Incongruities

The contrast couldn't have been more stark. In the late afternoon yesterday I was watching a very disturbing item on Sky News about a poor little lad allowed to starve to death by his mother, his body lying in a cot unburied. And this following another dreadful story about a mother killing her two-year-old son through repeated violent abuse. It seems one of the jurors in her trial for murder had to be excused having broken down when the evidence of his injuries was given.

And then I spent part of the evening watching a show, a musical, about a little girl suffering from cancer and surviving. The little girl in question, who appeared in the final scenes, is the daughter of one of my colleagues and it was his wife (oddly I taught her as a teenager!) who had produced Brave Maeve as an exercise in fund-raising and raising awareness of children stricken with cancer - and, I suppose, celebrating a lovely story of love and survival. Some of the early scenes when Maeve is first taken ill were pretty harrowing, making no attempt to sugar-coat the traumas involved. I liked that. And really the show didn't sugar-coat anything. The love shown for the child by the community around her, and the sheer effort put in by all involved in the musical itself to make something even more positive out of all this, were straightforwardly real - and a reminder of ultimate realities.

I still can't quite put my day together. Glimpses of hell and heaven. I suppose this is something of what Blake felt composing his songs of innocence and experience.