Well, the mayhem continues. The bombs have been dropped. President Macron of France claims that he guided Trump’s hand, first in maintaining a presence in Syria and secondly in limited the strikes to chemical weapons sites. I suppose everyone wants to appear to be in control, unless they just want to appear to be at least part of the action and not left behind. Which is one way of looking at Mrs May’s situation. And she has two things to give her attention to at the moment: the bombing thing and the offspring of the Windrush immigrants - our very own “dreamers” threatened with being sent back where they came from!!! But it distracts attention from Brexit!
Something I read this morning suggested that the OPCW people were not being given full access to the site of the Douma bombing. And another report suggested that the Russians are suspected of tampering with the site. Oh boy! Chaos continues! Will we ever really know the truth?
So I think I’ll just get on with things and put off worrying about the state of the world until later.
One of this morning’s tasks was wrestling the futon mattress back into its cover, which has been washed. I have been known to moan about the difficulty of getting kingsize duvets into their covers but the futon mattress takes the cake.
Added difficulty comes from its being rather knocked out of shape. We loaned it to our daughter years back and it returned with the mattress stuffing unevenly distributed. It needs a good shake-up, something quite hard to do single handed. Our eldest granddaughter is about to take the futon off our hands to help furnish her newly acquired house. I shall give her instructions as to how she and her boyfriend, both young and strong, can pick the mattress up and give it a good pummelling to get it back into shape.
That’s another problem dealt with.
I came across a little diatribe about the use of language in yesterday’s paper. The writer started off moaning about how coffee, which used to be just black or white, is ordered nowadays in the UK. He had been peeved to find himself in a queue behind a hipster who was ordering a “triple shot skinny macchiato with almond milk” and trying, unsuccessfully I was amused to note, to pay for it with his iPhone! He went on to be astounded at a notice advertising “handcrafted coffee”, which turned out to mean that a human being operated a coffee-making machine! His best find, however, was about museums “deaccessionising their collection as a quick fix for financial trouble”, which translates roughly as selling off items to make some money!
I reflected further on language when I saw a friend’s comment on Facebook about something in the political world that was annoying her. “What a dickheaded thing to do!” she remarked. Now, she is the kind of person who rarely swears or uses profanities in speech. I cannot imagine her actually calling a person a “dickhead” face to face. So did she write this because as a non-native English speaker she doesn’t actually understand the register of language used? (And there is a school of thought that says that swearing in foreign doesn’t really count!) Or is she, like many people who use social media, quite happy to be more aggressive in her written language than in her spoken?
Elsewhere in the paper I found reactions to Labour’s proposal/promise to offer free bus travel to the under-25s. Some people thought it would be a good way of getting people out of their cars and thus reducing congestion and contamination. Others thought it would make life easier for young people, actually enabling some of them to continue with their studies or get to work without incurring debt. Yet others saw it as a ploy by Labour to bribe young people to vote for them. Polly Toynbee’s was the best, in my opinion anyway:
“It’s still a lot less generous than older people’s travel passes. In London the over-60s get not just free buses but free tubes as well, even for high earners still in work. So no one should begrudge this modest offer to the young.”
I can use my Greater Manchester bus pass on London buses. I wonder if I will eventually be able to use it on the tube as well. That would be nice!
Monday, 16 April 2018
Sunday, 15 April 2018
A little nostalgia in a crazy world!
As the politicians seem intent on trying to wrexk the world as we know it, I find myself drawn to items about nostalgia.
In an article about old possessions people are inordinately attached to, Will Self talks about the Olivetti Lettera typewriter that used to belong to his mother. It’s nearly seventy years old and he still uses it. He must be among the few who still use typewriters, even though he admits to never having learnt to touch type. (Same here - in fact my teenage granddaughter is highly amused to see me sending text messages as I hold the iPhone in one hand and use one finger to tap out my message. None of this two-thumb stuff for me!)
I received a portable typewriter for my 21st birthday. I loved it. Along with my portable record player, one of those that closed down into a mini-suitcase, it was one of my most treasured possessions. Both Phil and I used the typewriteri for years and years, probably until we acquired a word processor. This was in our pre-computer days.
Will Self thinks regretfully that his precious Olivetti might not see him through his next book. He will need to find another way of composing.
