Ladies who lunch. Standing up for our rights in the cafe. Bus journeys. Strange Easter celebrations.

Granddaughter Number Two wanted us to do ladies-who-lunch today. She misses family social life while away at university and is determined to  make the most of her time at home. There was no discussion about where she wanted to go - her favourite cafe in Greenfield. She and her mother had a few errands to complete before we could meet so when I caught the bus to Greenfield I decided I had time to pop into Tesco, across the road from the cafe, before meeting them. I wanted a few things that for some reason the Co-op does not stock - such as Boddington’s beer and grapefruit juice - presumably because there is not a high enough customer demand for them. 

The first thing I saw when I entered Tesco was Granddaughter Number Two, who was striding along and did not see me at all. But then I ran into my daughter and the small boy, who was wailing because he did not want to sit in a trolley. Neither did he want to walk. He wanted his mother to carry him. A morning of running errands had made obviously him tired and grumpy. Maybe he was hangry! (He cheered up later after hot chocolate with marshmallows!)

It seems my daughter had decided, like me, that there would be time to pop into Tesco for a few items before meeting me at the cafe. She was surprised that I had managed to get there so quickly by public transport! 

While she put her shopping in the car and prepared to move the vehicle to a parking spot a little closer to the cafe, ideally just next to the cafe, I walked over to try to secure us a table and to reserve a slice of chocolate Guinness cake for Granddaughter Number Two. I was told that the cafe was full - it was Friday lunchtime, after all! - so I ordered a slice of cake to take away. At that moment my daughter, Granddaughter Number Two and the small boy arrived. Apprised of the situation, Granddaughter Number Two asked if I could please order her a bacon sandwich to go as that cafe’s bacon sandwiches are superior to any others locally.

While I was doing this another group of people arrived and asked for a table. I overheard them being told that only the sofa area was available. My indignant side popped up at that moment: why were we not offered the sofa area? I asked. We would be more than happy with that. And so we preempted the new arrivals and ensured that the stuff I had pre-ordered and already paid for could be delivered to our table in the sofa area, which is one our favourite spots in Granddaughter Number Two’s favourite cafe. 

After we had had our various refreshments, my daughter, Granddaughter Number Two and the small boy went off to collect Granddaughter Number Four from school and I headed for the bus stop. As there was going to be at least a ten minute wait I decided to walk to Uppermill and catch the bus from there, rather than stand in the drizzle for ten to fifteen minutes. 

From Uppermill I caught the small bus that runs a long and convoluted service between Ashton Bus Station and Oldham Bus Station via Mossley, Greenfield, Uppermill, Diggle, Delph, Denshaw, Moorside and various housing estates en route. The whole route must take forever and a day! Originally conceived as a bus service between Denshaw village and Greenfield train station, timed to coincide with trains from Manchester and thus be useful to local commuters, at some time during Covid lockdown it changed into the weird and wonderful lengthy service it is now! 

Anyway, as I went through Diggle I noticed that many gardens were positively festooned with scarecrows of various shapes and sizes. What was going on? I wondered. Clearly some new way of celebrating Easter. Other countries in Europe have very solemn religious processions, Diggle has scarecrows. I overheard a couple of schoolgirls commenting that it’s usually Delph that has scarecrows. But Delph has scarecrows that all have donkey heads, The Delph Donkey Trail, and besides that’s at Whitsuntide. So I looked it up on the internet when I got home. This is what I found:  

“This is a self led trail around the village looking for scarecrows, most of which are situated in private gardens but can be seen from the pavement. This years theme is MUSIC. How many can you spot?

The trail is run by Friends Of Diggle School who are a registered charity ( registered charity no 1035075) to raise funds for Diggle School.

£3 a sheet sold by several local businesses in the village including The Gate Inn, Diggle Chippy, Diggle Lock and Grandpa Greenes.”

No information about how long this has been going on, but there are suggestions that it has been around for a while. Who knew? There’s even a spooky version for Hallowe’en. My guess is that they are copying Delph!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

What happens on Thursday!

 It’s Thursday again! 

The small boy arrives at my house bright and early as usual. I have the ancient toy farm set organised ready. We spend some time transporting plastic bales of hay around on a plastic farm machine. It makes a change from driving toy monster trucks all over then living room carpet. Mind you, the plastic farm machines have to have conversations in the same way that toy monster trucks do. 

After some time he declares himself starving hungry and we head down to the kitchen for coffee for me and “sweetibix” (Weetabix with honey) for him. There is a request for the “planets song”, of which I know only the first line. So we find it on YouTube and spend some time singing it over and over - this does not mean I remember the correct order of the planets that go round our sun - before moving on to other children’s songs and stories. 

On the principle that small children should not spend too much time glued to a small screen, I take a unilateral and marched him off to make shapes with PlayDo. As he wants to keep some of the fishy creatures we have created, something not worth doing with PlayDo, we progress to air-dried clay, slightly messier but more satisfying in the longterm. We decorate fishy shapes and sea-shell shapes with coloured beads and in a couple of days he will be able to paint them. 

Next we go exploring. The earlier quite torrential rain has given way to intermittent sunshine and so we set off to the “sandy park”, a favourite destination, spotting interesting things and meeting interesting dogs along the way. Some dogs are amazingly strange creatures. A quite large, woolly creature some yards ahead of us hears the little fellow singing and just plain refuses to go any further until she has had a chance to try to wash the child’s face with her tongue. “Holly just loves children,” says her doting owner! “She looks like a donkey!” says our Lewis. 

