Twenty Stolen Children

I am sick to the pit of my stomach...it has taken me two days before I can even begin to collect my thoughts and reflect on this immense and personal tragedy for not only Newtown Connecticut but the USA and humanity as a whole. Twenty six lives lost...twenty of these are first grade children....ripped from their families lives at an age when you see the promise of individualism...the opening definition of who these young people are going to become and what ignites their passion.

I remember Charlotte and Tom at this age like it was yesterday. Their sweetness, their chatty enthusiasm about their days at school, their friends, their excitement of birthdays, Christmas, school plays, a special day with Mum. Their morning ponderance of what they are going to wear and what they are going to do at the weekend. I can begin to fathom the loss and pain being suffered by the families by this heartless criminal act. How can these parents bear to wake up remembering they will no longer hear the voice of their special child.

Unfortunately gun control is not going to stop these tragedies. People who are insighted to kill will find a way of arming themselves regardless. Our only defense is an understanding of our children and families....their dark side and pain. We have to be better educated on the signs of anti-social behaviour...we need to make harsh decisions about the children that exbibit cruelty and hate....

I hope many of these parents believe in God, Angels or anything that will help make their pain less.

 

I am adding this link to a blog by Jeff Belanger who has a personal link to Newtown and writes a heartfelt essay.

 

http://www.jeffbelanger.com/blog/christmas-in-newtown-connecticut/#comment-48041



Welcome to Holland

This remarkable perspective from a mother of an autistic child was shared with me by Charlotte.....

Welcome to Holland

 

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability – to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this…

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?" I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy.

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to some horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy a new guidebook. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

The pain of that will never, ever, go away, because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.

Written by Emily Perl Kingsley

Cyprus continued......

 

Oh, and by the way, what Cyprus lacks in wine taste it compensates with clementines....we found this lady selling them in the Akamas region...they are soooo sweet.

 

 

In addition to the clementines the olives were to die for....my particular favorite were doused in oil, garlic and oregano. We bought six bags home!!!!!!!

 

 

 

The Akamas Penisular is to the west of the island and is a beatiful natural habitat bragging the mythological birthplace of Aphrodite and an emerald grotto where she would take her mythological bath and meeting place of Adonis.

 

 

The Penisular had beautiful beaches with turquoise waters looking quite spectacular when the wind picked up.

 

 

 

It also boasted  tiny litle harbor called Latchi which had a handful of restautants and coffee shops.

 



 

 

AND regardless of where we went there was a heathly (or unhealthy) supply of Baklava...

 



 

 

A Taste of Cyprus

My third post on Cyprus, featuring our delightful November jaunt and a blast of sun. Andy, of course, had ulterior motives with the mushroom season in it's prime but I managed to overlook and enjoy the scenic pines, junipers and cistus in the Troodos mountains whilst he was mesmerised by rare Amanitas and Fennell Oysters.

I loved the mountain villages, not quite as pituresque as some of the Greek Islands but attractive with their more rustic, fuctionality and streets big enough to accomodate a slim donkey as opposed to a car. A little less on the bougainvillea front and a little more on large rusty water canisters.....

Two highlights for me...

The first was a visit to a small monastry in the middle of nowhere when I was out for a solo drive, I was greeted by this wonderful monk who took my hand and led me to the breaktaking chapel....it was quite an emotional experience which made me glad he left me for a while. When I left the chapel he walked me through his humble garden and gave me sprigs of lavendar and lemon verbena. He even let me take his photo

 

 

 

My second thrill was the village of Odomos. Took forever to get to but way up in the Troodos it was a jewel and something that seems to have been unscathed by time. It has a wonderful little square nestled between countless passageways and was accessible through the church.....

 

 

This is a wine making village although the wine in Cyprus has a lot to answer for.....not good! That being said, August may be the most forgiving month as there is a wine festival every day and you get to sample the goods for free and after a while you can probably get used to the taste :)

 

Cyprus Rescues

The Cypriots have a lot to answer for with their care, or lack of, with animals. The number of stray cats is one thing and something I have witnessed before is the warmer climates but the dog situation is deplorable. Dogs are abandoned in their hundreds and thousands by callous hunters who feel they have got the best years out of their dog and have no further use for them. A number of them are dropped off on highways and left for dead or dropped in the forest where they will starve.  Andy's friends in Cyprus are my heroes as they are single handedly rescuing these animals and trying to rehome when they can. They currently have 27 cats and 3 dogs. They are miracle workers and have spent a small fortune in vets bills bringing these vulnerable cases back from the brink....

