Travel misadventures. Random meetings with old gentlemen - well one! Telling life stories. Further tree-felling investigation. HS2.

This morning I got up and ran round the village in the sunshine. On my return, after showering, putting some washing in the washing machine and putting the little coffee maker on the stove I phoned the chemist. I wanted to check if they now had a couple of prescription items which they had assured me would be delivered yesterday, when I simply ran put of time to do anything about it. Yes, they did! 

So I hung the washing out to dry in the garden. The weatherman assured me it would not rain until 5.00 pm. Then, by now quite late in the morning, I set off to catch a bus which should have got me to the chemist’s before they closed. This is Saturday and some places still only open for the morning on Saturdays. 

And then I got on the wrong bus! Oops! This is possible because two buses with the same number but with different destinations go through our crossroads, into and out of the village centre, at approximately the same time. I must have been distracted for it was only when “my” bus turned towards Oldham that I became aware of my mistake. So I got off at the next stop, quite a way down the road, and set off to walk back to the crossroads. By now the bus I should have caught was long since departed but there was an outside chance that if I walked quite quickly I could still arrive in time. 

Such optimism! I arrived five minutes too late. And to add to the mix, it started to rain, just gentle rain but far earlier than forecast! So I bought a few items at the coop store (but not mince pies) and sat at the bus-stop to wait for the bus home. No chance of confusion there. 

A gentleman arrived. Did I mind, he asked me, if he sat down beside me? He assured me he was harmless, unlike so many supposed gentlemen these days, being 83 and “past all that sort of thing”. I almost got his life story, including an adventure where he was propositioned last year in the centre of Oldham. A “foreign-sounding lady”, probably about 40 years old, noticed he was walking with a stick and first asked was he all right. Assured that he was well, she went on to ask him, “Do you want to have sex with me?” When he declined, she asked if he would like to buy her a meal. He declined that as well. When he returned home and told his son of his adventure, the latter said it was time he wrote accounts these adventures and published an autobiography. 

The son is probably not wrong. We all need to write down not just our adventures but also the family stories. My generation’s childhood was quite different in many ways to what our grandchildren are living. Granddaughter Number Two is always telling me to write stuff down so that she and her siblings have a record of the family fun and games. One day someone will have to go through the various notebooks and the files on my iPad where I have begun to do this at various times - never very systematic as real life gets in the way.

In the wider world I read that a sixty year old man has now been arrested under suspicion of cutting down the famous Sycamore Gap tree. I wonder who else was involved. A spokesperson for Northumbrian police has said, “I hope this second arrest demonstrates just how seriously we’re taking this situation, and our ongoing commitment to find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

A friend of mine would like an investigation into all the trees that have been felled in connection with the still mythical HS2 train line. I was reminded the other day that this project dates back to the time of Gordon Brown. We’ve had a long period of Tory rule since then and little progress has been made. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Getting, or not getting, boosters. Library visits. Christmas comes early. Vandalism. City centre closures,

 Yesterday I went back to the chemist’s in Uppermill, as planned, in the afternoon and had my Covid booster vaccination. Phil didn’t! He had too much to do. Now he’ll have to organise something else. 

While there I visited the library. I would have done so in the morning but worked out that I did not have time before catching my bus. As someone I got into conversation with at the bus-stop said, there’s little point in rushing a library visit, as part of the experience is wandering around looking for inspiration. I didn’t find much inspiration though. I think I need to go to a bigger branch. 

I also popped into the co-op store for a couple of things. There I found mince pies on sale. It’s not quite October and we haven’t yet got the madness of Hallowe’en out of the way but there they are. A German friend told me that the German traditional Christmas lebkuchen go on sale in October. She tried to persuade me that it’s something to do with the bakeries that make such things needing to set up their machinery in plenty of time. I am not convinced. i think they just play on people’s sentimentality and greed. 

Later in the day I heard that a 300 year old tree had been cut down in Northumbria, at a gap in Hadrian’s wall. This was an unauthorised felling of a famous tree, a tree which apparently starred in the film “Robin Hood Prince of Thieves”, although quite what Robin of Loxley was doing all that way up north remains a mystery. It was also famous for people scattering loved ones’ ashes there, proposing under the tree, having their wedding photos taken there, even actually getting married there. And now it’s been cut down, which has been widely acclaimed as an act of arrant vandalism. 

It seems a sixteen year old was arrested and has now been released on bail. Even if he was the brains behind the deed, for whatever reason, it strikes me as unlikely that the achieved it single-handed. The average sixteen year old does not have the necessary equipment to cut down bid old trees. Surely it would have needed a team, and some of them experienced tree-fellers! 

