Early morning stuff.The cost of things. Banning books. Not paying writers.

 We had a plumber due to arrive at 9.00 this morning. It’s a good job I didn’t snooze my alarm or I might have been in the shower when he arrived at 8.30! Yes, 8.30! He had miscalculated how long it would take him to get here from his home in Marsden, which is only about 5 miles up the road from here. Ten minutes max I would have said but clearly he was expecting roadworks or something - tractors? sheep ln the road? 

Anyway we now have shiny new taps in the bathroom, taps which work and which do not judder noisily and then cut off when you’re halfway through washing your hands. So there it is. Having paid our plumber, I walked into the village to the cash machine in the coop store as I had used up all my cash. Many years ago I used to give private French lessons to our local chemist. On one occasion he huffed and puffed about the cost, saying that he, a chemist, did not earn as much per hour as I was charging for French lessons. I pointed out that I spent time finding and preparing materials for the lesson. I didn’t quibble over the implied suggestion that a chemist was better qualified than a linguist! I wonder what he would say to plumbers’ and electricians’ and builders’ charges these days.

The writer Sally Rooney has found out that she cannot sell her books in the UK. When Palestine Action was declared a proscribed terrorist organisation last year (was it only last year?) she declared that she would give proceeds from sales of her book to Palestine Action. In September she did not travel to the UK to collect a literary award as she could perhaps have been arrested. Her books have been dramatised for television. This was before the ban on Palestine Action but the independent producers of the series have advised her (that’s an odd term - they didn’t just tell her) that any payment for these series would be a breach of terrorism laws if they knew that planned the use the royalties to fund Palestine Action! What happens to the payment now? 

Banning books, withholding payment, denying people access to their own bank accounts! Whatever next?

It seems that Section 15 of the Terrorism Act makes it an offence if a person “provides money or other property, and knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism”. It carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Wow! 

Her UK and Ireland publisher, Faber, said: “Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work. To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher.

“As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”

A friend of mine has suggested that maybe we’ll see an influx of smuggles copies of her books from the Republic of Ireland.

I seem to remember hearing a suggestion when the Ukraine war started that we should not listen to music by Russian composers. I don’t think anyone said we should not read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky though. 

It’s all part of the interconnectedness of everything. Here is an example of that interconnectedness (and possible interference):

And here’s a little something on possible elections: 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The shrinking local market. Early release. Presidential comments. Theatre etiquette.

 I was out just after 8.30 this morning: 8°, blue sky and sunshine. It was a beautiful day to be out and about quite early. In what used to be the market in Uppermill the square was not even closed off to cars and the fish-man, the only remaining vendor,, had difficulty finding a place to park his van and set up stall. It’s a much reduced service. I’ll continue to buy fish on a Wednesday morning in the hope that the fish-man does not give up as well. There is an excellent fish stall on Oldham’s central market but that’s further away and, besides, I like to encourage local facilities.

I had an appointment with our GP Practice physiotherapist in the midmorning and so I was hanging around in Uppermill rather longer than usual. This meant that I had time to return my library books and select some replacements. One of the librarians and I exchanged compliments: she admired my beret (we’ve moved into beret-wearing season again) and I admired her elegant outfit. Somehow she always looks like a Victorian lady from an old-fashioned book.

By the time I was waiting for the bus home at the end of the morning, the cloud was moving in. October days!

Here’s a cartoon about the early release from prison scheme and other )jdisturbing stuff going on in the world.

The world is full of odd events, like case of the mentally disturbed man who jumped into the tiger enclosure at a zoo in South Yorkshire. Even odder is the fact that the president of the USA posted footage of the event, with the comment: “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.” And odder still is that same president having posted an AI video of himslef wrestling with that same tiger! 

Here’s something else about America, a link to an short article by Arwa  Mahdawi about Americans being made to work standing up: supermarket cashiers, airport security workers and passport control people. Apparently it looks more efficient! But Aldi, which is increasing its presence in the USA, still provides seats for its  cashiers. Their research tells them seated cashiers work more efficiently. There you go!

Finally, here’s something about eating in the theatre, a prqctice ai fail tomunderstand, and other bad theatre etiquette, leading to actors getting cross!

Kristin Scott Thomas slams theatregoer eating a ready meal during live performance

• Slow Horses actor Kristin Scott Thomas has highlighted poor theatre etiquette, revealing that the worst behaviour she has witnessed was a front-row audience member eating a ready meal during a performance. 
• The 66-year-old actor expressed her strong preference for live theatre over screen work, describing camera acting as extremely lonely compared to the invigorating experience of working with a stage company. 
• Scott Thomas is returning to London's Harold Pinter Theatre this month to play aristocratic landowner Lyubov Ranevskaya in Anton Chekhov's final play, Cherry Orchard. 
• She stars alongside Stephen Mangan, who plays businessman Yermolay Lopakhin and recently admitted to kicking a theatregoer's feet off the stage, warning that actors can easily see and hear audience disruptions. 
• Her remarks contribute to an ongoing debate over West End audience etiquette, following recent disruptions including Rosamund Pike calling out a texting viewer and the Royal Shakespeare Company asking a mother with a crying baby to leave

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain, running and Russians. Drinking on trains.

