Some thoughts on motherhood in the media age. Gun-toting children. And changeable weather.

While I sat in Scona cafe in Greenfield yesterday with my daughter, Granddaughter Number Two and the little fella, a young woman arrived with her baby. Later she was joined by another young mother. Eventually there were half a dozen of them. This led inevitably to a lot of cooing and gooing at our table. Small creatures are always appealing and these were all rather nice-looking babies. Granddaughter Number Two expressed her wish to be a mother eventually but declared she wasn’t too keen on the idea of pregnancy and birth. Maybe having seen her mother go through two pregnancies, Granddaughter Number Two has been rather put off the idea. She would quite like to foster or even adopt though.

We didn’t want to disturb the young mums’ lunch date but we did have a brief conversation with one of them when our little fella went walkabout and bumped onto her. They had all met during pregnancy she told us, sort of confirming my daughter’s and my suspicion that this was a National Childbirth trust group or similar. (In my day we used to meet in each other’s houses.) The babies ranged from two weeks to two and half months. The young mum confided that it’s very hard, much harder than she expected. It’s the lack of sleep that does it! Well, yes. But it’s surely  not that bad. Maybe my daughter didn’t help by telling her that the little fella, three and a half, is still not a reliable sleeper. But after all, they had managed to organise themselves for a lunch date with their offspring. 

And I find myself again wondering if young mothers today find it extra hard because social media tells them it’s really hard. And many of them have already been reasonably successful career-women and suddenly find there is something they have to work at in a different way altogether. Just to confirm it, here’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett on motherhood and how artists balance creativity with maternity. 

On the subject of children, here’s an article about a six year old who shot his teacher. It’s in the USA of course, and it seems the child did it quite intentionally!! How does a six year old get his hands on a gun? I ask myself. Even if you accept a gun-toting society, surely parents should keep them safely out of reach of their offspring! The mind boggles.

It’s been a funny sort of day here today. I ran in the rain first thing. Well, rather later than first thing. It’s not so much running in the rain that is hard, it’s deciding to get out of bed when you can hear the rain on the roof. But I wanted to pick up a couple of items at the coop. So off I went. 

Later the sun came out and we had blue sky. I persuaded Phil to get organised to walk up the hill in the sunshine. By the time he had answered a phone call and we eventually set off, cloud was moving back in and the blue sky seemed to be headed for deepest Yorkshire. There was a fine winter sky towards Dobcross. We were caught in the drizzle on our  way back. And the sun came out briefly, but only briefly, after we returned home. So it goes! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some thoughts on cake, New Year’s resolutions, British citizens being expelled from EU countries, and Maths.

When I declared Christmas over and done with yesterday, I forgot to mention that my daughter and I polished off the very last slice of Christmas cake between us. Well, almost no-one else appreciated fruit cake and so it was quite appropriate that we should be the ones to finish it. 

This morning there was a message from Granddaughter Number Two: could we make another attempt to have breakfast / brunch at her favourite cafe in Greenfield? Last Friday’s expedition was interesting but not did not quite go according to plan. So after I had been for a run and showered, I got organised to catch a bus to Greenfield to meet her. I left a pot of coffee in the kitchen but didn’t really have time to consume any as I scuttled out with two minutes to spare to catch the bus. By the time we met at Greenfield, she coming on a bus from the opposite direction, all I had consumed was my fizzy vitamins. I was ready for a late breakfast. 

So toasted fruit toast was definitely called for along with my coffee. The teenager - soon to be a teenager no longer - consumed a bacon sandwich and chocolate Guinness cake, undecided at first about which to consume first. We had reserved the chocolate Guinness cake on entering the cafe, before we had even found ourselves a table. Indeed we had reserved all the chocolate Guinness cake remaining: one slice for Granddaughter Number Two and one for her mother, who was joining us once the small boy’s musical activity was over and done with, and three slices to take home - another one for Granddaughter Number Two to consume later today , one for her small sister, who was rather cross that we were going to the cafe without her as she is in school today, and one for my daughter’s partner. 

It has to be said that the chocolate Guinness cake is extremely good, much better than the inferior version Granddaughter Number Two tried in a different cafe last week! One of her New Year’s resolutions is to venture into the centre of York, when she returns to university there, to try locate a similar small cafe with good cakes! 

