Three years out of the EU. Random acts … of one kind or another.

Three years ago today we left the EU. Of course, it’s rather longer than that since we voted in 2016 but the actual official leaving was three years ago today. Over the last couple of days there seem to have been a number of programmes on TV and radio analysing the effects of Brexit on the country but the government response appears to be that we should celebrate the benefits of Brexit. This is despite reports that increasingly, by a margin of around 60%, Britons are saying that Brexit was a mistake.

Even sedate and eminently sensible programmes like Radio 4’s Food Programme have had reports from cheese makers, shellfish merchants and the like whose businesses have been decimated by the effects of Brexit. 

I don’t suppose having a pandemic in the middle of everything has helped. Almost everything was slowed down by that, except perhaps selfishness. Maybe it was spending so much time not interacting with others that has made it perfectly all right to be constantly looking out for number one. Someone posted on social media recently:

“Nobody is trying to fix the problems we have in this country. Everyone is trying to make enough money so the problems don’t apply to them anymore.”

This may well be true. However, I keep coming across posts on social media about “random acts of kindness”. You know the sort of thing: 

• Someone helps an elderly person sort their shopping from the counter into their shopping bags and when the elderly person gets their purse out to pay they discover that the helper has already paid for their shopping and disappeared.

• A small boy is told he can choose something to buy in the supermarket and instead of choosing a toy he chooses a pair of gloves and a scarf for the homeless man sitting outside the supermarket entrance.

There are a number of variations of the last one, usually carefully videoed  by a proud parent, which makes me wonder how spontaneous the small boy’s actions were. But it’s heartwarming to know that some folk are quietly helping others. 

And yet … and yet … it’s not always what it seems. I read this morning about a woman in Australia, out shopping for shoes. She was asked by a young man in the street to hold a bunch of flowers for him while he put his jacket on. She willingly agreed to do so. The flowers in the woman’s hands, young man then smiled at her, turned on his heel, wished her a good day and ran off. She was a little bewildered and then spotted a film crew, or at any rate someone with a camera on a tripod, filming the whole episode. Later that day her grandchildren told her she was causing a sensation on TikTok. The young man who handed her the flowers was maintaining / hoping he had cheered up an elderly lady’s day, even had made her shed tears of gratitude. In the first place she didn’t consider herself elderly and in the second she had handed the flowers to the camera-on-a-tripod man, declaring “You can have these, I don’t want them!” She was furious to have video footage of herself out there on the Internet without her permission.

The young man turned out to be a well-known - no, not just well known, famous - TikToker with millions of followers, no doubt making money from sponsors, regularly filmed being kind. Such artificially set-up acts of kindness are not in the least “random”. Or perhaps they should be called “random acts of self-aggrandisement”!

Note to self: be careful not to appear lost or helpless when out and about. I don’t want to be the victim of a random act. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well! Everyone!

Thinking about Sindy and Barbie and Wednesday + mostY Barbie and collectibles!

When I was in my late teens I had a friend who nicknamed me Sindy because of my neatly coordinated look - matching shoes and handbags and the like. I’m not sure that being named after a doll was really all that flattering but there it was. He was making friendly fun of me and was the only person ever to call me Sindy. I am still known for being well-coordinated, by the way, even though my shoes and bags no longer match. 

Sindy, the doll, doesn’t seem to have survived into modern popularity the way Barbie has. She, Barbie, is still around. My smallest granddaughter has a few but she also has other similar “fashion” dolls such as Bratz. 

Personally I never liked Barbie dolls. Maybe it’s because I was too old for dolls when Barbie came onto the scene, too old to play with dolls and collecting such toys for their future re-sale value was not yet something people did. Nowadays it seems that vintage Barbie dolls sell for ridiculous amounts of money, especially of unopened in their original packaging. Quite why a child would keep a toy in its original packaging, unopened, defeats all logic. Presumably these unopened dolls were bought with the intention of storing them that way. Indeed, this article includes sections about people who collect dolls that way. 

