Anthea's Virtual Jotter (AVJ)

Food for thought.

2012-01-27T09:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve been re-reading Dickens. It’s something I’ve planned to do for a while and finally I have got round to it and I am thoroughly enjoying it. My copy of Great Expectations dates from 1965, a Penguin Classics edition, original price £1.75. Those were the days! It would probably cost more than that to by it from a second hand bookshop now. At the end of the book, along with various explanatory notes about the text was a comment on the ending, which went like this:

"Dickens, at the last moment, changed his original ending to Great Expectations. His friend, Edward Bulwer Lytton the novelist, pleaded with him to unite Pip with Estella.”

Since then, only George Bernard Shaw has ever reprinted the book with the original ending where Pip declared that the only good thing he had ever done was to help Herbert Pocket establish himself and that was all.

And there I was, thinking that giving a “happy ending” to stories, putting a positive spin on things was a modern invention, probably coming from Hollywood. I’d even heard stories of film makers coming up with two alternative endings, trying them out on a test audience and going with whichever seemed the more popular. Well, apparently it’s been going on a little longer than I thought!!

I’ve also been reading about Italian cookery. We recently watched an excellent series about Sicily where the art expert Andrew Graham Smith and the celebrity chef GiorgioLocatelli went on a tour of the island looking at ... yes, you’ve guessed ... food and art. At one point the art expert showed his mother’s old copy of Elizabeth David’s book, Italian Food, with illustrations by Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso. This inspired my Phil to get me a copy, unfortunately without the famous illustrations, for my birthday.

In the introduction to the first Penguin edition of the book Elizabeth David writes about traditional English attitudes to cookery, especially back in the 1960s. This is part of what she said:

"The French, we believe, have been forced to perfect the art of cookery owing to what we like to think is a necessity to disguise poor materials. We ourselves have, we comfortably imagine, no need for either art or artifice in the kitchen. Our basic ingredients are too superb to need the application of intelligence or training in their preparation."

Now, I think I’ve heard that argument somewhere else more recently. Where could that be? Oh, yes! Galicia!!

On a more serious note, they’re having a rough time of, not just in Galicia but all over Spain where unemployment has reached over 5 million. Emigration is back to the rate it was at 10 years ago as more and more young, and sometimes not so young, Spaniards go and seek work abroad.

In the same week that this news has come out, it seems that the Argentinean footballer Carlos Tevez is trying hard to recoup from Manchester City the fines imposed as disciplinary action. He’s down £9.3 million, I understand.

I’m pretty sure that a lot of those unemployed Spaniards would love to be ABLE to lose that much money!!

Point of view

2012-01-25T05:48:00.000-08:00

On Saturday my granddaughter and I visited the Manchester Art Gallery. We’d been planning to do this for a while and Saturday was the right time. Her small siblings were off doing something with their father. Her mother had a 2,500 word assignment to complete for Monday for her teacher training course and so getting the teenager out of her hair was a good idea. Besides, the teenager and I enjoy doing things like this together and it’s useful for her GCSE course.

So we tramped across a rather rainy Manchester city centre and spent a good afternoon looking at the paintings and having a bit of a chat about this and that.

At one point we came across this piece of sculpture.

The teenager asked me, “Why does he have smiley faces in his eyes?” I did a double take, but yes, she was right, he had what looked a lot like a smiley face - :) - in each eye, right where the pupil should be.

We speculated on the possibility of graffiti of some kind but in the end decided to ask one of the art gallery employees. She was completely amazed and confessed that she had made a series of drawings of that sculpture for an art study project and had never noticed this thing about the eyes before. Further assistance was needed so she made a call to a man who knew.

He told us that many people thought that it was a strange case of modern graffiti but dismissed it. The gallery has photos of the work dating back to the 1930s and the detail is already there in the eyeballs. This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t OLD graffiti but smiley faces are a relatively recent phenomenon. Received wisdom is that the artist did this himself as a way of making people notice the eyes but without realising why they did so.

Now I had looked at the sculpture and not seen the eye-feature, the gallery employee had drawn the work and not noticed it but the teenager spotted it straight off. The gallery employee was probably in her twenties, young enough to be into regular electronic communication. However, the teenager is that bit younger again, not quite another generation, a sort of half-generation maybe and as such of an age to use emoticons – smiling :) - winking ;) – scowling :( -on a regular basis and therefore to notice them more readily than the rest of us.

It’s all down to the way you see the world.

British utilities.

2012-01-22T05:27:00.001-08:00

Sitting reading the other day, I could hear snippets from the radio which was playing in the next room. One little bit that impinged on my consciousness was something about China investing in Thames Water. Rather like a little dog hearing the word “walkies”, I found my ears pricking up and eventually I got round to investigating.

Sure enough, the China Investment Corporation has bought 8.6% of the company which owns the UK utility group Thames Water. Apparently one advantage of this is that less public money needs to be spent on ongoing repairs and maintenance; they can spend Chinese money instead.

However, I find the whole idea rather strange. I know that this is getting into the strange alien universe of stocks and shares where unreal sums of money change hands buying and selling something called “futures” among other things. Personally I rather like to think that my future is my own and not something that you can put a price on.

I have accepted that my bank, which used to be a building society, was bought out by a Spanish bank long ago. Somehow you expect banks to be in the business of making money. I did rather naively think that banking with a Spanish owned bank might make dealing with financial matters easier while living in Spain. Load of rubbish! They might trade under the same name but effectively they run two separate banks and still charge huge amounts of money for transferring money from one country to the other. On the whole though the UK bit of it seems to have fewer bank charges than the Spanish end where they slap charges on for almost every transaction: pay your electricity bill through the bank and pay an extra €3 for the privilege!

And then there are the airports. BAA, the operator of Stanstead and Heathrow was bought out by Ferrovial, a Spanish company. And it seems that NCP car parks are now owned by Australian bank Macquarie. But once again these are the kind of enterprises that you expect to have profits as a major concern. And, goodness knows, NCP charges so much it must be raking in the profits.

Somehow, though, I feel that supply of things like water, gas and electricity should be dealt within a different way. Oh, I know that we have to pay for it and unless you go down the nationalisation route someone will want to make a profit out of it. And yet, I find myself wanting these organisations to be run by British companies where there is a remote possibility that they might understand our way of life.

Of course I am being naive and idealistic about this. After all, this is the country where schools and hospitals are supposed to run on a business model! But it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

I have already been indignant in the past that some of our electricity supply can be administered by the French company EDF, which I always pronounce according to the French alphabet - E as in the, D as “day”, F as “eff” – instead of English fashion. After all, it stands for Électricité de France. On further investigation I find that npower has been bought by Germany’s RWE.

But then, it turns out that Thames Water is owned by a company called Kemble Water, a consortium of investors led by Australian bank Macquarie. (So they have the car parks and the water company – this is starting to sound like a Monopoly game.) It’s not just Australians and Chinese, though; in December the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority bought 9.9% of Kemble. And in August a Hong Kong-based investment firm made a £4.2 billion takeover of Northumbrian Water.

It’s almost a kind of reverse colonisation. The rest of the world is taking over UK utilities.

So maybe when the Olympic Games finally arrive in London, there should be a public notice that says (like at the end of those foreign language films which say they are sponsored by TV companies form various countries), “Sponsored by China, Australia, France, Germany, Abu Dhabi ... and anywhere else that has an investment here”.

Spreading the knowledge!

2012-01-18T05:54:00.000-08:00

Although yesterday was cold enough for me to light a fire for only the second or third time this winter, today, as the weathermen predicted, is milder. The clear blue sky has been replaced by a matt grey one. The crisp frosty surface has gone and the mud has returned. Somehow this weather exchange does not seem to be working in our favour. If anyone wonders where all the melt-water has gone from the reducing polar ice caps, I think I have may have the answer. It has almost all been falling on the North West of England and is being stored in the ground in all the places where I like to walk.

I did manage to go for a walk yesterday without mishap despite the crisp frosty surfaces. Washing the white items of clothing from Monday’s fun and games has so far been only marginally successful. The still grubby items are currently soaking in one of those miracle solutions which claim to remove all stains and restore your whites to pristine brilliance. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile Mr. Gove has been attracting my attention again. This time it’s an article about his plan to give every school in the country a copy of the King James Bible, personally inscribed by him. If it goes ahead I think he’s got a bit of writer’s cramp ahead of him. However, as with his support for a new yacht for the queen, this project is getting somewhat guarded support from Mr. Cameron. Basically, it’s a case of “go ahead but find a private sponsor to fund it”.

I doubt very much that David Cameron could have spoken out against it. After all, in December he said: "The King James Bible has bequeathed a body of language that permeates every aspect of our culture and heritage. Second, just as our language and culture is steeped in the Bible, so too is our politics. Third, we are a Christian country. And we should not be afraid to say so.” He’s not really likely to do a u-turn on that position, is he? Not if he knows what's good for him.

Personally, I have a feeling that many of our schools already have a copy of the King James Bible. It’s probably in the school library somewhere. It’s just that it’s a little difficult to write it into the lesson plan for all subject areas. I wonder if it could become another of those boxes that teachers have to tick when making their lesson plans for inspection.

Differentiation – tick. Diversity – tick. Variety of activity – tick. Catering for different learning styles – tick. Intro to lesson that states aims – ticks. Plenary session that checks aims have been met – tick Dividing everything into bite-size 15 minute chunks because students apparently have short attention spans – tick. Juggling and standing on my head to make the lesson entertaining and fun – tick. Now, what else? Oh, yes, King James Bible – tick.

Oops, cynicism coming through again.

While on an education thing, here’s a little something I had confirmed. My weekend papers included supplements about memory. One of the aspects they talked about was testing. Here’s a little quotation:
“The American psychologists Jess Carpicke and Roddy Roediger investigated the most effective method for learning languages. They found that repeated testing during the learning period resulted in 80% accurate vocabulary recall when examined a week later, whereas strategies used in language study guides saw success rates drop to 30%.”

So all that time when I gave my students a quick vocabulary test at the start of each lesson I was doing the right thing. The students thought it was just another way of getting at them but also as an opportunity to win lollipops for being vocab champ of the month but really I was spot on in methodology. How good was I?

What’s in a name?

2012-01-17T06:09:00.000-08:00

On our ill-fated walk yesterday (well, ill-fated for me anyway as I ended up sitting in a muddy place at one point) we went past a house which called itself “The Monastery”. As the area is known as Friarmere, we wondered if it had in fact been a monastery at some time or if a monastery had stood in that spot. So, as you do, I went and googled it.

It turns out that the whole area we know as Saddleworth was divided into a number of “meres”: Friarmere, Quickmere, Shawmere and Lordsmere. In the seventeenth century they were administrative districts but records show them as manors in the middle ages, each with a lord and tenants.

Friarmere, as its name suggests belonged to the church, having been granted to Roche Abbey by Robert de Stapleton (there’s a nicely mixed name for you), Lord of the Manor of Saddleworth in the thirteenth century. When good old Henry VIII set about the dissolution of the monasteries, Friarmere reverted to the crown and was sold in 1543 to two Rochdale men, Arthur Assheton and Roger Gartside There are still lots of Ashtons and Gartsides or Garsides around here to this day.

In spite of the land belonging to the church, there was never a monastery here. They did have what they called a “grange” – one of the French words for farm – from which the monks, probably based over in Rochdale, administered the land and demanded taxes from the tenant farmers. And there is a hamlet called Grange in the area, oddly enough.

It wasn’t until 1765 that someone decided that Friarmere should have its own church. Before that the residents had to go to Rochdale in one direction or Saddleworth Church in Uppermill in the other. But as the population of the area grew the people in charge decided that what they called a “chapel of ease” was needed, a daughter church to Saint Chad’s in Uppermill. And so the chapel of Saint Thomas, Friarmere was built, probably using the labour of the local residents. Nobody refers to it as Saint Thomas’s though. It’s always just Heights Church.

Apparently the chapel was declared “redundant” in 1970, probably because it was easier to go to the church in Delph village, but it is a listed building and is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. People still get buried up there and I believe that of you know how to go about you can get married there.

So, getting back to the original point of inquiry, there was never a monastery in Friarmere. Maybe the folk who live in the house of that name feel so isolated up there that their life feels monastic at time. On the same lane, however, is a house called Paradise Cottage. Perhaps the owners of that one have a better view, of life as well as scenery.

In the course of my investigations I found another little story. Here it is. Saddleworth church, founded in 1200 and dedicated to St Chad has a legend associated with its location. It is said that the original site for the church was on nearby Brown Hill, but every night the stones were mysteriously moved to their present position. Eventually the builders gave up moving the stones back to Brown Hill, and built it where the stones were placed each night. The fairies (who were held responsible for the nocturnal moving of the stones) were said to have been driven out of Saddleworth when the church received its bells. The loud chiming knocked the smaller fairy bells out of tune, and they went off in a "huff" over Stanedge towards Marsden, Slaithwaite and other districts.

And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

Sparkling weather and diamond jubilees.

2012-01-16T08:37:00.000-08:00

The splendid weather that we had over the weekend – crisp and cold with blue sky and sunshine – has continued into today. I must say that I am in favour of such perfect January weather and hope it goes on a bit longer. It’s lovely to replace the soggy mud puddles with crisp frozen mud. I have, of course, been making the most of it, taking myself off yesterday for a walk around Dovestone Reservoir: quite excellent.

This morning I got up and went for a run as I often do. Well, this morning part of it was a walk as I have decided that running up Lark Hill, a steepish and very stony path going past an old quarry, is rather out of my league. However I did run the rest of the way. When I got to the top of Lark Hill a small yappy-type dog came to investigate me. His owner, muffled up in a long coat, big scarf round her neck, looked me up and down in my running gear and asked, “Where’s your dog? Have you not got a dog?” When I confessed to lacking such an accessory she went on, “Are you just walking on your own then?” She sounded rather accusing as if there were something quite perverted about walking around the countryside on your own without a dog. When she discovered that actually I was running (hence the running gear and the water bottle and so on) she was baffled and told me I should just take it easy. I suppose madness takes a variety of forms.

As my own form of madness involves getting out and about while the sun shines, I persuaded my Phil to get his hiking boots on later in the day and we set off to stomp around the bridle paths and old farm tracks around here. We were getting along fine, managing to avoid the major icy places and feeling quite pleased that the cold spell has hardened all the places that were quagmires only a few days ago, when we got our comeuppance. Well, I did anyway.

Many of the old farm tracks around here were originally laid with stone slabs, presumably so that carts could be pulled up and down them. Now most of them have fallen into disuse and are fairly grown over. Like much of the stone in this area they have been covered with the ubiquitous “Saddleworth green”, a kind of moss or lichen which is treacherous when wet. Whether this was what I put my foot on or whether it was a small patch of black ice is neither here nor there; the consequence was the same, me sitting down in a cold soggy place.

Sod’s law inevitably came into play here as I was wearing a long white jumper and a white hoodie. What better to wear when you are going to sit down in a cold soggy place? So when I got home I had to peel soggy clothes off and try to remove the worst of the mud before putting everything in the washing machine. So it goes! If it doesn’t wash out maybe I could just make a style feature of the muddy bottom look.

After finding the expression “food insecure” in yesterday’s paper, today I find Nick Clegg making comments about “the haves and have-yachts”. This is all because of Michael Gove, Education Secretary who has suggested that we, the British people, should help the queen celebrate her Diamond Jubilee by giving her a new royal yacht - £60 million. Now, isn’t that nice of him? I didn’t know that came into the remit of the Education Secretary. My feeling is that if there is a spare £60 million around then maybe Mr. Gove should suggest spending it on education.

Mr. Gove’s boss wasn’t very impressed either, by all accounts. Mr. Cameron has said that in this time of austerity such expenditure isn’t appropriate. He didn’t suggest spending the money on education or telling Her Majesty to buy her own yacht though.

And now it seems that Mr. Gove has added, “If there is not sufficient public money, then we should look for generous private donations to give every school a lasting memento of the occasion." Any suggestions? A ship in a bottle maybe? It could be a small version of the one on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The queen’s old yacht, the Britannia, was taken away from her in 1997 and is now a tourist attraction in Edinburgh. Now, if Scotland goes independent, will England want the yacht back? That’s another important consideration when you start to talk about breaking up the Union!

I leave you with that thought.

Security matters

2012-01-15T09:45:00.000-08:00

I read in the Observer today that film and media stars at the Golden Globe ceremony are being served with a very riche dessert. This fantastic pudding, slaved over for an equally fantastic six months by the chef who crated it, consists of chocolate, almonds, berries, honey and … wait for it … edible gold flakes!!!! Yes, that was EDIBLE GOLD FLAKES!!! And they cost $135 a gram!!! Apart from a sneaky curiosity as to what edible gold flakes taste like, I’m not really sure I could stomach it.

Apparently adding gold to food goes way back to the Romans: a nicely ostentatious way of making people realise how wealthy you are.

Back in today’s world, there is some speculation about whether the more politically aware and even politically active of the stars will be happy to be fed such rich fare. An American “food poverty campaigner”, Joel Berg, has already commented on the uncomfortable contrast between rich people who enjoy eating very well indeed and the 50 million American citizens living in households that he calls “food insecure”.

Don’t you just love the terminology used there? First of all, I am astounded that someone can be described as a “food poverty campaigner” but then to go on and talk about people being “food insecure” is something else again. What is wrong with saying that people are going hungry or don’t known where their next meal is coming from? I am almost tempted to say that it takes the biscuit.

Meanwhile, other aspects of life in the US of A have also been coming to my notice in the Guardian newspaper. People of my generation will probably remember being threatened that if they didn’t behave a policeman would come and deal with them. I have even recently heard a mother on the bus telling her child that if he didn’t sit still, the driver would come and tell him off. Well, in some schools in Texas children are being arrested for disruptive behaviour in class!

The schools employ a police officer to patrol the corridors. Not only does he intervene if there are fights in the canteen or if something occurs involving weapons or drugs. Oh, no! If a child answers back in class the teacher can pick up the phone and send for the police. The officer then arrests the child on the spot or issues a ticket and the offending pupil then has to appear in court. Fines are issued which must be paid, quite a difficult thing for families who might already be “food insecure”.

If fines are not paid, when the offender reaches 17 s/he will probably face a prison sentence. And then, there’s the small matter of having a police record. This means that the offender will probably not be able to get a college place on leaving school and certainly can’t expect to qualify for any kind of scholarship to help pay for their studies. So, as a result of throwing a paper aeroplane when you are 11 or 12 or retaliating in kind when another pupil pushes you, you may never be able to escape from the spiral of poverty and crime that your family lives in. Now, I suppose such people are “education insecure”.

And this is not just happening to secondary school age youngsters. Children as young as six have been arrested for disruptive behaviour in class. It’s a good job such a system doesn’t operate here or my youngest grandchild, who is going through a rather bad patch at the moment, would have quite a substantial record already.

But still, our government looks to the USA for ideas on how to deal with the supposed gangs who caused last summer’s riots. American ways of coping are held up as models to us. Maybe our government is “ideas insecure”.

Words, words, words!

2012-01-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

At some point in the Christmas holiday season someone, quite probably my Phil, was heard to say, “Humbug! Humbug!” One of the grandchildren then remarked that she thought a humbug was a kind of sweet. Yes, indeed. Why, she went on to ponder, is it called a humbug. It did spring to mind that maybe, humbugs being striped, they were so called because of similarity to bees, a bug that hums, well, after a fashion. OK, so it’s a little farfetched but there you go.

The upshot of this discussion was that eventually I got around to googling “humbug”. This is the kind of anorak-inspired thing you do if you’ve spent just about the whole of your life learning and teaching foreign languages. It may well be a form of madness but, if so, it’s a fairly harmless one.

Anyway, it seems that “humbug” first appeared in student slang in 1751, originally meaning “hoax” or “jest”. It also came to mean “nonsense” or “gibberish” and can be used to indicate a fraud or imposter. Charles Dickens helped to spread the use of the word by putting it into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol”, of course.

According to one source the word also exists in German, Swedish, Hungarian, Finn and French, but the online dictionary only confirms this for German and Dutch, giving me “fumiste” for the French translation.

So where does it come from? In Old Norse, “hum” meant night or shadow, while “bugge” was a kind of bogeyman. In Old English, to “hum” meant to deceive. So that’s one possibility.

There was a suggestion that it was derived from “Hamburg” as false coins were minted there and shipped to England during the Napoleonic wars, presumably to destabilise the economy. However, this etymology is dismissed as inaccurate because the word had already appeared in print fifty years before the aforementioned wars occurred.

I think my favourite is the idea that it came from the Italian “uomo bugiardo” which means “lying man”. Apparently there was a good deal of Italian influence on medieval English; after all a fair few of Shakespeare’s plays were based on Italian stories.

There was even on source that said it refers to a small humming insect: something small and unimportant that makes a lot of noise. So maybe the granddaughter and I were not so far out.

I also liked the Google source that simply said, “1751, student slang, “trick, jest, hoax”, also as a verb of unknown origin. A vogue word in the early 1750s, its origin was a subject of much whimsical speculation even then.”

There we are: “whimsical speculation”!!!

Words seem to have been in the news quite a lot recently, with footballers being reprimanded for insulting each other and football fans upsetting players by calling them insulting names and politicians getting into trouble for tweeting stuff that they really should have thought twice about.

