Fourth of July! Some Trump quotes. Swimsuits. Evictions.

 It’s the 4th of July. Independence day for the United States of America. 

Here’s a link to some interesting photos from the 250 years of independence.

Burning flags, busty blondes and bison skulls: 48 photographs that capture America at 250 | Photography | The Guardian

And here are some Trump quotes from his speech at the semiquincentennial (250 years) celebration:

“A generation after we fought and won the cold war against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.”

 “The communist party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

“It’s the enemy of the constitution,” he declared. “Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4th, 1776 … Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.”

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

“The communist party is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”

No comment. But here’s a cartoon.

I was talking about holidays with Granddaughter Number Two, specifically about how nice it was to have a swimming pool at our hotel in Portugal recently when it was so hot. She declared that she needed to start swimming again, now that her latest piercing (she has multiple ear piercings, not to mention a whole lot of tattoos - she’s that sort of girl) has healed and she can go back to the swimming baths. But she needs a new swimsuit. So here’s a relevant cartoon strip for her: 

I’m taking the plunge and buying a new swimsuit: the Becky Barnicoat cartoon

I wrote recently about van dwellers in Cornwall, people priced out of accommodation by the tourist boom. Here’s a link to an article about moves by local councils to evict such van dwellers from their ‘homes’. We love in a harsh world.

And here’s something about another kind of eviction, a story that has been popping up and getting a lot of concerned comment on my social media pages:

“Much-loved attraction near seaside town closing doors after 87 years

Funding for the attraction in Churchtown has been pulled.

An aviary that has been going for nearly 90 years is set to close. 

Sefton Council said the attraction in the Botanic Gardens in Churchtown in Southport will shut in March 2027.

Connor Atherton, the small animal and avian keeper at the council-run site, said news of the closure had come "out of the blue". 

The council said every effort would be made to re-home the 170 birds and small animals at the aviary and putting them down had been "completely ruled out". 

Atherton said the council had told him it cost about £60,000 a year to fund the aviary and it had taken the "difficult decision" after reviewing animal welfare guidance, ageing infrastructure and budget pressures.

He said that sum was "a drop in the ocean" for a free attraction which served as a rescue centre and a place for children and older people.”

This is a place my family visited when I was small, a place I took my own children to, a place that became a regular destination when we had family reunion lunches in Southport - me, my daughter and her children, the Spanish branch of the family, those family members who never moved away from Southport. Everyone enjoyed provoking the parrot into greeting us. 

Another bit of nostalgia swept away! So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some stuff about the weather. Quite a lot of stuff about summer sports.

 Today has gone from cloudy to sunny to cloudy but no rain. However, the puddles which took what seemed like weeks to dry up have reestablished themselves in the rain that we had during the last few nights. There’s no rain forecast for today but thundery showers for tomorrow. They keep promising me thunderstorms but so far we’ve not really had any. On the positive side, the next door neighbour has mown the grass in our shared garden. Hurrah!

People have been dying of the heat - in France anyway. “The number of deaths recorded in France surged by nearly 30% during the hottest week of the record-breaking heatwave that scorched much of Europe last month, the public health authority has said, adding that it expects the toll to rise further.

Public Health France said on Friday there had been “an increase of 29.1%, corresponding to 2,025 additional deaths compared with the previous week”. It said the figure was probably an underestimate and “mortality will rise further”.”

Meanwhile the football madness continues. On Monday England plays Mexico, kicking off at 1.00am UK time. Pubs will be allowed to stay open until 5.00am. That should be fun; football fans will start drinking at some point on Sunday afternoon / evening and continue doing so into the wee small hours, either celebrating or drowning their sorrows. The police have apparently criticised this decision.

And head coach, Thomas Thuchel, has said parents should let their children bunk off school so they can stay up to watch the match against Mexico. Play could last until at least 3am.

Speaking after England’s win against DR Congo, Tuchel said: “Write an excuse for school and let them watch football. They have so much school to go to, but the World Cup is every four years. Let them watch, there will be a big, big match in four days and we need the support of everyone and especially of the children.”

Does the team really need the support of the children? Who knew?

Twenty-odd years ago World Cup fever coincided with the spoken exam period for AS and A Level modern foreign languages. We had to chase up two students at my college because they were late to arrive for their German spoken exam. When we located them we rather wished we hadn’t. Both were clearly rather the worse for drink. They had been watching England play and, so they assured us, you cannot watch football without lots of cans of ale! (It’s the same law that says you can’t watch a movie, even at home, without copious amounts of popcorn.) I can’t actually remember what we did with those students. I know the college principal was involved.. i hope we managed to rearrange the exam time for the students but it would have served them right if we had simply excluded them. 

As well as football, there is tennis. It would seem that fashion has invaded Wimbledon. Naomi Osaka walked on to court wearing frills, a bustle, outsized bows and extended sleeves. Based on Japan’s ceremonial dress, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, the pieces designed by Hana Yagi conformed to the all-white Wimbledon dress code. Presumably she had to take layers off to reveal more conventional tennis gear. 

