Celestial phenomena! And crazy dog-owners!

Not just weather(wo)men but just about everyone seems to be posting pictures of the northern lights. I must confess to having taken a look out of our attic windows late last night just to see if I could see anything. After all, you never know. But it must have been the wrong time, or too cloudy or maybe I needed to be at the top of one of our hills. As it was, all I saw was black darkness. 

 

But here’s a picture of the northern lights as seen from Crosby beach, not far from where I grew up. That’s one of Anthony Gormley’s men in he foreground, to give it a bit of perspective. Otherwise it’s just a very flat expanse of beach.

I

f the northern lights could be seen from Crosby beach I assume they could also be seen from Southport or Ainsdale beach, the beaches of my childhood. 

 

And, yes, here’s a photo I just found of the lights seen from Ainsdale beach. 

To the best of my knowledge, we never saw such celestial phenomena off our beach when I was a child. The best we saw on a clear day was the Welsh hills to the south and Blackpool to the north. And now, living fairly close to,the foothills of the Pennines, we usually don’t see many celestial phenomena as it’s too cloudy as a general rule. 

I suppose that at one time such fantastic displays would have been taken as an omen of some kind - angry gods sending is a message. Maybe that's still the case: a message about climate change! 

I may not have managed to see the northern lights but this morning I saw a deer as I ran through the wooded area between the two millponds. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year, indeed the first I’ve seen in the whole of the last twelve months. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to get my phone out to catch a picture as he was moving too fast. But it was good to see the deer around again.

In the Italian conversation class yesterday one of our number, just returned from a stay in a language school in Turin, was complaining about the increase in the numbers of dogs in restaurants in Italy. She is allergic to dogs and really does not appreciate sitting close to one in a restaurant. Nobody else, she told us, seemed to object. In fact, complaints led to suggestions that she should simply find another restaurant! Where, no doubt, she would come across the same problem. Our Italian teacher confirmed this increase. Since the pandemic and lockdown, she said, many Italians have gone dog crazy, treating their pets like children, carrying them around in baby slings, referring to themselves as mummy and daddy, dressing the dogs in doggy high fashion and generally being stupid about them. Amazing! 

From the other side of the ocean, I came across this article about proposed laws in Florida to ban dogs from sticking their heads out of car windows. Supposed dog-lovers have got up in arms about, declaring that their dogs “love” to travel with their heads out of the car window. I wonder how these dog owners know these things. And has nobody told them how dangerous it is for dogs’ eyesight to travel with their heads in the wind like that. There’s something about dog ownership that must addle the brain. 

I even notice it within the family, where there is a kind of oneupmanship about whose dog is the better behaved, my daughter’s or my granddaughter’s. On Sunday my daughter’s dog had a go at leaping up at the table to help himself to mashed potato from her plate: definitely no acceptable behaviour! Granddaughter Number One, whose own dog was not present, was quietly smirking. Personally I would rather not have either dog anywhere near the dinner table but there it is. At least when they travel by car they are in proper dog harnesses and in general they are not babied. So it goes. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Supplies of wool and tomatoes!

On Friday Granddaughter Number One had a day off work. We had a plan. I had recently seen that a new shop had opened in Uppermill village centre, described as a craft shop but allegedly also selling yarn for knitting and weaving and such like. Granddaughter Number One, ever a bit of a crafts enthusiast and lately a knitting enthusiast was keen to investigate. I always like to discover new sources of wool for my various projects.

Her day off seemed a perfect opportunity. The problem was that her state of constant high anxiety makes her more than reluctant to use public transport. At one point it looked as if I might need to catch a bus to her house, only to then immediately accompany her onto another bus back to Uppermill. We concocted a plan. Her mother usually takes her smallest offspring to a toddlers’ music session on a Friday morning. Perhaps Granddaughter Number One could persuade her mother to collect her en route and then we could all meet in Uppermill.

So I was all set to walk to Uppermill to meet them in the late morning and even have light lunch together. But then word came that they were all going out for breakfast, an unusual sort of thing to do in my opinion, but then the pub next door to us advertises “breakfast for non-residents” so maybe it’s a modern thing to do. After that they planned to go the big Costco supermarket place on the other side of town. Would I care to meet in Uppermill in the early afternoon? They would let me know when they were en route. Okay! 