In the Observer at the weekend, journalist Miranda Sawyer spoke to young people about language that they see or don’t see as insulting. One young man had to have the term “mong” explained to him as he couldn’t see why it was upsetting. This is because an earlier stage of political correctness stopped people referring to Down’s Syndrome children as “Mongols” or “mongoloid”.

And then some of the young people interviewed found it difficult to see why it might be wrong to use “gay” as a generally derogatory term if you thought something was no good.

The general consensus though was that it doesn’t really matter if you use insulting terns among your friends provided, of course, you don’t mean them in an insulting way. So one young man declared he would tell his friends, both black and white, “You are my nigger”, but in no way could he accept anyone from outside his circle referring to him in that way. Everything comes down to perceptions in the end.

It doesn’t stop me, though, from being offended when I hear loud young women on the train liberally spattering their conversation with “f***ing”, as if that were the only adjective that could be used. It sounds like a lack of imagination on their part.

Mind you, it’s beginning to sound as though I am turning into a grumpy old person. Heaven forbid that!!!

The real world and a small world once again.

2012-01-08T05:02:00.000-08:00

We switched on the radio this morning to find the Sunday omnibus edition of the Archers coming to an end. As the dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum faded away, the radio announcer informed us that if we went onto The Archers’ website we could see photos of Will’s and Nick’s “going away” outfits. Hmmm?!

Now, I seem to have listened to The Archers on and off for most of my life. I remember listening to it with my mother back when it was described as “an everyday story of country folk”. Like all good soap operas, once you know who the main characters are you can go years without listening (or watching if it’s a TV soap) and still slot back into the story line without major difficulty. But we must not lose track of the fact that these are “soap operas”, a made up story, not real life, no matter whether they keep to a real life timeline or not. They may be slightly more real than so-called “reality TV” (now that’s a rant for another day) but they are, in fact, totally invented.

So why on earth would anyone want to go online to look up The Archers’ website and look at the “going away” outfits of two invented characters. Even though I seem to recall that Will was named after another William who has also recently got married, I still don’t quite get it. It’s bad enough that we are frequently reminded of how elegant the Duchess of Cambridge is and how well that young lady dresses. But who said that a gamekeeper from a fictional estate in a fictional bit of England in an "everyday story of country folk" and his wife were style icons?

And then, surely the whole point of radio is that you LISTEN to it. Each listener, like each reader of a book, can have their own idea of what the characters look like. A character could be played by an actor with two heads and it would make no difference whatsoever. In fact, I understand that two of the actors from The Archers are married to each other in real life although only vaguely related in-laws in the soap opera. What on earth does that do to the people who insist on doing things like sending presents when a new baby is born?

OK, rant over!

Back in the real world I have been working my way through a list of jobs that have needed doing for years. The kitchen has been repainted. Various piles of old rubbish have been taken to the tip. My grandmother’s old rocking chair has been repaired; an overweight friend sat down on it too vigorously years ago and went through it. I even persuaded my son during his recent visit to go through piles of old computer games, university notes, boxes of photos and other memorabilia and throw out unwanted stuff and take away with him anything left over. I still have to go through the wardrobe once more and get rid of clothes I am never again going to wear. We still have to do a major cull of books, of which we have far too many. But I am managing to tick items off the list.

One such item is mending a display cabinet given to us long ago by my husband’s grandfather. This rather fine piece of furniture had two of its glass panels broken when my Phil sat down on a dining chair which collapsed, catapulting him into the door of the cabinet.

It begins to sound as though we have a whole collection decrepit furniture which falls apart when sat on. This is not the case. The collapse of my grandmother’s rocking chair and the aforementioned dining chair are isolated and unrelated incidents.

When the cabinet door was broken I was too busy (and my Phil admits to being too idle) to do anything about repairs. And then we took ourselves off to Spain for a while, putting possible repairs and other such jobs on hold for a while.

Finally, the other day I got my act together, made templates of the sections needing new glass, parcelled up the door and took everything off to a local glaziers’ shop. My plan was to have them cut me some glass according to my templates and then with the help of a friend have a go at mending the door. The glaziers, however, had other ideas. I was, they said, naively misinformed and overly optimistic about my skills a furniture restorer. No way were they going to cut me any glass but they did give me the name of a retired cabinet maker who would almost certainly have a go at fixing it for me.

So, I phoned him and left a message on his answering machine. And then I phoned him again because I had neglected to leave my phone number. Over the next few days Mr Fogg, the retired cabinet maker, and I kept phoning when the other was unavailable and leaving messages. Eventually, though, we managed to speak to each other and arranged for him to call in on his way back from Huddersfield or some such place.

When he arrived yesterday morning he told me, in tones of some surprise, that he had been here before but hadn’t realised that was the case until he pulled up outside our door. It turns out that he has brought his grandson here for chess lessons on a number of occasions. Small world syndrome strikes again!!!

Anyway, Mr Fogg took a look at the cabinet door, ummed and aahed a little and eventually said that he had not yet come across a repair he had been unable to complete and declared that he was looking forward to the challenge of this one. Excellent!!

We now wait to hear from him, hopefully with a successful outcome.

Here we go again.

2012-01-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

Today is the birthday of King Juan Carlos I of Spain. He spent his 74th birthday going about his kingly duties, reviewing military parades and so on.

It’s also the feast of the Three Kings. Today the Wise Men are supposed to bring presents to all the good girls and boys, leaving them for the most part on the balcony. Like good old Father Christmas they have magical powers and can fly through the air and get through locked doors. And, according to this cartoon, Spanish children expect excessive amounts of presents from the kings, just as British children do from Father Christmas.

Mama says, "Don't you think t=our little boy is a it over-optinistic about the Kings this year?"

It’s another excuse for a bit of a fiesta as the Kings lead a parade through the streets, distributing sweets to all the children. The latter go equipped with plastic carrier bags so that they can collect in one night enough sweets for the coming year. So much for a healthy diet. Here’s the route of the parade through the streets of Vigo.

While the festivities continue in Spain, it's all over and done with here. I have taken down the tree, vacuumed up the pine needles, put the decorations away for another year and deposited the Christmas cards in the paper recycling. So that's it for another year. The boy and his girls have visited and gone back to London. The small people have gone back to school and everything is getting back to normal.

2012 has begun with storms and high winds here. Time to start planning some more travelling, I think.

Meanwhile, I have just found that Spain continues to have problems with paperwork and documents. According to an article I found in La Voz de Galicia a young woman of Gallego family but born in Venezuela is having difficulties dealing with the bureaucracy necessary to give her Spanish nationality.

It’s rather reassuring to discover that things don’t change.

Let it snow, let snow, let it snow.

2011-12-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

This morning I had every intention getting up reasonably early, running the long way into the village to buy the paper, then returning home for to shower and read the paper over a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast. And then I looked out of the window to discover that White Christmas had come a week early. Around two and a half inches of snow lay on the pavements, the road, the shed roof, everywhere. So a radical re-think was called for. Earlier in the week I had read an article about running in the rain and snow and although it was full of good ideas somehow this did not seem like the moment to put the advice into practice.

Instead I did the indoor exercise routine, had my shower and read my book over a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast. Sometime later in the morning I put on an extra pair of socks inside my boots, wrapped myself up in coat, scarf, hat and gloves (two pairs) and ventured out, camera in hand, to walk the long way into the village to buy the paper. It was well worth all the wrapping up as the sky was a wonderful clear winter blue and the views were rather fine. Here is a selection. I was particularly impressed by the group of walkers in Santa hats.

On Friday I listened to Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4 going on at length, and in quite an interesting manner, about Christmas carols. Part of his thesis was that we should be accepting of new arrangements of old Christmas carols and he played some pleasant variations on old themes. I am all in favour of such ideas but I had to disagree with a part of Mr Lawson’s reasoning.

One of his arguments was that we should welcome these new, fresh versions because everyone knows the old traditional ones as they are taught in schools. This was where I had to part company with him. The old traditional carols are no longer automatically taught in schools. Over the last few years I have been to a number of school Nativity Plays.

In fact I went to one on Friday morning and saw my small grandson play the part of an innkeeper who, on being asked by a small Joseph if he and the small Mary could stay the night, had to say, “No, we’re full!” He did it quite well, as well as you might expect from such a limited role, but I really felt that he would have been better cast as the shepherd who declared, as they sat around the campfire, “I’m BORED!” Now, this would have been the perfect part for our young chap as this is one of his favourite complaints. In fact, he has been banned from saying it in our house and has to resort to saying, “I’m B-word.”

Getting back to the rant in hand: traditional Christmas carols. In the various Nativity Plays I have seen over the last few years the only traditional carol I have heard is “Away in a Manger”.

In Friday’s performance, as Mary and Joseph and a small boy with an Eeyore head-dress walked to and fro across the stage, did they sing “Little Donkey”? Oh no, they sang something called “Plodding towards Bethlehem”.

While shepherds sat on the pretend hillside, the children sang a song about shepherds warming their toes and having a little doze by the campfire which went reassuringly, “Crackle, crackle, crackle”. What’s wrong with “While shepherds watched their flocks by night”? I ask you!

The reception class children were all appealingly dressed as stars. So, of course, they had to sing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. Now I seem to remember that “Little Donkey” has a chorus that goes something like,

Ring out those bells tonight
Bethlehem, Bethlehem
Follow that star tonight
Bethlehem, Bethlehem.

So if they had sung “Little Donkey” the stars could have had their day and the children who jingled the sleigh bells in yet another new and unknown song could have done their bit too.

No, I haven’t got anything against new Christmas songs but they didn’t even manage “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem”. And you can’t even tell me that small children can’t learn the words to the old songs. I remember being an angel (what else?) in a Nativity Play and singing “Oh. Little Town of Bethlehem”. It’s mainly that the new songs the children sang all seemed a little bland and anodyne.

Now, our grandchildren go to a Church of England primary school where they are taught a fair bit about religion. My Phil has been heard to mutter about them "ramming religion down their throats". Even as a non-believer, however, I think they should learn the Bible stories. They are part of our heritage after all. But the old traditional Christmas carols are also part of our heritage.

And besides, if they don’t know the original versions of “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night” and “We three Kings of Orient are” how on earth are they going to appreciate these variations on old themes?

While shepherds washed their socks by night,
All seated round the tub,
The Angel of the lord came down
And gave them all a scrub.

and

We three kings of Orient are,
One in a taxi, one in a car,
One on a scooter,
Blowing his hooter
And smoking a fat cigar.

These too form apart of our rich heritage!!

Where DOES the time go and do you know where your liver is?

2011-12-14T03:37:00.000-08:00

Retired ladies are supposed to have loads of time for everything. So why have I found it hard to snatch a moment to post a blog recently? Between grandchildcare, doing the ladies-who-lunch thing with various different groups, running errands for my daughter who assumes that as a retired lady I have loads of time available and knitting small garments for babies recently arrived or about to arrive – to my daughter’s friend and to my friends daughter in law respectively – there just doesn’t seem to have been a moment.

And then, the weather has continued cold and wintry. I know I should expect such stuff in December but even so ... And yesterday I came across my Phil getting all nostalgic looking at a website which lists property available to rent in Vigo. On the list was the flat we used to rent in Vista Alegre with its beautiful view over the bay of Vigo. Very tempting! Maybe he just wanted to cheer himself up as he is suffering from his second cold in as many weeks.

Which brings me to an item featured on the BBC’s “From Our Own Correspondent”. This time it wasn’t from some war-torn part of the world but from Italy, not quite war-torn but suffering from economic stress and strain. My Italian teacher told us a friend of hers, also Italian, plans to take food parcels when she goes to visit her family for Christmas as four of the supermarkets in their small town have been forced to close recently.

Anyway, Dany Mitzman commented on the fact that she was cycling around Bologna in a lightweight jacket while all the Italians have got their fur coats on and about a million thick scarves and glove and mufflers. But then the Italians apparently have to protect themselves from something called “cervicale”.

She went on to explain, “ "Soffro di cervicale (I suffer from cervicale)," they tell me, making it sound particularly serious.

Most people over the age of 30 seem to have the condition, but I am still at a loss as to what exactly it is and how to translate it.

I have looked it up in the dictionary and found "cervical" - an adjective referring to the cervical vertebrae, those little bones in the back of your neck - but as an ailment, there is simply no English translation. We do not have it!”

That sounds about right, not just a stiff neck from being in a draft but a full-blown malady with a fancy name.

She went on to marvel at the way Italians have an amazing anatomical knowledge, knowing the whereabouts of parts of the body the rest of us have never heard of. I found myself nodding in agreement because in my experience the Spanish and the French are just the same. Loli, my yoga teacher in Vigo, used to refer to bits of the anatomy that I had only the vaguest idea about but everyone else in the class appeared to know exactly what she meant. This included, interestingly enough, “los cervicales” – as the BBC’s Italian correspondent discovered, some part of the neck where it joins onto the spine.

According to my Italian teacher this is not taught at school; you just kind of absorb it from your mother. (My mother never taught me stuff like that!) But even Adalgisa, my Italian teacher, expresses surprise now when she goes back to Italy and everyone knows a whole range of medicines and tablets you should take for every ailment under the sun.

On the other hand, maybe this reference to obscure bits of the anatomy is just another ploy to confuse the foreigners, or maybe just the English. It’s another version of the fish menus (and fish counters in supermarkets, for that matter) with species of marine life we didn’t know existed let alone have any idea of what they might taste like (or how to cook them). It’s a kind of Europe-wide conspiracy: “These English, some of them think they can speak our language but we’ll show them by talking about internal organs they’ve never heard of and serving them food which is completely strange to them.”

Or maybe the ailment thing is just part of the Europeans’ hypochondria. (We can call them just
"Europeans" now that David Cameron has effectively isolated the UK from the mainland!) I remember a French friend of mine many years ago warning me of the dangers of drinking too much tea and coffee. Apparently she did this one day and her stomach turned inside out. I didn’t know stomachs could do that!!!

Meanwhile, back here in the (non-European) UK Christmas advances on us at a furious rate of knots and I still have no idea what buy my six year old grandson. What do you buy for a child who seems to have room full of stuff he doesn’t play with and then declares he is bored?

But am I downhearted? Not at all.

I have completed the home-made Christmas wreath and bought a very small Christmas tree (“Don’t you want a bigger one, Grandma?”) which has now been decorated.

I was tempted to leave it at stage one of decorating when it just had the lights on. However, the oldest grandchild insisted that it needed more.

So there it is. Christmas has officially started in my house.

Running up to Christmas.

2011-12-07T04:53:00.000-08:00

This morning I joined the ranks of the crazy people who run in the rain and snow. This was not deliberate on my part. Oh, no! My plan was to run to Uppermill, the biggest of the Saddleworth villages, visit the excellent baker’s shop for a loaf, pick up some milk from the coop and then catch a bus home. It was a kind of “carpe diem” exercise: run while the weather is fine for tomorrow it may be snowing.

The important bit is “run while the weather is fine” for when I set off the sky was actually blue. OK, the wind was a little chilly but I planned to keep moving so staying warm was not a problem. Five minutes down the road and onto the Donkey Line, a local bridle path cum nature trail, and the clouds moved over and the hail started to come down, followed by the rain. So, as I said, I became one of the mad women who run in the rain and snow.

Fortunately most of my route goes through a lightly wooded area so I was protected from the worst of it and by the time I reached Uppermill it had largely blown over. So I made my planned purchases, got to the bus stop and was just wondering whether my bus had gone or was running late as usual when it arrived at the stop. Such a masterpiece of timing is very unusual!

The cold winds and snow and such are the result of December coming in with a blast of weather to remind us that it is in fact winter. November may have lulled us into a false sense of security by giving us some delightfully clear and sunny days but December so far is getting its own back on us. There was snow on top of the car on Monday when I got up to drive to my daughter’s in the early morning. And, yes, there were still some mad runners out and about.

But December has arrived and while everyone appears to be rushing round buying stuff, I just seem to be eating out. The various groups of people I meet occasionally for lunch are all arranging a pre-Christmas get-together. Am I complaining? Not at all.

A certain Miss Pippa Middleton has apparently had her Christmas present early. She has reportedly received a £400,000 advance on a book about party planning. Now I know that her parents are in the party planning business so she probably has festivities in her genetic make-up but even so I am a little suspicious. I really can’t help wondering if being the sister-in-law of the second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom might not have something to do with it. Or am I just getting old and cynical?

Words, words, words.

2011-11-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

We discussed the vagaries of the Italian political system in our Italian class yesterday and one of our number read out the contents of some cartoons she had found. Now, Angela is the sort of lady who just does not swear. She’s rather older than I am, very intelligent – I believe she read PPE at Oxford – and very well informed. But she is of the generation of educated, emancipated women who just don’t include swearing like a trooper in there idea of gender equality. She’s practically the first person I have met who is even less likely to swear than I am. And I have been known to cause laughter when I do swear; on one occasion in a departmental meeting at college I was provoked into uttering that expletive that begins with F***. The young teacher sitting next to me grinned broadly and turned to say to me, “Oh, say it again, Anthea, say it again!”

Anyway, Angela was reading out her cartoon and, from her script, read the word “merda”. There was an almost audible but quite deliberate intake of breath as everyone was more than a little mock-shocked to hear such language from our very own Angela.

Coincidentally I seem to have been reading and hearing quite a lot about swearing recently. Mark Lawson was writing in the Guardian newspaper about how taboo words have been progressively losing their power. A judge has even ruled that swear words should not be considered offensive of it could be demonstrated that the speaker uses them so often that they are such a habitual part of his language that he doesn’t realise he is swearing. That sounds a bit like giving in to me! Mark Lawson wrote:

“Recently, in a move that still surprises me in retrospect with its potential riskiness, I asked a supporter at a League Two football match if he might consider minding his language. The bloke had been vocal throughout the first half, hollering the C-word and F-word in various combinations at the referee, assistant referee and the home team.

Although all 14 men had more than earned this derision by their performance, I was present at the game with a 12-year-old and there were other much younger children in what is commonly considered the family section of the ground. At half-time, in the queue for the loo, I mentioned to the man that, while there was widespread support for his views, it might be better for the children to hear a bit less swearing. His non-ironic response: "Swearing? I ain't been [sexual adjective] swearing, you [genital noun]."

I have had similar arguments with my teenage granddaughter who assures me that “bloody” and “damn” are not swear words at all. Maybe I am just getting old and cranky.

The BBC has been joining in with a featurette on Radio 4 about words that people use to replace swear words. “By the Duke of Argyll” was mentioned quite frequently. Many families have their own collection of such euphemisms. “Oh, bobbins!” and “Oh, poodle-droppings” have been heard in our house on a regular basis for quite some time. And the other day, in an attempt to put a stop to the use of “idiot”, “stupid” and so on, I persuaded the small grandchildren to come up with some new insults. It’s quite amusing to hear them say to each other, “You Thomas the Tank Engine”, “You Sponge Bob Square Pants” and “You Squidward”.

While new words are in the air, I note with interest that the Académie Française has just added some official neologisms to that wonderful language. They have always been picky about allowing foreign imports to be included in the official French vocabulary. Football and computer vocabulary has given them big headaches. But this article was about some interesting new additions to the language:

aigriculteur – a farmer (agriculteur) who is not happy with his lot and has become embittered (aigri)

phonard – a pejorative word for someone who overuses the mobile phone

photophoner - to take a photo with your mobile phone

ordinosore - an out of date computer (ordinateur + dinosaur)

The next two are my favourites:

bête seller – a particularly awful literary work that becomes an instant hit

attachiant – an adjective to describe someone you cannot live with but cannot live without. It combines attachant (endearing) with chiant (a bloody nuisance).

Getting back to Italian cartoons, here is one posted on Facebook by an Italian friend of mine:

The crusty old gent says to the small boy, “Just think, when I was your age, I was already working”. Small boys replies to crusty old geezer, “Just think, when I am your age, I will still be working”.

And that is one of the reasons why a reported 30,000+ people marched through Manchester today and through a whole lot more cities throughout the country. Time for the words of protest to be heard.

Women’s work.

2011-11-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

A (male) friend of ours has been round this morning asking for help with his computer, not from me, I hasten to add, but from our resident ID expert, my Phil. When the problem was sorted he took his leave, declaring in passing that he had a pile of ironing to do. His parting shot: “A woman’s work is never done!”

Meanwhile, I read in today’s Observer that young women are now earning more than men. I find this hard to believe as for so long the pay gap has been there, relegating women to the lower scale. However, according to Gaby Hinsliff, statistics show that women in their 20s now earn 3.6% more than men their age. This might prove to some that finally women’s superiority is being rewarded.

I can remember, back in the days of the 11+ exam, learning that the pass mark was lower for boys than for girls. Otherwise more girls than boys would have made it to the grammar school. The poor boys would have been relegated to the secondary modern and, who knows, maybe women would have ruled the world. But, no, it was accepted that boys were late developers and so the bar was lowered for them.

Nowadays it appears that girls on average still do better at GCSEs and A Level exams than boys. Examinations are geared, it seems, to reward girls’ ability to knuckle down and get the work done. What a surprise!

In the past there was resistance to giving women equal pay although not universal. According to Gaby, the mayor of New York way back in 1911 supported giving women teachers the same pay as men because this would encourage the employment of more male teachers by removing the financial incentive to employ women. It’s funny that there are still more female than male teachers, although still more male than female head teachers.

Women clearly still have their problems.

