In Manchester yesterday.

As we seem to have been leaving our adaptor plugs all over the place, we decided we needed to buy some new ones. So, as I was in Manchester yesterday, I popped into Boots to see what they had in their travel section. There was no sign of such a section on the ground floor. I began to think that they had given up on holiday stuff, on the grounds that nobody goes on holiday at this time of the year. So eventually I sought assistance. Upstairs was the answer. So upstairs I went. 

Still no sign, so I sought assistance again. I was directed to the other side of a display with baby milk on it. And sure enough, on the other side it said, in large letters, TRAVEL. And that was all there was, apart from a lot of empty shelves, all nicely labelled with a variety of travellers's needs. When I pointed this out, the assistant I spoke to told me that the stuff had been removed so that they could put up their Christmas display! Yes, their Christmas display! In the middle of September! Then she invited me to go downstairs and sit by her counter, which turned out to be one of the cosmetics counters, while she went to investigate where the travel stuff had gone. 

A fairly long time afterwards, she returned with the relevant information. In compensation for my waiting around so long, she offered me a free beauty consultation on which would be the ideal foundation for me. I thanked her but politely declined as I rarely use foundation. I wonder what compensation would have been offered to a male customer. 

 The main purpose of my visit to Manchester was not shopping, although shopping did go on. No, the plan was to meet some friends and former colleagues and go to Home, the big cinema/theatre/entertainments complex, to watch the new documentary film about the Beatles in their touring years. 

Before the film they were showing all the famous folk turning up to the world premiere of the film in Leicester Square In London. My friend and I had thought about sitting that out, planning instead to have a drink and a chat in the sunshine outside Home. In the event, when she went to pick up our pre-booked tickets, she was advised to go and find seats at about 5.30 as the cinema was fully booked and late arrivers might have difficulty finding seats together. And so, when a couple of other friends turned up, we left them to their pints and went off to find seats for the four of us. Just as well, for it was already filling up. 

And in the end the link to London was quite interesting. They interviewed briefly the interesting people who arrived, those who had been close friends of the fab four, and ignored the rest, just kind of letting the camera linger on them momentarily. Perhaps the most interesting was Dr Kitty Oliver, now a historian but then a young black girl who had never had much to do with white people until the Beatles refused to perform in her southern town if the audiences had to be segregated. 

"I think that the action The Beatles took was such a spontaneous thing that there was probably more of a delayed response to it," Oliver claimed. "The idea that they would come and challenge something [like that] was quite startling to some people, I think. Certainly, for people like me, what they did, opened the door to experiences that I had never had before and perhaps wouldn't have had at that particular moment. It was taking a step, at a moment in time, that ended up having [positive] ramifications." 

 After that first incident, they had it written into their contracts with American organisations that there was to be no segregation in their audiences. Amazing stuff. The film was excellent. The music was, of course, splendid. The Beatles were very YOUNG! Were they really that young? I suppose we all were. A fair proportion of the audience in the cinema were, I suppose, their contemporaries but there were a lot of younger people too. 

At one point they showed an interview with the a tress Sigourney Weaver, who had been at one of the concerts. When they were researching the film, looking at old footage, someone spotted a young girl in the audience and asked, "Is that not Sigourney Weaver?" And, lo and behold, it was . What were the chances of her being caught on film like that. A great evening. 

We all enjoyed every bit of it. Then an old friend of mine, run into unexpectedly at the film showing, commented that he had especially enjoyed the shots of the Beatles' visit to Australia, in particular Adelaide. He and his friends had been in a car just ahead of the Beatles' car as it drove through Adelaide. 

 Little moments of nostalgia!

Spiders, parties, social media and the aftermath of storms.

Spiders are in the news again.  Warnings are out that they will be heading into indoor places seeking mates. So we should be prepared to see more or them around, especially the large lady spiders! We can expect to look up from reading in bed, to see a huge, long-leggedy creature crawling across the ceiling once more!    

There seems to be some truth in the matter. We have seen almost no spiders for ages but last night as we were about to settle down to watch another episode of American mafia violence, aka The Sopranos, Phil suddenly leapt up. What was the cause of this abrupt action? Spider on the floor! LARGE spider on the floor!   

