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!

Reactions to the weather. Memorable nostalgia key. Trees. Spain’s housing crisis. And word.

4° - that’s the temperature given by the weather app on my phone at about 8.00 this morning. It proved to be a beautifully crisp morning.

Granddaughter Number Two had already expressed her opinion of this; “I am loving the chill in the air this morning! Finally feels like autumn.” She was up even earlier, on a train to York at 7.00, taking pictures of the sunrise. 

She is definitely a glass-half-full person, whereas her older sister, more of a glass-half-empty person, was just complaining about how cold it was. 

Firther to my comments yesterday about people purchasing relics/mementos of the rich and famous, here is a photo of a key.

This is the key to Paul McCartney’s childhood home in Liverpool. It has just sold at auction for £6,100, three times the pre-sale estimate! I assume that the current occupants of that house have a different lock on the door. The just sold key has apparently been owned by Beatles fan Kathy Salt from New York for decades. If she has had it for decades, presumably she is now of an age when she feels like getting rid of some clutter and maybe needs a bit of extra cash in her retirement. Good for her!

Now, I love trees. I have a favourite local tree, a horse chestnut, much photographed. This year I have been taking a picture at the start of each month, with the plan to display all the photos, showing its progress over the year. 

So here is a photo of an Irish tree, this one a wych elm, 150 years old, blown sideways as a young tree and continuing to grow sideways since then. It has just been named “tree of the year”.

My friend Colin in Galicia has been commenting in his blog (here’s a link) about the ongoing housing crisis in Spain and the demonstrations taking place in many places. This morning I read that María del Carmen Abascal, known on the media as Maricarmen, the old lady evicted from the flat where she had lived for 70+ years, the lady who became a symbol of the crisis and the protests, has died in hospital at the age of 87. I read that she was sending messages of support to the protesters.  “I would like to be there with you all,” she said in a video shot from her hospital bed. “But I’m not that lucky. So from here, I ask you all for courage and to fight and defend what is yours.” A strong woman!

For some light relief, here’s something a friend of mine posted on social media ;

“We’ll take this to the energy zone.”

“Let’s triangle back on that,”

“Put that in the idea fridge.”

No-one reacted. Everyone just nidded like it was completely normal. I figured it was some corporate lingo I missed.

Day two, I hear: “We’ll verticalize that bandwidth”.

I write it down to google later. Nothing. 

By day three, I’m starting to use them too. “Yeah, we should put that in the idea fridge”. People nodded. i felt included.

Friday rolls around. He pulls me to one side and goes;

“I’m making them all up.  No one knows what they mean”. 

HE GOT THE ENTIRE TEAM TALKING NONSENSE. Even the manager threw out “triangle back” in a call.

Now the whole office is trapped in fake jargon with no way out.

I respect it. I fear it.

Well, they say that if a lie is repeated often enough it is accepted as truth. Clearly the same applies to spoof expressions.

Life goes ln. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Collecting relics. Being a butter expert. Nostalgia for the vegetables of yesteryear.

It’s another of those days that began dull, gradually improved and was bright and sunny by midday! A person could get used to such a weather pattern!

For those who want to collect stuff that belonged to the rich and famous (a bit like collecting relics of the saints) there is news of stuff on the market. There is the James Bond suit worn by Sean Connery and the axe wielded by Jack Nichilson in The Shining, both up for auction. Where would you display such wonders? A huge axe over fireplace?! And today I have read that a Bentley believed to have been owned by a certain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has gone for sale at a Doncaster dealership for just under £125,000. 

There you go! Stuff to spend your money on.

I also read that Mr Mountbatten Windsor has accused Thames Valley Police of taking personal items during searches of his home. Goodness! How shocking! If true, maybe the policemen concerned were thinking of possible resale value at future auctions.

I suppose people have always wanted to possess something hat links them to famous people but something you pay vast amounts of money for surely is not the dame as a personalised autograph of someone you admire.

  

Here’s another oddity of the modern world: Specialist butter!?!? According to this article butter is more popular now than ever it has been. People queue up outside a specialist butter shop in Paris apparently. Coincidentally, we have been watching a series of programmes featuring Stanley Tucci travelling around   Italy discovering things about Italian cooking. In one part of Italy - which one ai don’t remember - they use huge amounts of butter for cooking. No olive oil for them. 

I suppose there are people who savour a little slice of butter on its own, able to recognise the vintage, just as there are people who like to ”drink” samples of olive oil to savour its vintage. I must be too much of a Philistine to do that, although I do like to use extra virgin olive oil for cooking.

