Flags - expensive items! Superfoods! Making pasta in the open air!

I wrote recently about my Italian friend’s surprise on returning from a summer spent in Sicily to find bridges over the motorway festooned with flags. Today I read about the amount of money spent on flags for Mr Trump’s recent visit to the UK. Apparently when there is a visit from some foreign dignitary any of that country’s flags to be used during said visit have to be approved by their embassy. Fair enough, I suppose. It turns out that the flags submitted by the UK for approval by the US embassy were rejected because the stripes were the wrong shade of red! So 66 new hand-sewn flags were made at an estimated cost of £52,800!!! 

Wow!!! 

That’s £800 per flag!!

Paid for out of public funds too!

What if it had rained on them? 

The whole flag business seems to me to have got a little out of control but I had no idea they could be so expensive!

I don’t suppose the flags I see hanging from people’s windows or from lamp-posts are hand-sewn super-expensive objects but still, anyone who makes flags must be rubbing their hands together in glee at the moment. 

Now for something about food.

Adrian Chiles wrote in today’s online newspaper about “aztec broccoli”. He claims it’s a new superfood, called “huauzontle” in its native Mexico and “chenopoiuam mnuttalliae is it Latin name. He says a huge panful boils down to small amount, rather the way spinach does, and finishes his article with this invitation: “if you do fancy a try, bring a large van round to mine and I’ll happily give you enough to make at least one dinner.”

I’m often a little suspicious of so-called superfoods. Maybe they should be called ‘superfads’. In some cases their great popularity with the chattering class (the twittering class?) leads to people who have long regarded that food as a staple part of their diet can no longer afford to eat it. However, I keep finding interesting things to do with spinach ( Popeye’s favourite) and with lentils.

And here are some photos of pasta being made and sold in the streets of Bari. On the “via delle orecchiettel, aka Strada Arco Basso, the ladies demonstrate their skill at making “orecchiette” which tourists can buy from them. 

Personally I would be a bit suspicious of eating stuff made on wooden tables outdoors and left to dry in the sun but maybe that’s just me. I feel the same about sweets and fudge and such sold on street markets and displayed in huge open tubs with a scoop so that passers-by-by can serve themselves and pay for the privilege of doing so. 

Anyway, there has, it seems been a bit of a controversy as some of the “nonne”, the grandmothers who make the pasts, are suspected of cheating and purchasing ready made commercially produced orecchiette to sell as their own hand. This is because the demand from tourists has been so great! Victims of their own success.

One of the ‘nonne’, it seems, travels all over the world demonstrating her skill and promoting Italian produce. 

All part of the strangeness of the modern world!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Seasons changing! Poets disappearing! New terminology for a nanny state. Dogs and their entitled owners.

 I walked to Uppermill in the drizzle this morning - damp but not particularly cold. Jokers tell us we have 12 seasons in Manchester:

Winter

fool’s Spring

Second Winter

Spring of Deception

Third Winter

Actual Spring

The Pollening

Summer

Hell

False Autumn

Second Summer

Actual Autumn —- THIS IS WHERE WE ARE NOW! 

Leonard Cohen sang about the Tower of Song. The best singer/songwriters are poets and deserve their place up there in that tower. What about poets? Their words are themselves a kind of music. Are they welcome in the Tower of Song? If so, the tower should have a couple of new residents: Tony Harrison and Brian Patten who have both just died. The latter was one of the Liverpool Poets who taught us that poetry doesn’t have to follow set rules and can be about almost anything - bits of beauty everywhere!

Here’s an interesting bit of terminology: pregnancy-related crime! It’s in a report from the USA:

“In the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, prosecutors in 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, new research released on Tuesday found.”

In the absence of an actual national database of arrests and prosecutions, the report tells us, the numbers could well be higher. This isn’t solely about abortion, apparently. Drug use / abuse comes into it. In one case, after a woman gave birth the hospital tested her umbilical card for drugs. The tests came back positive for marijuana (the woman had a medical marijuana card - a state-issued identification card  that shows a doctor has recommended the use of marijuana) and she was arrested … for felony child neglect … neglect before the child was born. Of course, I don’t know any details of the woman’s history of drug use or childcare - maybe her story is more complicated - but it all smacks of the state being rather too intrusive. 

It’s also part of what I hear referred to as the ‘fetal personhood movement’, which seeks to give embryos and fetuses the same rights as a child who has already been born. Thus laws intended to protect children can be used against pregnant women. And somehow terms like ‘personhood’ and ‘pregnancy-related crime’ make it all sound legal and impersonal. And more than a little dystopian! 

I have ranted on more than one occasion about dog-owners who like to decorate trees and bushes with little bags of dog poo! ‘Entitled dog owners’, as columnist Arwa Mahdawi refers to them, “expecting some sort of poop fairy to magically clean up after them”.  Here’s a possible solution from Italy: 

“Starting next year, the northern Italian city of Bolzano will charge tourists with dogs in tow a small daily tax of €1.50 (£1.30). Local owners are also being asked to cough up an annual tax of €100 (£87) a dog to help cover the cost of street-cleaning. Bolzano, by the way, has form when it comes to keeping pet owners on a tight leash. Last year it made DNA tests for dogs compulsory so that any abandoned excrement could be tested, and its owner then tracked down and fined.”

It’s an idea! However, it might be necessary to go back to having a dog licence in order to enforce such a requirement. And there are already enough people getting hot under the collar at the prospect of ID cards being (re-)introduced to the UK, let alone reintroducing dog licences!

While on the subject of dogs, I read yesterday about outdoor swimming pools and lidos allowing dog owners to bring their dogs for a swim and splash-about in said pools. My first reaction when I saw the headline was one of horror but it turns out the plan was to do so on the last day of such places being open before closing down for the end of summer. After that the pools would be drained and cleaned. So my feeling of revulsion at swimming in a pool where dogs had been bathing was unjustified. 

My apologies, dog-owners! I recognise that you love your pets but I don’t want to share seats on buses or restaurants with them and I certainly don’t want to swim with them!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!