Yesterday we did mid-birthday celebrations at our house. Granddaughter Number Four was 10 last Wednesday. Her brother, Grandson Number Two, will be 7 next Wednesday. So we had a family celebration at the midpoint, yesterday. I roasted a chicken, with all the usual trimmings, and Granddaughter Number Two made a shared cake.
Granddaughter Number One regaled us with news of one of her quail who has been hatching her own eggs, something quite rare apparently among domestic quails. We have decided to rename Granddaughter Number One as Grandmother of Quails. Not quite so impressive as Mother of Dragons (Game of Thrones reference) but there it is.
A good time was had by all. The washing up was mostly done communally (big family dinners are the only occasions when I feel the need for a dishwashing machine) but there were still some dishes that had been put on one side and forgotten until this morning.
Also this morning I stripped the chicken carcass, with enough meat left to make a chicken hotpot for this evening’s dinner, and put the bones in a pan to make chicken stock and eventually soup. We do a good line in leftovers at our house.
Over the weekend, people dressed in black and wearing balaclavas staged a protest in Dover and then in Southhampton against a boatload of immigrants arriving to be processed. Some of the reports suggest this was a spontaneous protest. It’s funny how they all spontaneously wore black and covered their faces. Perhaps they all spontaneously followed a call to action on social media. Part of a report in the Guardian says, “Hundreds of men, some dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, tried to stop the arrivals from being transported for processing until 3am, when police removed them with threats of arrest.”
Hmmm! THREATS of arrest! Had they been pensioners expressing support for Palestine Action they might not have been threatened by actually arrested! Clearly not a proscribed terrorist organisation.
It’s almost nine years since Tom Petty died, not long after I danced barefoot to his music in Hyde Park. Tom Petty, of course, was one of the Travelling Wilburys, the supergroup made up of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty himself. Here’s a cartoon somebody posted on a Tom Petty site on social media:
Tennis is one of those sports that demands silence. The umpire at Wimbledon calls out, “Quiet please!” at the start of a match. The noisiest I imagine is John McEnroe shouting out in anger at the umpire’s decision: “You can’t be serious!” Well, it seems that the US Open has become extremely noisy. There’s ambient noise from cooling units just outside the stadium, railroad noise of trains going to Long Island, forklift trucks delivering supplies of champagne and such like to the stadium and planes flying overhead. But principally it seems to be the spectators among whom are influencers who chatter continuously or talk into their phones to accompany the videos they are making to put out on social media. The ubiquitous mobile phone is disrupting another bit of life as we know it.
Perhaps this photo, with its caption saying, “Fans look at their phones during the 2025 US Open”, says it all.
The writer of this article says that New York is indeed a noisy city but contrasts the noise of another district of the city with the noise at the US Open:
“Continuing west you’ll eventually land in Corona, a densely populated working-class neighborhood with a significant presence of Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants. Here the contrast with the hordes at the US Open is genuinely fascinating. The streets are clamorous and intense, filled with the clatter of the elevated 7 train, the pop and sizzle of the food trucks, the chatter of twilight conversations on stoops and sidewalks, and the slap-slap-slap of the games of dominoes that crowd every corner. But there are no phone-gazing zombies meandering across pavements; there’s none of the greedy insensitivity of the masses at the Open; there aren’t even many devices visible. These streets are packed with people and thrumming with life, but their vibrancy is neighborly, uplifting, and welcoming, rather than hectoring, selfish, and bland as is the case for the hyperactivity beyond the entrance gates of the National Tennis Center.”
Interesting!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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