Apparently he used to have a whole collection of typewriters but now just has two Olivettis, both previously belonging to his mother. One of them was for a while with his brother in the USA and has US keys rather than UK keys. Now, I never knew that the USA used a different keyboard to us. Why would that be? After all, they speak what is basically the same language. I can understand that different languages require different keyboards because of the frequency of letters being used and so but surely, despite spelling differences, American English is not so different from British English in the written form.
One of my most amusing memories is of a rather pompous, big+headed young Frenchman I worked with spotting my typewriter, declaring that he could type and being amazed to find he had typed a load of gobbledegook. A small victory!
There’s a man called Phil Nuytten in Vancouver who is working on a project to establish a colony under the sea. He’s been fascinated by underwater life since he was a small boy. Back in the 1960s Jacques Cousteau organised people to live in underwater habitats. Jacques Cousteau was a wonderful describer of underwater worlds in his television programmes. Apparently there were lots of experimental under-the-sea projects back then. It was generally assumed that it would be an alternative living arrangement but the whole thing sort of fizzled out and attention turned to space. And for a while we imagined we might have colonies living out among the stars as well. That seems to have fizzled too.
But now Mr Nuytten seems determined to resurrect the underwater colony idea. He expects to get lots of volunteers and tells the story of an advertisement he had heard about which was placed in a UK newspaper which read: “Wanted: people to go to Antarctica. Poor pay. No guarantee of success. Doing things no one has done before.” They were inundated with applications and he expects the same to happen with his underwater colonies. And of course, with social media, any advertisement will receive extreme coverage.
Perhaps it will provide a way of escape from the mayhem that is going on in the world today!
In an article about old possessions people are inordinately attached to, Will Self talks about the Olivetti Lettera typewriter that used to belong to his mother. It’s nearly seventy years old and he still uses it. He must be among the few who still use typewriters, even though he admits to never having learnt to touch type. (Same here - in fact my teenage granddaughter is highly amused to see me sending text messages as I hold the iPhone in one hand and use one finger to tap out my message. None of this two-thumb stuff for me!)
I received a portable typewriter for my 21st birthday. I loved it. Along with my portable record player, one of those that closed down into a mini-suitcase, it was one of my most treasured possessions. Both Phil and I used the typewriteri for years and years, probably until we acquired a word processor. This was in our pre-computer days.
Will Self thinks regretfully that his precious Olivetti might not see him through his next book. He will need to find another way of composing.
Apparently he used to have a whole collection of typewriters but now just has two Olivettis, both previously belonging to his mother. One of them was for a while with his brother in the USA and has US keys rather than UK keys. Now, I never knew that the USA used a different keyboard to us. Why would that be? After all, they speak what is basically the same language. I can understand that different languages require different keyboards because of the frequency of letters being used and so but surely, despite spelling differences, American English is not so different from British English in the written form.
One of my most amusing memories is of a rather pompous, big+headed young Frenchman I worked with spotting my typewriter, declaring that he could type and being amazed to find he had typed a load of gobbledegook. A small victory!
There’s a man called Phil Nuytten in Vancouver who is working on a project to establish a colony under the sea. He’s been fascinated by underwater life since he was a small boy. Back in the 1960s Jacques Cousteau organised people to live in underwater habitats. Jacques Cousteau was a wonderful describer of underwater worlds in his television programmes. Apparently there were lots of experimental under-the-sea projects back then. It was generally assumed that it would be an alternative living arrangement but the whole thing sort of fizzled out and attention turned to space. And for a while we imagined we might have colonies living out among the stars as well. That seems to have fizzled too.
But now Mr Nuytten seems determined to resurrect the underwater colony idea. He expects to get lots of volunteers and tells the story of an advertisement he had heard about which was placed in a UK newspaper which read: “Wanted: people to go to Antarctica. Poor pay. No guarantee of success. Doing things no one has done before.” They were inundated with applications and he expects the same to happen with his underwater colonies. And of course, with social media, any advertisement will receive extreme coverage.
Perhaps it will provide a way of escape from the mayhem that is going on in the world today!
Friday, 13 April 2018
On drinking, sleeping and getting away from the world!
The scaremongers are out in force.
One report I read in today’s paper tells me that every glass of wine you drink over and above the recommended number of units takes half an hour off your life. And then another says night owls - i.e. those who go to bed late and get up late - are more likely to die younger than the larks - i.e, those who got to bed early and get up at the crack of dawn.
