On birthdays, celebrations, and confirmation of how wet the country has become!

We seem to have had a week of birthdays. Well, not quite a week but very nearly and certainly an extended weekend of celebrations. Last Wednesday was our daughter’s birthday. Wednesday is not a good for working teacher to celebrate a birthday so we put it off until the weekend.  Saturday was an old friend’s birthday. We usually celebrate each other’s birthdays with lunch at the pub next door but Saturday was just too busy so we postponed that too. Today is Grandson Number One’s 19th birthday. 

So yesterday we put our daughter’s and Grandson Number One’s birthday together and had a joint celebration dinner at our house. They shared a cake, with one candle, which we lit twice and sang the Happy Birthday Song twice over, to the delight of he smallest members of the family. A good time was had by all. Today my old friend and I went out to celebrate her birthday over lunch. Things can quieten down again now.

Earlier this morning I ran round the village as usual. It didn’t rain on me! 

Over recent times I have had numerous conversations with friends and acquaintances and even complete strangers about how wet it has been recently, sometimes I have thought it may just be our perception but today I had confirmation in a report in the newspaper. 

“UK harvests of important crops could be down by nearly a fifth this year due to the unprecedented wet weather farmers have faced, increasing the likelihood that the prices of bread, beer and biscuits will rise.

Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has estimated that the amount of wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape could drop by 4m tonnes this year, a reduction of 17.5% compared with 2023.

The warnings come as farmers have borne the brunt of the heavy rainfall and bad weather experienced over the winter, with the UK experiencing 11 named storms since September. In England, there was 1,695.9mm of rainfall between October 2022 and March 2024, the wettest 18-month period since records began in 1836.”

There you go. It’s not just my imagination. No doubt this will lead to another rise in the cost of living!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Muddy paths. Seeing wildlife. Works of art.

 On my usual daily running route is a stretch of woodland, not really dense enough to be called a wood but still a fair collection of trees in the valley bottom. The path through the trees has been consistently muddy for months. For a short time it was also frozen but that didn’t last long. People walking that way have taken detours off the path, establishing a new path in places and wearing away the grass and undergrowth. 

Yesterday, for the first time in ages, after a few days without any significant rainfall the path had dried out. Now, since we came home from our visit to Portugal Phil has not been out walking much, hardly at all in fact. He’s been busy but he’s also been rather knocked flat by some kind of virus - sore throat, cough, runny nose, generally feeling under the weather. Even before that he would decline to walk the path through the trees while it was so muddy. I ran it anyway, as my filthy running shoes bear witness! 

But yesterday I persuaded him to do that walk with me: past the cricket club down the lane, past the first millpond, through the trees, past the second millpond and the  circumnavigating the village centre and back home. The path was fine. We were rewarded with the sight of two deer on the hillside and the heron flying over the second millpond. All good.

During the night, of course, the rain returned. I expect the path is a quagmire once more. It was still raining when I woke up this morning so I chickened out of running and didn’t inspect the path. I needed a couple of things from the coop store and took a fairly brisk stroll in the rain before breakfast. The weathermen have promised some finer weather this afternoon. Maybe we’ll get a longer walk.

Here’s an odd item of not quite local news: 

“A town centre in Lancashire was placed in lockdown on Saturday, with British army bomb disposal experts forced to remove and destroy a grenade.

It is understood that a member of the public had donated items to a heritage centre in Darwen which included the grenade.

Emergency services were called to Railway Road at about 2pm and police cordoned off a large area of the town centre as bomb disposal experts carried out the operation.

The British army said the grenade was subsequently removed from the area and destroyed by a team from 11 Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Search Regiment RLC, its specialist unit responsible for improvised explosive device and conventional munitions disposal.”

I wonder how long the donator of the historic items had had a potentially dangerous grenade sitting in his attic. 