It’s always seemed to me an odd way for an adult to want to decorate their home but then, each to their own! Granddaughter Number One has a number of computer game figures all in their packaging, collectible items which she has on display. Somehow that’s acceptable when you are in your early twenties but I find it odd that mature women, such as those in the above mentioned article, go out of their way to buy, or re-buy, the dolls of their childhood. But then, is it any odder than my aunt who had masses of model swans - ceramic, glass, any other sort of material - decorating her house! And we seem to have acquired / inherited / had dumped on us a collection of Dinky toy cars, die-cast models, in their original packaging. They used to belong to my late brother, bought when he was an adult. I suppose we could let the car-obsessed smallest grandson play with them but according to some things I’ve seen they might be quite valuable; maybe we should sell them and put the money in his bank account instead.

Anyway, getting back to Barbie, we never bought Barbie dolls for our daughter. Somehow she never seemed like a good role model and didn’t lend herself to the kind of imaginative play our daughter enjoyed. We were going through our not quite hippy, mostly vegetarian, no television but lots of books and music phase at the time and so we were not subject to lots of advertising making her want Barbie dolls. 

We had a similar aversion to toy guns and were quite annoyed when my brother-in-law bought both our children cap-guns.

I think my older sister eventually bought our daughter a Barbie one Christmas or birthday, as much to annoy me as to make up for what she saw as a lack in our child’s life. 

At one point we went to a family party, possibly my older niece’s 21st birthday. Her younger sister, aged about 13, brought her best friend of the time to the party. The friend had a mass, a huge mass, of blond hair. She wore a net skirt, rather like a long tutu, and a close-fitting, stylish top. To finish off her “look” she wore elbow length net gloves. I suspect that the also wore rather more make-up than any 13 year old should be allowed to experiment with. As the two teens made their entrance, our daughter, a six year old tomboy who refused to wear dresses and skirts, was open-mouthed in amazement. “She looks just like Barbie!” she said to me. 

And indeed she did. I think she won Barbie lookalike competitions and did go on to a career in modelling, without, to the best of my knowledge, ever hitting the big time. I wonder how she feels now about Barbie having a good year. She must be pushing 50 now. How time flies! And there is going to be a new Barbie movie this year.

Meanwhile, as quite a lot of people are getting excited about “Wednesday”, the Netflix series based on the character of Wednesday Addams of ancient Addams Family fame, the news is out today that the original Wednesday Addams has just died, at the age of 64 - “Only 64!?”, exclaimed Granddaughter Number Two, a “Wednesday” fan, on hearing the news. 

Just imagine, the actress Lisa Loring was only 5 years old when she began to play Wednesday Addams. 

That’s enough nostalgia stuff.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Thinking about government, money, equality and such like things.

 Well, Nadhim Zahawi has been given the sack. Some are asking why it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe the Prime Minister was afraid of his cabinet falling apart because members of his party, and even of the cabinet itself, are under investigation of one kind or another. His deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, is also under investigation over bullying allegations, after all. And hovering in the background is Boris Johnson, still buzzing around visiting Ukraine, going to international meetings, all the while facing a high-stakes Commons privileges committee inquiry into whether he misled parliament over the Partygate scandal. Not to mention the BBC chairman and the large loan guarantee thing! 

I seem to remember that there was a time when you had to have a certain amount of money and own a certain amount of land before you could vote. Maybe we should have a law saying the people who are ABOVE a certain level of wealth should not be allowed to be in government. But, of course, those rich people would just bring pressure to bear on those in government, as happens via the media and via other means at the moment. 

An Italian friend of mine told me years ago that Britain should be regarded as the home, indeed the birthplace, of modern democracy. After all we had the Magna Carta to look back on. I’ve not seen him for a while and I wonder what he thinks about the state of things now.

Kenan Malik was writing in the Guardian about equality and how we seem to be losing sight of the fact that class difference is much more important than ethnic or gender difference. “The fact that some people of colour are rich and powerful,” American academic Walter Benn Michaels observes, should not be “regarded as a victory for all the people of colour who aren’t”. The same applies to women, of course. 

