COVID-19 – From a Drama into a Crisis!
We have as a nation endured for nine weeks now, an unprecedented period of social and political disruption which has had and still threatens, the most far reaching and serious consequences for the future well-being of our people. As we all know a viral pandemic has swept the world in the way that viral pandemics have since humans and our pre-human ancestors first walked this earth. Unlike most previous pandemics however, this pandemic — the…
Seventy-Five Years On
When I started work, most of my male colleagues, if they were beyond their mid-thirties, had been in the forces during the Second World War, and I fondly remember one old boy who had fought in the First! More than one of them had decorations for bravery, and there were a few empty sleeves and artificial legs. At one time I worked for a most generous and pleasant man who had lost one lung and…
Hope Springs Eternal
This glorious April, the finest in my memory, is drawing to a close. I am, as will be obvious, no expert on 19th and 20th century English poetry but somewhere in the remotest dusty recesses of my memory banks are snippets of verse about the beauties of England in the spring. Were they by Rupert Brooke? Or perhaps by homesick, and long forgotten, colonial civil servants or army officers stuck in the sweatier parts of…
Of Coronavirus, Lions & Sheep!
It is now roughly three weeks since my first article on this subject the whole world it seems is still in the grip of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. In the first countries to be infected, China and Italy there now appears to be some reduction in the rates of infection and in the numbers of deaths, but for the rest of the world the numbers are still rising steeply. Here in the UK the Prime…
Corona – goes viral!
The world is in the grip of a viral pandemic of the proportions normally only seen in horror movies, and we all begin to realise that in a ‘global village’; in which intercontinental travel has been promoted as the height of sophistication; and in which multiculturalism and multiracialism is regarded as de rigour, ‘conventional wisdom’ has been turned on its head.
New Victorians?
It’s well known that Boris Johnson has a taste for big projects; you’ll remember the “Garden Bridge” and “Boris Island” from his time as Mayor of London, both attractive projects (or so I thought), both fantastically expensive, neither realised – yet. Now Prime Minister with a big majority he can indulge that taste for grandiose projects to his heart’s content with no-one to say “no”, not even his neutered Treasury. So we are to have…
A Greater Europe
As our membership of the European Union begins to recede into the past, it’s time for a little reflection and a look into the future. Our 47 years as members first of the European Economic Community (the Common Market), and then of its successor the European Union, may have dominated the adult lives of most of us, but they will come to be seen as a mere historical blip in the eleven centuries since the…
All is Race
The fairy tale may not have ended, but it has taken a staggering blow. I write of course of the place in our monarchy of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. At the time of their marriage and subsequently, when young Archie was baptised, a number of articles appeared on Western Spring * deploring this mixed race relationship. Most particularly we drew attention to the main stream media’s quite disgusting grovelling at the feet of…
Bubbleheads Implode!
The three weeks or so which have passed since Boris Johnson’s famous victory in the general election of the 12th December has allowed us some space for reflection. Anyone who has read any of my earlier remarks about Boris will know that I am no fan of his, and he is no friend of ours. Nevertheless, it was with relief that I switched on the television at 10.00 pm that Thursday night to see the…
Black Good, White Bad
It wouldn’t surprise me to find the words “Black Good, White Bad” heading an article about the Labour party’s “Race and Faith” manifesto for this forthcoming election. Not when the Labour party is headed by a known Anglophobe who befriended the IRA when it was murdering hundreds of his fellow countrymen. It is, though, a great pity that the launch of this manifesto last Tuesday should have been so overshadowed by the storm about Labour’s…