Different degrees of dampness. When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire? Christmas trees

 I ran in the rain this morning. It’s actually quite a while since I have done that, partly because on days when the rain has been coming down in proverbial ‘stair rods’ I have simply chickened out and stayed indoors. Today it was not raining when I set out but the promise of rain on my weather app was enough to persuade me to put a rain jacket on. The rain I ran in was what the weathermen refer to as ‘light rain’, which presumably means it takes rather longer to soak you through than the ‘heavy’ variety.  That came some time after I had returned home, some truly torrential rain, provoking protests on our group chat from Granddaughter Number One who had to take her dog out in it as her housemate is away on a family visit to the USA. It’s a hard life! 

The torrential stuff had eased off by midday and now we have simply returned to cloudy and damp! Crisp and cold was more cheerful but did demand more effort to keep warm. 

I should not complain about the weather. At least we have a warm and dry home to return to. In Gaza and other places there are people living in makeshift tents with rain and wind making life extra difficult. Bad enough having to go on a daily hunt for water in warmer seasons, it must be horrific in freezing conditions. And how do you dry the clothes which got soaked in the rain? 

As this article tells us, the ceasefire is making precious little difference to life in Gaza. Air strikes continue, people are still being killed, there is is still not enough food despite some (insufficient) supplies being allowed in, and to make a bad situation worse, basic medical necessities are still in short supply. Medics told the Guardian on Sunday that stocks of gauze, antiseptics, thermometers and antibiotics were running low. Mohammed Saqr, the director of nursing at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said: “We are still suffering a severe lack of most of our supplies and medicines. We have daily crises, and the same shortages and deficiencies in supplies, and we are still exhausted as we are still receiving lots of casualties.

“There isn’t much difference from the period before the ceasefire. Unfortunately, the bombing is still going on … We don’t feel there is a big change.”

And yet reports still tell us that despite the continuing violence in Gaza having strained the ceasefire, both sides say they are committed to the agreement. Aid is still needed. We must not forget that.

Gaza hospitals running out of supplies as airstrikes continue, medics say | Gaza | The Guardian

Here in Delph, some gardens are already decorated with model reindeer and some homes are already displaying large Christmas trees in their windows. I am resolutely resisting the temptation to break out the Christmas ear rings. After all, it isn’t December … yet! In the village centre the tree which was erected yesterday morning, and which was even bedecked with lights by late afternoon, had disappeared. Goodness! Had someone stolen it! There hadn’t been a storm or even strong winds to blow it over. Someone in the co-op told me that they (whoever ‘they’ are) had decided it was too tall and the farmer (whoever that is) had had to take it away reduce its height. So it goes. By the time I came out of the co-op they were already re-erecting the abbreviated tree. Let’s hope it’s satisfactory this time.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Warmer or just less cold? Trees. Fringe nostalgia. Doctors.

As I ran round the village first thing this morning, a number of my regular nodding acquaintances commented that it was “warmer” today. I beg to differ. The correct description is “less cold”. But there was still ice on the millpond and, more dangerously, ice just below the surface of the puddles  on the bridle path, waiting like a booby trap for any unsuspecting walker or runner going even moderately quickly. 

The sense of community works though; we were all warning those who crossed our path of places with ice remaining or fallen trees still not removed. We need to look after each other.  

In the village centre they were distributing small christmas trees to participating shops, cafes, even individual houses. These trees will be positioned above the main doors of such places. They will be decorated ready for the great “Light Up Delph” ceremony, which will take place sometime very soon.

In the 1960s all the girls wanted to have smooth glossy hair with a smooth glossy fringe 

down to their eyebrows, just like Cathy McGowan, presenter of  the pop-music show “Ready Steady Go”. 

This was in the days before hair straighteners and the vast range of hair products available today, something of a nightmare for those of us with annoyingly naturally curly hair. I used to plaster my fringe to my forehead with one of the few products available, Amami Setting Lotion, and cycle to school secure in the knowledge that it would not shift. Arrived at school, I would comb out my stiff fringe and, lo and behold, a fashionable soft fringe would emerge.  Of course, if PE was on the timetable for that day, and if we had to go outside to play hockey in the drizzle, all my efforts were in vain.

Nowadays, Claudia Winkleman’s is the fringe to emulate. 

