Today started badly. Well, actually it started in a perfectly normal way: I got up and went for a run in the rather cloudy morning air. The crisp, sunny mornings we’ve had for the last few days had disappeared. It was still crisp but no longer bright. Then I returned home and found the shower was not working. What a pest! Was I going to have to have a bath? I can’t remember when I last had a bath. Fortunately, before it came to total immersion, Phil worked out how to fix the shower. My hero once again!
Yesterday my daughter dropped her second-born at York University where she will study for the next three years. The new student seems to have settled in fine, taking herself out of her room to meet fellow student-residence occupants. All is going well so far. It will be odd, however, not having her join us on family chippy hikes or suggesting I go shopping with her. A new era begins!
Apparently they handed out printed copies of the national anthem to people attending the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Maybe someone was afraid that members might not know the words. On the midday news they had Billy Bragg talking about the feeling of solidarity that comes from singing together. During the miners’ strikes they sang songs from the previous century and just tweaked the words. Is there a place for “nation” in there? Yes, he says, and gives the example of singing Blake’s Jerusalem at Labour Party conferences. What about the national anthem? It’s good because it’s short and uncomplicated, he says, but he’s not sure if in our multicultural society we should be asking a supreme deity to preserve the life of the head of the Church of England! Food for thought.
Phil just received an email telling him that an electrical gadget we had ordered had just been delivered. Odd! Nobody had rung the doorbell or even knocked pathetically at the door. The parcel was left in a black box outside the front door. We usually give instructions to put parcels there, provided they are not too big, if there is no answer at the door. We don’t expect the black box to be the first port of call for deliverers though. In this strange new world where we all buy so much stuff online, something has gone very wrong with deliveries, probably because of the pressure on deliverymen to make as many deliveries as possible as fast as possible. There are probably masses of parcels going to the wrong places all over the country. Our Number One Granddaughter lives in rather out of the way address and her parcels - and she does order a lot of stuff - are always going astray. You would think that modern technology could cope! We live in odd times!
Here’s another example of the oddity of the world. Tomás Saraceno, an Argentinian artist based in Berlin, whose work is appearing in an exhibition at the national museum of the Netherlands, has persuaded the curator to leave the museum largely uncleaned so that spider webs and other insecty stuff can accumulate. The exhibition explores the changing perceptions of creepy-crawlies. Okay. That’s fine. I can appreciate a delicately spun spiderweb with the best of us but it’s not really a deliberately thought out work of art. It’s more akin to the piece of “brilliant art work” your three year old can accidentally produce … provided you whisk the paper away from him/her before they cover it with brown splodges!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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