AMAL, NADIA, HANYA AND MICHELLE

For some years I stopped actively seeking out music. I'm not sure why. Music is memory, and not all memory is happy or sad; some memories are layered with depression, anxiety, fear, loneliness. Lately though, thanks to Desert Island Discs, I have found myself returning to music. I love the unexpected choices. I find myself delving deeper into the archives, particularly glad when I discover philanthropists like Sigrid Rausing and humanitarian activists like David Nott, vascular war surgeon. My favourite episode is with Aung San Suu Kyi - I think it is the only occasion when the interview takes place not in the BBC studio, but in Burma, in Daw Suu's home.

These days I am inspired by Amal Clooney, international human rights lawyer, currently attorney to a young 23 year old Yazidi girl, Nadia Murad, who managed to escape her captors and be smuggled out of Mosul to Stuttgart. She has recently been named a UN Goodwill Ambassador, but of course this involves her telling and retelling the tales of crime that were committed upon her person, and the bodies of thousands of women still remaining in the camps.

A friend of mine asked if I wanted to be part of a new book club; the first book we read was Hanya Yanigahara's A Little Life - a book that divided readers last year. Some thought it relentless in its portrayal of the suffering of its central character, Jude. And others, like myself, though no less fatigued by such a detailed rendition of a broken life, found truth in a narrative that does not see its way to an easy resolution. Nadia Murad may have escaped ISIS, but she will never be able to forget. We, in our lives of comfort, safety and daily entertainment, may find it a little too easy to imagine that suffering can be papered over. Especially the suffering of girls, of women.

And so to remind us to shore each other up, and stay alert and conscious to the ever present denigration of girls and women, we have our big sister Michelle Obama, a truly admirable mentor, to speak for us. She reminds us we are right to hold our boys and men to a higher standard than those among them who enslave, assault and abuse with impunity. Some of us, Michelle and myself included, and hopefully you too, reader, know men with integrity, refined intelligence, kindness and a strong sense of justice. To them we turn and hold out our hands. In the fight for human rights, we need each other. We have always needed each other.

RAIN, RAIN, I WISH WE HAD REMAINED

Yesterday it poured all day, and long into the night. June's roses have taken quite a beating. Will they recover?

At the hospital my stats were not promising: temperature - 37.7 and pulse - 113. The immunology team decided against my receiving intravenous immunoglobulins. Two weeks of antibiotics were prescribed and I was sent home. Unfortunately, a nurse had already hooked up one of my Ig bottles, which would sadly have to be discarded. I regret the waste of such valuable, life saving medicine. But deeply appreciate the nursing staff's concern in making sure I was the priority. I feel so loved by my team of nurses at the hospital; I am seen. Really seen.

As a patient I have to trust many others with my life. I have to trust that when they say they know more than I do, they really do know more. I have to trust that I matter. As a citizen of a country, we have to trust our lives do matter in the hands of those elected.

The vote to leave Europe was not my choice, but democracy is. I value my right to vote and the right of others to vote as they see fit. But sadly, as google analysts are proving by the discovery that many in the UK don't know what the EU is, let alone what leaving it will constitute, what has come to be has come to be as much out of fear and ignorance as anything else.

When a girl like Malala Yousafzai speaks out about the importance of education for the millions of girls who are unfortunate enough to be kept out of school, she is also speaking up for education itself. So often we, the educated privileged, don't know about our own governments, let alone global policies. Worst of all, how many of us can recite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?  It should be the most important piece of literature any student learns. Imprinted on our minds once we leave school and go beyond into the world of Others. That word that scares so many of us.

Shall we begin to recite together? Here we go... 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.' And sisterhood.

It is still raining. But we are together, reading and remembering some of the most beautiful words of our human language. http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the commission that drew up the text of the Universal Declaration, was considered the driving force behind its adoption in Paris in December 1948.