Wednesday thoughts. Drizzle. Big concerts. Celebrity nonsense.

 So this morning we woke up to drizzle. This despite the forecast offering us sunny intervals and a cool breeze. The cool breeze part was spot on. And by early afternoon we had some sunny intervals. But we had all grown used to sunshine and warm weather. Weather-wise today has been a bit of a letdown! Maybe it’s because ai have been watering plants! 

I was all set to cycle to the market as usual but my daughter phoned me and said she was dropping the little chap off at nursery, up the road from our house, and suggested she should pick me up and go to the market with me. So that’s what we did. 

People out and about divided into two camps: the optimists who still wore shorts and light tops and the pessimists who had reverted to raincoats and headgear of some kind. A fairly typical British summer scene, I suppose! 

An old friend of ours has gone to Edinburgh to see Brice Springsteen. I’ve seen photos of the concert, which was yesterday, and find myself quite glad not to be in that huge crowd of tens of thousands of fans. I felt the same when I saw photos of the concert in Rome. We’ve seen The Boss a few times, the last time in Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, with the same friend who has gone to Edinburgh. On that occasion we joked about the possibility of running into Bruce or members of the band as we strolled around the streets of Santiago de Compostela. 

During the period of his current tour of Europe, Facebook has been full of photos of his concerts but also of fans who managed to get a selfie with The Boss. In Ireland in particular he appeared to just pop into pubs, pull the odd pint, maybe sing a song with the locals, all the while seemingly seeking his Irish heritage. Americans seem quite big of their Irish heritage. President Biden went looking for his recently. But from what I’ve seen so far, there appear to be few celebrity walkabouts going on in Scotland. We’ll see! 

Meanwhile I am getting heartily sick of news reports about Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. So its been a bit of a shock for some people to discover that the former golden boy of television is not as pure as the driven snow but really, is it a matter of national importance? Except maybe to distract attention from other matters. So it goes. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Out and about in Manchester. The importance of labels. Closing schools.And greening Venice.

Granddaughter Number Two had to take some documentation into an office in Manchester, in connection with her upcoming re-employment with Transport for Greater Manchester, temporary reemployment for the summer. Without the documentation, they wouldn’t be able to pay her. So she asked me if ai’d like to go along with her and then we could take a wander round the shops.

As she had an appointment for 9.15, we needed to be on a tram before 8.30. We were up and about early. She had an address for the office and instructions for how to find it. When we got there, there was no indication on the building that it was the company she was looking for. We went in and asked. Yes, this was it: a place that housed various companies, none of which was labelled on the ground floor, just as the building had no label on the outside. Some labels would have been useful. She phoned to let them know she was there and only when someone came down to accompany her up to the third floor did she see any label saying who the company was! But she’s all sorted now.

Having done that, we went off to Waterstones Bookshop, first to make use of their cafe facilities and have a breakfast coffee, and then so that she could spend too much money buying yet more books! There was one particular book she was looking for, the latest in a series. She had already tried unsuccessfully to find it in Waterstones and W.H. Smith in York. The assistant in Manchester’s Deansgate Waterstones assured her they had about twenty copies. And then they couldn’t find them, not a single one. I suppose if you want to hide books then a bookshop is as good a place as any. They checked to see if it was available in their Arndale Centre store and assured her that there were copies available.  By the time arrived there, having stopped at one or two places en route, we discovered they had just sold the last copy! She has resigned herself reluctantly to ordering it from Amazon!

It was a lovely day to stroll around Manchester city centre: blue sky and sunshine and a bit of a breeze to stop us getting overheated. 

The other day I wrote about the problems primary schools are having with falling numbers and consequently reduction in funding. This article reveals how many primary schools are having to close because of those falling numbers. 

