Traditional happenings.

 It is fairly typical of British weather, especially northwest of England weather, that it changes from warm and sunny and pleasant one day to bitingly cold the next. So I should not have been surprised to see rain in the window this morning when I woke up. No, not surprised, just rather disappointed. However, having ascertained that the rain had already fallen and had now stopped I decided to go for a run anyway. 

Up the road I ran into my old friend Jack. Or rather, his little dog Rosie ran into me. Ever since she finally accepted me as a friend she waddles towards me when she sees me coming, instead of just carrying on rooting around for interesting smells as she used to do. Jack was wearing a thickish jumper and a body warmer. Personally I do not see the point of body warmers. Why wear what is essentially a jacket without sleeves? It may keep your body warm - as its name implies - but your arms are left exposed to the elements. A bit of fashion nonsense if you ask me. Anyway, Jack gave me a wry smile and asked, "Do you know what I did yesterday?" Before I could think of an answer he went on to tell me he had put all his winter coats and jackets away in the loft, clearly misled by the balmy weather of the last few days. He only had the body warmer available because his wife said it needed cleaning. So he put that on rather than scramble up the loft ladder at 8.30 in the morning!!! 

Do people really still put their winter clothes away like that? It would seem that some do. It sounds like something out of a 19th century novel when clothes for different seasons were put away, wrapped in tissue paper and with mothballs in between the layers. Or at any rate, those who had enough clothes to merit such activities did so. I thought that nowadays you just moved them to the more inaccessible bit of your wardrobe. Who knew that some folk were still so systematic? 

The day didn't get much warmer but it did improve somewhat. The rain clouds disappeared and the sun came out although the wind remained bitterly cold. But by the time I walked out to go to the supermarket it was bright and clear. I was rewarded for my perseverance by a view of the local heron fishing in the river just down the road from our house. 

My daughter picked me up from the supermarket. While I waited I was accosted by a smiling old chap who clearly thought he knew me. "Margaret?" he queried. I shook my head and neglected to tell him that he was half right; Margaret is, after all, my middle name but I wasn't going to get into conversation with random old gents today. 

Up in Dunblane today the tennis player Andy Murray married his young lady, the one who drew attention to herself by swearing at Wimbledon last summer. Apparently some said this was as near as Dunblane would get to having a royal wedding. Good for Andy Murray and his young lady giving a bit of joy to the town. But why did his mother choose to wear such a very silly hat? 

I was about to say something about the absurdity of English traditions but of course this was Scotland. So the traditions must be British!

Chaos and qualifications!

There was a small amount of chaos and mayhem outside my house when I went out for a run first thing this morning. One of the neighbours told me that it was a lorry attempting to turn round a bit further up the road. Another case of someone unthinkingly following satnav and finding themselves in a difficult situation we decided. In fact it was one of those flat-bed, low loader trucks depositing a digger of some kind onto one of the small side lanes. Quite why the truck driver had to place himself across the road, blocking traffic in both directions, remains one of life's mysteries. 

No doubt all those cars waiting with their engines running did little to help our local pollution levels, which I had not thought about until I was running past them. Hopefully the pollution cloud won't reach quite as far as here in the north west of the country. Or at any rate it might have dissipated a little. According to stuff I read in today's paper cities in the north of France expect to be very badly affected. Paris has taken measures to reduce the amount of traffic going into the capital. They tend to do odd things like alternating the days that cars with certain registration plates are allowed into the city. Today's was something to do with free residential parking to encourage people to leave their cars at home, presumably in places where you can only park free at night. Why not do something permanent about parking and reduce further the cost of public transport? Getting cars out of city centres seems to me to be the best solution. 

I was mildly amused to read in the article about today's pollution that a certain Dr Penny Woods of the British Lung Foundation "said it was unfair that those suffering asthma and other lung conditions should be repeatedly forced indoors by air pollution events". I quite agree with her that it most unfair that asthma sufferers and the like should have to suffer at times like this but it was the terminology that amused me. What on earth are "air pollution events"? Why not just say "air pollution"? To talk about "air pollution events" makes it sound as though someone has sat down and organised it, or indeed several someone's, a group, an "air pollution events committee". 

