No snow. Rain. Mobile phones. Weather in various places. Road safety and large vehicles.

 Well, the promised snow has not arrived … yet. It was, however, bucketing down with rain when I snoozed my alarm. Listening to the rain, I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere early and that snoozing my alarm was not sufficient. So I reset the alarm and went properly back to sleep for a while, much better than snoozing my alarm every 8 minutes or so and dozing between alarm calls. 

In the days before mobile phones served as alarm clocks, most of us used an actual clock which was much harder to set to “snooze”. Perhaps we slept better for it. Certainly an actual alarm clock could not wake you at 7.00am with the ‘ping’ of a text message, usually not so urgent that it could not have waited until a more civilised time but which has you feeling that you need to look at it just in case! One of these days I’ll ignore a genuinely urgent message because I have dismissed the ‘ping’ as yet another enquiry about the Italian conversation class from a fellow class member.

Here is a cartoon - ‘The Pocket Telephone; When Will it Ring? by W. K. Haselden - first published in The Mirror in March 1919.

The rain had stopped by mid-morning. I suggested a walk round the village after breakfast but Phil was expecting a delivery and so we waited … during which time it could well begin to rain again. But the parcel arrived and we walked without getting wet! Our river is running high though.

In other parts of the country the rain has been much worse than here. The River Ex has flooded land around Exeter, for example.

In Australia they are suffering from the heat. Quite how you operate when the temperatures reach close to 50° is a great mystery to me. On the other side of globe a good deal of the USA is gripped by snowstorms, as if they didn’t already have enough problems with ICE!

I still have a driving licence but have not actually driven for years and years. It becomes increasingly unlikely that I ever will again as I find modern traffic so daunting. I have undoubtedly mentioned before that my very first car, in the mid 1970s, was a much loved bright red Citroen 2CV. I look at photos, even very occasionally see a Deux Chevaux while I am out and about and shudder at the lack of safety features. It might be rather like driving a sardine can. And modern cars are all so large! I have great admiration, by the way, for the bus drivers who manoeuvre the roads around here where huge vehicles are parked all lver place, making driving on the narrow roads rather like a slalom. 

Now I read that huge pick-up trucks, described in this article as US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks, are becoming more popular on UK roads. Our next door neighbour has one but he does have horses in a field somewhere reasonably close by and the rear section of his pickup is often full of hay. But I am willing to bet that many drivers of such vehicles do not really need that facility. As the article points out, they are a danger to cyclists and pedestrians, especially child-sized pedestrians and in the event of collisions probably cause more damage because of their sheer height!

Number of US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks on UK roads has nearly doubled in a decade | Road safety | The Guardian

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Snowdrops. Possible snow. ICE protests. Prescient TV programmes. Terminology.

  We have snowdrops in the garden. The snowdrop patch is well established, even though the flowers themselves are amazingly small. Up the hill in Dobcross they usually have bigger snowdrops than we do. Perhaps theirs are foreign, imported snowdrops. Ours survived having a skip dumped on them when we first bought the house and substantial renovation work was going on. They just bounced back afterwards - nature at its most resilient!

The fact that the snowdrops are opening up is often a sign that it’s going to snow. As a rule they begin to open and then spend some time hibernating. As a new storm is forecast, Storm Chandry apparently, maybe the snow will arrive. 

January is plodding along to a rather gloomy end. Here’s a photo to prove it. Serendipity works and yesterday I managed to post photos on a blog I wrote some days ago. We’ll see whether the trick still works today. 

In the USA they are having huge protests against ICE. Here’s post I pinched from someone’s social media:

“BBC News why are you failing to report on the mass protests against ICE across the US that are taking place right now? Instead you reported vile nonsense from Trump. There is a huge peaceful outpouring of protest, but you have nothing on your 10 o’clock news. Not good enough. Let me help; here’s Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, San Diego and Washington DC to get you started.”

It’s odd how art can sometimes kind of foretell the future. It’s not just The Handmaid’s Tale. There is an episode of The Wire where a high school teacher tries to help one of his very underprivileged pupils overcome life’s difficulties by letting him use the school’s shower facilities and helping him get his clothes washed. He’s pretty much fighting a one-man battle and the pupil concerned is gradually drawn into the drug-selling culture of his community. I was reminded of this when I came across this article. This time it is in England!

Here’s a sample:

“Schools are regularly referring homeless children to food banks, driving them to classes and washing their clothes, according to research.

A survey conducted by the housing charity Shelter and NASUWT, also known as the Teachers’ Union, asked 11,000 teachers about their experiences of working with children living in temporary accommodation.