In Venice it seems they have been having problems with the Grand Canal turning fluorescent green. It turns put that this was was due to fluorescein, a non-toxic substance used for testing wastewater networks. It seems that the results “have not shown the presence of toxic elements in the samples analysed”, which is reassuring but it did cause some worry.  Police have been looking into whether the green water could be a protest by climate change activists, according to local daily La Nuova Venezia as it’s not the first time the Grand Canal has turned green. In 1968, Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu dyed the waters of Venice’s Grand Canal green with a fluorescent dye during the 34th Venice Biennale in a stunt to promote ecological awareness. There you go!

It would be rather interesting to see the Grand Canal in an unusual colour.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Equality of opportunity? Social mobility?

 Reading an article this morning about Faiza Shaheen, a young woman who stood (and lost but with a respectable number of people voting for her) against Iain Duncan Smith in 2019 for the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency, I was moved to think about social mobility and equality. 

“Losing in 2019 was, in the end, instructive. Shaheen lost by just 1,262 votes and Chingford and Woodford Green was one of only six seats in the country to see a swing to Labour. In the days, weeks and months that followed, she started to reassess what had happened. She found that while the odds of going to Oxford University – which she did – and then on to become an MP were one in 10m for her, they were closer to one in 10,000 for David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The question was less why she had lost, and more why she had ever thought she could win.” (My underlining.)

She’s a working-class, Muslim, British-Pakistani-Fijian daughter of a car mechanic who went to Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics - often seen as a a kind of entry ticket into politics. She’s written a book, “Know Your Place”, in which she analyses the social inequality she has experienced first-hand, and she writes that as she watched Smith give his victory speech, all she could say, over and over again, was: “There is no justice.”

Polly Toynbee also writes about knowing your place and being aware that coming from an upper-middle-class family gives you a privilege others might not have, even if your upper-middle-class family is staunchly anti-Conservative and probably disapproves of privilege. She wonders if she was given a second chance at education, having been fairly unsuccessful at her boarding school and being encouraged at sixth form college to try again, if her family background was “recognised” by the helpful teacher. Would he have encouraged a girl from a different background in the same way? It is to be hoped that he would. 

I wasn’t sent away to boarding school. Even though I read stories about girls’ boarding schools and thought they sounded like great fun: midnight feasts in the ‘dorm’, secret societies going around solving mysteries and righting wrongs. But now I can think of nothing worse than being sent away from home at age 7.

When I was 7, going on 8, I moved up from the local state infants’ school to the local state junior school on the same site. I still remember an occasion at the start of that school year when the headmaster came and spoke to our class. We were 1A, the top class, close on 50 of us who were expected to sit still and quiet. (Lower “ability” classes were smaller because they needed “controlling”.) The headmaster asked each of us what our fathers’ jobs were. I told him my father was a printer. “Are you sure?” He asked me, “ Is he not a gardener?” At some point I worked out that he had that impression because my older sister, two years ahead of me, had said he worked for The Guardian, which he did print when it was still the Manchester Guardian. I always wondered if I was somehow regarded differently because my father was an accepted professional. 

When I started teaching I really believed in comprehensive education and did see pupils progress from lower streams (this was before mixed ability teaching was the norm) and gradually move up into higher streams, do O-Levels and A-Levels and eventually even go to Oxford or Cambridge. 

Social mobility seemed more than possible. Now it seems less sure.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Summer habits? Flexible working. Positive and negative outcomes of lockdown.

 As the fine weather continues and promises to do so for a week or more yet, I have gone through the wardrobe and fished out the summer dresses and shorts and such like. After all there is every chance that this might be our summer. If it continues into June and July and August, all well and good. Mind you, there will come a point where they will start telling us to conserve water. Hosepipe bans will be introduced we’ll be told not water the gardens. We shall see! Meanwhile I am making use of the rainwater collected in an old dustbin outside the back door to water the pots of flowers on the garden wall. And I feel slightly guilty because the birds can no longer perch on the edge and take a drink. I’ll have to put shallow pots of water out for them.