My Italian teacher has sent us some tasks before we resume online classes next week, one of which is to list our own resolutions for this year. As the years go by it becomes harder to think of worthy tasks and goals to set yourself. I shall have to invent something amusing but not too silly in time for Monday. 

That’s enough stuff about cake. Out in the wider world things are going on. Here’s an odd Brexit-related fact: 

“More than 2,250 British citizens were ordered to leave EU member states between the end of the Brexit transition period and September last year, according to figures from the bloc’s statistical office.

Quarterly data published late last month by Eurostat shows a total of 2,285 UK nationals were expelled from 1 January 2021, when British citizens lost their free movement rights within the EU, until the third quarter of last year.

Experts cautioned that the data did not specify why people were ordered to leave so not all expulsions may have been related to residency restrictions, but said the figures amounted to “the starkest possible reminder” of the consequences of Brexit.

“British citizens are now third-country nationals in the EU and as such are subject to domestic immigration laws,” said Prof Michaela Benson of Lancaster University, who has co-led several research projects on post-Brexit migration, citizenship and identity.

The Eurostat data, first reported by the Local, showed striking variations between EU member states, with Sweden accounting for nearly half (1,050) of all British citizens ordered to leave over the period and the Netherlands almost a third (615).

Malta told 115 UK nationals to leave its territory, France 95, Belgium 65, Denmark 40, Germany 25 and Austria 10, while some countries with large populations of British residents, including Spain, Portugal and Italy, reported no expulsion orders.”

Either those British residents in places like Spain, Portugal and Italy got their act together to sort out residency or those countries are turning a blind eye to the whole business, knowing they have a source of income from those people. Who knows! 

Or maybe they simply can’t do the Maths and need someone like Rishi Sunak to insist they study Maths for a few years more. Granddaughter Number Two reports her best friend expressing her relief at no longer being in sixth form as she could not have stood the idea of being subjected to more Maths after struggling with GCSE level. 

Personally I’m in two minds about the whole thing. One part of me approves of the aim to broaden our post-16 curriculum but another part of me remembers being sixteen and knowing that all I really wanted to do was to study modern foreign languages! Either way, I think ad-hoc tinkering is not going to solve anything. It’s been tried so many times before. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Goodbye Christmas. Hello Chinese New Year.,

 Well, that’s it. Christmas is officially over in my house. 

The Christmas cards have been gathered off the mantelpiece and the bookshelves, even the:ones that arrived from France only the other day.

The Christmas Nativity scene figures have been put back in their box. 

The decorations have been removed from the tree - angels/fairies in one bag and the various baubles in another. I had planned for two of my elves, the two youngest grandchildren, to help me dismantle it but the six year old elf was tired from a hard day at primary school and the three year old elf was having a melt down because he wanted only jelly for tea, without eating anything more substantial first! So after they had departed I attacked the tree myself.

The fairy lights are unplugged, coiled up and put back in their box.

All that really remains to be done do is to take the tree outside into a sheltered spot in the garden and hope it survives until next Christmas. 

I’ve vacuumed up most of the pine needles. There were fewer that might be expected because it is actually a living tree. However, there will still be a few in the corner when the tree is taken outside tomorrow.

There are actually a few presents sitting in the corner still. This is because my brother-in-law was feeling seriously unwell when he called round briefly before Christmas to leave presents for the small people and a few bottles of good wine for Phil and me. Because of his germs he did not come into the house. Because I was busy in the kitchen nobody told me he was at the door and the moment to exchange gifts passed us by. It may be significant that no-one else in the family thought to give him the gifts for him and his wife! 

And now I am busy making amigurumi crochet rabbits for Chinese New Year, which falls on January 22nd this year, rather earlier than usual. It has become a kind of tradition that I make small relevant animals for the little people in the family who have some Chinese heritage. Last year I made tigers and the previous year oxen and maybe rats the year before that. Next year will be dragons - goodness knows how I will manage that! 

In the midst of the chaos of the world, I am maintaining family traditions. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Being enthusiastic. Becoming a knitting guru. Life of Pelé. Got to and from Argentina.

