Picking flowers. And swearing allegiance.

 I have a small bunch of bluebells in a vase on the dining table. No doubt one of the grandchildren will tell me later that you are not supposed to pick bluebells. I don’t know whether that is actually the case any longer but certainly for quite a long time they were a protected species and as such were not to be picked. 

I didn’t pick these as such. When I came back from running round the village this morning I popped down into the side garden to check on the progress of the little clump of bluebells at the top of the steps connecting the bottom garden and the side garden. It’s just one of those things I do, along with pulling up any remaining small sycamore trees that still try to take over the garden. The bluebells in the corner of the front garden are coming on nicely and the side garden bluebells had been doing the same. 

This morning the clump looked as though it had been flattened. I was quite upset. Trampled? By whom? Sat on by one of the local cats who wanted a place to bask in the sun when it came out? Whatever the cause, most of the leaves were bent down and many of the flowers snapped off. Had they been just bent I might have left them to straighten up of their own accord but the stems were actually broken. So now they stand proud in a vase on the table and hopefully will open fully. 

I was reminded of the time when my older sister and I went out picking bluebells. We must have been maybe 12 and 10, old enough to be allowed to go adventuring quite some distance from home. There was a place on the road leading down to Ainsdale beach where we knew bluebells grew around a boating lake. We found bluebells in abundance and came home with armfuls of them. We also came home with nettle-stung legs. In that place the best bluebells grew in the middle of nettle patches, which we ignored at the time, oblivious to the stings. We finished the day in a cool bath liberally dosed with Dettol disinfectant. Goodness knows if that is really a cure for nettle stings but we certainly didn’t have enough dock leaves to rub all over our legs! 

Now, we’re a week away from coronation day and it seems that we are to be invited to join a "chorus of millions" to swear allegiance to the King and his heirs next Saturday during the coronation service. Apparently it’s the first time this has been included in one of our coronations - not that we have had a lot of coronations in recent years. We are invited to say, all of us together: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to your majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.” 

Royalists, some MPs among them, are quickly declaring that it is “a lovely idea”, “bringing the nation together” and making sure we know that they will join in. Meanwhile republicans are equally quick to point out that swearing allegiance to Charles’ heirs includes swearing allegiance to Prince Andrew! Oh dear! We need to keep the radio and television turned off next Saturday I think!

I am reminded of back when I was a Brownie, and briefly a Girl Guide, and we used to hold up our right hands in salute and declare: “I promise to do my best to my duty to God and the Queen”. Do Guides and Scouts still do that? I wonder.

By the way, according to this article it will be possible for people in Kent to watch the coronation live at the cinema in the Bluewater shopping centre. Cinemas have been doing this sort of thing recently but mostly it’s been theatre productions rather than royal spectacles. So far I have not heard of Home in Manchester doing the same thing next Saturday.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Preparations for coronation.

When I went through the village this morning they were busy putting up union jack flags. All of the shops and houses which have a sort of bracket where small Christmas trees are fixed up at Christmas were having a flag installed. Patriotism was going into overdrive. 

Graham the Chippy, owner of the local chip-shop for as long as O can remember, was sitting on the wall outside his establishment. He was clearly feeling a little cycnical. “Hmmm! They’ll all look a bit sad when it rains!” he harrumphed. “I’m not interested in it myself”, he went on, “after all there’ll be another coronation before we know it.”

It’s perhaps a bit churlish to begrudge Charles Windsor a day of celebration. But then, he did have such a day back in 1969 for his investiture as Prince of Wales. I suppose he never expected to wait 50+ years for his coronation though. But that’s the system, apparently.

Meanwhile, it seems we are being urged to do some charitable work to celebrate the coronation. An “invitation” from the king himself it seems. Here’s a little something from the Guardian recently:

“Don’t have plans for the coronation bank holiday? Fear not. The king invites you to join the Big Help Out, a national day of volunteering designed to mark the new reign. Or as the Telegraph breathlessly describes it, a “tribute to Charles’s many decades of public service”.

The Big Help Out will, according to the official website, “give everyone an opportunity to join in”. 

With the cost of living crisis leading to growing hardship across the country, especially in the poorest communities, there is said to be a national shortage of volunteers to meet the demand for them. Organisers were hoping the Big Help Out would inspire a new wave of volunteering, but some in the charity fear the event will be “damp squib”, due to lack of participants.”

Oh dear! 

