A Gardener’s Gospel - Week 20
I learnt gardening from my dad. When I was three we moved into a newly built house, or, as they say in these days of poor grammar, a ‘new-build’. Like most new-builds, the patch of ground attached to the house was more a builder’s dump than a garden, with broken bricks, cement powder and general rubble thinly covered by a layer of poor quality top-soil. Undeterred, or at least that’s how it appeared to my three-year-old mind, my dad set about turning the wasteland into a place where flowers could grow.
Welcome to my site - I'm Fiona Veitch Smith, a freelance journalist, author, playwright and writing teacher. This site contains thoughts and articles I've written on a range of topics. I hope you find them useful.
Tainted Gold - Olympic scandals and triumphs
As I write this, the Olympic Flame has just been lit opening the 29th Modern Olympic Games. The first Olympic flame was lit at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928 and the Torch Relay was added to the ceremony in Berlin, 1936, at ‘Hitler’s Olympics’. It was not in the original vision of the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, in 1896, but he welcomed it as a powerful religious and artistic symbol that could be used to educate people in the ideals of the Olympic movement.
Image courtesy of Rick Sforza
These ideals, according to the Olympic Charter, are to
Nothing wrong with that, you would agree, but as the pro-Tibet demonstrators would have us remember, there is a huge gap between that ideal and the practise of the host nation in its occupied territory.
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