Actions that influence the weather. Malign effect of influencers on children’s cosmetics use. And shoplifting.

 On Saturday the next door neighbours got their barbecue equipment out and had their first barbecue of the year. I’m not a great fan of barbecues myself, perhaps because I’m not a great meat eater, but I do enjoy eating outdoors on a fine warm evening. Actually, by the time everything was properly set up and the meat was cooked the temperature was already dropping to its evening level. But in the afternoon and very early evening it was very pleasant to it out in the garden. 

Through Saturday, Sunday and yesterday I gradually reduced my running gear, first shedding my winter extra-layer hoody, then going down to a short sleeved running top and finally substituting my running trousers with running shorts. This was a good move with early morning temperatures of 14° and more. 

So, possibly as a consequence of all this summer-style organising, today the cloud has moved back in with a vengeance and the early morning temperature was 7°. My bare legs felt then difference. The sun is forecast to return later today!

 I have come across another new word: cosmeticorexia. Apparently it is an obsession with having a flawless skin. Children, principally girls, as young as 7 or 8 are buying beauty products, applying collagen boosting serums and retinol creams for their nonexistent wrinkles. And some of the yummy-mummies are encouraging it: party bags are stuffed with face masks and fluffy headbands, instead of glitter and gummy bears. Younger and younger girls are afraid to be seen without make-up. Dermatologists are treating children for skin disorders resulting from using exfoliants and other such products on their very young skin.  And experts are suggesting that cosmeticorexia “may represent a clinically relevant mental disorder”. They suggest it requires further understanding, tracking, research and potentially treatment.

Presumably this is another consequence of the presence of social media and influencers in so many aspects of modern life. Another bit of innocence is lost along the way. Our own nine-year-old granddaughter is, we hope, not so extreme as some of these youngsters but for a long time now she has carefully chosen which outfits she will wear, often planning in advance for special occasions. And she is quick to assess and congratulate people on how they look, on the clothes they wear and so on. 

It is a strange place the modern world.

Here’s another oddity: 

“Traces of illicit drugs in wastewater in England show spikes in usage during bank holiday weekends, heatwaves and sports events, while the Eurovision song contest ranks as one of the most drug-fuelled nights of the year.”

We have a bank holiday weekend coming up. And the sunshine is forecast to return. Maybe the drug-users will be out and about. 

I find it strange that the Eurovision Song Contest is mentioned in that context. I knew it had become a popular event in the gay community. Now I have an image of masses of people getting high as they watch the performance of often really mediocre songs! 

You can guess that I am not a fan of Eurovision!

Then there is shoplifting (which has been a crime in England since 1799), a rather antisocial activity that pushes up the prices of goods for us ordinary shoppers.recently someone lost his job for tackling shoplifters in a Waitrose store. And here is a link to an article about people who are pretty much professional shop lifters, having honed the art of selecting items to steal and resell, strolling calmly round stores not rushing in and out. Rushing in and out arouses suspicion; browsing looks normal, even if you are quietly secreting stuff away inside your coat, especially if it’s a respectable-looking coat!

And here’s an article about shoplifting by a group that calls itself “Take Back Power”. They collect goods i supermarkets, pack them in boxes labelled something like “these are going to people who need them” and if they can get them past security and out of the store they distribute the contents to food banks. Some of their number have been arrested at ‘training events’, arrested for lotting to carry out a crime ! While their methods of helping the needy are dubious, so too is their being raided and arrested before they have committed the crime. 

Such is modern society!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Birthday cakes. London Marathon - and Starmer and Mandelson. The continued madness of the world.

Yesterday sort of disappeared down a rabbit-hole of family birthday celebrations. Friday was our daughter’s birthday and on Wednesday Grandson Number One will be 21, and so we celebrated both birthdays with one cake. I seem to have become the official birthday cake maker for the family, even mKing one cor myself when my birthday comes around. Time was, I made rather spectacular cakes for our children’s birthdays - a London Bus, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and other themed cakes. Nowadays it’s just sponge cake with butter icing and sprinkles.

Yesterday was also the day of the London Marathon. Sebastian Sawe from Kenya ran it in a record-breaking under two hours! Considering that it is considered good going if you complete in under four hours, that’s rather frighteningly impressive. 

People  dress up to run the Marathon, usually raising money for the charity of their choice. The sons of a friend of mine, for example, raised lots of money for research into motor neurone disease.

