Pigeons and hobby horses!

Recently our smallest grandchild was very cross when a pigeon poohed on his arm. If anything he was more cross at the fact that everyone found the incident amusing. I can sympathise with him. A long time ago now I had the same experience while standing in the shade on a hot street in Florence. As I quite loudly expressed my disgust, laughing Florentines assured me that it was lucky: “Porta fortuna, signora, porta fortuna!” It may very well bring you good fortune but it doesn’t feel like it when hot pigeon poop lands on your arm! 

Personally I find pigeons quite objectionable whether they use you as a toilet or not. In town centres in particular they have a way of swooping down or taking off just in front of you, causing me to flinch every time it happens. And I’ve seen others ducking to avoid them as well, although I’ve never yet seen one collide with a person. 

I read the other day that London has the largest pigeon population in the country with 3 million pigeons. I sometimes think Manchester must have close to that. People often talk about “breeding like rabbits” but maybe “breeding like pigeons” would be more appropriate. Various attempts have been made to reduce their numbers. Ken Livingstone had a go in and around Trafalgar Square in the early 2000s and Northern Trains employed pest control experts to shoot pigeons in Manchester’s Victoria Station last year - the Manchester Victoria Pigeon Massacre. Neither was very successful. Both provoked accusations of animal cruelty from pigeon lovers. Yes, they do exist!

One solution offered comes from the National Pigeon Advocacy Association (NPAA) and its president, Sue Joyce (AKA Sue the Pigeon Lady):

“She has a vision of an avian utopia where the pigeon “problem” is solved for good.

The vision looks like this: in an empty council flat above a Boots, Sainsbury’s or Greggs, in each of the UK’s major cities, a haven for feral pigeons is constructed. Rows of shelving mimic the look of a cliff’s edge, the habitat where pigeons lived before humans domesticated them. The shelves contain side-by-side plywood roosting boxes for the birds. No need for twigs or shredded paper – pigeons aren’t fancy – just a steady food supply to keep them coming back.

Every few days, a volunteer stops by to replace recently fertilised eggs – which they will then destroy – with plastic ones. The pigeons will continue to sit on the decoy eggs until they realise hatching is unlikely, at which point they’ll kick them out of their nests and try again. Fewer squabs are born, and the mother pigeons are none the wiser. Over time the pigeon flock decreases to a manageable size, for which there is plenty of appropriate food to go around. The townspeople are happy. Their parks are no longer overrun. No more pigeons need to be shot, trapped, poisoned, starved or hunted by hawks.”

Okay! It could even provide employment for somebody. 

One day last week, out for a stroll, I saw a child with a hobby horse. You know the kind of thing: a horse’s head, with bridle and reins, on a stick which has a wheel attached; child straddles the stick and pretends to be riding a horse. The one I saw only seemed to have the horse’s head but she looked quite happy with it. I didn’t think hobby horses were still a thing. Then I saw this report:

“FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Germany’s first hobby horsing championship got underway in Frankfurt on Saturday, with hundreds of young riders competing in time jumping, style jumping and dressage on their wooden stick horses.

Roughly 300 riders — mostly youngsters, but there are about 20 adults enrolled — are expected to canter around a gymnasium Saturday and Sunday, watched by 1,500 spectators. The competition is part of a growing wave of hobby horsing events internationally: the United States and Australia also held their first championships this year.

“Hobby horsing just gives me self-confidence and I just enjoy doing it with other people,” said Max Gohde, a 15-year-old competitor from Gifhorn, Germany, who has been practicing since 2020. “And now there’s also this atmosphere here, where everyone is just happy for you. And I think that’s just really cool.”

The events stemmed from a grassroots movement in Finland, where riders trotted their hobby horses through Nordic forests more than 20 years ago. The pastime has since exploded in popularity through social media during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and it has been credited with highlighting female empowerment for the enthusiasts.”

Well! Who knew that such events took place? But there it is!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Getting check-ups. Eating disorders. And ways of eating pineapple.

 Today I’ve had an eye test and Phil has been to the dentist for a check-up. Hurrah for free treatment on the NHS - well, almost free, we do pay for dental services and I pid something to have an extra test at the opticians. But on the whole, hurrah for the NHS. We must do our best to maintain it.

We popped into Holland and Barrett, the health food store. I had a voucher offering me 20% off, a voucher given to me by their store in Manchester. The people in the Oldham branch scrutinised it carefully before accepting that it was genuine. Do people really turn up with forged vouchers? I wonder.

