Bikes. Music. Luxury accommodation for nesting birds.

Our kitchen is beginning to look like a bike shop. First of all there are the two bikes that Phil and I occasionally use. Far too occasionally at present! Then there is a bike that Phil bought because he was impressed by my hybrid (on-road/off-road) bike but which turned out to be not quite what he wanted. It was going to be bought by a friend of ours. He took it on trial to see if it suited him and then seems to have put it away while he got on with other things and forget about it. When we remembered to remind him, he returned it. So now we need to find another possible buyer. And over the weekend we acquired our grandson's bike. This was brought to our house for a kind of MOT. Grandfathers have their uses. 

The child has not ridden it for a good while and it has simply sat in the basement of their house doing nothing. Quite why he has not ridden it is unclear. He learnt to ride in the new modern way, starting off on a tiny little bike without pedals. The idea is to propel it along with your feet, rather like some of the very first bikes that were around before someone invented chains and pedals. In this way children learn to balance and can progress to a bike with pedals but without needing stabilisers, which can actually slow down progress in learning to ride properly. So at four years old he was whizzing around cycling all over the place. Maybe other activities just took over and left him no time for cycling. 

Now, however, his school is doing "Bikability". I assume this has taken over from what used to be called "Cycling Proficiency". They are going to be instructed safe cycling, cycling etiquette, road sense and all those sorts of things. Presumably a new trendy name makes it sound more appealing! 

His bike, more of a mountain bike than a classic road cycle, is extremely heavy. I certainly would not like to have to cycle that up any hills! 

The school has contracted in an expert to run this course for the youngsters. Our daughter has expressed her surprise at how many in the class are unable to cycle. Every year when they run this activity there are a few who opt out because they don't cycle but this year it amounts to about one third of the class: a high percentage of non-cyclists.! Does this say something about modern children, indeed modern society as a whole? 

Last night we accidentally watched a television programme where Alan Yentob interviewed Rod Stewart. I say accidentally because the TV just happened to be left on that channel after we had watched something else and suddenly it caught our attention. We are normally much more organised and discriminating in our television watching. This was in the "Imagine" series, which are often very interesting, as this one proved to be, reminding us of music we have not listened to in years and years. This prompted Phil to go and root through our collection of vinyl, hunting for our old Rod Stewart LPs and finding albums by various other artists at the same time. We shall have a great nostalgia fest later. 

Some of the vinyl collection has been replaced by CDs but not all and their are still a couple of shelves of LPs. We have been given instructions by our son that we are not to get rid of any of without consulting him; he wants, as they say, first dibs on our music collection. 

Out and about, running here and there, I often run down our local bridle path, the Donkey Line. Several times recently I have come across a horse tethered at the spot where the used to be a stopping place, not an actual station, for trains, back in the day when this was a branch line, connecting the mills of Delph to the larger conurbation of Uppermill. It seems that the owner of the horse brings a bucket of horse food, special treats instead of just grass and hay in his field, and parks parallel to the bridle path, then, instead of carrying the bucket up to his field, she collects the horse and walks him down to the donkey line where he receives his treat. Occasionally she grooms him there. It is very odd to come across your path blocked a person brushing a large horse. Today there was evidence that someone had been trimming a horse's main and tail. It was clearly not the same horse I have seen there before because he is dark brown while all the horse hair on the path was a nice honey-blonde colour. And the path was liberally strewn with the clippings. 

The local birds are going to have luxury link for their nests!

Birth stories.

Yesterday I found myself asking when so many people I know became such ardent royalists. First thing in the morning loads of people were going bananas because Kate Windsor (I suppose that is her name, or is he Kate Cambridge?), Duchess of Cambridge, had gone into labour. She was a lucky lady and three hours later gave birth to a little girl. The twittersphere, the tweetersphere and Facebook went crazy. You would seriously think that they all knew the lady personally. 