This last report seems to change tack part way through. Initially it tells us that “night owls are more prone to smoking, heavy drinking, depression and drug abuse. Oh, and unhealthy eating”. It also warns that “late risers are 30% more likely to have diabetes, 22% more likely to have respiratory problems and 94% more likely to have psychological disorders”. But then it turns around and says that the No 1 underlying factor when it comes to risk of premature death is chronic sleep deprivation. So, as most of us are quite likely sitting up at night worrying about whether our leaders have taken us to the brink of war and beyond, I reckon we are all pretty much stuffed!
Maybe if we had a properly allotted time slot here on earth, ideally longer than the biblical three score years and ten, we could take a rational decision about whether to have a high old time for a shorter time or to live more moderately for longer!
Or maybe we should opt to live in a radically different way. There is apparently a 72 year old man in Spain, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, who was brought up by wolves and now says that on the whole life with wolves was better than life with humans. He was discovered in 1965 living in a cave with a pack of wolves. The story goes that his mother died young and his father sold him to a local farmer.
Note that this was 1965, not 1865! It might seem a long time ago to today’s young people but those of us who were teenagers at the time thought that we were living in really sophisticated times. The music was great, the films and TV were not bad and we were already thinking that soon we would be travelling into space! And there, in Spain, was a child being sold! Yes, SOLD!
After his owner died, when Marcos was about 6, he ran away into the mountains and was adopted by wolves, where he stayed until he was “rescued” in his late teens. He has thought about going back but he says “it’s not what it used to be”. It seems that the wolves have forgotten him. “If I call out they are going to respond, but are not going to approach me,” he says. “I smell like people, I wear cologne.”
I seem to remember there being a spate of stories back in the late ‘60s about feral children, discovered living wild and uncivilised lives. Some of them never truly adapted to life with other people. We don’t hear such stories nowadays. Maybe the open spaces have shrunk, or at least are more visited than they used to be. Besides, everything is more documented and although cases of child abuse still slip though cracks, it appears harder for children just to disappear and go off and live with animals in the hills.
Having said that, in 2001 ANNC News reported the case of the “Dog boy”, who has not been named. This Chilean boy was abandoned by his 16-year-old mother and, after spending a period in care, fled to live among a pack of wild dogs in a cave. The boy would scavenge with the dogs for food and eat out of bins. It is said the boy wanted to remain with his new family so much that he even jumped into the Pacific Ocean to evade capture by the police.
But even that story is almost 20 years old now. We have other, more troublesome, stories in our newsfeeds these days.
One report I read in today’s paper tells me that every glass of wine you drink over and above the recommended number of units takes half an hour off your life. And then another says night owls - i.e. those who go to bed late and get up late - are more likely to die younger than the larks - i.e, those who got to bed early and get up at the crack of dawn.
This last report seems to change tack part way through. Initially it tells us that “night owls are more prone to smoking, heavy drinking, depression and drug abuse. Oh, and unhealthy eating”. It also warns that “late risers are 30% more likely to have diabetes, 22% more likely to have respiratory problems and 94% more likely to have psychological disorders”. But then it turns around and says that the No 1 underlying factor when it comes to risk of premature death is chronic sleep deprivation. So, as most of us are quite likely sitting up at night worrying about whether our leaders have taken us to the brink of war and beyond, I reckon we are all pretty much stuffed!
Maybe if we had a properly allotted time slot here on earth, ideally longer than the biblical three score years and ten, we could take a rational decision about whether to have a high old time for a shorter time or to live more moderately for longer!
Or maybe we should opt to live in a radically different way. There is apparently a 72 year old man in Spain, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, who was brought up by wolves and now says that on the whole life with wolves was better than life with humans. He was discovered in 1965 living in a cave with a pack of wolves. The story goes that his mother died young and his father sold him to a local farmer.
Note that this was 1965, not 1865! It might seem a long time ago to today’s young people but those of us who were teenagers at the time thought that we were living in really sophisticated times. The music was great, the films and TV were not bad and we were already thinking that soon we would be travelling into space! And there, in Spain, was a child being sold! Yes, SOLD!
After his owner died, when Marcos was about 6, he ran away into the mountains and was adopted by wolves, where he stayed until he was “rescued” in his late teens. He has thought about going back but he says “it’s not what it used to be”. It seems that the wolves have forgotten him. “If I call out they are going to respond, but are not going to approach me,” he says. “I smell like people, I wear cologne.”
