of the last Ice Age (about 8000BC) ushered in a long transitional period before the arrival of the Neolithic cultures who came from the eastern Mediterranean five millennia later. I shall return to these people later, as they are the progenitors of our story.

As the climate began to warm, the nomadic life of the hunters and gatherers began to melt away northward with the icecaps as reindeer and other game left for cooler climates. In the next 50 or so centuries, new races began to enter the peninsula, most likely from North Africa. They were most likely proto-Berbers (the indigenous race of most of North West Africa today) and also Iberians, although as we shall see, these people came later and mixed with inhabitants. They brought their own form of art: rock shelter paintings which survive all along the eastern coast of Andalucia. For the first time, human figures begin to appear alongside the animals of the hunt. Stories were being told, but the quality was vastly inferior to those of earlier times: often just stick figures such as the famous "Índalo Man" of Almeria.

The Índalo Man was the focus of my first book The Índalo Quest, about to be re-published, but this is just an aside. Much more on this later ... one book at a time!
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El Gallo de Santiago...

It's done!

Done, done DONE!

Three years of research and a little over one year of writing and St. James' Rooster is finally FINISHED!

I still have to proof-read it and do some final editing but to all intents and purposes that's another waystage in my life accomplished. Believe me there have been many times when I didn't think I would be writing these words.

It's a funny thing, writing a novel. One gives birth to a family and in some cases sees them grow up, fall in and out of love, learn about life, enjoy their golden years and finally pass on. But as with all your loved ones, they never pass out of your life. My main characters - both the fictional and the non-fictional ones - have become as real to me as my family, friends, students. When I had to break the heart of my favourite character, I cried, and when I had to say goodbye at the end of his life, I missed him so much for days that I couldn't write at all.

But that's in the past now.

I am going to take a bit of time off to update The Indalo Quest, my non-fiction book about mid-life changes, travel and the bond between father and daughter and mother and daughter. It is the type of book which will appeal to fans of books like Eat, Pray, Love and is due for re-printing after 15 years of retirement. It is also my tribute to my mother whom I nursed in her last weeks and whom I began to know only then. Every day I grow more like her. Readers of Pilgrimage to Heresy will recognise a bit of Miranda and Alex in the woman that was me just as I left Costa Rica and came to settle in Spain. It should become available in the late summer and perhaps before that on Kindle if I manage to get a roundtoit. They have been in short supply around here lately. Must be the Recession.

And then what? Well, I have already begun to research the next book in the Camino Chronicles Series. This third one will follow one of the characters from St. James' Rooster to the Languedoc area of southern France... Cathar country.

And that's all I am saying for now.

The story continues...Priscillian's book moves inexorably towards the present day.

Music for Japan ...

No time for a blog post this week. I am pulling all nighters trying to get St. James' Rooster finished by Easter. Phew! I wish these 12th century folks would hurry it along a bit.

Anyway, there are more important things going on in the world than my little rants and obsessions. Here is one of them I hope you will investigate.

I heard their very sweet plea on Spotify and Googled them immediately. The video is very low key and their sincerity will break your heart. Here is also the Facebook page. If you have any contact with a musical group or venue or any way to help them promote or raise funds, I urge you: do please get involved. What they say is true: now that the shocking images have receded along with the tide of destruction we are perhaps more worried about how it will all affect us. But there are still 17,000 dead or unaccounted for, many children orphaned, livelihoods lost, a nation in mourning, an economy in ruins and an environmental catastrophe about to taint their land for centuries to come if a solution is not found soon to the leaking reactor.

Anyway, enough from me. Here are some links.

http://www.facebook.com/musicforjapanhelp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNqjcCoZKCU

Please send them to your Facebook friends and everyone in your mailing list (undisclosed recipients). Let's show them we care...

Back soon.
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Beyond Good and Evil ...?

I read recently - and forgive me for my lack of accuracy - that a top ranking Japanese official said that the damage done by the tsunami was a punishment for the Japanese demand for more and more consumer goods. I have a horrible feeling that it was the Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, but it doesn't really matter. It is not unusual that someone blames such-and-such disaster on the people most affected by it: the wrath of (whatever) god, or gods.