In the meantime, though, it’s pleasantly warm and we can sit in the garden and enjoy it. Considering the problems that there have been with airports over the last few days, I’m rather glad that we haven’t booked ourselves onto a flight to anywhere. And it seems that cross-Channel ferry ports have not fared a great deal better. These are modern problems. 

 My daughter and I were talking about the flexibility of working hours these days. This was as we drove back from York the other day. As traffic queues built up and our average speed went down, our estimated arrival time according to Satnav made it doubtful that we would be back home in time for her small daughter coming out of school. So she phoned her partner and set him on standby to go to school for their daughter. He was able to do this as he works mostly from home. It was just a matter of letting his employers know that he would be off duty for specific times that afternoon. 

He had already availed himself of the flexibility rule by logging on to work early in the morning in order to be able to take time out later and attend an assembly at their daughter’s school, where she was receiving a certificate of some kind. Had he been working i n a city centre office none of this would have been possible. This is one of the positive outcomes of the pandemic - probably one of the few. Our son is able to make the same sort of arrangements. 

Of course, it’s not a possibility for teachers like my daughter or nurses for that matter. But, although I have heard that the government would like us to revert to the old way of working, I suspect it suits a lot of people very well. 

On the negative side is this report that car owners are having more problems than usual with cracked tyres, largely as a result of cars standing parked for long periods during lockdown. It has an adverse effect on the tyres apparently. 

Incidentally, in one of the backstreets of the village is an old Citroën 2CV, which appeared there mysteriously some time last year, I think. So far I have not found anyone who can tell me who it belongs to. It rather intrigues me because my first car, back in the 1970s was a red Citroën 2CV, so I have a bit of nostalgia going on there. Goodness knows what state the tyres of this old car must be. Just last Thursday, when it was the only vehicle parked there, our small grandson went to examine it, convinced that it had no rear wheels and satisfied to find them hidden under the wheel guards and half overgrown with weeds. Rather a sad end for a vehicle it seems to me. Maybe the owner is also nostalgic for a quieter time on the roads. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

On scarecrows, birthdays, photos, sweet-toothed bears and thieving scarecrows!

It’s that time of year when you start to see people wandering round our village with a leaflet, or even a clipboard, ticking off scarecrows as they find them. It’s the Whit Week Delph Donkey Scarecrow trail. Shops put donkey scarecrows in their windows and private houses in and around the village put donkey scarecrows in their gardens. People who want to hunt the scarecrows can buy a booklet, from the post office I think, and the proceeds possibly go to the local library. At least that’s what happened when it started 10 or 15 years ago. A little bit of village fun!

Today is my younger sister’s birthday. She was born on our mother’s birthday. It’s a bit of a family tradition to share birthdays. My daughter was born on my father’s birthday and her daughter was born on my son’s birthday. It makes it easier to remember the birthdays. To celebrate today’s birthday my sister posted a photo of our mother as a young woman, a photo I have never seen before. Goodness knows why not! I suspect that on one of my sister’s visits home from Spain she raided the family photo collection, on the grounds that as she lived so far away she had the right to take whatever photos she chose. Not that it bothers me. Well, not much!

The odd thing is that my mother as a young woman in that photo looks remarkably like my Spanish niece, daughter of my birthday-girl sister. Coincidentally there are photos of my sister when young which could equally well be photos of my aunt, my father’s younger sister, also when she was a young woman. Again this was a resemblance we had not noticed before.  It’s as if the camera catches a momentary expression, a moment of stillness and suddenly we see the similarity. 

Now, some of us grew up with stories of Yogi Bear, who loved to steal picnic (pickernick) baskets. This morning I read an account of a bakery in Connecticut that was ‘invaded’ by a black bear which scared the staff, stole a tray of cupcakes, took them out into the carpark and proceeded to eat about 60 of them. Clearly a bear with a sweet tooth - rather like Winnie the Pooh and his love of honey! 

But how frightening to live in a place where you might be raided by bears! 

