Travel, trees and testing dietary ideas.

Yesterday, making my way into Manchester to go to my Italian conversation class, I hopped off the bus from Delph to Oldham and almost immediately hopped onto a tram to Manchester. I thought my travel plans were working out very well. It’s not often you wait less than a minute for the connecting tram. However, this particular tram seemed not to be going anywhere. Then came a voice over the public address system: “Due to an issue on the Irk Valley section of the line, this tram will have to wait here for a few minutes before being able to proceed. We apologise for any inconvenience caused and hope to have the tram moving again soon.” I debated with myself about getting off and catching a bus into Manchester. The bus takes ages to get to Manchester, though, and it was cold and windy at the bus stop whereas I was at least snug and warm in the tram. After five or ten minutes I was just about to reconsider my decision when the tram set off. 

All seemed to be well but three or four stops up the line we had a repeat performance: “Due to an ongoing issue ... etc.” So it was an ongoing issue now! We got a little more information: the problem (or should I say “issue”?) seemed to be where the Bury – Manchester tramline and ours merged. A points problem, perhaps? By now I didn’t fancy getting off and finding a bus stop; I wasn’t entirely sure whereabouts on the route to Manchester I would come out if I left the tramline. So I stayed put and, lo and behold, we set off once again. 

Not for long, however! A couple of stops further along it happened again. Well, they say that things run in threes. As we set off once more, the driver told us: “Passengers should be aware that we may experience a brake application.” A “brake application”?? In other words, the train might have to stop again. Which it did. In the middle of nowhere but within sight of Manchester, indeed within spitting distance of the city. Ten minutes later I had listened in to a wide variety of mobile phone calls explaining the situation, apologising for expected late arrival and a good deal of moaning and complaining. 

We got to Manchester in the end but a journey which normally takes about twenty minutes lasted the best part of an hour. I had various errands I wanted to run before my Italian class so I rushed about in the city centre and then scuttled off to my class, only to discover that with all the hustle and bustle I had mixed up the times and arrived half an hour early. So it goes! 

Now, I want to know why a “problem” has to be an “issue” in modern parlance (I hear it all the time) and why our train driver couldn’t just tell us that we might have to stop again instead of going on about “experiencing a brake application”. It’s rather pretentious and silly. Almost as bad as what happens on the local trains where you will hear an announcement like this: “We are now approaching Greenfield. Greenfield: your next station stop.” Why a “station stop”? Surely it could just be a “station” or a “stop” but not a combination of the two. Bonkers! 

On to other matters: recently I bemoaned the felling of some trees at the bottom of our garden. I’ve just read about a place called Sarria in Galicia where they have been threatening to cut down trees as part of a project to channel the river. Clearly the planners have not heard all the discussion that has gone on about the Somerset Levels and how the channeling of rivers, removing natural meanders that slow the flow, may have contributed to the flooding. Some people are opposed to the tree-felling and have chained themselves to the trees to prevent it happening. Maybe we should have done that. 

I’ve also gone on recently about fruit consumption and dietary advice. Well, according to some sources, strawberries can reduce cholesterol. An Italian university has been doing tests, making their Guinea pigs eat half a kilo of strawberries a day and measuring their levels of cholesterol. Eat strawberries every day and your cholesterol levels go down. Stop eating strawberries and they go back up. It’s a pity strawberries are a seasonal fruit because the ones you buy out of season, force-grown under glass, have no taste at all. 

Eating strawberries, they reported, also protects against ultraviolet radiation. This must explain the fair complexion of English roses then. It’s nothing to do with English ladies not being exposed to sun; it’s eating strawberries and cream. 

Mind you, looking again at the article about strawberries, I find that they based this study on 23 volunteers. Hardly a representative sample of the world population! Back to the drawing board I think!

Authenticity

Years ago my mother was taken ill and my father took over the cooking. This was not really a problem. He had always helped out in the kitchen and now took over just about everything except baking cakes. There’s a limit to what even the most emancipated man will do. Anyway, he proved to be a pretty good cook on the whole but there was one small problem. 


