The recession has affected many businesses, many people, and many families. The news about British Airways losing money is further evidence of this. Personally, I couldn’t be happier that this airline is losing money – I don’t like flying, I don’t approve of their practices and I think people should cut down on such a polluting hobby. But this attitude leaves me with a dilemma – what about the staff? Continue reading
I have not been paying enough attention to the news, as tends to happen, but it’s been even worse lately due to a sense of guilt for not revising or cramming or finishing coursework. And so the sanity of the world just seems like a not-so-urgent matter compared to the dread of entering that exam hall and facing the possibility of failing. Yet, one cannot always revise and so instead of paying attention to anything else, I’ve been reading constantly for the past three weeks.
Although it’s difficult to overlook the relative success of the far right and the calamitous results for the centre-left at the recent European elections, environmentalists can perhaps at least console themselves with encouraging green party results in many European countries.
So the election is all over, but we won’t find out for a couple of days what the result is. Some colleagues weren’t bothering to vote because, as they said, ‘they never vote’. Others were waiting until they finished work. Of course most of the talk between staff and borrowers (I work in a library) was about The Apprentice, on Wednesday night. We had no local elections here. But I voted last week, via postal vote. Continue reading
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that our society has a ridiculously narrow concept of politics. We tend to talk as if ‘the political’ is what happens only in officially sanctioned avenues of political advocacy: elections, what goes on at Westminster or in Brussels, the to and fro of diplomacy within intergovernmental organizations etc.