Here’s a London Marathon-themed cartoon about Starmer and Mandelson:

On the day London Marathon hit the capital’s streets, the PM insisted he still has the support of the majority of the labour party

Here’s something from my friend Colin’s blog the other day:

“A wild boar walked into the city of Vigo last night. For the first time, I believe. They’re not yet a nuisance in Pv city, though I have seen them near my house, across the river in Poio. Only a matter of time before one them wanders across one of our 6 bridges.”

I wonder if it got right into the centre. I now have an image of a wild boar strolling down Principe, the main pedestrianised shopping street, nonchalantly window-shopping.

But Colin needs to watch out for boars crossing bridges. In Sumatra an orangutan has successfully used a canopy bridge specially constructed to encourage them to cross a road which cuts through their territory. 

Elsewhere in the wider world senseless violence continues:

“Israeli forces in Gaza killed a water engineer and two drivers who transported water to displaced families over four days in mid-April, exacerbating severe shortages of clean water that are fuelling the spread of preventable disease.

Israeli limits on the shipment of soap, washing powder and other hygiene products into Gaza have also forced prices up, adding to the challenge of keeping clean and avoiding infection in overcrowded shelters and tent encampments.”

And Donald Trump has apparently survived another assassination attempt. Probably just as well; he’s not become a martyr!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sunshine. Washing. Barbecues. Bluebells. No-show MPs. And killing journalists.

Another sunny day. At 8.30 this morning it was already 14°. Our next door neighbour has mowed the grass in our shared garden. And he has got his barbecue equipment out ready for later today. After all, this may well be our summer! Who knows what the weather will be like in a few weeks time. 

Carpe diem!

In the meantime we have all been washing things like mad and hanging everything out to dry in the garden - to be taken in before the barbecue is lit!

The bluebells in the corner of my garden are doing nicely. We need to do an excursion to the woodland area near Dobcross to check on the state of bluebells there. Maybe later this afternoon!

Yesterday ‘Reform are not your Friends’ posted this on Facebook alongside a photo of parliament:

“Eagle eyed viewers of Prime Minister’s Questions might have noticed a familiar face missing from the benches lately… Nigel Farage.

At first, we thought it looked a bit suspicious. Then we thought, maybe give him the benefit of the doubt and stop being all Reform Are Not Your Friends about it.

Then we thought… actually, no. Let’s check.

Here are the facts 👇

Never mind PMQs, since March 18th, the Reform UK leader hasn’t voted in a single parliamentary division.

Not one.

In that time, there have been more than 50 votes in the House of Commons.

Over a month of decisions affecting the country… and no participation.

If you’re elected to represent people, turning up and voting isn’t a bonus, it’s the bare minimum… and right now, Nigel Farage isn’t even clearing that.

He’s not just absent… he’s laughing at you, Clacton.”

Enough said!

Out in the wider world, journalists are still being killed:

“It has been sadly confirmed that 42-year-old journalist Amal Khalil of Al-Akhbar newspaper has been killed today, Wednesday, the sixth day of the ceasefire, in an Israeli airstrike on the town of Tiri in southern Lebanon.

She and freelance photojournalist Zeinab Faraj had been reporting on an earlier airstrike that targeted a car in front of them, killing two civilians, when they took refuge in a house. Israeli forces then carried out a second strike that directly targeted the journalists, trapping them inside. 

When Red Cross teams arrived to rescue them, the Israeli army threw a stun grenade at the ambulance before opening fire, blocking the rescue. After three hours of delays, with Israeli forces citing the need for “permission through the mechanism”, a second Red Cross team, accompanied by the Lebanese army, finally reached the three-story building and searched through the rubble. It was too late. Zeinab was evacuated to Tebnine Governmental Hospital where she underwent head surgery. The bodies of the two men from the initially targeted car were also recovered.”

You can’t really call the death of journalists collateral damage when emergency medical help is prevented from reaching them.

“Israel killed her.

Israel killed Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil.

It killed her after besieging her for hours and preventing the Red Cross from reaching her under the rubble.

Israel didn’t allow access until it made sure she was dead.”

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

St George and his Day. Summer ? Going out for brunch. Being psychic. Smartphones. And Petromasculinity.

Yesterday was St George’s Day. In previous years this has caused the England flag to sprout all over the place. Less so this year because it has been oevr-used and abused by extreme right groups. Some people, like our across the road neighbours, tried to reclaim it but on a very muted level, with a small flag planted in the flower bed.

George himself wasn’t English. That’s how it goes I hear he is also the patron saint of Palestine.

Summer has arrived here, it seems.in a gentle, very English way with a high of 19°. I’ve been out to “brunch” with our daughter, whose birthday it is, and one of her daughters, Granddaughter Number Two. 

