Out and about in Las Palmas, dodging Storm Thérèse. Historical-mythical heroes. The continued craziness of the world.

 This should have been posted yesterday but somehow went into draft. So here it is.

My Spanish sister has expressed concern that we might have been affected by the rain that has hit the Canary Islands - Storm Thérêse I think it has been dubbed - but we have been fortunate with no more than a little shower of drizzle at some point this morning.

Out on walkabout yesterday we saw a statue of good old Christopher Columbus. Allegedly … because surely nobody knows for sure what he looked like.

Thinking of historical, semi-mythical, literary figures, here’s an interesting thing about D’Artagnan, of The Three Musketeer fame:

“More than three-and-a-half centuries after a musket ball to the throat put an end to decades of exemplary swashbuckling, the French soldier who inspired Alexandre Dumas and went on to be immortalised on the stage and screen.

Workers repairing a church in the Dutch city of Maastricht have discovered a skeleton that could belong to the 17th-century Gascon nobleman Charles de Batz-Castelmore – better known as d’Artagnan – whose exploits led Dumas to make him the hero of the Three Musketeers.

The real-life d’Artagnan was a spy and musketeer for King Louis XIV who died during the siege of Maastricht in 1673. Three hundred and fifty-three years later, the longstanding mystery of where the warrior came to be buried may finally have been solved, thanks to a set of bones found under a collapsed church floor.”

There you go. Another mystery solved. 

Getting back to being out and about, I also admired the strange root formation of a tree. Trees are always fascinating, maybe exotic ones even more so.

Having got into our accommodation finally yesterday, we had a bit of a snooze, making up for being up well before the crack of dawn. In the middle evening we ventured out for a beer and a snack, sampling the local delicacy: papas arrugadas - small potatoes boiled in their skins (hence the wrinkles) and served in a slightly spicy sauce.

This morning we went back to the same place, Bodegón Veguetas, for breakfast. There’s something very civilised about coffee and toast and freshly squeezed orange juice in the open air.

Then we packed up and left, setting off to join an old friend with whom we’ll share accommodation for the rest of our stay here. 

Out in the wider world, Israel claims to have killed an Iranian naval chief. There is some doubt about whether or not peace talks are taking place. Personally I have little faith in peace talks any longer as someone always seems to continue dropping bombs and shooting folk despite alleged peace talks. Experts say the UK economy will be worse hit than other places by the conflict in the Middle East. Goodness, even the clothes store Next is saying they will need to raise prices. 

So it goes.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sight seeing. Moving house. Magpies.

 Yesterday after a bit of post-lunch snooze we went sightseeing. In the Plaza Santa Ana we admired a fine building at the far end of the square, which turned out to be Casas Consistoriales - more or less council offices.

There were some splendid dog statues for some reason.

And of course there was the  Santa Ana cathedral, less spectacularly beautiful than some cathedrals we have seen. 

We also saw the supposed Casa de Colón, the house where Columbus is supposed to have stayed on his way to the Americas.

Today we had to pack up and leave our temporary accommodation and move house again. A friend had booked accommodation for a group of us in the Triana district of las Palmas. The booking didn’t quite coincide with our flights from the UK and so we have been like wandering gypsies, spending Wednesday night in one place and Thursday night in another. Today finally we have been able to unpack our suitcases as we’ll be here for about 10 days! 

So this morning we went out for breakfast in a funny little bread-shop cum cafe not far from where we spent the night. Later we set off for this new accommodation, stopping en route to look again at places we saw last night. We considered looking inside the cathedral and inside the Columbus museum but the queues were rather daunting. That will be for another day.

Here’s something quite unrelated to our adventures. On social media someone asked what the collective noun for magpies. Why do people ask questions that you can look up cor yourself. In comments people declared their ignorance but offered magpie folklore:

“One is for sorrow, two is for joy, three is for a girl, four is for a boy, five is for silver, six is for gold, seven is for a secret never to be told” 

 8s a wish, 9s a kiss, 10s a bird u must not miss 

And here is a long version by Anyone John Finnemore:

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a girl

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a secret

never to be told

Eight for a wish

Nine for a kiss

Ten for a chance

you must not miss

Eleven for a wasp

Twelve for a bee

Thirteen for a coffee

Fourteen for tea

Fifteen for a pencil

Sixteen for a pen

Seventeen to hear

these options once again

Eighteen for pepper

Nineteen for salt

Twenty for an accident

in which you were not at fault

Twenty one for Jerry

Twenty two for Tom

Twenty three - where are all these

magpies coming from?