Here are some of my fave pics....

Jolly Good Time

Want a treat we had this week when we went to the Hampton Estate in Puttenham at the request of Sir Richard Thornton. He has been giving Andy permission to foray on his land, Puttenham Common for the last 15 years and thought it was time he learned a little about fungi....not a bad idea considering he is ninety years old. He had his lovely wife Gay in tow who spent a little time telling me how difficult it was to deal with her name in recent years as it was hard to go up to soemone, put out your hand and say I'M GAY!. His daughter Bridget who must have been the same age as me was now running the esate, lived in the gi-normous house and kept the whole show ticking over. They had been a dairy farm for the best part of fifty years but he profit from milk began to shrink and they then had to sell off the herd and reinvent themselves. They now focus on grass fed beef and hops and are getting back on their feet.

They were all charming and Sir Richard insisted on taking us out to lunch at the local pub. Their company was delightful. We all told Sir Richard what we would like for lunch and he ordered from the bar. By the time he returned, less than two minutes, he had already forgot what he had ordered for his wife!! His short term memory was completely 'shot', bless him.

He has lived in this small area of Surry his whole life and shared the changes he had seem since the time of the blacksmith and the wheelwright. He had a Governess for his early education and then went on to study agriculture at Cambridge. He has moved with the times and pioneered many ideas with the trees and woodland. He and his wife have actaully travelled worldwide to learn new stratgies for farming and conservation. We found him fascinating and utterly humble. He is not ready to give up either and still turns up for wortk at the estate every day by 9am. He has asked us to come back next year but not in September as he is hop farming....got to love that dedication.

The Wheelwright

 

The Hampton Estate

The Green Line

Cyprus, a country divided by two nations, with two religions, two cultures and two thoughts each struggling for dominance. With the descendants of the Ottoman rules and the sons of Plato and Aristotle, each believing they are the superior race and rightful owners of this territory, the result is a country, Cyprus, and capital city, Nikosia, literally divided....divided in to two zones by "the green line'. The country of Cyprus to the North inhabited by the Turks and the rest of the country inhabited by the Greeks.....and how did this become such a contentious and volatile situation...that's easy, The British of course!!!!

Cyprus is just below Turkey in location and was inhabited by the Mycenaeans as early as 1100BC. It remained in relative peace as a farming civilization until Alexander the Great (another Brit) captured it and then passed it over for Egyption Rule. In time is then passed to the Roman Empire  and things remained somewhat uneventful, including ownership going to the Lusignan family in 1192 who actually established Cyprus as a Kingdom . So all was well until the 16th Century when the Ottoman Rulers conquered and took control of the island.

The British jumped in in 1878 and convinced the Ottomans to let them take administration of the island.....just going to manage it they told them...it will still be yours (yeah right!). That made the Greeks happy, they finally had someone to listen to their voice as they campaigned for independance from the Turks.

When the Turks sided with the Central powers during World War I, as punishment Britain seized Cyprus as a British colony and it remained so until 1960 until they decided to forfeit Cyprus in a larger deal.

The Brits, being controlling told them how it had to be run. They initally devised a cabinet that enabled the Greeks and Turks to rule side by side (well sorta). Rule was split by a percentage...Greek had 70% of the cabinet and Turks had 30%. Greeks were unhappy with this as only 18% of Cyprus inhabitants were Turkish....they were even more unhappy when the Turkish Amry invaded in 1974 and drove all 150,000 Greeks out of the Northern part of Cyprus and seized all their homes and belongings.  The Turkish Army remain there today.

The actual dividing line between the Northern Turkish occupied territory and Greek territory goes through the capital city of Nikosia which Andy and I visited last week. We could only visit the Greek side of the capital as we failed to bring our passports which were required for entrance on to the Turkish side.. That being said, you can still feel the tensions within this city and the resentments of centuries passed.

 

 

The Green Line Border