Artwork. Fires and other environmental stuff.

 In an article about how we need to take global warming seriously (which, yes, we do!) there was this photo of people sitting on a beach in SW France, with smoke from the huge fires making the sky dark above them.

And I was reminded of Jack Vettriano’s painting “The Singing Butler”. It’ the general composition and the dark sky above them. Or maybe it’s just the way my mind works.

As regards the fires, global warming and our human interactions that have led to this environmental chaos, I read something about the fires near Bordeaux. Here it is.

In the 18th century, the coastal wetlands of south-western France were so swampy that shepherds used stilts to cross them in winter. Then, in 1857 Napoleon III made landowners drain the marsh and plant maritime pines, creating Europe’s largest manmade forest and a timber industry employing loads of people.

All very nice but when they burn pine tees do so very fiercely because of the resin they contain. And the floor of the forests becomes covered with pine needs and cones which provide perfect tinder when dry, as they nave been this year. (Eucalyptus trees, also planted deliberately, also burn fiercely as parts of Spain and Portugal know.)

It’s a mistake to create forests of only one type of tree. In a forest of mixed trees the broad-leaf trees retain moisture and provide shade which prevents the undergrowth from drying out to such an extent. And we now know that we need to creat firebreaks in forests so that if a fire does break out, for whatever reason, it can’t spread so rapidly and easily.

There you go. We are our own worst enemy! Let’s hope it’s not too late to learn.

A British cyclist, Matt Brennon, has won stage two of the Vuelta a España. He’s not in the lead though. TAdej Pogacar in in the lead after a stage one tome trial. Confusingly, for me anyway, the leader of the Vuelta doesn’t wear a yellow jersey as in the Tour de France, but a red jersey. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion, apparently, that Pogacar is going to win the Vuelta. We shall see! 

Actually I probably won’t see but I’ll read about it. Every year I follow the Tour de France in some detail but only take a passing interest in the other cycling races.

Here’s a link to an article about a farmer who has let a field re-wild itself with pleasing wildflower results. Some people deliberately scatter purchased seeds to create a wildflower area. In this case the farmer has just let flowers plant themselves. The field is mown once a year. Dairy farmers are pleased to have his hay with it’s mix of grass and flowers, food for the cattle apparently.

Incidentally / coincidentally, I have a self-planted sunflower growing in a pot in my garden. Earlier in the year I bought a pot of herbs, thyme I think, from a sale at the grandchildren’s school. Sadly I neglected it and the herbs dried up. I put the pot outside in the garden and over the spring and summer this stray sunflower has appeared. Whether it will bloom fully before the summer is over remains to be seen.

Incidentally / coincidentally, I have a self-planted sunflower growing in a pot in my garden. Earlier in the year I bought a pot of herbs, thyme I think, from a sale at the grandchildren’s school. Sadly I neglected it and the herbs dried up. I put the pot outside in the garden and over the spring and summer this stray sunflower has appeared. Whether it will bloom fully before the summer is over remains to be seen.

Life foes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

More local traditions. And attacking trees in the Middle East.

 It seems to be well-dressing time again. According to sources on the internet “the custom of well-dressing in its present form probably began in the late 18th century, and evolved from "the more widespread, but less picturesque" decoration of wells with ribbons and simple floral garlands” it’s also called well-flowering: “a tradition practised in some parts of rural England in which wells, springs and other water sources (especially holy wells or sacred springs) are decorated with designs created from materials such as flower petals.”

As they say “especially holy wells or sacred springs” I wonder of the tradition goes back a lot further with some suggestion of keeping the providers of water happy. Maybe it was linked to witchcraft and so became frowned upon and cancelled. Was it merely revived at the end of the 18th century? I’ve not found any evidence either way. 

Anyway, you take a wooden frame, pack it with clay and press flower petals into the clay to form a design. It first started to happen in Delph when we were released from Covid restriction. The designs have celebrated the NHS, mountain rescue and other things worthy of commemoration. This year it’s the turn of the Rushcart festival which has been going on this weekend.

We don’t have a well and so the well dressing board is propped against a tree at the edge of the village.

That’s enough about local traditions. 

Here’s something posted on social media by a group called Rabbis cor Human Rights:

“For more than twenty years, Amin has cared for a grove of olive trees in the village of Duma. He raised them from saplings, pruned them each season, and gathered their fruit every autumn.

This week, settlers destroyed more than twenty of those trees. Some had stood for twenty-five years. Trees that took a generation to grow are gone.

What threat does an olive tree pose?

This past Shabbat, Jews around the world read Parashat Shoftim. It sets a limit even on an army at war: when you lay siege to a city, you may not destroy its fruit trees. "You must not destroy its trees... Are the trees of the field human, that they should flee before you?" (Deuteronomy 20:19). Our tradition shields a fruit tree even from soldiers in the middle of battle. There is no war on Amin's land. There is only a farmer, and the trees he raised.

