Meeting old friends. Ceasfire stuff. Attacking books. And who knows best about plastic straws?

 I’ve been out this morning to meet an old friend an former colleague for coffee and a chat in the centre of Oldham. We caught up on family news - a son working in finance (somebody has to and in the modern world you may as well work in something that pays well, he says), a daughter living and working closer to home, his wife finally managing to organise an early retirement deal, and he himself working part time in a number of educational establishments - we set the world to rights and he went back to work while I went to the library and to the supermarket.

In the wider world, the ceasefire looks as if it might not keep going. Fingers crossed that the prophets of doom are wrong. 

Then there is this posted by Michael Rosen, yesterday I think:

“People of the Book arrest books.

O dear, representatives of the 'People of the Book' (that's what we Jews are sometimes called or sometimes we call ourselves) have raided...er....a bookshop and detained the booksellers.

People of the  Book arrest books.”

This is what happened:

“The raid on The Educational Bookshops happened on Sunday and hundreds of titles relating to the ongoing conflict in the region were bagged up and taken away, with police accusing the pair of inciting terrorism.

That charge was reduced to a public order offence.

Mahmoud Muna, who went to university in England, and his nephew Ahmad, appeared in Jerusalem Magistrates Court on Monday morning.

They have since been detained in prison for another 24 hours and will have to serve five days of house arrest once released.

The prosecution demanded the men be held for a further eight days to allow police time to examine the books, but the judge decided they should only remain in prison until Tuesday.

A small group of protesters gathered outside holding signs such as "coward confiscate books" and "Palestinian books matter".”

And here’s a Michael Rosen response today: 

“When they come for our bookshops

and owners of our bookshops

we know that 

they know

that we know 

that 

we've rumbled them.

We know what they're doing. 

We know why they're doing it. 

It's not that snatching books

and bookshop owners

is worse than bombing apartment blocks

locking up people without charge

and killing families.

It's not that snatching books

and bookshop owners

is as bad as bombing apartment blocks

locking up people without charge

and killing families.

It's just that it's

an alarm bell, a warning light

the kind of thing that usually merits

a cry from the heart of

whatever it is that liberal opinion 

thinks matters. 

But then when it comes 

to what the Israeli government and army do,

liberal opinion seems to sometimes lose its voice,

seems to sometimes fail to switch on the alarm bells

and warning lights. 

Seems not to cry out from its 

liberal heart.

 

It's almost as if

that old black and white film 

of books going on to the flames

in Bebelplatz in Berlin 

on May 10 1933

is in a museum, in a case

behind glass,

as some much lamented horror

that happened in the past

and only in the past

and - thank goodness - 

doesn't happen now.”

And here in the UK an NHS trust suspended two members of staff from working because they were considering a organising a Palestine demonstration during their lunch break. This happened some time ago and there has been a three month investigation which “found they had no case to answer and that the trust had breached its own disciplinary policy in its treatment of them.” 

The investigation also “noted that, though there was no intent from the pair to bully other staff members, two staff members did feel unsafe to come into work “as an indirect result” of their intent to organise the protest.”

Considering how little violence has been perpetrated by pro-Palestine demonstrators it’s hard to understand colleagues feeling “unsafe”. “Unsafe” seems to be turning into a synonym for “opposed to your views”. 

Across the pond, Mr Trump has apparently signed an executive order to bring back plastic straws, banned for some years and replaced with ‘liberal paper straws”, which in his experience “explode”. Paper straws are woke. One wonders what a man of his mature years is doing sipping his diet CocaCola through a straw but that’s how it goes. He seems to know better that environmental experts on this matter:

“While plastic straws have been blamed for polluting oceans and harming marine life, Trump said on Monday that he thought “it’s OK” to continue using them. “I don’t think that plastic is going to affect the shark very much as they’re … munching their way through the ocean,” he said at a White House announcement.”

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Warm January? Showers. Badgers.

According to climate scientists (more details in this article) January this year has been the warmest January on record. Not around here it hasn’t! I have a friend who has barely left her house this year so far as it has been too cold for her. I wouldn’t go quite that far; this morning for example I ran around the village in the gloomy damp. The gloomy damp has since developed into sleety rain, by the way.

