Eavesdropping!

On our plane yesterday, sitting just behind us was a woman who kept talking through boarding and take-off, directing her travelling companions to their seats, commenting on what they could see through the window. She did a repeat performance as we came in to land. “Can you see the river yet? There’s Porto. We’re just passing Porto. You can see the sea. We’re coming in to land. Yes, we’re definitely landing. We’ve landed.” This last presumably in case we perhaps thought we were still up in the air. “This is Porto airport.” Just in case we thought we had gone back to Manchester?

I couldn’t work out whether she was a nervous flier or just a busybody chatterbox.

Later, as we sat in the airport cafe waiting patiently for hours for it to be time to catch our bus, I listened to a family at the table next to ours. They might have been talking something Eastern European or it might just have been very dense, unintelligible Portuguese. At least three times the father of the group read out long texts from his phone, or maybe stuff he had found on the internet, quite lengthy pieces anyway. These he read at breakneck speed. I doubt that his listeners could really take in what he was saying. They didn’t seem terribly interested anyway but I simply did not know anyone could speak at such speed!

After they had left, their place was taken by a group of young Frenchmen. Hipsters by the look of them, shaven heads and those very fashionable beards. Late twenties I would think. They drank beer and discussed drinking habits, going into details of their taste in champagne, the different sorts of wines to be drunk at different times of day and with different types of food. All very technical and knowledgable. All rather loud and cheerful. Do young British hipsters talk so authoritatively about wine and food? In public and at top volume?

When we arrived at Vigo, finally, we decided to walk from the bus station to our flat. We had spent a good deal of the day sitting down and it was a fine evening. A brisk walk would do us good. En route we stopped off at As Cobas, one of our regular cafes-with-wifi. This one has the added advantage of serving very generous, and usually very good, tapas with a glass of beer. As it was too late to buy supplies at the supermarket, this seemed a good way of having a little something before retiring for the night.

The table adjacent to ours seemed to be hosting a discussion group, about five men and one woman. At first it looked like an fairly ordinary, in other words loud, Spanish conversation over drinks but it became clear that there were some dominant personalities. The token woman was not backward in coming forward, talking at length about some topic or other and not at all reluctant to criticise her companions. One of the men was quite forceful too.

Most impressive however was the man nearest to us who on several occasions went into what I think of as teacher mode. He obviously felt he had something important to tell the rest of the group and was determined not to be interrupted. So he raised his voice and slowed down his delivery but maintained a rhythm that did not provide any opportunity for others to butt in with their rebuttals or confirmations. Wow!

When we left the cafe he was still going on and on and on.

We left him to it and went on our way, inspecting the improvements to our street as we walked along. 

The last time we were here they were in the throes of replacing the pavements, something which had been completed in other parts of the street in the previous year, leaving our stretch in a parlous state. Now it is quite pristine, fine white paving slabs all along the length of it. Very smart indeed. I much prefer this to the increasing British habit of replacing old-fashioned paving stones with tarmac. At least that is what seems to go on in Saddleworth.

Full marks to Vigo for providing a pleasing street environment!

The plants in the central reservations need a bit of attention now but no doubt that will come. And this morning the street cleaners were out with their brooms and trolly-bins, keeping the place tidy. 

Now, why is that not done in the UK?

Efficiently inefficient travellers!

Here we are, back in the Iberian peninsula.

We very efficiently booked ourselves tickets for the AUTNA bus to take us from Porto to Vigo. Just not quite so efficiently as we thought. All will be explained.

We got up at the crack of dawn, after the worst night’s sleep I have had in a long time. Why is it that when you know you must get up early your sleep,pattern is totally disrupted?

We needed to be at Liverpool airport for maybe 10.45. And so we caught a bus at 8.20, a tram at around 8.50, and a train at around 9.45 to Liverpool South Parkway, where we caught yet another bus to the airport.

All went well. The sun even came out and the weather improved the closer we got to Liverpool.

It was in the airport that we made the discovery that we had accidentally booked tickets for a bus from Porto to Vigo that left three quarters of an hour before our plane landed.

Someone had misread the information on the boarding cards. He described this as “a rare glitch in an otherwise distinguished record of organising travel”.

I was quite amused. He tried to,put it right by emailing AUTNA - to no avail.

And we considered spending a further €30 on tickets for an ALSA bus, a more expensive service and one which takes longer to reach Vigo.

Update: After arriving at Porto and refreshing ourselves with orange juice, sandwiches and coffee, we finally received an email from AUTNA. Exceptionally, they told us, we can use our tickets on a later bus provided we show the email they sent us. Hurray for the internet!!!