Amin is not waiting to be rescued. He plans to stay, to replant, and to bring in next year's harvest. Rabbis for Human Rights stands with him and with the families of Duma who keep tending their land under pressure.”

Just something to reflect on.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Keeping up local traditions - no technology involved. And technology breaking records.

There seem to be an astounding number of temporary traffic lights around here at the moment. Roadworks abound, holes are dug and barriers erected, and bus routes are diverted. It’s not a good time to be driving around the area. And this weekend it’s going to be even worse because they’re going to be dragging the Rushcart from village to village.

So what is the rushcart? Well, it would seem that in the past churches commonly had basic earth floors. The floors would be covered with rushes for special and important occasions. Rushes were collected from places close to the church. But as settlements grew the rushes had to be collected from further afield and would be dragged on sledges to the church. Eventually they began to be piled high on carts and from this a tradition grew of making elaborate displays of tied bundles of rushes on the carts. Individual villages vied with each other to create the most elaborate rushcart. Here’s a rather old picture of a Rushcart.

Saddleworth is one of the few places where a traditional Rushcart survives. And this weekend it will be pulled from village to village, pulled by Morris men and accompanied by even more Morris men who will dance in each village where the rushcart stops. 

Here’s a view from the top of the Rushcart.

On Sunday I understand that the Rushcart will be taken to St. Chad’s Church in Uppermill where the top will be dismantled and the rushes mixed with fragrant herbs and flowers and then symbolically spread in the aisles. 

Rushcarts died out in the early 20th century but a group of folk dancers – now better known as the Saddleworth Morris Men – brought the tradition back to life. In 1975 they built their first cart and have built one each August ever since, usually a two-wheeled wooden cart which weighs two tons. Here’s an old photo of the Rushcart arriving in Delph, our village.

Much is being made of it being 50 years of tradition - 51 by my calculation but there it is. It’s a chance for grown men to dress in baggy white trousers and shirts, to put bells ln their clogs and to don hats decorated with flowers. There you go.

Here’s a different celebration: “Chinese ⁠smartphone maker Honor’s self-developed humanoid ⁠robot Lightning ⁠ran the 100m in 9.32 seconds, ⁠beating the human world ⁠record, China’s state broadcaster ‌reported.

The humanoid ‌reached a peak speed of 14.5 meters per second during ‌a preparatory test event for the second World Humanoid Robot Games, which ⁠begin on Saturday.

This performance surpassed the 9.58sec men’s 100m world record set by Usain Bolt 17 years ago at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin.”

Impressive but it was probably inevitable that a robot would do such a thing. I’m still more impressed by human beings who can achieve such things.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain. Re-wilding. Banning bikes.

We’ve had rain. Quite a lot of it. The pessimists in the media are now saying that the ground is too dry and hard to absorb the rain quickly and consequently we could have floods and a drought at the same time in some parts of the country. That doesn’t seem to be a problem where we live. The footpaths have absorbed quite a lot of rain without becoming waterlogged. Some of the muddy puddles have re-established themselves but not all. Much of our rain has fallen overnight, which suits me fine. Yesterday, however, I listened to the rain falling heavily on the roof, decided running was not an option, turned off my alarm and went back to sleep.

Advocates of re-wilding are boasting that areas where they have allowed streams to follow their normal meandering path, re-establishing wetlands, has helped those places survive the heatwaves which have dried up surrounding areas. Creating, or recreating, wetlands keeps plants irrigated in times pf drought, while the meandering river slows down the rush of water when there is a prolonged downpour. It’s what the National Trust has done on its Holnicote estate in Somerset.

It’s the sort of thing the National Trust can do. Persuading landowners that maybe that is a better option than building lots of houses and concreting over what should be floodplains is a different matter. Once again, it might be all about money! 

Here’s a link to an article about Mexicans who have lived in the USA for decades and are suddenly being arrested by ICE agents and sent back to the country they probably left when they were small children. That’s about 145,000 Mexicans. Some of them suffered quite badly on returning to Mexico. If you have not lived in a place since you were a small child it must be hard to avoid problems. Some of them have gravitated to a barrio of Mexico City which is now referred to as Little Los Angeles where their English language skills make them very employable. There is even an organisation called New Comienzos [a nice mix of languages) which helps deportees integrate into the country of their birth - ah, the irony! 

I have gone on a bit on more than one occasion about bikes (electric and traditional) and electric scooters on pavements. Now I hear that the mayor of Como in Italy is banning bikes in Como city centre. Some people accuse him of sour grapes, maybe a personal vendetta against cyclists after he was hit by someone on an electric bike.

Small businesses and restaurants who rely on cycle-powered delivery are protesting. Activists have started a petition calling for him to overturn the rule and cyclists are planning to ride their bikes through the specified streets in mid-September in protest. Oh boy!

