Weekends. Wakes Weeks and other such holidays. Wondering about AI.

We’ve not always had weekends. Of course not. The really wealthy didn”t need weekends: they could do leisure activities whenever they chose. Most workers had Sunday off: a day of rest and a day to go to church. They were lucky to get that in some people’s eyes. Girls who went into ‘service’ - ie working as maids, cleaners, cooks - in the houses of the wealthy were lucky to get a day off to go and visit their parents.

In 1926, or so I read, Henry Ford decided to reduce the working week to Monday to Friday, five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Trade unions and other groups had been pushing the idea but it needed a big industrialist to make it work. Philanthropist? No! Not really! “People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,” he said. And the new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. In the end it’s all about money. 

Here’s another example: John Boot, of Boots the Chemist, found that his factory in Nottingham was so efficient that they were producing too much stock. Possibly a bit a a philanthropist, he didn’t want to lay staff off at a time of high unemployment [1930s) and so he ended the Saturday morning shift, reducing hours for his workers without cutting wages. It worked. Productivity reamined good and absenteeism was reduced.

And now some people are agitating for a four-day working week and a three-day weekend. And with so many people working from home for at least part of the week, and with employers emailing employees outside of working hours (really not a nice thing!) the idea of the working week is very fluid. Of course, for shop assistants and catering staff the whole concept of the weekend is rather academic. So it goes!

Holidays are something else. Italy is in full ‘Ferragosto’, summer holidays starting on August 15th. Children have been on holiday from school for considerably longer but that’s a different matter. Here’s a link to an article about  the Italian ‘month off’. Interestingly the writer compares this to the Wakes Weeks that once existed here when mills and collieries shut down for maintenance work and all the workers had a couple of weeks holiday, usually in a seaside town. Hotel and boarding house owners knew when to expect groups from different industrial towns - the same  two weeks each year! This was, of course, before everyone wanted to head for the sun in some more exotic place than Blackpool.

AI pops up everywhere. It’s hard to tell what is AQ and what is not. Hee’s something that popped up on social media, supposedly posted by The National Geographic:

“Camel saves 50+ cats in the last two weeks.

During a brutal heat wave, a camel that regularly walks to a watering hole began doing something no one expected. Locals noticed stray cats struggling in the extreme heat, with some dying before they could reach water. Then the camel started stopping for them. One by one, the cats began climbing onto its back, and the camel would carry them across the scorching desert to the watering hole before continuing on its way.

Researchers observing the area believe the camel may have already helped more than 50 cats reach water in just two weeks. Even stranger, many of the cats now seem to recognize it and wait along its usual route. What started as one animal simply trying to survive the heat has turned into an unlikely rescue mission for dozens of others.”

It’s a lovely story. Animals are so much kinder than humans!  And so on! But a good 50% of comments protested that it must be AI generated! Who knows?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

One fine day in Manchester … 200 years ago and more.

 On this day in 1819 people walked onto the centre of Manchester from towns and villages for miles around.  They made their way to St. Peter’s Field, on the edge of town (where the Free Trade Hall was later built). High unemployment, rising food prices, poverty made people feel frustrated with politicians and the political system. Only the rich and privileged had the vote and some 60,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Field to call for democracy. They were peaceful, orderly and cheerful. There were lots of women and children. Many people wore their Sunday-best clothes. There was music and hymn-singing. Some carried banners which called for the reform of parliament, the right to vote and fairer taxes. Some banners had just one word: ‘Love’.

When the speeches started, magistrates called for the speakers to be arrested.  Special constables pushed the crowd back so that cavalrymen could reach the speakers. The horses got trapped on the crowd. Cavalrymen panicked and struck out at the crowd. More cavalrymen were sent in to quell the chaos. Shooting and bayoneting followed. 

At least 15 people were killed and over 600 injured. An unknown number of injured died at home later of their wounds as they could not afford medical treatment.

The speakers and organisers were all imprisoned. The government ordered the arrest of anyone who called for reform or anyone who tried to hold a public meeting. The newspapers were all strictly censored. The official story that was put out was that a “mob” had attacked the soldiers and started a “riot”. The Prince Regent sent his thanks to the Manchester magistrates for their "preservation of the public peace".

