I cycled to the market in the sunshine this morning. Mind you, I needed my windproof jumper and my cycling gloves. It was CO-O-O-OLD! There was frost on the grass along the Donkey Line bridle path! But what a splendid day to be out and about quite early in the morning.

And then I returned home and on the online news read about Hurricane Ian which managed to wipe out Cuba’s already rickety electricity supply system. The whole country was without power as a result. It may not be a huge country but still it’s hard to imagine a whole country blacked out and there are over 11 million people there. Ian is on his way to Florida where people have been warned to evacuate certain areas and to take steps to stay safe. If you’re an island like Cuba, however, you can’t drive to another state to escape. As I read about tobacco farms being flattened I thought back to the trip to Cuba my good friend Dee and I made not long after we turned 70. One of our excursions was a visit to a tobacco farm. The drying sheds, mentioned in the article as being destroyed by Ian, didn’t look as though they could resist a gentle summer breeze let alone a hurricane. 

Thank heavens we don’t suffer from such extremes of weather here in our bit of the UK!

On the subject of tobacco, I’ve re-read some Kurt Vonnegut recently. I meant to mention it yesterday while writing about Madeleine Peyroux. In one of her songs on the album “Half the Perfect World”, a song called “I’m  all right”, she sings:

He made me laugh 

He made me cry 

He smoked his stogies in bed 

But I'm all right 

I'm all right 

I've been lonely before 

Now in “Hocus Pocus”, a sort of critique of American society, Kurt Vonnegut explains about “stogies”, a slang name for cigars. He was writing about covered wagons taking adventuring settlers out into the Far West: 

“… the generic name for the sort of covered wagon that carried freight and settlers across the prairies of what was to become the United States of America, and eventually across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, was ‘Conestoga’ - since the first of these were built in the Conestoga Valley of Pennsylvania.

They kept the pioneers supplied with cigars, among other things, so that cigars nowadays, in the year 2001, are still called ‘stogies’ sometimes, which is short of ‘Conestoga’.

By 1830, the sturdiest and most popular of these wagons were in fact made by the Mohiga Wagon Company right here in Scipio, New York, at the pinched waist of Lake Mohiga, the deepest and coldest and westernmost of the long and narrow Finger Lakes. So sophisticated cigar-smokers might want to stop calling their stinkbombs ‘stogies’ and call them ‘mogies’ or ‘higgies’ instead.”

There you go - a little linguistic history.

Some of the quotations from “Hocus Pocus” still hold up well today:-

“Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe.” 

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” 

“Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.” 

“Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.” 

A clever man Mr Vonnegut: I must seek out more of his books from our collection and read them again.

Life gos on. Stay safe and well, everyone!