Malik starts off by quoting Margaret Thatcher who said in 1978, “There is no primary poverty left in this country. There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings” but such poverty is the product not of social policy but of “personality defect”. 

She more or less reiterated that belief in a speech in 1996. Would she be able to say it still in 2023, when it has been revealed that Zahawi “carelessly” failed to pay more in tax than most nurses earn in a lifetime. A time when people are working but can’t afford to both eat and turn on the heating.

Mr Malik points out that “One might wonder whether the Daily Mail understood that the reason the top 10% pay half of all income tax is because they own half of the wealth. One might wonder, too, whether an MP from a party whose former leader needed to call on an £800,000 loan because he could not survive on a prime ministerial salary of £164,080 is best placed to lecture nurses earning £30,000 on why they should be grateful for what they get.”

And just to finish off, here’s a link to an article about children arriving hungry at nursery schools.

Some children may get free hours (but not enough) in nursery even before the age when all children qualify for free hours (but again not enough) but the funding from government is insufficient. So prices go up for those paying for nursery places and some mothers are forced to give up work because the cost of childcare makes it untenable. It’s a crazy spiral.

That’s enough for today.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Changing cars in the modern age. Some thoughts on clutter

Our daughter has just changed her car. She’d not had the previous one all that long and had decided early in the time she owned it that a five-seater vehicle, even one that looks as big as a tank, was really not big enough. Now she has a seven-seater again. She maintains that this new vehicle will cost her less per month than the previous one and the road tax is also less. Once again I find myself not understanding modern car finance. But at least when we go to visit Granddaughter Number Two at university next weekend Granddaughter Number One will now be able to accompany us. 

Apparently Oxford Dictionaries’ 2022 word of the year was “goblin mode”. The phrase describes “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”.

This nugget of information came from an article about Marie Kondo, the priestess of decluttering, who has decided that with children in her life it is impossible to remain clutter-free. I could have told her that. She should have seen my kitchen after two small people had been doing cutting and sticking and, what is more, adding glitter to their sticking pictures. All part of the fun.

Here’s a link to an article about someone who decluttered and then spent rather a lot of time buying back the stuff she had given to charity shops, including her child’s tricycle. How odd! Surely it would be better for that tricycle to be used by another small child. 

But some things do need keeping for sentimental reasons, so she’s not totally wrong. I have quite a lot of clutter myself. 

When we talked about New Year’s resolutions in my Italian conversation class recently, I mentioned a friend of mine who has a one-in one-out rule. When she buys a new item of clothing she tries to throw out another older garment she no longer wears. This is a noble aim but my Italian friend and I agreed that what usually happens is that you give away a dress or some other garment and within a week you discover that you need it! That’s how it goes.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Nostalgic food. And generous Tories.

Recently Phil asked me why we don’t have potato cakes any more. That was a random bit of nostalgia as indeed we haven’t has them for decades. They used to be a go-to snack for children coming home from school hungry, a good way to tide them over until tea time. They were also good if you’d been on a long hike and needed something to fill you up because you were starving after all the exercise.

So why have we not had potato cakes for decades? The answer is quite simple: I haven’t spotted them on the shelves in the shops and supermarkets. Granted when both children were in secondary school and I was commuting across the whole of Greater Manchester to work, looking for potato cakes was not a priority when I did a rapid run round the supermarket on my home on a Friday afternoon/evening. But I have been scanning shelves again to no avail in recent weeks. 

And then, just as when you talk about something within hearing distance of your phone or computer adverts for that something pop up on all your social media, I spotted something in the window of the deli in Uppermill. There is a notice in the window about locally produced pies and pasties and … as I spotted on Wednesday … potato cakes, available in the deli. Why had I not seen it before? Goodness knows. Possibly because ai tend not to buy pies and pasties. Anyway I asked about potato cakes in the soon to close forever deli. (I’ve already had a little moan about its closing and the food loss to the community) Yes, I was informed, they do indeed have potato cakes but they are usually delivered after 10.30 in the morning. It was then 10.00. Did I want to hang around? Well, no, not really. I wanted to go home and shower and change and go out to celebrate my birthday by having lunch with a friend.

