Crocs. Clogs. Flamingos. And Cuba.

 I am told that Crocs are really comfortable and very good for your feet. When they first appeared they struck me as something really good for children to wear when playing on the beach, messing about in rock pools and other such summertime activities like paddling in the ford down by one of our local millponds. Definitely not, I thought, the sort of thing sensible adults would wear. Nowadays I see people of all ages wearing crocs in all weathers. Although actually I don’t see many children in crocs.

It was this article about a collaboration between Crocs and Lego to produce footwear that looks like Lego bricks. A Guardian reporter road-tested a pair, looking as though he had the walk in the same way as you might if you were wearing snow shoes. 

They definitely look as though running for the bus might be impossible. Walking up and down stairs, using the escalator, just plain walking, all caused problems for the intrepid tester. What’s more they cost £199 a pair!

He concludes his article: “Back at home in my trusty Adidas, I realise these aren’t shoes; they’re a performance art piece about the triumph of novelty over sense. My feet survived – barely – but my ego needs a rebuild. If fashion really is passion over practicality, then I think I’ll just stay fashionably ignorant, thanks very much.”

I did a bit of research. Ordinary Crocs can cost you around £50. Any footwear is expensive.

Lego is not the only firm to collaborate with Crocs. Here is a £720 example:

“Part of a Balenciaga x Crocs collaboration, these silver-toned clogs feature the iconic silhouette updated with a platform sole. The rubber pair is adorned with playful Jibbitz charms inspired by Balenciaga icons.”

Crocs have been around for almost a quarter of a century. “Scott Seamans, Lyndon Hanson and George Boedecker Jr. created Crocs in 2002 to make and distribute the sandals, as they saw its potential and ease of use for consumers.

The trio acquired Andrew Reddyhoff's design from Foam Creations, Inc. of Quebec City, which became the foundation of the Crocs sandals known in the present day. Seamans, Hanson, and Boedecker were drawn to the shoe's comfort and practicality.

In 2002, Crocs unveiled their first model, the Beach, at the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show in Florida, and all 200 pairs produced sold out.”

Oddly enough I remember owning a pair of actual clogs some time in the 1970s. Made of blue leather and with a classic wooden sole, they were very trendy in certain circles, comfortable but quite impractical for everyday living, and useless for dancing. As regards dancing, I suppose they were easily removed and then you could dance barefoot!

Just for the fun of it, here is a picture an equally impractical-looking thing: a flamboyance of flamingos. Having watched various tv programmes with our smallest grandchild I know that flamingos also have a dance, well, really a fancy stepping manoeuvre to cross difficult terrain. It’s also part of their mating rituals. 

Enough of that!

Some seven years ago now, a good friend and I went on an adventure to Cuba, exploring Havana, visiting a tobacco farm, dancing to a Buena Vista Social Club tribute band. We had a great time but were aware of how privileged we were, how our life style contrasted with that of most Cubans. Yet we felt welcomed and on the whole were impressed. 

Now, according to this article, as well as other problems arising from the oil embargo - power cuts, food shortages - tourism is also affected. Flights from places like Canada and Russia, which send a lot of tourists to Cuba, are being cancelled because the planes cannot refuel for the return flight!

Where does the arrogance come from that permits one country to interfere in the way another place organises its life?  The world is a depressing place!

And yet …

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sunshine for Valentine’s Day. Some comments on Valentine’s Day. Awards for athletes. And politics in art.

 Today began with blue sky and not a cloud in sight. It was, however, very cold: -3° according to my phone’s weather app. 

There was snow on the hills up towards Marsden, hills that have been hidden under cloud for the last few days.

If you paused in a sunny spot it actually felt warm; the February sun is getting stronger. In the shady places, however, it certainly felt like -3° and the millpond was frozen again! 

Here are some expressions about rain. In Wales they say that it’s “raining old women and sticks” and in various parts of England people will comment that it looks’ “black over the back of Bill’s mother’s”.  In Manchester they say., “If you can see the Pennines from town, it’ll be raining soon. If you can’t see them, that’s because it’s already raining.” Mind you, other places, as I have commented already, seem to be having more rain than we are at the moment. 

