December days. Advent calendars. Christmas trivia. Royal family problems.

 It’s been quite bright and occasionally sunny today, not exactly a classic crisp and bright December day but more cheerful than yesterday’s damp grey. It it has been, however, rather cold, but it is December after all. And then it rained later. 

When I collected the smallest grandchildren from school yesterday, the older one asked me if I had an advent calendar. Well, I told her, I do in fact have an advent calendar but I had forgotten all about it. It must have been last year that I acquired this rather fancy advent calendar. Comprised of two Christmas tree shaped pieces that slot together and fix onto a cardboard stand, it has a series of ‘decorations’ to be added to the ‘tree’, fixed onto little cardboard ‘hooks’. So when we arrived home we went up to the attic bedroom to look in the cupboard where stuff like Christmas decorations are stored. Behind boxes of Christmas lights, baubles, nativity scene figurines, we found a large white envelope and re-erected the tree. All the decorations came in a separate sheet, the decorations to be pushed out as needed. And they had been stored in that fashion but, having been released once, they were all now loose in the large envelope and we had to match up the shape of each decoration to its numbered slot on the original sheet. I suppose we could have hung any old random decoration in the designated spots on the tree but somehow that went against the spirit of advent calendars. It would have been like opening all the doors on a chocolate-filled advent calendar and eating it all in one go. Besides the nine-year-old wanted to do it properly. Advent calendars have come a long way since I was a child and you opened a door each December day to reveal … drum roll!!!! … a Christmas related picture! Nowadays, as well as chocolate treats, you can buy advent calendars with Lego figures to build, mini Christmas jigsaws to complete, beauty products and jewellery. If you are really ambitious you can make a personalised advent calendar, one with little boxes that you fill with selected small gifts for every day. It’s all a little over the top, not to say expensive! 

Here comes some Christmas trivia. It seems that Father Christmas as we now know and recognise him was developed in late Victorian times but the personification of Christmas has been around for a lot longer. Here is a 1848 depiction of Father Christmas crowned with a holly wreath, holding a staff and a wassail bowl and carrying the Yule log.

But English personifications of Christmas were first recorded in the 15th century, with Father Christmas himself first appearing in the mid 17th century in the aftermath of the English Civil War. The Puritan-controlled English government had legislated to abolish Christmas, considering it popish, and had outlawed its traditional customs. Royalist political pamphleteers, linking the old traditions with their cause, adopted Old Father Christmas as the symbol of 'the good old days' of feasting and good cheer. After the monarchy was restored in 1660, Father Christmas's profile declined but his character was maintained during the late 18th and into the 19th century by the Christmas folk plays later known as mummers’ plays.

He didn’t have much to do with children and the bringing of presents until some time in the Victorian era. And I have heard that his red coat and long white beard were pretty much an invention of the CocaCola company, who wanted him to match their cans. Before that he wore green, it seems. 

CocaCola like to match things to their image. My girls’ high school was close to the Royal Birkdale Golf Club, which has hosted big golfing events on a number of occasions. Nearby is a well known local landmark, a completely round house. 

One year, legend has it, when a big golf event was going on, CocaCola offered to pay a large amount of money to paint the house to look like a can of Coke. The owners refused. 

So it goes.

J

Yesterday my friend Colin gave us this link to an article about the retired Spanish King Juan Carlos. It seems our royal family is not the only one to have embarrassing members causing mayhem. I find it rather sad that Juan Carlos had come to this. I remember discussing the restoration of the monarchy with my A Level Spanish classes and the feeling of great optimism. Juan Carlos, brought up under Franco, was expected to continue with a Franco-style regime and yet when the 23F coup took place in 1981 he was reported to have sat up all night, accompanied by his young son, now King Felipe, persuading the generals to stand down and let democracy run its course. Rather a shame to end up in disgrace.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Back to grey. Keeping to appointment times. A bit of a rant about appointments. Christmas Whit Friday?

 We’ve had two bright and crisp days but today we are back to grey and damp. I think the weathermen are promising us rain as well. So it goes!

This morning I got up more or less with the sun, which was clearly as reluctant to leave its bed as I was mine. But I wanted to do a bit of shopping before going to the doctor’s surgery for a routine blood test.

So I set off for an early bus, remembering only at the last minute that we are now in December and the dispensation for old biddies like me to use our bus pass before the 9.30 am watershed was for November only! I watched another would-be bus-pass-user getting very confused when her pass was declined. How quickly we adjust to new normalities! 

