October weather and activities. Odds and ends of stuff in the news.

Today is the second of October. According to a Sicilian friend of mine, today is “La festa dei nonni” - “Grandparents’ Day”. Well I suppose we also deserve a day. So far, thank heavens, I haven’t seen cards on sale in this country to celebrate the event, no doubt it will come.

Today is the second of October. When I went out running first thing there was frost on the grass at the cricket ground up the road and cars had frosty windscreens. My hands were frozen too. It was, however, a beautiful day.

My daughter and I set off mid-late-morning on a long walk in the sunshine, taking in a visit to a local cafe, doing a bit of shopping in Uppermill and then meeting Phil on our way home at “the coldest place in the world”. This spot, where the road goes under the Donkey Line bridle path is always chilly, even on the hottest of summer days. We named it “the coldest place in the world” some thirty years ago and the name has stuck.

 As we passed “the coldest place in the world” we were rather shocked to see a large and hairy man dressed only in his trousers calling for his dog, which presumably had escaped. I think he was as shocked to see us as we were to see him, for he scuttled back inside his house, seemingly abandoning the search for his dog.

Later we wondered if this was the same dog we had seen earlier in the day as we set off on our walk. A car had pulled up alongside us and the driver had asked if we recognised the dog sitting on the back seat. She had found the dog wandering along the road on his own and was now driving around trying to find someone who knew him. My daughter, fount of much strange and arcane knowledge, gave her information about an organisation she could contact who would scan the dog to see if he was chipped. Such a thing was well beyond my canine-related knowledge.

According to the weathermen tomorrow will revert to wet and windy. Hurricane Lorenzo is on his way! So it is just as well we took advantage of today’s sunshine.

I just now read that Bernie Sanders has had heart surgery for an artery blockage and is canceling events until further notice, according to his campaign office. The 78 year-old is doing well by all accounts but some people are saying that the Democratic 2020 frontrunners are too old. Who can they find to stand against POTUS Trump in the next presidential race? Surely there must be someone!

I was also reading about a Spanish law allowing descendants of Sephardic jew expelled from Spain centuries ago to apply for Spanish citizenship. 132,000 people have applied, many from South American countries but also from many other countries around the world, this despite the need to take tests in Spanish language and culture, to prove their Sephardic heritage, establish or prove a special connection with Spain, and then pay a designated notary to certify their documents. That last requirement does not surprise me in the least; almost everything needs a designated notary to certify it in order for the notary to earn his bread.

Portugal had a similar law. I was interested to read that the Jewish Community of Oporto – which, along with the Lisbon Jewish community, certifies applicants – said it had received just five applications before the Brexit referendum compared with 400 in the two months following the vote. The Jewish Federation of New Mexico also recorded a spike in applications following the election of Donald Trump as president.

Does this have anything to do with the political situation in the world at the moment? I wonder!

On making appointments. An American writing about Americans. And a bit of Brexit stuff.

I wanted to see my GP about a small problem and tried to make an appointment when I was at the clinic for a flu vaccination on Saturday. Sorry, said the receptionist, we can only deal with flu clinics today. As she was doing everything on the computer I really failed to see why she couldn’t access another bit of the programme for me. But doctors’ and dentist’s receptionists are like minor deities and are not to be argued with. Of course it may be that she simply did not have the knowledge. It took her a great deal of effort to get into the bit of the programme that deal with flu clinics in Delph rather than Uppermill, both parts of the same GP surgery, so that I could make an appointment for Phil.

Anyway, this morning I got up just a little while before the sun did and made my way to Uppermill in order to be there when the surgery opened its doors. I had thought about phoning but it takes about ten years to get through to anybody. So there I was, outside the still-locked doors at 7.45 and there were already five people in the queue. It’s a good job I arrived when I did as people just kept on coming.

At about 7.55, doors still unopened, a woman arrived with three smallish children in tow. She was probably their grandmother. She took one look at the queue and, heaving a sigh, asked if anyone minded if she went in ahead of us to make an appointment for later in the morning so that the smallest child could have his ear ache dealt with. She didn’t want to go ahead of anyone in actual appointments but she had to get the two older children to school and they would be late if she stayed at the back of the queue. Most people were quite amenable but one woman got very huffy and declared that she had no intention of losing her morning appointment by letting someone go ahead of her.