It’s not just the girls who make sartorial statements. Frances Tiafoe did a surprise reveal – dramatically ripping off his trousers to show the shorts underneath.

Goodness me! What are things coming to?

And tomorrow the Tour de France starts. I need to find out which channel does a daily summary so that I can watch it.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A routine Thursday. No excitment.

 Well, it’s been a funny sort of day! Running in the drizzle first thing. After breakfast Granddaughter Number Two turned up, as she usually does on a Thursday. She wanted help ironing some embroidery work she’s been doing for Granddaughter Number One’s birthday. For all the world it’s a kind of “sampler”, the sort of thing victorian (I think) ladies used to stitch with uplifting words,often from the bible, and hang on the wall. Hers has some uplifting words which are much too rude to publish here. It needed ironing as it had ring-creases where she had used an embroidery hoop to keep the fabric taught. Now those creases needed to go but at  her house they have no iron or ironing board. My iron only emerges from the cupboard on very rare occasions. Time was I used to iron shirts and sometimes trousers and dresses but nowadays I hang stuff out to dry creatively. There are a couple of linen items which insist that they need ironing; nice as they are, they are worn rarely. And Granddaughter Number Two had the cheek to laugh at my venerable steam iron and even asked how old it is!  

So it goes.

We collected the small people from school. After tea the small boy and I played catch in the windy garden. We had to rescue the ball from its hiding place in a huge fern at one point. And there were several occasions when it almost disappeared over the wall into the crevasse between our garden and the industrial estate next door. Such exciting times!

And that’s pretty much the highlights of the day. I seem not to have found time to scan the newspapers. But, hey! Tomorrow is another day!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The loneliness of modern life. Mysterious wrecks. Small protesting chess player. And Trumps.

 It seems there is something called the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, co-chaired by the former Conservative minister Sajid Javid and the former Labour MP and policy chief Jon Cruddas, a sort of cross party thing. And it has has been looking at what it means to belong and the kind of country they want to live in.

James Graham, who wrote the play Dear England about Gareth Southgate’s time managing the England men’s team, said this: 

“We all know it. We all feel it in our hearts that the social bonds and the things that connect us, or traditionally have connected us, are fraying and breaking. That’s been going on for a very long time. It’s political, but it’s also social, cultural and emotional.”

“There’s no high street, the collapse of town centres and actual places to gather and be together as a community. But it goes beyond place as well,” he said.

“The rhythm of our lives has changed. We are lonelier, more isolated and more alienated. That’s true of older people, but, upsettingly, true for young people too. They’re the loneliest generation we’ve ever had. How can that be when we have all these ways to connect us?”

All of which is probably true to some extent. It has taken  quite some time for town centres to become anything like “normal’, normal meaning pre-Covid. Granddaughter Number Two and Grandson Number One both had their later school days disrupted by the Covid lockdown, she at sixth form stage, he at GCSE stage. Their social life became largely family and some online friend contact. Both of them now work mostly from home, with occasional obligatory “office days”. Some of the normal structures for making friends and establishing relationships through the workplace have disappeared. 

Granddaughter Number Two did go away to university to study and made some friends there but Grandson Number One went straight from sixth-form studies to work. For some time we worried about his social life - largely nonexistent - but he seems to be bouncing back. There is even a girlfriend on the scene now, although nobody in the family knows how he met her. We suspect online dating!

We love in strange times.

I was born and grew up in Southport. Consequently every so often Facebook makes a connection and shows me something related to that seaside town. A couple of days ago someone called Hannah Baldwin-Nugent posted this on the Southport Facebook page:

“Walked out to the wreck of the SS Chrysopolis today! Must have been an exceptionally low tide as neither me nor my dad have ever seen it before!”

Now, I had never heard of the SS Chryspolis. Surely my father would have told us about it but apparently not. So I looked on the internet and found this:

“The SS Chrysopolis ran aground on the Spencers Bank in fog on 14 February 1918. She was on a voyage from Genoa to Liverpool with a cargo of copper ore. During attempts to refloat her using two tugs, her back was broken and she became a total loss. A gale sprang up, resulting in her 38 crew and a further four salvors being rescued by the Southport lifeboat.”

And there the wreck seemingly remains. How odd!

Here’s a story of resistance or protest: 

“Lebanese 8-year-old chess player Loren Abdel Samad refused to play against Israeli opponents during the World Youth Chess Championship in Batumi, a decision that led to automatic losses and affected her final ranking.

According to her family, the move was intentional despite the consequences, with her father saying she was fully aware of the outcome but maintained a firm personal stance shaped by her awareness of Israel’s “destruction of homes and the targeting of children.””

Eight years old with a sense of right and wrong, 

And here’s something about Mr Trump.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Being a grumpy parent. And some nostalgia for end of college proms.

 In my online italian class we have spent some time talking about significant events and personalities during the last half century and more, since the end of the second world war really, that have changed the way we live, first in Italy and then in the UK. It was a bit of nostalgia fest really, some of it positive and some negative. And there was a certain amount of feeling that genies had been let out that could not be put back into their bottles: social media, mobile phones, even the internet. 

