Just a quick update tonight: am a bit shattered after a night on a friend's sofa (working in London till Friday, so two more of those to come) and an early false start on the Metropolitan line that took me way out of my way and made me late and flustered.
Today has seen two more fab prizes given for the raffle - a hamper of Fairtrade Divine chocolate from my very kind employer of ten years ago, and a weekend stay at possibly the most luxurious self-catering property I've ever seen, Rock Mill Estate in Membury Devon. So to Charlotte Borger, PR director for Divine and Jane, who owns Rock Mill Estate, a massive thank you. I must also say a heartfelt thank you to Lex Thornely (tweets under @LexPRnMarketing), PR supremo who has been so helpful in easing the way for me to ask his very generous clients for prizes.
I've been following today's extraordinary events in Damascus on Twitter, and from the reports of microbloggers on the ground and mainstream news organisations' reporting, there seems little doubt that a lot of people have been killed and terribly injured today. It always feels so odd to me to be sitting safely on one bit of the planet while some lives are changed utterly and others destroyed on another bit. It reminds me of a poem a foreign correspondent introduced me to when I mused on the same theme to him some years ago. Here it is - it's worth reading:
Musee des Beaux Arts, by WH Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on
So, we're up to £254 today. The money goes directly to Hand in Hand for Syria, who I think I'll be meeting up with for the first time in the next few weeks to find out more about how they work on the ground and how they get medical supplies into the areas under attack.
Please, please keep reading, keep retweeting my tweets and sharing the JustGiving details on your Facebook pages . Here's the link to the JustGiving page if you'd like to give some money and enter the raffle (make sure NOT to Gift Aid the money if you want to enter, and to put 'yes' to the question about whether your donation is in exchange for a raffle ticket). Right, that definitely is it for tonight. Cup of tea. Then glass of wine. Then sofa.
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