A little rant about advent calendars … already! Reporting demonstrations. Zack Polanski. French schoolkids.

 I don’t know how many days there are until Christmas but already adverts for advent calendars abound. Time was advent calendars were paper affairs with a little door to open each day in December, each one revealing a tiny Christmas related scene. Such innocent times they were when children could take delight in looking at a different picture each day! Everyone wants more than that nowadays

By the time I had children of my own it was quite difficult to find such innocent advent calendars. The shops became full of advent calendars with a chocolate behind each numbered door. I suppose it taught children to defer their satisfaction, learning to be disciplined to one small chocolate each day. Hmm!

Now you can buy Body Shop advent calendars, Boots Number Seven advent calendars and other similarly expensive collections of beauty products to be discovered day by day. Or you can buy jewellery-related advent calendars, each day presenting the lucky recipient with a ring or a pendant or maybe a series of charms to be added each day to a charm bracelet. 

What do these lucky recipients expect to receive on Christmas day? I wonder!

The adverts I have seen have all been intended as gifts for women. Are there similar advent calendars to men: pairs of socks? Mini DIY tools? Sample bottles of aftershave? But, of course, nowadays there are probably some featuring all kinds pf male beauty products too.

I confess to recently ordering on line one that features miniature camper vans. My daughter has a close friend who is crazy about VW camper vans and whose birthday is this month. It was one of those “I saw this and thought of you” moments. Now I need to deliver the present.

All of this nonsense has been prompted by my reading about Meghan Markle’s new advent calendar, which apparently costs £112! All credit to this not-quite member of the royal family for finding another way of earning some money but ai don’t know that she’s doing much to contribute to the economy of the country she and Harry have now chosen to live in. 

The “As Ever”ww calendar contains chocolates made by a Los Angeles chocolatier called Compartés - “The world's best chocolate, handmade in Los Angeles since 1950. Shop designer gifts, award-winning truffles, and gourmet chocolate bars in luxury packaging”. In this case I read that the chocolates are “thoughtfully inspired” by the garden of the duchess’s Montecito home. Maybe she’s not lived long enough in the Cotswolds to be inspired by English flora. 

Flavours apparently include strawberry, raspberry, blackberry and orange marmalade, with another finished in Meghan’s flower sprinkles. What a clever duchess, making her own flower sprinkles. Here’s to best thing: each comes numbered in her own handwriting, painted on in edible gold lustre. It must take a lot of practice writing your own distinctive numbering using an icing funnel! 

Really? What nonsense! But I bey some people will buy them and somehow preserve them for posterity. They’ll probably be worth more than £112 to collectors in fifty years time!

Now for more serious stuff.

There was a huge pro-Palestine demonstration in London yesterday but there has been very little about it in the mainstream media. maybe it was covered in the television news yesterday evening but I no longer watch the television news. Such mainstream media as I have seen reports thousands marching, as apposed to the tens of thousands reported on social media.

Zack Polanski, aka the Jewish antisemite according to some, is gallantly standing up for his party’s declaring zionism to be racism and he is fighting off calls cor him to resign as the Green Party leader . Don’t give in, Zack Polanski!

Just in case we were thinking that the current, often violent,  demonstrations by lycéens (high school students) in France was a new or recent phenomenon, here’s a link to an article about primary schools being trashed by young teenagers. Thirteen- and fourteen-year olds pay a visit to their former primary schools and wreck them. 

One explanation offered is that the summer holidays are too long, about eight weeks worth of freedom for school kids. Another is that “dares” are put out on social media. Somehow being filmed trashing a school is not quite the same as the “ice challenge”, where you are filmed having a bucket of ice-cold water poured over your head!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

How to greet people. Revolting (or not) students. A bit of sweet nostalgia. And the price of chips.

 Out and about, I greet just about everyone whose paths I cross. I usually say a cheery “good morning” but there are other possibilities. Just as in the past people used to greet each other with a polite “How d’you do?”, to which the correct response was a nod and “How d’you do?” nowadays the question is “You okay?” to which the standard response should be “Good, thanks. You?”.  Here’s a sideways look at that greeting, and incidentally at passport control.

