Family gatherings here. And broken families elsewhere.

 It’s all quiet in our house at the moment - the lull between organising almost the whole family together for lunch yesterday and the local bit of the family coming for Christmas dinner on Christmas Day.

We somehow managed to get almost the whole family to the local Italian restaurant: the southern branch of the family, the Spanish relatives, a few from Southport and those who live locally.

Granddaughter Number Four commented later: “I never knew I had so much family!l 

A lot of family catching up took place. A good time seemed to be had by all.

In the early evening one contingent set off to return to the B&B they had rented in Southport. And this morning the southern branch of the family headed back south. 

We’ve done a last bit of shopping to make sure we have supplies for Christmas Day, when we’ll have a family Christmas for those who live close by. Until then it’s calm and quiet.

Out in the wider world, it’s not very Christmassy. And not very calm and quiet. 

Here’s something Michael Rosen wrote two years ago. A reminder to those who think it all began in October of last year:

It goes on

till the ambulances are full of dying doctors

till the ambulances’ route to the hospital is 

blocked by bodies

till the ambulance sirens are worn out and 

cannot wail anymore

till the ambulances are full of tears

till the ambulances die

till the ambulances admit that it’s their fault

till there are no more ambulances

it goes on

And this was in today’s Guardian: 

Israel orders closure of one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza

Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and developments in the Middle East more widely.

Israel late last night ordered the closure and evacuation of one of the last hospitals still partly functioning in northern Gaza.

The head of the Kamal Adwan hospital, Husam Abu Safiya, told Reuters that obeying the order to shut down was “next to impossible” because there were not enough ambulances to get patients out.

He said:

We currently have nearly 400 civilians inside the hospital, including babies in the neonatal unit, whose lives depend on oxygen and incubators. We cannot evacuate these patients safely without assistance, equipment, and time.

We are sending this message under heavy bombardment and direct targeting of the fuel tanks, which if hit will cause a large explosion and mass casualties of the civilians inside.

Abu Safiya said the military had ordered patients and staff to be evacuated to another hospital where conditions are even worse. The Israeli military said that on Friday it had sent fuel and food to the hospital and helped evacuate more than 100 patients and caregivers to other Gaza hospitals.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Christmas chaos stage one!

 According to Granddaughter Number Three’s weather app on her tablet earlier this morning, it was about to start snowing! It hasn’t happened! Instead it’s damp and cold, that clammy cold you get when it’s damp on the air but not acrually raining.

Yesterday we did Christmas stage one at our house with an exchange of presents with the southern branch of the family. So much for Santa bringing all the presents on Christmas eve! 

The small boy, Grandson Number Two, who has been mega-excited for the last week about the imminent arrival of his cousin, took ill on Friday night. He woke his parents at 2.00 am, running a high temperature and generally miserable. So he spent most of the day snuggled up to his mother. He valiantly went off to “play” with his cousin and his older sister at one point and proceeded to climb into his cousin’s bed and go back to sleep while the girls played. 

When presents were exchanged he hugged his gift but couldn’t raise the energy to open it. 

Later today the Christmas invasion continues with the arrival of the Spanish bit of the family, whereupon 20 or so of us will descend on a local  restaurant! We hope the small boy be feeling better as he has also been excited about seeing his Spanish cousins again.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!

Midwinter thoughts! Family fun!.

 It’s the Winter Solstice today - the shortest day and longest night of the year there will be pagan celebrations somewhere! . From now on the days will slowly get longer. Not that we’ll notice much difference for a while.

I’m snatching a quiet moment to write this, before the Christmas chaos starts again.

Yesterday my daughter volunteered to run me to the supermarket in the late morning, after helping me make sure the bedrooms were sorted for the southern branch of the family who were arriving later. So we set off for Sainsbury’s via various stop-off errands along ghe way. We also took in Marks and Spencer and a brief stop at IKEA “click and collect” and a farm shop and finally arrived home at around 4.30. 

There were still a million things on my “to do”list, including sending a pre-order to the Italian restaurant where about a million family members will eat on Sunday - well, 20 of us at least!

And suddenly the southern branch southern branch of the family was almost here. We hurriedly coordinated fish and chips for everyone. Granddaughter Number One turned up with her best friend and their new kitten, which had just been to the vet’s for vaccination. A little bit of Christmas chaos. 

