Fixing stuff. Prime Ministers and Presidents. And stuff that appears on Facebook.

 Yesterday we spent quite a long time fixing the vacuum cleaner. For a while now it has been temperamental, to say the least, cutting out intermittently as if there were a blockage of some kind. Having followed all the suggestions for checking for blockages recommended by the handbook that came with the machine, all to no avail, we resorted to the time honoured process of taking it apart and putting it back together. 

Via the handbook and the internet we worked out how to reduce the thing to its component parts. We dusted and cleaned and poked around in all those bits and pieces and then put it back together. This can often be the hardest part of such an operation as it is not always logical how the various parts fit back together and in what order. Having done that, we tested it again. Still a rather stop-start affair, “pulsing” as the chap on internet described it. Then Phil said, “Let’s try it on the ‘high suction’ setting.” I was surprised. There are two settings: ‘high suction’ and ‘max section’. I reserve ‘max suction’ for very rare occasions. I cannot remember the last time I set it to ‘max’. Had I done so inadvertently? Had Phil done so - inadvertently or otherwise - in an attempt to make it work faster? Whatever the reason, it was on ‘max’ so I switched it to ‘high’ and, lo and behold, it worked fine! Was that the only reason for its ridiculous performance recently? Goodness knows! We shall see how it works from now on!

In the news they have been talking about Honours lists. We’ve had all sorts of rumours about Boris Johnson nominating his father for a knighthood!!! And now it seems Liz Truss has submitted hers. What I want to know is this: was Liz Truss really PM long enough to seriously merit an Honours list? How long did she last? Maybe six weeks? If we have an general election next year, as has been suggested, and if Labour win, as has also been suggested, then there’ll be another Honours list. Good grief!! 

Thinking about former Prime Ministers, there’s the business of Boris Johnson and those parties. Here’s an opinion put out on social media by Otto English, in a group called Scientists for EU:

“While his wife was dancing to ABBA, while his staff were carting wine into Number 10 and having piss ups in the garden, while Spads were vomiting down the wall and knocking out karaoke hits - the rest of us were doing the right thing - trying to save each other from Covid.”

Quite so!

On the whole I don’t mind if people refer to politicians by their full,name or just by their surname. I get a little fretted from time to time when reporters and commentators use the politicians’ first name, for all the world as if Boris and Liz and Rishi were personal friends! But that’s a different matter. We listened to David Sidaris on the radio the other day. He’s always worth listening to. On this occasion he was talking about letters from readers or listeners. One letter-writer objected to his referring to Former President Donald J Trump, 45th president of the United States, as simply Trump! This, the letter-writer said, was disrespectful. He should have his full title. Wow! As David Sidaris said, we speak of Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and nobody suggests that that is disrespectful. Maybe some people just need the honour of their full title! 

Petty stuff!

And finally, I would like to know why my Facebook seems to have been invaded by stuff about Stephen King - Lovers of Stephen King in particular. I’m pretty sure I haven’t spoken about the writer, or even thought about him so that the social media could pick it up as something I might be interested in!!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Protests. Hailstorms. Snowdrifts. Birdspotting.

 It all seems to be  “kicking off”, as some people say, in France. Protests all over the country. Town halls set on fire - well, at least one, in Bordeaux. They do have a tendency over there to wreck things! Even Charles has had to postpone his planned visit to Paris. Maybe at the back of his mind is the thought that they have been known to chop the heads off kings on that side of the Channel. Bang goes his first state visit as monarch! 

The world seems to be turmoil in so many places at present. I almost feel guilty that my major concern at this exact moment is the hailstorm that is rattling against the windows. Before I set off on my run this morning I considered not putting my beanie hat on. There seemed to be enough sunshine to merit leaving hat and gloves behind. In the end I decided in favour of wearing them. If necessary, I reasoned, I could always stuff them in my bumbag. It was the right decision. Mid- to late-March sunshine is fine and warm in sheltered spots but the wind this morning was bitter. This explains why the hailstorm has now cleared away completely, leaving a deceptively clear blue sky! 

