#76: Steely Thighs and the BWOML
Happy Friday!
Machynlleth Comedy Festival. Next year. Go.
Mind you, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as much fun if there hadn't been a heatwave. Or, indeed, if there had been sufficient public transport for the thousands of festival goers who, come midnight, stampeded the entire cavalcade of hackney carriages in Western Wales (about 5).
Other highlights included the contortionist comedy of Jordan Brookes, the thousand faces of Adam Scott-Rowley, and, naturellement, The Leak with Foiled producer Tom Price, James Acaster, Kiri Pritchard-Mclean and the ghost of Tom Allen. Oh and some jokes by me and Beth.
But that's the past! What's coming up? I hear you bawl.
Well, as trailed previously this summer I'm cycling 1,500km from Ljubliana to Sofia with a bunch of similarly foolish cranks. As two legs of the Thighs of Steel ride, we're all raising money for Khora, a spectacularly worthwhile cooperative community centre for refugees in Athens.
There are tens of thousands of refugees stranded in Greece and it falls largely on the shoulders of citizen initiatives like Khora to support these stateless people.
I've written an awful lot of words about refugees and migration in the past, but there's a risk of overcomplicating matters.
I have been lucky enough to travel through Central, Southern and Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and the Americas. I have never encountered anything less than open-hearted hospitality.
This is the way I would love to be treated; this is the way I would love everyone to be treated. Khora do this work, in a country where it is most pressingly needed.
If you want to contribute some of your hard-earned to this cause, then you will have my undying gratitude.
Thanks to a generous donation from Dave Charms, we're already 53% of the way towards raising my target of £1,000 and every penny goes straight to the library, language centre, kitchen, legal advice centre, music school and roof garden of Khora.
If you'd rather not, then that's fine too. We all have our own concerns and cares. I'm just grateful that I can share mine with you here and I hope you enjoy my stories of the cycle this summer. I truly appreciate your eyeballs!
Thank you!
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...COMING UP...
After last weekend was officially anointed 'The Best Weekend Of My Life' (BWOML), this one has an awful lot up with which to live...
EUROVISION on Saturday.
The very first Bike Project Social Cycle on Sunday. Hopefully we'll do something bigger and better for UN World Bicycle Day on the 3rd of June. Save the date?
Loads more Foiled all of the time.
A dog.
Now On: The Victor Frankl 5-a-day Book Club!
Membership Criteria: Read 5 pages a day of Man's Search for Meaning to complete the whole darn text in only 28 days. If you're pressed for time, try 3 pages a day of the central story: Experiences in a Concentration Camp.
Day 2, p17-21
These first pages of Part 1: Experiences in a Concentration Camp contain the most chilling passage I think I have ever read in a work of non-fiction.
After describing how desperate was the fight for survival in the concentration camps of World War Two, Frankl matter-of-factly states:
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves.
We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
Conditions in the camps were, to understate the matter, appalling. Frankl spent most of his six months in captivity digging and laying railway tracks. One time, he also took on the job of digging a tunnel for a water main under a road - alone and without help. He was rewarded for this particularly arduous task with coupons for 12 cigarettes, which he could exchange for 12 soups - 'a very real respite from starvation'.
For most of the prisoners, soup took priority over cigarettes.
The only exceptions to this were those who had lost the will to live and wanted to 'enjoy' their last days. Thus, when we saw a comrade smoking his own cigarettes, we knew he had given up faith in his strength to carry on, and, once lost, the will to live seldom returned.
Share your thoughts by replying to this email, or adding to the comments on my blog. We will continue, sporadically, but certainly next week...
Athenasius Kircher - I did my undergraduate thesis about his hapless heroic attempts to translate Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Beautiful.
via Kottke.org
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Great stuff. Oh and this is terrifying. Okay bye now!
Much love,
- dc
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this. When not writing this, David co-writes BBC Radio sitcom Foiled, does copywriting for The Bike Project and the Elevate Festival, and volunteers for refugee youth club Young Roots. He is almost always available for work. davidcharles.info // @dcisbusy
The Boston Public Library has digitized their collection of M.C. Escher prints. Huzzah.
via Kottke.org