Leaves and grass and photos.

This morning Phil looked out of the window and stated that he wanted to look out on green, not green with brown splodges. And so, after breakfast, we went out with rakes and gathered together all the fallen leaves. Now they are all in a soggy pile behind the fence at the bottom of the garden. Of course, we could have a dry spell, so that they can all dry out, followed by a windy spell and the leaves could end up all over the grass once again. Perhaps we should have organised a smoky bonfire.

Raking leaves off grass is not unlike combing tangles out of a small girl's hair. Slow and gentle works best. If you try to go too fast, you end up pulling out great clumps. Not good in either case. Although the grass does not protest quite so loudly as the small girl. The grass - I hesitate to call it a lawn - looks a lot better. Well, a lot greener!

Someone who has been trying to look her best is our PM, Theresa May. Ready to have her picture taken for the Sunday Times, she donned a pair of leather trousers (£995) and a pair of Burberry trainers (£295). The article which gave me this information did not mention how much her jumper cost; I can only assume it was equally expensive. She has been criticised for wearing these items, on the grounds that this shows she is out of touch with the general public. There is a part of me that agrees with this. Our parliamentarians - and those of all democracies - should not be spending huge amounts on clothes in times of austerity. There is absolutely no need for politicians to be wearing designer clothes! However, if you are going to wear leather trousers - never a good idea in my opinion - then they have to be good quality. And here's another "however": I have yet to hear of a male politician being criticised for wearing a suit that cost over £1000!

Here's a bit more nonsense. Yesterday an Italian friend of mine told us, in despair and incredulity, that she had heard on the radio on her way to work that Nigel Farage was going to appear on the cover of Time Magazine as their "Man of the Year". I checked: the former UKIP leader featured alongside the likes of US President-elect Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, scientists who have developed technology to edit DNA and Beyonce among the finalists for "Person of the Year". It seems that the American news magazine gives Mr Farage much of the credit for Brexit. Well ....

My investigations also revealed that Nigel Farage has been named “Briton of the year” by The Times, which hailed his “game-changing” politics. I wonder if they also hailed the role of the media in giving him lots of publicity! So much for British values!

There was a hiatus in production of this post while I sorted put a load of financial paperwork. As sometimes happens - too often for my liking - when Phil asks me to verify something about our finances, I go to the files, only to find at they are inexplicably in a mess. Loads of stuff has not been put where it belongs and needs sorting. Phil then laughs at me for getting somewhat stressed about this. He does not, however, volunteer to sort it in my place! This happened again today!

During that time, it transpires that Donald Trump is the one to appear as Man of the Year on the front of Time Magazine. How did that happen? Does he have shares in Time Magazine?

2016 has been quite a year. And there are still a few weeks to go!

Remembering stuff.

Over breakfast we usually catch up with email, Facebook (just me, as Phil is still a Facebook refusenik), the newspapers and suchlike. No, we are not completely antisocial; we are not one of those couples who sit in restaurants so busy with their mobile phones that they never say a word to each other. We comment on items of interest that we find, recommend articles to each other and generally swop and share stuff. All of this while consuming coffee and cereal and toast. We can multi-task!

And so this morning Phil informed me that chess Grand Master Timur Gareyev had broken the simultaneous blindfold chess-playing record. As a rule he does not share chess news with me but we met this odd young man in Portugal last year so he knew that I would be interested.

For those who do not know, playing blindfold means that you do not look at the board while playing. Your opponent tells you his move, you remember the state of the board, perhaps visualising it in your head, and then tell him your move. And so on. Doing this with one game at a time is clever stuff but over the last weekend young Timur Garayev played blindfold simultaneously against 48 opponents, winning 35, drawing 7 and losing 6.

Now, I call that pretty impressive, considering that some people have trouble remembering what they upstairs for!

We met Timur Gareyev, as I said, in Figueira da Foz in Portugal last year, when Phil was playing in the chess tournament there. I immediately thought he fitted into the category of "slightly odd chess player", although not as odd as some I have met. (No offence to chess players is intended ; every sport has its obsessives and eccentrics. I just happen to have met a fair few of the chess type.) Quite tall and skinny, he was full of a nervous energy, verging on manic, and frequently grinning. He seemed to be full of a sense of fun and appeared to be really enjoying life.

Looking up details of his record breaking, I came across this description by an American called Eric Vigil:

 "I had met GM Gareyev at the US Open in August in Indianapolis, Indiana where he had punked me out on Monday morning. He was wandering around the lobby at 7am. I had just gotten back from my daily constitutional, and he asked me where the Hotel’s restaurant was, as he needed to get some breakfast. He was an awful skinny guy and I thought he needed some food.

