Selective heat waves. Christmas is coming! Transport littering London streets and our river. RNLI. Election bribery.

 I saw a weather report headline that said warm weather was returning to the UK, with temperatures of 25°C in London. The rest of us are likely to have a high of 20°C if we’re lucky. There you go; UK means London and the South East. So it goes.

Even though the weather app on my phone says we have a temperature of 18°, it certainly doesn’t feel like it. But it is September, after all. 

Yes, it is September but not quite half way through September. Christmas is still quite a long way off. And yet our local Co-op store has mince pies on sale. 

A far too sensible friend of mine has commented that some people like to start stocking up early for Christmas! Maybe so! Can you freeze mince pies? I wonder. If not, but the time mince-pie-eating season comes around they’re going to be rather stale! I can almost, but not quite, understand starting to buy presents now and putting them away. I say not quite because I would probably put them in a safe place and forget where I had stored them. 

Here’s something about ebikes: “ London boroughs have seized at least 3,000 ebikes this year, a Guardian investigation has found, as hire companies face growing calls to stop bicycles littering streets and blocking pavements.

Local authorities across the capital have seized 3,393 hazardously parked or abandoned ebikes so far this year, 23% higher than the number seized during all of 2025.”

Our bit of Greater Manchester is too rural to have ebikes for hire. i’ve been quite impressed to see families out on proper bikes on the bridle paths, often including very small children on balance bikes.

We may not have bikes abandoned all over the place but I looked into the River Tame where it goes under the crossroads near our house and saw this:

No, it is not a real, full-size car in the river but a child’e ride-on toy. It’s been there for a few days now. Goodness knows how it got there!

Right wing groups have been accusing the RNLI of wasting resources by rescuing people crossing the channel in small boats.

In fact, only a very small percentage of the RNLI resources go to such rescues. And one of the consequences of the accusations has been an increase in donations to the lifeboat people. Sometime fairness rules. Karma!

Apparently Donald Trump has promised to pay €5000 dollars to all Americans if his party wins the midterm elections. Amazing!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Remembering September 11th.

 Twenty-five years ago today I left from the classroom where i was marking assignments and went down to the college office to organise some printing. When I got there I found the receptionist and other clerical staff glued to the computer screen where scenes of a plane flying into one of New York’s Twin Towers.

When I arrived home later I found my husband, our daughter and her four year old daughter similarly glued to the television screen. (I wonder if that four year old remembers that day now.) More information was coming in but nobody yet knew what had happened.

We still don’t know what really happened on September 11th 2001. Theories abound about the nature of the collapse of the towers being similar to a controlled explosion. We’ll never know but the fact remains that huge numbers pf people lost their lives and others were traumatised by what they went through getting away from what became Ground Zero.

And so aspects of our life and travel and security changed completely overnight.

Former Presidents Jo Biden, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton will be attending a memorial ceremony at Ground Zero together with other important people. But reports say that President Trump won’t be there, despite his having made various claims about where he was and what he did on September 11th 2001. 

One suggestion is that he refused to attend because he won’t be allowed to make a speech. Somehow even in his absence he makes it all about him.

But it’s not about him. It’s the people whose lives were lost that need to be remembered today. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Airport adventures. Viral cakes and cookies. The vagaries of fashion.

Here is a message I received about the continuing saga of my Spanish sister and her airport adventures:

“I have finally got home, Anthea. It was a long night at the airport with very little sleep, but in good company. First I was with a big group from Mérida who looked after me while we sorted out the luggage reclaim, which was chaotic as the luggage from all cancelled flights was coming out on three belts. Hence there were thousandd of peole trying to see their cases. We finally got ours and the group insiste on heloing me get a flight. Unfortunatemy they were having great difficulty getting flights for their group of 14, and would possibly have to wait till Friday or Saturday with six children in tow.

Then I spent tve night with a young couple from Bornos,in the Cádiz mountains, and we sat around talking amongst ourselves, and later with an Irish lady, and around 7a.m. a young Italian musician joined our group.He had been playing the clarinet in a concert in the Royal Albert Hall, and his flight back to Italy had been cancelled, too. A pleasant but uncomfortable night was had by all.