This morning one of the tabloids ran the headline "New princess brings joy to William, Kate and the nation!" Well, my first thought was that surely they should have put the baby's mother name at the head of the list. She did the hard work after all. And then, did this little girl really add joy to everyone's life? Judging by the people camping outside the hospital waiting for news, and the vast numbers who took photos of the royal birth announcement posted by the gate of Buckingham Palace, some people apparently need a new princes to make their happiness complete. 

According to Hello Magazine (courtesy of a Facebook friend, I hasten to add, as I only ever look at such magazines at the hairdresser's) "It's been an emotional rollercoaster for royal watchers who have been avidly following the news, waiting to meet the couple's second child. While Kate had said that her due date was around "mid-to-end of April" during a London-based engagement in March, the little Princess wasn't ready to make her way into the world until May." 




People can be really strange!

A very important aspect for Hello magazine was the outfit chosen by her duchessness to wear to leave hospital. This is now tipped to be a best seller. Most of us in her situation wear whatever we can fit into. 

I wonder if William and Kate need to produce any more little royal babies. They now have one of each kind. As far as I know, the isn't another gender. So maybe they can stop now and simply wait for the years to go by until they can become King Bill and Queen Kate. 

Will the birth of a royal child, a princess to boot, give a boost to the Conservative party in the forthcoming election? You never know? All sorts of things seem to affect the way people vote. One more i say, people are strange/

In the Guardian's Family section yesterday there was an article about a family who consider the 3rd of May to be important because, in one of those odd family coincidences, the son of the family was born on that date in 1965, his niece was born on that date in 1998 and the father of the family died on the 3rd of May 2012. Coincidences like a that are strange but my family can beat it. My younger sister was born on my mother's birthday. Our daughter was born on my father's birthday. Her oldest child was born on our son's birthday. And finally, my mother died on my niece's birthday. 

My younger sister has gone through all her life considering herself to be very important for sharing her mother's birthday. Add that to her being the youngest child of four and a left hander as well and you can imagine the self aggrandisement that went on there. Our daughter gets a little sentimental about being her grandfather's best ever birthday present and my niece gets positively maudlin every time her birthday comes around. The only ones who take the coincidence in their stride are my son and my granddaughter who just celebrate their birthday without any fuss. 

 I suppose that by now it is something of a family tradition and taken as normal.

Routine reflections on life, again!

My normal routine has been completely disrupted for weeks. Things keep preventing me from going out and running in the morning, starting my day with a good wake-up shake-up. If it's not the weather, it's running around doing things to help our daughter reduce her stress. And then there are the days when I have some social commitment which means I have to go our early and catch a bus. Of course, I could get up earlier and run earlier but I am supposed to be a retired lady, doing things at my own pace. 

I do, however, usually get a round to looking at the papers online. Today I have read about the Pope's concern that young people are not getting married. He feels they are put off by the fear of failure. This is caused by the increasing divorce rates apparently, especially in the case of children of divorced parents. I suppose he would say that, wouldn't he? Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, writing in the Guardian, doesn't agree with him. As the child of divorced parents, she does not feel at all put off marriage. Quite the contrary: the fact that her parents divorced makes her really want to form a nice, cosy family unit - commitment all round. She maintains that unstable jobs, zero-hours contracts and the housing crisis affect rates of marrying much more. What struck me was her saying that young couples feel that cannot get married until they can afford a house. Which I suppose is sensible, although people used to marry and then save up; maybe if you wait for everything to be perfect you might never get round to marrying at all. Maybe another factor is the attitude of society in general: surely very few people nowadays regard an unmarried couple living together as "living in sin". 

Here's another attitude that might be changing and certainly needs to change: attitudes to women who have been sexually attacked. I have read of two cases, one here and on in New York, of young women who have been raped and are turning down the option to remain anonymous. This was, and often still is, regarded as a protection for the victim but these two young women feel that publicising their suffering is a way of making people face up to the ongoing problem of young women not being able to walk around safely, especially in the late evening. The girl from Oxford has written an open letter to her attacker, letting him know that his attack on her is an attack on the whole community. Meanwhile the student from the university of Columbia University in New York has been carrying her mattress around the university, claiming that this represents an intimate part of her life that has been invaded. In the litigious society of the USA, the chap accused of attacking her is threatening to sue the university for allowing her portray him as a rapist!! Wonderful!! 