I seem to remember there being a spate of stories back in the late ‘60s about feral children, discovered living wild and uncivilised lives. Some of them never truly adapted to life with other people. We don’t hear such stories nowadays. Maybe the open spaces have shrunk, or at least are more visited than they used to be. Besides, everything is more documented and although cases of child abuse still slip though cracks, it appears harder for children just to disappear and go off and live with animals in the hills.
Having said that, in 2001 ANNC News reported the case of the “Dog boy”, who has not been named. This Chilean boy was abandoned by his 16-year-old mother and, after spending a period in care, fled to live among a pack of wild dogs in a cave. The boy would scavenge with the dogs for food and eat out of bins. It is said the boy wanted to remain with his new family so much that he even jumped into the Pacific Ocean to evade capture by the police.
But even that story is almost 20 years old now. We have other, more troublesome, stories in our newsfeeds these days.
Thursday, 12 April 2018
An evening out!
Yesterday I took my fifteen year old granddaughter into Manchester for an evening’s entertainment. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth was being transmitted live to a cinema screen at Home, the theatre and cinema complex in Manchester. As she has been studying Macbeth as part of her GCSE English course, it seemed like a good idea to take her along when a friend suggested that a group of us should go to see the production.
So off we went on the tram to Manchester, the teenager determinedly reading Harry Potter and resisting attempts to make proper conversation. It’s good to see her reading, and she does read a lot, but it would have been nice to have a bit more chat. She opened up a bit more over pizza. Some of it was a diatribe about her younger brother - they niggle and pick at each other constantly - but she also revealed a surprising enthusiasm for Mary Beard, whose feminist principles she admires and whose book, ”Women and Power”, she has just bought. One of the group of friends we met to go to the production was also reading “Women and Power”: cue a brief discussion of feminism before going to see a play where a woman with no real power is a driving force.
And eventually we went into the packed cinema, so packed that we ended up scattered in little groups wherever seats were available.
The play was done in modern dress, which was fine, although we did wonder how you married soldiers on modern battle fatigues and bulletproof vests with the use of swords.
Christopher Eccleston was a rugged northern Macbeth. Some reviews went on a bit about him being forever Doctor Who, but as I have never seen him in that role (indeed have not seen Doctor Who at all since my son was a teenager more years ago than either of us care to think about), this did not bother me. In fact, I mostly just remember him from the 1990s TV series “Our Friends in the North” and, at around the same time, quite literally bumping into him in Waterstone’s bookshop on Deansgate in Manchester.
The witches were three little blonde girls, making me think of John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos”, filmed as “Village of the Damned” but reminding others more of “The Shining”. I thought it worked reasonably well. My friend, a former English Literature teacher and film buff, declared that if children are to be used in such roles they should be made really frightening by giving them blank face masks. And I suppose it may have reduced the power of the witches words, as one critic commented: “Since this a play to which children, or the lack of them, is central, the three witches are incarnated in the form of young girls: a nice idea that underscores a point made by film critic Peter Bradshaw in the programme that Macbeth is the first horror film, but it means the witches’ ominous words go for little.”
Niamh Cusack, described by one critic as “unusually likeable if scamperingly neurotic” Lady Macbeth, was convincingly good until she asked one of the front row audience to take her hand, leading to a moment of blank incomprehension. (Note to self: avoid sitting on the front row in any theatre!) However, her descent from enthusiastic, driven ambition to twitching, unable-to-keep-still nervous breakdown was good.
The drunken porter, constantly sitting or standing at one side of the stage, kept a tally of deaths, chalked onto the wall, quite a good touch, but his almost pantomime-like direction to the hired assassins to do in Banquo and Fleance, a lot of gesticulating and miming hammer blows behind Banquo, and later pointing MacDuff in the direction of MacBeth seemed a bit unnecessary.
On the whole, we had a good evening but came away mildly disappointed, especially by the final, unconvincing fight scene.
Published reviews I have looked at this morning seem to share our mixed feelings about the production:-
“... the production bulges with bright ideas, I sometimes feel that Findlay is not simply directing the play but also delivering a lecture on it.”
“This is a lively production in which there has been much throwing about of brains, yet it all too often advertises its ideas instead of allowing them to emerge subliminally.”
