Sorting stuff out! Or ... women getvthe job done!

I have spent the last couple of days, in fact a good part of the last week, helping my daughter sort things.

First of all there was the painting. She wanted to freshen up the entrance hall of her house with a coat of paint. This is difficult to do on your own with a small baby and a daft dog to contend with at the same time. So I went along, we got everything organised and then decided that the best way to make a good start was for her to take baby and dog out for a walk while I did a good bit of painting. This worked well until I found that the huge pot of paint, which had already been broached during another painting session, had kind of self-glued its lid shut. It soon became apparent that opening it was going to be a two-woman job so I called her and suggested she come back. In the meantime I would out masking tape all over the place. By the time she returned I had fought my way into the pot of paint. Sod's Law, I suppose.

However, the baby had gone to sleep, which meant that one distracting factor was out of the way. As for the daft dog , well, we shut him up on a bedroom, where he proceeded to bark all afternoon. The repainting was so effective that my daughter was inspired to attack other parts of the house during the evening. By then I had gone home but she recruited other family members - partner, older children, etc - to be dog distractors and babysitters.

The next job was the garage, still full of boxes of rubbish ... oops sorry, boxes of unsorted belongings from when they moved house about two years ago. To be fair to my daughter, she was completing a degree in education and then holding down a first teaching post and finally producing another offspring. She has been a bit busy.


The passing of time has, if anything, facilitated the sorting mechanism.

Stuff that an eleven year old and a thirteen year old view differently from when they were nine and eleven could more easily be sent off to a charity shop without an outcry about how cruel it was of their mother to expect them to live without those things.

Files of notes that had been essential to the education degree student could now be put into paper recycling without so much as a backward glance.

And suddenly there was space in the garage. Not enough space to fit a car in but then modern cars are so huge that they don't really fit into garages anyway. But there was definitely space to see what else was still there to be sorted.

The biggest problem is the vast collection of books. This is probably a genetic trait as we also are in permanent danger of disappearing under a pile of books of one kind or another. Some of my daughter's book will go to school with her when she resumes her teaching post at the end of her maternity leave. She plans to try to persuade her older offspring to part with some of the collections of books they acquired when they were smaller. I wish her luck with that!

Among the books were treasures: favourite storybooks from when she and her brother were six or eight years old, or maybe a bit younger. There has been a suggestion that I might take some of these treasures back to my house. Goodness! I thought I had seen the last of them when I passed them on to her! But they ARE treasures and cannot simply be discarded. Besides, I can see why she is plotting this. Some of the books belonged to her older brother, now living in distant Buckinghamshire with his own little family. It would be nice to set up a bookshelf here which his small daughter could dip into when they come to stay.

I just need someone to help me sort my books so that I can create that space!

Today's was a different sort of errand, involving a trip to IKEA to look at certain bargain items to replace bits of her furnishings that have been worn out, partly by a small boy who thinks that furniture is intended for him to practice parkour on!

I just had a minor disagreement with the spell check about the spelling of parkour, which I wanted to spell parcour as it comes from a French word, "parcourir", to run round / over / through. Here's part of a description of this "sport" which developed from military training: "Parkour involves seeing one's environment in a new way, and imagining the potential for navigating it by movement around, across, through, over and under its features". My grandson thinks that the sport also involves moving around, over or through furniture in the same way. Much to his disgust, it is banned in my house! 

Anyway, we had a successful visit to the Scandinavian store and ended the day with a trip to the local rubbish dump to get rid of stuff we no longer wanted and that we thought nobody else could make use of either.

Quite a cathartic experience really!

Today is International Women's Day. Even my eleven year old grandson knows this. He told me so when we collected him and his cookery from school. His home economics class has been coming on quite nicely. A little bit of equality of opportunity there.

Some wag asked why there is not an International Men's Day. It turns put that there is one. It's on November 19th. They even have a website. Here it is. Their focus last November 16th was men's suicide. It seems that on most countries the male suicide rate is considerably higher than the female rate.

My daughter and I have celebrated the day by sorting out the contents of her over-full garage and taking a load of stuff to charitybshops and to the rubbish dump. Women working together get results!

As regards International Women's Day, I thought I had found out why it is celebrated on March 8th. Apparently, my source suggested, it dates back to 1908 when the female workers at a New York company, Cotton, went on strike to protest about their terrible working conditions. The strike went on for several days until, on March 8th, the proprietor, a certain Mr Johnson, locked all the doors so that the workers could not leave. When the cotton mill burnt down, the 129 women who worked there all died. Rosa Luxembourg proposed that the 8th of March should be designated International Women's Day, in memory of the 129 women.