And then there are those who got into trouble for expressing their opinion that Charles is not their elected head of state. Here’s another little something from the Guardian:

“Symon Hill was walking back from church on a sunny autumn Sunday when he realised his route was blocked; the roads around Carfax Tower in Oxford were closed off. It was 11 September, the day after Charles Windsor had been officially proclaimed King Charles III in London, and local events were being held nationwide. This ceremony, organised by the council, typified the pomp and pageantry. Hill is a quiet, thoughtful man of 46, but it doesn’t take much to rile him when it comes to the monarchy. He was looking forward to spending the afternoon relaxing with his housemates in their garden, and now he was stuck in a celebration he regarded as archaic and irrelevant.

Hill is a Christian, historian, pacifist, teacher, writer, activist and republican. At the start of the ceremony, which focused on the queen’s death, he was silent: “I wouldn’t interrupt somebody’s grief.” But when “they declared Charles rightful liege lord, and acknowledged our obedience to him as our only king”, Hill had heard enough. “I find this language very demeaning, and I called out ‘Who elected him?’” To his astonishment, he found himself surrounded by security, arrested and eventually charged under the Public Order Act 1986.”

It wasn’t the first time he had been arrested for protesting one thing or another but this was perhaps the most surprising as he has not planned to protest at all but just happened to be overheard expressing his opinion.

Symon Hill wasn’t the only one in trouble. “On the same day, a 22-year-old woman who allegedly held a placard reading “F*** imperialism, abolish monarchy” was arrested in Edinburgh for breach of the peace. More overt forms of protest also made headlines. One young man chucked five eggs at the new king and, despite his failure to hit his target, he was also charged with a public order offence.”

And barrister Paul Powlesland was threatened with arrest for holding up a  blank piece of card in Parliament Square. He was actually protesting for freedom of speech rather than against the monarchy:

“Powlesland had never given the royals much thought, but he’d given plenty to freedom of speech: “The protest was initially more about that.” Protesting with a blank piece of paper was purely practical. “I couldn’t get arrested because I had a case next day. Holding up a ‘Not my king’ sign is not unlawful, but they can still arrest you and I didn’t want to let my client down.””

I just hope the thought police don’t check whether or not I’ve got the TV switched on on coronation day. 

Back in the village this morning, Graham the Chippy, sitting on his wall waiting for his daughter, someone I remember as a small girl at the local primary school when my own children were small, confided in me that today is his 75th birthday. So I told him about my good friend and me celebrating 75th birthdays at the pub next door to my house. “It’s getting like The Last of the Summer Wine around here”, he commented! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Celebrations. Heatwave - but not here. Saving the wild flowers.

We’ve been having a week of family and friends’ birthdays this week. And it’s not quite over. I took an old friend out to lunch on Wednesday. We couldn’t manage her actual birthday, yesterday, as I had our small grandson and, charming as he is, his presence would have changed the nature of our lunch date. On Sunday we’ll do a joint celebration of my daughter’s birthday, which was Monday, and Grandson Number One’s birthday, which is tomorrow. A two-for-the-price-of-one birthday. I shall bake a chocolate cake, with chocolate butter icing and sprinkles of sugar stars! Candles might well be limited to one each! 

Forty three years ago, when our daughter was born, I was already wearing summer clothes and had quite a nice suntan, some of that down to the fact that you tan more easily when pregnant. But the fact remains that it was warm enough to stroll around in light clothes in the warm sunshine. A few years ago, when they finally decided that we could meet friends and family in small groups in our gardens, instead of covid-enclosing ourselves indoors, we organised a birthday gathering for her in the garden - birthday cake on the picnic table.

This year it would be decidedly chilly to do a birthday party in the garden. My weather app tells me it’s 12°: hardly picnic temperature! Southern Europe is having a ridiculously early spring heatwave. The maximum temperature at Córdoba of 38.7C is highest April temperature ever recorded in Europe. But the hot blast from Africa is not reaching here. I am trying to find a way to blame it on Brexit; since we “left” Europe, we don’t benefit from warm weather. Another Brexit benefit!? Yes, I know that that is all nonsense. In Florida they’ve been having huge hailstones! Climate change is playing havoc everywhere! 

But spring is actually here. The trees are coming into leaf. My bluebells are opening up nicely. And a charity called Plantlife is advising us all to refrain from cutting the grass. “No Mow May” is the name of their campaign, urging us to give wild flowers a chance to spring up on our gardens. (These month-name campaigns drive me barmy. Dry January was enough but Veganuary really put the cap on it!) They tell us that the  10 most common plants recorded during the campaign last year were daisies, creeping buttercup, yellow rattle, common bird’s-foot trefoil, field forget-me-not, meadow buttercup, white clover, common mouse-ear, oxeye daisy and dandelion. I think we have most of those in the garden but the “lawn” has mostly dandelions, daisies and clover. 

