The Hopscotch Grid

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"The hopscotch grid took up the width of a narrow strip of pavement very close to shops and there was an important safety issue with children playing on the grid, particularly for people walking on the pavement, who would have to step into the very busy road to avoid them."
Blackpool street scene manager.




We were crowded into far-off days, the floating plates of glass, the moments when we knew we were in the right place at the right time and all was well. The mountains clear and cold in the distance. The adventure all for a purpose. Noble experience. Self-satisfaction. A dark tinge. He wasn't going to mark this cave in any other way. He had to protect his family. He experimented; and couldn't keep the images back. He struggled through layers, became conscious only at brief points. He was sick of the pain.

When we made it clear we were going forward; they chuckled. He couldn't have been more outraged, surrounded by triumphalism, normal, happy people. He didn't know why he had been born so melancholy. You need to learn to enjoy your life. Michael dropped by briefly yesterday evening. A friend of his went to the doctor on Wednesday with stomach pains and was diagnosed with stomach cancer. On Friday he was dead. He was 52, younger than us now. Mortality is everywhere, in the frame of everything. We started to have the same conversation we had had a dozen times before, and couldn't be bothered. It wasn't cruel, just busy.

Somewhere out there lay a different world, a different him. The maestro of fresh starts. The complete lack of confidence. The love for his children, who's names he couldn't remember as he struggled to wake in the hospital bed. I can't go back in, I can't go back in, he heard his head chanting. She was there, trying to talk to him again. It's become urgent, I'm being released soon, the message said. Are you coming with me? He shook his head. He looked at the hospital paraphernalia which surrounded him. He struggled to make it to a sitting position. Then he struggled towards the lounge. Somewhere he could see the image of a building burning.

They're offering us a way out and this crazy woman doesn't want to take it, he thought, as he spotted her curled up in one of the institution's large lounge chairs. They hadn't spared any expense, even if they never spoke. He went and sat by her. She held his hand. There was so much longing for something he couldn't understand. He had never felt so isolated in all his life. The world was a muffled echo someplace else. He was longing for a solution; for the village they proffered before him, happy days, children laughing in the sun. Oh please, please, let's just leave here, let's be happy, he thought.

She held his hand more firmly and looked into his eyes. I'm being transferred soon, she said. I've refused to go to their so-called village, I've said I want to go back to my old life. In truth I want to go back in. It's only from the inside we can make a difference. He raised an eyebrow. They don't monitor us here, she said. I've worked it out. There was so much static and garbage and false clues they gave up. I don't blame them, she said, listening to our heads, laughing only slightly. Their fingers curled in and out of each other's palms. But the truth is, I can't do it by myself, she said.

A tear trickled down the side of his face. It's not possible, he said. It's just not possible. Look at me. I've no idea who I was, where I've been, what I did. All I get is disconnected images. Why would I put myself through any more torture? We've tried. We can't beat them. I can't survive being wiped again; something in me, I just know. It's not possible to make another fresh start, back to the office, back to the house, a woman appearing. It wasn't you. I know, she said, or I figured, they wouldn't let me anywhere near you. Anytime I tried I got piercing headaches, which got worse the closer or more persistent I was. There isn't any way, then, he said. That's not necessarily true, she replied, snuggling her tiny frame even further back into the lounge chair, as if hiding from watching eyes. Their fingers curled together more frantically, damp and intense. He stood up. They're watching, they're listening, he whispered. I'll see you tomorrow. He looked down at her startled, sad little face; then he went back to his room. He didn't know why. the spies were everywhere, he could feel them.




THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3908304.ece

By a twist of fate, the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech falls on the day the Democratic presidential nominee is to deliver the acceptance speech at the party convention at the end of August.

The slain civil rights leader foretold that America would live out the true meaning of its creed that “all men are created equal”. Barack Obama will be the first African-American to reach the White House if he can dispense with John McCain, the Republican candidate, as effectively as he appears to have dispatched Hillary Clinton.

“It’s like the fulfilment of a prophecy,” said Loretta Augustine-Herron, 65, an old friend from the Illinois senator’s days as a community organiser alongside her in Chicago. “He will be the people’s president.

His whole life is about ‘we’ – ‘We the people’,” she added, in a reference to the preamble to the American constitution.
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History seems to have turned its back on Clinton, who had hoped to be the first female president, as she stumbles towards the end of her campaign. It would take some nerve to smash the dream on the anniversary of King’s speech by somehow swinging what she called “hard-working Americans, white Americans” last week behind her in defiance of black voters.

For disheartened members of her inner circle, and possibly Clinton herself, all that remains is to negotiate the terms of her surrender while Obama turns his attention to the duel with McCain, the 71-year-old Arizona senator and Vietnam war hero.


http://blogs.usatoday.com/onpolitics/2008/05/gallup-obamas-l.html

Barack Obama leads Hillary Rodham Clinton in today's Gallup national tracking poll of the Democratic nomination race by a 5-percentage-point margin, 49%-44%.

Yesterday, he led 48%-46%. The day before, Obama was ahead 47%-46%.

Gallup writes today's numbers:

Are the first three-day aggregate in which all interviews have been conducted after last Tuesday's North Carolina and Indiana primaries. Although Obama's margin over Clinton is now larger than it has been over the last several days, he has yet to move into a significant or commanding lead, despite much discussion about the inevitability of his becoming the Democratic nominee.

Gallup surveyed "1,270 Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters" and says the results each have margins of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

It's important to keep in mind that polls are snapshots of public opinion, not forecasts of what will happen on far-off election days.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3908489.ece

There is no doubt an American humanitarian mission would save a significant number of Burmese lives if allowed. Faced with the junta’s refusal, ought America be prepared to intervene regardless?

One strong advocate of intervention is Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister. Expressing righteous anger over the junta’s callousness last week he proposed forcing the delivery of aid on Burma.

Kouchner invoked the United Nations’s “responsibility to protect” civilians, a concept conceived at a summit in 2005, partly in response to atrocities in Rwanda and Darfur in Sudan.

His call was echoed by Andrew Natsios, the former head of the US Agency for International Development. “Sometimes you have to . . . intervene against the wishes of the local government,” he said.

Such views encountered opposition from Douglas Alexander, Britain’s international development secretary, who said threatening to airdrop aid into Burma without permission was “incendiary”. “I don’t think we have any legal right to impose [air drops],” he said, though he added: “We might have a moral obligation.”

There is no indication that Bush is preparing a unilateral rescue mission in Burma. But there have been precedents, both happy and unhappy, in recent years. Interventionism was tried in Somalia in an operation to protect aid that backfired when the Americans were caught in a civil war and withdrew.

The Americans justified intervention in Iraq by reference to the “war on terror” at the price of damaging the military’s reputation as a force for good. Saving the lives of the people of Burma could help to redress the balance but it could backfire if it turned into a shooting war.