Old photos. Old ways. Bailouts. Cold weather warnings. Good investments.

Here’s a photo of 1913 Oldham someone posted on social media. Among the various comments about how this must have been a special occasion as the women were all smartly dressed, showing off their well-wrapped babies, someone asked if these were Asian women as so many of them had their heads covered. 

 

This photo predated the arrival of Asian workers in the mills of Oldham. A shawl covering head and shoulders was normal attire for working women. Indeed, even into the 1950s it was perfectly normal, indeed expected, that women wore a headscarf when going out shopping. My grandmother would never have been seen out of the house without her hat. This has been forgotten by some people. 

 

Someone remarked on how tall the policemen were back in the days when you had to be 6 feet tall to be a bobby. Another comment someone made was about the relative freedom that working class women had in the early part of the 20th century. They also said it was more usual for women to go out to work in the North of England than in the South. I don’t know how true this is.

Thames Water, currently in difficulty, is owned by China and other foreign countries. Much of our electricity supply is run by EDF, which stand for Électricité de France. How did we get to this situation? Is this what they meant by ‘taking back control’?  Here’s a post from a political commentator called Marina Purkiss, someone I’ve not heard of, probably because I don’t watch morning television programmes:

“Homeowners who took out big mortgages on low interest rates now facing crisis:

No bailout. Hold your nerve.

Water companies who borrowed billions to give to shareholders now facing crisis:

Govt talks. Bailout incoming.”

If this is true, it’s another example of different rules for different groups of people in our society. 

Hey! Ho! So it goes. 

Here’s a cartoon I find myself agreeing with. It is so easy to choose to be offended.

 

Today is damp but quite mild. I hear that the BBC weather forecasters have been having some problems, predicting autumnal temperatures for some parts of the country. 

And here’s a link to a story about a Harry Potter book bought for 30 pence and now valued at somewhere around £5000. That was quite an investment.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Random facts. A family Thursday.

 Odd facts: 

The most densely populated city in the world is Manila in the Philippines, apparently, with 100k per square mile.

Glastonbury had 210k people in 1.4 square miles.

So for a week Glastonbury festival was the most densely populated place not just in the UK, not just in Europe, but on earth.

All of which confirms my reaction when I have seen photos and video footage of the festival that really I was rather glad not to be there. The same applies to the pictures I have seen of the Bruce Springsteen concerts at the moment.

My brother in law called round this afternoon. We haven’t seen him for months. He’s been travelling round Europe going to concerts by the band Marillion. I think he’s been to every one of their concerts in recent months. No wonder ha ps suffered from sore feet! On his latest jaunt the plane he was travelling on the go to Berlin ( I think) was diverted to an out of the way airport in Poland when it was struck twice by lightning! The airport was very small, and was actually closed when they landed. So they all had to stay on the plane until passport control staff could be summoned to come and process them. We have warned him to be careful of thunder storms - he might not be so lucky a third time.

He called round today, not just to see us but to make use of our IT facilities. His ticket for this evening’s concert (not Marillion this time) was on his phone and he had had a message that he needed to print it. His phone would not “speak” to his printer so he required some assistance. How strange to sell people E-tickets and then not accept them as a valid way of entering a venue!

Today has been a day for family stuff. The small boy spent quite some time fascinated by poppy seed pods when he discovered that he could up-end them like small pepper pots and pour the seeds out like black pepper. No doubt I will have even more poppies in my garden next year! Then my Spanish sister did a video call while my daughter and the small ones were here. She’s arriving here tomorrow for a few days before heading off for Manchester airport at some ungodly hour on Tuesday morning. Later my son rang to catch up on family news and the arrange to come and visit at the end of July when his daughter finishes school  for the summer, making his visit coincide with her small cousin also finishing school for the summer. My Spanish sister reminds me that children in Spain have already been on holiday for a week or two! 

So that’s been my Thursday. But I have managed to do a brisk walk round the village in the evening sunshine. Tomorrow will be busy as I need to collect the above-mentioned Spanish sister from the train station, among other things. So it goes.  

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Stormy weather? Heavy books. Identity. Graffiti. And discrimatory biolence.

It was raining when I got up this morning so I decided not to cycle to Uppermill today. Instead I put my waterproof on and walked along the Donkey Line. Of course, 5 minutes down the road the rain stopped. I probably could have cycled after all but I was already en route by then. In the end I walked on to Tesco in Greenfield, picked up a couple of things that are unavailable in Delph or Uppermill and, with perfect timing, hopped on a bus back to Uppermill. There I purchased fresh fish from the fish man, strawberries from the fruit and veg man, and biscuits from the cheese and biscuit lady,  and then hopped on the next bus home. A flurry of activity before the morning was halfway over!