Today I have been to Manchester to visit my hairdresser. I went with plenty of time to go to various shops - hence the late posting of my blog - nut I was surprised to find that several of my proposed destinations have closed since I was last in Manchester at the start of the summer. It’s rather sad to see places standing empty. A sign of the times perhaps! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Postcode confusion. Covid boosters. Fierce, biting dogs. Working from home. Childcare.

 For about the fourth time we have had an unwanted letter from the cut-price opticians Specsaver. It’s addressed to someone with the same surname as ours, the same house number and road name but - the important bit - a different postcode!! This latest one has had Denshaw crossed out and Delph? added to the envelope. I have put a note about postcodes on the envelope and will repost it when I go out again later.  Mind you, on another occasion when I did that, the same letter, complete with corrections, arrived back through our door a few days later. I hope Miss C Adams isn’t too disappointed not to hear from them. Someone at the sorting office should have gone to Specsavers!

We’ve been trying to organise Covid booster injections before we head off for a week and a bit in Portugal at the end of October. Online booking is fine but it gets complicated when two of you want to arrange transport together and the system offers you appointments at different times in different centres! Anyway, serendipitously, this morning I was talking to some friends in a chemist’s shop in Uppermill. They were there for booster injections. I described our difficulties. The young chemist, overhearing our conversation, offered to fit me in there and then or both Phil and me later this afternoon. So much for ‘you must book online’! I opted for both of this afternoon. Now I need to see if I can get Phil organised for that appointment - he’s a busy man! Or so he tells me.  

Fierce dogs have been in the news rather too frequently later, in particular the American Bully XL, which is apparently to be banned from this country. No doubt someone will work at smuggling them in but whenever I hear of a case of one of these attacking someone, often a child and quite often fatally, I wonder why anyone wants a dog so big and strong and bred for ferocity that it’s hard to control! And one that you cannot safely leave in the company of a smallish child. And then the other day I read this report: 

“Joe Biden’s dog Commander has bitten another US Secret Service employee, the agency said.

A uniformed division officer was bitten by the president’s German shepherd at about 8pm on Monday at the White House, and was treated on-site by medical personnel, said the Secret Service’s chief of communications, Anthony Guglielmi.

Elizabeth Alexander, the communications director for the first lady, Jill Biden, said: “The White House can be a stressful environment for family pets, and the first family continues to work on ways to help Commander handle the often unpredictable nature of the White House grounds.”

She said the Bidens were “incredibly grateful to the Secret Service and executive residence staff for all they do to keep them, their family, and the country safe”.”

It’s all very well posting videos of Joe Biden playing ball with the dog but is the White House really the place for such an animal. If he’s having to leave it with the security service while he does his presidential stuff, then there’s something wrong. His dog is not a Bully XL but it’s still a big, energetic animal. Granddaughter Number One’s dog gets stressed if she is left alone for more than half an hour and she’s just a smallish border collie who won’t bite you but might try to herd you. Fortunately Granddaughter Number One is able to work from home with only an occasional obligatory trip to the office. 

She hopes to be able to continue to do this, but according to this article more and more managers are now insisting that they want their workers in the office more frequently again. For a large number of people the possibility of working from home has been a godsend. The benefits - less time commuting, money saved by not paying transport costs, less wear and tear of smart clothing - outweigh the joy of meeting to chat and gossip over the watercooler. And for working parents, going back into the office can incur astounding increases in childcare costs. It’s all got a lot more costly since the days when I was putting children into after-school care.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Insect invasions. Hunting spiders. Storms. The failure of multiculturalism? Attitudes to immigrants.

 It must be something to do with the arrival of autumn but spiders are once again trying to invade the house, and coincidentally I am finding lots of ladybirds on the plants in the garden. Granddaughter Number One, who for some reason spent yesterday at Alton Towers, reported large numbers of wasps, also common at this time of year, but in this case landing on her glasses more often than she liked. 

On the subject of spiders, here’s a spider hunting story. Last night Phil was in the bathroom when he noticed a moderately large spider scuttling across the floor. Intending to catch in the traditional manner - pop a glass over the spider, slide a card under the glass, throw the spider out of the window - he pushed the bathroom door closed while he turned to get a glass off the windowledge. The spider, possibly sensing movement, maybe seeing a shadow pass over her (I read somewhere that the ones who come indoors are largely female, looking for a place to natch some eggs), turned turtle, lay on her back, drew in all her legs and played dead. She looked nothing like a spider. Had Phil not seen the transformation he would have thought it was bit of black fluff or dust. But he knew exactly what the black blob was. He popped the glass over the spider, whereupon she spread her legs out, did a body flip, and tried to scrabble out of the glass. Phil threw her out of the bathroom window. Who knew spiders were such clever camouflage merchants?