I don't subscribe to this kind of god. On the other hand, if we try to look for a reason "why" such tragedies have fallen on the Japanese (and of course, you can fill in the blanks with whichever nationality of group you wish: there are many we never hear of) we are bound to come up short. Does "God" punish children, babies ...dogs, innocent men and women for their so-called superficial lifestyle? If so, we'd better all watch out. Would you, personally, want anything to do with a God that launched such a biblical outpouring of fury? I thought that Zeus had gone into retirement, and I hoped that Jehovah was keeping him company.

Whether we can attribute cause to God or apportion blame to those unfortunate people who experience "His" vengeance, the degree of horror associated with the tsunami and even now as I write, the doubt expressed in the extent of truth that is being allowed speech as far as the condition of the reactors is concerned, has caused all of us to stop and examine our own understanding of morality and mortality.

I think that what has remained with me all week is the first helicopter footage showing the speed with which the tsunami made its way inland. For me, it was seeing those people in their cars out on the highway going about their business not knowing that everything familiar in their world was about to go into a tailspin. It was looking at that white car, metres from the wall of water bearing down upon them, halt, turn to go in the other direction and seemingly stop on the verge of the road. What was going on in the minds of the people inside? Did they make it? Did their loved ones? Did they have a home to return to?

Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil seems to be claiming in the following quote that we over-reach ourselves in our desires and that what formerly was a blessing now has become a burden.

"That which an age feels to be evil is usually an untimely after-echo of that which was formerly felt to be good - the atavism of an older ideal."

Perhaps the Japanese have allowed themselves to slip away from the simple things. Perhaps we all have. Look around you: do you really need that, or this, or the other? Does it really add anything to you, as a person? Are we over-reaching ourselves as we widen the gap between the rich and the poor? Do we somehow believe that we have that right, just because we happen to born "here" and not "there"? Perhaps it is this which makes a disaster such as this one in modern, industrialised Japan seem so much more horrific than if it happens in Mongolia or some island chain: after all, we are the "developed" nations: don't we buy security from the ire of Nature?

No, I don't think that God has anything to do with this. Perhaps it is simply "bad luck". More likely the more recent seismic activity has something to do with the extraordinary number of sun spots and the gigantic solar flares that have been observed lately. Certainly these will have been affecting the earth's magnetic field. That's enough to give our planet the belly ache. The heavenly bodies do affect our planet, and that has nothing to do with whether or not you believe in astrology!

The biggest problem is that we somehow believe that the planet is here to serve us and we forget - to our sorrow - that we are tenants only, living on a crust so thin and so vulnerable that at any abrupt moment the seething mass underneath which is the true substance of our planet may remind us that really, life - any life - counts for very, very little to it.

If that is God speaking, I'll buy it. But I always hoped - vain hope I know - that God was somehow more than just the laws of physics.

Sorry if this is rambling, but I cannot apply much logic to those pictures I have been seeing these past 7 days.
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Big Bluebird is Watching You…

Every now and then on this blog I have a little rant. It’s my blog, and I’ll rant if I want to. If you don’t want to read about me ranting, then come back next week when I shall return to being all sweetness and light.

Right. You’re still here aren’t you? Good, because what I am about to talk about will offend everyone from the civil rights movement to the animal protection league.

It seems that the American government has spent a no doubt proportionately ridiculous amount on developing little spy planes designed to look like hummingbirds.

Yes, you read it right. If that is not enough, they are also working on mechanical drones to look like insects and even maple leaf seeds.

I kid you not.

And if that is not enough, they are also fooling around with the idea of implanting surveillance equipment into real insects as they are undergoing metamorphosis. The only aspect of this which seems to be bothering the folks at the Pentagon is that these little guys might interfere with aircraft. Oh and the "legal implications".

This makes me Very Mad Indeed.

But, enough about me, let’s talk about them for a minute. Here’s the Associated Press article in its entirety. It’s worth reading all the way through… (The Silly Comments in bold are, of course, mine.)

AP: The Pentagon has poured millions of dollars into the development of tiny drones inspired by biology, each equipped with video and audio equipment that can record sights and sounds.

They could be used to spy, but also to locate people inside earthquake-crumpled buildings and detect hazardous chemical leaks.

The smaller, the better.

Besides the hummingbird, engineers in the growing unmanned aircraft industry are working on drones that look like insects and the helicopter-like maple leaf seed.

Researchers are even exploring ways to implant surveillance and other equipment into an insect as it is undergoing metamorphosis. They want to be able to control the creature.

The devices could end up being used by police officers and firefighters.
Their potential use outside of battle zones, however, is raising questions about privacy and the dangers of the winged creatures buzzing around in the same skies as aircraft.

