On the main road from Delph to Dobcross they have installed traffic-calming measures. These are not like the small stiff strips put across the road on the A62, where our house is situated, not very high but closely placed in such a way as to make the dickens of a row as a vehicle goes over them, reminding drivers that they are entering a 30 miles an hour zone. No, these are huge great ramps, raising up to a good 9 inches or so above the road surface. When first set up they bore no warnings, leading to some interesting rollercoaster bus rides. Now they have white stripes visible as you approach them and a large 20 in a circle on the humps themselves. This is intended to remind drivers that there is a 20 miles an hour speed limit there. In practice what happens is that the bus hurtles round the bend as it comes out of Dobcross and has to break fiercely before going over the very portly sleeping policeman. The bus then speeds up until the next speed bump appears a short distance further along the road. It leads to interesting bus journeys!
Slogans and names given to movements are always interesting. Well I think so, anyway. I was reading about Margaret Atwood making her own stand against Donald Trump and his expressed desire to make Canada the 51st state of the USA. Like a lot of Canadians it seems, she is carefully refusing to buy goods which come from the United States, buying Canadian alternatives instead, and declaring “elbows up”. I looked up the origin of the slogan and found this:
"Elbows up" is an idiom in Canadian English that encourages people to be strong, determined, and ready to defend themselves, originally inspired by hockey players who keep their elbows up to ward off attacks. It has become a rallying cry for Canadians to stand strong against aggression.
There you go.
And hurrah for Margaret Atwood, still going strong at 86. Here’s a link to a quite long but interesting article about her.
At one point the writer of the article tells us that the young Margaret Atwood’s ‘nickname’ was Peggy. Nickname? Does the writer not know that Peggy was always a standard diminutive of Margaret, just as Bobby was of Robert and so on?
There is also a brief mention in the article of Doggerland, referring back to a time when Great Britain was attached by land to Europe. I wanted to know a bit about Doggerland, named apparently for Dogger Bank, one of the sea areas listed in the Shipping Forecast. There have always been stories about lost lands which disappeared under the sea, Atlantis being the big one. Here’s a link to an article about Doggerland and amateur archaeologists helping scientists discover more.
Dogger Bank, I discovered was named for the Dutch fishing vessels of that name, described as early as the fourteenth century, that commonly operated in the North Sea. The internet tells me that “Early examples were single-masted and were largely used for fishing for cod by rod and line. By the seventeenth century, two-masted doggers were common and were using trawl nets. Doggers were slow but sturdy vessels, capable of fishing in the rough conditions of the North Sea.”
Here’s a picture of such a vessel.
A dogger viewed from before the port beam. Her gaff mainsail is brailed up and her lateen mizzen is set. c. 1675 by Willem van de Velde the Younger.
“The boats were used for fishing for cod, now called kabeljauw in Dutch, but in that era the name dogge or doggevis was more common. Dutch boats were ubiquitous in the North Sea, and the word dogger was given to the rich fishing grounds where they often fished, which became known as the Dogger Bank.”
Ah! The interconnectedness of everything!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
