The Blind Assassin

Seems an appropriate enough title. It was my choice for book group this evening, and we had an excellent discussion about it. Not exactly a masterpiece photo-wise, but I have not felt inspired these last two days and I deleted the half-dozen other photos I took.

We had an early night (by Spanish standards) on Friday, so we didn't discover the full horror of the events in Paris till Saturday morning, by which time we were packing and cleaning. A quick scan of news sites was more than enough -- it seemed unreal, unimaginable. It was another foggy day. News sites suggested French borders were closed; however evidently there were priorities as to which border crossings to watch. The Aragnouet-Bielsa tunnel is not a very heavily used crossing point. The road was as quiet as ever; we passed maybe half a dozen cars in our drive to the border, and within 10 km we were out of the clouds and back in brilliant sunshine. On the Spanish side there were a couple of Guardia Civil just before the entrance to the tunnel, one of them armed with an automatic weapon -- although S later mentioned to me that there were a dozen others lurking below the level of the road that I hadn't noticed. On the French side, two gendarmes. All of them waved us on without asking us to stop and prove who we were. We noted that at the main border crossing at le Perthus there were reports of long queues as border controls had been reintroduced.  An uneventful drive saw us home by three.

I didn't mention this here at the time, but one morning last week, while we were still in Spain, a woman in Montlaur, who was a municipal councillor, was stabbed to death in the street by one of her neighbours, whom she barely knew. The motive is still not clear. We didn't know her, but we'd met her once by chance as she worked for someone we discussed a web development project with. Senseless violence on both a large and very small scale ... it feels as if the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

I was also thinking about when I lived in London in the 1970s, during the IRA bombing campaign. Bomb scares were a regular occurrence, actual bombs fortunately less so. It wasn't something you thought about constantly; the bag checks at every public venue, the absence of litter bins, the alerts for abandoned baggage in stations were something you got used to. The IRA never managed to create a climate of terror to the extent that people were prevented from getting on with their lives. And 40 years later, a man who was implicated in that campaign was shaking hands with Prince Charles (whose uncle was murdered by the Provisional IRA). Can we take any hope from that? Or is the situation now completely different?