Signs of spring. Putting judgemental labels on people. And fashion as a statement of all sorts of things.

 It might still be grey and damp as February rushes to its end but there are increasing signs that spring is not too far away. This morning I saw the first almost-open daffodils on my running route. Other parts of the country may well have glorious displays of daffs by now but, apart from clumps of miniature daffodils, these are the first I have seen around her. 

The Green Party has won the Gorton and Denton by-election, which is good. A worryingly large number of people voted for Reform. It is to be hoped that this was a protest vote rather than an indication that people have been taken in by grinning Farage. 

Nazir Afzal, chancellor of the University of Manchester and a former chief prosecutor, wrote this article for the Guardian’s Opinion column. He makes the interesting point that in so many aspects of his life he is just himself, without an identified religious label. He is not the MUSLIM chancellor of the University of Manchester, for example. But as chief prosecutor for North-west England suddenly he was the “Muslim prosecutor” and investigating grooming gangs he was the “Muslim decision maker”. We live in a multicultural country, whether the far right likes it or not. If we look back at our history most of us are descended from immigrants of one kind or another. We need to accept people as they are, without putting labels on anyone, especially labels which are intended to divide us. 

Fashion is a strange thing. We are all of us judged one way or another for the way we look, the way we dress, how we style our hair, whether we wear lots of makeup and paint our nails, or indeed add long extensions to those nails! We look at people and make snap judgements about their political views, whether they are left- or right-leaning, whether we need to feel threatened by them, whether we can feel comfortable talking to them.

Justine Picardie, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK has written a book called “Fashioning the Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture”, maintaining that what the members of our royal family wear is a political statement of sorts. And according to this article the appearance of King Charles at the opening of London Fashion Week and that the Prince and Princess of Wales at the Baftas was a sign that the royal family was going about business as usual, despite the much-publicised misbehaviour of a certain former prince. 

And even the fact that Catherine had worn her Bafta dress on another occasion was a sign that she is taking a sustainable approach and showing restraint. Goodness! I can remember a time when Queen Letitia of Spain got press for wearing the same outfit twice.

It’s been going on forever it seems, this political statement via fashion. Justine Picardie, points out that the “after the crisis of the abdication in 1936, when Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) was dressed by Norman Hartnell in an idealised vision of traditional Englishness, to counteract the hard chic of the pro-Nazi Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”

Even the fabric used for clothes can be significant. “Picardie notes an example from 1947 when, in the aftermath of the second world war, then prime minister Clement Attlee expressed his concern over whether the silk for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding dress had been produced by Japanese or Italian silk worms. Thankfully, the fabric was made in China.”

Hmmm! Would Chinese silk be acceptable nowadays? I wonder.

The late queen’s outfits were often scrutinised for political messages: the Brexit hat, the choice of jewellery and so on. The royal family is supposed to stay out of politics so maybe choosing your clothing to match the occasion you have to attend is one way of making a statement. Who knew! 

It’s there in all our lives too. We can show solidarity by way we dress. In recent months I have attended a funeral where we were asked to wear the colours of Palestine and another where we were asked to wear suffragette colours. 

Choose your outfit with care!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Appreciating people who serve us. And criticising politicians.

 Another grey day! With a high percentage chance of rain according to my weather app, so I wore a light rain jacket over my running gear this morning. And it did rain but not really enough to worry about. It would be nice, however, to see a bit more sunshine! A person can grow weary of grey clouds!

I read that some people are objecting to influencers filming their visits to restaurants, sometimes just filming the food they are eating, sometimes giving an overview of the restaurant, and most often including selfies in the mix. I may need to change my photographic habits before someone complains about me. I am certainly not an influencer but I do like to take photos of the meals I am about to consume, mostly to share on the family messenger chat and occasionally to post on my blog. A waitress interviewed for the newspapers says that in fact influencers busily filming their meals are probably the least annoying of the clients she has to deal with. 

High on her list of dislikes are the arrogant who consider themselves superior to the waitress, looking down on her for having a “lowly” job and ranging from condescending to downright bossy in their dealings with staff. You never know quite why someone is working as a waitress: it may be a student job; maybe it’s the only job available in the place where she chooses to live; maybe she just enjoys dealing with people (so long as they are polite. I’ve never been a waitress but I remember dealing with the arrogant and supercilious when I worked in a shoe shop in my student days. There was a certain class of customer who would demand to see a range of shoes in a particular style or colour and eventually walk away without having made a purchase, leaving a scattering of shoes on the floor for the assistants to put away in the correct places.

