Fires. Wild swimming. Keeping the Tour cool. Water company problems.

 So the heatwave continues. Here in Saddleworth it’s actually been quite pleasant the last few days, not outrageously hot and enough wind to keep things cool. My neighbour and I have been commenting that we’re getting used to hanging washing out with the guarantee that it will be dry by midafternoon.

Wildfires continue too. There are now reports of wildfires in Merseyside and near Llandudno. It seems there is a story behind our local fire. On Friday a young man, a teenager, decided to cool off by going for a swim in the reservoir. He got into difficulties and drowned. On Saturday some of his friends went up to Dovestone reservoir to set off fireworks as a tribute to their friend. And that’s how the tinder dry moorland caught fire! A sad but stupid story!

There are lots of warnings about wild swimming at the moment, advising against it. I’m very wary of wild swimming, probably because I am not a strong and confident swimmer. I enjoy swimming but I prefer to be in a situation where I know I can put my foot down if I feel the need. Unfortunately we don’t have enough open air swimming pools in this country, probably because we don’t usually have long, hot summers.

It’s been so hot in France that they even reduced to distance of yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France by 30 kilometres. They still had a very long way to ride in the heat though. The support teams are going through vast amounts of water. Riders are not just drinking it but tipping bottles of the stuff over their heads and on the back of their necks to keep them cool. I hope the clean-up team retrieves all the discarded bottles for recycling! One problem is cooling down the riders when they reach the finish. Not just the stage winners but the whole peloton. So many hot riders to cool down at more or less the same time! This is where they need an open air swimming pool for the riders to jump into as they get off their bikes. 

The support teams have been providing ice packs which riders put down their cycling tops, these packs are kept chilled in refrigeration units in the tour buses. Surely all the tour buses, support cars, motor cycle teams, not to mention camera crews, must all be contributing to global warming. And Pogacar has been suggesting that they should have stage departures at 8.00 am, although they would still be finishing stages in the heat of the day. He bas also said that maybe the whole timing of the Tour needs examining in view of changing weather conditions. Food for thought!

Water companies pop up in the news for various reasons: imposing hosepipe bans, running out of water, supply problems and so on. Here’s an odd story from today’s news: 

“In May, our supplier, Yorkshire Water, made a surprise payment of more than £3,500 into my partner’s bank account.

We assumed that it was an error and we would be told to repay it.

Exactly a month later, she received another payment, this time of £3,300. Yorkshire Water told us it did not recognise the payment reference and did not think it had made the payment.

My partner’s bank said there was nothing it could do to stop, or return, the payments. Both companies took the issue quite lightly and told us to enjoy the money.

We have transferred it into our savings account so it is not touched, but don’t know what else to do. We are concerned it might be some sort of money laundering scam.”

The Guardian’s team investigated and discovered that one of the water companies employees and given them the wrong bank details. Their salary was being pid into the writer’s partner’s account. Had they not written to the newspaper they might have continued to receive regular payments. But the whole thing was sorted, the money was refunded. It was a good job they didn’t follow the advice to “enjoy money” as some people,might well have done. The water company gave them £100 by way of a thank you!

Moral: Always check those bank details! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Football. Fires. Beach rules in Italy - the panino police! Celebrating ancient victories.

 When I went to bed last night, Norway had just scored a goal against England in the World Cup. There goes the chance of an extra bank holiday, I thought! But there was still an hour to play. I did not stay up to watch. In the wee small hours I heard cheering and reflected that maybe a lot had happened in that hour. England had indeed defeated Norway! There you go!

Fires are raging in the south of Spain and we have fires on the peat moors at our local beauty spot Dovestone. Apparently it was fireworks that started it. What kind of idiots go and set fireworks off in a place where everything is tinder dry? The same kind who leave portable barbecues in places where they can cause fires, or who leave them on beaches under a light covering of sand (intended to extinguish them!!) which unsuspecting people tread on with their bare feet! 

Years ago we discovered the Italian system of private beaches. It was hard to believe that you could privatise beaches. Charging for sun loungers and sun umbrellas and pedalos is one thing but preventing people from quietly strolling along the tideline without having to go out of town to do so is something else altogether. 

