Extremes of weather, of leeway to bellicose countries, of attention to trivis.

On Tuesday the weathermen were issuing warnings of heavy rain, positive rainstorms, possible flooding in some parts of the country. Yesterday, Wednesday, dawned dull and damp. I chose to walk to the market in Uppermill (a rather feeble showing of a market with only the fish-man and the fruit-and-veg-man - better than last week but still not exactly bustling!) rather than cycle through the drizzle. 

The drizzle turned to something more like rain after I returned home but as the day went on that rain eased and the day got marginally brighter, bright enough for a brisk walk round the block in the late afternoon. I began to think that those predictions of torrential rain were exaggerated. Maybe the rainclouds that had featured in the weather forecasts, swirling in over the western side of the Iberian peninsula, across the Bay of Biscay into France and swooping over Wales, had shed their load before reaching us. 

Maybe we had got away with it, I thought!

Hmmm!

Then in the late evening Granddaughter Number One started sending messages about the torrential rain that fell on her when she went out into her garden to make sure her quails (yes, her quails!) were properly covered up for the night. She followed that with concerns that the water was getting dangerously high outside her back door. We looked out. Yes, it was pouring down here as well, maybe five miles away from Granddaughter Number One’s house. 

The torrential stuff continued through a good part of the  night. This morning, however, was bright and sunny. The cloud has moved in since but it’s not threatening rain, at least, not according to the BBC!

We’re fortunate only to have weather to worry about. If all that falls from our sky is rain, maybe he occasional hailstorm, we can love with that. Other parts of the world are a good deal worse off.

I see that the USA has given Israel 30 days to allow aid into Gaza before they cut off arms provision. In the meantime, presumably, they’ll still provide those arms. And in those 30 days people will die of starvation and disease. 30 days is quite a long time.

We watched Newsnight on the BBC last night as they discussed the proposal that appetite-suppressing injections should be provided on the NHS to overweight out-of-work people. The idea is the reduce the number of people claiming disability benefits and declaring themselves unable to work because of obesity. There is a part of me that wants to protest that not all out of work people are obese, but of course they know that. 

One of the participants in the discussion had funded her own injections, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of pounds worth of injections and had gone from something like 26 stone to 12 stone. Impressive! but surely we should be able to deal with obesity without having to resort to drugs and surgery! 

In the middle of this serious discussion came a newsflash: a singer from One Direction had died falling from a hotel balcony in Argentina. There followed quite a long discussion about the singer, with tributes and expressions of surprise and sadness. I don’t know how long it continued as we changed channels. Now, I can understand a brief interruption for such a newsflash, and I sympathise with fans of the singer. After all, he died young and seemingly as he was about to embark on a successful solo career. But did it really merit suspending a serious discussion for more than a minute or two? 

Okay! I admit to being influenced by the fact that I am not a fan and cannot name one song by One Direction.  But there it is. We give a lot of media attention to trivia such as game shows and scandals and who is getting married or, more salaciously, divorced. Bread and circuses! 

Or maybe, appetite suppressants and news about the rich and famous.

On the subject of the rich and famous, and the maybe not so rich but in the public eye, cabinet member Bridget Phillipson told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that while she would not repay the £522.54 cost of the two tickets, which she was given as a gift by the FA, she would not accept further freebies in future.

£522.54!!! For two tickets!! 

No wonder Taylor Swift can generously contribute to food-banks. No, I am not belittling her contributions. I think she’s wonderful to do such a thing. And I am aware that not all the extortionate price of concert tickets goes to the performers. I’m just rather amazed that anyone pays such a price for tickets. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Christopher Columbus and whose land is it anyway?

 My friend Colin in his blog has been going on a little about Christopher Columbus and the question of where he was buried and, more controversially, where he was born. He likes to think that Cristobal Colón, as the Spaniards call him, was born in Poio, Pontevedra, Galicia. 

