Milder weather? Coughs and colds. Still chaotic in Palestine. Pensioner terrorists.

Yesterday began bright and sunny and very cold. Today began grey and damp and less cold. Somehow, though, the crisp cold is preferable to the damp less cold, no matter how much the weathermen congratulate us on having milder weather. 

So I ran round the village in the damp, noting  Christmas decorations along the way. Maybe the early putting up of Christmas trees is a way people have of cheering up this rather dull time of year. 

Most of the family seems to have given in to sniffles and coughs, possibly spread by the smallest grandchildren. On a Thursday I collect said smallest grandchildren from school and we all have tea together before Phil is given a lift to chess club. In recent weeks I have had to concoct something Granddaughter number Two will eat as she spurns the scrambled eggs on offer to everyone else. Today she declares herself too ill to come visiting - no sausages and chips today! 

Earlier this week our prime minister visited a primary school and inadvertently, or perhaps advertently if such a term exists, set a class of children off on six-seven uproar. Maybe he was setting out to prove he has a less serious side before Rachel Reeves got into the budget. Here’s a link to what happened.

In Hong Kong they’re still seeking survivors from the horrific skyscraper fires. Apparently the residential blocks were clad in bamboo, which surely  must burn easily. Latest reports tell of 55 dead, many injured and hundreds missing. Fire and flood, two elements we have not conquered yet. 

In Palestine, in other words Gaza and The West Bank, chaos continues. The ceasefire seems very shaky, to say the least. Here in the UK pensioners are still being arrested for supporting Palestine Action, or at least protesting at the organisation being deemed a terrorist movement. And according to this article the high court is being told the ban should be lifted: 

“On the first day of a legal challenge to the ban brought by co-founder Huda Ammori, her lawyer said the group had been engaged in an “honourable tradition” of direct action and civil disobedience prior to proscription.

Raza Husain KC told the court in London on Wednesday: “There are reasons of profound importance as to why, in the 32 executive orders that have been made adding organisations to proscribed lists, no direct action civil disobedience organisation appears.

“Such proscription is repugnant to the tradition of the common law and contrary to the European convention on human rights.””

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Early morning stuff. Protecting languages … and living rooms … from extinction.

 This morning I got up in the dark, something I have not done for while. The various arrangements and rearrangements to see my doctor for a routine appointment had ended up with my having an appointment at 7.45 this morning. So I duly climbed out of my warm nest in the dark, got washed and dressed and headed out in the fading dark to the bus stop at the crossroads. I had calculated that if I caught the bus that goes all around the houses, through just about every out of the way twist and turn, at the crossroads at around 7.15, I should arrive in Uppermill in time to stroll comfortably up to the clinic without having to wait around for long in the cold. Because, boy! was it cold! My weather app said -3°! The bus arrived on time - so far so good - but at the usual left turn towards Dobcross centre it carried straight on. It turns out that there are roadworks on one of the more distant bits of the bus route and they were just not going there. 

Consequently I was in Uppermill centre before 7.30 and it was still very cold! I walked round the block a few times to keep warm and then went and paced around by the entrance to the surgery. 7.45 came … and went … and the surgery remained firmly closed with only the merest light right at the back. 

Meanwhile there were some very colourful clouds i the sky as the sun struggled to rise.

The doors eventually opened at 7.55. Minimal apologies from my GP but all was well. Mind you, it seems to me that if they are going to send you a text, received yesterday, reminding you to arrive promptly for your appointment, the least they can do is let you in out of the arctic cold conditions. 

Afterwards I walked to Tesco in nearby Greenfield, bought various odds and ends and made my way back to  Uppermill, where by that time the fishman had set up his stall at the market and I was able to buy fish and catch the next bus home in time for a mid-morning breakfast.

The other day I wrote about Iceland and their fears that their language might disappear. Today I read that an organisation called the European Language Equality Network organised a conference in Barcelona, attended by representatives of around 60 minority languages to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes to save it. The speakers of those languages do not regard them as “minority”, by the way, but “minoritised”, hardly surprising as many of them have been banned in the past. The different attitudes to these languages, on the part of the speakers themselves, is interesting and varied. All recognise the importance of keeping their specific culture alive but some regard it as a holy thing fixed in time, like a fly caught in amber, that must be preserved intact and pure, allowing no influences from outside while others recognise that it is a living thing and must evolve, as do all the majority languages.  Here’s a link to an article about it. 

Something else in danger of extinction is, apparently, the living room. How can that be? Many young, and increasingly not so very young, certainly past student age, people rent a single room in a house, usually at an extortionate price. In these shared dwellings it is very hard for the housemates to become true housemates as there is no communal area, other than maybe a small kitchen, too small for true social interaction. And so isolation and depression set in. Problems of modern living! Here’s a link to an article about it.

