TO RECEIVE EDUCATION

I was extremely honoured this week to receive a Kreativ Blogger award not once but twice; once from the charming Dorte of DJS Krimiblog in Denmark, and another from the equally charming Margot at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.

Both these ladies have wonderful blogs; Margot has an encylopaedic knowledge of crime fiction, and Dorte incredibly blogs in two languages [English and Danish] at the same time, and has even translated from a third [Swedish] when requested.

Why do we read, and why do we blog?

Because it takes us away from the problems that life throws up, and into very different worlds. At the moment I am reading a book set in Communist Shanghai as part of my Global Challenge 2010, and I have learned that people there faced problems that were far greater than ever dreamed of by the Western liberals, who wore Mao T-shirts in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yu Guangming and Jing Peiqin, though too young to be Red Guards, found themselves labelled as educated youths, despite the fact they had received little education, with copies of the shining red Quotations of Chairman Mao as their textbook. As educated youths, they, too had to leave Shanghai to "receive education in the countryside." They were to go to an army farm in Yunnan province, on the southern China/ Burma border.

.......because while their status was still recorded as single, for them to move back to Shanghai. According to government policy, the educated , once married , had to settle in the countryside.

They missed Shanghai.