He then noticed my shirt with the Weber Elementary Chess Club of Iowa City, Iowa on it, and asked if I coached chess. I answered yes and we started off on a chess discussion. This young man seems very interested in chess I thought. I offered to buy him a US Chess membership and provide him with the tournament entry fees for the Quad.

He looked at me and in a very serious tone said, “Those crooks at US Chess would just be stealing your money!” then went on to say he would just win all the money at the quads and it would not be fair. I thought this young man is pretty full of himself. “Are you sure?” I asked, “Do you have something against playing rated chess?”

At that point another person came up and asked GM Gareyev for a selfie picture… DAWG! I was just swindled as GM Gareyev was pretending to be an average Joe. GM Gareyev was very gracious and came back with me to the breakfast area of our hotel and played my roommates in some blitz chess and talked up many of the delegates to the US Chess meeting."

That sounds just like the young man we met!

Memory is a strange thing though. It can be trained and improved. Phil said his personal record for simultaneous blindfold chess was five games at a time. I have seen his perform this party piece. Who knows how many he might have managed if he had decided to train himself up to it? I am always impressed at the way he can remember details of the moves in games played years and years ago.

But then, people have often asked me how I remember the grammar rules and vocabulary for the various languages I speak. It's just one of those things I can do; my brain and memory have programmed themselves that way. When I have been asked how I manage not to confuse the languages - a problem I have never really had - I explain that I think of it as having separate compartments in my head: a kind of box for each language I speak.

We see musicians playing lengthy pieces of music without reference to the score. Singers go through a repertoire of maybe twenty or thirty songs in a performance, without a songsheet there to remind them of the words. Only once or twice have I heard a singer say they did not know the words and in each case it has been a new song.

All of these feats of memory impress me greatly, especially as I sometimes fit into the grandma stereotype of having to go through the whole list of family names before coming up with the correct one!

Education and results.

Our daughter-in-law has been teaching their small daughter Spanish. All was going well. The little girl was having fun. This morning I received a text message. One stage of the learning had gone like this:

Mummy: Grandma speaks Spanish, doesn't she?
Little girl: Yes.
Mummy: Hola, abuela.
Little girl: Hola, umbrella.

I love the logic of the small child's brain. Faced with a new-sounding word, the brain substitutes a familiar word. Fantastic. Years ago, when our first granddaughter, now a very grown-up 19, was just a little, two-year-old dot of a thing, there was a song around called "I need a miracle". The small person, nicely in tune, sang out, "I'm in America". Brains are wonderful!

On the subject of education, Phil read out a headline to me: "Graduate sues Oxford University for £1m over his failure to get a first".

Well, I thought, it was bound to happen sometime. We live in a litigious society. I have to say that I thought the first case would be a pushy parent suing a sixth form college because their super-intelligent offspring had not achieved high enough grades at A-Level. I was really only surprised that it had not happened sooner.

And then I read the article. It turns out that the graduate in question received his degree 16 years ago. He then trained as a solicitor and did not have so successful a career as he expected. Apparently he believes he would have had a career as an international commercial lawyer if he had been awarded a first rather than the 2:1 he achieved 16 years ago. And he blames his teachers! According to his lawyer, he suffers from insomnia and depression because he did not achieve his first class degree. 

Oxford is largely dismissing the charge since it all happened so long ago. I tend to agree with them. Surely, if he was going to suffer from insomnia and depression because he did not do well academically, his symptoms would have manifested themselves long ago.

A rather more important court case is going on at present. The government is trying once more to sort out the rights and wrongs of the methodology for getting us put of the EU. We wait to see the outcome!

Meanwhile, I was beginning to feel a little more optimistic about things when Austria did not vote in the right wing candidate. But then the results of the Italian constitutional referendum came out this morning and it would seem that the lunatics continue in charge of the asylum. My mother always said that bad things come along in threes. 

The writer of this article believes that Renzi's defeat is not in the same class as Brexit and Trump but my Italian friends are very upset about it.

Once again, we shall wait and see.

Boredom

I have listened to several items on the radio this last week about boredom. The general consensus seems to be that being bored is good for a body. It gives you time to think, to reflect, in some cases to write poetry. Writers they spoke to said that it was in those moments of "boredom" that they had their best ideas. We are told we should not fill children's time up with wall to wall activity; they need some time to invent their own activities, to play imaginative games.

