Such a lot of things to write about:

• my mother, again, now it's six months since she died and I'm troubled by the bland version of her life I produced, but didnt read out, for her memorial service. How to reconcile demands of love and honesty? Not that I have any problem loving her, but with other people who might be hurt by what I say. Love, to be worth anything, must embrace the worst as well as the best of us; and honesty requires that we dont skip or blur the bad bits. It might be interesting to take the rather formal eulogy as a framework, and cut into it with the things I didnt say...
• Then there's Richard and his Spirit Level, my pride and jealousy, and the questions his book raises: if unequal wealth and incomes cause so many problems, what causes unequal wealth and incomes? To get things more equal we must get at the dynamics and structures that have widened the gap in countries such as ours. Will Hutton hinted at that when he suggested that our present government might find it difficult to redistribute when the most needy are also the most despised (though that bit of his Observer piece was left out when the Guardian Weekly reprinted it). Why do we, more than some other peoples perhaps, want to kick the people below us, not lift them up?
• An annual newsletter for the Troserch Woodlands Society - since I'm a director of the not-for-profit company that manages the woods, and such a lot's been happening with felling, fencing and replanting. Pity most of the material I need are locked up in the computer the police took away.
• Two songs: Janis Joplin's Freedom's just another word for nothing else to lose, and Nina Simone's I wish I knew how it would feel to be free: what's this freedom thing, and how does it relate to love, equality etc?