Weather fronts! Snow! Coordination matters!

Last night the weathermen described a “warm front” (how warm could it be in December?) on its way in and hitting the “cold front” (which certainly has been cold!) and the resulting in precipitation falling as snow. So I was not at all surprised to wake up to snow this morning. It didn’t feel significantly warmer though. But I looked at the snow still falling, I looked at the slippery-seeming pavements and decided that running was not on today. So I got back into bed for a while and then went to shower and wash my hair. Later I’ll walk into the village to buy a few essentials.

I am rather pleased that Number Two Granddaughter and I did our shopping trip yesterday rather than today. Manchester in the slushy damp would not be so appealing.

My daughter has sent me a photo of her small son wearing a red nose , presumably left over from Red Nose Day. Yesterday he told me that this was Rudolf’s nose but that Rudolf does not need it at the moment as it is not yet Christmas and so he does not yet need to light the way for the sleigh. I love the logic. 

Granddaughter Number One does just about all her shopping online and regularly moans about supermarket substitutions. The latest is her order for a slinky (one of those coiled metal affairs that tumble down the stairs) intended as a stocking filler for her housemate, which had been replaced by 16 mini-slinkies!! Weight for weight, I suppose. I suggested she should give everyone in the family a mini-slinky in their stocking but I think she now plans to wrap all sixteen individually for her housemate as a joke. I hope it is appreciated.

I like to be co-ordinated. I no longer insist on a handbag to match each pair of shoes I own but I do like to look as though I have selected items to match each other to some extent. So yesterday it was a green beret, green gloves and, by complete chance, a shoulder bag of the exactly the right shade. And now I read that lots of members of the royal family went to a Christmas carol service at Westminster Abbey in matching shades of burgundy clothing. 

Journalist Hannah Jane Parkinson interpretes this as a deliberate snub to Maghan Markle who apparently said in her and Harry’s Netflix nonsense, “You can’t ever wear the same colour as Her Majesty, if there’s a group event. But then you also should never be wearing the same colour as one of the other more senior members of the family.” I wonder how the journalist knows such things. 

Maybe all those royal people have a kind of family telepathy. When we go on family outing, we quite often find we have coordinated our clothings by mere serendipity. And we don’t have rules about such things. But we do seem to have the telepathy.m

That’s enough nonsense for today.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

In Manchester!

Granddaughter Number Two and I went on a shopping trip to Manchester today. We had planned to go on Wednesday but her anxious older sister had her anxiety issue about the plumber’s visit and my presence was required at her house instead. So we rescheduled our plans for today, involving some messing around.

I got up and out to catch the 9.27 bus from our crossroads to my daughter’s house. I set off in time to walk a couple of bus stops’ distance so that by the time I caught the bus it would already be 9.30 and my old biddy’s bus pass would be valid. I have known the odd stickler for correctness to refuse to accept its use even if only a few minutes before 9.30am pm a weekday. Some people just love to have authority, even over something like the use of bus passes! But a brisk walk at the start of the day never goes amiss. It was, however, extremely cold!

I arrived at my daughter’s by 10.15 or thereabouts (the bus follows a very convoluted route and today everyone and their grandmother was going shopping, causing the bus to pause at each bus stop) and we then had to wait for delivery of a supermarket online food-shop before we could go anywhere. To compensate for that my son-in-law (who for some reason could not deal with the food delivery) gave us a lift to the Ashton tram stop. We were on our way!

Once in Manchester we were very efficient. Having made an approximate list of what we were looking for, we were able to move from Christmas market stall to shop to Christmas market stall to shop without too much doubling back and retracing our steps.

At one point Granddaughter Number Two got very excited to discover a branch of Tim Horton’s in the city centre. I had been aware of some excitement when this shop was about to open but I had no idea what it sold. It turns put to be a Canadian restaurant chain specialising in coffee, doughnuts and other fast-food items. It is Canada's largest quick-service restaurant chain, with 5,352 restaurants in 15 countries, as of June 30, 2022. It seems to have been around forever in Canada, well, since the 1960s, but now it’s a big thing in the UK, at least if you like dough nuts. Personally I can take them (if absolutely fresh) or leave them (most of the time) but my daughter’s section of the family loves them. 