There’s always one!

In the end the grumpy lady got an appointment for 8.30, I got one for 8.35 and the grandmother with the ear achey grandson got one for 9.35. All was well! Everyone else in the queue seemed to be accommodated as well.

But they do need to improve their telephone booking system!

I was looking at a review of Bill Bryson’s book about the body, “The Body: a Guide for Occupants”. I have enjoyed all of his books, well, the ones I have got around to reading. It sounds as though this one is full of interesting facts. Here are some of the things he tells us about Americans:-

•  even rich Americans die younger than the average-income European because of diet, obesity and America’s anomalous, hyper-expensive and iniquitous healthcare system. 
•  the average American eats two entire cheesecakes-worth of calories more than the average person in Holland or Sweden, every week. 
•  Americans shoot one another more often than anyone else, drink and drive more than “almost anybody else” and wear seatbelts less frequently than anyone but the Italians. 
•  Insulin, the patent for which was donated by its discoverers for the good of mankind, is six times more expensive in the US than in Europe. 
•  Cuba and Lithuania have better infant survival rates than America. 
•  The US has double the number of financial administrators in its healthcare system than it does physicians. 

 And some people feel we have more in common with them than we do with Europe. However, Bill Bryson also points out that UK government austerity between 2010 and 2017 has led to about 120,000 preventable early deaths. That’s down to the people who like the American way of life too! 

One of the odd knock-on effects of Brexit that I have read about is in education.

Teachers are feeling the need to discuss news items, including Brexit of course, with children who are confused and rather frightened about what’s going on. Not only that but parents are apparently venting their own anger and frustration by going into school and shouting at teachers.

 “Ever since the referendum result was announced, levels of anger have slowly been building among parents,” said Anthony White, headteacher at Pound Hill Junior School in Crawley, Sussex. “We’ve had parents coming into school and shouting at me and my staff, when they get frustrated,” he said. “We’re confused, angry and anxious over Brexit … and so are the children we teach”. While the confrontations were not about Brexit, he claimed they involved more tension because of it. “We live in a much more angry society,” he added. White said he thought more parents, particularly from white British backgrounds, were expressing anger with teachers, who they see as public servants. “They are using us as a punchbag,” he said.

 Then there are the daft things you find that people have said - there was someone on the radio saying that if we don’t leave the EU he will leave the UK. Asked where he would go, his reply was somewhere in Europe. You could not make it up!

 It’s not surprising that such things are going on, though, when even the Chancellor says no-one “really knows” how much crashing out of the EU will cost the country – undermining repeated ministerial claims that the damage will be minimal and short-term. He acknowledged the severe impact on businesses, “especially if you a trader with the EU”. And speaking ahead of his Conservative conference speech, Mr Javid also condemned a call by a former Tory cabinet minister to publish the government’s Brexit proposals as a “ridiculous suggestion”.

 Comments about the blind leading the blind spring to mind!

Corrections! Extreme weather. Saving the world. And sponsorship.

I have to start today with a correction. Goodness! I almost feel like a national newspaper! Yesterday I wrote about the fresh-faced young local councillor and then it seems I completely misheard or at least misunderstood what Phil said about him. So here is the correction: Phil did not teach the fresh-faced young local councillor’s father to play chess but taught the fresh-faced young local councillor himself. So really Phil should have answered the door and then he could have had a bit of a reunion. 

Okay, that’s that over and done with!

The rain has continued to fall overnight and well into this morning. It is not falling so heavily now but I wouldn’t plan any long walks just in case it starts again. I ran in the rain first thing this morning, stopping only to take photos of the rather swollen river.

My feet were so wet that I was tempted to tip my shoes up and see if water ran out of them. Yesterday someone told me that nearby Greenfield was flooded. Odd things are going on!

On the question of preserving our planet, once again the way we eat and what we eat comes to the fore. I read that in October 2018 an assessment of the lovestock industry’s environmental impact was made. The authors concluded that although undernourished people around the world could, perhaps should, actually eat more meat and dairy, well, a little more, the average citizen around the world needs to shift to a more plant-based diet in order to prevent catastrophic, irreversible damage to the environment.

