Getting up early. Serendipity. A judgemental Fitbit. Landslips in Sicily. A festival of mud.

 

This morning I got up early,maybe not early compared to when I had to get in my car and drive across Manchester to work, but early for a person whose alarm usually rings at 8.00 and who usually “snoozes” said alarm at least twice!  I had an appointment at the doctor’s in Uppermill and had to get organised to catch a bus.

As I was almost ready to leave, my Fitbit started to vibrate. Odd! It was telling me ai had a text message. This was pure serendipity as I am always accidentally switching off the ‘notifications’ thing. The text message informed me that my appointment was cancelled as the doctor is ill.

Now, doctors are not supposed to get ill. They are like teachers, meant to be available at everyone’s beck and call! Anyway, my doctor was ill. I needed to phone the surgery and rearrange! Very annoying!

Quite often, if I have a reason to go to Uppermill early in the day, and if the weather is set to be fine, I walk to Uppermill, just over half an hour’s brisk walking. If I had not decided to catch the bus today I would have been half way to Uppermill before the text message arrived. Indeed I might not have noticed until I arrived at the surgery. Another bit of serendipity!

I debated changing into my running gear for a morning run but in the end just opted to walk round the village. In any case, my Fitbit usually considers that I have been for a walk. Clearly I don’t run fast enough but walking still meets the Fitbit requirement for exercise! 

Here is a photo of Niscemi, a town in Sicily that I think I have written about a few weeks ago.

A landslip carried away a huge chunk of the town and led to the evacuation of districts at risk of further landslip. As well as houses, a 17th century church and a library full of rare and valuable books are at risk sliding down the hillside. Residents were told to leave their homes taking only “essentials” with them. Some left with only the clothes they were wearing. 

How do you decide at short notice what are the essential belongings and what can be left behind in the hopes of maybe getting back into your home to salvage some more stuff? Family photos and family heirlooms alike, each valuable in their own way, are left behind. I would be hard pressed to know where to start.

Note to self: make sure essential documents such as passports are easily accessible!

Fortunately we don’t live on a flood plane, nor in an earthquake zone, but you never know in the age of climate change and weird weather.

Thinking of weather and especially rain and mud, I read that according to the Anglo-Saxon calendar this time of year was called Solmōnaþ, a name which translates loosely as Mud Month or, more pleasantly, Cake Month. It marked a time when offerings were made to pagan gods, back when England was less Christian and more heathen. The idea was simple. Feed the gods and hope they stayed in a good mood. Humanity has always tried to bargain with the weather.

Here’s a link to an article about someone organising “Month of Mud” Festival. I am aware that there have been times when Glastonbury has seemed like a Festival of Mud but Glastonbury takes place at a hopefully more clement time of year. Rolling around in warm(ish) mud must be preferable! 

Life goes on. Stay and well, everyone!

Rather shy sun! Weather statistics. The rain in Spain. Signs of Spring. Opening ceremonies. Booing!

For a brief interlude this morning it looked as though it was going to be quite a nice day. The sun was having a good try at breaking through and the cloud cover had thinned sufficiently so that you could actually tell that the sky was blue behind there. You could even see the vapour trails from planes passing overhead!  It didn’t last! The cloud moved back in. From time to time the sun has another go but it’s not doing well! 

Then there are headlines like this one:

‘No end in sight’ to Britain’s wet weather as dozens of flood warnings issued

Met Office forecasts more rainfall to continue UK’s 37-day run, and flooding expected especially in south-west England and Midlands

And there are statistics like these: 

In only the first three days of this month, the south-east received nearly a third of its average February rainfall.

Rain has fallen every day of 2026 in the south-west and south Wales, the Met Office announced earlier this week.

So, on the whole, while we have had mostly dull grey days, other parts of the country have been worse off than here. I rather get the impression that most of our heavy rain has fallen overnight, which not much fun for folk who have to work at night but suits the rest of us quite well.

My sister who lives in southwest Spain, near Cadiz, has been posting pictures of the “lakes” which have formed on their beach, the result of all the heavy rain and storms.

However, here I am seeing signs that Spring is on the way. There are catkins on the trees.

