Oversleeping. Odd messages. The cost of live music. Family quarrels. Pests. Rude awakening.

 It’s been a funny sort of day so far. First of all, I switched off my alarm and woke up about an hour later! I think what woke me finally was a series of pings on my phone. One after another came four notifications, all telling me that my AIRBNB verification code was …. a series of four numbers. Each time the code was different. Of course, I haven’t made any AIRBNB bookings. Is somebody somewhere waiting for a code they have not received?

To add to the weirdness, I then had a phone call, purporting to be from the USA, thanking me for using their telephone verification service and trying to give me yet another code! I hung up before thy could fire more numbers at me.

So my day began rather later than planned. I didn’t go for a run. But it’s actually a beautiful day, quite warm and sunny. I shall have to go for a long walk later. 

Further to my comments the other day on Lucy Mangan declaring her disappointment on discovering that Bruce Springsteen wears pyjamas (But does he sleep in them? Or are they just to wander about in over breakfast or to relax in to watch telly?) here is a link to something about the madness of fans. 

Fans are paying thousands of dollars/pounds to get VIP tickets to performances. This gives them the chance to be right at the front, close to the stage. Now, I can appreciate wanting to be close to your much-admired singer or band. The very best concert I ever attended was Leonard Cohen at the Manchester Opera House, which is quite a small venue. Quite by chance we had seats about only four rows from the stage. Absolutely brilliant! But the tickets cost less than £50. Mind you, that was back in 2008. I doubt that tickets even for a small venue are so cheap nowadays! 

However, wonderful as it is to attend live music events, it’s hard to justify the prices of tickets nowadays. They try to justify such prices by saying it compensates for singers and bands losing revenue as sales of CDs have plummeted. Even so, I can think of better things to spend thousands of pounds or dollars on.

It may be that those big spenders are doing the right thing, living for now, enjoying concerts while they can. After all, the political leaders of the world seem to be heading madly towards a possible armageddon!

A friend of mine used a similar argument to justify spending an inordinate amount of money on a walking holiday in the mountains of Canada. And to justify flying hime business class. Spending her children’s inheritance, she said, having helped her various offspring financially through university and later to purchase houses! So now she feels she can treat herself to expensive adventures. 

Fair enough! Maybe there will be no family arguments about inheritance. Family arguments are never good. Just look at what is going on with the Windsors, the Spencers, The Waleses and the Sussexes. Maybe it’s time to stop digging up old grievances and just get on with life.

The Guardian runs a feature they call something like ‘The Pet I’ll Never Forget’, in which people wax sentimental about a long lost family pet. In contrast they also have ‘The Pest I’ll Never Forget’. Here’s a link to one article about someone suffering from rats and a link to another about infestations of mice. I was transported back to my student accommodation in my second year at university. My bedroom was separated from the kitchen by a flimsy partition, which did not quite reach the ceiling. If friends and I had had fish and chips, late in the night I would hear mice scrabbling through the chip papers. If I stood on the table I could look down at them scurrying around the kitchen. All my food was kept in well-sealed tins. Eventually I moved out when I woke to find a cheerful mouse on my pillow!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A bit of reflective Eurovision nostalgia.

 Here’s a link to an article about why the UK always loses the Eurovision Song Contest. 

Yes, the digital, culture, media and sport committee chair Caroline Dinenage wants MPs to look into why we don’t do better in this competition, especially as we are so good at music of all kinds. Surely there are better and more important things to investigate!

When I was a child, once we acquired a TV set, which wasn’t until I was 11 or 12, we watched the build up to Eurovision every year, all the excitement of choosing the right song and the right candidate. And we got quite excited about the contest itself. Some of the songs were very good. Those were innocent times. There were only two TV channels and even the music programmes were quite refined, with well-dressed David Jacobs in charge of Disc Box Jury.. Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go were perhaps the most exciting music programmes we saw.

