Some reflections on hot weather, and on smartphone use, and children. And duck race nostalgia.

It was already hot when I went out running earlier this morning. I must not have run fast enough because my Fitbit only recognised it as a walk! It’s a good job I don’t take this stuff seriously. My weather app tells me it’s 26° and, stepping out into the garden, I find it’s warm even in shady places! 

News reports of the heatwave concentrate as ever on the south of the country - the only place that really has weather: 

“The latest heatwave is expected to push temperatures close to record levels for June and result in the hottest ever start to Wimbledon. 

Amber heat alerts remain in place until Tuesday evening for all of southern, western and eastern England with a warning of excess deaths particularly among those over 65, and increased demand on health and social care services.

Meanwhile, the London fire brigade has highlighted a “severe” risk of wildfires.

After the temperature rose to more than 30C (86F) in parts of southern England this weekend, it is forecast to hit 34C on Monday. This would make it the hottest day of the year so far, and just short of the UK’s record temperature for June of 35.6C, recorded in Southampton in 1976.”

I remember the summer of ‘76. I succumbed to heatstroke while camping in Brittany in June. We returned to England to find that not only Brittany but even Oldham had had brilliant sunshine. The final weeks os term in a hot school building were sticky! And it went on until some time after we all returned to school in September. At the school where I worked a young Frenchman, employed to give conversation classes, arrived on the day the weather broke. It rained so much in the ensuing weeks that he refused to believe we had had such a hot summer!

As we all depend so much on our electronic devices, here’s a cartoon which made me smile.

I read something recently about children starting school unable to climb stairs, unable to sit on the carpet to listen to a story - sitting on the carpet in reception class is quite an important social activity to round off the day.  “I’ve got two children [in my class] who physically cannot sit on the carpet. They don’t have core strength,” a reception teacher in the north-west told researchers. They are unable to do these things because they spend so much time slumped on a sofa watching stuff online. Not enough running and jumping!

“Less than half (44%) of the 1,000 parents of reception-aged children who replied to a survey said they thought children should know how to use books correctly, turning the pages rather than swiping or tapping as if using an electronic device, when they started school. But most, three in four, agreed that toilet training was something a child should have achieved before reception.”

“Parents are busy working and I don’t think they’re actually spending a lot of quality time with the children, having those basic play skills and conversations,” a reception teacher in the north-west said.

Here’s a link to an article about Jonathan Haidt who wrote a book called “The Anxious Generation”: he recommends no smartphones before 14 and no social media before 16. It’s very hard for parents to impose such restrictions nowadays without subjecting their offspring to bullying peer pressure and being labelled “geeks”.

Life was simpler before smartphones and social media came along. We reflected on this yesterday when we walked into the village to find a crowd on the bridge overlooking the river.

The annual ‘duck race” was taking place.

Plastic ducks, purchased by members of the public, are released into the river somewhere further up the valley. A barrier is constructed by the bridge in the village and presumably there are prizes for the first ducks to make it into the village!

It is an activity reminiscent of our 1950s and 60s childhood with beetle drives and housey-housey (bingo) at the church hall. Oh, yes! We knew how to have a good time!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Global warming. Investigating the protestors. More madness. And more silliness.

Glastonbury is underway. They seem to have sunshine, which is much better than mud. According to this map

and according to this article, most of Europe is having a heatwave, an unseasonal heatwave, with temperatures up to 40+° in southern places. In some parts of southern Italy they have banned working outdoors, hard physical labour, in the hottest parts of the day. We seem to have broken the planet!

Getting back to Glastonbury, some of the musicians have been making it all very political. And some of their statements are going to be investigated by the police. I would have thought the police had better things to do! Here’s Zarah Sultana on that topic: 

“Why is our media and political class more outraged by musicians showing solidarity with Palestine than by a UK government directly complicit in genocide?

Condemn war criminals, not musicians.

Ban arms sales with a genocidal apartheid state, not non-violent direct action groups.”