The teenager, who knows the play quite well, declared herself a little annoyed with gender changes of some characters and with what she regarded as tinkering with the script. On the whole, though, she enjoyed her evening out.
So off we went on the tram to Manchester, the teenager determinedly reading Harry Potter and resisting attempts to make proper conversation. It’s good to see her reading, and she does read a lot, but it would have been nice to have a bit more chat. She opened up a bit more over pizza. Some of it was a diatribe about her younger brother - they niggle and pick at each other constantly - but she also revealed a surprising enthusiasm for Mary Beard, whose feminist principles she admires and whose book, ”Women and Power”, she has just bought. One of the group of friends we met to go to the production was also reading “Women and Power”: cue a brief discussion of feminism before going to see a play where a woman with no real power is a driving force.
And eventually we went into the packed cinema, so packed that we ended up scattered in little groups wherever seats were available.
The play was done in modern dress, which was fine, although we did wonder how you married soldiers on modern battle fatigues and bulletproof vests with the use of swords.
Christopher Eccleston was a rugged northern Macbeth. Some reviews went on a bit about him being forever Doctor Who, but as I have never seen him in that role (indeed have not seen Doctor Who at all since my son was a teenager more years ago than either of us care to think about), this did not bother me. In fact, I mostly just remember him from the 1990s TV series “Our Friends in the North” and, at around the same time, quite literally bumping into him in Waterstone’s bookshop on Deansgate in Manchester.
The witches were three little blonde girls, making me think of John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos”, filmed as “Village of the Damned” but reminding others more of “The Shining”. I thought it worked reasonably well. My friend, a former English Literature teacher and film buff, declared that if children are to be used in such roles they should be made really frightening by giving them blank face masks. And I suppose it may have reduced the power of the witches words, as one critic commented: “Since this a play to which children, or the lack of them, is central, the three witches are incarnated in the form of young girls: a nice idea that underscores a point made by film critic Peter Bradshaw in the programme that Macbeth is the first horror film, but it means the witches’ ominous words go for little.”
Niamh Cusack, described by one critic as “unusually likeable if scamperingly neurotic” Lady Macbeth, was convincingly good until she asked one of the front row audience to take her hand, leading to a moment of blank incomprehension. (Note to self: avoid sitting on the front row in any theatre!) However, her descent from enthusiastic, driven ambition to twitching, unable-to-keep-still nervous breakdown was good.
The drunken porter, constantly sitting or standing at one side of the stage, kept a tally of deaths, chalked onto the wall, quite a good touch, but his almost pantomime-like direction to the hired assassins to do in Banquo and Fleance, a lot of gesticulating and miming hammer blows behind Banquo, and later pointing MacDuff in the direction of MacBeth seemed a bit unnecessary.
On the whole, we had a good evening but came away mildly disappointed, especially by the final, unconvincing fight scene.
Published reviews I have looked at this morning seem to share our mixed feelings about the production:-
“... the production bulges with bright ideas, I sometimes feel that Findlay is not simply directing the play but also delivering a lecture on it.”
“This is a lively production in which there has been much throwing about of brains, yet it all too often advertises its ideas instead of allowing them to emerge subliminally.”
The teenager, who knows the play quite well, declared herself a little annoyed with gender changes of some characters and with what she regarded as tinkering with the script. On the whole, though, she enjoyed her evening out.
Wednesday, 11 April 2018
In the eye of the beholder!
I scanned the newspapers online and decided to avoid all the dire and terrible news stories - lying politicians, attacks on innocent children, increasing crime rates, and on and on - by looking at an article in the Guardian about the perils and hardships of being too beautiful. This led me via a link to another article on the New York Magazine’s lifestyle website, a section they call “The Cut”.
I normally only read this sort of thing in the hairdresser’s.
The introduction read as follows:
“Self/Reflection is a week of stories on the Cut about how we feel, versus how we look. Here, a woman in her late 50s tells Alexa Tsoulis-Reay how being beautiful affected her life, and how she feels about her looks today.”
The woman interviewed began: “Around eighth grade people started to tell me I was pretty. I was tall and willowy. I had a great figure and I never weighed more than 120 pounds throughout my 20s. I started modeling in high school and had waist length dark brown hair and brown eyes. When I do the whole makeup, eyelashes, high heels, gown look I am very intimidating.”
I have to confess that this put me off a little to begin with; she was just a little too full of herself for my liking.