That's the feminist issues bit of this post out of the way. 

Finally, Microsoft has produced a facial analysis tool (is it a tool or an app?) called "How Old Do I Look?" It analyses photos of faces and comments on the gender and age of the subject. I can think of no sensible use or need for such a tool? I suppose that if it constantly tells you that you look ten years younger than your actual age than you might find it flattering. But how depressing must it be if it tells you that you look ten years older? A young friend of mine on Facebook has had her photos variously analysed as 24, 29 and 37. Her six-year-old son has been declared to look 51! 

Well, they do say that some small boys are like little old men!

"Eateries". Force of Nature. Presentations.

Yesterday was our grandson's tenth birthday. For a treat, he wanted to go out and eat at Nando's, the restaurant chain. So off we went to Nando's in Ashton only to find that we would have to wait over an hour for a table. As it was already well past seven o'clock, by the time we had got our table and ordered some food we might not have been eating until going on for nine o' clock. And the birthday boy and his sisters had to get up for school today! This was not really a problem as there was a Frankie and Benny's restaurant on one side and a Mexican place called Chiquito's on the other. More restaurant chains! We would go elsewhere.

After consultation we opted for the Mexican place. A twenty minute wait, the meeter-and-greeter told us as she handed us what looked like an old-fashioned mobile phone. My almost eighteen-year-old granddaughter and I looked at each other and with one voice asked the meeter-and-greeter, "what is this!" It turned out to be some kind of pager which would flash red when our table was available. How very odd! I can't say I am a great fan of Mexican food. Too many tortilla wraps and fajitas and burgers for my liking. Everyone else was happy though, so I selected a flatbread with roasted vegetable topping. Not wonderful but acceptable. 

What amazed me was the number of people eating out. This was Wednesday evening, not Friday or Saturday, and the three restaurants I have named were all heaving. I thought we were supposed to be in recession, with austerity measures all over the place. And then there are all those television shows encouraging people to be adventurous in their home cooking. It doesn't seem to have influenced the behaviour of people around here very much. 

The location of the restaurant was another of those things that I find odd about modern UK society. There was the Nando's, which we didn't go to, with Frankie and Benny's on the right and Chiquito's on the left. Opposite were at least two other "eateries". All of them were huge places, capable of hosting huge parties and, judging by my admittedly limited experience of such places, presumably all serving exactly the same menu and decorated in exactly the same way, maybe even playing exactly the same music, as all the others in their particular chain. 

In the complex there was also a huge cinema and a bowling alley; it was, I suppose, the entertainment equivalent of an industrial park or a shopping complex. It all seems to me to be a strangely impersonal way of organising things. I wonder if the managers of these chain restaurants ever dream of having their own personal restaurant to run. There appears to be very little opportunity to stamp your own personality onto an establishment of the entertainment complex kind. But perhaps I am just turning into an old romantic! 

This old romantic has been mildly amused by stories of nature getting its own back recently. Thee was the tale of a big game hunter who was killed by a charging bull elephant a week or two ago. Some people believe the elephant was annoyed because the big game hunter had killed a leopard who was a friend of the elephant. Do such friendships exist outside of the world of Disney? And this morning I read about a man standing on his boat of San Diego, California, waiting for his wife to take a photo of him with a huge yellowtail fish he had caught when suddenly a sea lion leapt up, bit into his hand and pulled him overboard. I assume the sea lion was attracted by the fish but I never knew they could attack in that way. Perhaps that is why they are called sea LIONS. The fisherman survived to fish another day but maybe he will be more careful in future. 

This morning I visited our middle granddaughter's school to listen to her and some of her classmates making "presentations" about topics of their choice. They have to demonstrate their spoken skills as well as reading comprehension and writing for their English Language assessments. So I sat and listened to mini-talks, accompanied by PowerPoint, on "My Greyhound", "My dog Baxter" (our granddaughter's choice of topic), "My Holiday in Spain" ("This is the hotel. This is the pool. This is the restaurant. This is the beach. This is Palma airport." At last something indicated that it was actually Spain! This is rather mean of me; after all, these were 12 year-olds!), "Cricket", "The Truth about Sharks" and, possibly my favourite, "Strange Sights in the World". 