When I was s sixth-former, the school canteen started to sell freshly made jam doughnuts. None of the fancy sort with cinnamon, or chocolate brownies flavour, or multi-colour sprinkles on icing. I grew used to the jam-filled ones, which had to be eaten carefully if you were not to squirt strawberry jam over yourself or someone sitting close to you. Now I seem to have grown out of them altogether.  

Granddaughter Number Two, however, was very pleased and vowed to return to the shop as we eventually made our back back to tram stop in Piccadilly Gardens. She planned to buy a box of doughnuts to share with her siblings. We did this. The shop appears to be a veritable model of modern catering, marketing and serving. You feed your order into a machine, pay with your card, receive a numbered ticket and then wait for your number to be called out by one of the few human staff. A minor miracle of efficient staff deployment but a little off-putting to those of us who like to interact rather more with those who serve in shops. 

But before we reached that point in the proceedings we had successfully completed most of our shopping. We had stopped for refreshment some time after midday. My plan was to have no more than a coffee, with maybe a small cake or cookie of some kind. Granddaughter Number Two revealed that she had had no breakfast and so we selected a “classic cheese toastie” for her. Unfortunately we did not read the labelling in detail when it arrived we found it also contained lettuce - not a bad addition in  my opinion but rendering the toasted sandwich inedible to my no-vegetables-of fruit granddaughter. So I ate the sandwich and Granddaughter number two took sustenance from a large packet of crisps! The toasted sandwich, by the way, was excellent - if you like warm lettuce with your  runny cheese. 

We made our way back to her house, checked we each had the correct selection of purchases and sat and put the world to rights while it went dark outside and I decided that my daughter, who had been out and about on adventures of her own, was not going to,turn up any time soon to give me a lift home. We checked bus times and I set off in time to have no more than a few minutes to wait for a bus home. 

On the whole a good day! I seem to have Christmas presents organised. All I need to do now is wrap them all! And then I need to start to think about food! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The unfairness of some things. But not all negative stuff today.

I hear that Boris Johnson has already made £1,000,000 from speeches since resigning as PM.

An update to the MPs’ register of interest showed the former PM had made more than £750,000 in fees for three speeches given in November. Added to the £276,000 Mr Johnson was paid for a speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October, it means he has made £1,030,780 from speaking engagements since he left Downing Street.

Who knew his words were so valuable, that he had such a golden tongue?

Presumably he is still drawing his salary as a MP, but maybe he just regards that as pin money. 

When I was out walking the dog with Granddaughter Number One yesterday she told me about meeting someone with an old dachshund called Boris. He owner assured her he had had the dog for at least a decade and certainly before he had heard much about a certain Mr Johnson. He didn’t want her to think he was a supporter of that gentleman. 

Four people, at least, drowned in the Channel yesterday. That’s on top of the other casualties this year. Some 45000 people have crossed the Channel in small, unseaworthy boats this year. Why not make it possible to apply for asylum from France and then travel safely? Those denied entry will still try to cross the Channel but there would be fewer.

Those who travel are as a rule sadly ill-equipped - some of yesterday’s travellers wore only T-shirts under their life jackets. And even though the water was calm when they left the French coast in mid-Channel there was a huge swell. And it was bitterly cold. 

Apparently it’s taking up to 450 days for applications to be processed once people arrive here. The system is clogged up with bureaucracy. 143000 people are waiting for applications to be processed. No wonder some people disappear. Also these people, often well qualified cannot work, and therefore cannot fill vacancies in key areas, and therefore cannot pay taxes, and therefore cannot contribute to society. 

