The dire state of things!

For a short time this morning I thought the weathermen had got it wrong. 

Rain, rain and more rain, they said. And yet I went out running under a mostly blue sky and with the sun shining nicely. Not a bad day at all! By the time I had showered and put some breakfast on the table, however, it was starting to rain, just a bit of drizzle at first but gradually settling into a quiet, steady downpour. So far we have had no torrential downpours like yesterday. Neither have we had thunderstorms. There is time, though, for such things to develop!

In southern Europe, in particular Greece and Turkey, wildfires continue to rage. A friend of a friend has been ranting sadly about the poor provision of firefighters in more rural parts of Greece. It seems there is better provision closer to Athens. He sees it as a political decision and a lack of coordinated policy, the consequence of which is that fires that could have been contained have grown and spread and become unmanageable. Small communities are being wiped out.

The news here reports that strong winds are hampering firefighting as well. The UK is sending a brigade of firefighters to Athens. 

It’s hard to imagine a whole community losing everything. In the TV news last night a reporter from California described how a small town, 8,000 inhabitants, had just been razed to the ground. Fortunately all the inhabitants had been forewarned and had managed to get out but anything they had not been able to carry with them had been destroyed. How on earth do you decide what save from the approaching flames? How do you begin to recover and rebuild your community? And until the fires are under control starting any kind of recovery is not even possible! 

There are clearly worse things that a bit of rain.

Here’s another one - bubonic plague:-

“Surrounded by fires, parched by drought, and shut down by the pandemic – residents of California’s scenic South Lake Tahoe thought they’d endured everything.

That was until this week, when the US Forest Service announced it was closing several popular sites after discovering bubonic plague in the chipmunk population.

The federal agency announced this week that “based on positive plague tests” in the rodent population around hiking areas, it would close the well-trafficked Taylor Creek Visitor Center and nearby Kiva Beach through Friday.”

Apparently bubonic plague is not unusual among the animals of the Sierra Nevada and surrounding region. Someone from the Lake Tahoe basin management unit said, “It’s something that visitors need to take precautions about, but it’s not something that they need to worry about.” And plague in humans is now actually very treatable. Symptoms to watch for include sudden fever and chills, headache and muscle aches.

It all sounds rather biblical though: all around the world we have fire, floods and now plague - as if a pandemic was not enough! 

The rain is rather cramping the family’s adventuring style though. A hike in the rain is not impossible but it’s not quite as pleasant. I feel rather sorry for the various groups of cyclists I saw out and about earlier today. It’s to be hoped that they managed to get their long rides in before the rain started.

Here’s something from The Campaign to rejoin Europe:-

“A representative of UK farming was on BBC radio 4 news this morning (Saturday 7th) answering a question as to whether the shortage of foreign veg and fruit workers (meaning lower UK harvest) would drive up prices. His answer was "no, unlikely". The reason? Supermarkets would compensate lack of UK produce by importing more! Another blessing of Brexit. Less UK home grown produce and another blow to farmers.”

But all is not lost. 

Wales has its first day of “freedom” from Covid restrictions. 

Team GB has been winning more medals at the Tokyo Olympics. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain!! And some environmental thoughts.

They promised us rain and rain we have … in abundance. It was only mildly drizzling when I went out for a run first thing this morning and so I contemplated cycling to Tesco in Greenfield for some odds and ends only available in supermarkets rather larger than our village co-op store. However, as the morning went on the rain grew heavier, at times torrential. The bridle paths would be soggy and muddy and the main roads extra dangerous. Many car drivers are pretty much oblivious of cyclists at the best of times but when heavy rain is falling they seem to put on extra blinkers. And so I donned my raincoat, picked up my huge umbrella - small folding ones are no use in torrential downpours - and went out to catch the bus. The road was rather like a river. No doubt some places will flood!. Returning home with my shopping, with 20 minutes to wait for the bus, I contemplated walking to Uppermill and catching the bus from there, but one look at the huge puddles on the road convinced me that the playing field I would need to cross would be quagmire. 20 minutes in the bus shelter it was! But at least we don’t have thunder and lightning … yet!

My daughter has ventured into Manchester in the rain, rather against her will and better judgment. She and her partner went to Manchester in the sunshine yesterday morning - sunshine that rapidly became cool cloud cover but did not deteriorate further until the evening - to have brunch. This is something they like to do on occasion. While there she picked up a pair of shoes for her smallest offspring. When she arrived home she discovered that the “pair” consisted of two shoes of the same size but slightly different styles. She wanted to return them and sort out the problems as soon as possible before the others disappeared! Maybe there is a new fashion around and somewhere there is another small child with an identical “odd” pair of shoes.