Plantlife estimated that Britain’s lawns could be cut as many as 30m times a year under a weekly regime. This would be equivalent to the consumption of 45m litres of petrol, resulting in 80,000 tonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions – or the combined carbon footprint of about 10,000 average households. I wonder how many of these lawn trimmers do it our way with an old-fashioned push mower! We use no petrol and I’m pretty sure Phil produces minimal carbon dioxide as he pushes the mower up and down the garden. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Striking teachers. Small boys. Dog walking. Who do we trust?

 Our primary school teacher daughter has been on strike today. Her primary school daughter’s teacher belongs to a different teachers’ union and wasn’t on strike today but will be one day next week. So she took ghe small girl to school and dropped the small boy off here as usual quite early this morning. No, she wasn’t going to a picket line. Instead she was catching up with some preparation and marking work. 

While there’s a part of me that says she should be there on the picket line but I can understand her wanting to try to catch up with or even to get ahead of herself! Either way, the small boy would have ended up at my house.

Apart from a minor tantrum when I insisted that the television has to go after after possibly three quarters of an hour’s “Gigantosaurus”. There are worse things to watch with a small boy and it does have nice moral tales about being kind to friends, sharing, being helpful, as well as throwing in odd facts about dinosaurs, but after a while it does get a little wearing. And now I have the theme tune in my head as an earworm!!

Besides it was about time we had a late breakfast and so, when the tantrum had run its course, we went off to the kitchen for “Sweetiebix”, aka Weetabix with honey, for him and coffee for me. 

Later in the day my daughter turned up with 17- very nearly 18-year-old Grandson Number One and their dog. She was deliberately earlier than usual so that we could take the hound for a walk. For longer than I care to remember we have only seen Grandson Number One on high days and holidays, special occasions. Lately he wants to visit once or twice a week. I could flatter myself that he has rediscovered the delights of my cuisine but in reality I think it’s that he likes walking the dog around our village and enjoys the fact the dog os usually quite calm and well behaved. He’s very proud of the dog, so proud you would be forgiven for think g the dog just belongs to him. I have suggested that instead of constantly haranguing his busy mother for a lift he could hop on a bus with the dog. He still has free sixth-form student travel and it only costs 50 pence for the dog. We’d be happy to accompany him on long dog-walks and we would feed him to boot. 

After our dog-walking, my daughter went off to collect Granddaughter Number Four from school and then everyone stayed for tea, before giving Grandad a lift to chess club. 

Having been invaded by small children and a dog I had to spend some time putting the place to rights and leaving windows open to reduce the smell of dog. Despite protestation to the contrary from those who love him to pieces, the dog leaves a distinctly canine aroma around the living room. 

Getting back to the teachers’ strike, the TUC is spreading the news that the House of Lords has just VOTED DOWN plans to sack nurses, teachers and firefighters who go on strike. Hurrah! The House of lords is being useful! Hard-working professionals need all the support they can get!,

And here are some statistics I came across:

Most trusted professions in the UK:

1. Nurses (89%)
2. Engineers (87%)
3. Doctors (85%)
4. Scientists (83%)
5. Teachers (81%)

Least trusted professions:

1. Politicians (12%)
2. Advertising executives (14%)
3. Government ministers (16%)
4. Estate agents (28%)
5. Journalists (29%)

Food for thought!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Motorbikes. Trousers. Lawyers. Equality for women!

 I have just finished reading yet another murder mystery by Val McDermid, this one dealing with a body found preserved in a peat of in the highlands of Scotland along with a well preserved vintage motorbike, dating back to World War II. Someone had been murdered at some point between the end of the war and the present day as someone else tried to reclaim vintage war loot. A good, complicated tale.

Now, I’ve never been a great fan of motorbikes. A pushbike (a term I have not heard used for a good while) is a different matter altogether, much more controllable. Maybe it goes back to an occasion in my childhood when for some reason Brown Owl (as we called the leader of the Brownie Pack) insisted of giving me a lift home on the back of her Vespa motor scooter. It was not an experience I relished. We didn’t even wear helmets in those days. And certainly I have never felt any inclination to don leathers and ride around on a motorbike. My daughter, much bolder than I, went through a phase when she loved motorbikes. I seem to remember my brother-in-law taking her off to watch motorcycle races one year.

