Some oddities of modern life - tourism and utilities.

The government is determinedly looking after our health, or at any rate, that’s what they would like us to think. No smoking in outdoor areas of pubs and restaurants, hospitals and so on is the latest proposal. It sounds like quite a reasonable idea, especially when the outdoors area of the pub means the area around the entrance so that anyone going in has to go through a cloud of smoke. Some of the people who work in the hospitality, however, are saying that it’s another nail in the coffin for them - quite an appropriate expression to use about what slang used to refer to as “coffin nails”. And here’s columnist Daisy Jones declaring how it will put a damper on flirting with and chatting up potential partners when you nip out for a quick nicotine fix. The joy of socialising in the cold and damp outside the pub will disappear!      

I do sometimes wonder how young people, and the not so young singletons for that matter, get boyfriends and girlfriends these days. When I was a young teenager, our social life and intermingling centred on “socials” organised by the church youth club. As far as I know many / most / almost all of those have disappeared. Then, with so many people working from home the workplace romance must be hard to develop. Flirting on a zoom office meeting is not easy and a bit public. From what Granddaughter Number Two tells, even university romances are problematical as many lectures and classes take place online. It’s like a strange dystopian future scenario for a novel. We’ll be back to arranged marriages for all before we know it. 

Here’s another odd element of the modern world: tourism is a double-edged sword it seems. As more and more people seek interesting and picturesque places to visit on holiday, those destinations are becoming overcrowded. Life becomes difficult and sometimes intolerable for local residents; more and more places are trying to set restrictions on how many people can go there. It’s a fine balance between making money from tourism and being able to live comfortable with tourism. 

One of the latest places I’ve read about is Santorini in Greece, where watching a beautiful sunset seems to be turning into a free-for-all, a competition to get the best spot and, of course, the best photo. 

Even the mega-rich have their tourism problems, with a huge cruise ship, the Villa Vie Residences' Odyssey, which was due to set off from Belfast at the end of May on a three-year round the world, stuck in Belfast for the last three months because of mechanical problems.

I can’t imagine spending three years on a cruise ship but one couple, Lanettte Canen and Johan Bodin, have apparently been documenting their life on the ocean liner on their social media page called Living Life on a Cruise. The pair claim that their cabin on the Odyssey will be their home for the next 15 plus years. Good grief! And they will have paid a lot for that, in my opinion doubtful, privilege. I hear that passengers have paid £680,000 for their lavish cabin and, by all accounts, that’s just a start. They need to pay something extra each year. Now, I wonder how much the crew members are paid. 

There are two contrasting headlines about water companies in this morning’s Guardian newspaper online. “Thames Water lobbied Whitehall to press Ofwat on allowing higher bills”, says one article.

“Many protected landscapes owned by English water firms in disrepair, data shows”, says another. 

So, not only do water companies struggle to ensure that we all have clean water and that our rivers are not polluted more than is absolutely necessary but they can’t manage to look after the Sites of Special Scientific Interest for which they are responsible. And they want to charge customers more. They probably manage to pay their shareholders’ and investors’ dividends though.

It’s a strange world we live.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rosario Dinamitera - reading about the Spanish Civil War.

 Earlier this month my Spanish sister posted something on Facebook about Las Trece Rosas Rojas - the Thirteen Red Roses. It was the anniversary of their execution, on the 5th of August 1939. In the years following the end of the Spanish Civil War, there was a campaign of what can only be called terror against anyone who had fought on the Republicans’ side. And these thirteen young women, aged between 20 and 29 were amongst the first to be sentenced to death.

Inevitably there was some score-settling. Neighbours reported to the police folk who had offended them pr upset them, inventing details of their involvement in the Republican cause, membership of the Communist Party or some other left wing party, or simply expressing enthusiasm for the Republicans, who were after all the elected government of the time. It was a hard time to live through. 

When my sister put her post on Facebook I remembered that I had a book about those thirteen young women, written by Carlos Fonseca, a journalist who is described as a specialist on information about terrorism. I read it years ago when we were living in Vigo, Spain. So I hunted it out and lent it to my sister when she came to stay.

In the process of looking for that book I also found Rosario Dinamitera, Rosario the Dynamiter, by the same author, an account of the Spanish Civil War and the after-war years but centred on the life of Rosario Sánchez Mora, who enlisted on the Republicans’ side at the age of 17 in the early stages of the war. She lost a hand while throwing home made grenades at Franco’s forces. The poet Miguel Hernández wrote a poem to her, hence the title of the book:

Rosario Dinamitera,

sobre tu mano bonita

celaba la dinamita

sus atributos de fiera.

When she recovered from her injuries she continued working for the Republic but by then women were no longer permitted to be on the front line as active soldiers. She survived the war, was arrested and initially sentenced to death although her sentence was changed to thirty years in prison, of which amazingly she only spent three years. Life was not easy for her once she was released but she survived until 2008. A complete heroine! 