We use a tried and tested method to remove spiders, especially the large lady spiders: trap the beastie under a glass, slide a card under the glass, pick the whole thing up and walk as far from the house as possible before throwing the spider out. The theory is that if released at some distance from the house, the spider just might be less likely to find her way back in.   
So, I was commissioned to keep an eye on the spider while Phil went for a glass. Just as he lowered the glass over the spider, it scuttled across the carpet. It took two more tries to get the glass over the spider, clearly one with Olympic speed record ambitions! By that time I was falling about laughing at the sight of a grown man doing battle with a creature the size of his thumb nail ... and almost losing! Eventually, though, she was caught and duly ejected! 

What makes them think they will find a mate in our houses? Goodness knows! Maybe there is a spider version of social media that sends out messages for all the arachnids to come and party in one place. A sort of spider date night!   

While we were spider hunting, we could hear a vacuum cleaner whirring away in the house next door. The parents of the house have been away on holiday, visiting relatives on the USA. Perhaps, Phil speculated, they were about to return and the offspring were cleaning up. Now, I knew the parents were not due back until the end of the month. So why the sudden urge to clean, when there has been little evidence of such activity since the parents went away? This morning I received the answer from another neighbour, who has been walking the next-door dog every day. (Why the offspring, aged 19+, are unable to do this is another small mystery. If they are old enough to be left in charge of the house, surely they could also walk the dog? However, that really has nothing to do with me!) the offspring are about to go and join the parents on holiday in the USA. They will all fly back together in a couple of weeks. So presumably the offspring did in fact feel the need to be tidy for the parental return.   

The last time the parents went away and left their daughter behind, she organised a party. All well and good, but she made the mistake of commenting on social media about it and the house was invaded by gatecrashers. There were not so many as in the horror stories you read about in the press but still there were enough, and they were unruly enough, to cause a mess. What provokes people to wreck places? I can understand, possibly, just about, inviting yourself to someone else's party - free drinks, food and so on. What I don't understand is the urge to pick up things and hurl them at the wall to watch them break, raiding the fridge for stuff like yoghurt that you can throw around and pour all over the floor.   

This time the young lady is older and wiser and more media-savvy and any mess is her own and her brother's!    

This morning all is quiet. No spiders. No noise of vacuuming. The mess is all outdoors. Huge, sloppy mud puddles abound. Anywhere that soil washed down from higher ground can collect is full of a thick, brown mess. There must be places with no topsoil left to be washed away in future storms. Grids are blocked with leaves and debris. In Uppermill, the Memorial Gardens are flooded at their lower level. The stepping stones are partially covered.   

In spite of this, the day is fine and warm again. Nobody would really think there had been a storm at all!

Weather, location and identity crises!

"UK's hottest September day in 105 years sets 2016 record". 

That's what the headline said. 

Of course, reading on in the article, I found this: "South-east England is enjoying Britain’s hottest day of the year, as a late summer heatwave raised temperatures to more than 34C." So the UK is really the South East. Obviously the North West Is another country. 

Having said that, I have to admit that it was already 18 degrees when I went out for a run at 8 this morning. And, despite the protests of a friend of mine that it was still fairly chilly in Chorlton, we have had a very pleasant, very warm day in Delph and Ashton. My daughter and I took the tiny person on her first bus ride and walked back to their house in our shorts and sleeveless tops, feeling positively summery! 

On my way home, it was decidedly muggy and threatening. By seven we were in gloomy darkness and there was an amazing electric storm going on, so fierce and so close overhead that we disconnected the computer and various other electrical gadgets, just in case. I don't think I have seen such a spectacular storm since we were in San Sebastián, at least ten years ago. 

We sat in a restaurant which had rain water running through it, watching places just a little lower bailing out their premises. We were also sending text messages to friends in the south of France, just across the bay, who were seeing the same storm from the other side! 

The storm seems to have moved on now but I have seen some splendid photos of flooded streets in Manchester. 

They say the hot weather will continue, although for which parts of the country remains unclear, until the weekend when it will all cool down again. 

