Sunshine. Gardens. Out and about making accidental phone calls. Jokes.

 We have had another fine and sunny day today. I’ve lost track of how many days of sunshine we have had in the last week or so. One of the neighbours has taken to carrying a sun umbrella, one of those with reflective foil on the outside and a pretty flower pattern on the inside, when she is in the garden inspecting her garden plat. She  comes from California originally so she must be aware of the dangers of too much sun. 

The garden plot is a mixture of flowerbed, vegetable patch and herb garden. When we moved into this house there was an ancient outside privy in the shared garden, no longer in use, a relic of the age when such houses did not proper bathrooms. Our children used to climb onto its roof and once we almost lost a pet rabbit into the depths when he foolishly ventured inside. We successfully coaxed him out. At some time years ago the owner of the house next door decided to demolish the old privy. The garden was still shared in practice and usage but in fact the two houses had a certain amount of garden described on the deed and the privy fell into his domain. Unfortunately, instead of carting the rubble away, thus creating more space in the garden, he built a sort of walled section with some of the stone and dumped the rest of the detritus in the space created, reducing the actual garden area. The current owners of the house were then renting but later bought it off the privy-demolisher. 

Large amounts of compost have been poured in on top of the builders’ rubble, so that now it looks rather like a raised garden plot. I am amazed at how well the Californian manages to coax and cajole growth out of plants in the raised flower / veg / herb bed. After all, beneath the added compost there is a thick layer of stone and concrete, hardly the best foundation, but there it is. She has produced some quite amazing pumpkins, the herbs have done well and last year there were tomatoes. We shall see what 2025 brings! 

We may have the sunshine and it is certainly delightfully warm in sheltered spots but we still have a bitingly cold wind. Consequently I went out to the supermarket wearing a warm hoody, a wooly beanie hat … and sunglasses! After doing some shopping I stood at the bus-stop near the supermarket trying to read the information on the Bee network app that Granddaughter Number Two installed on my phone some time ago. It’s hard to read digital information in bright sunlight when you are wearing sunglasses. Consequently I was still squinting at the screen when one of my possible buses arrived on the opposite side of the road to me. (There are two possible buses to get home from the supermarket, on opposite sides of the road to each other!!) Had I not been squinting at the small screen I would have been looking out for that bus itself and would almost certainly have seen it in time to cross the road safely and flag it down. As it was, I had to let it go and then waited 20 minutes or so for the alternative bus. 

In the process of doing all this, I pocket-dialled Granddaughter Number Two (pocket-dialling = accidentally calling someone while your phone is supposedly switched off in your pocket!) She was highly amused, especially as yesterday I pocket-dialled her mother in the same way. This despite my supposedly having switched the phone off before putting it in my pocket.

I was reading an article about the comedian Sara Pascoe, a comedian I have to say I don’t listen to. However, in the article she appeared as the mother of two young children, both under three years old, without going into a moaning diatribe about how hard life is a working mother. This may be because she had some difficulty conceiving and then had her two babies by IVF. Yes, it’s tiring being a mother but she enjoys it, even relishes it. 

Like many young women she went through years of people asking when she planned to ‘start a family’, a question we should really avoid as you never know what problems people might have. I was greatly impressed by her imaginary riposte to people asking if she was going to have kids, often parents and parents-in-law. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said to anybody: ‘Oh, have you been on QI? Ahhh, you should go on QI!’” she insists, settling into her archly patronising pep talk. “No I didn’t think I wanted to be on QI until I was on QI, and then it was like I looked back and my entire life had been leading up to me being on QI. Yes it’s very tiring being on QI, but it’s so worth it. I just wouldn’t want you to leave it too late and they’ll have stopped making it!”

I like it! 

That’ll be all for today apart from this cartoon.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Evening walks. Wildlife. Protective sculptures. Writing and drawing on walls. Imposing tariffs.

One advantage of longer days and lighter evenings is that you can go for a stroll after your evening meal, without needing to carry torches. This is what my daughter and I did with the smallest grandchildren yesterday.

On a Thursday I collect the two smallest grandchildren from school, and 8 year old Granddaughter Number Four and I chivy 5 year old Grandson Number Two away from the attractions of the school playground and his small friends so that we can catch a bus to my house. Some time later my daughter arrives and we all have tea together before she gives her father a lift to chess club on her way home with the children. Yesterday an old friend gave Phil a lift to chess club and so my daughter and the small people hung around a little longer than usual and we went for a walk in the last of the evening sunshine.

We more or less walked my usual running route, along the main road to Rumbles Lane where we took a left turn, diverging from my usual route. At the end of the lane we turned right onto an unmade road in front of a row of houses, past some fields, took ?another right and left and we were back onto Sandbed Lane, my usual route. From there we went down Hull Mill Lane to the millpond, where we stopped to play Pooh Sticks on the small bridge over the stream. There we saw frogs: it’s that time of year when frogs get busy. As we made our way into the wooded area leading to the next millpond, Eagle Mill Pond, we spotted deer on the hillside. 

