Out and about. Angry men. Mistaken posts. Apologising. Student debt. The cost of houses.

 

I’ve been out to lunch with old friends today in Manchester. It was noticeably less cold in central Manchester than in Oldham. 

On the tram on the way into Manchester the whole compartment in which I was sitting was treated to a telephone tirade. Someone got on at the stop after mine, already deep in conversation on his phone. Maybe he doesn’t understand that it’s not necessary to SHOUT when talking on the phone. Maybe he was just so angry that his volume was out of control. He was having a furious row with someone, possibly a girlfriend, about money she had given him and which he had put into his bank account. She - I know it was a she as he called her by name - when he wasn’t calling much ruder names - seemed to be accusing him of stealing money from him and he was furiously telling her that this was not the case. All well and good … except that his conversation was at mega-top-angry-shouty volume and not a sentence went by without the f*** word being said at least three times. Then there was the fact that he told her over and over that she was a dumb, stupid, annoying c***. All of this interspersed with calling her ‘love’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’ - a strange mix of insults and endearments. 

I briefly considered asking him to moderate his language but decided that if he could be so violent in his language there was no knowing how he might respond to somebody remonstrating with him. I also considered moving seat but his long legs were sprawled across the aisle and I might have needed to ask him to move to let me go by. 

All in all, an unpleasant witnessing of a man whose anger was out of control. Or maybe not. Perhaps that was how he spoke to everyone about everything!

Anyway, I went and had a good long chat with old friends - one of who  apologised for using the word ‘bloody’ after he heard by travel story. We didn’t talk about our various ailments (we have all resolved not to become the kind of old folk whose main topic of conversation is aches and pains) and we kept the exchange of photos of grandchildren to a minimum. Mostly we reminisced and swopped news about other friends and former colleagues. We tried not to dwell too much on setting the world to right. 

The daughter of one friend is married to an American. So we had a bit of a good-natured rant about the strange contrast between American society in big cities and in the sparsely populated spaces like the part of Vermont where his daughter’s father in law lives. Most of the inhabitants of the small town were born, grew up, married, raised children and will eventually die there without ever leaving the state! Almost everyone knows everyone by name.Yes, I know there are pockets of England where people live like that but I get the impression they are less common. I could be wrong and misinformed! 

Thinking of the USA, here’s a news report I’ve only just got round to reading: 

“Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

The post was up for 12 hours.”

Wow! Who even begins to think that depicting anyone as an ape is a clever thing to do? Let alone someone working in the White House!  If a staffer is blamed for posting it erroneously, it creates another series of questions: 

who appoints the staffers? 

are they vetted before being appointed? 

do they have mentors advising them and perhaps checking from time to time? 

And then, how did the post stay up for 12 hours before being taken down? 

Of course, as with all the scandal about Mandelson, it takes attention away from other things going on in the world. A lot of time and energy and resources are going into investigating such things. 

Here’s another related headline:

Starmer apologises to Epstein victims as he seeks to weather Mandelson scandal

PM says he is sorry for believing ‘lies’ told by former Labour minister when he appointed him US ambassador.

Sometimes it seems too easy to say sorry. Even Tesco has had to do it after putting bilingual signs in a Cornish supermarket … with the signs in English and Welsh, a similar language but not the same.

More than apologies are needed for the problem this article considers. Graduates are leaving university with huge debts as they have had to apply for “student finance” to pay for their studies. In recent years the interest on these student debt packages has been so huge that a debt of £60,000 to £70,000 rapidly grows to close to £100,000 in the worst instances as this article describes. 

Our Granddaughter Number One was having a bit of a moan recently because she has been making payments on her mortgage but it’s making no difference to the amount she owes. That’s paying the interest for you! But at least she doesn’t have a student loan to pay back (she did an apprenticeship instead of university studies) and she has a house, which she might one day choose to sell, maybe at a profit if she manages to sort out the defects she keeps finding.

Incidentally, on the bus coming home I fell into conversation with an old chap who bought his house in nearby Dobcross some 45 years ago for around £40,000. Today he estimates he could sell it for £450,000!

Such is modern life!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Complaining about the cold, grey days. On being in contact with family and friends. Sharenting. And Winter Olympics.

 Columnist Adrian Chiles rants about January-February weather and general gloom in today’s Guardian:

“I hate this time of year. From the start of last month to the end of this, I hate it. The days are wet, or at best damp, and are either cold or suddenly rather warm, cooking you in your rainwear. And, worst of all, the days are grey. So terribly, terribly grey. The clouds, the buildings, the trees, the cars, the people. The buses, being red, albeit a dirty red, try to do their bit. But inside, the condensation on the windows sweats away, grey and wet, obscuring the view of the greyness and wetness you will soon be stepping back into.”

Quite so, Adrian Chiles! Change the buses from red to yellow and it all applies to Greater Manchester.