There are now a record 175,025 children in temporary housing in England, according to the most recent government figures. Many families affected are living in B&Bs, hostels and overcrowded flats.”

How did we get to that situation?

Now for something about terminology. 

We used to talk about “yuppies” (young, urban professionals), a prosperous class of upwardly mobile, status-chasing people working in major cities. Now it seems we should talk about the white-collar “Henrys” (high-earning, not rich yet) – a cohort near-identical in demographic, profession and status-obsession, but who are now apparently the overlooked, and the hard-done-by, of our current political settlement. 

In South Korea it seems they have a cohort now known as “Young 40s”, people who have reached the age of 40 and are being mocked as they try to hold on to their youth. They are a bit offended at being laughed at. “I’m just buying and wearing things I’ve liked for a long time, now that I can afford them,” one said of his skate gear and Air Jordans. “Why is this something to be attacked for?” Another felt self-conscious in interactions with younger colleagues: “I try to keep conversations focused on work or career concerns.” I must say, I have often wondered at quite grown-up young men who insist on skateboarding; isn’t it a teenager activity. 

Then there is the SAHS group - SAHS for “stay-at-home-sons”, 20 - 34- year old men who still live in their parents’ home. There are more of them than daughters who still live home, which might explain why there are no references to SAHD: “stay-at-home-daughters”. As regards the SAHS there is merchandise. Somebody is making money out of this.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Storms. Standing for parliament. On being too early.

It seems that there is storm going on - Storm Ingrid, so named by the Portuguese national weather service.

“Downpours and high winds are likely to continue after Storm Ingrid wreaked havoc in the south-west and washed away part of a historic pier in Devon, the Met Office said on Saturday.

It has been a wet weekend for many, with yellow weather warnings for heavy rain in place across parts of Northern Ireland, Scotland and south-west England and Wales.”

Well, the God of Weather must have decided that Greater Manchester already has a reputation for being damp and dull (weather-wise, that is, as other sources say it is a bright and lively place) and have decided that this storm should just ignore us. Instead, we in Delph just have rather damp and gloomy weather. For a brief moment after I came back from my morning run the sun did try to emerge but the clouds defeated it. Such is life!

Greater Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burham, is applying to stand for parliament but Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) has blocked his request to seek selection for the Gorton and Denton by-election, setting off an immediate and furious row within the party. Oh dear! 

If he does successfully become an MP again, will he try to oust Kier Starmer as leader of the Labour Party? And who will be Greater  Manchester’s mayor? 

Would a replacement mayor honour the promise to give bus pass holders the right to free travel at all hours of the day? At the moment the bus pass can only be used after 9.30 am, giving rise to people being referred to a Twirlies (too early). (This nickname has always amused me as there was a group of people in the more traditional academic side of the college where I worked who referred to Performing Arts students as “Twirlies”, because of all the song and dance stuff!) From March it has been decided we shall be Twirlies no more! 

I came across a new profession for the modern age: a Sleep Coach. People are making money advising others on how to have a good night’s sleep. One, known as the Sleep Fixer, said: “Sleep coaches look at client’s whole 24 hours – habits, mindsets, daily stressors.” So, a kind of therapist then. She also says that she encourages clients to “step away” not just from online advice but also to strip off the “wearables”. “Sleep trackers often increase anxiety, which only makes things worse,” she said. (I confess to going through a time of checking on my Fitbit to see how it assessed my night’s sleep, usually contradicting my gut feeling about how rested I felt. Not much point, really!)

There’s a company the “Good Sleep Method” whose Amy Cheseldine said that personal coaches succeed because they hold clients to account. “People often understand what to do but fail to apply it consistently – or they do loads of things but miss the one small thing that will really help,” she said. One of the people interviewed said his “one small thing” was realising he was his bedtime. “It took just one session with a coach to realise I was simply going to bed too early,” he said. “I now understand that I only need seven hours of sleep a night, so if I go to bed at 10pm, I’m going to have a disturbed night or I’m going to wake up in the early hours. I needed a later bedtime. It really was that simple.”

There you go! If only all life’s problems had such easy solutions!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Penguins and presidents. High school journalist. ICE.

Here, perhaps (if blogger manages to post it - if not, you might need to visualise it for yourself) is an AI picture of a certain president walking through Greenland with a penguin. Unfortunately, whoever mocked up the photo didn’t know that penguins are in the Antarctic not the Arctic! Oops!

It’s cold enough here today for penguins but we haven’t seen any.

Getting back to Mr Trump, here’s a little something:

“Donald Trump withdrew on Thursday an invitation for Canada to join his “board of peace” initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts.