We do get rained on, but not substantially. And we spend some time digging up sand at the “sandy park” with one of the plastic farm machines that has gone along with us. By then it is almost time for Mummy and big sister Lydia to turn up at my house after school. 

The toy farm set comes into its own once more, with a lot of imaginative input from big sister. And we all have scrambled eggs for tea, as we often do on a Thursday. 

Lydia and Lewis decide after eating to go for a runaround in the garden, now that the threat of rain has seriously diminished. They are entranced by the number of tiny sycamore seedlings growing all over the grass and almost stage a major protest march at the suggestion that Grandad might mow the grass: “Don’t let Grandad kill the forest!” When the time comes to get ready to go home, dropping Granddad at chess club en route we have another rebellion. Nobody wants to come inside. This is what happens when you put the clocks forward and have longer evenings! 

Then Lydia spots a bumble bee and has a major panic. They both head indoors. Lydia screams, “There’s a bee in the kitchen! There’s a bee in the kitchen!” I send them through the side garden to the front door and hurry up to open that door for them. When I go down againmthere is no sign of the bee, which I could hear buzzing earlier. I close the back door, assuming he has had the sense to exit and then get on with some tidying up. Then I hear him again and eventually spot him: the biggest, noisiest bumble bee I have seen in years. So I switch out all lights and fling the door open again - no, that’s wrong, I wrestle the door open as it is slightly swollen and sticks - and go to find a window lock key. Eventually I find the correct key, cursing the fact that each window seems to need a slightly different key. Of course, I am too short reach across the kitchen sink to the window and so I have to get the step-stool. I manage to open the window and get on with the washing up, keeping an eye on Bumble as he eventually makes his way out! Phew!

Earlier in the day Lewis and I watched a children’s programme about bees. This told us that bees can lead others from their hive to good sources of nectar when they find them. So why can’t a stupid bumble bee not find his way to an open window in less than 15 minutes?

And the panicky rush indoors means that there are muddy footprints all over the place. It’s a good job we got the vacuum cleaner working properly again!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Postponed rain. Speaking foreign languages. Babies, maternity grants and the educational divide.

 I listened to the weather forecast yesterday evening and was pretty much convinced that I was going to wake up to rain this morning. I usually cycle to the market in Uppermill on a Wednesday morning but I like to check the weather before I set off. I don’t mind so much walking in the rain but cycling in the rain is miserable. If it’s doing more than a light drizzle the bike stays at home and I walk, usually catching a bus back with my purchases. So it was quite a pleasant surprise to find that it wasn’t raining at all and off I pedalled.

One of the stallholders told me she had heard that the rain had been “postponed” until later in the day, which struck me as an odd expression. Checking on my BBC weather app on my iPad I found that the percentage chance of rain does in fact increase as the day goes on. We shall see! 

I am listening to The World at One on the radio - by the time I get back from the market, get changed and organise a late breakfast on a Wednesday, most of the morning has gone and it would be lunchtime if I did lunch - and they have just announced King Charles’ state visit to Germany. A German friend of mine has been commenting on social media that she’ll watch his speech on German TV but that she’ll have to put subtitles on as she can’t understand his pronunciation of German. As a retired languages teacher I am quite used to people who have a marked accent in their own language having difficulties with pronunciation of foreign languages. In fact it’s more intonation than accent. 

When I was teaching A-Level French I used to advise my students to fool around speaking English with a mock French accent before going in to do their French spoken exam. In that way their mouths were set to French patterns and it made their spoke French more authentic. It really works, except for the case of the student with a lovely lilting Scots accent, whose spoken French was delightfully tinged with that accent. She was, however, perfectly comprehensible and achieved a very high grade in her exam! 

Reading the papers online over breakfast I found an article with this headline: “Inequality starts before birth – so child benefits should too”. It recommended financial assistance for pregnant women as a way of ensuring that all mothers-to-be could eat properly and so avoid a low birth-weight or premature baby. It told us that, babies in low-income families are more likely to have a medically low birth weight and be born prematurely. This has long-term consequences. Premature babies effectively start nursery and school weeks or months younger than their peers, putting them at an educational disadvantage from the start. 

Some countries are beginning to consider this. In 2022, Italy introduced a new, universal child allowance that starts in the seventh month of pregnancy. In the US, the Mitt Romney campaign has called for the child tax credit to be paid to pregnant women. (Maybe his campaign should also include providing good, free health care as giving birth in the USA is very expensive, but that’s a different matter.) It has been done here in the UK too. “The last Labour government, shortly before the end of its term in office, introduced the health in pregnancy grant: a universal cash transfer equivalent to three months of child benefit. A lump sum of £190 was given to all pregnant women who visited their GP or midwife in the third trimester of pregnancy.

My research shows that this relatively small sum led to significant improvements in babies’ health. Average birth weight increased, while the proportion of babies born prematurely fell. The biggest winners were low-income, young mums.”

Well, it seems Tory austerity put an end to that, perhaps on the grounds that the recipients would spend the money on cigarettes and alcohol!! 