We had torrential rain at times yesterday. At the point in the late morning when Granddaughter Number Two was contemplating catching a bus (and complaining about delays) to come and join her small brother at my house the rain was bouncing off the rooftops and forming a small lake in the back garden. By the time she arrived we were back to blue sky and sunshine and decided to risk a walk to the local park, via the chippy. One of the things she has missed while away at university has been buying sausage and chips on a Thursday lunchtime from Delph chippy. 

So we set off, taking one of the longer routes into the village so that we could check if the snow mountain (more of a large molehill really) was still there in the field where it had been dumped when the snowdrifts were cleared from the lane. Almost two weeks later it is still there, three feet high and very dirty! It’s like the apocryphal stories people tell of the winter of 1948 when snowdrifts were still around in May according to local legends. 

After that we followed the path that runs alongside the river, spotting water wagtails as we went. That was when we saw two small black and white birds, new to us. Not magpies, despite being black and white. Not ducks either as far as we could tell. Later we checked in the bird-book to no avail but eventually internet identified them for us as white-throated dippers, not native to our neck of the woods. There you go.

The plan for our walk was to share her sausage and chips with the little chap in the park, let him run around for a while and then head for home. Barely had she unwrapped her chippy spoils than the clouds blew in and brought more torrential rain, his time with hailstorms thrown in. We took refuge in the Co-op and then scuttled homewards once weather conditions allowed it. Back home the small boy tucked into cold chips with gusto. No protests there! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Confused spring flowers. Admiring artists. Trophy hunting. The joy of dancing.

 Spring appears to have sprung. How long it will last remains to be seen. Tomorrow winter could return. That would not surprise me. But today I had a very pleasant cycle ride to the market in Uppermill. 

The various flowers in our garden are confused by the weather. As is to be expected, the snowdrops are now past their best. They had their moment of glory, partly spent covered on snow, and now, having recovered briefly from being weighted down by all that snow, they are looking rather bedraggled. In the plant pot on the garden wall the hyacinths are seriously confused. It may be that the cold weather prevented them from growing to their usual height but they remain about one inch tall. However, their flowers are quite obviously there and and are indeed turning nicely blue + dark blue buds sticking up out of the soil. It is to be hoped that they put on a growth spurt before the flowers start to open fully!

I read that on a beach somewhere in Hampshire they found the body of a shark, quite a large creature, about 2 metres long. Experts say they think it is a smalltooth sand tiger shark, normally only be seen in warmer waters – and rarely anywhere north of the Bay of Biscay. They should ask my small grandson as he appears to know just about all the different kinds of shark and recognises them expertly. This is progress from the stage when he simply sang “baby shark, doo doo doo doo”. 

Scientists believe the discovery can help them learn more about how the species develops and lives its life. Unfortunately before the historian Dan Snow, who was apparently one of the discoverers, was able to do nore than take photos of it trophy hunters had made off with bits of it. “The head, tail and fin were grabbed before I assembled a big enough team to drag it off the beach to the nearest road. We went to secure the shark for science last night. But we were too late,” he said on Twitter. He has appealed for the trophy hunters to return the bits and pieces, if only temporarily: “Please, please – if you have the head get in touch. The scientists want to have a look at it, and then it’s yours to keep.”

Collecting sea shells and bits of sea glass is one thing but hacking the head and tail and fin off a dead shark is a different thing altogether. I can think of nothing more gruesome - well, I probably can if I set my mind to it! What do these people plan to do with those bits of fishy flesh? 

My friend Colin in Galicia wrote in his blog yesterday about the Spanish artist Sorolla. A friend and I discovered Sorolla in a museum/art gallery in Havana, Cuba, and fell in love with his work immediately. I was fortunate enough to be able to see an exhibition of his work in London some time later. It’s always worth looking at his paintings again, so here is a link.

Watching stuff on Netflix I have come to the conclusion that someone has decided that in the middle evening it is an aging demographic who should be targeted with advertising. The advert that brought me to this conclusion is one for the Co-op funeral service. The advert features a woman explaining that she has always loved dancing and wants people to dance at her funeral, in celebration of a life well-danced I suppose. Coincidentally I have come across a number of items about how dancing is good for us and lamenting the loss of places to go to dance. 

