Thought for the Day. Xenophobia. Apologies. Wildfires. Baby photos.

There was a time when I was a regular commuter to work and I enjoyed listening to Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4. This was before the morning commuter traffic got so bad that I needed to set off earlier, arriving at work earlier but spending less time sitting in slow-moving traffic. This meant I arrived at work before Thought for the Day was broadcast but was able to get ahead of myself, organise my day and with luck be able set off for home at the end of the day before the traffic built up once more.

Anyway, there was a time when I was a regular listener to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.  Probably my favourite “thinker” was Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose wry take on the state of the world was very refreshing. I was led to think about this when I read that the BBC had retrospectively censored the broadcast by Krish Kandiah, a theologian who heads the Sanctuary Foundation, a refugee foundation. It seems that in his “Thought” he described Robert Jenrick as xenophobic. 

Apparently Jenrick had said, ‘I certainly don’t want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally, and about whom we know next to nothing.’ According to Krish Kandiah, “These words echo a fear many have absorbed. Fear of the stranger. The technical name for this is xenophobia.”

Jenrick probably would not want to share his neighbourhood with quite a lot of men who support far right groups. After all he’d know next to nothing about those men either. I suspect he would make sweeping generalisations about council house dwellers, similar to those he makes about refugees. 

The BBC has apologised to Jenrick … but not to the refugees! 

Today is cooler than yesterday but as wildfires burn in the North York Moors national park - burning since Monday - as well as similar wildfires in other parts of the UK, firefighters are warning that we are hitting a record number of wildfires this year. “In England and Wales alone, crews have already tackled 856 wildfires this year, the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) said – a third higher than the record-breaking totals seen in 2022 and six times the number recorded last year – warning that hot and dry weather means the figures will likely only increase.”

And in this article, Spanish journalist María Ramirez points out that heatwaves are an annual event in her country, something people expect to happen. But she tells us, people like herself from Madrid are finding it more difficult to escape the heat by heading to the north of Spain, as places like Galicia are also experiencing greater heatwaves than preciously. In fact, all of Europe is heating up. We need a concerted, international effort to reduce emissions and fight climate change before it is too late. 

Now, here’s little bugbear of mine. My eyes were drawn to this headline: 

‘We popped the baby in a flowerpot!’ Anne Geddes on the beloved photos that made her famous

I have no objection to photos of babies. In fact I like looking at photos of friends’ babies, just as I enjoy looking back at photos of family members as babies. What I object to is “cute” photos of babies in unnatural poses, sometimes babies only weeks old, their little limbs manipulated into ridiculous, possibly cruel and abusive positions. So the idea of “popping a baby into a flowerpot” for a photo-shot is anathema to me, even if said flowerpot has been lined with fabric! 

Yet such photos have made Anne Geddes famous. 

Here’s a link to an article about her career. Rant over!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Hot weather. Out and about. Volcanic eruptions. A case of the pot calling the kettle black!

It’s very hot here. We’ve just come back from lunch with an old friend in Manchester. Sam’s Chop House was deliciously cool and the food was good, as was the company. The tram and bus journey home was sticky but we have an old stone house which is delightfully cool to come home to.

They say that we can see meteor showers at night at the moment. There was some fear that the bright sturgeon moon would block out the meteors with its brilliance. Maybe that was the case. Last night I saw the bright moon, now just past its full-moon glory but I didn’t see any meteorites. I didn’t really expect to see any as we are often deprived of celestial phenomena around here.

Volcanoes are being busy. Mount Marapi in Indonesia erupted again on Tuesday, sending an ash plume into the sky. And Etna has been erupting again, as reported today: “An important lava flow is currently underway on Etna, in Sicily. In the last few hours, a new effusive hole has been identified on the southern slope of Bocca Nuova, at an altitude of three thousand meters. The lava flow is heading south and is being constantly monitored by personnel. national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) experts are on the ground assessing the situation.” I have a soft spot for Etna, having seen it in eruption more than once. 

We might find high temperatures hard to deal with at times but we don’t have to worry about lava.

Here’s a thing: 

“The Trump administration has accused the UK of backsliding on human rights over the past year, citing antisemitic violence and “serious restrictions” on free speech.”

That’s rich coming from America!

“The report cited the “safe access zones” around abortion clinics, which it said “could include prohibitions on efforts to influence … even through prayer or silent protests”.”