The article features at one point a South African journalist, Sofia Patel, who describbes herself as a “butter horader” with selarate categories of butter’ cooking butterm eating butter and “ornamental butter”, the stuff thatvis too precious to eat. In the last category is a half pack of Kerrygold from 2019, frozen ever since. “I have it partly as insurance, in case I run out. But also because it’s reassuring – it reminds me of a different time,” she says. She loves her work but her dream job is to run a dairy farm. “Or at least go to Paris, to that shop, and eat all that butter.” 

Now, recently Phil was doing one of his regular research projects into what we should or shouldn’t eat and decided that the very best butter to buy is Kerrygold! What a coincidence!

Since we seem to have moved onto food concerns, here’s something else I found this morning:

“The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.

The report, from researchers at Deep Science Ventures, found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would have been present in their food in the 1960s.

The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.

Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.

“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”

The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.”

So much for “five a day”!

Now we can get nostalgic for the vegetables of our childhood too, 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Silly weather. Communication within the NHS. Tourism problems. How to be a qualified influencer. French students.

So we’re almost a whole week into October. We sometimes have several seasons in one day. It’s often a bit dull early in the morning (well, at an hour which is early for a slugabed like me). By midmorning the sun has tried to come out and the very air warms up. So today my washing is out to dry in the garden again). When the sun goes down later in the day, which it inexorably does a little earlier each day, the temperature plummets! So it goes.

This afternoon we are going to have flu vaccinations at our local pharmacy. Even though we have this organised I keep receiving texts from the NHS telling me I have a message from the GP’s surgery. As I have a routine appointment with my GP tomorrow I always open the message, going through all the routine annoying security checks, just in case my GP has some pressing reason to cancel or change my appointment. Every time I have done so the message has been  a reminder to make an appointment for a flu vaccination. Somehow the bits of the NHS do not talk to each other.

I have often commented on the problems of electric bikes and electric scooters in city centres. Well it seems that Rome has an extra one: golf carts! Some enterprising individuals have discovered that there is money to be made from giving tourists a ride round the city in a golf cart. Money to made from people too lazy to walk to the ancient sites, discovering interesting things to look at en route, or too frightened to venture into the public transport system. And other drivers are complaining that the roads are clogged up with these golf carts. The authorities are working out how to get things back under control!

We were talking about tourism-related problems in the Italian conversation class yesterday, specifically about people who don’t really look at paintings in galleries but just stand by a famous work of art and take a self - would be influencers! 

Well, it seems that you can study to be an influencer. I read that Nottingham Trent University has a degree in “content creation”, aka “the influencer degree”! The “three-year course comes with BA (Hons) status and a top-tier price tag of almost £10,000 a year, for which students will learn “hands-on technical production”, “analytics, branding and commercial strategy” and collaboration with brands and “industry partners”. Course leaders are at pains to point out it won’t turn them into overnight social media stars.” However, I’m sure that those who are shelling out a huge £30,000 are hoping to make the money back. The world is crazy! 

In France students, presumably not on “influencer” courses, are continuing to cause chaos, and brandishing reminders of revolutionary times past

Now, here’s a nice cartoon about RAF Fairford.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Doomscrolling and other such activities. Green Party decisions. US - RAF bases?

 As mobile phones have turned into pocket computers and people, such as our own Granddaughter Number Two, read more and more stuff on their phones, it seems we are all more prone to “doomscrolling”. That is, spending an excessive amount of time on digital content. Apparently it’s more prominent among young people, and more specifically among young men and people who actively follow political events. It has been linked to a decline in mental and physical health. Goodness! Reasons for doomscrolling include fear of missing out (maybe a reason why it increased during the covid lockdown), increased anxiety and attempts at gaining control over uncertainty.

One source I looked at suggested that doomscrolling can be compared to an older phenomenon from the 1970s called the mean world syndrome, described as "the belief that the world is a more dangerous place to live in than it actually is as a result of long-term exposure to violence-related content on television". Studies show that seeing upsetting news leads people to seek out more information on the topic, creating a self-perpetuating cycle.

Well, i know people who do just that! And the huge number of podcasts available nowadays simply make it all the more possible. 

But in fact I think most of just spend an inordinate amount of time just “scrolling” without the “doom” element. This might explain the number of platitudes that people post on social media. Maybe we are all seeking for things of interest. Or maybe we all want to post things just to appear interesting. Of course, such judgements also apply to those of us who write blogs! 