Altogether a successful walk, nature-wise, My daughter and I commented that there never used to be deer around here when she was small. Maybe they were always there but we never saw them. In recent years, even though they are good at hiding themselves, we come across them on a fairly regular basis. 

The small children sat on trees and posed for us.

Recently I think I misread a headline, or maybe the news item I read had a misleading photo. It was all about a new statue / sculpture outside Manchester Piccadilly railway station “to welcome and protect passengers”. The picture showed a huge bee, the symbol of hardworking industrial Manchester. 

All very well, I thought, but isn’t it a bit superstitious to say that a bee sculpture will “protect passengers”? Checking up on the details now, I discover that the sculpture that is meant to do this is in fact a set of letters, an abbreviation of the name Manchester, made of metal pieces riveted together, representing the city’s industrial heritage. It’s placed on the pavement next to the taxi rank and it is intended to prevent vehicles from mounting the pavement and endangering passengers arriving at or leaving the station. There you go! 

Heritage of a different kind has been found in a former Tudor hunting lodge, The Ashes, in Inglewood Forest, near Penrith in Cumbria. Work on the property revealed 16th century wall paintings of fantastical plants and animals. One contemporary writer, Henry Peacham, described the style as “an unnaturall or unorderly composition for delight sake, of men, beasts, birds, fishes, flowers &c without (as we say) Rime or reason.” So that is how wealthy Tudors liked to decorate their houses.

Some friends of ours used to let their children draw pictures on a wall in their house. I wonder if those pictures will be rediscovered hundreds of years down the line, indicative of what early 21st century decor was like! 

Finally, here’s a little comment on the USA imposing tariffs, particularly  on small uninhabited islands.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Getting up later than intended. And a bit of nostalgia about radio and early television.

 When I was a child, before we had television in our house, we used to listen to the radio quite a lot. There were plays and serials as well as music and news broadcasts. One thing I remember listening to was “Journey Into Space”, a science fiction series. Special effects were all sound-created and therefore totally believable. Created in 1953 (I’ve just checked that on the internet) it ran for three series but seemed to me to go on forever. It was apparently the last UK radio programme to attract a bigger evening audience than television. There was always a cliffhanger, naturally. We kept going back for more. I remember none of the story lines, nor any of the characters, just the fact that they were frequently under attack from aliens whose mysterious music or just rhythm transmissions made the intrepid travellers sleepy and therefore easily defeated. At least once an episode you would hear the main characters intoning, droning, “I must not go to sleep! I must not go to sleep!”

I feel I should be repeating that in the morning when I have snoozed my alarm once or twice, eventually switched it off, and know that if I so much as close my eyes, the next time I open them half an hour at least will have gone past. All my determination to get the day started a little earlier will have been to no avail! However did I manage when I had to get up considerably earlier in order to be up and organised and ready to hit the road before rush hour started properly? It’s likely that my alarm back then did not have a snooze button. 

I don’t remember listening to specific music programmes on the radio in my childhood. We did however acquire a second hand wind-up gramophone from one of the church jumble sales we all helped at. It was a huge piece of wooden furniture with a speaker horn, like the one on the His Master’s Voice labels. At least that’s how ai remember it. It came with a stack of old 78s, some of them classical, some pf them perhaps slightly more modern, those silly songs that were all the rage for quite a while: ‘I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus” and “ I’m a blue toothbrush, you’re a pink toothbrush” and “The laughing Policeman” and such like. There was a little box of “needles” which we changed every so often, hoping to improve the quality of the music. My older sister and I made good use of it. The younger siblings were too young to be allowed to mess with it. Then one day disaster struck! We overwound it! There was a huge twang! Whatever spring mechanism made it work had broken. And that was the end of that! 

Not long after that we moved house. And then we got a television set. Before we knew it we were watching Pinky and Perky and the other puppets performing pop songs. My older sister learnt to dance a really good jive, a skill I envied, as I did her ability to do hand stands against the wall. And there was science fiction on the TV too. When “A for Andromeda” began to be broadcast, on the same night as I was supposed to go the Girl Guides, I suddenly discovered I had too much homework to be able to continue with my Girl Guiding. My father sussed me out and was quite disgusted but it was too late by then. i was hooked. 

Nowadays I’d be able to watch it on catch-up! Different times!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

April and poets. Artists and writers in conversation, Two Michaels’ thoughts and opinions.

 “April is the cruellest month”, said T.S. Eliot in “The Wasteland”. So far this year, however, it has been a very nice, sunny, blue-sky month. Mind you, it’s only the 2nd of April, so we have a way to go yet. Of course, the neighbours and I have been doing that North of England thing, washing everything that is not folded up and put away. The gardens are full of washing blowing dry in the wind and being warmed by the sun. It’s forecast to remain bright and sunny for the next few days too! 