The poet who sang her praises, Miguel Hernández, died of tuberculosis in one of Franco’s prisons, aged only 32. 

I have just finished the book. It might seem like an odd choice in this current time of conflict and yet there is something uplifting about reading about those who fought for a cause they believed in.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Peacocks. Freedom. Control. And some cartoons.

Status is a very odd thing. Well, the importance people give to it is a very odd thing. In 2022 Dunfermline in Fife was given city status. Did the people of Dunfermline suddenly feel more important, more prestigious? And now the peacocks (yes, the peacocks!) of Dunfermline have officially been given the Freedom of the City. Were steps taken before this to keep them in their place? i wonder. “Peacocks have had the freedom to roam around the park for over a century, so when Dunfermline got city status, we pushed even more to give it officially to the birds,” says the lead warden for the peacocks, Suzi Ross. “These birds are loved by so many people from Dunfermline and all over the world.”

Famous free peacocks! It sounds like the of minor absurdity that Billy Connolly might have ranted about once upon a time. 

There’s a house not far from ours which often has peacocks in the garden. They :can be very noisy when they so choose, woth a raucous screech. So far nobody has proposed giving them Freedom of the Village!

Conspiracy theories abound. Are all our lives being manipulated? Here’s another of Michael Rosen’s King and his Tutor ever-relevant comments:

'Tell me tutor, do you ever have a sense that there's a bigger power than us?' said the King to his tutor.

'God,  you mean?' said the tutor.

'No, not God,' said the King.

'Who then?' said the tutor.

'You know, a great power,' said the King.

'Well of course we have allies,' said the tutor.

'I know that,' said the King, 'but I was thinking that maybe one or two of these allies might be a kind of bigger power than us.'

'I don't think it's wise to go down this route, sir,' said the tutor.

'It's just that every now and then,' said the King, 'I get the impression that maybe we're not in charge of our own destiny.'

'Well, put it this way,' said the tutor, 'if that were true, the best thing to do would be to keep quiet about it.'

'Why's that?' said the King.

'Because we want the world to know that we're standing on our own two feet,' said the tutor, 'protecting our people, doing what we're destined to do, in this great land of ours.'

'Yes, I get that,' said the King, 'but what if all that is just so that this greater power than us, gets its own way?'

'It's possible,' said the King, 'and if it were true, it doesn't really matter because we're the beneficiaries, aren't we?'

'Yes,' said the King, 'but then it's us that gets whacked, if trouble breaks out.'

'That doesn't matter in the longterm,' said the tutor, 'because we can always take advantage of that and get what we want, and even more of what we want.'

'Because it suits this greater power?' said the King.

'Exactly,' said the tutor.

'So we're all doing well out of it,' said the King.

'Yes indeed,' said the tutor, 'though not exactly all. But all of us on this side of the argument, yes.'

'Yes,' said the King.

And here’s a bit of relevant graffiti art:

While I’m posting pictures, here are a couple of cartoons I’ve been forgetting to post.

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

Four-year-olds here and there. Fires. Young rioters.

I checked with my weather app this morning when I got up: mostly cloudy - okay! - rain starting in 35 minutes - less that okay! So I got up and got organised to walk to Uppermill. It was fine when I set off. About five minutes up the hill towards Dobcross I felt the first spits and spots of rain. Another fine minutes later I needed to put the hood of my raincoat up as the rain was coming down quite heavily. Between the hood of my hoodie and the hood of my raincoat, I was effectively blinkered. Goodness knows how many people I stomped past without greeting them!  I’m not usually so ill-mannered. 

I was stomping to Uppermill rather than cycling because I had made arrangements with my daughter. (Mind you, I might well have walked anyway as cycling in the rain, or in the promise of imminent rain, is not my favourite occupation.) 7 year old Granddaughter Number Four was having a play date with her friend Jessica and four year old Grandson Number Two was likely to cause havoc in their carefully arranged games. So he was meeting me and we were going to the park before catching a bus to my house. 

The rain stopped and all went well. But the benches and all the play equipment in the park was very wet. On the bus on the way home some time later as the little fellow rang the bell, he looked  at me in concern and said, “That man smiled at me as if he wants to eat me!” I reassured him that I had known the gentleman in question for years and that I knew he did not eat children. Someone has been taking fairy stories too much to heart. 

And so the day went along, nothing of great importance going on here.

Elsewhere, a block of flats in Dagenham went up in flames yesterday. Fortunately nobody died but it’s another thing that should not have happened. It’s seven years since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and they’ve been talking about replacing the cladding which burnt so fiercely ever since. Many blocks still have dangerous cladding. Nobody seems able to expedite matters. Ironically this latest block was in the process of having the cladding removed - just too late! Also ironically,  when cladding-replacement work is underway the very scaffolding used 2is a further fire risk because of the wooden platforms needed! 