We had got into the habit of listening to Desert Island Discs after breakfast on a Sunday morning, always an interesting selection of music and anecdotes. And now the BBC has changed their Sunday schedule so that omnibus editIon of the everlasting radio soap opera, The Archers, now airs from 11.00 til 12.00. There was a time when we listened religiously to The Archers but during lockdown we found their system of recording individual actors, to avoid risking their infecting each other with covid, was unsatisfactory and we got out of the habit. Now, annoyingly, the soap opera has taken the Desert Island slot. Perhaps I should complain to Broadcasting House.

On Radio 3 there is a programme similar to, but not the same as, Desert Island Discs. Famous people talk about the events, music, people, books which have influenced them over their lifetime: This Cultural Life. Yesterday the guest was the sculptor Anthony Gormley, who created The Angel of the North, up in Gateshead, and the iron men, all cast from his own body, which stand on the beach, and sometimes under the water, at Crosby beach, not far from my birthplace, Southport. 

I remember seeing The Angel of the North with some friends in Gateshead not long after it was erected - impressive! I’ve also seen the standing men at Crosby. When last I saw them somebody had dressed one of them in Liverpool football kit. This happens quite a lot apparently. He spoke about having erected similar figures in Belfast, one of which was “necklaced”, having a tyre placed round its neck and set alight as a kind of protest, a reflection of that city’s troubled past. But Anthony Gormley accepts that such things happen; he wants his work to be “out there”, provoking reactions. 

One of the things that he said had influenced him was work by Walter de Maria, an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New York City and whose work was connected with what they call land art, popular in the 1960s. The specific work he talked about was The Lightning Field in Catron County, New Mexico. It consists of 400 stainless steel poles with solid, pointed tips, arranged in a rectangular 1 mile × 1 kilometre grid array. It is maintained by the Dia Art Foundation as one of 12 locations and sites they manage. While the work's title, form and best-known photographs may suggest the installation attracts lightning strikes, in fact these happen rarely.

I found photos of this art work but was unable to copy them directly. So instead, here is a link which should take you to a photo.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Exotic pets and rescue centres. Exotic names. Strange vocabulary.

It’s another cold but reasonably bright day here in Saddleworth. It might be a day for a brisk walk or maybe just another day for curling up somewhere cosy with a good book.

Liz Truss has published her memoirs, the story of her six or seven weeks as prime minister. She must be possessed of amazing self confidence to bounce back from that debacle believing that people would want to read about it all. It’s not flying off the shelves and has led to a lot of jokes at her expense. But according to what I have read some 2,228 people have actually bought it during its first week on sale. This puts it in 70th place on last week’s best-seller list. Maybe they bought it just to see what it’s like. But then surely you could do that by picking it up in a bookshop and flicking through the pages. Perhaps they are friends and family and a number of curious people who only ever do their shopping online.

The Guardian’s reviewer describes the book as “one of the most shamelessly unrepentant, allpetulant, politically and economically jejune and cliche-ridden books I’ve read”.

There you go!

In the Louis de Bernières trilogy about flying ace Daniel Pitt, which I read earlier this year, two sisters acquire a white lion as a pet. They name it Baby and treat it rather as a domestic cat, albeit a very large one, and not really a wild animal at all. I never knew there were white lions, but that’s a different matter. I was reminded of it when I saw this article about Wildside Exotic Rescue – a centre near Ross-on-Wye that now houses animals from meerkats to mountain lions, mostly from UK homes. 

Now, those who know me well are aware that I am not a great animal lover. I have nothing against animals, wouldn’t do anything to harm them and am quite prepared to recognise that for some people having a pet is a kind of therapy. I simply have never felt that need myself and certainly do not want to live with an animal - wild or domesticated. But I find it hard to understand why anyone would choose a pet which you can’t stroke or take for walks. Granddaughter Number One has a number of such pets - a snake, a bearded dragon (a kind of orange lizard creature) and maybe even an axolotl! In her case it’s not particularly for showing off purposes, unlike the man who apparently used to walk a lion along Southport’s Lord Street during my childhood. But I must say I quite admire the lady who rescues exotic pets from ill-treatment.

Here’s another odd fact I gleaned from scanning newspapers:

“Elena Propper de Callejón Bonham Carter is the mother of Helena Bonham Carter and has spent most of her life in North London, married to Bank of England Director, Raymond Bonham Carter, working as a psychotherapist.