This means we arrive at Vigo after the supermarket has closed but, hey, there are worse things happening in the world.

And besides, we can go out to a bar with internet, have a beer and some tapas, and post this blog. Unless I decide to post it on airport wifi.

It’s a good job we always have plenty to occupy us on our travels.

Preparing to run away again.

So Boris Johnson looks like being the next leader of the Conservative Party. He has won the first ballot at any rate. They seem to think people will vote for him in the event of a general election being called.

Sometimes I despair of people.

In the meantime there is this:-

“The US Just Threatened to Move Against Corbyn: Where Is the Outrage?

WRITTEN BY CHRIS NINEHAM ON 10 JUNE 2019. POSTED IN NEWS & COMMENT

The Secretary of State of the world's most powerful nation has promised to 'push back' against the possibility of the leader of the Labour Party in Britain getting elected. He suggests US agencies will try and intervene to stop that eventuality because "it's too risky and too important and too hard once it's already happened".”

As far as I can tell, the world has gone even more crazy. 

And just to cheer us up, it continues to rain! Not as heavily here as in some parts of the country but wet nonetheless!

But we are opting out for a few weeks, taking ourselves off the Galicia, where the weather forecast does not promise a great heatwave but where even if it rains it will likely be warmer rain than we have here.

In just over a week we’ll head for Sanxenxo, where there is a chess tournament. We rely on the organisers to arrange for decent weather while we are there. They are usually quite good at that.

In the Italian class on Tuesday, while we shivered in the Manchester gloom, Piero, our guide during our recent trip to Sicily, contacted us with a “saluto” for the men of the group and a kiss for the girls, “un bacio per le mie ragazze”. We did not object to being called girls.

He went on to tell us that temperatures there had reached 40 degrees C. A little too hot for the site-seeing we did during our visit! But better than Manchester’s 10.

One of my travel companions from the trip asked me if I was already packed for our journey to Spain. Not at all! She has already packed for a trip to Wales. I can never understand being packed a week in advance. Making lists of stuff to take is fine but actually putting it in the suitcase is a bit excessive.

And so today I have scuttled round collecting this and that - and bullying Phil into doing the same - and doing last minute cleaning jobs. I wonder why we have a mania to leave the house sparkling before we go away.

But that’s how it is.

And tomorrow we hit the road again. Further adventures await us.

Just a few thoughts on the unfair distribution of wealth.

Kylie Jenner, famous for being a member of the Kardashian family, a “media personality” and for her cosmetics company - does she invent them all herself? Surely not? People are employed to do it in her name, are they not? - has invited people to her Handmaid’s Tale themed birthday party.

You can almost feel the excitement from here. A fancy dress party is always fun. “We can dress up in those cute red outfits but make them just a little bit sexy!” And there is a certain frisson of daring because, after all, everyone really knows that the Handmaid’s Tale is about female subjugation but, well, when you are rich and famous such things can never happen to you. 

It all smacks of privilege!

Sometimes it seems that when the rich and famous are not being outrageous they are giving us their words of wisdom on how we should run our lives. Gwyneth Paltrow, for example, likes to remind us that we should wash up after the evening meal and not leave it til tomorrow. All those nast germs sitting in the sink! “I can’t sleep at night if there are dishes in the sink,” she said. But then we already knew she is a bit obsessive.

Experts suggest that there is no real harm in it, apart from chopping boards that have been used for preparing meat and fish. They need cleaning properly straight after use.

I suspect Ms Paltrow has ulterior motives when she talks about washing-up though. Her lifestyle business - yes, he lifestyle business!! - is called Goop and sells washing-up liquid as part of a cleaning kit – yours for just £64.

There you go!

Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, just appears to obsess about her cats, Ginger and Snow, which she likes to take out and about with her. “I’ve just got one of those carriers,” said Kidman. “Have you seen those? Those backpacks that you can put them in? A cat carrier that’s a backpack and it has a window that they can peek out of and it’s got air and everything and they love it.”

Now, I see people, quite ordinary people, not famous at all, carrying small dogs in baskets, dog carriers and even handbags but I have yet to see cats being transported in this way.

Ms Kidman’s reported actions have got the animal rights people a little agitated. They see thhings from a feline perspective. Despite cats’ love of curling themselves up into small containers - think of all the cute photos you can see on social media of cats in shoe boxes, saucepans, fruit bowls and the like - they are very independent creatures and like to do things in their own terms.