It’s very hard, well nigh impossible, human nature being what it is, to slot interviews of one kind or another into a specific time frame. When I was a  teacher we always tried to keep parents’ evening appointments to five minutes per student. With a bit of preparation and foresight you could keep most appointments to those five minutes - a carefully prepared statement on a student’s progress (or lack of), aptitude and attitude, personality and expectations made things move a lot faster. However, there were always some parents who wouldn’t accept that prepared statement and wanted to go into greater detail or simply wanted to talk about what a lovely person their offspring was and sometimes wanted to thank you cor the wonderful work you were doing! And your timing went to pieces!

Doctors have a similar problem with patients who want extra details, extra reassurance, or maybe just a bit of a chat. And so when my GP falls behind in her appointments I can understand and sympathise. Harder to understand is why routine appointments for blood tests or vaccination should fall behind. These are administered by a practice nurse and should have no place for a long diagnosis of the situation, or a short one, or indeed any diagnosis at all. So why did I have to wait for a good ten minutes beyond my appointment time this morning? Once in the nurse’s room, even taking into account that it’s December and it’s cold and it was necessary to remove layers of clothing to allow access to my vein, taking a blood sample took a maximum of three minutes.

I have ranted before now about the difficulty of making doctors’ appointments. Here’s a link to Adrian Chiles ranting on the same subject.

I find myself in perfect agreement with this sentiment:

 “I don’t care about the shabbiness of hospitals, confusion over appointment times and places, even the poor communication skills of some doctors. I just want to know there’s a number to call, which will get me someone relevant to talk to.”

Quite so!

I see that the pub next door and the pub in the centre of the village are offering what they are calling “Christmas Whit Friday”. On Friday December 12th twelve brass bands will perform in the carpark of the pub next door. I think the village centre pub has booked Friday 19th. Whit Friday is Band Contest Day in the Saddleworth villages, celebrating Pentecost with Whit Walks from local churches in the morning and a gathering of brass bands in the afternoon and evening. So Christmas Whit Friday is a bit of a nonsense name in terms of religious significance but it’s a name that will make perfect sense to everyone here.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Cold sunshine again. Modern architecture. Girl Guides and Women’s Institute.

It’s another fine, bright day in Saddleworth, crisp and cold but sunny. A definite improvement on grey and gloomy. 

When we drove from here to Southport on Monday there was some kind of problem with the M60 or the M62 and my daughter’s SatNav took us on a strangely convoluted route into and around central Manchester. Some of the route I recognised from decades ago when I would drive Phil to chess matches and he would work,out a traffic-beating shortcut using the Manchester A-Z map book. Much of his old navigation has been knocked into touch by the development of the Metrolink tram line and the building of places like the Etihad stadium and the velodrome.

It took us the better part of an hour to reach the point where we circumnavigated the city centre. That’s rush hour traffic for you! And suddenly we found ourselves on the edge of the high rise development near Castlefield, part of the new Manchester skyline, which I find quite ugly. The beautiful old bits of Manchester are being dwarfed by glass and metal tower blocks.

I remember the first of these being bullt, the Hilton Tower, back in 2006, described by the Financial Times as "the UK's first proper skyscraper outside London". From 2006 to 2018, the skyscraper was the tallest building in Manchester and outside London in the UK. In November 2018, it was surpassed by the South Tower at Deansgate Square. And now it’s just one of an increasing number of shiny giants! 

When it was first built, its very top section would hum or whistle in the wind, sounding uncannily like some kind of warning siren,scaring the wits out of me one early evening as I walked to an Italian class.

And today I read this article about the lates Norman Foster addition to the New York skyline. I wonder how future generations will look at these constructions. Will they be considered monstrosities? Or things of vintage beauty? 

In the news yesterday it was announced that the Girl Guides will no longer  accept trans girls into their organisation: “Trans girls and young women, and others not recorded female at birth, will no longer be able to join Girlguiding as new young members”.

I was rather surprised. I’d always thought of Girl Guides as a tolerant, accepting organisation, asserting girls’ / women’s rights to do things just as well as the boys and men in the Boy Scouts. Of course, the decision has rather been forced upon them. A statement from the organisation’s chair of trustees, Denise Wilson, chief executive, Felicity Oswald, and chief guide, Tracy Foster, said: “Following April’s supreme court ruling relating to sex and gender, many organisations across the country have been facing complex decisions about what it means for girls and women and for the wider communities affected.

