Today is the summer solstice. Some people call it midsummer’s day. Others say it is the official start of summer. With the odd weather patterns we’ve had in recent times it’s really hard to say when one season ends and another begins. How nice it would be if the seasons would behave themselves like in a story book, with a neat three months for each of the four seasons. At the moment the summer solstice does not seem to be very sunny here. But it’s pleasantly warm outside and it’s not raining on us - small mercies and all that sort of thing.
It seems that Saturday (June 19th) was what the Americans call Juneteenth, a day of celebration to commemorate the end of slavery in America in 1865. Here’s a link to some pictures of the celebrations. It’s a little frightening to think that not much more than 150 years ago it was legal to own people. It’s even more frightening to think that slavery in one form or another still exists around the world, not so official and perhaps not so widespread but still there. It’s also frightening that we still need anti-racist organisations. Back in the 1960s and 1970s I was fairly optimistic that the world was heading for times of tolerance and equality for all. I’m rather more pessimistic now.
Also back in the 1960s we saw the beginning of the big music festivals. The USA had Woodstock. We had the Isle of Wight. Here’s a link to a brief article about the Isle of Wight festival, or rather about the photographer David Hurn and his picture of crowds of festival-goers heading naked into the sea.
It was the end of August so the sea would have warmed up a little I suppose. I have Spanish friends who do not believe that we actually go into the sea off the shores of our island. But then they bathe in the Atlantic, which is considerably colder than most of the UK waters, with the possible exception of the North Sea off the coast of the North East of England. I swear my feet turned blue paddling in the sea there one summer’s day.
I wrote recently about my milkman having said I need not return the green screw tops on the empty milk bottles as they don’t reuse them. The tops are colour coded. Green tops signify semi-skimmed milk, red means totally skimmed, almost transparent, a sort of watery, milky pale blue in colour, and blue tells you the milk is full fat, so rich in flavour it’s hard to take when you’ve been drinking semi-skimmed for years. Well, over the last few days our milk bottles have had white tops! What do white tops signify? This morning I found out. The milkman apologised for white tops. They’ve had lots of phone calls about them apparently. Not from me; as long as the milk tasted right I was not worried. It turns out that they have run out of green tops and are expecting a delivery imminently. By Wednesday, he hopes, normal service should be resumed.
I refrained from commenting on the supreme irony of this. If they got their act together to re-use the metal bottle tops they would not have to worry about running out. So it goes!
UFOs - or as I really should say nowadays, UAPs - are in the news again. The Pentagon is about to release a report on the activities of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Who knew that such a programme (or program) even existed. Just as I thought that this was a special US madness, possibly aimed at justifying increased funding for defence, I read that closer to home, in Todmorden, not too far from here, they are equally crazy about UFOs and even have a resident ufologist. Who knew that that was a profession? Picture the school child who pipes up, “When I grow up I want to be a ufologist”.
The aforementioned Tod ufologist is Tod bookshop owner Colin Lyall who set up the Tod UFO Society (it’s really just The UFO Society - Tod is my addition!) back in 2016 and organises monthly meetings. They meet in a local pub on a Tuesday night (presumably they can do that again now) and usually have 30 - 50 people, locals and visitors, wanting to find out about the local former policeman Alan Godfrey who claims to have been abducted by aliens in 1980 and has written a book about his experience, and presumably about more recent unexplained “events”. They’re very excited about the soon to be released Pentagon report.
Goodness! I am taken back once again to some time in the early 1970s, when a colleague and I stood at the staffroom window and watched a strange light in the sky, speculating jokingly that it might be a UFO.
I am also imagining the possibility of a TV series along the lines of the BBC’s “Detectorists”. We could call it “Ufologists”.
Of course, if it turns out that after all this time the aliens are finally going to be revealed to us, then the ufologists will have the last laugh. However, I really can’t help feeling that if those aliens wanted to talk to us they would have done so by now.
Happy Solstice Day!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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