For now, most of these devices are just inspiring awe.

With a 6.5-inch wing span, the remote-controlled bird weighs less than a AA battery and can fly at speeds of up to 11 mph, propelled only by the flapping of its two wings. A tiny video camera sits in its belly.

The bird can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways, forward and backward. It can rotate clockwise and counterclockwise.

Most of all it can hover and perch on a window ledge while it gathers intelligence, unbeknownst to the enemy.

(Emphasis mine... That's it! The bird feeder has GOT to go.)

"We were almost laughing out of being scared because we had signed up to do this," said Matt Keennon, senior project engineer of California's AeroVironment, which built the hummingbird.

The Pentagon asked them to develop a pocket-sized aircraft for surveillance and reconnaissance that mimicked biology. It could be anything, they said, from a dragonfly to a hummingbird.

Five years and $4 million later, the company has developed what it calls the world's first hummingbird spy plane.

"It was very daunting up front and remained that way for quite some time into the project," he said, after the drone blew by his head and landed on his hand during a media demonstration.

The toughest challenges were building a tiny vehicle that can fly for a prolonged period and be controlled or control itself.

AeroVironment has a history of developing such aircraft.

Over the decades, the Monrovia, Calif.-based company has developed everything from a flying mechanical reptile to a hydrogen-powered plane capable of flying in the stratosphere and surveying an area larger than Afghanistan at one glance.

It has become a leader in the hand-launched drone industry.

Troops fling a four-pound plane, called the Raven, into the air. They have come to rely on the real-time video it sends back, using it to locate roadside bombs or get a glimpse of what is happening over the next hill or around a corner. (Note: Edgar Allan Poe is saying from the grave: "See!")

The success of the hummingbird drone, however, "paves the way for a new generation of aircraft with the agility and appearance of small birds," said Todd Hylton of the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

These drones are not just birds.

Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple leaf seed, or so-called whirly bird, loaded with navigation equipment and imaging sensors. The spy plane weighs .07 ounces.

On the far end of the research spectrum, DARPA is also exploring the possibility of implanting live insects during metamorphosis with video cameras or sensors and controlling them by applying electrical stimulation to their wings.

The idea is for the military to be able to send in a swarm of bugs loaded with spy gear.

The military is also eyeing other uses.

The drones could be sent in to search buildings in urban combat zones. Police are interested in using them, among other things, to detect a hazardous chemical leak. Firefighters could fling them out over a disaster to get better data, quickly.

It is hard to tell what, if anything, will make it out of the lab, but their emergence presents challenges and not just with physics.

What are the legal implications, especially with interest among police in using tiny drones for surveillance, and their potential to invade people's privacy, asks Peter W. Singer, author of the book, "Wired for War" about robotic warfare.

Singer said these questions will be increasingly discussed as robotics become a greater part of everyday life.

"It's the equivalent to the advent of the printing press, the computer, gun powder," he said. "It's that scale of change."

I suppose that what really angered me about this development in robotics was not so much the invasion of privacy (there is far more out there than any of us wee mortal folk will ever know), but the fact that humans could sully nature so much that in order to re-create it we have to use it for our own violent ends. Can you imagine looking at a Blue Morpho Butterfly, or an Owl Butterfly and wondering: Friend or Foe?

I mean really… meddling Monarchs, snooping Salamanders, and terrorist Termites?

Holy Preying Mantis (sic), Batman!

But of course, the article offers by way of reasonable explanation, these drones can be used to BENEFIT humankind. Instead of sniffer dogs in earthquakes, man’s best friend could be a fully automated sparrow. Firemen could keep Great Spotted Whatnots as pets and save on the cost of Dalmatian food. It’s all very practical really and who wouldn’t love to be rescued by a hummingbird?

And you wondered where all the bees had gone…
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The Camino: Lessons for Life...?

I mentioned this a few days ago in a post about The Universe. Several people have asked me to repeat it so here it is. Every day I find its lessons more and more relevant to how I want to see life, and perhaps to how I want to be seen.

Here is the original post from August 2009 post Camino Portuguese:

Insights and a Serious Attempt at Introspection...

What have I truly learned from this Camino?

I have learned, once again, that the Camino is a microcosm of the world that could be. Those who have walked it, (or within whatever transport they took it) already know this. Those who have yet to experience it, will, in one way or another learn this: that much is guaranteed.