Last night we caught the tail end of a programme about the artist David Hockney. He was being interviews by the writer and presenter Melvyn Bragg, two old gents well into their eighties (David Hockney was born in 1937 and Melvyn Bragg in 1939) having a conversation about the artist’s life, still full of ideas and enthusiasm. Two old gents each with a distinctive and easily recognisable way of speaking! David Hockney now lives and still paints in Normandy, mostly doing landscapes of his property there, especially now that he feels he “knows” his trees properly. He gets up and paints for hours every day - an example to us all. 

It was David Hockney who inspired me to “play” with he drawing programme on my iPad. Oh, to be able to produce the kind of works that created!

Now, here are some thoughts from two Michaels. First there is Michael Foot:

“We are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer “To hell with them!” The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”

Maybe today’s leaders need to look back at the likes of Michael Foot.

The second is Michael Rosen:

“Here's a thought: imagine all the alleged mistakes or even actual mistakes the non-parliamentary left in this country has been accused of making or actually making over the last 25 years. Call to mind the thousands of miles of newspaper print and the thousands of hours of broadcast time devoted to saying what terrible mistakes these are. Now compare these alleged or real mistakes with the death and destruction our leaders have brought through bombs and guns, either directly or indirectly. On the one side, words, demos, articles, social media posts. On the other the most ingenious and up to date ways of destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people.  

I imagine a Martian coming to Earth and hearing about this mis-match between the two sides and the difference between how the two-sides are regarded in the public arena. On one side there are people with banners in all sorts of outfits and looks. On the other are people in beautiful suits and uniforms, feted in TV studios, but, as the Martian notices, their hands are bloody. 'Why's that?' the Martian asks. 'Oh, don't worry about that?' say the suited and uniformed people. 'Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that.'”

We should listen to him as well!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reading or not reading the news. Artists. The madness of the world.

 I complain about losing an hour’s sleep when we put the clocks forward, as we did at the weekend, but I have to confess that I like having longer afternoons and lighter early evenings. Persuading myself to leave my warm bed in the morning remains a slight problem. The trouble with lingering in bed before getting up and going for a run means that by the time I have showered and we have had breakfast, half the morning has slipped away.

We have been having some nice mornings, however, even if the cloud moves in later. Today we have blue sky and sunshine. There’s a bit of a breeze and the air is still cold but if you find a sheltered spot to stand in the sunshine, it’s very pleasant and you can make believe that summer might arrive eventually. 

Over breakfast I skim the headlines in the newspapers online. Sometimes you have to go on and read the article as headlines can be misleading, with words chosen for dramatic effect. According to the head of BBC news, there is a “growing trend of news avoidance”. “I used to have the news on the TV every morning for an hour or so as I got the children ready for school and completed my household tasks,” said one person they spoke to. “Now it has literally been switched off and unplugged. I can’t cope with it any more. It’s just too much and there’s nothing I can do about it”. There are even columnists such as Eva Wiseman more or less advising us to avoid the news if we want to stay sane. Actually, she’s mostly advising turning off those annoying news alerts that pop up far too often on your mobile phone, the senders fully aware how difficult it is to resit looking when your phone goes piiing!.

As this article points out, news producers are concerned about falling audiences. People are turning away from established media news outlets. Some of that may be because it’s hard to find an unbiased source. So a lot of people get their news off social media. That too is biased, of course. You end up receiving material that is selected to match what AI perceives as your area of interest. And of course, I too get information from social media, but I try to keep things balanced. 

As I skim headlines and dip into articles, I bookmark things of interest and occasionally copy the odd paragraph, intending to come back to it later. In such cases, I sometimes forget what the original whole article was all about. Here’s an example:

“Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction. The Italian conceptual artist has been provoking and delighting audiences in equal measure since the 1990s. Cattelan has a new show, Bones, opening at the Gagosian in London in April and, to run alongside this, a set of posters will appear in Tube stations. For these, Cattelan has used the tropes of classic Greek myths to portray the trials of modern life. So next time you’re on the central line, look out for Sisyphus with a shopping trolley or Atlas dressed for the 9-5 with the weight of the world on his back.”

It was the image of Sisyphus with a shopping trolley that led to my saving that paragraph. 

Reading the introductory sentence, “Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction”, had me googling him, as I had no idea who he was. It turns out he’s the artist who duct-taped a fresh banana to a wall as part of an exhibition in 2019. He called it Comedian and it sold for $6.2 million in 2024. Not bad for a self-taught artist. 

I have to say I find the Sisyphus picture more interesting than the banana. 

In the wider world, and in the world closer to home, craziness continues. April is being dubbed “Awful April” because of price rises. Medics and journalists are being targeted by the IDF. The Met police are breaking into Quaker meeting houses and arresting young people for discussing the state of things. And Palestinian teenagers arrested without charge are dying in Israeli prisons.

That’s why people avoid reading the news. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!