So today I went back and bought potato cakes. On my return from shopping we had a cup of tea and a potato cake. They were fine, although rather bigger and a bit stodgier than the ones we used to buy pre-packed, made by Warburtons, the bread people. Tesco, by the way, still don’t sell them. I checked this morning. I also checked online. I should be able to find them at Asda or Sainsbury’s. And I found a recipe to make my own potato cakes from leftover mashed potatoes! There you go!

Moving on to perhaps more serious matters, I see that the Nadhim Zahawi tax stuff rumbles on and I was reminded of something I read the other day.

“As a Patriotic Millionaire, part of a network from multiple industries and of differing backgrounds who want a more just, stable and inclusive economy and the end of extreme wealth, I see tax as investment in our public services and I would welcome being required to pay more tax as a person with the privilege of wealth.”

That’s what a certain Julia Davies wrote in this article. 

Of course, she could always give a lot more of her wealth away to help a whole range of organisations.

Then this morning I read that Rod Stewart, a self-confessed long time Rory supporter, wants to give money to pay for people to have much needed scans - he went for a scan in a private clinic which was pretty much empty apart from him. He thinks it’s time the Conservatives stood aside and gave Labour a chance to see if they can improve things. He  might discover it’s not really about taking turns, things don’t work that way. However, it’s good to see Tories and rich people thinking about others. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Back on my bike. Thoughts about keynote speeches and about headscarves.

Yesterday, for the first time this year I got on my bike and cycled to Uppermill. It was rather foggy when I looked out and had to make the decision: to cycle or not to cycle. But I decided it was time. 2023 was beginning to whizz past! It wasn’t just foggy but also rather drizzly when I finally got outdoors but by then it was too late. I was committed. And it was okay. I didn’t get too wet. The Donkey Line wasn’t too muddy. And the market was reasonably well attended. All good. 

Later I heard on the news that there was what could have been an important meeting to do with the much vaunted “levelling up”. The Convention of the North took place in Manchester, with mayors from Greater Manchester, Liverpool city region, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and the North of Tyne getting together to try to sort things out. The “levelling up” secretary, Michael Gove, was there but he didn’t seem to do much, apart from give a keynote speech. I’ve never really seen the point of keynote speeches unless they are followed up with some action. 

The northern mayors wanted to lobby Gove to get the government to strip Transpennine Express of its rail contract, after the operator cancelled up to 46% of its services in recent days. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham managed to speak to him for about two minutes, according to reports, but none of the other mayors get a word in at all. So what exactly was the point of his being there? 

Was it another case of a Tory minister swanning around looking as though he was going to get something done but really just swanning around. I hope he didn’t travel by private jet, at least! 

Here’s a link to a report about a young woman chess player from Iran who  has been refusing to wear the hijab when she plays in tournaments in Europe. Has protest come into the world of chess?

Some twenty odd years or so ago I worked in a sixth form college with quite a high proportion of moslem students. In conversation with my tutor group one day a group of girls told me that there were days when they chose to wear the headscarf and others when it seemed less important to them. It seemed like quite a healthy attitude to me. After all, religion should be a personal decision, not something imposed by the government. 

That’s my view anyway. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Language and understanding.

Yesterday the small town of Darvel in Ayrshire were celebrating their football team’s defeating Aberdeen, 56 places above them in the Scottish league tables, and knocking them out of the Scottish cup. As the goalkeeper said when interviewed by the BBC that the couldn’t go out and celebrate because he had to get some sleep to be ready to go to work as a maths teacher this morning, I was reminded of my teenage years when I used to babysit for a few of the players on Southport’s football team. They too were teachers at local schools and weren’t earning the fabulous wages of the top footballers. 

Here is a link to some info about the plucky Darvel team.