I also came across this account of seagulls and their eating habits. It seems they observe what humans eat and like to snack on the same things. I have long known that seagulls are intelligent birds and quite competent food thieves. We have often had to be vigilant when having a drink outside a cafe in Galicia because if there is a bowl of crisps or some mind of free tapas on the table the seagulls will happily land on your table and help themselves. And they are rather big and frightening birds. I once saw two young girls strolling along a Vigo street eating waffles only to have a seagull swoop down and literally snatch the food out of their hands! And in this country one of our granddaughters had her chips spilt all over the seafront when a seagull tried to steal the whole tray! 

Perhaps not quite as frightening as having your store room invaded by bears but even so, those gulls need watching?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Education. Babies. And testing knowledge.

 Today my daughter and I drove to York to collect Granddaughter Number Two, whose first year at university has come to an end. We were both confused as we thought she was just coming home for the weekend and had a few weeks to go. Some courses are continuing but she has finished her exams and assessments - no results as yet as exam markers are on strike. And she could have stayed and socialised as her accommodation is paid for for another few weeks but she is starting work  in a temporary job for Transport for Greater Manchester almost immediately. Or rather, taking up again the post she had before going off to university. They more or less head-hunted her to get her back for the summer! 

As we drove up the motorway my daughter and I discussed the pros and cons of moving away to university. Granddaughter Number Two has used up most of her savings to pay tuition fees and accommodation. She could have stayed at home and travelled in every day to study at Manchester University but instead she moved out. Personally I think living independently, even though she has not lived a wild student life but has spent a fair amount of time studying in her student bedroom, has probably been good for her. We have yet to see whether the degree she obtains in a couple of years’ time, three if she decides to go on to do a masters, will guarantee her well paid employment. It’s all rather different from when those of us going to university were the minority and could walk into a job on graduation. So it goes.

My daughter also talked about staffing levels and pupil levels at the primary school where she works. Most primary schools around here are having funding problems because their pupil numbers are falling. (One down the road from our house has a huge notice advertising the availability of places for nursery and reception-age children!) Pupil numbers are falling because people are having fewer babies. People are having fewer babies because they can’t afford them. Conservative MP Miriam Cates went on about the need to have more babies at the recent National Conservativism event.

Here’s one response to her ideas:

“I’d love to be a mother. I don’t think I ever will be.

I’m 26, I’m living in my partners parents house just to try and save for a house. Who knows if that will happen soon. I studied for four years for a job that I was told would make me upwards of 40k, I am making 24k. My partner struggled to get a coffee shop job, on a zero hour contract no less.

We have talked about kids, but we will only consider them once we have not only a house, but savings and financial stability too. We are both women, and having a child isn’t cheap as it is never mind our extra need for medical intervention/IVF/Sperm Donor.

It’s a sad thing, but how do you expect people to have kids when they can barely afford to care for themselves? Or get a stable job that actually covers base expenses? Our country is slowly crumbling and falling, why would I bring a child into this madness.”

However a contributor to the newspapers’ Letters page tells us:

“A low birthrate among high-consuming, high-environmental-impact citizens of wealthy countries is good news for the planet and, if we can moderate our excessive consumption per capita, will benefit people currently paying the price for those excesses far beyond our shores. For ageing societies, despite the hysteria articulated in places such as the recent NatCon event, this is a long-anticipated demographic transition that can be managed through sensible, pragmatic policies, including on health, pensions and lifelong learning. The baby bust narrative, however, suits the socially conservative, for whom “family values” tend to come at the expense of women’s autonomy and reproductive freedom.
Alistair Currie
Head of campaigns, Population Matters”.

And while we think about children and education, here’s a link to Michael Rosen’s blog, where he gives his criticism of the latest standard tests in Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling for year 6 children. It makes for interesting reading. And you don’t need to know all the (possibly invented) grammatical terminology to understand what he has to say. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Some thoughts about summer time. And a picture ahead of its time.

