Staying dry. Out and about. A bit of language fun. Sneaky photos. Bits of beauty.

 I fully expected it to be raining when I got up this morning but it wasn’t. So I persuaded myself out of bed and went for a run before the weather decided to live up to the forecast.

I put some washing in the machine to complete itself while we had breakfast. Tea-towels and such I hung in the garden to dry as it wouldn’t be the wind of the world if they were rained on. Other items I hung in the spare room. Hedging my bets seemed like a good idea. 

Later, as it was still fine, we decided to take ourselves out for a walk almost at once, the forecast percentage chance of rain going up hourly. We managed to go up the hill towards Dobcross, down the path through the woods (and up again) and back home along the Donkey Line bridle path without rain. Good timing! It started not long after we arrived home.

We admired autumn colours on our walk.

 

And I sneaked a look, and a crafty photo, of the old Delph Station as the owner had left his gate partly open. 

I have commented before that it is rather a shame he hides this treasure behind a wrought iron gate, which was all right until he backed it with ugly planks of wood. Still, his property, his decision!

It does seem to me, however, that there is an increasing tendency to erect fences around property.

Here’s a little something I read about D. H. Lawrence: 

For Lawrence, “a child’s apperception is based on wonder”. By contrast, “modern people” are “inwardly and thoroughly bored”; they “experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man, he is dead.”

(Incidentally, this was from an article about the writer Geoff Dyer’s admiration for Dylan’s song lyrics.

We need to keep seeing, and seeking out, those bits of beauty everywhere.

Granddaughter Number One commented on our family group chat the other day: “Tell me how highly educated men can type 'Had the court waiting on tentacles' in seriousness”. 

We all laughed - i.e. sent laughing emojis!

Tenterhooks, by the way, were used in the fabric industry to stretch damp woven fabric into an even rectangular form. This may explain why it is sometimes necessary to pull T-shirts back into shape after washing. 

On the subject of tentacles, we were sitting in Waterstones cafe the day when I noticed a young woman at the next table whose very, and I mean VERY, long pointed fingernails were quite astounding. She had to sort of scrabble on the table (the sound attracted me) to pick something up with these claws. Amazingly, they did not prevent her from typing stuff on her phone with her finger tips - well, not really the tips, more the fleshy pad above the first joint. Her claws, by the way, were artistically painted in a variety of colours and patterns. 

Mine are cut short and remain unpainted. 

I read that stoves and fireplaces cause about 29% of particle pollution emitted in the UK, but there are even greater problems in eastern Europe, where solid fuel heating is responsible for more than 45% of the particle emissions in many cities.now warnings are going out about people adding rubbish to their home fires, causing problems with air pollution and with the effectiveness of their heating systems.

Long gone are the days when we had a coal burning stove running our heating and cooking systems in this house. It was picturesque but time-consuming and not very efficient once I returned to full time work. Whoever arrived home first had to “wake it up” so that we had a warm house and the ability to cook the evening meal. And it was very poor for baking cakes! Eventually it sprang an expensive-to-repair leak and we replaced it with a gas-fired central heating system and an electric cooker - also probably bad for the environment!

So it goes. Here’s a cartoon, with an environmental message and possibly a hint at Brexit. 

Life goes on. Stay safe, everyone!

Out and about and getting organised in sunny Manchester.

 We went into Manchester yesterday on a reconnaissance mission. For years and years now we have been having reunions of a group pf friends who went through school together in some cases, through university together in others. We’re scattered around the country, even around Europe. One member has been our social secretary for ages, emailing everyone, checking dates, booking tables at restaurants, sometimes even organising us onto adventures on old steam trains. This year he’s been ill and so Phil and I found ourselves volunteering to do some organising.

We’re not quite up to investigating steam train journeys but finding a suitable venue for lunch, we decided, should not be beyond our capabilities. One of our number recommended Mr Thomas’s Chop House in Manchester, oddly enough a place I have written about recently after reading an article about someone who gave it a damning review, mostly because it didn’t provide colouring pages and  sets of crayons for their children. Some people just ask too much! 

It was hard to tell from their website whether they could accommodate a dozen of us sitting down to lunch together. An in-person, face-to-face investigation was called for. All good! We would have preferred a round table but settled for a long rectangle, set a date, paid a deposit and off we went to email the gang that all was well and would they please look at the menu and send us their preference so that we could inform the establishment in advance. Job done!