As French students continue to cause havoc - not just university students but high school students - some people have been asking why British students are so reluctant to get out on the street. The writer of this article suggests that maybe we are failing to teach our young people the history of protest in this country. In France by contrast they get to study not just the French Revolution of 1789 but also the Events of May 1968.

There seems to have been a study about sugar and its consumption, suggesting that those of us born in the post World War II years are on some ways healthier than those who came after us.

“Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid- to later life: those exposed throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.

Here’s a link to the article about it. I find the adverts for Mars Bars particularly interesting.

Now, I am old enough to remember playing with ration books once they were no longer needed. I also remember receiving 3d (three old pence - if 5p is more or less a shilling (1/20 of a pound) then 3d approximately 1.25 pence) each week for pocket money. My older sister and I were allowed to go to the local sweetshop and buy our sweets for the week. You could splurge the lot on a barleysugar stick, which would get stickier as the week went on, or a packet of Rowntrees fruit gums, longer lasting than the softer and chewier fruit pastilles. Or you could ask the shopkeeper to weight for you 2 ounces of things like pear drops or mint imperials. Alternatively you could get separate pennyworths of chews of some sort usually sold 5 for a penny or 10 for a penny. And we had to make whatever we chose last the week. There was perhaps less choice of sweet stuff and nobody had ever heard of Haribo!

Still on a bit of nostalgia about the price of things, there is an expression that people used to use about something being good value for money: Cheap as chips! Perhaps people still use it but it’s no longer really true. Fish and chips used to be cheap alternative family meal, a good way to eat out if you’d been on a family excursion, but also a bit of a treat if you rushed them home and saved the bother of cooking a meal for the family. In our youth if we had been on a night out to the cinema or wherever, it was fairly common practice to buy ‘six of chips’ to eat from the paper as you walked home - 6d (six old pence) worth of chips. According to this article all of that is now a thing of the past. Fish and chips is no longer a cheap alternative family meal - the fish is more expensive, even the potatoes are more expensive. And you can no longer wrap the chips in old newspapers!

But we do still enjoy the treat of a chippy tea!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain - lots of it. Violence here and there!

 So much for crisp, sunny autumn days, such as we have had for most of the last week. The weather turned in the early evening yesterday and I think it  rained all night and well into this morning. It rained sp hard at one point in the late morning that it demolished the gazebo that the next door neighbours erected during the heatwave, one of those tent-like affairs never intended to be permanent but which has remained there for months now, providing shade on sunny days and shelter under which to hang washing on days when it threatened to rain. Maybe this collapse under the torrential downpour is a sign that we must all accept that autumn is well and truly upon us and that winter is on its way! 

Having said all that, the rain now appears to have stopped (it’s midday) and there is even some blue sky to be seen below the clouds. The forecast is not good, however. We shall see!

We’ve been watching an American series on television, “Marshals”, a spin-off from a number of series about the trials and tribulations of the Dutton family and their ranch. Once again we have been amazed at the levels of gun-violence. A businessman, thwarted in the deal he has tried to negotiate, is able to mount a whole war against the rancher whose land he craves. Bodies are strewn all over the place, buildings and vehicles are trashed, supposedly traumatised people, one of them still a teenager, people you might expect to need counselling, take it in their stride and move on to the next problem. Do people really live like this? Is the Wild West really still so wild?

Then I look at news items. First there is the case of Christa Pike whose execution failed to work. Apparently it’s not the first time a lethal injection has failed to work, something to do with difficulty of finding suitable veins. It all sounds quite barbaric. And it seems she expected this to happen and asked to be executed by hanging instead: request denied. She was 19 when she committed her crime and is now 50, so she’s had time to research execution methods! Good grief!

Then today I read that Pentagon secretary Pete Hegseth has proposed that the execution of a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, should be live-streamed so that it can be a public event. “It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

This is the 21st century! One of the most powerful countries in the supposedly free world is giving examples of barbaric behaviour? 

