Another Monday.

It seems a long time since Friday. 

Amazingly Friday was mostly bright and fine and sunny, even though it did get a little dull towards the end of the afternoon. I say amazingly because it was Whit Friday, the closest we come to a fiesta around here, which usually means that the weather turns wet and windy, not say bleak and cold at times. 

Whit Friday starts off with Whit Walks, a kind of procession of witness from the churches and Sunday schools, not restricted to this area. I can remember doing this as a child but I’m pretty sure we walked on Whit Sunday not Whit Friday. Decked out in new white pleated skirts, white cardigans and white sandals (the little girls) and crisp white shirts and Sunday best trousers (the little boys), we marched in pairs between ropes of paper flowers, with our little church’s curate at the front and assorted parents bringing up the rear. Somewhere along the way we joined the larger procession from the Mother Church of Saint John, to which we all marched together for the Whit Sunday family service. 

(Our smaller church was the “Daughter Church” of Saint Mary, originating as a Sunday school on the recreation ground and progressing to a temporary church building as the congregation grew along with the housing estates at our end of the town. My sister was the first child christened there and always planned to be the first to be married there. However, church attendance fell off and the temporary building was never replaced by a permanent one. I never found out what happened to the funds we worked so hard to raise! And eventually the temporary building was removed, the land deconsecrated and two houses built in the space left in the road. As for my sister, she was married in Spain and, our little church having disappeared and the vicar of the Mother Church having long since passed away, ended up having to appeal to the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool for certificates of baptism and confirmation so she could be married in the church in Andalucía. I wonder if she would have to do the same nowadays!) 

Anyway, here in Saddleworth the Whit Walks take place on Whit Friday morning, accompanied by the local brass bands and causing mayhem to the public transport system as roads through village centres are closed for at least a couple of hours. I wanted to go to the local Tesco and set off on foot, knowing that I would have trouble catching a bus. 

At 10.30 in the morning there were already people waiting at the side of the road out of Uppermill sitting on folded canvas chairs and equipped with flasks of coffee and sandwiches and goodness knows what other supplies as well. They had a long wait. As I went past the park in the centre of Uppermill, they were gathering the masses (surprisingly numerous masses), groups from the various local churches and brownie packs and so on. A chap with a loud speaker was urging the children to come to the front and get ready for a good sing. But, as yet, there was little sign of movement and I went on my way towards Tesco in nearby Greenfield. 

Coming home, I thought I might be able to walk from Greenfield to Uppermill, pick up a nice loaf from the baker’s and catch a bus the rest of the way home. No chance! There was a police road block preventing traffic from making their way through, the place was jam-packed and the procession was just making it’s way out of the park. This was about 12.15 so the spectators on their folding chairs must have been a bit fed up of waiting. I hope they had a book with them. 



I pushed my way through the crowds, managed to buy my loaf of bread, admired the procession and decided to carry on walking homewards, crossing the river via the stepping stones and getting onto the bridle path that way. 

Imagine my amazement to find a barrier across the access to the stepping stones: “Stepping stones closed for Friday 13th of June”. Goodness knows why! Maybe they were afraid of drunks falling into the, currently not very deep, river later in the evening and feared legal come-back! Fortunately, the barrier was not very substantial and was easily circumvented. On the other side of the river, where the access point is narrower, someone had simply pulled the barrier away. The place is getting more like Spain every day: a sunny day for a religious fiesta and a little bit of anarchic disregard for petty authority! So I crossed the river and went home with my purchases. 

One reason for the Whit Walks taking place on the Friday here is because it coincides with the Saddleworth Band Contest. Saddleworth is made up of a collection of distinct villages which have not yet managed to join up into one huge conurbation, despite increased building in recent years. Brass bands from all over the country, and from various places in mainland Europe as well, travel from village to village by coach, stop just outside each one and march into the village centre in their band uniforms to play the requisite set piece and be awarded points. And, as we all know, points mean prizes! Many of the bands are traditionally work-place based and some have achieved national and international fame. I have worked in at least two educational establishments with prize-winning bands. And our village, Delph, featured in the film “Brassed Off” starring Pete Postlethwaite, with the band marching over the bridge into the village centre. Here’s a link to a clip of the Grimethorpe band (I think) playing the Concierto de Aranjuez.

