We live in a world of experts, there is nothing we cannot now know, isn't that the case? The internet has us switched into almost anything we would like to know. I mean I can know everything from the fact that Richard Thompson plays a Lowden guitar which I can't justify having on account of the cost, to the fact that Eleanor Marx Aveling, 16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898, also known as Jenny Julia Eleanor "Tussy" Marx, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl and might have been murdered. I was asked recently, with all this information to hand do we really need education? Well, I guess we only have to look at the way politicians cherry pick ideas to answer that. Surely the purpose is not to talk about things we can know but to really know about the things we talk about. And by that I mean to really know them, to be able to analyse ideas and thoughts and to encourage a view of the world in which the loonies don't get to run the asylum. Alas, I sometimes think they already are, and the problem is they don't actually know they are the loonies. But forgive me, last night I went to see Lion King in London. Good clean entertainment and it made me remember that while the good guys don't always get to rise to the top, when they do they still have a job to do (and sometimes they forget this). Getting to the Pride Lands is just the start, now he has to restore them. And I look now at Syria, Afghanistan, Thailand, Uganda... places of strife and ask, how is it still possible a woman and her unborn child can be stoned to death in broad daylight because her father had the hump with her choice of husband - it starts with one but we must keep pushing against the wheel - here's Richard Thompson and his Lowden - I need you at the dimming of the day:
