Up the hill for a family stop!

We have family visiting: my Spanish sister and the southern branch of the family, aka my son and his family. 

We’ve had a cloudy sort of day but with no rain. So we went on a family stomp to Heights Church, a local beauty spot. The church is old and largely out of use but occasionally open such as for Easter services.

A good walk for a day like today, an uncomfortable walk when it’s very hot.

En route we admired the local flora, for example at the allotments

and the local fauna, surprisingly in someone’s garden.

Up at Heights Church, we explored grave yard, one of our favourite occupations.

We had a picnic.

Some of our party did a bit of gravestone rubbing, a project we have been planning for a good while and almost didn’t manage this time as we forgot to pack the necessary equipment. Realising this before we got too far, some of the group doubled back to purchase paper and crayons from the local post office. 

We further admired the flowers

and in some cases even collected a few.

And then we trundled back down the hill for coffee and biscuits.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Fruits of the forest - nature under stress! Moaning about noisy work colleagues. Weekend fun and games.

 When we have been out and about over recent weeks, maybe even over the last couple of months, we have been observing the progress of the various fruits that grow wild around here. 5-year-old Grandson Number Two has enjoyed picking and eating raspberries - all gone now! The blackberries are in profusion and assuming they all ripen, as they are doing at present, we shall have a bumper crop. It’s still early days although some seem to be ripening earlier than usual. The apple tree in a local farmer’s field is doing quite nicely, ripening fine but the apples are small. The wild tree in the little wooded are is not producing as many as last year. One of the local last year left bags of apples for passer-by to take and use. Maybe that will happen again.

Now, here is a link to an article which suggests that we might not have such a bumper crop as expected. Nature, it tells us is under stress and in some places the berries are very shrivelled. It’s all because we’ve not had enough rain at the right time to promote proper growth and perhaps too much hot weather too soon. Not only is the berry crop affected but some trees are already turning autumnal and beginning to drop leaves. 

Nature is confused! Aren’t we all?

And here is a cartoon comment of wildfires:-

Here is an extract from an article about and employment tribunal: 

“Older employees who are disturbed by younger, more boisterous colleagues in the workplace are not victims of age harassment, an employment tribunal has ruled.

Employees in their 20s and 30s may annoy more mature co-workers by chatting, socialising and looking at their phones but they are not breaking workplace equality rules, the tribunal said.”

Oh dear! Here we have a very modern dilemma. On the one hand there are people saying that young people do not have the same opportunities to meet life partners through work because there’s so much remote working since covid. On the other, some people are complaining because young people socialise at work! 

It’s Notting Hill Carnival this weekend, as I have mentioned before. This morning I read that the police who will be keeping an eye on things have been told they are NOT to dance, even if they really like the music. At one time dancing with the revellers was considered a good thing as it established good relations with the community. Now it is believed to distract the bobbies on the beat from looking out for wrong’uns!

Here in Saddleworth we have our own kind of carnival this weekend. The Saddleworth rushcart will be hauled from village to village, probably as a celebration of harvest at one time in the past.

And the Morrismen will dance their curious way around the district. 

Unfortunately, the various members of the family who are coming to visit tomorrow will have moved on by the time all the fun starts. So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Fires continue. We have cloud. The importance of keeping a diary. Protests in Israel. And “Plasticine Action”.

 While fires still blaze in Spain and Portugal and temperatures soar crazily all over Europe, we’ve had an oddly cloudy day and fairly cool here in Greater Manchester.

I went into Manchester to meet some old friends for lunch. Every couple of months I arrange to meet these particular friends, former colleagues. Today three of us waited for the fourth to arrive. We tried in vain to get in touch with him. Eventually, after we had lunched and were on a bit of a post-prandial walkabout, he called. He had been into Manchester on the 8th of August and wondered why no-one else did. Today is the 18th! He needs to keep a better diary! Why he didn’t contact any of us on the 8th remains a mystery. The moral of the story seems to be that I need to send out reminders a day or so before we meet! An organiser’s work is never done! 

Here’s a cartoon that made me smile: 

“Apple”. Marco de Angelis. Italian journalist & cartoonist. (1980- ). 

So many different ways to look at fruit! 

On more serious matters there is this: 

“Latest Gaza ceasefire proposal includes suspension of military operations for 60 days, says Egyptian official source

The latest Gaza ceasefire proposal agreed by Palestinian group Hamas includes a suspension of military operations for 60 days and could be seen as a path to reach a comprehensive deal to end nearly two-year-long Gaza war, an Egyptian official source told Reuters on Monday.

The period of suspension would see the exchange of Palestinian prisoners in return for release of half of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the source said.”

We’ll see whether anything comes of that. 

Meanwhile there have been massive street protests across Israel on Sunday. Some 400,000 or more joined in. Netanyahu is not impressed: 

“The people who are calling today for the war’s end without Hamas’s defeat are not only toughening Hamas’s stance and distancing our hostages’ release, they are also ensuring that the atrocities of October 7 will recur time and again, and that our sons and daughters will have to fight time and again in an endless war.