Meanwhile the craziness continues. 

Here’s yet another Gaza poem.

The weapons of war become ever more impersonal and remote. Here’s a link to an article about pilotless drones. War accelerates the production of such weaponry.

And here’s a link to an article about what kills most children in the USA: not the reluctance/failure to vaccinate children against measles and other diseases, not obesity and poor diet, but guns and cars. “In 2020, gun injuries overtook car crashes as the leading cause of death in the US for children and adolescents. From 2019 to 2021, there was a 23% increase in gun deaths among Americans of all ages, while gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in the same period.” Crazy!

On a less gloomy note, I am continually amazed at the things people write to newspapers about, consulting “advice gurus” about the silliest thongs. Here is an example: 

“You be the judge: should my partner stop trying to kiss me after kissing the cat?

Darryl thinks Ethel the cat is covered in germs. Georgia thinks Darryl’s moggy aversion is illogical. You’re the judge in this game of cat and mouth.”

 

Well, as for me, I think kissing animals is wrong, as simple as that! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Muggy weather. Gardening. Works of art.

 Today has been dull but rather stuffy, as if we need a good thunderstorm to clear the air. I took my waterproof with me as insurance when I walked to the Italian greengrocers in Uppermill. On my return I attacked the ferms and pampas grass which have been trying to take over our small front garden. I also removed the poor drowned roses which never managed to fully open after they were caught in the heavy rain showers, which have mostly fallen overnight. The roses were doing really well in the fine sunny weather but the soggy weather put an end to that. And the current warm but cloudy stuff isn’t helping. I can’t say the garden looks perfect but it looks considerably tidier than it did before I started. 

There were masses of funny little bugs which five-year-old Grandson Number Two assures me are baby ladybirds. Judging by the fact that I saw some odd-looking ladybirds on my dustbins yesterday, he may be right. Since he discovered how to manipulate YouTube Kids on his tablet, he knows all sorts of odd facts! I am hoping he will progress to books as well! 

We have been watching a series of films about Impressionism by Waldemar Januszczak, an art critic with his own particular, idiosyncratic  way of presenting material. Very informative but not dull and plodding, rather as if he is having fun not taking himself too seriously. One of the pieces he gave particular attention to was "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by the pointillist Georges Seurat. Parisians out and about on a Sunday afternoon. The city of Benoit, in Wisconsin, USA, has made a project of creating their own version of the famous painting to celebrate the revitalising of their waterfront. Organised and coordinated by a local,photographer, volunteers followed instructions and stood in prescribed places, crating what the photographer called “magical impressionism”. Great stuff! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Somebody stole my week!

 Well, it’s been a funny sort of week so far.

Monday and Tuesday went pretty much as usual. On Wednesday I went to visit a friend in a hospice on the other side of Manchester. Despite some careful journey-planning by Granddaughter Number Two, it took me far longer than expected to get there. But my friend wasn’t going anywhere and when I arrived she already had an unscheduled visitor. 

Her daughter, a very organised young woman, has set up a spreadsheet so that potential visitors can book a slot. For some reason my phone won’t let me access the spreadsheet, so I had to arrange things by Facebook Messenger. My friend was not upset by my later than expected arrival. As I said, she already had an unscheduled visitor, someone who didn’t know there was an organised rota. My friend also told me she has a better social life now that she is officially dying than she has had in years. So it goes. We’re all too busy getting on with things. She’s very philosophical about it all and still manages to post indignant comments about the state of the modern world on social media.

My return journey was marginally shorter than my outward journey, but it was still quite late when we eventually go around to eating. Maybe we are going to fit into a modern trend. According to this article we British are now becoming more European, or at any rate more Spanish, in our evening eating habits. Personally I prefer to eat a little earlier.