Even with my hair straighteners I am not sure I could quite achieve the “look”. Besides, if I were to manage to do so I suspect it might lead to divorce proceedings judging by Phil’s explosion whenever her image appears: “Good grief! How can she see anything?”

Anyway, here is a link to an article about clip-on fringes and the difference it can make to a woman’s confidence and life in general. Who knew that such a thing as a clip-on fringe existe

At around the same time that I was trying to have a fashionable fringe, I remember that our family doctor would “pop in” to check up on how the family was getting along. Similarly, moving on to the 1980s, I remember regular home visits from a health visitor in the few weeks after my babies were born, checking up that as a recently-delivered mother I was coping and the baby was thriving. I’m fairly sure that doesn’t happen now. Here’s an extract from an article about the NHS from today’s Guardian:

“GPs can no longer guarantee safe care for millions of patients because of a dangerous shortage of medics, Britain’s top family doctor has said.

Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of GPs (RCGP), said surgeries were desperate to hire more doctors to meet soaring demand for care but could not afford to do so because of a lack of core funding.

Exhausted family doctors have been working “completely unsafe hours” because their surgeries did not have the cash to recruit new staff or replace those quitting, increasing the risk of serious errors or deadly conditions being missed, she said.

“GPs will always push themselves to do what’s best for our patients, but we can’t go on like this,” Hawthorne said. “GP workload pressures are so pronounced that many of our members are telling us they are worried they can’t guarantee safe care when there aren’t enough GPs to keep up.””

Now, there are masses of recently qualified doctors whom would love to join a team at a local surgery. Unfortunately the funds are not being made available to fund those extra doctors and provide a more efficient service.  When you do manage to see your GP, you have to be rather assertive if you want to see a specific member of the team, at least at our local surgery. I’m pretty sure there would be fewer mental health problems if GPs had the time to get to know their patients and maybe notice problems before they became crises. In the same way, I am sure new young mothers would cope better with adjusting to motherhood if there were more regular support.

But it’s all down to funding and I expect someone will call me an idealist, a nostalgic idealist at that! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Feeling the cold. Axolotls. Beauty products.

 -3°: that was the temperature outside according to my weather app at 8.00 this morning before I went out for a run. By midday my app told me the temperature had risen to 2°, which is officially warmer but does not really feel much different. Even with the sun shining on it the heavy frost on the roof of the garden shed has not shifted! I noticed yesterday as I made my way to the smallest grandchildren’s school that the ice on puddles had not melted, even though it was now almost 3.00pm. 

However, it’s a beautiful day with blue sky and sunshine. Mustn’t grumble!

When I was at school we had an axolotl in a tank in the science laboratory. An amorphous grey blob of a creature, he did very little. His name was Aristotle. I have a very tiny purple plastic axolotl, given to me by Granddaughter Number Four; for some reason she had a bagful of tiny axolotls and was selecting different coloured ones to give to members of the family! In Mexico the axolotl Gorda, an elderly amphibian creature living in Mexico Caity’s museum, was selected to feature on the 50 peso bank note. And now millions of these not very valuable bank notes are being hoarded, well, not being spent, by perfectly ordinary Mexicans for the simple reason that they like the design. 

Perhaps it is because axolotls are a symbol of something uniquely Mexican. After all, they have been around since before the Aztecs, let alone since before the Spanish invaded! 

Here are some nerdy facts about words that a friend sent me:

• Dreamt is the only word that ends in mt.
• The oldest word in the English language is ‘town’.
• ‘Bookkeeper’ and ‘bookkeeping’ are the only two words in the English language with three consecutive double letter.
• The dot on top of the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle. (This is why if we care very little about something we can say we do not care one jot or tittle - both words probably derive from greek “iota”.)
• The word ‘testify’ derived from a time when men were required to swear on their testicles. (Women at that time were probably considered not sufficiently important to need to swear on anything!)

There have always been products on sale meant to ‘make us all more beautiful’ - nowadays even for men as well as women - but according to this article there are now more and more beauty products aimed at younger and younger girls. I accept that our nine year old Granddaughter Number Four knows the words to all sorts of pop songs, has a very definite fashion sense all her own, selects her well-coordinated outfits with care and compliments older female members of the family on their choice of clothing, but there is something disturbing about four year olds using face-masks, ‘cleansers’ and moisturisers. Small girls should be playing games and getting messy, not to say dirty. The only skincare they need is sun protection!  

