Super-rain. Super-hailstones. Super-moons. Virgin (?) births and other rabbit-related surprises.

Choosing to wear a summer frock yesterday seemed to work some kind of charm on the weather for the day turned put to be quite nice on the whole. Mind you, it had already begun quite brightly so it already stood a good chance of being more than acceptable, despite the gloomy forecast. The rain set in though at the point when we had thought we might go for an after-dinner stroll. And that was that!

This morning I woke to the sound of yet more rain on the skylights. You couldn’t say it was hammering down … more like pattering … the kind of thin, slow, persistent rain that soaks you, not because it’s heavy but because it goes on and on. I decided to put on my waterproof and go for a run anyway, on the grounds that if I waited for it to clear up I might not get out all day. And it was fine. The river is bouncing along, not quite full to overflowing but pretty full. The footpaths are full of puddles. Despite the waterproof I did get wet but, hey, I don’t melt … or at least I’ve not done so yet. If ever I discover that being rained on makes you melt I’ll patent it as a slimming system.

The weather could be worse, of course. How about this report:

“Temperatures were not the only weather-related record to be broken over the past couple of weeks. The European hail record has been breached too. Twice.

On 19 July 2023, there were several very large hailstones, more than 10cm in diameter measured along their longest axis, recorded across parts of Italy and Croatia. One of these stones, measuring 16cm in diameter, was recorded in Carmignano di Brenta, Italy, and broke the previous largest hail record in Europe, which was previously held by a 15cm stone found in Romania in 2016.

However, just five days later, a new record was set. At about 9pm UTC on 24 August 2023, a 19cm hailstone was found in the town of Azzano Decimo, also in Italy. This is very close to the all-time largest hail recorded of 20.3cm, found on 23 July 2010 in South Dakota, the US. Hailstones of this size are usually formed in supercells, which have strong rotating updrafts that are able to support their mass, keeping them suspended long enough so the hailstones can grow to these very large sizes.”

There you go. The weather could indeed be worse but then, it could also be better!

They’re starting to announce imminent supermoons again. We should have a full moon this week it seems. I was amused to find that the latest announcement ended with this statement:

“Supermoons are typically about 14% larger in appearance than ordinary full moons and up to 30% brighter. Most people, however, will be hard-pressed to truly notice a difference.”

That’s my underlining as we rarely manage to see celestial events around here - we’re just poorly located and besides it’s often too cloudy! 

Having read about virgin births among laboratory fruit flies, my interest was sparked by this headline: “The pet I’ll never forget: Thumper was a caged rabbit. So how did she get pregnant?”

No miraculous intervention here; it turns out that rabbits can do what they need to do in order to breed like … well … rabbits even through chicken wire. And wild male rabbits had had their wicked way with poor, innocent, enclosed behind chicken wire Thumper. Here’s the full story for anyone interested. I was reminded once again of a rabbit from my childhood. I am told it is quite difficult to be sure of the gender of young rabbits and one of the neighbours was convinced hers was a buck and so let him wander freely from garden to garden. “He” always returned to his own garden and hutch. The one morning Mrs Eastwood, the owner of the freedom-loving rabbit, called across the gardens to my mother, “Mrs Pye! My buck rabbit just had six babies!” Take nothing for granted!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

On politicians, cynicism, positive dressing, and acting.

 Oh, dear! It must be hard being a politician, trying to have ideals while trying to win votes. Forget about hearts and minds! Votes are what you want to win. It could make a person very cynical.

The world is in the middle of a climate crisis. We all know we need to do something to reduce carbon emissions … drastically. And so both the main parties are finding reasons to wonder if low traffic zones are a good idea. Here’s a link to an article about it.

I wonder when one of the parties will properly organise a cheap public transport system that works. We shall see. 

Thinking of ecological things brings me round to loo roll. There was a point at the start of the pandemic lockdown when there was suddenly a shortage of that useful stuff. Our Granddaughter Number One is very particular about which brand of loo roll she like and grows indignant if the supermarket substitutes another kind in her online shop. It seems to me, though, that life is too short for such finicky attitudes. But nowadays thee is even designer loo roll which people buy in bulk so that they can display it tastefully close to the bathroom for visitors to see and admire their good taste! Who knew loo roll was a status symbol? I suppose it takes all sorts. Here’s a link to an article about loo paper! 