 

Walking through murky back alleys to St Ann’s Square we came upon St Ann’s church from a different angle to the usual a fine little church, rightly referred to as “the little gem”. I may be mistaken about that title as if you look up Manchester’s Hidden Gem it directs you to the website of St Mary’s Catholic Church, a much more hidden church not far from St Ann’s. However, I like that view of St Ann’s church. Indeed I also like the interior of the church and have attended Christmas carol concerts there on several occasions. 

The trees in St Ann’s square are festooned with red / orange paper lanterns. I was a little taken aback by this. After all, Chinese New Year  is hardly around the corner! Then I remembered that Hallowe’en is Indeed just around the corner! 

Before we know it we’ll be on the mad slide towards Christmas. In fact, Phil has already selected a fine hard-book as a gift for our son. Making an early start this year! Maybe the unusual sunshine went to his head. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Mushrooms. Darning. Recycling. Protesting.

The small boy, Grandson Number Two, took himself off to the bathroom yesterday, or rather, his mother took him off to the bathroom. Before coming downstairs he went for a rummage about in the spare bedroom and came down with my darning mushroom. He likes to see if there is anything interesting to investigate. Why, he wanted to know, did I have what looked remarkably like a wooden mushroom or toadstool? So I explained to him how a darning mushroom works, how you can put it inside a sock which needs darning so that you have a good surface to work on, weaving the thread in and out. 

We went on to discuss whether it still is used - yes, it is - and where it came from. I really don’t know if it is still possible to buy such gadgets. Do people, apart from me, still darn socks and other garments? In fact, his oldest sister does darn socks. I think she learnt how to do so from YouTube video, just as she learnt how to knit and crochet. I had taught her to knit when she was a small child but she needed to relearn. It’s amazing what you can learn from YouTube! 

As to where the darning mushroom came from, well, this one belonged to my grandmother, so it’s a bit of a family heirloom. This led to speculation as to what should happen to it after I stop using it. Ideally, we decided, it should be given to his sister, Granddaughter Number One, as she would be the most likely to make use of it. On the other hand, she is a bit of a hoarder and her house is full of clutter. (“What’s clutter, Grandma?” “Oh, when you have lot of stuff all over the place.” “You mean a mess?” “You’ve got it?) the darning mushroom would disappear into the clutter, like her kindle and various other useful items, usually found with pleasure weeks after they were needed. So maybe the darning mushroom should go to Granddaughter Number Two, the next oldest sister, as she is obsessively tidy and could quite easily teach herself to darn.

The mushroom came in useful this morning, by the way. We are moving into the season of warm tights, in a range of colours, depending on the rest of my outfit. The ones selected this morning had a small hole in one foot. So I had to hunt about for thread of a suitable colour to carry out a repair. I suppose I could have thrown the tights out and bought a new pair buy this particular shade of blue, maybe teal, comes usually in a pack with a couple of pairs of black ones. Black tights I have a plenty. It’s very annoying that it is difficult to find individual pairs of specific colours these days. Everything comes in multipacks! And I really don’t like throwing stuff away (see below on recycling clothes). So I made use of the darning mushroom that the small boy had brought down yesterday. All good! 

I commented recently on someone who went to Ghana, I think it was Ghana, and spent some time sorting through discarded clothing, part of an attempt to save the world. Here’s a link to an article about someone on a similar mission in Ireland. Shocked, but inspired by seeing piles of discarded clothing on a beach in Kenya, she founded Change Clothes, a non-profit organisation that hosts a swap shop in Dublin and runs pop-up outlets and workshops across Ireland. It lets people rent, exchange and buy used clothes and gives tutorials in mending and upcycling frayed garments. Every little helps!

And here’s a link to an article by George Monbiot about some Stop Oil activists who have been sentenced to two years in prison for throwing soup at Van Gogh paintings. He points out that the same judge who sentenced them gave suspended sentences to men accused of violent crimes - an odd disparity. Some might ask why the Stop Oil people target works of art - another pair recently glued themselves to a painting - rather than oil producing places. Well, mostly because “attacking” famous works of art gets more media attention. Even people who don’t go to art galleries are rather shocked when famous sunflowers are targeted. Usually the paintings are behind glass so they are not actually harmed, by the way! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Lost at sea. And strong women.

 Well, it appears that the cruise ship which spent three, no, four months stranded in Belfast tried to set off but got into a muddle over paperwork and had to drop anchor again, still not far from Belfast. One passenger said he was a bit “confused” by the situation but was “happy to be home” and to have slept in his “own bed” onboard the vessel for the first time. What an odd situation! Imagine considering a cruise ship as “home”, even one where you plan to spend the next three years, and to consider the bed in the cabin as your “own bed”. Mind you, I hear they have paid large amounts for their cabins so I suppose they are entitled to consider them their own. 