The sun is shining, it’s pleasantly warm, there is blossom everywhere - and the good weather is forecast to continue i to the bank holiday weekend at least. It was quite a surprise to realise we have another bank holiday next Monday. We do seem to be having rather a lot of them at the moment. This next one is Whit Monday. And at the end of that week we have Whit Friday, Brass Band Contest day around here. That is a sure sign the weather could change. I don’t have official statistics to hand but my gut instinct says we have has more wet and windy Whit Fridays than bright and sunny ones. Which is rather a pity as when the weather is good Whit Friday is as close to carnival as we get around here. 

I’ve checked the weather forecast though and it promises us sunny intervals and a gentle breeze for Whit Friday. Of course, weather forecasting seems to be en inexact science, rather like casting rune stones, and much can change between now and then. But all of that is in the future. The fact remains that today is bright and sunny. This may well be our summer!

I made that comment to someone in the queue for the fish-man at the market this morning, saying that we should make the best of it. She shook her head and said to me, “Don’t cast a clout ‘til May is out!”. Well, that’s all very well, but does it mean the mont of May, which can often be very pleasant, or does it refer to may blossom (aka hawthorn blossom) which is out in profusion everywhere?

We’ve almost got “summer ready”, as they say; Phil has cut the grass, I am going to trim the bushes in the back garden so that they don’t impinge too much on the available space, and we’ve put the garden bench out. There comes a point at the end of every summer when we decide to move it indoors so that it doesn’t get rained and snowed on too frequently. Fortunate.y there is room for it in the large kitchen-dining area but still we manage to bruise our legs in collision with its metal end-frames! But for now it’s back in the garden and we have somewhere to sit once more.

I came across this rather prescient picture somewhere on social media:

“Vision of the Future" published  by German margarine company, Echte Wagner in 1930. It came with the following caption:⁣

⁣

"Wireless Private Phone and Television. Everyone now has their own transmitter and receiver and can communicate with friends and relatives. But the television technology has also improved so much that people can speak to each other in real time. Transmitters and receivers are no longer bound to their location, but are always placed in a box of the size of a camera."

I wonder if the visionary who had the imagination to see that kind of future imagined how much use we would make of the little machines!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A little rant about cancel culture!

A friend of mine got very agitated just before the coronation because the song “I’m gonna be (500 miles)” by the Proclaimers was removed from the coronation day playlist. (According to one source, by the way, the “playlist of 27 songs has been hand-selected on behalf of His Majesty by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and includes plenty of classic acts like Queen, The Beatles and Sir Tom Jones among the newer ones”. I wonder if His Majesty got to have a look over it and maybe had a final say.) Anyway, it seems that the Proclaimers’ song was removed, not because of any offence that might be perceived in the lyrics but because the Proclaimers, twin brothers Craig and Charlie Reid, are known republicans. They support Scottish Independence and Welsh Independence. Was someone afraid that the words of the song would suddenly change into an anti-monarchy rant?

Well, my friend got in such a state that he wrote to his MP about it. Yesterday he told us he had had a reply: a load of flannel in his opinion! But at least his letter was acknowledged.

Writing letters used to be the way to express your opinion and get it out to a rather wider audience than your immediate circle of friends and family. Nowadays most of that goes out on Twitter. In fact I’m rather surprised my friend didn’t use Twitter. Its probably because he doesn’t have a Twitter account. I seem to remember seeing his protests on Facebook. 

But broadcasting your opinion on social media is becoming a hazardous occupation in these times of cancel culture. J.K. Rowling found herself no-platformed because of her published views on transgender women. She’s not the only one. 

Last night on BBC’s Newsnight they broadcast and interview with a certain Dan Kaszeta, a global expert on nerve agents. He had been invited to speak at a government-backed conference: the 25th annual Chemical Weapons Demilitarisation Conference. He needed persuading to accept the invitation but in the end he agreed to attend. Then last month he received an email that told him:-

"Rules introduced by the Cabinet Office in 2022 specify that the social media accounts of potential speakers must be vetted before final acceptance to the programme. The vetting is impartial and purely evidence-based. 