“Therefore, in order to advance our hostages’ release and to ensure that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel, we have to finish the job and defeat Hamas,” he said.

And here in the UK a protestor has been arrested for wearing a “Plasticine Action” T-shirt. The arresting office did not his mistake until the time came to charge him. Just another bit of protest!k

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Running out of water. Hygiene habits over the years.

As the warm sunny weather continues I read that we could run out of water in the UK!! How is that possible in a country famous for rain? After all, I have Spanish friends who seriously believe we don’t have summer here and certainly don’t go to the beach! Wrong on both counts! Even before global warming came along we used to go to the beach as children and splash about in the sea. I have photos to prove it. Mind you, it was the Irish sea which I later was told was warmed by the Gulf Stream current, unlike the North Sea, where your feet could turn blue as you paddled. That didn’t stop people going in it though. 

Anyway, here’s a link to an article about water shortage. Of course, much of the problem is down to water companies not having maintained the system and losing vast amounts of water to leakage. 

Here’s an interesting statistic from the article: 

“UK households use more water, mostly on showering and bathing, than other comparable European countries, at about 150 litres a day per capita. For France the average is 128, Germany 122 and Spain 120 (although in Italy it’s 243 litres a day).” 

So Italy is ahead of all of us for freshness and cleanliness. But we are pretty clean. 

Years ago my Spanish sister told me about her daughter (now in her thirties, which shows how long ago it was) coming home from school very upset because some of her small classmates had taunted her for her half-Englishness, on the grounds that the English were known to be dirty as they didn’t shower every day!! I thought this was quite rich as I could remember a time when not all Spanish homes even had running water. My sister’s response to her small daughter was to advise her to tell her friends that maybe the English didn’t shower every day but at least they had a good wash! 

All of this had Phil and me reminiscing about our childhood when it was accepted as the norm that you had a bath once a week. Many families had a designated bath-night. We knew families where it was usual for the bathwater to be re-used, family members taking turns. After all, we mostly relied on an immersion heater for our hot water and it was quite common to “run out” of hot water. We also knew a number of smelly children - almost one per class - but that was largely down to unwashed clothes as much as unwashed people.

The girls’ grammar school I attended was in a brand spanking new building, considered state of the art as it had showers in the PE changing rooms! Such an innovation! When I went to university my first year landlady told me my rent entitled me to one bath per week. Already in the late 1960s this seemed a little unhygienic, even with a “good wash every day”. I used to make use of the facilities at the Student Union building - a bath with as much hot water as you liked, and a hairdryer, all for a reasonable price. I doubt that such facilities exist nowadays! 

Thinking of heatwaves and lack of rainfall, here’s a picture indicating the extent of wildfires in Spain and Portugal. A friend of ours is mourning the destruction places where she has walked the Camino de Santiago.

And here’s a photo of wildfires in Canada, where they are having wildfires break out in places where it has never happened in the past. 

In the meantime, I am just happy to hang my washing in the garden, confident that it will dry quickly for me.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A-Levels. Changing times. Wildlife. And wildfires. Notting Hill Carnival. And Woodcraft Folk.

It’s been A-Level results day this week. Almost, but not quite, twenty years ago I would have been busily helping my students negotiate the clearing system to get themselves into the university of their choice. This year, apparently, a record number of students have been accepted by their first choice university. A record number have achieved A and A* grades. Quite how that can be I am not at all sure. It used to be that the grade boundaries shifted slightly each year so that the same percentage of students each year received / achieved the various grades. So it goes.

The news programmes over the last couple of days have featured interviews with excited students. That didn’t used to happen back when we did A-Levels. We didn’t even go into school to collect our results: they were posted to us. All I got was a congratulations card from my French teacher for achieving the top grade in her subject. Mind you, back then fewer of us sat A-Level exams and fewer of us went to university. Things have changed.

As we go on our various walks out and about around here we keep our eyes open for interesting wildlife. For most of the year we just see squirrels and very occasionally deer - few and far between. We also look out at the moment for interesting butterflies - mostly cabbage whites or similar but from time to time a red admiral or even a peacock makes an appearance. Phil commented yesterday that there seems to be a dearth of caterpillars. He remembers seeing them ‘everywhere’ in his childhood. A shortage of caterpillars would explain the reported decline in butterfly numbers.  Meanwhile, someone in Suffolk has been spotting wallabies! It is expected that they are the results of escapees from zoos, which have then bred in the wild. How weird to have one of those jump into your path! 

I was reading about Notting Hill Carnival, coming up next weekend I think. Apparently there has been discussion about the use of facial recognition cameras on the streets of Notting Hill during the carnival. Facial recognition cameras are institutionally biased and are more likely to falsely identify black people as possible criminals. You would have thought that the technology would have improved to counter that but  seemingly it hasn’t. Some politicians have even suggested that the carnival should be moved to somewhere like Hyde Park and become a ticketed event. If it moved to Hyde Park would it be possible to continue calling it Notting Hill Carnival? i wonder!