The average US amd UK citizen must consume 90% less beef and 60% less dairy. And they reckon that having no animal products for breakfast or lunch would come close to achieving that aim.

Does that mean I should not have milk on my muesli? Am I supposed to go for almond milk or one of the other substitutes? And, oh, I do like real butter on my small amount of toast. But I eat no beef, ever, so does that compensate?

I just half-listened to a programme about sponsorship in the arts. Artists of all kinds are sponsored by nany different kinds of organisations. Saint Martin’s Art College in London is sponsored by at least a couple of big businesses. It’s one way to keep going. What struck me was the group of purists who declared that you should be making art for art’s sake, a nicely idealistic notion, and that once you accepted a commission you were no longer creating art.

I wonder how they thought the great artists of the past managed to get by! I’m pretty sure Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo didn’t have the luxury of making art just because they liked the idea of being creative!

Redefining yourself. And possibly having to accept (relatively) old age.

Our middle granddaughter, the teenager who has just started sixth form college, has spent part of today in rainy Manchester with some friends in an escape room. More specifically they have been trying to escape from the escape room. As I understand it, they are voluntarily locked in a room and have to seek clues in order to open doors, progress through corridors and the like and eventually get out. All this is to celebrate one of the group’s 17th birthday. They did the same thing a few weeks ago. Apparently this is the activity of choice for adolescent girls as a birthday celebration. Or maybe it’s just this particular group of friends. At one time it was all paintball sessions. Or maybe that’s just boys.

We have been watching a curious metamorphosis in our middle granddaughter. Always a little shy and bookish, more likely to chat with her friends on Facetime than to actually go out and do things with them, it’s as though she has taken a decision, with the change in educational establishment, to remake herself. And suddenly she has a social life, a proper social life, and warns that she might be late home from college as she and a bunch of friends are going to hang out in the town centre.

Along with this has come a style change. She has always been her own person as to what she would or would not wear - usually something black with leggings. And comfort was always the principle decider - the number of items of clothing that have been rejected because they did not feel right is astounding. Also labels had a tendency to disappear, clipped out because they were “annoying” and thus causing washing havoc from time to time. Now suddenly she wants bright colours, well, brighter than black anyway, and she is wearing jeans. About time!

Most of my friends and I waited until we went away to university to remake ourselves, in my case cutting several inches off all my skirts! I guess everything happens earlier these days!

As for me, today I went off to the local doctor’s surgery in the rain to get myself a flu jab. I had an appointment for this so there was no problem but some people, probably remembering last year’s drop-in sessions were turning up and finding themselves disappointed. One lady was indignant and shoutily angry because they would not fit her in. Today they were dealing with the 70+-year-olds not the under 65s. Boy! Was she cross and unreasonable!

I found myself shunted through to another room in the clinic after my jab. Records showed that it was time I had my blood pressure checked. Fair enough! No problems! But I had to be subjected to a litany of questions:

Did I consider myself very fit? Quite fit? Unfit?    Very!
Did I get much exercise?    Yes!
Did I take medication?   No!
Had I had any falls recently?     I beg your pardon!!

Have I really got to the age where they start to think I might fall down? Just randomly tripping over stuff?

Oh boy!

But then, yesterday there was a ring at the doorbell, which proved to be a very fresh-faced young local councillor canvassing for the Labour Party. He asked if we were thinking about voting in the (possibly/probably) upcoming elections. Yes, I told him, we were thinking of voting. A bit mean on my part but I couldn’t resist. I reassured him that we are mostly on his side and we chatted amicably about this and that before he went on his way, leaving me his contact details, in case we discovered things we wanted to raise.

Phil looked at the stuff he had given us, complete with a picture of the young man and his name. “I used to teach his dad chess,” said Phil. Not the young man himself, but HIS DAD!!

 Oh boy oh boy!

Feeding the multitude, Carrier bags. Appointments. And votes.

