Thursday, 23 August 2012

An Unlikely Role Model



Just caught up with this picture from the Newport event last week - could make an interesting screensaver it occurs to me...

Meanwhile guess what I am mostly eating at the moment in the vegetable department? Five portions a day of tomatoes is the answer. Notwithstanding the awful weather Mrs Blog's greenhouse has delivered very effectively again this summer with the bonus of lots of cucumbers.

Outside the salads have held up well too - indeed the rain is good for lettuce, rocket and so on and the cool temperature stops them bolting.



Last night I watched an interesting programme on BBC4 about the Queen's mother-in-law Princess Alice of Greece. I had heard of her as an eccentric with religious obsessions but did not know that she had colourful psychotic experiences and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, leading her unpleasant mother and husband (the disagreeable and silly Prince Andrew of Greece) to hide her away in a sanatorium against her will and clearly unnecessarily.

It is much to her credit that, in spite of having good cause to be cynical about humanity after the way she was treated, she went on to shelter Jewish refugees in Nazi-occupied Athens at great personal risk and later did charitable work to help a deprived neighbourhood in the Greek capital, evidently experiencing episodes of illness right into old age. An unlikely but genuine role model for what people with a serious mental illness can achieve in contrast to the many worthless, dilettante, and obnoxious members of European royalty.