Wildfires still cause problems in the Iberian Peninsula. One thing I read suggested that in Portugal, for example, the decision years and years ago to plant eucalyptus trees has contributed largely to the problem. Eucalyptus trees produce eucalyptus oil and can spontaneously combust when the temperature is hight enough. When the decision was taken for economic reasons to plant lots of eucalyptus the temperature rarely got high enough for that to happen. Now it’s a regular thing for temperatures to soar to 40°. 

In neighbouring Spain, decades of rural depopulation has also contributed to the problem. As small inland towns and villages have been abandoned inn favour of big cities, nobody has been controlling the growth of stuff which can then catch fire. This year they’ve had heavy rain in Spring, promoting growth, followed by successive heatwaves which have dried the vegetation out and, bingo! it’s a recipe for wildfires! 

A solution, or partial solution has been suggested by shepherds in Catalonia. They have offered to graze their flocks of sheep and goats in certain areas to keep the vegetation down and to provide the fire department with easy access if fires occur. The flocks are know as “Ramats de Foc”, fire flock. Brilliant!

Here’s a link to an article about the Woodcraft Folk, a socialist alternative to Brownies, Guides, Cubs and Scouts. It’s 100 years old this year. Still going strong judging by this photo. 

The likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Rosen grew up with the Woodcraft Folk. Clearly a good influence!

 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A short Friday post.

 It was already warm when I went out at about 8.30 this morning. I would not be surprised if the Great British Summer continues until my Spanish sister arrives next Wednesday. 

Granddaughter Number Two and I met for brunch today - now she is earning money again she was determined to treat me. She told me which bus she was catching from her house and I organised myself to get on the same bus at the corner of the street, quite a masterpiece of timing!

We went to a farm a mile or so along the road from here, a farm which has set about adding to the farming income by opening a farm shop and cafe, which is clearly flourishing. So we set the world to o rights over some food and then contributed to the local economy by purchasing local produce. They had rhubarb!

J D Vance is spending his summer holiday in the Cotswolds. I read this morning that he tried to book a table at a local restaurant but the staff threatened to walk out if his booking was accepted. So he was turned away. This could turn out to be a difficult holiday for him if other places follow suit.

On the subject of protests, here’s a cartoon that made me smile.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Thought for the Day. Xenophobia. Apologies. Wildfires. Baby photos.

There was a time when I was a regular commuter to work and I enjoyed listening to Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4. This was before the morning commuter traffic got so bad that I needed to set off earlier, arriving at work earlier but spending less time sitting in slow-moving traffic. This meant I arrived at work before Thought for the Day was broadcast but was able to get ahead of myself, organise my day and with luck be able set off for home at the end of the day before the traffic built up once more.

Anyway, there was a time when I was a regular listener to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.  Probably my favourite “thinker” was Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose wry take on the state of the world was very refreshing. I was led to think about this when I read that the BBC had retrospectively censored the broadcast by Krish Kandiah, a theologian who heads the Sanctuary Foundation, a refugee foundation. It seems that in his “Thought” he described Robert Jenrick as xenophobic. 

Apparently Jenrick had said, ‘I certainly don’t want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally, and about whom we know next to nothing.’ According to Krish Kandiah, “These words echo a fear many have absorbed. Fear of the stranger. The technical name for this is xenophobia.”

Jenrick probably would not want to share his neighbourhood with quite a lot of men who support far right groups. After all he’d know next to nothing about those men either. I suspect he would make sweeping generalisations about council house dwellers, similar to those he makes about refugees. 

The BBC has apologised to Jenrick … but not to the refugees! 

Today is cooler than yesterday but as wildfires burn in the North York Moors national park - burning since Monday - as well as similar wildfires in other parts of the UK, firefighters are warning that we are hitting a record number of wildfires this year. “In England and Wales alone, crews have already tackled 856 wildfires this year, the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) said – a third higher than the record-breaking totals seen in 2022 and six times the number recorded last year – warning that hot and dry weather means the figures will likely only increase.”

And in this article, Spanish journalist María Ramirez points out that heatwaves are an annual event in her country, something people expect to happen. But she tells us, people like herself from Madrid are finding it more difficult to escape the heat by heading to the north of Spain, as places like Galicia are also experiencing greater heatwaves than preciously. In fact, all of Europe is heating up. We need a concerted, international effort to reduce emissions and fight climate change before it is too late. 

Now, here’s little bugbear of mine. My eyes were drawn to this headline: 

‘We popped the baby in a flowerpot!’ Anne Geddes on the beloved photos that made her famous

I have no objection to photos of babies. In fact I like looking at photos of friends’ babies, just as I enjoy looking back at photos of family members as babies. What I object to is “cute” photos of babies in unnatural poses, sometimes babies only weeks old, their little limbs manipulated into ridiculous, possibly cruel and abusive positions. So the idea of “popping a baby into a flowerpot” for a photo-shot is anathema to me, even if said flowerpot has been lined with fabric! 

Yet such photos have made Anne Geddes famous. 

Here’s a link to an article about her career. Rant over!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!