Sometimes it’s a relief, no, a privilege, to have been young when we were!

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Perceptions of cold weather. National ideas of politeness. National food dishes.

Today is bright and crisp and sunny … and cold! The BBC weather app tells me it’s 5° but my personal temperature gauge says it’s colder. It could be that when the temperature reaches a certain low level I don’t notice the difference any more. Anyway, the BBC forecast us freezing and just below by early evening. 

Facebook’s ‘memory’ suggests it may have been even colder eight years ago.

In our online Italian conversation class yesterday we talked about politeness: what we expect, the different standards in different countries and so on. Our Italian friend tells us that her British husband finds Italian drivers’ inability to express gratitude when, for example, another driver gives way to them when they want to change lanes more than a little annoying. A simple wave or raised hand will suffice, he rants. Instead, what usually happens is that other drivers get angry and pip their horns or make rude gestures! Cultural differences! Mind you, I have had Spanish friends tell me that we British say thank you far too frequently.  The same applies to saying excuse me, and I’m sorry! 

A recent addition to our British over-politeness is wishing people a nice day. I’m sure we never used to wish everyone a nice day but nowadays as I get off a bus I thank the driver and wish him a nice day, I pay for goods in a shop (cash as often as possible in my personal campaign to keep cash alive and to keep my details off the system as far as possible by bot using my credit card if it can be avoided) I thank the cashier and wish them a good day. And here’s a link to Adrian Chiles describing his experience of the cashier who wished customers not just a nice but a WONDERFUL day. He thinks it may be an American import.

For next week’s Italian class we are asked to do some research into Christmas food in different parts of Italy. Here in the UK we have turkey ( surely an import from the USA!), Christmas cake, Christmas pudding, mince pies, pigs in blankets (I don’t think we had those when I was a child) and inevitably Brussel sprouts (to which I add chestnuts).  I suppose traditional food is an important part of every country’s culture but here in the UK we borrow and adopt from other places all the time. And so we add Italian pannetone and Spanish jamón serrano to our Christmas fayre. Even our sprouts must have originated in Brussels!

At the end of the now almost legendary summer of 1976, when the sun shone from the middle of June until early September, the weather broke just as a young Frenchman arrived to spend a year as a foreign language assistant at the secondary school where I was working. It rained so much in the early weeks of his stay that he expressed the belief that we had totally invented the myth of the wonderful summer we had just had. One day I invited him to come and spend  an evening with Phil and me in our flat. I was less ambitious in my cooking in those days, and I was still a red meat eater at the time. So I served up steak and chips and peas and was congratulated on making a “very French dinner”. “Steak frites” is still a “very French dinner” and here is a link to an article about the search for the best place to eat ‘steak frites” in Paris. Plus ça change … and all that sort of thing!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain. Oversleeping. Packaging. Sand dunes. Environmental stuff.

So this morning I woke up to the sound of rain on the skylight windows, switched off my alarm (having snoozed it once already) lay back to listen to the rain and woke up about an hour and a half later!! Well, I reckon I must have needed the extra sleep but it changed my usual start to the day. And it was still raining!

By midday the sky was clear and the sun was even shining. Maybe I’ll get out for a walk to make up for not going for a run.

Packaging is a big feature in modern life where so many of us order large amounts of stuff online. What often happens is that one small item arrives in a rather large box, the small item cushioned by scrunched up brown paper. It seems that most companies have one standard size box that they use for everything. It’s probably been carefully calculated in a time and motion study, no time wasted on selecting a suitable size of box for the item to be dispensed! And we, the recipients, then recycle the box and the brown paper packaging into the paper and cardboard recycling … assuming that we are good environmentalists.

Here’s another aspect of the same problem: Granddaughter Number One has been ordering underwear online from Marks and Spencer - noted for the quality of their underwear. She did make a foray to an actual M & S shop but they didn’t have her size and so she resorted to online ordering and found what she wanted. There’s a delivery charge. And of course there is packaging. If she orders two items, possibly two identical or near identical items, she says, there will be two packages and two delivery charges! Come on, M & S! You can do better than that! 

On a broader scale the whole problem of waste disposal is getting out of hand. Fly-tipping, dumping your waste products in some out of the way spot in the countryside, still goes on. Walking back from the village the other day I noticed an old bath tub, neatly cut into two halves, at the side of the roadway through the local industrial estate. I am hoping that this is on its way to a proper waste disposal place and has not just been abandoned when someone from the nearby housing estate has had a bathroom update! Here’s link to an article about the waste disposal problem in the UK.