Getting ready to go out and run this morning, at the last moment I put a light waterproof on top of my running gear. The weather app on my phone had suggested there might be sleety showers in the next half hour. It’s just as well I had that extra layer of insulation, not because of the damp but because the wind was bitter! At one point it was quite hard running against it. Mind you, it doesn’t take much to slow me down these days!

The sleety rain didn’t arrive until later in the morning. 

On the family group chat Granddaughter Number One told us she had nearly been blown away when she went out to check on the quails in their pen in her garden. (Yes! Among other things she has quails in the garden. For a while when she first got them we were supplied, even over-supplied, with quail eggs on a fairly regular basis. Lately they have been laying fewer eggs.) Granddaughter Number Two, on one of her twice-weekly trips to the University of York, informed us that it’s noticeably colder up there - ‘feels like -8°!’

I skim read this article about what they call ‘low contact’ families and reflected that with our family group chat we are very much a ‘high contact’ family: well, at this bit of the family - me, my daughter and Granddaughter’s Number One and Number Two. Granddaughter Number One in particular shares her life and work ups and downs on a very regular basis. As the article points out, email and messaging and mobile phones have made it much easier to be in almost constant contact with family and friends. I remember going away to university with instructions to write home once a week. I knew full well that if I did not do so there was a strong possibility that my mother would be on the next train to Leeds to check up on me. 

My parents did not have a telephone when I went off to university. It wasn’t until we and they both had telephones that we stopped writing letters. Knowing that we could get in immediate contact if necessary reduced the need to send written news. My younger sister who went off to study and then work (and eventually marry and have children) in Spain, still recalls those family letters she received while so far from home. Nowadays my sisters and I only phone each other intermittently. We must count as a ‘low contact’ family but it’s not because we disagree about anything; it’s just the way we are. It should be possible for family and friends to be ‘low contact’ and still be as close as ever when we get together, each reunion picking up where we left off at the last reunion. But we should start writing letters again; it has become a lost art.

I wrote recently about ‘sharenting’, posting stuff about your children on social media, some people managing to make money out of it! Recently I have noticed a huge increase in the number of ‘reels’ (those video clips of life incidents lots of people post on social media) of small children reacting to the arrival of a new sibling, sometimes with joy, sometimes with surprise and astoundingly often with horror. I try not to look at them but they keep popping up. Do the parents coach them in what to say when they meet their tiny siblings? Surely some of it must be staged!

The Winter Olympics are about to start in Italy. Here are two posters, one from the first time the Winter Olympics took place in Milano Cortina in 1956 and the second from this year. 

On balance I prefer the older version.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Early morning market shopping. What takes priority in the news. And potatoes.

 Snow was forecast but it hasn’t arrived. I am reliably informed that a few miles up the road at Marsden they had a sprinkling but that’s all. 

I was up early to go to Uppermill and catch the fish-man, he and the ‘shoes, slippers and second-hand books with bric-a-brac on the side’ man being all that remains of the Wednesday market. It’s rather sad really but that’s how it is. So I bought fish and some rather nice fishcakes. Fish, by the way, is not a cheap option, at least  not fresh fish; I paid £25 for two sea bass fillets and four fishcakes! But it’s good to have a source of fresh fish. 

I tried to buy aspirin at the chemist’s and was told that they need to order some as it is in short supply! Who’d’ve thought it? You would think basic aspirin would be easily accessible! 

Then I popped to the Italian greengrocery, where they have some very nice oranges at the moment. Oranges can be deceptive, looking fine but seeming dry and stringy once peeled. So it’s good to find a supply of decent fruit. 

By 9.30 I was at the bus stop ready to return home for breakfast! 

I am growing heartily sick of the Epstein business taking priority in the newspapers online, one of the first articles you come across! As they find more and more men with links to Epstein - even Chomsky! - I could begin to lose faith in mankind. And I mean MANkind, the male of the species. It’s a good job I know some good men who, as far as I know, don’t regard women as a sort of commodity provided for their convenience! 

But why does that gossip-based news take priority over articles like this one about the continued atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. Médecins Sans Frontières has now been told to leave Gaza, reducing even further the provision of medical services there. All because they wouldn’t provide Israel with a list of employees, a failure to do so indicating that they are obviously shielding Hamas activists.

Incidentally, here’s a poem on that subject, but mainly about the USA, by Steve Pottinger:-

A Beginner’s Guide to 21st Century American English

 Nurse means terrorist.

Mother means terrorist.

Clergy means terrorist.

ICE means thug.

Poor means terrorist.

Black means terrorist.

Woke means terrorist.

ICE means thug.

Law means tear gas.

Law means pepper spray.

Law means murder.

ICE means thug.

Now, here’s a question: How do you define a tryrant?

It seems that Spain has proposed a ban on social media use by teenagers as attitudes hardened in Europe against the technology. This has provoked comments against Spain’s prime minister from Elon Musk. Apparently he wrote on X: “Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and a traitor to the people of Spain.” Later he continued, posting: “Sánchez is the true fascist totalitarian.”

