Another Wednesday. It rained massively in the night. Whether it rained all night is debatable but I know that I heard heavy rain at several points in the night. My weather app suggested a “window” of rain-free time between 9.00 and 11.00, perfect for my ride to the market. By midday it still hadn’t begun to rain again so maybe Storm Barbara has got stuck a bit further south. I bought apples at the fruit stall. I am laying in stocks of Coxes apples, almost certainly the best apples in the world, from the fruit stall at the market. They are only available for a limited time. I’m sure that when I was a teenager we used to get Coxes apples from New Zealand at other times of the year. Is that a false memory? Or does that kind of import not happen any longer?
I’ve not been buying biscuits from the cheese and biscuit stall lately. Phil asked me to stop doing so as he was simply eating them - that is what they are for, after all! - and he was concerned about his waistline. Today I bought a sneaky pack of “oat flips”, biscuits that my gluten-intolerant brother-in-law can eat, as we have planned a Diggle Chippy Hike again for Friday, weather permitting. If he can still have a cup of tea in the garden, possibly not now that we are in tier 3, he can have a biscuit to go with it. In the meantime, the oat flips are hidden away.
Here’s an odd fact about biscuits:-
“No other country buys and eats more biscuits than Britain. In the last month of the national lockdown, shoppers spent an extra £19m on biscuits. There is a biscuit for every occasion: rusks for teething babies, party rings for birthdays, custard creams to dunk in tea, Penguins and Tunnock’s wafers for lunchboxes, water biscuits to eat with cheese. We even assign character traits to different varieties and use them to reveal our personalities. Politicians interviewed on Mumsnet are routinely asked to choose their favourite.”
And here’s another:-
“Queen Victoria refused to have a biscuit named after her. Association with royalty helped sell biscuits. Marie biscuits were named after a Russian duchess, bourbons after a French royal house, Albert biscuits after Queen Victoria’s husband. However, Victoria declined Huntley & Palmers’ request to name one after her. Perhaps she thought it would be too vulgar to have her name emblazoned across biscuit tins. The palace suggested that they should instead name it after her favourite home on the Isle of Wight – and so it came to be that Osborne biscuits were one of the most popular 19th-century biscuits.”
I wonder if anyone told her about the cake known as a Victoria Sponge!
Well, Greater Manchester goes into tier 3 of the Covid lockdown at midnight on Friday. Our granddaughter is growing a little more anxious than usual, already high, at the prospect of not seeing her mother apart from at a distance for the foreseeable future. Now the news on the radio informs me South Yorkshire is following us into tier 3. So that’s a large swathe of the North of England under increased restrictions. South Yorkshire has been praised for the sensible way it carried out negotiations for financial assistance. Is that an implied criticism of Andy Burnham? Or is the local government of South Yorkshire avoiding having stuff imposed on them from above? The whole question of financial aid has been very thorny.
Over in the United States, as well as the upcoming election there is the question of the confirmation (or not) of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court Judge, a position for life which it’s important to get right. Now, Amy Coney Barrett, belongs to a christian group called People of Praise.
I read this:-
“The basic premise of everything at the People of Praise was that the devil controlled everything outside of the community, and you were ‘walking out from under the umbrella of protection’ if you ever left,” said one former member who called herself Esther, who had to join the group as a child but then left the organization. “I was OK with it being in a tiny little corner of Indiana, because a lot of weird stuff happens in tiny little corners in this country. But it’s just unfathomable to me – I can’t even explain just how unfathomable it is – that you would have a supreme court justice who is a card-carrying member of this community.”
How strange to talk about your country as a place where “a lot of weird stuff happens in tiny little corners”. It sounds like something from a science fiction or horror story. Do weird things happen in tiny little corners of England? We need someone to write a good story about it. But Esther is correct: it really is unfathomable that someone as important as a supreme court justice, or an influential politician should have fundamental,religious beliefs that include a belief in the devil controlling large parts of our life!
Here’s another small town story. There’s a little town in Canada with the unfortunate name of Asbestos. As it’s name implies this little town was once important for the production of asbestos, something to be proud of before anyone realised how dangerous that once-ubiquitous mineral really is. So now the townspeople have voted to change its name to Val-des-Sources. When I read that the vote was 51.5% in favour, I wondered if quite a lot of people wanted to remain Asbestosians, but on reflection I assume this was 51.5% in favour of that name over other proposed options. “It’s a name that represents our area, and especially, it’s inspiring for the future,” said the Quebec town’s mayor, Hugues Grimard. Quite so! Good for them!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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