Twenty five no seriously

Thirty this is weird

Forty eight from where have all these

magpies suddenly appeared?

Sixty two stop counting

Seventy just run

Ninety nine the revolution

of the magipies has begun

Two hundred no more sorrow

Five hundred no more fears

One thousand for how long

the empire of the magpies will last

in years

That’s enough of that. A group of magpies, by the way, can be called a "conventicle," "tiding," "gulp," "mischief," or "congregation."

And a group of moles is called a “labour”

Hey ho.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Adventures and travel.

 Last night I went to bed at about 10.00pm. This was because i had to get up at around 2.30am this morning. Amazingly I managed to do so without snoozing my alarm several timex over! A taxi was coming to collect us at 3.15am to take us to Manchester airport for a flight to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where Phil is going to take part in a chess tournament and I am going to take part in tourist activities. 

We have walked miles and miles around Manchester airport, a confusing airport made more confusing by “improvements” and on arrival here around the airport of Gran Canaria, which is enormous and potentially just as confusing as Manchester. We had to go through the new rigmarole of having our fingerprints recorded! Then we had to locate the place where we are going to sleep tonight. We have complicated arrangements to share an Air B&B with a chess playing friend but that does not include tonight. 

We (or rather, Phil) had researched buses from the airport to Las Palmas. Finding the bus stop was a challenge, involving a further long to the end of the airport complex, across a carpark and onto the regular public bus service place. But eventually we got here and, as we could not get into tonight’s accommodation straight away, we found a place to have lunch: tortilla española (the restaurant prides itself on being experts in making tortilla and have been doing so since 1985 - just a little longer than I have been doing so) and an ensalada mixta.

Then we tried to get into tonight’s accommodation, a room in a suite of similar rooms, with no receptionist on duty. To get in you need a key code for the street door and the inner door to the suite of rooms, then another code to open a mini safe containing the key to our room. Ingenious and probably perfectly logical to habitual users of such accommodation. Unfortunately they had not sent us the instructions and the codes by email as promised. A series of complicated phone calls ensued. We got in. We had a snooze to make up for the missed night’s sleep and the impossibility of sleeping comfortably on Ryanair planes!

And finally we had to go through further rigmarole to discover which wifi we should connect to and what the code for said wifi might be.

All’s well that ends well! Another adventure begins.

I hear they have had snow in Greater Manchester!

Oh, at the restaurant we had a bottle of water from a place called Teror, a place up in the mountains, about 14 kilometres from Las Palmas city. I was amused at the idea of fierce and frightening mineral water. It really doesn’t take much to entertain me!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Fire and ICE. And the chaos of the modern world.

Recently I commented that the blossom trees seemed to be flowering early this year. Well, here’s something else. Last night it was reported that a huge moorland fire broke out not far from here, on Scout Moor, between Ramsbottom and Whitworth. Big enough to be seen from Rochdale and parts of Oldham.

That’s not the first local fire this year. Saturday was a beautiful day, warm and sunny. Uppermill was crowded with what a friend of mine refers to a “grockles”: people who are not local, who have come to browse the charity shops, the secondhand book shops, the assorted tat shops (clothes, jewellery, ornaments, souvenirs), and of course to sample the numerous cafes. A few miles further along is Dovestone reservoir, a local beauty shop, probably also crowded. Late in the afternoon Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service were called to a 'small fire' near to the reservoir, a fire which was suspected to have been started by a barbecue found discarded at the scene.

So it would seem that the fire season has also begun early. A week of fine sunny weather brings out the urge to go to an out of doors place and have a barbecue … and then in some cases leave the portable barbecue behind to cause whatever havoc it likes.

However, it rained in the night, for the first time in a week. I ran round the village in the drizzle this morning. Hopefully the rain will damp any remaining fire and damp the enthusiasm of those who like to make fire on the open air.

It’s unusual for me to be grateful for rain. After all, it’s taken the better part of a week for the footpaths to dry up and the muddy puddles to shrink.  But the moors around here are basically peat bogs. People used to dig up dried peat to burn on their kitchen stoves. If it catches fire (or is set alight deliberately) it can smoulder below the surface for days. Just another bit of chaos in the world.

And, of course, the chaos continues in the wider world. We talk hopefully about the so-called ceasefire in Gaza and then Inread about the death of Abed Elrahman Hamdouna, a volunteer ambulance driver in northern Gaza.

