Currently enjoying a few sun-blessed days in Arrecife, the capital of Lanzarote for the second year. Today Sally and I took a short stroll around the current exhibition in La Casa Amarilla, a small municipal gallery in the town. Last year it was an exhibition focussed on rituals around death and mourning which we visited on our last day here, preparing me for my return to porridge, though I have applied few of the more local rituals in the year since. Today I thought we were visiting an exhibition called "Gateways to Macronesia", assuming these were the lesser known (and indeed non-existent) big brothers of Micronesia in the Pacific, without knowing why such an exhibition would have wound up here... But no, I had missed out an "a" and "Gateways to Macaronesia" was actually an exhibition of old photographs of ports and airports across the Canaries, Cape Verde, Madeira and the Azores, with the name going back to the ancient Greek "Isles of
Like many others in Northern Ireland this past week I've been thinking about events of Good Friday 1998, last Wednesday, partly in the light of the other political bombshell delivered on Good Friday this year. Last year there were many opportunities for wistful looking back, self-congratulations and international talking-shops. But the lack of an assembly at that point demonstrated the frustrations of the previous quarter century. As I said this time last year, the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, was NOT a settlement, as as illustrated by its bifurcated name. Rather it was a way marker on a journey that too many have been reluctant to take further. At that point so many things remained unresolved/agreed/settled, not least policing, paramilitary weapons and activity, victims and "The past" - not to mention bread and butter issues such as education, health, housing and others, all of which are tainted by our divisions. Against that background O wrote this, and o