The world from my window

I t's a strange day today. Black as the inside of a bag and raining like billio. I don't like it. We had snow last week. Just five minutes of it, but snow nonetheless. It's as if the natural world is protesting at what's going on in the unnatural world. Refugee crisis, terrorism, Trump... Don't get me started. And since my Brexit heartbreak , the landscape has been changing. Literally. Here's a couple of trees whose progress I've been following since the summer. (Excuse the quality of the photos, they were taken on my phone. I blame Brexit). Indulge my flight of fancy, but I think they look like the British Isles. I am always seeing symbolism in nature. This is what the trees looked like in the early summer. Scotland was a big dodgy and the west and south east coasts of Ireland weren't quite right, but you can see what I mean, can't you? Fast forward to the late summer/early autumn. Wales has dropped off but Scotland, surprisi...

Living in Greece for the past couple of months, I've been asked what the refugee situation is like here. Well, to be perfectly honest, apart from scenes of chaos I see on television and long threads of polemic discussion on social media sites, I'm probably as well informed or as ill informed as the next person. Corfu, you see, is in the Ionian Sea, on the west coast of the mainland, a long way from the Aegean, the place to which many of the refugees make their way from their homeland via an already circuitous route. The only thing I have heard about here is the work of a Corfu doctor who is taking donated supplies such as fleece blankets, nappies, wipes and baby food to the Macedonian border to give to the refugees gathered there. This is an unprecedented situation as hundreds and thousands of people try to make their way to countries who want them and where they feel safe. It's complicated, things aren't black or white, good or bad. The solution probably lies...