Minette Marrin

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ReflexionesSocial

Maria Carmen del Bousada de Lara was a poor spinster of 66 who desperately wanted a baby. As a retired shop assistant she had little money, so she sold her house in Cadiz to buy some IVF treatment and donor eggs and sperm in California.

Without telling her family, she flew to the Pacific Fertility Centre in Los Angeles, and before long her wish came true. She gave birth to twin baby boys, who are now two years old, and was photographed with them in a youthful leopard-print outfit. People said she was too old but she didn’t care. She said she thought she’d live to be 101.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

The idea that we can plan our lives is fairly new and very western. For thousands of years people assumed that their destinies were not in their own hands, but in the unpredictable grasp of gods or demons or chance or family history or destiny. Man proposes but God (or something ineffable) disposes – that was how everybody thought.

Now, however, we in the rich world imagine we can choose our fates; we can eliminate diseases, double our harvests, split the atom, uncover the mysteries of the moon and even hold back time.

This feeling of being in control began slowly, not much more than 300 years ago in the West with the scientific revolution, but in the 20th century it suddenly burst forth as a new religious belief.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

Cuba - what a word to conjure with. And what nonsense people have used it to conjure up for half a century now. Those who are determined to see Cuba through the rosy tints of revolutionary spectacles have for decades claimed the country as proof that socialism can work; a Cuban David was able to stand up to the western Goliaths of colonialism and corruption, and Castro’s revolution 50 years ago last week brought peace and plenty - or, if not exactly plenty (given the wicked US blockade), then something better in the shape of brotherly and sisterly content and hospitals far better than those of the National Health Service.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesTestimonios

Harold Pinter was the greatest English playwright of the 20th century. That is as near to a fact as one gets in such matters. It is quite likely that, in the future, he will be seen as one of the greatest English playwrights in history. Pinter’s early plays are what is meant by creative genius.

Pinter needs no attempts at cheerleading from me or from anyone else. I idolised him from the moment I saw, as a teenager, a production of The Birthday Party, or possibly from the moment, at about the same time, when I saw a photo of him on the back of a copy of the play.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial,

Everyone in the country must have been touched and saddened last week after Corporal Sarah Bryant’s death on duty in Afghanistan by photographs all over the media of her wedding day three years ago. She looked luminously young and pretty, in a fairy story wedding dress, with her handsome soldier husband beside her and her life ahead of her.

The death of any soldier is a terrible loss; all the massed photographs of the young men and women who have died have been painful to look at, as has the news footage of coffins coming home and families struggling with their grief at funerals all over the country.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoEuropaUnión Europea, ,

It might seem all’s well that ends well. Prince Harry should never have been sent into harm’s way to fight in Afghanistan. The British media should never have agreed to keep silent about it. But given that he was and they did, and now that we know, a great deal of good seems to have come of it in the event – or at least in the lack of any event.

Almost everyone has come out of it well. Harry has emerged from interviews filmed in Afghanistan as an unassuming, sensible, endearing and brave young man; clearly popular with his men and well regarded by superior officers, he is (despite a couple of lapses at clubs and parties) altogether a man his country can be proud of.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

My text for today is “Hold fast that which is good”: 1 Thessalonians 5:21. These are words I heard so regularly in prayers at my Anglican girls’ school that I have been unable to forget them. I draw them to the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to have forgotten them. At least, he seems to be losing his grip on what is good in this country and, indeed, to be throwing it away with both hands in his curious suggestion that aspects of sharia should be recognised in English law.

In an interview on Radio 4 last Thursday, Rowan Williams said that the introduction of parts of Islamic law here would help to maintain social cohesion and seems unavoidable.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial

Stories are essential to us. Those who say our obsession with the extraordinary story of Madeleine McCann is shamefully prurient, sentimental or commercial may be partly right, but they are missing the point.

We need great stories, and have done so time out of mind, to enable us to understand the world and our places in it.

Our fascination with Madeleine’s unfolding story - most of it speculation and fantasy - has a great deal more to do with ourselves than with her or her parents. And her parents have deliberately awakened and fed this elemental appetite for a story, to the point where only the most high-minded or unimaginative can be indifferent to it.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalTerrorismo InternacionalEuropaUnión Europea,

Truth is said to be the first casualty of war; trust is one of the many casualties of terror. If your surgeon or your child’s school assistant or your charity’s youth worker might be a terrorist – as we have seen – whom can you trust: the woman in the scarf at the checkout till? Your bearded GP? The tragedy is that trust is essential to a free and civil society; when trust dies, petty animosities and resentments will swell and civility and civil liberties will shrink.

There was a sad example of this last Thursday on the London Underground in the rush hour.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocial, ,

Let a hundred flowers bloom, Chairman Mao once said to China’s repressed intellectuals, inviting diverse ideas. Sure enough, when the intellectuals obliged, Mao ruthlessly mowed them all down. Our rulers do not believe in diversity either, although they are constantly nagging us to join them in celebrating it. What they really believe in, on the contrary, is orthodoxy and they are increasingly prepared to enforce it. That is the alarming lesson of the uproar about Catholic charities and gay adoption.

For our orthodox masters in parliament and in the public services it is not enough that gay couples have the right to adopt children like anyone else.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

‘How do y’all like that jumbo shrimp,” the kindly obese jailer asked the black prisoner sitting in front of a plate heaped with good southern food on death row. It was the boy’s last meal in a famous prison in the southern states of America, and in their humanity — or rather in the ghastly traditions of capital punishment — the authorities had allowed him to choose whatever he wanted to eat.

This last treat, this final whopping serving of ice cream sundae and jumbo shrimp with fries was clearly supposed to console the prisoner for the fact he was about to be fried himself.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea,

The horrifying murders of five young women in Ipswich have thrown the nation into one of its periodic fits of hypocrisy about prostitution. Somehow we seem to be in permanent confusion about the oldest profession, torn between contempt, ignorance and political correctness.

The unfortunate women in Ipswich were all prostitutes and all the early news reports described them that way. Rightly so. If they had not been street walkers, they would still be alive. Their unpleasant occupation was relevant to their deaths and it was in the public interest to know that.

Yet immediately from all sides came the usual cry that they should not have been described as prostitutes; that was demeaning; they were women, people and daughters first of all; they should not be stigmatised; they should have been called sex workers, like any other kind of worker.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente PróximoEuropaUnión Europea,

In China under Mao Tse-tung the families of condemned men were forced to pay for the bullet that would kill their father or their son. I was reminded of that exquisite little cruelty by the government’s confession last Monday that the bereaved families of troops killed in Iraq have been forced to pay hundreds of pounds to get access to the official records of their children’s deaths.

These documents are freely available to the army and to the coroner, but shocked and grieving families had to find the money. Apparently these large sums were to cover the cost of photocopying done by the coroner’s officials; one man had to pay £600.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

Jonathan Swift made a famous Modest Proposal in 1729 that the babies of the Irish poor should be eaten to prevent them growing up to a poverty-stricken life of crime. It was, of course, satirical. But nearly 300 years later I would like to make a modest proposal about babies that is almost as shocking, yet not at all satirical.

I’ve come reluctantly to think, especially after the senseless killing of Tom ap Rhys Pryce, that perhaps some babies, in the public interest and to prevent them growing up to a life of violence, should be forcibly taken from their mothers and adopted.…  Seguir leyendo »