But it’s not a new idea. Here’s a link to a poster from 1946 about maternity benefit. So, not a new idea at all! 

And I found myself thinking back to my own experience of a maternity grant, which began some weeks before the baby’s due date and continued for about 11 weeks after delivery. More by good luck than actual concrete planning our two babies were born close enough together (about 21 months apart) I managed to qualify for two lots of maternity grant! Of course, it was dependent on your having made National Insurance payments. In other words you needed to be in employment beforehand. And a friend of mine did not qualify as she had been paying a “married woman’s”rate National Insurance because it was cheaper. So it probably didn’t help the most needy. And then I think it disappeared anyway.

But it’s now the 21st century, a good two decades in, and we need to deal with the problem. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone. 

More world madness of one mind and another.

 The world is going crazy in all sorts of ways. 

It’s not quite April but some parts of Spain, such as Murcia and Alicante. have already had temperatures up to 30° last weekend. It seems very early in the year for such high temperatures. 

Across the Atlantic Mississippi was assaulted by tornadoes and storms, almost totally destroying a small town called Rolling Fork. Sometimes it seems as though the films and tv series must be exaggerating when they show scenes of small town and trailer park America and yet, there’s this place with picturesque name of Rolling Fork, with its population of about 2,000 people. 20% of the residents live below the poverty line and 21% live in mobile homes- well, probably not any longer. It’s bad enough hearing the wind and rain lashing against a well-insulated house so living in a caravan and having a tornado come along must be terrifying. I doubt that many of them remained standing. 

Rolling Fork, by the way, is known as the birthplace of the Blues music pioneer Muddy Waters. I should think it would be enough to give anyone the blues! 

There’s more in the news from the USA: a other school shooting incident. A 28 year old woman, armed with what the news report described as two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun, went into an elementary school in Nashville and opened fire. It seems she had planned it carefully, drawing a map for herself. She had other places in mind as well by all accounts. Why would anyone want to go and shoot junior school children, or any children or, indeed, any bunch of people at all? 

Nashville chief of police John Drake said investigators believed the shooting stemmed from “some resentment” the young woman harboured “for having to go to that school” as a younger person. 

Once again I find myself asking why anyone wants and, more importantly, is permitted to own an “assault-style” weapon. Personally I am not tempted to use violence on anyone. I gave up physically fighting even my older sister when I was about 9 years old. However, I have fairly often come across short-tempered people who would lash out with their fists at the slightest provocation. I imagine that such people, if they had a gun in their hands, could equally easily be provoked into shooting someone. Logically, therefore, it should be made very difficult for folk to have guns. 

Frighteningly, it is reported that in 2020, guns overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death among children and teens in the USA. And here in the UK, we’ve not come to that but every time I hear of yet another fatal stabbing, with teenage victim and perpetrator, I wonder where our statistics are going.

Then there’s Posie Parker, real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a British anti-transgender rights activist who travels around the world organising events to promote anti-trans messages and ideas. No matter how you feel about the whole trans thing, she seems a bit extreme, to say the least. Anyway, she’s just been denied entry to New Zealand. I believe in free speech but I tend to feel New Zealand took the right decision. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/25/anti-trans-activist-posie-parker-ends-new-zealand-tour-after-violent-protests-

I did wonder how she funds her travels but, then, she founded an anti-trans group called Standing for Women and has links with other such nominally feminist but really rather extreme groups. I read that she is a special adviser to the women’s rights organisation Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which is reported to have accepted a $15,000 donation from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – a global “religious freedom” organisation campaigning against abortion and LGBT rights. There you go! 

So that’s the weather, guns, violence, extreme groups. What about politics? There’s this:

“Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour MP at the next general election, Keir Starmer will confirm at Tuesday’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting after he vowed to prove the party had changed under his leadership.”

Well, the party has certainly changed, with people suspended and expelled, often seemingly for not toeing the party line, like naughty schoolchildren. It may not be all down to Starmer but he is the current leader and leaders have to take responsibility for the state of things. So as the party of the “broad church” seems more concerned with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet than believing it is possible to have the same aims but still have differences of opinion, it must be largely his fault.  

The world is crazy.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Some of the oddness of the modern world.

 We seem to be entering the yellow time of year: daffodils have opened up all over the place, bushes that a friend of mine assures me are called forsythia are bursting with yellow flowers and we are starting to see dandelions - there’s even one in my front garden. 

The blue flowers are doing less well, at least in my garden. Other people’s hyacinths stand about 6 inches tall, as do mine usually, but this year the ones in my planters are about 1 inch high but already trying to open up - strange little blue flowers poking up through the soil. So far they have not developed the distinctive hyacinth smell. I can only think that the various cold spells have stunted their development in some way!

However, the days are getting longer, and it was quite pleasant being pit and about today. I even had to carry my jacket at one point, walking along the canal towpath in the sunshine! 

This morning I got up in time to make sure I was organised to phone my dentist as soon as the clinic opened. The receptionist went off to consult with my dentist and checked to make sure I had no objections to paying an extra charge if they brought my check-up appointment forward so that she could deal with my fallen-out crown. Otherwise she recommended waiting the three weeks until my check-up. No thank you! I’d prefer to get rid of my gap-toothed smile as soon as possible. As it is, the clinic is so busy I have to wait until next Monday!! Very annoying!!