Besides, who really wants to be intimidating?
She went on: “My looks definitely opened doors for me. I worked in PR and as a news producer, writer, reporter, and talk-show host. I did acting in daytime soaps, TV commercials, and theater. I never interviewed for a job I didn’t get. I had a good degree from a good college, sure, but I think all things being equal I’d get the job above other candidates because of the way I look.”
By now I was wondering how people not blessed with good looks ever get jobs. And did she send a photograph along with her CV and letter of application to ensure and interview?
However, although she got the jobs, life did not always treat her well, especially in the field of relationships: “Throughout my life, competitive, attractive, wealthy, entitled women really hated me.”
Presumably lesser women, less competitive, wealthy and entitled, were simply ignored and did not come into the equation at all.
She gave details: “At my first job after college, my female colleagues conspired against me. They planted bottles of half-drunk booze on my desk so that it looked like I was drinking on the job. Two women were obsessed with me. They told my boss lies to get me fired. I talked to some of my superiors about it and they put it to me straight: Look, it’s pure unmitigated jealousy. They really do hate you because of the way you look.”
Or maybe she just made herself unapproachable.Nothing like being standoffish to put people off you.
Outside of work it was the same story: “I was once engaged to a man who ended it after his sister-in-law spread gossip about me to his family. They threatened to cut his inheritance if he stayed with me, so he left.”
But on the boyfriend front it was OK really: “I never had any trouble getting guys, but I got bored easily and moved on. I should have taken the good ones more seriously. I can see now that they would have been good husbands, fathers, and providers but I’d just drift away on to the next and stop returning their calls.”
Now that she is in her fifties she is rather miffed to find that she is becoming “invisible”, no longer attracting the admiring glances but having no network of friends to fall back on either. I find it hard not wonder if she should perhaps have worked on developing a personality instead of relying on her much vaunted beauty - which after all is in the eye of the beholder.
How will she feel when she is in her seventies?
In contrast, of sorts, I came across this article reminding those who rationalise being fat as a lifestyle choice that while fat-shaming should truly not be around, it isn’t really healthy to be overweight. What an odd world we live in where you can have eating disorders such as orthorexia - a pathological obsession with eating organically produced foods - and where we have people who are famous as Instagram stars!
Maybe we are all too obsessed with the way we look.
I normally only read this sort of thing in the hairdresser’s.
The introduction read as follows:
“Self/Reflection is a week of stories on the Cut about how we feel, versus how we look. Here, a woman in her late 50s tells Alexa Tsoulis-Reay how being beautiful affected her life, and how she feels about her looks today.”
The woman interviewed began: “Around eighth grade people started to tell me I was pretty. I was tall and willowy. I had a great figure and I never weighed more than 120 pounds throughout my 20s. I started modeling in high school and had waist length dark brown hair and brown eyes. When I do the whole makeup, eyelashes, high heels, gown look I am very intimidating.”
I have to confess that this put me off a little to begin with; she was just a little too full of herself for my liking.
Besides, who really wants to be intimidating?
She went on: “My looks definitely opened doors for me. I worked in PR and as a news producer, writer, reporter, and talk-show host. I did acting in daytime soaps, TV commercials, and theater. I never interviewed for a job I didn’t get. I had a good degree from a good college, sure, but I think all things being equal I’d get the job above other candidates because of the way I look.”
By now I was wondering how people not blessed with good looks ever get jobs. And did she send a photograph along with her CV and letter of application to ensure and interview?
However, although she got the jobs, life did not always treat her well, especially in the field of relationships: “Throughout my life, competitive, attractive, wealthy, entitled women really hated me.”
Presumably lesser women, less competitive, wealthy and entitled, were simply ignored and did not come into the equation at all.
She gave details: “At my first job after college, my female colleagues conspired against me. They planted bottles of half-drunk booze on my desk so that it looked like I was drinking on the job. Two women were obsessed with me. They told my boss lies to get me fired. I talked to some of my superiors about it and they put it to me straight: Look, it’s pure unmitigated jealousy. They really do hate you because of the way you look.”
Or maybe she just made herself unapproachable.Nothing like being standoffish to put people off you.
Outside of work it was the same story: “I was once engaged to a man who ended it after his sister-in-law spread gossip about me to his family. They threatened to cut his inheritance if he stayed with me, so he left.”