Variations on the Manchester comment exist: in Devon (“If you can see Dartmoor …”), Edinburgh (“the Fife coast”), Swanage (“the Isle of Wight”). In Spain they will tell you it rains jugfuls - Llueve a cántaros - and in France it can rain like a peeing cow - il pleut come une vache qui pisse. Here it’s just cats and dogs. 

It’s Valentine’s day. All the shops and cafes are decorated with hearts and flowers. I’ve seen advertisements for ‘gifts to give your children for Valentine’s Day’. Good grief! There was a time when Valentine’s were sent anonymously or one person would ask another, ‘be my Valentine’. Now it’s another excuse for manufacturers of cards and tat to make more money. Here’s a link to an article bemoaning the modern trend to decorate your house with seasonal tat. 

Here’s caroonist Madeline Horwath on Valentine’s day for city dwellers:

Love knows no bounds, except perhaps the morning commute.

I read this morning that President Zelensky has awarded the order of freedom to Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Uktanian athlete banned from wearing “helmet of memory” in the Winter Olympics. “Remembrance is not a violation,” Zelenskyy told him. “Ukraine will always have champions and Olympians”. Well, I bet that makes him feel better!

Writer and film maker Arundhati Roy, one of my favourite authors, is not afraid of speaking her mind. She has just withdrawn from the jury at the Berlin film festival in protest at Wim Wnders’ claim that films should “stay out of politics”.  She said Wenders’ stance was “unconscionable”, and that to “hear [him] say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping.”

It’s nice to have amusing, beautiful, carefully made films and other pieces of art but sometimes art should be more than that. If political comment was banned then works like Picasso’s Guernica might never have been created.

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Snow … of sorts. Winter Olympics uniform problems. Children and screen and language development.

We were promised snow. I fully expected to wake up to find a blanket of white everywhere. Nothing at all. I got organised for a morning run round the village, checking the weather app on my phone just before setting off: “snow starting in 3 minutes!” But it wasn’t actually snowing at that moment so I put on a light just-in-case waterproof and set off. And, lo and behold, three minutes down the road it started to snow. Well, it was more like semi-frozen drizzle. I’ve run in worse. And besides, if the severe weather warnings of ice and snow come true, then it may not be fit to run anywhere tomorrow. 

All morning snow flurries have come and gone but it all melts once it touches the soggy wet ground. 

Over in the land of ice and snow where the Winter Olympics are going on, various un-sport- related things have been going on.

The Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych  insisted on wearing what he called a “helmet of memory”, emblazoned with the images of Ukrainians killed as a result of Russia’s invasion. He was informed only 21 minutes before racing by the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, who spoke to the media in tears after she could not persuade him to change his mind. 

Skeleton, by the way  is a winter sliding sport in which a person rides a small sled, known as a skeleton bobsled, down a frozen track while lying face down and head-first. The sport and the sled may have been named for the sled's resemblance to a ribcage.

The controversy has not been limited to one athlete. The Ukrainian short-track speed skater Oleh Handei revealed on Thursday that he too had been ordered to alter his helmet – this time to tape over a line from the Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko reading: “Where there is heroism, there can be no final defeat.” Olympic officials judged the quotation to be linked to the war and therefore in violation of neutrality rules. “They saw my sentence and they said to me, ‘Sorry, but it’s war propaganda,’” Handei said, adding that he would comply so he could still compete.

And earlier at the Games the IOC blocked another symbol. Haiti’s two-person delegation arrived wearing uniforms designed by Stella Jean, originally featuring the revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, on horseback. Louverture was a former slave who led the charge that created the world’s first Black republic in 1804. The IOC ruled the image violated restrictions on political symbolism, forcing the figure to be painted out, leaving only the charging red horse against a vivid tropical landscape.

Once upon a time the only concern about uniforms was the colour and style. Nowadays everything has become political.

And on the ice-dancing front, first there was the shock that the American pair were beaten to Gold by a French couple. And now it seems that both the French skaters are involved in scandals about domestic violence or bullying of former partners. Here’s a link to an article about it.

