Language oddities. Ambitious embroidery. And a “grave threat” to Blackpool rock.

In my zoom Italian class on Monday we presented our Italian teacher with a range of odd expressions and vocabulary in English: words for the same thing which vary from one part of the country to another. There was, of course, the inevitable collection of words for a bread roll: bun, barm, bap,  to mention but three. Then there were the words for alleyway: ginnel, snicket, back, to mention three again. 

Later in the week I came across this article about minority languages, well, about Slovene in particular. The writer had been invited by a German organisation to present her recently published book, also recently translated into German. They wanted her to speak in German, about which she was rather nervous. Some fellow writers persuaded her to stand up for herself, assert her identity and address the multitudes in Slovene, which she did. Identity is important. In Slovene they have some interesting idiomatic expressions. We grin like a Cheshire cat, but in Slovene, when pleased, they smile like “a roasted cat.” If you freeze to the spot, out of fear, anxiety, whatever, you “stand there like a linden god”. And if someone leaves in a great hurry they do so “as quickly as a lightning bolt”. Interesting stuff!

I have recently been dabbling in embroidery. It’s another was of creating pictures, drawing with thread instead of pencil or pen and ink or paints. Today I read about someone who is making her own copy of the Bayeux tapestry. This seems like a singularly ambitious project and makes my own representations of dried flowers or cats inspired by Gustav Klimt seem very small and insignificant.  But what will she do with it once complete? And what will she move onto next?

There’s a bit of an anti-China thing going on in some of the mass media. The latest thing I’ve come across is a report about a Chinese threat to the seaside rock industry:

“Blackpool rock, a British seaside institution as traditional as donkey rides on the beach, amusement arcades and fair to middling weather, is facing an existential threat from cheap and inferior Chinese imports, manufacturers have said.

Ten rock makers have come together to sign a letter warning of a “grave and immediate challenge to our industry, jeopardising the lives of our employees and the sustainability of our business”.”

Goodness me! I would have thought that it you were determined to rot your teeth by chomping on a very sugary treat it really wouldn’t matter where it came from. But British rock producers are worried.

The article maintains that most British rock is made in Blackpool, which rather surprised me. Growing up in the rather more refined (according to the posher residents) resort of Southport, I was led to believe that that was where the noble art of sticking letters all the way through a stick of rock mostly took place. Things have clearly moved on since my childhood.

Looking into matters, I discovered this; 

“The earliest form of rock is said to have been sold at fair grounds, namely ‘Fair Rock’ in the 19th Century when sugar was abundant and inexpensive. Although it was not brightly coloured, striped or lettered in those days, it was of similar shape and size as it is today.”

Then there is this;

“You may not have thought it, but it takes an incredible amount of skill for sticks of lettered rock to be created, skill that machines are still unable to master even in the 21st century. Practised craftsmen of seaside rock are called Sugar Boilers and, as the name suggests, they start the process by boiling sugar and glucose in a copper pan heated to 300 degrees centigrade.”

The flavour is added after this. Traditionally seaside rock is mint flavoured but it seems that nowadays you can get bubblegum flavour, which I suppose is acceptable, but chicken tikka and pizza flavour rock  seem to me a step too far. 

Not that I plan on buying rock any time soon.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Stampeding horses. Crime reduction. Modern warfare problems.

Yesterday five horses from the Household Cavalry raced in panic through central London, spooked apparently during a routine exercise by builders dropping blocks of concrete or something. Three of the horses are fine, animal lovers will be pleased to know, but two are being treated for injuries, having crashed into taxis, buses and other vehicles. Four horses have been named in news articles today: Vida, Trojan, Quaker and Tennyson. Why is the fifth not named? Who knows?

A more important question, raised by a friend of mine is this: why do we still have cavalry? Surely we never ever again expect to have soldiers charge into battle on horseback. We came to the conclusion that it’s all for pomp and show and because “the tourists like it”. This is confirmed when you google it: 

“The Household Division forms a part of the British Army’s London District and is made up of five regiments of foot guards and two Household Cavalry regiments. The division is responsible for performing public duties and state ceremonies in London and Windsor. Such functions include the State Opening of Parliament, Trooping the Colour and Mounting the King’s Guard.”

It’s hard to believe we are in the 21st century. Even less so when you see the regalia even minor members of the royal family have to wear for such occasions!

However, as I reflected on this stuff and nonsense I recalled something I saw on television recently about Rudy Giuliani and his campaign to reduce crime in central New York. According to the report, he sent mounted police on horseback to patrol the centre. At the same time plain clothes policemen were out and about on foot in the crowds. The police on horseback were in radio contact with the police on foot. From their vantage point they could look down on the crowd and spot pick-pockets, bag-snatchers, violent incidents and other such crime as they were taking place and let the foot-police know. The latter were then able to arrest offenders in flagrante delicto. Incidents of petty street crime reduced significantly.

Of course, to carry out such vigilance the police force needs to be properly funded. That’s a different matter altogether.

But, no, we really are not likely to have soldiers charging into battle. War has taken a further step away from direct human involvement with the use of AI and drones. This makes it more impersonal, apart from for the people who are actually killed and wounded by the machine-driven attacks of course. 

We seem to have a lot of talk at the momenta about our need to be prepared to be on a “war footing” but at the same time I have heard reports that we (not just the UK but all the countries sending arms to conflict zones) could run out of actual weapons. We’ve donated or sold too many of them to war zones. And it seems that it takes a good deal longer to manufacture modern weapons than it did to make old-fashioned bullets. Warfare has become more sophisticated.

21st century problems!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Cold weather comments. Arresting protestors again. The symbolic power of shoes.

 

I had a very cold, but crisp and bright and sunny, cycle ride to Uppermill this morning. Various people I spoke to told me that it’s going to get colder and wetter towards the weekend, and maybe it will even snow! I might have expressed total disbelief at that but then, I remember a day long ago when I set out from my lodgings in Leeds to go to the university, wearing sandals and a light jacket. By the time I was returning at the end of the day there was a thin covering of snow on the ground. And that was probably early in the month of May. So I may well look back nostalgically to this day 44 years ago (the day our daughter was born) when I was in the village centre in a thin cotton maternity dress because it was warm and sunny but both extremes are possible. 

Uppermill was very quiet, especially for a Wednesday market day. Maybe everyone was huddled indoors keeping warm. Only fools like me were out and about, seriously underdressed in my cycling gear. 

We’ve just had Easter although for believers it’s not really over until Ascension Day. The Muslims have had Ramadan. And now the Jews have Passover, a festival of freedom, commemorating the Israelites exodus from Egypt and their transition from slavery to freedom. Bitter herbs are eaten to remind them of the bitterness of slavery. 

Yesterday we had reports of pro-Palestinian protestors arrested for demonstrating, and setting up a protest camp, outside Columbia University in New York. The university president called for the help of the police as some students felt threatened and intimidated the peaceful protestors. That protest spread to other universities. Today I read that hundreds of Jewish anti-war demonstrators have been arrested during a Passover seder meal that doubled as a protest in New York. Theyshut down a major thoroughfare to pray for a ceasefire and urge the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, to end US military aid to Israel.

Speakers included some well-known people, such as journalist and author Naomi Klein, and Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour as well as several Jewish students suspended from Columbia University and Barnard College. 

“We as American Jews will not be used, we will not be complicit and we will not be silent. Judaism is a beautiful, thousands-year-old tradition, and Israel is a 76-year-old colonial apartheid state,” Morgan Bassichis, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, told the crowd.

“This is the Passover that we take our exodus from Zionism. Not in our name. Let Gaza live.”

Rabbi Miriam Grossman, from Brooklyn, led a prayer before the first cup of ritual wine. “We pray for everyone besieged, for everyone facing starvation and mass bombardment.”

“This Passover is not like other Passovers,” said Naomi Klein. “So many are not with their families but this movement is our family,” she added in reference to political disagreements that have divided Jewish families since the start of the war.”

Some feel threatened by the protests, and very probably there were people among the protestors who would shout out their protest, somehow blaming and shaming Jewish students for the conflict. Others join in the protest.  

Here’s a link to an article about the Stutthof Nazi concentration in Poland. In the area where camp used to stand the ground is covered with a layer of soles of shoes. Thousands and thousands of them have been found and there are moves to preserve them so that nobody forgets what used to stand there. “Stutthof, which was built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and later became an integral part of the machinery to exterminate European Jews, eventually assumed a role as leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The shoes transported there – mostly from Auschwitz, after their wearers had been sent to their deaths – were recycled into leather goods such as belts, rucksacks and holsters.”