Anyway, when I went to the dentist’s recently, as I walked back from the clinic to the town centre I heard the roar of motorbikes and saw a veritable host of motorcyclists, quite aging motorcyclists, with their leather jackets emblazoned with a variety insignia. There was not a helmet to be seen. They all wore their longish hair tied back in ponytails of one style or another. What was going on? It was like a scene from the TV series Sons of Anarchy. I was tempted to take a photo but my viewing of some episodes of Sons of Anarchy warned me that these gentlemen might react badly to an invasion of this solemn ride. It was clearly a procession of some kind, making its slow and stately way along the street. 

Eventually I saw what it was all about. Behind the motorcycle cavalcade came a hearse. The coffin was adorned with only one wreath and a motorcycle helmet. One of their motorcycling brotherhood (their chapter?) must have died and this was their tribute to him. Impressive! 

Then this morning in a random item on social media I found a photo of two women on motorbikes, with the caption: “Adeline and Augusta Van Buren were the first women to travel across the United States on two solo motorbikes in 1916. They made it despite being imprisoned often for wearing trousers.”

What was that all about. I had to look it up. 

It turns out they were sisters (descended by the way from then eighth president of the USA, Martin Van Buren, although that is irrelevant) and they weren’t the first but the second and third women to cross the continent by motorbike. The first was Effie Hotchkiss, who had completed a Brooklyn-to-San Francisco route the year before with her mother, Avis, as a sidecar passenger. It’s possible they were the first to do so wearing trousers though! 

America was about to enter World War I, and the sisters wanted to prove that women could ride as well as men and would be able to serve as military dispatch riders, freeing up men for other tasks. For their ride, they dressed in military-style leggings and leather riding breeches, a taboo at that time. They were arrested numerous times, not for speeding or other motoring offences but because they were wearing trousers! 

I was about to exclaim: Wow! Imagine not being allowed to wear trousers! But then, back in the 1970s together with some of the women I worked with we campaigned for, and eventually won, the right to wear trousers to work in the secondary school - provided the trousers were part of a “matching or co-ordinating trouser suit”. No casual jeans for us! 

Despite succeeding in their trek, the sisters' applications to be military dispatch riders were rejected. Reports in the leading motorcycling magazine of the day praised the bike but not the sisters and described the journey as a "vacation". One newspaper published a degrading article accusing the sisters of using the national preparedness issue as an excellent excuse to escape their roles as housewives and "display their feminine counters in nifty khaki and leather uniforms".

So it goes!

Coincidentally, we are currently watching an Italian TV series about Lydia Poët, law graduate from Turin university towards the end of the 19th century, and her fight to be allowed to practice law - the first modern female lawyer in Italy!

Keep up the fight for equal rights, sisters!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Seedlings. Flowers. Books and bookshops and bats.

 We’ve cut the grass in the back garden and the side garden. Well, when I say WE have cut the grass, I really mean that Phil has done so. He has got rid of the “forest” of sycamore seedlings (my clumsy fingers first typed “seedlings” as “weedlings”, which on balance seems like quite an appropriate term) which had sprung up everywhere. The sycamore tree at our end of the pub carpark next door has always been there for as long as I can remember but never before have I seen so many seedlings spring up all over the garden! 

I’ve already gone on about the gutterman removing another such “forest” from the gutters, front and back of the house, and my having to remove from the front garden huge clumps of grass and seedling gunk that he had thrown down. I found another load yesterday. But checking the flowerbeds for progress I am finding even more seedlings/weedlings that I cannot blame on the gutterman. They have simply planted themselves in every bit of land they could find. So I have been pulling them as I find them taking care not to pull up the soon-to-be-flowering plants that are meant to be there. 

There are two developmental aspects to this problem:- 

1. The weedlings are getting bigger by the day, producing the first really recognisable sycamore leaves and substantially longer roots.
2. My aquilegia plants are also growing taller, making it harder to spot the mini-trees.

In a few weeks the front garden will come into its own with a mass of aquilegia in a range of colours and small yellow and orange poppies - but never any red ones for some reason. The bluebells in the corner are coming into bloom nicely and now that I have somewhat belatedly removed the debris from last year’s ferns I am hoping that the London pride will add its flowers to the mix. There are a few dandelions at the moment but I am not pulling them up as the bees appreciate them. But I really don’t want a host of young sycamores rooting themselves in nicely under cover of my rather wild garden. 

I learnt a new word this morning: tsundoku - the practice of surrounding ourselves with unread books. The ‘unread’ aspect is important as it reminds us of all the stuff we still don’t know. A statistician called Nassim Nicholas Taleb says that these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary”. I think I prefer the Japanese name. I have passed the new word on to Granddaughter Number Two who is totally incapable of going into a bookshop and coming put again without a bag full of books. She has stacks of books “waiting to be read” and always has a book on the go.