While I’m on an environmental roll, here’s a link to an article about sand dunes in Chad, and the struggle to prevent those sand dunes from further engulfing the oases which keep old traditional ways of life viable in the changing world. 

Sand dunes are fickle creatures, changing landscapes and shore lines. We’ve recently returned from Figueira da Foz on the coast of Portugal, where you walk miles, well, long distances, to reach the Atlantic. I have seen old photos, dating back to the early twentieth century, showing the sea coming up close to the promenade which ai have run along on many occasions. Not so much the work of sand dunes there as the gradual depositing of sand and the withdrawal of the ocean. Just a reminder that we don’t control our environment … we can only try to do so.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Different degrees of dampness. When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire? Christmas trees

 I ran in the rain this morning. It’s actually quite a while since I have done that, partly because on days when the rain has been coming down in proverbial ‘stair rods’ I have simply chickened out and stayed indoors. Today it was not raining when I set out but the promise of rain on my weather app was enough to persuade me to put a rain jacket on. The rain I ran in was what the weathermen refer to as ‘light rain’, which presumably means it takes rather longer to soak you through than the ‘heavy’ variety.  That came some time after I had returned home, some truly torrential rain, provoking protests on our group chat from Granddaughter Number One who had to take her dog out in it as her housemate is away on a family visit to the USA. It’s a hard life! 

The torrential stuff had eased off by midday and now we have simply returned to cloudy and damp! Crisp and cold was more cheerful but did demand more effort to keep warm. 

I should not complain about the weather. At least we have a warm and dry home to return to. In Gaza and other places there are people living in makeshift tents with rain and wind making life extra difficult. Bad enough having to go on a daily hunt for water in warmer seasons, it must be horrific in freezing conditions. And how do you dry the clothes which got soaked in the rain? 

As this article tells us, the ceasefire is making precious little difference to life in Gaza. Air strikes continue, people are still being killed, there is is still not enough food despite some (insufficient) supplies being allowed in, and to make a bad situation worse, basic medical necessities are still in short supply. Medics told the Guardian on Sunday that stocks of gauze, antiseptics, thermometers and antibiotics were running low. Mohammed Saqr, the director of nursing at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “We are still suffering a severe lack of most of our supplies and medicines. We have daily crises, and the same shortages and deficiencies in supplies, and we are still exhausted as we are still receiving lots of casualties.

“There isn’t much difference from the period before the ceasefire. Unfortunately, the bombing is still going on … We don’t feel there is a big change.”

And yet reports still tell us that despite the continuing violence in Gaza having strained the ceasefire, both sides say they are committed to the agreement. Aid is still needed. We must not forget that.

Gaza hospitals running out of supplies as airstrikes continue, medics say | Gaza | The Guardian

Here in Delph, some gardens are already decorated with model reindeer and some homes are already displaying large Christmas trees in their windows. I am resolutely resisting the temptation to break out the Christmas ear rings. After all, it isn’t December … yet! In the village centre the tree which was erected yesterday morning, and which was even bedecked with lights by late afternoon, had disappeared. Goodness! Had someone stolen it! There hadn’t been a storm or even strong winds to blow it over. Someone in the co-op told me that they (whoever ‘they’ are) had decided it was too tall and the farmer (whoever that is) had had to take it away reduce its height. So it goes. By the time I came out of the co-op they were already re-erecting the abbreviated tree. Let’s hope it’s satisfactory this time.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Warmer or just less cold? Trees. Fringe nostalgia. Doctors.

As I ran round the village first thing this morning, a number of my regular nodding acquaintances commented that it was “warmer” today. I beg to differ. The correct description is “less cold”. But there was still ice on the millpond and, more dangerously, ice just below the surface of the puddles  on the bridle path, waiting like a booby trap for any unsuspecting walker or runner going even moderately quickly. 

The sense of community works though; we were all warning those who crossed our path of places with ice remaining or fallen trees still not removed. We need to look after each other.  

In the village centre they were distributing small christmas trees to participating shops, cafes, even individual houses. These trees will be positioned above the main doors of such places. They will be decorated ready for the great “Light Up Delph” ceremony, which will take place sometime very soon.

In the 1960s all the girls wanted to have smooth glossy hair with a smooth glossy fringe 

down to their eyebrows, just like Cathy McGowan, presenter of  the pop-music show “Ready Steady Go”. 

This was in the days before hair straighteners and the vast range of hair products available today, something of a nightmare for those of us with annoyingly naturally curly hair. I used to plaster my fringe to my forehead with one of the few products available, Amami Setting Lotion, and cycle to school secure in the knowledge that it would not shift. Arrived at school, I would comb out my stiff fringe and, lo and behold, a fashionable soft fringe would emerge.  Of course, if PE was on the timetable for that day, and if we had to go outside to play hockey in the drizzle, all my efforts were in vain.