A music journalist and writer, Emma Warren, has even written a book about it: Dance your way home. The publisher’s blurb reads: “This book is about the kind of ordinary dancing you and I might do in our kitchens when a favourite tune comes on. It's more than a social history: it's a set of interconnected histories of the overlooked places where dancing happens... Why do we dance? What does dancing tells us about ourselves, individually and collectively? And what can it do for us?”

It seems there has been a serious reduction in the number of clubs where people can go and dance. I must say that clubbing has never been my thing. Dancing in a hot, sweaty, enclosed space is not by idea of fun. However I have always enjoyed a good dance. As a teenager I used to go ice skating with a bunch of friends and finish off the night dancing into the small hours. Granddaughter Number One and I used to dance in the kitchen when she was small. I still dance in the kitchen, mostly on my own these days. This letter someone wrote to the Guardian newspaper expresses my feelings about dancing nicely: 

“I couldn’t agree more with John Harris (In an isolated world, humans need to dance together more than ever – but we’re running out of places to do it, 19 March). I’m 67 and constantly moan about never having the chance to dance. Rare parties usually end in disappointment as the music’s never quite right for me. Nightclubs? Forget it. I’m in bed before they even open their doors. So every few months, in a local village hall, we organise an event called Chance2dance4charity.

My dance teacher provides the music, we bring refreshments and the proceeds are split between my favourite charity, Amnesty, and a different local charity each time. We dance for two hours to Motown, soul, rock, pop, reggae, bellydance, salsa – you name it. We have a whale of a time and are safely home by 10pm. And my favourite tracks are always on the playlist. Result.
Sue Bingham
Reading, Berkshire”

There you go. Keep on dancing!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reviving old traditions. Eating out. Finding fault with writers. Noisy neighbours.

 Today a couple of friends and I set about reviving an old tradition. After we all retired from teaching, and before pandemic and lockdown came along to restrict our activities, we used to meet every once in a while and go out for lunch in Manchester, a suitable mid-point for all of us travel-wise. Then lockdown came along and we were all stuck in our separate places. Once travel restrictions were lifted I suggested meeting once more but one of our number was still a little cautious and then another actually caught Covid and was out of the running for a while.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from the reluctant traveller saying that she had recently travelled to London to see her daughter and that going to the centre of Manchester no longer seemed so daunting. So we settled on today as a reasonable date and met in Waterstone’s cafe at midday, just as we always used to. From there we moved on to El Gato Negro, a Spanish or possibly Catalan tapas bar. Over croquetas and queso manchego and albóndigas and pan a la catalana and other stuff we caught up with all our news. 

So now we need to decide when to repeat the experience.

On balance I think tapas places here in the UK are perhaps a bit of a rip-off. £8 for 4 meatballs or for 4 salt-cod croquetas is a little,on he dear side, especially when you have grown used to free tapas in so many Galician bars. And the salt-cod croquetas were not as good as the “pastéis de bacalao”, almost the same thing, that I can get from the Portuguese cafe in Oldham market. That place was quite a find. Portuguese speakers from the Oldham area have been there tucking into authentic-looking Portuguese food whenever I have popped in for take-away pastéis. 

I’ve been reading a detective story in which research takes an investigative journalist (aka a nosy parker) to Italy. There she sees a villa with a for sale sign:  se vende. Unfortunately that’s the wrong language. It should say in vendita. I do hate it when writers and their proof-readers don’t do their research properly! Otherwise it was a good read!  

Granddaughter Number One is suffering from noisy neighbours. They seem to have been having family rows for ever - lots of screaming and shouting and banging around the place. Today it all go so loud that Granddaughter Number One, working from home, had to apologise to the people in her zoom meeting because they were having difficulty hearing what she had to say. Oh boy! We are very fortunate, we rarely hear our neighbours at all. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Putting labels on things.

 I don’t watch cookery shows on the television. In fact I don’t watch competition shows of any kind on television - baking, sewing, decorating your home -  none of them. So I don’t know anything significant about Gail Simmons except that she is a judge on one such show. In an article I skimmed online, I came across this statement by Ms Simmons:

“London is a food gateway. It’s a multicultural city like nowhere else in Europe, with its own food traditions, but really, from a food perspective, it’s a story of immigration.”