Eventually we all got together in the centre of Uppermill. They day had improved considerably. From a dull, damp morning it had turned into a bright and crisp afternoon. Later I organised to meet Phil as I walked home again. 

Granddaughter Number One and I went off to investigate the new shop, leaving her mother and small brother investigating the playground. Taking a three year old into a small basement craft shop might not have been the best plan. The shop turned out to be a smallish basement room crammed to the ceiling with yarns of different colours and thicknesses - knitters’ heaven! A veritable Aladdin’s cave! There is something very pleasing about a display of balls of variously-coloured wool. There was also a table of assorted craft materials - a sort of token craft-shop element. Granddaughter Number One spent an inordinate amount of money on balls of rainbow coloured wool. We might not need to return there for a while. 

The shopkeeper and I swopped experiences of learning to knit as a child, lamented the disappearance of wool-shops, praised the resurgence of knitting as a pastime and agreed that villages like ours need more little shops like hers. She used to sell on-line only but found her house over-full with stocks of yarn. 

On the radio news I have just heard that Aldi is joining other supermarkets in limiting the number of packs of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers customers can buy. Apparently they have a reasonable supply but “increased demand” has created shortages. What I want to know is what are people doing with the extra tomatoes and peppers and so on that they are buying. Are people simply eating lots of salad? Are they batch cooking ratatouille to put in the freezer? Making tomato soup? Or will the extra tomatoes sit in the fridge until they go soggy and then be thrown away? The mind boggles!

The problem, the radio news assures me is all to do with bad weather in the south of Spain. Friends in continental Europe assure me that their supermarkets are still well-stocked. Nothing is said about the problems of transporting stuff to the UK with all the related paperwork. I apologise for going on about this but it’s annoying me just a little. 

Meanwhile, we await news about the Northern Island Protocol!!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Reworking old ideas.

 As the debate about updating (aka bowdlerising) Roald Dahl’s children’s books had bounced around, I came across this letter in one of the newspapers:

“I read an unedited edition of Robinson Crusoe as a child, at my grandma’s house. It included a gruesome account of the launching of canoes over the trussed, living bodies of prisoners. An asterisk directed that “when reading aloud to children, this passage should be omitted”. Of course I then read it with very close attention.
Valerie Smith
Harrogate, North Yorkshire”

There’s nothing quite like forbidding something to make it seem attractive. 

And here’s David Mitchell ranting about rewriting, re-editing, republishing (as as way of making more money for publishers, especially of dead authors) and about spin-offs from successful TV series - themselves usually adaptations of books.

His particular gripe seems to be about a series called “Endeavour”, which apparently gave the background story to “Inspector Morse”. He prefers to have the Morse he knew from the original series as an established character, without needing to know how he was formed, as it were. Fair enough.

I tend to agree with his gripe about re-makes of old and successful films and TV series. I feel much the same about English language versions of series I have watched in a foreign language, or American versions of English series. Having said that, I confess to thoroughly enjoying the remake of “West Side Story”. 

But I do wonder, along with David Mitchell, if we have run out of new stories. Although there seem to be plenty of stories about vampires and zombies around. Not my thing at all. So it goes.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Shortages? Whatvshortages? Tomatoes? Apples and pears? Leeks? What about pomegranates?

 I have had no trouble buying tomatoes, despite all the dire warnings of shortages. Maybe it’s because I don’t often shop in the big supermarkets where people seem to buy in bulk and therefore create further shortages. Just look at what happened with loo roll at the start of the pandemic lockdown. Whatever the reason, our small local Tesco doesn’t have rows and rows of empty spaces on shelves like the ones people post in photos on social media. 

So I now have tomatoes, both for making my pasta sauce and for putting in salads. Not that I was ever really panicking. By the way, here’s a nice suggestions for a substitute for tomato ketchup.

Some pieces in todays papers suggest that apples and pears could be our next food shortage item. Leeks are also seemingly under threat. Surely these are things that we can grow in the UK and not need to worry about importing. However, it would seem that certain crops, such as leeks, were adversely affected by the very cold weather we had not so long ago. And farmers are uprooting their fruit trees in order to try other crops because they don’t make enough money selling them to the supermarkets. What a silly state we have got ourselves into.