Granddaughter Number One is given to enthusiasms. Most of us are to some extent: we find an activity interesting on first introduction to it and become mildly obsessed with it for a while … until the next one comes along. So we find ourselves reading book after book by the same author, buying the same style of clothes over and over (cf the policeman Rocco Schiavone in the Italian series we have been watching constantly wearing desert boots, even when the are totally inappropriate for the weather), ordering the same food almost every time we go out for a meal or, best of all, joining a gym, paying the year’s membership fee and then not going once mid-February comes around. 

But Granddaughter Number One does it to extremes. She’s done jewellery making, felting (making cute creatures out of felt), drawing very elaborate, and beautifully produced drawings which she sends to friends and relations, furniture renovation - she still has two wooden boxes, intended to be receptacle for plants in her garden, which she got half way through restoring but never quite completed or painted - and even antique sewing machines, of which she has two, lovingly restored but not quite finished. Most of these activities she comes back to after a while, attacking each with new enthusiasm.

Her latest fad is knitting, which she learnt to do as a child, this time triggered I think by her finding a rather nice set of assorted knitting needles on offer online - of course! That’s where she does her shopping. I want her to accompany me to a craft shop in Manchester but her reluctance to leave the house and catch a bus make this a difficult project. Anyway, having acquired knitting needles, she appealed to me for some yarn, knowing that I always have left-overs from knitting projects of my own. I provided her with assorted yarns and she set about knitting squares, following instructions in online sources for different types of stitches. There might be a blanket eventually.

For Christmas somebody gave her a kit for knitting fingerless gloves, the ideal opportunity to follow a proper pattern, not too complicated but demanding enough to maintain interest. Her ambition is to progress to a cardigan or so she tells me. We have seen photos of the progress of the gloves on our family messenger chat site. This morning she sent me a message with a photo of an extract of her knitting pattern and the question: What does this mean? 

It was a difficult question to answer without having seen the whole pattern or the work in current progress. So we did a video call and sorted out what she needed to do. This is the second or third knitting consultation Granddaughter Number One and I have had in recent weeks. And not long before Christmas an old friend brought her knitting round for me to help her sort out how to finish a complicated woolly hat for her daughter in law. (Typically this old friend, a very amateur knitter, chose the most complicated pattern available!) I am becoming a knitting guru!

There used to be a group of knitters who met in the pub where I used to go to a poetry group meeting (another example of an enthusiasm I might return to some time). It always amused me to see the ladies, and they were all ladies, with their needles clacking away over their pints, for all the world like the tricoteuses by the guillotine! 

Moving on to other matters, here’s a link to a nice cartoon representation of the life of Pelé.

Also, I was reading about birth-tourism: the practice of going abroad to give birth in order to give  your child the opportunity to have dual nationality. According to this article Russian women are going to Argentina to have their babies. Argentina is a country that does not demand complicated visas apparently. However, despite the article’s insistence that Russian is now commonly heard in Buenos Aires, I wonder what percentage of Russian women can actually afford to up-sticks and give birth on the other side of the world. Not a high percentage, I would have thought! 

On the other hand, according to this article Argentinians of Galician descent whose forebears went seeking their fortune in that country are now opting to return to Galicia for a more peaceful, less violent life. Galicia is welcoming them back. The article, by the way, has a lovely photo of Plaza de la Constitución in Vigo, making the little square look bigger and more elegant than it is in real life. The traditional Spanish plaza mayor is something that the fine city of Vigo lacks, in my opinion anyway. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Some thoughts on books, owning books, and on bringing up children.

 The other day we tried to persuade our 17 year old grandson to borrow an Asimov science fiction book. No good! I” can’t remember when I last read a book”, he told us. How odd!  we thought. His older sister, Granddaughter Number Two is never without a book. Both were read to as small children. So it’s nothing to do with his never having been encouraged. It may be something to do with his eyesight problems not being recognised until he was about 7. Maybe the difficulty in deciphering what was on the page prevented a real love of books from becoming properly embedded. Mind you, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t watch many films or TV series either. Perhaps he just doesn’t like stories any longer, unless they are part of an action packed computer game. He does, however, play chess online now, he revealed to us the other day, picking up on a hobby he gave up when he moved from primary to secondary school.