Between dinnertime and bedtime the elves (aka Granddaughter Number Three, Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two) decorated my small Christmas tree. Christmas traditions are being maintained!

We’ll see what kind of Christmas chaos today brings.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Being Christmas busy. And thinking about a ceasefire.

 The last two days have been crazily full, running round seeing people, watching the small boy in his school nativity play - or rather not watching him because he refused to put on his star costume and sing his heart out. He refused again today when his mother went to watch! 

He did, however, join in with enthusiasm when it came to making Christmas hats after school at my house. So it goes. 

Today Granddaughter Number Two and I went to Manchester early, dropped off at the tram stop by my daughter while it was still only just light. Breakfast in the Arndale Centre Prêt à Manger and a run round the shops, ticking items off her list as are went. I was supposed to be able to pick up an order from Gap, delivered supposedly to the Next shop in the Arndale. They sent it to the wrong shop! Now they will deliver it free to my house, hopefully still in time for me to wrap it before the recipient of the contents arrives. 

I’ve also been trying to organise people into giving me their order for the restaurant where an increasingly large group of us will eat on Sunday. Members of the family group keep adding extra bodies. Hopefully the restaurant will cope. But I need to give them an pre-order tomorrow.

I’m running put of discussion time, so here’s something I saw yesterday, regarding the supposed Gaza ceasefire talks: 

What do we know so far about the latest ceasefire talks?

Peter Beaumont

On Tuesday an Israeli negotiating team travelled to Qatar while a report from Reuters – denied by his office and Egypt – said that the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was planning to travel to Cairo for talks.

Instead, Netanyahu’s office said he had toured a buffer zone inside Syria that was recently seized by Israeli forces after the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, which he said would remain under Israeli control for the foreseeable future.

Two Egyptian security sources added, however, that Netanyahu was not in Cairo “at this moment” but that a meeting was under way to work through the remaining points – chief among them a Hamas demand for guarantees that any immediate deal would lead to a comprehensive agreement later.

CIA director William Burns, a key US negotiator, was due in Doha on Wednesday for talks with Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on bridging remaining gaps between Israel and Hamas, Reuters reported.

Hamas said in a statement that a deal was possible if Israel stopped setting new conditions. A Palestinian official close to the mediation efforts said negotiations were serious, with discussions under way about every word.

Reinforcing the sense of optimism the White House spokesperson John Kirby said in an interview with Fox News: “We believe – and the Israelis have said this – that we’re getting closer, and no doubt about it, we believe that, but we also are cautious in our optimism.”

He added, however: “We’ve been in this position before where we weren’t able to get it over the finish line.”

Hmm! A familiar story!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Thinking about pollution. And how the internet watches our every move and thought.

Dreams can be very strange indeed. Last night’s saw me, my daughter and the two smallest children travelling back by train from a day by the sea. There was an announcement that our scheduled train was too full and was not stopping at our station. Another was going to be provided. We just had to wait. There then followed something resembling a visit to the railway museum, with trains of all types, some of them very impressive,  trundling through our station. We were filthy from the smoke. I woke up before our train arrived so in dreamland we are forever stuck at the station. 

Which brings me to smoke and pollution! Recently we have been for late afternoon  / early evening walks around the village and have increasingly noticed smoke on the air. It must be at a time when those who have open fires are lighting them but it’s very noticeable.

When we moved into this house we had a coal-burning stove, similar to an Aga, in the kitchen, running the central heating for the house. We also had an open fire in the living room. We had regular deliveries of supposedly smokeless coal but we also burnt logs on the living room fire. And even with ‘smokeless’ coal, we must have been contributing to pollution. 

Our stove was fine while the children were in primary school and I was working part-time. However, once both children were in secondary school, and became effectively independent latchkey children, as I then began to work full time, it became something of a problem. The stove needed banking up in the morning so that it wouldn’t go out and it needed “waking” by whoever arrived home first in the afternoon/evening - not really a job for young teenagers! The house needed to warm up, as did the stove before any meals could be cooked.

Eventually it sprang a leak and would have cost more to repair than we had paid for it in the first place. We had it removed and changed to an electric cooker and a boiler for the central heating. We kept the open fire in the living room for a few years more but even that has long since been replaced by a fancy coal-effect electric fire. We cannot claim to be pollution free or ecologically perfect but we no longer send smoke into the air.

