Once

Breda at work lent me a lovely film called once. A contemporary music film set in Dublin where a busker meets an assylum seeker single mum and set about making an album of some quite good music. This film has a wonderful sound track and deals with the issues of single parent hood and assylum seekers in an intelligent way portraying the fact that these people do have hard lives and have the same needs and aspirations as everybody else. It basilcally kicks the backside of grown up - comics like The Daily Mail. Having said that these were not the main themes of the film - the music was central.
However it did ring a chord with someone at work wanting to tell me a joke about assylum seekers and I said that I didn't want to hear it. One wonders if the Daily Mail readership lived under an oppressive regime they would want a better life for their children? The trouble is that the Daily Mail readership rarely questions the so called facts that this comic produces and sometimes the lies about scrounging e.t.c. I also reminded the person that the Marchant surname is of Hugenot lineage and over a hundred and fifty years ago would have come over as political assylum seekers away from the French Catholics. No answer to that!!