I have learned as the I Ching counsels “not to put too much trust into those with whom we have recently become acquainted”: sad but true.

I have learned that there are angels on the Camino. Usually where you least expect them (and I am still not totally convinced about angels anyway.)

I have learned to ask for what you truly need, for it will be provided.

I have learned that sometimes we are too hard on ourselves.

I have learned that the distance is not something we need to really concern ourselves with: it is about putting one foot in front of the other.

I have learned that blisters go away; in fact most annoying things go away eventually.

I have learned that you can speak Spanish in Portugal and be more or less understood, but that you may not have the slightest idea of the response believe me, it doesn’t really matter, the Portuguese are the most helpful people on earth.

I have learned that parrots have a sense of humour, pigeons don't like peanuts, and that I can raise swallows from the dead.

I have learned that sometimes I have to let myself be taken care of.

I have learned that what “the church” has told you is very much open to question.

I have learned to open myself up to others: if you can master this you may find that the ones around you can help you move further upon your journey. This, I have found, is very important.

A corollary to the above would be not to let a moment pass by: sometimes an instinct which says “Do this Now!” can lead to contacts which can help you further your quest I was to find this time and again...: There is no such thing as “luck”.

I have learned that I am quite content with my own company, especially in the rain.

I have learned that most of the times the things that annoy us are part of ourselves and anyway, they don’t count for much in the overall scheme of thing. Learn to forgive and forget. see http://www.headstartcentres.org

I have learned that whatever religious path you may have been taught we all come together in the most fundamental things.

I have learned that life is a beautiful gift: you only have to open your eyes to the “ordinary”and accept it to recognise how lucky you really are.

Perhaps most of all, I have learned that I need to wage war against “righteous indignation”: those moments when the world provides us with idiots and you know you are right. It is easily spotted: it begins with these words:...they should..., why don’t they... you would think that they... it’s not right that...But it’s counter-productive and only increases the frustration. I’m working very hard on a Live and Let Live philosophy. But it’s not always so easy.

Now 18 months later I find myself wondering what I would add to this. I was asked a couple of days ago what my "objectives" in life were. The question pulled me up short. I answered: To maintain a reasonable level of contentment.

But is that it? It's easily misconstrued. It is not that I want to lack challenges: far from it! It isn't that I want to lead a dull, uneventful, unproductive life. Heaven forbid. What I want is to see each opportunity as a challenge to take me further and further to my own core of contentment; accepting what "the Universe" provides as steps to an eventual realisation of exactly what and who I am, and by that implication, I suppose, exactly "who" and "what" God is.

I've mistakenly fought for it, and missed it by looking too hard...now I just want it to manifest itself in everything I do: the hard and the simple; the extrasensory and the very, very ordinary.

Socrates said: "The unexamined life is not worth living". Perhaps. But I would rather say that the unlived life is not worth examining.

I would rather live life ... and examine trees.
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Something to Crow About...

There is no doubt about it in my mind. Choosing a title is harder than writing the book. I have always had a title for Book Two of The Camino Chronicles, but I never thought of it as a working title. Compostela was the title I had chosen and that was that.

More recently, though, I have learned something of the skill of SEO: that's Search Engine Optimisation to you. I have also learned a thing or two about spiders: Google spiders. It seems they are very choosy and will only pick up words that are linked back. One or two people liked the name Compostela, but said that it might easily be confused with a non-fiction title while others said that it would never end up on the first page of any search about pilgrimage books. And I had to agree they were right.

But now what? Because the story has not one but two timelines (as does Pilgrimage to Heresy) it made it much harder to pick something snappy that would be appropriate to both. I needed something to grab peoples' attention.

Then the other day I was reading one of my many reference books and I found just the very thing. In a novel by Gallego Ramon Otero Pedrayo, one of his characters refers to Bishop Diego Gelmirez as El Gallo de Santiago. Now everything I know about Diego Gelmirez (and after three years of research I know a lot) tells me that was a man who - as my mother would have put it - wasn't backwards in coming forwards. Almost single handedly, Diego put the Santiago into Compostela. He was tireless (and ruthless) in making Compostela one of the three most important sites of Christian pilgrimage in the world. He was, most truly, cock of the walk: The Rooster of St. James.

So it's official. And you read it here first!

And the morning after...