This last one had some lovely interaction with the audience, along the lines of asking if anyone could guess what was going on with the goats in a tree or the numerous feral-looking cats who were clearly gathered together to get up to no good. One of his pictures showed a group of around twelve people lined up to hold a huge thing that might have been a sea snake or some kind of marine monster. It turned out to be something called an oarfish. This one did not look as though it was about to take revenge on the folk who had captured it though.

Reflections on the state of the world.

On Thursday I strolled around the centre of Manchester bare legged, bare armed, sun hat and sunglasses on! Today out on my run I met a fisherman (a number of them fish the old millpond I run past most days) who was all wrapped up against the cold and told me it had been snowing earlier. I was not up for the snow: still tucked up in my bed at that point. Towards the end of the morning there were hailstones and I was sorely tempted to turn the heating up a few degrees. My grandson tells me that they had thunder and lightning close enough to his school to cause power cuts, annoyingly preventing them from using computers. We have also had periods of rather chilly sunshine. 

Whether this is part of the natural cycle of weather (as one of my scientist friends maintains) or a consequence of global warming (as another scientist friend maintains) I really could not say. But I can say that I am not impressed! 

However, the year is getting along. I saw my first bluebells of this year when I was running this morning and there are buds on the plants in my garden. All set for a riot of wildflower garden colour before we head off for Galicia in a few weeks time. 

According to some scientists, volcanoes and earthquakes are also affected by seasonal changes and slight alterations in the earths rotation as well as by global warming and melting ice sheets. Sheets of ice weigh a lot and hold down the tectonic plates to some extent. As the ice melts, the plates spring back to where they were before and so we have more volcanic activity and more earthquakes. I wonder if this also explains the huge sink holes that have appeared in recent years! 

I have been reading about volcanoes because our daughter has been preparing a super-duper lesson on this topic for her final teaching practice and I have been one of her main sounding boards to bounce ideas off. I hope her class of 7 to 8 year-olds enjoy all this stuff. I don't remember learning such things when I was that age. If we did, most likely our teacher would have stood at the front and told us about them. Or she might have given us books to read and made us copy chunks out. Nowadays they have to do much more practical stuff, building models of volcanoes and cutting up hard boiled eggs which are meant to symbolise the various bits of the earth and its composition. Perhaps they should really do a cross section of a soft-boiled egg so that the centre could be nicely molten. This would, of course, make for a much messier lesson. 

How did my generation ever learn all the stuff we know without all this hands-on education? 

I find myself asking similar "how did we" questions about all sorts of things. For example, this morning I read that expectant mothers are advised not to drink organic milk or UHT milk as they contain less iodine than ordinary pasteurised milk. Iodine is necessary for brain development in the growing foetus so mothers who change to organic milk could be harming their babies. (So there's another guilt trip for mothers!) But surely mothers were drinking unpasteurised "whole" milk for centuries before pasteurisation came along. Does this mean we are all cleverer now? Imagine what Leonardo Da Vinci could have achieved had his mother drunk pasteurised milk during pregnancy! He would probably have actually built that flying machine! 

And then I read that they been giving dairy cows supplements to make milk and other dairy products the main source of iodine in our diet in the UK. Other countries apparently add it to salt or bread. What else do the various governments do to the food we buy? Big Brother is not only watching us but adding stuff to our food, rather like soma, the happiness drug doled out in Orwell's 1984. When will they discover something they can surreptitiously add to our food to prevent or at least combat obesity? 

I almost begin to understand those who want to go off and live self-sufficiently on a little patch of land where they grow all their own stuff and rear a few cows and hens.

The plants travel again. Classic film watching.