The question about use of screens in classrooms rumbles on everywhere. Sweden has expressed concerns about the situation. “Studies raised red flags about declining reading comprehension and concentration among Swedish students. The Swedish government officially announced it would scale back the use of digital devices in early grades, 

with more focus on physical books and handwriting. 

According to an AP News report, Sweden’s Education Minister Lotta Edholm said students “need more textbooks” and emphasized that physical books are important for student learning as the country reconsiders screen-heavy instruction.”

Here in the UK, lexicographer Susie Dent is urging families to read, talk and play word games to boost language development. Children’s vocabulary is shrinking, she tells us and the overuse of screens is to blame. She points out that English-language speakers have always been afraid of new technology. Apparently the Victorians were suspicious of postcards because people would have to cram messages into small spaces and the elegance of the written language would be lost. Goodness knows what they would say about text messages! I can remember people worrying that watching television would be harmful to children’s language development. And yet both television and the internet have been useful tools on education - used in moderation!

Our smallest grandson (6 years old) has a quite amazing vocabulary. His knowledge of stuff about undersea creatures and insects has been enhanced by what he has seen on screen. However, he also loves books about these and other scientific topics. And he has always been exposed to nursery rhymes, picture books, stories and lots of conversation. Not afraid to ask what things mean, and to listen to the explanation, he is one of the lucky ones.

Here’s a thing: “A limited edition of Soreen lunchbox loaves will include fun words such as kerfuffle and hullabaloo, with definition and origins, as a way of sparking children’s curiosity.” Soon we’ll be back to reading the cereal boxes at the breakfast table, something quite common in our baby-boomer childhood.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.

Wet winter or ice-cold winter? Exploding trees. Bears. Dealing with accumulated clutter.

Everyone, me included, is going on about the continual rain. However, to be honest, here we have had grey days, occasional damp days and even some bright days. For once the wettest weather has circled around Greater Manchester, keeping the worst of the rain for the night time! Today rain is forecast but it’s not happened yet (early afternoon). Here is a link to an article by Guardian columnist Emma Brooks, telling us how preferable a wet winter is to a deep snow winter.

Tomorrow they are promising us snow. We shall see!

And here is a link to an article about exploding trees. Apparently when there is a severe drop in temperature, really severe, down to serious minus figures, the sap in some trees freezes. And the frozen sap expands. Just like frozen water in your domestic pipes expanding and breaking the pipes, the expanding frozen sap causes the tree to crack open. If it happens suddenly it can be quite noisy. We don’t seem to have that problem here. 

Neither do we have the problem of bears moving into your house, as the writer of this article describes. Of course it’s all down to where you live - buying house, or building your own, at the edge of a forest where bears are known to live - and the kind of house - the sort with a fairly open-access basement area. The bears I have seen in reports of this kind of squatting are large, rather fierce-looking creatures that could just be shooed out. Someone also told me that when bears get used to ‘raiding’ people’s homes for food they grow so used to it that sometimes they have to be humanely put down as they will never re-adapt to foraging in wild for more bear-appropriate food. Think of Yogi Bear and his love of picnic / pickernick baskets!

I spent part of yesterday de-cluttering desk drawers, getting rid of ancient bank statements, out of date documents and such like. Most of these things we now deal with online, so it was time to purge and remove anything no longer needed. Quite cathartic in its way.

Guardian columnists Zoe Williams recently wrote about the hassle of moving house, swapping notes with a friend about the difficulty of dealing with all the clutter. Here’s s sample:

“My friend, clearing out a chest of drawers, found one filled entirely with different-coloured ribbon of unusable length. I stare at old Christmas cards and can’t figure out whether they’re from a person I’ve tragically forgotten, or if I just found them on the street and decided the right thing to do was to file them. I have spices that are older than my youngest child (16), so I must have moved house with them twice already. I have more defunct appliances than I could name, and fair enough, it is hard to bin a soup maker or an air fryer when you have no clue why they stopped working – if it’s that random, who’s to say they won’t start working again? But there is no excuse for a MiniDisc player.”

I fully understood the bit about the hoarded unusable ribbon. When my father died we sorted out his beautifully organised garden shed. There we found old tobacco tins filled with miscellaneous objects: rubber bands which had perished, assorted screws and nails, and, possibly best of all, pieces of string, all to short to be really useful for anything! But all neatly stored in tins! 