I listened to one of the people interviewed. He might have been the manager or trainer of the team. What struck me was how strongly accented and almost totally incomprehensible his “English” was - impenetrable, I would say! 

And then, some time this morning on The Language Nerds’ post, I found a thing with a flag of the USA and the statement:

“Driving for 4 hours and still in the same part of the country”

followed by the Union Jack and the statement:

“Driving for 2 hours, the local accent has changed twice and the bread rolls have new names”.

That about sums it up.

That’s just one of the differences. I read yesterday that Biden wants to introduce laws to ban the sale of assault rifles to the public. Well, I quite agree. Even if you believe in the citizens’ right to bear arms (a debatable right at the best of times!) quite how do you justify pwning an assault rifle?

And I found this odd post:

“At customs in LAX (Los Angeles Airport)

Customs Agent: Where are you from?

Me: Denmark.

Customs Agent: Sir, please don’t lie about your nationality.

Me: Excuse me?

Customs Agent: Denmark isn’t a real country; now please tell me your country of origin.

Me: Sir, you are literally holding my passport, which is from Denmark, in your hand. How can you sit there and tell me my country doesn’t exist?!

Customs Agent: Sir, Denmark is a region of Sweden, and not a recognised  independent nation.

The Swedes would be fond of this encounter.”

The mind truly boggles!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rules meant to be broken? Bits of basic unfairness. Equality. Bits of silliness.

All sorts of stuff seems to be going on again. There’s the question of when to wear a seatbelt in your car! And we’ve got Zahawi, or Nadhim “He Pays What He Wants” Zahawi as John Crace calls him in his column in the Guardian, being careless and getting in a mess with his taxes. This gives a new definition of the word “careless”. I heard someone on a news programme trying to tell us that “careless” is actually a technical, legal term for Zahawi and his tax muddle. “Careless” is when you drop a glass or forget your shopping list! Definitely not muddling up your tax payments! Anyway, imagine having so much money that you can be “careless” to the tune of £5m! Maybe if the government and the tax department were more “careful” we all might be better off. 

I keep hearing strange statements and definitions on news broadcasts. Last night it was someone assuring us that the BBC is totally impartial in every aspect. This was in connection with the appointment of Richard Sharp as Chairman of the BBC and the recent revelation that before he was appointed by Boris Johnson he had helped the aforementioned Boris Johnson obtain a guarantor for a loan of £800,000. What a coincidence. As regards the impartiality, it’s very hard to think of any media famed for it’s impartiality these days. They don’t really seek to inform as much as to mould opinion. 

Getting back to the loan, it’s funny how rules work differently for certain people. If you are poor you need to turn to loan sharks and the like because the banks won’t lend you the small amount you need (small is, of course, a relative term!) and you end up paying silly amounts of interest. If you want to borrow a piffling £800,000 you can turn to a wealthy, influential person to help you find a guarantor. I’ve never had anything to do with loan sharks, fortunately, but I don’t imagine they run to amounts like that. Just imagine what the interest would be! Of course, now the aforementioned Boris Johnson probably wouldn’t need a loan; he’d just go and do a speech somewhere and receive silly amounts of money for doing so.

There’s a basic unfairness there! 

Having got that rant out of the way, here’s another little oddity of the modern world. Another example of how things that we have been used to hearing or seeing around us are increasingly being deemed offensive to one group or another. A young (well, younger than me) friend and former student drew my attention to this headline: 

Now Aretha Franklin’s song Natural Woman is deemed offensive to trans women: Outrage as ‘activists’ demand song is removed from Spotify and Apple Music.

There we go again! The song was written, of course, by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. If the original Aretha Franklin version is banned, will all other versions by other artists also be banned? Which other Carole King songs might need examining for dodgy content? Why do people choose to be offended by stuff like this when there are more important matters to get hot under collar about? 

Okay, here’s a bit of silliness I can approve of, another thing posted on social media, originally by a writer called Natali Simmonds:

Me, to my 11 y o: What do you want to do for your 12th birthday in Feb?

