It’s been a while but the real world took over for a bit. Exams and friends then recently applying to uni etc. I managed to get an interview for Cambridge though which is fabulous but utterly terrifying at the same time. Anyway I’m hoping to get back to the blogging- whether anybody out there reads my ramblings or not- as a friend recently got a tumblr and she’s reopened the appeal of this whole thing to me. My friend is danceindark, you guys should add her as she’s infintely more interesting than myself. Anyway I ought to be doing my language coursework so I’m going to make a start on that since it’s due tomorrow. So till sometime in the not too distant future, goodnight.

As a planet, united in our situation, we are navigating our way through the worst economic storm since the Great Depression. It seems to me that we can learn a lot from history and while revisiting the difficulties of the 1930’s may seem depressing in itself it is my belief that not only can it act as a warning of just how extreme our predicament could get, particularly to those who seem to lack the understanding of its seriousness, but that it can also teach us how to survive. There are two stories from two continents that spring to my mind when considering that tragic financial decade; the first is that of the ruined financiers who jumped to their deaths in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, the second that of the Jarrow March. When the devastating crunch of the depression came in 1929 many financiers found themselves in absolute financial obliteration, their livelihoods gone, and out of either pride or desperation many threw themselves from the buildings in which they stood. Their deaths seem now a faint thud in a ghostly New York street yet they are not so distant in this time of uncertainty- how long till man reaches such ills again? Seven years later, their livelihoods too struck by the Great Depression, a group of around 200 workers from Jarrow (a working class, mining and shipbuilding town of North East England) marched some 300 miles from their homes to the Palace of Westminster to lobby Parliament. Their motivation? Unemployment and extreme poverty that had hit the North East particularly hard. The Prime Minister refused to see any of the Marchers representatives on their arrival and nothing was done to help them despite their having walked for nearly a month carrying a petition with 11,000 signatures. Indeed, all they received for their efforts was £1 each to catch the train home from London back to Jarrow. The defining point between these two stories is that one tells a tale of hopelessness the other of enduring hope. Thus we must learn that although history may remember more the men who gave their lives in true, glorious Roman style it is those who marched and fought and hoped that lived not in memory but in flesh. To hope is to survive and to survive is to live. It may seem that the Jarrow Marchers got little for their efforts but they went home knowing they had tried: men with nothing more than the clothes on their backs commanded, for a short while, the attention of the leader of their Country, the Empire even, he may not have deigned to see them but he knew they were there. An undeniable force. If we live in hope, if we exercise our hopes, then we have a far better chance of survival than if we bend to the whims of numbers, facts, figures. Hope and the strength it gives is all we need to survive.

Photographs have the ability to reflect and mimic life. Almost everyone can take a photograph and present us with a realistic and relatively good reflection. Only the true masters of photography can turn that reflection into art and reflect beauty that perhaps we would not have seen. Annie Leibovitz is one of those masters- in fact her 2009 Hollywood Portfolio inspired me to create this post; I genuinely could look at one of her photographs for hours. My favourites from that collection are posted below but here’s the link for the complete 2009 Hollywood Portfolio, if genius was ever witnessed it was here.