Hints of approaching autumn already! Names of practitioners of non-sports - well in my opinion.

It’s the first week in August and the rowan trees are already heavy with berries, some of them still an orangey yellow but quite a lot of them turning properly red. There are raspberries on odd bushes at the side of the footpaths. How did the raspberry canes get there? My childhood memories have blackberry brambles popping up almost anywhere but not raspberry canes. Somehow they always seemed more domesticated. The brambles are also laden with blackberries but they are still small and green. Occasionally I come across one that looks full grown and ripe but they are usually a bit sour. In a couple of weeks though I expect we can go blackberrying.

On the subject of fruit, by the way, here are a couple of photos of the large gooseberries from Ye Olde Egton Bridge Gooseberry Competition that I mentioned yesterday.

Then this morning, out and about, I spotted the first red-gold leaves in one of the trees. Autumn seems to be coming on apace! Surely it shouldn’t be happening quite yet. Is this one of the climate change things? It was a rather fine and sunny morning though, very much like summer in fact! 

 

Later, however, the cloud moved in, the backs of the leaves were blowing up in what my weather app said was a “light wind”. It was beginning to look rather autumnal.

I read this morning that we should be using cargo bikes instead of vans to make deliveries in towns and cities. Because they can avoid congestion and can go onto streets where heavy vans are not allowed they can deliver about 60% faster than vans in city centres. And they cut carbon emissions by 90% compared to diesel vans and by a third compared to electric vans. Sounds good! It’s electric bikes they are talking about, not the kind of thing where you see a young cyclist with a square rucksack almost as big as he is delivering pizza and other such fast foods. These cargo bikes are odd-looking things and would certainly need some assistance to go up hills with their load of packages. I wonder how they cope in heavy rain and snow. Surely they would need waterproof covering for their parcels.

I wonder if “Deliverer” will ever become one of those occupation-related surnames we has so many of. On of our recent medal winners (for BMX riding, a sport that I regard as a kids’ pastime) was Bethany Shriever. Checking the spelling of her name before ai made derogatory comments about her sport in a recent post I came across a bit of information about her name, which must be a version of Shriver (cf Lionel Shriver: We need to talk about Kevin). The name connects to the verb “to shrive”:- 

1. To hear the confession of and give absolution to (a penitent).

2. To obtain absolution for (oneself) by confessing and doing penance.

v.intr. Archaic

1. To make or go to confession.

2. To hear confessions.

From that of course we get “shrove” as on Shrove Tuesday, bu which day we suppose believers have confessed their sins and have been “shriven”.  But basically it comes from Middle English schriven, from Old English scrīfan, from Latin scrībere, to write. So a Shriver is a writer. Maybe you needed to be able to write to give sinners a written absolution.

I even found out this odd fact:-

“The ancestral home of the Shriver family is in the German state of Bavaria. The name Shriver is an occupational hereditary surname, a type of surname that was taken from a word describing or common to the profession of the original bearer. It is a name for a clerk. The name Shriver is derived from the German word "schreiben," which means "to write" and was itself derived from the German word "schriben", and the Old German word "scriban." The Latin word "scribere" also means to write and could be a root word of this distinguished surname.”

There you go! An appropriate name for a writer of novels, if not for a rider of BMX bikes. 

Our media has been celebrating our success in another non-sport (in my opinion) skateboarding, where 13 year old Sky Brown has just become Great Britain’s youngest ever Olympic medal winner. Now, if her surname had been Blue, I wonder if her parents would have had second thoughts about calling her Sky. Just a thought!

And finally, here’s a link to the story of another skateboarder, Australian this time,

who managed to knock over a cameraman during his sporting activity. He still managed to score highly enough to qualify for the finals though.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!