For some time now, I have been receiving messages from the Universe. No, I am not hearing voices or anything like that. My messages are relayed through Mike Dooley who somehow or another seems to know what I am thinking about! Mike Dooley is in Texas, I believe. We have never met and although the Universe very nicely addresses me by name, Mike doesn't know me from Eve.

Twenty years ago, my daughter and her best friend organised my 40th surprise birthday party. The theme - and the banner which adorned the wall - was Happy On Top of the Hill. I had no idea that these teenagers had been contacting my friends secretly and was astonished! I also liked the idea that at 40, I was "on top of the hill".

I was completely wrong.

Now I am sure that I had scaled a few foothills up to that point (abnd a few Sloughs of Despair), but I am not sure that I had really scaled The Big One.
I'm not even sure now, but the view from up here sure is nice. (Are those more mountains I see in the distance? Great! I've got my best hiking boots on...)
Anyway, the reason for two posts in two days is that the Universe has surpassed itself today. Having considered whether I was actually enjoying some sort of summit yesterday, here was my message today...

"Tracy, one of the greatest things about finally reaching the 'top of the mountain,' - gazing about at the magnificence of life through tears of joy, thoroughly understanding every inch of your climb and its many unexpected setbacks, and grasping the dazzling perfection of it all - is looking back down at those still climbing (no, not what you're thinking, there's more...), still struggling, still lost and confused, and realizing with absolute certainty that they, too, will reach the top, in just a whisper of time."

Have WikiLeaks been telling the Universe my top secret information?

Enjoy every day of your climb. The view really is magnificent!
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Thoughts on becoming a little old lady...

I never thought it could happen to me! Today I officially become a "little old lady". That is to say that it is my 60th birthday and when I was a teenager I thought that anyone over 25 was incapable of having fun or really aware of the important things life at all. Well really: look at all the responsibility! Not to mention wrinkles and as Prince Phillip candidly put it recently, "bits starting to fall off". He is 90, I believe. By that time I shall be surprised if I have any bits at all. Not that I want my life in any way to be compared with Prince Phillip's, with or without bits.

And anyway, I am not 90. But nor am I 25. However, you know what? I think I am really going to enjoy my 60's - something I NEVER expected to be able to say. I wouldn't trade this day for my 25th birthday for anything in the world.

Why?

A couple of years ago, I posted my "Lessons from the Camino". I have since adopted them as lessons for life. I don't always succeed at remembering them, but I do try and I am grateful for all the little things the Universe sends me.

In fact the Universe did send me something today. I'll share it here with you. It said:

"Someone like you doesn´t come along very often. In fact, there has never been a single one like you, not is there any possibility that another will come again. You are an angel among us. Your eyes see what no eyes have ever seen before; your ears hear what no others have ever heard or will hear. Your perspective and feelings will never EVER be duplicated. Without you, the Universe and all that is would sadly be less than it is today."

Put it that way, and the very uniqueness of a human life - my life, my granddaughter's life, my children's lives as individuals your life - is an extraordinary thing.

Have you ever stopped to consider the very miracle that YOU are here at all? My father could have been torpedoed in his little e-boat off the Guernsey coast; my mother could have died in an air raid in Swindon. My grandfather could have fallen down a brewer's hatch, or my other one blown to smithereens in a Welsh coal mine. My German grandfather could have been killed during the First World War instead of living just long enough to sire my father in 1920. My German greatgrandfather could have had some horrific accident while he was chauffering the Kaiser's car (which of course could have wiped out the Kaiser too come to think about it). And then you can go even further back: if someone related to me hadn't survived the Battle of Hastings, or the Inquisition, if someone had been on the wrong side in the French Revolution, or the war of Caesar against the Gauls, I would never have come to be! So a big "Thank you" to all of them for the simple act of surviving long enough to procreate...

It's true! I am AMAZING!

And so are you.

Celebrate it! The Universe really wants you to.
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P.S. If you want to know what the universe really thinks about you, it speaks through a very nice man in the USA. See: www.tut.com

A Happy Heretic takes on the White Man's Burden...

I received an e-mail forward a few days ago. It was called "I'm 63 and I'm tired", written, purportedly, by an ex-government official with a lengthy service record. It was from someone I have known for very many years. That she had sent it to me came as a surprise since she and I have acknowledged (or so I believed) that we are poles apart politically. It was full of the old "White Man's Burden, all Muslims are terrorists, and why am I supporting all of you scum" sort of crap which I had hoped was only limited to Tea Baggers and those unfortunate enough to believe that Nick Griffin is the Messiah. I certainly am not going to dignify it by repeating it here.

