photo @Jim_Cornelius
Packing day. Only four possibilities: take with us, give away, store here for next year, or throw out. Lots of microdecisions, though. Today is a holiday. Not quite independence day but the day when the guerilla movement known as EOKA began, a guerilla movement designed to gain freedom from being a British colony, a conflict not entirely creditable on either side. Mixed up with a history of Enosis, the movement for political union with Greece. The chief problem being not the interest in union with Greece - a desire not particularly shared by the Greeks - but the wish to eradicate the Turkish presence on the island at the same time.
Watch the evening debates in the UK parliament on the second of the days when parliament rather than the executive control the agenda and come close to but not quite to agreement on some aspects of Brexit. Have lived my entire life in a country with a Westminster style parliament and paid reasonably close attention to what was happening. Even took a Canadian Politics course in university. Admittedly a little over half a century ago now 😏 but the system hasn’t changed much. However this open conflict between parliament and government (the executive, i.e. prime minister and cabinet) is totally new to me, as is the hostility with which the prime minister responds to parliament, and the unequal power, with parliament at the mercy of (even a minority) government. A little comic relief though, as several demonstrators, women as well as men, clad only in political fig leaves, stand in the gallery with backsides to the MPs on the floor below, protesting lack of concern for environmental threats to the survival of the planet. Once sat next to a young man who was evicted merely for reading a book. This lot a bit harder to shift, though, as some of them have glued their bums to the glass and removal of glue and demonstrators not simple.
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