Sharon Feinstein

Having just come back from the most idyllic holiday in Crete, suffused with a sense of peace and serenity, it’s a total contrast to confront the absolute mayhem in the UK Capital, and extremely frightening. Police have warned that my square is within a target area tonight, and all across London buildings are on fire, cars torched, businesses ransacked and homes smashed to smithereens. Londoners are walking around in shock and incredulity unable to fathom what is happening around us. It’s just engulfed us so suddenly and violently it beggars belief. My family live in Johannesburg and I’m always telling them how they need to leave crime city, but now I really can’t talk from any different standpoint. London is lawless and who knows whether the 16,000 police ordered onto the streets will be able to stem this tidal wave. And how are we going to pay the £100 million bill of the estimated destruction so far when no one has any money and taxes are at record highs. No chance of a pint of milk tonight with shops boarded up and things changing hour to hour. A kind of war going on here, and an economic war raging and zinging round the world at the same time. How to see the glass half full at this stage is eluding me, for the moment.

I have done this interview with someone I actually grew up with in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. She has been struck down with early Alzheimer’s disease and is facing her fate with extraordinary courage and good humour, not flinching from the slow horrors that unfold in her life, and never losing her smile and indeed her sensitivity to others. I was so impressed and in awe of Nadia’s positive approach and how attentive she was towards me, curious and interested in my life, in the midst of everything she is going through. She is indeed an example of someone who sees her cup half full, and I found her an absolute inspiration.

Read more: Sorry Mr Pratchett, but with Alzheimer’s there’s no point in being angry

Is it just me or is anyone else worried that we haven’t seen any evidence of Bin Laden’s death. I don’t want to rain on the parade and maybe I am just a compulsive worrier, but we had evidence of Saddam being pulled out of his hole in Iraq and I just need something visual to show me that the most evil man on the planet is no longer of the flesh. Dropping his body into the sea means we can never know this for sure. Did they take a photograph? I know there are DNA samples but do we believe this, I want some concrete and visual proof. Assuming all is well, and the rest of the world seems to be at peace with this (apart from me) it is a massive turning point for us all. A hugely emotional day but mostly for those who have lost someone to the vicious terrorism of Al Qaeda. To them the day will bring bitterness and sadness as well as joy and relief. Well done to President Obama and God Bless the U S of A, and all the military and intelligence that has gone into this huge feat. Gone is the financier of terrorism, the terrible Satanic visionary of death, the master planner of destruction. Yes Al Qaeda lives on in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and one has to note how saddened and condemnatory Hamas has been today. But the heinous movement has been stripped of its Head. Let’s hope the Hydra serpent doesn’t grow more heads and that if it does the West manages to torch them off and bury them under a rock forever, as with the mythical Hydra. Following on from the legend, it’s interesting that Hydra lived in the Lernean marshes, near Argolis, and Bin Laden lived just 60 miles from Islamabad, Capital of Pakistan. Does that mean the Pakistani authorities were complicit in his survival and life there ? Surely yes! How can he have kept his compound such a closely guarded secret just a two hour drive from the Capital and streets away from Pakistan’s Sandhurst, a military academy complex that has been the training ground for the country’s officer corps for 60 years.
“Osama – who cares? He’s just a creation of America,” said a mechanic, from under a broken vehicle in Abbottabad, this quiet military town in the Himalayan foothills, which seems to have housed Osama Bin Laden for many years. “We don’t care about him. Petrol prices are rising, food is more expensive, and our leaders are corrupt. That’s all we care about.”
Well you know what mate, the rest of us do care about this a whole lot, we in London who lived through 7/7, those in New York who lived through 9/11, and the countless others in places around the world where Bin Laden unleashed his atrocities. Most recently Marrakech, where two friends of mine have just celebrated their honeymoon and were in the Square when the bomb went off last week, mercifully shielded by some stalls and thank God unhurt. Yes many, many others around the world most certainly DO CARE that, hopefully, Bin Laden is finally dead.

I haven’t been onto my own blog site for a long time, which is a serious desertion of duty, and I must apologise to all followers.
And as regards the Royal Wedding you’re under an avalanche of stuff about it already, so I won’t add my own opinions or comments.
Just to say that I’ve interviewed Camilla Parker Bowles’ lovely hair colourist, Jo Hansford, a vibrant, enterprising, passionate and extremely talented woman.
She had some very amusing comments to make about her client of 20 years, the rather jolly and intriguing Camilla Parker Bowles.
Camilla had just left the salon on the morning I did my interview with Jo, her last touch up with honey coloured low lights in time for the appearance at Westminster Abbey in front of, effectively, 2 billion people.

