by Maggie Ling | Aug 11, 2025 | Climate, History, Human Rights, Politics
High above the Central Court of England and Wales, commonly known as The Old Bailey, standing tall and straight, a sword pointing to the heavens in her right hand, a pair of scales hanging from her left, her feet resting on the globe beneath them, her spiky crown...
by Maggie Ling | Jan 30, 2025 | Climate, History, Human Rights, Politics
In a time of universal deceit, George Orwell may have said, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Having found this quote on a website, not Wikipedia, a fact-checked biography, a memoir by the man himself, or in my well-thumbed Penguin Dictionary of Quotations, I...
by Maggie Ling | Dec 18, 2024 | Climate, History
My childhood was spent in rural East Anglia: the 1950s and early 60s when the post-war push for food production encouraged arable farmers to invest in bigger machines to harvest bigger crops; and bigger fields meant the removal of hedges. ‘Grubbing out’, thus...
by Maggie Ling | Sep 6, 2024 | Human Rights, Politics, Women’s Rights
A child early to walking and talking and, it could be said, early to finding my writer’s voice, in that I wrote my first short story collection when I was five or six – see On the Shelf podcast – my need to express myself creatively has continued throughout my life,...
by Maggie Ling | Jul 5, 2024 | Climate, Racism, Refugees
I had hoped to write this if not before then during Refugee Week, which the UNHCR package I received prior to it, informed me was June 17-23, but family commitments prevented me from doing so. Though I did display the enclosed poster on my sitting-room window, were it...
by Maggie Ling | Feb 15, 2024 | Health, Politics, War
Last year brought 75th birthday ‘celebrations’ for the NHS, the state of Israel, and for me. The last British troops left Haifa four days after I almost killed my mother, the home-birth of her second child suddenly a medical emergency, our hospital discharge coming a...
by Maggie Ling | Jan 10, 2023 | Politics, Women’s Rights
Christmas almost upon us, the cold snap coming to an end, shopping for spices in the fabulous market of this fine city, the friendly stallholder asked me how I was. A dangerous question to a writer partial to telling it like it is. A bit down, I answered… voice...
by Maggie Ling | Nov 30, 2022 | Politics, Women’s Rights
While football-crazy folks spend large amounts of money flying to Doha to watch super-rich footballers kick a ball about a stadium (built by poor immigrant workers, some dying in the process), I’d like to take you back to the Qatari capital and February 29th 2020....
by Maggie Ling | Aug 15, 2022 | History, Politics
There’s a girl, her curly ginger hair pulled to one side with a turquoise slide, wailing in the cloakroom, tears trailing down her freckled flushed cheeks. Beyond distraught, she’s on the verge of hysteria. A year older, having clocked up my fourteenth year that May,...
by Maggie Ling | Apr 22, 2022 | COVID, Politics
Lies, damned lies and statistics. For some reason, these words came into my mind, and since, politically-speaking, they summed up January 2022, they are the theme for this blog. The full phrase, There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics, was...