No doubt such people would have degrees in "events management", probably from a modern university that used to be a polytechnic. Oh dear, there's my intellectual snobbery coming out again. But why is it necessary to have a degree in such skills? Do such degrees really mean the same as a degree in Classics or History or any other traditional subject? Maybe our way of categorising qualifications needs a shakeup. 

As debate starts to rage about children who "fail" their SATs tests at age eleven being obliged to resist them in their first year of secondary school, I read more and more from people of my generation about the schools that they went to. There were what are now called "vocational classes" in secondary schools for the "less academic". I love that terminology. Just give someone a big label: less academic!!! 

Nowadays, many of those supposedly less academic positions demand a degree in their speciality: office skills, events management, possibly even construction. Who knows? What a crazy world! The sheep in the field up the road from here don't seem affected by any of it. However, in the radio soap opera, The Archers (an everyday story of country folk, as it used to be sub-titled and possibly still is), I think that the daughter of the one of the Archer's is doing a degree in agriculture! Nothing is simple any longer!

Consequences!

There's that old thing about a butterfly flapping its wing in Japan and causing a hurricane or similar extreme weather in California. Now they are saying that a dust storm in the Sahara is going to make pollution worse here in the UK. Perhaps not quite so far-fetched a possibility as the butterfly thing but it still sound a long way away. But it is a little ironic that just as the weather has turned very pleasant and people are wandering about in the sunshine and being really nice and friendly to one another, the weather bods start to tell us that over the next 24 hours we have to be extra careful about pollution. 

In the middle March it was a cloud of smog coming from Europe that was causing the problem. What a pity that is not the case now; the anti-Europe political parties would have a field day. Transport mix-ups led to my spending a fair amount of time walking about in the open air today so I hope the pollution problem has not set in too quickly. I had been doing some helpful sorting at my daughter's house and looked up the time of buses home. According to the timetable there was no bus or train for a good three quarters of an hour. So I set off walking along the bridle path. 

At a suitable halfway point I checked the timetables again. There was supposedly still no bus for going on for twenty minutes so I set off along the next stage of the bridle path. Within minutes I saw a bus sail past along the nearby main road. So it goes! Further along my route, I caught one of the local buses that go all around the houses, going once or twice round various out of the way housing estates. As we approached Uppermill I alighted, intending to pop into the Co-op while the bus went up the hill round another estate and then I planned to hop back on as it came through the village centre. No good! The queue in the Co-op was longer than expected and by the time I came out the little round-the-houses bus had gone. Consequently I ended up walking a little further than originally planned. 

In the radio news later, as well as telling us about pollution, they told us that Duchess of Cambridge has announces that her second child, due in a few weeks, will be born in the hospital where baby number one was born a couple of years ago. Well, I will sleep more easily in my bed now that I know that that is all under control. 

I suspect they include these titbits in the news as light relief from all the stuff about the election. News about babies gives many people a lovely warm glow, after all!

Normality ?!

It's very strange getting back to "normal life" after having been planning an event for weeks and then having it take place. So, having sent the Spaniards home on Monday, we had the place and our time to ourselves yesterday, for the first time in a while. It didn't remain so for long. 

I had to return my daughter's car to her. We had borrowed it for the duration of the Spanish chess visit so that I could very people around. You would have thought taking it back would have been a straightforward affair but life isn't like that as a rule. First I popped into the supermarket to replenish stocks of this and that, including snacks and drinks for the kids' lunch. Then, having arrived at my daughter's house, instead of being driven back home again, I waited around while the kids had lunch and then until it was time to take the oldest one to a meeting regarding her part time job. Follow that with a visit to the local tip to get rid of bags of rubbish of various kinds and it was time to go and collect the oldest granddaughter again. 

Time flies when you are doing bits and pieces. I almost forgot to mention the useless trip to the charity shop. We had a bag of stuff to give them but it was almost five o'clock and the three charity shops in Uppermill village were closed. The sun was shining and the place was full to bursting with people strolling around but the main shops were all beginning to close, leaving only cafes and sweet shops open. It always surprises me how early places close up in the UK. In Spain people are still shopping at 8 in the evening. So we collected the kids from the park, where we had left them paddling in the river in their wellies while we went to the charity shop. Then we all had an ice cream in the park in the sunshine before heading to my house for a cup of tea. 