Elena is the daughter of Eduardo Propper de Callejón,  a Spanish Jewish Diplomat to France who saved 30,000 Jewish lives from the Holocaust during WWII.”

Who knew that actress Helena Bonham Carter had such a background. And what a wonderful name! Well done, Señor Propper de Callejón! 

I sometimes find Helena Bonham Carter rather “presumida”, an appropriately Spanish term for rather vain, presumptuous, self-obsessed, but you have to admire her style! 

And here’s a linguistic oddity which accompanied a photo of people sitting around talking to each other: “What people did without cell phones back in the day. Just look at it, face to face communication.  People conversating with one another.”

“Conversating” - we need to do more of it! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Language oddities. Ambitious embroidery. And a “grave threat” to Blackpool rock.

In my zoom Italian class on Monday we presented our Italian teacher with a range of odd expressions and vocabulary in English: words for the same thing which vary from one part of the country to another. There was, of course, the inevitable collection of words for a bread roll: bun, barm, bap,  to mention but three. Then there were the words for alleyway: ginnel, snicket, back, to mention three again. 

Later in the week I came across this article about minority languages, well, about Slovene in particular. The writer had been invited by a German organisation to present her recently published book, also recently translated into German. They wanted her to speak in German, about which she was rather nervous. Some fellow writers persuaded her to stand up for herself, assert her identity and address the multitudes in Slovene, which she did. Identity is important. In Slovene they have some interesting idiomatic expressions. We grin like a Cheshire cat, but in Slovene, when pleased, they smile like “a roasted cat.” If you freeze to the spot, out of fear, anxiety, whatever, you “stand there like a linden god”. And if someone leaves in a great hurry they do so “as quickly as a lightning bolt”. Interesting stuff!

I have recently been dabbling in embroidery. It’s another was of creating pictures, drawing with thread instead of pencil or pen and ink or paints. Today I read about someone who is making her own copy of the Bayeux tapestry. This seems like a singularly ambitious project and makes my own representations of dried flowers or cats inspired by Gustav Klimt seem very small and insignificant.  But what will she do with it once complete? And what will she move onto next?

There’s a bit of an anti-China thing going on in some of the mass media. The latest thing I’ve come across is a report about a Chinese threat to the seaside rock industry:

“Blackpool rock, a British seaside institution as traditional as donkey rides on the beach, amusement arcades and fair to middling weather, is facing an existential threat from cheap and inferior Chinese imports, manufacturers have said.

Ten rock makers have come together to sign a letter warning of a “grave and immediate challenge to our industry, jeopardising the lives of our employees and the sustainability of our business”.”

Goodness me! I would have thought that it you were determined to rot your teeth by chomping on a very sugary treat it really wouldn’t matter where it came from. But British rock producers are worried.

The article maintains that most British rock is made in Blackpool, which rather surprised me. Growing up in the rather more refined (according to the posher residents) resort of Southport, I was led to believe that that was where the noble art of sticking letters all the way through a stick of rock mostly took place. Things have clearly moved on since my childhood.

Looking into matters, I discovered this; 

“The earliest form of rock is said to have been sold at fair grounds, namely ‘Fair Rock’ in the 19th Century when sugar was abundant and inexpensive. Although it was not brightly coloured, striped or lettered in those days, it was of similar shape and size as it is today.”

Then there is this;

“You may not have thought it, but it takes an incredible amount of skill for sticks of lettered rock to be created, skill that machines are still unable to master even in the 21st century. Practised craftsmen of seaside rock are called Sugar Boilers and, as the name suggests, they start the process by boiling sugar and glucose in a copper pan heated to 300 degrees centigrade.”

The flavour is added after this. Traditionally seaside rock is mint flavoured but it seems that nowadays you can get bubblegum flavour, which I suppose is acceptable, but chicken tikka and pizza flavour rock  seem to me a step too far. 

Not that I plan on buying rock any time soon.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Stampeding horses. Crime reduction. Modern warfare problems.