I try not to buy more books these days, unless I buy them straight to kindle. Kindle is an inferior way to read books, in my opinion, but it does make reading in bed a lot easier. And if I fall asleep reading the kindle falling on my head is a lot less painful than a hardback book doing the same thing. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also talks about his delight in the smell of books, another think you don’t get with the kindle. Granddaughter Number Two would certainly agree with him about the smell. I have seem her go into raptures about the ‘new book smell’ and indeed the ‘old book smell’. Indeed, she delights in just about every aspect of books: embossed front covers on some (she covets our hardback copy of Lord of the Rings, with its beautiful front cover and its flimsy ‘bible’ paper pages!) and the coloured edge of pages on others. 

 I also make regular use of the library, which is why many of the books I read are in hardback. 

Now, I would like to know of there is a specific term for the list of books you have already read but would like to read again. I have a list of those as well. 

Apparently writer Umberto Eco had a personal library of 30,000 books, not because he had read all of them buy because he wanted to read an know more. I thought we had a lot of books but Umberto Eco makes our collection look small.

I read that there is a library in Portugal called the Mafra Palace Library. Completed in 1755, it is regarded as a national treasure of Portuguese architecture, and holds 36,000 leather-bound volumes dating from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Ot is also home to a colony of small bats which sleeps behind the shelves or outside in the trees during the daytime and flies around at night eating bookworms, moths, and other insects can wreak havoc on their delicate pages. A much more eco-friendly way of controlling things than spraying everywhere with chemicals! The staff cover the furniture with dustcloths at the end of the day and clean the bat poo off the marble floor every morning. That’s the price! 

Portugal is clearly a good place for book lovers. It also has the beautiful Livraria Lello in Porto, a bookshop well worth visiting. The last time I visited they were charging for entry to the shop as so many people were just going in to stare and to take photos (most probably here-I-am-in-this-fancy-bookshop selfies) that it was hard for real purchasers to see the books. If you bought a book they deducted the entry fee from the price of the book - all good! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone! 

Rabbits. Drought. The slave trade - symbols and making amends. Racism and/or prejudice

 Rabbits! We’ve grown used to hearing about problems with wolves, bears, wild boar and other such relatively large and fierce creatures causing havoc in and around farms, and even towns, in parts of Europe. But now it seems that vine growers in Catalonia are having trouble with rabbits.  

Well, really they’re having trouble with continued drought but the rabbits are contributing to the problem. During the pandemic people weren’t going out hunting and so the rabbit population was not kept under control. As I understand it, Spain was a lot stricter than here about people having to stay indoors. Here in the UK you could probably have gone out and popped a few rabbits as part of your daily exercise. And rabbits, especially when left to themselves, breed like … well, like rabbits! 

And because last summer was very hot and this winter very dry there is less grass around for rabbits to eat and so they are feasting on young vines. (Rabbits will gnaw through almost anything; we had one, a very tame one who roamed around the kitchen, who once chewed through the cable for the lights on the Christmas tree. How he wasn’t electrocuted goodness only knows.) As regards the drought, one vine grower commented that they’re learning to adapt their farming methods to suit the changing climate conditions: “We’ve noticed that if we leave ground cover around the vines they are better equipped to survive drought because the morning dew doesn’t just settle on the leaves but on the grass, too,” she says. That makes sense. We need to adapt. 

There has been a fair amount of stuff recently about Manchester’s connections to slavery. There’s always been a lot of textile industry around here and so the region was dependent on cotton, grown and picked by slaves, coming here. Now it seems that the city and its two football clubs are coming under fire for having a three-masted ship in full sail, a positive galleon, on the city’s coat of arms and on the football clubs badges.

Some think the ship is there because of the Manchester ship canal, which has some logic behind it, but now it seems it’s more to do with the salve trade. Other places seem to have realised the possible connection earlier than we have around here:  “Few English football clubs feature ships or boats on their badges. Those that do have an obvious explanation: Tranmere’s warship signifies the town’s shipbuilding heritage; fishing town Grimsby has a trawler; and Plymouth’s Mayflower commemorates the Pilgrims’ ship that set sail for the new world. The football clubs of port cities directly implicated in the slave trade – Bristol, London and Liverpool – steer clear of ships as motifs in their badges (although the Bristol Rovers flag features a pirate).” 

And here’s an article I read today about people whose families made money out of the slave trade (when slavery was abolished such families received compensation to the tune of millions of pounds in today’s money!) feeling the need to put things right, often by donating money educational projects and pressuring the government to apologise and make amends. I wonder if they can persuade the king to join their association. Historical cleansing is taking place!