 

There you go.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Thinking about living like a refugee.

 While we were away in Portugal, as we manoeuvred our way around the reasonably-sized hotel room - hardly a palatial suite - I reflected on the difficulties refugee families have in rooms of that size, often with several small children entertain as well as every other difficulty.

As our government makes plans to make it harder to seek asylum, here is something from Facebook by Gulwali Passarlay. Wikipedia tells me “he is a member of the Global Advisory Council of Displaced International (DI) and a dedicated advocate, humanitarian, and spokesperson for refugees and asylum seekers across the U.K. and Europe. A best-selling author, he is an award-winning activist and campaigner, a member of ARENE, and part of NEON Spokesperson Network. Since arriving in the UK in 2007 after being forced to leave Afghanistan as a 12-year-old boy, Gulwali has achieved beyond all odds to become a well-respected and sought-after public speaker, influencer, and political campaigner for refugee’s rights, social justice, and education.”

Here’s part of his story:

“Tomorrow marks the beginning of my 19th year in the United Kingdom. I arrived here as a frightened 13-year-old in November 2007, alone, searching for safety. Since then, I have spent nearly two decades  campaigning, advocating, and speaking across this country about refugee rights.

Over that time, I have watched successive governments repeat the same cycle of cruelty: deterrence, detention, deprivation, deportation. The latest proposal by the Home Secretary to “copy the Danish immigration model” is just another version of that cycle. It divides refugees into the “deserving” and the “undeserving”, trapping people in permanent uncertainty rather than offering stability and the chance to rebuild their lives.

It is wrong. It is immoral. It is ineffective. And history shows it has never worked.

The real impact of “temporary protection”

People cannot rebuild their lives when every 30 months they face the threat of removal. They cannot start businesses, pursue education, build families, or contribute fully to society. I know this personally.

It took me:

 • 5 years to finally receive refugee status

 • 11 years to get settlement

 • 15 years to become a British citizen

And that was under a system far more humane than what is being proposed today.

If I had been kept in limbo for 20 years, I would never have been able to:

 • finish school, college, university

 • earn a degree and a Master’s in governance

 • write The Lightless Sky

 • speak at hundreds of schools and universities

 • travel to 30 countries

 • carry the Olympic torch

 • start a business serving my local community

 • get married and raise two beautiful children

Everything I have achieved happened because I was eventually given stability, safety, and the ability to plan for the future.”

Our travel adventures pale into insignificance compared to stories like that.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Coming home … almost but not quite to Narnia!

Yesterday we left Figueira da Foz bathed in early morning sunshine. 

A lift had been organised to take us to Porto airport, scheduled to arrive at our hotel at 8.00 am. 8.00 arrived and no car materialised. Just as we began to be concerned a car turned up, not the scheduled vehicle but the private car of our designated driver. He had been unable to collect the car we would travel in as it was locked in a garage at his place of work! After a short discussion he agreed to give us a lift to his works garage where we waited for about 20 minutes for his colleague to turn up and unlock the garage! Fun and games!

Phil dozed in the back while the driver chatted to me about anything and everything. However, I still have no idea what his name is! I must find out for next year and also improve my Portuguese instead of relying on his good English. 

As a rule I enjoy time spent in Porto airport; it’s not too big, not too crowded and has a pleasing collection of small shops and restaurants. We usually manage a light lunch or at least coffee and a croissant while waiting for our gate to be announced. Yesterday, the information and the instruction ‘go to gate’ appeared almost as soon as we were in the main concourse.

So we duly ‘went to gate’ and waited … and waited … and waited. For well over an hour! Had we known that nothing serious was going to happen and that there were precious few facilities on that side of this final passport control we would have remained in the main concourse a while longer. But there we were, with only a measly coffee in a paper cup and an egg, cheese and ham bagel to sustain us!

Eventually we boarded, the plane took off, and we arrived at Manchester airport in a rain storm!

