It's just after four o'clock in the morning. Awakened from some dreams as fractured as my whole life has been, I stumbled into the kitchen to start on my porridge: four spoonful of oats, a spoonful of honey, and a handful of raisins, covered in milk, and cooked on a low temperature for some ten minutes which is just about as long as it takes me to get ready for the new day.
It's a new day with more of the same: rain. It's been raining for weeks now, and more record-breaking downpours are forecast for next week. A good time to stay home, although we had a nice birthday lunch for a friend across the river at our favourite Thai restaurant yesterday, and today is Nelligen Market which Padma will visit. I prefer to stay home with enough books to read to outlast the rain for weeks to come.
And then there's all the news to absorb, shocking as it is, and ignorant as some people are of how close we are to the unthinkable. It's easy to quip that the second-strongest army in the world is now the second-strongest army in Ukraine, and that Moscow appears to have become by far the largest supplier of heavy weapons for Ukraine, but have we already forgotten the Cuban missile crisis? I was only seven years old during that month-long confrontation in October 1962 between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it's still seared into my memory.
I can hear the porridge bubbling away on the stove, so first things first.