Yesterday five horses from the Household Cavalry raced in panic through central London, spooked apparently during a routine exercise by builders dropping blocks of concrete or something. Three of the horses are fine, animal lovers will be pleased to know, but two are being treated for injuries, having crashed into taxis, buses and other vehicles. Four horses have been named in news articles today: Vida, Trojan, Quaker and Tennyson. Why is the fifth not named? Who knows?

A more important question, raised by a friend of mine is this: why do we still have cavalry? Surely we never ever again expect to have soldiers charge into battle on horseback. We came to the conclusion that it’s all for pomp and show and because “the tourists like it”. This is confirmed when you google it: 

“The Household Division forms a part of the British Army’s London District and is made up of five regiments of foot guards and two Household Cavalry regiments. The division is responsible for performing public duties and state ceremonies in London and Windsor. Such functions include the State Opening of Parliament, Trooping the Colour and Mounting the King’s Guard.”

It’s hard to believe we are in the 21st century. Even less so when you see the regalia even minor members of the royal family have to wear for such occasions!

However, as I reflected on this stuff and nonsense I recalled something I saw on television recently about Rudy Giuliani and his campaign to reduce crime in central New York. According to the report, he sent mounted police on horseback to patrol the centre. At the same time plain clothes policemen were out and about on foot in the crowds. The police on horseback were in radio contact with the police on foot. From their vantage point they could look down on the crowd and spot pick-pockets, bag-snatchers, violent incidents and other such crime as they were taking place and let the foot-police know. The latter were then able to arrest offenders in flagrante delicto. Incidents of petty street crime reduced significantly.

Of course, to carry out such vigilance the police force needs to be properly funded. That’s a different matter altogether.

But, no, we really are not likely to have soldiers charging into battle. War has taken a further step away from direct human involvement with the use of AI and drones. This makes it more impersonal, apart from for the people who are actually killed and wounded by the machine-driven attacks of course. 

We seem to have a lot of talk at the momenta about our need to be prepared to be on a “war footing” but at the same time I have heard reports that we (not just the UK but all the countries sending arms to conflict zones) could run out of actual weapons. We’ve donated or sold too many of them to war zones. And it seems that it takes a good deal longer to manufacture modern weapons than it did to make old-fashioned bullets. Warfare has become more sophisticated.

21st century problems!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Cold weather comments. Arresting protestors again. The symbolic power of shoes.

 

I had a very cold, but crisp and bright and sunny, cycle ride to Uppermill this morning. Various people I spoke to told me that it’s going to get colder and wetter towards the weekend, and maybe it will even snow! I might have expressed total disbelief at that but then, I remember a day long ago when I set out from my lodgings in Leeds to go to the university, wearing sandals and a light jacket. By the time I was returning at the end of the day there was a thin covering of snow on the ground. And that was probably early in the month of May. So I may well look back nostalgically to this day 44 years ago (the day our daughter was born) when I was in the village centre in a thin cotton maternity dress because it was warm and sunny but both extremes are possible. 

Uppermill was very quiet, especially for a Wednesday market day. Maybe everyone was huddled indoors keeping warm. Only fools like me were out and about, seriously underdressed in my cycling gear. 

We’ve just had Easter although for believers it’s not really over until Ascension Day. The Muslims have had Ramadan. And now the Jews have Passover, a festival of freedom, commemorating the Israelites exodus from Egypt and their transition from slavery to freedom. Bitter herbs are eaten to remind them of the bitterness of slavery. 

Yesterday we had reports of pro-Palestinian protestors arrested for demonstrating, and setting up a protest camp, outside Columbia University in New York. The university president called for the help of the police as some students felt threatened and intimidated the peaceful protestors. That protest spread to other universities. Today I read that hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder meal that doubled as a protest in New York. Theyshut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.

Speakers included some well-known people, such as journalist and author Naomi Klein, and Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour as well as several Jewish students suspended from Columbia University and Barnard College. 