Yesterday I read about plans to “rework” the novels of Agatha Christie, to remove “potentially offensive language”. Whether this will actually happen remains to be seen. I am told that the proposed alterations to Roald Dahl’s work were stopped because of protests. Proposed changes to Roald Dahl’s works were justified, or attempts were made to justify them, on the grounds that children read his stories and might be led astray by his offensive language. I wonder how they explain the need to bowdlerise works for adults. 

It’s a long time since I read any Agatha Christie, by the way. I read quite a lot of her works translated into French when I worked as a foreign language assistant in a school in France. The school library was really quite lamentable but they did have lots of Agatha Christie.

This need (?) to check established authors’ works for potentially offensive stuff has given rise to a new bit of the publishing / editing profession. Their title is apparently “sensitivity readers” and I hear that they are paid a pittance for their work! 

On the subject of sensitivity, great works of art in other fields also come in for criticism. Parents of 11 - 12 year olds at a school in Tallahassee, Florida objected to their little darlings being shown pictures of Michelangelo’s David on the grounds that it is phonographic. Not all the parents, I imagine, but enough to lead to the principal being forced to resign.

Hope Carrasquilla, the former principal, told the Huffington Post that she wasn’t entirely surprised by the reaction. Every “once in a while you get a parent who gets upset about Renaissance art”. Indeed, normally, a letter is sent out to parents of students warning them that their kiddos are going to see a picture of one of the world’s most famous sculptures. (I believe this is known as a “trigger warning”, something I thought the right were vehemently against.) This year, however, due to a “series of miscommunications”, the letter wasn’t sent out, exacerbating parental anger. 

Oh, dear! The world is a little bit crazy!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Stolen time. Lost crowns. Food fads. Breakfast cereal toys and other such nostalgia items.

 They’ve stolen an hour from us today. I had completely forgotten that we were supposed to put the clocks forward overnight. My various electricals - phone, iPad, Fitbit - do it automatically and so when my alarm rang this morning at 8.00, I thought nothing of it and got up, although I did wonder why I seemed so weary. Quite simple! Not enough sleep! What a difference an hour makes. I read something reminding us to put the clocks forward but it was unclear when it said “today”: did it mean overnight Saturday to Sunday, which is what usually happens or did it mean tonight? I was further confused because the clock in the living room told the same time as my phone and that clock is not electrically controlled. Phil must have altered it before he went to bed last night. Fortunately he had not clambered up to reach the wall clock in the kitchen. That is still telling then old time or, as some insist on saying, “the real time”. 

So I set off for my run and even though I had by now ascertained that it was an (old system) hour earlier than when I ran yesterday, it didn’t feel significantly earlier. During my runaround one of my crowned teeth fell out, a most disconcerting event. Over the last couple of days it had felt a little odd, not wobbly as such but sort of clicking. I was rather ignoring it, thinking that I could hang on until I have a check-up appointment with the dentist in a couple of weeks’ time. This was not to be. I managed to find the errant tooth and it is now in a safe place. I suppose I was lucky that it had not fallen into a muddy puddle! And now I will have to phone my dentist tomorrow morning to try to get an emergency appointment. Again, I suppose I should consider myself fortunate: at least I have a dentist to contact. 

I came across another new (to me) word yesterday: nooch. It must have been in some article or other about food preferences as it seems “nooch” is “nutritional yeast”. Sold in yellow flakes or granules it is apparently popular with vegetarians and vegans and can be used as a seasoning. In Australia, it is sometimes sold as "savoury yeast flakes". In New Zealand, it has long been known as Brufax. There you go, another food product from the other end of the world, like Vegemite!  Because its flavour is sometimes described as “nutty or cheesy”, some vegans use it as a cheese substitute. It might be one of those things I will abstain from sampling! 

While I am on the subject of food, here’s a link to an article about breakfast cereals. More specifically it’s an article about the toys that used to appear in packets of cereals. The writer was bemoaning the fact that they are no longer given away. Some people still have collections of Rugrats pencil-toppers and other such useless stuff. Apparently a company called Logistix was founded in Marlow in 1989 and first began designing toys for Kellogg’s in the early 90s. “We had a qualitative and quantitative research team, a dedicated quality-control team,” says Rodrigues. Madeley elaborates on the depth of their research. “We created various kid-tracking studies… We were collecting data on how much pocket money they got, how many kids had tellies in their rooms.” The science of give-away toys! 

Maybe they’ve disappeared because parents are too busy to sit down at the breakfast table with their children and chat over cereal. That means that children have also lost the learning aid of practising reading the cereal packets. Other things that appear to have disappeared are the informative cards that used to be tucked into packets of tea. You could send for themed albums to stick the cards in and children would swop “doubles” with their school mates. Happy days! Kinder eggs are still around with the same mind of useless tat inside - toys, if they can be described as such, which keep children entertained for about as long as it takes to eat the chocolate egg. 

Granddaughter Number Four, by the way, has given up chocolate for Lent, presumably under the influence of the church school she attends. I must say I have been impressed by how well the six year old has stuck to it. The other day I had bought a Kinder egg for her small brother, who insisted I should also buy one for his sister - impressive sibling thoughtfulness! When Granddaughter Number Four arrived and was offered her egg, she reminded me of her abstinence promise. I suggested putting the egg away until Lent was over. There was no need, she assured me. She would have the toy and Mummy would eat the chocolate! Problem solved. 