 

I always find it interesting how differently children brought up in the same way by the same parents can turn out. We have an old toy farm set in a box, the usual mix of tractors, farm machinery, animals and people. We probably bought it years ago when Granddaughter Number One was tiny and it has come out at different times for each grandchild in turn. The most recent users have been Granddaughter Number Four (now aged 6) and Grandson Number Two (now aged 3). The former used to sort out the animals, occasionally the people as well but mostly the animals, into family groups and organise story telling games where small animals were lost and found, were mischievous, had adventures and so on. The latter totally ignores the animals and concentrates on the tractors and machinery. Sometimes the tractors are involved in games with other wheeled vehicles, in which they talk to each other and go on journeys and adventures. At other times he examines the machinery quite scientifically and has long discussions with us about what the machinery is used for. 

Some might say it’s just the difference between girls and boys but there has certainly been no conscious gender-stereotyping going on in their upbringing. It seems to be just the way they are. Grandson Number Two is bold and adventurous, ready to set off at a run or to climb (although he tells me that he was frightened of the aeroplane he travelled in to go on holiday) while his sister is rather cautious and likes to know that she will be able to achieve whatever physical feat is required. Similarly Granddaughter Number Four has always drawn or painted careful pictures of recognisable animals and figures while her small brother is just wild and gleeful in his use of paints and pens, broad splashes and splodges representing nothing in particular but fixated on one particular colour: black for the felt tip pens and red for the paints. He has been very disappointed recently to discover he has used up all the red from the paintbox! 

Ah, but how boring life would be if they all turned out exactly the same, like little clones.

All of that has taken me away from the subject of books, which was prompted by this article about a first edition of Robert Burns’s poetry found in a barber’s shop in the late 19th century and which has now gone on display in Fife.  

It’s missing the first fifty pages as the barber was apparently tearing them put and using them to clean his razors! Clearly not a great lover of poetry or of books! My father would have had a fit at the idea of anyone using pages of books in such a fashion. And yet the poems would still have existed, printed in other editions. It’s odd and yet understandable how we have a kind of reverence for old or particularly beautiful editions of books. I have been trying not to buy books in the last few years. We simply do not have shelf space for any more. This does not stop Phil from acquiring yet more chess books nor from purchasing “nice” hardback editions of books we already own in dilapidated paperback form. 

So I have been making better use of my library card. And, of course, there is always my kindle. However, much as I love my kindle for travelling (how else could I carry enough reading matter for two weeks in my hand-luggage-only allowance? Our son used to sacrifice holiday clothes for holiday reading in pre-kindle times!), I much prefer to read an actual book, even the big fat ones that refuse to stay open easily on my knee while I knit and read at the same time or which threaten to give me concussion if I drop them on my head while reading in bed. 

Granddaughter Number Two, the one who is never without a book,  agrees with me on this. Amazingly she is not a member of the library, unlike her two smallest siblings, but explains this by saying she loves to own books. Like her grandfather, she waxes lyrical about the embossing on hardback covers or about the colour of the edges of pages. Like us, she is running out of shelf space. So far this is just in her bedroom but one day, all being well, she will be a house-owner in her own right and will probably fill her dwelling with books. 

That is all the future, however, by which time she may well have decided to “inherit” our collection. So, it goes. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone. 

Day 2 of 2023. Stress and exercise. One of the secrets of long life.

Today began bright and clear, with blue sky and sunshine. I’m not surprised. There was a bright, clear growing moon in last night’s sky. When I went out running (not too) early this morning, I spotted a gritter out and about, trying to stop the roads from being icy. 

 

Yesterday the river was looking positively angry under the grey sky. 

 

Today the ford at the bottom of one of our lanes was looking sunnier but still overfull, with water making its way into the stream by new and interesting routes, uncovering old cobbled surfaces. 

 

It is, however, a good day to be out and about if you are well wrapped up.  

 

I read the other day that exercise-related stress is good for you. It helps stave off things like Alzheimer’s in old age.

The article included this information about a Frenchman who was breaking records at the age of 105: 

“In January 2017, the French cyclist Robert Marchand made headlines by setting a new age group world record at a velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. What was particularly remarkable about Marchand’s performance is that he had turned 105 a month earlier and his efforts made him the first centenarian ever to demonstrate improved cardiovascular health with age.

