Yesterday was Europe Day. I would have mentioned it yesterday if I had remembered in time. Europe Day is a day for celebrating “peace and unity in Europe”. Is there peace and unity in Europe at present? I wonder. Well, at least we’re not actually fighting each other but there seem to be a few disagreements about who supports what.
There was an article in this morning’s paper pointing out that the police crackdown on demonstrators on university campuses is nothing new. Back in the 1960s though, in the USA it was state governors who called in the police rather than university chancellors. In the article people who were active in earlier generations’ protests compare then and now. One of them said this: “I have some criticisms with the encampments. But when you send in the cops, then my sympathy is with the students. That’s a separate issue from whether they could be more effective if they moderated their stance.”
Eleanor Stein, an activist from the 1960s and 1970s, hopes that, if history is any precedent, the reaction to these protests may be the thing that shifts public opinion. Like the draft, images of students being rounded up in paddy wagons wheeled on to college campuses may have a way of bringing the war home, and moving the needle of public opinion”.
I noted the use of the term “paddy wagon”, something I’ve not heard for a long time. Judging by the name it must have something to do with the Irish, as Paddy, short for Patrick or Padraig, has often been used to mean “Irish”. So, as usual I looked it up. One theory is that it is just a shortening of the American “patrol wagon”. Another is that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a disproportionately large number of Irish were police in North American cities. Oddly enough, the original paddy wagon, one source suggests, was a wheelbarrow - a reference to Irishmen growing potatoes and pushing a wheelbarrow around. What that has to do with police detention vans is a bit of a mystery.
Yesterday was Thursday.
So in the mid-afternoon I set off to collect the smallest grandson from pre-school.
I walked down through the bluebell woods, which was lovely.
I had to wait around for a while outside the preschool premises. The reception class and the pre-school class had been out on an excursion to Smithills Farm in Bolton, a farm cum petting zoo x one way for a farmer to supplement his income. They were rather late back but eventually turned up, lots of rosy-faced children after a day in the sunny open air. I hope someone remembered to administer suncream.
There was no room for the coach on the school carpark so it stopped on the main road and the various adults accompanied the children back to their classrooms. One of the waiting parents commented that the children would be tired as they had to walk up the hill from the road - really! maybe a couple of hundred yards! Some parents must not walk their children to school on a regular basis or even take them for walks just for fun.
We should have been just in time for a later bus back to my house but the small boy asked if we could walk home through the forest. We have discussed this before but this time the initiative was his. Before agreeing I extracted a promise that he would in fact walk all the way as grandmas do not carry 4 year olds. Well, not his one, anyway. Fine! We set off! He gave me explanations and information about all sorts of things we saw on the way, as well as a lecture about how we were not to pick bluebells.
However, it was fine to pull up Indonesian, or possibly Japanese, balsam as that is a “mean plant” that does not leave room for other plants to grow well. Judging by the amount of balsam already shooting up, it’s a good job the bluebells have flowered first!
At one point my daughter phoned to see where we were, as we usually arrive at my house before she does. So she left her car outside my house and set off with 7 year old Granddaughter Number Four to meet us half way along the woodland path. As a bonus, just before we met them, Grandson Number Two and I saw a deer on the hillside next to our path. Splendid!
Two young children happily walking the woods! All good stuff!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
I heard a long time ago that the name for paddy wagon comes from picking up a lot of rowdy, drunken Irishmen off the streets for being drunk and disorderly to let them sleep it off in jail. It is also how the Irish came to be considered drunken alcoholics in general, at least in the American cities where most emigrated to, which ended up discriminating against them by not allowing "Irish or dogs" to enter their establishments.
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