Category: Political Events
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Sixty Years of Protests
Recently my sister sent me pictures of her daughters at a Rally in Glasgow for the Climate Summit. It made me think of all the protests over the years, and the few I have actually attended. Like most people my age (84) the preoccupation for us as young people post war was the threat of…
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Summer Work in Edinburgh
By the second summer of my time at Edinburgh University I again found I did not want to spend it on the farm. Neither of my roommates wanted to leave the city either. So we decided to get a job and make some money to tide us over until school began again. Because we were…
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Teaching English in Cuba
When I finished the course in English as a Second Language in 2003, I looked around for somewhere to put my new found skill into practice. Previous to Algonquin College I had considered a much shorter course offered by T.E.S.OL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) This was a crash course in teaching abroad…
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The Development of White Privilege
I seem to have missed out on the discussion of white privilege over the last nearly twenty years. I have always been aware of racial discrimination and followed the black power movement and the fight against apartheid. However, I really saw these issues as completely out of my area of influence. I believed they had…
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The Suez Crisis of 1956
The Suez Crisis was one of the first real political crises that I understood. At my age, now over eighty, I have lived through many times of political instability. At the end of the war it seemed like the beginning of a new era to my parents. On the farm, we built a large pile…
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Not cut out to be a Beatnik
Our days at Edinburgh University in the 1950’s were a mixture of conformity to a pre-war ethic and the beginnings of the radical ethos of the1960s. As nice young women we wore the New Look and behaved demurely. We also wanted to break out of something we could barely articulate. We would perhaps have described…
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Living in Interesting Times!
It seems there is no recourse these days from the remorseless tumble of events. One catastrophe follows another, all over the world. We feel it has never been as bad as now, but we are probably wrong. Now in my eightieth decade, I have seen my share of world politics and have periodically felt that…