Nowadays, Claudia Winkleman’s is the fringe to emulate. 

Even with my hair straighteners I am not sure I could quite achieve the “look”. Besides, if I were to manage to do so I suspect it might lead to divorce proceedings judging by Phil’s explosion whenever her image appears: “Good grief! How can she see anything?”

Anyway, here is a link to an article about clip-on fringes and the difference it can make to a woman’s confidence and life in general. Who knew that such a thing as a clip-on fringe existe

At around the same time that I was trying to have a fashionable fringe, I remember that our family doctor would “pop in” to check up on how the family was getting along. Similarly, moving on to the 1980s, I remember regular home visits from a health visitor in the few weeks after my babies were born, checking up that as a recently-delivered mother I was coping and the baby was thriving. I’m fairly sure that doesn’t happen now. Here’s an extract from an article about the NHS from today’s Guardian:

“GPs can no longer guarantee safe care for millions of patients because of a dangerous shortage of medics, Britain’s top family doctor has said.

Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), said surgeries were desperate to hire more doctors to meet soaring demand for care but could not afford to do so because of a lack of core funding.

Exhausted family doctors have been working “completely unsafe hours” because their surgeries did not have the cash to recruit new staff or replace those quitting, increasing the risk of serious errors or deadly conditions being missed, she said.

“GPs will always push themselves to do what’s best for our patients, but we can’t go on like this,” Hawthorne said. “GP workload pressures are so pronounced that many of our members are telling us they are worried they can’t guarantee safe care when there aren’t enough GPs to keep up.””

Now, there are masses of recently qualified doctors whom would love to join a team at a local surgery. Unfortunately the funds are not being made available to fund those extra doctors and provide a more efficient service.  When you do manage to see your GP, you have to be rather assertive if you want to see a specific member of the team, at least at our local surgery. I’m pretty sure there would be fewer mental health problems if GPs had the time to get to know their patients and maybe notice problems before they became crises. In the same way, I am sure new young mothers would cope better with adjusting to motherhood if there were more regular support.

But it’s all down to funding and I expect someone will call me an idealist, a nostalgic idealist at that! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Feeling the cold. Axolotls. Beauty products.

 -3°: that was the temperature outside according to my weather app at 8.00 this morning before I went out for a run. By midday my app told me the temperature had risen to 2°, which is officially warmer but does not really feel much different. Even with the sun shining on it the heavy frost on the roof of the garden shed has not shifted! I noticed yesterday as I made my way to the smallest grandchildren’s school that the ice on puddles had not melted, even though it was now almost 3.00pm. 

However, it’s a beautiful day with blue sky and sunshine. Mustn’t grumble!

When I was at school we had an axolotl in a tank in the science laboratory. An amorphous grey blob of a creature, he did very little. His name was Aristotle. I have a very tiny purple plastic axolotl, given to me by Granddaughter Number Four; for some reason she had a bagful of tiny axolotls and was selecting different coloured ones to give to members of the family! In Mexico the axolotl Gorda, an elderly amphibian creature living in Mexico Caity’s museum, was selected to feature on the 50 peso bank note. And now millions of these not very valuable bank notes are being hoarded, well, not being spent, by perfectly ordinary Mexicans for the simple reason that they like the design. 

Perhaps it is because axolotls are a symbol of something uniquely Mexican. After all, they have been around since before the Aztecs, let alone since before the Spanish invaded! 

Here are some nerdy facts about words that a friend sent me:

• Dreamt is the only word that ends in mt.
• The oldest word in the English language is ‘town’.
• ‘Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are the only two words in the English language with three consecutive double letter.
• The dot on top of the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle. (This is why if we care very little about something we can say we do not care one jot or tittle - both words probably derive from greek “iota”.)
• The word ‘testify’ derived from a time when men were required to swear on their testicles. (Women at that time were probably considered not sufficiently important to need to swear on anything!)

There have always been products on sale meant to ‘make us all more beautiful’ - nowadays even for men as well as women - but according to this article there are now more and more beauty products aimed at younger and younger girls. I accept that our nine year old Granddaughter Number Four knows the words to all sorts of pop songs, has a very definite fashion sense all her own, selects her well-coordinated outfits with care and compliments older female members of the family on their choice of clothing, but there is something disturbing about four year olds using face-masks, ‘cleansers’ and moisturisers. Small girls should be playing games and getting messy, not to say dirty. The only skincare they need is sun protection!  

 

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!