As regards toys in cereal packets, I was rather disappointed the article made no mention of the small plastic model racing or sports cars that used to be hidden in cereal packets in the 1950s. Occasionally I see a “Big Boy’s Toy” - two-seater car driven by an aging malex and I am reminded of those models. Ah! Nostalgia!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Fixing stuff. Prime Ministers and Presidents. And stuff that appears on Facebook.

 Yesterday we spent quite a long time fixing the vacuum cleaner. For a while now it has been temperamental, to say the least, cutting out intermittently as if there were a blockage of some kind. Having followed all the suggestions for checking for blockages recommended by the handbook that came with the machine, all to no avail, we resorted to the time honoured process of taking it apart and putting it back together. 

Via the handbook and the internet we worked out how to reduce the thing to its component parts. We dusted and cleaned and poked around in all those bits and pieces and then put it back together. This can often be the hardest part of such an operation as it is not always logical how the various parts fit back together and in what order. Having done that, we tested it again. Still a rather stop-start affair, “pulsing” as the chap on internet described it. Then Phil said, “Let’s try it on the ‘high suction’ setting.” I was surprised. There are two settings: ‘high suction’ and ‘max section’. I reserve ‘max suction’ for very rare occasions. I cannot remember the last time I set it to ‘max’. Had I done so inadvertently? Had Phil done so - inadvertently or otherwise - in an attempt to make it work faster? Whatever the reason, it was on ‘max’ so I switched it to ‘high’ and, lo and behold, it worked fine! Was that the only reason for its ridiculous performance recently? Goodness knows! We shall see how it works from now on!

In the news they have been talking about Honours lists. We’ve had all sorts of rumours about Boris Johnson nominating his father for a knighthood!!! And now it seems Liz Truss has submitted hers. What I want to know is this: was Liz Truss really PM long enough to seriously merit an Honours list? How long did she last? Maybe six weeks? If we have an general election next year, as has been suggested, and if Labour win, as has also been suggested, then there’ll be another Honours list. Good grief!! 

Thinking about former Prime Ministers, there’s the business of Boris Johnson and those parties. Here’s an opinion put out on social media by Otto English, in a group called Scientists for EU:

“While his wife was dancing to ABBA, while his staff were carting wine into Number 10 and having piss ups in the garden, while Spads were vomiting down the wall and knocking out karaoke hits - the rest of us were doing the right thing - trying to save each other from Covid.”

Quite so!

On the whole I don’t mind if people refer to politicians by their full,name or just by their surname. I get a little fretted from time to time when reporters and commentators use the politicians’ first name, for all the world as if Boris and Liz and Rishi were personal friends! But that’s a different matter. We listened to David Sidaris on the radio the other day. He’s always worth listening to. On this occasion he was talking about letters from readers or listeners. One letter-writer objected to his referring to Former President Donald J Trump, 45th president of the United States, as simply Trump! This, the letter-writer said, was disrespectful. He should have his full title. Wow! As David Sidaris said, we speak of Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and nobody suggests that that is disrespectful. Maybe some people just need the honour of their full title! 

Petty stuff!

And finally, I would like to know why my Facebook seems to have been invaded by stuff about Stephen King - Lovers of Stephen King in particular. I’m pretty sure I haven’t spoken about the writer, or even thought about him so that the social media could pick it up as something I might be interested in!!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Protests. Hailstorms. Snowdrifts. Birdspotting.

 It all seems to be  “kicking off”, as some people say, in France. Protests all over the country. Town halls set on fire - well, at least one, in Bordeaux. They do have a tendency over there to wreck things! Even Charles has had to postpone his planned visit to Paris. Maybe at the back of his mind is the thought that they have been known to chop the heads off kings on that side of the Channel. Bang goes his first state visit as monarch! 

The world seems to be turmoil in so many places at present. I almost feel guilty that my major concern at this exact moment is the hailstorm that is rattling against the windows. Before I set off on my run this morning I considered not putting my beanie hat on. There seemed to be enough sunshine to merit leaving hat and gloves behind. In the end I decided in favour of wearing them. If necessary, I reasoned, I could always stuff them in my bumbag. It was the right decision. Mid- to late-March sunshine is fine and warm in sheltered spots but the wind this morning was bitter. This explains why the hailstorm has now cleared away completely, leaving a deceptively clear blue sky! 

We had torrential rain at times yesterday. At the point in the late morning when Granddaughter Number Two was contemplating catching a bus (and complaining about delays) to come and join her small brother at my house the rain was bouncing off the rooftops and forming a small lake in the back garden. By the time she arrived we were back to blue sky and sunshine and decided to risk a walk to the local park, via the chippy. One of the things she has missed while away at university has been buying sausage and chips on a Thursday lunchtime from Delph chippy. 

So we set off, taking one of the longer routes into the village so that we could check if the snow mountain (more of a large molehill really) was still there in the field where it had been dumped when the snowdrifts were cleared from the lane. Almost two weeks later it is still there, three feet high and very dirty! It’s like the apocryphal stories people tell of the winter of 1948 when snowdrifts were still around in May according to local legends. 