The we-eat-wild-food people I come across on social media are asking whether catkins are good to eat. Not very, seems to be the answer, rather dry and full of pollen. You would have thought that with all the damp there would be plenty of edible fungi around without eating catkins. Maybe the happy foragers just want some variety.

The Winter Olympics have got underway. Much fuss has been made about the opening ceremony, which I didn’t watch. Friends who did watch it seem to think it was rather poor. There was a time when opening ceremonies were just the various national teams parading around waving their country’s flag. Now there seems to be a competition to see who can put on the most extravagant, and expensive, display.

One report I saw this morning told that when the cameras cut from the parade to US vice-president JD Vance and his wife, large sections of the crowd booed. The reporter told us, “Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching  NBC did not.” Oops! Technical problems? Censorship? 

A US downhill skier had an accident in training and was expected not to take part the games after all. Bravely (?) or foolishly (?) she decided to go ahead and yesterday had to airlifted to hospital after crashing badly during the women’s downhill. I could have told her that might happen. Surely a professional athlete knows better than to force strained muscles and ligaments to carry on competing! 

So it goes! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Social conventions: talking on buses; saying thank you; using common sense.

Returning from Manchester yesterday, I arrived at Oldham Mumps to find I had 15 minutes to wait for the next bus to Delph. I considered walking the next couple of stops to keep warm but decided that it was probably better to stay where I was in a bus shelter that protected me from the wind. An old chap asked if I knew what time the next 350 bus (my bus) was due. He couldn’t read the timetable as he did not have his glasses with him. And so we got into conversation. This is the gentleman I mentioned yesterday, the one with the house at Dobcross that he bought for £40,000 some 45 years ago. He told me he had been getting lost in Failsworth, another district of Oldham. A screen of some kind needed replacing in his house and he had gone looking for the shop in Failsworth where the original was bought those 45 years ago. Now that could well be a definition of optimism! 

Needless to say he didn’t find a replacement because he didn’t find the shop, probably closed long since. And then he got lost, adding to the fruitlessness of his task. As we were talking we spotted a 356 bus, a service which also goes to Delph and Dobcross via a convoluted route, pulling into the next stop. Simultaneously we declared out inclination to catch that bus, despite its long and scenic route, because it would at least get us into a warmer place than the bus shelter.

So we continued our conversation on the bus. We swopped anecdotes about all sorts of things to do with travel, the bus service and so on. In the process I learnt a good deal of his life story. He was about to be 89, a very sprightly 89 I must say. Maybe some of this was down to his having been a competitive cyclist in his youth. He told me the story of how he met his wife, who died some 12 years ago now, their adventures meeting at various places when he was on leave from military service, pretty much his life story in effect.

At some point he commented on how few people bothered to talk to each other on bus journeys. Too many people just sit and stare at their mobile phones. (Some, of course, share their music, their podcasts and even their quite intimate  conversations with all the other passengers.) I told him that I talk to anyone who is prepared to chat. When I got off in Delph village I promised to look out for him next time I go through Dobcross.

This morning I read this article in which Sangeeta Pillai sets out why she believes we British thank everyone too much.

I have also heard this accusation from friends and acquaintances in Spain. It seems we over-express our gratitude:  “The problem is that we thank too many people, often mindlessly, and innumerable times a day. Thank you, shop assistant (whose job it is to help you shop). Thank you, bus driver (who is getting paid to drive the bus). Thank you, cafe owner (whom you are paying for the food you have ordered). By what feels like the hundredth thank you of the day, the words lose their very essence”

I beg to differ. Around here at any rate the shop assistants and bus drivers seem pleased to be thanked. They also appreciate the small children thanking them as they get off the bus. Sometimes it leads to mini-conversations. And we usually add to it, “Have a nice day!” Now, that may be an Americanism but it makes the world a more cheerful place! Thank you!

Thank you also to the jury in the a certain trial who chose to acquit the activists, the Filton Six, accused of aggravated burglary (all six acquitted), violent disorder (three acquitted) and criminal damage (three acquitted). Here’s a link to Jonathan Cook’s blogpost on that. 

It took considerable courage, he said, for the jury in the that trial to ignore the demands to convict from the judge, the government, the police and the media and instead to weigh the actual evidence. 

Sometimes common sense rules.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Out and about. Angry men. Mistaken posts. Apologising. Student debt. The cost of houses.