“Following detailed considerations, expert legal advice and input from senior members, young members and Girlguiding’s council, the board of trustees for Girlguiding has reached the difficult decision that, going forward, membership of Girlguiding will be restricted to girls and young women, as defined in the Equality Act.”

I was a Girl Guide, albeit very briefly. I had thoroughly enjoyed being a Brownie, where I was a “sixer”, leader of the Pixies subgroup, making sure my little troupe had cleaned their shoes and polished their badges ready for inspection, and joining in all the various games and activities. In due course I “flew up”, making my way up a “ladder” which consisted of the other Brownies. I promised to “do my best, to do my duty to God and the queen” and learnt the facts of life at a Girl Guide camp, one pf the older girls giving us chapter and verse about how babies were made. To my 11 year old self it seemed a rather unlikely and inconvenient system. The following year I had changed schools to a girls’ grammar school, with lots of homework. Coincidentally we acquired a television set at home and a new and exciting science fiction series, “A for Andromeda”, clashed with the time I usually went to Guides. Using homework as an excuse, I said farewell to Guiding.

Today comes the news that the venerable organisation The Women’s Institute has also had its arm twisted and is banning transwomen from joining them as new members. And once again the High Court Ruling, and possibly some small group pressure from within, that has influenced that decision. 

Melissa Green, the chief executive of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, said, “My hope is that the message that the transgender community gets from this is not one of betrayal, but is one of our desire to continue to maintain those friendships and that support. This has been a very difficult year for everybody, particularly for the transgender community, but I hope that when that anger subsides the transgender community will know that we stand with them.”

“As an organisation that has proudly welcomed transgender women into our membership for more than 40 years, this is not something we would do unless we felt that we had no other choice.”

The Women’s Institute has been around for a long time. Wikipedia tells me: 

“The WI movement began at Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada, in 1897 when Adelaide Hoodless addressed a meeting for the wives of members of the Farmers' Institute. WIs quickly spread throughout Ontario and Canada, with 130 branches launched by 1905 in Ontario alone, and the groups flourish in their home province today. As of 2013, the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario (FWIO) had more than 300 branches with more than 4,500 members.”

“The organization had two aims: to revitalise rural communities and to encourage women to become more involved in producing food during the First World War.”

“At the end of World War I, the British Board of Agriculture withdrew its sponsorship, but the Development Commission financially supported the work of the forming of new WIs and gave core funding to the National Federation until it could become financially independent. In 1925, Polie Hirst Simpson was appointed the WI's first national agricultural adviser, and by 1926, the Women's Institutes were fully independent and rapidly became a prominent part of rural life.

One of their features was an independence from political parties or institutions, or church or chapel, which encouraged activism by non-establishment women, which helps to explain why the WI has been extremely reluctant to support anything that can be construed as war work, despite their wartime formation. During the Second World War, they limited their contribution to such activities as looking after evacuees, and running the Government-sponsored Preservation Centres where volunteers canned or made jam of excess produce; all this produce was sent to depots to be added to the rations.”

There you go, all rather different from Influencers and Mumsnet.

Here’s a photo of the Women's Institute building in Llanfairpwll, Wales. 

Dating from 1915, this is the oldest WI in Britain. Somehow the building looks so typical of Scout and Guide huts all over the place. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sunshine after rain but still a lot of water around. At the library. Environmental news. Christmas trivia begins.

After yesterday’s all day rain and gloom today is bright and sunny again, temperature 7° according to my weather app. Yesterday my Fitbit told me I took only 3000 steps, possibly a record low for me. Today, running round the village I had done 6000 before breakfast. I suspect my Fitbit will tell me I went for a walk rather than a run. I clearly don’t run fast enough to satisfy my Fitbit.

On my running route, at the junction of Sandbed Lane and Delph Lame, there are still problems with drainage, or lack of the same. Very pretty! But potentially very dangerous.

The ford at the end of Hull Mill Lane is also overflowing but its more picturesque than actually dangerous. 

I took my library books back today. They can stop sending me ‘OVERDUE BOOKS’ notices. It’s a good job they no longer fine borrowers for overdue returns!