The snowdrops saga continued to a sensible conclusion. Our daughter's two younger offspring were coming to stay overnight on Saturday while their mother went out to celebrate her birthday. Because our grandson was supposed to be going to a birthday party at the Manchester Climbing Centre I had the car to take him there. Whatever happened to birthday parties? When did they morph into great adventure epics like this? Whatever the answer to that question, in the end he did not go to the adventure party as he was suffering from some kind of tonsillitis - a mild kind as he seems to have recovered now. 

Anyway, because I was supposed to be driving close to my friend Heidy's bit of Manchester, I had arranged to take the snowdrops which went to Manchester and back on Friday. When the plan to go to the climbing place fell through, I decided to take the snowdrops anyway, taking the middle grandchild with me and leaving the tonsillitis king with his grandfather. As we drew near my friend's house we went past a huge, really huge, cemetery. My granddaughter commented, "I wouldn't like to live around her when the zombie apocalypse happens!" I was somewhat gob-smacked. The snowdrops were successfully delivered though, and all was well. We did, however, have two grandchildren to entertain. We also had a plan. 

More than twenty years ago we sneaked our daughter into the cinema to watch the film "Dances with Wolves". It was certified as 12+ and she was only eleven. She was quite a tall child though and we pretended she was already twelve so that we could all watch the film together as a family. And what an amazing film it was. Thundering buffalo (or should we call them bison?) heading for the edge of the big screen and having us all ducking before they hit us. Panoramic views of the American Indian camp. Splendid sunset skies. Kevin Costner dancing round a camp fire, doing his own American Indian ceremony with Two Socks the wolf and earning his Indian name: Dances with Wolves. 

Well, it just happened that we had recorded the film onto our digital biz some time ago. (I almost said "videoed" the film but the technology and terminology has moved on.) So we decided to give the two grandchildren their own version of their mother's experience. The older child is old enough to see it even in the cinema but the younger is not quite ten, so he would have had to be sneaked in too. 

This "old" film certainly bears re-watching. Both children appear to have appreciated the experience and were moved to laugh and almost to cry but certainly to think. So many films nowadays, especially films aimed at children, have a saccharine happy ending or promote a world view where everyone is "entitled" to behave in unacceptable ways and obtain whatever they ask for, or they lead children to believe that a zombie apocalypse could actually be a reality. 

What's more, we watched the film without popcorn or fizzy drinks! 

We feel it is our duty to introduce our grandchildren to a different world view!

Travelling plants!

Today I took snowdrop plants to give to my friend Heidy. She has long admired the snowdrops that grow on my garden. For just as long I have promised to give her some. So far we have never coordinated it properly. Last time I saw her, the snowdrops were buried under snow and there was no way I was digging under the snow to find them. 

So, having organised to meet today, I was out last night at eight thirty in the evening digging up snowdrop plants. It was so late in the evening because I had been entertaining the grandchildren, feeding them bacon sandwiches, taking them to the park and eventually home again. I carefully dug up a nice clump of snowdrops - no flowers, only leaves. You have to get them now before the leaves die down and you can no longer see where they are. The plants were safely transferred into a plant pot, plant pot into a small plastic bag, plastic bag into my flowery shopper and carefully carried to Manchester. 

We met at the Deansgate tram stop (sorry, Metrolink stop), from Oldham in my case and from somewhere along the track from the East Didsbury end in hers. Heidy was very pleased to see my little gift for her in my bag. And we had a nice wander around Castlefield, stopping for a coffee and moving ourselves from a table in the sun to a table with a chimenea heater thing when the sun went in. We had a good long chant and set the world to rights and then made our way back to the tram station and said goodbye. 

As my tram set off I swore softly, making a chap opposite me smile, especially when I explained that the snowdrops were still in my bag. This happened because of my altruism. I carried them around myself instead of giving her the bag straight away as she has some problems with arthritis. I very nearly hopped off the tram at the St Peter's Square stop but saw that the tram which Heidy was going to catch was just setting off from there. Had there been more time I would have gone back to the Deansgate stop, given her the snowdrops and caught a later tram back home. However, as it was I would have been chasing after her all the way to Chorlton and probably would not have caught up with her. 

The snowdrops may have to be planted back in my garden I fear. The best laid plans and all that sort of thing!!!