“We as American Jews will not be used, we will not be complicit and we will not be silent. Judaism is a beautiful, thousands-year-old tradition, and Israel is a 76-year-old colonial apartheid state,” Morgan Bassichis, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, told the crowd.

“This is the Passover that we take our exodus from Zionism. Not in our name. Let Gaza live.”

Rabbi Miriam Grossman, from Brooklyn, led a prayer before the first cup of ritual wine. “We pray for everyone besieged, for everyone facing starvation and mass bombardment.”

“This Passover is not like other Passovers,” said Naomi Klein. “So many are not with their families but this movement is our family,” she added in reference to political disagreements that have divided Jewish families since the start of the war.”

Some feel threatened by the protests, and very probably there were people among the protestors who would shout out their protest, somehow blaming and shaming Jewish students for the conflict. Others join in the protest.  

Here’s a link to an article about the Stutthof Nazi concentration in Poland. In the area where camp used to stand the ground is covered with a layer of soles of shoes. Thousands and thousands of them have been found and there are moves to preserve them so that nobody forgets what used to stand there. “Stutthof, which was built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later became an integral part of the machinery to exterminate European Jews, eventually assumed a role as leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The shoes transported there – mostly from Auschwitz, after their wearers had been sent to their deaths – were recycled into leather goods such as belts, rucksacks and holsters.”

Shoes, and in this case the soles of shoes, are a powerful symbol. It’s why so many parents preserve their child’s very first pair of shoes. Recently some anti-war / pro-Palestine protests have taken the form of laying out thousands of pairs of shoes, of different sizes and colours and styles, to represent the people, especially the children, killed and missing in Gaza in recent months. We need reminders of the enormity and sadness of war. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

St. George. Baby girls. Arresting protestors.

It’s a very chilly St. George’s day. Forty four years ago, I tottered around the village with my very large baby-bump in warm sunshine. We must have had a few weeks of sunshine because I was quite tanned. One of the benefits of being pregnant is that even fair-skinned ginger-heads tan more easily. Several people told me to “get that baby born today and call him George”. “That baby” didn’t oblige. She waited until the next day. We didn’t call her George, or even Georgina. 

Anyway, the weather was quite a lot warmer on St. George’s Day 44 years ago. That was also true of the year of the pandemic. We may have been suffering a lockdown but we had a very nice spring and those of us fortunate enough to have a garden, even if only a small one, were able to sit out in the sunshine. Today is (so far anyway) quite bright and sunny but cold. When I ran this morning I left my gloves behind. That was a mistake! 

But now I have optimistically hung washing on the line in the garden, hoping that the wind will blow it dry before the cold half-freezes it.

In today’s newspaper online was this story:

“Doctors in Gaza have saved a baby from the womb of her mother as she lay dying from head injuries sustained in an in Israeli airstrike. The girl was delivered via an emergency caesarean section at a hospital in Rafah.

The woman, Sabreen al-Sakani, was 30 weeks pregnant when her family home was hit by an airstrike. Her husband, Shoukri, and their three-year-old daughter, Malak, also died.

“We managed to save the baby,” Ahmad Fawzi al-Muqayyad, a doctor at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, told Sky News. “The mother was in a very critical condition. Her brain was exposed, so we saved one of the two.”

On Sunday the baby lay wriggling and crying in an incubator in the neonatal unit of the nearby Emirati hospital. The tag around her wrist bore her dead mother’s name.”

A feel-good story of sorts amidst all the horror. But what happens to babies like this one? In her case there is a grandmother who is prepared to take her once she can leave the hospital. Where her grandmother can take her to is another matter. Some people are returning to their “homes” but mostly this is just a space where a home used to be. And there are now so many orphans from this conflict.

In the United States students at Columbia University have been arrested for setting up a protest encampment. The university president said she requested NYPD clear the encampment as it “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students”. However, during a news conference later that day, the NYPD commissioner, Edward Caban, said: “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say.”

Of course, it’s not just in the USA that such things are happening. Here too the right to protest has been restricted.  So much for freedom of speech. 

And let us not forget that St. George was not actually English. He was Turkish, I think and his mother was Palestinian. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!