Things that are not happening. Ganging up to protest. Some silliness.

It’s a lovely sunny Bank Holiday Monday here in Saddleworth. In other years we would have had the Brass Band Contest last Friday, with bands from all over the place competing with each other. It’s quite ironic that in the year when the weather has been decent enough to make a proper outdoor spectacle of it the band contest had to be cancelled.

People would also have been going around this week hunting for scarecrows dressed up and placed in gardens and shop windows and doorways. That”s not happening this year either.

Messages have been flying to and fro between those of us from the Italian class who should have been meeting in Catania later today for a week in Sicily. I’m making do with sunny Saddleworth instead.

It might be a Bank Holiday but lots of places have been asking people to stay away this year. In the USA, however, they have just had their Memorial Day holiday, the start of summer apparently. This article shows people gathering to celebrate. And their president is playing golf and shaking hands with other golfers! He should think about what happened to a certain prime minister who insisted shaking hands was fine!

As regards breaking rules, even the church is critical of Mr Johnson’s support for Mr Cummings. I am afraid the headline about bishops turning on Boris Johnson created in my head an image of massed bishops physically setting about the prime minister, perhaps threatening him with their mitres!

Now, a really cool prime minister seems to be Jacinda Ahern. Not only has she seemingly dealt very well with the coronavirus crisis but she was filmed commenting unconcernedly “We seem to be having a bit of an earthquake” as she was about to be interviewed on television. You have to admire her sangfroid!

Now for some bits of nonsense!

I was reading about the benefits of bananas. Well, it makes a change from reading about how fattening they are! As well as providing you with various vitamins and roughage to keep you regular, there is this:-

“Peels
If you’re having a banana a day that also means you’ll have a banana peel handy every day! Banana peels have great cosmetic benefits and can be used at home for teeth whitening, fading scars, reducing wrinkles and helping with acne. All you have to do is rub the banana peel on for a few minutes on a regular basis to see results- bananas are a 2-in-1 deal for your insides and your outsides!”

And so I think about rubbing banana peel over my face and then going around smelling of banana all day. No, it’s not going to happen!

And finally some odd bits of vocabulary, sent to me by a friend who appreciates words as much as I do:-

The way it smells after the rain is called “petrichor”.
The rumblings of your stomach is called a “wamble”.
The day after tomorrow is called “overmorrow”.
When you combine an exclamation mark with a question mark (!?) it is called an “interrobang”.
The armhole in clothes, where the sleeve is sewn in, is called the “armscye”.
And the dot over an “i” or a “j” is called a “tittle” - presumably giving rise to the expression “not one jot or tittle”.

There you go.

Stay safe and well, everyone!