“Please let this Letter serve to represent that the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining, what will be, the most prestigious Board of Leaders ever assembled, at any time,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post directed at the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney.

Trump launched his “board of peace” initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos, claiming it would be “one of the most consequential bodies ever created in the history of the world”. The board, which will be chaired by Trump, was originally described as a temporary body to oversee the governance and reconstruction of Gaza.”

We have to wait and see where that goes! 

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for well over a week. Other stuff has got in the way. Lila Dominguez is a high school student in Minneapolis who had started her school’s newspaper a few months ago. On January 7th she was in her school’s basement writing an article about the ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day. “I was kind of pacing around. My hands were really shaky,” she said. “I was just very overstimulated, and not really sure what to do in that moment for the people that I was with, or the people outside or my family.” Here’s what she wrote:

“On Wednesday January 7th at 3:20 pm I was working in the wrestling basement of Roosevelt Highschool to publish an article about the tragic event that occurred earlier today in South Minneapolis when a woman was shot and killed in her car by an ICE agent. Right before doing my final edits to the piece I was informed that ICE was right outside the building we were in trying to detain people.

Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed in South Minneapolis 7 minutes away from Roosevelt. In the past week Trump announced a target on Minneapolis, sending over 2,000 ICE agents into the Twin Cities to conduct raids. Before that in early December Trump put a target on the Somali community in Minneapolis. ICE has had a large presence in Minneapolis for over a month now affecting a lot of people’s day to day lives. Schools have seen a drop in attendance and there have been over 400 arrests from the past month in Minneapolis of “deemed criminals”.

 

Renee Nicole Good, the woman who was shot and killed was labeled as a “rioter” by DHS, but from bystanders and video footage the situation seems to be different. The woman was driving along Portland and was cornered in by ICE vehicles because of a raid happening. A bystander to the situation claims to have heard ICE agents yell instructions at the woman to “get out of here.” Renee reverses and attempts to drive away, doing so the ICE agent shot her multiple times through the front windshield. The ICE agent guilty of killing the woman claimed that “he was in fear of his life and his co workers lives, because he thought she was going to run them over” meaning the act was done in “self defense”.

Later in the afternoon today my high school Roosevelt was paraded by ICE vehicles during dismissal. Our community and staff stepped up to protect one another. I was in the basement of Roosevelt while all of this was happening, and the role that I watched the wrestling coaches jump into to protect our students is a role I wish no teacher or coach would ever have to be in. MPR news reports “ICE agents broke a window to a car and detained people present.” Many students, staff and neighbors were brave enough to video record and get in the ICE agents’ faces yelling and blowing their whistles.

Students, Families, Staff, and community members are angry. Roosevelt has one of the most diverse student and staff populations in Minneapolis, so it is so important that we show up for each other during this time. The victims of the raids, their families, the bystanders at today’s event, and the people who were also in Roosevelt during the event are all in our thoughts.

Its hard to process these things, especially when they are happening at our front doors. The second I got home from Roosevelt today at 5:00 the first thing I did was hug my dad tight. It is so important to be with the people you love during this time. If you know people in your community who are struggling, reach out. During this time we need to be unified as one.

 

ICE has taken up too much space in Minneapolis and the areas surrounding. Families and individuals are too scared to leave their own houses, forcing them to miss work and other activities. Many families’ holidays were affected by ICE, they were unable to have a holiday dinner or go out to buy gifts, food or see family and friends. ICE has been profiling people simply by the color of their skin, or the language they speak, whether they are a citizen or not it seems ICE may detain any person they chose to suspect.

 

When something happens like this in our community its a natural instinct for us to want to take action. This is the time more than ever to treat everyone you interact with with a bit more empathy, kindness and sympathy. Little actions can have a big impact. You never know what someone may be going through or how events like these can impact a person. Reach out to your people and if you are able, do your best to support the community, and those directly impacted by ICE.

ICE its time to get out of Minneapolis.”

Today I found this article about ICE agents’ treatment of a two-year-old girl in Minneapolis. No further comment needed!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Keeping family traditions going. Criticising the USA en famille. Trademarks. Do we need to know about the Beckhams?

 I don’t recall how many years ago we started a kind of family tradition of walking from our house in Delph to the fish and chip shop in Diggle where we would buy fish and chips, consume it al fresco by a local millpond and then walk home again. There would be me, Phil, his brother, our daughter who didn’t work on Fridays, and one and then two of her smallest offspring. Various older offspring joined us from time to time. This became known as the Diggle Chippy Hike.

Diggle Chippy is located in a wooden hut on the main road on Diggle. It’s decorated inside with photos of old Saddleworth. They serve very good fish and chips. They taste even better eaten by the pond. For a brief while after Covid you couldn’t go inside the chippy but had to place your order, pay and then collect your order from the side door. Things are back to normal now.

