Road trip to York. Barbecues. A bit of Springsteen controversy.

Yesterday my daughter and I, with the two youngest grandchildren, went to York to visit Granddaughter Number Two, who is coming to the end of her studies at the university there. We spent rather a long time in the York Museum Gardens, first of all eating ice cream at what Granddaughter Number Two assured us is the best icecream seller in the city, and then looking at ruins of the Abbey of St Mary.

Originally founded in 1055 and dedicated to Saint Olaf, it was “refounded”  in 1088 by King William II and rededicated to the Virgin Mary. There followed some problems with fires and some rebuilding, it became the largest and richest Benedictine establishment in the north of England and one of the largest landholders in Yorkshire, was worth over £2,000 a year, (equivalent to £1,700,000 in 2023). No wonder it fell victim to Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries. On 26 November 1539 the Abbey surrendered £2,085 and 50 monks to the crown.

We went on to wander round the city centre and eventually to eat pizza at Pizza Express, which has become a kind of tradition when we go to visit Granddaughter Number Two. And we walked back along the old walls, rather quickly towards the end of our walk as we realised our carparking ticket was about to run out and we might need to pay more! 

The sun shone on us all day. granddaughter Number Two, naturally very pale, wore a sundress and neglected/forgot to put on sunblock and ended up with rather pink shoulders and back. She doesn’t expect in to turn to a beautiful bronzed effect. Rather, it will perhaps peel but certainly fade back to white. Her mother slathered her with aftersun cream before we set off back for home.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of barbecues. Maybe it’s because I don’t really appreciate red meat. Yes, I know you can barbecue chicken but somehow I’ve always found other ways, preferable to me, of cooking chicken. My particular complaint is against disposable barbecues. They are one of the causes of wildfires around here with our peat-based moorlands. It seems that the people who appreciate disposable barbecues don’t understand that the idea is that you take it home to dispose of it safely. And apparently sandy beaches are no better than peat moorlands when it comes to abandoning these infernal devices. Here’s a link to an article about children who have been seriously burnt by treading on sand which covers buried disposable barbecues. Horrific stuff! They should be banned! 

We’ve been deleting stuff from the material we have recorded from TV over the years, stuff that we’ve watched over and over again. We wanted there to be space to record a marathon set of programmes BBC2 is broadcasting this evening, all centred upon Bruce Springsteen. Maybe they want to preempt the Springsteen biopic due to be released later this year. And this morning I read that The Boss’s criticism of Trump during his recent Manchester concerts has caused a schism in his fans in the USA. Republicans are not happy with him! Oh dear! Here is a link to an article about it.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Warding off the weather. Medieval reading matter. Outspoken sportsmen. Aid distribution problems.

Today is wild and windy but it’s not raining, despite the forecast. I have just hung washing to dry in the spare room and so, of course, the sun has now come out, suggesting I could have hung it out in the garden to be blown around. Maybe it will work like a magic charm and keep the sun shining on us this afternoon. It’s rather like taking an umbrella out with you to prevent it from raining, rather like medieval amulets to ward off evil spirits. 

I have been reading and rereading (because initially I read them out of order) a series of books by Kate Mosse, set in medieval France and Holland, with struggles raging between protestants and catholics. My imaginary world is full of medieval characters, one of whom is obsessed with collecting holy relics, such as parts of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. (Medieval madness, nowadays replaced by having a famous singer sign his name on your arm and having it tattooed!) What I don’t want is for someone to make a series for Netflix based on these characters. Sometimes you need them just to remain in your head. 

I hear that the young Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz has turned down sponsorship from Elon Musk, who wanted him to wear a shirt advertising his Tesla cars during the Italian Open. During a press conference following one of his matches, Alcaraz addressed the situation directly. “I have nothing against Tesla or Mr. Musk, and I respect what he’s done in the tech world,” Alcaraz said. “But I believe in being authentic, and I only represent brands that align closely with my values—on and off the court. For me, it’s not just about money or fame. It’s about staying true to who I am.”