On radio news programme earlier in the day an expert in Calais talked about the numbers taken into the Uk from Hong Kong, from Ulraine, and so on. If we can accommodate these, she argued, we can actually accommodate all those in Calais, much smaller numbers. Why not have recognised safe routes for Iranians or Syrians for example as there are for Ukrainians?

Then on last night’s news someone from the Royal College of Nurses, when asked what had been done yesterday to prevent strikes, said that nothing had happened because nobody would negotiate with them. Who is making life difficult for whom? “We never asked for a 19% payrise. We asked for 5% above the rate of inflation,” she said.  Nurses’ pay has dropped by 20% in real terms over the last ten years.

Helen Whaley, minister for health replied that the Secretary of State for Health has said his door is open. Who exactly is it open to? “I’m very disappointed about nurses striking,” says Helen Whaley. She probably earns more than nurses do.,

This is the first time ever nurses have agreed to strike. A decade of real term pay cuts has pushed them into it. The govt has ignored recommendations from pay bodies. Vacancies stood at 39,000 before the pandemic; there are 50,000+ now. 

Meanwhile, Dominic Raab is being investigated for bullying. His fans say he is a victim of reverse bullying, whatever that means. I think it refers to the loads of complaints, In Italy Giorgia Meloni says she was bullied at school and it made her determined to lose weight. Bullying is therefore a positive thing!!

Not everything today has been negative. Granddaughter Number Two and I took the little chap out for a walk and ate sausage and chips in the park before giving in to the cold and going home again. Later in the day my daughter collected her six year old from school and came to join the other members of her family who were here at my house. As we sat around talking after tea she was multi-tasking, talking to the family and producing a document which her head teacher had just asked everyone complete by the ned if term, ie by the end of tomorrow. As she typed away the six year old stood by her and read out some of what she was typing, involving words like confidence, nurturing, environment, encouraging. We complimented her on her skill at working difficult words out, to which she solemnly replied, “With a bit of help I can read lots of stuff that is inappropriate for me!” How does a six year old know such things?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Cold weather. Plumbers. Language “borrowing”.

It’s been another fine sunny day but very cold. I think the outside temperature was registered here at -4° when I got up this morning. By midday we had reached a “high” of 0° but it’s predicted to be back to -5°  by 8.00 tonight. But as it’s still a dry cold, for the moment anyway, the footpaths and pavements are mostly passable. 

I walked to the market this morning so that I could catch a bus from there and go to Granddaughter Number One’s house. We had arranged for a plumber to call in and sort out her erratic heating system. Her housemate is away attending a sister’s graduation ceremony and Granddaughter Number One’s anxiety issues had her in a bit of a state about seeing the plumber on her own. So I was called upon to be her support system. I was also incidentally the person who forked out £40 callout charge for the plumber to tell us the problem was the timer switch which nobody had thought to check!! The radiators had been bled, the boiler pressure had been checked, the thermostat had been examined (by my daughter and Granddaughter Number One and others) but no-one had noticed a little switch on the middle of the timer mechanism. Now I want to know who switched it on in the first place as I am pretty sure they did not have problems with the heating last winter. Hmmm!

When we had a problem with our boiler recently our plumber, not the one who visited Granddaughter Number One today, examined the boiler, told us how to reset it if it played up, suggested we probably need a service (in the process of being arranged with him) and departed without charging us a penny. Clearly a man with a different view of life!

After the plumber had left Granddaughter Number One’s house, she and I took her dog for a walk along the canal towpath. The canal was rather frozen. Granddaughter Number One reminisced about being at primary school and having yearly lectures about the dangers of frozen canals and ponds. She pointed out to me places where her housemate has managed to slip and slide in the last week. And then we got to a point where she suggested turning back rather than crossing the bridge as the path on the other side of the canal was just a sheet of ice. Neither of us fancied a dip in the canal today. 

Moving on to other matters, I found this article about how the English language has been enriched by additions from other languages. Some of the words which have made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary, such as “lepak” (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, “deurmekaar” (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, “kaveera” (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and “whāngai” (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, are words I have never heard used. I must move in the wrong circles.

