Sunny mornings needed. A bit of stuff about words and the use of language.

Despite the weathermen predicting heavy rain, today began with blue sky and sunshine. It doesn’t make it any easier to persuade yourself to get out of bed but it makes everyone you meet (when you eventually get up and go out!) more cheerful and positive about things. We need more days which begin with sunshine … even if it gets cloudy later.

Here is a collection nicknames for lazy co-workers, sent to me by a friend who enjoys words as much as I do:

Cordless - only works for two hours.

E.T. - always wants to go home.

Kitkat - always taking a break.

Seaweed - just floats around all day.

Sensor light - only works when someone walks past.

Wheelbarrow - only works when pushed.

Adrian Chiles, writer, tv/radio presenter, has been ranting a bit about mis-used apostrophes, in this particular case seeing a sign for “WALE’S LARGEST VAPE SHOP” and being so outraged that he almost missed the fact that the advertising poster went on to announce that they had the CHEAPEST PRICE’S. It’s one of my frequent bugbears. We did once sneak out late at night to remove an errant apostrophe from a notice outside the pub next door! It’s not impossible to teach the use of apostrophes, even to quite small children. Knowing how punctuation works is, in my opinion, more important than learning about fronted adverbials! However it is quite complicated to teach where to put the apostrophe when the word already ends in S.

I

But the writer of this letter published in response to the item about WALE’S / WALES’S knows how to do it:

 “Re Adrian Chiles’s item, while on holiday in Northumberland last year I visited a delightful cafe that sold various local crafts including handmade “Christma’s card’s”.

Jane Marsh

London”

Another bugbear of mine is the Americanisation of the English language. Granddaughter Number Two regularly used ‘gotten’ instead of ‘got’, which I am fully aware used to be standard English, emigrated to America, probably with those Pilgrim Fathers, and has now made its way back. Despite my knowing this, the use of gotten still grates on my ears. 

Anyway, here is a cartoon by Stephen Collins entitled “‘Can I get a sausage roll?’ and other Americanism you should never hear in Greggs”:

By the way, every time we pass a Greggs (which perfectionists might say really needs an apostrophe) some member of the family will remind us of an American friend who declared herself impressed by the goods sold in G.R. Eggs - so impressed that she even punctuated the name for us! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone!

Sharenting - posting pictures of children - not a completely new phenomenon.

 It’s almost February. January is almost over. It’s still cold. One of my nodding acquaintances told me this morning that she had just been away for a few days in and around Torquay where the temperature was a balmy 14° and they had blue sky and sunshine. Blue sky and sunshine we manage occasionally around here but 7° or 8° seems to be our current maximum temperature. Still, the days are gradually growing longer. Today is a changeable day, changing from grey and dull to blue sky and bright. So it goes.

Among the new words I come across from time to time is ‘sharenting’. This is the practice of putting lots of pictures of your children on social media. Some people make money out of it apparently. Others are pressured by family and friends to post those pictures, which seems like nonsense as it is quite possible to post those photos onto a closed group. Some people, like a friend of our son, refuse categorically to allow photos of their children to be posted on social media. Grandparents have always asked for photos of the grandchildren but it used to be actual photos, not digital stuff. Indeed, my bookshelves seem to be festooned with photos of various grandchildren at different stages in their lives.

I suppose children have always been “exploited”. I remember the ‘bonny baby’ competitors that were held in my childhood, the forerunners of the pageants such as ‘Little Miss Texas’. And images of children have long been used in advertising. Pears soap used Millais’ “Bubbles” in an early advertising campaign. 

I read that in 1958, the annual "Miss Pears" competition began, with the offer of £1,000 prize money, and the winner's image to be used on soapboxes and print advertisements for the year.

Even before the competition was instituted they sought out photos of children to use. I distinctly remember being told as a small child that ai could never be a “Pears” photo child as I had freckles. Pears were seeking a flawless image for their product and freckles were considered to be a blemish! Ah! The trials of being a ginger-haired freckly!

 Amazingly the competition continued until 1997, with parents entering their young daughters, many aged just three or four, resulting in 25,000 entries every year. Wow!