At least such customers didn’t walk out with shoes they hadn’t paid for, unlike the “dine and dasher” who orders fancy food, tucks in appreciatively and then quietly leaves without paying. These exist in Spain as well, the “sin pagar” who are the bane of restaurant staff’s life, especially as waiters and waitresses are notoriously poorly paid. The waitress interviewed for the newspaper tells of pursuing such customers down the street and making them come back and pay, despite their excuse that they had a meeting to go to! 

She also wrote about the “work from homers” who don’t actually work from home but from the place where they a cup of coffee and make it last for hours! I remember a friend from my student days during my time studying in France. She would order a “menthe à l’eau” - peppermint cordial or syrup accompanied by a jug of water for the customer to dilute to their liking - which she would manage to spin out for several hours, adding water until it had almost no green colour left. The cafe was a warmer place to study than her student flat! 

Donald Trump has just made his state of the union speech, the longest US Congress has seen from a President's State of Union address. But history shows he's had a challenger in former Democratic President Bill Clinton:

1 - Donald Trump, February 2026: 1:47:40 

2 - Bill Clinton, January 2000: 1:28:49 

3 - Bill Clinton, January 1995: 1:24:58 

4 - Donald Trump, February 2019: 1:22:25 

5 - Donald Trump, January 2018: 1:20:32

As for the shortest recorded State of the Union, that's a title held by Republican Richard Nixon, who offered Congress some relief by speaking for under half an hour when he finished after just 28 minutes and 55 seconds in January 1972.

It provoked actor Robert de Niro to criticise his president. Many celebrities seem to be doing that lately, all of them being dismissed as just a singer, just an actor, or on the case of De Niro, demented!

So it goes.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The disappearing market. Talking to strangers. Going vegan - but not quite! Perfectionism

 It was fine and sunny first thing this morning when I went out to the market in Uppermill. Now we are back to grey. On the whole ai think I prefer it to begin grey and turn fine and sunny later.

There was only the fish man in the square this morning. Can we still call it a market? Apparently the shoes, slippers, second hand books and bric-a-brac people are on holiday. They go regularly to Spain. (At some point in the past I inadvertently revealed that I have been a teacher of Spanish and sometimes find myself having random conversations about Spanish grammar with the stallholders.)The fish man told me this morning that fruit and veg man has decided he is just too old to run a market stall. So that’s another one gone for good! However, the fishman assures me that he has no plans to disappear any time soon.

Making my way home, very efficiently arriving at the bus stop not long before the bus was due, I fell into a conversation with another hopeful person, mostly about public transport: how often buses were late, the excessive number of temporary traffic lights along the route, for example! The same thing happened yesterday as I waited for a bus from Oldham to home, on that occasion it was the number of buses going to a mysterious destination called ‘Not in service’! Now, according to this article people, especially younger people, are losing the ability to talk to strangers. 

Maybe it’s mobile phones. Maybe it’s having been ferried to and from school in their parents’ car. Maybe it’s the continual reminders about “Stranger Danger”, the feeling that we shouldn’t engage with people we don’t know. Maybe it’s general social anxiety. But there it is, a reluctance to talk with people we do ‘t know.

The writer of the article mentions getting into conversation with the waitress in a restaurant: “we chatted and I learned that she was from Seoul. She was shy and softly spoken. We talked gently about Korean food and what she missed about home.”

Later her 15-year-old son asked: “Is it OK to talk to people in that way?” What way? He was asking about the boundaries when it comes to talking to someone about their home country. But the question could apply to talking to any stranger.

“This was a very good question.” the writer went on, “How do you know, generally, what the terms are of a conversation with a stranger? I realised that there is a sort of unwritten code you learn as you get older, which enables you to assess whether a conversation is a good idea or not.”

It’s rather sad that modern society has become more insular. As for me, I frequently talk to strangers on buses. The world is full of interesting people!