Shoes, and in this case the soles of shoes, are a powerful symbol. It’s why so many parents preserve their child’s very first pair of shoes. Recently some anti-war / pro-Palestine protests have taken the form of laying out thousands of pairs of shoes, of different sizes and colours and styles, to represent the people, especially the children, killed and missing in Gaza in recent months. We need reminders of the enormity and sadness of war. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

St. George. Baby girls. Arresting protestors.

It’s a very chilly St. George’s day. Forty four years ago, I tottered around the village with my very large baby-bump in warm sunshine. We must have had a few weeks of sunshine because I was quite tanned. One of the benefits of being pregnant is that even fair-skinned ginger-heads tan more easily. Several people told me to “get that baby born today and call him George”. “That baby” didn’t oblige. She waited until the next day. We didn’t call her George, or even Georgina. 

Anyway, the weather was quite a lot warmer on St. George’s Day 44 years ago. That was also true of the year of the pandemic. We may have been suffering a lockdown but we had a very nice spring and those of us fortunate enough to have a garden, even if only a small one, were able to sit out in the sunshine. Today is (so far anyway) quite bright and sunny but cold. When I ran this morning I left my gloves behind. That was a mistake! 

But now I have optimistically hung washing on the line in the garden, hoping that the wind will blow it dry before the cold half-freezes it.

In today’s newspaper online was this story:

“Doctors in Gaza have saved a baby from the womb of her mother as she lay dying from head injuries sustained in an in Israeli airstrike. The girl was delivered via an emergency caesarean section at a hospital in Rafah.

The woman, Sabreen al-Sakani, was 30 weeks pregnant when her family home was hit by an airstrike. Her husband, Shoukri, and their three-year-old daughter, Malak, also died.

“We managed to save the baby,” Ahmad Fawzi al-Muqayyad, a doctor at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, told Sky News. “The mother was in a very critical condition. Her brain was exposed, so we saved one of the two.”

On Sunday the baby lay wriggling and crying in an incubator in the neonatal unit of the nearby Emirati hospital. The tag around her wrist bore her dead mother’s name.”

A feel-good story of sorts amidst all the horror. But what happens to babies like this one? In her case there is a grandmother who is prepared to take her once she can leave the hospital. Where her grandmother can take her to is another matter. Some people are returning to their “homes” but mostly this is just a space where a home used to be. And there are now so many orphans from this conflict.

In the United States students at Columbia University have been arrested for setting up a protest encampment. The university president said she requested NYPD clear the encampment as it “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students”. However, during a news conference later that day, the NYPD commissioner, Edward Caban, said: “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say.”

Of course, it’s not just in the USA that such things are happening. Here too the right to protest has been restricted.  So much for freedom of speech. 

And let us not forget that St. George was not actually English. He was Turkish, I think and his mother was Palestinian. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Putting things in perspective.

Today I woke up at about 6.00 am and went to the loo, confident that I had another couple of hours sleep ahead of me before my alarm rang at 8.00. Of course I didn’t get bank into proper deep sleep, but rather into an extended doze. When my alarm rang I could have slept on and on - isn”t it always that way? - but I wanted to phone the doctor’s surgery to make an appointment. Before 8.00 nobody answers but when you ring at 8.00 there is already a queue of people waiting to be dealt with. But I was organised: phone on speaker, book to read while waiting and diary at the ready for when I finally go through. Since I last did this they have eliminated the cool, clinical voice which used to announce, “Thank you for your patience. You are currently number … in the queue!” Perhaps someone advised them that it was depressing and that cheerful music on and on and on was better. 

Anyway, some 45 minutes later I managed to speak to an actual person. Success! It was still raining hard so I abandoned the idea of going for a run. Had it still been 8.00, I might have considered running in the rain but I had listened to the rain for long enough to find the prospect off-putting. Maybe it will clear up later, although the forecast is not good.

 

All my problems, if they even count as problems, face into insignificance compared with the wider world. Scanning the newspapers I’ve been finding articles about conflicts or ongoing situations that have been almost forgotten about as our sympathies and concerns have all gone to Gaza. Even Ukraine has slipped into the background to some extent. So here’s a link to an article about the ongoing conflict in Sudan. And here’s another link, this time to a film made by Jennifer Lawrence and Malala Yousafzai about the abuse of women in Afghanistan. 

I have been trying to relocate something I saw about the national dress of women in countries where now we tend to think that women are just totally hidden by the burka. I’ve not found it but the beauty and striking colour of those outfits was amazing. 