Our neck of the woods still has odd weather. It rained copiously in the night but I ran round the village in reasonable sunshine. Later in the morning, just as I finished hanging washing in the garden, it rained hard for two or three minutes … no more! So the washing stayed there and will get blown around a little before I decide to bring it indoors. At that point no doubt, the cloud cover will shift once more and the sun will come out again. 

In the meantime I have taken an executive decision - I am wearing summer clothes in order to convince myself that it is actually summer. As a matter of fact it is still relatively warm, perhaps not as warm as it should be considering that it is almost August but still not requiring heating. Which is, of course, why I want to hang washing out in the garden. Ours is a cool house and without central heating drying washing indoors is not a speedy process. 

I came across something yesterday where David Baddiel was complaining about Cillian Murphy playing a jewish character! I assume he’s referring to his casting as Oppenheimer in the film of that name. Cillian Murphy, of course, is from an Irish family. It was quite a surprise when I first heard him speak with his Irish accent as ai had grown used to his Brummie character in Peaky Blinders. But maybe David Baddiel thinks he should only play Irishmen. I grow a little tired of various groups demanding that actors cannot play characters of their specific group, be it social or racial or gender. The clue is in the professional name - actors act. Life would be quite boring, and making films and TV series and putting on plays would be extremely difficult, if actors only ever played themselves.

It strikes me too that our politicians are all reasonable actors, rarely playing themselves totally but being what they think people want them to be. Not, not even that, being what they hope people will vote for. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Sunny interludes. How not to make tea or coffee. Things to avoid. Mixed feelings about Farage.

The weathermen have warned us of low pressure moving in (again!) bringing increased chances of rain. However, so far today we have had mostly bright weather, with some blue sky and sunshine. Maybe the rain will wait until this evening.

Round about midday  went down to the kitchen to have a cup of tea. We waited the required five minutes for the tea to brew (Phil’s rules) and then he poured … wait for it! … hot water into the waiting mugs. He had forgotten to put teabags in the pot! We had to start again. On the plus side, the pot had been nicely warmed, in good old traditional fashion. 

This happens sometimes with the mokka coffee maker. We wait for it to glug nicely, indicating that water had been efficiently pushed from the lower section to the upper, and then discover we have a nice supply of very hot water. Doing this occasionally is probably a good way of thoroughly cleaning the coffee maker. Its just that we don’t usually do it on purpose. 

It’s just rather a pity I haven’t found an “accidental” way of cleaning pit the fridge. However, I do quite deliberately run the washing machine on a fast cycle with neither washing nor detergent on occasion, as a way of flushing out the system. 

I have always had an aversion to rollercoasters. Indeed, more than an aversion, an absolute dislike, tinged with fear. On a couple of occasions in my youth I was persuaded to have a go, or indeed tricked into going on the ride in the case of a ride at Eurodisney, Paris. Both of those occasions only served to confirm my natural reluctance to take part in such activities. Bungie jumping is definitely not for me. A bicycle ride down a moderate slope is quite sufficient if I want a thrill. 

So reading this report this morning gave me a certain feeling of pompous self-congratulation:

 “A 30-metre high rollercoaster broke down leaving passengers left hanging in the air for up to 40 minutes.

Videos on social media showed people on the Rage ride at Adventure Island in Southend, Essex, stuck at a near 90-degree angle facing the sky on Friday afternoon.”

Another good reason not to ride on rollercoasters. 

I would add riding roller coasters to this list of everyday things doctors say they avoid. 

Here are a few of my favourite extracts: 

“I wouldn’t have Botox until I was in my late-40s. There are a lot of people having it in their 20s, but there are risks. I wouldn’t let anyone I know have buttock implants. It is too dangerous and having a big bottom might not be fashionable for ever.” (Plastic surgeon)

“I try not to worry where possible. I go for walks with my husband and talk to friends to help me relax. When I talk to pregnant women, I tell them, “Let’s worry about the next few weeks, not think ahead too much” because half of the things we worry about won’t happen.” (Gynaecologist)

I don’t take paracetamol for a headache unless it is really bad. I see a lot of people with headaches in my clinic and they can usually be avoided by a healthier lifestyle. Quite often patients get headaches from popping too many paracetamols, or other over-the-counter medications. It is a vicious cycle: we call it an analgesic overuse headache. (Neurologist)

Recently I have found myself in two minds over the Nigel Farage bank account closure business. A large part of me wants to say that it couldn’t happen to a more appropriate victim. But then an even larger part of me says that it shouldn’t happen to anyone. And then I read this article about people or organisations whose bank accounts were closed or frozen because of their political views, with considerably less fuss made about them than was made about Farage! 