And just the other day I came across this article about how wood-burning stoves and fires may be more harmful to the atmosphere than other forms of heating. A study on a small rural town shows that despite the inhabitants thinking their air is pure, in fact it is as polluted as the air if big cities, just because if all the wood they burn. 

Oh dear, all those very trendy wood-burning stoves are bad for the environment! 

Yesterday I wrote about essentials in handbags, including sewing kits. Almost immediately, Amazon sent me this advertisement:

AUERVO Travel Sewing Kit, Over 70 DIY Premium Sewing Supplies,Mini Sewing kit for Home, Travel & Emergency Filled with Mending and Sewing Needles, Scissors, Thimble, Thread,Tape Measure etc…

Big Brother is watching us! And sending advertisements according to what he notices we take an interest in! The same happens when you make purchases online or even when you pay for stuff with a card.

I shall continue to pay cash where possible!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Christmas is coming. Essential stuff to carry around. When is an invasion not an invasion?

Christmas is rushing towards us at a furious rate of knots. I have just returned from lunch at the restaurant next door with an old friend. The place was full of pensioners celebrating, some of them with wearing paper hats. We drew the line at that, although we did pull the crackers and tell each other the regulation jokes, which I shall pass on the Granddaughter Number Four, who is currently obsessed with telling jokes. As a rule her small brother then insists on telling his version of the same joke, subtly altered so that the point of the joke is lost altogether. So it goes!

This week we are taking turns to go and watch five year old Grandson Number Two be a star in the infants school nativity play. All the reception class will be dressed as stars. Granddaughter Number Four is too old to be in the nativity play now that she is eight. Over the hill so young! 

 

However,mGranddaughter Number Four solemnly told me the other day that she believes in Father Christmas. It may well be that as she feels the need to reassure me, she herself has doubts. Here’s a link to a short article about a vicar who went to talk to religious education class at a school somewhere in Hampshire. It seems that after going through the story of the birth of Jesus, which surely year 6 children knew already, he went on to talk about Father Christmas and the fact that he does not in fact exist. This apparently left some children sobbing at their desks. Some parents complained that he had ‘ruined Christmas’. Really! The children of Hampshire must be particularly credulous if at 10 to 11 years old they still believe in Santa. Our almost eleven year old Granddaughter Number Three worked it out long ago. She knows where the presents come from. This year she wants clothes, books and money! 

I dipped into an article about the stuff people feel that absolutely MUST carry around in their handbags, apart from the obvious things like keys, money/cards, comb, and in case lip-balm. Some people must be real pessimists, expecting awful accidents to happen to them to destroy their  perfect image:

“I carry a Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater stain treater in most of my bags. It came recommended by a friend who spilled red wine at a vineyard, only to have her server whip out this stain remover. I feel like a hero whenever I get to use it, especially on a friend. It’s larger than a Tide pen, but in my opinion way more effective.

Erika Veurink, fashion writer”

“A mini hotel sewing kit – including a safety pin and spare button – is great for emergency repairs. It’s amazing the number of times a safety pin or a quick stitch saves the day, whether fixing an unravelling hem or holding a cuff together that’s lost a button.
Laura Bailey, photographer and model”

“I try not to leave home without a mini sewing kit. I typically “borrow” them from hotels – they work a treat. From loose buttons to dropped hems, I’ve found them to be a sartorial life-saver.

Candice Brathwaite, author”

I confess to taking mini sewing kits from hotel rooms, not to carry round on an everyday basis but to take on holiday with me. And my daughter, usually accompanied by a potentially messy five year old, usually has wipes of some kind. They also serve as stain removers.

I wonder what men feel they must carry in their pockets! Some of them, of course, also have shoulder bags. 

More seriously, here is a post from Michael Rosen:

Please mind your language.

Israel has not invaded the Golan Heights

Israel has not occupied the Golan Heights.

What has happened is that there has been a

'demographic development'. 

Please bear in mind when writing 

about the Norman Conquest of 1066

that William the Conqueror 

did not invade Britain.

William the Conqueror

did not occupy Britain.

There was a demographic development.