My parents had spent a fair number of holidays in the south of Spain, largely because my sister had married an “andaluz”. There my father had been introduced to garlic, something little known in the north of England back in the 1980s. (Well, little used, anyway, if you don’t count the private student of mine who advised me to put some under my children’s mattresses to ward off the evil eye which she claimed was aimed at her but affecting all people associated with her. I quickly stopped giving classes to this eccentric lady.) The culinary problem arose because my father added garlic to traditional North of England dishes. Shepherd’s Pie and Lancashire Hotpot do not need garlic. My mother was dismayed. We talked him out of it. 

I was motivated to comment on this by an item I came across concerning “Paella Valenciana”. Guillermo Navarro and two of his friends have been horrified to discover that chefs such as Jamie Oliver were adding chorizo, avocado and even poached eggs to their regional dish. They regarded it as prostitution of a traditional recipe and were especially upset that some chefs recommended using artificial food colouring instead of the delicately flavoured saffron to turn the rice yellow. So horrified were they that they set up a website called Wikipaella to inform people correctly about the dish. 

I wonder what they would have made of the old Vesta dishes that used to be around in the seventies. Before it was possible to buy the ingredients for these exotic dishes in the UK, you could buy special packs to make paella, couscous, coq au vin and curry. Adding water to dried food products and getting stuff out of tins you could make some distant relative of the original. Talking about food in my Italian class recently we tried to explain these things to our Sicilian teacher; she was baffled! She would have been even more baffled had she actually tasted them. Those of us who had tasted the dishes in their country of origin knew that they were dreadful. 

 I’m pretty sure that my onion soup (one of my standby self-invented recipes to use up left-over chicken bits) bears little resemblance to French onion soup. Likewise my curry is a purely me-invented dish; it uses reasonably authentic curry powder and curry paste but you couldn’t give it the name of any genuine curry dish. I’ve even concocted my own recipe for “sopa de pescado”, much simpler than the complicated recipes I found for this most excellent fish and shellfish soup from Spain. The thing is that I don’t pretend they are the genuine article. 

And that was one of the points that Mr. Navarro and friends were making: you can add what you like to recipes based on particular dishes but you can’t pretend that they are the traditional dishes. Mr. Navarro compared it to adding oranges to fish and chips and saying that that was the traditional British dish. Authenticity is all! 

And finally, but still on the subject of authenticity, I have been relieved to notice a change in practice when you make a comment on someone’s blogpost. There is always a security check to make sure you are a genuine human being and not a robot. I am not entirely sure why this should be necessary but I go along with it. In the past there was always an incomprehensible, virtually illegible set of letters which you needed to copy and which I frequently got wrong, implying that I was indeed a robot. Recently, however, these seem to have changed into two sets of numbers, much easier to decipher and much more difficult to get wrong. 

I am no longer mistaken for a robot: an authentic human being at last!

It's a hard life!

Life gets more and more complicated. Well, that's how it seems if you listen to all the health advice that' going around. First they tell you sugar's bad for you. Ok, yes, I'll go along with that; I've not taken sugar in tea or coffee since I was about 16. But then they start going on about fructose - fruit sugar. So, despite all the government advice about getting your five-a-day, fruit isn't all that good for you either. And certain vegetables such as carrots, which they always used to say we're good for improving eyesight, should be avoided as well because they contain too much fructose. And if you start to think about smoothies, well, forget it. Getting your fruit in that way is even worse because you don't take time to digest it and the fructose hit is faster and more dangerous. 

Pretty soon we'll just be drinking a little bit of water and perhaps having the occasional bowl of porridge. 

And then there's the question of exercise. They tell you that you should get 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. But then they say that if you spend the rest of your time sitting around all the benefits of those 150 minutes of exercise are lost. So what is a body supposed to do? Clearly you walk around all day, eating your occasional bowl of porridge and sipping water. 

But then, make sure your water doesn't come from a plastic bottle as all sorts of nasties can be transferred from the plastic into the water. Now, that's bad news for all the people you see with their supermarket trollies full of stacks of bottles of water. An Italian friend of mine tried to convince me recently that you see this in Spain and Italy because the water coming through the taps is undrinkable! Really? I thought that had been solved years ago but she maintains that in Sicily she gets sand coming through her taps! 

All in all, as I said, life has become extremely complicated. There are just too many things to be taken into account. 