I confess to posting pictures of my grandchildren and occasionally copies of photos of my children, which I couldn’t post in their childhood as social media was non-existent.m. Mostly I try to be discreet. Today I have posted photos of art work produced by the two youngest, ages 9 and 6: a joint effort sunset picture 

and a solo effort by the youngest, with a whole story of a mole, complete with pink nose, popping up at sunrise to greet the day.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Protest songs. And a rant about overusing IT and losing human connections.

We’re back to dull and grey here today, but it didn’t rain on me as I ran round the village. Probably because the cloud has moved back in it’s not been frosty. It is still cold however, 3° according to my weather app but feeling colder as there is a damp wind.

It’s colder in Minneapolis. Bruce Springsteen has written and recorded a protest song: The Streets of Minneapolis. Here are the first two verses:

[Verse 1]

Through the winter's ice and cold

Down Nicolet Avenue

A city aflame fought fire and ice

'Neath an occupier's boots

King Trump’s private army from the DHS

Guns belted to their coats

Come to Minneapolis to enforce the law

Or so their story goes

[Verse 2]

Against smoke and rubber bullets

In the dawn’s early light

Citizens stood for justice

Their voices ringing through the night

And there were bloody footprints

Where mercy should have stood

And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets

Alex Pretti and Renee Good

And here is a link to the song itself.

No doubt some of Mr Trump’s people will dismiss him as ‘just a singer’ but we need those singers expressing outrage. We need real, human responses.

Here’s a link to The Long Read in the Guardian, all about how we have grown used to over-using technology in our everyday lives. It is, as you would expect, quite long and points out how we are losing our physical connections with other people.

Here’s a small sample:

“While writing this, I dropped into a casual Indian restaurant I’ve been going to for years, only to find that, since my last visit, the system had changed so that you no longer say your order to a fellow human. Instead, you punch it in on a touchscreen even if someone is behind the counter. I helped the next customer, an old woman who just wanted a cup of chai, figure out the screens for her order. The process took us so much longer than saying “a cup of chai, please” and precluded any human contact with the servers, though at least she and I interacted with each other.”

Now, the writer is based in California where things are perhaps more extreme than here but it’s creeping in. Some examples:

Our bank is closing more branches. We are all encouraged, indeed expected, to bank online but sometimes you might want or really need to speak to a proper human assistant.

Phil recently purchased something online (yes, I know he should gone to an actual shop but it would have involved a trip to Manchester centre in the cold weather!) which turns out not to be suitable. He can’t just return it via the post office but now needs to go online for instructions on how to return the goods! That’s how inertia sets in and people order, and keep, stuff that’s not quite suitable.

I have railed at length about the automisation of supermarket checkouts. Even in our fairly small co-op store in the village as you approach the checkouts, you are assailed by a recorded voice on one of three self-service checkouts, instructing you to “present one item or swipe your Co-op card to start”. There are still two manned checkouts fortunately, which is just as well since the self-service machines only accept card payments.

Of course, a lot of people don’t even set foot in the supermarkets but do their “big family shop” online and have it delivered. It saves time for working people! Yet I remember being a working woman who did my “big family shop” in a supermarket on my way home from work. Not only did I do the shopping but I frequently met old friends and acquaintances and we caught up with each other’s news!

All the online shopping, the online banking, the online working from home cuts us off from contact with other human beings. And even that casual contact with  shop assistants and bank clerks is important to our humanity. The number of people in shops and on the streets, watching out for others is reducing. And so people become nervous of going out on the streets; after all, the media tells us they are dangerous places! And so anxiety increases and other more serious mental health problems - statistics are constantly reminding us of the high percentage of men, women and children with ‘issues’! 

They say that it takes a village to raise a child. Well surely it also takes a community to keep us all sane. I have a nodding acquaintance with a large number of people in our local community. I am more likely to know their dogs’ names than the people’s names but still we stop and chat and look out for each other.

We need more of that and less IT-based stuff. IT generated girlfriends / boyfriends/ friends / advisors / therapists can only replace people to a limited extent! That’s my opinion, at least!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Cold weather here and there. Wednesday efficiency. ICE Not wanted in Italy.