Then we tramped for what seemed like miles from arrivals to the railway station (making up for steps we had not counted up earlier in the day) where we hopped on a train to Manchester Piccadilly. Actually it was going all the way to Edinburg but its first stop suited us fine. A tram took is to Ashton where our daughter kindly collected us. This was a much faster airport to home journey than the occasion when we made the mistake of catching a tram from the airport to Manchester Victoria, chugging along slowly and seeming to stop every couple of hundred yards along the way! You live and learn.

This morning I woke to sunshine, mostly blue sky, snow on the distant hills,

the ford on my running route overflowing,

a fallen tree blocking another section of my route,

and a temperature hovering around -1°. Yes! -1° !! And it’s forecast to get colder. Roads going from here to Yorkshire and Derbyshire have already had problems with snow! 

Storm Claudia has apparently gone on her wicked way but Winter appears to have moved in. 

The aftermath of a holiday always involves washing and putting away the clothes you took with you. I also took a bus-ride to Tesco to replenish our supplies of … just about everything.

We’re home! 

Oh, and here is cartoon by Sempé (see yesterday’s post), which I dedicate to male friends who have described participating in teacher-bating events of this kind.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Thunder. Chess. Looking for lunch. Borrowed vocabulary and policies. Worshipping Thor.

I was woken at about 2.00 this morning by a thunderstorm, rain lashing down (again!) and thunder rumbling and rolling around. This morning everything is a lot calmer. The wind has died down. The sun is shining. If there’s a further improvement in the weather it’ll be because we are going home tomorrow. 

We have just come to end of what I am told is the 17th Festival Internacional do Xadrez here in Figueira da Foz. We‘ve not attended all 17 but we’ve been to quite a few. Always enjoyable, even when Storm Claudia comes along.

Here’s a chess-related photo from Nairobi, Kenya. 

‘Young people compete at a chess tournament in the Kibera township. The tournament brings together 195 children from different informal settlements in the Kenyan capital with the aim of nurturing young minds, strengthening critical thinking and inspiring the next generation.’ 

Today we are hunting for somewhere new and interesting to go to for lunch. This may be difficult as many places close on Mondays. We shall see.

Further to my remarks about Icelandic yesterday, here’s a word I found which maybe should be introduced into English, which is, after all, a language influenced by all sorts of cultures: 

Hoppípolla, pronounced hop-pee-poh-lah (Icelandic verb). To jump in puddles. A playful act that celebrates childlike joy, wonder, and the delight of small, unexpected moments in life.

Hygge (a Danish and Norwegian word that describes a cozy, contented mood evoked by comfort and conviviality) has become fairly standard English, so why not hoppipolla as well. I’m sure A. A. Milne, with his love of puddly places (from his collection of poems for children Now We Are Six, I think), would approve. 

Here’s a ‘Men Behaving Badly’ comment on the Trump - BBC confrontation: ‘Our client has broadcast all of the right words, but not necessarily in the right order.’

I am old enough to remember that scene from the TV show where Morecambe and Wise harassed, nay humiliated, Andre Previn.

We’ve borrowed vocabulary from the Danes (see my reference to Hygge)  and now it seems the UK Home Office would like to copy some of Denmark’s policies regarding immigrants. Here’s a link to one of the latest ideas, seizing immigrants possessions to pay for processing costs. 

According to Home Office minister Alex Norris on Sky News, “At the moment, the British public pay billions of pounds a year so that those seeking asylum, or those who have already failed in their applications, can be supported in their accommodation and their living.

“It is right if those people have money in the bank, people have assets like cars, like e-bikes, they should be contributing. No, we’re not going to be taking people’s heirlooms off them at the border. But … people have cars. People have e-bikes. Those are assets they should contribute to the cost of benefits.”

Now, I am sure that people seeking asylum want to contribute to costs. Maybe it should be made easier for them to actually work and pay taxes and so on. I’m a little worried that statements such as the above by Mr Norris might provide fuel for myths about ‘rich’ asylum seekers exploiting Britain! We live in dangerous times!

On a lighter note, here’s a link to an article about paganism in Sweden, and people worshipping the ancient god Thor. Maybe it’s a sign of how alienated some people feel in the modern world. Worshipping Thor perhaps brings them a modicum of comfort in trouble times, after all, he was the god of war. Wikipedia describes him as ‘a hammer-wielding god associated with thunder, storms, strength, protection, fertility, farmers, and free people’. Maybe it was Thor who woke me in the small hours of this morning. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.