Hailstones on a sunny day! Safe splashing. Interesting words. Gardeners.

I woke up quite early this morning to the sound of heavy rain on the skylight windows. So I switched off the alarm, turned over and went back to sleep to the sound of the rain. No run round the village this morning. Mid-morning the sun came out. Maybe the day was shaping up quite nicely after all. Later as I contemplated popping into the village for a couple of items, walking the long way round to make up for not running earlier, I realised that the sun had disappeared and we had hailstones! All seasons in one day!

I see that Artemis II has splashed down safely, which is good, but I still don’t know quite what the purpose of the mission was. I am not one to denigrate scientific endeavour but I do wonder quite what they found out that we did not know before. So it goes. 

I’ve come across a new expression: “friction-maxxing”. I have already commented some time ago on “looks-maxxing”, used about young men “maximising their physical attractiveness”, and supposedly about young women too. According to my research “maxxing is an internet slang suffix meaning to optimize or maximize a particular quality or activity. The suffix originated in game theory and role-playing game terminology before being adopted by incel communities in the 2010s, where looksmaxxing referred to maximizing one's physical attractiveness. It entered mainstream usage through TikTok and social media in the 2020s, often applied humorously to everyday activities.”

Hmm, maybe “looksmaxxing” only applies to young men after all.

“Maxxing”, by the way, is not accepted as a real word by the spellcheck programme, which wants to correct it to “maxing” or even “Maxine”!

Anyway, it seems that “friction-maxxing” is all about doing things the more difficult way, maybe the old-fashioned way. This includes cooking a meal from scratch rather than using ready meals, or one of those deliver services which sends you all the ingredients ready prepared, or, heaven forfend, UberEats. And of course, there’s writing your own reports and essays and dissertations instead of instructing AI to do so. You can even take it so far as to mend your own clothes, or even make them yourself in the first place. Living at a slower pace seems to be the thing, along with the satisfaction that comes with achievement. Here’s a link to an article about it. 

Still thinking of words, here’s a new example of turning nouns into verbs: suddenly there is a verb ‘to sauna”.

And here is some fun with words by Lemn Sissay:

'Is it a homophone or a homonym?'

They row as they row the lake

The morning is to her a hymn

To him it is a wake

Here is an interesting take on Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny.

David Beckham, by the way, has been signed up to co-design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, working with Alan Titchmarsh, who does know a thing or two about gardens. He has apparently been given a garden gnome to paint, presumably as well as other garden-related tasks. Gnomes used to be frowned upon, definitely not the thing (except possibly for a few gardens near ours which really do favour gnomes and pot toadstools and all sorts of garden ornamentation) and banned from the Chelsea Flower Show for years. A special dispensarion has been granted for this year and gnomes painted by famous folk such as David Beckham, Cate Blanchett and mary Berry will be auctioned to raise money for gardening projects in schools. There you go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Washing. Some cartoon comments on life. Sweet nostalgia. And a troubled Foreign Secretary.

The rain has gone … for the time being. I have optimistically hung a lineful of washing in the garden. Optimistically, I say, but the first items are halfway dry already, a little but of sun and a regular gentle wind! That’s the way to do it.

Here’s a cartoon targeting Trump supporters. “The REAL Trump Delusion Syndrome. Some suffer so deeply, they don't even recognise they're suffering at all...  “

Here’s a dalek comment on peace plans.

And here are several cartoons relating to the recent space mission.

One of my early childhood memories is about receiving a threepenny bit for pocket money and going off independently to spend it on sweets, which had to last all week unless you gave in to temptation and ate them all there and then. Some items could be bought at a certain number for a penny, various sorts of chewy sweets or aniseed balls for example. Some were sold loose by weight - sherbet lemons, mint imperials, dolly mixtures, and various disgusting flavours of coloured sugar, marketed as “fizz”, which you consumed by dipping a wet finger into the bag and licking it, turning your finger a lurid blue or pink. Three old pence would usually buy you two ounces of whatever you chose. 

A foot-long barley-sugar stick seemed like a good idea but once partially unwrapped it just got stickier and messier as the days went by. One of the best was a packet of Rowntree’s fruit gums; if you resisted the urge to chew you could keep one fruit gum quietly dissolving in your mouth for about 15 minutes. And if you eked them, sealing the packet up each time, you could make the packet last all week. On balance, I must have been a horribly determined child; I don’t think I could resist the temptation nowadays! 

