[Magdalen] No mail...

[sally.davies at gmail.com]

I'm here...not as often as before. My email has become a swamp of unwanted
stuff and it's so wearisome combing through it for those that I want to
read.

Is anyone else watching the Bush funeral on CNN?

Magnificent church, magnificent music..

We have had two grand funerals in South Africa these past two weeks -
Mam'Winnie Madikizela-Mandela last week, and former Cabinet Minister Dr
Zola Skweyiya today. Both emotional in different ways.

I thought that I would feel detached from the First Lady's funeral service,
hoping just to enjoy the music (which I am).

But it's not like that. I'm feeling a bit thin skinned today for various
reasons known and unknown, but this service is really getting to me. It
feels as though I'm watching the funeral of a world I knew and have taken
for granted, a world in which the President of the USA was a leader,
someone who made a contribution and at least tried to make the world a
safer place.

In which news was news and truth was truth, available to be contested for
sure but at some point resting on the bedrock of fact.

A world in which civilities and a certain formality was the norm in public
life and one did not have to brace oneself on a daily basis for the next
disgusting instalment of ever present news.

In a way Barbara Bush is what South Africans might call "the Mother of the
Nation". I feel for her family, grieving in the glare of publicity, and for
her nation which has lost its way, and the world she leaves behind, in
which we all must try to make our way and hold some hope for our children.

It is some comfort to see the Obamas sitting in the front row, being nice
to Melania. Perhaps there's just a glimmer of hope there that decency,
humanity and kindness are not altogether lost to us all in political and
public life. And of course these things are still very common in ordinary
life.

Sally D