Weekend

Hello Everyone. I hope that you are well.  I'm a bit tired I'll be honest. We have been away for the weekend to Stroud to stay with some friends. We had a lovely time and have been looked after really well, but I have reached a time in my life when, even if I am having a nice time, anything a bit unusual leaves me completely jiggered. We drove up (correction HOH drove up). I've just noticed that I have had an email from M and S at the Moto Services asking me for a review. Good Grief - they are quick off the mark. Well. I'll be frank it was a bit grim. Very clean which they aren't always but just a bit depressing. We opted to eat our sandwiches in the car whilst watching a really posh couple in the car next door arguing ferociously about how they were going to get the dog to have a wee and carry their food at the same time. 

Him "Well I can't carry it darling - can't possibly carry it. I just can't do it!"

Her (supposedly under her breath but we could hear in the car) "No you never can, can you."

Always something worth watching at Motorway Service Stations. Almost worth an extra star on the review. (I didn't do a review. My Mum always said, "If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all").

I've never been to Stroud before - our friends haven't lived there that long. We were all amused to see in the newspaper today that Stroud is the new place to live for the South West Jet Set (it's not a huge group of people). It is quite a boujee sort of place - we went out to buy Sourdough from the local market for our soup. But our friends moved there so they could babysit their grandchildren and I don't think that Sienna Miller or her chums will be inviting them around for canapes and champers anytime soon.

We've been to the pictures a couple of times this week - for very different films. The first one we saw was the documentary "Twiggy". She seemed very nice. A  nice normal person. Very famous in the Sixties obviously. She seemed to have to put up with a lot. Interviewers thought nothing of asking her what her "vital statistics" were or if she thought that a lack of big bosoms was going to hold her back in the long run. She seemed to take this with good grace. She emerged from the cauldron of the Sixties to a career on Broadway, then singing country music (a little tentatively) on Top of the Pops and a Light Entertainment show with people like Bing Crosby and Brian Ferry. She probably didn't give a monkey's uncle about what these Sixties Dinosaur blokes were thinking about her. 

The second film we saw was last night with our lovely, groovy Stroud friends. "No Other Land" is a film by a Palestinian-Israeli collective which documents the clearing of the village of Masafer Yatta - firstly by the Israeli Army, supposedly to make room for an army training camp and latterly by marauding, armed Israeli settlers who enter the villages purely to attack Palestine families while the army looks on. 

Can I be entirely honest with you? Some (not all) of the people in this country who support the Palestinian cause can get on my nerves sometimes. The cinema that we went to was full of people wearing the scarves and looking down their noses a bit. The lady who made the introductory speech before this film insisted on an experiment involving us all standing up and down at different points if we had heard of Masafer Yatta As far as I could see, all that was achieved was making some of us feel a bit stupid and other people feeling a bit smug. 

HOWEVER, the film itself is essential viewing. It has just won the Oscar for Best Documentary this year and if nothing else, that should make it easier for people to get to see it. I think if anyone had asked me about the plight of ordinary Palestinians, I think I would have been able to describe how awful it was but watching people's homes being bulldozed as well as their schools was a completely different experience. Or seeing concrete poured down the only well in the village while Israeli settlers watched on. Seeing it happen is both shocking and essential. The film currently has no US distributor - not everyone wants you to watch it. However, it is available for streaming on Channel 4 I believe and, if you can, you should. 

To go off on a bit of a tangent, Pete Greig has been doing the story of Hagar and Sarah and their sons this week on the Lectio 365. That is an equally complicated story about the relationship between Jews and Arabs among other things but what shines through for me is God's kindness to Hagar and Ismael all through very messy events in which no one gets Gold Medals for behaving well. The way that God dealt with it caused Hagar to say one of the best things anyone could say...

“You’re the God who sees me!

“Yes! He saw me, and then I saw him!”

It's not simple. It is messy. We came back from the film saying that we couldn't see a way out of this. Justice. Kindness and Mercy change everything but how that happens at the moment, I really couldn't tell you. 

See you next week.

Have a good week.