Not (yet) quite as cold as forecast. Tramps and hobos. Books. Nostalgia.

Here’s a headline from today’s paper: UK weather live: country braces for snow and freezing rain as temperatures fall.

Well, when I went out running earlier this morning I found it was not as cold as yesterday or the day before. Presumably the worst is yet to come. Hull Mill Pond is still partly frozen though. The seagulls were perched on the ice floes.

I’d been watching the seagull floating around opportunistically, as they often seem to do, not purposefully flying but on the lookout for somewhere to land, and at the seaside for someone eating chips or other street food that they can swoop in and steal. 

The geese had also flown over en masse, in a series of arrow formations, honking their destination to any stragglers. Geese always seem to fly purposefully, as if with some landing place already in mind. 

The local rooks, however, appear to fly just for the joy of flying, in raucous and tuneless crowds, for all the world like school kids let out to play and just running around and yelling their heads off. I’m pretty sure that in reality the rooks are hunting insects to eat but I rather like the idea of them flying just because they can! 

That’s enough bird psychology for today! 

Here’s bit of linguistic / semantic clarification that popped up on screen sometime recently: 

A “tramp” is someone who travels and avoids work if possible; a “bum” neither travels nor works, and a “hobo” is a travelling worker. 

I wonder who decided the definitions. They sound rather American to me: we don’t really talk about hobos in the UK. Decades ago we used to hear about “tramps” here in the UK, often men who had decided to opt out of “normal” society and its rules and regulations, and go walkabout, doing odd jobs here and there, often paid in kind - food, clean clothes, the chance to sleep in a farmer’s barn - rather than in cash. The original drop-outs! Some of therm did a kind of circuit, aiming to get back round to a friendly place at more or less the same time year on year. George Orwell did it, leading to Down and out in Paris and London, and Laurie Lee set off with his violin, giving us the ending to Cider with Rosie. 

In the age of homelessness, do such tramps still exist or do they belong to a our nostalgia?

Here’s a little Louis de Bernières nostalgia: 

“During my 20s, I was too poor to go abroad on holidays, as my friends did. They would go somewhere blazingly hot, and roast themselves stupid on beaches filthy with cigarette ends and beer cans. I was a landscape gardener, and my summers were spent in the Surrey Hills, building walls and terraces from stone. By the time I reached my 30s, however, I had a girlfriend – and, because I had become a teacher, a few weeks’ holiday in the summer.

Annie was from Northern Ireland, and she taught French. During half-terms and the shorter holidays, we would go to Donegal to escape the stress and horror of the Troubles. But in the summer we would pile into my home-made Morris Minor Traveller, built out of two wrecks, and cross the Channel to France. We would drive from one historic town to another, pitching our tiny camouflaged tent in the municipal campings, where the French would set up capacious awnings and drink cold white wine in folding chairs with their dignified, amused cats sitting beside them like statues of Bast.”

We too used to go on such summer camping holidays, mostly in Normandy and Brittany, with one child and then two children in the back of our red Citroën 2CV and later our Renault 4L, also red, and some very basic camping gear. And like Lous de Bernières we marvelled at the way the French set themselves up a long stay at whichever campsite we stopped at, their gear much more sophisticated than ours, even at times with television!!

Louis de Bernières goes on:

“But one year my new girlfriend, Caroline, said: “Please can we not go to France and drive around in your Morris Minor any more?”. I said: “You choose something, then.” She chose Cephalonia, and the result was Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. For the next summer she chose south-west Turkey, and so I came to write my best novel, Birds Without Wings. She entirely and unwittingly changed the course of my life.”

Another case of wanderings producing literature! 

I could continue in this nostalgic vein but I need to do other things with my Saturday. The nostalgia-fest might possible continue tomorrow though. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!