Just about everywhere I go I take my iPhone with me. And to a great many places I also take my iPad. I log on at the homes of friends and family. I log on in various cafes around the area. Not quite as many as around Vigo but still quite a lot. And yet, compared to some folk I know, I am quite restrained. 

Then the other day I listened to a programme about the continual online snooping that enmeshes our life at present: "The Online Identity Crisis" on BBC Radio 4. Basically any information or opinion you put on your computer and send out into the ether in one form or another will be stored somewhere and can be used against you in the future. Well, we knew that already, did we not? But the extent to which this permeates our life is worrying. 

Perhaps the most disturbing thing was the fact that the programme makers received an almost identical rejection to their invitation to send a spokesperson to the programme from Facebook, Twitter and Google. It went along the lines that their company thanked them for the invitation but was not going to "reach out at this time". The wording was so close in each case that it could well have been written by an artificial intelligence of some kind, an algorithm perhaps. 

Send no more emails, write no blogs, post nothing on Facebook: Big Brother is watching you!!! 

But my plan is to proceed as usual but to say nothing too indiscreet. 

Here's another thing: make-up. From time to time there are challenges for people, in other words women, to post photos of their "naked" face, the face they wake up to in the morning before they put on their make up. I read about someone who protested when she bought her new phone and discovered that it came automatically with an app to "touch up" any selfies, so that the user always looked her "best". With difficulty she managed to disable it. But apparently we should be using almost professional make up all the time. 

In Sunday's newspaper I came across a feature on advice on how to use "colour correctors" ("Pale green to correct redness, orange to balance greenish shadows, and peach to cover bruisy blues, all followed by your foundation.") correctly, so that you don't go out looking like a clown. The answer, apparently, is carefully. 

 I am clearly living my life all wrong, going out without ensuring I have been on a beauty therapy course first! And, of course, living at the wrong end of the country for the weather forecasters to even truly recognise my existence.

What I think!

The grammar school debate rages nicely here. I've been talking about it today with my daughter. 

There is a sort of nostalgia for something that existed throughout my childhood and still exists in little pockets of privilege around the country. Strangely there isn't a parallel nostalgia for secondary modern schools. Nobody is leaping up and saying how good that side of the old selective system was. 

Various people, however, keep popping up in the media explaining how awful the 11-Plus experience was in their family. In some cases they were very traumatised because the teachers at the private schools they were then sent to after failing the exam singled them out as stupid for doing so. I wonder if they will get around to talking to the "ordinary people" that our prime minister keeps talking about. 

In my case, through the last two years of my primary schooling I watched the new girls' grammar school being built about twenty minutes away from my house, replacing a decrepit building at the other end of town. I wanted to go there. I referred to it as "my school". And then I failed the exam and went to the local secondary modern: classes of forty children, teachers who assumed you were badly behaved from the word go and shouted at you constantly. 

Fortunately for me, my parents did not make me feel that I had let them down. I was not punished, as some of my small contemporaries were. But I was disappointed and not a little jealous of those I knew who had passed and received a new bike as a reward for being so clever! 

Equally fortunately for me, in my town they offered you a second chance: the 12-Plus, with exams in English, Maths, Science and French. My parents had been told that I failed the 11-Plus by one mark and were encouraged to let me sit this other exam. No pressure from my parents, I was simply to do my best. 

I passed and found myself in the second year (year 8 in modern parlance) at the girls' grammar, not in the bottom form where many of the 12-Plus girls ended up but in the middle stream, perhaps thanks to the idealistic young French teacher who had made me love learning a foreign language, and with the chance to begin learning Spanish as well. And that's how I ended up with a career in Modern Foreign Language teaching. 

Small classes (about 24 girls) and teachers who spoke to you reasonably and expected that you would do your best as a matter of course. And so mostly we did. I thought I had found a kind of paradise. And I carried on feeling that way despite the evident faults in the system, especially the elitism that I became aware of. 