There is some discussion about what to do with children as young as 14, or even 12 or 11 years old, who took place in the recent riots. The Prime Minister wants quick justice, to deter further rioting but I’m not sure locking up youngsters is the answer. Surely a sensitive programme of education in social issues would be more productive, maybe having the parents attend as well. At the risk of going on about austerity and such like, I can’t help feeling that the lack of things for young teenagers to do in the csommunity must have some element of blame here. 

Further afield, it seems that Israel is now attacking places in the Occupied West Bank, adding to the chaos already existent in Gaza. In Israel itself, family life continues with relative normality, taking children to museum, where small boys accidentally cause havoc. I don’t think I need to point out the contrast between the life of the four year old boy who broke a museum exhibit and that of a four year old in Gaza is very striking.

Life goes on. Say safe and well, everyone!

Autumn approaches. Independent travel for teenagers. Pizza oddities.

 It’s not quite the end of August. September is still around the corner and not quite here yet. However, standing talking to a neighbour this morning, I noticed that the trees are already beginning to show Autumn colours - nature’s telling us that summer is over. 

What’s more, I’ve given up on bare legs. The warm tights have been resurrected. 

Reaction to Kirstie Allsopp sending her teenage son off travelling independently in Europe continues. Here’s a link to a series of letters to the Guardian on that subject.

The pub next door to us has a wood-fired pizza oven in a corner of the carpark. They opened it towards the end of the pandemic, at the point when we were told we could meet people in outdoor spaces. Occasionally we have had to remonstrate because the smoke from the oven seeps in through our windows but recently they only open it up at the weekend.

Meanwhile, in the industrial park just behind the pub a cafe that calls itself The Garage (it’s next door to a place that does repairs to posh, expensive cars) has taken over a second unit which they are now calling Garage Pizza. They are now offering take-away pizza, in competition to the pub, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Their new unit is next door to one that’s used as a gym. So now there is a big poster that declares: My head says gym but my heart says pizza. Oh boy! 

We’ve not yet sampled either pizza. 

But here’s a link to an article about “posh pizzas”. Who knew that such thing was possible when pizza first came on the scene. But Granddaughters Number One and Number Two assure me that there are major differences between sour dough pizzas and ordinary dough. They discuss the virtues of thin crust and thick crust and stuffed crust! A whole new view of what is basically a convenience food! 

Mind you, when we went out for lunch with my sisters recently, the menu in that pub offered “posh fish and chips”. I think the fish was a bit more fancy. One of my sisters declared that it was because they served fish which still had its skin!  There you go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The perils of letting your offspring roam freely. A bit of nostalgia. Some thoughts on unfair modern society.,

Another bank holiday comes around and that’s August almost over and done with. Somebody commented that it will be officially autumn in a fe days time. Goodness! 

But because it’s a bank holiday Granddaughter Number Two gets double pay for working today, for which she is quite grateful as she is an impoverished student! Mind you, being an impoverished student does not prevent her from spending quite large amounts of money on tattoos. But it’s her decision.

I’ve been reading articles about Kirstie Allsopp letting her teenage son go interrailing around Europe with a friend after they finshed their GCSE exams. Much was made of the fact that he was only 15 - except that when you look into it he’s in fact very nearly 16. She describes him as “summer born”, so I’m assuming he”s an August birthday. Kirstie Allsopp wrote about it as part of an article on how we need to give our children more freedom to roam. And now, it seems, someone has reported her to social services and she is now being observed for neglecting her son!! 

I would imagine that it’s probably a good deal safer to go interrailing than hitch-hiking which many of us (well, not me personally but plenty of people I knew) did when we were 16 or not much older. 

Children nowadays are much more “timetabled”, with masses of organised after-school activities, rather than just that mysterious activity “playing out”. People of my generation get quite nostalgic about a childhood where you went out to play and were out for hours, without a care in the world on anyone’s part so long as you were home in time for tea. I think most of us did tell our parents more or less where we going and, certainly in my case, there were places that we knew we were not supposed to go. But it’s all run into a kind of nostalgic freedom-filled time, just as all the summers of our childhood were sun-filled (but not too hot) and amazingly went on for far longer than the six weeks of the school holidays! If all our stories are true, we were all members of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and sailed on Windermere with the Swallows and Amazons. 

Yesterday my daughter showed me a T-shirt belonging to her smallest son. It was washed when they were on holiday (air b&b washing machine) and has come out with a few odd marks. Did I think I could do anything with it?, she wondered. I don’t known that I have the necessary skills but I thought to myself that it will always serve to “play out” in. And then I wondered if that is still a thing: having best clothes, school uniform and clothes to play out in. Another bit of nostalgia. 

