Losing Thursday again. Restoring whips. Taking the huff. Gaza comment and education comment.

Well, Thursday was kidnapped by grandchildren who arrived in time for breakfast and stayed until suppertime. Craft activities ensued, we had a picnic in the park, fun and games were had by all. But I never got round to writing, let alone posting, my blog. I barely got round to reading the news headlines. 

This morning I read that Diane Abbott has been readmitted as Labour MPs. A move to reestablish harmony in the party? There has been a lot of pressure to restore the whip to Diane Abbott, who was, after all, probably a member of the Labour Party before the current leader was born. 

Zack Polanski has come in for criticism for posting a picture on Instagram of a man with a t-shirt featuring a guillotine and the words ‘We’re only planning for Nigel” or something similar. Nigel Farage has been a bit cross about it. Here is Ben Jennings’ cartoon.on Nigel Farage’s anger at Zack Polanski’s Instagram:

I read also that something else upsetting Nigel Farage is the fact that Andy Burnham has asked Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey to discuss spcial care with him but hasn’t invited Mr Farage, whp seems to have forgotten that he is no longer actually an MP.

Here’s a little comment on Gaza.

And here’s something from Michael Rosen about children and books and testing.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Drought but not officially here in the NW. Wedding and fashion silliness. Annoying language. And some serious stuff about justice.

The Environment Agency says that half of England is officially in drought, with July set to be the driest on record after winter floods: East Anglia, Hertfordshire and the whole of London, Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, and Wessex (covering Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, and south Gloucestershire). 

So we can continue to water our plants here in the NorthWest. But our peat moors are still smouldering away and my water barrel is still almost empty., but the blackberries are beginning to ripen.

Skimming through an article about weddings I gleaned this bit of information: 

“former rugby player Danny Cipriani and his fiancee, the actor Annalynne McCord, launched a “tacky and distasteful” (as one source had it) crowdfunding page asking guests to help pay for their wedding. The total amount they are asking for is £10,660. It seems fair to say that their combined earnings considerably outstrip those of your average newlyweds.”

I can understand crowdfunding to pay for special medical treatment but for an overpriced wedding it is rather over the top. And surely there are better things to spend £10,660 on. 

The writer, who declares herself to be fairly traditional Irish Catholic, speculated about what her own wedding might be like and declared “the idea of being married in a humanist service by someone wearing, say, skinny jeans and a black T-shirt gives me willies.” 

Oh dear, I hate it when people get expressions slightly wrong; that should be “gives me THE willies”! It’s not quite as bad as all the Americans who say “I could care less” i stead of I could’t care less”, but even so …. Even the spellcheck tries to correct could to couldn’t! up!

 

Here’s some more silliness: extremely wide and extremely long trousers! A fashion trend by all accounts. Together with ridiculously high heeled shoes, they are causing women to end up at A&E with damaged knees and other injuries.the moral is: don’t wear anything that can trip you 

Now for some more serious stuff. More that fifty years ago the chilean folksinger and political activist, Victor Jara, was murdered in the coup that brought down Allende’s government. One of the soldiers responsible for his death, someone who has been ln the run, has now been imprisoned. 

The Víctor Jara Foundation, set up by his widow, the British dancer and activist Joan Jara, said in statement: “We learned that retired Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei, who had been a fugitive from justice since 2023, was found and imprisoned. We welcome this news.

“However, it is important for us to emphasize that, half a century after the murders of Víctor Jara and Littré Quiroga, it is difficult to see this as this justice.” Here’s a link to an article about it.

Life goes ln. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Doing lots of steps. My crazy Fitbit. And thinking about air conditioning.

According to my Fitbit, now getting rather old and unreliable in the battery department, I have taken 22,461 steps! Amazingly even when it’s telling me it has a flat battery, it keeps on counting my steps. It won’t speak to my phone app any longer. Weeks ago there was some kind of change in the system and for some reason the app thought I was a new Fitbit user. I gave up trying to connect properly. And then when it really did run out of battery I recharged it and now for some reason it tells the time 7 hours and about 10 minutes behind the actual time. It’s quite amusing really. And besides I now wear a plain old fashioned wristwatch as well.

Anyway, it seems I have 22,461 steps today. I jogged slowly round the village in the cool of the earlyish morning. Later our daughter and various offspring turned up with some stitching that needed doing. (She often brings repairs to our house for me to deal with!) This led to us going on a family stomp along the Donkey Line bridle path to the Lime Kiln cafe where refreshments were consumed. Our return journey was interrupted by a visit to the local garden centre where some of our number wanted to buy a small tree but was persuaded that we could not carry such a thing. 