The check on your social media has identified material that criticises government officials and policy. It is for this reason and not because we do not value your technical insight, that I'm afraid that we have no choice and must cancel your invitation to the CWD conference."

Oops! 

Apparently on social media he had poked fun at Liz Truss, expressed anti-Brexit views and criticised asylum policy. Perhaps there was an outside chance that he would leap up at the conference on chemical weapons demilitarisation and start ranting about Brexit or immigration!! Really!!??

We need experts. Experts tend to be well-informed. They also tend to be opinionated. And they express those opinions in whatever form suits them. That’s what free speech is all about. 

One thing that bothered Mr Kaszeta was the fact that rules referred to are not easily available to the public and, what is more, seem just to have been decided by the Cabinet Office rather than debated in parliament. 

Coincidentally, here’s an article about a comedian, Roger Ng, known professionally as Uncle Roger, who has had his social media accounts suspended in China because he made fun of the regime. Hmm! But that’s China! Things like that couldn’t happen here! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Looking for gold. Thinking about ceasefires and police raids. Can we reverse Brexit?

 A couple of years ago we walked up the hill towards Dobcross, a walk we often do, and were somewhat overwhelmed by the golden blossom of the laburnum trees in the sunshine. A veritable tunnel of golden blossom. Last year we looked for it again and saw no sign of it. As various laburnum trees around here are now in full bloom, we decided to have another look yesterday. Not a bit of golden blossom anywhere up the hill. A bit of a mystery. I trawled back through the multitudinous photos on my phone and found that the original photos date from mid-June 2021. So maybe we’ve just been looking at the wrong time. I’ll have to look again in the next couple of weeks. 

Out in the wider world I read that Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have agreed to a week-long cease-fire so that humanitarian aid can be delivered to the country. I hope the opposing forces can manage to keep to agreement but I find myself wondering if they couldn’t also use that week to have some constructive talks and broker a longer-term agreement, even a permanent one! Mind you, I’m not sure that everyone wants a peaceful solution, as reports say that UK arms sales have reached a record £8.5bn. Hmm! 

Reading reports of journalists beaten up in Sudan during raids on their flats by Rapid Support Forces, my first reaction was to feel glad that we don’t live in a country where that can happen. And then I read this article about a group of people whose meeting place was raided by police on the day of the coronation. They were attending a seminar on non-violent protest, at least one of their number doing so as a way of avoiding anything to do with the coronation. The venue, some five miles away from the route of the coronation procession, was raided by the police and the attendees arrested “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”. It was all a bit farcical in the end and I gather they were eventually released without charge but it is to be hoped that they do not have this arrest on their records. Who knows how it might affect things in the future? More seriously, do we really want our country to be a place where people can’t meet to discuss things freely? 

Now, here’s something from letters to the Guardian, on the subject of Brexit, reflecting some of my own feelings: 

“Jonathan Freedland’s article reinforced my exasperation, as an increasingly reluctant Labour supporter, about why Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet persistently fail to grasp the implications and develop policies to rejoin the EU. As it becomes so apparent that Brexit has failed to deliver, surely an honest recognition of this, allied to clearly thought out strategies and policies to move back into membership of the EU, would make sense to voters, even in “red wall” areas (which are among those affected worst by recent policies).

Straight talking from leading politicians would contrast with the recent evasions and lies from the current government. Would the EU welcome us back? What would be the costs and benefits? For a start, it would discourage many Scots from pushing for independence if the UK were part of the EU again.

Somebody ought to be asking these questions loudly and clearly. I have squirmed as Keir Starmer has writhed about Brexit in TV interviews, desperate not to be seen as advocating that it should be reversed. But why? It is so obviously an issue worth considering.
Kate Purcell
Coventry

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!