Anyway I have a collection of new expressions - well, new to me - similar to doomscrolling but maybe less worrying, which apply to the modern world. Here goes:- 

• “Coffee badging” is when employees enter the office building briefly, tapping in with their identity badge, grab a coffee or mingle with colleagues before leaving to work the rest of the day from home.
• “Attention infidelity” is spending more time looking at your phone (doomscrolling?) when out on a date with your partner and not paying them any where near enough attention.
• “Microcheating” os a way of cheating on your partner but not acknowledging it as such: ‘liking’ posts by your partner’s friends, sending flirting Direct Messages to other people, taking a “look” at dating apps, exchanging numbers with someone you meet at a party - but not actually cheating! 
• Resenteeism is when a person turns up to work, not really wanting to be there, physically present, going through the motions but is not mentally or emotionally present.
• Fauxductivity is when you give the appearance of doing something productive at the expense of doing any meaningful work. I suppose displacement activities come into this category - sharpening all your pencils before starting work, doing a sudoku puzzle rather than tidying the kitchen! 

That’s enough of that nonsense.

I read that the Green Party leader has been banned from entering Israel after members of his party voted to define Zionism as racist. And the head of the Jewish Greens says she may well leave the party as a result of that vote. It must be odd to be Jewish and be accused of antisemitism and be denied entry to what is supposed to be your homeland! 

 

Then there is the US Air Force which is reported to have pulled its bombers from RAF Fairford following an investigation into an alleged planned terror attack at the base. Most of us don’t think of the USA having bases here, largely because they are called RAF something or other. And yet there are approximately 11,000 US military personnel are stationed at these bases, along with civilian staff and family members. This presence is part of the broader military cooperation between the US and the UK, which has been ongoing since World War.

This is what the CND page has to say about it:

The United States military has had a continuous presence in the UK since the Second World War. Located throughout Britain, US military bases have contributed to illegal and immoral drone strikes, the transportation of weapons for military operations overseas, mass surveillance and the globally destabilising missile defence system. And now it looks like US nuclear weapons will even be based here.

And here is a link to a map showing the various bases spread around the country.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A little light relief. Remembering Cable Street. Disturbances here and there in the here and now.

 In our increasingly violent and dangerous world, we need some things to cheer us up. (Having said that, I am aware that we live in a very peaceful bit of the Uk, if we discount occasionally noisy traffic.) So here are some strangely amusing wildlife pictures.

And here is a cartoon in praise of books and quietly critical of our society.

On this day, 4 October 1936, Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists planned to march through a predominantly Jewish section of East London, instead the Battle of Cable Street occured. The fascists were met by over 100,000 local residents and workers who – insistent that 'They shall not pass!' – fought both the blackshirts and the police protecting them, forcing the march to be abandoned. 

And we’re still fighting fascism today,

In France the lycée students are still causing chaos.

“France to keep up to 500 schools closed on Monday

The education minister says 400- 500 high schools will remain partially or fully shut following a week where riot police clashed with high school students as protests on classroom conditions have spread nationwide.

Lessons will be “totally or partly suspended” given the unrest, says Education Minister Edouard Geffray.

He said 24 schools had been “burned or ransacked” since the start of the movement.

At least 5,000 people, mainly teenagers, have been arrested while dozens of people, including students and teachers, have been injured. Unions are calling on teachers to strike.”

Meanwhile, in Spain ten of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Madrid ⁠and other Spanish cities as they step up demands for action to tackle ⁠a mounting housing crisis ⁠after government measures were struck down by the opposition.”

It seems the Europe is just revolting!

We had a lot of trouble with wildfires earlier in the summer. Today I read this:

“The government quietly scrapped plans to prepare the countryside in England for wildfires, it has been revealed. This was despite new data showing fire crews do not have the proper protective gear to tackle them.”

And the firemen, much praised, had inadequate protective gear apparently. Here’s a link to an article about it.

We’ve been revising our Portuguese. Or rather, we have been trying once again to acquire some mastery of that language, listening to CDs and podcasts and the like. I must have said many times that I can read the language, helped by my knowledge of other Latin based languages, and I can work put how to express ideas and make enquiries, but listening to the spoken language still remains hard. We’ll keep on trying. 

Now, all the various language programmes tell us that Brazilian Portuguese is easier to understand. But according to this article Brazilians in Portugal are discriminated against because of their language. This is “glottophobia”. I am rather surprised as I had always admired the Portuguese for their skills in English, for example, a consequence of their watching foreign films in the original  version, rather than dubbed into the local language, as happens in Spain and Italy. Life is full of surprises.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.