This was followed by a stop at a playground. At that point Granddaughter Number Two and I decided to hop ln a bus that conveniently came along, leaving Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two playing in the park and then walking home. granddaughter Number Two and I made coffee ready for the arrival of the others.

At some point after coffee, and after I had done the aforementioned stitching, Phil suggested a walk round the millponds, as ha had not been out to stretch his legs. And off we went. Tht’s how I managed 22,461 steps.

Even though it was quite late in the afternoon, almost early evening, it was surprisingly hot. Is this the start of the next heatwave.

Here, by the way, is a Ben Jennings cartoon on southern Europe’s wildfires.

Here’s a link to an article about the Liberal Democrats stating that new homes being built now should all be equipped with air conditioning. British homes are not equipped for hot weather. Neither are we really prepared for the sort of life-style where people sit around outside in squares and on street corners socialising and trying to catch whatever cool breezes are around. I read recently that London is particularly badly prepared for hot weather - too much concrete and not enough trees! We are quite lucky, personally, to have an old house with a cool basement. And we have a relatively shady garden too. I”m pretty sure that building air conditioning into every new home - and adding air conditioning to existing houses - is not really going to help with the climate crisis. But something must be done, as our daughter keeps assuring me. And she should know as she spent the last few weeks of the summer term in an overheated classroom with insufficient ventilation while the heatwave continued outside. Expecting children to learn in overheated schools is counterproductive. As well as tackling the climate crisis, we need to adapt our way of life.

Between wildfires, fire-clouds, earthquakes and tsunamis, it seems that the world is protesting and punishing us for not looking after it better.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Tour winners. Fire clouds. What exactly is a terrorist? The importance of suits.

Well, the Tour de France is over for another year, ending as usual with a ride over the cobbles of Paris.

As expected Tadej Pogacar won. Only if he had fallen off his bike was there any possibility of his not winning. 

And so  he joins Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin as a five times winner of the Tour! Here’s a picture of Miguel Indurain, back in the days when they didn’t wear helmets - crazy cyclists who protested when helmets became obligatory! 

Tadej Pogacar did not win the final stage of the Tour though. The honour of winning the Paris stage went to Mathieu van de Poel. Tagej Pogacar came in second along with Isaac del Toro, who won the young riders’white jersey. 

Isaac del Toro beat France’s young hopeful, Paul Seixas, to the white jersey. But hey!  19-year old Paul Seixas came fourth overall, which is very impressive for his first time riding the Tour. Richard Carapaz was impressive as King of the Mountains, winning the polka dot jersey. And Mads Pederson won the sprinters’ green jersey. In fact, from early in this year’s Tour the competition for the green, white and polka dot jerseys was more interesting than the competition for yellow. So it goes! 

The headline for an article about holidays this morning was something like “The best places to visit in the shoulder season”. What is the “shoulder season? I wondered. So I looked it up and found this:-

“Shoulder season is the travel period between a destination's peak and off-seasons, offering fewer crowds, lower prices, and mild weather. It typically falls in spring (March–May) and fall (September–October) in many Northern Hemisphere destinations.”

I wonder who invented the name.

Yesterday’s rain didn’t do much to fill up our garden water barrel, so I don’t think it will have replenished the reservoirs very much either. I read this morning about “fire clouds”, aka pyrocumulonimbus, or “pyroCb” clouds. Wildfires form dense clouds of their own, creating a sort of mini weather system if they are sufficiently dense, with the possibility of lightning, and the risk of them causing further fires to break out some distance from the original fire. They’ve had these fire clouds in Australia since the start of this century and they formed in California in 2022. And now they are forming in France, the first time the’ve occurred in Europe. This is, of course, another frightening development in the climate crisis. We might enjoy the sunshine but things are getting worse! 

 

Another thing that is getting worse is sentencing of Palestine activists. Brendon O’Hagan, 28; Amanda Kelly, 31; Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31; Mohammed Malik, 28; and Alma Yaniv, 70, were found guilty of causing £212,000 of damage during a direct action protest in Burnley in August 2024. They targeted the bank because it held shares in the Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems. This was before Palestine Action was deemed to be a banned terrorist group. At the time of the trial their action was not assessed by the home secretary nor officials to be a terrorism incident. However,  the CPS is calling for them to be sentenced as terrorists. I wonder how far back retrospective judging can go!

Here’s a photo of Andy Burnham in a suit, something which I think was not often seen in the past. More of an informal dresser.