I am often amazed by the kind of thing people write to agony aunts about. One example is someone writing to the life and Style, You be the Judge feature in the Guardian, to ask for advice about her 31 year old brother who only showers twice a week. She thinks he should shower every day. He maintains that as he doesn’t smell bad, twice a week is plenty. Talk about washing your dirty linen in public.

I was reminded of the occasion, at least a couple of decades ago, when one of my Spanish sister’s offspring came from school upset because someone in the  class said the English are dirty because they don’t shower daily. Her response:  we may not shower every day but we have a good wash!

I also thought back to my childhood when it was common for people to have a bath only once a week, probably because of the less than efficient way most households were (un)able to heat enough water. 

The same sort of thing applied when my landlady in my first year at university, in the late 1960s, told us that we could only have one bath each week. Wednesday afternoon was kept free for all sorts of sporting activities and there were no lectures or seminars. In my case it was an opportunity to take a towel, soap, shampoo, etc and make use of a facility in the students’ union building where for a small fee you could have a good deep bath in a bathroom in the basement, equipped with hairdryer as well! 

Very few people had showers in those days! 

Bathroom facilities and our attitude to personal hygiene have come a long way since then.

Now, here is a photo of a badger captured glancing up at a graffiti version of itself has won the Natural History Museum’s people’s choice award for wildlife photographer of the year.

Seeing one walking along the pavement by his wall one night, he set up a small hide on the edge of the road to capture the animal reaching for food, illuminated only by light from a lamp-post.

The resulting photograph beat 24 other shortlisted images after a record 76,000 votes from around the world were counted, the Natural History Museum said.

Around here we don’t see badgers as a rule, only the occasional fox or deer.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Out and about on Saturday evening. A bit of linguists’ obsessions.

Yesterday we went out in the late afternoon /early evening to meet an old friend and his partner, someone we’d heard about but never met and who turned out to be a perfectly nice person - all good. The plan was to have a bite to eat and then go to a concert together … but separately, as we had booked our tickets at different times.

Our old friend suggested meeting and eating at a place near the concert hall, a good idea! The food venue was one of those barn-like places, with lots of tables (unlike most of the city centre pubs where everyone stands and has shouted conversations) and a dazzling/confusing variety of street food outlets as well as a bar. It was very loud and crowded (early Saturday evening stuff) but our friends had managed to secure a table for four in a corner by the window. With restricted time it was hard to decide what to eat. We went for the safe option, sharing a pizza from a stall run by Noi Quattro, an Italian restaurant we know in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. 

That’s two days on the run I’ve had pizza for my main meal of the day. 

And so we went from the loud and crowded ridiculous, with something that could loosely be described as music thumping in the background, 

to the only slightly less loud but equally crowded sublime of the Bridgewater Hall, with fine music with something of a Scandinavian theme to it. 

We all met up at the interval, able to talk and to hear each other, which had been well nigh impossible in the eatery. And afterwards we continued our conversation in The Britons Protection, a fine old-fashioned Manchester pub. 

As we settled into our seats in the concert hall, Phil asked me in Italian if everything was all right - Tutto a posto? The chap sitting next to him pricked up his ears and asked if we were Italian. He was a Scotsman with family living in Italy and wanted to know where in Italy we “came from”.  How we all laughed when we revealed the truth of the matter! So we had a bit of a pre-concert chat about visiting Italy and learning languages. 

It’s one of those things about being a linguist; you like to play with words and expressions and accents. And the origin and etymology of words become fascinating subjects of conversation as you go for walks. One such recently was “silhouette”. Is it a diminutive of another word, as so many …ette words are? Is there a word something like “sihou” or maybe a verb “sihouer”? Eventually I looked it up.

It turns out that the word silhouette is derived from the name of Étienne de Silhouette,  a French finance minister who, in 1759, was forced by France's credit crisis during the Seven Years War (1756–1763, a global conflict involving most of the European great powers) to impose severe economic demands upon the French people, particularly the wealthy. Because of his austere economies, his name became synonymous with anything done or made cheaply, such as outline portraits, profiles cut from black card, the cheapest way of recording a person's appearance in the days before photography, which came to be called “silhouettes”.