Ah, so that’s what some of it is about. Meanwhile, people are still being arrested by ICE agents, as in this account.

New Zealand woman and six-year-old son detained for three weeks by Ice in US enduring ‘terrifying’ ordeal | New Zealand | The Guardian

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Heatwaves. Our odd weather again. A bit of shared nostalgia for “politer” and more positive times. Gender stereotyping.

 My daughter and I sat in the park in Uppermill yesterday while the two smaller grandchildren played in the river with a host of other children. Damp children being provided by well-organised mummies with dry clothing was the order of the late afternoon. And yesterday the weather forecast for today was for a continuation of yesterday’s fine and sunny weather. 

I was looking forward to going into Manchester in light clothing for a hairdressing appointment. However, this morning the forecast changed to showers and sunny intervals. So I put on a light jacket, packed an umbrella and a light scarf to put over my hair in case my trusty umbrella was less trusty than it should have been. It was cloudy and cool when I set off. Rain splattered the windscreen of the bus. It rained on me in Manchester. Quite a lot of people were expressing their puzzlement at where the sun had disappeared to. 

By the time I left my hairdresser’s the rain had departed, the clouds had cleared and the temperature had risen to the high 20s. The great British summer continues on its uncertain way. In the news this evening I heard that parts of the midlands and the south and east of England are on yellow alert for extreme heat. 

It could be more severe. The south of Europe has temperatures at 40+°. Wildfires are reported to be burning in parts of Spain and Portugal, in addition to those already reported in Greece and Turkey. Our daughter and her partner have taken the small people off to Croatia, somewhat miffed that they are leaving good weather behind here. Croatia, however, is one of the places under alert for high temperatures. I hope they have packed enough sunscreen and sun-hats.

Apparently this is our fourth heatwave of this summer but the people who study these things assure us that this summer is not exceptional. I feel it may be exceptional for the NW of England. 

I returned from Manchester on the tram, arriving in Oldham just in time to miss my connecting bus home. I had a couple of fairly weighty bags of odds and ends I had picked up in Manchester or I might have considered walking a couple of bus stops along the way. But in the end I sat in the shade and chatted to a lady in a similar situation. We swopped stories, as you do at bus stops, and lamented the parlous state of our town Oldham. She remembered the town centre she grew up with and which I got to know in the early 1970s, a bustling town with Woolworths, C & A, then Debenhams and other stores, as well as a busy market. Now the big names have gone, replaced with a lot of charity shops, like so many town centres. And the market is much reduced. 

Together we lamented the feeling of optimism we had back in the early 1970s, the feeling that everything was improving and that people were becoming more tolerant and open. Now it seems that nastiness rules in a lot of areas. One such is the situation of women described in this article, not necessarily trans-gender people but simply women who don’t fit the gender stereotype who are being quite aggressively challenged in ladies’ toilets and changing rooms.

It may well be that people as a whole are not really less tolerant than they used to be but that they are generally ruder and more willing to shout out about it, whereas in kthe past British reserve made a lot of people keep quiet. However, I am not totally convinced about this. Other nations have traditionally been more outspoken about such things. More than twenty years ago for a while I wore my hair very short indeed. I accompanied a group of A-Level Spanish students on a visit to Malaga and one day paid a visit to the ladies’ toilets in a cafe. I was greeted with horror by some ladies who declared that I was not allowed in there as this was for ladies only. I had to reassure them that I was indeed a lady. The Spanish teacher with our group told me that it was my hairstyle that had done it: women of “a certain age” like me - I was in my fifties - wore their hair longer! Of course Iw was challenged!! And this was long before gender identity was an issue.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Summer is back. Reading habits. Nostalgia for toys and for sweets and ice lollies. More on arresting protestors.

With temperatures forecast to reach the mid twenties this week, it seems that we are back in summer mode. For a few days we’ve had rather thin sunshine, cool winds and decidedly chilly evenings. But maybe we can get back into shorts and t-shirts or floaty summer dresses. It is August after all!

With that in mind, here are a couple of summer-related cartoons:

In the days before the kindle made summer reading more portable our son used to sacrifice clothing in favour of books when packing to go on holiday. But then, he is a proper reader, not one of those who only read when they go on holiday. 