Now, the other day our doorbell rang. On opening the door I found a young woman with a large bag over her shoulder and a laminated card in her hand. On the card in large letters it said, “HAWKER”. She explained that she was on a job creation scheme and asked, with resignation in her voice, whether I might like to take a look at the goods she had to sell. I’m afraid I did not want to look at her wares and wished her the best of luck, thinking inwardly that maybe they should just have given her an ID card stamped with the words; “REGISTERED BEGGAR”. Presumably she has to tramp around form house to house like this in order to claim her Job Seeker’s Allowance but is this really the best kind of thing that a Job Creation Scheme can come up with?

Thank you.

2011-11-24T13:20:00.000-08:00

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Here is this year’s pardoned Turkey. If he really is that big then I’m not surprised President Obama wanted to stay on the right side of him.

We were talking about this during the coffee break in our Italian class the other day. Well, we weren’t really talking about Thanksgiving Day as such, and certainly not turkeys, but it came into the discussion.

What started it all was talk of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in London which quite a lot of us wanted to go and see. My Phil and I had plans to go and stay with Offspring Number One down in London and take in the exhibition while we were there. However, not one of us has managed to get tickets.

The exhibition has received so much splendid publicity that all the tickets are sold out. There has been so much activity by ticket touts, some of them selling tickets for up to £500, that the gallery now plans to institute checks on who purchased the tickets and people may be denied entry as a result. They have apparently reserved a certain number of tickets for direct sale each day but I imagine you have to get up at the crack of dawn to queue for these. Somehow I don’t see the night owl I am married to doing that.

Talk moved on from that exhibition to other places where we have all queued (or refused to queue) at some time in our lives. One of our number said that right now is a good time to visit exhibitions for which you normally have to queue for hours. His reasoning was that the British won’t be there en mass because they don’t go to many places when there is not some guarantee of sunshine and warm weather and the Americans won’t be there because they’ll all be back in the good old US of A celebrating Thanksgiving and eating turkey. All we need to do, he finished off, is to find some reason for the Japanese to stay at home in the third week of November and we’ll be laughing.

Walking back to the station later I heard a heart-warming story from another member of the class. Years ago she had taken her small son to London for the day to see the Tutankhamun exhibition. After queuing for some time she resigned herself to just taking him in to see the regular exhibition of Egyptian mummies. At some point one of the museum attendants overheard her say to her son that it was a pity they had not managed to see all the King Tut stuff. The attendant asked where they had come from and on learning that they had travelled form Bolton he told them to stand against a wall, join hands and close their eyes. On his command they were to take a step backwards and only then could they open their eyes. They did as they were told and found themselves inside the Tutankhamun exhibition. The museum chappie had opened a partition for them and got them in. Now that is a story to restore your faith in humankind.

On the subject of restoring faith, we finished watching The Way. And yes, the Martin Sheen character does find inner peace and has his faith restored. Just about everyone finds inner peace and even the annoying Irishman with writer’s block regains his faith. Not only that but the American father changes his whole life style and apparently does not go back to being a pressured ophthalm.... eye doctor somewhere on America. In fact, the last time we see Tom Avery (aka Martin Sheen) he is still carrying a rucksack but this time has a big grin on his face, instead of the frown which he carried through the north of Spain, and seems to be making his way through Morocco.

Time to give thanks?

Finding the way.

2011-11-23T04:28:00.000-08:00

We had a rather interesting discussion in the Italian conversation class yesterday, all about the new Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, whose name is an anagram of “rimontiamo” – we rise up again. Is this a good omen for Italy? the Euro? the Eurozone? the European Union? We shall see.

All of us were a little disturbed about what one Italian journalist described as a “colpo di stato” – a coup d’état – effectively giving Italy an unelected government. This was carried out by the Italian President, Mr Neapolitano. Maybe this is what happens when your president sounds like an ice cream.

Most upset was the Canadian in our group. This lady was very worried by the fact that Mr Monti has worked/works as an advisor for Goldman Sachs. According to her all those connected to such an organisation must be “ladri” – thieves.

There followed a certain amount of national stereotyping: Northern Europeans being more organised and Southern Europeans being a bunch of tax evaders. On that basis we found it hard to know where to put Ireland and how to explain its precarious situation. Our resident Italian says that many, if not most, Italians will actually feel more in common with the now departed Mr Berlusconi than with Mr Monti who is better known in European financial circles than he is in his own country.

One thing we reluctantly agreed on was that we have not seen the last of the singing, womanising Mr Berlusconi who will almost certainly find a way back. Once again, we shall see.

In the evening my Phil and I settled down to watch “The Way”, the film about the Camino de Santiago, made by Emilio Estevez and starring his father Martin Sheen. We had followed all the hype about the making of the film while we were in Vigo and so felt that we should finally see the finished product. The first thing that struck me, I’m afraid, was completely irrelevant to the storyline; it was how amazingly similar to his father Emilio Estevez is. Must be strong genes there.

The film is nicely shot, the scenery is lovely – the Spanish tourist board must love it – and it is well acted. However, it didn’t entirely grab us. There’s a certain predictability about events in the story. We expect Tom (Martin Sheen) to find inner peace and regain his faith by the end of the film.

I say we expect this as we have not yet seen the ending. Our viewing was interrupted by a phone call from a friend who had lost a chess game, stormed out the venue in a strop with himself, taken a wrong turning and got himself lost as well.

So Phil helped him organise his route home and we agreed to meet in the pub next door. So we put the film on hold (more comments after we have seen the ending) and stepped out into a very chilly night, met our friend for a couple of drinks and put the world to rights in our own inimitable way.

Morning Thoughts.

2011-11-21T04:44:00.000-08:00

Oh, the looniness of the 6 am runner!! I was driving to my daughter’s house at around 6 this morning and managed not to run over a jogger – running in the road!! Yes, she was wearing a high visibility vest so there was no possibility of my not seeing her. And yes I exaggerate a little; I really came nowhere near running her over. Nonetheless, the fact is that at 6 in the morning it is still very dark in this part of the world. And this morning it was extra dull and drizzly. And she was running IN THE ROAD. And there was a perfectly good empty pavement she could have been running on.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against runners. I run myself. In fact, this very morning after dropping the grandchildren off at school I almost certainly convinced an old colleague that I was quite mad by refusing her offer of a lift home on the grounds that I was planning to run. It’s part of my Monday morning routine unless it’s throwing it down with rain. So I have every sympathy with all who run, especially those truly dedicated ones who run in the dark because they have to set off for work at around 7 am. I feel quite fortunate not to have to be tied to such a routine. Having one day a week when I get up early (no, at the crack of dawn) to help my daughter is quite enough.

No, my argument was with WHERE she was running. I see no point in putting yourself at risk by running where the cars go when there is a perfectly good pavement to run on. I have the same quarrel the other way round with cyclists who seem to think they should ride on the pavement. To my way of thinking, the only people who should ride bikes on the pavement are small children. When I was a small child they even used to talk about “pavement bikes” and “road bikes”. As a rule you graduated from the first to the second when you were about 10 years old. If you are big enough to ride a grow-up bike with all the gears and so on, then you should ride it on the road.

I am aware that some people prefer the pavement because they find the traffic rather daunting. And I do know that there are far more cars on the road now than when I was a small child. Even so, grown-up cyclists should learn to use the road. You do need to wear high visibility clothing but they will never establish a proper system of cycle paths if people keep riding on the pavement. Pavements are for people to walk on and I object to being bowled over by speedy bikes. It’s especially annoying in our neck of the woods as there are many bridle paths and canal towpaths which provide traffic-free cycle routes.

While I’m on the subject of bikes and cyclists, here are a few other things which try my patience:

• cyclists who ride in pairs on the road, insisting on their right to take up the space of a car regardless of the fact that they don’t go as fast as cars and so hold up all the traffic.

• cyclists who ride at dusk, or even in the darkest dark, without lights. Like many pedestrians, they seem unable to understand how invisible you are on the road in the darkness. (I even heard recently of a young teenager who had a big row with his mum over lights on bikes. She said that if he didn’t put the lights she had bought on his bike he couldn’t ride it. He said that it wasn’t cool to have lights and that none of his friends did so. Crazy world!!)

• cyclists who creep up behind you on the bridle path and only at the last minute give a feeble shout to let you know they are there. What’s wrong with a good old bicycle bell?

You may wonder what gives me the right to go on like this. Well, I do have a bike and I ride it on the road although I prefer the bridle paths and have discovered that you can go for quite a distance without having to be in traffic. I don’t have lights on my bike at the moment so I only cycle by day. But I do have a very loud and effective bicycle bell.

Onto other matters. I read with interest at the weekend the story of the passengers who had to pay for the fuel to get their plane to take off for London. I hope no-one tells the RyanAir people. If they get wind of this it will be their next money-grabbing gimick!

And finally, the Spanish have voted out Mr Zapatero and replaced him with the rightwing Mr Rajoy. It remains to be seen whether this bearded chappie can make much progress in the fight against national debt, la crisis, youth unemployment and all the other ills of modern society. At least he has been elected, which is more than can be said for some people!

Numbers and conversations

2011-11-15T03:08:00.001-08:00

I understand that rather a lot of people got married on Friday which was the 11th of November. While to most of us this meant Remembrance Day, to some people, especially in far Eastern countries, it meant a palindromic date, this being the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of the century, an auspicious day to be married on apparently.

Numbers are funny things. I can remember my son being amused and pleased on his eleventh birthday. He was born on July 6th and the date of his eleventh birthday was 6-7-89. Now his niece was born on his birthday but she won’t be able to manage that nice sequence of numbers for the date of her birthday until she is 86. So it goes.

Yesterday I spotted a lorry unloading Christmas trees in our village centre. There’s always a huge one in the centre itself, another large one at one end of the village and small ones set up on the walls at intervals along the main street. So, Christmas decorations are clearly on the way. This reminded me of a conversation in my daughter’s house. She has the habit of finding odd bits of information masquerading as news on the internet. On this occasion the conversation went like this:

Daughter: “Oh, that’s awful. Someone has stolen all the Christmas lights that were stored in a lorry overnight ready to decorate ..... town centre. How dreadful!”

Granddaughter (the one who shares her birthday with her uncle – 14 and bright as a button): “Well, they’ll soon spot the thief’s house once he puts all those lights up!”

We discovered amusing women by accident on BBC2 late on Thursday evening. This was a series of short sketches in French, featuring women taking a wry look at all sorts of things. Here is a link to a sample of their wares. It’s on BBC2 for the next few weeks if anyone else wants to catch it.

Here’s another link, this time to La Voz de Galicia. Catching up with news from my favourite bit of Spain online the other day, I thought I recognised a young man in a still from a video clip. The item was all about a young woman walking through the streets of Vigo wearing a Celta de Vigo football strip and getting reactions from people. Either the young man in the diamond pattern hoodie is Phil’s young chess playing buddy Samuel or Samuel has a double. It certainly sounded like him as well.

Finally, here’s a conversation I had with a postman. I spent Thursday morning waiting at my daughter’s house for the postman to arrive. She had been expecting a parcel. The post office had attempted to deliver it earlier on the week when there was no-one in. Now, this was what they call a “tracked item”. I am unsure exactly what this means; presumably it’s something to do with the post office keeping tabs on where it has got to. However, in the event of it not being delivered a tracked item is not left at the nearest local post office to the parcel’s destination. Oh, no, it has to go back to a main sorting office, open only Monday to Friday and closing at 5pm. Consequently my daughter could not just go and pick it up because of work and child-collecting commitments. So she tried to rearrange delivery. Thursday was the best offer so I was asked to house-sit.

Eventually the postman arrived. He did not knock but, having been forewarned of his arrival by the dog, I was ready and whipped the door open as he moved on to the next house. He following dialogue ensued:

Me: Shouldn’t you also have a parcel for us?

Postie: Oh, yes. It’s in the van.

Me: Could you get it for me?

Postie: Are you staying in? It’s going to be about 15 minutes.

Me: That’s fine, I’ll be here.

And lo and behold, the parcel was brought to the house ... and left on the doorstep! It’s a good job I was in. I did wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t opened the door to speak to him.

Porridge, pay-outs and platforms: why make life difficult?

2011-11-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

In yesterday’s Guardian I found an article about porridge. I took a look at it because my Phil likes the occasional bowl of porridge for breakfast. It appears that as well as being very good for you – slow release of energy and keeps your bad cholesterol at bay – porridge has become popular among the rich and famous, among whom are Nicole Kidman and David Cameron. Mind you, I’m pretty sure my Phil won’t appreciate having much in common with Mr Cameron.

There are even porridge making competitions such as the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship, which takes place every October in Carrbridge, Inverness-shire. What a wonderful notion! Its name comes from "spurtle", a traditional Scottish stirring stick shaped like half an elongated cricket bail. Now, me, I just use a wooden spoon and my porridge tastes fine.

The main content of the Guardian article was how to make the perfect porridge. This includes such things as toasting the oats to give it a "nutty flavour", leaving the oats to soak overnight, steaming the porridge, cooking it in a bain-marie and all sorts of other complicated stuff about the fineness or otherwise of the oats used. The executive chef at the Balmoral, according to the Guardian, claims that "one of the most important things is once the porridge is cooked, to turn off the hob, put a lid on it, and just let it sit there for 10-15 minutes".

Now, this all seems unnecessarily complicated for a breakfast activity, even for a retired ladylike myself with plenty of time to spend seeking perfection. Quaker Oats, who must know a bit about porridge as they have been producing porridge oats for ages and ages, produce a perfectly nice quick-cook porridge which takes about three minutes to produce. Why make life difficult?

One thing I did like in the article was the mention of a superstition concerning which way you stir your porridge. It must be clockwise as ''stirring anti-clockwise invokes the Devil." Goodness me! Life can be hard enough at times without stirring the Devil into your breakfast.

Away from the breakfast table, the difficulty of some people’s lives continues. There’s that very earnest-looking Mr Murdoch trying to convince us all that he had no idea than phone hacking was endemic at the News of the World. The £750,000 paid out to keep a certain person quiet? He knew nothing about that. Well, all I can say is that if he could approve a payment of that amount of money without batting an eyelid and asking what it was for, he really must have more money than sense. Maybe he treats the whole of life as a monopoly game.

We, on the other hand, have just been having a cultural time. On Wednesday, having spent the afternoon watching George Clooney get himself nominated as the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the USA in the film “The Ides of March” – well worth seeing, by the way – we followed it up with an evening of classical music.

We met some friends and went to the Bridgewater Hall in central Manchester, the rather fine modern building looking strangely eerie in the evening gloom. There we heard the Halle Orchestra play some Vaughan Williams, a bit of Dvorak and some rousing Elgar to finish off with, the latter conducted very enthusiastically by Sir Mark Elder.

At various points of the evening, however, my attention was distracted by the shoes of one of the lady violinists. She wore a pair of extremely shiny black patent shoes with a platform at least one inch thick and needle sharp stiletto heels that must have been six inches high. How she walked onto the stage, I cannot imagine. It’s a very good job she didn’t have to play standing up; she would have been in serious danger of wobbling off to one side and breaking an ankle.

Don’t get me wrong, I like an elegant pair of shoes as much as anyone and these were certainly very elegant, at least when she was sitting down. I can’t vouch for the elegance of the walking style they must have induced. However, as I said about porridge making, why make life difficult?

Long weeks and small worlds.

2011-11-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

It’s only Tuesday but this week seems to have been going on for a good while already. Maybe it’s the weather. After all, we appear to have gone from crisp and clear on Sunday to bleak and drizzly ever since. Maybe it’s having got up at the crack of dawn on Monday to defrost my daughter’s car and then drive it to her house before the rest of the world was awake.

Whatever the reason, I am surprised to find it is only Tuesday evening now. Of course, some of it is having been busy, once again. After dealing with the Monday morning get-up-and-take-the-kids-to-school routine, I came home, got us both organised and set off with my Phil to go to Huddersfield. Why Huddersfield (Or Oddersfeldt as it was originally called, apparently)? Well, we were meeting our friend Colin there for lunch.

I say Huddersfield but in reality I should just say Huddersfield railway station. It was so cold and damp that when we did stick our noses outside the station complex we felt frostbite coming on and scuttled back inside again. This was no bad thing, however, as the station pub, The Head of Steam, was well worth a visit. The interior had been very nicely maintained as a good old traditional station pub with station decor to match.

Better still, though, they have a collection of real ales and serve home-made food of high quality at a very reasonable price. Definitely worth visiting. I remember being mildly amused when some friends of ours went for a day out to have lunch at Stalybridge Station where I am given to understand the pub food is also very good. But now I have joined the ranks of those who go to eat in station pubs and can no longer scoff.

Today has been marginally less cold but just as damp as yesterday. Nonetheless I ventured out to my Italian conversation class and serendipitously came across a friend at the local station and was able to catch up with gossip and family news.

In the Italian class last week we discussed traditions in Italy to celebrate All Saints. This week we had been asked to talk about traditions, national, regional, local, family and personal, that we regretted seeing the back of. At some point in the discussion I prefaced my remarks with, “I was brought up in Southport...”. Before I could continue my classroom neighbour chipped in with, “So was I”. The discussion continued but during the coffee break we did that catch-up thing.

It transpired that she had lived about 10 minutes away from me and had attended the same girls’ grammar school, albeit a few years behind me. So we had a happy chat about teachers we remembered and the excessively stupid rules and regulations we had suffered from.

And then we got onto our old Spanish teacher, the inimitable Miss Phyllis Brown who my class believed had had an unhappy love affair with a Spaniard, possibly having her heart broken when he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War and she had to return to England. We never did find out the truth of the matter. My new friend Joy had no memories of such things. Maybe her class was less romantic than mine.

However, she did remember the singing and asked me if Miss Brown had regularly made my class sing “the song about the squirrel” at the start or the end of almost every lesson. Yes, indeed! And we delighted the rest of our Italian class with a very tuneful rendition of this delightful little song:

Yo soy una pobre ardilla.
Chiquitilla, débil soy.
Soy pequeña mas risueña.
(Now I’ve forgotten the rest of the words. )

We are probably members of a small but select group who know this little ditty. Some might say that that is all for the best but we felt a certain satisfaction at having found the past in common. As I have said on many previous occasions, it’s a small world – el mundo es un pañuelo.

As for the outside world and the events going on there at present, this evening I am expecting to find some comment on Facebook from my Italian teacher, probably overjoyed at the prospect of Mr Berlusconi finally talking about resigning!!

Time and seasons and such.

2011-11-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

This week has begun strangely. Yesterday I was up at the crack of dawn. Today I more or less overslept.

Since my daughter decided to return to university on a part-time basis in September we have had to make complicated arrangements for childcare. On Sunday her car stays overnight parked outside my house. I then get up at silly o’clock on Monday morning to drive to her house before the buses have started running so that she can set off for Ormskirk at around 6.30. (Eventually I get the kids up, make sure they have some breakfast and get them all to school on the bus.)

It’s quite interesting (if tiring) being up at that time of day. In Spain you are regularly woken in the small hours by dustbin men emptying the huge rubbish containers on the street corners. This does not happen as a rule in the UK. Instead, when you drive in the early hours you have to weave around all the milk floats as deliveries are being made. You get to see all the dedicated joggers who are up and about running in the dark: quite disturbing! And then there are the loonies who think that as they are driving in the early hours when there is relatively little traffic (apart from milk floats), they don’t need to bother with such things as signalling. Now, I would have thought signalling was more necessary at a time when drivers might still be half asleep but, well, that’s just my opinion.

Today, either I slept through my alarm or switched it off without remembering it. Or maybe I never set it at all. Whatever the truth of the matter, I was woken by the sound of the phone ringing, assumed it was an early morning panic call from my daughter – which of the grandchildren was not well this time??? – and leapt out of bed to answer it only to discover that it was in fact 10.15 and that this was a friend calling. Goodness knows what time I might have woken without the phone call!!

So it was a hasty morning routine today and just over an hour later I was on my way to Manchester. I was due to begin my Italian conversation class, of which more later, but first I wanted to return some library books to the college which had cancelled the Portuguese class because of low numbers. Half way into Manchester I remembered the library books, still on the bedside table. Botheration!!! Still it was a lovely day for a stroll around Manchester before hunting out the new venue for Italian class.

The aforementioned Italian class was making a late start because of the economic crisis, I believe. Several weeks ago I went along to what I understood to be the first of this year’s classes, only to be told that the Italians had left the building and that I should have received an e-mail letting me know this. It transpired that the Italian government had suddenly decided to close their consulate in Manchester. The organisation which provides Italian classes, not only for interested English people but also free classes for the children of Italian families based in Manchester, had been given a week’s notice to find somewhere new. They considered staying where they were but the rent was too high and they needed to find somewhere cheaper. So, reading between the lines, it would seem that closing the consulate may be part of Mr Berlusconi’s economy drive.

Anyway, classes started again today and we had fun discovering what they did in Italy to celebrate All Saints’ Day before the invasion of their country by the American tradition of Hallowe’en.

“Trick or Treat” seems to have taken over just about everywhere; I’ve seen it in Spain as well, another country where Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day) was what they used to celebrate. It’s a great excuse for children to collect lots of sweets and for adults to throw parties, mostly over the weekend.

On Sunday morning our local village centre was strewn with bits of purple net. Some witch or vampire had clearly shredded her costume on her way home. Children seem to have gone Trick-or-Treating on Saturday, Sunday AND Monday evenings and a friend of mine described having traumatised his small children by making a pumpkin lantern and then switching off the main lights so that they could better see the scary face. Result: two screaming toddlers, too scared to go to bed!!!