Meanwhile Diane Abbott seems to be the latest to fall foul of Labour’s cleansing policy. She’s had the whip suspended for expressing her views about racism and prejudice. She is someone who should know what she is talking about. And that difference between out and out racism and prejudice, both of them hurtful and dangerous, is the sort of thing that we should be able to discuss without the instigator being “punished” for even mentioning it.  

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

A postscript to my thoughts on memorabilia. Superstition and false beliefs. And what did Cleopatra really look like?

After I went on about memorabilia yesterday, Phil expressed his surprise that I had not mentioned Charles and the True Cross. This is an item I was unaware of. Here is a bit of explanation:

“VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- As Britain's King Charles III walks into Westminster Abbey for his coronation, he will walk behind a processional cross containing a relic of Christ's cross given to the king by Pope Francis.

"The fragments of the relic of the true cross were donated by the Holy See in early April, through the apostolic nunciature, to His Majesty King Charles III, supreme governor of the Church of England, as an ecumenical gesture on the occasion of the centenary of the Anglican Church in Wales," Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office said April 20.

A Vatican official said the two fragments in the coronation cross came from a relic preserved in the Lipsanoteca Room of the Vatican Museums.

The fragments now are under glass in the center of the coronation cross, which is made of recycled silver bullion.

Anglican Archbishop Andrew John of Wales blessed the cross during a service April 19.”

Here’s some more:

“Chris Trott, the British ambassador to the Holy See, said on Twitter that "we are deeply moved and grateful to Pope Francis for this extraordinary gift."

The gift of the relic, he said, reflects the strength of the relationship between the Holy See and Great Britain, a "relationship that developed over the course of the reign of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, who met five popes!"”

Meeting five popes - that’s quite impressive! This is what happened when you live as long her late majesty did. 

I must admit that when I heard about these fragments of the true cross I was tempted to say, “It’s a miracle they have survived so long”.  And I was reminded of the moment in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s book “The Leopard” when the collection of holy relics belonging to the wife of Prince Fabrizio di Salina are almost all declared not to be truly holy after all and have to be thrown out. 

But that was towards the end of the 19th century. People believed a lot more in ancient relics back then. And yet here we are almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century and we’re still believing that bits of wood come from the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. And we’re going to have Charles ride in a golden carriage and then follow that Welsh cross and its incorporated relics into Westminster Abbey!

For a religion that believes in a god nobody can see, indeed a religion that back in the old testament declared there should be no worship of graven images, a lot of store is set on the fancy trappings and ceremonial objects. It’s why back when I was a believer I much preferred the unadorned simplicity of the Methodist church.

So that’s religious paraphernalia dismissed. What about the matter of skin colour? There’s been quite a lot of hoo-ha about the casting of the actress Adele James as Cleopatra in a new Netflix series, all because of the colour of her skin. As we all know, Cleopatra looked like Elizabeth Taylor! No way was she really Egyptian, of Macedonian descent, possibly with some black African in there! 

Kenan Malik writes about it in the Guardian. 

He begins with this:

In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”.  “All Africa,,” he wrote, “is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny... And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also.” Only “the Saxons… [and] the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”

I suppose it was a fairly common belief back then. Notice that Mr Franklin talks about the English, not the Welsh or the Scots or the Irish. You can be the wrong kind of “white”, clearly! Think of the days when boarding houses here put up notices saying they would not accept Irish tenants! And for a long time Irish and Italians were considered to be inferior “Americans”, not as good a class of immigrants as the English. Hence, of course WASPs!

In his article Kenan Malik quotes an American classicist Shelley Haley, an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics, according to wikipedia. She believes modern sensibilities can be useful in framing how we perceive Cleopatra:

“My grandmother was white,” Haley writes, “had straight black hair, and the nose of her [Native American] Onondagan grandmother but she was ‘colored’” because of the “one-drop rule” – the insistence that “if we have one Black ancestor, then we are Black.” Similarly, Cleopatra was undoubtedly “the product of miscegenation”; so “how is it she is not Black?” Haley adds that “Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would. Hence we embrace her as sister.”

What a strange world we live in. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

On memorabilia - aka almost holy relics!

Bobby Moore was the captain of the England football team when they won the world cup in 1966. That’s the only time our team has done so. They came close in 2018 with Harry Kane as captain and it seems that the current team is in the quarter final against France, only three games away from a possible second world cup win. Maybe we should not say that out loud as we might put a hex on it. 

I write all this confidently sounding as though I know what’s going on. I must confess that I have no idea!

Checking facts led me to wonder why the team is called the Three Lions. Here’s what I found:

“The history of the nickname refers back to the Three Lions which feature on the England national team badge.