It was cold and frosty early this morning. This was not evident when my alarm rang. It was much more a question of whether I could persuade myself to get up and organised and head for Uppermill market or snooze the alarm a couple of times, run round our village and catch a bus to Uppermill later, after breakfast. The latter option won. I still have fish I bought last Wednesday in the freezer, so there was no rush to get before the fish-man left.

So I eventually got out of bed and went for a run round the village. It was a beautiful, crisp, clear morning - blue sky and (rather chilly) sunshine to cheer everyone up after the grey days we’ve had recently. The frost was still around and the more northerly of the two millponds on my route had a new thin skin of ice. It must have been quite lot colder overnight.

It’s a lot colder though in New York city where, according to this article, they had up to 15 inches of snow in some places, 8 people have been found frozen to death, and the River Hudson froze! 

And in Sicily they’re having problems with a hilltop town sliding away. A storm caused a landslide and houses and cars just slid away. Nobody has been killed. Residents whose property is in imminent danger have been evacuated and those in other zones have been warned.

Also in Italy there have been some complaints about the proposal that ICE should have a security role in the Winter Olympics about to start there next Friday. Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, told RTL radio that the agents would not be welcome in the city “because they don’t guarantee they’re aligned with our democratic security management methods”.

“This is a militia that kills,” he said. “It’s clear that they are not welcome in Milan, there’s no doubt about it. Can’t we just say no to Trump for once? We can take care of their security ourselves. We don’t need ICE.”

There you go. Protests continue against ICE in the USA. By pure coincidence I have just read Isabel Allende’s book, The Wind Knows My Name, with stories of children separated from their parents, beginning with one Kindertransport child and looking at cases right up into 2022. The immigration and refugee problem has been going on for a long time! 

Getting back to my Wednesday, after breakfast I hopped on a bus to Uppermill. There I called in at our GP’s clinic to arrange for a blood test, as my doctor had reminded to do. They could fit me in within half an hour! That was a surprise, giving the lie to the stories about how inefficient the NHS can be. So I scuttled down to the local library, exchanged my library books and hurried back to the clinic. There I was efficiently dealt with, unlike a couple of people I spoke to who had been waiting some considerable time!

A quick stop at the Italian greengrocery, where they had rhubarb, the first I have seen this season, and in no time at all I was on the bus and homeward-bound! 

Sometimes things just fall into place!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

No snow. Rain. Mobile phones. Weather in various places. Road safety and large vehicles.

 Well, the promised snow has not arrived … yet. It was, however, bucketing down with rain when I snoozed my alarm. Listening to the rain, I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere early and that snoozing my alarm was not sufficient. So I reset the alarm and went properly back to sleep for a while, much better than snoozing my alarm every 8 minutes or so and dozing between alarm calls. 

In the days before mobile phones served as alarm clocks, most of us used an actual clock which was much harder to set to “snooze”. Perhaps we slept better for it. Certainly an actual alarm clock could not wake you at 7.00am with the ‘ping’ of a text message, usually not so urgent that it could not have waited until a more civilised time but which has you feeling that you need to look at it just in case! One of these days I’ll ignore a genuinely urgent message because I have dismissed the ‘ping’ as yet another enquiry about the Italian conversation class from a fellow class member.

Here is a cartoon - ‘The Pocket Telephone; When Will it Ring? by W. K. Haselden - first published in The Mirror in March 1919.

The rain had stopped by mid-morning. I suggested a walk round the village after breakfast but Phil was expecting a delivery and so we waited … during which time it could well begin to rain again. But the parcel arrived and we walked without getting wet! Our river is running high though.

In other parts of the country the rain has been much worse than here. The River Ex has flooded land around Exeter, for example.

In Australia they are suffering from the heat. Quite how you operate when the temperatures reach close to 50° is a great mystery to me. On the other side of globe a good deal of the USA is gripped by snowstorms, as if they didn’t already have enough problems with ICE!

I still have a driving licence but have not actually driven for years and years. It becomes increasingly unlikely that I ever will again as I find modern traffic so daunting. I have undoubtedly mentioned before that my very first car, in the mid 1970s, was a much loved bright red Citroen 2CV. I look at photos, even very occasionally see a Deux Chevaux while I am out and about and shudder at the lack of safety features. It might be rather like driving a sardine can. And modern cars are all so large! I have great admiration, by the way, for the bus drivers who manoeuvre the roads around here where huge vehicles are parked all lver place, making driving on the narrow roads rather like a slalom. 