I was thinking about imported food. We have grown used to eating all kinds of food from all over the world. Whenever we are asked about traditional British food in our Italian class, we come up with the old roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, roast leg of lamb and new potatoes and garden peas, and that kind of thing. Fish and chips, of course! And yet in fact most of us are much more cosmopolitan in our approach to food and the types of cuisine we not only eat but also cook for ourselves. 

And now there’s talk of rationing certain food items. I’m not old enough to remember rationing after World War II, although I do vaguely remember playing with ration book coupons as a small child, after rationing had disappeared. 

I also remember more clearly a time when we had never heard of certain food items. Pepper was something that was put on the table in it’s little pot alongside salt. Who even knew there were such things as green peppers, let alone red and yellow ones too? Figs came preserved in boxes at Christmas time - or in fig biscuits - and tangerines also appeared only at Christmas. Cherries were mostly glacé and peaches mostly came sliced in tins, as did apricots. 

We may not have known about peppers and yet I can remember having pomegranates, which now seem more exotic. We would be given half a pomegranate, or maybe a quarter, and one of my grandmother’s hatpins to prize the individual pomegranate seeds out without getting the rather bitter tasting pith. It’s amazing how long a piece of pomegranate can last when eaten that way! It’s even  more amazing that nobody worried about children wandering round the house with sharp hatpins in their hands. 

We were talking about this yesterday when Granddaughter Number One ordered a San Pellegrino orange and pomegranate drink in a cafe (where incidentally they misspelt Pellegrino on their menu, changing it to Pelligrino) only to find they had sold out. They offered her San Pellegrino blood orange but she is unable to have anything with blood orange or grapefruit as they interfere with the medication she takes! She declared her love of pomegranate but confessed that she buys it ready prepared - “I can’t be doing with the faff of picking the seeds out of fresh one!” I told her about buying freshly squeezed pomegranate juice in Sicily, from the same kind of machine as cafes use to provide freshly squeezed, and chilled, orange juice. 

So I found myself wondering why we have known pomegranates for so long and other fruit and veg for such a relatively short time, despite our rapid assimilation of these items into our cooking. Is it because we had a long ago connection with a certain Catherine of Aragon. Just as the Tudors had their rose (also known as the Union Rose as it combined the red rose of Lancaster with the white rose of York), so the pomegranate was the symbol of Aragon and was combined with the Tudor rose to make a symbol for Henry VIII and his first wife. It could be that we’ve had pomegranates ever since then!  

Those who know such things are now saying that food shortages could continue for a couple of months yet. We’ll see how the rationing works out. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Tomatoes. Food crisis. Working mums.

 

It seems that we are suffering from a tomato shortage. There are reports of supermarkets rationing how many tomatoes each customer can buy. On the other hand, in the Netherlands, according to something I read, they have a tomato glut. This is because they have traditionally exported lots of tomatoes to the UK but with all the paperwork now involved and the ensuing delays transport companies are refusing to have anything to do with driving lorry loads of tomatoes to us. Nothing to do with Brexit, of course! Some politician suggested we should switch to eating turnips, a good British vegetable, but somehow a mixed salad with slices of turnip doesn’t seem quite right. 

It was Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who made the suggestion about turnips. I did wonder if she might have a French connection because of the spelling of her name but the internet tells me she was born in St Helens, Merseyside, of perfectly English parents, so maybe it was some affectation on their part to put those accents on her name. (In similar fashion I know someone whose daughters are called Amélie and Esmée, with no more continental connection than the fact that their mother studied French for A-Level.) 

Today I read that Ms Coffey has also suggested that if people can’t afford to buy food they should work extra hours. This is rich coming from an MP with a decent salary and subsidised meals available at the House of Commons. Someone should remind her that there are only so many hours in a day and that rather a lot of people are already working at two jobs in an attempt to make ends meet. 

