Skip to main content

Perspective

Like most morning I was listening to The Today Programme on Radio4 this morning. They had an interview with Chris Martin the lead singer of Coldplay about fair trade and the what is being done against poverty in the "Third World" in reaction to the possible lack of agreement at the end of the upcoming Hong Kong trade summit. Nothing unusual so far. Nothing unusual in most of what Mr Martin said either to be honest. He talked about how is experience of going to Africa and experience the people's poverty there brought all he had read and seen on the subject to reality. He also insisted that being pessimistic is never a good thing. He mentioned how unromantic fair trade was and that made it difficult for him to write songs about it. He had apparently tried but failed. My thoughts at this were that perhaps it took a better writer to do the job or certainly one a little self absorbed.

What was really strange about this interview, was the set of references used by Martin. Describing his experience in Africa, he mentioned his meeting a young farmer there and how this had brought home the difference in access to commodities, goods and education one gets so easily when one is a member of Coldplay. A few seconds later, insisting on people must always remain optimistic, he went on to declare that one might be pushed to number two in the charts by Crazy Frog, just like it happened to him and his band, but that it was important to always remain positive. Obviously the sort of experience everyone can relate to...

Strange.

Tags: , , , , , , .
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

For the Living Left Behind - Frieda Hughes

No one dead who loved you  Would wish your future years dismembered  Against the rocks of their departure.  They would not sentence you to the guilt of betrayal  For any moment they weren’t uppermost in your mind  Nor would they wish you whittled down like a stick  To pick the stony teeth in the open mouth of abject misery,  Daily, until you are nothing left.  No one dead who loved you  Would want your still-breathing carcass  To be lost in the wilderness  That spans the two worlds of the living and the dead,  Where you are neither dead nor living.  They would not applaud your misery,  But would weep to watch their loss  Made pointless by the waste of you.  The dead become a part of us; our skin, our bones, our thinking;  Their existence is continuous in us  And the best we do in everything  As we move on from the moment of their passing.  Step back from the graveside where nothing flower...
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome to Towleroad Readers

On Wednesday, Towleroad , the top gay blog, who win all the awards, were kind enough to link to and quote from my post on Football and Homophobia . This has generated quite a bit a traffic in this otherwise desolate region of the blogosphere. So much so that Wednesday was my highest day ever with 132 hits (previous one was 97), this week is already my highest ever with 317 hits so far (previous one was 287) and this month is the highest month ever with already 865 hits (previous one, last month, was 739, thanks to the posts on the Danish cartoons). So thank you again to Towleroad and welcome to their readers. I hope they like what they see and will be back from time to time.
Post a Comment
Read more