Yesterday also disappeared down a kind rabbit-hole. Granddaughter Number Two, home from university, awaiting final results ready to graduate, has been re-employed temporarily by Transport for Greater Manchester via a temping agency. However, they are being very slow in giving her a start date, which is very annoying as she wants to start earning money. So yesterday she invited herself around for the day, so that she could accompany me to collect her small siblings from school in the mid-afternoon. I collect them every Thursday and bring them to my house on the bus. Their mother collects the, later and gives her father a lift to chess club.

So Granddaughter Number Two duly arrived, not quite so early as the last time she did this but still in time to have breakfast with us. Oh, boy! She barely stopped talking all morning. She can talk for England, I swear. In the early afternoon we set off to walk to Greenfield to collect the small people.and catch the bus home. After we had all had pizza, scrambled eggs, salad, jam sandwiches, ice lollies and so on, my daughter took her father off the chess club, leaving her various offspring here. On her return we went for a family walk round the village, while her partner was off playing football somewhere. This is the second week on the run that we have done so. It could become a family tradition, a pleasant one on the whole. 

This is one of the advantages of having an early evening meal; a digestive stroll is good for you. 

It meant that my Fitbit told me I had done 24,000 steps over the course of the day and overachieved on my various goals! Who knew?

By the time we returned home and my daughter had had another cup of coffee and the small people finally got washed, cleaned their teeth and  put their pyjamas on so that they could go straight to bed when they arrived home, it was almost time for Phil to return from chess club.

So I finished tidying up and we followed what has become another family tradition, well, mine and Phil’s: a quiet beer while we watch another episode of whatever Italian/ Spanish/ French/ Portuguese series we are currently watching. The beer, I hasten to add, is purely a Thursday evening habit!

Today has been less busy - just a load of washing and a trip to the supermarket.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A disappointing midsummer’s day. Selfies and memes and damaged artwork. The continuing madness of the world.

 It’s supposedly midsummer’s day today but it’s blustery and wet. I lay in bed listening to the rain on the skylight windows and considered staying there all morning. When it eased off somewhat I gave in and got up and got ready to run round the village. I needed to go to the cash machine in the co-op. So I ran in the drizzle, which wasn’t too bad. I’ve run in worse weather. But it was all in vain as the ATM was faulty and couldn’t give me any cash after all. Maybe I’ll try again later, or even elsewhere. 

The reason I wanted to get cash is that tomorrow I plan to go and visit a friend in a hospice on the other side of Manchester. This will involve a bus to Oldham, a tram to central Manchester, another tram to Eccles and then a taxi. My journey planner, Granddaughter Number Two, assures me I could catch a bus from the Eccles interchange to Little Hulton Precinct and do a five minute walk from there to the hospice. But as I don’t know the area, there is a strong possibility of my wandering around getting lost. Granddaughter Number Two suggests using Google Maps at that point. She forgets who she is dealing with; I love a paper map but Google Maps usually defeat me. So I’ll catch a taxi from the interchange to the hospice. Hence the need to make sure I have enough cash. 

And before anyone tells me to get an Uber, which will be linked to my credit card, I’ve explored that possibility before now. My iPhone is too old a version to support the Uber App. I think I am becoming even more of a technophobe than I was before! So it goes!

I’ve been reading about valuable objects being damaged or lost. In the Uffizi gallery in Florence a 300 year old painting was torn at the weekend when a visitor fell backwards into it while trying to take a photo of himself in front of the painting. He was trying the “make a meme”, apparently. I do not know what the difference is between a selfie and a meme. I did consider googling it but, really, is it worth it?

Earlier this month, in a similar situation, a tourist damaged an artwork in the Palazzo Maffei in Verona. It was a crystal-encrusted chair by artist Nicola Bolla. The person taking a selfie, or perhaps making a meme, ended up sort of sitting on it and it shattered. Oops! 

I can understand taking photos of works of art. I’ve done so myself, although some galleries don’t even like you doing that. But I fail to understand the urge to include your own image along with the work of art. Is it some way of proving that you are a cultured person? Without the selfie, is there no proof that you were actually there? 

