A thought provoking day

I was glad that I decided to drive to Tyne Green this morning to walk on the flat path by the river.

First, I watched the rowers from Queen Elizabeth High School launch a few boats and row up and down the river. My extra is of the ducks who appear to be leading the way!

It’s a busy place with lots of dog walkers and a few runners with golfers playing and families out for a weekend walk.

I always talk to dogs and the owners if they choose to join in! Pictured is D with Shep. We walked together and he told me a lot of his life story on the way.

The most dramatic part was a terrible accident when he worked at an open cast mine in Wales. He was rescued from the cab of his fork lift vehicle by the rest of his crew. His injuries were very serious and he was in a coma for weeks. When he regained consciousness it was to find that five of that crew had dies in an accident a few days later and his beloved collie had also died.

In a wheelchair and unable to walk, he was struggling. Then a border collie rescue centre asked him to take on 6 tiny puppies who needed to be hand reared. They were only 2 weeks old and he had to work around the clock to feed them. One of them would not be separated from him. This is Shep, now over 11 and with arthritis.

D moved back to the north east where a young orthopaedic surgeon gave him the chance to walk again.

I was very moved by his story and sorry to part company when I had walked far enough for my hip.

On the way home, I was listening to Times Radio and caught part of an interview about József Debreczeni’s book Cold Crematorium - reporting from the land of Auschwitz. He was a Hungarian survivor of the concentration camp and wrote a powerful memoir that has only recently been translated and published in English. (Reviewers liken him to Primo Levi.)

I read a review of the book in the New Statesman online. This took me to read about Hannah Arendt. I had not heard of her. The Wikipedia entry is long and fascinating.

So, on Holocaust Memorial Day, I am giving you a quotation from Hannah Arendt:
That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them. Men in Dark Times (1968)