We have rather too much rain at the moment but in South America I hear they are suffering from a drought. Aerial photos of the Andes show considerably less snow than in previous years. Places on lower slopes that depend of snow melt for their water supply will have problems. We need to find a way to balance the supply between the countries of the world - another need for a global effort! Will our PM address any of this at the climate summit about to take place in Scotland? We shall see.

To the north of Sardinia there is a little island called Budelli, one of an archipelago of 7 small islands. An old chap called Mauro Morandi lived there for 30 years as a sort of caretaker, fulfilling his own desire to escape to an island away from the hurly-burly and protecting the island’s ecosystem, preventing the few tourists allowed onto the island from stealing the pink sand from the beach. Then in 2013 the private company that owned the island went bankrupt. Plans to sell it to a New Zealander who promised to continue to employ Signore Morandi as caretaker fell through and in 2016 a judge decided that the island should go back into public ownership. The old gent had to leave the island and now lives in a flat on one of the larger islands. Tourism on Budelli is still restricted but it is monitored by CCTV cameras and there is nobody to explain things to tourists. Signore Morandi recently went back there to collect some belongings. “It was a disaster,” he said. “The beaches were trampled on. I knew this would happen. There is nobody there any more to educate the tourists.” Another sad story of environmental carelessness!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Hints of approaching autumn already! Names of practitioners of non-sports - well in my opinion.

It’s the first week in August and the rowan trees are already heavy with berries, some of them still an orangey yellow but quite a lot of them turning properly red. There are raspberries on odd bushes at the side of the footpaths. How did the raspberry canes get there? My childhood memories have blackberry brambles popping up almost anywhere but not raspberry canes. Somehow they always seemed more domesticated. The brambles are also laden with blackberries but they are still small and green. Occasionally I come across one that looks full grown and ripe but they are usually a bit sour. In a couple of weeks though I expect we can go blackberrying.

On the subject of fruit, by the way, here are a couple of photos of the large gooseberries from Ye Olde Egton Bridge Gooseberry Competition that I mentioned yesterday.

Then this morning, out and about, I spotted the first red-gold leaves in one of the trees. Autumn seems to be coming on apace! Surely it shouldn’t be happening quite yet. Is this one of the climate change things? It was a rather fine and sunny morning though, very much like summer in fact! 

 

Later, however, the cloud moved in, the backs of the leaves were blowing up in what my weather app said was a “light wind”. It was beginning to look rather autumnal.

I read this morning that we should be using cargo bikes instead of vans to make deliveries in towns and cities. Because they can avoid congestion and can go onto streets where heavy vans are not allowed they can deliver about 60% faster than vans in city centres. And they cut carbon emissions by 90% compared to diesel vans and by a third compared to electric vans. Sounds good! It’s electric bikes they are talking about, not the kind of thing where you see a young cyclist with a square rucksack almost as big as he is delivering pizza and other such fast foods. These cargo bikes are odd-looking things and would certainly need some assistance to go up hills with their load of packages. I wonder how they cope in heavy rain and snow. Surely they would need waterproof covering for their parcels.

I wonder if “Deliverer” will ever become one of those occupation-related surnames we has so many of. On of our recent medal winners (for BMX riding, a sport that I regard as a kids’ pastime) was Bethany Shriever. Checking the spelling of her name before ai made derogatory comments about her sport in a recent post I came across a bit of information about her name, which must be a version of Shriver (cf Lionel Shriver: We need to talk about Kevin). The name connects to the verb “to shrive”:- 

1. To hear the confession of and give absolution to (a penitent).

2. To obtain absolution for (oneself) by confessing and doing penance.

v.intr. Archaic

1. To make or go to confession.

2. To hear confessions.

From that of course we get “shrove” as on Shrove Tuesday, bu which day we suppose believers have confessed their sins and have been “shriven”.  But basically it comes from Middle English schriven, from Old English scrīfan, from Latin scrībere, to write. So a Shriver is a writer. Maybe you needed to be able to write to give sinners a written absolution.

I even found out this odd fact:-

“The ancestral home of the Shriver family is in the German state of Bavaria. The name Shriver is an occupational hereditary surname, a type of surname that was taken from a word describing or common to the profession of the original bearer. It is a name for a clerk. The name Shriver is derived from the German word "schreiben," which means "to write" and was itself derived from the German word "schriben", and the Old German word "scriban." The Latin word "scribere" also means to write and could be a root word of this distinguished surname.”

