And it was

Photos from Ghin's two parties. I haven't been able to upload both videos. I'll keep trying, promise.









Far to busy at work for a first day at work. I spent only two hours in the morning with Ghin and an hour in the evening before packed him off to bed. We did have dinner at the dinner table though for the first time in ages and it was so beautiful. Tomorrow is Ghin's birthday and we're having a few friends round. It's all very hum drum right now. The car is going to be serviced today so that should be fascinating to see how much that will set us back. I'm missing the family in Singapore a bit. I think it's the talk of holidays that's making me a bit sad. The possibility that we won't be going down - we'll stay in Donegal instead, and that should be wonderful too. But i will miss the people, the culture. And when i say culture, i mean just the sheer diversity of people on the streets. I don't really miss the food. It's weird huh?

The seige of Gaza continues. It reminds me of anything that begins with "The Sack of..." What are the Israelis hoping to acheive? It looks pretty much like a reoccupation. Or perhaps they're hoping to teach Hammas a lessons. Maybe they're behaving like any other colonial power, fed up with the constant annoyances from a determined but weak territory and have decided to do something about it. The something however includes women, children and men who are not involved in the fighting. It is not a something we should ever have to resort to in this time. It is a something which was done in darker days. When men and women lived closer to blood. When children were made slaves. When life was shorter, more brutish. Maybe in Gaza, that it what it is like.

On a hill overlooking the war, a group of rednecked Sedorats watch the carnage with binoculars as if they were at Nascar or in some sort of amphitheatre. It's about time this happened, some of them say. Of all the images of war this one is probably the most nauseating. It is humanity at its filthiest. It is almost pornographic. Death served up as gratification. The most piteous, the children. A girl, no older than Oisin, both her legs crushed lies on a hospital bed. Her face is immobile, her eyes wide open. She has been stunned into pain, she registered nothing. She is bleeding through her bandages, it is impossible to know if she will live. This is what those men above watch. The death of this child and so many like her. In their bunkers the Hamas talk about fighting. About killing Israelis like rats. You will die here. Palestine is your graveyard. This is delusion speaking. The only people who are behaving like rats are them. Hiding behind the bodies of their people.

The only people who will create graveyards are them. They have created human sheilds out of the soft flesh of their own people. They are the animals, they may be worse than animals. Not even animals would do their to their own. This is where pride and anger and vengeance have led us. The bomb is an inanimate object. It is people who use them. No one uses a bomb with love. There is no love here. There is no life.

And so the weeks fly by, the years. And perhaps, after many decades, there will be no one left in Gaza, just rubble and the rusted latticework of shells which have corroded in the salty desert air. The rest of the world goes on, some of us happy, others sad, others resigned. No one will remember those faces, the children who died, the women wailing in their long black robes, beyond the edges of grief. The soldiers, scarred within by the blood they shed, the broken lives they will live, the wives they will beat, the children they will look at with silent fear for the fear of the lives they took too. All those lives lost, all those people killed. All the pain that has scarred us. The accusation in the child's sad eyes, our dereliction of duty. Has it come to this? And we will wonder what was it for? What was anything for? That horrid lie which Wilfred Owen recalled only 25 when he himself died in battle, Dulce decorum est pro patria mori.