The Oleander
The Oleander or Laurier Rose, is one of my favourite plants. It loves the Mediterranean climate and can grow into a tree with beautiful green leaves and stunning flowers, usually pink, red or white. I associate it with warm sunshine and it is a symbol of everlasting love.
In Greek mythology, Hero is a priestess of Aphrodite (the goddess of love). She lived in a tower in Sestos and fell in love with Leander who was from Abydos on the opposite side of the Hellespont (the Dardenelles today). Hero would light a torch on the top of her tower and Leander would swim across to see her. One stormy winter's night, she lit the torch and Leander got lost as he swam across and the torch was blown out. Hero found his body washed up on the beach and she jumped off the tower to join him in death. It is said that she found him surrounded by the flowers and she screamed 'O Leander, O Leander' and this is how the Oleander got its name.
It's more likely that the plant's name comes from the Latin word for olive 'Olea' and the Greek word for tree 'Dendron'. It was thought that the leaves were very similar to olive trees.
David Hockey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
My children gave me tickets to go to Paris to visit the David Hockney exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. I have never been a Hockney fan prior to this but I am now. The 88 year artist's latest works are absolutely extraordinary and I love them! His landscapes techniques combined with his vivid use of colour make for remarkable pictures that are both realistic and imaginative at the same time. He now uses an iPad in some of his art and the impact is magnified as the pictures in front of you transform. A few of my favourites are below.
Finally I should say that the newish Fondation Louis Vuitton and the surrounding attractions in the Bois de Boulogne are worth a visit in their own right. Spectacular!
Jobless benefits reach record high
By Ross Clark in The Spectator 26/08/2025
"Quietly, without even a press release, let alone a fanfare, Britain over the past 12 months has just passed a grim milestone. The number of people on out of work benefits has surpassed the peak reached in the early 1990s. It is higher now than it was at the peak of Covid-19 in 2020.
Remember when unemployment of three million used to generate headlines every week, in the early 1980s and then again a decade later? Well, there are now 6.5 million people living on out of work benefits. Yet it hardly causes a ripple in the political pond because most of them are not officially ‘unemployed’ – they are either on disability benefits or on Universal Credit, many of them without any requirement to look for work.
Official unemployment figures – which since the 1990s have been based on a questionnaire called the Labour Force Survey rather than on the number of claimants – have become a scam. They enable the government to boast of apparently low unemployment while the real picture is one of mass worklessness.
There is a terrible price to pay for this sleight of hand. While the unemployed used to be highly visible, the growing millions who have been signed off as unfit for work are not. They don’t necessarily have to visit Job Centres or unemployment offices in order to sign on every other week, as claimants had to do in the 1980s. Since the pandemic, many claimants do not even have to present themselves for a face-to-face assessment; rather, they are carried out over the telephone. It has become laughably easy to play the system, with numerous TikTok accounts even providing coaching on how to get signed off, in many cases by claiming mental ill-health.
Keir Starmer came to power a year ago promising to get people back to work, but then cowered at the first hurdle when his own backbenchers revolted at the very principle of trimming the benefits. There is now zero hope of reform during the current Parliament. The economy is being compromised by having to lug along an ever-heavier deadweight of the economically inactive. And all the government will do is try to cover up the scale of the disaster."
C.S. Lewis Quote from 'Learning in Wartime, his 1939 sermon at St Mary the Virgin in Oxford
"If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life'. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil... turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies".
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