This was the Peterloo Massacre.

It’s not been forgotten … and yet people are being arrested nowadays protesting peacefully. Protest movements are being proscribed as terrorist organisations. 200+ years after Peterloo, you would think we might have learnt to do better.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Government Alerts! Banning barbecues and bonfires! The Great Stink. Hormuz. Women in Afghanistan.

Doing stuff in the basement kitchen early yesterday evening we were suddenly disturbed by a shrill, fierce noise. It couldn’t be the smoke alarm because we would have recognised that piercing noise at once. The only electronic gadget we had down there was Phil’s iPad which was playing something different. So I went to check my phone and iPad which were one floor higher up. My phone told me that I had received a Government Alert (capital letters for importance!), warning me about Heatwave Number Five, telling me not to light fires outdoors and informing me that portable barbecues were temporarily banned. Not that I was planning to have bonfires or barbecues. 

As far as I am concerned the sale of those portable barbecue kits should be permanently banned, dangerous objects that they are. I’m not a great consumer of meat - in fact I haven’t eaten red meat in a long time - so I fail to understand the attraction of eating charred meat outdoors. What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned picnic with egg sandwiches and a bottle of pop?

Ironically enough, having been warned about the heatwave, today we woke up to cool and cloudy weather, much better suited for a hike than the extreme heat!

Louise Haigh, deputy Prime Minister said!

“This is the most extensive use of the UK’s emergency alert system in response to an active incident, and reflects the seriousness with which the government is acting to safeguard people and property.”

I can’t remember the emergency alert system being used before but it’s good to know it works.

Here’s a cartoon from 1859. The UK’s drainage system is still based on the work of the Victorian civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who designed London’s sewers in response to the 1858 Great Stink. 

Wikipedia tells me this:

The Great Stink was an event in Central London during July and August 1858 in which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the River Thames. The problem had been mounting for some years, with an ageing and inadequate sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames. The miasma from the effluent was thought to transmit contagious diseases, and three outbreaks of cholera before the Great Stink were blamed on the ongoing problems with the river.

The civil engine Joseph Bazalguette was given the task of sorting it out. The historian Peter Ackroyd argues that Bazalgette should be considered a hero of London.

Elsewhere in the world, it seems that Donald Trump is threatening to declare the strait of Hormuz ‘territory of the United States’. Now, I wonder how that is going to pan out!

And then there is this report:

“The Taliban in Afghanistan have launched a diplomatic effort to end their isolation as major regional and international powers show a readiness to engage more closely with the repressive regime despite its systematic human rights abuses.

Five years after the Taliban took power, an increasing number of countries are renewing ties or scaling up diplomatic contacts with the hardline Islamists, who seized power in Kabul in 2021 after 20 years of brutal insurgent warfare.”

It’s almost as though if something bad keeps on going for long enough it will be accepted as normal. the countries making diplomatic contact should remember the kind of life the women of Afghanistan are living. As this article tells us, families are “marrying off” their daughters of marriageable age (mid-teens) so that the dowry they receive can be used to buy food for the rest of the family. They are effectively selling their daughters! 

We must not forget the women of Afghanistan.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Random facts about eclipses. Interesting words. Denmark. Transfers. Fires and the environment.

 Well, we didn’t get to see the eclipse from our house, which is what usually happens with celestial phenomena. I have since learnt that the three way alignment where the moon passes directly between the sun and the earth is known as  a syzygy. There you go!

In ancient times the Chinese reportedly believed that the cosmic order was being threatened by dragons, while in India the disruption was blamed on a demon’s disembodied head. We know better than that now but still we flock to places where we can stare in wonder. It was a Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, who first suggested a scientific explanation, after he witnessed an eclipse in 478 BC. So we’ve known about it really for quite some time. And good old Columbus is said to have used his knowledge of an approaching eclipse o frighten Jamaica’s Indigenous people into giving him food after they had refused.

Here’s a picture os a spectroscope designed to look at the sun, the sort of machine used by the astronomers Pierre Janssen of France and Norman Lockyer of Britain when they discovered the element helium during the 1868 solar eclipse over India.