Granddaughters Number One and Number Two are both readers, especially Granddaughter Number Two, who is a compulsive buyer of books, a great fan of second book shops. She recently expressed a wish to move in and live in one we discovered in Whitehaven! As a rule though they tend to read books that fend to be spin-offs from Tv series, fan-fiction and that sort of thing. This week though we were involved in a three-way discussion in our family chat about Jessie Burton’s novel “The Miniaturist”. Quite impressive!

Here’s a link to an article about young adults buying Pokémon cards and Lego sets, not as presents for younger siblings but out of nostalgia for their own fairly recent childhood. 

I can’t think of a toy I might feel so nostalgic about that I would want to buy a new one now. And I don’t think the bubble gum with photo cards of pop singers that my friends and I collected back in the day is still on sale now. At the age of 10 I had picture cards of American singers I had not really heard of and whose records I had never heard as we did not have television and my parents didn’t listen to that kind of radio programme! 

Granddaughter Number One is part of nostalgia-toy trend without having gone to the trouble of re-purchasing stuff. Doing some sorting of her belongings, she found her old Tamagotchi digital pets and revived them. So for the last few weeks she has been carrying them around with her and keeping track of their “needs”. This is what young adults do for fun apparently! 

On the subject of nostalgia, here is a link to an article about the chocolate bar called the Freddo, a small chocolate bar depicting a frog. The daughter of the creator laments the increase in price of this chocolate bar. But almost anything that cost 10 pence in the 1990s will inevitable cost a good deal more nowadays. 

Somehow we ended up discussing this sort of thing the other day in conversation with my daughter and the aforementioned older granddaughters. The item in question was the Jubbly, often referred to as a “Lubbly Jubbly”, a tetrahedron - 4 sided carton of orange juice, never to my knowledge simply drunk but frozen. You then cut off the top and gradually pushed up the orange flavoured ice, gradually sucking the juice out until all you had left was ice! In the 1969s they cost three pence, three OLD pence! And as our local corner shop didn’t sell them, we had to walk the best part of a mile to a shop which stocked them! Those were the days.

That’s enough nostalgia. On a more serious note, here's a headline from today’s newspapers: 

Anyone showing support for Palestine Action 'will feel the full force of the law', justice minister says.

And here is a relevant cartoon:

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Protestors here and there. Arrests. Some thoughts about AI. And odd footwear.

At some point yesterday there were reports of 200 people arrested at the protest in London against the banning of Palestine Action. Later it was up to 365. One for every day of the year. This morning it was over 400. Somewhere I read that the police have never arrested so many people at a single event. How many of them, I wonder, are pensioners? Then there is this:

“Officers searched the bags of those arrested. In one backpack handled with blue forensic gloves, they uncovered some bread and a milk carton filled with water.”

Did they really expect peaceful protestors to be carrying dangerous stuff with them? And surely the police have better things to do with their time! 

In Tel Aviv meanwhile, it seems that tens of thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating against the latest proposals to continue and intensify the attacks on Gaza. 

Here are some photos of women protesting outside Greenham Common back in the early 1980s. Some of the elderly ladies being arrested at present might well be those same women. 

I’m reading quite a lot of stuff about Artificial Intelligence and how it is being used at the moment. Apparently fans at a Rod Stewart concert were divided in their feelings about his using digital reincarnations of recently deceased Ozzy Osborne, reunited with Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley. Abba concerts have taken place using avatars but the real Abba members declined to appear on Eurovision, even in digital form I understand. 

Jim Acosta, a former CNN White House correspondent, interviewed a digital recreation of Joaquin Oliver who was killed at the age of 17 in a 2018 high school shooting in Florida. The avatar of the teenager was created by his parents, as part of a campaign to change the gun control laws in the USA. They said it was a blessing to hear his voice again. 

Ii’s understandable that people want to hear the voice of loved ones who have died. I have heard of people phoning them  just to hear their voice telling them to leave a message, just Jesse calling his girlfriend in Breaking Bad. And I suppose that it’s a logical extension of looking at lots of old photos or film clips. And yet I still find it rather disturbing that possible digital recreations could become a regular thing. Even more disturbing is labelling such recreations “griefbots” or “deathbots”. Here’s a link to an article. 

But is it any more disturbing than making death-masks, which apparently used to be something that happened before photography was available? Or the strange picture being constructed out of the hair of dead relatives as described in the opening chapter of the novel La de Bringas by Galdós.  

However, AI should not be allowed to take over our lives. 