This morning Zoe Williams was doing some of the same kind of thing in her column in the Guardian. She began like this:

“When I was young, and Halloween was just becoming a thing, and other people’s mums were doing fun stuff like blindfolding children and sticking their hands in a bowl of peeled grapes, calling them witches’ eyeballs, my mum was saying: “This is a disgusting Americanisation of what was previously a very low-key event.””

That’s a familiar sentiment, I thought, having expressed the same thing umpteen times myself. 

She went on to discover that she has turned into her mother (we all do at some point in our lives) and was railing against proms:

“But then 40 years flashed by, and prom became a thing, and now it’s me asking the dumb questions, which all boil down to the same question: why are we doing this? Is it just because we learned it off the telly?”

Coincidentally, I spoke to my sister the other day and she told me how beautiful her youngest granddaughter had looked all dressed up in her finery for her prom. Goodness! There I was, thinking of that child, my great-niece I suppose, as a little girl and there she is, GCSEs over and done with and a prom to go to! 

I thought back to quite a lot more than a quarter of a century ago when one of the younger teachers at the college where I worked had the bright idea of organising a social event for our soon to be departing upper sixth students. We didn’t call it a “prom”, even though that was certainly the American idea that inspired him, but a “leavers’ ball”, with a nod to the sort of formal occasions they might come across at university. We liked to think we were innovators organising this event. It was to be more formal than, for example, the occasional dances (hops) we had organised previously. The girls would wear long dresses - ball gowns - and the boys would wear tuxedos. The students grasped the idea with both hands. They loved it: a formal dinner, some dancing, and awards. A new tradition was born: every year students, and teachers too, were nominated for awards, some serious, some less so: the most consistent late hander-in of assignments; the most likely to ask a daft question: the worst at parking their car. Aah! Nostalgia!

Years went by and suddenly all the high schools were also having leavers’ proms. Now even primary schools have proms, although not quite so formal as high school and sixth form college events. And even nursery schools have graduation ceremonies. It’s really all got a little out of hand! But fun for those taking part! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Advice on keeping cool. Air-conditioning a# a potential political thing. And still killing Palestinian children.

 It’s cooler today. I even contemplated putting on a long-sleeved running top to go out running this morning but decided that that would be unnecessary. My weather app told me the temperature was 14° at 8.30, up to 17° now at more or less midday, with a high of 20° forecast. Quite acceptable! 

The newspapers continue to give us advice on how to cope with hot weather. After all, the last few days have been the hottest June days on record in the UK, or so my son tells me! Mind you, it’s not clear whether that is the whole of the UK or just the South East. Anyway, whole articles are dedicated to how to stay hydrated: basically drink water at intervals, tea is okay, one pint of beer is fine but not two! And the latest thing is to carry sun umbrella. Lewis Hamilton was spotted holding a Ferrari red umbrella that matched his race suit.

I’m not sure that a red umbrella is really effective as it must surely absorb the heat but apparently it’s the shade that counts. A reflective outer later is best. Otherwise a pale colour and a close-weave fabric is next best. For £295 you can get a Ladies Handmade Sun Umbrella with Malacca Cane Crook from James Smith & Sons, an umbrella shop in central London that dates to 1830. 

More modestly, you can get a folding version (more portable but less posh) from Uniqlo for £19.90.

Here’s a link to an article about air-conditioning. I liked this bit about outside shading:

“Many British homes overheat simply because they lack good insulation and outside shading. This week my neighbour, struggling in the heat, hung a sheet outside his window to test whether some external shading might stop his bedroom from overheating. He recorded a 17.8C difference between the internal temperature of his unshaded windows and shaded ones – the equivalent of multiple 400W radiators on full blast. Sure, he could install AC, but without first cooling down his windows he’d be throwing money down the drain. And what happens when his air conditioning unit malfunctions, as many are prone to during prolonged heatwaves?”

(Incidentally, or coincidentally, we were talking to our son, who lives in the hotter SE bit of the UK, about this and that and he said he is thinking of fitting shutters to the south-facing windows of his house, precisely to provide shade and insulation on hot sunny afternoons.)

But I especially liked this suggestion that air-conditioning homes should be nationalised:

“As temperatures rise, cooling systems will become just as fundamental to a functioning society as other essential infrastructure. Leftists should seize the opportunity to demand public ownership of the cooling sector, bringing democratic accountability while preventing corporate profiteering at the expense of increasingly desperate consumers.”

That’s the frivolous stuff done. Now for something more serious. 235 Palestinian children and teenagers have been killed by Israeli forces on the West Bank since the 7th of October 2023. Another five have been killed by settlers themselves. This, of course, is in addition to the vast number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. 38 Israeli children died in the Hamas attack on October 7th. If Palestinian children are being killed in retribution, it has  got somewhat out of hand. Here’s a link to an article about the killing of Palestinian children, from teenagers to toddlers. Some of the accounts of quite harrowing!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!