Now I have to see about trying to get a refund fron easyJet🤪”

From reports I have read about people having to travel without their luggage, people having to wait days for flights to their chisen destination, I think my sister got off quite lightly. And reports suggest that, with over 2,000 flights cancelled, getting compensation could be difficult.

Now, some people seem to wait in queues for fun. I keep reading about cake shops and cafes going viral and people travelling long distances to buy cookies - always cookies, never biscuits - and cakes. The latest I’ve heard of is the Yo-Chi dessert shop in Notting Hill.

“We wait in line for everything now,” says 23-year-old Hannan Mahamud as she stands midway down the queue with three friends. “I queued for an hour the other week for a cookie, although it wasn’t worth it. We heard about Yo-Chi through a creator on TikTok who works in an office building across the road and posts queue updates. We thought it might be a fun day out.”

What a strange world! 

Here’s another example of strangeness. Marks and Spencer, once much valued for it’s underwear by a French friend of mine, is now selling a “hip boost” bodysuit - “essentially, a leotard with slits to stuff full of padding to give the wearer a surgery-free brazilian bum lift (BBL) that follows in the footsteps of M&S’s stick-on nipples – and padded bum shorts.” Padding your backside apparently makes your waist look thinner, presumably without actually having to do exercises to make it really thinner.

Fashion is strange. I’ve never quite understood the desire for a big bum. Maybe it’s having grown up in the time when Twiggy was the model we all wanted to emulate, a more slender, almost boyish figure. But the hip-boost bodysuit was preceded long ago by the bustle, “a padded undergarment or wire frame used to add fullness, or support the drapery, at the back of women's dresses in the mid-to-late 19th century.

There was also the crinoline.

And in the 16th and 17th century the farthingale served the same purpose.

And nowadays wedding dresses can be bought with built in bustles. 

It’s all madness. It’s time body-shaming truly stopped and women chose to wear what theyvloke because they like it, not because the dictates of fashion hpuses tell them what to do.  

That’s another rant over.

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Wednesday’s shrinking market. A bit of linguistic investigation. Travellers having problems of one kind or another.

It’s Wednesday so I set off to catch a bus to the market in Uppermill. I was out earlier than planned and my Bee app (the app that gives me info about Greater Manchester public transport) told me my bus was not going to come for about 15 minutes. So I walked a couple of stops along the route. It was a fine and sunny and waiting at a bus stop in the open air was more pleasant than standing in the often rather smelly bus shelter at the crossroads. 

The market was more depleted than ever. In the square there was only the fishmonger. Maybe the shoe and slipper man (shoe-and-slipper-monger?) was on holiday as he quite often goes off to Spain. The other stalls that used to be in the square disappeared some time ago. On the other side of the road, outside the Methodist church, there is still a busy flower and plant stall but really it is hard to call the whole set-up a market any longer. 

Having wondered about the possibility of saying “shoe-and-slipper-monger”, I decided to do a bit of research. It’s something of an occupational habit among linguists. The first thing I found was this:

monger /mŭng′gər, mŏng′-/

noun

A dealer in a specific commodity. Often used in combination. 

"an ironmonger."

A person promoting something undesirable or discreditable. Often used in combination. 

"a scandalmonger; a warmonger."

A trader; a dealer; -- now used chiefly in composition. 

"fishmonger, ironmonger, newsmonger"

Other sources reinforced the idea of a “monger” as someone not to be admired:

a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way (usually used in combination).
a gossipmonger.

a promoter of something unpleasant
warmonger

It turns out to be an old term:

Origin of monger

First recorded before 1000; Middle English noun monger(e), mounger, Old English mangere, equivalent to mang(ian) “to trade, act as a monger” (ultimately from Latin mangō“salesman”) + -ere agent noun suffix; cognate with Old Norse, Old High German mangari.

There you go!

I said that wondering about words was a bit of an obsession among linguits. linguists. Out of the blue yesterday, Phil pondered about the origin of the expression “the elephant in the room”.  This is what my research gave me: 

“In 1814, Ivan Krylov, (1769–1844), poet and fabulist, wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man", which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial. Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Demons wrote, "Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum...."

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, in The New York Times on 20 June 1959: "Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It's so big you just can't ignore it.According to the website the Phrase Finder, the first known use in print is from 1952.