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Reflecting on exam results and entry requirements for post-16 progress.

 It’s GCSE results day. Last Thursday was A Level results day. I’ve never found out why Thursday is a good day for results. It’s also the day of the week when we get to vote. I wonder what’s special about Thursday?

Anyway, it’s GCSE results day. Back when I was a sixth form tutor it was the day when we started enrolling students for the coming year, getting into the desperate competition to get the most and the best students in our college.

Here are a couple of today’s headlines that caught my eye:

“Overall results slightly better than last year, with share receiving grades 7, 8 and 9 rising by 0.1 of a percentage point to 23.1%”

Every year someone will say the results are better than ever. How can that be? Is this evidence that young people are getting more and more clever year on year? Is that possible?

Then there’s this one:

“GCSE results: almost one in four boys in England get top grades in maths”.

Now, yesterday I read an article which explained that we should stop making young people re-sit GCSE examinations, by which, of course they mean Maths and English. I’ve never heard of anyone being obliged to re-sit GCSE Geography, for example. Apparently, the stress of re-sitting Maths and English GCSE is detrimental to the mental health of our young people. It’s one of the factors that contributes to their dropping out  becoming NEETs - Not in Education Employment or Training. Girls get more stressed about re-sitting Maths,’ it seems, while boys are more stressed about re-sitting English.

I must say that I have come across a fairly large number of students who re-sat Maths three or even times before achieving a pass - taking the exam in the autumn term and the summer term of their lower sixth uear and again their upper sixth year.

What the writer of the article I saw failed to say was that universities usually ask for pass grades in those subjects as an entry requirement. Go back far enough and  pass in Latin was required for some courses, eventually replaced by a pass in a Modern Foreign Language. And I remember a top university getting rather sniffy about one of our students taking a GCSE course in Spanish rather than French or German, somehow considered more rigorously academic!  (The student in question had not been deemed suitable for a Modern Foreign Languages course in high school, and so we helped him out when his GCSE results proved him to be an above average student.)

Maybe here needs to be a review of entry requirements for all kinds of post-GCSE activity for our young people.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Social media, influencers and tourism.

 There’s a place in the Italian Dolomites called the Friedrich August refuge. 

There they bake and sell krapfen a kind of traditional German pastry rather like a doughnut.

Food bloggers have posted videos of themselves eating krapfen high up in the Dolmites. Consequently lots of other people have been going up the mountains to sample the pastries. Some of them set off really early in the morning, aware that supplies were limited. Then the posted videos of the queues and even more people went up there seeking to share the moment of fame.

 

A person who works at the refuge but who wanted to remain anonymous said it had been making the pastries for 30 years without any fuss, and blamed influencers for creating a “chaotic” situation. “We don’t like it,” they said.

This is what they call social-media-driven-tourism. I’ve heard before of people driving across the UK in search of a particular delicacy sold in some out of the way place. A delicacy posted on social media. I had never yet heard of an international version! The world is full of crazy people.

It’s strange how things trend, activities and interests. On of the latest it seems is fossil hunting. Beaches in Dorset are the place to go apparently. Again it’s social media that’s a driving force. The sub-headline to this article reads: 

Social media and soaring prices are fuelling a fossil-hunting boom, with rare discoveries worth thousands of pounds.

Some people will always have been doing it, walking along the beach with eyes fixed to the ground in search of something interesting. Just for the joy of finding something. Our Grandson Number Two would happily spend an hour or so doing just that. And then he’d draw us a picture and explain what the various creatures were like when they were alive. That’s the enthusiasm of an obsessed xix year old.

But some are doing it because they hope to make a fortune, or at least quite a bit of money, by selling what they find. People who have been fossil hunting all their lives are concerned that the beaches are being overworked . Here’s a link to an article about a fossil collection being sold abroad as our museums can’t afford to buy it.

I suppose it all comes down to money in the end.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Storks and herons. And odd reactions to the heatwave.

 Some time last week white storks raised in captivity were released into the wild in Cornwall, in the hope that they will settle down and breed. What a good idea!

Storks are amazing birds. On visits to Spain and Portugal I have spent huge amounts of time watching them, spotting their untidy nests in unusual places and taking photos of them.

We don’t have storks in our region … yet … but we do have herons. Here’s a photo of our local heron who has grown used to being fed by the people whose balcony he perches on. They believe, probably mistakenly, that this will prevent him from disembowelling ducklings and the like. As for me, I suspect he’s just taking advantage of their generosity. But so far he doesn’t seem to be biting the hand that feeds him.

As the heatwave seems to have abated, at least in the North West of England, I read that Reform UK’s Richard Tice has said that we should embrace the heatwaves and climate change as all of this will improve British wine.

That’s all for this rather late posting. I’ve spent part of the day in Manchester and then we were invaded by our daughter and her offspring. Nice to see them after their holiday in Cyprus.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!