Here’s a more light-hearted look at violence.

Mind you, we’ve also been watching the latest series of “Slow Horses” and there’s an awful lot of shooting and killing going on in that version of London. So far, however, nobody seems to have huge great machine guns!

And in France, student riots and disturbances continue, with fairly traditional stone throwing in some cases. Here are a couple of France related cartoons: 

I’m glad to live in a reasonably quiet place, where a collapsing gazebo is our only problem.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reactions to the weather. Memorable nostalgia key. Trees. Spain’s housing crisis. And word.

4° - that’s the temperature given by the weather app on my phone at about 8.00 this morning. It proved to be a beautifully crisp morning.

Granddaughter Number Two had already expressed her opinion of this; “I am loving the chill in the air this morning! Finally feels like autumn.” She was up even earlier, on a train to York at 7.00, taking pictures of the sunrise. 

She is definitely a glass-half-full person, whereas her older sister, more of a glass-half-empty person, was just complaining about how cold it was. 

Firther to my comments yesterday about people purchasing relics/mementos of the rich and famous, here is a photo of a key.

This is the key to Paul McCartney’s childhood home in Liverpool. It has just sold at auction for £6,100, three times the pre-sale estimate! I assume that the current occupants of that house have a different lock on the door. The just sold key has apparently been owned by Beatles fan Kathy Salt from New York for decades. If she has had it for decades, presumably she is now of an age when she feels like getting rid of some clutter and maybe needs a bit of extra cash in her retirement. Good for her!

Now, I love trees. I have a favourite local tree, a horse chestnut, much photographed. This year I have been taking a picture at the start of each month, with the plan to display all the photos, showing its progress over the year. 

So here is a photo of an Irish tree, this one a wych elm, 150 years old, blown sideways as a young tree and continuing to grow sideways since then. It has just been named “tree of the year”.

My friend Colin in Galicia has been commenting in his blog (here’s a link) about the ongoing housing crisis in Spain and the demonstrations taking place in many places. This morning I read that María del Carmen Abascal, known on the media as Maricarmen, the old lady evicted from the flat where she had lived for 70+ years, the lady who became a symbol of the crisis and the protests, has died in hospital at the age of 87. I read that she was sending messages of support to the protesters.  “I would like to be there with you all,” she said in a video shot from her hospital bed. “But I’m not that lucky. So from here, I ask you all for courage and to fight and defend what is yours.” A strong woman!

For some light relief, here’s something a friend of mine posted on social media ;

“We’ll take this to the energy zone.”

“Let’s triangle back on that,”

“Put that in the idea fridge.”

No-one reacted. Everyone just nidded like it was completely normal. I figured it was some corporate lingo I missed.

Day two, I hear: “We’ll verticalize that bandwidth”.

I write it down to google later. Nothing. 

By day three, I’m starting to use them too. “Yeah, we should put that in the idea fridge”. People nodded. i felt included.

Friday rolls around. He pulls me to one side and goes;

“I’m making them all up.  No one knows what they mean”. 

HE GOT THE ENTIRE TEAM TALKING NONSENSE. Even the manager threw out “triangle back” in a call.

Now the whole office is trapped in fake jargon with no way out.

I respect it. I fear it.

Well, they say that if a lie is repeated often enough it is accepted as truth. Clearly the same applies to spoof expressions.

Life goes ln. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Collecting relics. Being a butter expert. Nostalgia for the vegetables of yesteryear.

It’s another of those days that began dull, gradually improved and was bright and sunny by midday! A person could get used to such a weather pattern!

For those who want to collect stuff that belonged to the rich and famous (a bit like collecting relics of the saints) there is news of stuff on the market. There is the James Bond suit worn by Sean Connery and the axe wielded by Jack Nichilson in The Shining, both up for auction. Where would you display such wonders? A huge axe over fireplace?! And today I have read that a Bentley believed to have been owned by a certain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has gone for sale at a Doncaster dealership for just under £125,000. 

There you go! Stuff to spend your money on.

