No seques please, we're British

So, a bunch of non-sequiturs today.
There was an episode of Bromwell High on yesterday that was so funny I was having difficulty breathing. Whoever writes that programme just knows British schools inside and out. Ben tells me it has started airing on Channel 4 in the UK, rock on.

Spoke to Austen yesterday and he told me about a news item that had angered ppl. Same old garbage we get here, but there's actually no excuse for it in Britain. The question about whether ppl should be referring to Christmas as such had been raised. Usually in GB it's enough to say, 'well you can fuck right off, we have an established church.' In this case, a letter was received from one of the Archbishes, and counter signed by one of the Imams, saying that since, at the last census, in a form where ppl had the option to put 'no religion', 71% put 'Christian' they figured it was pretty much OK to refer to Christmas by its name. No kidding. Made me realise that in school, the Eid party was pretty much the beginning of Christmas, although I think that may not have been the case this year, Ramadan seemed to be earlier than usual.

So, another complete non-sequitur. I have been trying for some time now to get my head round what is going on in Israel. The whole Palestinian-Israeli situation has been going on for so long it has almost become background noise, until the withdrawal from the Gaza strip and then, you know, it gets your attention. Something big is about to happen there, I just can't work out what, but my instinct tells me we don't want Ariel Sharon to be out of the picture.

Went to see Capote the other night at Tinseltown. Wow, what a film, or, in Irish, filum. So carefully drawn. So competently portrayed. Such depth, we are looking closely throughout the film at this man and his psychology, through his dialogue, his mannerisms, his reactions and through camera work. So good to be presented with an interesting story from the angle of a character who is far from one dimensional, and that's just one of the fascinating people in the film. Seemingly some of it was filmed in Manitoba.

Last night we went to see the Festival of lights at van Dusen. I am STILL spellbound by them. It is something to do with the unreality, the brain can't quite cope with it, all these lights making shapes, hanging in the darkness, reflecting in the water. There was one part that changed in time to several movements from the Nutcracker Suite.

This is a sequitur though. The whole concept of unreality, as I pondered it, reminded me of how I felt last year in Berlin. We visited the former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. The unreality thing kicked in as you go up a leafy, pretty little residential road towards the death camp. What must the residents of these typically German little houses with flowers and gardens have thought as the lines of people on their death march went past their front doors but no line ever came out ?
Inside was even more strange. There was a feeling of peace and serenity. I was not expecting that. Sachsenhausen was I think the first or one of the first two concentration camps and was sold to the German ppl as some kind of holding facility where people would be changed, persuaded of the right way of thinking. It was where a lot of the medical and scientific research was done, and there was a text and photograpic display of some of the horrors that were suffered there.
The art work throughout, screamed at you. This was art by the German ppl expressing their horror at what had been done to some Germans by others.
We went down into the charnel house. Bodies would have been piled here and there was a mortuary slab where autopsies were performed. The East Germans had blown up the gas chambers, we were not able to see those.
We went through cells where 'criminals' were held, communists, British soldiers, anti-Nazis. Another display recorded whole families who had been wiped out - gypsies, their eyes just staring from the photographs.
Sachsenhausen was an extermination camp not just for Jews and the genocide of the gypsies but also for Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political reactionaries. Now it stood silent, surrounded by trees. The German people refuse to allow themselves to forget that at that point in history, their nation was a blind creature, hacking and torturing its own flesh.