I was amused to discover that in Italy, as in Spain they have the tradition of “fare il ponte” (“hacer el puente” in Spanish) according to which if there is a public holiday on a Thursday, for example, you take Friday off as well, making a “bridge” to the weekend and thus extending your free time. This is not skiving. There is no need to phone in sick. It is standard practice.

In Italy both the 1st and 2nd of November are public holidays to commemorate the dear departed and this year, obviously, they fall today and tomorrow. So most places took Mondayoff as well and have had a very long weekend indeed. So why not, I wondered aloud in the class, just take the whole week off? Well, in many places that is exactly what has happened, especially in schools. There you go: half term!!

So, we’ve got Hallowe’en out of the way and now, without even bothering with Bonfire Night, we can move straight on to Christmas. ALL the shops and supermarkets have Christmas displays up, witches and pumpkins having disappeared by magic overnight. When we went to the local Ikea store on Saturday I noted that Ashton town centre has stolen a march on other places as regards seasonal street decoration. They have Divali lights up everywhere, thus ticking the multicultural box. However, both Oldham and city centre Manchester are advertising the switching on if the Christmas lights on Thursday 10th November: that’s Thursday of next week!!!!

It’s time I thought about baking a Christmas cake, laying in stocks of mince pies and buying a Christmas tree!!!

Getting out and about.

2011-10-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

As the rest of my family had arranged to do a variety of separate things without me today and as it was, incidentally, a very nice crisp, sunny autumn day, I decided to go for a long walk around one of my favourite local beauty spots. I am sure I have mentioned this place before.

They call it Dovestone Reservoir because, so I am given to understand, of a rock formation which is said to look like a dove. Personally I have always thought it bore more of a likeness to a duck but I suppose Duckstone Reservoir lacks a certain something.

Be that as it may, I had a happy stomp around both the lower and the upper reservoirs, trying to avoid an annoying family being bossed about by a mother who felt that she had to train her children to ride their bikes and her dog to walk properly to heel in ringing tones which I am sure could be heard from the other side of the water.

The local birdlife was sunning itself very confidently – so confidently that I wondered for a while whether I had taken a picture of a bird that had just accidentally popped its clogs in a photogenic perching posture. But no, I think it was just resting.

On my way round the upper reservoir I was just reflecting that it was a good job we had had a few days of dry weather to get rid of some of the larger mud puddles which were still there in reduced form on the path when I successfully put my foot in one of them up to the ankle. This led to some rude words being said, not I hasten to add in ringing tones which could be heard from the other side of the water, and gave rise to a “Which shoe has had the mud bath?” photo.

Fortunately I had already rolled my trousers up so I did not end up with muddy trousers as well.

By the time I reached the end of my walk my shoe and sock had dried off nicely so, despite this small mishap, a good time was had on the whole and I returned home without further incident.

Earlier today I read with only a modicum of interest that aging French singing star Johnny Hallyday is making his UK debut next year, coming to perform in the Albert Hall. Not that I have a burning desire to see this man who was a star in France when I went there for the very first time while studying A Level French more years ago than I care to remember. I am just rather surprised that he has not been here before.

I suppose it’s a measure of the insularity of the British that most people here have never heard of him. But then, unlike la Bruni (aka Mrs Sarkozy) he was not able to marry a French president to promote himself internationally. Mind you, I suspect many people still don’t know who Carla Bruni is either.

I do wonder about the advisability of dressing in all that glittery gear at the age of 68 but he does still seem to have all his hair which is more than can be said for some of his age. Of course, if he were British he would be now be Sir Johnny and would probably appear alongside Sir Cliff (Richard), Sir Elton (John), Sir Paul (McCartney) and even Sir Mick Jagger.

That's how it goes; you start off as a rebel and end up a pillar of the establishment. I suspect that on theo ther side of the Channel you have to do something rather intellectually challenging beofre they give you honours and titles.

Back to the blogging board.

2011-10-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Having been reminded by my friend Colin that I’ve not blogged for a while, I decided it was time I got going again before the world collapses around me. And collapsing is certainly what it seems to be intent on doing.

There’s the Eurozone going strangely berserk and looking as though it’s about to implode. The sums of money talked about stop having meaning for me and when they discuss “buying” countries’ debts, well, my mind just gives up on the whole thing. And just where is all this “extra” money to shore up failing economies and guarantee loans going to come from. A part of me wants to run to the bank, demand all my money and then go home and hide it under the bed.

Then nature is going a little crazy as well. We’ve had a period of continuous rain which reduced everything around her to one huge muddy puddle. Then, in a surprising reversal of what usually happens, we had about a week of sunshine (well, part of the time) and fine if windy weather while other often more weather-fortunate parts of the country still had rain. This meant that we have been able to take ourselves off on long walks, admiring the autumn scenery. And then, as the autumn leaves pile up everywhere I noticed something odd about one of the bushes in the garden. Having gone through flowering in the spring, produced its crop of little white berries and lost most of its leaves, it is now flowering once again. Madness.

We saw a different aspect of nature’s crazy diversity the other night. We had spent the evening at the home of some old friends of ours where we had been very well fed and watered and then sat around talking and listening to music until the small hours. Eventually we decided that it was time to call it a night and as the night was clear and fine we opted to walk off the alcohol instead of spending an extortionate amount of money on a short taxi ride. So off we went, staggering slightly but definitely not rowdily drunk. Imagine our surprise as we got a shortish way down the road and discovered we had company of sorts. On the opposite side of the road a fox was busily scavenging in the bins in a pub car park. He looked up, weighted up our threat-potential, clearly judged it to be absolute zero, finished his rummaging in the rubbish and went on his way with scarcely a backward glance. I half expected him to swish his tail at us disparagingly.

With all this exciting stuff going on in Europe, my life seems very pedestrian: a fair amount of babysitting (including some amateur nursing as ALL the grandchildren managed to be ill at the same time) while my daughter discovers the delights of combining work, studying AND motherhood; some very pleasant early morning runs and later in the day long walks; a good deal of DIY (I have become an expert painter and decorator); and making clothes for teddy bears and producing strange woolly animals for the aforementioned grandchildren.

I am not complaining. We have managed the odd lunch with friends and we have been to the cinema to see Woody Allen’s latest offering, “Midnight in Paris”. Very good it was too. We really enjoyed it, even the cameo of Mrs Sarkozy as a sort of travel guide. This was still slender Mrs Sarkozy before she started to reproduce. Since then she has done her bit to boost her hubby’s popularity by being the first President’s wife to give birth in France. Jolly good show, Carla! Now let’s see if she can keep that little girl out of the public eye. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Carla Bruni and discovered her as a singer long before she set her sights on the Elysée Palace.

All in all, life could be a lot more difficult and unpleasant. My friends in Vigo were complaining of storms yesterday. And then Ireland and Italy have had to suffer floods on top of their monetary problems. And then, the poor Italians have to suffer the embarrassment of Berlusconi on top of everything else.

That’s all for now. I have to get ready for the arrival of a number of small people who need entertaining for the afternoon.

Is it really so bad?

2011-10-01T08:03:00.001-07:00

Is it really so bad? OK, so now it’s official: the UK is the worst place to live in Europe, well at least in the countries included in the uSwitch quality of life index. Apparently we have the worst weather, the second lowest hours of sunshine, the highest cost of living, the fourth highest retirement age and fewer days holiday than other places. (Once again, I have occasion to be glad to be born when I was and so to have been able to retire at 60. Phew, what a relief to be old enough to do these things.)

We even die sooner than the French do and our government spends less on health and education than many other places. We even come behind the Irish with all their current economic problems. And still we’re not out on the street protesting?

(At least we don’t live somewhere like Saudi Arabia where you can be punished for protesting, not just with time in a cell or a fine but with a number of lashes. Women are banned from driving because freedom of movement puts them in danger of sinning – just by giving them the opportunity to do so – and so they need protecting. Men of course don’t need such protection. Is it because they are all strong enough to resist temptation? A woman who protested by getting in her car and driving around was sentenced to 10 lashes. Her sentence was removed by order of the king who is described as “gently pushing for reform”. There has been no official confirmation of the ruling but it seems that Princess Amira al-Taweel, wife of the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, tweeted: “Thank God, the lashing of Shaima is cancelled. Thanks to our beloved king. I am sure all Saudi women will be so happy. I know I am.” Maybe she should also get in a car and go for a drive instead of being so very grateful!!!)

Despite all the talk of how awful it is to live in the UK, it really doesn’t seem so bad at the moment. The sun has been shining nicely all week. So what have I and all the other ladies on our row of houses done? Washed everything that wasn’t pinned down, of course. There’s nothing like a bit of good weather to get us filling those washing machines and pegging stuff on the line. It’s just as if it will stop you having to wash it all on dull, wet days.

But that’s not all I’ve done. We’ve been out and about, taking the kids to paddle in the sea last weekend – only the British paddle in September, I’m sure.

And yesterday we were off having lunch with friends in Manchester where we saw that the deck chairs were out so that the workers could catch some midday sun. Splendid.

Sunshine and shipwrecks

2011-09-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

September has begun, as predicted, with sunshine. Whether or not this will continue remains to be seen but today has been delightful and I have spent most of it ferrying two smallish grandchildren around the bridle paths and towpaths of our area from one children’s playground to another. Not a bad way to spend the day. Even into the evening the day remained bright and mild.

Before we began our wanderings, however, I checked my various forms of electronic communication and found that my sister had put a sad little post on Facebook. Now, my sister has lived longer in the Andalusian town of El Puerto de Santa María than she ever did in the northwest of England. I first went to see her there almost thirty years ago when she was still teaching English at a language school across the bay in Cádiz. So we would get up quite early, walk through the quiet morning streets of El Puerto down to the harbour where we caught the little ferryboat known as el vaporcito – the little steamer - across the Guadalquivir to Cádiz.

Around eleven years later my children also made that journey across the bay and years after that my eldest granddaughter also travelled on the ferry but I doubt that she remembers as she was only two. Just about all our family has crossed the bay that way at some time in the last thirty-odd years. On one famous occasion my father forgot his sunhat and got serious sunburn on his bald pate.

My sister’s Facebook post was lamenting the sinking of that very ferryboat. Apparently the boat ran into the quayside, making a hole somewhere near the bow and in seven minutes the boat was sunk. Just like that! ¡así de rápido! They managed to get all the passengers and crew off the boat but couldn’t prevent the poor little vessel from going under. The pilot has been breathalysed and found not to be under the influence of alcohol. This has not prevented fifteen passengers from making a denuncia, an official complaint against the pilot. Some of them claim that he fell asleep and had to be warned by passengers of the imminent collision. Whatever the cause, the boat was holed and down she went.

By nine o’ clock this morning, however, some 2000 people had already signed up to a Facebook page campaigning to get el vaporcito back to the surface. All the political parties seem to have affirmed that it would be a pity to lose the boat permanently and Pepa Conde, spokesperson for Izquierda Unida declared that refloating what she described as una de nuestras señas de identidad would be an investment in the future of the area. We shall see.

In the course of my investigations I discovered a little bit of the interconnectedness of everything. The ferryboat known generally as el vaporcito and really called Adriano III was built in Vigo in 1955, probably in one of the boatyards we know from our two years in Vigo.

As I have said many times before, el mundo es un pañuelo – it’s a small world.

The end of the summer?

2011-08-30T06:27:00.001-07:00

As August rushes to a rather damp and dismal close here in Saddleworth, we ask ourselves if this is all the summer we are getting. It has certainly been a bit of a washout so far. Yesterday was a bank holiday so, of course, after a moderately promising start it rained! My tomato plants, which are thriving nicely and producing quite a lot of fruit (fruit? or veg?) need some warmth now to ripen up the tomatoes. Otherwise we’ll be eating fried green tomatoes. So what we need now is a bit of an Indian summer. In the past we’ve had some nice Septembers and I would like this year to follow suit.

It’s no consolation to read that Galicia is expecting rain and lower temperatures today. I’ve even read a report that they have had more cloudy days that sunny but I bet it’s been better than here and that no-one has felt the need to put their heating on.

Not that we haven’t had some good days, however. Last weekend offspring number one and his wife came to stay for a few days. We had a long and sunny walk around the reservoir and later along the canal towpaths to the garden centre which was very good.

And then on Tuesday we went off on an excursion to Fountains Abbey near Ripon in Yorkshire. We went in two cars and managed variously to get lost, one load from following SatNav too faithfully and the other from following instinct and getting tangled up in the Leeds one-way system.

Still, we had a good day out and I can heartily recommend a visit to the remains of what King Henry VIII didn’t quite manage to destroy completely. There was a rather know-it-all chap selling tickets who had been confusing some Japanese tourists by saying odds and ends in Spanish to them. When he started on us I threatened to speak proper Spanish to him and ended up doing so, successfully settling his hash! He then settled down and advised us quite knowledgeably on which was our best route, although he wouldn’t allow the smallest member of our party to ride his bike around the place, another thing which annoyed us somewhat.

We set off on a bridle path which took us to the rather charming St Mary’s church with quite excellent stained glass windows, a well-preserved tiled floor which you were not allowed to stand on without putting on protective slippers and a spiral staircase which we all wanted to take home with us.

Leaving the church we admired the view in a straight line down towards Ripon Cathedral, too far distant to appear as more than a blur in my photo.

We went past the rather delightful Chorister’s House which we were disappointed to find is a private residence as we would have loved to sneak a look inside.

Eventually we made it into the very fine gardens, some of us taking a detour to see the “surprise view” from Ann Boleyn’s seat. She must have visited before her head was chopped off.

And finally we reached the abbey itself and spent ages exploring the ruins. My children had a trip down memory lane watching the youngest of our party – aged 8 and 6 – running around inventing games in the different rooms of the place, doing exactly what they had done the last time we visited there when they were also aged 8 and 6.

Tired but happy we settled down to tea and cakes in the cafe and then the obligatory visit to the SHOP. No museum visit is complete without this marketing exercise but we escaped without too much outlay. Don sabelotodo – the know-it-all – from the entrance found us there and asked us if we had had a good visit so we forgave him for being somewhat overbearing at the start of the day. And so we set off for home.

The SatNav followers switched it off on the way back and succeeded in taking a wrong turn in Ripon and ending up going miles out of our way on the Leeds ring road. Such fun!

Arriving home rather later than planned we finished the day with a fish and chip supper. All’s well that ends well.

Rain and riots and stuff.

2011-08-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

I have been rather neglecting this blog in the last week or so.

Partly this has been because I have been busy in an uninteresting kind of way, just getting on with things and helping offspring number two get some decorating done. All in all, not really the stuff of blogs.

Then we had a major internet problem. There was a quite impressive electric storm one day and it appears that our BT internet box might have suffered from a power surge when an enormous thunderclap went off right overhead. Either that or the law of coincidences came into play. Either way, the box was as dead as a dodo and our internet connection went bust. We did manage to piggyback onto the pub next door but the connection was very, very slow.

Eventually the new box arrived and all was back to normal. However, I was still running around cleaning and painting and getting stuff done.

In the middle of all this, total mayhem broke out in London, leaving us in some concern about offspring number one who has made the capital city his home for a good few years now. He was fine, of course, just rather angry at what was being done to “his” city. Understandable I suppose. After all, he had visited some of the restaurants targeted by the mob and that does make it all feel a little more personal. And there were some fine old buildings destroyed; they survived two world wars and disappeared in one night of rioting more or less.

On Tuesday night the madness spread to our own city of Manchester with semi-organised gangs running the police ragged and stealing designer goods from what looked like selected stores. I’ve had an ongoing Facebook conversation with a friend of mine who maintains that this is the deprived underclass striking back. Maybe ... but I note that among those arrested are an army recruit, a graphic designer, a classroom assistant, a university graduate ... shouldn’t these people be a bit more responsible?

Anyway, yesterday I had planned to meet an old friend in Liverpool. We planned to take in the art galleries, have lunch and catch up with our news. It was with some trepidation that I set off to cross two cities which had suffered problems from rioters and looters but there really wasn’t any difficulty. Liverpool looked just the same as it did last time I went, just rather wetter. On my return to Manchester, I walked the length of Deansgate (still in the pouring rain), taking in St Ann’s Square en route. It was all rather sad with boarded up shops and many more taking the precaution of closing early. The place looked rather like a very wet ghost town. I hope it gets back to normal soon.

Travelling to Liverpool from Manchester by train is quite enjoyable, if only for the names of the places you go through. I suppose Eccles is reasonable enough although it does have you thinking of the old Goon Show. But where do names like Patricroft and Whiston come from? Then there is Earlestown which sounds as though it should be in an old western or maybe in a Sprinsgteen song about the working man.

The most appropriately named place, given the weather, is probably Rainhill. It has certainly rained all around here for days and days and days. There were veritable rivers running down Deansgate as I walked along there yesterday. Summer seems to have gone awol once again in the northwest of England. I spotted an article in La Voz de Galicia last week complaining that the summer was rather poor over there as well with temperatures 3° lower than usual, if that’s any consolation for us here. Mind you, I’ve checked the weather online and I see that Vigo is still managing temperatures in the upper 20s so I think it’s rather warmer than here. So it goes.

Finally, a little comment on automation and the job situation. On the train yesterday I read a little item in the newspaper about a town called Hombourg-Haut in the north of France, near the German border. An enterprising chap there has made an automatic baguette-dispenser. Instead of queuing up in the baker’s shop and chatting with the boulangère about the terrible weather we are having, you put some money in a slot and the machine pops out a steaming hot loaf of bread. Some 4,500 loaves were sold that way in July of this year.

What about all the jobs in bread shops? Will they disappear of this new automatic way of selling bread becomes the norm.

Finding things to do.

2011-07-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

Accompanying my daughter to collect her two youngest from school (they break up today, later than many other schools) I overheard parents wondering what they were going to do with the children for 6 weeks. I refrained from pointing out that Spanish children have already had a month of holidays; I don’t think they would have appreciated it.

The debate about school holidays has come up again as Mr Gove has been suggesting that the school year should be restructured to reduce this long break when, apparently, children from a disadvantaged background fall behind because they don’t get to do the stimulating activities more privileged youngsters are presented with. I can see the arguments for both sides but I still come down on the side of the pro-long(ish) summer holiday lobby. I always enjoyed the sense of a demarcation line between one year and the next.

Having said all that, on Monday I received a whole series of text messages from our eldest granddaughter to the effect that she was bored and that there was nothing to do. Her school finished for summer last Friday, the school where her mother works finished on Tuesday of this week and the smaller siblings’ school finishes today. As a result she was home alone and had not organised any activities for herself. (She had had a friend to stay over the weekend so she couldn’t be said to be deprived of company but that’s teenagers for you, I suppose.) My suggestions that she should walk the dog, tidy her room, read a book and so on did not go down well.

However, later on Monday I suggested to her that we might take a trip to Liverpool on Tuesday as the Tate Gallery is currently hosting a Magritte exhibition. This turned out to be the just what she needed. She is starting a GCSE Art course in September and has a homework task sheet (so much for six weeks of freedom and nothing to do!!) which includes, if possible, going to the Magritte exhibition and then doing some follow-up work. So off we went.

The plan was that I would get on the train at our nearest station – Greenfield – and she would get on the same train at her nearest station – Mossley. It was a brilliant plan except that either her mother had not told her or she had not been listening. Whatever the reason, she was not at the station but at her house when my train arrived at Mossley. Most annoying! I had to hop off the train and go and find her.

Eventually, armed with task sheet, sketchbook, camera, almost everything but the kitchen sink, we caught the next train an hour later and still managed to reach Liverpool in the very early afternoon.

The sun was shining, it was quite summerlike and Liverpool looked very good. They have done a lot of work on making the centre of the city pedestrian – shopper- tourist friendly and the result is good.

So we made our way down to the Albert Dock and into the Tate Gallery where we spent a happy hour or three looking at Magritte paintings, discussing them, taking notes, sketching bits and pieces and generally being very studious. Not a moan at all about this being too much like a school visit. The only (very minor) complaint was when I ran into an old friend I’d not seen for about 10 years and we spent too long catching up.

Having “done” Magritte, we made our way down through the rest of the gallery, happily discussing whether a pile of concrete bricks in a supermarket trolley or a heap of old clothes in a corner of a room really constitute a work of art. But we also got to see a Picasso, an Andy Warhol, a Mondrian, a Henry Moore and a load of other good stuff. There was some question, though, about why a Campbell’s soup tin was a good subject for a painting!

Finally, having expended a lot of energy in art appreciation the teenager needed sustenance so we stopped at Prêt à Manger on our way back to the station and found her something to eat. Then it was back to the station through the Liverpool sunshine, a final dash for a train which was leaving in two minutes time and which allowed us to make our connection back to our neck of the woods.

A successful expedition. She was very good company.

I suppose this means that she is now one of the privileged youngsters who are taken out to do stimulating activities. Only another 6 weeks to go.

What to do next.

2011-07-25T06:25:00.001-07:00

Well, that’s the Tour de France over with for another year. And what an exciting last few days we had of it. They went into the mountains with Frances Thomas Voeckler (what kind of French name is that?) still wearing the yellow jersey but declaring along the way that he did not think he could win the Tour. The French people had other ideas and were rooting for him all the way but in the end he was right. I seriously thought he was going to have a heart attack at the top of the Col du Galibier.