Her: I want a Potato Book party.

Me: What’s that?

Her: Just something I came up with. We serve 6 different types of potatoes, everyone brings their books, and we read.

Genius.

Genius, indeed! It could be ideal for our soon to 20 year old Granddaughter Number Two, who is never without a book on the go. Of course, in her case you couldn’t have 6 types of potatoes; it would have to be chips and potato wedges (which are really chips but cooked in the oven!). 

That’s all.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Sibling rivalry stuff. Pocket etiquette. Regal nonsense.

Well, I delivered two crocheted rabbits to the small people yesterday evening, one grey, one purple, and apparently caused minor havoc because the older small person decided she wanted the grey rabbit. This, of course, meant that the younger small person also wanted that one because he always wants what his role model wants. Such are the trials of being a big sister! And a small brother! So it goes. 

Families always have these odd mixtures of adoration and rivalry. I have two sisters and between the three of us we have occasionally had those moments of noting that one has put weight on, or neglected to sort out her hair or things of that nature. 

Even figures in the public eye have family members keeping an eye on them. There’s this story I saw in today’s newspaper about a Japanese politician: 

“A senior aide to Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has apologised for putting his hands in his pockets during an official trip to the US, admitting that his mother had scolded him and told him she was “ashamed” of him.

Seiji Kihara, the deputy chief cabinet secretary, revealed on YouTube that his mother had read comments that he was “disgracing his parents” after he was caught with his hands in his trouser pockets as Kishida spoke to reporters outside Blair House in Washington.

Kihara, 52, appeared chastened by an angry phone call from his mother, who told him she was “ashamed” and suggested he “sew up his pockets”.”

Oh dear! Such a casual pose is, I read, considered rude in Japan in certain social and professional situations. Not just in Japan, I would have thought. Do we not remind people, especially our children, to stand up straight when meeting someone important or being interviewed for some position or other? Boris Johnson was criticised for burying his hands in his suit jacket and trouser pockets at a Nato summit in Brussels in 2022, as he watched other leaders shake hands and engage in small talk. But then, I suspect that was more would-be upper class casual cool as much as anything else.

I read somewhere recently that some people believe the queen usually carried a clutch bag, rather than a handbag that could hang over an arm or shoulder, as a kind of shield that she could hold with two hands. This meant that she did not / could not respond to hands stretched out to shake her hand but that she would be the one to initiate the handshakes. I think it was in one of those articles extolling the virtues of Kate Middleton, saying how she models her behaviour on her husband’s late grandmother’s. 

It must have been at the hairdresser’s that I read it as that’s the only place where I read scandalmags. 

It’s funny how often we still refer to Kate Middleton by her maiden name, perhaps because she and William seem to,have a variety of possible surnames available to them. Occasionally she is spoken of as the Princess of Wales, her official title after all, but rarely have I seen her called Princess Kate. Maybe Kate is also too casual and she would have to be Princess Catherine. 

That’s enough of that nonsense! 

This morning I read this article about rubbish! 

Who knew that the mafia was taking over our refuse-collection? Not so much the collection as the disposal, by the sound of things. I was instantly reminded of The Sopranos and wonder why refuse disposal is something that the mafia find so enriching!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Year of the Rabbit. Some more A.I. art stuff. Cold weather wear. Language nonsense. And a bit of Brexit benefit!?

Happy Lunar New Year to one and all! 

My daughter tells me that the are not coming to dinner today as they are off to Chinatown to see the dragon dance. No doubt the small people will enjoy the spectacle. In the meantime I have two New Year’s rabbits looking for a new home. There is talk of “popping in” to collect the bunnies so that the small people can show them off at school and nursery tomorrow. I’ll wait and see what happens. 

Further to my comments yesterday about art and artificial intelligence, here is a link to a series of pictures of household appliance made in the “What would Gaudí do?” style of equipment.

All very pretty, but also pretty difficult to maintain. The more twiddly bits your kitchen machinery have, the more difficult they are to clean and maintain. Personally I prefer my kitchen equipment plain and functional but that’s just me. The article is worth looking at just to see the photos.