Even buying a secondhand car has become more complicated than it used to be. It's not that I'm thinking of buying one; it's just that I read recently about the problem of people using their cars as security for loans - loans that they then pay back at extortionate rates of interest. The average amount for these so-called "log-book" loans is £1286 but some people borrow up to £19000. A crazy amount and they can end up paying back up to eight times what they borrow. If they fall behind in the repayments their car can be repossessed. The trouble is that sometimes cars are sold on before the loan has been repaid. So you can buy a secondhand car with a loan attached, although you won't know this. And then, if the borrower defaults on the loan your secondhand car can be reclaimed by the loan company. How weird is that? Now, it reminds me of something. Years ago someone explained to me one of the dangers of buying property in Spain: occasionally the property would come with a loan attached and the new owner of the property became liable for the loan. Scary stuff! 

Pretty soon I'll have to start living in a cave, preferably one above the flood plain, where I can walk about all day and live on water and porridge!! 

It's not all gloom and doom though. Little by little I am learning to do new tricks on the iPad that Father Christmas brought me. Today I am trying to post my blog via the iPad. 

Well, that didn't work. Maybe I need to get a special blogger app. So it's back to emailing what I've written to myself, opening the email on the net book and posting from there. 

At least I've learnt how to do letters with accents on my iPad. That's a start!

The buzzing of saws

Today the woodcutters finally came. I sat reading and realised I could hear a constant buzzing noise. Looking out of the window I saw a man up a tree at the bottom of the garden. It wasn’t clear what he was up to but I guessed by the noise of his saw. The lumberjacks or tree surgeons or whatver you choose to call them who were supposed to come last week had finally arrived. Branches were soon flying down from the trees. Neither was it clear how he was managing to balance up there. 

 

Looking out later, I saw that he and his assistant had made rapid progress. Whole trees had almost disappeared. There was really only one left by now.

One of the neighbours had come out to cheer them on. At least I assume that’s what he was doing. He certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything useful. Maybe he is one of those who will tell you, “I love work. I could watch it all day.” 

With fewer branches to worry about you could see better how the lumberjack managed not to fall out of the tree. He was attached to a kind of belt that went around the tree. He planted his feet (did his shoes have spikes, I wonder?) into or against the trunk and leant back into the belt. His saw was attached to his belt on a rope. In that way he could drop it after use while he adjusted the position of his safety harness without fear of knocking his mate out with the saw. Flying logs were a different matter. 

Gradually he worked his way down each tree trunk in turn, chopping chunks off as he went, until all that was left was a line of tallish trunks. 

And even these were cut right down in the end. All that remains is a line of stumps and a pile of sawdust. The vista is far from beautiful. Brick walls really do lack charm. 

Our son has protested that part of his childhood has been taken away. Our oldest granddaughter has yet to comment on it. And she is the one who really, truly resents change of any kind! A friend tried to console me with the thought if all the firewood we would get from these felled treed. Not a bit of it. They threw it all over the wall and then took it away in a great big trailer. 

So that’s that. The world is a bit plainer now.

From puddly places to sunny islands.

Yesterday’s fine sunny weather must have been a blip, a freak of nature, for today we are back to grey and gloomy. Last night’s weather forecast on the TV showed great swathes of cloud coming across the Atlantic towards the western side of Europe. The actual rain managed to hold off here until I was halfway to Uppermill, where I wanted to visit the greengrocer’s shop. This is the closest proper fruit and veg shop in our area and is the nearest thing I have found here to the little fruit shops which appear every hundred yards or so on most Spanish streets. It’s no good Mr. Cameron and his government urging us to eat our five-a-day when it’s so difficult to buy the stuff. 

In the co-op in Uppermill one day last week we had an odd conversation with one of the shop-assistants. He was tidying up one of the shelves and suddenly asked, “Are onions one of the five-a-day? It says on this label that it is.” His customers assured him that, as an onion is a vegetable, it would be included in the famous five. “So,” he continued, “how much onion do you have to eat for it to count?” Well, I wonder. How long is a piece of string? As long as you want it to be? So, you eat as much onion as you want, presumably. We ended the discussion by assuring him that we expected to see him tucking into an onion and breathing onion-breath on all the customers. 