The Norwegians were out in force to cheer on Thor Hushvold and Edvald Boasson Hagen who won quite a number of stages between them even if they didn’t make it to the podium in Paris.

We had great drama as Andy Schleck attacked on the Col du Galibier and then our old friend Contador attacked on the Alpe d’Huez. And both of them were finally eclipsed by a smiling Australian, Cadel Evans, who just kept up with them all and in the end overtook them and stood on the podium in Paris with the Schleck brothers in 2nd and third places. A lot has been made of his being the oldest Tour winner in post war years. At 34 years and five months he is an OLD cyclist. Poor thing!!! But he showed them!

The ITV 4 presenters were possibly more excited about our own UK success than about the final overall result. Having lost the great UK hope Bradley Wiggins to a broken collar bone early on in the race, everyone’s eyes were on Mark Cavendish, a sprinter from the Isle of Mann going for the Green Jersey for the best sprinter.

He almost didn’t make it as he found the mountains very hard and kept being docked points for not quite getting home within the time limit. On the Alpe d’Huez he was lucky not to be eliminated but they would have had to eliminate about half the riders and so he got away with it. And then in the final stage in Paris, he almost lost it when he had bike problems and had to swop machines and catch up with everyone. But he made it in the end: dramatic stage win on the Champs Élysées AND confirmation of winning the Green Jersey. Oh, he was a happy boy!

Another North of England boy shone in the final stage, making a breakaway rather nicely and showing what he could do even if he didn’t win the stage. As he was interviewed later we thought we heard a slight Manchester accent there so I Googled him. Born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, he started riding for Mossley CRT, a cycling club just down the road from us which is noted apparently for helping young cyclists to develop their skills. Small world, isn’t it?

But what happened to Alberto Contador? We mustn’t forget that he worked his way up from 75th on day one to 5th on the final stage, which is pretty impressive.

Maybe he was too ambitious; apparently he wanted to try and win both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in the same year. Possibly that was a mistake.

Then, he seemed to be dogged by bad luck. On day one he was held up by the big crash and it does seem that if you don’t get a good start it’s hard to catch up later. He had a couple of falls himself and injured his knee, which can’t have done him any good.

He and his team manger Bjarne Riis also reckoned that the team was not as good as they would have liked. And certainly he wasn’t getting the organised support that Andy Schleck and Mark Cavendish got from their teams.

He reckons that he knew he’d finally lost it when Andy Schleck made his very successful attack going up the Col du Galibier. After that, despite doing well on the Alpe d’Huez and on the team trial he appeared to just settle down and enjoy his cycling. After all, there’s always next year.

In the meantime, I now need to find another obsession to occupy some of my time. No more Tour de France on ITV 4 in the afternoon. Maybe, as French philosopher Voltaire said, it’s time to “cultiver notre jardin”. The tomato plants are doing quite nicely thank you.

And finally, here’s a nice little alphabet of the tour from El País.

The rain in ...

2011-07-19T04:52:00.001-07:00

We’ve all been moaning about the rain. It just keeps falling and falling. Last Thursday I went into Manchester to a friend’s retirement party where we sat outside and chatted in the sunshine.

En route I snapped a photo of a Red Bull Cavalcade on Deansgate, Manchester – a very strange sight!

Since that delightfully sunny occasion, summer seems to have done a bunk, gone awol or turned itself into a premature autumn. Friday was just dull and showery but Saturday, Sunday and Monday were just a washout with torrential downpours almost all the time.

Still, I suppose it could be worse; you could be hurtling down a steep mountainside in the rain in the Tour de France. Quite how they keep going at those speeds on wet roads I do not know. My Spanish hero, Albeeeerto Contadoooor, has moved himself up to 7th place (not bad from 75th on day one) but he is still 4 minutes behind the leader and needs to do some serious catching up in the stages in the Alps, starting today, if he is going to make it onto the podium in Paris. I notice that the newspaper, Faro de Vigo, advertising its online coverage of the Tour, still talks about Alberto Contador’s chances of winning once again. There’s still almost a week to go, however, so anything is possible. Our almost local boy, Manxman Mark Cavendish (well, the Isle of Mann is off the coast of the Northwest of England), is doing well. He’s not a contender for the big prize but he may walk away with the green jersey for best sprinter.

Even my friend Colin in Pontevedra has been complaining about the weather. Reading between the lines, I think someone pinched his umbrella. You wouldn’t think you would need to do that in Galicia as there are usually umbrellas on sale EVEYWHERE!!!

I looked up the weather forecast for Vigo and Pontevedra – I like to know what I’m missing but also if the forecast if for cloudy sun with temperatures of 15° to 20° like today it makes me feel slightly less bad about our delightful British summer.

Scanning the Galicia newspapers, I discovered that the rain had also got in the way of the Festival de la Virgen del Carmen on Sunday. Now, most people associate adoration of the Virgin with the south of Spain but in fact the Virgen del Carmen is the patron saint of fishermen and so it’s logical that the Bouzas district of Vigo should have a procession for her.

Normally her statue is taken out to sea in a fishing boat, accompanied by a number of other boats all finely decorated in honour of the Virgin. Julio Vazquez had his boat Rebeca all organised to take her out but in the end the sea was running so high and the rain was lashing down so hard that they had to cancel the boat trip until next year.

They had to limit the celebration to a short precession through the streets with the faithful under their umbrellas. Better luck next year!

Home again! Home again!

2011-07-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here we are: Wednesday already!! Time seems to have flown since we returned from Spain last Thursday. We arrived late in the evening to find that obras had followed us home and were making progress slow on the motorway homewards. We made it eventually, of course, and woke next morning to rain, slow and steady to start with and then torrential with quiet bits in between downpours. And the gallegos say it rains a lot in Galicia. They don’t know the half of it.

We were back home with a vengeance: rain AND babysitting!!

On Saturday, after the rain stopped, I went exploring old haunts to see that all was well. For several months now I have been getting up and jogging along the Delph Donkey Line. This used to be a branch line of a rail system going through Uppermill on its way from Manchester to Yorkshire. Some time in the fifties the line fell out of use and was eventually closed, along with many others throughout the country. I suppose that back then no-one could have foreseen that now it would be an ideal commuter line from here to Manchester. So it goes; what we have instead is a very pleasant leafy walk along the former railway track. Anyway, some time in May a notice appeared warning of an imminent temporary closure of a central stretch of the walk so that they could do some repairs to the dry stone walls. Of course the work was late starting because the rain got in the way. So they began a couple of weeks before I went away and on my return the path is now a muddy mess with mounds of earth, muddy puddles and messy machinery all over the place.

Sunday came along and Grandma’s Girls set off in the sunshine to do the Race for Life in Heaton Park, a huge park in another part of Greater Manchester. By the time we were half way there, the heavens opened. We sat for about a quarter of an hour before we left the car in the car park. It stopped raining pretty well for the waiting – and there was quite a lot of it with ladies in crazy pink wigs – and the warm-up, which was quite a sight to see with masses of pink clad ladies jumping up and down in unison. Anyway, we did the race: 5 kilometres in around 45 minutes, a mix of fast walking and jogging. And it rained on us. But between us we raised some £500.

On Monday I did the “Ladies Who Lunch” thing with a couple of old friends, managing to sit outside in the sunshine after lunch and after a walk round the sales. In the middle of all this I had a text message saying that grandchild number three had been delivered to our house as had been sick at school. What a lucky escape I had, especially as I was not going straight home. After my day out I was going to watch grandchild number two in her school play. This was an entertaining look at education called School Daze. Grandchild number two was in the chorus as the main roles go to the children about to leave primary school to go to high school.

To follow this Tuesday morning saw me babysitting grandchild number two who was not allowed back to school until he had gone 24 hours without sickness.

And finally, today, Wednesday, I was out for a run when my phone rang. It was my daughter once again, telling me she was on the way to my house with grandchild number one who had clearly caught the summer vomiting bug from her small brother and was on the way to my house so that mummy could go back to work.

Maybe it’s time to run away to Spain again before they give it to me!

On the road again

2011-07-06T10:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we left Pontevedra and made our way back to Vigo once again where we are staying a couple of nights with some friends. One of the first things the chess player did on arriving was to get out the chess set and teach our friends’ two small sons how to set it up. Moving the pieces around will come another day. For the time being they are happy to move them around and enjoy the feel of them.

In the evening while the chess player went off to catch up with the goings-on at Xadrez Galego, the chess club here, I went for a drink and a chat with my friend Carmen. She will pass on my greetings to all the ladies from the Club de Lectura Francés.

We finished the evening with a few beers and some free tapas at a couple of bars near our friends’ flat. Very pleasant!

Vigo appears to remain much the same as ever. Some of the obras have been finished an others have been started. So, there are still traffic cones here and there. I understand that work on the AVE, the high speed train, continue very slowly. I found this cartoon in a local paper.

One man says, “We Jews have been waiting for centuries for the Messiah to come. What are you Gallegos waiting for?” “The AVE,” comes the reply. (So work here is going more slowly than work on the trams in Greater Manchester. We were promised a link from Oldham to the Manchester City Centre for 2012 but now all the signs say it will be open in the autumn. We shall see.)

There’s some protest going on about the train service between Vigo and Porto coming to an end, planned for this Sunday in fact. This service currently runs at 7.45 am and 7.45 pm, taking about three hours to complete a journey which is rather shorter by car or bus. It has the advantage of arriving at the rather fine Oporto station but this doesn’t make up for the slow journey for some people by all accounts.

However, some businessmen have started complaining and protests are underway. When it was first planned at the end of the 19th century, the rail link as regarded as an international project and an international bridge was commissioned to cross the River Miño, the border between Spain and Portugal. This was tested in 1885 to see if it could bear the weight of a train and the service was inaugurated in March 1886.

And now international cooperation is underway again as the mayors of Tui on the Spanish side and Valença on the Portuguese are joining forces to oppose the closing of the line.

Meanwhile in France, Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador has faced protests of a different kind. Some people felt he should not be allowed to take part in the Tour de France this year as there are still matters pending from an investigation about drugs from last year. Poor thing, he’s having a rough time of it so far. On day one, an opening stage with rather a high number of crashes including a spectacular multiple pile-up which delayed Contador and several other top-end contenders, he finished in 75th place, not at all to his liking. Day two, a team time trial, saw him moving up to 66th place, not a great deal better. Yesterday he almost won the stage but was pipped to the post by Cadel Evans who beat him by ⅓ of a wheel length. So he began today in 41st position.

This did not prevent the newspaper El País from headlining its report with this optimistic comment: “Contador empieza ya a ganar el Tour”. Well, I suppose it could be the start of a win. After all, our boys David Millar (currently in 4th place) and Bradley Wiggins (6th) have started among the leaders on other occasions and have ended up sliding down the ratings.

So maybe our hero can make up for Rafa Nadal being pushed into the runner-up place in Wimbledon.

Hasta la Vista, Sanxenxo

2011-07-04T00:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we said farewell to Sanxenxo. As the chess player played his final round I packed our bags, settled up with the hotel, put the bags in their store room and went for a last walk along the paseo marítimo. It was one of those dull and cloudy mornings where the world seems to disappear under mist.

Down at the harbour something had been going on with those water scooter things but it was obviously all over by the time I got there as they were loading them onto trailers, washing the salt water off them and taking them away. I clearly should have got up and about earlier.

So I said goodbye to the sunbather and to the surfboarding statue with the odd name of La Madama. I find it interesting that Vigo, a working port, has its swimmer statutes, vigorous and purposeful (perhaps?) while the seaside resort of Sanxenxo has a sunbather and La Madama engaged in leisure activities.

Back at the hotel I took the chess player an energising cup of coffee and before we knew it he had won his final round. Does coffee count as an artificial stimulant I wonder! Then we sat around for a while waiting for things to come to an end and the prize giving ceremony to be announced.

Great was my chess player’s surprise when he discovered that he had won a prize after all, for he had convinced himself that he was quite out of the running even for the “veterans’ prize”. But that is what he got: €100 for being the highest scoring player born before 1956. Age has its privileges after all!

His chess playing mate Rafa from Vigo won best Galician player and a bunch of Cubans walked away with a whole load of prizes. The top winner, a certain Dragan Paunovic, won a boat. No, not a proper, sea-going boat. Chess players don’t win at that level, unlike the Wimbledon champion who, I understand, won 1.1million pounds yesterday!!! Mr Paunovic was quite happy; this was his third boat and anyway he did win some money as well.

And so we set off for the bus station where we lunched on a “Monbus Extra” sandwich, basically a ham salad sandwich with everything possible in it. We were joined at our table by an extremely garrulous chess player from O Grove, also waiting for his bus home.

Eventually we met up with our friend Colin and headed briefly for the hills, well, for a glass of wine on the terrace of his house in the hills. Lovely views from there over the ría.

We ended the evening in an Asian buffet restaurant, one of those all you can eat places, where Colin introduced us to a couple of friends, also coincidentally from the Manchester area. It turned out that one of them had been a pupil at the very first school I ever taught at. And so we had a little reminisce, finding that the senior staff who had been the bane of my life as a young teacher were the very ones she remembered with some horror. It’s a small world once again!!

If only everything were as reliable....

2011-07-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

It’s reassuring to find that things don’t change too much.

You go away for a while and come back to discover that people still stop and talk at will, blocking the pavement without a care, even if they are a group in wheelchairs like this morning when I was out for a run.

Cars are still parked in bus bays and get towed away. You still hear the expletive JODER!!! when someone gets back to their quite legally parked cars only to find that they are completely blocked in with the cars in front and behind absolutely bumper to bumper. Well, it was probably the only way the other drivers could fit in, after all. The lady I overheard this lunchtime should be glad her car was not concertinaed between the other two.

And then, of course, there is still cocido. I was so pleased to see this sign outside a restaurant on the sea front.

Our hotel continues to overfeed us. Their problem is that they are so proud of the dishes made on the premises that they want you to have them all. We have persuaded them that we CAN survive on only two courses at lunchtime: an entrante + one other plato. So they tell us what the three courses are and we choose accordingly. Today we had decided to go for the entrante – vol au vent de mariscos – very nice – and the last course which was pork chop with rice. The middle course was empanadillas, not my favourite and so one that I was happy to miss. However, the waiter was really insistent that we had to try the. They make them on the premises and they are very good, we were assured. He went on so much that we agreed to let him put a couple of empanadillas on the plate with the pork chop. If we wanted more, we could ask for more. Ok. Fine. We went along with it and the empanadillas were OK but we’re not big fans of little mini pasties and so we didn’t ask for more.

Now, on Thursday evening, at the cena especial organised by the chess people, we had some very nice empanada, one of the best I’ve eaten, followed by some equally good pulpo. Finally the promised arroz con bogavante arrived. Bogavante never fails to amaze me. Is it just me or is it really an awful lot of fiddling around to get very little out of the claws of the creature? Still the flavour is good and the rice they serve it up with is excellent. I thought I’d got away with a small portion until my plat was whisked away and refilled, coming back with about three times as much as first time round. Ooooof!!!! The following day I heard one of the Spaniards turning away food at lunchtime with the excuse, “Anoche comimos mucho arroz con bogavante”. So, even the natives find it overwhelming. I have to say, though, that the seafood has been very good this week. I’ll be back for more.

At our cena especial we had the company of two delightful young ladies, the ten year old twin daughters of one of the chess players. The parents are Catalans of Andalusian descent and the mother is one of those tall, proud Andalusian women with long dark hair and striking features. The little girls are just clones of Mamá. The best thing about them was that they were so polite and pleasant, joining in the adult conversation when necessary and otherwise just getting on with things. Even our friend Colin from Pontevedra who had popped over for a glass or two of wine was impressed.

The little girls are being educated in Castellano, Catalán and English. The parents told us, in rather bemused tones, that they (the parents) speak to each other on Castellano but to the girls in Catalán. Very strange. But they are very happy with their daughters’ progress. So bilingual or even trilingual education can work, apparently. I’ll be interested to see what their opinion is if / when the girls change schools as they get older.

Off on a boat ride.

2011-06-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Today I abandoned the chess player (as of yesterday scoring 3 points out of a possible 5 – 2 wins, draws and one loss) and went and caught a boat to the Isla de Ons. I was going to do it yesterday but when I went to enquire about boats they told me they had cancelled the 4.15 boat because there was “mucha mar”, the equivalent, I suppose, of a heavy sea. So today, to avoid problems, I went out for the 12.15 boat and had a fine ride out to the island.

Along with the Islas Cies, which I always praise to the skies, this island and a couple of others make up the Parque Nacional de las Islas Atlánticas de Galicia. This means it has the same restrictions about what you can and can’t take to and from the island. I was interested to hear the announcement about this on the boat telling us that you are not allowed to remove sand from the island. Hmm, I wondered if they were going to check all our shoes and look between our toes just to make sure.

This island was inhabited back in the Bronze Age, has a couple of castros in it and the remains of what might have been a monastery or some kind of fortifications. I am told that it is even mentioned in Pliny but I have no proof of that. No doubt somebody knows what that illustrious Roman had to say about it. It’s one of those places that have changed ownership over the centuries but it became the property of the Xunta de Galicia back in 1984.

Unlike the Islas Cies the Isla de Ons is still inhabited on a regular basis. It was home to a fishing community in the past but I suspect lives more form tourism now. You can rent rooms or even self catering apartment there as well as camping. Because of generator problems however electric light is restricted to the hours of 13.00 to 16.00 and 21.00 to 02.00. Presumably this would apply to recharging your mobile phone and laptop computer as well.

I discovered what may just possibly be the ugliest little church in existence, from the outside anyway. The bell tower looks as though it is made from concrete and really is not a pretty thing. The main doorway and the interior are much more appealing though, quite pretty if you like that sort of thing and certainly worth popping your head in.

I understand that some people go to the Isla de Ons just for the food as its pulpo is said to be very good but I did not sample the restaurant as tonight we are eating a special cena of arroz con bogavante with the chess organisers here in Sanxenxo. However the restaurant did seem to be doing a good trade.

The chap selling what I think of seaside tourist tat – ear rings and other jewellery made out of sea shells and so on – did not seem to be doing quite so well.

I had a pleasant visit, walking miles and miles around the island – a good few kilometres anyway – following one of the trails on the information leaflet. I must walk a lot faster than most people though because a circular route which was supposed to take two and a half hours had me back at my starting point in one and a half.

To my mind the Isla de Ons is not quite as spectacular as the Islas Cíes but nonetheless worth the €14 I paid for my return ticket.

On the return journey we were treated to the sight of fire-fighter planes dropping water onto a forest fire on the other side of the ría de Pontevedra. This is unfortunately one of the prices you pay for having hot dry sunny weather. I do hope they managed to get it under control.

In search of culture

2011-06-28T10:37:00.000-07:00

Studying the map of Sanxenxo today, I noticed “Pazo de Emilia Pardo Bazán” just up the hill on the edge of the town and decided to go and have a look.

Emilia Pardo Bazán is a bit of a feminist heroine: journalist and novelist at a time when women weren’t really doing much. She was noted for her naturalistic descriptions and by all accounts was rather influenced by the French novelist Zola. She was born in La Coruña in 1851 and despite being married off at 18 to a Galician country gentleman, she was still active in Galician politics and a defender of Galician rights and so on.

There is a monument to her in La Coruña and I was interested to see what the pazo here was all about. Not terrible easy to find, was my first discovery. As with most tourist maps, there were roads that appeared to connect but in fact were blocked off by new developments. Some roads quickly turned into fairly open country. (Like many seaside places Sanxenxo has a few streets running more or less parallel to the beach so that no-one is ever more than a short walk away from the sea.)

But there were signs directing motorists towards the place and eventually I got there. It was a bit of a disappointment, I must say. I thought at first it was a new modern police station. It was the rather misleading sign saying Policía that did it. But in fact the police station was just next door. I did think it was odd that a police station should have a statue of a (rather plump,middle class matronly) lady novelist outside its doors, but then all things are possible.

Be that as it may, I had found the pazo and it was a brand spanking new modern building with no obvious connection to the novelist apart from its name and the statue outside. It is, in fact, a local cultural centre where concerts can take place and cultural activities for Sanxenxo people of all ages. I am sure Emilia would approve.

On my way back I went past the new(ish) Sanxenxo church, identified on the map as the “Templo Nuevo” and was so struck by this strange and rather oriental looking edifice that I just had to take a photo.

Processions and flowers.

2011-06-27T08:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, growing tired of waiting for my chess player to finish – and incidentally to win – his game, I strolled out for a walk on the beach. It was noisy. Rockets were going off: three loud bangs apiece. Something appeared to be going on so I went to investigate.

As I got close to the little church I saw an intricate carpet of flower petals laid out on the pavement. In front of the doorway of the church was a circular pattern of flower petals with the head of Christ in the centre. This last was protected from straying feet by temporary barriers, not surprisingly as it must have taken hours of careful work to make it.

I moved on towards the harbour to look for the source of the rockets: two men standing at the edge of the promenade, one handing the other huge rockets which he calmly lit and launched into the air from his hand. No Health and Safety concerns here then, obviously!!

At that moment the bells of the church started to ring so I made my way back, stopping to ask a local policeman what it was all about. I was informed that it was to let us know that the procession was due to arrive. On enquiring what the procession was all about, I received one of those “are-you-really-so-stupid” looks and was told, “El Corpus”. I couldn’t begin to explain to a Spanish policeman that when you have been brought up in an English Methodist/Low Anglican tradition you just don’t know the dates of all the religious festivities, not even Corpus Christi. The only processions we had were Whit Walks, certainly nothing to do with walking the Eucharist through the streets to celebrate the Body of Christ and Mass and so on.