The attendees of the Hike have varied as the small children started school. And then for a couple of years my brother-in-law had various health problems, including foot problems, that made long walks difficult. So it’s been a while since we did a Diggle Chippy Hike.

We’d not seen my brother-in-law since some time before Christmas. Various members of the family were afflicted by a flu virus and nobody wanted to inflict their germs on anyone else. Then last week sometime he contacted us and proposed coming to visit today, provided we had recovered from our Christmas flu and provided he didn’t pick up yet another chest infection on his travels to Amsterdam to attend  music concert. 

Everyone seemed to be well this morning. The weather forecast not being good, he proposed coming via Diggle Chippy and collecting a chippy lunch, for old time’s sake. With the promise of a chippy lunch, our daughter opted to join us. And then Granddaughter Number Two, not working today, followed suit.

So we sat and ate fish and chips - sausage and chips for Granddaughter Number Two - and chatted round the table. We didn’t so much set the world to rights as demolish the character of the USA, its government, its policies,  almost everything about it! Quite cathartic but rather depressing!

Now, here’s something I found on social media, posted by someone who goes by handle of “revchuckcurrie”:

“As an American, I want to applaud European leaders who stood up to Donald Trump over Greenland. Yesterday Trump was crying for war. Today in Davos, Trump surrendered to Europe, which is a very, very good thing. The United States has never been perfect, but as the world’s oldest democracy, we’ve provided an uninterrupted example of expanding democracy for 250 years, until now. We need pro-democracy voices in Europe and the Americas to grow even louder. To keep Trump’s America in check.”

Well! I wondered about the claim to be the world’s oldest democracy. What about ancient Greece? But I suppose their democracy didn’t last and so it doesn’t count. Searching on the internet I find that if you count from when the United States declared independence from Britain, then they might count as the oldest democracy. Mind you, you have to bear in mind that black people couldn’t vote and women couldn’t vote. What kind of democracy are we talking about? I’m not getting started on “expanding democracy”!

That’s how it goes.

In one of those “news flashes” that pop up on your electronic devices, this morning I was informed that “Victoria Beckham has trademarks on all her children’s names”. Two responses: why do I need to know that? And can you actually trademark your children’s names? Regarding the second of these I wonder if there is an organisation that checks up on you if you accidentally give your child a Beckham name. I also wonder about the Spanish women called Cruz, a name chosen for one of the Beckham sons I think. Might they not get indignant as they had the name first? 

More seriously, I think it reflects rather badly on our news media that we give attention to trivia about the Beckhams’ family arguments and their opinions of names and so on. More imprtant things going on in the world are being ignored.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The plunder of shipwrecks. The trials of modern child-rearing. IT proficiency. And ways of learning.

 In the 1949 film Whisky Galore a ship runs aground off a small Scottish island, an island which has run out of whisky, due apparently to wartime rationing. Conveniently the ship is carrying whisky and the islanders plunder the vessel, against the wishes of the customs and excise officer, and make off with cases of bottle os whisky. Huzzah! 

The other day I read that residents of Brighton are finding their beach littered with the contents of containers which have been washed overboard from container ships: single use plastic gloves, lids for disposable coffee cups, cans of beer and a variety of vegetables such as onions. Litter picking has been organised, although it’s not easy to deal with soggy avocados and rotting bananas. The article doesn’t mention it but I wondered if the locals availed themselves of the net bags of onions. Might those onions have survived their dip in the briny? Are the people of Brighton having lots of onion soup?

I always thought it was the Cornish coast that was the place for boats to be lured onto the rocks so that profiteers could run off with the valuable cargo!

Today I read about the problem of children starting school, going to reception class without having been properly toilet trained, unused to feeding themselves, to putting their own coats and shoes on - lacking basic life skills. Extra work for the teaching staff! Some of this is blamed on the isolation of having been born during the Covid lockdown. I am a little sceptical. Even if Grandma couldn’t visit the babies and toddlers, surely they were advising the new parents on the importance and the convenience of getting the toddlers out of nappies and able to develop a measure of independence! One bit of me wonders about the disappearance of the health visitors who used to go around checking up on new parents and advising on the stages of development in early childhood. In the case of our youngest grandson, before he was able to be enrolled for preschool his parents had to ensure that he could put his own coat and shoes on and that he knew how to eat with a knife and fork. 

