I am lucky enough now to be living within spitting distance of the Yorkshire Ouse. It’s about 300yards wide where it runs through York, and at the bottom of our street is a strip of green space below the rows of terrace houses which straggled south of the city centre. Horse chestnuts, massive leaves now in carpets of gold, willows, runners, walkers, dogs, ducks, geese. I join this parade of life from time to time, for instance a daily minimal 10-minute jog to replace the dog-walk I used to do. The run includes a quick there-and-back across the Millennium Bridge, built at the turn of the century just for walkers and cyclists.
But no running on Sundays. Today I try to keep special: a stroll down to the bridge, and instead of using it, tramping across, I pause to relish its beauty.
A beauty not just of structure but of setting: I love its green banks, the waters which pulse with the coming and going of rains miles away in the north and west, the sky and the trees. A woman is walking her dog from west to east. I pause, and for a moment I am at peace.
Spanning the river between Fulford and the South Bank, this lovely structure is a symbol of our commitment to building friendships between our city and the people of the Gaza Strip
In this scene, which includes myself, I sense a metaphor for the whole endeavour which is the Gaza convoy. The bridge is about both art and engineering: somebody had to have the artistic flair to design its sweeping curves, and the engineering know-how to build it and make it safe and minimise maintenance. And before that someone had to have a vision of a city with cars and lorries taken down a notch or two in the transport pecking order, uniting the two banks in humane ways of movement. To realise that vision some people, probably a committee, had to go through a series of bureaucratic hoops – consultation, dealing with objections, applying for funds, managing contracts.
It is prose and poetry.
This past month we have had plenty of prose preparing for the Gaza convoy: getting our personal registrations done on-line, scanning in our passport and driving licence details, chasing a best deal on insurance for the ambulance, organising flights home. Not to mention checking out and buying the ambulance itself, getting it fully serviced, getting used to its handling. Raising cash and seeking sources of supplies. In many ways, though, poetry has kept on creeping into the process.
Example: for many practical reasons it has made sense to link with the nearest neighbours who are coming on the convoy, based in Bradford. Not least because some of them have done it before. But these meetings have gone way beyond the practical: they have been energising, we have sensed the drive and commitment which comes from over there – they draw support from a wide net around the city.
Example: we have an invitation to York’s mosque, to show off the ambulance and invite the congregation to support us. The sermon at Friday prayers was inspirational. The giving was of course useful, enabling us to select best-quality goods so as not to insult our hosts in Gaza. But the scale of the giving was inspirational too, reminding us of our huge privilege in being able to go.
Example: we have arranged a press call just outside York Minster, ambulance parked on the precinct of the Church of St Michael-le-Belfry, thanks to the good relations one of our group has with the vicar of that church. Professor the Baroness Afshar of York University’s Department of Politics is to cut a ceremonial ribbon and launch our public fund-raising campaign. And just as we think we have taken all the pictures a group of five boys from the mosque arrives. They have been collecting for play equipment, for their own needs as a small community within a community. But when they heard about the needs of the children of Gaza, and about our convoy, they chose to donate to us instead. Humbling.
It all adds up to giving us a huge sense of responsibility – to the peoples of both York and Gaza – to get the vehicle ready and take it safely across. But it also gives us wings: with such support we can do so much more than we could have done alone.