In the library a young woman was handing out cards from the local council asking us what will make us happy. I didn’t complete mine. She was being engaged in conversation by a regular chatterbox, often to be found in the library. From his interrogation I discovered the young woman in question has a degree in social sciences from Newcastle University. Does that qualify her to hand out cards to potential borrowers? 

Here’s some good environmental news: “The hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic this year was the smallest and shortest-lived since 2019, according to European space scientists, who described the finding as a “reassuring sign” of the layer’s recovery.

The yearly gap in what scientists have called “planetary sunscreen” reached a maximum area of 21m sq km (8.1m sq miles) over the southern hemisphere in September – well below the maximum of 26m sq km reached in 2023 – and shrank in size until coming to an early close on Monday, data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams) shows.”

 

Not perfect but getting better. 

Today is December 1st. Time to start wearing Christmas ear rings. After visiting the library I bought some Christmas cards. Slowly I am getting into the spirit of the season. My son tells me his 11 year old has made a series of Christmas lists, each one slightly updated on the one before. So now I can think about gifts. She has clearly gone beyond the stage of writing to Santa.

According to something I read, the practice of writing to Father Christmas probably began in the United States. As early as 1773 Saint Nicholas, a fourth century saint, probably Sinterklaas in Dutch, was being commemorated by Durch settlers in New York. As the US postal service became more formalised and efficient in the aftermath of the civil war, which ended in 1865, the idea of writing a letter to a benevolent man who lived at the north pole gathered currency. In England, where a figure called Father Christmas had emerged from medieval folk tales to personify festive cheer, Santa Claus was first recorded in 1864, according to English Heritage. By the 1880s, the two figures had merged into one. 

There you go. My first bit of Christmas trivia. More will undoubtedly follow.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Family stuff. Trains. Statues and ice rinks.

 Today we got up early to travel to Southport for a funeral. Family reunions tend to be such events these days but it was nicely done.

In the mid afternoon we saw our son onto a train to Liverpool, from whee he caught a train back to London. By the time I finish this blogpost he might just about be back home in Buckinghamshire. The rest of us drove back home to Saddleworth.

Yesterday I commented on the 7.00 am Manchester to London train being cancelled. My son, who works for Transport for London, tried to persuade me that it was all a matter of security. I was not convinced. Now this article tells me that the decision has been reversed. There you go. 

Now, here’s a photo of a statue of Luciano Pavarotti unveiled to much fanfare last year in a square in the centre of Pesaro, a coastal city in the Marche region.

And here is a photo of the same statue trapped in a Christmas celebrations ice rink! There has been a bit of an outcry. 

Andrea Biancini, the mayor of Pesaro, has apologised, admitting that the local council had “made a mistake”.

“There was no intention of disrespect,” he said. “I was assured that Pavarotti wouldn’t be touched or incorporated into the ice rink floor.”

But with the festive feature due to open in the city’s Piazzale Lazzarini this weekend, he said it was not possible for it to be dismantled, and that trying to move the statue would be costly and could cause damage. But maybe Pavarotti would enjoy being involved in the Christmas fun.

Today has been a wet day. My step count is much reduced from its usual high level. Too much time spent sitting in a car, and sitting  talking to members of the family.

Normal service should be resumded to orrow. 

Lofe goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Cold sunshine. Bits of nonsense.

 It’s been a fine but cold day. We began with blue sky and sunshine and continued that way until well into the afternoon.

Our son is on his way here from London, being collected by his sister in Manchester. Then we’ll get most of the family together for dinner. There’s a family event going on in Southport tomorrow and so he is making a flying visit.

Here’s a bit of travel nonsense. There has been a train from Manchester to London for ages apparently, leaving Piccadilly at 7.00 am. It’s been popular with commuters apparently. Now a decision has been taken to scrap it, sort of! The 7.00 am train disappears off the timetable but workers who staff the train need to be in London to man a train making the journey in the opposite direction. So the train will continue to run but without any passengers! I wonder at what point someone will notice the contradiction! 

Here’s some more nonsense, art-related his time. In 1985 married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in fabric. 

Now an artist apparently know as JR plans to emulate them.

In 2021 Christo and Jeanne-Claude created another art installation, L’Arc de Triomphe Empaqueté. 

Fancy ideas but is it really art? And can the people who crochet all sorts of things to go on the top of post boxes claim to be creating art?  