It’s not what I would want to spend my money on, assuming I had enough to afford such things. Somehow the thought of all that water below my “home” would be quite disturbing. Haven’t they heard about the Titanic?  I have no idea of how long you might expect a huge boat like that to last but I read that this particular one is 31 years old, and it had been idle for four years before being taken over by the cruise company. Hmmm! 

But it’s not my problem, thank goodness!

I notice that Michael Rosen has returned to his practice of posting “letters” from Boris Johnson: 

“Dear Mogg

I am splattered all over the News outlets, all picking up on the sensational turbo-charged reveals in my great memoir. I've cast myself as a  21st century Scarlet Blimpernel heroically saving GB from the Corbynite Stalinist woke Reign of Terror. 

Detritus reflux

Boris”

Mr Johnson is receiving quite a lot of media attention again lately, maybe because he’s been writing his memoirs but also coinciding with the Conservative party leadership circus. Is he being reinstated? 

Here are a couple of things about women. 

First, here is a link to an article about a woman going to court in 1697 in Preston, asking to be paid what she was promised for fostering a child, not that they called it fostering back then. But the practice of having children looked after by women not their mothers seems to go back a long way: 

“The practice of “boarding” or “tabling” a child with a woman who was not a relative held an ambiguous legal status, but was a crucial element of the ad hoc provision of welfare of the time. Poor laws gave local officials the authority to seek care or apprenticeships for children who would otherwise be destitute, and to place them for a small sum with women who might otherwise need aid themselves – potentially addressing two problems at once. Forty shillings, the most commonly cited annual sum, was equivalent to 22 days’ worth of wages for a skilled tradesman.”

A good solution to problems in society. We still have stuff to learn from the past.

And here’s a link to an article about a Bolivian mountaineer and mountain guide who climbs wearing a “pollera”, a traditional voluminous floral skirt over layers of pink petticoats. 

A woman in what is often considered a man’s role, she has a very positive attitude:

“It is not all about reaching the summit,” she says. “Sometimes it’s about enjoying being in the mountains and going as far as you can, without suffering because of them. Since I began climbing mountains, I’ve learned the same applies to life. t’s not about getting to the top, but enjoying yourself on the journey. The most important thing is to be happy.”

She is a “cholita escaladora”, one of a group of women who have become known for mountaineering. The word cholita comes from chola which was previously used as a pejorative term for indigenous Aymara women. They’ve reclaimed the word to make it a positive thing. But she and her companions don’t give up their traditional women’s garb: “I have never worn trousers to go up a mountain and I never will. Our polleras don’t impede us,” she says.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

A disrupted Wednesday.

 The weather is supposed to be getting milder again but it doesn’t feel much like it so far this morning. Mind you, I’ve not been out and about. My daughter phones at about 7.30am to ask of she could leave Granddaughter Number Four with me for the day. Said granddaughter has tonsillitis and is not fit for school. Normally she could stay at home with her father as she’s no bother and just occupies herself with a book or her tablet, unlike her small brother who “invites” you to play with him constantly. But her father has just had a promotion and needs to work on the office this week rather than from home.  

Consequently I have not cycled to the market this morning. It’s not a problem; the fish-man has gone on holiday for a couple weeks to Portugal and I seem already to have a supply of the excellent oat biscuits sold by Jenny Biscuit. Anything I might pick up from the fruit and veg man I can also get tomorrow from the frutivendolo, Alimentari Alberti, the Italian greengrocery off the main street in Uppermill. So it goes.

Out in the wider world, things are getting very serious in the Middle East. The mainstream media seem so busy blaming Iran for everything that it doesn’t appear to occur to them that what Israel has done and is still doing in Gaza and now in Lebanon amounts to terrorism. 

Here’s a picture of a map of Gaza superimposed on a map of Merseyside, making it plain what a small place it really is. I’m pretty sure a lot of people have no real concept of the geography involved. Maybe TV news reports should always involve maps. 

And here are a couple Michael Rosen posts. First this:

'You must always remember your ancestral lands, sir,' said the King's tutor.

'Oh I do, tutor,' said the King, 'but where exactly are they?'

'A good guide on that matter,' said the tutor, 'is to say that our ancestral lands are where we say they are.'

'Yes, of course,' said the King, 'though I found myself wondering when I woke up this morning, whether everyone has ancestral lands.'

'Well, there are ancestral lands and ancestral lands,' said the tutor.