“Vegan but Bacon” is another aspect of modern life I have read about. It seems that quite a lot of people like the idea of being vegan. After all, we keep hearing about the need to preserve the world’s resources and how much better it would be if we all ate less meat and other animal-derived food. The problem for some folk though is that they can’t bear the thought of giving up the “bacon butty”. Abandoning fried bacon between slices of white bread or on a white bread roll is a step too far. The concept - “go vegan but bacon” - of continuing to enjoy your bacon butty but otherwise being vegan comes from a social media influencer, of course, followed by millions of people. Vegan but bacon is a step on the road to perfect veganism, which for purists is even better than vegetarianism. Every little step goes some way towards protecting the planet.Perfectionists would hold their hands up in horror. Mind you, for some of them the idea of eating white bread rather than wholemeal is anathema! 

As for me, I’ve been vegetarian but nowadays eat chicken and fish but not red meat. I’m a long way from perfection and confess to liking to add ham to some dishes. So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

An MP upset at being prevented from travelling to the Chagos Islands. Going or not going to art galleries.

I hear that Nigel Farage has been complaining about not being allowed into the Chogos Islands, a group of seven atolls comprising more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean about 500 kilometres south of the Maldives archipelago. (From 1715 to 1810 the Chagos Islands “belonged” to France, and then in 1814 they were ceded to the United Kingdom. It’s delightful how we sort of passed places around from one country to another in the past. Mind you, some people would like to continue doing that.)

Mr Farage planned to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius. “The British government,” he claimed, “are applying pressure on the president and the government of theMaldives to do everything within their power to stop me getting on that boat and going to thethe Maldives Chagos Islands.”

Unfortunately you need a permit to go there - not just Mr Farage - but anyone and he didn’t tell to government that he planned to go there. He really should not take it as a personal insult. 

But it gives him something to gripe about, which is perhaps better than working in his constituency!

I went into Manchester this morning to go to the hairdresser’s. It was very dull and grey when I set off but the sun came out later and it turned into a fine day. I thought that while I was in Manchester I might visit the Whitworth Art Gallery , in support of keeping galleries open and free, but by the time I had run a few errands I sort of ran out of energy.

My plan to go to the art gallery was the consequence of reading this article about the National Gallery which is having some financial difficulty. Numbers of visitors are down, never having really recovered from Covid when nobody went anywhere. But as admission to the main gallery if free, that’s not the main cause. It needs more government help and more sponsorship. Selling tickets to special exhibition doesn’t cover it. We need to protect our culture. I’m saying nothing about the amounts spent on weapons of war! 

I need to go to more art exhibitions! So does everyone else. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Spring flowers. Muddy paths and potholed roads. Traffic control measure. And M&S underwear.

Spring is definitely round the corner. There are crocuses all over the place. 

The footpaths are still very muddy. There’s one stretch that’s not really a footpath but an actual road leading to a row of terraced houses. It’s full of deep potholes that have been full of water for what seems like months. I really don’t know how the residents of the houses stand it, especially the one who has a large ‘dog-grooming’ van. In fact, I think the residents need to ‘adopt’ the stretch of road and have it properly surfaced, after which the local council will take responsibility for it. At least, that’s what we did when we live in an out of the way terrace in the valley between Delph and Denshaw.

On many of the actual main roads around here they have installed speed bumps / sleeping policemen to make drivers slow down, but not on our road which is the A62, at one time the main thoroughfare for going to Yorkshire, still used as a run-off road if the M62 is closed. The speed bumps are quite fierce, as I have commented in previous blogposts. In Mumbai, according to this article, they have installed a section of “musical road” on the Coastal Road expressway. If drivers keep to the reduced speed limit it “plays” a well known tune. Drivers who exceed the speed limit are subjected to a less musical, more unpleasant vibration. Local residents are not happy and want the “music” to stop.

Recently I have taken to “shopping the wardrobe”, as my daughter calls it: rooting out some item of clothing I have not worn for years. Some styles have come around again in the time these items of clothing have been locked away. Not locked away but equally vintage as some of my other clothes is underwear. Now, this morning Guardian columnist Emma Beddington wrote about having been advised that your knickers should be changed every 6 months - not changed as in ‘clean knickers every day’ but thrown away and replaced with now ones. Apparently even regular washing will not completely remove all the bacteria and such like, so we should throw them out. “It’s a horrifying thought,” says Ms Beddington, “given I’ve got pants dating back to 1995”. Quite so! Mine too! It sounds like another ploy to make us spend more money. Not quite built in obsolescence but long-life bacteria.