Well, here’s a new twist to that tale: forbidding people, who have already paid to go on the beach and to hire a sun umbrella, etc, from taking a pranzo al sacco (packed lunch) to eat on the beach. Here’s a link to an article about someone who was caught by the panino police.

“While there is no national rule prohibiting customers at private clubs from bringing in food and drink, concession holders sometimes set their own policies, as was the case in Vieste.

Luca Pernice, a journalist with Corriere della Sera, who happened to be at the same beach, explained that the woman, named Rosaria, had concealed the sandwiches at the bottom of her bag.

When lunchtime arrived, she advised her hungry son to eat his close to the sea, away from the prying eyes of the resort’s staff. But alas, he got caught and Rosaria was reminded that the resort forbids packed lunches.

“It’s a common occurrence on the beaches here,” said Pernice. “People don’t want to be forced to spend at the restaurant every day, they can’t afford it, and so this is what they do, they strategise.””

Here’s an interesting headline I saw this morning: Man dies after falling from Eleventh Night bonfire in east Belfast. What, I asked myself, was “Eleventh Night”? So I took a look on the internet. It’s the night before the 12th of July, the day Northern Ireland protestants celebrate the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the Protestant King William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James. So it’s to celebrate the victory of Protestantism over Catholicism in Northern Ireland. It’s come to be referred to as “bonfire night” and the lighting of such a community bonfire, made up of wooden pallets, is usually accompanied by a street party and marching bands.

Then I recalled Orangemen’s Day from my childhood when Liverpool Orangemen had a parade through the centre of Southport with military style marching bands and troops of girls in short skirts danced along waving orange shakers in time to the music. That must have been on or close to July 12th. My father would  not let us go into town on that day: too many drunken celebrators. Does it still happen? i wondered. Well, it seems that last year it rook place on the 6th of July with record numbers of spectators.

This is information relating to last year: 

“The main 12th July parade

Saturday 12th July 2025 will see the Traditional Orange Lodge Parades taking place in Liverpool and Southport. This will be to commemorate the 335th Anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne that took place in 1690.   

The Provincial Grand Master Steve Kingston says that he “anticipates the largest attendance for a number of years, as this year’s parade falls on a Saturday, which enables more of our members and supporters to attend and take part”.  “

It’s going to be repeated this year; 336 years since the Battle of the Boyne it’s still being celebrated. Memories are long!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Summer goes on. Old warnings of global warming. Murder! The Archers. Family reunions. Nigel Farage and fhe Bayeux Tapestry.

 There was a nice breeze when I was out and about this morning. The day promises to be another hot one. The blue sky and sunshine are very impressive but it must be hard if you have to work in it. Lots of news articles keep going on about how we need to adapt our homes, schools, hospitals, workplaces (basically the whole country) to help us cope with climate change. It was certainly unpleasantly hot in the hospital waiting room where Phil spent a good part of yesterday morning. And our son tells us it’s been hotter in London than it has been in Genoa where he and his family fly to on Friday.

On the subject of Global Warming, here’s something I found:

“This is a complex subject and there are degrees of uncertainty. Isn’t there room for doubt?

The physics and chemistry are very simple: the more we increase greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, the more we will warm the climate. Those basics have been known since the 1850s, with the first quantification of the effect of increasing carbon dioxide levels being made in the 1890s.

In 1938, Guy Callendar, an English steam engineer, was the first person to show that the world had already warmed by about 0.3C, and linked this to the rise in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the amount of coal that had been burned. That was more than 80 years ago. Today, the evidence is overwhelming. There is no doubt among scientists even if other people still refuse to believe it.”

So, basically, we’ve known about it, or someone has known about it, for much longer than they’re admitting to. The industrial revolution messed the planet up. And now there’s the further worry about IT needing to use lots of water, just exacerbating the problem! We really do need to go back to a much simpler lifestyle. Unfortunately that’s another genie that won’t go back into the bottle. 

The news sources tell us that Anne Widdecombe didn’t just die but was murdered!  Yesterday they arrested a young man but today they have un-arrested him and they are continuing to search for her killer. Strange times when no-longer active political figures are targeted!

Meanwhile, the news comes that actress Patricia Greene, aka Jill Archer, the longest standing actor in The Archers, has died. Imagine spending all your acting life playing the same character through all her various life stages. Quite accidentally and coincidentally we tuned in to Friday Night is Music Night on BBC Radio 3 yesterday evening to find they were having an evening dedicated to 75 years of The Archers. 