But no doubt the rich and famous can ignore that as well. There is one rule for them and another for the rest of us.

Journalist Arwa Mahdawi, not so rich, hears her biological clock ticking and bemoans the fact that really only the rich and famous can afford to have babies in the USA, where she lives. A straightforward, no complications, no operations birth can cost £20,000. Any birth problems send the costs up. And in that case only the best health insurance plan will cover it. One couple faced a bill of $770,000 for the care of their premature triplets.

And still some people think it will be OK for the US to interfere in the running of our health service!!

Adverts and giving in to media pressure!

Every so often when we are watching something on some channel on the TV, PBS America I think it is, there pops up an advert which drives us crazy. A lycra-clad young woman on an exercise bike screams into her headphone microphone something along the lines of “Come on, Peloton!”, followed by very urgent instructions. We both wince, Phil throws a hissy-fit about how he really can’t stand this advert, and we turn the volume down or even channel-hop until we think the adverts are over.

So we never discovered what this is an advert for.

Then I found an article in the Guardian Weekend Magazine all about exercise bikes. There I read put that “Peloton sells smart, connected exercise bikes, to which it streams spinning classes from its Manhattan studio”. The bikes, which incorporate big touch screens, cost £1,990 and riders pay £39 a month to access the classes. So people set up sort of mini-gyms somewhere in their home and “spin” at home instead of going to a class. Then there is “Zwift” which lets users pretend they are following a route, such as going up the Alpe d’Huez, one of the really, really hard stages of the Tour de France. Oh boy!

We have an exercise bike and a rowing machine. Together they came nowhere near £1,990 to set up. Yes, it can be a bit boring perhaps to sit for ages on an exercise bike. This is where the iPad can be really useful. I usually just play music but Phil sets his up to play chess videos for him. It seems to work for us.

It’s funny how fads come and go.

How long will Peloton keep going? I wonder!

I sometimes go on a bit about my Fitbit but I mostly do it tongue in cheek, although there was a moment when Phil and I seemed to be getting a little competitive about who had done the most steps in a day - usually me, by the way, because I go up and down stairs a lot and move around the house a lot during the day. Also I have usually clocked up 5,000 on my morning run. But I am always amused by the analysis of my sleep, telling me how much deep sleep, light sleep and dreaming sleep I have had, not forgetting the time awake in the night!

It’s a good job I am amused by it because, from what I have read this weekend, if I took it too seriously I could become properly insomniac. Apparently some people are getting so anxious about what their various sleep trackers are going to tell them that they really begin to suffer from insomnia.

Oops! there it is again, that influence that social media and related apps can have on real life.

There are more serious things to worry about in modern life. I just listened to a programme on the radio where a young medical doctor talked about her experience working, and being overworked and overstretched, in emergency medicine. She is about to emigrate to Australia, I think, where she will work with the flying doctors service, where there will surprisingly be less stress. Emergency medicine in the NHS is her first love though and she expects to return to it sometime in the future. That assumes, of course, that there will still be a NHS to return to.

And I found myself thinking how wrong it is that dedicated doctors and teachers in this country, people who have a passion for their profession, are being forced out because the pressures of the job make a normal life impossible!

And now here is an odd story I came across the other day, a story which I find hard to believe:-

“It was May 2006, and I had just been swimming. I was on my way from my home in Hastings to work as a revenue executive for HMRC. It was raining hard, and the visibility was terrible. I was crossing the road when a white van drove into me and I fell, hit the side of my head, and rolled under a parked car. I have no memory of it. In fact I didn’t remember anything from a year before the accident until four years afterwards; I began to work out what had happened to me from what other people told me.

I was in an induced coma for three weeks in the neurological unit attached to Haywards Heath hospital. The medical staff tried to bring me out of the coma after about 10 days, but it was too early. I’ve got no medical notes about my time in hospital, but my family and friends were there every day. My coma was marked grade 3 in the Glasgow Coma Scale: the deepest one you can be in but still be alive; luckily I didn’t need brain surgery.

When I started coming round I was moved to my local hospital. The strangest thing was that the first words I spoke were French. A friend asked the nurses whether he should speak to me in French; they thought it was a good idea, to encourage communication. So he would ask me a question in French, and I would reply in fluent French. No one knew why, but I had done both German and French at O-level almost 30 years earlier.

After a while, the doctors decided speaking French was not helping me, because I’m English. So posters were put on the wall asking people not to speak in French.

