Fun on the plantation

I was at a dance the other night where the soundtrack went beyond the usual swing music to include some ska (slower) and balboa (faster) tracks. Among the eclectic mix was a song I sang in elementary school in Virginia in the early 1970s:

I went to Alabama to pick a bale of cotton
Jump down, turn around, pick a bale a day
Oh Mandy, pick a bale of cotton
Oh Mandy, pick a bale a day.

As I recall, we mimed the movements in the song. Because nothing captures picking cotton in the American South like a peppy song with a few hops and spins. There was one black girl in my class in Chester Virginia. I wonder what she made of that song. I wonder where the rest of the black kids in Chester Virginia went to school?

Today’s highlight was a walk at Stormont with Jenny, a retired professor who is active with the Green Party. I ran at Stormont recently and admired bird houses that I wanted to come back and get a closer look at.

What’s ironic is there are no openings into the birdhouses. Like Stormont itself, they are lovely to look at but useless to the intended beneficiaries.

Jenny and I debated such things as whether the people of Northern Ireland are politically mature enough to govern themselves. We have been without a government for 19 months because the two main parties (DUP and Sinn Fein) cannot agree on how to move forward. I don’t see how these two parties can govern when one believes in a united Ireland and the other wants to remain part of the United Kingdom. In addition, they are both corrupt and treat Northern Ireland like a big piggy bank that they each shovel money out of.
The problem with direct rule (from London), is that Northern Ireland is not on their radar. They don’t know about us or care about us and so aren’t well positioned to govern the place.
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