Running in the rain … or not. Blossoms in their prime. Pics of the Paris of my youth. Mogging.

I ran in the rain this morning. Well, to be strictly truthful, I ran mostly in thin sunshine and only had a couple of occasions when I was rained on. A fairly typical June morning around here.

Out walking yesterday, we realised that by going off to Portugal for a couple of weeks we missed the full glory of the hawthorn trees and qsbushes in bloom. They were just getting into their prime as we left but now completely gone.the same applies to the wisteria, which grows in great profusion all over the exterior of a building close to the centre of the village. Here’s a photo from a few weeks ago.

Poppies are a different story. Like the buttercups they are everywhere. Here in Delph, as I have commented before we seem to have only yellow and orange ones but I spotted red ones in Greenfield, not too far away, yesterday.

That’s enough horticultural stuff.

In today’s paper there was an article about a collection of Photos of Paris in 1970:

“Paris frozen in time in May 1970 – in pictures

In March 1970, Paris announced an amateur photography competition C’était Paris en 1970 to create an archive of a city undergoing a proliferation of large-scale urban development projects. A grid system divided the city into 1,755 squares and a photographer was charged with documenting each square during May 1970. Some of the 91,655 photographs taken are on displaybat the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris until 7 October 2026”

Most of the pictures really are frozen in time. Just look at the petrol pumps and the cars, not to mention the clothes.

But this one of children playing on a slide could have been taken yesterday, in my opinion anyway.

I came across a new word yesterday: “mogging”. Apparently it means to outdomor outshine someone. Ot is a word from the “manosphere” and began as a verb derived from the acronym for “alpha male of the group: “Amog”. In misogynistic forums in the 2010s, to “mog” came to mean to outdo someone in terms of sexual desirability and more recently has been adopted by “looksmaxxing” male influencers who encourage men to try to alter their looks – sometimes in extreme ways – to increase their “sexual market value”. (Really?)

What a strange world we live in where people of all genders are encouraged to alter their looks to such an extent. Of course, fashion and make-up and styling have all been part of manufacturing your “look” but nowadays more permanent changes are all the rage - not always for the best!

But now it seems that “mogging” means “besting” (another annoying word) others at basically anything. The gold medal Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu said in an interview last year that her main competition strategy was “to mog”, and it is possible to do “walk-mogging” when you overtake people on the street. 

I wonder what Mr Rees Mogg feels about his name being used in that fashion!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!