Granddaughter Number Two waxes very sentimental about family birthdays and, as she is not working today, insisted on our doing something to celebrate her mother’s birthday. So I went and met them at a local cafe, walking there along the Donkey Line bridle path, for the first time this year. It has been so wet until now that truly it was not a good idea but with a few days of sunshine it has dried up nicely.

According to this article, a survey of US adults reveals many of them think they have extraordinary powers of intuition – especially those in younger age groups. Maybe it’s the tendency of that generation to watch so many shows about ghosts and supernatural stuff. 

Here’s a link to an article about the dangers of smartphones in schools.

And here’s a link to an article about ‘petromasculinity’. This is a new term to me, so I looked it up and found this:

“Coined by political scientist Cara Daggett in a 2018 paper, “petro-masculinity” describes a pernicious fusion between fossil fuel use, climate change denial, and defense of authoritarian white patriarchal masculinity. Noting how fossil fuel extraction and consumption are coded “masculine”, while environmentalism and green technology are coded soft, weak and “feminine”; it tracks how insecure men are increasingly leaning in to a petro-masculine identity in order to assert traditional masculine authority in the face of climate change, threats to traditional extractive industries, and changing social norms.”

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

Florence. Ancient monuments. Churches. And the Church and State thing.

It’s a long time since I visited Florence - once in the height of summer, dodging from patch of shade to patch of shade and once at Christmas when it was bitterly cold but we managed to get into the Uffizi without queuing. It was quite crowded in the summertime with queues to get into all places of interest but I imagine it’s even more crowded now. Like so many places it’s the victim of its own tourist success. I read that Florence is one of Europe’s most-visited and overcrowded cities, attracting roughly 16 million tourists a year. Wow!

This week I read that a tourist has been charged with criminal damage to a 16th century statue of Neptune. In what was described as a “pre-wedding prank” she tried to climb the statue to touch Neptune’s genitals. (It’s strange how stag-dos, which once meant the groom’s friends taking him out and getting him drunk on the night before his wedding, and hen-parties have developed onto expensive group visits to somewhere foreign where you do daft things for a dare.) 

The monument was inspected and it was found that the prank had caused “minor but significant damage to both the legs of the horses she had walked on and to the frieze she held on to in order to avoid slipping”. They say it could €5,000 (£4,340) to repair it and the woman has been charged with defacing an artistic and architectural asset. That will make it a very expensive hen-party! 

The statue was created by the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati, commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1559 to celebrate the marriage of his son, Francesco I de’ Medici, to grand duchess Joanna of Austria. This seems like an odd way to celebrate a wedding but then, so is climbing up an ancient monument. 

The closest we have to an ancient monument in our village is an old church, a rather fine building which has been closed for years and years. There also used to be a fine old lych gate at the entrance to the churchyard, where I was once told couples could be married if for some reason they couldn’t avail themselves of the whole church ceremony. Some time after the church closed, the lynch gate was demolished. There used to be a notice informing people about how to arrange for burials in the connected graveyard but even that has gone now. For some years the church was boarded up but then the window blockages disappeared and birds flew in and out, as did the weather! Rumours abounded that there was a conspiracy to reduce it to a poor condition, facilitating its conversion to a new use. And then this year, eventually, work began on converting it into flats and building several houses on the adjoining land. So the shell of the building will be preserved, better than just falling into ruins I suppose.

Such may be the fate of many churches apparently. “According to the National Churches Trust, there are about 38,500 churches, chapels and meeting houses in the UK, approximately half of which are listed buildings. In a survey last year by the trust, in which 3,628 churches took part, one in 20 of those surveyed said they felt they will “definitely” or “probably” not be used as a place of worship in five years’ time.” 

Here’s a link to an article about an abandoned church in Wales.

As a child I went to Sunday School, as a teenager I was quite devout but that’s all in the past. And yet I still feel, it’s rather sad for the old churches to be completely abandoned.

Meanwhile in the United States this week they are having an evangelical event: America Reads the Bible.

“Discover the Bible again or for the first time, join us in Washington, D.C. or on the live stream for the national event and movement. Together we can inspire others to interact with God's Word during this crucial time in America's history.”

Even the president has been involved (naturally!) reading to camera in the Oval Office on Tuesday: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14

The organiser of the America Reads the Bible event is someone called Bunni Pounds, President and Founder of Christians Engaged, an author, podcast show host, former political consultant and former congressional candidate.

Hmm! It seems that the separation of church and state has got a little lost in the  USA!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!