Royalists will be pleased to hear that King Charles and his younger son, Harry, have gone some way towards reconciliation, at least according to this article.

King Charles understood to have met Prince Harry’s children at Highgrove | King Charles III | The Guardian

Nice for Charles to have a chance to get to know his American grandchildren!  It would seem, however, that Harry and his big brother, William, have not made up their differences. Knowing how my grandchildren appreciate family reunions where they get to play with their cousins, I feel rather sorry for the princes and princesses but maybe they have compensations. 

Families can be strange. There are bits of my extended family where members don’t speak to each except to complain. So I am quite pleased, not to say smug, that my immediate family gets on so well. 

Here’s a link to Craig Murray’s blogpost about Nigel Farage. It would be amusing / interesting if Count Binface won the by-election at Clacton.

And here’s a cartoon which brings together Nigel Farage and the Bayeux Tapestry.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Bus travel. Assemblies and awards. High temperatures. Things that that people are remembered for. Maxxing.

 This morning I was out and about in the relative cool, heading for a bus that was supposed to be at 8.27. The bus arrived only a few minutes late which was good. The Bee App (the Bee network link that keeps me up to date with where my bus is and when to expect it) started working again this week, after several weeks of cancelling itself because my phone is not modern enough. Transport for Greater Manchester has finally sorted it out. I am amazed at how quickly I came to rely on being able to check whether my bus was delayed and so on. I felt quite deprived while it did not work. Thus I was able to reassure myself that here was a bus eb route. 

I was heading for the smallest grandchildren’s school in time for a 9.00 assembly at which the little chap was getting a class teacher’s award for working hard at his writing skills. At 6 years old he is what my daughter calls a ‘reluctant writer’ and she should know as she is a primary school teacher and has all the jargon. The little chap just doesn’t see the point of writing to order. In fact he sees little point in doing to order anything he hasn’t chosen to do. The writing he worked hard at was about hopes for next year when they all move up a class. His hope, ironically, is for “craft work all the time”. That figures; he likes nothing better than cutting paper shapes and sticking them together to make a creature of one kind or another. 

I was the family representative at the assembly. My daughter was busybrunning her father to an appointment and was quite miffed, when she received notice that he was due for an award, not to able to attend the assembly. So. In the interests of giving the little chap some moral support I went and sat in a hot school hall while myriad certificates were presented, 

Out in the wider world the heatwave we seem to going through - 29° at midday today and forecast to get hotter - has been causing massive fires in Spain. People are dying. The heat has arrived earlier than expected!

Singer Bonnie Tyler has died, aged 78, remembered for her powerful voice and her songs. Anne Widdecombe has also died, aged 78, a woman with a different kind of powerful voice. The first notice I saw of her death described her a ‘Strictly Star”. Considering that she also had a career in politics and was once a government minister it must be sad to be largely remembered for a reality TV show.

i suppose it’s rather like Alec Guinness being remembered as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, ignoring all his other roles. Or Ian :McKellen only being remembered as Gandalf the Grey in The Lord of the Rings. Fame is Fickle!

On the subject of hobbits, I have read about something called hobbitmaxxing:

Hobbitmaxxing. The seven habits of highly effective hobbits include going barefoot, keeping warm, prioritising meals and generally tending to the small things in and around your hobbit hole. To be honest, it’s not that different from being a badger.

According to this article, it is possible to do all sorts of “maxxing” - going all in on a particular trait, habit, quality or pastime. The most dangerous perhaps is this one :

 

Tanmaxxing. Tanning your skin to its maximal darkness by spending longer in the sun and ignoring warnings about what an obviously terrible idea this is.

Which beings us back to the high temperatures. In typical British fashion, people are complaining about it being too hot. I heard it as I queued to get into the school assembly; I heard it in Tesco; I heard it on the bus!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.

Cutting down trees. Various sporting events. Embroidery versus tapestry - Bayeux? And a bit of feminism.

 I returned from my run around the village this morning to find tree surgeons at the bottom of the garden. Well, not really our bit of the shared garden but the part that belongs to the house next door. I had been reflecting just the other day how nice it was to have the tree hiding the industrial estate behind our houses. And we have all appreciated the shade offered by the tree. And now someone had decided it needed to come down. 