It was this article that got me thinking about sweets from my childhood sweet-eating. Before it was taken over by Nestlé, Rowntree’s was one of the three great Quaker businesses, along with Fry’s and Cadbury’s. They were said to be known as good Quaker employers, treating their employees well. Now, the article says, Rowntree’s has appointed someone to look into their past connections with slavery. I guess it was one of those things that even philanthropists took for granted back in the 19th century.

I’ve not quoted Michael Rosen for a while. So here’s his reflection on events in Lebanon:

Yvette Cooper is 'troubled'.

She says she's 'troubled'.

She's been on TV saying she's 'troubled'.

What's troubling her, it seems

is that Israel is killing people in Lebanon.

I wonder if that really is what's troubling her.

Perhaps what's troubling her

is that the British government 'stands by Israel'

but hardly anyone else is.

Perhaps what's troubling her

is that she knows she can't go on and on

turning up in studios and in the House of Commons

justifying what Israel is doing.

Perhaps she feels that Israel has

let her down.

"After all we've done for you, Israel

and now you go and do something beastly

that I can't justify."

So Yvette Cooper is 'troubled'.

And it's all been such a surprise.

Up till now

everything that Israel has done

since the 1940s 

has been great.

And here’ s what Jeremy Corbyn had to say about it:

The UK Foreign Secretary says she is “deeply troubled" by Israel's latest massacre in Lebanon.

So “troubled” that the government still supplies Israel with weapons and intelligence.

Israel is committing war crimes in Lebanon - and this government is shamefully complicit.

Hmm!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Leaving Las Palmas. Fires and flowers to greet us. “Blackface” traditions.

On Monday, as I may have mentioned already, we moved house, from a rather elegant flat in the Triana district of Las Palmas to a less elegant place in a district whose name I never learnt, a district of high-rise flats, altogether less tourist-orientated, more everyday life-orientated. Trying hard not to get lost we followed Google maps on the phone to find the local Spar so that we did at least have the makings of breakfast on Tuesday morning. 

Tuesday lunchtime, still trying not to get lost following Google maps (which never make it clear which way is north so that it is easy to head in the wrong direction) we went in search of a restaurant, a specific restaurant, hence Google maps. We paused briefly outside a place that roasted chickens to take away and found the restaurant we were after just a little further along the road. The men sitting at the tables outside started to tell us, “martes, está cerrada”. At first we took this to mean that the restaurant itself was closed on Tuesdays. Such a disappointment! We would have to start afresh. 

But no, the helpful men had jumped to conclusions and assumed we wanted a roast chicken. Confusion sorted, we discovered that yes, of course, we could lunch at this little local restaurant. After further confusion when they began to tell they only served “platos combinados”, making me wonder if we were only going to get egg and chips, we had very good grilled fish - yes, with chips - and a nice ensalada mixta. It quite made up for the rather basic accommodation we had moved into and for the Google maps confusion. A good end to our stay!

And yesterday we flew home, leaving sunshine behind in Las Palmas and returning to sunshine in Greater Manchester. 

Okay, by this morning the blue sky and sunshine had disappeared here and later in the day it rained quite heavily. By early evening, though, the sky was blue again, just in time for the sun to go over the hill. So it goes! 

While we were away wildfires spread over the peat moors around here. Highly inflammable stuff is peat. Saddleworth moor, Marsden moor, Derbyshire all had outbreaks. Some roads were closed, people were advised to stay away from local beauty stops, and in some places people were advised to keep their windows closed. What caused the fires? It could be foolish / careless folk with portable barbecues. It could be kids messing about … they are still on holiday from school. One scientific explanation is that the hot and sunny weather of the last few days dried out the top layer of peat and it just self-combusted! 

Whatever the cause, it’s a mess and the season of fires has started early this year! Maybe today’s rain will have helped. 

On the positive side, we have returned to bluebells and forget-me-nots flowering in the garden. 