Whatever you might think of Sanchez, such a description is something of an exaggeration!

Yesterday I wrote about food. To add to that, here is a link to an article about potatoes in Berlin, where they are giving them away it seems.

All part of the world’s strangeness!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some food related stuff gleaned from online newspapers and the internet.

It’s amazing the rabbit holes and worm holes and mole holes that the internet can take you down when you read articles online with their links to all sorts of other interesting stuff. 

It was this article that drew my attention this morning with its sub-headline:

“There used to be hundreds of pie and mash shops in London. Now there are barely more than 30. Can social media attention and a push for protected status ensure their survival?” 

According to the article “pie and mash” is / was the “original fast food”. Really. But only in London, it seems. And besides, surely the “original fast food” should be an apple or some other fruit easily picked and eaten as you go about your business. 

Anyway, reading the article drew my attention to the fact that the original pies would have been “eel pies”, which I remember reading about in various novels set in Victorian and possibly older England. Research told me that as eels became less easily accessible the pies changed to minced beef for some of the time, still served with “liquor”, a sort of parsley sauce made with he water that the eels were cooked in, or with gravy if it’s a meat pie. 

(Personally, I get very squeamish about anything to do with eels. His is the fault of an odd boy who lived next door to us in my early teenage years. He often went fishing and on one occasion insisted on showing me a bucket of eels he had caught and how he could revive them if they appeared to be dead by squeezing their gills. Quite enough to put you off eels for life!)

Apparently TikTokers are reviving interest in pie and mash shops. Some of them are said to like investigating old traditions and this is one such. Some of them get very picky about how the mash should be served.

Originally, my various links told me, pies and mash were sold on the street by “pie men”, sold to workers who perhaps didn’t have the chance to return home to lunch. The “pie men” would set up make-shift shelters so that workers could shelter from the rain while eating their pies. Eventually these morphed into proper shops, like this one, which is said to be the oldest surviving pie and mash shop in the London area. They weren’t allowed to label it a pie and mash shop because the council thought it would lower the tone of the neighbourhood. So it goes! 

I was reminded of the old nursery rhyme:

Simple Simon met a pieman,

Going to the fair;

Says Simple Simon to the pieman,

Let me taste your ware.

Said the pieman to Simple Simon,

Show me first your penny;

Says Simple Simon to the pieman,

Sir I haven't any.

Here’s some information: 

“The verses used today are the first of a longer chapbook history first published in 1764. The character of Simple Simon may have been in circulation much longer, possibly through an Elizabethan chapbook and in a ballad, Simple Simon's Misfortunes and his Wife Margery's Cruelty, from about 1685.”

So what is a chapbook?

Chapbook (c. 1800) of  ‘Jack the Giant Killer’.

“A chapbook is a type of small printed booklet that was a popular medium for street literature throughout early modern Europe. Chapbooks were usually produced cheaply, illustrated with crude woodcuts and printed on a single sheet folded into 8, 12, 16, or 24 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. Printers provided chapbooks on credit to chapmen, who sold them both from door to door and at markets and fairs, then paying for the stock they sold. The tradition of chapbooks emerged during the 16th century as printed books were becoming affordable, with the medium ultimately reaching its height of popularity during the 17th and 18th centuries”.

There you go. Lots of useless, but possible interesting, information.

Then there is Eel Pie Island, a real island in the Thames.

Why is Eel Pie Island famous?

“It was once a bubbling cauldron of British rock ’n’ roll. There was a five-month period in 1963 where you could see the Rolling Stones play there every Wednesday. The Who, Pink Floyd and Screaming Lord Sutch all did gigs at the Eel Pie Island Hotel, a rickety nineteenth-century ballroom that was lost to a fire in 1971. It was a place for counter-culturalists, poets and a pretty sizeable hippie commune because… well, it was the ’60s.”

That’s enough about pie and mash. Now for another food: Spanish ham - jamón - used for discrimination purposes it seems. Here’s something else Onread this morning: 

“For all the happiness it brings to people, jamón also has a darker history and it is one that is threatening to re-emerge in our present culture wars. The esteemed place jamón holds in Spanish culture has been used as a tool for social exclusion. The persecution of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition, beginning in 1478 and lasting almost four centuries, particularly targeted Christian converts from Judaism (conversos) or Islam (moriscos), who continued to practise their religion in secret. The consumption of jamón became a symbol of Catholic identity and therefore a huge part of Spanish public life. But it was also a way of excluding those who did not eat pork on grounds of their faith.

As a way of getting around it, morisco and converso families would hang sausages in their houses. Indeed, some people speculate that this is how the practice of hanging sausages and hams in Spanish bars and restaurants started. Others would even cook ham that they had no intention of eating, so that the smell from their houses would waft to neighbours or passersby. The slaughter of pigs became the basis of many popular festivals, a number of which continue today, and the families who did not take part would immediately come under suspicion.”

Think about it when you see all the jamón in shops in Spain! Here’s a link to the whole article.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!