 Okay, this is all well and good but I don't think they are talking about boredom. You can be very busy, have a load of stuff to do and be bored out of your tree. Or you can snatch a period of time out of your busy schedule and do nothing. That is not the same as boredom.

I don't think I have been bored for a long, long time. I can remember as a young child, in summer holidays, telling my mother I was bored. What it meant was that I had not decided what to do with myself and my time. And since then, I have never really been bored, occasionally frustrated but never bored. Waiting in an airport because your plane has been delayed is more frustrating than boring. You just have to make sure you have reading matter, stuff to think about.

It's a bit like sadness. How much of the great poetry or beautiful songs would have never been written in there were no sadness in the world. Maybe we just need some down time to appreciate when we are really feeling good.

And certainly we need some time to do nothing so that we can appreciate the stuff that we fill our busy lives with.

That's my take on it, anyway.

Knowledgeable gnomes and speedy Santas.

Yesterday evening I was invited to a friend's birthday celebration in Manchester. So off I went, despite the fact that, like Cinders, I would have to leave the party early, not because my frock would turn to rags and tatters but because of the stupid bus service, of which more later, although not MY rant this time. The pub was noisy, as you might expect, but it was good to catch up with old friends and colleagues. 

As I left the pub and walked along Deansgate, I serendipitously came across another group of old friends and colleagues, who had been having a departmental Christmas meal and were on their way to greet the birthday boy. Lots of grown-up people getting excited and hugging in the middle of the street! Splendid!   

I scuttled away to catch a tram to Victoria station, followed by a tram to Oldham Mumps, keeping my fingers crossed that I would manage to arrive there before the last bus left. With only two minutes to go when I reached Oldham Mumps, I was a little anxious that the bus might have left early, not unusual on our route. But all was well.    

At the stop was a small, rather gnome-like gentleman. Now, I will happily initiate conversation on public transport, on  train platforms  and at tram and bus stops. This gnome-like man was clearly of the same turn of mind. He enquired which bus I was waiting for - the same one he was planning to catch - and, after reassuring me that it had not yet gone, went into a tirade about how ridiculous it is that the last bus from Oldham centre to Saddleworth leaves at 10.28. After all, they have just opened a new cinema complex in the town centre and their last showing finishes at 10.30!!! Why is this allowed to happen? Thus he ranted on and on until the bus arrived.   

On the bus he continued, to my amusement. He asked if I knew who owned the local bus companies. No idea! Not something I have researched! Well, he told me, one of them belongs to an American company, the one that runs Greyhound buses all over the States. Billionaires! So any suggestion that they don't run more frequent and later buses because few people use them and they can't afford not to make a profit is a lot of nonsense. Another company is owned by the German public transport network. They can afford to subsidise their transport system, he told me, because they make a profit from the privately-owned services they run in the UK!    

All of this I took with a pinch of salt, especially as he further went on to tell me that the bus company does not bother to train drivers who are new to a route but simply tell them to work it put and, if they are stuck, ask a passenger; they usually know the route! Now, this I know to be untrue as I have travelled on buses where new drivers are accompanied by a trainer. However, it was an amusing bus-ride home!    

And it would not really surprise me to discover that our bus services are foreign-owned. After all, EDF is a French electricity company and the Chinese are building a nuclear power station here. So it goes!    

Today I walked to the local supermarket at Greenfield, another of the Saddleworth villages. All along my route I kept coming across masses of skinny Santas! What was going on? Then I remembered that today there is a fun run: the Saddleworth Santa Dash. Consequently, there were Santas of both genders, of varying heights and ages but almost all skinny runners; very few traditionally plump Santas. They seemed to be organised in teams according to the area they came from. Near to the supermarket, the Greenfield Santas were busily donning orange beards. Look carefully at the photo. Perhaps they have discovered that Santa has Celtic origins. Perhaps they want to counteract the prejudice against ginger folk.    

Despite the fact that my bus journey back from the supermarket was somewhat slowed down by this surfeit of Santas, I can only applaud the Christmas spirit and hope they made a lot of money for charity!

Jobs!

I used to know young teachers who took on extra jobs - bar work in the evening and stuff like that - to supplement their income. I always wondered how they managed to find the time. But then, I suppose, if it was bar work they could pretend that it was part of their social life as well. Nowadays I suspect that it would be even harder for teachers to take on extra employment as there is so much paperwork added on to the usual marking and preparation.