I came across new terminology for eating disorders today. First here is orthorexia, according to experts an anxious preoccupation with the safety and purity of food. (I thought of that again as Phil scrutinised the label on a jar of honey in H & B!) apparently the term “orthorexia nervosa” was coined in 1997 by an integrative physician named Steven Bratman, who was seeing a lot of obsessive thinking about food and nutrition in his patients. 

As long ago as 1997! 

Mind you, long before that we were macrobiotic vegetarians, members of a whole-food cooperative, bulk buying brown rice, wholemeal flour, various beans and pulses. We moved on from that long ago but still I don’t eat red meat and try to avoid over-processed food. According to dieticians, being mindful about food isn’t inherently disordered – many people want to eat healthily. By contrast, orthorexia can be defined as an obsessive and extreme fixation on food, like purity of food, healthfulness of food, cleanliness. 

There you go. And then there’s chemophobia, an irrational, broad distrust of chemicals based in misinformation. “Based on misinformation’! It’s become a standard “joke” that people dismiss the opinions of medical practitioners who have studied for years and years in favour of something theybfound on the internet! So it goes.

The thing is I know a number of people who could be diagnosed with orthorexia and chemophobia! Such is the modern world!

I read an article by Emma Beddington in the Guardian, all about trying to eat pineapple without using a knife. Quite why anyone would choose to do that is beyond me. Her reasoning was as follows: 

“I’m trying to  ‘touch grass“ more these days, to embrace embodied experiences and introduce analogue “friction” – and fun! – into my life.

So what does “touch grass” even mean? According to the internet, “Touch grass means to spend time outside in nature or engage in real-world activities, especially as a break from the internet or online interactions. It is often used to suggest that someone needs to reconnect with reality.”

So eating pineapple with pout a knife and getting all messy in the process is a way of “reconnecting with reality”? Who knew?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Pictures of war. Green cards. Freedom of speech everywhere.

 Not long ago I wrote about Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Today I read about another artist who depicted scenes from the Spanish Civil War, José Luis Rey Vila, who went by name of Sim, a name chosen in tribute to his friend the philosopher Simone Weil. There’s an exhibition of his work in Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d’art de Catalunya from May to December. 

He was born in Cádiz and studied art in Gibraltar. His experience as a navy gunner in Spain’s Rif war in Morocco persuaded him to become a pacifist. He moved to Barcelona where he began work as a graphic artist. Then in July 1936 Franco staged his military coup from north Africa and the Spanish Civil War started. And as fighting began in the streets of Barcelona he began to make pictures of the conflict.

The anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo/Federación Anarquista Ibérica) propaganda office published his work in a book called Estampas de la Revolución Española 19 Julio de 1936. The next year, the government of Catalonia published 12 Escenas de Guerra. Some of his work made it to Canada, the USA, even China.

In 1937 he went to France where he helped with the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition, where Picasso”s Guernica was displayed. He never returned to Spain but continued making images of chaos, such as the Nazi invasion of Paris and much later the upheavals in that city in the Events of May 1968. He died in Paris in 1983.

Here are some of his illustrations of the Spanish Civil War.

There was a time, not too long ago when we hoped that conflicts like the Spanish Civil War and repressive regimes like Franco’s were a thing of the past. Not so! And more and more it seems that our much vaunted free speech is becoming a thing of the past. Arwa Mahdawi, a British-Palestinian, the Guardian US correspondent writes that applying for a green card may be difficult for those who have openly criticised the US government or Israel’s actions in Palestine. “One example cited by the New York Times of speech that could cause problems with obtaining a green card, for example, is a social media post that says: “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out. Participating in pro-Palestinian protests would also count against you.”

Arwa Mahdawi also tells of actions against immigrants (there’s ICE again - and immigration officers are known as Homeland Defenders! ) such as Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, on a US student visa, who made headlines last year when she was snatched off the streets of by masked immigration officers and detained for the “crime” of co-writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper. 

Brian Hauss, deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union told Arwa Mahdawi in a statement:

“The Supreme Court has recognized for 80 years that noncitizens residing in this country have First Amendment rights, including the right not to be discriminated against for your beliefs. While the administration currently seeks to penalize flag desecration or speech about Israel-Palestine, there is no telling what political opinions it will try to censor in the future. We should all be concerned about the government’s abuse of the immigration system to suppress dissent.”