So syzygy is my latest new word. And here’s something about Scandinavian vocabulary from the letters page of the Guardian:

‘Confusion over the names of mealtimes also reigns in Scandinavia. Breakfast in Norway/Sweden is frokost/frukost, but morgenmad(morning food) in Denmark. Lunch in Norway/Sweden is lunsj/lunch, but frokost in Denmark. At least they can all agree on the main meal of the day, which is middag(midday/noon) but served in the early evening.

If attending a wedding party or function in Denmark, don’t be surprised to be served natmad (night food) around midnight. It is used as a friendly indication that the event has come to an end, hence its colloquial name of skrub af mad (fuck-off food).
Gary Calder
Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire”

Apparently Denmark is the place to go to for international marriages, post brexit rules having made such marriages more difficult to arrange in the UK. Here’s link to an article about one couple’s experience.

Here are a couple more cartoons of POTUS  being transferred secretly from plane to plane:

And as wildfires still keep going, the latest grassfire having destroyed houses in the Midlands, here’s an environmentally-based  cartoon:

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Serious reading matter - discovering things about Franco’s Spain.

 I’ve been reading, and then re-reading, a very long novel in Spanish: Las Tres Bodas de Monolita by Almudena Grandes. I had to re-read it because there were so many intermingled stories that I wanted to get straight. The author told the same events several times over from different character’s points of view. Nothing is really recounted chronologically. An event is hinted at and the details gradually revealed in a time-shifting fashion. And yet it works extremely well.

Much of the narrative is woven around real people and real events, leading me to investigate some of them on the internet. Manolita’s three weddings refer to a system where a priest at the Porlier prison in Madrid, where republican prisoners were held in the post Civil War years, arranged for a quite large price for women to have conjugal visits with prisoners, conjugal visits in quite disgusting conditions! The priest was making a fortune from the misery of others. Manolita and other fictional characters are part of this system.

Manolita also regualrly took food parcels to her father, and later to her fisnce, in the prison. Wives, daughters, sisters of prisoners queued up to provide food parcels for men who would otherwise be severely undernourished. The same happened for Republican women held in the Ventas prison. A sense of community developed in the queues for delivering parcels and visit prisoners.

Manolita and her fiancé Silverio eventually lived together for some years in a “house” constructed by Silverio and his fellow prisoners in the Cuelgamuros valley where prisoners were building Franco’s monument to the soldiers who had died fighting on his side in the Civil War. 

This was the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, its name changed officially in 2022 to Valle de Cuelgamuros, changing it from a monument to fascism to a monument to all Spaniards who died in that conflict. Franco was initially buried there but later exhumed in 2019, in an attempt to prevent glorification of his dictorship.

Throughout the Civil War Silverio, a skilful engineer, worked in an underground munitions factory in the unfinished metro station Nuevos Ministerios. Because of the non-intervention pact the Republicans had great difficulty purchasing munitions but this underground factory helped keep up the defence of Madrid, albeit an eventually unsuccesdful defence. This was an aspect of the Civil War that I had never heard of before.

In her notes at the end of the novel, Almudena Grandes tells us of her meeting with the real Isabel Perales, the name given to the sister of Manolita in the novel. Under a system that I had again never heard of before, children of Republican prisoners were sent to be “educated” in boarding schools. The real life Isabel Perales was one such. The novel sends her, aged 14, to one such school in Bilbao, together with her much younger half-sister. The younger sister receives a good education, if indoctrination in good Catholic values and the belief that their parents were mistakenly bad, could be considered a good education. The older girls like Isabel, who had been excited at the prospect of learning to read and write and learning new things, were set to work in the school’s laundry. Like the real Isabel Perales, the fictional Isable has a severe allergic reaction to the soda used to wash sheets and tablecloths and clothing, and bore the scars for the rest of her life. But in real life, she went on to a career in the costume department of cinema and television.