But English has a long history of appropriating words from other languages. “Schadenfreude” and other German words are in common use but even old, long-established words like “chamber” came originally from French. My daughter’s family sprinkle their conversation with tiny bits of Cantonese - her partner’s parents came from Hongkong long ago. And English, of course, has reciprocated, giving words to other languages, often words that have changed their use in the process, such as “parking” for a car park and “camping” for a camp site in both French and Spanish. The French will comment on someone’s “look”. But among my favourites are the Franglais or Spanglish adaptations of English words, such as the “French” verb “relooker” - to give something a new look, a makeover I suppose - and the “Spanish” for “jogging” - “el footing”. Computer terminology is a prime example: the Italian for “to click” is “cliccare”, on computers anyway! 

Aren’t languages fun?!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Running. Some thoughts about dogs. Talking about healthcare.

I was out running again this morning. Because the weather has been mostly dry cold, no fresh snow or sleet having fallen on the stuff from the other day, the footpaths are mostly clear and quite passable. Just occasionally I had to stop and walk carefully over the odd patch of compacted snow. All good!

I have no problems with dogs when I am out running. There’s the odd one that decides he wants to jump up and greet me but that’s all. Maybe the owners of aggressive dogs walk them in other places. A few weeks ago my son in law, who runs miles every day, mostly on the pavements of Ashton, ran past a man with a doberman. Maybe he startled the dog but as he ran past the dog leapt at him and bit his backside. It wasn’t a serious bite - he’s lost quite a bit of weight since he’s been running so fat every day and there’s not a lot of flesh for a dog to sink its teeth into - but it ruined a good pair of running trousers and I am told the bruising was quite impressive.

Now, according to this article, the number of cases of dog bites in the UK is going up. And it is thought that nine people have been killed by dogs this year. No-one seems to have a full explanation for these statistics. What I do know is that I cannot recall a single case of someone being killed by a dog during my childhood. Yes, there were dogs we knew to be wary of, even actively afraid of. There were dogs that roamed free during the daytime but these were not the most frightening; on the whole they just wandered around and returned home in time for feeding time when their owners returned from work.

When we are out and about with the small people we always ask permission before letting the children pet a dog, even one on a lead. And if we have our daughter’s dog with us she always asks if it’s all right for him to “make friends” with other people’s hounds. And yet in the horrible case related in the article the child who was nastily bitten by a dog had been happily petting the dog for some time before the sudden attack. 

Maybe it’s something to do with the breeds of dogs which are around now which you never saw in my childhood. Maybe, as someone in the article suggests, it’s lack of socialising and training during lockdown. Maybe we need to reinstitute the dog license, in a better, stronger form, as the article dismisses the old one as useless. Whatever the solution, stressed and possible aggressive dogs are another modern problem. 

I’ve been into Oldham on the bus today. On my way in there was someone with a perfectly friendly dog sitting on a seat, something I rather object to. Dogs should sit on the floor in my opinion. I do not want to sit on a seat  previously occupied by a dog. 

On my way home I got into conversation with an elderly lady of Irish extraction who told me all her problems with medication, doctors’ appointments, opticians appointments and so on. I found out that she lives alone and so her need to chat was understandable. Her problems with the health service are also understandable, under the present regime, although still not acceptable. Here’s an article about agency doctors being paid silly amounts of money to work a hospital shift. I have come across similar stories of nurses leaving the NHS and signing up with agencies as they can be paid more for filling the absent places on hospital teams. The country is crazy! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Children singing for Christmas. Cold weather continues.

This morning I was the designated adult for our smallest grandson, Lewis, so that he would not be the poor sad child with no adult to cheer him along at his nursery’s “carol concert”. His mother has already asked for time off work his week to go and watch his big sister be an angel in her school nativity play and felt she could not justify two such absences in one week. So she asked me to go along to the nursery for 9.00 this morning. 