Just in case you think it’s not happening here, reflect on the Palestine Action court cases, the proposal to ban pro-Palestine demonstrations and the furore caused by Zack Polanski daring to criticise police action. 

Here, by the way, is a link to the article by Arwa Mahdawi.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The return of the puddles! Some thoughts on the benefits of being older. Foreigners. And Banksy.

It took a couple of weeks of dry and sometimes sunny, sometimes even hot weather for the bridle paths to dry out. It took one night of rain for a fair few of the puddles to return, not quite to their former muddy glory, but definitely making a comeback. I went to sleep last night to the sound of rain on the roof, quite a soothing sound, and this morning I ran in drizzle. The sun has tried to come out but it’s not been very successful so far.

Occasionally, when lunching with old friends, I reflect on how fortunate we are to be able to enjoy our old age - trying hard not to become the kind of old folk who begin their conversations by swapping lists of their various ailments, aches and pains, medications and so on. According to this article a comfortable retirement may become a thing of the past. Not that it is all that comfortable for quite a lot of people my age: people whose employment didn’t have a decent pension scheme, or women who were persuaded at some point that it was a good idea to pay only half the National Insurance payment. I just checked that last online, in case I had misremembered. Until 1977 it was possible for married women to pay a reduced rate. Some who opted to do so may have continued to pay what they called the “small stamp”, even after the scheme ended. As a consequence they may be in receipt of a reduced state pension. 

Here’s an extract from the article I linked to above: 

“Retirement in Britain has a surprisingly short history, underpinned by dramatic improvements in older people’s quality of life over the past 50 years. Large public and private bureaucracies first started to enrol long-serving employees into pension schemes from the mid-19th century. In 1909, Britain was the first country to pioneer an old age pension, funded by the state and targeting the poorest, who could claim it from the age of 70. But it was only after the second world war that a period of leisured old age become an ordinary expectation for most British workers.”

Presumably before there were pensions old people had to depend on the kindness of their family or ended up, like an old couple described by Laurie Lee in Cider with Rosie, in the grimness of the workhouse. It is interesting that when the old age pension was first introduced it could be claimed at the age of 70. Things improved. I was able to receive mine at the age 60, feeling rather guilty as I was still in full-time employment. Similarly, I received my first free bus pass at 60. Now, however, the qualifying age for both the state pension and the free bus pass has been gradually increasing.

Here’s a comment on attitudes towards foreigners/ refugees/asylum seekers, a response to something Mr Farage said:

And here’s a picture of a Banksy statue, with annotations. I wasn’t aware he did statues. And how did he manage to erect it overnight?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Meeting old friends. Thinking about justice and equality and modern society. And Maypoles,

 Yesterday I went out to lunch with some old friends and former colleagues. We sat outside a pizza place on King Street in Manchester and talked about anything and everything for hours, quite literally for hours!  We’ve been meeting every few months for at least a couple of years now, probably more. Yesterday one of our number brought along an even older friend and former colleague, someone I’d not seen for years and years. Such a nice gesture to organise a reunion.

This older friend and former colleague has been volunteering for a long time now with an asylum seekers support group. Among other things she provides tuition in basic English or on how to improve your basic English. And on Tuesday she is going to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace, where she could well meet the king! She was amused/perplexed/mildly annoyed when the official ticket arrived inviting Mr ….. ….. andMrs ….. ….. to the palace. As she was the one invited and her husband purely her significant other, why does protocol put his name above hers?

Her asylum seekers support group has premises in her town centre. When they started up years ago they had a board outside the door, saying who they were inviting those in need to drop in. Now they no longer set the board up for fear of repercussions. There have been threats of violence. A sign of the times we live in!

Phil and I have been been watching on Netflix ‘The Man in the High Castle’, a series based on a story by Philip K Dick: the story of a world in which Germany and Japan win the second world war. The United States is now divided into two section: the German Reich and the Japanese Empire. There is a resistance movement but in general in both sections people live in fear of offending the ruling regime. Reprisals are violent in both regimes.

And suddenly we are moving towards a similar situation in this country. A clearly mentally ill man stabbed three people in London, two Jews and a Moslem. The news headlines only reported the attack on the two Jews and the incident was treated as terrorism and antisemitism. When the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, criticised police treatment of the man arrested for the attack - tasered and immobilised on the ground he was kicked by the police - he was himself criticised for those comments. Our prime minister said the Zack Polanski was not fit to be the leader of one of our political parties (!). Eventually Zack Polanski was persuaded to apologise for his comments (!).