That’s probably true of most of our big cities. That ”story of immigration” explains why it is quite hard to pin down what we mean by “English cuisine”. Anyway, the article told how she praised our cheese, saying how much better the range of cheese we have in our supermarkets is than what the Americans have at their disposition. That’s nice, I have always defended our range of cheese when people go on about wonderful French cheeses.

Then she turned to chocolate:

“Everybody knows, but I’m here to tell you: candy bars in America are not proper chocolate. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: grocery-store-level foods are just better in the UK. I grew up in Canada and, as a part of the Commonwealth, we had a lot of stuff from England. I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it over the past 25 years of living in New York until I came to shoot in London.”

She particularly likes Cadbury’s chocolate. I find this rather amusing as some time ago there were purists saying that British chocolate is not real chocolate at all. But I have spent time in Spain hunting out supplies of Cadbury’s chocolate and proper Cheese. And Cadbury’s chocolate is good chocolate. 

Sometimes it’s just a matter of terminology. 

 

I came across this cartoon on Facebook, with an accompanying comment about Leah Panapa, someone I had never heard of. So I did a little bit of investigating and found that she hosts a radio show, but not one that I never listen to, one of those chat shows. Anyway it turns out at some point recently she got a little indignant in a discussion about  the term “pregnant people”, spluttering about the fact that it should be “pregnant women”, not “pregnant people”. I tend to agree with her. 

After all, you simply can’t have “pregnant men”! 

Except that there has been at least one case of a transperson who stopped their transition from woman to man so that they could have a baby. I remember that case and recall being a little indignant myself that someone could so clearly want to have their cake and eat it. But that seems to be the way of the modern world. And surely while he/she/ they was (were) pregnant he/she/they was (were) actually, physically, still a woman. Goodness, those pronouns are confusing!

Leah Panapa has apologised for what has been described as a “toxic rant about pronouns” and the cartoon seems to have disappeared from Facebook, perhaps because someone in their wisdom decided that someone else might be offended by it. Of course, it might just have disappeared quite innocuously or maybe I just can’t find it but it seems a little suspicious to me.

I find the whole pronoun business very confusing, as I have already said. My two eldest granddaughters (aged 25 and almost 20) just accept it as a normal thing and remember which pronoun they are meant to use for different friends. But when one of tells me about a friend visiting from thenUSA and says that ‘they’ will be hiring a car, I grow confused about how many people are coming, much to the amusement of the aforementioned granddaughters. No doubt the whole business will sort itself out into normality eventually. However, I do wonder what they do in languages which use gender for everything - books being masculine and houses feminine and so on. I must remember to ask my Italian friend.   

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Modern problems ticking away in the background.

Tick tock! Or rather, TikTok! Described as “a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance”, it’s yet another app I don‘t have on my phone and I don’t really feel the need to add it. From some of the samples played on the news this lunchtime I’m even more convinced that I don’t need it. Does anyone really need or want to see short videos of someone’s cat and dog having a fight? Have they really nothing more interesting going on in their lives? And that applies to both the maker of the video and those who watch it.

It’s in the news because TikTok is the latest thing to come under fire for being Chinese owned. There is a great fear, apparently, that the Chinese government is trawling through all the TikTok posts to find interesting information about other countries so that they can take over the world. Do they have someone, a whole team of people and computers, looking put for compromising stuff popping up? 

TikTok is almost certainly about to be banned in the USA and here in the UK there’s talk of not allowing government employees to have the app on their phones. That’s both their work phones and their personal phones, because it seems it’s quite common for MPs and other government employees to answer and send messages during meetings. Now, I know they need to be contactable pretty much 24/7 but I would have thought that the first rule of meetings should be to switch phones off. Goodness, I think the principal of the college where I worked would have been spitting feathers if we had all been messing with our phones during staff meetings. You are asked to switch them off or at least put hem on silent in the cinema and theatre. And in chess tournaments all the players have to hand in their phones before entering the playing room - no cheating allowed.

This is the strange modern world we live in. You look something up on the internet and suddenly you are inundated with advertisements for related products. In fact sometimes it seems that all you need to do is discuss something in the presence of your phone and even that generates a mass of advertising. So to some extent I can understand the worries about phone apps. They are able to glean all sorts of background information about the user. And MPs who want to be up to the minute, modern, down there with the kids use all the latest apps. 

