Maybe it’s my holiday reading: Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain on the Spanish Civil War and Curzio Malaparte’s viciously ironic rendering of liberated/‘re-occupied’ WW2 Naples in The Skin …

maybe it’s what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Mexico - all the other places …

maybe it’s the expressions on their faces …

.. that explains why looking at this picture I do not see what they are seeing, what is going on behind me, what maybe was them once, being blindfolded, handed a baseball bat, having a hard hat plonked on their head while from a balcony a laughing man pulls a rope and a flowerpot swings into the air, and the other children scream and shout, the parents scream and shout as the blindfolded boy staggers and swipes until he whacks the festival piñata, everyone cheers and the children scrum for scattered sweets, and soon it will be time for fireworks, races and later dancing …

… and the young men in the mountain village square look on, apart, thoughtful, somewhere else already.