by Sarah Groszewski I became a single mother in August 2019, when I moved nearly 100 miles away from the life I’d built in London over the past 12 years, to start again in Southampton, when my marriage ended. The main thing that struck me was how much easier...
Opinion Pieces
Opinion: New President, new hope
by Satvir Kaur. In a time of lockdown and January blues, Joe Biden’s inauguration gives us all something to look forward to and be optimistic. Four years ago today, I joined an anti-Trump rally in Southampton. I remember being surprised but comforted by how many had come. While coming...
Opinion: Important elections this year
by Tony Bunday. What a year we have had since the last elections in December 2019. Brexit done, 12 months to sort out a trade deal, and of course the Covid-19 virus taking loved ones from us, separating us from others, and severely disrupting our lives and freedoms. We...
Opinion: stay moving and stay well
by Eleanor van der Hoest. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) Are you beginning to find everyday movements a challenge? Or are you starting to get little signs that all is not well...
Opinion: The nation is not a household – comparing national and family budgets is nonsense
by Chris Oakes-Monger The unnecessary damage to our wealth caused by treating government spending like a family budget. This week a group of leading economists wrote to the BBC. In a report not untypical of the bulk of BBC news and current affairs coverage of government borrowing during the...
Opinion: being a refugee is not fate, it’s fortune
by Lewis MacLean The tragic story of an entire refugee family drowning in the British channel last month might’ve hit me harder, more than most. This is because I probably met them. Back in August I spent a few weeks volunteering for Care4Calais working with refugees and I recognise...
Reader’s letter: Southampton City of Culture – a call to arms
Since moving to Southampton as a fine art student in 1995 I’ve always felt the city had enormous potential. Now as the director of a growing arts charity (aspace), which over the last 20 years has reimagined lost buildings in Southampton with art and heritage, I am thrilled to...
Reader’s letter: why isn’t the media calling Priti Patel right wing?
Dear Editor, With the many media reports about the Priti Patel’s bullying inquiry, I have seen no reference to her being right wing. Compare this to ANY reporting of Jeremy Corbyn by the media: ‘left wing’, ‘hard left’, even ‘far left’. His supporters are always ‘left wingers’. Laura Kuenssberg...
Experience: Cancer in a time of covid
by anonymous. There is a very thin line that holds the fabric of our lives together. Things can change at any minute. These are my reflections from the perspective of going through the journey alongside a person with cancer. The Second World War broke out on 3rd September in...
Opinion: Looking back on the eleventh hour of the eleventh month.
by Roger Townsend. We are living through one of the most extraordinary and unsettling years of our lifetime and as we are now around that almost mystical time of the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ it is perhaps appropriate to look back at some...