Strange Fruit

Thursday 17th December

I have always loved the song, and Billie Holliday’s delivery is hauntingly beautiful.  A very sad song and an even sadder subject, of course.  Hopefully that period of America’s history is over, though the repeated emergence of U.S. cops shooting black people is sickening – there still appears to be an attitude that black lives count for less.  And we in Britain are not immune, in Iraq and Syria it is obvious that brown lives are worth far less than one of our soldiers.

I was reminded of the song today by the sight along our roadsides of another strange fruit.  In France the sides of the roads tend to be kept clear, the verges mown regularly and bushes and trees cut down.  You can often see right across a few fields.  But along many of our roads there is a dense mass of bushes and trees, dark and brooding and crowding in on the road as you drive along.  And the strange and only winter fruit are the tattered remains of carrier bags, chucked carelessly out of passing car windows and now blooming in the pale winter light.  Some are in shreds and like ribbons wave in the air; others are more or less intact and balloon out in the wind and rain.  But what an awful shame that all along our roads we have these almost indestructible reminders of our disposable society.