Thursday morning early

It has been nearly a week since the last post but have not done a great deal, just the usual routines of hospital, meal at Emmanuel last night Wednesday, and I am meeting Bruce and Rosalyn for lunch today.

 

More presidential candidates are coming forward.  Hilary Clinton has declared she is going to run.   But is keeping under the radar, and has yet to give an interview to the media, whereas the other candidates have given 4 or 5 each.    She stated she wants to concentrate on "the middle classes and the economy".    Certainly the last thing she wants is a barrage of questions on her somewhat less than brilliant tenure as Secretary of State, which has seen chaos erupt in the Middle East; the rise of ISIS; Iran and its nuclear weapons, and I suspect anyone asking her about Benghazi is going to get very short shrift indeed.   She has already been questioned about it by - I think it was Congress, some committee anyway - and she threw her hands in the air and asked - shouted in fact - "why does it matter".   I wondered how many people like me thought that it matters very much to the families of the four Americans who died, and she should have been sensitive to that.    You can go off someone, and I think that's when I went off her. 

 

I've been into some interesting books, memoirs of people the same age as me who grew up in wartime Britain.   The book I am currently reading is by an East Ender who married a GI at 16 - in this day and age that would be considered child abuse - and came to America with her husband on a troopship which sounded very, very uncomfortable with everyone vomiting all over the place.

 

When they landed in New York she wanted to buy a dark brown jumper to go with a skirt she had.  A friend took her to the bargain basement at Macy's where she asked for a "nigger brown jumper".  The assistant visibly recoiled, and her friend had to drag her back out into the street.   

 

We never had taboo words like that in England in the 1950s, and I always just thought of nigger brown as a colour, it never occurred to me - like it didn't to her - to question its meaning, or make any racial connections.

 

Time to go back to bed and see if I can get some sleep before it is time to get up.