After that my activity slowed down. A leisurely cup of coffee or two and a browse of the headlines online. At some point as I was taking recycling out to the bin, Phil called to me to pop up to the front door as he could hear the postman knocking. When I got there the postman was putting a large parcel in the box by the front door. I relieved him of the parcel and we had a chat about the odd weather: dull and grey but very calm and clammy, as if we are about to have a thunderstorm - too warm to walking about delivery post, he told me. Maybe we need a good downpour to clear the air!

The parcel was a huge book of chess-related anecdotes (just what we need, a book so solid that if you read it in bed and fell asleep and dropped it on your head, you would risk serious brain damage!) which we had had delivery notice of at the end of last week. The delivery notice had said, “Your order has reached its destination”, which rather puzzled us as it clearly had not. Examining the notice more closely, taking in the small print, we discovered that it meant it had arrived in the UK, from Holland or somewhere. Misleading notices! Now it has indeed reached its destination.

In the midst of all the discussion of gender identity, there has been a story in the news about a girl identifying as a cat and being teased by her classmates. This led to all sorts of comments about children identifying as cats, dogs, other furry animals. The girl concerned was 13, which struck me as a bit old to be saying she was a cat, but it turns out to be a bit of fake news, a silly conversation recorded on a phone and posted on Tiktok which went viral and led to her teacher being criticised for not being totally sympathetic to her choice of identity. Talk about a storm in a teacup! Both our smallest grandchildren pretend to be cats from time to time. We have to communicate with them in miaows but there is never a question of them self-identifying as furry animals! They know full well what they are, even though the smallest still gets his pronouns and possessive adjectives confused at times.

Here’s an article about graffiti in Glasgow. The still unidentified Banksy, of course, managed to make graffiti respectable and even profitable. However it seems that when a couple of local Glasgow artists decided to point out the double standards regarding graffiti by making a fake Banksy not far from an exhibition of his work, their efforts were frowned upon. Not only that but the work was obliterated by the local authorities with black paint. Personally I quite like clever graffiti. Don’t get me wrong. The kind of tagging that goes on, just a scrawled mess that isn’t even a real signature, I am happy to see obliterated. However, when some thought and effort have gone into creating something interesting and even beautiful, I don’t see why it can’t be left alone.

Onto more serious matters, it seems that there have been problems in Paris, specifically in Nanterre, after a young man was shot by police when he refused to stop his car as requested. When he died from his wounds and footage of the incident appeared on social media, local youth turned to violence of their own. 

There were 13 deaths from police shooting during traffic stops in France last year. This was the second fatal incident in such circumstances in 2023. Reuters records show that the majority of such victims in 2021 and 2022 were people of black or Arabic origin. It seems to remain true that you are more likely to be stopped and searched if you are not white. And yet our Suella Braverman wants to increase the use of stop and search. We should be thankful that our police do not routinely carry guns! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

On getting up early and hearing the birdsong. Some thoughts about wealth!

Novelist Kate Mosse on Desert Island Discs the other day told us that she usually gets up at about 4.30 in the morning so that she can put some time into writing before the rest of the household is up and about. She likes to hear the birds at that time of day. I can confirm the birdsong! I am occasionally woken by it. Apart from going to the loo, I am not tempted to get up and do things. 

(That’s another of life’s mysteries: in the small hours do we wake up because we need to go to the loo or do we need to go to the loo because we wake up? Hmm!)

I can appreciate the pleasure of being up and about early. There was a time when I used to get up at 7.00 or earlier just to be able to have time alone with my father, who was an early riser. Not that we talked about anything too profound but it was always good to watch the day wake up together. Nowadays I set my alarm for 8.00 and usually snooze it at least once! It’s amazing how well you can sleep in the morning.

We hear quite a lot in the media about the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates but today I read about the richest man in the world, a Frenchman called Bernard Arnault. Apparently he has overtaken Elon Musk as the world’s number one rich person. Maybe he’s well known in France but I had never heard of him and compared with other rich men he seems remarkably quiet. Wikipedia describes him as “a French business magnate, investor, and art collector. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's largest luxury goods company.”

He appears to have spread some money around in France, helping with various projects to do with post-covid recovery and donating money towards the restoration of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. And he has an art gallery in Paris. The writer of the article about him suggested that the money his company donates to good causes is roughly €45m. This, the writer tells us “is like an average French household (in a country where the median net wealth is €124,800) giving about €25 to their dearest causes. Or, if you add in the €43m from LVMH to help the Musée d’Orsay acquire a painting by Gustave Caillebotte this year, then that average family dug deep and gave about €50. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s not missing a zero.” Maybe he gives away more privately without making a fuss about it. 