We often meet some friends in the centre of the village to listen to at least one band and then have a beer. This year we had invited another friend to join us and planned a pleasant “grown-up” evening. Then our oldest grandchild decided to sort of join us. She wanted to use us as a base, then meet friends in the village and eventually sleep at our house as there would be no buses back to her house – roads closed, as above. That was ok. although she did have some problems getting here as the bus she caught to come here stopped and threw its passengers off so that it could take a diversion which did not go through the Saddleworth villages. She ended up walking most of the several miles here, occasionally phoning me to rant at length about “annoying bus drivers”. 

In he midst of all this, and while I was still walking home with my shopping, my daughter called me. Her almost-mother-in-law had been rushed onto hospital and was in intensive care. She and her fiancé wanted to go over to Lancaster to the hospital in question. Could she drop the younger grandchildren off for the weekend? Well, what could I do? By 3.30, I had a grumpy, hot and tired older grandchild, recovering from a long walk and two younger grandchildren, promising their mother that they would be super-good, super-co-operative and so on while she rushed off on a mission of mercy. 

So some extra bits and pieces were added to the planned early evening meal, extending supplies to accommodate three grandchildren and the older grandchild’s best friend. The walk into the village involved taking along a football so that one rather grumbly grandson could have a kick-about the pub garden. Our “grown-up” evening became a “family” evening but, give or take a couple of arguments, a good time was had by all. 

On Saturday the younger grandchildren and I went on a mission to find “loom bands”, the latest trend for kids throughout Europe, or so Sunday’s newspaper told me. We successfully bought packets of tiny rubber bands which kids weave into friendship bracelets. Our rather macho, football-loving grandson sports about eight of these on each wrist and asks me to admire his colour combinations! And in the evening we recorded the England-Italy football match so that the football-loving boy could watch it on Sunday. 

And suddenly it’s Monday and it seems a long time since Friday!

This and that.

Running (oops, sorry, that should be jogging, as agreed some time ago) round the village this morning, I came across old Jack walking his dogs as usual. Unexpectedly, he told me rather too much about his constipation problems. So we swapped dietary ideas for keeping regular. But, truth to tell, there are some things you don't need to talk about on a fine sunny morning. 

A little further along the route, my phone pinged. A message from the daughter. Could I collect an item from a house in Delph? Oh, and did I mind paying £65 for it. She would reimburse me later. It's a good job I had my bank card with me so that I could get enough money to pay for said item. There's a sort of group on Facebook called something like "Things for Sale in Saddleworth". Our daughter, and various other people I know, buy and sell second hand items. A bit like eBay but without the postage as all the buyers and sellers are within a smallish area. It seems to work. 

So I withdrew some money while I was in the Coop and called in at a complete stranger’s house to do a little informal trading. Networking of sorts, I suppose. 

I must remember to take this item with me when I go to my daughter's house later. And to reclaim my £65!! 

Today I learnt my latest bit of Spanglish, via my Vigo friend Brendan on Facebook: el "chill out". How long will it be before we speak a strange mix of all languages? 

We are all international now! So why are there bits of the UK, and Spain for that matter, still agitating for independence? Yesterday waiting for the bus to Oldham, I got into conversation with an old lady of 92. We often meet this old lady, a former land girl during the Second World War. She is always immaculately turned out - white raincoat and smart white hat yesterday with a sturdy furled umbrella in lieu of the stick she really needs but won't carry - and drops hints about a dramatic past. Anyway, yesterday she was railing against the prospect of "losing Scotland", as she put it. Part of her justification for our staying together is that in the event of war we need the men of Scotland to fight for us. Ok, that's an argument I've not heard before! 

Later in the day I heard that the writer J.K. Rowling had donated a million pounds to the campaign to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom. How nice to have a million to donate but good for Ms. Rowling. I'm with her on this. Once it became public knowledge that she had donated this sum, however, she started to get abusive tweets. This is one of the disadvantages of the social media world we live in: instant criticism! 