I had experienced both sides of the selective system and as I went on through education and became a teacher, I decided that what I had had at my girls' grammar was the experience all schoolchildren should have. Not the elitism but the small groups and the thoughtful teachers and the expectation that you were able to do your best and would do well. And later I worked in a comprehensive school that, like my girls' grammar, had its faults but did allow even pupils who would undoubtedly have failed the 11-Plus to progress through the school and improve sufficiently to go to university, not just any old university but in some cases to Oxford. 

It seemed to work for a while, at least in some places. But we still had to fight, mostly unsuccessfully, for smaller classes.

And since then, successive governments have messed up the system. 

So I don't look back on a golden age of grammar schools. And I particularly do not look back nostalgically to a time when a significant number of children were made to feel like failures at eleven years old. 

No, I don't know what the solution is but I don't think a return to an old system, even in a new coat, is going to work.

Two September days.

On September 11th 2001, I was working in a sixth form college. It was a quiet afternoon. I had free time to mark and prepare. At some point I went down to reception to talk to one of the secretarial staff about something that needed doing. On the ground floor it was remarkably quiet except for a huddle around the reception desk, watching events unfolding on the television screen. 

I drove home early. Everything had come to a stop at college. When I arrived home I found my husband, my daughter and her three and a half year old sitting on the sofa watching film of planes flying into the twin towers in New York. 

And that, 9/11, was the event that changed all our lives from that time on. 

Fifteen years on, I'm retired. There are a few articles about 9/11 but mostly about photographers who took pictures that day and such like. I

t's been a lovely sunny September day here. A friend of mine has been complaining on social media that it is too cold and she needs to put the heating on. On the other hand, I have had the kitchen door open and suffered that September pest: wasps. Two of the nasty, little critters were buzzing round the kitchen and managed to sting me as I put the chicken in the oven. I suspect I just got in their way. Phil went into overdrive and googled "what to do for wasp stings". Answer: not a lot unless you are among the unlucky few who have an allergic reaction or, of course, if it stings you inside your mouth! 

And so I am left with a slightly swollen red patch on my arm. Oh, and a dead wasp on the kitchen window ledge. Phil went on a killing spree, risking knocking my poor avocado plant for six in the process. 

What a difference fifteen years makes.

Reading the Saturday papers! No serious news comment!

It's Saturday. Phil is home from Spain. Our daughter's partner is at home for the weekend so I don't need to rush off and be useful to the household with the new baby. And so, Saturday settles into its old routine: get up, go for a run, come home and shower, have a latish breakfast, walk to the supermarket and return on the bus with enough food to feed a small army just in case our daughter and family accept the standing invitation and descend on us for Sunday tea. 

And then I read the papers and find snippets of stuff that tickle my fancy. 

Bradley Wiggins, 36, is contemplating what to do with the rest of his life. He's won the Tour de France. He's won gold medals. He was made a knight, for goodness sake! And now he says he's retiring from the sport but he's not sure what to do. It must be hard, not wanting to be remembered as "that cyclist with side burns", not wanting to spend his time going on TV shows like A Question of Sport, but unsure what he really wants to do. 

Ironically, or perhaps quite seriously, Sir Brad says he can't go and work stacking shelves in a supermarket, something he refers to as a "normal job". Maybe he could do what so many models, actors and, yes, even sportspeople, seem to do these days: design clothes. He has already designed bikes for Halfords so he has a head start. But we have to agree with him that 36 is a tiny bit too young to start talking about retiring and doing nothing for ever more. 

I am used to reading recipes in the weekend papers with ingredients that I don't have any chance whatsoever of finding in the local co-op, and not much better chance of finding them in the supermarkets around here. Today in a recipe for "Indian spiced sweetcorn fritters with ginger yoghurt" most of the ingredients listed turned out to be easily obtainable. I was quite impressed and then I came across "one teaspoon of nigella seeds"!! What on earth are "nigella seeds". Has celebrity chef Nigella Lawson been producing a range of products (something that TV cooks do, just as models design clothes) or are they seeds that would grow into little Nigellas if you planted them. I am imagining little Nigellas about the size of Thumbelina! 

 A little further on in my Saturday paper reading I came across a thing about thigh-high boots designed by Kanye West. Another celebrity "creative". (Apart from Paul McCartney's daughter, I have not read anything about any of these famous people having any training in fashion, art and design, how to make clothing, or anything else fashion related!) 