Another real life character incorporated into the narrative is Roberto Conesa Escudero, one of Franco’s men, awarded honours for his work in capturing and extorting confessions from Republicans after the war. Throughout the novel the reader is aware that this supposed Republican, member of all the correct organisation during the Civil War, and an infiltrator on the post war years, is not to be trusted. The friends and comrades of his youth are undecided and he leads to the downfall of real and fictitious Republicans. Researching him on the internet I found he was crucial in the capture and execution of a group of young Republican women, whose story I had read years ago in Spain; Trece Rosas Rojas. 

And so the circle goes around. So many things still to learn.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Saving the world? Saving POTUS? Staying alive.

It was already hot at 8.30 this morning. We’re supposed to have a top temperature of 31° here today. Goodness knows what it will be like in the hotter bits of the UK. But it’ll be okay; Andy Burnham is going to chair an emergency Cobra meeting as the 5th heatwave of the summer hits us.

Private Eye has been commenting that they’re having difficulty putting out the fires in the New Forest because all the water is being used up by date storage centres!!

And here’s a First Dog on the Moon cartoon:

Etna is still erupting. They’ve been having an earthquake in Colombia. And there are typhoons in China. The earth seems to be fighting back

There have been quite a few cartoons about President Trump secretly switching planes by hiding in a catering cart, to avoid a threatened assassination attempt. I wonder of he enjoyed the drama of the moment. Here is a selection of cartoons’

And here’s  comment in reaction to that moment of drama:

“”It appears that the idea was we can reduce the danger to President Trump by offering up 100 or so people to be killed by the Iranians in his place,” said Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State and a former CIA intelligence officer and senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch.”

No comment!

Some more serious stuff! Here’s a link to an article where 12 women tell what life is like for them in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Their bravery and powers of endurance are impressive.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Solar eclipse and hotel prices. Water problems. Add consequences of digital and AI stuff.

 There’s going to be a solar eclipse tomorrow. The media is giving us information about the best places to see the eclipse. And hotels in those places have reportedly been putting up their prices. In Reykjavik tourists have been paying £587 on average to secure a room for Wednesday night, a 98% increase on the same night last year. As well as Iceland, Spain is said to be a good place to see the eclipse, and they expect 460,000 overseas tourists to go there just for the celestial phenomenon. (I can think of better reasons for going to Spain.) So the rate for rooms in A Coruña has gone up 135%! The increase is less steep in Mallorca, where you should be able to see the eclipse on the horizon at sunset, room prices have gone up by a mere 24%, while in Santiago de Compostela and Bilbao, hotel room prices have risen 34% and 67% respectively. What a strange situation, all about something you won’t be able to look at directly, but will need special glasses! No doubt lots of eclipse-selfies will be posted.

Today the sun keeps shining normally. Imagine your taps suddenly running dry in this summer weather. Well, according to this article residents of flats in Tower Hamlets, London, have had that happening to them, it’s probably nothing to do with the heatwaves. There seems to be some argument about the cause of the problem. 

But here”s a cartoon by Martin Rowson on the drought and Britain’s water companies, commenting that while the hot summer and hospipe bans continue, bosses at many utilities firm recieve payrises.

I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day, putting the world to rights as usual. He was predicting that banks will have to rturn to “physical banking” with chequebooks, etc because of AI facilitation of digital fraud and theft. Shortly after that I came across this report:

“Don’t bother trying to download a digital ticket from Vauxhall to Waterloo, the terminus for many trains to London from the west – or on a number of other routes, apparently including from Norwood Junction to London Bridge, where many services from the south coast hit the capital. For those and some other routes, you will now need to collect a physical ticket from a physical ticket machine, after operators found that up to 95% of tickets on some short routes were being used fraudulently.”

Cheque books and actual tickets for trains! Attempts to put the genie back 8n the bottle!

There”s some interesting vocabulary connected with the travel fraud business:

“short-faring” – a trick by which passengers buy a last-minute digital ticket only for the final part of their journey, even if they boarded in a station without barriers much further away.

“quick scanning” - buying a ticket on your phone seconds before being approached by an inspector.

“tailgating” - squeezing behind a paying customer as they pass through a ticket gate. 

“donutting”, a scam by which a passenger buys a cheap ticket covering the first part of their journey and another covering the last, but avoids paying the higher cost of the full trip.

Interesting times! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!