Life used to be a lot simpler!

I have just been downloading templates for dinosaurs for a craft project we have in mind. I wonder what sort of advertising will arise from that!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Obsessions with water and water-bottles. Finding treasure.

One day recently, when my daughter arrived to collect her small boy from our house, she asked me if I had an old towel she could use to mop up close on two litres of water which was sloshing about in the footwell of the front passenger seat of her car. On a routine basis she carries around with her a huge quantity of water in a fancy drinking bottle. On the day in question her husband had filled up her water bottle for her and popped it into the car as she loaded up children to take them to school or to my house before going on to work. At some point in her journey she heard the huge bottle fall over with a clunk but thought nothing of it. What she didn’t know was that her helpful husband had failed to fasten the bottle securely. The normally watertight fastening was slowly letting water glug out into the footwell. By the time she arrived at work and reached for it, the bottle was almost empty. Fortunately the bag carrying her laptop was waterproof!!

Which brings me to the modern obsession with water bottles.  I confess that I too have a rather pleasing water bottle. It doesn’t hold anything like two litres of water. I take it out with me if I am going on a long walk in warm weather and know that I will not be passing anywhere selling refreshments of any kind. Very often it comes home full. It does not accompany me on shopping trips. But my daughter, and all her offspring, have a bottle of water to hand at all times. Well, the little chap doesn’t bring one to my house because he has his own drink cup here. I am, however, reminded to ensure that he drinks plenty of water. My daughter has her huge bottle in her classroom and all her little charges all have their bottles of water in the classroom. Granddaughter Number Four has a water bottle emblazoned with the name of her primary school. The school sells them to parents of reception class children.  

I stop and wonder how I managed to go a whole morning teaching my A-level classes, sometimes without a break as back to back classes meant I taught from 9.00 to 12.00, without drinking copious amounts of water, or indeed any water at all! Indeed, I wonder how I managed to get through my own education without stopping to have drinks in the middle of lessons. 

I am not alone in wondering about this. Emma Brockes, in her Digested Week in today’s Guardian, asks:

“Do you carry a water bottle to work? Do you send your kid with one to school? The obsession with hydration is decades deep, but still too shallow to reach back to my school days. I sometimes freak my children out by telling them entire days would go by when I didn’t drink water and no one thought anything of it. By contrast these people are constantly chugging and running off to the loo.”

She goes on: 

“As it turns out, what an Australian psychologist has termed “emotional support water bottles” might not represent the straightforward advance in human wellness we assume. Associate Prof Keong Yap of the Australian Catholic University made his comments about bottles-as-security-blankets to the New York Post in response to a recent US study that found reusable water bottles can contain 40,000 times more germs than the average toilet seat and twice as many as the kitchen sink. More-germs-than-the-toilet is a hardy PR formulation and it should be noted that the study was funded by a water filter company.”

Now, that is quite disgusting! 

I have also read recently that the modern obsession with drinking two litres of unadulterated water every day is erroneous. Much of the two litres can be from cups of tea or coffee, from fruit juices and indeed from fruit itself. And really it’s mostly the very young and the very old we need to worry about getting dehydrated, and that mostly in very hot weather. 

My inner cynic suspects that it was originally a plot by bottle water companies to make us all buy more. And then, as we have all become aware of the problem of plastic bottles all over the place, re-useable water-bottle manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon. Having a really “nice” water-bottle is rather like having a really “nice” set of leotards for your aerobics class back in the 1970s and 1980s or the latest trend in running gear nowadays. 

There you go.

I don’t watch The Antiques Road Show. On the odd occasion that I have accidentally seen it - in the background in a pub or at someone else’s home - I am amazed at the stuff people find in their homes to bring along to be assessed. Sometimes they are large items that require quite complicated transportation. How disappointing it must be to go to all that trouble only to discover that your “treasure” has only sentimental value. However, occasionally it comes good, like the detectorists who eventually find a treasure trove after years of finding no more than old bottle tops. So here’s a link to a story of someone who took along an old painting that had been in the family for decades and discovered that he had a David Hockney on his hands, worth between £20,000 and £30,000! 

I don’t think we have anything like that hidden in our attic, just the odd bit of our children’s and grandchildren’s art work. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.