I came across this information on an Italian website. Wikipedia, hiwever, denies the truth of this story. According to Wikipedia, the earliest organised Women's Day observance was held on February 28th 1909, organised by the Socialist Party of America in remembrance of the 1908 strike of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

It goes on to say that there was no strike on March 8th, as some people claimed,  and that even the year was wrong since the strike it celebrated, the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, ended on February 28th, 1910.

At that point I gave up on the whole idea of researching the origins of the date. Today is International Women's Day and that's that!

And on a completely different topic, but with a bit of nostalgia thrown in, here is a link to a set of photos of London in the 1960s and 1970s. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/extraordinary-colour-photos-show-london-life-in-the-1960s-and-70s-a3481196.html

Food for thought!

Actress Imelda Staunton has spoken out against people eating in the theatre. I didn't know people ate in the theatre. I knew it happened in the cinema but I thought the theatre had managed to keep free of that blight. I get annoyed enough with people who have to open crackly sweets during musical performances.

"I don’t know why people can’t engage in just one thing. I don’t understand this obsession with having to eat or drink something at every moment of the day,” said Imelda Staunton. I have to say that I agree with her. I would go so far as to say that I don't understand the need to eat and drink during films either. Cinema managers must have other ideas, however, because modern cinemas all seem to be fitted with a drinks holders next to every seat. But then the cinema company makes a lot of extra money out of people buying popcorn and other snacks to consume while watching the film. 

Back in the day, when you had a B movie, then a break, and then the main feature, they used to have girls (always girls, with a special tray to carry their wares) come around with trays of ice cream and choc ices for the audience to buy and consume during the interval. And it was usually timed so that you could just consume your little tub of ice cream before the lights went down again for the big movie. Failing that, if you had been slow in purchasing your ice cream, you had to keep trying with your little wooden spoon to see if you had finished it. But woe betide you if you made a noise while you did so.

 Of course, that was back when there still were B movies, just as records had an A side and a B side. And cinemas tended to show only one main movie for a week or two. If you wanted to see a different movie, you had to go to another cinema in town, instead of another screen in the multiplex. Or you could do what a friend of mine did and watch the same movie every day for a week, usually a John Wayne movie in her case.

Nowadays we don't have an interval so you have to take the goodies in with you. Even though you are only going to be confined to your seat for about an hour and a half. When I used to be a sixth form Modern Languages teacher, at least once a year I would take a bunch of students to see a foreign language film, followed by a workshop by some expert, usual.y from one of the Manchester universities. As regular as clockwork, one of the students was bound to ask why the Corner House, the venue for such films at the time, did not have at least a little kiosk selling bags of sweets and popcorn and bottles of fizzy drinks. Because this was a venue that expected people to be able, and to want, to concentrate on the film they were watching and reflect on the ideas. That was why!

And that's what Imelda Staunton has been going on about. She goes a step further as well, saying that people should follow her example and avoid eating when watching television at home. “I don’t do TV dinners. There might, at one point in the evening, be a very small, very naughty bowl of ice cream. But that’s not noisy.” Yes, I agree with her on that as well. And I think that there should be no television in the kitchen or the dining room. That's the kind of old fashioned I am.

The actor Kit Harington (Jon Snow in "Game of Thrones") has been said to have defended people eating in the theatre. My reading of the various articles I have come across on this topic is that Kit Harington is not so much defending eating and drinking as saying that we must not blame the young. It's certainly not just the young who indulge in a good feed and a chat during a show. He is afraid that if we blame the young, they will be put off attending the theatre: “I am afraid that, if the theatre is going to die of anything, it will be from exactly this type of stereotyping and prejudice aimed towards a new and younger generation of theatregoers." Good point!

And while I am showing myself to be perhaps a little old school, yes, I did refer to Imelda Staunton as an actress. We have a perfectly good word for a female actor, so why not use it?

