armistice day

Prime Minister William Massey addresses soldiers of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company near Arras, France, on 2 July 1918

A few years ago I was passing through a small village in northern France. Inside the municipal buildings two impeccably dressed ladies, (I remember one was wearing a glittering peacock broach), manned a small information centre and gift shop. I wandered around the cavernous interior and noticed a long corridor displaying photographs from the First World War. Sepia toned young men with muddy boots and big smiles, standing outside of trenches and tunnels stared back at me. On handwritten notes beside the photographs, I saw the words 'New Plymouth' and 'Christchurch' and bizarrely 'Bluff'. After a sceptical eyebrow raise at my attempt to ask for more information, Peacock Lady gave me a transcript in English.

I was in Arras, perhaps best known for the Battle of Arras. The photos were of the New Zealand Tunnelling Company: 400 kiwi's, many of them West Coast miners helped create a vast network of military tunnels under the village. They burrowed under no-man’s land to blow up and destroy the German trenches above. They had named each of the tunnels after a New Zealand town. According to the Defence Force website: 'Through the winter of 1916 as the town of Arras above was destroyed by German artillery the underground city grew large enough to accommodate 20,000 men. There was running water, electric lighting, kitchens, latrines, a light rail system and a medical centre with a fully equipped operating theatre'.

From a population of just over a million people, 103,000 New Zealand troops and nurses served overseas in 1914-1918. Of these 16,697 New Zealanders were killed and 41,317 were wounded during the war - a 58 percent casualty rate - one of the highest per capita of any country involved in the war.

The passing of Harry Patch earlier this year means there will be no veterans at today's Armistice ceremonies. That generation has finally passed. And so it is up to us now, to remember them.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts a peace, under an English heaven.

~ Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

way less than awesome

woo.

This is my new sound. It is the noise I make when I am tired and stressed and sick and busy and sore and tired. It is not one half of ‘woohoo’, it is much smaller and tireder and fedupper than that.

It is like a tiny injured cow.

'woo'.

wtf monday #44

sicko

While we were celebrating the failed attempt by Guido Fawkes to blow up Parliament, last night the House of Representatives passed the Democrats' healthcare reform bill. They still need the Senate to vote in favour before this becomes law. This is HUGE people! Criminally, the US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to fend for themselves. And 50 million people can’t afford insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can’t access basic healthcare and medication. That’s equivalent to six times the deaths caused by 9/11, every single year.

For more information on the issues surrounding healthcare reform in the States, this Radio 4 podcast is brilliant.

And I do wonder what those upset that change is not coming quickly enough, have managed to achieve in the last 100 days? Hmmm yeah. I thought as much.

Image from the Boston Globe Big Picture: A town hall meeting on health care at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia, U.S.

what i need

I am being sucked into the vortex of meh. Working from home today in an attempt to finish a few things without distraction, while I pull myself together to finish the third and final uni assignment due next Friday. And of course this is when my brain and my body decide to gang up and be complete bastards to me. I am pre-monstrous and my throat is a bit scratchy. I can't string sentences together so I am just writing bullet points under topic headings, the juice of which will be filled in later.

What I need is some sort of catharsis, and writing doesn’t feel very cathartic at the moment, or what I need is…crap I don’t know what I need.

A glass of wine and a bloody good shag?

friday five: god's fireworks* are awesome

*A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in space. Some nebulas are regions where new stars are being formed, while others are the remains of dead or dying stars. There are four main types: planetary, reflection, emission, and absorption nebulas. They are stunning.

'i gave her my heart and she gave me a pen'

I cannot believe it's been twenty years since Say Anything. I bloody love Lloyd Dobler. I love complex, depressive, kick-boxing, Peter Gabriel fans, devoid of ambition. And I love the flash mobbers that celebrated the anniversary dvd release.

'Maybe I didn't really know you. Maybe you were just a mirage. Maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we're all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it's not your fault. I'm been thinking about all these things and... you're probably standing there monitoring. And one more thing - about the letter. Nuke it. Flame it. Destroy it. It hurts me to know it's out there. Later.' ~ Lloyd Dobler's last message on Diane's answering machine.