On a less serious note, here’s some rather odd footwear. How difficult must it be to put such shoes on? 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Experiencing Manchester. Aging terrorists? Solidarity amongst allotmenteers.

 Granddaughter Number Two has her best friend from university visiting at  the moment. She travelled from somewhere small down south by train - three trains and then a tram. This was her first experience of trams. She said she thought she had the whole tram experience: lots of shouty people and one person being escorted off because he didn’t have a ticket. This morning the two friends went into Manchester, further enhancing her tram experience by encountering drunken football fans at 11.30 in the morning. It probably takes a special skill to be drunk already at that time of day. 

This is Granddaughter Number Two’s account of their morning:

“So everything is going down in Manchester today - on the way in we had crazy drunk football fans (11:30 drunk 🙄), we saw a My Body My Choice protest, then a Jesus Can Fix It group who were saying sh*t like “something will always come between you and your wife”, then a Palestine protest and THEN a conspiracy theorist.”

That sounds about par for the course for a Manchester Saturday. Meanwhile, this is going on in London:

“Arrests have begun in central London at the largest demonstration relating to Palestine Action since the group was proscribed as a terrorist organisation.

The Metropolitan police said they had drawn officers from other forces to help form a “significant policing presence” in the capital as it faces a busy weekend of protests.

By Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people had gathered in Parliament Square for a demonstration organised by the campaign group Defend Our Juries.

Protesters have previously held up placards supporting the proscribed group in Parliament Square. Defend Our Juries announced earlier this week that today’s events would go ahead despite police warnings.”

I wonder how many of those arrested are above pensionable age. This article tells of increased resistance to the banning of the Palestine Action. 

‘Gross abuse of state power’: defiance grows over UK ban on Palestine protest group | Protest | The Guardian

Retired former teachers and according to that article an 81 year old former British magistrate who was honoured by the late Queen Elizabeth II for services to the community, are among those reported to have been arrested and held for questioning, having their homes searched and so on. It seems that my generation is a generation of possible terrorists! Maybe it’s a consequence of having seen May’68 kick off on Paris, anti-Vietnam War protests and such like. We thought we were changing the world and now it seems we still need to do so. 

On the subject of aging activists, it seems that Jeremy Corbyn has been criticised, on the Guardian letters page of all places, not for terrorist activities buy for his allotment skills’:

““Is this government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?” Jeremy Corbyn wrote in the Daily Telegraph (Jeremy Corbyn warns rules on council asset sales threaten allotments, 5 August). Never trust a man who can’t tell his parsnips from his potatoes: leaving spuds in the ground till February means they’ll have been spoiled by frost or rot. And I say this as a lifelong Labour voter.

Dariel Francis

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Mr Corbyn has defended his gardening knowledge: 

“I must respond to a scathing attack on my gardening knowledge and integrity. Dariel Francis claims I am wrong about “leaving spuds in the ground till February” (Letters, 6 August). I never said I would – and I reject this scandalous and deeply hurtful accusation. I said “digging ground for potatoes” in February. That means manuring and preparing the ground, before planting the potatoes in March or April. Save our potatoes – and save our allotments!
Jeremy Corbyn MP
Independent, Islington North”

Other allotmenteers (is that really a word?!) also sprang to his defence:

“May I, as a fellow allotmenteer and former parliamentary colleague of Jeremy Corbyn, defend him from the attempts to imply that his statement about “digging ground for potatoes in February” betrays an ignorance of the potato cultivation calendar? Like Jeremy, I will be digging the ground in February, but preparing the plot for the planting which, of course, takes place on Good Friday, and not lifting any of my maincrops, which will have been long scoffed or stored.
Stephen Pound
Labour MP 1997-2019; chair, Framfield Allotment Association”

 Dariel Francis should have kept her eyes peeled and read the quote from Jeremy Corbyn more carefully. Like those of many current Labour voters, this attempt at discrediting Mr Corbyn is half-baked. 
Dr Barbara Henderson
Spittal, Northumberland

There’s even a suggestion for name for his new party: 

“Jeremy Corbyn may inadvertently have stumbled on a name for his new party (Jeremy Corbyn warns rules on council asset sales threaten allotments, 5 August). The Allotment party embraces opposition to local authorities selling off public land, green issues and community involvement, with a nod to allotting tasks in a democratic way. Perfect.
Toby Wood
Peterborough”

Oh! Boy! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!