After that we followed the path that runs alongside the river, spotting water wagtails as we went. That was when we saw two small black and white birds, new to us. Not magpies, despite being black and white. Not ducks either as far as we could tell. Later we checked in the bird-book to no avail but eventually internet identified them for us as white-throated dippers, not native to our neck of the woods. There you go.

The plan for our walk was to share her sausage and chips with the little chap in the park, let him run around for a while and then head for home. Barely had she unwrapped her chippy spoils than the clouds blew in and brought more torrential rain, his time with hailstorms thrown in. We took refuge in the Co-op and then scuttled homewards once weather conditions allowed it. Back home the small boy tucked into cold chips with gusto. No protests there! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Confused spring flowers. Admiring artists. Trophy hunting. The joy of dancing.

 Spring appears to have sprung. How long it will last remains to be seen. Tomorrow winter could return. That would not surprise me. But today I had a very pleasant cycle ride to the market in Uppermill. 

The various flowers in our garden are confused by the weather. As is to be expected, the snowdrops are now past their best. They had their moment of glory, partly spent covered on snow, and now, having recovered briefly from being weighted down by all that snow, they are looking rather bedraggled. In the plant pot on the garden wall the hyacinths are seriously confused. It may be that the cold weather prevented them from growing to their usual height but they remain about one inch tall. However, their flowers are quite obviously there and and are indeed turning nicely blue + dark blue buds sticking up out of the soil. It is to be hoped that they put on a growth spurt before the flowers start to open fully!

I read that on a beach somewhere in Hampshire they found the body of a shark, quite a large creature, about 2 metres long. Experts say they think it is a smalltooth sand tiger shark, normally only be seen in warmer waters – and rarely anywhere north of the Bay of Biscay. They should ask my small grandson as he appears to know just about all the different kinds of shark and recognises them expertly. This is progress from the stage when he simply sang “baby shark, doo doo doo doo”. 

Scientists believe the discovery can help them learn more about how the species develops and lives its life. Unfortunately before the historian Dan Snow, who was apparently one of the discoverers, was able to do nore than take photos of it trophy hunters had made off with bits of it. “The head, tail and fin were grabbed before I assembled a big enough team to drag it off the beach to the nearest road. We went to secure the shark for science last night. But we were too late,” he said on Twitter. He has appealed for the trophy hunters to return the bits and pieces, if only temporarily: “Please, please – if you have the head get in touch. The scientists want to have a look at it, and then it’s yours to keep.”

Collecting sea shells and bits of sea glass is one thing but hacking the head and tail and fin off a dead shark is a different thing altogether. I can think of nothing more gruesome - well, I probably can if I set my mind to it! What do these people plan to do with those bits of fishy flesh? 

My friend Colin in Galicia wrote in his blog yesterday about the Spanish artist Sorolla. A friend and I discovered Sorolla in a museum/art gallery in Havana, Cuba, and fell in love with his work immediately. I was fortunate enough to be able to see an exhibition of his work in London some time later. It’s always worth looking at his paintings again, so here is a link.

Watching stuff on Netflix I have come to the conclusion that someone has decided that in the middle evening it is an aging demographic who should be targeted with advertising. The advert that brought me to this conclusion is one for the Co-op funeral service. The advert features a woman explaining that she has always loved dancing and wants people to dance at her funeral, in celebration of a life well-danced I suppose. Coincidentally I have come across a number of items about how dancing is good for us and lamenting the loss of places to go to dance. 

A music journalist and writer, Emma Warren, has even written a book about it: Dance your way home. The publisher’s blurb reads: “This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social history: it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens... Why do we dance? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us?”

It seems there has been a serious reduction in the number of clubs where people can go and dance. I must say that clubbing has never been my thing. Dancing in a hot, sweaty, enclosed space is not by idea of fun. However I have always enjoyed a good dance. As a teenager I used to go ice skating with a bunch of friends and finish off the night dancing into the small hours. Granddaughter Number One and I used to dance in the kitchen when she was small. I still dance in the kitchen, mostly on my own these days. This letter someone wrote to the Guardian newspaper expresses my feelings about dancing nicely: 

“I couldn’t agree more with John Harris (In an isolated world, humans need to dance together more than ever – but we’re running out of places to do it, 19 March). I’m 67 and constantly moan about never having the chance to dance. Rare parties usually end in disappointment as the music’s never quite right for me. Nightclubs? Forget it. I’m in bed before they even open their doors. So every few months, in a local village hall, we organise an event called Chance2dance4charity.

My dance teacher provides the music, we bring refreshments and the proceeds are split between my favourite charity, Amnesty, and a different local charity each time. We dance for two hours to Motown, soul, rock, pop, reggae, bellydance, salsa – you name it. We have a whale of a time and are safely home by 10pm. And my favourite tracks are always on the playlist. Result.
Sue Bingham
Reading, Berkshire”

There you go. Keep on dancing!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reviving old traditions. Eating out. Finding fault with writers. Noisy neighbours.

