Frost. Out and about. No decisions. Language stuff. A good smack. Or not!

Today is crisp and bright and sunny.  The forecast has cloud moving in later and rainier conditions again tomorrow. 

 

That’s how it goes. 

 

There was frost around first this this morning but on the whole I would rather frosty, sunny mornings than damp grey ones. 

Yesterday we managed finally to get in our Diggle Chippy Hike, postponed because of bad weather a couple of weeks back. A good walk. Fine views. Excellent fish and chips. 

The picnic table area by the duckpond was rather squelchy. A lady walking her dogs told us in indignant tones that we had Diggle Primary School to blame for that. They organised some kind of activity there for Hallowe’en and masses of people were stomping around on the wet ground. Squelchy mud as a consequence! “And barely a mask and no social distancing at all!” she finished off her rant! But I bet the local kids had some fun.

 

 

They’ve started mass testing for the virus in Liverpool, aiming to test everyone apparently. The jury is out in the usefulness of this, however. Some scientists don’t seem to think it will help reduce the R-number. It might make people feel they are doing something useful though.

The USA remains in limbo as regards who will be president for the next four years. There has been, indeed there continues to be, a lot of kerfuffle about postal voting, or “mail-in ballots” as they call them over there. As though the idea was completely new and strange. Maybe it is for them. I know people here who always vote by post. Now, I wonder how long it will be before we start to talk about postal votes as “mail-in ballots” in this country. I have already noticed a number of reporters doing so. I hope it is just those who are reporting on the US elections!

Language is a funny thing. In recent years older people have stopped falling over or falling down. Instead they “have a fall”, which sounds more dignified. Children fall over, buildings and trees fall down, but old people have falls. I suppose there is some logic to it. Linguistic logic anyway. After all, we “have a talk” with people and we “have a look” at things.  

Thinking of children, Scotland has become the first part of the UK to ban the smacking of children after new legislation came into effect. The 58th country in the world to ban it but the first in the UK. We don’t lead the world in being nice to children then. No doubt the “a good smack never hurt me” brigade will still be shocked by this but I never understood how a “good smack” did any more than convince a child that it’s okay to hurt someone provided you are bigger and stronger than they are. 

My daughter told me of having to remonstrate with a parent on this subject. The child had done something wrong at school. On hearing about it, his father declared his intention to beat his son when he got him home. My daughter convinced him, she hopes, that this was not necessary. Her own expressions of disappointment were probably enough to persuade the eight year old not to offend again. She has mastered the knack of making her little charges feel bad if they let her down. No raps on the knuckles with a ruler necessary there.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Explosive times!

Because I knew I was going to be busy today, Friday, when I ran round the village on Thursday I thought I would pop into the co-op and pick up a few things. Nothing I desperately needed. Just getting ahead of myself. So it was very annoying to arrive in the village centre and find the co-op festooned with police-crime-scene-no-entry tape and a police van sitting outside. Peering through the gaps I could see quite a messy situation in there with stuff strewn around the floor.

We walked into the village later to see if things had improved. Not one jot or tittle! Same police-crime-scene-no-entry tape. Possibly the same police van. Certainly the same mess indoors. This time there were two policemen on duty outside so I asked what was going on. Someone broke into the co-op on Wednesday night. Well, yes, I had worked that out. No idea when the shop would reopen. How annoying. The co-op is my major food shopping venue apart from Uppermill market. I’m pretty sure I am not the only one in that situation. If this continues I shall have to cycle to Uppermill coop or maybe even Greenfield Tesco, maybe on Saturday. I shall monitor the situation. 

My daughter reckons the thieves were after the STM, the cash machine, or rather, its contents. I guess if you know how to break into one of those you can extract thousands, if not tens of thousands of pound! It seems other small coop stores in the area have been broken into and their cash machines emptied! Goodness, I would not know where to begin to attempt to rob a cash machine! They did not teach stuff like that at my school!

This was confirmed later. Apparently they blew up the cash machine at about 11.30 pm. Local people heard the explosion, said the report. Not us! We must be far enough away from the village centre not to hear it. Or maybe we heard something and thought it was some loony setting off fireworks. There have been quite a few of those!

This morning I ran past the coop and it appeared to be open for business as usual. Well, thank goodness for that!