A friend sent me some stuff about a couple of writers and warnings/advice they gave about how Israel should avoid making mistakes. 

In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Having been tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, he knew what he was talking about and wrote, ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’ Similarly Primo Levy, another Auschwitz survivor, warned, in the 1990s I think, ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ And he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’

Their words seem to have been ignored. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Some nonsense about insects.

 It’s another fine sunny morning. According to my next door neighbour we’re going to have a week of good weather. We could certainly do with some dry weather, if only to dry up the mud puddles on the bridle oaths, which are rather like a quagmire in places. According to my various gadgets the temperature is around 10° but to me it still feels colder than that. 

Maybe I’ve not yet re-adjusted to lower temperatures, having grown used to 27° or even 30°+ while we were in Portugal

But the flowers are coming on nicely and there was even a ladybird on one of the plants in the garden this morning. Eva Wiseman was writing about ladybirds in this morning’s paper - as well as her migraine and other things. She maintains that the collective noun for ladybirds is a “loveliness”, which she suspects the ladybirds themselves of having invented. She goes on to speculate about other creatures inventing names for themselves: a “conspiracy of lemurs”, a “bloat of hippos”, a “destruction of wild cats”. All quite plausible in their way. But I went and checked on the “loveliness of ladybirds” and it’s quite true, 

According to one source they are also called “Our Lady’s Beetle, a Name they originally got in the Middle Ages when there was a swarm of aphids gobbling up crops. The source was seemingly written by an American, who insists on calling them “lasybugs”, despite the fact that they are technically beetles! 

“Legend has it that the people prayed to the Virgin Mary for help. Millions of coccinellids (ladybugs) flew in, annihilating the aphids and saving the crops. The insects were known as “Our Lady’s beetle,” or bird from then on. 

Once again, in 1880, a nasty pest, the cottony cushion scale, invaded the California citrus groves. Farmers brought in a swarm of ladybugs. They bred and decimated the orchard pests, saving the citrus groves.

The same rescue mission was carried out on the Galapagos Islands about 100 years later, with equal success. 

Ladybugs have also been likened to paintings of the Virgin Mary, where she is seen wearing a red robe or coat.”

Then there’s the idea that ladybirds bring good luck:

“Some people believe that if a ladybug lands on you, it is a sign that good luck will follow. You should count the number of spots to see how many years of luck you will have.

Others say that the number of spots shows how many months will pass before your greatest wish comes true.

Still others believe that the redder the ladybug, the more intense your luck will be. Of course, true love must also go into these predictions.

A ladybug visit can predict the imminent arrival of this new true love. How lovely.”

And here are some “interesting facts” about these little creatures:

• Ladybugs have hidden wings that unfold in a tenth of a second. Once these wings are open, the ladybugs flap them 85 times a second! The colored wings above are just body armor.
• Ladybug larvae look like baby alligators with their black spiny bodies and yellow spots.
• They are not harmful to people, but are not too popular with winemakers. If they get scooped up with the grapes during a harvest, they will be frightened and squirt out a disgusting liquid in self-defense. This gives the wine a foul smell and taste. Anybody for ladybug wine?
• Ladybugs live for about a year. In that time, they can consume up to 5000 aphids.

There you go! I just remember a rhyme we used to chant as children if a ladybird landed on your hand:

Ladybird, ladybird,

Fly away home,

Your house is on fire

And your children are gone.

And then you blew it away. 

Here’s a bit more Wikipedia nonsense: 

“This traditional verse relates to ladybirds, brightly coloured insects commonly viewed as lucky. The English version has been dated to at least 1744, when it appeared in To  y Thumb’s Pretty Songbook Vol. 2.The verse has several popular forms, including:

Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

Your house is on fire and your children are gone,

All except one, and her name is Ann,

And she hid under the baking pan.

A shorter, grimmer version concludes:

Your house is on fire,

Your children shall burn!

The child who hides may also be named Nan, Anne and Little Anne and she has hidden under a "warming pan", "porridge pan", "frying pan" or even a "pudding pan".[2] Alternatively, her name may be Aileen and her hiding place a "soup tureen".[3] A widely varying Peterboroough version makes the remaining child a boy:

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, / Your horse is on foot, your children are gone;

All but one, and that's little John, / And he lies under the grindle stone.”

There you go. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!