The young Spaniard elaborated, explaining that while Tesla is known for innovation, he felt the brand did not resonate with his personal principles, particularly when it comes to environmental sustainability and ethical alignment. Alcaraz is known for his support of renewable energy and grassroots environmental initiatives in Spain, and he suggested that accepting the sponsorship would have felt hypocritical given his personal stance.

That’s another sportsman making sort of political statements!

Here’s a photo of Palestinians carrying huge packages of aid. Apparently Israeli soldiers opened fire on some of the Palestinians. 

Here’s part of a report from Haaretz:

“One Palestinian was killed and 48 others wounded by IDF fire on Wednesday, as just one of four designated distribution hubs for humanitarian aid opened in the Gaza Strip and was quickly overrun. The hub constitutes the first attempt at giving out aid after Israel blocked all entry of aid in early March. 

The distribution points are guarded by private security contractors and are surrounded by chain-link fences channeling Palestinians into what resemble military bases surrounded by large sand berms. GHF said its military contractors had not fired on the crowd but "fell back" before resuming operations. The IDF claims it fired warning shots only.

Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office for the Palestinian territories, had earlier told reporters in Geneva that 47 people were wounded, mostly by gunfire.

On Wednesday, the Foundation announced that its hubs would not be opened that morning due to "arrangements" that needed to be made following the events of Tuesday. It also said that it is working diligently to renew the distribution as soon as possible.”

And here’s a link to an article about it in the Guardian.

There must be a better way of doing things.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

On the importance of words!

 Here’s a new word! New to me anyway: 

foofaraw. 

It means excessive or flashy ornamentation. 

A fuss over a trifling matter. 

Overly excessive or flashy ornamentation or decoration. I

I came across it in an article about the National Spelling Bee in the USA. There was a foofaraw, in the second definition given above, about accepting “womyn” as an alternative, but correct, spelling of “women”. Some people objected to the alternative spelling on the grounds that it was an instance of “crazy indoctrination of our children” into … shock! horror! … feminism! One parent declared, “This is supposed to be about spelling and language, not ideology.”

Here’s bit of explanation about the spelling: 

“Womxn and womyn are alternative political spellings of the English word woman used by some feminists. There are other spellings, including womban (a reference to the womb or uterus) or womon (singular), and wombyn or wimmin(plural). Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix "-man"or "-men", see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm. 

These re-spellings existed alongside the use of herstory, a feminist re-examination and re-telling of history.”

Hmmm, I wonder what do with words like “specimen”!

There are probably more important linguistic things than words ending in “man” or “men” to get het up about. The writer George Orwell understood the intimate relationship between language, thought, and politics. He observed how “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”

And he wrote that long before countries were mired in the current messes they find themselves victims of.

Here’s a poem by a Palestinian poet, Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023:

And if one day, O Light 

All the galaxies 

Of the entire universe 

Had no more room for us 

You would say: ‘Enter my heart, 

There you will finally be safe.’” 

It features in an open letter from a large group of writers calling for an end to the genocide and an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At one point it says:

“Too often, words have been used to justify the unjustifiable, deny the undeniable, defend the indefensible. Too often, too, the right words - the ones that mattered - have been eradicated, along with those who might have written them."

On the subject of words and language, here’s a link to an article about our diplomats all over the world being monolingual. That’s another aspect of language and communication that is important. In my last few years as a Modern Languages teacher, I worked at making it possible for students at our college to get a taste of Arabic and Mandarin. A few of my students went on to study those languages at university. As far as I am concerned it is a matter of courtesy, as well as diplomacy, to try to communicate in the language of country where you work, or even simply spend your holidays. With cuts to foreign language learning possibilities in our schools and universities, however, I am not surprised that so few of our diplomats speak languages other than English. 

Words are important.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Contradictory weather. And victory marches.