There you go. Because a silhouette emphasises the outline, the word has also been used in fields such fashion, fitness, and some areas of art to describe the shape of a person's body or the shape created by wearing clothing of a particular style or period.

The family name, Silhouette, turns out to be a Frenchified form of a Basque surname; Arnaud de Silhouette, the finance minister's father, was from Biarritz in the French Basque country; the southern Basque form of the name would be Zuloeta or Zulueta, which contains the suffix -eta "abundance of" and zulo "hole" (possibly here meaning "cave").

It’s amazing what you can find out on the internet! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Violent times.

I forgot to comment on an odd incident that I witnessed on Thursday. After my visit to the dentist, and my shopping trip to the market, I walked through the town centre towards the nearest stop for the bus towards Delph. Had there still been a stop in the town centre outside the bank, indeed, had buses still run through the very centre of town, I would probably have caught the early afternoon bus. As it was, I saw my bus (probably a few minutes ahead of schedule) make its way down a side street, turn onto the main street and sail past the stop which was a good hundred yards or more ahead of me. Very annoying! But I resigned myself to walking a bit further to wait for the next bus at the tram/bus interchange.

That was when I realised that something was going on just beyond the stop where I had not caught the bus. A small group of people were punching a man, who fell to the ground and curled himself up to try to avoid the kicks and punches that rained down on him. One of the aggressors was rather flabby and incongruously bare-chested, wearing some kind of loose shorts. Another was a skinny woman, dressed in some kind of uniform, such as you might see in a fast-food outlet. She was jumping around trying to stamp on the victim’s head so it’s just as well she looked as though she weighed no more than seven stone. The aggressors, three or four of them, kicked and thumped the curled up man and set off along the road, only to turn back for another go when he looked to be about to stand up. The flabby bare-chested man growled something along the lines of “Come near my daughter again and I WILL beat you up properly”. They disappeared into a doorway.,And that seemed to be that. 

I and various other passers-by sidled past the curled up man as he got to his feet and walked away. Further along the road someone asked me what had been going on. He said he was too far away to see and, besides, he didn’t have his glasses with him. He seemed disappointed that I could not really tell him anything. Goodness knows what that was all  about. Fights on the street at around one o’ clock in he afternoon are not usual. Maybe it’s another sign of the violent times we live in.

On the subject of the violent times we live in, here’s something a friend sent me: 

“The reality of the ceasefire...

"Hamas said only 8,500 trucks out of the 12,000 that should have arrived so far had entered the territory, most containing food and secondary goods including chips and chocolate instead of more urgent items.

In addition, only 10% of the 200,000 tents and 60,000 caravans needed to provide shelter had arrived, Hamas said, leaving hundreds of thousands in harsh winter weather.

Finally, heavy machinery needed to clear millions of tonnes of rubble and recover the thousands of bodies thought to be buried had not arrived."

(Guardian update 07:28)”

And here are some comments about Trumps proposals for Gaza, considered from a different angle, comments by Michael Rosen, of course:

“Given the claim that Gaza is part of we Jews' ancestral lands, then obviously we Jews have to have them and that includes Gaza. Then along comes Trump and says, he wants Gaza. Hang on, Trump, we've been saying they're ours, not yours. What a cheek! What's going on? All those years making sure that the Palestinians don't have our ancestral lands and then in a blink of an eye, a Christian says 

they're his. Arrrrrgggghhhhh!!! It's all going wrong.”

“Where is the outrage from supporters of Israel that Trump is threatening to get his goyisher hands (gentile hands) on our ancestral lands?”

“Has Netanyahu twigged that what Trump said about the US taking over Gaza was anti-Zionist? Zionism says that the ancestral lands belong to the Jews, not to the USA. Surely, Trump will be labelled antisemitic for this...

[irony alert]”

Meanwhile what I have heard referred to as the ’Gazification’ of the West Bank and Lebanon continues. No ceasefire there!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Out and about. The oddity of the modern world.

