Patriot Realm

As we observe the number of Covid cases and deaths dwindle throughout many parts of the world, we can reflect on the past year to make sense of the pandemic. By comparing different countries’ strategies and outcomes, we can decipher which mitigation policies worked and which ones did not. 

 So many words are used these days ( even in this world of diminishing adjectives.) The young and less well-educated of our global population would no doubt tell us that something they like is awesome, wicked, cool, sick, hot or some such other word that bears little reality to its original meaning. 

I would hate to have to write a dictionary for today's  younger generation. How something can be cool and hot at the same time is beyond me. A young man may see a young woman and say " she is hot. " or " she is so cool. " Both phrases mean that he has just seen a particularly attractive female to whom he is sexually attracted. I am not suggesting for one moment that Cary Grant would have said that Doris Day was a " particularly attractive woman, " but in his movies, he may have ventured to give an appreciative smile and a backward glance and allow his mind to do the walking. And the talking.

One of the most iconic movies of the 1980's was one called Dirty Dancing. It is hard to imagine that it was made 35 odd years ago, yet still remains a cult classic. One of the lines from the movie was " Nobody puts Baby in the corner. " 

And it brought to what is happening around the world at the moment. 

Everyone is putting Baby in the corner. 

We need to fight for Baby.

When war broke out on 3^rd September, 1939 there was no mad rush of support for the causes espoused by Britain or for Poland and other occupied European countries. Americans were very much of a mind to remain out of any European war. There was no universal feeling of kinship towards Britain and there was, in fact, quite a lot of sympathetic support for Hitler. The second most common language spoken in the USA at the time was German and to cap it all the Neutrality Act prevented any engagement, let alone involvement, by Americans with any belligerent country. That included Britain and France as well as Germany.

My late father hated four-leggers. He could not say the word that is spelled beginning with an R , has the middle letter A and ends with the letter T. Four leggers to him, as a child of the Great Depression, were the harbingers of disease and despair. His distaste for their very existence was bordering on being a phobia. Even their smaller cousins, mice, were repugnant to him. 

My father was employed in the Gold Mining industry as a metallurgist, and consequently, I spent my school days as a student in the mining towns of the outback, or at boarding school. In those days there were nuns and priests, many of them Irish, in most outback Australian towns.

I started school with the Sisters of Mercy, and after 75 years I still recall those wonderful selfless women. They lived in a corrugated tin-roofed convent, and taught in an adjacent corrugated tin-roofed school, dressed in their long black habits and veils and white wimples and bibs. In the sweltering heat of summer with no air-conditioning, the heat must have been unbearable.