There was frost on the shed roof this morning when I got up, despite the fact that I got up later than intended. When my alarm rang I pressed the “snooze” button … or so I thought. The fact that when I checked the time almost an hour had gone past rather suggests that I must have switched it off completely.it’s a good job I didn’t have any deadlines to meet.
I should have been at the hairdresser’s this morning but my stylist phoned me yesterday to tell me that the salon has closed down, the chain has gone bankrupt, some people have not been paid and in general chaos reigns. Looking back, I can see how this has crept up on them. Hairdressing salons, like the hospitality industry, suffered as a result of being closed during the Covid epidemic. Some places never reopened. Some that did we never quite the same again. I think my hairdressing salon is one of the latter group. Once it reopened, initially on a restricted basis with clients having to keep a certain distance apart, ir never seemed to recover the bustle it had in pre-Covid times.
At least my stylist let me know yesterday rather than just leaving me in the dark, in which case I would have got up very early, accepted my daughter’s offer of a lift to the tram stop on her way to work and had breakfast in Manchester city centre before going and discovering the salon closed. But I was forewarned. My stylist had an ulterior motive as well. One of her colleagues is now opening a salon, not far from the original place, and my stylist was really touting for business, transferring my booking from today to Friday. Fingers crossed that it all works out and that I can actually locate the new place.
As I have already said, there was still frost around, despite the slightly later hour but it’s another fine, crisp day. The changeable weather is quite disconcerting though. One day we have temperatures in the 13° to 16° range and the following day we have sub-zero and frost on the grass!
Maybe it is because of these temperature variations that I still see men in shorts, even though it is now December. It’s not just very young men either. This morning I crossed paths with a man in his fifties sporting his knee-length shorts. In his case I suspect he wanted to show off the tattoos which covered his calves! It’s a strange thing, however, to see someone muffled up with a warm puffer jacket, wooly hat and scarf and gloves and legs bare from knee to ankle! Do they not feel the cold? Is it a kind of macho exhibitionist thing?
When I go into central Manchester later in the week I shall have to weave my way around the stalls of the Christmas markets, which fill up just about every pedestrianised corner of the city centre. This morning I read about Tommy Banks, a Michelin-starred chef I have never heard of, who had had a van loaded with his trademark pies ready to go the his pop-up stall at York Christmas markets - £25,000 worth of pies, left in the refrigerated van overnight! That’s an awful lot of pies!
And then the van was stolen! He suspects that the thieves did not realise the van was full of pies and has appealed for them not to let the pies go to waste when there are hungry people around. He suggests they leave them at a community centre: “I know you’re a criminal, but maybe just do something nice because it’s Christmas and maybe we can feed a few thousand people with these pies that you’ve stolen, do the right thing.”
My Italian teacher yesterday told us she had been to see the film “Joy”, which tells the story of the first in-vitro baby, Louise Joy Brown, born in Oldham hospital about a month after our son was born there. My Italian friend was astounded to discover that such an important and significand medical development had taken place in Oldham, rather than Oxford or Cambridge or some other place with a prestigious university behind it. But, no, they just worked away in Oldham. And now Louise Brown, like our son, is 46 years old but “test-tube babies”, as they were once called, remain an ongoing miracle for women who discover they cannot conceive naturally.
It used to be couples deciding to try for a baby via in-vitro fertilisation but it seems that more and more women are going it alone. This article and this article are about women deciding not to wait for ‘Mr Right” to come along.
Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!
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