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! 

Shoe lace problems. David Sidaris being obsessive. The apparent increase in bad language. Royal security problems.

 As I ran round up the road this morning, feeling rather pleased that it was cool enough for me to feel like running rather than just walking rather slowly, I became aware of a flapping sound. This happens quite frequently. It means that the lace on one of my trainers has come undone. On this occasion it was both shoes!  Before I set off to run I slip my feet into my trainers and step out of the door. Then I put one foot after the other on the garden wall to fasten the laces as firmly as possible. I tie the bow and give the loops an extra tug to ensure that they are good and tight. Sometimes it works. Quite often it doesn’t and at some point I recognise that slap-flap and have to stop and retie my lace or laces. It’s a wonder I’ve not tripped myself up. (Ironically, when I did fall over my feet, or over an uneven  it of pavement, last year my shoelaces had nothing to do with.) And this morning I read Coco Khan in the Guardian berating the sorry state of modern laces, echoing my own complaint:

“the failure of shoelaces has been my private obsession for some years now. You see, I have always been a fan of trainers, and in the 2010s new designs started to catch my eye – styles marketed as “cutting edge”, using “technical” materials, that seemed to be created for the “optimised”, “high performance”, heavily caffeinated girlboss going to the gym at 5am.

These high-performance laces often looked great. Many were thinner and rounder for neatness, with some synthetic or coated lines promising to maintain their clean appearance longer. But they also slip quicker. They do not do the one thing we ask of them. They do not stay tied.”

I’ve also been reading David Sidaris, who always makes me laugh. He wrote long ago about his obsession with achieving and over-achieving his step-count, extending his goal on a regular basis. Today he was writing about Duolingo, the language-learning app that so many people of my acquaintance are using. Here’s some of what he wrote:

“Duolingo was seemingly designed for people with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The same could be said for my fitness-tracking Apple Watch. And so I had combined the two and was walking my minimum of 10 miles per day while pointlessly reading sentences out loud in Japanese, German, Spanish, and French. This turned me into the person whom, since the turn of this latest century, I have most hated: one who moves about while staring down at a device. On the busy sidewalk, at the airport, everywhere a person should be paying the utmost attention to those around them, I suddenly was not.

There was no excusing my behavior; this was simply who I was now. That’s it, I regularly told myself. Today is the last day I am doing this. But I was powerless to stop. Making it all the more pathetic, I was competing against people I didn’t know. People who may not even exist and have names like GeACzQDe and fuuuuu.”

I must say I share his dislike of people who walk along staring at the tiny screen. It’s amazing how often I have had to step aside to avoid collision. I especially dislike those who have to have a loud conversation wherever they are, seemingly unaware that there is no need to shout down your mobile phone. However, my disapproval extends to those who cannot go for a walk without their headphones, usually listening to some absolutely riveting podcast.

Mr Sidarisalso wrote about coming across a group of  “No Kings!” protesters “whooping and chanting” on a street corner.

‘Most were of retirement age and brandished signs at the oncoming traffic. It was hot and muggy, yet one member of their group, a bearded man playing the accordion, wore a fleece-lined winter hat with flaps over his ears. It pained me to admit it, but they looked like kooks, like Tea Party demonstrators during Obama’s first term. Who cast this thing? I caught myself wondering, as they seemed the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: “Join us! We folk-dance!”

As I passed them, I thought back to the early Civil Rights protesters: the well-groomed men in suits and ties, the women in dresses. All of their signs were clearly lettered, likely by professionals, none with crudely drawn penises on them or the word fuck.”

Quite so! But it’s not just protest placards that have become ruder and cruder. Of course I have no statistical evidence to back this us, but my general impression is that swearing, including what we used to think of as very crude bad language, has become “normalised”, “standardised”. It’s as though the world has become an angrier place. I just need to listen to Granddaughter Number Two expressing her opinions about anything and everything. But what do regular cussers do when something really gets under heir skin? How do they express that greater emotion?

Yesterday I went on a little about royal finances. Today I hear that Prince Harry is probably cancelling his planned family visit to the UK because he can’t get police protection. You would think he could afford some private security. I can appreciate that he doesn’t want his children subjected to unwanted paparazzi attention but i wonder how much walking about in public places the children would be doing. Knowing how my own grandchildren enjoy family reunions, especially spending time with their cousins of a similar age, I feel it’s rather sad that these otherwise privileged children are being deprived of it. So it goes.

Life goes ln. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A bit of a rant about security checks. An interesting word. Stuff about politician I found online.

No thunderstorms this morning but there is a cool(ish) wind. Mind you, my phone app tells me we are running at 26° now in the middle of the day. Some places are a lot hotter! 

Yesterday we had an appointment at our bank (unlike many people, we are fortunate enough to have a bank with an actual office in the town centre) to review various things to do with our accounts. I made this appointment when I went in on Monday with a quick transaction that took longer than expected and led to further bank-related stuff. Yesterday morning, having realised that keeping the appointment would involve travelling by bus at just about the hottest time of the day (29° to 30°), we decided to postpone it, rearrange for a cooler day. The young lady I spoke to on Wednesday had given me ‘her’ phone number and so it should have been a simple matter of a quick phone call.