Our granddaughter and her housemate organised a bonfire in their barbecue bucket in their garden last night. She sent photos, very pagan looking! One of the neighbours gave them a bit of their winter store of firewood, another gave them sparklers and, lo and behold, a mini community event but with each household in their own garden!

Still no results from the USA, but a lot of noise and divisive chatter from the current POTUS! 

My daughter sent me this quote, supposedly attributed to one of my American heroes, Bruce Springsteen:-

“There’s no art in this White House. There’s no literature, no poetry, no music. There are no pets in this White House. No loyal man’s best friend, no Socks the family cat. There are no images of the first family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation: no Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments, or the Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport, no Reagans on horseback, no Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape.

Where’d that country go? Where did all the fun, the joy and the expression of love and happiness go? We used to have a president who calmed and soothed a nation, instead of dividing it. We are now rudderless and joyless.

We have lost the cultural aspects of society that have always made America great. We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness, our cheering on of others— the shared experience of humanity that makes it all worth it. We need to reclaim that country once again.”

-Bruce Springsteen

There you go.

The sun is shining, the early morning fog has cleared and the sky is blue. I have a Diggle Chippy Hike to go on.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The lights are going out (in Blackpool) ... or are they (in Vigo)? A bit of snobbery. A bit of nostalgia.

Blackpool switches off its illuminations for a month ... well, maybe longer, but initially for a month. I’ve never seen Blackpool illuminations. It’s a little bit to do with growing up in Southport. In a snobby sort of way we always considered ourselves a little above Blackpool, altogether classier with our snooty Lord Street shops and fancy shopping arcades. Besides, my father was never one for fairgrounds. We rarely went to Pleasureland in Southport so we were hardly likely to go the a bigger funfair in Blackpool. And as a family we didn’t go to Southport beach, preferring the quieter, and cleaner, Ainsdale beach. And from there you could see Blackpool Tower on a clear day. But you could also see the Welsh hills.

Lord Street now, by the way, is rather sad and run down - not at all a classy place to go shopping any longer. If my mother were still alive she would probably say it’s the result of Southport becoming part of Merseyside - Lancashire no longer! 

I’ve only ever been to Blackpool once and that was not really my choice. The sixth form college where I worked organised a staff day out at the end of every year, ostensibly to thank us for our efforts over the year. (That stopped a few years after I retired - cuts meant the college had no spare funds to treat the staff!) We all got in a charabanc and off we went to places like York and Chester, a boat trip on the Mersey in Liverpool, even Southport, and, one year, Blackpool. And so I went finally to Blackpool. But it was July and there were no illuminations. And I didn’t go up the Tower. When you’ve been up the Eiffel Tower, there seems little point in also doing the smaller one in Blackpool.

But the Tower is the one thing that will remain illuminated through the lockdown - a symbol of hope apparently.

 

Now, what I want to know is whether Vigo still able to be lit up for Christmas. Mayor Abel Caballero has invested a lot of money in his city’s Christmas lights over the last few years and this has attracted masses of visitors, bringing revenue unto the city as people come for short stays in the hotels, eat and drink in the bars and restaurants and ooh! and aah! at the lights after dark. With Spain in a state if emergency and travel restrictions in place, will visiting Vigo’s illuminated streets be a possibility this year?

Bonfire night, tonight, has already been cancelled. Community firework displays are not taking place. Presumably you can only have one in your garden if it’s just the household attending. None of the gatherings of friends and relations like we used to organise years ago when our children were young! Those were the days! Remember, remember, the fifth of November! Ah, nostalgia!

However, I saw somebody buying enormous amounts of potatoes on Wednesday, all the sort of potatoes advertised as good for baking. Either her family eats a lot of spuds or she was planning a baked potato party ... maybe for Bonfire Night! Who knows! 

My oldest granddaughter and my daughter both report fireworks being set off over the last week or so in the bits of town where they live. So fireworks are still being bought and sold somewhere.

Here’s an interesting bit of otherwise useless knowledge concerning Bonfire Night:-

Gingerbread men are modelled on Guy Fawkes

After the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, a new tradition spread through England. The biscuit figures sold at fairs were traditionally made in the likeness of Catholic saints, but after Guy Fawkes’ foiled attempt to blow up parliament, the bonfire celebrations that followed featured figures of him. People could now show their support for the Protestant cause by eating the papist villain. Hence, the association of gingerbread with Bonfire Night.