Hey ho!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Out and about. Scientific stuff and odd seismic activity.

It’s quiet at our house again now after a few days’ flurry of activity. The southern branch of the family set off for home at midmorning. Our daughter and her two smallest offspring came along to see them off. Amazingly there were no tears but the small people refused to hug each other goodbye, as a kind of protest agains the visit having been, in their opinion, much too short. 

To compensate for some of the disappointment, my daughter proposed a hike up the hill to Heights Church, one of our favourite beauty spots around here. The day was moderately sunny. 

 

It would have been better if we had had the southern branch of the family along as well but we had a good picnic.

The views were fine. 

 

We saw interesting flora and fauna. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the small people went adventuring in the churchyard.

I read that scientists have managed to make female fruit flies reproduce without the help of male fruit flies. And my first reaction is: WHY? Okay! I know we need to expand the boundaries of knowledge but I fail to see the point of fruit flies. They are surely just a nuisance!

And here’s an odd fact: Taylor Swift’s Eras tour performances at Lumen Field in Seattle on 22 July and 23 July generated seismic activity equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake, according to seismologist Jackie Caplan-Auerbach.

A local seismometer detected activity generated by dancing fans comparable to the famous 2011 “Beast Quake”, when Seattle esSeahawks fans erupted in response to running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch scoring a touchdown in an NFC wild card game.

Concerts have been known on occasion to register seismic activity, such as a 2011 Foo Fighters concert in New Zealand attended by 50,000 fans and a 2022 Garth Brooks concert at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. But seismic magnitudes on the Richter scale were not provided from those concerts.

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.

Sindy, Barbie, women’s freedom and young people’s creativity.

 In my late teens I had a friend who gave me the nickname Sindy. It seems I reminded him of the Sindy doll, precursor pr maybe an English version of Barbie, more sensibly proportioned and more realistic, but still her main activities were keeping house, changing outfits and getting ready for dates with Action Man! Not very feminist! Here’s an article about Sindy and how she lost out to Barbie. 

And now everyone is talking about the Barbie movie, which I am afraid is not tempting me at all. No doubt some feminists will tell me I am mistaken in my reluctance to go and see it. Meanwhile more important things are going on in women’s lives. In Afghanistan beauty salons and hairdressers are being forcibly closed. Women’s lives there are becoming more and more restricted. And in Iran the morality police appear to be back with a vengeance.  

We have the southern branch of the family visiting for a few days. This morning I watched my nine year old granddaughter condescendingly explaining to her father how to get into the game she was playing on her tablet. Perhaps each generation will have something technological to explain to their parents. 

When they arrived yesterday we went along to meet my six year old granddaughter at the end of her last day in school, finishing for the summer holidays. We hadn’t told her that her cousin was visiting so it was a surprise for her. Squeals of delight all round! Unusually there was an ice-cream van in the playground, perhaps because it was the last day of term. We considered buying ice-creams but then realised that the queue was snaking out of the playground and into the carpark. So we quickly abandoned that plan. 

The small people got busy with a variety of craft projects while the adults organised the evening meal for everyone. My daughter had collected Granddaughter Number One … and her anxious dog who cries if left alone at home … and Granddaughter Number Two caught a tram from Manchester, where she had been working all day, and then a bus to our house.  Not quite the whole family - Grandson Number One was still working from home - and my daughter’s partner had been round for coffee earlier and to say hello to everyone but had gone home to keep Grandson Number One company. 

This morning I read this article about how teenagers are afraid pf being creative and I thought about how we had watched the small people busily making up stories to accompany their craft projects. It seems that as children progress through school and the various testing routines, they become fearful of “not getting things right”. Such a shame. Let’s hope we can encourage our small people to keep up their creativity.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Security matters!

The modern world is full of security checks. We have passwords for all sort of things, some of them backed up with “secret questions”, the answers to which you must remember as you might be asked for the 3rd and 5th letters of the answer when you want to access the account or whatever service it is. I’m all for a bit of security. I seriously do not want to be hacked. For a while now our computer has asked me to enter a security code before it will let me log on to blogger. Fair enough! It sends the security code to my mobile phone. Yesterday it went a step further. Before it would send me a security code I needed to confirm that the number they were texting it to was actually my number. My paranoia levels are on the rise! 