Wealth is all relative of course. Some can put millions without a blink into foundations to help the homeless (Polly Toynbee writes: “Prince William is going to solve homelessness with a new royal foundation, launching a project called Homewards that starts with £3m for six towns and cities across the UK” and then says it’s just drop in the ocean) and some of are just glad to be able help the family out from time to time. 

In discussion with a friend I described someone as “well off”. He responded that he didn’t know that person was wealthy: he thought he worked for Manchester University. He decided that he was thinking of “independently wealthy” whereas he now assumed I meant “professional middle class”. Nowadays, of course, the “professional middle class” are also being squeezed and, if they are still paying a mortgage, may not manage to set aside money for a rainy day or for helping out their offspring at a future date. 

This is turning into a rather gloomy post. So in that vein here’s another quote from the Guardian, this time on the Covid inquiry:

"Prof Philip Banfield, the chair of the British Medical Association, has said there was “no doubt that both staff and patients were put in harm’s way” because of underfunding in the decade running up to the start of the pandemic."”

There you go. And to round things off on an equally dismal note, here’s a link to an article about the disappearance of arts and culture from state educational establishments. 

Hey! Ho!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Tour de France. Cycle safety. Nostalgia. How some suggest people deal with mortgage hikes.

 So the Tour de France starts on Saturday in Bilbao, amid some concern about safety after the death of Gino Mäder who crashed while descending at high speed in the Tour de Suisse on 16 June. Coming down a mild slope at speed on my bike is frightening enough for me and whenever I watch the racing cyclists hurtling down slopes, especially with dangerous bends, my heart is in my mouth. Sometimes it’s just amusing as a rider fails to make the turn and ends up in some farmer’s filed or barn instead. When they come off their bikes though their lycra outfits give little protection against the road surfaces. Motorcyclists wear leathers for that very reason. 

When I see the peloton all bunched up together, all too close for comfort, all jostling for space, I am reminded of Djamolodine Abdoujaparov, from Uzbekistan, known as the “Tashkent Terror”, whom I saw on many occasions - on television of course, not on the actual road. He always seemed to be all elbows and knees, both of those joints thrashing about making room for him to get through any obstacles in his way, his bike wobbling from side to side. How he did not cause more crashes I do not know. 

The only other person I ever saw cycle in a similar fashion was my own father, a much more sedate and calm cyclist, it must be said. He did, however, cycle with his knees sticking out, the consequence possibly of years of riding with one small child or another perched somewhat precariously on a makeshift seat on his crossbar. This was, of course, before we all started wearing cycle helmets, and in an age when the amount of traffic generally on the roads was considerably smaller than it is now. Such a seat was a far cry from the bike seats you can now fix on your bike to carry a child and altogether different from the kind of thing described in this article - not so much a bicycle with trailer as a kind of bike train, the latest thing in eco-friendly ways to take your children to school. 

My father would also manage to carry quite large baskets of fruits and vegetables from his allotment, dangling rather dangerously from his handlebars. (This is why I am so fussy about strawberries - I was so spoilt by the excellent strawberries he grew that it is rare for me to find shop-bought varieties to my satisfaction and why I never buy them out of season.) When I see photos of whole families piled onto mopeds or Vespa motor scooters, laden with bags of goodness only knows what I think of my father returning from his allotment with bags and baskets of goodies. 

Ah! nostalgia!

Here’s a looking-back-at-how-things-used-to-be post that I found this morning: 

“A pensioner said young people need to "stop whinging" and "work harder" to pay their mortgages like people did in the old days.

Brian Meek, 76, said he and wife Rosemary, 70, put in extra hours at weekends and evenings when interest rates soared in the late 70s. The couple barely saw each other as they juggled his long shifts in engineering and hers in the civil service around their growing family to pay for their home.

Brian believes homeowners should knuckle down to get through the current interest-rate hikes. Brian said: "We just did whatever we had to so we could keep paying our mortgage”. “

Fine! Everyone needs to work harder! Of course, back in the seventies mortgage payments were not a big as they are now and the price of houses was more in line with what most us earned. It’s easy to forget that things are rather out of proportion, especially for the likes of Brian Meek, 76, whose mortgage was probably paid off long ago.

Rishi Sunak has a similar sort of message about mortgages and told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: "I want people to be reassured that we've got to hold our nerve, stick to the plan and we will get through this."

Easy to say if you have lots of money!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Festivals. Dentistry. Cheeky blackbirds. Redundant wellies.

