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The
Guest These are from Walt's sister's?fridge
?#060;/p> * Discussion * Talk about it here. WHAT I'M READING...
Sarum WHAT I'M WATCHING... CNN NEW Samples of two of the Pictures from the Cincinnati are now up at Steve's Club Photo page. Pictures from our Family reunion are on my own Club Photo page.
That's it for today!
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"It's a new world--and I hate it" 14 September 2001 We were sitting at a cafe in the British Library this afternoon. A balding gentleman at the next table was speaking with a colleague. They finished their lunch and got up to leave. He put on his raincoat, picked up his briefcase and turned the other man. "It's a new world...and I hate it," he said. That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? The men sitting at our table were talking about trips to California. One of them--who looked like Tony Randall--kind of looked embarrassed and asked "So--did you know anybody in all that unpleasantness?" I do love the British manner of understatement. We have moved to a new hotel today. No longer on a quiet street near Hyde Park and a block from a 24 hr cyber cafe. Now we are at the Travel Inn and will be meeting our group in a few hours. The nearby Internet access is in a travel agency which is only open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., so I suspect that entries are going to be made at odd hours. This one is being made way too soon, for example. We are still glued to CNN, though had to take break after we left the hotel because our new room wasn't ready yet. Yesterday morning I sat there for hours, tears streaming down my face, just from the pain of everyone, the futility of it all, and what this world is coming to. It seems like we've been here forever. It's only been two days--but the world changed in that time. The cab driver who brought us to the new hotel was from the Middle East (aren't they all?)--tho he said he was from New Jersey. I hated myself because my first thoughts were..."how does he feel about this?" and suspicion. He talked about God asking the devil to pray for man...I'm sure it made sense to him, but I had difficulty following it. He then said that technology was the end of mankind. Then he wished us a happy vacation and sped off to his next fare. We went to a map exhibit at the British library today and as I looked at many of the maps which had been made for various battles, I thought of the graphic CNN showed, which positioned the US battle ships at strategic points. For what? To fight whom? This world has always had battles, country to country--we haven't learned how to fight suicidal groups armed with razor blades. All the money and balistic missiles in the world aren't going to combat that. We took a break yesterday and walked in Hyde Park, discovered Kensington Palace and took a tour of the state rooms, where I learned more about the protocol of dressing for court than I ever wanted--or will need--to know. But it was a world removed from the one we left back at the hotel. We walked around the nearby lake and saw the swans and Canadian geese--and I smiled when I recognized a coot, remembering the coots we saw on the Thames back in May. Back in May, when the world was familiar. Email is wonderful, but I miss being able to call and talk to the people I love...just for the reassurance. SecraTerri said it wonderfully. She said she knew what it would feel like to get a call from someone you loved letting you know they were about to die. It was very real for her. It's so real, in fact, that every once in a while I have to stop whatever I'm doing and pick up the phone and call the people I love once again, just to make sure that they're still there. I want to hear the voices of people I love to know they're still there. But it will be two weeks before that can happen. In the meantime, there is email. Thank god for email. We had dinner last night with a friend from California whom we had not seen in five years. He's lived in London long enough to have developed a British accent and I teased him about it. We met his partner, with whom he has been living for a year. We heard about their flat and the decorating they have been doing. It was nice not to think about "the difficulties" for awhile. I don't know where we go from here. Where we physically go in the next couple of hours...where we go in general over the next weeks / months / years. It's a new world--and I hate it.One Year Ago: |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 9/5/01 by Bev Sykes |
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