In all future communications

with this department

responsible for making this announcement

please refer only and exclusively to the

'demographic development'.

No one was injured in the writing of this poem.

['Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the government had “unanimously approved” the “demographic development” of the occupied territory [of the Golan Heights], which would seek to double the Israeli population there.' Aljazeera 16 Dec 2024]

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Confusing buses and considerate drivers. A tale of two Alans (Garner and Turing). And freedom to protest.,

 At the bus stop at the crossroads near our house you can catch a bus to Oldham or a bus to Ashton, to the bus stations at each end of a long route. Confusingly, buses in both directions have the same number, which must be difficult for anyone who does not know the area. And occasionally the destination indicator on the front of the bus gets stuck so that you can’t be sure where it’s going without asking the driver. To add to the confusion, the Oldham bus goes just a few minutes before the Ashton bus, and the times of both buses are approximate as they do such a very long route.

So today, on a mission to buy screws from the hardware shop in Uppermill, I went out for a bus due at the stop at 2.30. As I approached the crossroads I saw a bus just leaving the stop. According to the time it should have been the one bound for Oldham; but no! this was the Ashton bus departing about 4 minutes early. Close behind it came an alternative bus, one which goes through Diggle on the scenic route but which would still take me to Uppermill. It takes great skill, or perhaps poor time management, to miss two buses at more or less the same time! So, as I was at the crossroads and the alternative bus was stuck in traffic I waved my arms and jumped about, signalling to the driver to pleeeease!!! open the door for me. They are not supposed to do so between stops but the drivers on the scenic route are more tolerant of the ways of the local people or maybe just more flexible about bending the rules from time to time. 

And so I caught that bus to Uppermill, did my hardware shopping, posted a few Christmas cards, chatted to the Big Issue seller outside the hardware shop, and hopped on the next bus home! Quite efficient, I congratulated myself!

Earlier in the day I read this article about the writer Alan Garner, author of the rather frightening children’s book “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen”, still writing stuff at the age of 90.

Here’s something Alan Garner wrote 13 years ago about Alan Turing:- 

“In the 1950s I was an athlete. Those were the days before joggers clogged the highway, so it was unusual for me to see another runner when I was training. We fell into the habit of meeting up and pounding the miles together for company.

He was stocky, barrel-chested, with a high-pitched, donnish voice and the aerodynamics of a brick. He was funny and witty and he talked endlessly, but I understood very little of what he was saying, and it became clear that he ran in order to think. He seemed to be obsessed by mathematics and biology. That much I could work out.

We had one thing in common: a fascination with Disney’s ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, especially the transformation of the Wicked Queen into the Witch. He used to go over the scene in detail, dwelling on the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, one of which gave death. We had both been traumatised by Walt.

On one occasion he asked me whether, in my opinion as a classical linguist, artificial intelligence was possible. After a couple of miles of silence I said that, in my opinion, it was not. And that was that.

He killed himself when an ignorant and uncouth judge gave him the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration; and I was overwhelmed by fury at the salacious, gloating humiliation imposed on my friend, and by a sense of guilt that I did not, could not, help him; which lasted for decades, and was made only worse when the Official Secrets Act revealed his true heroism.

He died of cyanide poisoning. By his body was an apple, partly eaten. The apple was not tested for cyanide. His name was Alan Turing.”

We might think that couldn’t happen now but the powers that be are still controlling us, it seems. Here’s something I came across yesterday by a freelance journalist called Nina Lakhani:

“Back in early August, I reported on the arrest of two climate activists outside the New York headquarters of Citibank, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel financiers and target of a campaign known as Summer of Heat.

John Mark Rozendaal, a former music instructor at Princeton University, and Alec Connon, director of the climate nonprofit group Stop the Money Pipeline, were detained for 24 hours and charged with criminal contempt, which carries up to seven years in prison. Why? Rozendaal was playing a Bach solo on his cello while Connon sheltered him with an umbrella – which police claimed broke the conditions of a temporary restraining order that related to another bogus charge of assault (that was later dropped).

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, took up the pair’s case, and together with three other UN experts wrote a formal letter to the US government explaining their fears that the charges were without foundation, and appeared to be a punishment for participating in peaceful protests on the climate crisis and human rights.”

So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!P