To the start of hope

After the bread round had a busy week with just one walk and absolutely no yoga - quite a pathetic effort really. However the paperwork is up to date – which seeing it is only January is nothing really to crow about but the bread is as good as ever, this weekend we have our first baking course of the year and today, I shall head out to advertise our new delivery service to some office blocks and see how we go.

The week always starts well with a day devoted to catching up and prepping all at the same time, a day without the really early morning and with lots of energy after the weekend. Then, the week picks up and by Friday afternoon, I often have done two 15 hours days on 4 hours of sleep and one more day to go. Last Friday, I came home at 4 pm, after a very long if very productive day,  and sat down to watch what everyone watched last Friday – the impossible inauguration, the one that we thought we never see. The inauguration,  where a man with no manners, no style and with a hugely overinflated sense of his own importance took high office. Every last little bit of hope that he had just played the masses to his own advantage and was not really that bad fled beyond hope with his speech - short, infantile and nasty as it was. On Friday evening I thought we were heading into disaster but over the weekend I read a lot, followed the women’s marches all over the world, the protest, the reaction and today, I see the daffodils emmerging for another year, and hope resurrects itself.

One piece written by Peter Leyden and widely shared on social media claims that rather than ending an era and dying a death, we are in throws of growing pains as one economic period replaces another, i.e. we are starting new things and for this the Donald Trump era is the one we need to activate and energise the change. In California ( where apparently everything happens years before everywhere else) the change happened, the republican got so bad( for Donald Trump read Arnold Schwarzenegger)  that people stood up and the ultra conservative era ended forever. The same he claims will now happen in America as a whole where the last conservative nasty stronghold of the republicans will die under this disastrous administration that in a very short time nobody will be able to support any longer.
I like hope, I like optimism and I like this sliver of a silver lining, which was also shown up again and again during the women’s march on Saturday. Gloria Steinem remains in my memory as she, among many other, insists on staying positive and believing in her fellow Americans. “Very often”, she said, “we elect a president and go home. This week, we elected a president and we are not going home. We are staying here and planning and we will succeed”. I do hope she is right and I am grateful for that little bit of optimism and hope. Today, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and there is definite signs of spring. I found a pot of daffodils in the garden which I had thrown out – planning no doubt to plant the bulbs somewhere. Time passed, I didn’t plant them and now they are flowering again. I will plant them today.