Blue Sky Thinking

It's carnival week here in Swanage and despite the autumnal weather, there's a real feeling of summer. People are in holiday mood; children are staying up late for the fireworks and normally sensible adults are wearing comedy hats and drinking beer in the daytime. I love to see the town I'm so esconced in filled to the brim with holiday-makers - it saves me going anywhere myself, as I can just pretend I'm one of them. If the weather were better I'd pretend I was abroad as well - though, actually, this feels like the winter I spent in a New Zealand summer, if that makes sense. Damp, predictably unsettled, bit dissapointing, but fun anyway.

The picture above says summer to me, though it was taken one October. It has the colour of summer. Looking out the window now at a leaden sky over damp grey roofs it says October to me, although it's late July. So there we go.

Last weekend saw me at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. It was my first time, despite years of left-wingishness and Tolpuddle being so close to home. It was a windy but wonderful day. I spent an hour behind a stall extolling the virtues of the Transition movement while listening to some great music from across the folk world, then wandered with Vicki and my boys among radicals, revolutionaries and really sound idealists before listening to the always fantastic Tony Benn address the crowd. I picked up leaflets galore and signed petitions a-plenty and came home with two tired children who won't appreciate for a while why such a place should be such a rush for their two idealist but realist parents.

I think of it now because I spent some time talking to a woman about the joys of the Solidarity Brigades but the difficulties of being a vegetarian in Cuba. On a grey English day like this I think of travel and Cuba is a place I've long longed to go to. Talking to her I was aware of an irony, though. I wandered past other stalls campaigning for democratic reform in the UK and against dictatorships in the Middle East and elsewhere, and yet there we all were, waving little Cuban flags and helping celebrate 50 years of Revolution there. Cuba cannot function as a democratic entity while the US still interferes in elections across Latin America - the CIA would never be able to resist funding the right-wing anti-Castro parties that would spring up and with a US funded campaign there's a good chance they would win. I suppose too that while the centre-right West declares certain dictatorships to be acceptable and friendly for financial reasons, then it's understandable that left-wingers can have a friendship with Cuba.

I think that's what I think, but then again maybe it's the beer in the afternoon that's talking.

This picture was taken here.