Having read all this, she claims to have headed to M&S, the best place for underwear; even the super-stylish French have been known to compliment M&S on the quality of its undies. But Ms Beddington had this complaint:

 

“I was unable to identify the pants I used to buy back in the day, and instead faced a baffling onslaught of fabrics and proprietary names: Flexifit Modal Thongs, Boston Microfibre No VPL High Rise Shorts, ContourWear No VPL Brazilian Knickers and SmoothEase Invisible Comfort Shorts. I was reduced to wandering around, sadly whispering: “I just want a multipack of plain black cotton pants.” And yes, I know how old this makes me sound – even older than my pants.”

Maybe Manchester ladies are more demanding of stores stocking what they want and need that London ones but I have never had difficulty finding a pack of 5 standard cotton knickers. And it must be said that M&S is the best place to find men’s standard Y-Front underpants, although, as with the ladies’ knickers, there is a disturbing amount of choice of styles of gent’s undies!

I’m going to Manchester tomorrow so I’ll check out the undies situation nowadays.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Weather differences. Artistic activities. Watching the Winter Olympics. Wuthering Heights.

My daughter, various grandchildren and I left Buckinghamshire this morning in the rain. Oddly enough, the further north we progressed the more the weather improved. We had been unable to see more than a hundred yards beyond the edge of the road when we travelled south on Thursday, all scenery obliterated by low cloud. Coming back our landscapes were restored.

The main reason for our going south was to celebrate the 12th birthday of Granddaughter Number Three. We were actually more than a week late in celebrating because all the younger grandchildren have to go to school and we had to wait for the half term holiday. He birthday banners remained in place.

Among the various activities we organised was decorating T-shirts. The children coloured them in to their own designs. Once ironed the T-shirts retained the colour. So they sat and coloured while I read them a story. 

Grandson Number Two insisted on a dragon design on his, with the message “DRAGONS ARE AWESOME” on the back. 

We watched a bit of awesome figure skating in the Winter Olympics. My son’s cat also enjoyed the skiing, occasionally trying to catch a figure off the screen.

And here is a cartoon about curling, now that the fuss is over and done with.

 

Much fuss has been made about the latest film version of Wuthering Heights. In an odd twist on the arguments about which actors can play which roles (disabled roles to be played by disabled actors, Irish or Scottish roles to be played by Irish or Scottish actors, gay and lesbian roles by gay and lesbian actors and so on) this article protests that the leading roles, Yorkshire people, were not played by Yorkshire actors. This is an argument which will go on and on. I’ve not seen the new film but from the photos I have seen, Cathy seems to have grown from a teenager to a rather older, more mature woman, which seems odd. I really shouldn’t criticise without watching the film.

Anyway, here’s a cartoon about the making of the film.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Swans. Sagrada Familia. ICE. And a bit of Michael Rosen.

This morning we walked into the centre of Chesham, where they have a very superior Saturday market. When we took the small people up the hill to the park we saw swans on the lake. They are clearly last year’s goslings now grown up as they still had greyish-brown feathers on their wings. But still elegant!

I hear that they have put the final central tower on the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Everyone is very pleased. I’ve always liked that church. Jordi Faulí, the chief architect for the project, said: “It’s been a joyful day, wonderful for all the people who have made it possible.” A ceremony to mark the completion of the tower – the tallest of 18 conceived by Gaudí – is due to take place on the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 1926 on 10 June, 16 years after the church was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI.

I thought at first that this meant the church was finally finished but, no, they still have to do the south façade. This is the Glory façade, which is expected to take a further 10 years to complete. Is this the longest-lasting construction project ever.

Some people say it should have been blown up during the Civil War but it’s still there, a huge tourist attraction. The anarchists did, however, destroy Gaudí’s drawings and the plaster model, which years later was painstakingly reconstructed. Experts say that Gaudí’s geometry is so precise that should there be any deviation from his plan, the building would collapse.

Over in the USA ICE continues its nasty business. Even tourists are t risk. Just in case you think it couldn’t happen to you, here’s a link to an article about the experience of an Englishwoman in the USA. 

And for the first time in a long time here is one of Michael Rosen’s posts as his alter ego, Boris:

 

Dear Mogg

As King Lear says, 'The world is too much with us, Horatio, and I have miles to go before I sleep.' Let us not put pen to paper on all our thoughts about events of which we shall not speak. We can only hope 'twill always be a green and peasant land.

Septic gortex

Boris

Life goes on. Stay self and well, everyone!