Jo, who was awarded the MBE for her services, at a very moving ceremony with Princess Anne, told how Camilla’s chief emotion is anxiety and concern in relation to this wedding.
But Why? How can that be? Are the couple not well-matched? Is there something we don’t know.
Well actually that’s the wrong track.
It’s all to do with a little 3-year-old who will be walking down the aisle, a very long way, with the Royal entourage. Prince William’s god-daughter-little Eliza Lopes- is the three-year old granddaughter of Camilla Parker Bowles—William’s stepmother, and Camilla is apparently very worried about her.
Jo said—-I think Camilla’s quite worried about what her granddaughter’s going to do, they’re going to look cute, as long as they walk, they’ll be taken away once the ceremony gets going. They’ll be given a box of sweeties to shut them up. As long as they make it up, its a hell of a long walk. Imagine all those people. I don’t know Kate so I wasn’t invited, but I went to Camilla’s and Charles’ wedding.”
Ah!! All 2 billion eyes will be on those little faces and what will inevitably be their gorgeous, sweet frocks. But will the little ones make it up? That’s one of the many exciting moments to come!!!

The sight of a person suffering terrible grief is an agonising thing. And most heart wrenching of all is when it is a parent mourning the loss of his or her child. In this case it’s the sight of hundreds of Emperor Penguins lying prostrate on the icy tundra of the Antarctic, a picture of terrible, pathetic misery as they mourn the untimely deaths of their chicks.
A brave photographer has captured the image of these majestic and highly emotional creatures in their tragic act of mass mourning on the Riiser Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica. They are all hunched over, shiny black bodies on the frozen white ice in a state of abject grief and bewilderment, some just wandering around the bleak landscape desperately trying to locate their chicks, trying to ward off the inevitable.The photographer felt it was difficult to say how and why the chicks had died, but that he’d been told by scientists that it was not unheard of. Weather, starvation, can cause this kind of pitiful, calamitous event. Looking at the terrible scene of a future generation of penguins wiped out and the total shock and horror of their parents, I was reminded of those lines which I once read and have never forgotten ——When a parent dies, you lose your past. When a child dies, you lose your future

He may have blown himself up in Stockholm, but he was radicalised in Britain, and the roll call goes on. This time it was Iraqi-born Al-Abdaly who moved here from Sweden nine years ago to study in one of our universities, which I’m not sure he ever even enrolled in, unless it was in the dark arts of how to blow up people and destroy families’ lives. There was the shoe bomber Richard Reid, the man with the exploding underpants, and the perpetrators of the horrific 7/7. Young British men who have been exposed to the rantings of extremist preachers, most likely in Luton, Finsbury Park or on the internet. I understand that the Secret Services are weighed down monitoring the chatter from the Islamist threat, and that we’re spending millions every year in our efforts to track the jihad, but why aren’t we more alert to the very obvious, open threats germinating in our midst. The police know exactly who the Mad Mullahs are, the mosques know who their extremists are, and communities know when one of their men exhibits worrying extremist tendencies and disappears to a terrorist training camp in Yemen. In the case of Al-Abdaly, an iman from Luton revealed that he tried to convince him that Islam was a peace-loving religion, to no avail, but never thought to bring his disciple’s extremism to the attention of the police. We have to assume that madmen like him are proliferating around Britain and must be rooted out before they head off to Yemen and come back with bombs in their shoes, underpants or rucksacks. The Inquest into 7/7 really brought home to the nation just how vile and horrific the jihad in our midst actually is. The authorities cannot do this alone, it must be down to people power, mosques, communities and vigilant neighbours to protect each other, our children, tubes, planes. We must stop more and more of these maniacs from slipping through the nets.

Sitting opposite the inscrutable man in the military cap and mirrored glasses in the small, stifling room at Burma’s border post with Thailand, my heart was racing. Even more so when I handed over my passport and began the long walk across the bridge into the Union of Myanmar. It’s not a comfortable feeling being anywhere without a passport let alone in a military dictatorship where foreign journalists are banned and dissenters met with instant arrest. My darker side was imagining a catalogue of horrors,being scooped up by the security police and disappearing into a black hole, no passport, no identity, no records, no one to find me. But we walked on, past small children in rags with cupped hands begging and mumbling to us, an emaciated man shuffling along with bare chest and bony legs, young girls pleading with us to buy their woven bangles, rusty old cars banging over the pot holes, mopeds loaded up with passengers weaving along, and people eeking out a meal with a few vegetables and pan fried rice cakes. Just across the Mekong from the lush, mist laden Golden Triangle, are the horrors of Burma where Aung San Suu Kyi is really a lone, but very fragile hope. Aids is rife and it’s notable that one of her first ports of call has been an Aids clinic on the outskirts of Rangoon. Sadly, predictably, straight after her visit the authorities told the Director of the clinic that everyone must leave. Where do you start in this vicious land ? It was exhilarating to be there and see it from inside, albeit so fleeting and so surface. But even more exhilarating to have got out, retrieved our passports and be safely back in Thailand after the one day visit. The all pervasive security police watch the monks, the students, the politicos and of course every step Ms Suu Kyi takes as did the SS in Nazi Germany. Ms Suu Kyi will try desperately to lift the spirits of the people where and when she can but beyond that I fear there’s nowhere to go in Burma. Unlike us, collecting our passports and heaving sighs of relief, 47 million Burmese don’t have that luxury. The world must continue to protest and put more pressure on China to break their alliance with the illegal ruling junta. China could make a big difference indeed.