Before my coma I’d never heard of foreign accent syndrome, which can occur when people wake up from a coma and their speech is affected; people sometimes perceive it as a foreign accent. What happened to me is different, because I really was speaking French, and not just for a few seconds – for two weeks.”

Why don’t I quite believe it? Well, to be fluent in a language you need a bit more in your memory than the stuff you learnt for O-Level thirty years ago. It sounds like a load of stuff and nonsense to me!

The birds! The birds!

Birds! Large, black, raucous birds! Rooks or crows or jays or all three together! There are masses of them in our neck of the woods! We see them flying around and Phil comments, without fail, “Flying school!” regardless of the time of year and whether or not there are any young ones involved.

And that is where they should be: flying around outside! Not inside my house!

Now, everyone has something that gives them the heebie-jeebies. Some people can’t stand spiders. My grandson cannot abide wasps; all his courage disappears and he becomes a quivering wreck. Me, I can catch spiders, even large ones, and throw them out at the bottom of the garden, as I have boasted only recently. I am a pretty good wasp dispatcher as well. My kindness towards spiders does not extend to wasps. I have been told lately that I should not squish hem as they are as valuable as bees in the pollinating business. However, I find them much more annoying than bees and far less inclined to let themselves be trapped in jars and transported outdoors. So squishing it has to be.

But things that flap give me the willies! Butterflies I can just about cope with. Moths, which are stupid and seem to fly deliberately towards people, give me the jimjams, but over time I have trained myself not to panic. In a supreme act of bravery I have accompanied the grandchildren into the bat cave at Chester zoo. Pigeons taking off in front of me cause me to shudder and I have to force myself not to scream in horror. You can imagine my reaction to seagulls and pigeons on the terraces of Spanish bars.

But birds indoors are, for me at any rate, the stuff of nightmares!

When we first viewed our house, well over thirty years ago, there was a very old-fashioned gas fire in the living room. In the romantic flush of relative youth we decided to get rid of it and replace it with an open fireplace - coal and logs and such would provide our cheer. And, in addition, we installed, or rather had someone else install for us, a coal-burning stove in the basement kitchen to run the central heating. When the coal-burning stove eventually packed in we had gas-fired central heating put in. Several years ago now we gave in and bought a very realistic-looking electric-powered fire to go in the fireplace in the living room, effectively blocking it.

What has all this to do with large, black, raucous birds? You might well ask.

About twenty years ago, when our daughter and her small daughter were living with us, I set off for work as usual somewhere between 6.30 and 7.00am. All was well. About an hour later our daughter brought her daughter down for breakfast and found a crow, or a rook or a jay, sitting in the fireplace with its baby. She did not panic, as I most assuredly would have done, but retreated upstairs to alert her father to the situation. He came down and calmly opened the living room window as wide as possible and amazingly the bird and its young flew out.

That was bird invasion number one.

A few years ago, while Phil and I were away in Galicia, our daughter, accompanied by the same daughter as before, now in her mid-to-late teens, popped in to check that the the house was fine. It clearly wasn’t. Things were knocked over in the living room but it did not really look like a burglary. Further inspection revealed a certain amount of soot and bird droppings. But no sign of a bird. On going upstairs they discovered a similar sort of mess in the main bedroom. But again no sign of a bird. Like angels, they cleared up the mess and eventually found a poor dead rook, or crow or jay, in a corner of the bedroom. They cleared him up too.

That was bird invasion number two.

One summer, after the installation of the electric fire and thus the blocking of the fireplace, our daughter and her partner came round, again in our absence in Galicia, and heard flapping and squawking behind the fire. Armed with large shopping bags, they gingerly moved the fire and successfully caught a large, black bird, rook or crow or jay, and sent him on his way into the great outdoors.

 That was bird invasion number three.

Yesterday granddaughter number two complained that she had heard a noise behind the fire. It was only hailstones tumbling down the chimney. She did, however, put a hex on the place for this morning it was plain that bird invasion number four had taken place. I was up fairly early as I had an appointment for a dental check-up. Having some breakfast in the basement kitchen, I distinctly heard a squawk, the kind that rooks or crows or jays make. But this one appeared to come from inside the house. Somewhat freaked out, I steeled myself to go up to the living room and check. No sign of anything but a certain amount of noise from behind the electric fire. It was still too early to wake Phil so I put up a fireguard and placed a moderately heavy coffee table in front of the fireplace in the hope that whatever was there would not be strong enough to shift the barricade.