Then there is this report of a 280-year-old violin that a musician took to a restaurant with him. Someone walked off with it. It is worth £150,000!  Not the sort of thing you want to prop up next to your chair while you have your meal, especially when it’s not even yours but on loan from a kindly benefactor! At the very least, if you absolutely have to take it with you, you would ask if you could put it in a safe place while you eat! Did the thief know what he was stealing?

On a more serious note, things are still topsy-turvy in the Middle East. Mr Trump seems to think he has “brokered” (I believe that’s the term) a cease-fire, but the parties concerned either aren’t aware of this or are ignoring it. Mr Trump is getting rather cross and shouty about it.

In this country there are moves afoot to have the protest group Palestine Action declared a terrorist organisation. Jeremy Corbyn, Independent MP for Islington North, had this to say about it:

“The government’s proposal to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is as absurd as it is authoritarian.

It represents a draconian assault on the democratic right to protest - and is a disgraceful attempt to hide the real meaning of violence: the mass murder of Palestinians.

The UK government is complicit in genocide, and we see the latest move for what it is: an a to of desperation from a government trying to shield itself from accountability.

We will keep on campaigning for an end to military cooperation with Israel, and we will not rest until we have brought about the only path to peace: freedom and justice for the Palestinian people.”

There is no more to be said.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some escapist nonsense about the Feast of St John the Baptist.

 Avoiding the midsummer madness that is afflicting the world at present, here’s some less serious midsummer nonsense, concerning a DAY. I have often commented that there seems to be a DAY for everyone and everything. Today, or rather tomorrow, is no exception.

It’s the 23rd of June, St. John’s Eve. Tomorrow is his feast day. Most saints’ DAYs commemorate their death or something significant that they were supposed to have done. St John’s Day celebrates his birth, well, the supposed date of his birth. According to the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist was born 6 months before Jesus. So assuming Jesus was born on December 25th, then John’s birthday was six months before that. 

Of course, experts in such matters have since said that Jesus was almost certainly not born on the 25th of December. I seem to remember reading that setting Christmas at that date meant the old pagan celebration could be subsumed into a Christian one. Similarly, June 24th was the date of the summer solstice on the old Roman calendar: cue another bit of combining the old and the new religions. It’s also why so many places have all sorts of festivities on that date, or rather straddling the 23rd to 24th of June. 

We once arrived at Porto airport on the 23rd of June and were amazed to see small bonfires lit at intervals along the rout the tram took from the airport into the city. There were also lots of people bopping each other on the head with squeaky plastic hammers! Wikipedia tells me that St John's night in Porto (Festa de São Joãn do Porto) has been described as "one of Europe's liveliest street festivals, yet it is relatively unknown outside" Portugal. There you go! 

Then there was the year I accompanied a group of A-Level Spanish students on an exchange visit to Galicia and at least one of them expressed concern about being expected to jump over a bonfire. When asked for advice on this, I was able to tell them that on no account should they do such a thing as I had signed a paper saying they would not be taking part in dangerous sports. 

Here’s another bit of interesting nonsense: Mussorgsky’s composition “Night on Bald Mountain” was originally titled “St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain”, based on the story “St John’s Eve” by Gogol. It seems he completed the work on the 23rd of June 1867 - there’s a little coincidence!

St John is the patron saint of Florence and his “day” has been celebrated there from medieval times when St John's Day was "an occasion for dramatic representations of the Baptist's life and death" and "the feast day was marked by processions, banquets, and plays, culminating in a fireworks show that the entire city attended." He’s also the patron saint of Genoa and Turin. In Genoa and coastal Liguria it is traditional to light bonfires on the beaches on Saint John's Eve to remember the fires lit to celebrate the arrival of Saint John's relics to Genoa in 1098. (It’s amazing how far those biblical figures’ bones travelled!) Since 1391 on the 24th of June a great procession across Genoa carries the relics to the harbour, where the Archbishop blesses the city, the sea, and those who work on it. 