Anyway, I got back to the church where two young men were up in the bell tower hammering away at the bells. Clearly this church had no bell ropes and English style bell ringers. I just hope the young men were wearing ear plugs although when I commented on this to another spectator she said she didn’t think they would damage their ears. Oh, no? Those bells were pretty loud at ground level, let alone up close at the top of the tower.

Eventually the procession arrived complete with a marching band (every Spanish community has one), banners very reminiscent of the Sunday School banners form the Whit Walks of my childhood, small girls in their First Communion frothy frocks and small boys in their sailor suits. I did wonder if small boys and girls would have been included in a procession at almost 9 o’clock at night in the UK, but the sun was still up and it was nice evening.

The ladies and gentlemen of the procession, as well as the small boys and girls, all carefully went round the edge of the flower petal street decoration. However, when the head honcho arrived – the priest or possibly a bishop if Sanxenxo has such a thing – under a canopy held up by four dignitaries, he walked straight across the whole thing.

All that effort, just to be trampled in a few minutes flat!

And then the boys in the bell tower started throwing handfuls of petals down on the assembled multitudes. Revenge perhaps. It was an interesting bit of local colour. Amazing what you find when you least expect it.

On my way back I came across a bit more local colour in the shape of a gaita player and his drummer girl companion. I find these much more acceptable than the mariachi men who go from restaurant to cafe to bar and then from table to table expecting to be paid for the one tune they can play. And it usually is one tune. I have even seen ere the violin player I used to see all year round on Príncipe, Vigo’s pedestrianised shopping street. He wore the same shiny brown suit, had the same smile and played the same bit of Carmen over and over and over. Still, I expect he too deserves a day out, even if it’s a working day out.

But the gaita player and his drummer girl just stood on the promenade and played, looking quite happy about it. Passers-by could give them money or not, as they chose: no pressure!!!

Out and about in Sanxenxo

2011-06-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

At nine o’clock this morning I was running (slowly, it has to be said) down Sanxenxo’s paseo marítimo to the lighthouse at the harbour and back. It’s a good time to be out and about, bright and fairly cool with just a few early birds and the road sweepers around. Then it was back to the hotel with time for a shower before breakfast.

By eleven fifteen we were both out and about, this time in the direction of Porto Novo to take in the view from the headland. The beach was still fairly empty as we set off but by the time we returned it was already filling up. There was that very Spanish beach scene of lots of coloured umbrellas, a spread of beach towels and a whole host of people walking along the waterline. Mind you, I suppose it’s rarely warm enough on most British beaches to make it worth your while to stroll up and down at the water’s edge in your swimsuit but not actually in the water.

Because my Phil takes at least three days to grow accustomed to heat and sunshine, we were back at the hotel just after twelve. So, while he did chessy things on the computer I went and threw myself in the pool, one of my favourite summer holiday occupations. The pool was heaving – well, actually, the pool itself was fairly empty but every single sun lounger was occupied. It was quite hard to find even a plastic chair to sit on.

It’s a good job the pool itself was not too crowded as one member of the Merseyside Triathlon Team (obviously here for the Pontevedra event mentioned by my friend Colin in his blog) was giving another member a lesson on something complicated to do with breathing and using certain muscles and so on. It makes my pathetically slow breast stroke look even more even more feeble!

I like watching pool society. An open air pool is a great way for Spanish papás to show what good fathers they are, teaching the children to swim, throwing them around in the water and giving them rides on their backs. Some of the mamás join in but many just sit and chat at the poolside. Often you have the whole family there together: kids, parents, grandparents and assorted friends and relations. And then there’s the fuss as the kids get out of the water into the sunshine and have to be wrapped up in a towel, not to get dry, oh no, no such thing, but in case they get cold! They should try bathing on Ainsdale beach in the 1950s and 60s; that’s all I have to say!!

Lunchtime came around (after another shower!) and we made our way as usual to the hotel dining room. As a rule we prefer to have bed and breakfast only so that we can explore local eating places. However, part of the deal for the chess event that is going on is that we have half board. Now, while the food here is very good, we are finding the amounts served to be huge. Three courses is at least one too many for us, especially if the second course is paella and the third course is roast pork with chips. I remember long go reading something about us all having a “potato-shaped space” that needs filling daily but surely rice AND chips is a bit of an exaggeration. We seem to have got our waitress trained now though, as she tells us in advance what the three courses are going to be so that we can choose which ones to have. Despite our reassurances, she’s still quite concerned about us and keeps offering us alternatives, just in case we really need to be force fed. I don’t think either of us looks anorexic.

After lunch we wandered out for coffee elsewhere, just for variety’s sake, and took a look at the local press. The absolutely definite arrival of summer is discussed quite a lot with temperatures yesterday of 34° here in Sanxenxo, 36.5° in Vigo and an unbearable 40° in Ourense. But then, they always do things to excess in Ourense – freezing in winter and frying in summer!

The language thing popped up again in one article we came across. Spanish has a long habit of borrowing “...ing” words from English, as does French for that matter. Today we found two new ones in an article about the internet: “el grooming” and something strange called “el phising” which can only “fishing” (in the IT sense), I suppose, but why spell it in that strange way. I can understand the “s” for “sh” as that’s a sound that doesn’t really occur in everyday Spanish. Years ago we asked a waiter what a particular menu item was, only to be told “eez fis”. Well, we knew it was fish but we really wanted in idea of what sort of fish. I suppose you can’t win them all.

On the subject of winning, the chess player drew his game yesterday. We hope for better today.

Back in Galicia.

2011-06-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

So here we are, back in Galicia – briefly anyway.

We flew into Porto on Thursday evening, our RyanAir flight once again trumpeting its arrival on time. They may cut corners on all sorts of things but they do like to arrive on time and crow about it.

As we made our way into Porto on the Metro line, having arrived too late for a bus to Vigo, we noticed alongside one of the stations a group of people with a sort of mini barbecue. One of them even ran up to the train and toasted us with his glass of wine. When we emerged from Trindade Station near the top of Avenida dos Aliados and I smelt grilled sardines, I realised what was going on. It was la festa de São João, of course, 24th of June.

As in Spain, they celebrate the feast of Saint John in Portugal with street parties and eat lots of sardines, or perhaps I should say sardinhas. However, in Porto they celebrate it in a BIG way. Every 50 yards or so there was a stall selling plastic hammers which squeak when you hit someone over the head with the. And that is exactly what happened. It was impossible to walk through the streets without being bopped on the head every few steps. Some people just bopped everyone indiscriminately as they went along. Others only bopped friends and relations. Small people stretched up to manage to hammer adults on the head.

(I wonder if they have to have permission to organise street parties and have to do health and safety checks as was suggested for organising street parties to celebrate the great William and Kate event. Somehow I doubt it. How exactly do you assess the H & S factor for hitting people on the head with a joke hammer?)

The crowd was moving with an apparent objective in mind, despite frequent stops to hammer and squeak. So we went with the flow and ended up on the edge of the port area where a stage had been erected and a group was busy performing. They were very well received so I assume they were quite well known locally.

We dragged ourselves away and went to a quiet place we know – well, quiet by festa de São João standards – and treated ourselves to sardinhas, washed down with cold beer. After another beer in another relatively quiet place where we watched the fireworks on the TV, we headed back to the hotel to bed, hoping that the noise from Aliados was not going to go on too late into the night. Such fun!

By Friday morning everywhere was cleaned up and sparkling. Apart from the odd reveller sleeping it off in a doorway and some people sitting on a bench still clutching plastic hammers and cans of beer, you would hardly have known there had been a festa.

Still, it was good to see that the Portuguese can still have a good time despite the crisis and national debt and all its other current problems.

From outside the classy MacDonald’s on Aliados we caught the Autna bus to Vigo where old friends met us at the bus station. Then it was food for some more fish – not sardines this time – at El Puerto, one of our favourite Vigo eateries. Unfortunately one of our party got his dates and times mixed up and failed to arrive. We caught up with him briefly, however, at Pontevedra station between taking a train to Pontevedra and then a bus to Sanxenxo, just along the coast.

And now we are comfortably installed in a fine hotel in Sanxenxo where Phil is playing chess and I am playing swimming round the pool, wandering up and down the seafront (jogging up and down it early in the morning in training for my charity race in 2 weeks time) and generally being a good tourist.

Sanxenxo appears to be full of quite recently developed hotels and blocks of tourist apartments with just occasional throw-back to a former time like this old house outside which I saw an ancient lady in one of those wrap-around pinafores sweeping her pavement this morning.

She seems to have hung onto her old place but almost everywhere else is bright and modern. But it’s clean and bright and friendly without being brash and the beach is very fine.

Watch this space for further news of the chess tournament and my jogging/swimming prowess.

Busy Weekend.

2011-06-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

Well, the Whit Friday weekend madness has come and gone. The small people (my grandchildren) and I walked into the village in the late morning and saw our local brass band play in the village centre. I suppose playing hymn tunes is a good final practice for the contest in the evening. The small people and I went on to the playground and then had sausage and chips for lunch from the local chippie which was already doing a roaring trade.

By the time we went back into the village to meet some old friends, the place was crowded, not quite so much as in warmer years but still a pretty good turn out. We watched the bands march into the village and then turn into the side street to play in front of the Delph Club where judges assessed their performance. One of last year’s trophy winners was showing off the cup they had won – not bad at all.

At one time most of the bands would have been community brass bands like our village’s band or workplace bands. A lot of schools and colleges in the area also have their own band which takes part as well. One of the colleges I used to work for has a band which won prize in international competitions.

As I walked into the village to buy the Sunday paper yesterday, I met an old chap who told me he remembers when the band contests almost died out and were usually over by 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Nowadays, having had a major revival in recent years, it goes on into late in the evening and you get bands from all over Europe. You also get some odd ones like the one who band coach I snapped.

As Friday evening wore on it turned a little damper and we were treated to the sight of bandsmen in plastic ponchos.

On Saturday morning I escaped into Manchester to get my hair done. When the train arrived at the local station, before we were able to get on we had to wait while it disgorged troops of smurfs, hippies, St Trinian’s schoolgirls and a whole range of animals. And then when I arrived at Manchester Elvis impersonators and a gang of Vikings, complete with boat, were waiting to get on. It wasn’t that everyone had gone mad. No, Saturday was the Saddleworth Beer Walk. Teams sign up with the organisers and then do a kind of extended pub crawl in fancy dress. Each team stops at almost every pub on a long walk around the Saddleworth villages collecting money for their chosen charity as they go.

I returned in the late afternoon to find the landlord of the pub next door to our house sweeping the pavement. I could hear the sounds of revelry making its way onwards into the village centre. “Have I missed all the fun?” I asked. “Yes. Aren’t you lucky?” replied the landlord, recognising the irony in my tone of voice. So I have no photos of this year’s beer walk.

Finally, yesterday was Father’s Day, an invention of the card companies, I’m sure, so that they can persuade people to spend even more money with them. In our house it turned into Grandfather’s Day as the small people arrived with presents and hand made cards and for him. Little Matthew had put some thought into the present he had bought from the Father’s Day stall they set up at his primary school last week. Intrigued, Granddad opened his present and then wondered exactly WHAT he was going to do with a ... bubblegum dispenser!!! The answer was easy, of course: hand out bubble gum to the small people.

On ducks, donkeys and gipsy caravans.

2011-06-12T07:49:00.001-07:00

Roads around here are being decked with notices saying: PARKING RESTRICTION. NO PARKING. NO UNLOADING. NO WAITING.

This is all in preparation for next weekend. Friday is Whit Friday and almost everything around here comes to a halt on that day. Well, not quite, in the morning the local churches organise processions through the villages: the Whit Walks. Having got that out of the way the local children traditionally go mad running around with pea shooters, firing lethal dried peas at each other and at anybody who happens to get in their way.

Needless to say, the local schools close so that the children can get involved in this little bit of mayhem. As my grandchildren have the day off but their mother doesn’t, her school being outside of the Saddleworth area, they will end up with me and we will go and observe this madness but also see morris dancers in the square and possibly get involved in a duck race. A friend of mine has been the custodian for the last 15 to 20 years of a set of numbered yellow plastic ducks which are floated down the river. You “buy” a duck and if yours arrives at the finishing line first, you win a prize. Such fun!!!

In the evening there is the Band Contest. Brass bands some from all over England, all over Europe in fact, to play in each village in turn. That’s what the parking restrictions are all about; the bands go from village to village by coach and then march into each village in turn and play their piece. They don’t want parked cars getting in the way. Back when I was a working girl I would arrive home to find that I had to park about a mile away from my house and walk back.

The bands are judged by a committee in each venue and eventually an overall winner is chosen. We usually meet up with old friends in the village to watch the bands progress through Delph and then we retire to one of the local pubs. On rare Whit Fridays, the weather is delightful and people stand around in the evening sunshine, enjoying the spectacle. Mostly, however, it is rather cold and damp but we all put on a brave face, a good English stiff upper lip and declare that we are enjoying ourselves anyway. Don’t knock it; this is the closest we get around here to a fiesta.

The whole thing has started already with a Donkey Scarecrow trail around Delph. If you can’t manage to just walk around here without the need for added stimulus, you can buy a map and tick off Donkey Scarecrows as you spot them. All proceeds go to the local library; so it is all in a good cause. There are even a couple of donkeys in the car park of the pub next door to our house.

I’m not at all sure whether the gipsy caravan which I spotted in a farm gateway just on the edge of the village has anything to do with all this. It was there yesterday when I jogged around the village (in training for the Race for Life which I am running with granddaughter number one and a couple of her friends in July to raise money for cancer research) but today has disappeared.

And then today is the Saddleworth Show , a sort of village fête on a large scale. That, of course is, why the day that began with sunshine has moved on to wind and rain. It’s traditional to get soaked at Saddleworth Show.

It’s just another example of the English summer, with bells on!

Summertime!

2011-06-09T04:18:00.001-07:00

The English summer continues in its multi-seasonal way here. Monday: sunshine and fine weather, good enough to take the kids to play in the park. Tuesday: April showers in June. Wednesday: thunder and lightning, hailstorms, torrential rain.

On Tuesday I listened in to the conversation of a couple of Spaniards walking towards Piccadilly Station. One said to the other that she had brought her sunglasses to Manchester but she never wore them as she never needed them. I do think she exaggerated a little. At that particular moment the sun was shining nicely. The fact that it absolutely threw it down only minutes later is neither here nor there.

The showery weather had the umbrella sellers out on Market Street in Manchester, an unusual sight, making me think for a moment that I was back in Galicia.

I was in Manchester in my lady of leisure role: Italian conversation class, a bit of shopping, a cup of coffee with friends – you get the picture. Having done my lady of leisure bit I realised that I had about eight minutes to get from St Anne’s Square to Victoria Station to catch a train to my daughter’s house. There’s only one train an hour and the bus, although marginally more frequent, is less convenient. I caught the train and almost wished I hadn’t as it was so crowded; it was one of those journeys which make you understand how sardines feel. Apparently the rail company is aware of the problem but won’t put longer trains on as some of the stations on that route have very short platforms!!

My daughter had asked me to babysit so I had invited myself to tea rather than go home and then have to go out again immediately. The evening was uneventful enough until I was on my way home, waiting at the bus stop just down the road from my daughter’s house. She was doing the concerned daughter bit and watching out of the window to check that the bus arrived as I had left my mobile phone at home by mistake and so could not text her to let her know I was safely on board. (What did we do before mobiles?)

As I stood at the bus stop I saw a car pull up opposite, followed shortly by another, just ordinary cars. Two young men got out of each car and had a little confab on the corner of the street. They then got back in the cars and moved them around a little, got out and talked some more and then got back in. My curiosity was aroused but I was trying not to let it show as I was all alone at the stop ... without my mobile phone!!

Then they moved the cars so that they were facing the same way down the street. I heard one say, “Right! We’ll do the countdown now! Three... two ... one ...” And they were off, racing down the street. And there I was, waiting for a crash at any moment and ... still without my mobile!

They came back, one driver accused the other of having modified his engine in some way and then they raced again! They returned for another go but I didn’t see that as my bus arrived and they had to pull out of the way to allow the buss to get through. My daughter did see the third race, however, and phoned the police at that point. Fun and games in the late evening in Mossley, Greater Manchester!

Stranger things happen in other places though. I heard on the radio news yesterday that a man in a suitcase was arrested in North East Spain. Yes, a man in a suitcase!

It turns out that this man and his partner were regularly stealing from cases in the luggage compartment of the bus taking plane passengers from Gerona airport into the city. Thefts were only discovered when travellers opened their cases in their hotels and found that laptops, cameras, kindles and suchlike had disappeared. Police were puzzled and then one day someone noticed something wrong with a bag in the luggage hold and called the police, solving the mystery on the spot.

One smallish man hid inside a large suitcase. His partner deposited the bag in the luggage hold of the bus. Once the bus set off, the smallish man got out of his case and rifled the other bags, putting all the swag and himself back in the suitcase in time for his friend to unload him. Quite ingenious! My Phil, who already likes to sit where he can check that no-one walks off with our bags, will be even more paranoid next time we do the airport bus stage of our travels!

Still, at least they caught that thief. The newsman said that according to Gerona police it was an open and shut case!!

Zen and the art of Xenophobia

2011-06-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4, always a radio station worth listening to. This was “Off the Page” where a group of writers discussed “foreignness”. One speaker, Amanda Mitchinson, described buying chicken when she lived for two years in Cairo. On the first occasion she located a smiley lady in the market who shooed her away to finish her shopping while she killed, plucked and cleaned up the selected chicken. She returned later to find her chicken parcelled up in newspaper. On opening the parcel she found eight wings, a neck, one leg but no breast meat. The next time, she hung around while the deed was done, took her parcel of chicken home and discovered, six wings, some neck meat, one leg, assorted bits of offal but still no breast meat. On the third occasion she did managed a small amount of breast meat. During her two year stay in Cairo she regularly bought chicken from the same smiley lady, received progressively fewer wings and more different bits of chicken but never enough to reconstitute a whole bird.

Never mind discussion with Bedouin about the cost of brides in different countries, for Amanda Mitchinson being foreign means never getting the whole chicken.

Another speaker talked about living in France and believing he had mastered not only the language but the local accent quite well. That is until the day he went to book a table in a restaurant in Paris. As he walked away he realised he given them all the necessary details except for one important one: his name. So back he went to the restaurant, only to find that there was no problem; he was booked in as “The Englishman”. So much for going native!

Now, towards the end of my two years in Vigo I did find that when I met new people they did think I might be Spanish. Similarly, when we went to Figueira da Foz in Portugal last October I heard someone talking about my husband as “the English chess player” and commenting that he wife was not English but Spanish. I find that quite hard to credit as I feel I look very English and not at all Spanish. Maybe after a while you pick up mannerisms as well as accents.

However, I do agree with one of the speakers who said that no matter how long you live in a country you remain foreign. You wear the wrong clothes, speak the wrong way and have the wrong expectations. Above all, you don’t have the shared history; your school and youth experiences are all different. (I remember going to Italian conversation classes and thinking during a discussion about education that the Spaniards and Italians in the group had more in common educationally than I did with either group.) One speaker on the radio programme even went so far as to say that this also applies to cities. He is from Philadelphia but has lived for over thirty years in New York. However, he never feels he can call himself a New Yorker!

My sister and I discussed this a little in her recent visit, swapping frustration about things you can’t buy in Spain that you just take for granted in England – and, of course, the other way round. What struck us both is how hard it is to escape from the stereotype of your own nationality. When it rains in Andalucía, or in Galicia for that matter, someone is sure to say, “Oh, this must make you feel at home! The rain must remind you of England!” Well, no, actually; the rain is different!

Now, my sister has lived for almost 35 years in Andalucía, far longer than she ever lived in the UK, but she still regards Southport as “home”. My son, in contrast, refers to London as “his city”; he’s lived there for less than one third of his life and seems to have cast off his North of England personality. He apparently has no need to have been born in the place to feel that he belongs there.

Different people obviously experience things differently. Apart from odd bits of vocabulary, my sister speaks English just the way she ever did. A friend of ours who moved to France about fifteen years ago reckons he finds it hard to think in English; he has no problem speaking it however. Another friend who has lived in France for going on 40 years visited England for the first time in a long time recently and amused us all by having a very slight French accent when she speaks her “native” tongue. Similarly my young friend and ex-student, Craig, who has lived mostly in Spain and France since he graduated from university a few years ago is developing a nicely clipped, general European accent in his English. Interesting!

And, of course, we must not forget that being foreign is in itself interesting. One of the BBC guests expressed the view that everyone should live in a foreign country for a while. It makes you take stock of yourself and your country, makes you see life differently.

Zen and the art of ....

2011-06-02T05:39:00.000-07:00

This week Spanish cucumbers have had very bad press, accused, wrongly as it turns out, of causing an outbreak of e-coli in Germany. The declaration that the pepinos were innocent came too late for the poor Spanish market gardeners who have had to destroy crops and now find a kind of international reluctance to buy any of their products. The Russians, it seems, don’t want to have anything to do with vegetables coming from the EU. Advice is going out generally to wash fruit and veg before eating. Isn’t that a thing that you normally do?