Getting back to eating during performances, I think it has always been there. I an pretty sure I have read about it as being the norm back in Shakespeare's time. And I remember going to the panto for a friend's birthday treat, long ago (but not quite Shakespearean times) when we were both about eight years old. We were given money to spend on sweets to suck during the panto - sucking a sweet was recognised as a way of preventing coughing - and spent the lot on Uncle Joe's Mint Balls, very hard, long-lasting inty sweets.. They were sold at the corner shop, 2 sweets for an old penny. We had 2 shillings, 24 old pence. So we had 48 Uncle Joe's Mint Balls. By the end of the evening, despite our having taken time out to go up on stage and sing with a crowd of other children, we had scoffed the lot, the roofs of our mouths were raw and we never wanted to see another Uncle Joe's Mint Ball, let alone eat one.

So there is a long tradition of eating while you watch. But that doesn't make it right or even acceptable!

Collecting stuff and sorting things out.

When I think about works of art being sold, I imagine paintings, sculpture and other portable stuff. However, a castle in Wales, Gwydir castle, is trying to locate a missing parlour, complete with ornate panelling and fireplace, which was bought by Willian Randolph Hearst in the 1920s. Or rather, the owners or custodians of the castle are trying to locate the missing parlour, which used to be part of the castle. They have already found another missing interior, also bought by Hearst and subsequently sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. They stored it for decades and then the castle bought it back off them in the 1990s. It dates back to the 1640s. Amazing!

I've heard of buildings being bought, dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to be rebuilt. Until now, however, I had not heard of individual parts of buildings being sold off like that. But apparently it's not uncommon. All sorts of bits and pieces, works of art of various kinds have been sold and transported away, often never to be seen again. An expert said, "A large proportion of Britain's art history from the 16th to 18th centuries may be missing.

It's always gone on in one form or another. Think of the stuff that was pillaged during wars in ancient times. Think of the Elgin marbles. Think of the contents of poor old Tutankhamun's tomb, for goodness sake. Except that he was neither poor nor old, but that is by the by. If you go back in history it was marauding hoards who stole the art work. In more recent times it's governments and rich folk. 

People buy and sell things. People like to collect stuff. It seems rather a shame though for works of art to be bought and then put in storage. Not seen by the public and not even seen by the purchaser. It all seems like such a waste. It's rather like compulsive shoppers who buy clothes and put them in the wardrobe, not even removing the labels and certainly never wearing them. Compulsive shoppers, however, usually don't sell on their clothes collections at a profit.

A different kind of work of art is "The Prince" by Machiavelli. Yesterday's newspaper has an article which asked "Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?" The main idea of the article was to ask us "What if the Italian civil servant whose name became shorthand for devious politics was trying to warn us about the despots, not advise them?" 

Here's an excerpt that sounds remarkably true to modern times:

"If you’re a political outsider who wants to move fast to the top job in a democracy, how to do it? You could start by dipping into a book written 500 years ago by an out-of-pocket Italian civil servant. The quickest way, it says, is to have fortune on your side from the outset, with plenty of inherited money and a leg up through family connections. If lying and breaking your oaths help you crush the opposition, so be it. Make the people your best friend. Promise to protect their interests against predatory elites and foreigners. Fan partisan hatreds so that you alone seem to rise above them, saviour of the fatherland."

Hmmm! Add to that a theory I heard about the latest scandal regarding possible wiretapping of a certain Mr Trump. He reckons President Obama is responsible. President Obama's people deny all knowledge. The head of the FBI says no such thing happened. Last night's TV news featured someone who believes that this is all smoke and mirrors. You (or Mr Trump) say something has happened and make a fuss. It goes in all the papers and other news media. Lots of people believe it. Even if/when it all proves to be untrue, you have taken attention away from other matters for which you might be criticised. Thus are things undermined!

The Ancient Roman democracy came to a sad end. Will modern democracies go the same way?

Cultural changes.

I was reading about the return of eight year old Sunny Pawar to his home in what he article describes as "the Kunchi Kurve Nagar slum near Mumbai's airport". Little Sunny was the child star in "Lion", the story of Saroo Brierley, accidentally separated from his biological family at the age of five, adopted by Australians and eventually rediscovering his origins as an adult. My daughter tells me it is a very good film. Maybe I'll get around to seeing it.

Meanwhile little Sunny's life must have been changed almost as much as the child whose story was told in the film. He was only five when it all began and film people came to his school looking for possible child actors. His father lost his job as a street sweeper because he took so much time off to take sunny to auditions. He then became Sunny's business manager, taking the child around the world on film business. Sunny's mother says, "He was just a normal little boy. Now everybody says, 'Oh, a Hollywood star lives in our neighbourhood'. Overnight I have become the mother of a movie star."