It’s raining again. Or maybe it’s still raining. No, we’ll go with the first statement as it wasn’t raining when I went out first thing this morning. So we’ve gone from a warm, dry spring back to a damp, dull, very cool spring. My Spanish sister (I’ve just been speaking to her as it’s her birthday) tells me that in Cádiz they’ve gone from exceptionally rainy weather to hot and dry, almost overnight, with temperatures heading up towards 30°! Phew! Things are, as they say, hotting up!

Yesterday Liverpool went from football celebration to chaos as someone drove his car into the crowds lining the street. Nobody seems to know what really happened, or what motivated it. The police very quickly released the information that the driver of the vehicle is ethnically white British, aged 54, apparently not connected to any terrorist organisation.  They are being praised for releasing that information, thus avoiding the kind of rumours that spread about the attacker in Southport last summer which led to racist incidents. No doubt more information will come out eventually. 

From elsewhere in the world came this report, also about yesterday: 

“Thousands of Israelis on Monday joined a state-funded march through the Muslim quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem, where large groups chanted racist slogans including “Gaza is ours”, “death to the Arabs” and “may their villages burn”.

The annual march, paid for and promoted by the Jerusalem city government, celebrates Israel’s capture and occupation of East Jerusalem and its holy sites in the war of 1967. The Israeli takeover is not recognised internationally.

The Jerusalem municipality advertises the event, known as the flag march, as a “festive procession”, part of a broader programme of events celebrating the “liberation” of the city.

The march has been marred by racism and attacks on Palestinians for years, and is preceded by a campaign of violence in the Old City that in effect shuts down Palestinian majority areas, particularly in the Muslim Quarter.”

State-supported demonstrations in praise of “superiority”! 

As I read about it I was reminded of the Orangemen’s Parades of my childhood in Southport. Every summer, on the 12th of July, the protestant Orangemen would travel from Liverpool, with their bands and the men and boys in military-style uniforms and the girls in cheerleader-style outfits, waving their pom-poms in the air. They would march through the centre of our town. It was one day in the year when my father would not allow us to go into the centre: too many, often drunken, hoodlums he would say. 

At the time I had no idea what it was all about: a primarily Ulster Protestant celebration of the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690).

It’s amazing how religion and politics get intermingled with colonialism and one group taking over another group’s land. It’s also amazing how the victors show off, rubbing the losers’ noses in it. 

And as far as I know, the Orangemen still march in Southport on The Twelfth! 

Peace in our time? 

Michael Rosen has been writing about inquiries into antisemitism:-

“The antisemitism inquiry at Goldsmiths University of London has now been going on for two years and nothing has been published. No interim reports, no statements. 

I'm now in search of possible theories as to why this is the case.

1. There is so much antisemitism at Goldsmiths, it's taking years to find it and describe it.

2. The subject 'antisemitism' is so complex that it's taking years to understand it, define and describe it.

3. The person or people involved in conducting the inquiry don't know what they're doing or why.

4. The person or people involved in the conducting do know what they're doing, they have produced a report but the people who commissioned the inquiry don't like it and have knocked it back.

5. The people who commissioned the inquiry now wish they hadn't commissioned it. That might be because:

a) it looks a bit odd to be spending something like 200k on one particular kind of racism and not on others

b) they've realised that when the inquiry does the report, people are going to ask, who said that we needed this inquiry in the first place and why?

c) they are worried that the report will be 'inflammatory in the present context'.

6. They're tired.

7. The college has run out of dosh. 

8. Any  other suggestions?”

Personally I wound like to know how they have managed to spend £200k on such an enquiry without anything to show at the end of it! 

That’s another unsolved mystery.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Gary Linekar says goobye to the BBC. What footballers are “allowed” to do. The problems of aid-distribution.

 Gary Linekar said goodbye to Match of the Day and the BBC last night, after 26 years presenting the programme. There was a lot of praise for his work as a presenter from footballers and pundits. His departure in the end was hastened by his criticism of Zionist Israel and standing up for Gaza. According to this article, it wasn’t the first time he was more than a little outspoken.