Three Lions have adorned the England national team badge since 1872 as the symbol of the English FA.

Explanations over the exact history of their usage differ, depending on historical interpretations, with 12th century historical battles including English armies bearing the standard of three gold lions on a red field.

There are also historical connections dating back to Henry I taking the throne in 1100 and Richard the Lionheart (1189-1199) using three golden lions on a scarlet background as a symbol of the English monarchy.”

There you go. Historical lions even before we played football. 

So, as I know little or nothing of any value about football, why am I rabbiting on about it? Because I saw a headline about Bobby Moore’s ex-wife asking whoever currently has the shirt he wore in the 1966 world cup final to please return it to her. 

“I would really love to get that shirt back where it belongs – with me, with my family, and with the nation, for everyone to have a chance to look at it and marvel at Bobby’s achievement,” she said.

Apparently she got all his football memorabilia when they divorced in 1986. If they were divorcing why did she want the memorabilia? You would think the last thing you would want was a load of stuff reminding you about the person you were divorcing. Did she not want to be divorced?  Or did she simply recognise its financial value? 

Maybe the shirt should be in a football museum, like the one in the centre of Manchester. 

However, I find it strange how we are attached to things like shirts or other items that our heroes wore, rather like collecting relics from saints. Sometimes the old relics are still used, such as Hank Williams’ old guitar which Neil Young plays from time to time and sings about in his song “This Old Guitar”.

I tried to find out how Neil Young acquired it. This is one story I found: 

“The story goes that Hank Williams, Jr. had traded the guitar for some shotguns, and it then went through a succession of other owners until it was located by Young's longtime friend Grant Boatwright who secured it for Young from Tut Taylor, the *dobro legend who owned the GTR music store in Nashville.

Young has toured with it for over 30 years. A story about the guitar and the song it inspired, "This Old Guitar" can be seen about 50 minutes into the "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" film. It was Young's primary guitar on the "Prairie Wind" album.”

*I looked up dobro: “Dobro is an American brand of resonator guitars owned by Gibson and manufactured by its subsidiary Epiphone. The term "dobro" is also used as a generic term for any wood-bodied, single-cone resonator guitar.” The wonders of the internet!!

I love the fact that Neil Young doesn’t really regard the guitar as his - “this old guitar isn’t mine to keep, it’s mine to use for a while”. I wonder who he will pass it on to.

We have an old rocking chair in our house that, like that guitar isn’t really mine to keep. My grandmother used to sit and rock in that chair, rubbing her hands on the ends of the arms so that the polish is quite worn off there. My younger sister always hankered after that rocking chair. She decided it had her name on it. Then she went off and married a Spaniard and ended up living in the south of Spain. When Grandma died we had a little quandary about that rocking chair. Nobody even truly considered shipping it to Spain. But nobody wanted to just get rid of it. Our older sister declared it was too old fashioned to go in her house. And so it came to my house where it fits in fine but our younger sister still maintains that it really belongs to her. I am the custodian! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Activities to celebrate nostalgia. Resignations. And (non)apologies.

We were promised rain. And rain came in the night. I could hear it on the roof when I went to bed last night. This morning dawned bright and clear though. I went out for a run as usual and thought I might get blown away, so strong was the wind against me. 

We had debated going for a Diggle Chippy hike today but decided against it when we checked the weather. So when I saw the clear blue sky this morning I wondered if our decision was a mistake. However, by late morning that wind had blown the cloud in and it was already spitting with rain. Instead of a chippy hike, we decided that we would meet at Granddaughter Number Two’s favourite cafe for her to have a slice (or maybe two) of her favourite chocolate Guinness cake before she goes back to university this weekend. 

I tried to book us a table and to reserve some slices of cake for her but I never managed to get through to them. So we took pot luck and met there at around 2.30. Yes, they had a table available, but not the one the small boy prefers, the upstairs table with sofas! (He threw a slight wobbler and very nearly went up the stairs himself to check!) And, horror of horrors!, they had no chocolate Guinness cake. She was able to order a bacon butty though. So it goes.

Next time we go to visit Granddaughter Number Two we’ll have to pick up a takeaway slice of cake before we set off! 

So Dominic Raab has resigned because of the findings of the investigation into accusations of bullying. No apologies. It’s interesting to read about apologies in such cases, when they occur. It’s not really a case of apologising as such, more a case of “I’m sorry if people feel offended, hurt, bullied or whatever”. Apologising without accepting responsibility for the offence. The person offended is, in fact, more guilty than the offender!