The aforementioned grandson, now six years old, is a proficient user of certain aspects of IT. He knows how to find his programmes on our television set and works his way through Minecraft on his tablet. But he also likes to listen to a good story, has been known to weep at the plight of baby owls, and loves to demand a piece of paper, some glue and scissors to do what he calls a “make” - usually a Minecraft creature or some monster of the deep sea with lots of teeth. He is definitely not one of the children adversely affected by excessive screen time referred to in this article. I was astounded at how many children younger than our small grandson reportedly have their own mobile phone.

On the subject of proficiency with IT, I am still having problems posting photos to my blog, despite my very IT-proficient husband’s best efforts. I am also finding that since the latest software update to my iPad many more of my usual ways of doing things have become more complicated. My once good IT skills are deteriorating! 

The writer Adrian Chiles points out a notice he saw on staffroom noticeboard on a recent visit to a school:

Learners remember 10% of what they read; 20% of what they hear; 30% of what they see; 50% of what they see and hear; 70% of what they discuss with others; 80% of personal experience; 90% of what they teach someone else.

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Trying to get earlier. Strange pets. The intelligence of cattle.

 Since I was brought low by flu, or rather since I began to feel better, I have been trying to fight the lethargy (aka laziness) which makes it hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. It’s not been working very well. Today, however,  I was woken by my phone going “ping” at 7.30 am. A so-called friend was sending me a message about a possible future social arrangement. What was he doing sending messages at that time of day? It’s not the first time this has happened. He must be an early - and inconsiderate - riser! Anyway, there I was … awake and apparently not going back to sleep. So within a relatively short time I was up and dressed and, today being Wednesday, on my way to the market in Uppermill.

The market is still sadly depleted but the fish-man keeps on turning up, which is probably my main motivation in going since Jenny Biscuit, the cheese and biscuit stall-holder, has given up. So I bought fish, went to the Italian greengrocer’s for some fruit (the fruit and veg man at the market having also disappeared) and to the co-op store for the strawberry jam I have been forgetting to buy for the last week. And before you could snap your fingers I was on a bus and homeward bound. At some point I might get back on my trusty bike for Wednesday outings! 

But this was a big improvement in “getting the day started”. We shall see what tomorrow brings. 

It would seem that the girls’ grammar school I attended in the 1960s was way ahead of its time, in one respect at least. In the science lab we had an axolotl. His name was Aristotle, Aristotle the Axolotl. He didn’t do much, just moved around his tank from time to time, a sort of amorphous grey blob of a creature. But nowadays axolotls are THE THING. Much of their popularity is attributed to Minecraft as axolotls were added to the game back in 2021. TikTok has helped, or so I am told. 

It seems an unlikely sort of pet. You can’t snuggle it or take it for walks or teach it to do tricks. But then the same could be said of tropical fish and a friend of hours reckoned he spent relaxing hours watching his fish. And then there are stick insects - which you have to watch carefully in order to distinguish them from actual twigs. 

Someone called Eric Rasmussen owns The World of Wet Pets in Portland, Oregon, and says his store has had axolotls for years and years but it’s only since Minecraft featured them that interest in them has increased. And Jake Pak, who owns, or at any rate runs, Axolotl Planet, a breeding and sanctuary company in Texas, says that almost all the children who visit his establishment go there to see one in real life, having seen them in the world of Minecraft. Usually they ask to see a blue axolotl, the rarest in Minecraft, but non-existent in the real world,  a genetic impossibility, much to the chagrin of the children.

That’s the USA, so I decided to investigate the situation here in the UK. There are masses places where you can buy axolotls and all the equipment necessary and axolotl food. Who knew? It seems it’s their permanent smile that makes them so appealing!

Personally, I have a small plastic axolotl, purple in colour. Granddaughter Number Four recently spent some of her pocket money on a bag of tiny axolotls, about 1.5 centimetres in size, in assorted colours and presented just about everyone in the family with an axolotl of their own. Mine sits on a bookshelf in the bedroom. 

Right, that’s the axolotls dealt with. Now, what about the cows? Social media is full of pictures of a cow using a stick to scratch its back. Here’s a link to an article about it. People are amazed. Who knew that cows were so clever? Not only that, but what a surprise that humans are not the only tool-users. 

And yet when cows were largely kept outdoors in fields they always knew when it was time to make their way towards the milking shed. Once in my childhood we were playing in the cow-field behind our house. The cows ignored us until a small friend arrived with her dog and the cows took offence. They pursued us across the field, the small friend with the dog in her arms, until we jumped over the ditch and escaped back into our gardens. And many years ago someone told me that cows are used rather than bulls for training bullfighters. Bulls (and cows) quickly learn that it’s more important to charge the man behind the cape than the waving cape itself.  This is why bulls only ever fight once, or so I was told.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!