As I was out and about in Manchester centre early yesterday I decided to call in at the cinema / arts complex known as Home. In a former life it had been the Cornerhouse, so named because it was situated on one of the corners of Oxford Road. It was a good place to see foreign films and other films of the kind that don’t appear in mainstream cinemas. I frequently took groups of sixth form students to study days based on French and Spanish films. When the big new complex was built the work of the Cornerhouse was subsumed into that organisation. For years after ai retired I would get invitations to those study days.

My Italian friend and teacher often does courses on Italian cinema for them and recently took time out of baking herself in hot Sicily to send us all information about one she is running in the Autumn, with the warning that we should book early if interested. Her courses are usually very popular. On Monday I found it online but could not access the enrolment section. So, having discovered that Home opens at 10 in the morning I decided to go and enrol in person. The young lady at the front desk found the course in question but apologised to me: the building opens at 10 but they don’t open for sales until 12. There was no suggestion that she could make an exception as I was already there. I suppose she had other work to get on with. Suggesting that I could book online she checked and found that the online booking wasn’t going live until later in the day. Not a good system, in my opinion. Anyway, I popped back in after I had been to the hairdressers and so I sorted it all out.

A friend of mine contacted me this morning about that same course. He was having difficulty enrolling online. The system was asking the a 3D authentication.  Either of us has any idea what one of those is! Eventually he used a different debit or credit card and all was well. Such a lot of fuss for a payment of around £60. Another bit of security overload. But then, he wouldn’t want Home to empty his bank account! 

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Phil’s fun and games with a parcel, just a small parcel. On Monday he was expecting a delivery of vitamins from the health food store Holland and Barrett. At some point in the day he received a message: your parcel has been delivered! Oh no it hadn’t! We looked in all the obvious places where parcels might be abandoned by overworked deliverymen. No sign. The delivery people were of no help on their website. Eventually he tracked it down to the house across the road, not even an immediate next door neighbour.  The parcel was addressed to Phil Adams, Delph. Oh, and there was a postcode, which is the same for a host of houses in relatively close proximity to ours. It’s a good job it wasn’t a rare book or some other object of great value. So much for security!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Celebrating in the midst of chaos.

The world may be going to the dogs but we keep on celebrating things. 

High temperatures in Sicily don’t seem to be stopping my Italian friend celebrating her wedding anniversary (30+ years) there. Mind you things seem to be looking rather fierce in the south of Europe. And now there are reports of the Gulf Stream being likely to collapse within a couple of years. I’ve no knowledge of what the implications of that are for climate change but I suspect they will be serious. I was always told that it was the Gulf Stream drift that prevents the Uk from having the kind of winters they have in Canada and gives the Irish Sea a pleasant temperature to swim in - provided nowadays that therek is not too much sewage in it. It really seems that the world is falling apart around our ears! 

In the meantime, here is an article about yet another long-standing Labour Party member - forty years a member and brought up in a Labpur supporting family - threatened with expulsion because of tweeting something two years ago; apparently he had praised an example of cooperation between the Lib Dems and the Green Party, saying: “This is what grown-up politics looks like.” Hardly the most damning thing a person could say. 

I’m not happy with a world where people … and computer programmes … trawl through stuff we wrote or said years ago and hold it against us now. Also a world where “apologies” are supposed to make everything right for some people, even when we know they are just words.

And here’s a little more on that royal pay rise.

 

 

Here are a couple of cartoons sent to me by friends. 

I’ve also been reading about on-the-spot fines issued by councils for what have been dubbed “busybody offences”. These offences include activities such as feeding birds, swearing and napping in public. While I admit to sometimes being tempted to ask people please not to swear such a lot in public, I don’t know that it merits an on-the-spot fine. Presumably “napping in public” does not mean respectable old gentlemen having forty winks on a park bench but homeless people sleeping in doorways. Sleeping in a vehicle has also incurred wrath and fines. So those who have lost their homes and are living out of their cars, showering at the gym and so on, should be careful always to park in pit of the way places. An increase in such fines has been reported from 10,412 in 2019 to 13,433 in 2022. Such is modern life! 

Out and about in Manchester today I passed numerous rough sleepers and was approached by at least three not-too-disreputable-looking characters asking for a small contribution so they could pay for a night in a shelter. Rather a contrast to the beautiful people I saw earlier in the day, all decked out in academic robes and mortar boards, on their way to Manchester Metropolitan University’s graduation ceremony at the Bridgewater Hall. Most were accompanied by well-dressed friends and family, carrying flowers and gifts and selecting good picturesque places for photo-memorabilia. Good luck to them all! I hope they find jobs to match their new qualifications.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.