Then there is the difficulty of being a working mother, as is explained in this article. Here’s a little extract from what the writer of the article, Abi Wilkinson, has to say:

“Personally, I’d like to work. Ideally just evenings and weekends to begin with, to avoid my entire income disappearing on childcare costs, and potentially full-time once my oldest starts school. Since the term after she turned three, she’s been eligible for some funded nursery hours, but the subsidy doesn’t stretch as far as you may think. The much-touted “30 hours of free childcare” for working parents is term-time only, so over a full year it averages out at 22 hours a week. Factor in travel, and that’s less than half of what you need to hold down a full-time job.”

Looking back, I was fortunate enough to be able to do just that when our children were tiny. As a qualified Modern Foreign Languages teacher I was able to teach evening classes to adults who wanted to learn some holiday Spanish or French. It meant that we had to reorganise our time, quite often with me going out not long as after Phil returned home. Also it meant our family evenings were somewhat restricted but Phil was a good reader of stories to small children and so it all worked out. Gradually, as the children started school, I was able to accept daytime classes at adult learning centres, fitting work in around school times. Before- and after-school clubs were still a thing of the future, at least in our neck of the woods but we parents organised reciprocal pick-ups of groups of children. 

It’s all got rather more complicated and formalised since then. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.

Crisp evening weather. Silverfish stories. Coffee - preferably unadulterated. Starbucks stories.

Towards the end of this morning, close to midday, I persuaded my small grandson that playing in the garden would be a good idea. He refused point blank to put his coat on, declaring that his hoody was warm enough. To be fair, his hoody was a good deal warmer than the jumper I was wearing. So I put an extra layer on me and kept his coat handy in case he changed his mind. In the event, with all the running around he was doing he was plenty warm enough. And in the bits of the garden that the sun had reached it was positively balmy. I had to keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t get his sleeves wet as he experimented with what would and wouldn’t float in the water barrel.

It was a beautifully clear and sunny day. It would have been perfect for a bit of a ramble but my daughter had not left the buggy and I did not fancy getting to the point where 2.5 stone of toddler would turn to me and demand to be carried the rest of the way. That’s not what I signed up for. 

This evening by contrast it has gone very cold. My weather app tells me we are down to 0°. It’s still very clear. There’s the thinnest sliver of moon and a couple of planets visible nearby, probably Venus and something else I have yet to identify. 

Granddaughter Number Two sent us a a screenshot of a kind of messaging service they have in the her student accommodation block at York University. The message read: “Whoever is playing the flute or whatever in ……….. College, I just want you to know it’s so f*****g loud we can hear it in the new quad.”

It was accompanied by a comment: “It’s the Pied Piper collecting all the silverfish”. 

Priceless! It’s nice to know there are still young people with a sense of humour.,

Why are modern buildings like that hall of residence infested with silverfish, though? It could be worse but it’s not pleasant. Mind you, back in the late 1960s I lived in a student flat infested with mice - much worse! 

Yesterday I read that Starbucks is about to start selling coffee infused with olive oil in Italy. It will be introduced to US branches in the spring and to UK and Japan branches later in the year. Friends and family know my aversion to coffee “infused” with anything other than coffee. You can keep your vanilla latter, caramel latter, apple pie latte, or minced pie latte - indeed, instead of keeping them you should throw them in the bin. Coffee should be coffee, in my opinion. And I don’t want oat milk or soy milk or any other kind of plant based milk, thank you very much. And I know that there is a long tradition of drizzling oil on bread and even sampling tiny shot glasses of beautiful extra virgin olive oil. However, I don’t want it in my coffee. 

I read that Starbucks only opened their first store in Italy in 2018 I’m amazed they’ve kept going. It’s probably a trendy, young people thing. Oops! Am I unjustifiably stereotyping the young? Never mind! When plans were announced to open that first  branch in Milan (in what the US coffee giant said it was “the most beautiful Starbucks in the world”, housed in a 2,300 sq metre former post office in Piazza Cordusio) there were calls by some coffee lovers for a boycott of Starbucks. A Starbucks spokesman said: “We are not coming to teach Italians how to make coffee. We’re coming here with humility and respect, to show what we’ve learned.”

We shall see!

On the subject of Starbucks, here’s a joke (of sorts) I came across yesterday:

“Today in Starbucks when I placed my order, I gave the name ‘Spartacus’ as a joke. When they called my name to pick up my order I stood up and yelled, “I am Spartacus!” Everyone turned to look at me. Than an old man sitting in the corner stood up and yelled, “No! i am Spartacus!” Then, one by one, everyone in the Starbucks stood up and yelled, “I am Spartacus!””