Today I’ve been out to lunch in Manchester with a couple of old friends. There should have been four of us but the fourth had to cancel because of a family celebration for a grandchild’s birthday. Fair enough! So three of us met and reminisced over a stack of old photos before going off the eat pizza. Oddly the pizzas did not have names, only numbers, despite the restaurant supposedly being Italian. They were good pizzas! 

Manchester is still festooned with red lanterns celebrating the lunar New Year.  Bit of brightness in the city centre. Not that it needed brightening today, which has been been crisp and sunny, with ehatvthe weatherman called ‘blustery winds’ but which seemed like a standard very cold, fairly strong atvimes wind to me.

Well, they’ve not yet put President Trump in jail but Former President of France Nicholas Sarkozy has been fitted with an electronic tag after losing his appeal against his conviction for corruption and influence peddling. He was sentenced to three years in jail, two years suspended, and told he would be allowed to serve the third under electronic monitoring to avoid prison. His appeal against this judgment was rejected by France’s highest court in December, leading to the fitting of the electronic tag at his home on Friday.

He’s not the first French President to be put on trial

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, a fellow conservative, is the only other president in modern French history to be convicted by a court. Chirac was found guilty of corruption in 2011, four years after he left office. He was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for having overseen a fake jobs scam at Paris city hall when he was mayor.

So French presidents get sentenced but have them suspended or are tagged. I wonder what would happen to them if they had to go to prison like ordinary folk. 

I’ve been reading about fly-tipping. It’s a while since I’ve seen any around here. Rubbish dropped on the ground, possibly because of a complete lack of litter bins in some places, yes, but large items such as mattresses, kitchen sinks and so on dumped at the side of the road, no. And yet In some parts of the country scenes like this

are being seen too often, leading to huge clean-up bills. Ours is a selfish society in some ways. But it takes some organisation to dump such a load. That’s not from the back of a family car! 

The friend I had lunch with today commented on having seen a kind of tent city close to Manchester Central Library. We also noticed it a couple of weeks ago as we waited for a tram in St Peter’s Square late on a Saturday evening. From the uniformity of the tents, they have clearly been donated by an organisation, providing shelter for the homeless. Some people are clearly not so selfish after all. But what a dreadful inditement of our society that we need such a thing in the 21st century. 

That’s all. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Being busy. And still feeling indignant.

 Today has been a day of travelling around on buses. I had a dental appointment and so got up and organised, sorted out the day and headed out to catch a bus into Oldham. From there I walked to the dental clinic. A very rapid check-up saw me on my way back into the centre of Oldham, on a bus to the bus station. There seemed to be plenty of time so I walked to the market hall for the makings of vegetable soup and tomato and basil soup to go in the freezer. 

This meant I missed a bus home by about 3 minutes. I walked another section of the route and eventually caught a bus home, just in time to drop off my purchases, do a rapid turn-around and catch another bus to go and collect the small people from school.

Having collected the children and chivied them along to the relevant bus stop, I discovered that that stop was “suspended” because of road works.  The bus was due to arrive in 3 or 4 minutes. We had to walk to the next stop. A cue for more chivying. And after all that the bus was a good ten minutes late. Fortunately the small people were happy to play I Spy with my Little Eye!

When my daughter arrived to have tea and to collect the children and give her father a lift to chess club, she came with Granddaughter Number One, who has been off work with arthritic problems and needed a bit of family time to cheer her up. 

It’s been a non-stop day. 

But at least nobody is threatening to move us out of our home, knock it down and send us to some other country where we might be “more comfortable and safe”.

I am amazed at the arrogance with which Mr Trump talks about moving a couple of million people out of their homeland, whether they want it or no. What’s more he dresses it up as a way of “helping” them solve their problem!

Here’s Michael Rosen again:

“from wiki

'judenrein (German:  "clean of Jews") a term of Nazi origin to designate an area that has been "cleansed" of Jews during The Holocaust.'

'German-annexed Alsace – reported 'judenrein' by Robert Heinrich Wagner in July 1940'

Trump on Gaza: 'clean out the whole thing'.”

It’s hard to believe that people still behave that way!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!