There were icicles hanging from one of the small industry buildings this morning. The blue sky and sunshine have disappeared, replaced by grey cloud. Maybe the warmer air is arriving after all, and bringing clouds with it. 

 

I forgot to mention yesterday that I saw a young woman in shorts in Tesco. She was wearing knee-high boots and a fluffy jacket, so her lower and upper extremities were kept warm. But the jacket was quite short so her midsection (waist to knee) was a little exposed. Maybe she wanted to show off her tanned legs. Maybe she only ever travelled by car and so did not need to worry about standing at bus stops in the cold.

Mind you, in my mini-skirt phase I too used to be oblivious to the cold on my exposed legs. Maybe my tights were warmer than I remember. And, of course, I was of an age to be more concerned with maintaining my look than with keeping warm! 

My daughter resurrected a photo of Granddaughter Number One modelling her grandfather’s “dead sheep” coat. “Dead sheep” because it is lined with sheepskin. This is a garment bought years ago on special offer from The Observer newspaper, I think. Advertised as a Swedish army greatcoat, if I remember rightly, it was not often worn as it weighs a ton. Falling over in the snow in such a garment might leave you unable to stand again. However, it hangs still in a wardrobe in the spare room. Maybe it should come out again if the cold weather continues.

Now, here’s a bit of linguistic nonsense posted originally on the Language Nerds site: 

A. How come French doesn’t have a word for lime? “Green lemon”, nice job!

B. They don’t have a word for 80. Did you expect them to do better with fruit?

A. Excuse me. I’d like to buy four twenties of green lemons please. 

It made me laugh, anyway.

I know that I have a tendency to rant on a little about Brexit but here’s something from Facebook:

“I live in France, I am a British Citizen. For over 55 years I have held a current bank account at Barclays in the UK. During this time I have been domiciled for long periods in Caribbean and African countries. Throughout these stays abroad Barclays maintained my account in the UK. Now, because I live in France, they have announced that they will close my account on 2nd February 2023. They state: "This is because we're applying limitations to the banking services we provide to customers with an address in the European Economic Area." So much for Global Britain.”

And here’s a comment in response to that post:

“I am Swedish living in the UK since 1994. I make a couple of yearly payments to Swedish accounts that used to be quick and easy to do online.

After Brexit the bank stopped online payments abroad. Now I have to phone the bank and last time it took 1 whole hour to make the payment. Poor staff!”

So it goes … on and on.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Crisp and cold still. And some thoughts on artificial intelligence.

The sun has been shining again today but the temperature around here was -3° at 9.00 this morning. Fortunately, because it’s not rained most pavements are reasonably free of ice so running was not a problem. I missed out the path round by duck-ponds. We walked there yesterday afternoon and had to pick our way carefully to avoid some serious icy patches. The lane down to the duck-ponds obviously doesn’t get gritted. 

It’s been a very good day to be out and about, even into the afternon as the sun prepared to go over the hill, so long as you were wrapped up. The weathermen keep telling us some warm (or at least warmer) air is moving in. It has clearly not reached out bit of the UK yet. We shall see. 

I was reading about place names. According to this article the UK abounds with places whose names lend themselves to often filthy interpretations. There’s a place called Twatt which has removed its roadside nameplate because visitors kept stealing it. Now they have a souvenir shop where you can buy old photos of name plates of former years. Twatt is really a corruption of Thwaite, which means village. There you go. 

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about artificial intelligence this week. 

Apparently Nick Cave has been getting hot under the collar. Someone sent him some lyrics written “in the style of Nick Cave” by the ChatGPT AI system. He wasn’t impressed:

“With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”

It’s understandable, I suppose. If you’re a singer -songwriter you expect songs to have meaning, to reflect a felt experience. And maybe A.I. Can go through the motions, follow the ideas and methodology but not have that deep feeling. It’s perhaps not unlike the difference between a bunch of friends who make music together and a bunch of people selected almost at random to become a manufactured boy-band or girl-band

It’s not just music either. An A.I programme called Dall-E has been used to produce works of art in the style of Rothko, Manet and others. These were then shown to experts, art historians and the like to see if they could spot the fakes. The results were mixed. 