I could almost wish to have been there.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Sea glass. Mudlarking. And the value of cycle helmets.

Two or three weeks ago my daughter and her partner took their children for a day out at the seaside. The beach in February can be a bit daunting but they weren’t going paddling or building sandcastles. They were looking for sea glass - pieces of glass, and sometimes pottery, of different shapes and sizes and colours which have been tossed to and fro by the tide and smoothed and polished by the sand until all their sharp edges have disappeared. It’s not an uncommon pastime. My daughter knows someone who makes and sells jewellery made from fragments of sea glass. Others make various sorts of art work out of it.

On this last occasion they made quite a haul. My six year old granddaughter proudly showed off prize finds: a pale lilac piece and some apparently very rare blue glass. We were talking about it with my daughter-in-law last weekend, showing off photos of the collection. 

She recalled reading about people “scavenging” the mud of the Thames at low tide. I too had heard about this practice but we couldn’t for the life of us remember the name of this odd hobby. We knew it had something to do with mud. And then this morning the term “mudlarking” popped into my head, as these things do. 

I looked it up just in case I was fantasising. Apparently it began in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Somehow I expect people have always scrabbled in river mud in this way, looking for something useful, but it’s only relatively recently that people have seen it as a way of finding stuff to sell. And nowadays, of course, metal detectorists are joining in as well.,

There are even organised mudlarking sessions: among others, “Mudlarking Tours and Guided Walks The Thames Discovery Programme, a nonprofit community archaeology organization, offers occasional guided walks of archaeologically significant areas of the foreshore. Thames Explorer Trust offers guided mudlarking expeditions at the Millennium Bridge, Rotherhithe and Greenwich.”

Don’t go thinking you can simply keep any treasure trove you come across: “Should you be lucky enough to find something extremely old, rare or valuable on the foreshore, you are legally required to report your find to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a governmental department dedicated to tracking and documenting archaeological finds made by the general public. Here's how to contact them: 

Finds Liaison Officer for London, for any significant mudlarking finds made within the greater London area. 

Finds Liaison Officers for other areas outside of London for finds made anywhere else in the UK.”

There you go. 

I also verified my belief that there was once a pop group called The Mudlarks, back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It seems they had two Top Ten UK singles on 1958, not that I have any memory of that. They didn’t have anything to do with mudlarking, as far as I know, but took their name from the founding members Fred and Mary Mudd. They even appeared on “Six-Five Special! And there is Jeff Mudd - surely the last of them - living out his days in Cornwall. There you go!

I cycled to Uppermill this morning as is usual on a Wednesday. I almost gave up on the idea as it was was rather wet and drizzly. In the end, though, it eased off enough for me to don my cycling gear and set off. In the co-op in Uppermill the cashier asked if I was on a “push bike”, a term I have not heard in years. A delivery lorry was struggling to park in its usual place in the side street next to the store as there was a parked car blocking the way. Could the co-op staff check if it belonged to a customer, please, and ask them to move it? the driver telephoned to ask. But it seems I was the only customer: “There’s just one lady and she’s wearing gear that suggests she’s on a pushbike”, the cashier told him. He then turned to me to ask: “You are on a pushbike, aren’t you? Or are you just really safety conscious and wear a helmet all the time?” Such a joker!

So we had a little chat about cycle helmets and I told him about a broadcaster called Dan Walker who was recently knocked off his bike by a motorist and swears his helmet saved his life. He has no memory of the actual accident, as often happens in cases of concussion, apart from waking up to find himself on the tarmac surrounded by paramedics. His bike is a write-off but he has managed to escape without broken bones but with a good deal of bruising. Walker, who lives in Sheffield, said: “The helmet I was wearing saved my life today so – if you’re on a bike – get one on your head.

“Smashed my watch and phone, ruined my trousers, my bike is a mess but I’m still here.”

South Yorkshire police described it as a “minor injury collision” - not so minor for the cyclist and it is to be hoped that the motorist’s insurance buys him a new bike, and a new helmet, not to mention his watch, phone and trousers! 