But on the boyfriend front it was OK really: “I never had any trouble getting guys, but I got bored easily and moved on. I should have taken the good ones more seriously. I can see now that they would have been good husbands, fathers, and providers but I’d just drift away on to the next and stop returning their calls.”
Now that she is in her fifties she is rather miffed to find that she is becoming “invisible”, no longer attracting the admiring glances but having no network of friends to fall back on either. I find it hard not wonder if she should perhaps have worked on developing a personality instead of relying on her much vaunted beauty - which after all is in the eye of the beholder.
How will she feel when she is in her seventies?
In contrast, of sorts, I came across this article reminding those who rationalise being fat as a lifestyle choice that while fat-shaming should truly not be around, it isn’t really healthy to be overweight. What an odd world we live in where you can have eating disorders such as orthorexia - a pathological obsession with eating organically produced foods - and where we have people who are famous as Instagram stars!
Maybe we are all too obsessed with the way we look.
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
Testing times!
Today I went for an eye test and had certain elements of my test administered by a charming young lady whose name badge announced that she was called Sandra. I spent a good deal of time resting my chin and forehead on gadgets intended to check my peripheral vision, puff air into my eyes to measure pressure, take photos of the back of my eyes before being handed on to a more senior optometrist (when did they stop being just opticians?) for the eye test proper.
Returning to Sandra to select glasses, I felt we had got to know each other sufficiently for me to comment on her ever so slight accent and to ask where she came from originally: Macedonia (country of fruits salads to some people - Macédoine de fruits, etc). She has been away from her country for twelve years, studying here and there, working here and there, and now in the UK for the past year.
Considering that she looks about 18, this was hard to believe but she claims to be thirty? So we had a little chat about Brexit, the progress of her application for permanent residency, and our mutual hope that the whole thing could just go away!
As I was between buses on the route that would take me home directly, I decided to catch a bus to our local Tesco, giving me the chance to pick up a couple of food items and get a bit of a walk into the bargain. And so, supermarket purchses comleted, I walked from the Greenfield Tesco to the Uppermill baker’s shop, where I picked up one of their excellent rye loaves.
Leaving the shop I noticed a bus from the brand new service between our villages parked in the square and decided I would try to catch it. After all, if we don’t use the service someone will decide to take it away. As it happened the bus was broken down and was still sitting there when the much-moaned-about 350 bus came along to carry me homewards.
The new service has been operational only since yesterday morning.
Is this a record for early breakdown?
Returning to Sandra to select glasses, I felt we had got to know each other sufficiently for me to comment on her ever so slight accent and to ask where she came from originally: Macedonia (country of fruits salads to some people - Macédoine de fruits, etc). She has been away from her country for twelve years, studying here and there, working here and there, and now in the UK for the past year.
Considering that she looks about 18, this was hard to believe but she claims to be thirty? So we had a little chat about Brexit, the progress of her application for permanent residency, and our mutual hope that the whole thing could just go away!
As I was between buses on the route that would take me home directly, I decided to catch a bus to our local Tesco, giving me the chance to pick up a couple of food items and get a bit of a walk into the bargain. And so, supermarket purchses comleted, I walked from the Greenfield Tesco to the Uppermill baker’s shop, where I picked up one of their excellent rye loaves.
Leaving the shop I noticed a bus from the brand new service between our villages parked in the square and decided I would try to catch it. After all, if we don’t use the service someone will decide to take it away. As it happened the bus was broken down and was still sitting there when the much-moaned-about 350 bus came along to carry me homewards.
The new service has been operational only since yesterday morning.
Is this a record for early breakdown?
Monday, 9 April 2018
Getting the facts right!
I begin to get the impression that our government ministers either do not read or listen to the reports their various advisers give them or they are poorly advised. Or maybe they just choose to take no notice of what their advisers and information seekers tell them.
First we had Boris Johnson stating that he had been given evidence that the Skripal poison must have come from Russia, which was later shown not necessarily to be so. Then yesterday Amber Rudd assured us that the rise in violent crime had nothing to do with reduced police numbers on our streets, while leaked documents today insist that the opposite is the case. Total mayhem!
Maybe they just misread headlines of reports. It’s easy to do.
I saw a headline today that read:
Toronto police hint for woman accused of stealing £12,400 stone.
This was accompanied by a picture of Yoko Ono, giving for all the world the impression that she was the woman sought.