Coincidentally, my Italian friend and teacher and leader of our zoom Italian conversation class on Monday was getting equally worked up, as only Sicilians can, about the nationality of Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo, as the Italians call him), declaring him to be most definitely Italian. How dare anyone suggest otherwise? She says she tries to ignore the news, steadfastly not reading newspapers, as she finds it all too depressing. But her English/Scots husband had pushed a Guardian article about good old CC her way. Hence the indignation. She then ranted for a while about Christopher Columbus day in the USA and told us that really Columbus should have been shot before he was able to “discover” America and inflict US hegemony on the world.  Wow! 

Apparently the second Monday of October marks Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day in the United States. It all gets a little confusing. In 2022, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation:

     “NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim October 10, 2022, as Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.  I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of our diverse history and the Indigenous peoples who contribute to shaping this Nation.”

They do seem to like a bit of flag waving.

So now there is Indigenous People’s day, as there should be, and more and more states are starting to embrace that idea but Columbus Day is still commemorated as such in quite a few states.

 Doing a bit of research, I found that the direct reason for declaring the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday was the mass lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891. The New Orleans police chief had been murdered and the city’s Italian population was blamed.  19 Italians were to be tried but weak evidence led to 6 being acquitted and 3 trials were declared mistrials. Before the rest could be tried an angry mob stormed the prison and shot 11 Italians, some of whom were not even on trial. That’s angry mobs for you! 

The event threatened diplomatic relations between Italy and the United States, and, to appease the Italian government, U.S. President Benjamin Harris proclaimed the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday in 1892, intending it to be a one-time celebration.

But cities with a large Italian-American population began to celebrate it every year and in 1937 it was proclaimed an annual federal holiday, with parades and floats and general jollity. However by 1992 (500 years on from Columbus sailing the ocean blue) some people had started objecting to celebrating it and proposed alternatives, such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Small compensation really for having your land taken over! 

Thinking of such matters, here’s a poem by Michael Rosen:

PROMISED LAND

A family arrived and said they had papers

To prove that his house was theirs.

• No, no, said the man, my people have always lived here,

My father, grandfather …. and look the garden,

My great-grandfather planted that.

• No, no, said the family, look at the documents.

There was a stack of them.

• Where do I start? said the man.
• No need to read the beginning, they said,

Turn to he page marked ‘Promised Land’.

• Are they legal? he said, who wrote them?
• God, they said, God wrote them, look,

Here come his tanks. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Getting organised with family tasks. Environmental stuff. Warlike stuff.

 Granddaughter Number One has sent her housemate/best friend to collect their washing. As she went off with the bags, I popped out to retrieve our blue (paper and cardboard recycling) dustbin. The dustbin-men are clearly on a tight time schedule. Not only do they not take bins from your garden (if they’re not outside your garden gate they are ignored) but once they have emptied them they just dump the bins haphazardly and sometimes quite dangerously all over the pavement. “Oh dear,” said the housemate/best friend, “we keep forgetting to put our bins out. We’ve had to do two runs to the tip with our rubbish”.

I can’t say I am surprised but I am resisting the temptation to tell them how to get organised.

Now all I have to do is complete my daughter’s stitching and darning and I will have completed the family-related tasks I accumulated over the weekend.

Yesterday was brilliantly blue and sunny. Today we are back to grey. That’s the way it goes. There are studies which show that the trees and the ground are not absorbing carbon as well as they used to. 

Take Finland for example: 

“For decades, the country’s forests and peatlands had reliably removed more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. But from about 2010, the amount the land absorbed started to decline, slowly at first, then rapidly. By 2018, Finland’s land sink – the phrase scientists use to describe something that absorbs more carbon than it releases – had vanished.”

We need to find new and better ways to save the planet. Instead we appear still to be blowing up quite a lot of it. And those of us not actually blowing things up are helping provide the means to do the blowing up. 