And presumably Sunny's education has been rather different from what it might have been had he just stayed at home. He's been around the world and has been exposed to a range of cultural differences. 

The family still lives in the same small house as they ever did. Sunny is only eight, he needs to go back to school and eventually decide what to do with the ret of his life. He says he would like to work in Hollywood, in Bollywood, everything, but there are no concrete plans. Probably a good idea.

Maybe some time in the future a film will be made telling the story of Sunny Pawar. I say this because I heard recently that only a small percentage of films made at the moment are based on novels. Many are based on screenplays written specifically as such. Indeed, when you read some modern novels you can almost see the screenplay underneath the text. So modern novelists receive offers for the screenplay when their novel is not yet completely written; the offer is made on a synopsis of the planned novel. And many films nowadays are made from true life stories: the story of the climber who had to amputate his own arm when he became trapped in a cleft some rocks, the story of the Boston marathon bombing and, of course, "Lion".

Interesting times.

The Food Programme on BBC radio 4 was talking today about tea. Despite the rise in coffee drinking, tea still remains the most popular. Oddly enough when tea was first Introduced to Britain people didn't know what to do with it. However it was THE THING to have in your food cupboards if you were rich and up to date. The programme told the story of a wealthy industrialist in Leeds who bought tea and proceeded to spread it on his breakfast toast!

There are similar stories about reactions to potatoes when they were first seen here. And a friend of mine tells a story about long grain rice. Although my eldest granddaughter does not believe this, there was a time when the only rice you saw in the UK was round grain rice and the major use for it was to make rice pudding. Gradually, along with the spread of Asian cuisine I suppose, long grain rice began to be sold. My friend's mother, always one to try put new ideas, had heard about is new kind of rice and decided to experiment with it.

And so one day my friend arrived hime to find her mother triumphantly declaring that they were trying something new for tea. (This is the Northwest of England where you have tea at 5.30 pr 6.00 instead of supper or dinner. Dinner is at lunchtime and supper is a bit of a snack before you go to bed.) A bowl of steaming rice was placed in the centre of the table. That was it. Everyone had a serving and declared it a little bland.

Getting back to tea, the drink, although we continue to be a nation of tea drinkers, young people, I learnt, are more likely to drink green tea than black tea. Then there is tea with milk, a very British thing. There is a historical side to this. Originally we got most of our tea from India, which produced mainly black tea and we developed the habit of tea with milk. Other countries in Europe still find it hard to deal with this properly, often serving hot milk instead of cold!! How shocking!! But most of these other countries imported their tea from China and other places, where the leaves were prepared differently. And Russian tea-drinking was influenced by bringing it along the silk road. The journey, by camel train, involved frequent atops along the way with the tea they carried and drank "contaminated" by smoke from the campfires. And a taste for smokey flavours developed.

Travel broadens the mind and the taste buds!

How to run the world!

In a world where a small group of rich people own more and more of the world's wealth, it's interesting to see what they do with their money. In many cases they could just keep it in a box under the bed, take out a little every time they need something and still have enough to live a couple of lifetimes. I don't think I have heard of anyone doing that. Making money must be addictive: the more you have the more you want.

Anyway, there is one rich man called Robert Mercer, the owner of a network of technology and media companies. He Funded Ted Cruz in his bid to be the Republican candidate in the US elections and when Mr Cruz dropped out, Mr Mercer switched his funding to Donald Trump - $13.5 million. 

It's an expensive business standing for election for the presidency. In theory anyone can become president. In practice, you need a lot of money behind you.

This rich man's money also funded Breitbart, the right wing news site, to the tune of $10million. And he has a $10 million stake in a data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica.

That strikes me as a prodigious amount of money to be spreading around.

Cambridge Analytica apparently specialises in "election management strategies" and "messaging and information operations". They are good at looking at what you do on social media, analysing it, and then feeding you information to influence the way you see the world.

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign. Some people say they had some influence on the UK referendum but Cambridge Analytica denies working for the Leave campaign - they probably had nothing to do with the Remain campaign either for that matter. However, the organisation Leave.EU says it worked for them and taught them how to target people and scoop info from their Facebook profiles.

So it goes. Without money you stand no chance. The rich have already inherited the earth. They can mould things their way.

It's very scary. You use social media, they track what you like and, more importantantly what you "like", and set about controlling you. Be very careful what you put out there!