There you go! An appropriate name for a writer of novels, if not for a rider of BMX bikes. 

Our media has been celebrating our success in another non-sport (in my opinion) skateboarding, where 13 year old Sky Brown has just become Great Britain’s youngest ever Olympic medal winner. Now, if her surname had been Blue, I wonder if her parents would have had second thoughts about calling her Sky. Just a thought!

And finally, here’s a link to the story of another skateboarder, Australian this time,

who managed to knock over a cameraman during his sporting activity. He still managed to score highly enough to qualify for the finals though.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

DNA stuff. Basking blackbirds. Food competitions and shows.

Scientists say something like 90% of our DNA is in common with cat DNA.  Cat lovers are, of course, delighted as this validates their passion for their furry friends. They need to be reminded that we also share a lot of DNA with cattle and mice. What does that tell us about human nature?

Personally I wonder about blackbirds as I keep seeing them basking in the sun in our garden. Blackbirds and humans both like to stretch out in the sunshine and let the warmth sink in. It’s quite fascinating to watch the blackbirds choose a spot, settle down, spread their wings out and just relax in the warmth. They get little chance if our four year old granddaughter is around, however, as she likes to creep up on them to see how close she can get.

We have more blackbirds around than really seems possible. And lately they have been in pairs, apparently a parent bird and a fledgling practically as big as its parent and seemingly quite able to fly, but still demanding to be fed tasty morsels by the parent. Is this the bird equivalent of the thirty year old who still lives at home with his parents? One such pair of birds had me wondering if the parent blackbird was actually fostering a cuckoo as the fledgling was so large and more brown that black. On balance though, I think the fledgeling is more probably just a female blackbird. 

There has been plenty of sunshine for basking blackbirds this morning. I had a pleasant ride to the market in the morning sunshine. However, everywhere I went people were advising me to enjoy the sunshine while it’s here and warning me that rain is forecast for later. So I am watching the clouds build up and keeping an eye on the washing drying in what remains of the sunshine. 

I read this morning about the Yorkshire Gooseberry Competition. My first thought on seeing the headline was that it might be some odd competition to see who could annoy their offspring the most by playing gooseberry. But, no, this is an actual horticultural thing to see who can grow  the biggest gooseberry in a place called Egton Bridge near Whitby. This year the victor is an 85 year old called Bryan Nellist. 

The competition has been going on since 1823 and has written rules! Last year it was cancelled because of covid but now it’s back. Tourists pop in to see what’s going on. Goodness! I thought it was just Spain that had such food related events. Somehow I don’t think the Egton Bridge Old Gooseberry Society’s annual competition quite rivals the Albariño Festival in Cambados though.  

Competitive gooseberry growing in not without its bit of controversy however. It seems that in the Cheshire village of Goosetrey, also held recently, the reigning champion, a certain Terry Price, 76 years old, could not enter because either his home village competition or the Egton one because his bushes had been sproyed and poisoned and killed by a suspect rival! Shocking! The Egton people said they had never heard of auch a thing but then,  “That’s the other side of the Pennines, that’s just foreign”. One spokesperson added, “I’ve never come across anything like that. If that really has happened, that is something very odd going on there. I mean, people talk about competitive leek growing and the shenanigans that go on there, but gooseberry growing isn’t like that.”

As for me, I look at the pictures of gooseberries as big as good-sized plums and think to myself that surely that is not natural. How is the flavour affected by this insistence of size? Do they sample the champion gooseberry for taste? And I think back to when my  other would enter her Victoria sponge sandwich cake in the flower and produce show at our local church once a year. The cakes were not judged on appearance alone. Oh, no! A minuscule slice was cut from each one so that the lightness and flavour of the cakes could be assessed also by the judges! Could a similar thing be done with giant gooseberries?

My mother, by the way, regularly won prizes for her cakes. All the entries were then sold to visitors to the flower and produce show raising money for the church. My sister still wins prizes at such shows, not for cakes but for knitted baby clothes! Such traditions live on!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The trials and tribulations of a public transport user!

Today I ventured into Manchester to have my hair done. The visit to the hairdresser’s was fine. Transport was a different matter. 

To begin with I needed to visit The Travel Shop, which is just a fancy name for the information office at Oldham bus station. Not long before we went into the first lockdown it was decided that those of us with old biddy bus passes should pay £10 in order to be able to travel on local trams and trains free of charge as well as on local buses. This seemed quite reasonable to me. After all, a couple of trips to Manchester on the tram would cost me more than a tenner. Not that we had much chance to make use of the facility once everything shut down. When the first lockdown restrictions began to be eased we were able to use our bus passes on the trams without any extra charge but now the £10 fee has been introduced.