Waiting for the bus home after my shopping trip today – walking the three miles there is fine, as is walking back as a rule, but with a rucksack full of fruit and veg it can be a little tiring – I was told that my rucksack was boring. This came from a gentleman (maybe not a true gentleman if he was rude about my rucksack) whose rucksack was covered in badges relating things to do with the railway. Amazing! He could leave it behind in Stalybridge Station Buffet and people would think it was just part of the decor. I had to send a picture of his bag to my eldest granddaughter as I knew she would appreciate it. She has a denim shoulder bag whose strap is covered in badges and buttons she has collected over the last few years, including some vintage ban-the-bomb and anti-Nazi-league badges she appropriated from my house. 

Talking at the bus stop is a habit of mine. Occasionally you come across grumpy folk who appear to believe that you have to be properly introduced before you can have a conversation but mostly it works. Today we ranged through dog training (if you get a rescue dog it might take you a little longer), the public transport system (still inadequate in our neck of the woods), the closing of railway lines by Beeching (if the local line had been kept open it would now be very useful to commuters whereas now it’s a very nice, if muddy, bridle path), through parking problems (connect to comments about public transport and closed railway lines) and on to the construction of a new school to house the local secondary age kids (the current one if in a decrepit state but there is some local opposition to the site chosen for the new building). 

As you can see we had a fairly long wait for the bus. We concluded, in good English fashion, by agreeing that the stormy, rainy weather has gone on for far too long. I am fairly sure that my friends in Galicia feel the same way. So here, to cheer us all up is a link to a short film made two “vigueses” living in Madrid. It’s called “Cíes en dos minutos y medio” and was made with the collaboration of the Parque Nacional Illas Atlánticas and a company called Lowcos Producciones. That’s another example of an English expression, “low cost”, being highjacked into Spanish. 

Anyway, two and a half minutes of the Islas Cíes, one of my favourite places ever, is always good. A little reminder of sunny days.

Sunday again!

The recycling box outside our front door had lost its lid, various people’s fences had been blown down (but not ours) and normally dry footpaths had been turned into muddy, puddly places; these are all things I discovered when I jogged into the village this morning to buy the newspaper. On my return I rescued our recycling box lid from the carpark of the pub next door. How had the wind managed to remove the stones that weigh the lid down, get its windy fingers under the lip of the lid and then hurl it over a five-foot high fence? This is one of life’s mysteries. 

As the day was still very grey and gloomy after I had breakfasted, I set about indoor tasks: a pile of washing, tidying up this and that, chopping vegetables to make soup and other such domestic things while listening to Desert Island Discs on the radio. Eventually I sat down in front of the computer to answer some emails and write this blogpost. It was then that I looked out of the window and discovered that the sun had decided to come out. 

Never one to miss an opportunity, I abandoned the blog and went out for a walk. Carpe sunshine! You never know at the moment when you might see it again. So off I went, up the hill past the old quarry, admiring the view as I went, along the top road to Dobcross village and then dropping down towards Uppermill. There was even warmth in the sunshine; it is the middle of February after all! But that didn’t stop some of the paths being very muddy. 

The sunshine had brought everyone and their grandmothers out to walk along the towpath by the canal in Uppermill. Some of the grandmothers move very slowly. If I’d been on my bike I’d have rung my bell. Instead I had to ask politely, sometimes more than once, if I could please get past them without falling into the canal.

The stepping stones had disappeared under water and turned into a waterfall. This did not stop some teenagers from determinedly crossing them. I suspect their Converse will never be the same again. 

So that’s Sunday afternoon and even now at just after 4 o’ clock the sun is still shining and the sky is mostly blue. How astounding after all the stormy weather! 

About those storms and their names, it seems that the Free University of Berlin has been naming storms since 1954. So it’s their fault. The gender of the storms is not fixed, however. In even number years, like 2014, the storms and hurricanes and what have you are given women’s names but in odd number years they receive men’s names. It’s just that we have had so many storms so far this year that we, or at any rate I, have been noticing an apparent gender bias. I stand corrected. 

