I didn’t watch it last night as I was always busy but I found the Queen’s speech inspiring, especially when she mentions the speech she delivered as a young girl : “It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister. We, as children, spoke from here at Windsor to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety. Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones. But now, as then, we know, deep down, that it is the right thing to do.”The Telegraph
I found this all the more touching that first of all if you read that message she was “the child of that day” yet the world of her “tomorrow” is in a profound depression after two generations. It is also incredible that this lady has known a time when broadcasting meant using the radio out that she is still delivering meaningful speeches at important times. I remember when I was in the Channel islands, how children were literally evacuated  from their homes to be safely protected from war casualties. It meant that they were not only confined for a couple of weeks, say a month, but for several months if not years. I remember this because the Jerseyans and Guernésiais actually blame this evacuation for their loss of their french language which was still prevailing till the war started.
See also my Channel Wanderings.
Apart from that, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been the admitted in hospital which is certainly not a good sign and we are seeing outbreaks Ecuador out it’s like recession in Spain.
Arundhati Roy wrote a very powerful paper in the FT which been translated in Le Monde and gives the full measure to the extent of the drama in populist and individualistic times,
Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science? (…)The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?.(…)Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America”
COSMO POLITIQUE 