So I popped into the travel shop to pay my dues so that I could travel to Manchester on the tram without problems. I took Phil’s pass with me to see if I could validate his pass at the same time. The happy chappy behind the counter was clearly a joker. He began by telling me that Phil needed to be there in person and then, as I was about to put Phi’s pass away, informed me that he was joking and that I could sort the passes for all my friends and relations if I chose to do so. What a wag!

Then I walked down to the tram stop, thinking to myself that I was going to arrive in Manchester far too early for my appointment. However, at the tram stop I discovered that there was engineering work going on and that my tram would not go all the way to Manchester. I needed to alight at Central Park and catch a Magic Bus (another joker had clearly decided that a fleet of buses needed a cheery name!) to take me the rest of the way. 

I joined a group of happy travellers waiting to see which of the buses, all helpfully labelled “Not In Service”, would be ours. And so I got to see a bit of Greater Manchester hitherto mostly unknown to me and eventually arrived in the city centre, still in plenty of time to do a few pre-planned errands before heading to the hairdresser’s.

The hairdressing salon always used to be a bustling, busy place with stylists dealing with several clients simultaneously, giving instructions to their juniors to complete mundane tasks like shampooing clients, sweeping up, bringing clients cups of coffee and so on. Now stylists, of which I only saw two all afternoon instead of four or five as in the past, did everything and dealt with only one client at a time. One poor little junior did a lot of running around but little that actually gave her hair styling experience! Rather sad! And I wonder how long they will be able to operate in this way and still make money.

Returning home was a further travel adventure. I contemplated going to Piccadilly Station, at the other end of the city centre, to catch a tram to Ashton or a train to Greenfield, a possibly faster journey. but my foolishly chosen sandals were by now squeezing my poor little toes, and trams across the centre to Piccadilly were not running. A brisk walk up the hill to Piccadilly did not appeal to me. So I did the reverse of my Manchester-ward journey, slower than a straight tram ride would have been. This was clearly a mistake as I arrived at Oldham Mumps just in time to see my connecting bus sailing away in the direction of Delph. No more buses going to Delph or even Uppermill, from where I could have walked, even with my toe-squeezing sandals, for one hour! 

Under more normal circumstances I would have walked back to the taxi rank and paid an extortionate amount for taxi-ride home. But I had had enough of travelling along in my covid mask and gave in to the temptation to phone my daughter and ask if she was available to play taxi driver for me. Fortunately she owes me a favour or two and so within ten minutes or so there she was, ready drive me home. Thank heavens for helpful offspring!

I quite like going to Manchester but, oh! I find returning home on public transport a real pain! So it goes.

By the way, the passengers on the buses and trams I travelled on today were mostly mask-wearers. In the Arndale Centre and in the shops in the centre there was mix of cautious mask-wearers and carefree, liberated, bare-faced shoppers. Which is pretty much what I was expecting. I fall into the cautious mask-wearer category. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well everyone! 

Being criticised. Language matters!

School teachers have long been criticised for having a long(ish) summer holiday. Parliament is on its summer break. Why do MPs not come in for the same criticism?  Just a thought.

The sports presenter/ commentator Alex Scott has been criticised for her accent. On Saturday Lord Digby Jones accused Ms Scott, a former Arsenal footballer, of spoiling the Tokyo coverage due to her “inability to pronounce her ‘g’s”. Not all ‘g’s but the final ‘g’ at the end of the present participle. He said she needs elocution lessons. 

He tweeted: 

“Enough! I can’t stand it anymore (sic)” Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin.”

All of this is pretty rich considering that the upper classes of Britain have long enjoyed huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. 

And, besides, Digby Jones really needs to listen to Priti Patel, who seems to suffer from the same “need for elocution lessons”.

Stephen Fry, who knows a thing or two, replied to Digby Jones as follows: 

“You are everything linguists and true lovers of language despise. Also, since we’re being picky, you are not Lord Digby Jones, your are Digby, Lord Jones. There’s a world of difference. But however you’re titled, you disgrace the upper house with your misplaced snobbery.”

I’m not an expert on how lords should be addressed or spoken of. In fact I am not at all interested in lords but I do object to snobbery, even if the dropping of the final ‘g’ offends my ear. The disappearance of the letter ‘t’ upsets me more though.