A friend and I have been having a bit of a discussion about this announcement: “It’s time to say goodbye to those red envelopes. Netflix announced on Tuesday that it would end 25 years of mailing DVDs of shows and movies to its subscribers.

Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said mailing DVDs had “paved the way for the shift to streaming”, but that “after an incredible 25-year run, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down at the end of September”.

“Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult,” Sarandos said.

Netflix launched as an alternative to video rental stores, allowing customers to rent DVDs that were sent to their homes. The first DVD it sent out was a copy of Tim Burton’s 1988 classic Beetlejuice.

The business model took off, and soon Blockbuster, the biggest video rental store chain, and its rivals were in trouble.

But the shift to streaming has eaten away at the company’s DVD by post business, and accounted for $126m of Netflix’s $31.6bn in revenues last year.”

My friend suggested that CDs and DVDs will soon become collectors’ items, as vinyl records are now. And today he added that he has heard that audio cassettes are going to make a comeback. My friend says he has no means of playing his remaining collection of vinyl, or cassettes if he had any! We are fortunate enough to have a music system which allows us to play some nostalgic stuff on vinyl from time to time. We even have the wherewithal to play audio cassettes. And I do still have a few cassettes that I decided not to throw out all those years ago. We even have a few examples of the compilation music cassettes we used to play to enliven our car journeys to the south coast to catch a ferry to go camping in France. I bet those are collectors’ items themselves by now! 

A bit of nostalgia does no harm!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Feeling a little let down.

Just before Easter, the Thursday before Good Friday to be exact, I took a parcel along to the local post office to send to Granddaughter Number Three who live in the southern end of the country. The post office man (postmaster) weighed it, charged me whatever he felt was the relevant amount of money, stuck a stamp on it and popped it in his bag for the post an to collect. I had been forgetting all week to post this parcel but now it was done and although it might not arrive in time for Easter Sunday, at least it should arrive while Granddaughter Number Three was still on holiday from school.

It was some craft stuff, plywood shapes to paint. Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two had something similar on Easter Sunday and occupied themselves happily painting wooden rabbits. I had wrapped Granddaughter Number Two’s stuff in a recycled envelope, carefully covering up any old address labels with new ones.

Now, my daughter-in-law is quite punctilious about getting their little daughter to send thank you letters and even photos of the small child enjoying whatever she has been sent. SomI was rather surprised not to hear anything from the southern branch of the family. 

Then, on Tuesday I think it was, the day before yesterday, I had a text message from my daughter-in-law. A parcel had arrived for their small girl. She assumed it was from me as the writing looked familiar, if a little larger than usual. But there was a sender’s name on the reverse which she did not recognise. Who was this mysterious person and was I in fact the sender? I was pretty sure I had stuck a label over that sender’s name and address - a chess playing friend of Phil’s. Presumably it had fallen off. And then there was a notice on the front saying the stamp was invalid and that there was a charge of £3.50!! I apologised for the inconvenience. 

I shall have words with our village postmaster! He’s usually very efficient.

And why did the parcel take so long to reach its destination. The postal service is letting us down. 

Then there’s our gutterman. Last Thursday he came and cleared a small forest out of our gutters. The gutters look fine now. We’ve not had any really torrential rain since then so we’ve not been able to test the true efficacy of his work. But it did seem to be efficiently done. Earlier this week, possible Tuesday again, I was checking how things were coming along in the garden. I noticed a patch of what looked like worn grass in the middle of what can’t really be called the lawn in the back garden - it’s much too full of clover and daisies and dandelions to merit such a posh name. The rough patch turned out to be a pile of sycamore seedlings and other stuff the gutterman had vacuumed out of the gutter at the back of the house. That was a bit poor, I thought. If he’d asked I could have suggested he put it in my composting and garden waste bin. I’d have moved it myself if necessary. After all, that’s what I did in the end.,

A little later, having noticed that the bluebells in the side garden were nicely in bud, almost ready to bloom properly, I went to check on the ones in the corner of the front garden. Goodness! They were half buried under clumps of soggy grass and sycamore seedlings, presumably thrown down by the gutterman. He had not vacuumed the front gutter but had ventured bravely up a ladder and pulled out the mess by hand. But I had not expected to find said mess in damp clumps all over the flowerbeds in the front garden. I had thought he would have collected it all together to dispose of it. Which is what I did, dropping the clumps of stuff - not just from on top of the bluebells but from several other flowerbeds - in the garden waste bin. Last Thursday I was pleased with the gutter-clearing work. This Tuesday I was less impressed! 

But the bluebells appear to have survived their ordeal. Now we just need them to come into bloom properly. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!