It's rather a sad indictment of our modern world that criticism has to be accompanied so often by nastiness. 

I shall continue to refuse to tweet and twitter!

Bits of nostalgia, bits of silliness!

There are some things you just don’t forget how to do, assuming you learnt to do them in the first place: riding a bike, swimming or, in the case that sparked this reflection, using a sewing machine. (If you haven’t learnt to do these things earlier in life it often gets harder to do so as the years go by.) No doubt there are a load of other things that fall into this category. 

This was all prompted by my deciding to do a bit of repair and renovation on the curtains in the study. This is a task I have been putting off for some time but finally this week we took the curtains down and I set to work. I used to sew a good deal but on the last twenty years, at least, the sewing machine has largely stayed tucked away in a cupboard in the attic. And, just as when you sit on your bike and have your balance at once, so I looked at the sewing machine and threaded it without even thinking. 

Preparation for doing these repairs involved a trip to Oldham’s indoor market to seek out a haberdashery stall so I could buy that tape you put at the top of curtains to gather them and then to attach the hooks to hang the curtains. Time was, I could have popped into the village and bought it from the wool shop but that shop has long since changed into a beauticians and then an estate agents. Most of the other shops in the village have also changed from something useful on an everyday basis – butcher, baker, greengrocer and others– into a cafe, a birthday cake shop (yes, a birthday cake shop, not an ordinary cake shop!) and, most commonly, private houses. But wool shops and haberdasheries, like hardware shops, are the hardest to find these days. When I’m in Spain I find these shops all over the place but in the UK they are a dying breed! Am I alone in missing them? 

On the television news last night I heard a discussion about fish. There was an American woman who maintained that fish, like larger creatures that we eat, should be killed humanely. Farmed fish, she said, should be stunned before being killed, as happens with cattle and sheep. She’s even written a book about it. Pressed to consider the wider application of this idea she agreed that it would be difficult to apply this principle to fish caught out at sea but she really felt that it should be possible to develop a system to make that possible. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not at all in favour of making our food suffer unnecessarily. And I am aware that fish can feel pain. However, there is a difference between a fish and a large mammal. And it’s not just that fish are not very cuddly. I’m afraid the poor lady just came across as a crank! Sorry! That’s just the way it seemed to me. 

And then there are fashion cranks. One fashion trend for this year is the formal gents’ suit ... with short trousers!!!! Apparently this is meant to make gentlemen who have to wear formal suits feel more comfortable in a heat wave. Really!! I would have thought that it’s not so much the long trousers that cause the discomfort as having to keep the jacket on and the tie fastened up. But I’m just a humble blogger so what do I know? Well, I do know that pictures of models wearing these suits look for all the world like overgrown1950s schoolboys stuffed into a formal school uniform with short trousers. Daft! 

Also daft is the fad for lovers to fasten a padlock to a bridge in Paris, the Pont des Arts. Fastening the padlock to the bridge means that the couple can never be separated; their love will last a lifetime. Unfortunately, there are now so many padlocks on the bridge that a chunk of it has fallen off into the River Seine. Maybe these are all the padlocks of people whose love has proved less than durable. You never know! 

When we stayed in the city of Modica in Sicily we went up to a viewing spot we had visited before, a place where the road overlooks the city, giving a beautiful panoramic view, ideal for photographs. On the safety barrier up there we came across a number of padlocks, just like on the Pont des Arts. The first time we went up there, about seven or eight years ago there were none. By September 2012 there was the beginning of a fine collection. 

I wonder how many are there now. 

I wonder if someone should warn the inhabitants of Modica, especially those who live immediately below that viewing spot!

Parenting and language stuff.