Exercise physiologists found that Marchand, who had begun serious competitive cycling in retirement at the age of 68, had an aerobic capacity for exercise – the gold standard means of measuring cardiovascular fitness - comparable to men aged 42 to 61, half a century younger than him.”

I decided to find some more information about the old cyclist, who died in 2021 at the age of 109!!

Born in Amiens, he was a firefighter in Paris in the 1930s. A member of the French Communist Party and the CGT Trade Union (90 years a member!!), he took an active part in the 1936 strikes in Paris which gave rise to the modern era of French employment legislation. During World War II he was a prisoner of war and after the war he moved to Venezuela where he worked as a lorry driver and sugar planter. In the 1950s he was a lumberjack in Canada. On his return to France in 1960 he worked as a gardener and wine dealer until 1987. A bit of a Jack of all trades! 

And he cycled as well. 

On 4 January 2017, he set a world record in one-hour track cycling in the over-105 age group, covering 22.547 kilometres (14.010 miles) in one hour, and the 105 year old centenarian declared: "I could have done better, if I had seen the 10-minute warning card, otherwise I would have pedalled slightly faster".

At the age of 105 he was recognised as the world's oldest competitive cyclist by Guinness World Records.

He  put his remarkable fitness and longevity down to a diet consisting of: lots of fruit and vegetables, a little meat, not too much coffee – and an hour a day on the cycling home-trainer.

After he turned 106 Marchand's doctors advised him to stop competing for world records. He obliged, but refused to quit racing completely. In early February 2018 Marchand completed a 4,000-meter race in the same stadium where he made his last record.

Marchand celebrated his 107th birthday by going for a 20-kilometre bike ride in the Ardèche. After his 108th birthday Marchand stopped riding bikes outdoors due to hearing loss.

There you go. You could make a whole,list of New Year’s resolutions based on his advice. I think I’ll carry on cycling … but not setting any records, I’m afraid.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Happy New Year.

 2023! Goodness! How did we get to that number. 2000 seemed a big enough number.

On Radio 4’s Food Programme they are discussing hangover cures. Who would have thought a serious-sounding programme would devote time to such a subject. I know people who swear by CocaCola, the full-fat variety, none of the Coke Zero nonsense! The Food Programme began by suggesting a pot noodle sandwich. The trick seems to be carbohydrate and sugar in some combination or other.

We don’t need a hangover cure. We saw the New Year in with a very modest small glass of a rather nice malt whiskey someone had given to Phil as a Christmas present. We had no specific plans for New Year’s Eve. In years past we have celebrated with friends but this year we were very quiet. We were about to settle down and watch some TV when our daughter turned up with some nice (in her opinion) oranges, to give Phil some extra vitamin C for his cold, and some blueberries, also for vitamin C but as a hint that maybe I should make blueberry cheesecake for dessert today. 

We have been watching an Italian detective series, “Rocco Schiavone, Ice Cold Murders”, one episode a night, all the series so far in a slow binge watch. The episodes are rather long, made longer by the fact that it is on All Four which has advertising breaks, breaks you cannot fast forward through. So we started watching a little earlier than usual so that Phil could catch Match of the Day later in the evening. And then, lo and behold! there was no Match of the Day, probably because it was New Year’s Eve. 

So we checked to see if there was anything else we might want to watch live. No! Next we hunted through our music DVDs: nothing we haven’t watched recently. As a last resort we checked though stuff we have recorded over the years. It’s an odd fact of the digital, catch-up, streaming age that we tend to forget the stuff we have all recorded. And we found an old programme about the excellent Carole King. And that’s how we saw in the New Year, with a little tot of whiskey and some good songs. No TV footage of Big Ben bonging midnight, nor of fantastic displays of fireworks. Just some nice music. 

This morning I woke to the sound of rain on the skylights. So 2023 was beginning rather soggily. I decided I was not running - it was a bit late - but that I might walk with my brolly so that I could be sure I had the wherewithal (aka ingredients) to make the aforementioned blueberry cheesecake. By the time I set off to walk the rain had in fact abated, the sky was clearing and the day has been fine since then. So far so good! 

As I set off my phone rang, but not its usual ringtone, rather the ringtone for a video-call on Messenger. And I walked round the village talking to my Spanish sister, showing her our fine views as we went. 

Happy New Year!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!