Have we actually won or even done well since Sandie Shaw came top with ‘Puppet on a String’ in 1967 and Cliff Richard came second with Congratulations in 1968? 

I think that what I really liked about Eurovision in my teenage years was the opportunity to hear songs in foreign languages and see how much I could understand. Yes, I was that kind of geeky kid, already obsessed with the languages I was learning at school and quite likely to stay on a bus beyond my stop so that I could eavesdrop if someone was speaking in French or Spanish.

Maybe it’s a generational thing because I seem not to be the only one. I attend an Italian conversation class online. Our teacher refers to us as I Vecchi Amici because all of us are in our seventies. Anyway, one day we were talking about the Festival di San Remo, very important to the Italians, and Gigliola Cinquetti was mentioned. Her song “Non ho l’età’ was the Eurovision winner in 1964. We had an Italian class group memory and every one of us remembered the words to the song! 

In 1968 another young female singer, Massiel, won with ‘La La La’, telling us that ‘Todo en la vida es como una canción’ and pipping Cliff to the post. Originally the Spanish had wanted Joan Manuel Serrat, a singer I later came to really like, to sing the song but he insisted that he wanted to sing it in Catalán. Uh, oh! Regional patriotism was not yet quite approved of and so he was dismissed and they opted for Massiel instead. Maybe it needed the appeal of a young female singer to win the points. 

That year I spent the summer term of the academic year in Murcia, Spain. A Spanish friend used to delight in singing a song about how we should give them back Gibraltar, adapting the words of Cliff’s “Congratulations”.

Nowadays I take no notice of Eurovision. Granddaughters Number One and Number Two keep me apprised of the “good songs”, which mostly don’t appeal to me. Most nations sing in English and it often seems that they just want to be outrageous. Maybe I am soing the contest a disservice.

Some people are now boycotting it because of Israel’s inclusion. Quite when Israel became part of Europe is a mystery in any case!

Isn’t it amazing, how one article about something silly like the governement getting involved in making us fit to win Eurovision could provoke such a lot of nostalgia!?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Scams. Banning gambling advertisement. RNLI supporters under attack from “doxxing”. Caitlin Moran.

 It was crisp and sunny when I ran this morning. Not exactly an Indian summer here but quite pleasant to be out and about in.

Do you know what a homoglyph is? I confess that I did not until I read an article about one of the latest scamming attacks that are going  on. A homoglyph is a character that looks very similar, or even identical, to another one. For example, the headline to this article read as follows: “Reαd carefully: how to spot – and avoid – a homoglyph attack”. In the original the letter “a” was in a slightly different typeface in just one of the words, only really noticeable if you looked carefully.  But now my copying and pasting has removed the anomaly.

Anyway, it seems that using a letter from a different alphabet or typeface in this way enables scammers to creat urls to tempt you into following a link into a system which will steal your details and generally get into nefarious activities in your name! Here’s a link to the article, where it is better explained.

I read something the other day about the House of Lords, or some members of that establishment, getting together to persuade parliament to debate banning advertisements for gambling.

“After hearing our evidence, the House of Lords Liaison Committee is today calling for a "comprehensive ban on gambling advertising."

Now the Government must act.

For I don’t know how long I have been shouting at the TV set whenever one of the numerous adverts for gambling pop up. Now ai wait to see if anything comes of this.,

Another new word for me is ‘doxxing’. This is apparently a form of online abuse where someone is marked as a target by publishing their name, address and identifying info online. It’s been used a lot recently by "Patriots" going after the RNLI - revealing the names and home addresses of volunteers - leading to further acts of violence and intimidation against them. Now Lisa Nandybhas reportedly announced that the government would be clamping down in “doxxing” attacks.

This information is from the Campaign to Rejoin the EU.

“All this comes in response to "Patriots" going after the RNLI - revealing the names and home addresses of volunteers - leading to further acts of violence and intimidation against them. 

That's the thing about doxxing. 