Far be it from me to delight in a father and his child falling out. However, when I heard that Jean-Marie Le Pen had been criticised by his daughter for making disparaging comments on the Front National website about a singer of Jewish origin, I’m afraid I could not help but be a little pleased. Daughter Marine Le Pen has worked hard and quite successfully, unfortunately, to make their party seem more acceptable, less horribly xenophobic, giving right wing extremism a softer, gentler face. And along comes Dad and puts stuff out there that makes them seem as nasty as ever. So she said he had made a political gaffe and ordered the video to be removed from the website. (I wonder if she managed it fast enough to prevent others putting it out into the wider electronic media world on you tube and the like.) It’s really quite pleasing when they start to fight among themselves. Long may it continue! 

Maybe Monsieur Le Pen was never a truly hands-on dad, as the terminology of today has it, and therefore Marine feels she has the right to boss him around. He was perhaps too busy being a right wing extremist to take much notice of her. He did manage to inculcate her with his views though, also unfortunately! 

Apparently more and more modern fathers are being hands-on dads these days. I was reading about it in an article by someone complaining that stay-at-home dads get lots of praise while stay-at-home mums are often criticised for being self-indulgent or derided for being silly enough to give up career opportunities. You can’t win, you see! Stay-at-home dads, on the other hand, are viewed as noble creatures, worthy of praise. At one point the writer stated, “Despite the uptick in fathers’ involvement in parenting, women still do the vast majority of domestic work, from housework to child care.” I couldn’t argue with the content of the article: all good stuff, absolutely spot-on. 

However, and it’s quite an important however in my opinion, I do have to object to her use of language. “Despite the uptick in fathers’ involvement in parenting,” she writes. “The uptick”??? Where did that expression come from? Wherever it came from it should be sent back there at once. It’s really not proper English. Phil and I spend a small amount of time getting cross about stuff like this. One of his bugbears is the use of “going forward” instead of “in the future”! We don’t spend a lot of time stressing about this. It’s just a minor irritation and we recognise that there really is little we can do about it but there it is. 

While we’re on the subject of words, here’s another odd one: adorkable. It is a blend of “adorable” and “dork” and means “socially inept or unfashionable in a charming or endearing way”. Originating from Twitter, it has made its way into the next edition of the Collins English Dictionary. The compilers of the dictionary say that the word “has settled into a steady and rising pattern of use, establishing adorkable as a popular word in general use which is here to stay”. 

And to think I had never heard of it before!!

The way you see things!

Up the road from our house is the local cricket and bowling club. The car park isn’t very big so people who want to watch the cricket tend to park under the trees on the grass verge/pavement at the side of the road. This is fine. Well, actually, no, it’s not fine if you fancy walking up the road because you have to walk IN the road. Just a little inconvenient, not to say dangerous. 

My real gripe, however, is with the litter they leave behind. You might think they would get out of their cars and go down to the cricket club for a drink and a snack. But no, that would be too sensible. Instead they sit in their cars or, if the weather is good enough for them, alongside their cars and consume McDonald’s, pre-packed sandwiches, huge packets of crisps, cans of assorted drinks and those throwaway paper cups of coffee. 

The trouble is they leave the evidence behind them. Under one of the trees at the moment, along with other assorted detritus, there is one of those throw-away barbecue kits. You know the kind of thing: a metal foil tray with a grill on top. They even provide the food to barbecue I think. You light it, cook the food, eat the food and throw away the barbecue kit. Except that these barbi-lovers have left it under the tree. How hard is it to pack up your rubbish and take it away? There’s even a litter bin just by the car park! 

I wonder what the cricket club thinks of all this. After all they are missing out on the custom from these litter louts. 

According to various sources, the British are increasingly a nation of racist fatties. Apparently the proportion of Britons who admit to being prejudiced against immigrants has risen considerably in recent years. I find myself wondering if maybe it’s also becoming more acceptable to admit to such sentiments and this is what the statistics reflect. Just a thought! 

As for the fatties, we are probably the fattest nation in Europe or so we are told. Well, we’re not all the fattest in Europe but our average size is the biggest. What a sad thing to be best at! I have recently read about a 10 year old who weighs 14 stone and a 5 year old who weighs 10 stone. How do you pick up for a cuddle a child who weighs as much as an adult and more than some? Needless to say both these children have ended up in the care of social services. It makes you wonder if our society is somehow broken. At my most pessimistic I wonder if it can be mended! 