On investigation, I discovered that a wall separating our garden area from the industrial estate had collapsed. There was a council order that the tree had to be removed, roots and all, so that the wall could be rebuilt. Apparently the next door neighbours had been shown all the paperwork. Talking to one of the neighbours later in the morning, I was told that they had been informed about 6 weeks ago that the tree had to come down but she had no recollection of seeing any paperwork. Maybe her husband had seen it, she reflected. They’ve been a bit busy with her having been very ill so maybe things have slipped through the net. However, she would have liked to have been informed that today was the day.

Some years ago trees at the bottom of the garden area were cut down because the industrial estate people said the trees were undermining the wall - that very same wall. Whoever did the job was not very efficient because over the years those tree stumps produced new growth, leading to the current situation. It’s not going to regrow this time. The roots have been excavated! So it goes!

World Cup fever continues apace. I saw this headline this morning:

“England to get bank holiday if team win World Cup, Starmer expected to announce.

Prime minister understood to be poised to give England a day off should the nation’s team bring home the trophy for first time since 1966.”

I wait with bated breath! (Not really!)

The cyclists in the Tour de France continue to cycle in the heat. I’ll catch up withbtem later tonight. Q

I have no idea what’s going on at Wimbledon.

Granddaughter Number Two and I have spent the afternoon at the sports day at the primary school Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two attend. We moved around watching the two small people’s classes in turn participate in the sprint, the egg (tennis ball) and spoon race, the hurdles, the obstacle race and the javelin (if you can call spears made of foam javelins). It was quite a masterpiece of organisation on the school’s part. All children had to wear sun-hats and carry a bottle of water. Granddaughter Number Two and I had to be very organised also so that one of us was watching one of the children at all times. 

It was very hot. Granddaughter Number Two does not cope well with the heat and complained all afternoon, protesting that it should have been cancelled or at least postponed. When they called for volunteers for a parent’ race while they totted up the scores, I thought she was going to have an apoplectic fit! She just wanted to go home. But eventually we collected the small athletes and headed for home.

To add to her misery there were roadworks outside the primary school and our bus stop was closed. We had to walk some distance to the net stop! Such is life!

Granddaughter Number Two has taken up embroidery, or cross stitch, as a hobby. I am considering buying her a kit to embroider a replica section of the Bayeux Tapestry. This would cover her interest in history as well.

Here is something I found online about the Bayeux Tapestry:

“Picture a woman in Canterbury, sometime in the 1070s, bent over a strip of linen with a needle in her hand.

Her country has just been conquered. The men who did the conquering are the heroes of the scene she's stitching. And she is going to work anyway, because the bishop who commissioned this thing, Odo of Bayeux, is William the Conqueror's half brother, and you don't say no to him.

The Bayeux Tapestry isn't actually a tapestry. A tapestry is woven. This is embroidery, wool thread pulled through linen, about 230 feet of it, telling the story of how the Normans took England in 1066.

Most scholars now agree it was made in England, probably in Kent, by English women. The needlework style matches what Anglo-Saxon embroiderers were famous for across Europe. So the conquered were stitching the story of their own conquest, panel by panel, for the man who helped lead the invasion.

And then there are the borders.

Above and below the main narrative runs a strip of smaller figures. Lions, griffins, farmers plowing, a fox and a crow acting out one of Aesop's fables. In places, naked men and women. A cleric reaching out to touch a woman's face in a scene that has puzzled historians for centuries. Bodies stripped of armor and dignity after battle.

Some of it is decoration. Some of it isn't.

The fables in the margins tend to be stories about trickery, about the strong being fooled by the clever, about promises broken. They sit directly beneath scenes of Norman triumph. Whether the embroiderers chose them or were told to include them, the effect is the same. The official story runs down the middle. Something quieter runs along the edges.

We don't know their names. We don't have a single signature, a single record of who held the needles. The tapestry survived the Reformation, the French Revolution, and Nazi interest during World War II, and it still hangs in Bayeux today.

The men on horseback got the glory.

The women in the margins got the last word.”

A little tribute to the women who stitched the tapestry.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!