“I’ll give you my number”, she said. But when I rang it turned out to be a general national number for the bank. So first I had to listen to a lot of information about how I could do things online but if I still wanted to speak to someone I would be in a queue. “Here’s some music!” Well, yes, music interspersed with still more information about things you could do online! After five or ten minutes I was connected to a person. Once I had explained what I needed to do, he asked for some security proof. Could I give him certain specific digits from the magic number I use when I log on to their online banking? I did so. It didn’t work, probably because I don’t use an App on my phone. So could I give him details of a recent payment into my account? Well, yes, if he waited while I logged on to the system on my iPad. Hurrah! It worked! He then needed to know at which branch of the bank I wanted my rearranged appointment to take place. I could see such and such a person, he told me. But no, I wanted to see the original advisor I spoke to the other day. Finally I got it sorted. A simple phone call to the local branch would have been so much easier than a lot of automated nonsense which took a good half hour of my day! Fingers crossed I have no problems with the new appointment! 

Rant over! 

Now, I am fond of new words. Here’s one that has popped up as a friend’s “word of the day”: anyhowly. Apparently it’s East African English or Singaporean English. Originally it meant in any way, under any circumstances. Later it has been used to mean randomly, haphazardly, without direction or planning. I need to find ways to bring it into use within the family.

Here’s something that popped up on one of my social media feeds about Mr Trump and his misappropriation of music:

Leonard Cohen's family flatly refused to let the Criminal-in-Chief use Leonard's song, "Hallelujah" (as he'd promised he would) at the rally that he used to replace the concert that all of the musicians refused to perform for said Criminal.  In informing said Criminal about this, Cohen's estate & family wound up their correspondence with the phrase: 

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

And here’s an amusing comment about Brexit.

On the subject of prime ministers, here’s something else I found online:

“Oh how the mainstream media and the political establishment rewrite history.

​Look at how they are fawning over Andy Burnham at the moment. 

He’s being treated like a returning messiah, with politicians queuing up for selfies and journalists offering nothing but praise. 

No one seems to question the sheer entitlement or the fact that he lost two previous leadership elections. 

The red carpet has been rolled out, and any real opposition has been completely cleared away.

​Yet, contrast that with how Jeremy Corbyn is treated. 

When Jeremy is mentioned, the media acts like he’s something unpleasant they’ve stepped in, completely erasing what actually happened under his leadership. 

But the facts speak for themselves, under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party had zero debt, became the largest political party in Europe, and secured millions more actual votes than the current government managed.

​Why is a man who has achieved so little treated like a god, while the leader who built the biggest grassroots political movement in modern British history is either ridiculed or completely erased?

​The double standards are incredible .

 It shows who the establishment is really trying to protect.

Stay safe ❤️”

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well and cool, everyone!

Thunder and rain. School closures … or not. Water restrictions. Carbon saving. Royal family stuff.

 This morning I was woken by thunderstorms at 6.00am. No lightning, just a lot of rumbling. Then it rained torrentially but not for long. I spoke to the milkman this morning. He has been making deliveries early, supposedly so that we can fridge the milk as soon as possible. He said it didn’t rain for long enough. It freshened things up briefly but by 8.30am we were already up to 25°.

Our daughter’s headteacher sent all the children home at 2.30pm yesterday and all the staff home at 3.30pm. He said it was inhumane to keep people in classrooms in yesterday’s heat. Our smallest grandchildren’s school decreed that the children could all attend school in their PE kit and could take small portable fans into the classroom. Here’s a cartoon about teachers and weather.

As usual on a Thursday, we had a large number of the family for tea yesterday. After tea it had cooled down sufficiently - well, just about and there was shade - for the small people to play in garden. And later, much later, we went for an abbreviated walk round the block, at the request of 6 year old Grandson Number Two, who probably just wanted to postpone the moment of going home to bed.

We have a water barrel for collecting rainwater in the back garden. It used to be very full until I let the aforementioned six year old water some plants. Before I knew it he had almost emptied it. Some of the water went over his sister! It took some time for it to return to its current half-full state. But at least I can water the plant pots that sit on the wall between the front and the side garden. The next door neighbours use a hosepipe which I can make use of for stuff in the back garden but which won’t reach the front garden. So far we have no water restrictions. 

Now, according to reports in the Telegraph, South East Water has introduced restrictions to stop families in Kent from filling up children’s paddling pools, washing cars and watering gardens, after the country experienced record-breaking temperatures.

The ban covers Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Snodland, Maidstone, Tenterden, Ashford, Faversham, Canterbury and Herne Bay. And it could well last all summer, one long ban rather than a series of stop-start restrictions.

And so we stagger along, dealing with the effects of climate change. Thinking of the environment, here’s  Ben Jennings on a new idea for ‘carbon capture’.

Private jets are only one carbon emitting asset of the world’s richest people, who cause nearl $1bn a year of damage to the environment, according to Greenpeace. 

There are reports that King Charles is going to get a pay rise. The Sovereign Grant, which funds Charles’s official duties and the work of his household, increased by £45.8m to £132.1m in 2025-26. Now that he has reportedly published his tax returns, perhaps we could calculate whether he really needs that Sovereign Grant. Just an idea!

I also hear that once the ongoing refurbishment of Buckingham Palace (£370m worth of refurbishment!) has been completed the king and queen have opted not to live there. They’ll continue to live in Clarence House. (How fortunate to have so many places to choose from!) It’s all to do with allowing people to visit the palace. Public access to the palace will be increased, which has played a part in the decision, as visitor numbers and areas open to them would be limited if the king was in residence.

“His Majesty retains huge affection for Buckingham Palace and a deep respect for its role in royal and public life,” said a palace spokesperson. “It will be a buzzing hive of royal activity in every other way”. I’m sure we are all relieved to discover that last fact!

There you go. Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!