I listened this morning to Tamara Rojo, the ballerina, artistic director of the English National Ballet, talking on Desert Island Discs. Born in Canada of Spanish parents, she speaks excellent English with a delightful Spanish accent; “words” is pronounced to rhyme with “swords”, for example. At one point she expressed the view that her generation of Spaniards is probably the most educated, the best educated in Spain because their parents so much wanted them to succeed – to have the chance to go to university, to learn languages, to get on in life. It seems to have worked for her. 

According to journalist Kirstie Allsopp, on the other hand, girls should not go to university straight from school but should get a job, save some money, find a husband and have a baby while still in their twenties. This is all to do with fertility and the problem that young women are increasingly having of waiting too long to have babies because they need to finish their studies and establish themselves in their careers. Kirstie Allsopp reckons you can go back to studying at any age. Which is, of course, true but her view doesn’t take into account meeting a like-minded someone to be your life partner and the father of your babies. I’ve come across a number of women who had babies young and returned to studying later in life, only to find that suddenly they didn’t have anything in common with their life partner and father of their babies. Maybe Kirstie Allsopp doesn’t intend women to have a life partner. 

I really don’t know quite where she’s coming from. Besides, I don’t think she’s advocating this for everyone; she simply said that that was the advice she would give her daughter. I do know, however, that our daughter had her babies young and is now, in her thirties, combining part-time (almost full-time) work with studying and looking after said babies, now rather bigger, and it’s not easy! 

In any case, it’s all down to how you see things!

Saying hello.

Recently I have read a number of articles about how the British greet people. It would seem that since “How do you do?” has gone out of fashion – too stuffy, too old school – we don’t have a proper greeting. The French have “Ça va?” and the Spanish “¿Qué tal?”, both really non-questions that don’t demand a true response about the health and well-being of the person addressed. In fact, the proper thing to do is to repeat the same back to the greeter. I hear a lot of “How are you doing?” and “Are you all right?” but, according to the articles I have read, this is insufficient as a replacement for “How do you do?” and can lead people to think that (Heaven forbid!) you are making a genuine enquiry about the person you are speaking to. What a load of nonsense! 

And then there are the gestures. We British, or so I read, never know whether to shake hands, kiss, hug or just stand there looking sheepish. It’s that standoffishness that says, “Don’t you dare touch me; I don’t do that sort of thing”. Continental Europeans, on the other hand, know exactly when and who to kiss, and how many times, when to hug and when to simply shake hands in a formal manner. The writers of these articles have clearly never watched teenagers, especially female teenagers, who seem to have adopted the habit of hugging and squealing on meeting and hugging at such length on taking their leave that you might think they were not going to meet again for at least six months. 

The best thing I found in all this was criticism of “hello” itself. This greeting is apparently inferior because it does not contain the word “good”, unlike “BONjour”, “BUENOS días”, “BONgiorno” and “BOM día”. Good grief, even the Germans manage it with “GUTEN Tag”. The writer admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that we do say “GOODbye”. Obviously he or she (I don’t remember which it was) has never heard anyone say “GOOD morning”, “GOOD afternoon” or “GOOD evening”. 

Of course, it may be that people are just too busy to greet each other properly. 

I read this morning about a service that will tweet or twitter on your behalf if you are too busy to do it for yourself. There’s an odd thing! How do your surrogate tweeter-twitterers know what to say on your behalf? Mind you, as I neither tweet nor twitter, I have little real understanding of what all this hash-tag stuff is all about anyway. 

This must be a day for finding odd things in the paper. Stephen Bayley, writing in the Guardian, was talking about cars and attitudes towards them. He maintains that he is one of the last generation the remember “going for a drive” as a leisure activity in itself, not going somewhere in the car with a specific destination in mind but just packing the family in the car and setting off for a drive round just for the fun of it. He must be from my generation because I can remember people doing that, back in a quieter age when children could sit on the garden wall collecting car registration numbers because it was quite a novelty seeing them go past. I can remember doing that with my siblings as a little kid. What a waste of time and paper that was! 