And that was the best part of a day over and done with. Amazing! 

Talking of differences between countries, here's something. In the UK we give Easter eggs. But there is more formal stuff. I was not sure whether the queen still gives out "Maundy money" on the Thursday before Good Friday so I checked online. Yes, she does. Checking that, I also revised a bit of the history of Maundy Thursday. Somewhere back in the thirteenth century members of the royal family would distribute money and gifts and wash the feet of selected poor people, an act of humility recalling Christ washing the feet of his disciples. By the eighteenth century our monarchs had given up on the humility bit and stopped washing people's feet but did give out gifts of money and clothing. It all became just gifts of money in the nineteenth century. 

Nowadays, as many elderly men and women as there are years in the queen's age are chosen to receive Maundy money, because of their Christian service to the church and the community. So if you are an old curmudgeon who does nothing for the community, even if you go to church every Sunday you won't qualify. I must say I am quite surprised nobody has raised the diversity and discrimination thing here but I suppose that as it's part of the Christian Holy Week they can justify a bit of bias! So this year 88 fine upstanding old folk in Sheffield received two small leather purses from Her Majesty. One, a red purse contains ordinary coinage, money in lieu of the old gifts of food and clothing, and the other, a white one, contains silver Maundy coins, specially minted I think, consisting of the same number of pence as the queen's age. There you go! 

In the Guardian I found a link to an article about traditions in old Slovakia, where the custom was to whip women with thin willow branches and to throw cold water over them. This was supposed to make them healthy for the coming spring. As this took place, and perhaps still does, on Easter Monday, I would have thought they were more likely to catch their death of cold from getting soaking wet. But who am to criticise old traditions? Anyway, here's a link to the article. 


And in the USA the president organises an egg roll: an event involving singing, storytelling and rolling eggs down the South Lawn of the White House. I suspect Barack Obama has someone else to organise it for him but he wishes them all a 'Happy Easter' at the start and perhaps even joins in the fun. This year's was the 137th such event. 35,000 people were expected to be there. Really? Do they all get to roll eggs or do most of them just have to watch respectfully? 

Just a slight difference in customs. On the whole though, I think the Americans probably have the most fun!

Chocolate eggs. Bowling. Españoles en Manchester.

Yesterday we gave our Spanish visitor an Easter egg, explaining that this is the tradition in the UK. The same as in Spain he told me. Odd, I thought, since you never used to see Easter eggs except in Catalunia. You do see displays of big chocolate eggs in bakery shop windows but, unless it's different this year, the supermarkets don't seem to be full of Cadbury's cream egg eggs, flake eggs, mini egg eggs, Nestlé rolo eggs, smarties eggs and all the other varieties of eggs you get on display in the UK from somewhere around the end of January. Anyway, he looked at it and asked me if it was a whole egg made of chocolate. So somehow I don't think he's in the habit of receiving Easter eggs. 

Then I read in the newspaper this headline: "Enjoy your eggs this Easter: they may soon be just a luxury treat." There is, it seems, a crisis in the cocoa industry which will probably lead to a price rise. Cocoa trees are high maintenance and some farmers are turning to easier crops. Then there is a labour shortage as young people don't want to work in coca but prefer to go work in cities. 70% of cocoa beans come from west Africa where there has been major political and social upheaval over the last two decades. And finally there has been an increase in demand from China and Asia, not traditional chocolate eaters but now rushing to join the obesity and bad teeth epidemics of the world. Consumption increases of 230% a year!!! That's a lot of extra chocolate. It's a good job I am not a chocoholic! 

Today all our Spaniards, a fair number of them having won prizes in the chess tournament that finished yesterday, were flying back to Galicia. As we had the morning free beforehand, one of the host parents arranged for everyone to go bowling and then have a spot of lunch before heading off for Liverpool airport. This was great success. Phil, who swore he was not going to bowl, not having been tenpin bowling for more than thirty years, proceeded to achieve the highest score of all of us. It must be that competitive spirit! 