Lebanon is being bombarded. Refugee camps in Israel are being attacked, tents set on fire - as if living in a tent was not enough of a hardship. And there are still unidentified dead beneath destroyed building. 

This morning I read this very relevant poem by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Han Kang:

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.”

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral,

So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine.

These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine.

These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

― Han Kang, Human Acts

And here is a recent bit of Michael Rosen’s King and his Tutor:

'Have you seen these?' said the King to this tutor.

'You look worried, sir,' said the tutor, 'what are they?'

'They're reports, tutor,' said the King, 'reports of what people are saying about us.'

'Go on,' said the tutor, 'and do try not to look so worried about it.'

'These reports,' said the King, 'say that people are "not happy" with what we're doing.'

'And?' said the tutor.

'This one here,' said the King, 'says that they're "a bit unhappy". A bit unhappy! It's unbearable that people are saying things like that.'

'I think you need to take stock of the situation, sir,' said the tutor, 'it's just words.'

'But what words, eh!' said the King. '"Not happy" and "a bit unhappy". I'm shuddering thinking about it.'

'Sir,' said the tutor, 'relax. There is no need for this kind of anxiety. I put it to you again, what are any of these critics actually going to do? Answer me that.'

'Nothing, I suppose,' said the King.

'And there you have it,' said the tutor. 'It's just "da-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da...a little bit unhappy". It makes about as much difference to what we do, as a fly being cross that he forgot to have a piss.'

'I haven't looked at it like that,' said the King, 'you see, I was stung by the criticism.'

'Exactly,' said the tutor.

'But hang on,' said the King, 'why are they doing it? Why are they so critical of us?'

'The main reason,' said the tutor, 'is to keep their friends happy. Whatever they say about US, is really a code for what they want the people in their countries to think about THEM.'

'And the other reason?' said the King.

'People hate us not for what we do, but for who we are,' said the tutor. 

'You mean that we could do anything and they would still hate us?' said the King. 

'Yes,' said the tutor.

'We could invent a new way for the whole world to have clean water, and they would still hate us?' said the King.

'Yep,' said the tutor.

'Oh well,' said the King, 'now you've put it like that, we might as well just carry on doing what we're doing.'

'Exactly,' said the tutor, 'you've got it.'

'Thanks, tutor,' said the King.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Monday trivia.

 Today has been a perfectly beautiful day so far: blue sky and sunshine, although a little on the chilly side to begin with. There were some fine reflections on the millpond when I ran round the village this morning. 

All through the summer, well, the months that we called summer, Phil and I went on occasional forays up Lark Hill to see if we could spot a host of butterflies on the buddleia bush, where we saw a load of very exotic ones a couple of years ago. All to no avail. I have read since that there has been a shortage of butterflies generally this year. So it’s not a local problem.

Early this afternoon, however, Phil set off to the crossroads to catch a bus into town. A couple of minutes after setting off he phoned me. Uh, oh! i thought, he’s forgotten some important document! But no, he was calling to tell me that on a bush just before the crossroads there was an enormous butterfly, probably a red admiral, and masses of bees. Maybe I would care to take a look and maybe take a photo. 

Well, I was a bit sceptical about the butterfly staying there but I needed to go and post a birthday card to a niece, and so I got organised and set off. Amazingly the butterfly was still there. Or maybe one of its friends had come to take its place. It must have been basking in the October sunshine. Here it is.

Granddaughter Number One has a problem which prevents her from using her washing machine at the moment. This has been going on for a few weeks. When it all started she threatened to bring her washing to my house. This did not happen until yesterday. In between times, it transpires, she has been taking washing to her housemate’s mother’s house, but only the stuff which she felt could be safely put in the tumble-drier without shrinking. So yesterday she turned up with two large bags, which has now been washed. My washing line is full and there is stuff draped around the house. Quite what she and her friend have left in the way of clothes intrigues me. They will come and collect it, dry or still damp, tomorrow.