I also read that Mr Mountbatten Windsor has accused Thames Valley Police of taking personal items during searches of his home. Goodness! How shocking! If true, maybe the policemen concerned were thinking of possible resale value at future auctions.

I suppose people have always wanted to possess something hat links them to famous people but something you pay vast amounts of money for surely is not the dame as a personalised autograph of someone you admire.

  

Here’s another oddity of the modern world: Specialist butter!?!? According to this article butter is more popular now than ever it has been. People queue up outside a specialist butter shop in Paris apparently. Coincidentally, we have been watching a series of programmes featuring Stanley Tucci travelling around   Italy discovering things about Italian cooking. In one part of Italy - which one ai don’t remember - they use huge amounts of butter for cooking. No olive oil for them. 

I suppose there are people who savour a little slice of butter on its own, able to recognise the vintage, just as there are people who like to ”drink” samples of olive oil to savour its vintage. I must be too much of a Philistine to do that, although I do like to use extra virgin olive oil for cooking.

The article features at one point a South African journalist, Sofia Patel, who describbes herself as a “butter horader” with selarate categories of butter’ cooking butterm eating butter and “ornamental butter”, the stuff thatvis too precious to eat. In the last category is a half pack of Kerrygold from 2019, frozen ever since. “I have it partly as insurance, in case I run out. But also because it’s reassuring – it reminds me of a different time,” she says. She loves her work but her dream job is to run a dairy farm. “Or at least go to Paris, to that shop, and eat all that butter.” 

Now, recently Phil was doing one of his regular research projects into what we should or shouldn’t eat and decided that the very best butter to buy is Kerrygold! What a coincidence!

Since we seem to have moved onto food concerns, here’s something else I found this morning:

“The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.

The report, from researchers at Deep Science Ventures, found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food in the 1960s.

The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.

Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.

“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”

The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.”

So much for “five a day”!

Now we can get nostalgic for the vegetables of our childhood too, 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Silly weather. Communication within the NHS. Tourism problems. How to be a qualified influencer. French students.

So we’re almost a whole week into October. We sometimes have several seasons in one day. It’s often a bit dull early in the morning (well, at an hour which is early for a slugabed like me). By midmorning the sun has tried to come out and the very air warms up. So today my washing is out to dry in the garden again). When the sun goes down later in the day, which it inexorably does a little earlier each day, the temperature plummets! So it goes.

This afternoon we are going to have flu vaccinations at our local pharmacy. Even though we have this organised I keep receiving texts from the NHS telling me I have a message from the GP’s surgery. As I have a routine appointment with my GP tomorrow I always open the message, going through all the routine annoying security checks, just in case my GP has some pressing reason to cancel or change my appointment. Every time I have done so the message has been  a reminder to make an appointment for a flu vaccination. Somehow the bits of the NHS do not talk to each other.

I have often commented on the problems of electric bikes and electric scooters in city centres. Well it seems that Rome has an extra one: golf carts! Some enterprising individuals have discovered that there is money to be made from giving tourists a ride round the city in a golf cart. Money to made from people too lazy to walk to the ancient sites, discovering interesting things to look at en route, or too frightened to venture into the public transport system. And other drivers are complaining that the roads are clogged up with these golf carts. The authorities are working out how to get things back under control!

We were talking about tourism-related problems in the Italian conversation class yesterday, specifically about people who don’t really look at paintings in galleries but just stand by a famous work of art and take a self - would be influencers! 

Well, it seems that you can study to be an influencer. I read that Nottingham Trent University has a degree in “content creation”, aka “the influencer degree”! The “three-year course comes with BA (Hons) status and a top-tier price tag of almost £10,000 a year, for which students will learn “hands-on technical production”, “analytics, branding and commercial strategy” and collaboration with brands and “industry partners”. Course leaders are at pains to point out it won’t turn them into overnight social media stars.” However, I’m sure that those who are shelling out a huge £30,000 are hoping to make the money back. The world is crazy! 

In France students, presumably not on “influencer” courses, are continuing to cause chaos, and brandishing reminders of revolutionary times past

Now, here’s a nice cartoon about RAF Fairford.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!