 Elton John is apparently getting organised to be the closing act at this year’s Glastonbury, with invited guests such as Blondie’s Debby Harry and Cat Stevens helping him along the way. This is supposedly his last live performance ever. We shall see!

I read that the medical services at the festival have seen people queueing up for dental attention, mostly because they can’t get appointments at home! It seems that the medical services, including the dental clinic, had opened a month before the festival began for staff and construction workers setting up the facilities. “We’ve seen a lot of the site crew, people working here on the build, who haven’t had access to a dentist either because they don’t have one or they couldn’t get off to see someone,” said Chris Howes, managing director of Festival Medical Services which was founded at Glastonbury in 1979 and has organised the healthcare at every event on Worthy Farm since then. “We don’t offer routine check-ups or teeth polishing or anything like that – it is emergency dentistry that we do.”

In the early days they had midwives available, in case anyone went into labour. Nowadays they whizz such women off to hospital. Do these modern women feel cheated that they cannot say, “my baby was born at Glastonbury”? 

Just imagine, though, going to a music festival and including a visit to the dentist in your festival activities. It seems, also, that the medical services are dealing with more sprains and broken bones. Falling on hard dry ground is not the same as falling into six-inch deep mud! There are also more cases of people suffering from asthma because of the dry, dusty conditions. Festivals are not what they used to be. 

I also read that a largish group sheltering from the sun in a marquee were treated to Richard Thompson singing to his acoustic guitar, no microphone, no sound system, a whole range of his songs ancient and modern, ending with “I want to see the bright lights tonight”. Now that is something I would have liked to be there for.  

And that’s Glastonbury over and done with for another year. They’ve had fantastic weather for it. Locally, we’re having fantastic weather for the Saddleworth Show, also known as Wellifest. It’s so called because it’s held at Well-i-Hole Farm on Well-i-Hole Road, Greenfield, and not because the people who camp there usually need their wellies!

I read that “Wellifest has gained a reputation for showcasing exceptional musical talent. The festival will feature a mix of local bands and emerging artists.

From indie rock to acoustic melodies, the Wellifest stage will pulsate with the sounds of diverse genres, ensuring a memorable experience for all music lovers.”

There you go. Our own festival! 

A National Trust place down in Cornwall was planning a  pick-your-own cherries event this week but they have had to cancel it because blackbirds ate all the fruit. Like something from a nursery rhyme! I wonder how you prevent that from happening. Presumably you need a series of nets over your trees. 

Here at our house we have just re-instituted a bead curtain making a screen outside the back door to try to prevent flies and wasps and remarkably stupid bees from buzzing into the kitchen when we have to door open. The stupid bees usually get trapped in the window and are unable to find their way out even when you open the window as wide as possible. Ever since six year old Granddaughter Number Four was briefly trapped in their car with a wasp she has had panic attacks whenever anything buzzes near her. Hopefully the bead curtain will prevent that as well. 

Summer problems!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Vaping. Adventuring. Capsizing. Napping.

As I’ve been out and about on public transport this week, at various times I have seen quite young children, secondary school age but probably only about 12 or 13 years old, puffing away on E cigarettes. I read some information comparing the amount of nicotine in old fashioned cigarettes and E cigarettes. It seems quite hard to make a comparison. But it seems to me that if youngsters are vaping away at almost any time of day, rather than having a cheeky puff on a cigarette behind the bike shed and probably sharing one between several of them, it’s highly likely they are taking in more nicotine the “modern” way. Besides they would usually sneak away to somewhere secluded to have a crafty fag, whereas I see them quietly get an E cigarette out on the bus and have a little puff, as you might sneak a sweet into your mouth. What is going on with our young people? 

Then there’s the Titan, that submersible that got lost. Last night on a radio programme, possibly the BBC’s PM, I heard a Titanic expert way that he had been told on Monday that the Titan had imploded. Its shape, he said, was all wrong for withstanding the pressure of all that sea water. Everything seemed to be wrong with its design. But he implied that he had been told that this was not news for public consumption. And so the rescue mission, which can’t have been cheap, went ahead with all kinds of speculation about how much oxygen the five occupants had left.

Then this morning I found this on social media:

“So I just found out the 19 year old on the Titan sub didn't wanna do the trip at all, and was absolutely terrified and concerned for his safety, but agreed to it because it was Father's day and he didn't wanna disappoint his dad, who'd been pressuring him into doing it.

So yah, yet another takeaway from this: Overbearing parents don't always know best and kids should absolutely stay true to themselves instead of trying to please their parents. 

This is the real tragedy here. Lack of respect for his right to informed consent leveraged by extreme power dynamic.”