On the other hand there is a not so rich Dutchman called Rutger Bergman. He has has written a book "Utopia for Realistsv - And How We Can Get There" - in which he sets out a kind of plan for sorting the world's problems. His plan calls for a measure of global cooperation.
He proposes a Universal basic income for all of around £12,000 per year. Along with that he suggests a short working week of 15 hours. Open borders are part of his plan too; everyone should be able to go and work wherever they please.

He calls for a recognition that globalisation has lifted masses of Chinese out of poverty, doing more for the country than communism ever did. No one acknowledges it, he tells us.

He also says the left needs to decide what it is FOR, what it is in favour of. "I think the big problem with the left is that it only knows what it is against. So it's against austerity, against homophobia, against racism. I'm nor saying I'm not against those things but I think you should be FOR something. You need to have a new vision of where you want to go."

Is this too idealistic? Unworkable?

Ideas like his are around though. Some Dutch towns are conducting trials on basic income. Finland has implemented a trial but only with the unemployed. Fife and Glasgow are looking at a scheme and the Swiss are interested. Shadow Chancellor Andrew McDonnell has said that "it might be an idea whose time has come" and Benoit Hamon, French Socialist candidate, has included it in his manifesto. There's even a US tech billionaire, Elon Musk, expressing an interest. He knows that work will become more scarce as work on robotics and AI advances.

So now we just need to get the governments of the world to agree and persuade those rich people to spread their wealth around differently. Not much if you say it quickly.

Exclusion? Inclusion? Being polite and civilised?

How hard is it to be reasonable and polite to people? I keep coming across stories about the rude treatment of people not being allowed into the USA for one reason or another. There was the teacher from Wales, a young man with a Muslim name, removed from his plane and never really finding out why he was not allowed to continue.

Maybe his name was simply wrong, like the son of Muhammid Ali, the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay. He was detained along with his mother and questioned about his faith. All this despite having been born in the USA and having an American passport.

Some people found out that their visa was wrong. Well, maybe not actually wrong as such, but perceived to be wrong. There was a French historian, a holocaust expert, invited to speak at a university conference. If he had not been able to contact the organisers of the conference and get legal help, he might not have got in at all. 

Then there was an Australian woman, the writer of books for children. She was told she needed a work visa in order to go and make a speech at a conference on literacy. Eventually they let her in. One of the officials, having discovered that one of her books for children had been selected as Australia's gift to our little Prince George, even wanted to shake her hand and declare how pleased he was to meet her. Something of a snobbish turnaround if you ask me.

Both the last two were held and questioned for quite some time before being allowed into the country. What struck me above all, however, was the writer Rem Fox's description of the attitude of the officials. Any explanations given were shouted in an aggressive manner. All of the people waiting in the holding room with her were bing treated as if they were criminals guilty of some heinous crime. Communication seemed to be unnecessarily harsh; officials got up close and personal and shouted at the "suspects". Older people were not treated with respect. Forget that qualification: nobody was treated with respect.

Whatever happened to common decency? Even if someone has committed a crime, and certainly if it has not been proven that they did, in fact, commit that crime, it should be possible to speak to them calmly and politely. Oh, I know that there are some who might say that the violent and aggressive only understand violence and aggression but I beg to differ. If we deal aggressively with the violent and aggressive, then we put ourselves at their level. And surely it is the job of officials, whether at immigration control or in police stations, to ascertain true facts, not to pre-judge and mete out punishment.

That's my take on it anyway. And I am not claiming that we are any better in the UK. Look at all the discussion and confusion and posturing about the situation of EU nationals resident in the UK. The PM says no guarantees can be offered about their status after Brexit. The House of Lords disagrees. Meanwhile a mass of people are in limbo, uncertain about their future. Last night in the television a politician declared that EU residents should have nothing to worry about. Of course they will be allowed to stay in the UK! Nobody is going to throw them out!

If that is the case, why is so much fuss being made about it? Why are people I know being told that they suddenly need a special kind of health insurance policy? One that no-one told them about before? Why are there families afraid that they might be forced to split up, the EU national going "home" to Europe and the British partner staying here and the children lost in the turmoil?

The argument goes that we can't offer guarantees from our end until we have assurances that UK nationals living in Europe will not have problems staying where they are. And so we have a stand-off: Europe on the one hand and the UK on the other, hands on hips, legs apart, staring each other out, each waiting for the other to cave in first.

I make no claims to be an expert diplomat but it does seem to me that some polite, restrained talking is called for.

 A little politeness goes a long way!