Yesterday must have been the day for bringing items for me to deal with. There was stuff to be printed - Phil’s job - and a skirt for stitching as well as a small soft toy which had been used in some activity in her classroom, an activity involving throwing the toy from person to person, in the process of which one of its seams had begun to unravel. 

I am the go-to person for stitching and darning! 

If only the more serious problems of the world could be solved so easily. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Celestial non-events around here. Stars on my floor. Living to be 100.

Well, I’ve still not seen any Northern Lights. And apparently there is a comet around that hasn’t been in our bit of space since neanderthal times but I don’t expect we’ll see that either. 

But my kitchen floor is strewn with tiny golden stars. The smaller grandchildren were doing craft stuff yesterday, specifically making snow globes with whatever glittery stuff they could find in my craft box. In the end they were more glitter globes than snow globes but the small people were happy with them. As ever when children and glitter get together, there were spillages. To do them justice, after the initial sprinkling of small golden stars on my kitchen floor they were very careful to spill as little as possible. Tiny gold stars are, however, remarkably difficult to sweep up! 

I was reading about living to be 100, something which they seem to think is more possible now than it used to be. In fact, they reckon that the person who might live to be 150 has probably already been born. Anyway,  it seems that where you live may make a difference. Sardinia, Okinawa and Ikaria, in Greece, are places with high longevity. However, Saul Newman from University College London, suggests that much data on human centenarians is bogus.

“I tracked down 80% of the people in the world who were older than 110,” says this Saul Newman, who has been investigating and found almost none of them had a birth certificate. “It’s a statistical garbage pile.”

It seems that in 2010,  a Japanese government review discovered 230,000 of the country’s centenarians were missing – presumably dead. And Saul Newman says data suggests that some 72% of Greek centenarians are dead or missing, but their relatives haven’t declared as much, possibly to keep collecting their pensions. Strange goings on!

In the UK the London borough of Tower Hamlets is an odd mixture with the highest proportion of 105 year-olds but a lower-than-average life expectancy overall!  

Then there’s a tech entrepreneur called Bryan Johnson who is working on extending his life-expectancy by taking 111 pills a day, eating his last (vegan) meal of the day at 11am, staying teetotal, doing an hour of exercise daily and going to bed at 8.30pm. Odd! There seems to be little point in living forever if you don’t actually get much enjoyment out of life. Maybe he does. Maybe I’m being too judgemental! 

The experts say it’s probably all down to genetics.

And, as I see it, if certain parties keep pushing us closer to a world war, and if we keep on destroying the planet, we should just stop worrying about it and enjoy the life we live. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Controlling the weather? Thinking about children in difficult situations again.

 Another Saturday comes around. My Spanish sister says it’s still sweltering in the south of Spain but we have 8° or maybe 9°. Not exactly freezing but a bit chilly. Windy enough, however, for washing to get pretty dry hanging in the garden. So far, no extremes of weather here.

Marina Hyde has been writing about the people who think the government (well, the Democrats)  controls the weather. She writes: 

“Yes they can control the weather,” explained the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (on X, of course). “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” One customary reaction to Marjorie is to remark that it’s as if she’s on another planet. I so wish she was. The problem is that she and her fellow settlers are here, walking among all the agency officials and disaster experts and emergency workers who have to deal with reality as it presents itself – and not reality as whatever rubbish advances your cause that day.”

It makes me wonder two things: what do they teach them in science lessons at schools in America and how does someone who believes we can control the weather get to be a congresswoman?

In some parts of the news we’ve all been concentrating on Lebanon. After all, they’re being threatened with the Gaza treatment. 

Once again it’s the fate of children that strikes home. UNICEF on X says this:

“Children in Lebanon are living in fear.

UNICEF is providing children who are displaced with essential needs, including mental health support.

What they really need is a ceasefire.”