Perhaps all these quibbles will be cured when Latin is reintroduced into state schools. I have no objection to Latin being taught in our schools. In fact, I think it’s probably a good idea. The suggestion that our secondary school teachers need training to teach Latin disturbs me. Is it going to be a case of teachers keeping a lesson or two ahead of their pupils in their learning of Latin? I’m already worried about teachers with little more than GCSE French delivering French teaching to our primary pupils! 

While I’m ranting about language, here’s a little something a friend sent me: 

THE English language is complex so it’s easy to make mistakes. But these mangled phrases are never acceptable:

A damp squid

It’s bad enough that no one has shown up to your 30th birthday party, but to make matters worse you’ve described the event as a ‘damp squid’. Cephalopods have nothing to do with the fact that you can’t make any friends, and the word you’re looking for is ‘squib’, a type of firework that doesn’t go bang when wet.

An escaped goat

A swing and a miss for the term ‘scapegoat’, which you’ve just embarrassingly used in a heated meeting at work whilst being blamed for the entire sales team underperforming. Expect to see ‘can’t use basic English’ written on the reference for the next job you’ll be looking for soon.

Carpet Demon

A valiant effort at carpe diem, which you struggle with because it’s in a different language, perhaps French or Dutch. You know it means you should enjoy life and have adventures, but you’re still perplexed as you’ve heard it translates as ‘seizure day’ which doesn’t sound like much fun.

Bite your nose to cut your face

Wrong on every conceivable level, this horribly mangled version of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ requires a lot of mental gymnastics to even attempt to decode. By the time the person you’re talking to has registered what you’ve just said, they’ve also registered you are a halfwit.

In lame man’s terms

The correct phrase is ‘in layman’s terms’, which means to explain in a way that is free of obscure technical words. This means that for your whole life you have been telling people you’re going to explain something to them slowly and clearly because they’re so f**king lame. You’re an idiot.

There we go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Chilly here. Too wildfire hot in some parts of Southern Europe. Our odd critical society.

So it’s the first day of August and Phil has switched the central heating on. It’s not really all that cold but that’s how it goes. The weather forecast I’ve just heard on the radio suggests little improvement during the coming week. 

My Italian friend has escaped to her native Sicily for the rest of the summer. According to this article, which is mostly concentrating on wildfires in Turkey, there are also dangerous wildfires in Sicily. This may be more heat than my Italian friend was looking for. 

Other parts of Europe are suffering as well. We need to get our act together worldwide, it seems to me, of we don’t want things to continue in this manner.

This morning I listened to Nazir Afzal on Desert Island Discs. Wikipedia tells me the following:-

“Nazir Afzal is a British solicitor with experience in the legal areas of child sexual exploitation and violence against women. He is a practising Muslim, with outspoken views in favour of women's rights and against forced marriage, female genital mutilation and honour killings. Afzal spent most of his career in the Crown Prosecution Service, rising to be Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England in 2011, a role he held until leaving the CPS in 2015.”

During his conversation with Lauren Laverne they discussed his involvement in the case of young girls being groomed for sexual purposes in Rochdale. Apparently after the case was concluded he received all sorts of abuse, both online and actual physically threatening situations from right wing extremists. The family got used to having to use a panic button in their home. Even his children learnt to do this. They also had to go to school by taxi for several months. This was because an element of white society could not accept that a brown man was responsible for bringing other brown men to justice, which is more or less how he expressed it.

There is something wrong with our society.

Checking the spelling of Lauren Laverne’s name I discovered that when she was appointed to present Desert Island Discs, an article appeared in The Spectator to the effect that Desert Island Discs was “losing the plot”. Presumably this was because she is young and has been involved with pop music. Writer Kate Chisholm called the presenter “lightweight and uncerebral”, claiming the show had become “more politically correct” during her tenure. 

“Her capacity to come up with the forgettable phrase is quite something,” Kate Chisholm added. 

Fans came to the defence of Lauren Laverne. Here are a couple of examples:

“Finally found the hill that I'm prepared to die on, Lauren Laverneis an excellent interviewer and obviously highly intelligent.  Anyone that can get a warm interview out of Lou Reed is worth their weight in gold.  What a bitchy snobbish article.”

“Hey Lauren Laverne I’m running a campaign challenging BBC on their erasure of middle aged women & their misguided, exclusionary need to attract audiences under 35 at the BBC. I think you’re PERFECT on desert island discs. That writer wants you replaced by a 71 year old bloke? “

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What an odd society we live in. She seems perfectly fine to me.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!