 Today a couple of friends and I set about reviving an old tradition. After we all retired from teaching, and before pandemic and lockdown came along to restrict our activities, we used to meet every once in a while and go out for lunch in Manchester, a suitable mid-point for all of us travel-wise. Then lockdown came along and we were all stuck in our separate places. Once travel restrictions were lifted I suggested meeting once more but one of our number was still a little cautious and then another actually caught Covid and was out of the running for a while.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from the reluctant traveller saying that she had recently travelled to London to see her daughter and that going to the centre of Manchester no longer seemed so daunting. So we settled on today as a reasonable date and met in Waterstone’s cafe at midday, just as we always used to. From there we moved on to El Gato Negro, a Spanish or possibly Catalan tapas bar. Over croquetas and queso manchego and albóndigas and pan a la catalana and other stuff we caught up with all our news. 

So now we need to decide when to repeat the experience.

On balance I think tapas places here in the UK are perhaps a bit of a rip-off. £8 for 4 meatballs or for 4 salt-cod croquetas is a little,on he dear side, especially when you have grown used to free tapas in so many Galician bars. And the salt-cod croquetas were not as good as the “pastéis de bacalao”, almost the same thing, that I can get from the Portuguese cafe in Oldham market. That place was quite a find. Portuguese speakers from the Oldham area have been there tucking into authentic-looking Portuguese food whenever I have popped in for take-away pastéis. 

I’ve been reading a detective story in which research takes an investigative journalist (aka a nosy parker) to Italy. There she sees a villa with a for sale sign:  se vende. Unfortunately that’s the wrong language. It should say in vendita. I do hate it when writers and their proof-readers don’t do their research properly! Otherwise it was a good read!  

Granddaughter Number One is suffering from noisy neighbours. They seem to have been having family rows for ever - lots of screaming and shouting and banging around the place. Today it all go so loud that Granddaughter Number One, working from home, had to apologise to the people in her zoom meeting because they were having difficulty hearing what she had to say. Oh boy! We are very fortunate, we rarely hear our neighbours at all. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Putting labels on things.

 I don’t watch cookery shows on the television. In fact I don’t watch competition shows of any kind on television - baking, sewing, decorating your home -  none of them. So I don’t know anything significant about Gail Simmons except that she is a judge on one such show. In an article I skimmed online, I came across this statement by Ms Simmons:

“London is a food gateway. It’s a multicultural city like nowhere else in Europe, with its own food traditions, but really, from a food perspective, it’s a story of immigration.”

That’s probably true of most of our big cities. That ”story of immigration” explains why it is quite hard to pin down what we mean by “English cuisine”. Anyway, the article told how she praised our cheese, saying how much better the range of cheese we have in our supermarkets is than what the Americans have at their disposition. That’s nice, I have always defended our range of cheese when people go on about wonderful French cheeses.

Then she turned to chocolate:

“Everybody knows, but I’m here to tell you: candy bars in America are not proper chocolate. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: grocery-store-level foods are just better in the UK. I grew up in Canada and, as a part of the Commonwealth, we had a lot of stuff from England. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it over the past 25 years of living in New York until I came to shoot in London.”

She particularly likes Cadbury’s chocolate. I find this rather amusing as some time ago there were purists saying that British chocolate is not real chocolate at all. But I have spent time in Spain hunting out supplies of Cadbury’s chocolate and proper Cheese. And Cadbury’s chocolate is good chocolate. 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of terminology. 

 

I came across this cartoon on Facebook, with an accompanying comment about Leah Panapa, someone I had never heard of. So I did a little bit of investigating and found that she hosts a radio show, but not one that I never listen to, one of those chat shows. Anyway it turns out at some point recently she got a little indignant in a discussion about  the term “pregnant people”, spluttering about the fact that it should be “pregnant women”, not “pregnant people”. I tend to agree with her. 

After all, you simply can’t have “pregnant men”! 

Except that there has been at least one case of a transperson who stopped their transition from woman to man so that they could have a baby. I remember that case and recall being a little indignant myself that someone could so clearly want to have their cake and eat it. But that seems to be the way of the modern world. And surely while he/she/ they was (were) pregnant he/she/they was (were) actually, physically, still a woman. Goodness, those pronouns are confusing!

Leah Panapa has apologised for what has been described as a “toxic rant about pronouns” and the cartoon seems to have disappeared from Facebook, perhaps because someone in their wisdom decided that someone else might be offended by it. Of course, it might just have disappeared quite innocuously or maybe I just can’t find it but it seems a little suspicious to me.

I find the whole pronoun business very confusing, as I have already said. My two eldest granddaughters (aged 25 and almost 20) just accept it as a normal thing and remember which pronoun they are meant to use for different friends. But when one of tells me about a friend visiting from thenUSA and says that ‘they’ will be hiring a car, I grow confused about how many people are coming, much to the amusement of the aforementioned granddaughters. No doubt the whole business will sort itself out into normality eventually. However, I do wonder what they do in languages which use gender for everything - books being masculine and houses feminine and so on. I must remember to ask my Italian friend.   

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Modern problems ticking away in the background.

Tick tock! Or rather, TikTok! Described as “a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance”, it’s yet another app I don‘t have on my phone and I don’t really feel the need to add it. From some of the samples played on the news this lunchtime I’m even more convinced that I don’t need it. Does anyone really need or want to see short videos of someone’s cat and dog having a fight? Have they really nothing more interesting going on in their lives? And that applies to both the maker of the video and those who watch it.

It’s in the news because TikTok is the latest thing to come under fire for being Chinese owned. There is a great fear, apparently, that the Chinese government is trawling through all the TikTok posts to find interesting information about other countries so that they can take over the world. Do they have someone, a whole team of people and computers, looking put for compromising stuff popping up? 