There’s obviously something new to learn every day!

We are still waiting for the results of the US elections. Good ness knows what chaos will ensue but ...

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Larks and owls. Elections results ... but not yet! Market stall closure - what is an essential item?

There are theories about different types of people. There are larks and night owls. Larks get up early, bright and perky. I am a lark, on the whole. My father was a lark. We larks are very annoying, or so I am told, especially to owls, who are sleepy and blinking in the morning. Owls stay up late into the night. My husband is an owl and always has been. He did his best studying at university after midnight. Strictly speaking we are incompatible. Sometimes this lark has adapted to owldom, staying up late to watch TV programmes. It’s amazing how many denouements of detective stories I have missed by dozing off in front of the TV set. Owls find it hard to get up early in the morning, despite admonishments about missing the best part of the day.

Since the clocks went back and the sun sets a lot earlier than it used to, making the actual day a whole lot shorter, my night owl has taken a decision. He wants to see more of the day, make better use of daylight hours, especially if we happen to have some sunshine and have the chance of absorbing some apparently much needed vitamin D. So he has been making a determined effort and setting his alarm a little earlier each day. 

For a good while now, our day has followed a pattern: I get up earlyish and go for a run; I wake my night owl on my return and he comes to consciousness gradually while I shower; finally we have a latish breakfast. The new regime has meant that he has got round to being up and about when I return from my run. We have joked that if he continues to get up a little earlier each day eventually he will be getting up before he goes to bed. Of course, getting up earlier means he has to  go to be earlier as well.

Last night, though, he had a setback. Somewhere between 2.30 and 3.00 in the morning I woke up and realised he was only just about to retire to bed. He had been delayed by watching results come in from the US elections. Once you start to watch that sort of thing it becomes addictive. And it was also becoming depressing as crazy Trump supporters had turned out to vote for him and he was doing better than predicted. It’s a wonder my night owl got to sleep at all.

So the early rising went by the board somewhat this morning. It’s a good job tomorrow is another day!

By the time I got up this morning Biden had clawed back some of that small-hours-of-the-morning Trump lead. Biden seemed now to be in the lead but not by enough to feel secure. There is still everything to play for. And Trump is playing, saying that there should be a cut-off point beyond which votes will not be counted. So much for democracy!

On a more cheerful not, today is a beautiful crisp day. The sky is blue and the sun is shining. But it is very cold - finger- and toe-freezing cold! My cycle ride to Uppermill market was chilly but pleasant, although there was so much traffic going through the lower part of Dobcross during my return journey that I ended up pushing my laden bike along the pavement, which proved faster and undoubtedly safer than trying to weave along between parked cars and white vans. 

There is some doubt about whether the market be able to open next week. Non-essential shops have to close because of the new shutdown. Now I can understand that the stall that sells slippers will not be able to be there. (Although people will perhaps need more slippers than ever if they have to stay indoors!) The flower and plant seller is in a bit of a grey area - after all, garden centres are allowed to remain open. However, you would have thought that the cheese and biscuit stall, the fruit and veg stall and the fishman could set up chap again next week. But there was a chap with a clipboard going round chatting to stall holders, warning them of a possible closure. 

How silly! 

So I bought extra fish, some of it to go into the freezer, just in case there is no fishman next week. The delicatessen, a shop rather than a stall, will remain open, they assure me. Olives, sun-dried tomatoes, jars of harissa paste, florentine biscuits and other such delicacies are clearly essential items!

On the radio they have been talking to people who have discovered the delights of craft projects ... knitting, crochet, quilting, all sorts of craft work. Suppliers of craft materials are having a small boom. Lots of people are planning to make Christmas presents by hand this year. So for years I have obviously been ahead of the trend as I have always included some hand-made gifts in my gifts to family and friends. 

The 1.00pm news tells me that the US election results might not be through for a few days yet. It’s probably harder to count to votes this year as the turnout had been so high. Oh, boy!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Routine activities. Parcel problems. Working the system. Other bits of news.

It gets to feel a bit like the film Groundhog Day: I get up and go for a run, managing usually to avoid the rain; it starts to rain not long after I return; some time later it stops raining again and we go for a walk. This is the pattern most days. 