In the process of reminding myself about the feast of good old St John, I discovered a bit of linguistic stuff: 

“in worshipp of seinte iohan the people woke at home & made iij maner of fyres. On was clene bones & no wode & that is callid a bone fyre. A nothir is clene wode & no bones & that is callid a wode fyre fore people to sitte & to wake there by.

—John Mirk, Liber Festivalis, 1486”

A rather more modern, but undated, version reads: 

“In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire”.

Now I had always assumed, like many people according to Webster’s dictionary, that the word “bonfire” was vaguely connected to French, the idea being that it was a “good” fire. But Mr Webster confirms that it began as a “bone fire”. 

That’s enough mildly superstitious nonsense for one day. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Do you hear the dogs of war growling? Discrimination! And baby dolls!

 So the USA has been dropping bombs on Iran. What a piece of news to wake up to on a Sunday morning! Mr Trump claims to have destroyed some main nuclear sites. Other reports, not main stream media as yet, say that the damage is not as serious as Mr Trump claims. Either way, it’s escalation! 

Apparently UK business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has said our government was aware of what was planned but did not take part. Probably for the best. However, Mr Starmer has stated that he supports the US action. Probably not for the best.

Maybe someone can persuade everyone to talk. 

I also read that our government is spending £15b on revitalising our nuclear weapons. (It’s OK for us to have them, even if that’s not the case for Iran. Let’s hope we don’t fall out with Mr Trump and have him bomb our nuclear facilities.) David Cullen, a nuclear expert at the Basic thinktank, said this makes it possible for “the UK to maintain its position as a member of the nuclear club”. Hmm! The issue is partly one of skills: “The capability to deploy warheads atrophies if you don’t have warhead designers who have actually made a nuclear bomb,” he added.

Well, that’s all right then! And from the sound of things a lot of money is also being spent on security at places like Aldermaston - extra police, roof-top snipers and the like. 

Of course, if you protest about any of this you might be arrested. There was a police raid on a Quaker meeting house recently because a group of young women, members of protest group Youth Demand, were meeting to talk about protests and the state of things. 20 uniformed police, some of them with tasers, forced their way in. Six young women were arrested. Laptops and phones were confiscated! And here’s a link to a report of a related incident where police broke into the supported housing where a 23 year old activist, a young man with diagnosed autism, was arrested, taken to the police station for questioning and held for several hours. 

The Thought Police are busy these days and we’re a long way past the year 1984 and we don’t actually live in Oceania - it’s just beginning to look a little that way.

This morning I read two articles about growing up with discrimination in the UK. First there was Diane Abbott writing about the Windrush generation and the difficulties her parents had, struggling to buy a house - renting was difficult as landlords could refuse to accept black tenants - and renting rooms out to other families so that they could afford to pay the mortgage on the property they managed to buy. Then there is Adeel Akhtar talking about the difficulties of being an Asian actor. But he was sent to speech and drama classes because his parents believed they were elocution lessons that could teach him to “speak properly”. And he was a pupil at a fee-paying school. A different childhood but still facing discrimination.

On a completely different subject, here’s a photos of baby dolls ; Reborn dolls. It’s hard to tell properly from a photo but they certainly look convincingly realistic. 

It seems they are all the rage in Brazil, not for little girls - they can cost between £200 and £2,500 - but for adult collectors. Some of these have posted videos on social media of themselves bathing the dolls, tucking them into bed, pushing them in prams, just as if they were real babies. Either these women are somewhat deranged or they are seeking their five minutes of fame as influencers of some kind. Some purchasers may be genuine doll-collectors; let’s not be too judgemental! Anyway, there have been proposals to ban them from receiving public healthcare (imagine the doctor’s reaction when you ask him/her treat your ”baby”) or to prohibit collectors from using them to claim priority in queues for public services (which seems a more likely thing). 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!