One of the girls on reception at the bowling alley turned out to be Spanish. Then we found a Spaniard working in Nando's restaurant. Add to this the fact that our waitress in the cafe in Manchester town hall was a Spanish speaker from Colombia and you might begin to see a pattern here! Small world syndrome strikes again! I shouldn't be surprised really. I already knew that Manchester has an enormous Spanish or Spanish speaking population. 

The young man working in the restaurant came over several times to speak to our group of young Spanish chess players. He seemed quite delighted to see them. I found myself wondering if a young Englishman working as a waiter in Spain was in the same situation, finding himself with a group of English school kids in his restaurant, would have been so keen to come over and talk to them. The English adults in our group seemed to agree that he probably would not have done so. English reserve and all that sort of thing! 

Anyway, we finally got everyone to the airport with no more mishap than one young Spaniard managing to lose his jacket in the bowling alley. He left it behind and only remembered as we left the restaurant. We went back to look for it. To no avail; no jacket had been handed in and none was lying around in the area where we had been bowling. He was remarkably calm about the loss. I wonder what his parents will say when he gets home without it! And so another project comes to an end. 

Life returns to something like normal and we can start to think about our own travel plans.

Synesthesia. Oh, and animals.

Some years ago I worked with someone who one day happened to ask, quite conversationally, what colour Tuesday was for the rest of us. She saw it as blue. She was an Art teacher. It turned out that not only did she see each day with its own distinctive colour but she also saw them arranged in a quite specific pattern, as if laid out on a page. The only person who answered with a colour, not blue if I remember rightly, was an English teacher. Both of them spoke of experiencing certain tastes and sounds in colour as well. Neither of them had heard of synesthesia, the term for this kind of inter-related sense experience. Various poets, including French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire I believe, saw the world through synesthetic eyes. My two friends/colleagues both believed that everyone saw the world in colours as they did and were surprised to find that most of us live in a different kind of world, perhaps more impoverished. I can sometimes think of sounds as colours but I am not sure if I am making it up as I go along. 

Now I read that a behavioural psychologist has been researching how certain colours and types of music can enhance, and presumably detract from, our experience of food. He gave groups of people chocolate to eat while listening to pieces of classical music. While listening to sombre music people found the chocolate bitter but declared it set when listening to lighter music. How bizarre! Presumably restaurateurs could use this knowledge to enhance customers' experience of their food and thus encourage them to return in the future. Interesting! But just a little worrying! How easily are we manipulated? 

Today, having dropped my chessplayers off at the pick-up point for their lift to the chess tournament, I waited for the early morning mist to clear a little and then went over to my daughter's house so that we could take her crazy small dog for a walk. Despite the sunshine, the walk was rather damp underfoot. Afterwards we had to tie the small dog up outside for a while until his legs dried off a little and the mud could be brushed off him. After that he more or less had the run of the house as usual, although the younger children were taking care not to let him into their bedrooms as there were toys around that he believes belong to everyone and, therefore, that he is allowed to chew them. As a rule they have no objection to his being in their rooms. In fact, they usually encourage it. 

When my daughter and family moved into their new house, on the first night they took a decision that the small dog was to sleep in his basket downstairs and on no account was to be allowed in anyone's bedrooms. He howled all night. Nobody got much sleep. Research shows, my daughter tells me, that if you move house and make your small dog sleep downstairs alone he will be sure, once you head upstairs for bed, that he has been abandoned and will howl out of sheer despair. A poor creature abandoned by his pack! Consequently the dog now seems to sleep in different bedrooms on different nights. 

Not only that, but quite often he sleeps at the foot of the bed, on the bed or indeed IN the bed. Here's another thing: when I stayed at my son's house, babysitting overnight while he and his wife went to a wedding reception, their cat made no attempt to pester me during the night. Perhaps she did not realise where I was sleeping. However, when the young couple returned the following day the cat made a point of sleeping that night on the pillow, practically curled up around my daughter-in-law's head. 

Now, I find all of this very disturbing. Sleeping with animals if fundamentally wrong. And I am not even talking about bestiality; I mean simply having animals in your bed. I would even draw the line at animals in the bedroom. However, I seem to be expressing a minority view, at least to judge by the pictures I keep seeing on Facebook. These are pictures of children snuggling up to dogs and cats. Not only quite large children such as my grandchildren who are old enough and large enough to carry their dog around and often do. In fact, the whole family has a habit to pick him up and cuddle him. They are a little surprised if I am reluctant to be hugged by them after they have spent some time snuggling the hairy creature! 