 

I’ve been out to lunch with old friends today in Manchester. It was noticeably less cold in central Manchester than in Oldham. 

On the tram on the way into Manchester the whole compartment in which I was sitting was treated to a telephone tirade. Someone got on at the stop after mine, already deep in conversation on his phone. Maybe he doesn’t understand that it’s not necessary to SHOUT when talking on the phone. Maybe he was just so angry that his volume was out of control. He was having a furious row with someone, possibly a girlfriend, about money she had given him and which he had put into his bank account. She - I know it was a she as he called her by name - when he wasn’t calling much ruder names - seemed to be accusing him of stealing money from him and he was furiously telling her that this was not the case. All well and good … except that his conversation was at mega-top-angry-shouty volume and not a sentence went by without the f*** word being said at least three times. Then there was the fact that he told her over and over that she was a dumb, stupid, annoying c***. All of this interspersed with calling her ‘love’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘darling’ - a strange mix of insults and endearments. 

I briefly considered asking him to moderate his language but decided that if he could be so violent in his language there was no knowing how he might respond to somebody remonstrating with him. I also considered moving seat but his long legs were sprawled across the aisle and I might have needed to ask him to move to let me go by. 

All in all, an unpleasant witnessing of a man whose anger was out of control. Or maybe not. Perhaps that was how he spoke to everyone about everything!

Anyway, I went and had a good long chat with old friends - one of who  apologised for using the word ‘bloody’ after he heard by travel story. We didn’t talk about our various ailments (we have all resolved not to become the kind of old folk whose main topic of conversation is aches and pains) and we kept the exchange of photos of grandchildren to a minimum. Mostly we reminisced and swopped news about other friends and former colleagues. We tried not to dwell too much on setting the world to right. 

The daughter of one friend is married to an American. So we had a bit of a good-natured rant about the strange contrast between American society in big cities and in the sparsely populated spaces like the part of Vermont where his daughter’s father in law lives. Most of the inhabitants of the small town were born, grew up, married, raised children and will eventually die there without ever leaving the state! Almost everyone knows everyone by name.Yes, I know there are pockets of England where people live like that but I get the impression they are less common. I could be wrong and misinformed! 

Thinking of the USA, here’s a news report I’ve only just got round to reading: 

“Following an intense backlash this morning, the White House has now taken down Trump’s Truth Social repost of a video showing a racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes.

Multiple outlets cite a senior White House official as saying:

A White House staffer erroneously made the post. It has been taken down.

The post was up for 12 hours.”

Wow! Who even begins to think that depicting anyone as an ape is a clever thing to do? Let alone someone working in the White House!  If a staffer is blamed for posting it erroneously, it creates another series of questions: 

who appoints the staffers? 

are they vetted before being appointed? 

do they have mentors advising them and perhaps checking from time to time? 

And then, how did the post stay up for 12 hours before being taken down? 

Of course, as with all the scandal about Mandelson, it takes attention away from other things going on in the world. A lot of time and energy and resources are going into investigating such things. 

Here’s another related headline:

Starmer apologises to Epstein victims as he seeks to weather Mandelson scandal

PM says he is sorry for believing ‘lies’ told by former Labour minister when he appointed him US ambassador.

Sometimes it seems too easy to say sorry. Even Tesco has had to do it after putting bilingual signs in a Cornish supermarket … with the signs in English and Welsh, a similar language but not the same.

More than apologies are needed for the problem this article considers. Graduates are leaving university with huge debts as they have had to apply for “student finance” to pay for their studies. In recent years the interest on these student debt packages has been so huge that a debt of £60,000 to £70,000 rapidly grows to close to £100,000 in the worst instances as this article describes. 

Our Granddaughter Number One was having a bit of a moan recently because she has been making payments on her mortgage but it’s making no difference to the amount she owes. That’s paying the interest for you! But at least she doesn’t have a student loan to pay back (she did an apprenticeship instead of university studies) and she has a house, which she might one day choose to sell, maybe at a profit if she manages to sort out the defects she keeps finding.

Incidentally, on the bus coming home I fell into conversation with an old chap who bought his house in nearby Dobcross some 45 years ago for around £40,000. Today he estimates he could sell it for £450,000!

Such is modern life!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

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!