When I reported his exploits on the family online chat, both Granddaughter Number one and Granddaughter Number Two recoiled in horror at the idea of spiders becoming smart! I quite admire Ms Spider’s ingenuity! 

This morning I set off early to ride to the market before the promised storm should arrive. It was a lovely morning. By midday the cloud had moved in, bringing rain but not exactly what you would call a storm. I was under the impression that this one was to be called Agnes but someone at the market told me that today we expect Storm Ida. Storm Agnes is for tomorrow! They are the start of a series of autumn storms apparently. We’ll see how that goes!

The market was seriously depleted - only the fruit and veg man and the fish man, and the latter had a notice saying he’ going on holiday and won’t be around for the next two weeks. He’s off to Albufeira in search of some Portuguese sunshine and, presumably, to eat some Portuguese fish. Is the market fading away? 

Out in the wider world Suella Braverman has been making speeches in the USA, trying to dismantle all sorts of time-honoured agreements about humanitarian treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, and declaring that multiculturalism has failed. She must be blind to irony. Born in Harrow, Greater London, she is the daughter of parents who immigrated to  the UK from Mauritius (her mother) and Kenya (her father) and, as well as studying at the University of Cambridge, she benefitted from the Erasmus scheme to study in Paris for a couple of years for a master’s degree in European and French law at the Sorbonne. Add to that an American touch (she was reportedly named after Sue Ellen Ewing from the soap opera Dallas, which it seems her mother enjoyed), and you can’t get much more multicultural! Mind you, as the niece of Mahen Kundasamy, a former Mauritian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, she is hardly your run of the mill child of immigrant descent!  

She’s also upset one of our national treasures by saying that “simply being gay, or a woman” should not by itself be enough to gain protection under international refugee laws. Sir Elton John said she risks “legitimising hate and violence” against gay people. He and his long-term parter David Furnish released a statement via their AIDS Foundation calling for “more compassion, support and acceptance for those seeking a safer future”.

Here’s a link to an article about the figures she has been using when talking about refugees.

And here’s another article, this time about her attitude to human rights. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Train travel problems. The price of chips. Cooking eggs.

 A month or so ago we renewed our Senior Rail Cards, which entitle us to cheaper train travel around the UK. It was with some trepidation that we organised travel to our son’s home in Buckinghamshire. Train travel has been problematical for a good part of the year. The outward journey went smoothly: the return journey involved a lot of standing around at Euston station watching a noticeboard that kept telling us our train to Manchester was increasingly delayed. But we got home safe and sound, without too much trauma, unlike the people in this account of travel from London to Edinburgh.

Of course, if you can travel by helicopter or private jet, you don’t have such problems.  

One part of the account tells of a group of schoolchildren and their teachers. Avanti West Coast’s solution of  providing taxis from Preston (where their train terminated prematurely) to Edinburgh didn’t work for this group as it would have involved putting groups of unaccompanied schoolchildren into taxis. In the end they organised a coach and bought all the children chips to keep them going! Crazy times!

I thought about chips as I made my way to the supermarket this morning. I had caught the bus which follows the scenic route through Diggle instead of going directly through Uppermill on its way to Greenfield (location of the supermarket) and beyond. This bus takes us past the famous Diggle chippy, which we have not visited for some time now. Our failure to organise “chippy hikes” is another story, possibly for another day. Anyway, as we sailed past the chippy I found myself thinking back to the days when you could buy a portion of chips for sixpence - that’s six old pence! About 2 pence in today’s currency. In my youth you would go into the chipshop and order “six of chips”, in my case often to eat walking along the streets of Leeds on my way home from university. 

Last Friday I paid an inordinate amount of money for a variety of items ‘n’ chips (fish ‘n’ chips, sausage ‘n’ chips, scampi ‘n’ chips) for a family supper. But we were 5 adults and 2 small people so it was never going to be cheap. However, I witnessed another customer order a “lite bite”, which I think was fish with a small portion of chips; it cost her £13.95, which seems a little extortionate to me. This is why families end up at McDonald’s! 

Thinking of food, it is interesting that when a person is a rubbish cook, in English we say that person “can’t boil an egg” while in Spanish they say, “no sabe freir un par de huevos” - s/he doesn’t know how to fry a couple of eggs. (Please note that the Spanish use more eggs in their expression!) Both these methods of cooking eggs are not as easy as the expressions try to make us think, but there it is. Here is a link to an article about how adding a fried egg can enhance food. 