And then I went out. A couple of hours later, my dental appointment over, I phoned Phil and mentioned, en passant, that there was bird in the chimney. Which he had already discovered, of course, but which he had decided to leave where it was as a problem for us to solve together.

On my return home, I spent some time working in the kitchen as I could not bear to sit in the living room and hear the scrabbling and squawking. In the meantime, my hero and knight in shining armour had consulted the great god Google and found instructions on How To Remove A Bird From A Chimney Or Fireplace. And so we carefully moved the fire and managed to drop a towel on top of the by now exhausted bird, clearly a young crow or jay or rook. Phil scooped him up and dropped him out of the window, whereupon the bird flew away. 

Quite traumatised, we had to have tea and cake!

The thing is that after bird invasion number three we spoke to the builder next door and ascertained that he would be able to fit a cage over the chimney pot.

We know that around here rooks, or crows, or jays, whatever, like to nest on or in or next to chimney pots. And the young are daft, like all young creatures, and are prone to falling in. The builder next door assured us he would cap the pots. He has not done so and as he promised to do it free of charge I did not like to nag.

I did hear that he has been suffering from vertigo, not a good ailment to have when you plan to do roof work. I know a good do-it-yourself cure for vertigo as I have helped Phil to overcome the problem. It involves moving the head around a certain way in order to perform what the website calls “rolling the stones”, shifting bits of crystal that get into the ear canal and cause dizziness. Who knew we had crystals inside us!?

While I have no intention of helping the builder next door to “roll his stones”, I think I need to ask him once again about putting a cage on our chimney pots.

Getting rid of spiders and other nuisances!

It seems to be large spider season again! I have removed two in the last couple of days. I am, in fact, a spider catcher extraordinaire, using the tried and tested glass and postcard method. This morning’s large spider, body about half an inch long and legs to go with it, seemed very angry at being trapped in a glass. You could almost hear him hissing as he scrabbled against the side. Ignoring his protests, I unlocked the back door and walked to the bottom of the garden to throw him out, hoping to trick him into not being able to find his way back in.

Back inside, I was unable to find the back door key. It was clearly one of those days! Obviously the thing had bounced out as I opened the door, which is always a bit stiff in damp weather. There is the added problem that we only have the one key. Presumably we started out with two and lost one long ago. (Memo to self: get a second key cut and put it in a safe place for emergencies such as this!) So we needed to locate this one. After hunting, without results, in the likely places close to the back door I decided the time had come to investigate the bag of paper and cardboard waiting to be put out for recycling next Tuesday. No luck on the first cursory inspection! So I went into more detail, looking into the Weetabix packet and the cardboard biscuit box that contain other smaller containers. And there it was!

As I said, one of those days. Even the weather is odd.

I ran round the village in early morning sunshine, disposed of the spider a little later when the cloud had moved in, debated whether or not to hang the washing out to dry and felt spots of rain. Once the washing was draped around the house, the sun re-emerged. Not for long though. Before we knew it we had a hailstorm! And now the sky is trying to clear again.

So much for Flaming June!

Mind you, I suspect I am having a better day than some.

Cocaine user Michael Give is still in the news. Here are some comments:-

“In 2014 Michael Give’s education department passed a new code of conduct that included disqualification for teachers convicted of possessing class A drugs like cocaine.
So snorting coke makes you unfit to teach but fine to run the entire education system!”

“Thank goodness Michael Give is only admitting to the serious criminal offences of possession o class A substance rather than necking a can of Marks and Sparks mojito on the train. There’d be hell to pay.”

I wondered what had provoked his admission. Then I discovered that Owen Bennett had revealed it in a new book.

So there are no lies, just a bit of omission. Until forced to reveal all.

Some Tories have gone on about what an unconservative thing taking drugs is to do. Really? I remember reading years ago that the offspring of the privileged classes, educated to be adventurous, were probably just as likely, if not indeed more likely, to try drugs than working class kids.

Anyway, it does not seem to be making him give up the idea of becoming PM, and he is trying to get his campaign back on track. I read that “Gove dismissed as “foolish” the idea that American authorities could ban a prime minister from entering their country, even though some UK citizens have been stopped from going to the US after admitting to having taken drugs.
He acknowledged he was “fortunate” not to have been sent to prison. Asked if he should have gone to prison, Gove said: “I was fortunate in that I didn’t, but I do think it was a profound mistake and I have seen the damage drugs do. I have seen it close up and I have also seen it in the work that I have done as a politician. That is why I deeply regret the mistake that I made.”

We shall see! Some things can’t be caught in a jar and thrown over the garden wall!