Meanwhile Gaza is still starving: 

“No food has entered northern Gaza since 1 October, says UN

The United Nations food agency said on Saturday that no food aid had entered northern Gaza since 1 October, reports the Associated Press (AP).

The World Food Programme (WFP) said that the primary border crossing into the war-ravaged area had been closed for about two weeks, warning that Israel’s ongoing ground operation has a disastrous impact on food security for thousands of Palestinian families there.”

And the West Bank is still being battered and bullied. And the world lets it happen. Here’s another bit of Michael Rosen’s King and his tutor:

'It's marvellous that we have many noble and distinguished visitors, is it not, tutor?' said the King to his tutor.

'It is, sir,' said the tutor, 'and we do our best to train them.'

'Do you?' said the King, 'I had no idea. What do you train them to do?'

'The first and most important thing is 'How to look away',' said the tutor.

'That sounds interesting,' said the King, 'how do you do that?'

'Well sir,' said the tutor, 'we take them into a field, and explode things.'

'Do you?' said the King, 'how does that train them?'

'What happens,' said the tutor, 'is that many of them look in the direction of where the explosion happened.'

'And so they should,' said the King.

'And so they shouldn't,' said the tutor.

'But we want our visitors and their scribes to be alert, don't we?' said the King.

'No sir,' said the tutor, 'we don't. Looking in the direction of explosions is precisely the kind of thing we don't want.'

'What do we want?' said the King.

'We want them to ignore the explosions,' said the tutor.

'And how do you do that?' said the King.

'We train the visitors in how to look away,' said the tutor, 'so when one of the explosions happen, we are standing on the other side of the field, waving.'

'And then?' said the King.

'They look at us, instead of looking in the direction of where the explosions happened,' said the tutor.

'How ingenious,' said the King, 'but..but where does that get us?'

'People end up not asking questions about the explosions,' said the tutor.

'And that's good, is it?' said the King.

'That's very good,' said the tutor.

'I'll take your word for it,' said the King.

'I thought you would,' said the tutor.

And some more:

'Is it possible for people to not exist?' said the King to his tutor.

'Yes, of course,' said the King's tutor.

'But then, if they are people, they do exist, don't they?' said the King.

'Ah well, they may exist as persons,' said the tutor, 'but do they exist as a people?'

'I'm getting muddled, here,' said the King, 'I mean if, let's say, a few thousand persons, see things in similar ways, and see themselves in similar ways, aren't they a people?'

'Not if we don't want to call them a people?' said the tutor.

'It's down to us, is it?' said the King.

'Of course it is,'  said the tutor, 'we can't leave it to the people themselves.'

'Hang on, tutor,' said the King, 'you've just call them "the people".'

'Yes,' said the tutor, 'I called them "the people", but I didn't call them "a people".'

'I really don't see the difference,' said the King.

'Then I really must help you understand,' said the tutor. 'If we sit here talking of a bunch of people as "a people", the next thing we know is that they would start claiming things to do with their people's land, or their people's right to be here.'

'Is that bad?' said the King.

'Of course it is,' said the tutor, 'we want the land for us.'

'So what can we do about these people saying that they are "a people"?'

'We keep repeating that they are not "a people", we say that they never were "a people" and that there never was anywhere where they were "a people",' said the tutor.

'Will that work?' said the King.

'It helps,' said the tutor.

'Helps what?' said the King.

'Mostly it helps in times of war,' said the tutor.

'Why's that?' said the King.

'Because, sir,' said the tutor, 'it will prove that we're not fighting a country. We're just fighting a random sent of persons, just like any country has to do when it's dealing with criminals.'

'And we can do that,  simply by saying that these people are not "a people"?' said the King.

'All I can say again,' said the tutor, 'is that it helps.'

'But do you believe it?' said the King.

'What's that got to do with it?' said the tutor, 'the important thing is that we say it, not whether we believe it.'

'Oh yes, of course,'said the King.

'Excellent,' said the tutor.”

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!