I was amused to read this section: “The addition of a fried egg is often enough to turn any dish into a breakfast thing, but Angela Hartnett argues that her wild mushrooms on toast with fried egg could just as well be served as lunch or dinner. Well, I may not use wild mushrooms and I may not add garlic and thyme to my version but I have been serving “mushrooms on toast with an egg on top” as a main meal for more years than I care to remember. Occasionally I add a slice of ham under the mushrooms.  

So, eat your heart out Angela Hartnett, this is not “your” dish at all!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Royal visits to France. Statues and plaques. Carbon emissions. Armed police.

So the king has been to Paris. He and Monsieur Macron didn’t quite get to hugging but apparently their relationship is a bit touchy-feely, in that pat-on-the-back way that gentlemen can do. Their lady wives did the whole kiss on the cheeks things. Later the ladies also played ping pong, in totally inappropriate posh-lady dresses, at a sports centre they all visited. Charles is reported to be a fluent French speaker, like his mother apparently. As a linguist, I’d be interested to hear what his accent is like but I couldn’t bring myself to watch any video footage. 

One report told us: “After all, France was one of the countries Queen Elizabeth II most visited during her long reign, and where she enjoyed five state visits. The affection runs deep.” 

Goodness! Think of all the hundreds of years of France being our traditional enemy, reflected in those expressions that work in opposite directions depending on the language: to desert is “to take French leave” or , in French, “filer à l’anglaise”. Other examples exist but some of them are rather rude. Then of course, we had De Gaulle not wanting to accept us into the Common Market. If any of our politicians decide that we should apply to rejoin the EU, will Monsieur Macron stand in our way?

Things past have a way of popping up again. Recently it was once more the question of statues of rich men who made a good deal of money out of the slave trade. Professor Robert Beckford, whose very name presumably comes from his forbears having “belonged” to plantation owner William Beckford, objects to the decision to keep a statue of that plantation owner, a former master of the Ironmongers’ Company, on display in the Guildhall in London. “A plaque on a statue can’t cover a cruel slave trader’s mass murder. My ancestors deserve better,” he says. 

No doubt they do deserve better. There’s no way to justify one person “owning” another. But removing the statues wholesale is to some extent sending the embarrassing memory of those times down the memory hole (where the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” disposed of embarrassing historical documents and effectively rewrote history). Better to make sure the plaques are large enough and noticeable enough to remind us not to repeat history, and indeed to combat the slavery that still exists in the modern world. 

Personally I also favour this suggestion that I culled from a link in my friend Colin’s blog :

“Perhaps the best solution to any cultural controversy in recent years has come from the sculptor Anthony Gormley. In 2021, he suggested that the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford should be turned to face the wall in shame. Playful and novel, that creative solution feels like the most sensible form of protest I’ve seen in an increasingly febrile debate.”

Further to my recent comments about our PM reversing plans to reach net zero on carbon emissions, here’s a link to some worries about the recent wildfires on Canada. 

Not Mr Sunak’s responsibility I know, but all events that change a carbon saver into a carbon emitter are worrying. In this case, it seems that the decision over time to grow more combustible trees has contributed greatly to the problem. Making profits trumps saving the planet!

“The immense blazes that roared through much of the country are, in part, due to a legacy of poor forest management. The logging industry has long prized conifers and has gradually reshaped the landscape with lucrative – but highly combustible – trees. Decades of fire suppression, as well as a shift away from prescribed burns practiced by Indigenous communities, has left much of the forest floor littered with flammable deadfall.”

And I find myself thinking of wildfires in Galicia and Portugal where highly combustible (non-native) eucalyptus trees have also added to the problem. 

Something else that has been on my mind is the question of armed police in the UK. I read yesterday about armed response officers in the Metropolitan police force refusing to go on patrol in case they find themselves in trouble if they use their weapon, accidentally or deliberately. This arises, of course from the case of the driver who was shot through the windscreen of his car, leading now to the police officer concerned being charged with murder. I don’t know any details of the shooting but it seems to me that if a policeman doesn’t routinely carry a gun he’s not going to shoot anyone, accidentally or deliberately. 

I wondered how many of our policemen were armed. The information was quite hard to come by but here’s something I found: 

“There were 18,262 police firearms operations in the year ending March 2021, a 6% decrease (-1,131) compared with the previous year and the second consecutive year-on-year decrease.

The two largest police forces, Metropolitan Police Service and West Midlands Police accounted for 34% of these operations.

Of the 18,262 operations, 92% (16,713) involved an Armed Response Vehicle (ARV), a similar proportion compared with the previous year (91%). There has been a gradual increase in the proportion of operations involving ARV’s since records began in the year ending March 2009 (81%).