Now I read that huge pick-up trucks, described in this article as US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks, are becoming more popular on UK roads. Our next door neighbour has one but he does have horses in a field somewhere reasonably close by and the rear section of his pickup is often full of hay. But I am willing to bet that many drivers of such vehicles do not really need that facility. As the article points out, they are a danger to cyclists and pedestrians, especially child-sized pedestrians and in the event of collisions probably cause more damage because of their sheer height!

Number of US-style ‘battering ram’ pickup trucks on UK roads has nearly doubled in a decade | Road safety | The Guardian

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Snowdrops. Possible snow. ICE protests. Prescient TV programmes. Terminology.

  We have snowdrops in the garden. The snowdrop patch is well established, even though the flowers themselves are amazingly small. Up the hill in Dobcross they usually have bigger snowdrops than we do. Perhaps theirs are foreign, imported snowdrops. Ours survived having a skip dumped on them when we first bought the house and substantial renovation work was going on. They just bounced back afterwards - nature at its most resilient!

The fact that the snowdrops are opening up is often a sign that it’s going to snow. As a rule they begin to open and then spend some time hibernating. As a new storm is forecast, Storm Chandry apparently, maybe the snow will arrive. 

January is plodding along to a rather gloomy end. Here’s a photo to prove it. Serendipity works and yesterday I managed to post photos on a blog I wrote some days ago. We’ll see whether the trick still works today. 

In the USA they are having huge protests against ICE. Here’s post I pinched from someone’s social media:

“BBC News why are you failing to report on the mass protests against ICE across the US that are taking place right now? Instead you reported vile nonsense from Trump. There is a huge peaceful outpouring of protest, but you have nothing on your 10 o’clock news. Not good enough. Let me help; here’s Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, San Diego and Washington DC to get you started.”

It’s odd how art can sometimes kind of foretell the future. It’s not just The Handmaid’s Tale. There is an episode of The Wire where a high school teacher tries to help one of his very underprivileged pupils overcome life’s difficulties by letting him use the school’s shower facilities and helping him get his clothes washed. He’s pretty much fighting a one-man battle and the pupil concerned is gradually drawn into the drug-selling culture of his community. I was reminded of this when I came across this article. This time it is in England!

Here’s a sample:

“Schools are regularly referring homeless children to food banks, driving them to classes and washing their clothes, according to research.

A survey conducted by the housing charity Shelter and NASUWT, also known as the Teachers’ Union, asked 11,000 teachers about their experiences of working with children living in temporary accommodation.

There are now a record 175,025 children in temporary housing in England, according to the most recent government figures. Many families affected are living in B&Bs, hostels and overcrowded flats.”

How did we get to that situation?

Now for something about terminology. 

We used to talk about “yuppies” (young, urban professionals), a prosperous class of upwardly mobile, status-chasing people working in major cities. Now it seems we should talk about the white-collar “Henrys” (high-earning, not rich yet) – a cohort near-identical in demographic, profession and status-obsession, but who are now apparently the overlooked, and the hard-done-by, of our current political settlement. 

In South Korea it seems they have a cohort now known as “Young 40s”, people who have reached the age of 40 and are being mocked as they try to hold on to their youth. They are a bit offended at being laughed at. “I’m just buying and wearing things I’ve liked for a long time, now that I can afford them,” one said of his skate gear and Air Jordans. “Why is this something to be attacked for?” Another felt self-conscious in interactions with younger colleagues: “I try to keep conversations focused on work or career concerns.” I must say, I have often wondered at quite grown-up young men who insist on skateboarding; isn’t it a teenager activity. 

Then there is the SAHS group - SAHS for “stay-at-home-sons”, 20 - 34- year old men who still live in their parents’ home. There are more of them than daughters who still live home, which might explain why there are no references to SAHD: “stay-at-home-daughters”. As regards the SAHS there is merchandise. Somebody is making money out of this.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!