Yesterday was disrupted by the fact that we were expecting Amazon to deliver a parcel and so we stayed in despite the weather improving somewhat. We were expecting a new inner-tube for a wheel on our daughter’s all-terrain baby buggy. Unlike many standard baby buggies, this one has tyres which can be pumped up, probably because they might take quite a battering on rough tracks. One tyre kept deflating and all Phil’s attempts to sort it failed. It clearly wasn’t a puncture; we decided the valve was kaput and that a new inner-tube was needed. So one was ordered, the delivery was arranged to be at our house where we already had the offending wheel so that Phil could fix it.

It must be a generational thing. We oldies have our uses. I sort out the sewing repairs and Phil deals with mechanical stuff. Mind you, it’s reciprocal. Anything to do with mobile phones is dealt with by the younger generation.

Computers we can cope with - well, Phil can cope with them, as my longstanding refusal to understand anything more than how to do what I need to do continues - but mobile phones are a different matter! 

Anyway, we put off going for a walk as we were expecting the parcel containing the inner-tube. And time went by and the parcel did not arrive. And suddenly it was time for my online Italian conversation class. The parcel arrived at some point while I was busy talking Italian. We considered going for a walk after that even though it was already going dark. And then the rain came back. 

Goodbye Monday’s walk!

Phil fitted the new inner-tube. Our daughter will reclaim it after she collects her small people from nursery this afternoon. That way her partner can take the small people to meet the other grandparents in a park tomorrow morning - after tomorrow they won’t be able to do that for a while! In the afternoon, weather permitting, she will bring the small people, and maybe one of her bigger offspring, to go for a walk with us. Which we won’t be able to together for a while!

We are planning on being careful to stick to the rule of just one person from a household meeting just one person from another household! My brother-in-law, however, has been working on how we can manage a Chippy-Hike. Better weather is forecast for later this week. The chippy serves take-away food and so should be able to remain open. He has decided that if he drives over and becomes a walking-about meeting with Phil and if our daughter comes over with the small people, who will not be counted, then she and I can become another walking-about meeting - with unavoidable add-ons! - then we can go ahead. When we get our fish and chips we’ll have to sit at two separate picnic tables by the duckpond. That’s the theory, anyway!

Out in the wider world, voting should finish today in the USA but goodness only knows whether there will be a result at the end of the day. Probably not! France has seen a spate of supposedly Islamist attacks and now a similar thing has occurred in Vienna, Austria. As if the pandemic were not enough. France is already in lockdown and Austria, or at any rate Vienna, is about to go into lockdown. It’s very hard for governments to do more than try to control the virus, without extra emergencies coming along.

More cheerful nows comes from this report on studies going on in the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. 

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/nov/01/a-selfie-set-in-stone-hidden-portrait-by-cheeky-mason-found-in-spain-900-years-on

One of the stonemasons working on the huge columns that support the edifice seems to have carved part of the head of one column into his own likeness. A stone selfie! The visiting general public can’t see it. You have to be up at the top of the column. However, an art historian investigating the structure of the cathedral and stuff like that has discovered it. What a nice surprise! And how nice that such work has been able to continue during the pandemic. On reflection, it’s probably easier to do it now while there are fewer tourists than in a normal year. A little bit of serendipity. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

What to do with your old Hallowe’en pumpkin. A bit of motor car nostalgia. Who can you meet outdoors?

Well, that’s Hallowe’en out of the way. What’s next? Strictly speaking it should be Bonfire Night on November 5th but this year we’re starting a new lockdown instead. Besides, even before the pandemic, I had the impression that Hallowe’en had superseded Bonfire Night anyway. Trick-or-treat candy trumps treacle toffee!

All around the village this morning, where once again I managed to run without getting rained on (the weather gods must favour me for some reason), there are soggy-looking remains of pumpkins, their leery smiles askew! 

On Saturday morning our granddaughter and her housemate had a minor panic because they had no pumpkin. The housemate took herself off on a rather long stomp to their nearest co-op store - larger by far than the small one in our village but less conveniently placed - but all to no avail. This year they have not been stocking pumpkins. Nor have they been stocking packs of trick-or-treat candy. They offered her a turnip but it’s not quite the same. Although my granddaughter, who is a surprising mine of useless information, assures me that people used to make turnip lanterns to ward off evil spirits. (Who knew? Well, our granddaughter, obviously.) This was before we became Americanised and pumpkinised!