Anyway, Mr Bayley says his (grow-up) children regard cars as “unnecessary and expensive encumbrances, not the status symbol and romantic attribute they remain for” him. They almost certainly live in the London area where the public transport system is rather more frequent than around here where most young people regard having a car as a necessity if they are going to get to work and manage to go and see their friends. 

However, I do agree with Mr Bayley about the fun having been taken out of driving. Unfortunately there are now so many cars on the roads that it has become a very stressful activity. 
It's not just in the UK either. Mr Bayley tells me that surveys in the USA reveal that young people feel they could more easily get rid of their cars than their smartphones.

Bring on the self-driving cars as soon as possible! Then it will be possible to use the smartphones - to tweet and twitter - while in the car. And it will be possible to geet people without the need for hugs and kisses. In fact you can probably do it in textspeak!

Changes

So King Juan Carlos has decided to abdicate and Prince Felipe could become King Felipe. But apparently the Spanish government has to pass a law creating the legal mechanism for this to happen. Some people I know are saying there should be a referendum to decide whether the Spanish want to continue with the monarchy or become a republic. No-one would have dared to say that in the period immediately following Franco’s death. They’ve come a long way in that respect. 

The Borbón family have been having a bad time in the last few years. Juan Carlos has been a bit let down by his daughters, one getting divorced and the other involved in her husband’s corruption shenanigans. And he’s not done himself any favours either: a bit of scandal and silly behaviour here and there. And suddenly, from being generally considered to be a good monarch, he’s everyone’s target for suggested abdication. Mrs Borbón, Queen Sofía, still seems to be most people’s darling, which is quite good considering that she was much criticised in the early years for speaking better English than she did Spanish. 

So now Spain might soon have a King Felipe and Letizia will become queen: not bad for a divorcee who used to work on television! 

In the midst of all this it shouldn’t be forgotten that back at the time of the transition from dictatorship to democracy Juan Carlos was a great stabilising factor and helped that change go relatively smoothly. He was a good bloke! Credit where it’s due after all! It’s just a pity he didn’t abdicate before going off to shoot elephants! As it is there is sure to be some outcry about the cost of a coronation! We’ll just have to wait and see. 

Talking of waiting, we are waiting for the arrival of new laptop. Changes in the operating systems are driving us crazy and have led to the purchase of a new machine, after much research into what would be best. We even thought of moving over to Apple until Phil spent an afternoon helping a friend sort out her computer and decided that there were too many new tricks to learn if we made such a radical change. However, the new laptop is being very slow in arriving. Not a good sign! 

 Other changes are around as well. According to a certain Stuart Heritage, writing in the Guardian, I must not talk about going for a run. He says that we are not runners, well, not unless we rush fleet-foot everywhere with our hair blowing in the wind. No, we are joggers, pure and simple, “trudging reluctantly from foot to foot, our faces pasted with drool-crust from last night’s sleep...” I don’t think I would describe myself in quite that way but I know what he means. He goes on, “Nobody got faster or anymore co-ordinated. We still just gormlessly plod twice round a park with our cheeks puffed out, but now we seem to have given ourselves a completely unwarranted promotion.” Once again, I might argue with that “gormlessly” but I’ll let it pass. He puts it down to promotional ideas and fancy names for shops selling running, oops, sorry, jogging, gear: shops with names like “Runners Need”. He maintains that runners run because they love running but “joggers jog because they love cake and, to a lesser extent, fitting into their trousers”. Ok, I’ll wear that. From now on I need to talk about going for a jog, not a run. 

And finally, a bit of silliness from the fashion pages of the newspaper. It seems that the UK should be having a good summer (not so far but there’s time yet) and so people need to be prepared and get their wardrobe sorted. One thing they describe as an “inadvisable purchase” is a “bikini bag” which you can buy on the high street for as much as £40. That’s £40 for a plastic bag to put your wet swimwear in for returning from the beach or the pool! Really? I thought that was one of the uses for huge collection of plastic bags from the supermarket that every household has in a drawer or a cupboard somewhere in the kitchen.