Yorkshire ambulance service NHS trust said its staff “do an amazing job every day helping thousands of patients”. A spokesperson added: “We are very proud of the care they provide and would like to send our best wishes to Dan Walker for a speedy recovery.”

Indeed! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Weather - here and elsewhere! Baby equipment - just what do they need.

 I ran round the village in the grey damp this morning. A proper February morning. Later in the morning I went down to the crossroads to catch a bus into Oldham - a visit to the library, a quick look in Sainsbury’s for things I can’t get in the Delph co-op, maybe a trip to the indoor market to see if they have any nice oranges, and a few bits and pieces from Boots the Chemists and finally a hunt for a small padded envelope in the stationers. 

I managed everything except the indoor market. I’d given up the will to carry any more stuff around. Besides I’ll be going to the much smaller market in Uppermill tomorrow. I’ll have to see what the fruit and veg man there has to offer. 

By the time I caught the bus home the day had brightened up considerably. A bus ride home looking over towards the hills of Derbyshire (once you leave the built-up bits of Oldham behind) is always good. When I was a daily commuter, I used to love the moment when I left the built-up bits behind and the panorama opened up! Splendid! 

But that’s a good part of the day used up. So it goes! 

Casting my eyes over the papers online I stopped to look at what Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett had to say about child rearing. It’s occasionally interesting to contrast now and the time when our children were tiny, so long as you don’t get obsessive about, which I might be about to do. To begin with she was writing about buggies that fold up to the size of a carry-on hand-luggage suitcase. I know about these because our daughter has one. She took it to Portugal with them last year. Now, according to Ms Cosslett they cost about £400. I know for a fact that my daughter does not have random sums of £400 floating about. She bought hers second hand. i wonder how much she paid. I think she sold at least one or maybe two previously used buggies to fund this purchase.

Judging by my daughter’s performance, young mothers today change or update buggies almost as often as they change their socks. I seem to remember we only changed buggies when the one we were using began to fall apart, folding up annoyingly with a small child in when we were out for a walk. Of course, the range was more limited back then but even so there was already a certain amount of one-upmanship in the field of baby equipment ownership!  But that was as nothing compared with nowadays. According to Ms Cosslett: 

“Although an earth (grand)mother type might say that all you need for a baby is a sling, a pair of breasts and a drawer, baby products are big business. The average amount that new parents spend on baby equipment, according to a 2022 report, is £6,000. A 2019 study found that 90% of parents felt they’d overspent on baby gear. And you can understand why: not only is the social media marketing relentless, but many companies make big promises, usually to do with sleep.”

I think my friends and I fell into the “earth-mother type” category. I had a sling, a second-hand cot, a second-hand pram-pushchair (and later a smaller folding buggy) and a carrycot that my mother insisted on buying us as the top of the pram pushchair was a bit unwieldy to get into the back seat of our Citroen 2CV. Those were the days. 

Ms Cosslett went on to talk about gadgets parents fantasise about having for their offspring. She wrote: 

“For example: I loved the bassinet of our Ark pushchair, but as I pounded the pavements I used to wish for one that had built-in speakers that played white noise and a selection of classical music so that I didn’t have to put my phone in with him.”

Now, there’s a thing: white noise to help your baby to sleep. I did know someone who used to run the vacuum cleaner at bedtime as a sleep inducer. Certain others would drive their babies around in the car until they fell asleep and then transfer them carefully. But most of us rocked our babies and sang to them, if they didn’t fall asleep over the bedtime feed. No white noise for us. My daughter’s children have a white noise generator - the little fellow still takes ages falling asleep! Her 19 year old plays a recording of rain gently falling to help herself fall asleep. So that’s what white-noise babies progress to, is it?  

On the getting babies to sleep and parental fantasies question, Ms Cosslett writes:

“One dad I know fantasised about some sort of device that could take you from a standing to a lying down position without disturbing the baby on your chest.”

Now, that I can relate to! 

That’s enough about baby-tech. Let’s get back to weather. According to this article Italy is facing the possibility of drought again this year. Some of the smaller canals of Venice are running dry at low tide. That changes the whole nature of la Serenissima, which was having problems of acqua alta, high water flooding St Mark’s square, last time I was there. 

