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!

Deliveries. Packaging. Candlemas.

We have a notice next to our front door informing anyone who arrives that we want NO COLD CALLERS - no random salesmen, no evangelists, no canvassers for political parties, and so on.  However, we need another notice, like the one the next door neighbours have, which reminds friends and relations or people making deliveries to PLEASE RING THE BELL!  It’s quite amazing how many people, deliverymen especially, don’t see or choose to ignore the doorbell but opt to knock with their knuckles against the wood, making a gentle tap-tap-tap which can only be heard of you happen to be standing in the entrance hall. It happened again this morning!

Phil ordered some vitamins from the health-food store, Holland and Barrett. They promised swift delivery and swift delivery was what he got. The first we knew about it having arrived was when Phil received a “your goods have been delivered” text message. Neither of us had heard a ring or a knock. Maybe it occurred when I was in the shower! Anyway, the “goods” were left in a box outside the front door, a reasonably safe place we have agreed with delivery men. Eventually I went to seek it out. Yes, there it was, in the black box. 

Here it is: a cardboard box, stuffed with brown paper for insulation around two small bottles of vitamin tablets. This is why the world is running out of resources. You would think a company that specialises in healthy-living stuff would take greater care of the environment! 

Various posts on Facebook have had rhymes about today being Candlemas, reminding us that the days are getting longer and urging us to put out the candles and eat our evening meal by daylight. Of course now I cannot find them again, or I would have quoted them. 

Anyway, today is Candlemas, also known as the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ - a traditional presentation at the temple of a boy child some 40 days after being born. It’s also known as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, which strikes me as one of those anti-feminist practices about women who have given birth needing to be somehow ‘cleansed’.

In some countries they keep Christmas decorations up until Candlemas. In others they take candles to their local church to be blessed, these candles then serving as a symbol of Christ, the Light of the World, for the rest of the year.

There’s more. The Virgin of Candles is the patron saint of the city of Puno in Peru, held in the first fortnight of February each year. It is one of the largest festivals of culture, music, and dancing in Peru and judging by the photo it owes as much to South American culture as to Christianity.

“At the festival's core are music and dance performances organized by the Federación Regional de Folklore y Cultura de Puno, consisting of more than 200 dances in more than 150 dance sets. These include "native dances" from the various communities in Puno and sets of dances organized in different quarters of the city, mostly those known as "costume dances". These performances directly involve 40,000 dancers and some 5,000 musicians and indirectly involve about 25,000 people, including directors, sponsors, embroiderers, and the makers of masks, clothing, boots, shoes, bells, and other items, as well as the bandsmen and staff.”

A nice mix of cultures.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Saint Brigid - her day - how to get her blessing. We need a blessing in the modern violent world.

Apparently today is Saint Brigid’s Day, also known as Imbolc or Imbolg, a traditional Gaelic festival that marks the beginning of spring, half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It’s one of four seasonal Gaelic festivals: Beltane - May Day, 1st May, Lughnasadh - 1st August beginning of harvest season - aka Lammas in England, Samhain 1st November -  All Saints Day. 

Sources tell me that Saint Brigid is the patroness saint of Ireland. Now I knew about Saint Patrick, patron saint, but I was unaware that there was also a patroness saint. Do all countries have a patroness saint? Feminists should be demanding that bit of equality. 

In fact Ireland has three patron Saints, the third being Saint Columba, who has hid Day on June 9th, born in County Donegal in the 5th Century and said to be descended from great Irish nobility.

Other sources say that in fact she was an ancient pagan goddess and that, like many pagan personalities and events, was subsumed into the Christian tradition. Anyway, she is also the patroness saint of healers, poets, blacksmiths, livestock and dairy workers, among others. Busy lady! And she has her own cross, traditionally made from plaited rushes. If you make one and hang it outside your door, your house will be protected from fire, illness, and hardship for the year ahead. It’s not clear if it works outside Ireland. Maybe it works for the Irish diaspora.

Another way to get Brigid’s blessing is to leave items of clothing, such as maybe a scarf, outside the house on Saint Brigid’s Eve. Brigid is supposed to walk around Ireland blessing these cloths or pieces of clothing so that they can be used to help the healing process. Once again I wonder if Brigid manages to bless the Irish of the diaspora. Does she have Santa”s magic to travel all around the world in one night?

In the strangely hostile world we live in at the moment maybe we all need Brigid to give us her blessing. 

Here’s a report about Gaza:

“Israel has carried out some of its deadliest airstrikes on Gaza in months, killing at least 30 Palestinians, some of whom were sheltering in tent cities for displaced people.

Despite a nominal ceasefire, the Israeli military struck a police station in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood west of Gaza City on Saturday, killing 10 officers and detainees, the civil defence said. It indicated the death toll could rise as emergency responders searched for bodies.

Another strike hit an apartment in Gaza City, killing three children and two women, while seven more people were killed when Israel bombed tents in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.” 

There was a large pro-Palestine demonstration in London yesterday. 

Demonstrations are taking place in various parts of the USA calling for the end of ICE.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!