Skip to main content

July 20th

As the sun sets on a beautiful day in Tallinn and the crowds begin to leave the Raekoja Plats, I reflect on another trip to the Estonian capital. I shall be spending the weekend at the Viljandi Folk festival in the South of the country, so I will get a good blast of fresh Baltic air on the shores of Lake Viljandi.

July 20th- the anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. I still retain a fascination with the Apollo Programme- so many extraordinary things were achieved and yet at the end the enormous sunk costs were ignored and nearly 40 years later we have still not returned, even to lunar orbit. The pristine Moon, with the footprints of the Astronauts in the dust of the Sea of Tranquility, remains an enigma. The reaction of each of the astronauts to their extraordinary voyage has been dealt with in several books, which I never tire of reading.

Today is also the anniversary of the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler by Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg- a noble man who met a terrible death. Let us remember that Germans too were brave opponents of the monstrous Nazi ideology, and I shall raise a glass to the White Rose and those brave enough to stand up against tyranny- a tyranny that in Tallinn seems all too recent.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more