It's just the start for victims. 👇🏻

⚠️ they get sent things in the post

⚠️ their cars get vandalised 

⚠️ their windows get broken

⚠️ dog mess gets thrown at their houses

⚠️ people stalk and surveil them

And it can get worse from there. 

The problem with doxing is that once your details are out there, you have no idea who might choose to make use of them - and you have no way of controlling what they choose to do. “

This is the kind of thing that has Caitlin Moran railing against social media, expressing her disillusionment in this article.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Selective heatwaves. Getting on the housing ladder. Shattered dreams and illusions.

 I wore my light rain-jacket this morning when I went for a run. My weather app promised me rain within the next hour. Within 15 minutes the rain arrived, not heavy but enough to merit the rain-jacket. Later it rained more heavily. When I went out to the supermarket later the sun was shining but I wore my raincoat anyway, as an insurance policy. It didn’t rain on me. Indeed, when I came out of the supermarket it was positively hot! Now, midafternoon, it’s cloudy again!

Somebody quipped:

British weather today: coat on in the morning, sweating by lunchtime, raining at 3.

Maybe we are getting the promised Indian summer after all. Here’s the headline for a weather report in one of the morning papers: 

UK weather: Britain to be hotter than Athens next week as temperatures soar to 26C

And here’s a little detail from the report: 

“Met Office forecasts show Tuesday will be the hottest day of the week, with the mercury soaring to 26C across the south-east pf England. (My underlining)

Monday and Wednesday will also see temperatures above 20C across most of England, with the mercury only taking a slight dip towards the end of the week.”

Once again Britain = the south-east England. How odd. Here’s a weather map with temperatures:

And here are heatwave and post-heatwave pics of Hyde Park, London. They certainly got a lot drier than we did here.

Just because I found it, here’s a Stephen Ashman cartoon on the difficulties facing first-time homebuyers:

And here is a section of Lucy Mangan’s Digested Week which amused me:

“Monday

It’s funny, isn’t it, how many things we take for granted in life? How many things go wholly unmentioned, even wholly unconsidered in any even minutely conscious way – and yet, when they are suddenly kicked away you realise just how much of your internal organisation, your mental integrity, your structural soundness altogether, rested on these unexamined pillars.

One of mine, it turns out, is the belief – no, surely more than that? The sure and certain knowledge, in my bones if never alas vouchsafed by my mere mortal eyes – that Bruce Springsteen does not wear pyjamas.

This is fundamental, surely? The Boss sleeps naked. This is an eternal verity.

But no. According to what I can only describe as reports, he is a loyal customer of the venerable sleepwear shop Schostal in Rome, which was opened in 1870 by two brothers from Vienna. There’s a photo of Bruce hugging the manager, Shirley Braine – to whom he apparently sends regular postcards – and everything.

So. There you have it. The Boss sleeps in pyjamas. Acceptable province of 1950s boarding school boys, your worst boyfriend, and your dad. Please go carefully about your day and from the fragments of your shattered psyche may you rebuild better soon.”

And that’s how dreams are shattered. Maybe Lucy needs to accept that Bruce is getting older and maybe feels the need for pyjamas!

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Wardrobe issues. RNLI and the rightwing protests. Cats of one kind or another.

 As the weather varies from day to day and temperatures yo-yo I’m not sure whether summer is really over and whether autumn has really begun. Even on odd days I wonder if we’ve skipped autumn altogether and gone straight to winter! Okay! I exaggerate! 

However, I have reflected on the advantages of having proper seasons … from the wardrobe point of view! As the temperature has plummeted I have sought out warmer clothes in my wardrobe. I suppose there might still be people who carefully pack away the winter clothes at the start of summer and similarly pck up their summer clothes as the days grow shorter. In my case, though, everything stays in the wardrobe. And so as the temperature goes down I find myself rummaging into the depths of the wardrobe and rediscovering favourite outfits I’ve not worn in ages. It’s a good deal less expensive that going shopping for new clothes. Besides, some of my clothes are now old enough for that particular fashion to have come back into style! There is slmething to be said for being careful with your clothes!