So I set out to catch a bus at 8.42, which was supposed to deposit me opposite the nursery at 8.46. Our bus, as I may have mentioned before, does a long run from Ashton Under Lyne bus station to Oldham bus station, via various villages and housing estates. It drives into the village, turns around and drives back out again. There are bus stops on both sides of the road near the crossroads. I saw it approaching and, as it was so cold and I didn’t fancy waiting to catch it on the return trip, In crossed over and travelled round the village on the bus in the warm.

Of course, it was school run time and at the point where the bus needs to turn and go through a back road to turn around the road was blocked with cars parked outside the local primary school. It took almost ten minutes to get through. The bus driver was harrumphing furiously the whole while. Justifiably so as the road was blocked even for emergency vehicles and it is highly likely that many of the families dropping children off at school live within walking distance but had decided to drive as it was rather foggy and cold. Even as the sun came up the fog persisted in the valleys.

Consequently I arrived only just in time for the carol concert, which was not a carol concert at all but a bunch of three- and four-year-olds singing “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer”, “When Santa got stuck up the chimney”, “I’m a little Christmas tree” (to the tune of “I’m a little teapot”), S A N T A ( to the tune of “B I N G O and Bingo was his name - oh”) and other such. Some doting parents videoed the whole half hour. I captured a couple of bits to show our little chap’s doting mummy. My best bit of film shows him turning off to examine the jumper of the small girl nest to him because it had one of those sequin features that change colour if you alter the way the sequins lie. 

At the end of the concert there was some confusion. Some children who don’t normally attend nursery on a Monday had attended specially were putting their coats on to go home with Mummy or Daddy. Some of the remainers crying crying because they wanted to go too. Our little chap just went to get his coat and hat in a sensible fashion but accepted quite happily my explanation that he was staying to play with his friend and could come and play with me on Thursday, 

I walked home. The fog had cleared, the sky was blue and the views were splendid. A perfect day for a morning walk but still very cold.

My son has sent me photos of snow in Buckinghamshire or at any rate a picture of his daughter building a snowman. The radio news tells me that some parts of the country have reached -15° but that  much further north than here. 

 

In Solihull children have drowned after playing on frozen pond and falling through the ice. What a sad end to a winter adventure. When we walked past frozen duck pond on Saturday our 6 year old granddaughter commented that when she is old enough to ice-skate perhaps she will be able to skate there. We need to make sure she is aware of the dangers. She is, however, an eminently sensible child at the moment. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone. 

Cold blue skies. Christmas spending. Brexit fallout.

The blue skies appear to have returned today. It’s still cold but not quite so bitter as it was on Friday. Yesterday’s snow seemed to warm things up. We did a family walk round the duck ponds in the mid- late-afternoon, slowed down by the small boy who wanted to stamp in every bit of snow and the small dog who wanted to eat it. He even ate the tiny (6 inches high) snowmen the small people made on the wall by the duckpond. 

We had some tears when the small girl slid onto her backside and got wet trousers as a result. Coffee for the grownups and hot chocolate for the small people was served on our return home. So all was well!

Today we might walk up the hill to catch some sunshine and some vitamin D. I’ve already baked a cake and chopped vegetables ready for another family meal later this afternoon.

Various statisticians believe we will spend £393 a head this Christmas, which is £33 less than last year. How do they work these things out? 

Apparently some people spend £80 on a 7 foot Christmas tree! That’s a big chunk our of their £393. Mind you, that’s in London and maybe they are cheaper up north. There are all sorts of articles in the press advising us on how to economise on our Christmas spending. Smaller trees might be a good idea. Who has room for a 7 foot pine in their living room anyway?

It’s taken quite a while but various money-connected people are beginning to talk about the harm Brexit has done to the UK economy. Whatever your feelings about Europe - personally I’m still in favour of our belonging to the European family - it really seems that our leaving has not been a total success. 

“The governor of the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) all agree that, notwithstanding Covid or the Ukrainian war, Brexit is the main reason why the UK is the only economy in the G7 still below its pre-pandemic size. Here’s a link to more comments on this. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!