I was reading this article about how the way women are seen has changed over the ages. As well as explaining that life-creating goddesses became merely the consorts of life-creating male gods, it largely features a Dutch woman, Mineke Schipper, who went to live and work in the Congo in the 1960s. Apparently her parents cried when she set off with her husband, convinced they would never see her again -  “My parents were weeping in the airport, because they said, ‘We’ll never see this daughter back.’” - just think of that, Kirstie Allsopp! 

One thing that struck me was attitudes towards children that she encountered : 

“Schipper had her first child while in the Congo, which opened another vista of traditional wisdom. She and her husband, she said, were surprised when their neighbours came to thank them after the baby was born: “It means you have contributed new energy, new power to the community by having a baby. I found this very beautiful.””

What a splendid idea! Not ‘congratulations on having a baby’, making it purely an individual family matter, but ‘thanks for bringing new life into the community’. We need more of that! 

As regards community and how things should be in our society, I also read about the problems of NHS nurses from overseas. The article I read explained that nurses on temporary visas are unable to access benefits because of rules that deprive people coming to work in the UK of welfare benefits for five years after they arrive. And so they are being pushed into poverty and having to take out loans to make ends meet. But surely the answer should not be to change the rules so that they can claim benefits. Rather the answer must be that all nurses should be paid enough to manage without benefits. 

There is something wrong with our society if workers such as nurses and teachers have to claim benefits and use food banks in order to make ends meet and to feed their families.

Unfortunately that seems to be modern reality!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

More local tradition stuff - peacefully getting on with life, unlike other places.

Out and about yesterday, I went through the crossroads for the first time since Storm Lilian hit us. I’d already noticed branches broken off trees in other parts of the village but at the crossroads a large tree appeared to have been broken. I hadn’t been aware that Lilian had hit us so hard. I must have slept through most of her onslaught.

Still out and about, this time in the village itself, I noticed that it seems to be well-dressing time again. We don’t have a well, at least not one that I’m aware of, but for the last few years well-dressers have produced a fine piece of work which is usually attached to a tree on the edge of the village centre. It’s made of flower petals pressed into clay. This year’s theme is the Oldham Mountain Rescue Team. We don’t have spectacular mountains to speak of either but we’re close enough to the foothills of the pennines for unprepared walkers to get themselves into difficulty. 

“Well dressing, also known as well flowering, is a tradition practised in some parts of rural England in which wells, springs and other water sources are decorated with designs created from flower petals. The custom is most closely associated with the Peak District of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. James Murray Mackinlay, writing in 1893, noted that the tradition was not observed in Scotland; W. S. Cordner, in 1946, similarly noted its absence in Ireland. Both Scotland and Ireland do have a long history of the veneration of wells, however, dating from at least the 6th century.

The custom of well dressing in its present form probably began in the late 18th century, and evolved from "the more widespread, but less picturesque" decoration of wells with ribbons and simple floral garlands.”

Thank you, Wikipedia, for that information.

I notice that quite a lot of places in the Peak District have Well Dressing Festivals but they seem to be mostly in May. Our well dressing without a well usually takes place at the end of August, in time to coincide with the presence of lots of Morris dancers. 

Some places like Tissington in Derbyshire have very fancy decorations of actual wells, but ours is a much humbler affair.

We’re just peacefully getting on with local traditions. 

Elsewhere, Israel seems determined to take war further afield, with strikes into Lebanon. A dangerous business! 

Here’s a bit of Michael Rosen with The King and his Tutor:

'Today,' said the King's tutor, 'we're going to talk about saving lives.'

'That's nice,' said the King, 'at last we can talk about the good things we do.'

'The first thing to remember about saving lives,' said the tutor, 'is that we do this through war.'

'Yes,' said the King, 'you mean we have our apothecaries and physicians who administer medicaments and salves to  our soldiers' wounds.'

'Not exactly,' said the tutor, 'I was thinking more about what happens in times of battle.'

'Go on,' said the King.,

'Well we have swords, cannons, pikes, lances and arrows,' said the tutor.

'We do,' said the King.

'When we attack we use these,' said the tutor.

'We do,' said the King, 'I don't follow where you're going with this.'

'When we attack a city, say, we use these,' said the tutor.

'Of course we do,' said the King, 'that's where the enemy is.'

'What I want you to think about here, though,' said the tutor, 'is just think: if we wanted to, we could kill everyone in the city. But we don't.'

'That's true,' said the King.

'Today's lesson is about saving lives' said the tutor. 'I've just demonstrated how war saves lives.'

'On account of us not killing everybody,' said the King.

'Exactly,' said the tutor.

'It's been a good lesson today,' said the King, 'I'm most grateful to you.'

That’s all.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!