Riots

I do not think that I understand Black Lives Matter protest marches, mostly because I can’t work out what it is they are asking the Government to do.

These pages are not about politics, because they should be able to be read by everybody, but today I saw a video of a policewoman being knocked off her horse in London that made me cry.

It was not the being knocked off. It was that the crowd yelled and jeered and threw things as she lay on the floor, and the other policemen had to protect her. This made me so terribly sad, because even though she was a policewoman she probably thought that black lives are important as well, particularly to the people who are living them.

Gloriously, the other policemen surrounded her to look after her, and one fought his way through the crowds to be next to her and keep her safe, which made me so very proud of them.

I found out later that she has got a punctured lung. It is a long time since I have seen anything so horrible.

My own policewoman was also in a fight today, with somebody who had taken a lot of drugs and was being a dangerous nutter. He was abusing a black person, and misfortunately had to be wrestled to the ground and sat on, but he was white, and didn’t die anyway, so probably he won’t be featuring in a protest afterwards.

It is all awful, for everybody involved. I am very glad that we live in Windermere, where even though nobody is allowed to go to the pub, so far there have not been any riots. There were some girls in the corner of the Library Gardens the other night, with Black Lives protest cards, when Mark took the dogs out. Mark said that he did not recognise any of them and did not think they were local, because they were sitting in the bit where everybody’s dog goes for a wee on the way in. If you are going to sit in the Library Gardens you do not sit there unless you are a tourist and do not know. He was going to go over and explain, but then they started packing up to go, so he thought they might be happier not knowing.

Since there were no riots to go to we just got on with the day as usual. Mark has been putting the sink into the new kitchen and I have done lots of bits of things that needed doing but I haven’t done so far. I painted some bits that had been left out when I was painting the other week, and sanded off the cupboard door which had come off the front of the kitchen dresser.

This was another inheritance, and used to belong to my grandmother. It is the sort of dresser that you see in films about people in their kitchens in wartime, and I was interested to discover today that once, long ago, it had been red and white. It has been varnished wood for the whole of my lifetime, but clearly once somebody, probably my grandfather, decided that they were so fed up of it being red and white that it was entirely worth the massive mess that would follow, and sanded all the paint off and varnished it.

He missed some bits, which is how I know.

The varnish has become ancient and flaky, and the wood underneath has darkened with age. It is nice to see it starting to look fresh and bright again.  The hinges and catches had begun to go rusty, and were caked with the sort of stuff that sticks to kitchens over fifty or sixty years. I scraped it all off and wondered if it had been me or my grandmother who had been responsible for such shocking neglect.

I will like it very much when it is done.

There is a picture of the kitchen sink, also the new-to-us-dishwasher, which was one of the assets that came with last year’s kitchen heist.

I like it because it is big but we are going to have to get some more stick-on gold for the front.