The fact remains that we permit our police to use brutal treatment on a man already immobilised, then we are as guilty of wrongful violence as the perpetrator. We bring ourselves down to his level!

Then there’s the matter of the senior KC representing one of the Palestine Action activists in the Filton trial who now finds himself accused of contempt of course because his defence of his client mentioned things like genocide in Gaza. Here is a link to Craig Murray’s blogpost 

Are even barristers to be told what they can and cannot say in defence of clients? Are they going to have be afraid of losing their professional status for defending certain causes?

It seems that we too live in an alternative reality!

Another Green Party MP coming in for criticism and abuse is Hannah Spencer, plumber turned MP. She objected to the drinking culture in the Houses of Parliament, pointing out that in most other fields of work it is not accepted that you drink on the job. What a storm of criticism came her way! Here is a little of what columnist John Crace has to say in her defence: 

“My sympathies are entirely with Spencer. Though you might call me a puritan as well, having not taken drugs or drunk alcohol for over 39 years. But serving as an MP is a privilege and a responsibility. They are representatives of our democracy. Almost everyone else doesn’t get to drink at work, so surely MPs can also do without.”

He goes on:

“Though it seems that some journalists can’t. When the gunman tried to kill the president at the White House correspondents dinner last weekend, most people ducked under the table and left when told by secret service agents. But not all. Several hacks were seen grabbing bottles of wine. Altogether 179 bottles went missing. At $76 (£56) a pop.”

Still on legal matters, but in a possibly less serious vein - depending on your attitude to dogs - I read that Luca Salvetti, mayormof the Italian city of Livorno has decreed that dog owners should carry water bottles and sprayers to clean up their dogs’ urine. It seems that residents complained about the smell of dog urine, particularly in parks and children’s play areas. Failure to clean up the pee could result in a fine of €500.

Funnily enough, on our recent trip to Gran Canaria I repeatedly saw dog owners pausing to spray the bit of pavement where their dog had peed. I was impressed. A step further than putting your pooches’ poop in a plastic bag and hopefully taking it home to a bin rather than hanging it in a tree. Hurrah!

And finally, here are a couple of photos of maypoles:

May Day, Bridson Street, Weaste, Salford.  Photo

“We come to greet you here today,

And we hope you will not turn us away,

For we dance and sing in a merry ring,

On this Maypole Day.”

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

May Day .

 Tomorrow is the 1st of May, May Day. We don’t celebrate May Day in this country. Instead we have a bank holiday on the first Monday in May - much tidier!

According to tradition, Celtic tradition, we should begin celebrating May Day this evening: After celebrations on May Eve (April 30th), women would go out in the woods to collect May, other flowering plants. They would wash their faces in May Dew preferable from the leaves of Hawthorn. If not from beneath an oak tree, or from a new-made grave. The dew was said to improve their complexion. It was also used for medical conditions such as gout and weak eyes. Thinking of one’s lover on May Day might bring marriage within the year.”

It all gets mixed up with Midsummer’s Night and the Feast of St John (24th of June), when bonfires are lit on Spanish beaches and crazy people leapmlver thme to find out the imitial of the person they will marry. I was once advised to collect certain wild flowers on St John’s eve, stand them in water and then use the water to wash my face at dawn. This too was supposed to  be good for the complexion. I declined to wash my face with flower water! I survived as did my complexion.

Apparently the celebrations begin on May Eve because the Celtic calendar starts the day at Dusk. This seems strange to us who, perversely, ‘start’ our day at Midnight just after everyone has gone to bed! The other choice, and maybe the most logical is Dawn. But Dawn and Dusk are difficult to fix. Midnight was chosen by Julius Caesar when he created the Julian Calendar. Midnight has the virtue of being a fixed metric, being half way between Dawn and Dusk. From the Celtic point of view, the day ends when the Sun goes down over the western horizon. So the end of the old day, is the beginning of the new day. Makes sense?

Then ln May Day morning people danced round the maypole, erected a few day previously and repainted and decked with ribbons and garlands made mainly from hawthorn, usually having been stored all year in the church. 

If they managed to make garlands of hawthorn blossom the  they were doing well in my opinion as the hawthorn blossom (may blossom) doesn’t come out here until late May. Some in the church took against it and banned the maypole as it smacked of idolatry. Shocking!

Now, here’s a link to an article about British-Jamaican DJ, artist and educator, Linett Kamala, who adapted maypole dancing to more modern music.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!