Thigh-high boots always make me think of pantomimes, specifically women playing the male lead and slapping their thighs. 

What amused me in particular about the article was the advice on how to wear them. "The over-the-knee boot has become an important category within our boot range," said a footwear and bags buying manager, "due to the different heel heights and the appeal for many occasions, from day to night." So, not just pantomime wear then! 

The article went on: "They can be worn in different weather conditions (Wow!! Who knew that?) with dresses or skirts, over skinny jeans, sweater dresses and more." Now, that's reassuring! 

It doesn't stop there: "They work well with midi dresses, elongate the leg and are equally stylish in more of a daytime look with luxe knitwear layered with a longer length coat. Or, indeed, worn with no coat at all." 

 Golly! I am so well informed. It's a pity I have no over-the-knee boots!

Summer into autumn thoughts!

Two weeks ago yesterday I flew back to England, leaving Phil to continue playing chess in Vigo, so that I could assist with the preparations and eventual settling in of our fifth grandchild. That evening I wrote a blogpost, describing the fun and games of travel and the like. When I tried to post it, try as I might the system would not let me in properly. I went through all the usual steps, even tried a variety of passwords, but each time I reached a point where the notice popped up: "you currently have no blog. Would you like to start one?" That was a surprise, especially as I had gone into the system via an already existing blog. 

The start of that post went like this: 

"Well, my summer seems to have come to a soggy end. I was up at the crack of dawn this morning. No, in fact well before the crack of dawn, waiting for a taxi to arrive at 4.00 am. Fortunately, it did not arrive on Wednesday morning, as I feared it might. I took the precaution of phoning the taxi company on Wednesday evening, just to make sure it would actually turn up this morning. All was well. The taxi turned up. 

The bus station was in almost total darkness. But the doors were open and I had my ticket for the bus. A noisy group of young people were waiting for the bus as well. Eventually, at about 4.15 am they switched some lights on. We no longer had to rely in the soft drinks machine for illumination. 

And so I dozed my way to Porto airport, where just about everything on the ground floor was still closed. None of the cafes planned on opening until 7.00 and it was still only 5.30 am Portuguese time! Upstairs the queue to go through security was immense. However, there was a cafe open there and I opted for coffee and a croissant before joining the line of hopeful travellers. 

All the way to Porto, the weather had been getting foggier and foggier. But there were no notices of possible problems at the airport so I kept my fingers crossed. All to no avail! It was only after the gate number had been announced and we had been encouraged to gather at the far end of the airport, where the budget flights depart from, that they finally told us that departure was delayed by an hour, at least! Because of the fog, landings and take-offs were slower than usual and our plane had been retained at Manchester until a slot became available for it. 

I seem to have no luck with this 10.15 flight. Or maybe it's the flight itself that is jinxed. I have been delayed at least twice for this flight and a friend of mine was delayed by a good three hours in June! 

But I made it home to a rather damp and gloomy, although not cold, Manchester. Ever optimistic, I hold out hopes of a bit of and Indian summer even yet. September can be very nice. We shall see." 

There followed some reflections on the burkini controversy, which are being cast aside as they are now totally out of date and irrelevant. 

In the meantime, the expected fifth grandchild, a girl, has been safely delivered and all is well. Phil returned to England yesterday on the same 10.15 flight, with no delays whatsoever. So clearly, it's just me the airplane gods are conspiring against. I am trusting that with the return of my trusty IT wizard, I shall have no more posting problems. 

In the wider world, our crazy government wants to bring back grammar schools and selection at age eleven, as if our children did not have enough testing going on already. They also plan to lift restrictions on faith schools so that they can recruit 100% within their faith and have no need for diversity. The education system is in a mess. 

In fact the country is in a mess with the minister in charge of organising our withdrawal from the EU having no idea of how to proceed. No plan seems to be in evidence. 

Spain appears to be continuing without a government and now I read that the rickety old train that runs from Porto to Vigo has crashed, killing at least four and injuring others. 

The world is topsy turvy and the run of sunny days has turned now into rain but, fingers crossed, I can now blog again successfully!