This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959. For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of the British Journal of Education in 1915. The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class-room?"

There you go!

 I thought my Spanish sister was safely home with her family in the south of Spain. It’s about 10 days since she and her daughter and grandchildren left here to have a few days in London. I knew she planned to visit a friend once her daughter and co had set off for Spain but I really thought she had returned home by now. Then today I received this message: 

“Hi Anthes. I am stranded in Gatwick 😂After three hours sitting in the plane yesterday, we were told our flight, and all other flights had been cancelled due to a major air traffic control problem. I finally managed to get a flight to Gibraltar today at 16:30, but It was impossible to get a hotel and I have been in the airport all night, luckily in good company with people I met xxx”

Well, as I’ve read reports about continuing chaos at Gatwick, we are now keeping our fingers crossed that she manages to depart today.  One night sleeping in the airport is a bit of an adventure but a second night would be rather excessive.

Also excessive is the continued speculation about those travellers and would-be family rejoiners the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. So here’s a cartoon to that effect:

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Tree-cutting. Looking at the Bayeux Tapestry. Patriots. Starting a new school. And surnames.

 I woke up this morning to the sound of tree surgeons at work. Returning from my run yesterday I saw them at work too. Today I saw them removing overhanging branches from the driveway of the across the road neighbours’ house before I set off for my run. As I returned there was no sign of them but I’ve heard them from time to time all day so far. It seems to be work going on in the gardens of a row of houses a short distance along the road from here where there are some very large mature trees. I’m hoping they’re just pruning rather than cutting down whole trees. And If the latter, then I wonder if they have permission. We are fortunate to have plenty of trees around here but we need to keep them. I am opposed to cutting down trees without good reason.

Weatherwise the day has been odd. There was very heavy rain in the dead of night. Thundery showers and a light breeze are forecast for today. I wore a light raincoat when I ran first thing but despite the dismal forecast I did not get rained on. Neither did thunder occur. Later I contemplated hanging some washing out to dry but it was just starting to rain, not heavily but rain nonetheless! So we are back to hanging washing indoors to dry. It has been very pleasant over the last couple of months to hang washing in the garden and to being it in splendidly dry. Of course, since I hung the washing on a drier in the spare room, the sun has emerged once again. So it goes.

Important people have been looking at the Bayeux Tapestry.

The Labour MP Lisa Nandy, accompanied by the British Museum chair, George Osborne, views the tapestry. 

King Charles, alongside Queen Camilla, speaks to Emmanuel Macron as they view a section of the tapestry at the British Museum in London. 

It is interesting that Lisa Nandy had to wear a protective apron but King Charles and his party did not.

Here’s a link to an interesting update on the tapestry.

Here’s a cartoon portraying the black-clad, balaclava-wearing “patriots” involved in the anti-immigration protests over the weekend. 

They call themselves Patriot Platform - an army of Christian Patriots. ii’s curious how the followers of a man who advocated turning the other cheek and tolerating people from other races end up being violent and claiming to do so in the name of religion. From the Crusades to colonising English and Spanish forcibly converting Native Americans to Patriot Platform! 

The founder of Patriot Platform, aka Danny Tommo, like other rightwing agitators was privately educated - hardly a deprived child then! After some time in prison for attempted kidnapping he  "claims to have turned his life around, attending church every week and 'praying for forgiveness'." If he’s going round inciting violence he’s going to need to do some more praying for forgiveness!

Incidentally, on the subject of private schools, Prince George has just begun his time at Eton. It has always struck me as a strange practice to send the children you love away to boarding school for quite long chunks of time. It would be interesting to have a future king educated at a local comprehensive school, carefully selected of course! 

As another member of the royal family has been in the news lately, Harry having brought his family back to England, I wondered about surnames. Well, it seems that young George began primary school as George Cambridge but at Eton he will be George Wales, his name varying according to the title given to his parents. So presumably Harry’s children will be called Sussex, as their parents are the duke and duchess of Sussex. And all of them can fall back on Mountbatten-Windsor, if they so choose. 

So much choice and apparently so easy.

Our Granddaughter Number Two went through quite a bit of red tape and paid I don’t know how mu h money to change her surname. She didn’t want her father’s name, which figured on her birth certificate, but wanted our family name.