There were 4 incidents in which police firearms were discharged. This compares with 5 incidents in the previous year.

There were 6,543 armed officers as at March 2021, a 1% decrease (-41) compared with the previous year. A similar decrease (-37) was also seen in the previous year. The total number of armed officers includes those operationally deployable as of March 31st 2021. This excludes officers who were absent due to sickness, those on paid leave, and those who were isolating due to COVID-19.”

So there it is. I think we’re still some way from seeing our police officers routinely carrying guns. I hope so,anyway. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! J

Summer? What summer? Net zero targets. Climate change consequences. Silly stories.

 I feel rather cheated. We had that heatwave earlier in the year, although apart from a few days it seemed to affect more southern part of the country than our northwesterly bit. And for quite a long time we had so much dry weather that I used up almost all the rainwater in the water butt in the garden. And then “dull” set in and more recently an awful lot of rainy weather. On at least two, maybe three, occasions I have had to cancel arrangements to go for a walk with an old friend: once because it had rained and the towpaths we planned to walk along would be too muddy for her, although once, because it was too hot for her. And now I have resigned myself to getting the big wooly jumpers and thick tights out! It feels as though summer tried to get started, stalled and never recovered. Autumn appears to be having a fit of politeness and ushering early winter weather in ahead of time. Somebody stole my summer!

But none of this evidence of climate change (because I’m pretty sure that’s what is messing up the seasons) prevents our prime minister from setting back our targets and projects for reaching zero carbon emissions! Cynics say it’s a ploy to make people vote for him in the election that is not yet set but is imminent according to all the pundits. 

Which brings me to a new-to-me word: “solastalgia” - “distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment”. The word was coined, I read, in 2003 by an Aistralian philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, specifically in an effort to articulate how people in New South Wales felt about vast tracts of the region being ripped apart by strip coal mining. Solastalgia must be what I feel when I hear that much of the building of new (expensive) houses in areas that were formerly recognised as flood plains, causing flooding in nearby areas of older houses as the water has to go somewhere. I feel the same when I see yet another garden paved over the provide car parking space! It happens a lot around here where the older housing, like ours, is well over 100 years old, mostly built for textile mill workers who had no need for a parking space! 

According to Albrecht, those suffering solastalgia feel a sense of dislocation from their home environment, a melancholia; it is, he said, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”. People interviewed by Albrecht spoke of their distress not only at the destruction of the land around them but its effect on their physical and mental health, and their frustration at their powerlessness to stop it.

Journalist Damien Gayle wrote about going away on holiday, to the Lake District I think, and returned to his south London flat home only to discover that in his absence his neighbour had had the hedges and bushes that separated their two small front gardens ripped out. His daily connection with nature, birds perching in the bush and so on, had been removed. His children wept!

I expect that much of the climate crisis stuff, in this country anyway, will affect city dwellers more than those of us lucky enough to have some reasonably “wild” countryside to escape into. While I was aware of an inevitable financial impact, I admit to not even really trying to get my head around the financial side of it all. However, according to this article “the climate crisis has pushed the Bank of England” to consider stringent new tests for lenders to see how they would cope in an “extreme” catastrophe that plunges “Westminster under water” and sparks a rapid change in government policies.”

One thing I had certainly not thought about, probably because I no longer have a mortgage to worry about, was this: “For example, the chances of borrowers defaulting on their mortgages would increase as the climate crisis put their home at a higher risk of floods or wildfires. “If the house that the mortgage is on is on a floodplain, and climate change is making floods more likely, then that probability of default is going up.”” Who knew?

There we are: the interconnectedness of everything!

On a less serious note, here are two items amused me on the newspapers. The first is about a golden retriever who is apparently “mayor” of Idyllwild in southern California.  

Within the article I found this little gem: 

“In 1938, Kenneth Simmons, the mayor of Milton, Washington, nominated “Mr. Boston Curtis” for Republican precinct committeeman. With no competition and no information provided to the voters beyond his name, Curtis was elected with a total of 51 votes – and then revealed to be a mule. Simmons, a Democrat, had effectively pranked the town, going on to say that voters “have no idea whom they support”. 

Enough said!

The second comes from David Mitchell’s column about the royal family, or rather English royal families over the ages.

“In 1036, King Harold Harefoot had his step-brother Alfred blinded. Four years later, when Harold himself was dead, the new king, his half-brother Harthacnut, took revenge on Alfred’s behalf: he had Harold’s body dug up, beheaded and then chucked in a ditch.”

Who knew we once had a King Harthacnut?

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!