It brings us back to the question: what is a work of art? If you stop your toddler from daubing paint on paper at the moment when to your eyes it actually looks beautiful - rather than letting him/her decide when to stop turning it into a greyish-black mess - is the result a work of art? Or a happy accident? Does true “art” need conscious thought?

And does A.I. have conscious thought?

But might it not be used to produce masterpieces that the man in the street can afford to hang in his living room? Or will someone find a way to make even A.I. work unaffordable? 

Just a little conundrum! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Getting the boiler fixed. Setting the world to rights with the boiler-man … or at least agreeing on what's wrong with it.

 This morning I got up quite early (for the third day running for a variety of reasons) as I was expecting a boiler-man to come and service our gas-fired boiler. He said he’d be here for 9.00. I was waiting. He arrived at 9.30, apologising for being late. Everything was slow to start this cold morning, he explained, including himself. I know just how he feels. I am slow to start on cold mornings as well.

After he had pottered about doing boiler-man sort of things, he told me of a couple of things that need replacing to extend the life of the boiler. There’s a kind of control board that send messages to bits of the mechanism. It’s been going crazy and misreading the temperature, sending a message to the gas supply that it can cut off for the time being, effectively switching the system off. When we realise that the radiators are going cold and that there is no hot water, we have to press a re-set button. The more frequently this happens, the more chance there is of the whole thing shutting down for good and a new boiler being needed. So he’s getting the relevant bits and pieces and will come back and fix it for us.

We went on to discuss the imminent demise of gas boilers like ours. No more after 2030 declare the government. My boiler-man went into a little rant about government being unrealistic. Not that he is environmentally unaware or a climate change denier. It’s just that the currently proposed alternatives to gas boilers cost a good deal of money. Add to that cost the fact pipes and radiators throughout the house would need replacing,  causing major disruption and probably leading to the need for a major redecoration of the whole house, and you have a bill of tens of thousands of pounds. Oh, boy!

This led on to electric cars: a good idea but without a proper infrastructure? They won’t work unless they become as easy to recharge as petrol and diesel cars are to refuel. We didn’t mention insulation at all, which is quite amazing. It seems that most modern problems come from an “I wouldn’t have started from here” point of view. And solutions have to be feasible and affordable to the man in the street, my boiler-man told me. 

 And this led on to a rant about the government not being in touch with the proverbial man in the street, none of them, and not the opposition either. And by the way, he added, why can’t Labour find a leader who can speak properly and not sound as though they have a speech defect or are at the very least extremely adenoidal! 

My boiler-man went on too about older people voting for the Tories, with the exception of his dad and people like us. Some of my generation just never stopped believing the tabloids, he said, and despite thinking that things need to change still seem to accept that the Tories are ‘trying their best”, “doing a good jog under the circumstances. It’s not just older people though, he accepted! 

Wow, you could almost see the steam coming out of his ears! 

His father, he said, considered himself fortunate. Born in 1943, he saw the NHS come into being, he had free university education, he was able to pay off his mortgage at a reasonable age and was able to retire with a state pension and a teacher’s pension, as did his wife. (His parents sound like a few years older version of us.) And, besides, they lived through the sixties and had all the best music.

And so we finished off our conversation with music: the fact that so many of the great and good are now disappearing, with David Crosby the latest to die on us. But we’ve got the albums and have seen a good number of them live. Even though the boiler man is a generation younger his taste in music coincided with mine. 

He wasn’t just a grumpy moaner, ranting on about what’s wrong with the world. Rather, he was an indignant realist, wishing he could change the world but recognising that we still have things to be thankful for.

Goodby David Crosby. And to those of his contemporaries who are still going, in many cases still performing, keep on doing what you’re doing! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!