Abed Elrahman Hamdouna, a 31-year-old father of two, was killed in a reported drone strike west of Gaza City two weeks ago, as he was on his way to a family Ramadan iftar, to break fast with his brothers. He wasn’t doing anything remotely military; he was just on his way to celebrate with his brothers. 

Here are some statistics: 

• Since the ceasefire was announced on 10 October last year, Israel has killed 677 and injured a further 1,800 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. 
• Israeli strikes in Gaza have averaged about 10 a day across the territory over the past five months.

That’s not what a ceasefire should look like. 

And here’s a link to an article about a doctor treating migrants who are injured trying to get into the USA from Mexico

And, going in the other direction, here’s a link to an article about a ‘self-deportee’, a young man of Mexican origin but who lived in Los Angeles from being only a few months old. Now 38, he has grown tired of worrying that ICE might come and find him. So he has gone of his own volition to a country whose language should be his own but which he speaks haltingly because English has become his first language: a mother tongue which has turned out to be the tongue of a wicked stepmother. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some thoughts about pets versus children.

Our daughter and her smallest offspring, while out walking near their house, quite often come across a rather fine long-haired cat, a cat who looks as though he should be an indoors cat, definitely not a cat on the razzle, roaming the streets. They know his name, Leo, and where he lives, quite some distance from where they usually come across him. As a rule they take him home. Sometimes there is someone to take him in. Sometimes they have to leave him in his garden. The children would like to kidnap him and take him home to live at their house. 

Our daughter has almost always had a pet of some kind since she left childhood behind. She blames this apparent obsession on having pets on me, because we never had a pet when she was small, apart that is from the goldfish that a friend’s parent bought her for her birthday one year. That parent took an autonomous decision that our daughter needed a pet, in the belief that all children need a pet. She could have consulted me beforehand! Our daughter wanted a dog - and has had several - so that her children would grow up with no fear of dogs, a fear she had as a child. Some of that fear I put down to her reading the Wolves of Willoughby Chase is a children's by Joan Aiken rather than her not having had a dog of her own as a child. Her aim to accustom her children to having dogs around was mostly successful, except that the last dog was rather aggressive, especially towards the vacuum cleaner which he regarded as an enemy, and was so bouncy that he scared the wits out of one of the children and in the end had to be rehoused. 

She is currently pet-less but under constant pressure from the small people to get a cat! They are inspired in this by their acquaintance with Smokey and Buttons, their older cousin’s two cats.

It seems there are an estimayed 13 million dogs in the UK, many owned by Dinkwad couples. Dinkwad stands for “double income, no kids, with a dog”, in other words couples who have decided not to have children but get a dog and treat it as if it were the child they have decided not to have. The owner of such a child substitute, a golden retriever, said about herself and her husband and the dog: “We are deeply obsessed with him. He turned two last year and we had a little birthday party for him – we had party hats and got him a dog-safe cake and a little outfit: a little vest with a bow tie.” Well, okay, each to their own! Personally I think dogs don’t really need fancy outfits or bows in their hair, but that’s probably just me. (I feel the same, by the way, about doting parents who put fancy headbands on their practically hairless baby so that you can tell it is really a little girl, a very girly girl!)

Some might think having a dog is a good substitute from the financial point of view. After all, nursery fees for a small child can be extremely expensive! Similarly afterschool care! But vets’ fees are quite extortionate and if you take into account those fancy outfits and specialist dog food, it may be a false economy. Mostly though, I suppose that dogs don’t turn into stroppy teenagers who argue with their parents.

Dogs are even coming into political campaigns: “In a race that is expected to come down to a few thousand votes, every last one counts – including, for the candidates seeking to become the next mayor of Paris, those of the French capital’s disgruntled dog owners.

Both favourites in Sunday’s second-round vote, the leftwing frontrunner Emmanuel Grégoire and the former conservative culture minister, Rachida Dati, have promised an array of canine-friendly measures if they win – and for good reason.

In the last city council elections, in 2020, about 57,000 votes separated the winner, outgoing Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, from her closest rival, Dati. This year’s race is expected to be tighter still and Paris has more than 100,000 dogs.

“That’s, what, something like 170,000 votes,” said Loïc Amiot of Paris Condition Canine, an umbrella group of 10 dog-owners’ associations in the capital that has published a manifesto demanding better treatment for the city’s dogs.”

The world is full of mildly crazy people!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!