Hello internet, did you miss me?
Malta was lovely – hot, sunny, pretty, and full of Kinnie. (If you’ve never had Kinnie, you have missed out on an experience. My sister-in-law would say it’s a bad experience, and you should miss it, but she’s clearly wrong. Kinnie grows on you, the more you drink it. It tastes sort of like a non-alcoholic Aperol spritz, if that helps.)
And since the 1st November, I’ve been busy writing, as part of NaNoWriMo – it’s something I try out most years, and rarely complete, but a lot of the fun is in taking part. And, even if I don’t get anywhere near 50,000 words (I did once, the first year I tried NaNo, but never since), I still have several thousand more words than I would have done if I hadn’t taken part in NaNo, and I’ve had fun making up people and events and reactions. It’s creation for the sake of it, and I think the world would be better if there was more of that.
(In case you’re wondering, I’m up to 13,500 words so far. And I’m planning to go and write more when I finish this post. My story this year is about smallpox being released as a biological attack on the UK, France, Germany and the US. I’ve learnt rather more than I want to about smallpox already.)
On a more real note, today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK (ahead of Armistice Day on 11 November), when the war dead are remembered in cities and villages across the country, and there’s a wreath-laying ceremony in London, where the Royal Family and other dignitaries lay wreathes and pay their respects to the war dead. It’s a little too militaristic for me, but we shouldn’t forget those who died doing their jobs, especially those who weren’t given a choice about taking part – it would be especially helpful if we could keep our war dead at the forefront of our minds when deciding whether to start another war, but that rarely seems to be a consideration, sadly. To mark the centenary of the start of World War I, there’s an art exhibit of poppies at the Tower of London – I called in there on the way back from Malta to Brussels. It’s an amazing sea of ceramic poppies, one for each British soldier that died in World War I – 888,246 of them.
Today also marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s amazing to think that it was just 25 years ago – so much has changed today across Europe since then. And yet, there are still echoes of that unhappy time in international relations today – poor Ukraine is suffering as a result, and US-Russia relations didn’t look so positive either, last I heard about them. We can only hope that cooler heads see sense and that we don’t fall back into those dark days of a fractured, conflict-ridden continent – only this time, we would have the added joy of cyber-warfare on top of everything else. The new scope for propaganda alone is mind boggling; Kitchener would have had a field day, if he’d been able to access the internet!
It still scares me, sometimes, thinking about the amount of power we give our leaders, and all we can do is trust that they make a good job of it. I wonder if they realise it too, and if the thought of all that responsibility keeps them awake at night. I hope so – the consequences of their actions have real effects on all of us, after all, whether we agreed with them or not.
Anyway, setting doom and gloom aside for a moment, I’m going to share some photos of sunshine and prettiness in Malta.
ExpatinBrussels 
such beautiful photographs!