Three week holidays are great for your sanity.

Three week holidays in India are great for figuring out what you're doing with life.

Three week holidays where you get to meet up with friends you haven't seen for four years are just amazing.

But when I left the UK the temperatures were still pushing 20C on some days, I spend three weeks in a country where 35C is normal. When I return, it's 4C.

My toes are cold.

Tiddly pom.

I'll have lots more to say about the trip soon I'm sure. But I'm still easing myself back into the real world. And trying to resist the urge to turn the central heating up.

"There is a breathing space, and that time should be filled with people imagining how to rebuild New Orleans."

I heard an interview on the radio this morning with Christina Ford, who used to be a city planner in New Orleans in the 80s.

She made me believe that it's possible that there is some hope for the future...

"The one quality that makes a city planer is optimism, and I am trying to find something good in all of this, and there is precious little that is good. And I think that the only thing is that when we rebuild that city we make decisions that weren't even thinkable when that city was built in the first place."

You can here all of what she had to say (on Radio 4's Today Programme) here...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today2_biloxi_20050907.ram

A long, long time ago I was an archaeologist.

I caught a BBC prgramme last night about the Coast of the UK. One of the places featured was the Great Orme Copper Mine:



The presenter marvelled about the bravery and technology and human ingenuity that was involved in excavating and smelting the copper all those thousands of years ago. Fine, all your usual televisional archaeological clichés...

All I could think about was a recent Channel 4 report about tin mines in the Congo:



We really haven't come that far.

Great Orme Mines

Congo's Tin Soliders - Channel 4

There's this line.

I thought I knew where it was. Certainly, I know where I would like it to be. I knew that not everyone agreed on where it should be, and that sometimes people stepped over it because of neccesity, or anger, or mistakes, or fear. I thought we had at least had an common understanding of where it was. But now I'm in a weird place, because apparently, the line has been moved, and no one knew.

Jean Charles de Menezes is dead. It seems because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I know it's not the first time the British police have made a mistake. I'm sure it won't be the last. They're a long way from perfect.

But the circumstances of his death, at least what we know about it so far, have taken things to another place. One where I don't quite understand the values any more. And that scares me.

Maybe I should explain to people from other countries, the police in the UK don't, as a matter of course, carry guns. Most incidents that have armed officers involved are news. So right now, this moment, with armed police all over the place, with or without the shooting of someone who was already down on the ground, is new to us.

My thoughts, beliefs, values and opinions are my own. They are not the same as my Government's. They are not the same as the people I work with, the people I live with, the people I sit next to on the train. The country where I live gives me the freedom to be an individual, and that's why, even when I want to move one way and everyone is going in a different way, I still defend it.

But now my line and the decision makers, and the law enforcers, and the upholders of justice's lines are different. And they are getting further apart. When do I stop defending it?

And what do I do then?

Well, may be not a whole 'one', perhaps more like a "I think I might have an eye lash in there, but I can't see it, could you take a look? Oh, nothing? Well, maybe it was a bit of grit or something."

This was our small attempt to not let terrorists beat us. We have bought five double decker buses, they are for an event we are organising, and we are going to refurbish them and fill them full of global awareness activities for young people. (I guess that in itself is also another possible eye lash in the eye)

The Thursday before last, we had planned to have a picnic lunch on the bus. And then we heard the news. After a brief discussion, about whether it was appropriate, we decided unaminously, that it was very much appropriate.

So here we are, just a small example of us, standing up (sitting down) for our freedoms. On a bus.