For someone who has lived in the Highlands of Scotland, the sight of the slow, dignified, mourning party moving across the wild windswept landscape with the coffin of Linda Norgrove, evokes a thousand memories. The bleak, bold beauty of the Scottish Hebrides, with the low lying mists draped across the mountains, is an all pervading image. I found the people, the Highlanders, to have immense dignity, grit, and endurance, the quiet fortitude which can bear the blizzards and the death of one of their own in a tortured silence. Their wailing comes out in the wonderful Celtic song and poetry, when those the whisky driven nights explode with sudden unexpressed emotion, a bit like the the wild extremes of weather and landscape they live in from generation to generation.

They carried the coffin along a single track road passing the frame on which the box rested along the line of mourners in the Highland custom known as The Lift. This was a young woman who grew up in a village of 30 people, and went to help others on the opposite side of the world, returned to her own people, in death. They trudged in silence, a long way from the blinding white explosion that tore Linda Norgrove apart. At her funeral they said she brought Hope to the Hopeless. Were that there were more people like the dedicated Dr Norgrove in this hopeless world, and may her spirit live on, her compassion, empathy and devotion to the human race be an example to anyone who cares to stop and think about why they are here and what they can do to make a difference.

The Chilean miners are free, but Gilad Shalit still languishes in a dark place where no one has had access to him for four years. The Israeli soldier must be going through an unimaginable hell as the years tick by, his youth evaporates and his fear is a daily phenomenon. The Israeli Prime Minister must make this more of a priority. Shalit is a symbol of the push pull between Israel and Gaza and in the end Israel has to get her son home. There is a massive obligation to this soldier and his family and time must mean something entirely different to Gilad, than it means to the rest of us who wake up with choices. Human beings need to be psychologically and emotionally in touch with each other, our families, friends, society at large. It is crippling and killing to be in isolation and must test the deepest parts of oneself. None of us who are free can ever imagine what it must be like to be cut off from everything, in the hands of an enemy, and without any contact from the outside world. I think of Gilad a lot, not just for him as Gilad, but for the situation, for the many people suffering such a hideous fate.We must put huge pressure on the Governments and the influential powers that be, to help free this young, frightened, isolated man. Even the Chilean miners, in their subterranean hell, had each other and formed themselves into a society, and had the help of a nation and the sympathetic world. Gilad is all alone, inside his cell who knows where, and with so few voices crying or screaming out for him throughout the world. We must scream louder so someone will hear. God knows he must have cried and screamed enough times, with no one to listen.

One by one they came back to life, out of their subterranean blackness into the light, 33 men who hung on buried under the rocks and kept each other together against the odds. It’s a story of immense courage and endurance. ” I was with God and with the devil. I fought between the two. I seized the hand of God, ” said one of the 33, Mario Sepulveda, the second man to be rescued. Such a tale has the power to make one weep, rejoice and believe in the goodness of humanity in spite of the rapes, massacres and killings we have come to digest on a daily basis across the planet. Such tales come back to remind us that men can cling to life and make it count and value it above all else, even when on the other hand they dispose of it with such hideous disdain. It makes one ask, What would you have been like underground for 69 days. Would you have given up in despair, gone mad, become aggressive, desperate, suicidal, unbearably claustrophobic ? These men pulled together and created a society with different roles and meaning. That was important. They lived down there in the underworld, the place that claims the souls of the departed, and knew they needed to keep to a routine and give their days meaning. For 17 days they survived on spoons of tuna and sips of milk. They lost an average of 22 pounds each. Every day was black as night and must have felt like an eternity. Now they are free but forever trapped inside the memories. Who knows how the offers of money for films, books, stories will affect their next 69 days. But they have come back to the world and it is a miracle. ” We are all Chilean rescuers and family now, : said Diego Maradona on Twitter from Argentina. ” Miracles do exist. ”