Day of Unity 2009

A good Day of Unity.

This one fell in a difficult January. The currency had broken the previous autumn, industrial towns were on short time, and people were worried in the specific way that people worry when the worry is about money.

The day is about lands held together, and I remember thinking that year that the harder version of togetherness is not the symbolic chain in good weather. It is the ordinary version: a family taking in a cousin who lost work, a company holding on to staff it could not really afford, a town where people quietly know who is struggling and act on it without discussion.

That kind of solidarity does not get commemorated because it does not photograph. It is what actually carries a country through a bad year.

A good day to everyone marking it.