I’m off put for a walk in the late afternoon sunshine. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone. 

Works of art … of different kinds.

 On Valentine’s Day a Banksy work appeared showing a woman, missing a tooth and with a bruised face, pushing a man, presumably her abusing husband or partner, into a chest freezer. It was apparently called “Valentine’s Day Mascara”. Soon afterwards the chest freezer was removed by the local council. This led to a load of complaints along the lines of “if someone anonymously dumped an old freezer on the street it would take weeks for the council to remove it, but when a famous artist does the same it is removed at once”. It seems the council plans to return the freezer once it has been “made safe”. Quite what that means is a mystery!

Anyway, today I have found a photo of a group of people doing the conga with the woman from the artwork, which is still there. It ends with a man’s legs sticking out of a wheelie bin. Nice! 

 

I am pretty sure the original Banksy works were intended as street art. They quickly became collectors’ items. This conga photo takes the original street art to another dimension.

I’ve often wondered how the Banksy works are removed from walls to be preserved or sold for large amounts of money without destroying the work. But that’s another matter altogether.

My Italian friend has recommended to me a TV series called “White Lotus”, a sort of black comedy about the guests and employees at the White Lotus Hotel. She recommended it me largely because the second series is set in Taormina, Sicily, a place we have visited some three times to go to a language school there - instrumental in our learning to speak Italian. The first series was set in Hawaii but my friend thought we might like to watch series two in a place we know quite well. It’s always fun playing landmark-spotting in films and TV series! 

We haven’t got around to watching it yet. But now it seems that the popularity of the series has led to an increased demand for the kind of flamboyant pottery produced in Caltagirone, also in Sicily, also a place we have visited on a couple of occasions. It seems that the White Lotus Hotel in Taormina in the TV series is decorated with ceramic heads of a woman and her Moorish lover, based on a seemingly true and rather gruesome story. When the woman discovered that her lover was married to a woman back in Morocco she chopped his head off. Their presence is intended to remind viewers of the possible fate of clients at the fictional hotel. That’s what I have been told anyway! 

And now lots of people want to have their own ‘testa di moro’ ceramics to decorate their homes. Personally I prefer other bits of Caltagirone ceramics buy there is no accounting for taste.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Getting back into my routine. Children’s books.

Back home after a few days away I have taken step one towards getting back into my routine by getting up and running round the village at a reasonable hour. It’s less cold than it has been. I had been putting on an extra layer to keep out the cold but today I was back to a running vest with a light weight waterproof on top. 

There didn’t seem to be many people out and about. There was a man I quite often see with bis blind and deaf dog. The dog wanders along following its nose, which seems to work quite well. 

We’re expecting the family round for dinner later. I suspect my daughter might have preferred to stay home and get herself prepared for going back to work in her school tomorrow. After all we’ve been away together for the last few days. However, her eldest daughter is feeling a little abandoned. Her housemate has gone off with her family on a visit to their extended family in Friesland. We are not permitted to say the Netherlands or the friend’s father gets very upset and Friesland-patriotic. It’s a little like saying that the people of Galicia are Spanish! Anyway, Granddaughter Number One has been on her own for the last few days and would appreciate having a family gathering here. So I have baked a cake and will come up with some other kind of food. 

While I was at my son’s house I had a look at his small daughter’s bookshelf, reminding myself of the collection of books we used to read when he was equally small. There’s quite a lot of Enid Blyton, whose works for a while were pooh-poohed in some quarters. And yet her stories continue to enchant young children. The works of Roald Dahl are there too. Now, according to this article, latest editions of his works have been “rewritten”,  getting rid of language which is deemed to be offensive. For example, changes have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled. And so Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”, and in The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”

I wonder what the original writer would feel about others tinkering with his work. This description of part of bis childhood suggests he was not an angel by any means:

“Dahl first attended The Cathedral School Llandaff. At age eight, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers of at the local sweet shop, which was owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman named Mrs Pratchett. The five boys named their prank the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924". Mrs Pratchett inspired Dahl's creation of the cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, and a prank, this time in a water jug belonging to Trunchbull, would also appear in the book. Gobstoppers were a favourite sweet among British schoolboys between the two World Wars, and Dahl referred to them in his fictional Everlasting Gobstopper which was featured in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

And in my experience children delight in the exaggeration of the descriptions. Surely what parents, and grandparents, need to do is talk to children about all this and make them see that stories are one thing and real life is another. We can teach them to be kind!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

We went to the zoo, zoo, zoo!