There was his opening monologue to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, in which he succinctly but pointedly laid out all the human rights abuses that had occurred in the host country, and quickly put FIFA under pressure for allowing it to happen. It made for unexpectedly stirring television.

Then, post-Covid, his outspokenness grew more pronounced. In 2023, he created a firestorm by comparing the Conservative government’s language surrounding asylum seekers to “that used by Germany in the 30s”. The press were kicked into a frenzy and called for his head. The BBC decided to take him off-air for the next episode. In solidarity, pundits like Ian Wright, Alan Shearer, Micah Richards and Jermaine Jenas refused to appear on the episode. In the end a weird compromise was struck, with the BBC showing a commentary-free compilation of highlights from that day’s matches. For some, it was the best episode in years.

Sports pundits are apparently meant to keep their commentary to their preferred sport. Quite often actors are similarly expected to keep their mouths shut. Only when they appear on something like Desert Island Discs are they really allowed to have opinions. 

Marcus Rashford a star player for Manchester United and the England squad, got away with it when he spent the pandemic campaigning hard to fight child food poverty in the UK. He‘s spoken publicly about his personal experiences as a child growing up in Manchester with a single parent, and how this has influenced his work and activism.

He pushed the government to provide free meals to children in financially struggling families during the school holidays nationwide. He also recently set up a task force to end child food poverty in the UK. 

Would he get away with it if he were criticising Mr Starmer’s government? 

Otherwise footballers are allowed to be charitable: 

There’s Ronaldo: In 2015 Cristiano Ronaldo was named the most charitable athlete in the world for the vast sums of money he donates to various causes, including £53,000 to pay for a 10-month-old baby’s operation and the funding of a nine-year-old cancer patient’s medical bills.

A research centre at the hospital where Ronaldo’s mother was treated for cancer was also funded by the Portuguese’s £105,000 donation.

And Salah: Egyptian child Abdelrahman Mahmoud suffers from bone marrow cancer and requires an expensive transplant.

Finding out his compatriot’s dream was to meet Mohammed Salah, the Liverpool forward is in regular contact with him, and is paying for his treatment.

Not a stranger to a kind gesture, Salah has also donated to the Association of Veteran Egyptian Players and turned down a luxury villa as a reward for getting Egypt to the World Cup, instead asking businessman Mamdouh Abbas to donate to his home village

And Drogba: African player Didier Drogba has his own foundation that provides food,  

clothing, educational and health supplies to poor children in Africa. And he has received an award for his work in Africa with his foundation. The player has also collaborated in the construction of hospitals and orphanages for children. 

Their actions are allowed to speak but their words, apparently, should be kept to themselves.

Meanwhile, the killing goes on in Gaza. Here’s a link to an article about a doctor who lost nine of her own children when an airstrike struck the family home (is a tent or shelter a home?) while she was working to save the lives of other injured children. 

And the starvation continues. Here’s a link to an article about the head of the US-backed Gaza aid group who has resigned because he says the job is impossible and the plan unworkable.

“That plan, which had been set to begin by the end of May, was initiated by Israel and involves private companies – instead of the UN and aid groups who have handled Palestinian aid for decades – transporting aid into Gaza to a limited number of so-called secure distribution sites, which Israel said would be in Gaza’s south.

Heads of household would be expected to collect boxes weighing up to 20kg with several days’ supply of food and basic hygiene items like soap for their families. There is no provision for those too sick or weakened by famine to walk long distances across Gaza’s ruined landscape with heavy loads.

“From what we have understood, the plan would increase the ongoing suffering of children and families in the Gaza Strip,” UN children’s fund spokesperson Jonathan Crickx said earlier this month.

“How is a mother of four children, who has lost her husband, going to carry 20kg back to her makeshift tent, sometimes several kilometres away?” Crickx said. “The most vulnerable people, including the elderly, people with disabilities, the sick and wounded, and orphans, will face huge challenges to access aid.””

And only now are some of the mass media even talking about the problem. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!