 I woke up this morning shortly before 8.00, which is when my alarm was due to ring. It was pouring with rain. Maybe it was the rain hammering on the roof that woke me. When the alarm rang, I snoozed it. It was still raining so there seemed little point in leaping out of bed to go for a run. Some time later, a couple of “snoozes” later, In realised it had stopped raining. My weather app said “mostly cloudy” so I got up and ran. it didn’t rain on me but I had to balance on a wooden fence support to get past the largest muddy puddle, holding onto the wire mesh fencing to prevent myself from falling backwards to sit in the puddle. 

The day has only improved since then! 

Debate seems to be going on about whether or not Prime Minister Burnham wants to have us rejoin the European Union, while Brexit is still being blamed for all our woes. 

Also Mr Burnham tells us that he has proof that the Russians interfered with the Brexit vote. So really it’s the Russians who are to blame for all our woes, even ones that took place a decade ago! Curious times! 

Here’s a link to a short article by Zoe Williams about drinking on trains. She seems to have found herself, quite by chance, on trains where people were beginning celebrations of one kind or another fairly early in the day. I think it is still possible to do an “ale trail’ train journey from Manchester to Huddersfield, stopping off at Stalybridge’s rather fine station buffet and at Greenfield, where you need to cross the road to The Railway pub, and ending up at Huddersfield where there is another fine station buffet. On reflection though, there has been so much disruption on that particular stretch of line that it may no longer be a thing determined drinkers can do.

Granddaughter Number Two and I have been trying to plan an excursion to York  and are now hoping there will be no problems on that line next Monday.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!

The benefits of early rising. Appreciating autumn. Crazy football fans.

 As I got home from my run round the village this morning, it started to drizzle. Just think, had I given in to my propensity to snooze my alarm a couple more times the drizzle, which quickly turned to steady rain, would have got me quite wet. And lately I have given in to that propensity far too often. Bed is far more comfortable and sleep is easier to fall into when it’s time to get up. Not that as a rule I have a pressing need to get up early but there is something in my nature that feels that you get more done and the day is more productive if you make an early start. Maybe it’s my Methodist upbringing!

Oddly enough, Granddaughter Number Two, the 23-year-old student, seems to feel the same way. I was astounded when I shared a bedroom with her on a visit to the Southern branch of the family to discover that she regularly sets her alarm for 7.00 or earlier. This is fine on the days when she works, usually from home, or when she gets on the train to York where she has university classes two days a week. But she also does it on her ‘days off’, even if it only means that she goes to get a cup of coffee and then heads back to bed with a book.

Another of Granddaughter Number Two’s little quirks is her dislike of hot weather, or even fairly warm weather for that matter. The crisp, sunny but still chilly days we have had recently have filled her with delight. It means she can get out her big jumpers and warm boots. She is less enthusiastic about the damp days like today. Anyway, here is a link to an article where Emma Beddington expresses much the same sentiments.

I can’t say I am a football fan. The most excited I have ever got about it was when Spain won the European Cup in 2010. We watched it on television in the flat we were renting in Vigo. Every time Spain got near to scoring a goal the entire block of flats erupted into cheers and then groans. When they finally scored the winning goal the explosion of noise was amazing and, what is more, it moved outside. Looking out of the window we could see Spanish fans cheering while running victory laps round the gardens of the flats and then leaping into the swimming pool. Crazy football fans!

Anyway, I usually sit through Match of the Day on Saturday and Sunday evenings, reading or doing a sudoku puzzle as Phil comments on the game on the small screen. Last night Manchester City played Liverpool and were booed as they went onto the Anfield stadium pitch. I’ve never sen that before. I don’t know the details of City’s transgressions against football but feelings are running high.

Photos in today’s papers show City fans waving bananas. 

Why? Well, I investigated snd found that “it originated from a bet between Manchester City fan Frank Newton and his friend Allen Busby. During a visit to Busby’s house, Newton spotted an inflatable banana and asked if he could “borrow” it. Allen replied: “Only if you take it to a City match.” The reply came: “That was exactly what I intended to do anyway,” so the deal was sealed. He recalled some amusement amongst the supporters around him at City’s match against Plymouth. “Being the type of person I am, if I start doing something, I’ll continue doing it,” Newton told me, “and it took on a life of its own after that.”

Another friend – Mike Clare – penned a face on the banana, adding a bobble hat and a City shirt for good measure. Then came the incident that made the whole fad literally go viral. With City fans chanting for the introduction of substitute striker Imre Varadi, Newton hoisted his banana aloft. The chant changed from “Imre Varadi” to “Imre Banana”. “The whole thing was totally spontaneous,” Newton said. “I never originally brought the inflatable along in homage to Imre, contrary to what’s often been written.” Soon, there were bunches of inflatables proliferating across Maine Road and at their away matches.”

There you go.

Life goes (strangely) on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

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!