Archive for April, 2016

27 Years

Under a Grey Sky

Memorial

On the 15th April 1989 I was nine, and I can remember playing a game with my younger brother Sean. We were in the bedroom of our house in Burscough, messing around on the bunk beds. At some point we wandered downstairs, to get a drink or a ‘Toronto Snack’ – a fruit salad like the ones I used to get at nursery in Canada when Dad was teaching there for a year and Sean was just a baby. In my memory we came into the living room to find him watching the television.

“Something’s happened at the match,” is what I remember him saying. I remember the green of the pitch and the blue of the sky and the people milling around on the grass. People running as they carried others on makeshift stretchers. A line of police. As the afternoon progressed we learned of the deaths. 10, 20…

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We walk together? Europe’s failure on refugees echoes the moral collapse of the 1930s

That's How The Light Gets In

Europe is facing a wave of migration unmatched since the end of World War II – and no one has reported on this crisis in more depth or breadth than the Guardian’s migration correspondent, Patrick Kingsley. In today’s Guardian, Kingsley offers an impassioned overview of Europe’s collective response to the refugee crisis. This is how he begins:

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The Anniversary Waltz

The best thing I’ve read about football in a long time. For those who share my despairing love for Forest, or for other football clubs with similar histories, you’ll understand. For those who don’t get it, read this, and try. Forest ’til I die.

THE LOVING FEELING

No one knows why he chose Nottingham.

Arthur ‘Artie’ Scattergood had it all.  His parents – my great, great grandparents – were textile merchants.  They lived in a big house, on a grand Georgian square, in one of the nicest part of London.

And one day, it’d all be his.  The house, and the factory, and the money.  The life.

But Artie didn’t want it.

Why, we never knew.  When he rocked up at Bestwood Village in 1920, he had no friends, no prospects, and no reason for being there.  Maybe he’d taken the first train out of St. Pancras; maybe he just closed his eyes, and pointed at a map.

Whatever the plan was, Artie worked hard.  He made himself a life—a life of his own, for the first time.  He got a job at Bestwood Colliery.  He found himself a woman, and a home.  And soon…

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