Surnames are interestingly different in  different countries. Spain large.y used he father’s and mother’s surnames together. So former King Juan Carlos is Bonbón y Borbón, King Felipe is Borbón y Grecia while Leonor, Princess of Asturias, heir to the Spanish throne, is Borbón y Ortiz. More ordinary folk don’t bother with ‘y’ between the surnames. 

I like the Danish option. in 2006 Denmark reinstated patronymic and matronymic surnames as an option. Thus, parents Karl Larsen and Anna Hansen can name a son Karlsen or Annasen and a daughter Karlsdotter or Annasdotter.

That’s enough nonsense for today.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Birthdays. Quails. Protestors. Tom Petty. Noisy tennis.

Yesterday we did mid-birthday celebrations at our house. Granddaughter Number Four was 10 last Wednesday. Her brother, Grandson Number Two, will be 7 next Wednesday. So we had a family celebration at the midpoint, yesterday. I roasted a chicken, with all the usual trimmings, and Granddaughter Number Two made a shared cake.

Granddaughter Number One regaled us with news of one of her quail who has been hatching her own eggs, something quite rare apparently among domestic quails. We have decided to rename Granddaughter Number One as Grandmother of Quails. Not quite so impressive as Mother of Dragons (Game of Thrones reference) but there it is.

A good time was had by all. The washing up was mostly done communally (big family dinners are the only occasions when I feel the need for a dishwashing machine) but there were still some dishes that had been put on one side and forgotten until this morning. 

Also this morning I stripped the chicken carcass, with enough meat left to make a chicken hotpot for this evening’s dinner, and put the bones in a pan to make chicken stock and eventually soup. We do a good line in leftovers at our house.

Over the weekend, people dressed in black and wearing balaclavas staged a protest in Dover and then in Southhampton against a boatload of immigrants arriving to be processed. Some of the reports suggest this was a spontaneous protest. It’s funny how they all spontaneously wore black and covered their faces. Perhaps they all spontaneously followed a call to action on social media. Part of a report in the Guardian says, “Hundreds of men, some dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, tried to stop the arrivals from being transported for processing until 3am, when police removed them with threats of arrest.”

Hmmm! THREATS of arrest! Had they been pensioners expressing support for Palestine Action they might not have been threatened by actually arrested! Clearly not a proscribed terrorist organisation.

It’s almost nine years since Tom Petty died, not long after I danced barefoot to his music in Hyde Park. Tom Petty, of course, was one of the Travelling Wilburys, the supergroup made up of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty himself. Here’s a cartoon somebody posted on a Tom Petty site on social media: 

Tennis is one of those sports that demands silence. The umpire at Wimbledon calls out, “Quiet please!” at the start of a match. The noisiest I imagine is John McEnroe shouting out in anger at the umpire’s decision: “You can’t be serious!” Well, it seems that the US Open has become extremely noisy. There’s ambient noise from cooling units just outside the stadium, railroad noise of trains going to Long Island, forklift trucks delivering supplies of champagne and such like to the stadium and planes flying overhead. But principally it seems to be the spectators among whom are influencers who chatter continuously or talk into their phones to accompany the videos they are making to put out on social media. The ubiquitous mobile phone is disrupting another bit of life as we know it.

Perhaps this photo, with its caption saying, “Fans look at their phones during the 2025 US Open”, says it all. 

The writer of this article says that New York is indeed a noisy city but contrasts the noise of another district of the city with the noise at the US Open:

“Continuing west you’ll eventually land in Corona, a densely populated working-class neighborhood with a significant presence of Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants. Here the contrast with the hordes at the US Open is genuinely fascinating. The streets are clamorous and intense, filled with the clatter of the elevated 7 train, the pop and sizzle of the food trucks, the chatter of twilight conversations on stoops and sidewalks, and the slap-slap-slap of the games of dominoes that crowd every corner. But there are no phone-gazing zombies meandering across pavements; there’s none of the greedy insensitivity of the masses at the Open; there aren’t even many devices visible. These streets are packed with people and thrumming with life, but their vibrancy is neighborly, uplifting, and welcoming, rather than hectoring, selfish, and bland as is the case for the hyperactivity beyond the entrance gates of the National Tennis Center.”

Interesting!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!