Of course, I have no idea how true that is but it sounds sadly plausible. 

Personally I find the obsession with getting down really close to the Titanic, which after all is the last resting place for lots of the passengers, rather strange and morbid. Rather like stopping to gawp at a car crash. And yet I read of a couple who arranged to be married on a submersible just above the Titanic site. Not the romantic setting I would have chosen but there it is. People are decidedly odd! 

Meanwhile yet another boat has capsized between Tunisia and Lampedusa. 37 people are missing, many of them women and children. The 4 reported survivors are adult men. In the overloaded boat that went down recently near Greece it seems that the women and children were mostly on the lower decks. Are the women put in lower parts of these boats for their “safety”? I wonder. 

There’s also a good deal of talk on discussion programmes about the benefits of napping - yet another way of staving off the aging process apparently. Years ago, when I was bright young 40 something working in a college in Bolton I came across my head of department, an “older” lady in her 50s, with her head down the desk. Goodness! I thought, has she collapsed? Is she all right? She was power-napping, having told her inner alarm to allow her sleep no more than 20 minutes, recharging her batteries for the afternoon’s tasks. A 20 minute nap is what the experts recommend. This was the 1990s. She was clearly ahead of her time. Now in her 80s, I hear she is still busy organising charity activities of one kind and another. An example to us all!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Breakfast. Austerity consequences. Expensive footwear. Wild youth.

I was contemplating getting up and going for a run this morning when my phone rang. Granddaughter Number Two was letting me know that she, her mother and Granddaughter Number One were going for breakfast at her favourite cafe. Would I like to join them? Well  going out for breakfast isn’t really my thing but I’ve not seen Granddaughter Number Two for a while and so I changed my plans, quickly found some clothes other than running gear, sorted myself out and by 9.00 I was at the bus-stop at the crossroads. 

Of course, an invitation to join them for breakfast, or lunch for that matter,  usually means an invitation to pay for whatever is consumed but that doesn’t bother me. It’s not as if we go to really expensive places.

After breakfast, the rest of the gang went off to view yet another house for Granddaughter Number One to consider. No doubt I’ll get a report back at some point. I considered popping into Tesco for a couple of items and then walking home but I realised I was just in time for a bus home. So I caught the bus home instead. 

Scanning the newspapers I found an article that tells me this:-

“British children who grew up during the years of austerity of are shorter than their peers in Bulgaria, Montenegro and Lithuania, a study has found.

In 1985, British boys and girls ranked 69 out of 200 countries for average height aged five. At the time they were on average 111.4cm and 111cm tall respectively.

Now, British boys are 102nd and girls 96th, with the average five-year-old boy measuring 112.5cm and the average girl, 111.7cm. In Bulgaria, the average height for a five-year-old boy is 121cm and a girl, 118cm.”

I was reminded of things I read years ago about how much taller the Americans were than the British in the postwar years, largely because of how much better fed they were. We seem to have gone back in time. From other sources I know that more and more schools are organising breakfast clubs to ensure that children have had something to eat before they begin the school day. It’s hard to concentrate when your stomach is rumbling. 

And here’s Polly Toynbee on the same topic. 

I also read an article about the French actress Isabelle Huppert (sorry, I refuse to call her an ‘actor’ - do the French call her an ‘acteur’ [masculine] or an ‘actrice’ [feminine]? I wonder). Among other stuff, what struck me was this bit about her footwear: 

“On the red carpet at Cannes last month, she raised eyebrows with her choice of footwear: a pair of Balenciaga Anatomico heels, whose tips are moulded to look like human toes. It seemed like quintessential Huppert: an arch joke about the furore over the festival’s insistence on heels for women at events, rising above the idiotic dictate and the barefoot rebels who have recently flouted it.

Except apparently I’m overthinking it: “People were looking at my shoes?” asks the actor, in her soigné tones, on the phone from Paris. Yes, those weird ones with toes. “No, I wasn’t making any statement. Though they were very comfortable, so I was able to climb the steps very pleasantly.” She probably has that nonplussed expression she does so well. It seems very Huppert to deny everything, too.”

I looked up the footwear. It sells for about £850 a pair. Not austerity footwear then! 

And finally, here’s a link to revelations about Kier Starmer’s wild youthful student days, apparently illegally selling ice-cream on the French Riviera. Hard to image but perhaps I am doing him a disservice. As the closing paragraph of the article says:

“The anecdote from Starmer’s student days is a rare insight into a less buttoned-up side to the Labour leader. It is also a sign that as the country gets closer to next year’s election, scrutiny of his personal life and his past is likely to increase.”

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!