While I have been watching Easter processions in Gran Canaria, Morris dancers have been out and about here in the Northwest of England, as I have already said. In nearby Bacup they have a group of something like Morris dancers who are known as  the Britannia Coconut Dancers and perform a tightly structured percussive dance in which wooden "nuts" attached to the body are struck in rhythmic patterns, creating accompaniment through movement itself. 

They dance in “black face”, which I am not sure is strictly politically correct these days. However it has been documented from 1857, when they were known as Tunstead Mill Nutters. It is said to be the last continuous example of a once wider Rossendale practice. Although its earlier origins remain uncertain, the form is understood most securely as a tradition rooted in Lancashire's industrial culture and sustained through local continuity. 

The troupe processes through the town from morning to night in a ritual boundary dance across the town, accompanied by a brass band and stopping at key points along the route. Their striking costume includes striped skirts, clogs, turbans and blackened faces. Their movement is both percussive and processional, built around the rhythmic striking of wooden “nuts” strapped to their knees, wrists, and waists. 

As regards the blackened faces, some say it has connections to Cornish mining communities, or even Mediterranean and Moorish influences - think of the “ y Cristianos” festivities in some parts of Spain. Some say it could originally have been a way of warding off evil spirits. Others put it down to the original “Nutters” being coalminers whose faces were blackened with coal dust at the end of their working shift. I suppose we’ll never know for sure but I remain surprised that nobody has complained! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Bread. Space travel. Keeping culture alive. Games children play again.

I’ve not found a panadería near our new accommodation. So this morning I made a foray out to the Spar shop across the road and bought bread from there. Not quite as good as a small independent bakery would sell but at least it was still moderately warm when I bought it, suggesting it was freshly baked somewhere.

Space travel is taking our minds off the chaos of the world. Can the astronauts see the chaos their space capsule? I wonder. 

Here’s an animals’ eye view:

Anyway ….

“Artemis II astronauts broke Apollo 13’s distance record at 1.57pm eastern time on Monday, hugging each other in the cramped capsule as they made history for becoming the first four humans to travel the farthest from Earth.

About five hours later, at 7.02pm ET, the crew reached the furthest point in its mission, before swinging back around, at 252,756 miles from Earth – 4,111 miles farther than the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970.”

And then there is this:

I wrote about the seeming universality of children’s games yesterday. Today in this interesting article about the Navajo Nation in the USA there was a photo of “students being taught traditional Native American games in the Native American culture class at Holbrook high school.” They were playing, or learning to play, “cats’ cradle”, the suggestion being that this was a Native American invented game. 

Now, I used to play “cats’ cradle” with my friends when I was at school. As far as I know it was only the girls who played “cats’ cradle”, never the boys. I also played it with my older sister. She was very good at it and knew all sorts of complicated ways of weaving the string between our fingers to make know patterns which could be turned upside down to resemble an actual cradle. (She was very good at all those things: doing handstands, ‘running in’ when communal skipping went on with a long rope and a ‘turner’ at each end, fancy individual skipping. In her teens she was also an excellent jive dancer! Much more proficient at all those things than I was.)

And it seems to be another universal activity. Wikipedia tells me this:

“Different cultures have different names for the game, and often different names for the individual figures. The French word for manger is crèche, and cattle feed racks are still known as cratches. In  Japan, it is called ayatori (あやとり). In Korea, it is called sil-tteu-gi. In Russia, the whole game is called simply the game of string, and the diamonds pattern is called carpet, with other pattern names such as field, fish, and sawhorse for the other figures—a cat isn't mentioned. The game may have originated in China. In China, the game is called 翻繩; fan sheng; 'turning rope'. In Israel, the game is called "Knitting Grandmother" In some regions of the US, this game also is known as Jack in the Pulpit.”

Here is a picture of girls playing the game in Japan.

Amazing! 

At our youngest grandchildren’s primary school they still have hopscotch grids painted on the playground and I believe they teach them the old playground games. But in my childhood we simply chalked the hopscotch grid on the flagstones, in the playground and on the pavement outside our houses. The games went in seasons as well. At one point everyone had string for “cat’s cradle’, replaced suddenly by skipping ropes, replaced in turn by whip and top, and organised group games like “What time is it Mr Wolf?” and other such creeping up on someone games.  How many of them  them are remembered now?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!