Boris Johnson, he of the red-soled wellies, has been heard to comment that George Clooney has perhaps lost his marbles. This is because Mr Clooney, who has recently made a film about people protecting works of art from the Nazis in World War II, has said that the UK should return the Elgin marbles to Greece. I’ve heard arguments for both sides of this question. One reporter said that as Greece is a different country from the one the marbles were effectively stolen from, the Greeks have no claim to them. That’s a little weird! I prefer the one that says they should be seen in their original setting. You do, however, need some guarantee that they will be properly conserved. 

Good old George has also said that the Mona Lisa should be returned to Italy. I was rather under the impression that some French king paid Leonardo da Vinci for the painting long ago. I may be wrong, of course, but if that is so then the painting belongs to France, doesn’t it? Or should we be sending all the paintings by Canaletto that you find in London and around the world back to Italy? Should all the works of Picasso, Miró, Salvador Dalí and others make their way back to Spain? 

It all sounds a little over the top. I think it’s time I finally got around to reading that newspaper I bought this morning.

Victims of the weather and other stuff.

I just threw my umbrella in the bin. That’s the umbrella that I wasn’t sure would survive after its stormy trip to Uppermill the other day, when it blew inside out at least five times. Today’s wind and rain was too much for it. First of all it wouldn’t fold up properly and then the handle just fell apart in my hands. Fortunately, by the time I left the post office the rain had abated somewhat. Thank goodness I had my hat on! 

With rain and floods and reports of various politicians visiting flood victims in the news so much, I suppose it was inevitable that some journalist would come up with an article about wellington boots. Ed Milliband, Labour, wears sensible, no-nonsense, plain black wellies. David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, wears more upmarket green wellies; the reporter commented, though, that they appeared pristine and may have been bought specially for the occasion of flood-plain visiting. Nigel Farage, UKIP, wears waders which go half way up his thighs. He’s obviously prepared for a major surge of stuff that shouldn’t be here. Boris Johnson, flamboyant Conservative Mayor of London, wears flashy wellies with a thick red sole. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? 

Who knew that there was such a range, such variety in what the reporter referred to as “humble wellies”? I can remember when they only came in black and they were dirt cheap. Every kid had a pair and you wore them to school on really wet day, getting a red mark on the back of your calves because you wore a skirt or short trousers and your winter uniform long socks didn’t stay up long enough to give you any protection. Not so humble now. They come in all sorts of colours and patterns. (At one time only little kids wore coloured or patterned wellies!) The cheapest bog-standard wellies I’ve seen locally were priced at £30, which is hardly cheap for rubber boots! I blame Kate Moss. Vver since she wore Hunter wellies to a pop festival, it’s OK to charge the moon for them. This patriotic pair sells at a mere £85!!! 

 

I have read this morning that the amount of rainwater going into the “rías” of Galicia is causing problems for the shellfish sellers. There’s so much fresh water, presumably running off the land, going into the “rías” that the levels of salinity are seriously reduced and the shellfish are dying as a result. Another victim of the weird weather. 

And then there are the, admittedly very few, people who live on the Isla de Ons, one of the islands out in the Atlantic just outside the Pontevedra estuary. They expect to be cut off from time to time during the winter but this winter they’ve been cut off for a fortnight at a time. That’s what you call being isolated! 

I also chanced on a little article suggesting that the heat in the air over Indonesia is somehow contributing to the nasty weather we are experiencing here. I’m almost ready to believe it. This is part of what a friend of mine refers to as the “interconnectedness of everything”. 

Getting back to my outing into the village today, I had an odd little banking contretemps. The ATM in the local co-op was out of service but that should not have been a problem as I remembered that I could get cash from the Post Office. There’s isn’t a hole-in-the-wall machine but a card reader at the counter. I put my card in, told the Post Office chappie how much money I wanted and then discovered it wouldn’t let me have any. The Post Office chappie looked at the card reader and commented, “Oh, it’s a Santander card; that’s why.” Further conversation revealed that, although the Post Office Bank is largely owned by Santander, cards from older Santander accounts, significantly those that used to be Abbey National accounts, are not accepted by the Post Office Bank. That probably rules out a whole lot of Santander customers. And yet, it’s years and years since Santander took over Abbey National. And I sometimes get the impression that they’re taking over everywhere. So why is it hard for me to use the Post Office cash machine? Have they not heard about the “interconnectedness of everything”? 

 It’s enough to make me think about withdrawing all my money and keeping it under the mattress!