Stuff going on this week.

On Wednesday my middle granddaughter came round and made jam tarts in my kitchen. For some reason baking in Grandma’s kitchen is more satisfying than baking in Mum ‘s kitchen. I’m not complaining. She was good company. And we listened to quite a lot of music and chatted and set the world to rights.

On Thursday my old friend reneged on a walk in favour of political activity. (See yesterday’s post.) After she had finished her various administrative tasks, she took herself off to an anti-Boris demo in Manchester, then returned late to her home where she answered messages until close to midnight. Consequently she was in no state to go for a walk today, which was what we had planned.

So today I went for a run and then opened Grandma’s cafe to my daughter, the teenage grandson and the tiny granddaughter, the teenage granddaughter having gone off to a friend’s birthday celebration in Manchester. They were going to be locked in a room from which they had to make their escape. I do not know yet whether they actually managed to get out.

 The day turned out to be much better than the weather forecast had suggested earlier in the week. So my friend missed her chance to admire the scenery. Late in the afternoon I took myself off for a walk up what we call the Quarry Road, which is actually called Lark Hill, and almost got blown away. Summer lasted through last weekend and a few days beyond and Autumn seems to be blowing in with warm wind.

So it goes.

While my daughter and I were out and about in the late morning, she received a message about her daughter’s spending. Both her mid-teen offspring have a card on which she outs credit. When they spend money from the card, the system lets her know. Another aspect of social media controlling things! On this occasion it was notification of her daughter spending money in MacDonalds. We hoped that she was treating her friends and not spending £12+ on snacks for herself.

This article talks about the increase in snacking in this country.  “From quinoa bars to salmon skin chips: what's behind the snacking revolution? Forget breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the space of a generation, Brits have tripled their consumption of snacks – and the options are endless”, it tells us. People can organise regular delivery of snack boxes to their places of work. So instead of having breakfast, even en route, stopping for lunch and maybe having a tea break mid afternoon, people can dip into their snack box whenever they feel like it.

This strikes me as an odd way of running your life and may contribute quite a lot to the obesity problem, even if the snacks are supposedly healthy.

 Meanwhile Manchester is full of protests. As well as the anti-Boris stuff my friend has been attending, there have been environmental protests closing down Deansgate, one of the main central Manchester thoroughfares.

Here is an extract from something in one of today’s newspapers:-

 “The fires in the Amazon are “extraordinarily concerning” for the planet’s natural life support systems, the head of the UN’s top biodiversity body has said in a call for countries, companies and consumers to build a new relationship with nature. Cristiana Paşca Palmer, the executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest was a grim reminder that a fresh approach was needed to stabilise the climate and prevent ecosystems from declining to a point of no return, with dire consequences for humanity. “The Amazon fires make the point that we face a very serious crisis,” she told the Guardian. “But it is not just the Amazon. We’re also concerned with what’s happening in other forests and ecosystems, and with the broader and rapid degradation of nature. The risk is we are moving towards the tipping points that scientists talk about that could produce cascading collapses of natural systems.”
The world’s environmental crises are an increasing concern in international politics. Deforestation of the Amazon was high on the agenda of this week’s G7 meeting in Biarritz, France. In September, world leaders will gather in New York for a climate action summit. Next year, they are scheduled to get together again for a nature summit before a UN biodiversity conference in Kunming, China, in October.”

 Time for us to work together the serious stuff - instead of spending large amounts on adverts to persuade us that a No-Deal Brexit is okay!