TikTok is almost certainly about to be banned in the USA and here in the UK there’s talk of not allowing government employees to have the app on their phones. That’s both their work phones and their personal phones, because it seems it’s quite common for MPs and other government employees to answer and send messages during meetings. Now, I know they need to be contactable pretty much 24/7 but I would have thought that the first rule of meetings should be to switch phones off. Goodness, I think the principal of the college where I worked would have been spitting feathers if we had all been messing with our phones during staff meetings. You are asked to switch them off or at least put hem on silent in the cinema and theatre. And in chess tournaments all the players have to hand in their phones before entering the playing room - no cheating allowed.

This is the strange modern world we live in. You look something up on the internet and suddenly you are inundated with advertisements for related products. In fact sometimes it seems that all you need to do is discuss something in the presence of your phone and even that generates a mass of advertising. So to some extent I can understand the worries about phone apps. They are able to glean all sorts of background information about the user. And MPs who want to be up to the minute, modern, down there with the kids use all the latest apps. 

Life used to be a lot simpler!

I have just been downloading templates for dinosaurs for a craft project we have in mind. I wonder what sort of advertising will arise from that!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Obsessions with water and water-bottles. Finding treasure.

One day recently, when my daughter arrived to collect her small boy from our house, she asked me if I had an old towel she could use to mop up close on two litres of water which was sloshing about in the footwell of the front passenger seat of her car. On a routine basis she carries around with her a huge quantity of water in a fancy drinking bottle. On the day in question her husband had filled up her water bottle for her and popped it into the car as she loaded up children to take them to school or to my house before going on to work. At some point in her journey she heard the huge bottle fall over with a clunk but thought nothing of it. What she didn’t know was that her helpful husband had failed to fasten the bottle securely. The normally watertight fastening was slowly letting water glug out into the footwell. By the time she arrived at work and reached for it, the bottle was almost empty. Fortunately the bag carrying her laptop was waterproof!!

Which brings me to the modern obsession with water bottles.  I confess that I too have a rather pleasing water bottle. It doesn’t hold anything like two litres of water. I take it out with me if I am going on a long walk in warm weather and know that I will not be passing anywhere selling refreshments of any kind. Very often it comes home full. It does not accompany me on shopping trips. But my daughter, and all her offspring, have a bottle of water to hand at all times. Well, the little chap doesn’t bring one to my house because he has his own drink cup here. I am, however, reminded to ensure that he drinks plenty of water. My daughter has her huge bottle in her classroom and all her little charges all have their bottles of water in the classroom. Granddaughter Number Four has a water bottle emblazoned with the name of her primary school. The school sells them to parents of reception class children.  

I stop and wonder how I managed to go a whole morning teaching my A-level classes, sometimes without a break as back to back classes meant I taught from 9.00 to 12.00, without drinking copious amounts of water, or indeed any water at all! Indeed, I wonder how I managed to get through my own education without stopping to have drinks in the middle of lessons. 

I am not alone in wondering about this. Emma Brockes, in her Digested Week in today’s Guardian, asks:

“Do you carry a water bottle to work? Do you send your kid with one to school? The obsession with hydration is decades deep, but still too shallow to reach back to my school days. I sometimes freak my children out by telling them entire days would go by when I didn’t drink water and no one thought anything of it. By contrast these people are constantly chugging and running off to the loo.”

She goes on: 

“As it turns out, what an Australian psychologist has termed “emotional support water bottles” might not represent the straightforward advance in human wellness we assume. Associate Prof Keong Yap of the Australian Catholic University made his comments about bottles-as-security-blankets to the New York Post in response to a recent US study that found reusable water bottles can contain 40,000 times more germs than the average toilet seat and twice as many as the kitchen sink. More-germs-than-the-toilet is a hardy PR formulation and it should be noted that the study was funded by a water filter company.”

Now, that is quite disgusting! 

I have also read recently that the modern obsession with drinking two litres of unadulterated water every day is erroneous. Much of the two litres can be from cups of tea or coffee, from fruit juices and indeed from fruit itself. And really it’s mostly the very young and the very old we need to worry about getting dehydrated, and that mostly in very hot weather. 

My inner cynic suspects that it was originally a plot by bottle water companies to make us all buy more. And then, as we have all become aware of the problem of plastic bottles all over the place, re-useable water-bottle manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon. Having a really “nice” water-bottle is rather like having a really “nice” set of leotards for your aerobics class back in the 1970s and 1980s or the latest trend in running gear nowadays. 

There you go.

I don’t watch The Antiques Road Show. On the odd occasion that I have accidentally seen it - in the background in a pub or at someone else’s home - I am amazed at the stuff people find in their homes to bring along to be assessed. Sometimes they are large items that require quite complicated transportation. How disappointing it must be to go to all that trouble only to discover that your “treasure” has only sentimental value. However, occasionally it comes good, like the detectorists who eventually find a treasure trove after years of finding no more than old bottle tops. So here’s a link to a story of someone who took along an old painting that had been in the family for decades and discovered that he had a David Hockney on his hands, worth between £20,000 and £30,000! 

I don’t think we have anything like that hidden in our attic, just the odd bit of our children’s and grandchildren’s art work. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.