And then I read an article where the journalist was wondering whether Boris Johnson will go on writing his Daily Telegraph column. This pays him far more than his salary as an MP together with his salary as Foreign Secretary. I bet ordinary journalists don't earn that sort of money. No, it's his name that earns the fat salary.

However, it strikes me that if a government minister has time to write a regular column for a national newspaper he cannot be working as hard as the average teacher!

Names, of course, are very important. I hear that Samantha Cameron has launched her own brand of designer clothes, no doubt selling at quite extortionate prices. Now, I know that some will say that she is simply taking up her career where she left off to play that important role, wife of the PM. (As an aside, do the male partners of female politicians give up their career when their wife becomes PM? I seem to remember Denis Thatcher carried on with his business interests. And is there a Mr Merkel? What does he do?) However, one wonders how successful Mrs Cameron might be, no matter what training she has had in art and design, if she were not an already "known" brand!

Which brings me to the American designer Tom Ford who was asked in a recent interview whether he would be dressing the First Lady elect, Melania Trump. Apparently he has declined to design clothes for her in the past, saying she is not his type or shape. Now it seems that he has said that his clothes are too expensive for a first lady to wear because they have to 'relate to everybody'. Well, Donald Trump has said he wants to be the president of ALL the Americans, so that would be about right.

The fact that Tom Ford designed dresses for First Lady Michelle Obama is neither here nor there. 

Read more.

More seriously, Donald Trump is said to be on a celebratory tour of the States, thanking his supporters for electing him. On the television news last night I heard one of his fans praising him for saving 1000 jobs in United Technologies, a company that was going to send the jobs to Mexico (behind a wall?). And this before he is even in the White House. Bernie Saunders, however, writing in the Washing Post, points put that originally 2,100 jobs were to go to Mexico. So presumably over 1000 jobs are still disappearing. What's more, Trump has apparently promised tax concessions to United Technologies in exchange for keeping the 1000 jobs in the USA.

 Getting the job done!

Fog and language!

Today has been a day of fog. White-out all over the area. Not quite bad enough to cause major traffic problems but damp and grim all over the place. And nowhere near as bad as the fogs and smogs of yesteryear. We were talking about this on Saturday, during our train journey on the Santa Express. As one of our group pointed out, almost all of the houses we were passing would have been puffing out smoke from coal fires back in the fifties and sixties when we were growing up. Cue a bit of nostalgia about walking to school with your scarf over your mouth, blowing your nose and producing a nasty black mess in your handkerchief, and those evenings when the buses were cancelled and you had to make your tentative way home on foot.

One of our members waxed lyrical about how she and a friend made it through the fog to a Beatles concert, having decided that if they were having trouble getting there, then so would the performers and, therefore, it was worth getting there even if a bit late. They made it, screamed their way through the concert and, faced with the problem of getting home again, were very relieved when one of their fathers turned up to take control! Such stamina we had in the sixties!

Today pollution is in the news again. It seems that all those trees which have lined many city streets for years and years, those trees that we have long believed to be absorbing the CO2 and releasing oxygen, have in fact been preventing pollution from escaping upwards and away from us. In fact they create a kind of pollution tunnel! Oh, no!!! Here's a link.

The other thing is speed bumps. Because cars have to brake, sometimes violently, and then accelerate away, extra pollution is released into the atmosphere. It strikes me that if perhaps the drivers kept to the speed limit for the area with the speed bumps, maybe they would not need to brake and accelerate quite so violently! Mind you, that is just my possibly scientifically ill-informed opinion!

Something else altogether is a matter of language. I have long been agitated by the fact that "fun" has changed from a noun to an adjective. It's one of my little fads. We used to say that something was "a lot of fun" or "not much fun", using those constructions because "fun" was a noun, as is "cheese". Nowadays people, at least young people, talk about something being "very fun" or "not very fun". Wrong! You never hear people taking about "very cheese"!

Now I find that the word is one of the latest anglicisms to migrate to France. Time Out France has produced "Le classement des villes les plus funs". Like every good French adjective, it is made to agree with the noun it describes. Well, technically/grammatically, since "ville" is feminine, it should have had an 'e' as well as an 's', but perhaps "funes" would have lost the anglo-pronunciation. Scores or I should say "les scores", were given for dynamism, atmosphere, restaurants and bars, variety of district life, how welcoming they are, and cost of living.

Madrid came fifth, beating Barcelona. So much for the Catalan capital being the place to go! If you want to know more, here is a link.