Goodness! I thought, is she reduced to stealing stuff?
I thought she had plenty of money.
It turns out that she owns the stone. It is one of a pile of stones, all nicely smoothed by years in a river, that are part of an art installation. Each stone is inscribed with a message, such as “Love is all you need!” and visitors were encouraged to pick one up, look at the inscription and place the stone on a cairn. The thief simply put one in her pocket!
But how is one stone worth so much money? And will the thief be able to sell it? Does she even want to do so? Or is she an avid Yoko fan who just wants to keep the stone?
Now for some foody, and incidentally ecological, stuff.
Clever people have been developing containers made from seaweed for us to carry our drinking water around with us and then eat the container after use. No good if you prefer to drink water after eating rather than before but a lot better than dropping a plastic bottle along the route of your morning run! Someone else has been working on an edible straw that can last for 40 minutes in a mojito before it begins to dissolve. Clever stuff, but personally I am not into drinking alcohol through a straw. There are also edible plates. Three cheers for ecological thinking!
And here is an item about one man’s way of eating. He is an “ultra runner”,which I suppose is someone who runs ridiculous distances rather than just marathons. Taken from the weekend’s newspaper:
“Ultra runner Scott Jurek: how I eat! He spent 46 days running more than 2,000 miles through the Appalachian mountains – what got him through it?
This kind of thing blows my mind!
First we had Boris Johnson stating that he had been given evidence that the Skripal poison must have come from Russia, which was later shown not necessarily to be so. Then yesterday Amber Rudd assured us that the rise in violent crime had nothing to do with reduced police numbers on our streets, while leaked documents today insist that the opposite is the case. Total mayhem!
Maybe they just misread headlines of reports. It’s easy to do.
I saw a headline today that read:
Toronto police hint for woman accused of stealing £12,400 stone.
This was accompanied by a picture of Yoko Ono, giving for all the world the impression that she was the woman sought.
Goodness! I thought, is she reduced to stealing stuff?
I thought she had plenty of money.
It turns out that she owns the stone. It is one of a pile of stones, all nicely smoothed by years in a river, that are part of an art installation. Each stone is inscribed with a message, such as “Love is all you need!” and visitors were encouraged to pick one up, look at the inscription and place the stone on a cairn. The thief simply put one in her pocket!
But how is one stone worth so much money? And will the thief be able to sell it? Does she even want to do so? Or is she an avid Yoko fan who just wants to keep the stone?
Now for some foody, and incidentally ecological, stuff.
Clever people have been developing containers made from seaweed for us to carry our drinking water around with us and then eat the container after use. No good if you prefer to drink water after eating rather than before but a lot better than dropping a plastic bottle along the route of your morning run! Someone else has been working on an edible straw that can last for 40 minutes in a mojito before it begins to dissolve. Clever stuff, but personally I am not into drinking alcohol through a straw. There are also edible plates. Three cheers for ecological thinking!
And here is an item about one man’s way of eating. He is an “ultra runner”,which I suppose is someone who runs ridiculous distances rather than just marathons. Taken from the weekend’s newspaper:
“Ultra runner Scott Jurek: how I eat! He spent 46 days running more than 2,000 miles through the Appalachian mountains – what got him through it?
- Breakfast - At home, it’s a smoothie: fruit, greens, nuts, nut butter or flax oil and protein powder. Then, before my morning workout, some oatmeal and wholegrain toast with more nut butter. On a normal day I do 3,000-4,000 calories. When I was doing the Appalachian Trail, though, that went up to 6,000-8,000 cals and I still lost 8.6kg over the 46 days. Breakfast there was at 5am: a banana, a Cliff bar, and, my daily comfort, a coconut-milk cappuccino.
- Lunch - I do all the cooking, and lunch is usually leftovers from the night before. On the trail, my wife Jenny and I were living in a van and, twice a day, she’d bring me a sandwich, or something warm – fries, hashbrowns, whatever she could find in the local diners or supermarkets that was vegan.
- Snacks - On an ultramarathon, I snack twice an hour on sports gels and energy bars. At home it’s lighter: fresh fruit, popcorn, a second smoothie if I’m doing an afternoon workout. And lots of water, although I go by thirst as opposed to measuring it out.
- Dinner - On the trail, I’d long for homely dinners with a beer and some friends – Thai curries, slow-cooked soups, stews …”
This kind of thing blows my mind!
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