No, what I find most alarming are the photos of small babies cuddled up to sleep with dogs and cats. Even more upsetting to my delicate sensibilities are the videos of crawling babies and tiny tots in bouncing cradles and ride-on toys being "kissed" by the family pet. Most parents carefully sterilise baby bottles, baby cups and spoons, dummies and the like. Almost anything that is going to find its way into the tiny child's mouth is scrupulously cleaned. And then they let the child hug the pet ... and presumably afterwards put their fingers into their mouths!!! They allow the dog to lick the child's face ... and everyone knows that dogs lick the most unsavoury things! 

Two things:-  

• I am aware that children need to experience a little dirt and a few germs but there are limits. 

• I can understand the value of pets for a child's emotional development. Well, sort of! I think soft toys can be a very good substitute. (My daughter tells me she got her first dog so that her children would not grow up afraid of dogs. OK but I am not totally convinced!) 
• And I would not do anything to harm an animal. I just don't believe in living with them, especially not in close proximity. 

 I realise that those are three things but that's how it goes.

Weather, colouring and Zen activities!

My friend Brendan who lives in Galicia has been posting pictures on Facebook of his two delightful children playing on the beach in the sunshine. Meanwhile we have been to the airport to collect a bunch of young Spaniards, Galicians, who are coming here to play chess. So we drove through the rain, crossed the airport carpark in freezing wind and waited for them to arrive. It must have been a bit of shock to their system to come out into that. 

Mind you, I reckon it was more of a shock to those people I saw arriving in shorts, tee-shirts and flipflops! I know none of us really wants the holiday to end but do such people not realise that April in Manchester is not the same as some sunny place with a beach? Maybe they had seen - and believed - an April Fools' Day weather forecast this morning. 

Tomorrow we will show the young Spaniards Manchester so I hope that the weather forecast I have just seen for fine but still fairly cold weather will be true. Some time ago I bought myself an adult colouring book, much to Phil's amusement. Lots of complicated patterns of plants and flowers and such like stuff. I found it very therapeutic, a splendid way of relaxing. I used to feel this when I went to painting and drawing classes. We all simply got absorbed in the task in hand and forgot about everything external. In those days I probably needed to escape stress rather more than I do now but the Zen-like quality still remains. 

I mention this because I found an article about that very thing - adult colouring books - in the newspapers online. They even had MY colouring book in their illustrative photo. Apparently in Australia, there are even groups who meet to colour-in together. It's rather like the knitting circle that have sprung up all over the place. I don't think I'd go so far as that. The whole point of the colouring activity is that you concentrate solely on that. You don't need to chat at the same time. Surely you lose the Zen thing! As for knitting circles, I am not really interested in them either. If I knit - or rather, when I knit - I do it while reading or watching television. If I want to go for a drink with friends, I go for a drink with friends. I don't need to take my knitting needles with me to justify my being in a pub 

However, it seems I am correct about the Zen thing. Here is a short extract from the article: 

"As adults we can be in danger of forgetting how to play. Play is crucial at all stages of life; it can be used to practise spontaneity and to relieve stress. It helps to maintain our brain function, whether through solving the problems involved with colouring in, or the social interaction of a board game. Play also stimulates the imagination, helping us to stay flexible and develops a playful state of mind that is useful when coping with stressful situations, such as breaking the ice with strangers

you I have no intention getting my dolls out! 

The doodling and colouring stuff, however, has been recognised as good for us. "A study was undertaken in 2009 to see if subjects retained more from a list of random names being read aloud if they doodled at the same time. The researchers had suspected doodling might help the brain to remain active by engaging its “default networks” – these are regions that maintain a low level of activity in the cerebral cortex when outside stimuli are absent. In a surprise quiz given later, subjects who doodled while listening to the list remembered 29% more of the names than those who didn’t doodle. And the doodling they were doing? They were shading printed shapes – in other words, colouring in." 

So there you go. Get In touch with your inner child as soon as possible!