So yesterday we went to the zoo. Specifically we went to Whipsnade zoo, where I have never been before. Somehow I imagined it was closer into London and much further away from my son’s house than it actually is. But we drove for maybe thirty minutes and we were there.

It was very windy up at the top of the hill where the zoo is situated. The views were fine. Many of the animals seemed to have hidden themselves away indoors though. We saw lemurs and llamas and a solitary lion. Plenty of penguins and various minds of monkeys. 

 

Various horned beasts were seen from across fields and there were at least two zebras. 

 

 

We did see some splendid hippos in their pond but the rhinos were nowhere to be seen and the otters were otterly invisible. 

 

Hippos are imoressively large.

 

 

And we did see ostriches. 

 

We might have seen giraffes if we had been prepared to queue up to go inside the giraffe house. The queue was very long.

On the other hand we did queue to get into the aquarium and the butterfly house. Personally I stopped to admire the various fish and amphibious creatures in the aquarium. There was a splendid chameleon in shades of blue and green. But I did no more than skirt the edge of the butterfly enclosure, despite assurances that I could see a magnificent moth the size of a small dinner plate! Being surrounded by things that flap is not my favourite thing to do in the world. So I went back to entrance to keep an eye on the children’s scooters which we had been obliged to trustingly park in the entrance. The scooters were an excellent idea, enabling us to move at a reasonable speed between various animal enclosures.

Close to the red pandas’ enclosure we stopped for a picnic. Then we had some discussion about whether we were going to continue our adventures to take in tigers and elephants but the small people’s desire to  visit the play area won the day. Too tired to walk any further they had the energy run around and camber up and down climbing frames. It’s a splendidly imaginative play area but much too extensive with small people’s climbing frames leading on the equipment better aimed at 10 to 11 year olds. It’s sheer size was the main problem. We were three adults and three children, aged 3, 6 and 9. Even assigning one adult to each child we were constantly mislaying one or other of them, leading to some anxiety, as you can imagine.

Finally we had to visit the shop, an important element of any visit to a tourist attraction. Again we had to park the scooters. In the hurly-burly of persuading children that we had no intention of spending £10 a time on soft toys, we almost left the scooters behind! Fortunately we remembered before we actually set off the cross the huge parking area to find the car. A good day was had by all.

I might have posted this blog yesterday but at the point when I sat down to type my co-in-laws (this is a sort of translation of the Spanish consuegros - the parents of a married couple) arrived at my son’s house and time just ran away with us.

This morning we got up and packed stuff into the car. Then we set off on a two car trip to yet another play area, this one much more manageable in size and very well equipped. Then the two cars went their separate ways my son and family back to their house and us to make the long trek back to the north of England. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Going south.

 Today we organised ourselves, my daughter and I, to set off bright and early to travel to Buckinghamshire, to visit the southern branch of the family. 

It was damp and drizzly and the cloud had come down, so our view was rather restricted. 

About fifteen minutes into the journey we had the first are-we-almost-there? question. We only had another two and a half to two and three quarters of an hour journey to go.

Not long after that there was a bit of gloop from the back seat and we realised that the small boy had been sick. Rarely travel sick, he had chosen one of the first long journeys in a car his mother has owned for about two weeks to show off his vomiting skill. Fortunately it was not too copious, although he had managed to fill one of the shoes he had taken off and dropped on the floor. We found a lay-by and cleaned him up. 

After that our journey was uneventful, thank goodness!

Once we arrived, the small cousins immediately settled into we-are-all-best-friends mode. Excellent. 

My son and family have been having an extension built. Some of the walls are temporary plasterboard affairs that the children have now decorated with graffiti.

Later we persuaded them to walk down to a local park. A bit of fresh air was called for. It was still rather gloomy but not wet. We admired the red kites flying overhead. The children played with other small people on the various bits of play equipment. All was well.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!