And here is a link to an article about artists who have “recreated” trash in such a way that cleaners at the art galleries threw them away.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Giving into the sickness season. Margaret Atwood giving her opinions. Changes. Rage rooms.

 Another grey day. But another day when I managed to run round the village before the rain set in. I suspect that the rain is here to stay for today. We shall see.

As Phil and I seem to have been attacked by germs brought here by the grandchildren, here is a cartoon by Sarah Akinterinwa on surviving sickness season:

The writer Margaret Atkinson was 86 last week, still writing stuff, still giving her opinions, the freedom of being a writer (as she says, she can’t get sacked) make her fearless in speaking, still an example to us all. Asked how she feels about her body, something we all have to consider as we grow older, I suppose, she says:

“It’s old. Stuff wears out. But compared with the bodies of some of my contemporaries, and despite the pacemaker, it’s not doing too badly. I still have kneecaps, I can still touch my toes and walk 10,000 steps a day. Just not as fast as formerly. (“Still” is a much-used word among us.)

Young doctor: “Compared with most people in your demographic, your hearing is quite good.”

Me: “That’s because most people in my demographic are dead. They aren’t hearing anything.”

Him: (puzzled shock)”

As I just said, still not afraid to express her opinions, still outrageous. 

Asked about the mist significant changes she has seen in her lifetime, she lists the following: 

1. In 1939 there was hardly any plastic. The first big wave of it broke in the early 50s. Everyone thought it was great.

2. The switch from coal to oil in the 50s.

3. The advent of television, also in the 50s. Before that it was radio, with families gathered around the set, ears flapping.

4. The advent of antibiotics – magic! – and more vaccines, including polio. My generation of children had a lot of “childhood diseases”, including diphtheria, which killed young children. Four of my cousins died of it.

5. My generation was all about work ethic. You were just expected to work hard. We thought the 60s hippies were, well, lazy.

6. Civil rights in the 60s, however. We approved of that.

7. The advent of the pill for public consumption, in the 60s, around the same time as pantyhose, followed by the miniskirt and shortly after that by second-wave feminism. A huge change, hardly possible before the pill.

8. With Reagan (1980), the beginning of the end of the New Deal and the rise of the “religious right” as a political force, thus The Handmaid’s Tale, which many then thought would be impossible in the liberal, free‑world leader, the United States.

9. The collapse of the USSR and its bloc, 1989-90. Far‑reaching consequences not apparent at the time. Move one chess piece and all are affected.

10. Did I say media changes – in music, from vinyl LPs to tape cassettes and then CDs, and then the advent of the internet and smartphones and social media? 

What she didn’t include was the more recent change to downloading everything - music, podcasts, youtube stuff, films, tv series - and the fact that the younger generation seems to watch everything on their phones. This despite there being huge TV sets in most houses, usually conveniently placed so that you can’t miss noticing them as you run past. Also, the consequent loss of family TV time, when the family would sit round the YV set to watch the latest episode of some serial or other. This has been replaced to some extent to a “Family Film Night”, when you sit down to watch a (downloaded) film together, with popcorn, of course, and the lights dimmed, emulating a cinema experience! 

Here’s another new development! “rage rooms”.

“If you find it hard to count to 10 when anger bubbles up, a new trend offers a more hands-on approach. Rage rooms are cropping up across the UK, allowing punters to smash seven bells out of old TVs, plates and furniture.

Such pay-to-destroy ventures are thought to have originated in Japan in 2008, but have since gone global. In the UK alone venues can be found in locations from Birmingham to Brighton, with many promoting destruction as a stress-relieving experience.

According to Smash It Rage Rooms in south-east London, where a 30-minute solo session costs £50, “each smash is a cathartic release, a burst of pure, primal joy”.

“We are at capacity – we were looking for another venue because we can’t keep up with demand,” said Amelia Smewing, who set up the business with her husband after exploring ways to help their son cope with PTSD.”

I suppose it was inevitable in the age of sharing your emotions with all and sundry that someone would find a way to make money out of it.  It sounds like an expensive way to vent your feelings. Perhaps it’s not socially acceptable to go out into the garden and scream! 

In an article about young women not wanting to get married I came across a new word: a“situationship”, defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “a romantic relationship between two people who do not yet consider themselves a couple but who have more than a friendship”. A central feature of such arrangements is that only one party tends to consider it a “yet”.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.