'I don't follow you,' said the King.

'Some ancestral lands count and some don't,' said the tutor.

'Oh that doesn't sound very fair,' said the King.

'I don't think you need to worry your head about that, sir,' said the tutor, 'all that matters is that we've got our ancestral lands.'

'Apart from the ancestral lands we haven't got yet,' said the King,

'Good point, sir,' said the tutor, 'yes, we really need to do a lot more to get hold of them.'

'Yes,' said the King, 'I would like that...and you don't see any problems with that, though?'

'There would be problems,' said the tutor, 'if the Emperor thought it was a bad idea.'

'And does he?' said the King.

'Precisely the opposite,' said the tutor, 'he thinks it's a great idea.'

'Well that's all sorted then,' said the King, 'what a lovely start to the day.'

Then this:

'Do you think we come across as being very warlike, tutor?' said the King.

'There's no reason why we should,' said the King's tutor, 'why do you ask?'

'Oh just a thought I had,' said the King, 'because we are doing quite a lot of fighting.'

'Indeed we are,'said the tutor, 'but every bit of it is on account of having to defend ourselves.'

'Of course,' said the King, 'I know that's what we say we're doing but is it all really defending ourselves? Isn't some of it attack?'

'Yes indeed,' said the tutor, 'but attack is defence.'

'Is it?' said the King, 'I thought attack was attack.'

'An easy mistake to make,' said the tutor, 'but you have to remember that we have to abide by guidelines and convince people of the necessity of our actions.'

'And do people believe us?' said the King.

'It doesn't really matter whether they do or they don't,' said the tutor.

'Really not?' said the King.

'No,' said the tutor, 'it doesn't matter so long as they let us do what we're doing.'

'I think I get this,' said the King, 'and then the people we've said this stuff to about defending ourselves, they just go about saying we're defending ourselves? Is that it?'

'Indeed it is,' said the tutor.

'Very good,' said the King, 'so we've got right on our side, then.'

'We have,' said the tutor.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some nature conservation stuff. Eggs.

Yesterday it rained all day. I gave up any ideas of running or walking in the rain and simply stayed at home all day. Besides I had an Italian conversation class (on zoom) in the afternoon, for which I still hadn’t got round to doing any “homework”, and there was the remains of Sunday’s roast chicken to be dealt with: chicken soup was on the cards. We seem to have moved rapidly into the time of year when warming soup is called for with our evening meal - goodby summer salads. 

Today is marginally better. It’s not actually raining but it’s generally dull and damp. It didn’t seem especially windy when Iw went out running first thing but since then the wind appears to have got up. All the treetops are waving around vigorously!

According to something I read about the Royal Horticultural Society, experts say that the climate of Great Britain will become warmer and drier over the next 10 to 20 years. That is all of Great Britain with he notable exception of Greater Manchester! Well, of course! We’ll continue dull and damp, which makes this the ideal place for the Royal Horticultural Society to establish an arboretum, providing a refuge for native trees such as oak and beech which apparently are already suffering from drier conditions in more southern parts of the island.

On the subject of protecting species, I read that pine martins are returning / have been returned to Dartmoor. The headline, “Pine martens return to Dartmoor after 150-year absence”, made it sound as though they had been held hostage somewhere. Scotland it seems! Numbers have been increasing there and a group of 15 - 8 female and 7 male - have been released (you see, perhaps they were hostages after all!) into secret locations. Secret locations, secret from the general public, but they have been tagged so that their progress can be followed by experts. It appears that they now need protecting because back in the dark ages at the turn of the century they were specifically targeted to prevent them from killing off the pheasants that huntsmen wanted to kill for themselves. They were also believed to get into henhouses and kill chickens. 

From villains to being in need to protection: it sounds like a metaphor for something! 

Granddaughter Number One has something of a menagerie in her house. I must have mentioned it before: a dog, a cat, a tortoise, a corn snake, an axolotl, and assorted creatures from the lizard family. There were smelly rats (oops, officially knowns as fancy rats!) now deceased, and a bearded dragon (also recently deceased. Some weeks ago, maybe even a couple of months ago, she and her best friend / housemate took possession of a bunch (a clutch?) of newly-hatched quails. These are supposed to live outside in a special quail-house, which I trust is protected from the weather. 

So on Sunday Granddaughter Number One turned up with three quails’ eggs for us. This evening I think I need to fry or scramble the aforementioned eggs, purely so that we can tell her what we think of them. It has to be said, they look almost too ornamental to consider eating them. So it goes!

Life goes on.stay safe and well everyone!