My week, though, has been more concerned with Canadian exports. On Tuesday evening we went to listen to the wonderful K D Lang in concert in Manchester. Her support act was also Canadian. The oddly named Little Miss Higgins sang us songs and regaled us with stories of the part of Canada she comes from, apparently made up of “towns” of 400 people; her own place is now reduced to 398 inhabitants now that she and her accompanying guitarist have gone on tour with. In their area a big town is one with 800 inhabitants, about the size of fairly large primary school here. I bet they understand the idea of the “pueblo”.

K D Lang was mostly publicising her new album with her new band The Siss Boom Gang – very good they are too – but she did sing a good number of old favourites too. For me, you can’t beat her song “Miss Chatelaine”. She puts on a delightful, almost self parodying performance as she pouts and poses and dances around the stage in her own special way. However, the song she got the standing ovation for was Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluyah”, which she belts out to maximum effect.

It’s Leonard Cohen who is the other Canadian export who has come to my notice this week. He has just been awarded the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de la Literatura, not just for his songs which are usually pomes in their own right, but also for his books. He has a big following in Spain. When we saw him there in the summer of 2009 masses of people turned out and all of them seemed to know his lyrics well. According to the article I saw in El País online, Leonard Cohen started touring in 2008 because his latest divorce had left him more or less penniless. Now I was led to understand that it was his accountant who had ripped him off while he (Leonard Cohen) was in retreat in a Buddhist monastery. Whatever the reason for him impecunious state, the €50,000 which accompany a Miró statuette to make up the prize will go some way to make up for it.

I’m not sure what it is with Canadian singer-song writers and Buddhism. At one point in her concert on Tuesday, K D Lang mentioned the fact that she too is a Buddhist. All I need to discover now is that Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are also Buddhists. It must be a Zen thing.

Here in soggy Saddleworth I have just discovered an outbreak of toadstools in my garden. I’ve never seen them in the garden before. Maybe it’s a result of the warm and damp conditions that prevail at the moment.

They have promised us one of the hottest summers in a long time but it would not surprise me if that was just the rest of the UK and Saddleworth remained as wet as ever. Still we are escaping to Galicia for a visit in a few weeks time. Hopefully we will get a good dose of sunshine while we are there. And yes, before anyone informs me of this, I do know that Galicia is not reliable where sunshine is concerned. We will see!

My other discovery in the garden is the small cairns that the grandchildren have been building. Maybe there is a connection with the toadstools. Have they perhaps found fairies living at the bottom of the garden?

Only in Spain!

2011-05-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

So, what do my sister and President Obama have in common? Both of them are afraid of being trapped here because of the new ash cloud. In actual fact, it looks as though there won’t be a problem. The cloud is said to be moving on to Germany where they are busy closing airports today. But you never know; volcanoes are a bit unpredictable, after all.

My sister is here for an Eric Clapton concert in London and has taken the opportunity to visit family en route. This has lead to a rather roundabout journey: plane from Seville to Liverpool, car to Southport (to see my other sister), train to Greenfield and bus to Delph (to see us), bus to Manchester, train to London (I made sure she and her husband got on it this morning) and finally plain from London to Seville.

They have to back home in time for the 1st of June at the latest. Otherwise they wouldn’t be worried about ash clouds causing delays; they’d just stay a little longer. However, her Spanish husband took early retirement last year and because of this his pension is currently paid partly by his employer (essentially the Spanish state as he was a funcionario) and partly by Social Security. As a result he has to go and sign on the dole every three months until he reaches proper retirement age, whatever that is these days. There must be an easier way of doing things!

Before they came to England, my sister investigated getting them both European Health Cards. She had no problem doing this for herself over the internet but for her Spanish hubby they had to report to the Social Security offices. Once again, the problem was that he is an early retiree. This time it meant that he could not actually have a European Health Card but a bit of paper covering him for possible health problems while out of Spain. However, he was told that he was only covered for two weeks and should/could not remain out of the country for a longer time. When did this kind of restriction come into force?

While I’m on the subject of strange Spanish ways, here’s a link to a website I discovered. Since smoking restrictions came into force in Spanish bars and restaurants, there are smokers who desperately need to know which places have a separate smoking section and this website, AquíSí puedes fumar, lets you know this. Only in Spain!!

My “Spanish” sister was quite vociferously against banning all sorts of things, including bullfighting. She feels that people should have the choice. All well and good, but I don’t choose to have my lungs filled with cigarette smoke and I don’t suppose bulls choose to be prodded, poked and finally polished off in the bullring.

So, here are some pictures of Las Arenas, the old bullring in Barcelona which has been converted into a shopping and leisure centre with magnificent views of the Catalan capital from the top of the building. Now, that seems like a good way to preserve and old monument without having to maintain a tradition which really has little to do with the 21st century!

Out and about

2011-05-12T06:46:00.000-07:00

I have recently taken to going into Manchester by bus and train rather than by going all the way by bus. The journey is only slightly quicker but on the whole a good deal more pleasant. I catch a bus from our crossroads to Greenfield station although on occasion I walk some or all of the way; it’s a 45 minute walk if you go all the way on foot so it has to be a day when I’m not pressed for time. There is a bit of a wait at the railway station but this is just as well given the unreliability of our local bus service. My bus can be up to 10 minutes late (and sometimes is) without causing me to miss the train. If the bus is on time and it’s a fine day, I get off the bus a couple of stops before the station and walk the rest of the way.

Unlike the bus station, the railway station is not a bad place to wait. The bus station in the town centre is a modern glass and steel construction, extremely draughty and, as I have said before, full of people who are trying to ignore the announcements that this bus station is a no-smoking area. It would seem that you get a better class of travellers at the railway station or at least fewer smokers. Those who do smoke retreat into a little smoking shelter at one end of the platform.

Otherwise, it’s just a nice clean little station. On a fine day you can sit in the sunshine and if it rains there is a covered area all the passengers can squeeze into.

What’s more, I can travel on the local train on my bus pass. The joys of free public transport! Whereas the bus brings me into Manchester at Piccadilly Gardens, which have been “modernised” into a rather bland if not actually ugly square, in my opinion anyway, the train arrives at Victoria Station. Now, this station has been described as one of the ugliest in Britain and I have to say that whoever assessed it is probably correct. It really needs a bit of care and attention. In the daytime it’s dingy but at night it’s gloomy, dark and rather threatening.

, the exterior of the station is worth a look with its old glass and wrought iron veranda, proudly boasting the destinations you can get to from there: Southport, Scarborough, Blackpool, Belgium. Belgium??? Probably not any longer or at least not very directly.

And arriving at Victoria does mean that I get to walk past the cathedral and through some nice bits of old Manchester. You also walk through the large open area in front of Chetham’s School of Music, a specialist music school in the city centre and a building worth looking at. You just have to ignore the rather naff water feature which runs through the square.

Early evening yesterday, as on many a sunny evening, the square was full of boys – no, young men – honing their skate-boarding skills.

What is it with young men and skateboards? Do they not grow out of them? Apparently not, judging by the numbers I see trying to execute fancy jumps and turns in any open place available. You don’t see young women practising complicated skipping games, seeing who can “run in” without disturbing the rhythm of the turning rope. Neither do you see them playing the strange game which involves attaching lots of elastic bands together to form a long stretchy rope which two girls hold around their ankles while others carry out fancy manoeuvres jumping in and out and through. And you don’t find pairs of girls trying to do intricate cats’ cradle patterns with lengths of string. No, on the whole we have moved on. Young women who want to get involved in sports activities are more likely to be jogging or off to the gym. But the male of the species still likes to play with the skateboard. I fail to understand it.

However, the square was very pleasant in the sunshine and there were lots of people sitting outside the old Shambles pub. Manchester can be delightful!

I was on my way to the Royal Northern College of Music to a fado concert with Mariza, the Portuguese singer. So I had a fair trek across Manchester to the concert venue but was worth it. I discovered Mariza a few years ago on television when she was featured in the Cambridge Folk Festival. Her dramatic performance captured me immediately and I went out and bought a CD. I find myself singing along in Spanish to her Portuguese songs or poems, as she insists on calling them. She has a perfect right to do so as many of her songs are poems set to music but even new songs written for her by one of her musicians are referred to as poems.

When I booked my ticket for the concert there were no seats left in the main theatre area; all that was left were seats in the “pit”. So that’s where I went and I found myself on the very front row, right up by the stage. The only way to get closer would have been to be seated at one of the tables on the stage itself. Someone suggested the people seated there might be students from the College of Music but judging by the age range I don’t think that was the case. I wonder how they were selected.

The aim was to recreate “Mariza’s Taverna”, with tables in a semi-circle at the back and seats for the guitar players in front of them. Eventually Mariza arrived, quite tall and made taller by high-heeled shoes, very dramatic in a long black dress, all net and ruffles and long lace sleeves. Her hair is still worn very short, white blonde and plastered to her head. Her face seems all cheekbones and dark eyes but when she sings her mouth is unbelievably expressive.

She sang songs I recognised and some I had never heard before, some sad, some happy, all full of emotion. The song which she told us was her favourite fado was the first song I ever heard her sing, Primavera, a song about lost love, inevitably!

She had the audience joining in and, not satisfied with the singing, got down close and personal, into the audience after she had managed to persuade the staff to help her find a way down. At this point she gently told off a fan who used flash (not me, I hasten to add), explaining that in the dark of the theatre the sudden flash effectively blinds her, even onstage. So, no flash.

She ended the concert by telling us that we were now part of “a minha gente” – my people. When she started her singing career, “a minha gente” were the people of Portugal and particularly of her own town but she now includes all those who make an effort to understand and share her Portuguese culture. And then she sang for us as she said she would have sung in her taverna; without microphones or amplifiers for herself or her musicians. She opened her mouth and filled the concert hall with her song. Simply astounding!

Anticipation

2011-05-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

Today we received this postcard.

Our son and his good lady sent it to us while they were on honeymoon. The postcard was selected because his father is a rather more than fanatical chess player. Strangely enough, in the gardens of the hotel where the boy got married there was also a giant chess set. Odd!

Of course the boy and his lady were back from honeymoon well before the postcard arrived. This is what happens when you go off to the other side of the world.

Now this honeymoon itself was rather late. The boy and his lady were married in September but postponed the real honeymoon until March. If you’re going to combine a honeymoon in faraway places with a visit to members of the bride’s distant family, you need time to do it properly. So in September they had a quick week in Portugal and put off the honeymoon proper until later.

Clearly our boy and his missis have set a precedent because it has just been announced in today’s news that Prince William and his lady (do we now call her Princess Catherine or Princess Kate or Your Highness the Duchess of Cambridge or what?) have finally set off on their honeymoon. They too waited until the right time to go away, probably in their case as a way of avoiding paparazzi!

Anyway it’s always good to have things to look forward to.

I have recently managed to book tickets to see various singers in concert. The first is tomorrow evening: Mariza, a Portuguese singer. I’m going to that one alone as she sings fado, traditional Portuguese music which my husband says he has to be “in the mood for”, rather like Spanish flamenco. I can see his point but I like Mariza and her rather dramatic presentation.

Later in the week we will go together to see Loudon Wainwright III. Younger friends have usually not heard of him and need to be told that he is the father of Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright but for us it’s the other way around: Rufus and Martha are the children of Loudon.

And then at the end of the month we are off the see K. D. Lang, an old favourite of mine and whose songs my husband is fortunately usually in the mood for.

So, things to look forward to.

On a different note altogether, I am glad I don’t have to look forward to applying to university at the moment. It’s already hard enough for students to face the increasing cost of going to university along with the fierce competition to get a place at a really good one. Now it seems that plans are afoot to allow some of the most select (and selective) universities to offer extra places to those students whose families can pay upfront. These places will cost substantially more than the usual places and the applicants will have to renounce the right to take out student loans.

Apparently this will “free up” places at top universities, making it more possible for less financially advantaged students to attend those institutions. And the high-fee paying, no-loan student still have to achieve the high grades in order to earn a place on the courses.

However, it still has me wondering about the rights and wrongs of such a scheme. Might we not be creating a two-tier system? Am I too idealistic in thinking that this level of education should be available to everyone who makes the grade, or should I say makes the A-Level grades?

Once again I find myself glad to have been born a baby-boomer. Life was so much simpler then!

Pond life

2011-05-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening my daughter and I went swimming. This is a regular Tuesday evening activity. We park the children with granddad for a little bit of grandfatherly bonding and go off and swim up and down the local pool. She usually does a lot more lengths than I do as she is a much more proficient swimmer than I am, faster, able to do a variety of strokes and so on. I just plod up and down doing a very pedestrian breast stoke, the only way I know how to swim.

Sometimes the pool is relatively empty but tonight it was just a little overcrowded and as I dodged out of the way of other swimmers I found myself inventing categories of swimmers in my head.

There are the sharks; these super fast, super selfish swimmers plough up and down the pool quite heedless of other pool users. This clearly THEIR pool and they ruthlessly drive others out of their path. You are in serious danger of being pulled into the undertow and possibly getting eaten into the bargain.

Then you have the blind cave fish; these are fairly docile slow swimmers but, like the sharks, they are oblivious to all other swimmers. They simply don’t seem to realise anyone else is there until they bump into them. You have to swim around them as they are unable to swim round you.

The octopus is an interesting phenomenon. This is made up of two, three or even four swimmers, usually female, who stop half way up the pool and get in a huddle to talk about some obviously important matter. They have a prodigious number of arms and legs threshing about and getting in everyone’s way.

Quite harmless are the limpets. They tend to swim to one end and then cling to that point for a while before swimming to the other end to cling on there for a while longer.

The dolphins are people like my daughter: proficient swimmers who go up and down the pool sensibly and considerately. If they splash you, you can guarantee they do it on purpose and usually playfully. My dolphin daughter, however, has been known to kick extra hard and create lots of splashy waves as she goes past octopi.

Sometimes there are whales. These are the large ladies who come to the pool for aqua-fit classes but arrive twenty minutes early and bask in the water until it is time for their class to begin. Clearly no-one has told them what a good idea it would be to do a few lengths of the pool before the class starts. We didn’t see any of them this evening. Maybe we left the pool too early.

So what about me? Well, when I run I think of myself as a bit of a tortoise: slow and steady but getting there in the end. I swim in a similar fashion; EVERYONE swims faster than I do. And that is no exaggeration. However, I can’t call myself a turtle as they swim very fast and dart about all over the place at great speed. So maybe I’m a bit of a clown fish, except that I think I flatter myself by suggesting I might be like any kind of fish.

What's in a name?

2011-04-30T10:17:00.001-07:00

Scanning newspapers, English and Spanish, on-line this morning, I discovered that a young couple called by El Faro de Vigo Guillermo y Catalina had set off on honeymoon in a helicopter. I don't think they intended to use the helicopter for the whole of their journey. Their aim was to avoid the news-hounds who would follow their every move if they used a more conventional means of transport. I wonder if Guillermo was at the controls of said helicopter. For he is, of course, our own Prince William and I understand that helicopter flying is one of the skills he has perfected up in recent years.

What interested me was the fact that William and Kate/Catherine had become Guillermo y Catalina. It's one of those odd but interesting facts that the Spanish media always translate our royal family's names into Spanish while the English speaking press leave Spanish names in the original. You never see the king and queen of Spain being referred to as John Charles and Sophie. Prince Felipe and Letizia do not change into Philip and Letitia.

It is something that we must have done in the past. Our history books talk about the Catholic Monarchs (Los Reyes Católicos) as Ferdinand and Isabella, the anglicised form of Fernando e Isabel. When you look at place names, cities and regions which were known long long ago have anglicised names. Just as the Spanish call London Londres, so we say Seville for Sevilla and historically Saragossa for Zaragoza, but I suspect that tourist guide books now use the Spanish version for that city.

Really, of course, we should go back to their own-language version for all place names if we are to be truly modern. After all we no longer talk about Peking and Bombay but Beijing and Mumbai. So maybe we are just being very modern in not giving the Spanish royal family English versions of their names.

Of course, we do still use English versions of names of popes but I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that an institution steeped in tradition keeps to traditional ways of doing things, with a slightly different version of the Pope's name for each country he visits.

As for Guillermo and Catalina, well, I must be among the few who did not see the wedding as it took place. We went to a friend's party yesterday evening – to celebrate his return from a round the world cruise, I hasten to add, NOT to celebrate the royal nuptials – and one of the guests was telling everyone how she had got up at SIX in the morning to watch the television coverage!!!

We avoided the fuss altogether during the dayby trotting off to Chester Zoo to celebrate our grandson's birthday. So instead of admiring frothy frocks and big hats, we oohed and aahed over red pandas and elephants' bath time. There were rather more people there than we had expected. Other people obviously had the same ideas as we did. And there were a lot of caravans on the road: people off for a long bank holiday weekend.

But now that the big event is all over and the rubbish has been swept up off the streets of London, what ARE the media going to find to prattle on about?

And W is for …?

2011-04-27T13:07:00.001-07:00

I don’t know about anyone else but I rather want to get Friday out of the way, over and done with, gone. In case it’s not obvious, I am heartily sick of the ROYAL WEDDING which, if it doesn’t dominate the news, certainly features in just about every broadcast one way or another.

The weekend newspaper supplements had poems written by a collection of poets, suggesting delightful wedding vows for the young couple to use on the day.

There have been all sorts of fashion features concentrating on guessing what THE DRESS will be like. Errmm … probably white, possibly frothy, almost certainly long (but you never know) and elegant! It’s a wedding dress after all!

In Waterstone's bookshop in Manchester yesterday I saw a range of books with titles along the lines of “William and Kate”; how original is that for a title?

Just about every shop is selling memorabilia of some kind; even the charity shops have some. Now who has been able to donate commemorative tat from an even that has not yet happened? Hmmm!

The small cafe in our village has a positively sick-making patriotic display in the window and one of the local pubs has a life-size cardboard cut-out of William and What’s-her-name just outside its door.

Union Jack bunting is going up everywhere. Somebody must be organising parties after all. My grandson’s primary school class is having a party on Thursday to celebrate the event. They can’t do it on Friday because they have the day off. As it’s the little chap’s sixth birthday on Friday, he did think for a while that the day off was in his honour. He now knows, however, that Friday is the day of what he calls the Woyal Wedding.

Finally, in today’s Guardian online I came across a headline “Royal Wedding: Knit your own Corgi”. Now, I had been toying with the idea of knitting some kind of animal for the aforementioned grandson’s birthday. When it was his sister’s birthday I knitted dolls, complete with a change of clothes. But I hadn’t come up with anything for him and I rather fancied giving him something a bit unusual alongside the remote controlled car I mentioned in my last blogpost. So little woolly dogs, not very corgi-like in my version, were the perfect thing. I’ve got a day and a bit to knit a small pack of the things.

The knitting pattern apparently is an extract from a book called “Knit Your Own Royal Wedding” by Fiona Goble. I’ve not seen the rest of the contents, obviously, as I have no intention of paying even the Guardian’s special offer reduced price of £7.99 for the book. It does sound like a clever idea though and I hope Fiona makes some money out of it.

Out and about in Manchester

2011-04-26T08:17:00.000-07:00

Wandering about in Manchester midmorning yesterday I took this photo of a reflection in a window.

There it was: the old and the new, ancient and modern reflected in the glass.

The curved-roofed building is the old Manchester Central Station, now an exhibition hall called the GMex centre, for a while anyway; it may have changed its name recently. They do these changes to keep us on our toes. The other is the Hilton Tower, hotel, apartment and office building, the tallest in the North West of England by all accounts and certainly visible from miles around. It may be a marvel of modern architecture but it’s not really very elegant or beautiful, not to my way of looking at things at least. And when it’s very windy, the top of the tower gives off a strangely haunting siren noise. The first time I heard it, I wondered if we were under attack from aliens!

Midmorning Manchester yesterday was very pleasant. As it was Easter Monday Bank Holiday the place was remarkably quiet. Later on in the day there were lots of shoppers around but there was very little traffic. It was possible to stroll across major roads without any problems. The sun was shining and the air was amazingly clear.

In the sunshine, Manchester is a fine city. You have to ignore the ground floor of most buildings as they have been made anonymous by having brand-name shop windows and their displays imposed on them, making Market Street look exactly the same as any shopping street in any town in England. However, if you lift your eyes up from ground level, the buildings are worth a second look.

I won’t comment on the horrors of “refurbishment” that have been visited on Piccadilly Gardens but Albert Square, where the rather majestic town hall is situated, is splendid.

I had gone to Manchester to meet an old friend, someone I worked with for a good few years. We were both impressed with how nice Manchester is when it’s quiet. Because this is England in the 21st century, all the shops were open despite it being a Bank Holiday so we took a look around various places, ostensibly looking for an outfit for my friend to wear to her daughter’s wedding but not finding anything suitable and really taking the opportunity just to natter and catch up withhold gossip.

At lunchtime we unsuccessfully looked for a restaurant where my friend remembered having enjoyed the food. Could we find? Not at all. So we finished up in a Pizza Express where we ate a very satisfactory fancy salad and carried on gossiping.

Lunch over, we eventually went our separate ways, my friend to Victoria Station while I set off to trek across Manchester city centre to Toys ‘r’ Us in one of those retail parks just outside the main shopping areas. I needed to look for a present for my grandson who will be six on Friday and Toys ‘r’ Us was the only place to go.