And I too have ridiculously old jars of spices - usually bought for a specific recipe, used maybe three times and then stored in a kitchen cupboard!

So now I have resolved to do more decluttering, removing stuff that has been kept on the off-chance that it might be useful, photos of educational visits to unidentified places with now-forgotten former students, and so on. So much clutter to deal with! No time to be bored!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain. Bees in the workplace. Some more on words. Sneezing. And different views of America.

Granddaughter Number Two posted a message on the family chat this morning: “It Is RAINING raining today, like a proper heavy rain!” I assume she was on her way to work in the office. Had she been working from home, she might not have noticed the rain. Here, it’s just drizzling steadily.

According to newspaper reports, some parts of the country have been having biblical quantities of rain - 40 days and more.

Back in the day, when I was working full time as a sixth form teacher (not allowed to be ill, like the doctors I mentioned yesterday), we were regularly subjected to In-Service Training, often involving team building activities. Here’s a report of a similar idea: 

“In a growing number of workplaces, the soundtrack of the lunch break is no longer the rustle of sandwiches at a desk, but the quiet hum of bees – housed just outside the office window.

Employers from Manchester to Milton Keynes are working with professional beekeepers to install hives on rooftops, in courtyards and car parks – positioning beekeeping not as a novelty but as a way to ease stress, build community and reconnect workers with nature in an era of hybrid work and burnout.

“There’s something very special – almost spiritual – about enabling your employees to take time away from work to see how nature has created the greatest example of how every business should run,” said Chris Payne, a co-founder of Green Folk Recruitment.”

In some cases, it seems, employees are taken on excursions to bee farms. Very nice! But there is still a bit of me that says the time might be better spent. And if emplyers are really concerned about the wellbeing and mental health of their employees maybe shorter working hours and higher wages would be a good idea.”

They might have difficulty with bee hives in those places where the rain doesn’t stop.

It must be something to do with being linguists but Phil and I often wonder about the origin of words and expressions. One of these is ‘a pretty pass’ - we keep using that to comment on the state of the world. So I looked it up:

“The phrase "a pretty pass" originated in England, likely in the late 16th or early 17th century, and is used to describe a situation that has become undesirable or problematic. Its earliest recorded use can be traced back to a comic opera in 1763, highlighting its long-standing presence in the English language

The oldest printed record of the phrase “come to a pretty pass” can be traced back to 1763 in Love in a Village; A Comic Opera by Isaac Bickerstaffe that reads: 

“Hodge. Indeed! Marry come up! Why, then pray let yourself out again. Times are come to a pretty pass; I think you might have had the manners to knock at the door first.” 

“Pretty” word is from Old English prættig, “cunning,” from præt “trick” – unrelated to prat “idiot,” which originally referred to the buttocks (hence pratfall: a fall onto the backside).

By the 15th century, pretty described something cunningly made, crafty or clever, which led to its use to express someone gorgeous or attractive – most commonly a female or kid. However, the diarist Samuel Pepys refers to one Dr. Clarke as a “very pretty man.”

Ironic uses of pretty to refer to something unpleasant are the origins of phrases like “pretty pass,” “pretty state of affairs,” and “pretty kettle of fish”; the latter more often found in the phrase “different kettle of fish.” The kettle here isn’t the kind we use to make tea, but rather a large cooking vessel (from Latin catillus ).”

In an article about sneezing I discovered that sneezing doesn’t make your heart skip a beat or make your eyeballs pop out if you purposefully keep your eyes open (both are urban myths).  Nonetheless it remains true that sneezing while driving a car is one of the most disturbing things as you instinctively close your eyes. Moving from a dull place to a bright exterior can provoke a sneeze; this is an established fact. In our house we call them “sunshine sneezes”. I went to school with a girl who amused us all with her sneezing when we visited Stratford on Avon. Leaving dimly lit places like Anne Hathaway’s cottage had her sneezing repeatedly. I can understand that something tickling your nose can make you sneeze but what I want to know is why certain foods or drinks hitting the back of my throat provoke the same reaction.

Following the fuss about Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, here’s an interesting set of maps: 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!