I read yesterday that a Royal National Lifeboat Institute in Portsmouth has been forced to close temporarily because of action by right wing activists protesting about them saving asylum seekers who approach our shores on small boats. It’s not just the south coast either; RNLI volunteers across the UK were told that they should consider not wearing RNLI branded clothing if they felt this could put them at risk. What a crazy situation!

The RNLI has defended its work in the Channel saying that for more than 200 years it had rescued people without judgment, fear or favour.

It said rumours that the RNLI housed asylum seekers on its premises, or that there were RNLI missions to move migrants to secret locations were “completely baseless and untrue”.

The charity said RNLI lifeboats launched 9,058 times in 2025 but only 109 of those callouts were to small boats in the channel, representing representing 1.2% of its rescue work.

In Bolivia they have discovered a new cat species in the forests. The ‘Tilcaya’ is smaller than a domestic cat. Maybe that’s what has kept it hidden for so long.

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Our daughter keeps trying to adopt rescue cats with special needs. The various organisations send someone out to inspect the homes where such cats might go to live. So far she has been gazumped a  couple of times, if such a term can be used about the chosen, i deed promised, cats being ‘awarded’ to other candidate families. The grandchildren are feeling quite rejected! So it goes!

And here’s a Bayeux tapestry-related bit of nonsense: 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The state of the world. A bit of nostalgia. Fast cars. More nostalgia.

 Here are some odds and ends I collected from social media over the last few days. 

“My generation really believed peace was possible,” Graham Nash posted recently. “It feels silly sometimes, to hope for peace when everything feels hopeless. Still, I hope because hope is an act of resilience these days. I’m going to keep pushing back every damn day. I hope you will too. – G”

Being of the same generation as Mr Nash, I quite agree with him. As we watch the chaos and cruelty and selfishness of the modern world, we often reflect on the optimism that we felt in the 1969s and 1970s, the feeling that the world could only get more tolerant and inclusive and generally better! 

Here’s a cartoon about 35 years of the Big Issue.

There is still a regular Big Issue seller in the centre of Uppermill and very occasionally one outside the Co-op in the centre of Delph! I have a distinct memory of buying a French equivalent to the Big Issue and using it as the basis for a series of lessons with my AS and A Level French classes. Its name completely escapes me and so far Internet searches bring me no joy.

And here’s Ben Jennings cartoon on tech leaders’ outcry over the dangers of AI.

And here is a bit of Spike Milligan to make us smile wryly. 

George Monbiot, in this article about people - no, usually men - driving fast and dangerously, has given me a new bit of terminology: ‘petro-masculinity’ - a violent, misogynistic, climate-denying version of manhood, expressed through an antisocial driving culture.

As he describes cars roaring noisily through the streets of the Welsh town where once he lived, waking his baby daughter from her sleep, I think of the occasional noisy motorbike or fast car we see around here, fortunately not too often and not on a regular basis. Spotting these usually leads to one or other of us commenting, “There goes the local p****ck!”

Amongst other things he describes a different culture of antisocial driving where he now lives in Devon. Middle aged men in “lifted” pickup trucks” or SUVs modify them to be a loud and smoky as possible, to “roll coal” from twin exhaust towers mounted behind the cab, releasing a dense black cloud of soot when the driver hits the “smoke switch. Amazing! You would think that by middle age they might have grown out of it!

Maybe those men spent their youth watching coming of age films set in the USA where young men raced cars down the main street of small town America! Phil and I reflected back to our late teenage years when not enough of our peers had cars to encourage such practices, the climate didn’t encourage that kind of hanging around on the street trying to impress other teenagers, and besides our main streets were too bendy to encourage that kind of racing! 

I wonder what today’s late teens will find to reminisce about in 50 years time.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!