They call themselves a toyshop but I really loathe the idea of taking a child in there. First of all because it is such a toy-supermarket of a place, aisles and aisles of toys stacked up to the ceiling, encouraging children to want one of everything. And then the displays which are set up to show what the toys look like, few and far between, usually displays of garden swings and other large ride-on toys, are all labelled “Do not touch” or “Do not allow children to play on these”. Definitely not a toyshop, it’s just a warehouse where you can buy toys but which destroys all the magic of playtime. There should be a notice on the door saying, “Adults Only!!”

Be that as it may, I managed to find the remote-controlled car I was looking for at a reasonable price and made my way homewards. This took me longer than I expected as the buses were running on Sunday-service. This meant that instead of there being a bus every half hour for the last stage of my journey, there was only one every hour. So I had a long wait.

But the sun, which had disappeared earlier in the afternoon, had come back to make even sitting a bus stop with a book and an iPod enjoyable. First rule of the public transport user: always have your book and possibly some music with you!!

Reasons to be cheerful

2011-04-21T13:37:00.001-07:00

On the whole I am an easygoing, good-tempered sort of person. Even though I am known to rant about things on occasion, few things work me up into a serious rage. However, one of the things I do object to is being forced to share other people’s bad choice of music.

I can just about cope with the kind of muzak you get in lifts and in big department stores. You can usually tune that out and just get on with going wherever you are going. That’s not a problem.

No, what I object to is having to listen to doomph – doomph – doomph coming at top volume from some car stopped at traffic lights. The driver has to turn the volume up to the max as he is driving with his windows open because he’s smoking or, even better, because he’s got the roof down on his convertible and can’t hear his so-called music when he’s on the move unless it’s turned up really high. And with the rather pleasant sunny weather we have been having it seems as though every convertible owner is driving around the roads of Saddleworth with the roof down.

And then there are the leaky earphones on the bus. Presumably the owners of these malfunctioning headphones must be at least partially deaf as they need to turn the volume on their portable music system up as high as possible. Tinny doomph – doomph – doomph is a special delight.

I came across the best form of obligatory music sharing though just the other day. We got on the bus to return from Oldham. The only empty seats were near the back of the bus and, annoyingly, they were facing towards the back of the bus. (There is something very disconcerting about travelling backwards on a bus; it’s bad enough on a train!) It soon became clear why those seats were free. At the very back sat a group of four young ladies, aged somewhere between 16 and 19 by the look of them. They occupied the whole of the back seat: that’s four people using the space of seven. Not only that but they also had their feet on the seats facing theirs. Now, I know countries where you can get quite a hefty fine for doing just that. So there they were, nicely dressed bright young things but somewhat antisocial.

But most antisocial of all was the fact that one of them had her music player (iPod, iPhone, MP3 player, whatever) plugged into a portable speaker and was sharing her music with her friends … and with everyone else on the bus. Even putting my own headphones on and listening to my own iPod did not work. Their “music” drowned out even Springsteen unless I turned my volume up to a level which might damage my hearing.

I almost got around to asking them to turn their volume down so I could hear my own music. I almost remonstrated with them for their anti-social behaviour and selfish attitude in making the seats grubby for the next people who would sit there. When I recognised one of the tracks they listened to as a French rap artiste, I almost asked them condescendingly if they actually understood what they were listening to. I almost did all those things but in the end I wasn’t in the mood for confrontation. It was a lovely sunny day, too nice for an argument. And then the noisy bunch got off the bus anyway so all was peaceful once more.

We have been having an astonishing number of fine sunny days, unseasonably warm as well. Looking at the weather chart for Europe last weekend, I noticed that almost all of Spain appeared to be having temperatures around or even above 30°. I wonder if they will open the pool early in the gardens of the flats where we lived in Vigo. 30° is quite hard to manage of you can’t have a dip!

Here we aren’t quite up to that level but we’ve done a good deal of sitting out in the garden or going for walks in the sunshine. Most pleasant! The summer wardrobes are coming out early and strappy tops are to be seen everywhere. People are sitting outside the pubs – and not just the smokers! I was very gratified this evening to see drinkers outside one of our local pubs, the Swan at Dobcross, which I had been told had been forced to close. It’s always a shame when a village loses its local so it was good to see people there.

As I walked around admiring the blossom trees, which are very fine at present, reflecting on the summer clothes which have appeared almost overnight, I was reminded of the old saying, “Don’t cast a clout ‘til May is out.” I never did find a reasonable explanation for a “clout” as an item of clothing instead of a clip round the ear but I have always understood the saying to mean that you shouldn’t be too hasty in putting your winter clothes away.

Some people argue that May means the month; others say it means the May blossom, in other words hawthorn blossom. Well if the latter group are correct then May is almost out. The hawthorn bushes and trees are in bud and in the next few days they will be in full bloom.

Time to start casting clouts everyone!

Getting lost

2011-04-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I read a novel by a Spanish author, Rosa Montero, possibly one of my favourite writers. The story begins in an airport where the female narrator is waiting for her husband to emerge from the gents’ toilet. Time passes and he does not appear. Their flight is called for boarding and he does not appear. The airport staff search the gents’ and there is no sign of him. The rest of the story is not important here. I wouldn’t like to spoil it for you in case you ever get around to reading it. Ever since I read it, however, I have been on tenterhooks whenever we are in an airport departures lounge and my Phil disappears into the gents’, especially if it is close to the departure time for our plane. I mention this because last Sunday I thought I was going through a slightly different version of that scenario.

We had gone to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a place definitely worth visiting. When we reached the point of feeling quite “museumed out”, we decided to find the café for some refreshments. En route we took a stop off to go to the loo, ladies’ to the left, gents’ to the right. A few minutes later I returned to the point where we had gone our separate ways and waited … and waited … and waited. I began to have a feeling of déjà vu or maybe that should be “déjà lu”. Finally, some fifteen minutes later my wandering husband returned. He had missed the very small sign half way down a staircase and had ended up in the depths of the museum: lost!

This was not the first, nor indeed the last, time we had managed to get lost during our visit to London. Catching a bus to the tube station one day we had misread the information at the bus stop and convinced ourselves that the bus we were about to catch would take us all the way to Victoria Station. It would make a nice change, we thought, to travel into central London by bus. We could see the sights from the top deck. It was a fine if rather cloudy day and we were in no hurry. Besides, it would be free as we could travel on our Greater Manchester bus passes. So far so good. And then a few stops after the tube station the bus came to a stop and the driver announced that this was the terminus. After wandering around for a while we concluded that we were in fact heading away from central London! Oh for a compass in a situation like this!!

Then a few days later we did it again. In search of South Kensington tube station to begin our journey home after leaving the Victoria and Albert I misread the map and marched us well out of our way so that we had to retrace our steps to find a tube station to begin our journey home. We had had no trouble going from the tube station to the V & A because we had gone through the long, long tunnel system connecting directly to the museum. So I had us temporarily lost in London. But were we downhearted? Not one bit. It’s all part of the adventure. And our overground route took us past the Natural History Museum, a building well worth seeing even if you’ve run out of time and energy to visit it.

And finally I found something I had mislaid. A while ago I decided I wanted re-read a book by Cormac McCarthy, “All the Pretty Horses”. When I looked on our bookshelves there was no sign of it. The other two books in the trilogy were there no Pretty Horses at all. I remembered lending it to a friend but he declared that he had returned it long ago. Not being an argumentative soul, I kept to myself observations about people who borrow books and lose them for you. Well, during our visit to London, looking for something to read on our son’s bookshelves I came across a copy of All the Pretty Horses with our name in it. Hmmm, so now we know who the non-returner is. I wonder how many more of our books he has on his shelves!

On the road again!

2011-04-01T01:41:00.000-07:00

I have gone on at length before now about the advantages and disadvantages of public transport in the UK. Well, here I go again with another little rant. We are spending a long weekend in London, cat-sitting and flat-sitting while our son and his wife are away. So late morning yesterday we set off for the bus stop at the crossroads near our house, aiming for the number 350 bus at 11.53. This would connect us nicely with a bus from Oldham bus station and eventually to a train from Manchester Piccadilly.

Step one was fine. The bus arrived more or less on time, set off with a lurch as usual just before anyone had time to reach their seat and shuddered to a stop at every bus stop, throwing passengers around. This is all par for the course. Then we arrived at Oldham bus station. This is one of those modern structures made of tubular metal and lots of perspex, noisy and cold because the whole place rattles whenever the wind blows, which happens frequently as the sliding doors open and close automatically every time anyone walks past. It is made up of two sections: the main bus station and a kind of annex just around the corner. The main section has a delightful public address system which reminds you in condescendingly dulcet tones of a variety of things: “These floors can be slippery when wet.” “Pickpockets operate in this bus station; always keep your belongings close to you.” “It is against the law to smoke in this bus station; please do not smoke” (There is a small, possibly anarchist, minority who ignore this last one.) “This bus station is patrolled by GMPTE police.” (Now why are they never around to tell the anarchist smokers to go outside? That’s what I want to know.)

Anyway, our bus arrived at the main bus station and sailed through without stopping until it reached the annex. We could see our connecting bus to Manchester but by the time our 350 bus had come to a juddering halt that connecting bus was setting off. So we had to wait for the next one, fortunately only a matter of 5 to 10 minutes but that is not the point. Had the 350 bus stopped to allow passengers to alight in the main section, we would have caught the connecting bus. So we asked the driver why he had not stopped. Well, it seems that his bus changes from a 350 to 183 on reaching the bus station and the 183 stop is in the annex. Yes, but would it not make sense to allow the people who caught the 350, not the 183, to get off first? Oh, no, that never happens. Now, that is simply not true. I use that service frequently enough to know that many more co-operative and passenger-friendly drivers do just that.

We WILL complain!!

The rest of our journey, you will be pleased to hear, went according to plan. We did have to remind a phone user that she should not be having her conversation in the quiet zone but she was quite amenable to stopping. And there were rather a lot of announcements from the train staff, also disturbing the quiet zone, but you can’t have everything.

So we reached our destination without further mishap, settled ourselves in, took ourselves out for a rather nice Italian meal and came back and fed the cat.

This morning the cat came and woke us up at around quarter to eight, demanding to fed once again. When we baby-sit, the grandchildren feel perfectly within their rights to demand breakfast at any time from six o’ clock onwards. So on the whole cat-sitting gives me more sleeping time. And Audrey the cat does not ask for just another five minutes before bed and just one more story before going to sleep.

Now, we have our Oyster cards and our bus passes; time to get this London tourist thing underway.

Dreaming spires and all that.

2011-03-29T14:47:00.001-07:00

More years ago than I really care to remember my year group at the girls’ grammar school I attended disappointed our headteacher. Every year for as long as anyone could remember the school had sent a group of girls, as many as 10 a year, to study at Oxford or Cambridge University. Not a bad record for a state school of around 600 girls! But then we were the post war baby boomer girls, encouraged to do anything that boys could do –and more – and we had a headmistress who was determined to make us realise our potential.

We, she insisted, were the lucky ones, bright enough to make it to the grammar school and we should make her proud. Those who left school at 16 were interviewed and made to feel that they had let themselves down, had let their parents down but most of all they had let HER down.

Be that as it may, my year refused for some reason to apply for the big two universities. We went off to university and good ones at that but not Oxford or Cambridge.

Well, this weekend it was to Oxford that my Phil and I went. An old friend was getting married. Long ago we had been to his first wedding and now we were off to his second. The wedding service was held in Saint Edmund Hall, the college where the bride had studied. She clearly would not have disappointed my headmistress. The wedding service was quietly, graciously happy, complete with a piper; we thought we were back in Galicia for a moment.

And then we moved to the reception held in a hotel which used to be Oxford prison, complete with the old cells, now presumably converted into nice comfortable bedrooms.

We had an excellent time, meeting up with old friends we had not seen for years and visiting the city itself. I can quite understand those who fall in love with studying in Oxford, a delightful place to get lost in a subject you love!

The city was full of bicycles, just as the guide books say, even in places with signs banning them.

We even impressed friends by using our Manchester bus passes on Oxford buses!

The only hiccough was the train back. Well, it was Sunday, wasn’t it? So they were working on the lines and we had to catch the diversion bus to Banbury before continuing by train. And then the train was somewhat overcrowded and some of the people crammed into our so-called quiet carriage did not seem aware that “quiet” meant not keeping up mobile phone conversations for over an hour!

This blog post was more or less written on that very train but didn’t get posted until today because of my busy life.

On our return on Sunday evening I simply had to bake a friendship cake. Now a friendship cake is rather like a chain letter or one of those things you used to do when you were a child where you had to send postcards to six people and would eventually receive loads of postcards back. A friendship cake is better however because you feed it for about 10 days then split it into four portions. Three portions are given away (to friends, of course) and the last one you mix with a lot of other ingredients and bake. Unlike chain letters and postcard rounds, instead of possible bad luck or a load of past cards you don’t want, with a friendship cake you end up with a good cake to eat at the end of the ten days. Mine was ready for baking on Sunday evening when we returned.

Then yesterday I had to meet up with the ladies who lunch and go and eat out in Manchester. In the evening an old friend came round and shared a bottle of wine and ate some of the aforementioned friendship cake.

And today I have had yet another trip to Manchester for an Italian class. On my return we had to help celebrate my granddaughter’s birthday, which we missed on Saturday because of the wedding. And finally my daughter and I went for our usual Tuesday swim, followed by a long phone call to offspring number one who is off to Indonesia for a month tomorrow.

So you see, my life has just been too busy to blog!!

Isn’t nostalgia a fine thing?

2011-03-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

Well, Spring is officially here and seems to be springing all around us here. The heron has reappeared by a local mill pond and I’ve been watching with interest the progress of a rook’s nest in the tree by the bus stop at the corner of the street. And we have been having some fine sunny days to speed spring along. I’ve even hung washing out in the garden this morning. Mind you, you probably have to be a North of England housewife to fully appreciate that as an achievement!

Taking advantage of the sunshine we set off on a nostalgia trip on one of our walks at the end of last week.

When first we moved to this rather picturesque bit of Oldham we did not live in Delph village itself but in the bottom of the valley between Delph and Denshaw in a little hamlet consisting of two rows of “cottages”, one of four and one of six. Anywhere else they would have been referred to quite simply as houses. Situated in Salford or almost anywhere in the Greater Manchester conurbation they would have been terraces. However, located in an out of the way valley, they were called cottages.

They had been houses for mill workers originally I believe. This is after all an area of wool and cotton mills. The mill itself housed a small educational products company when we lived there about 25 years ago and I doubt if any of the inhabitants of the cottages had ever worked in a mill.

The outside “privies” still existed down by the river although all the houses had indoor toilets and bathrooms by then. One of the neighbours used them as a kind of garden shed. It was a nice quiet place to live. We all grew vegetables in a plot of land just nearby. There was very little traffic and the children learned to ride their bikes in the old mill yard. We only moved out when we outgrew the house. We simply needed more space with two growing children.

So anyway, we set off on a walk down the valley at the end of last week, taking a nostalgic look at our old home en route. Before we got there, though, we already had plenty of nostalgia. First there was the spot on the path through the valley where some selfish landowner decided one day to build a wall around his field, blocking a public footpath and making walkers take a detour up the hillside. This detour took us past the old house where they used to restore vintage cars. And, yes, there was still a shiny vintage vehicle in the yard and another work in progress in the garage.

Further on we discovered that the remains of old mill workings were still there beside the stream. We marvelled that no-one had reused the stone – probably the difficulty of access preventing its removal from the valley bottom! This place was known to our children as “Jim’s House”. Stories were invented about the rag doll who was supposed to live there.

As a whole the trees were taller than the last time we walked that way, probably about ten years ago, but really little had changed in the valley itself. Our old home had acquired a new stone front porch. The former vegetable plot, reclaimed by its owner shortly after we left so that he could keep a horse there, stood empty and rather unkempt. But the scruffy old mill building had been converted into smart flats and the mill yard was now an organised car park. Just down the lane there was also a small private nursery, no doubt meeting the needs of a larger population.

Time marches on! And so did we, making our way past old quarries, still flooded as they always used to be. The view was quite pastoral, sheep peacefully grazing and all that sort of thing.

It’s quite hard to believe that this is actually part of Greater Manchester – even if there are still those who would like to return it to Yorkshire to which it belonged before the re-drawing of county boundaries in the 1970s.

Changing dates.

2011-03-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

This evening after my Portuguese class I realised I was running a little late and that I might well not make the connecting bus from Oldham to Delph. That would mean either an expensive taxi or a long wait in the bus station. So, instead of racing across Manchester at top speed to catch the bus, I sauntered along to Victoria Station and caught a train to Greenfield where I would be able to catch a bus home.

The train was full of drunken leprechauns. It was quite amazing. There were huge numbers of people dressed in something green and wearing ridiculously comical hats which told anyone who was interested that today is Saint Patrick’s Day!! It made for a very entertaining ride home. Nobody was aggressive. There was a good deal of good-natured banter, mostly about Manchester City and Manchester United, the city’s two football teams.

The most soberly dressed of this crowd was probably the most Irish, possibly the only genuinely Irish, of them all. His shirt WAS green but his hat, instead of being a felt concoction about 18 inches high, was a fairly restrained bright green trilby. Granted you could only wear such a hat today and it did have a bright ginger false beard attached but he mostly kept that under his hat. He also sported a … what shall I call it?… a buttonhole? … a nosegay? …a sprig? …of shamrock. Whatever you call it, it was a sort of clump of shamrock pinned to his shirt. One of the Mancunian leprechauns asked him why he was wearing salad on his shirt.

The Irishman may have been (relatively) soberly dressed but, like the rest of them, he was not sober. However he appeared to hold his drink more quietly than the rest. Or maybe it was just because he was a soft spoken Irishman. The rest shouted happily the length of the train and peppered their wise sayings with numerous swearwords, causing one equally drunk lady to cry out over and over again, “Stop swearing!!!”

At one point someone decided to bring up St George whereupon the soberly dressed Irishman informed us that the English patron saint has had his day moved this year. One cheerful chappy suggested that this was to help pay for the royal wedding. I am not sure of the logic of that but others did agree with him. But no, the Irishman explained that it is because St George’s Day, 23rd April, this year falls in Holy Week and so cannot be celebrated on its usual day.

The “Stop swearing!!!” lady was very puzzled. She had never heard of Holy Week and needed to have it explained to her. Instantly one of her companions commented that “it must be a Catholic thing” so we had to explain that in fact it’s a general “Christian thing”.

Is it just here in the UK that people know so little of the culture of their country that someone hasn’t heard of Holy Week? I remain astounded. The lady concerned didn’t know when DT George’s Day was either.

Anyway, I was not totally convinced about St George’s day becoming a moveable feast so I googled it when I got in. I found a webpage all about the good dragon slayer with lots of info written by Dr John Sentamu. This is what he had to say,

“One interesting fact you may not know about St George's Day is that in the Church calendar this year it actually takes place on May 2.

The reason for this change is that this year April 23 is Holy Saturday, an important date in the Christian calendar, during Holy Week.

Holy Saturday is when our Lord lay in the tomb the day before His resurrection. This is a time of reflection and contemplation for Christians and is a long-standing tradition.”

So there we are. And Dr John Sentamu is the Archbishop of York so I suppose he should know. But somehow I bet there will be a lot of flags of St George around on the 23rd of April all the same.

Mobile matters.

2011-03-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

One of the advantages of the digital age is the snooze feature on your alarm or, in my case, the mobile phone alarm setting. Instead of switching the thing off and going back to sleep for too long, you put off the dread moment of actually getting out of bed in 9 minute chunks – again and again and again. You might still miss you bus through getting up too late but at least it’s not a complete surprise.

Of course, sometimes you don’t get as far as the alarm ringing at all. Other things wake you first. My granddaughter has taken to texting me before 8 o’clock. All right, I know that some people have been up for hours by then but I am now officially a lady of leisure and no longer need to leave the house at the crack of dawn to cross the Greater Manchester conurbation. I assume that granddaughter does her texting while waiting for the bus to school. Wherever or whenever she is doing it, she must text at speed as she never seems to have time to check what she has written before sending.

We are currently communicating about “Run for Life”, a 5 k jog/walk/run around a local park to raise money for cancer research. As we want to register “Grandma’s Girls” (me, granddaughter and friends) she need to give me some details, most of which she told me she has in her “wong”, which turned out to be her room. Eventually she had all the details except for one friends “bost clod” – her post code. Some are even more incomprehensible.

I should be used it by now. After all, her friend Adam was called Bean for quite a while as a result of one of her texting clangers.

She doesn’t like it if I use text-speak when I send her messages. Grandmothers are not supposed to say things like “c u l8r”. I do try to avoid it as much as possible but sometimes it’s quite fun. There’s a van I see around with the company name “Ener G” on the side. That’s not as good as the French NRJ; if you pronounce the letters French style it gives you “énergie”.

Mind you I get a little agitated about “texting” from a linguistic point of view. I long ago stopped ranting about making nouns (the text) into verbs (to text) but the purist in me gets very annoyed about the use of that verb and I have even had arguments with my daughter about it. If it’s a verb then it should behave just like other verbs. Therefore, the past tense should be “texted”. However, my daughter will insist on telling me that someone text (past tense) her with some important information. Now, as far as I am concerned, that should really be “texed” from the verb “to tex” but my daughter is not accepting that. And she’s not the only one of the younger generation to use the “verb” that way.

I must be turning into an old fogey after all!