In the end, our daughter came to the rescue and gave them a spare pumpkin that she had. Why would anyone have a “spare” pumpkin? Good grief! She had to ask permission from the four-year-old to pass the pumpkin on instead of having yet another pumpkin-carving session in their house. As the pumpkin was going to her beloved big sister the small girl agreed. And so the pumpkin was handed over, on condition that the inner flesh was returned to the donor who planned to make pumpkin soup, and was duly carved.

Yesterday, during our “let’s ignore the weather” adventure, our granddaughter told us that she and her housemate plan to take a walk into the small wooded area near their house to leave the carved pumpkin shell in a tree for the squirrels to eat. Her mother insisted that she should be careful to put it well out of the reach of hedgehogs. Last year, it seems, people were encouraged to leave their discarded  pumpkin carvings out for hedgehogs to eat but the latest findings are that pumpkins give hedgehogs the runs. They then become dehydrated and die. And hedgehogs have enough problems as it is, what with unwittingly hibernating in bonfires and discovering that curling up into a ball is no protection from lorries hurtling at you as you try to cross the road. 

 

All of this how-to-dispose-of-your-hallowe’en-pumpkin stuff is all new to me. But then, I have never made a pumpkin lantern in my life.

Running round the village this morning, I came upon a very tatty old Citroen 2CV parked on one of the back lanes. What a surprise! Oh, the nostalgia! Of course, this one was black so the nostalgia was not quite so great as it could have been. Our very first car, whose registration number we both still remember, was a bright red 2CV, brand new, bought, taxed and insured for under £2,000, back in the mid seventies. Red was clearly the best colour! Such fun we had driving it around the country roads of Brittany in the summer - the roof rolled back and the wind in our hair and serious sunburn on my forearms! We practically moved house in that car. When our son was born there were no baby seats but the removable top of his pram wedged nicely and safely onto the back seat. How sad we were when the Little Wonder finally gave up the ghost. We replaced her with a red Renault 4L. Almost as good and we had that fitted with rudimentary harnesses for the by then two children we were ferrying around. 

Okay! Enough nostalgia!

New rulings on the lockdown say that children under school age do not count when deciding who can meet outdoors. So now our daughter and the “littles”, as she calls them, can meet her eldest daughter, or me, or Phil, but not all of us together. She can meet a friend - just one - with similar “littles”. She can go and teach a whole class full of eight-year-olds but that’s a different matter. 

Similarly our son, or his wife, can go for a walk with just one friend, but they can’t go together. Neither can they take their six-year-old along if they plan to meet a friend, as she is of school age. And the friend cannot bring a school age child along either. But the children will be able to sit in the same classroom and probably play together in the school playground. I don’t think sleep-overs will be on the cards.

It’s a topsy-turvy time.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reflections on a new lockdown.

So here we are, approaching a new full lockdown. Well, almost a full lockdown because schools and colleges and presumably universities are still open. We can’t meet people from other households indoors, unless we are in a bubble, although some outdoor contact is possible. But the rule of six seems to have bitten the dust. So Phil or I, but not both of us together, will be able to meet one friend or one member of the family for a walk. That means my daughter can meet one of us but cannot bring any of her offspring along! And our tentatively rearranged Diggle Chippy Hike with my brother-in-law is probably a no-no! 

It’s all very depressing! 

People are already moaning about the lack of Christmas markets. Goodness, I just realised that this time last year they were just about ready to set up even thought Christmas is still a couple of months away. The Christmas markets have been cancelled in Germany as well - that’s where a lot of ours originated. Personally I think they are seriously over-rated, lots of stalls selling much the same stuff, some of it little more than tat. Okay, there are usually some little gems in the middle of all that. I found a really nice bread stall the year before last. But the idea of going to the crowded Christmas markets in Manchester’s Albert Square, for example, to have some greasy food and an over-priced mug of glühwein has never appealed to me. But in Germany, I have heard, fans of glühwein have invented their own term for taking a flask of it on a walk in the forest: Adwaspaglüh.

I just love German vocabulary!

My daughter and I have just planned a walk today, even in the rain if necessary, as it may be the last occasion we can do a family walk for a good while. Lockdown begins at Midnight on Wednesday and continues until December 2nd but the slimy Gove has admitted that it  may need to be extended. So she is picking up her anxious eldest offspring, who is very concerned that she might not be able to see any of us for weeks, and we shall head out for a mini adventure.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!