To make matters worse it ended: "If you don't send this on (to at least five other people) you are part of the problem".

Excuse me?

I fumed for a while; I muttered to myself; paced a bit; made myself a strong cup of tea. And then I decided that I would not be silent. I sent the following to everyone on the list of addressees including the person who had sent it to me.

Two strangers, to my surprise, wrote back and thanked me for my "thought provoking" response.

So I thought I might share it with you. Perhaps it makes me even more of a heretic... but somehow, I don't think so.

I'm tired.

I am very tired that people who I would have thought would know me better would think that I would agree with a single word of this hate provoking diatribe let alone further the racial divide by forwarding it on.

I'm tired of reading bigoted, racist and ignorant statements designed to provoke prejudicial reactions which somehow I am supposed to "send to friends". I wouldn't dirty their in-boxes with the shit I have received here today.

I'm tired of people in the developed world whinging about how bad they have it when they should visit the slums of Dar es Salaam and Calcutta.

I'm tired of the so-called Silent Majority heaving collective sighs of not-so-silent discrimination, most especially when they are not even the majority.

I'm tired of hearing people speak about Muslims as if everyone of them were a terrorist or keeps his wife in a Burkah. Traditionally Islam has been FAR more tolerant than Christianity. Read your bloody history books.

In particular, I am tired of the ignorance which serves only to promote the Anglo-Saxon White protestants' so-called work ethic when it was on the backs on the fuzzy- wuzzies in the colonies that we all got rich enough to have anything to complain about.

I'm tired of hearing so-called Christians assume that somehow God must belong to them and that gives them carte blanche to trash every other religious perspective without ever taking the time to study them or the people who practice them.

I'm tired of people who are blatant white supremists but who hide behind their supposed political correctness while seething underneath about how things were all so much better in the good old days (of ignorance; the rigid class system; apartheid; women's subjugation; slavery; lack of education; lack of sanitation, and religious intolerance...oh, sorry that last one is still with us.)

I am tired that people cannot see how their hatred is being manipulated by the media and hate-mongerers and in their ignorance they simply pass on mindless propaganda they have not bothered to investigate for themselves.

I am tired of hearing how the poor White Man still has to carry the Burden of paying for everyone else. Just think about that the next time you need to use some form of social services. What did your last by-pass cost you? What nationality was the surgeon?

I'm tired of hearing how X ethnic group treats its women and children. Do you think that no white man ever beat and humiliated his wife or deprived his children of dignity?

I am very tired of people who criticise the idea of global warming, mostly because I believe they must have their head up their arse!

I am tired of people who think that they have the right to blow smoke in my face because it's a "free country".

I am tired of wondering if some of the people I have known for many years are planning on voting for Nick Griffin in the next election.

And I am deeply sorry for the writer of this diatribe I have received today, Robert A. Hall, because one day he is going to realise just what his grand-daughter truly thinks of him...

But

I am glad:

I am glad I live in a multi-cultural world where I can learn and grow.

I am glad for the education I have received which allows me to think for myself.

I am glad that I have Muslim friends, Jewish friends, black, yellow and brown friends. They bring me joy!

I am glad that I was born in the western hemisphere where I don't have to worry about hunger or disease.

I am glad that I have a home, work, and family who haven't had to go to distant countries to earn money they have to send home to me so that I can live in squalor, but at least live.

I am glad that I know enough about deep ecology to know that we are heading for climatic disaster and I can do my very little part to help and encourage others to do theirs.

I am glad I can look at the foibles of this celebrity cult world we live in - and laugh!

I am glad I have studied Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and seen the beauty in each while not remaining blind to the horrors of religious fundamentalism.

I am glad that I can work with children and help them to see beyond self-righteousness, and show them how they can intelligently weigh up the pro's and con's of each idea before making it their own.

Oh and for all you self-righteous catholics out there...I am glad I can see through the Roman church and its 2000 year old out-and-out lies - yes, and write a best seller about just one of them! You think paedophilia is the Catholic church's only sin....? !!!

Prejudice and hatred will destroy the world if we let it. If someone sends you a hate-filled forward. don't just delete it. Write back to the person who sent it to you and tell them just what you think. It may lose you a friend. But do you really want those kinds of friends?
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