But, according to this article, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani always wears a suit because ‘it’s the de facto uniform, after all, of those seeking to project seriousness and solemnity’! So maybe that explains Andy Burnham’s sartorial switching!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain … much needed but is it enough? Getting our priorities right. International cooperation. Number 10.

Today it has rained sporadically. We returned home from our amily mini-holiday, dodging from our accommodation to the car avoiding showers. After we arrived home I had to choose my moment to walk into the village to replenish basic supplies from the local co-op store. I suppose I could have asked my daughter - our driver of the trip - to stop briefly in the village on our way home but we’d already had spent some fraught time loading the car - too many people with too much luggage - so we opted for her to simply drop us off at home. 

Before we went away I had asked our milkman not to make a delivery on Friday. I was quite relieved to find he had remembered that request; part of me was afraid we might return to find two bottles sour milk on the doorstep. And I had taken our supply of fresh fruit away with us, so  I needed to do some basic shopping. 

It rained on me as I walked back from the village. There has been enough rain to refill the various puddles on the path that runs through the industrial estate. I have not yet checked whether it has gone any way towards refilling our garden water barrel. So rain has been falling. Hopefully it will  help to completely extinguish our local wildfires!

As they’re still talking about the possibility of having to evacuate the whole of Bordeaux and as Madrid is still surrounded by fire, and as race organisers have shortened the finale of the Tour de France in Paris today, after security forces were redeployed away from the capital to help battle wildfires near Bordeaux, maybe it’s time we spent more on preventing wildfires than on worrying about Russia attacking Europe! 

In Cuba they’re still experiencing almost constant power cuts, adversely affecting so many aspects of life there, including water supply to homes. Here in the UK we take our electricity and water supply for granted most of the time, erupting into indignant outcry if something prevents it happening. Here’s a link to an article about life in Cuba, where people are having to go and fill containers with water. This is the 21st century!

However, there are reports of China providing and installing  solar panels to provide sources of power. But, of course, such power supplies need the right kind of infrastructure. Just another complication to overcome. But an example of cooperation and another reason for Mr Trump to rage against China.

It seems that our new Prime Minister wants to establish alternative government offices in Manchester, dividing his time between the North and the South of the country. Here’s a little cartoon reflecting on that possibility.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Fires - wild and uncivilised! Michael Rosen. Out and about. The possibility of rain.

 They are evacuating people from the suburbs of Bordeaux, Spain has declared a state of emergency as fires rage around Madrid, the Cairngorms are of fire, in various places in England fires are still raging. Meanwhile I have seen this post on social media. 

Here’s a bit of Michael Rosen’

“The steady daily killing and brutalising of Palestinians in the West Bank has nothing to do with 'fighting terrorism' or 'security' and everything to do with grabbing land by killing and scaring the people living on that land.

One way to do a massacre of a people is to do it slowly, one day at a time, so it doesn’t hit the headlines, doesn’t shock the world, doesn’t force other countries to do anything and just feeds denials. 

What massacre? they say.

There’s no massacre here, they say.”

We’ve been out for a morning walk under a very cloudy sky and had drizzle fall on us. Maybe it’s going to rain today and try to put out some of the wildfires. We saw fairly interesting flora and fauna and architecture.

Here’s a cartoon about daily walks that made me smile. 

We’ll be doing a more adventurous outing later.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Trying to catch up with the Tour de France. Fires in France. A bit of tourism.

 Last night, in the late evening, we managed to log on to a re-run of one of the summaries of a day’s activity in the Tour de France. For some reason it was the summary from the day before yesterday, the one we’d been unable to watch because our home television was not receiving the signal from Channel 5. So  ow we were But the system wouldn’t let us find yesterday’s summary. No doubt we’ll find that tonight but probably not today’s summary. We”re just a little behind. Adam Yates was having some kind of stomach trouble and one of yesterday’s newspapers reported that some kind of sickness was affecting other riders too. I wonder what’s going on.

In other parts of France, wildfires are still causing havoc.

Out walking first thing this morning we saw swans. And rabbits. And very small birds which so far we have not identified.

We’re on a family weekend away in a rented holiday home by a marina near Carnforth in Lancashire. That might explain our having found a replay of the Tour summaries, just being in a different location.

Last night the sunset was quite fine.

Today it has been cloudy and windy, warm when the sun broke through.

After breakfast and a good deal of messing around we went on an excursion Arnside, a picturesque place. We walked miles along the seafront but the se was miles away.

Here are some photos.

The local crochet group had been busy.

The pubs have interesting names.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!