Grandma’s cafe opened for breakfast again this morning ... with a vengeance. Over most of the past year my daughter turned up on a Tuesday morning, having dropped the big kids (aka the teenagers) at school, accompanied by her then youngest child for a leisurely breakfast as she did not work on Tuesdays. The summer break, the arrival of a new baby and the start of maternity leave sort of put a stop to it. But today it was reinstated and our daughter, the new baby, the three-year-old who used to be the youngest child and is now a proud big sister, and the older of the big kids, now a sixth-form college student with a study day on a Friday, all arrived for breakfast. It was at a rather later hour than the Tuesday sessions used to be and so Grandad (aka Phil) also joined us. A good time was had by all. I don’t know if is will be a regular Friday event as it is unlikely that the teenager, who today had a doctor’s appointment early, will manage to get herself up early. We shall see!

After breakfast we took a run to the charity shop to drop off the products of my recent wardrobe cull. I didn’t see any vintage bargains as I looked briefly around the stock. Will any of my contributions be regarded as a “find” by charity shop customers? Who knows? Ours is perhaps a step up from some charity shops but it’s hardly full of Versace and Armani bargains.

Heading for the charity shop we had to dodge the rainstorms, an important consideration as my wardrobe cull was mostly in a large paper carrier bag. I had visions of it disintegrating and depositing my rejected wardrobe items all over the village high street. We did, however, get them safely to the shop.

My daughter and I reflected on the use of paper carriers. It’s a common move at the moment to replace plastic carriers with paper ones but some of them seem very flimsy and not very water-resistant. They must be aimed at people who do no more than run from the supermarket door to their car. And yet I remember as a student carrying books and files around in large paper carrier bags, chosen for their occasionally psychedelic prints, and they used to last weeks before finally disintegrating. Did it really rain less in Leeds in the late sixties than in modern day Manchester?

We have recently had “invitations” to make an appointment with out local NHS clinic for a health check. This is what comes of being over 70 . However, it is one thing to invite people to make am appointment. Actually doing so is a different matter altogether. First you have to phone at times when the receptionist is working. Then you have to cross your fingers that your call actually manages to get through the barrier of “the number is busy / unavailable at this time”. And finally you have to go through the “if you want this service press button ... “ challenge. I made it through to speak to a receptionist eventually only to find that these checks only take place on Thursdays. Between days when they are already fully booked and Thursdays when I am busy doing something else, I have managed in the end to book for a Thursday in mid-November. It’s a good job I only want a routine check-up and don’t have an urgent need to see someone medical!

Yesterday I saw the Cambridges on the news. The Duke and Duchess were “working” hard launching a scientific research ship, the Sir David Attenborough. I wonder if Kate ever imagined when she was very young that she would end up doing stuff like that.

There was a once chance that the research ship might have been called Boaty MacBoatface. People were asked to propose names and vote for the final choice. Boaty MacBoatface won the final ballot. 

The people spoke and were over-ruled!

Now there’s a pertinent thought!

Rain. Roadworks. Decision making. Some statistics.

As I listened to the rain beating down in the small hours I wondered if I would manage to run this morning or not. And then the morning turned out to be quite fine and even a little sunny. So I ran round the village, playing dodge-the-puddles on the bridle path and noticing that in a couple of places the path is about to disintegrate totally and just become part of the river’s overflow patch. Judging by how long it has taken for them to get around to fixing the drainage problem on the main road going past our house, I am not expecting repairs to the bridle path to take place anytime soon.

On the main road major works are beginning to happen. They plan to close sections of the road for about six months while they install a new drainage system. That should cause some fun and games as this is the A62 and serves as an alternative route of there are problems on the M62. So it goes! So far they have only created some impressive holes but already the work has prevented parking on a 200 yard stretch of road. I have no idea where the large number of cars which are usually parked there have gone but that is not my problem. The sides of the impressive holes are shored up with planks, making them look rather like trenches. I suspect they needed pumping out this morning as so much rain fell in the night.

The bright morning, by the way, deteriorated by lunchtime into a uniformly grey cloud cover. More rain is forecast for later. To much water everywhere!

I watched a report on the news last night about the plight of the city of Hull where they are desperately building a seawall to try to prevent flooding of vast areas of the city. The sea once provided the city with a living and is now doing its best to destroy it. And the problem will only get worse as ice caps melt and sea levels rise.

And still there are people prepared to mock young Greta Thornberg and her campaign!

But Brexit still dominates our news here. The discussions in parliament seem to go round and round and I am rapidly reaching a point where I can no longer stand to listen to them and remain calm. It strikes me as odd that politicians can change their minds and switch the way they vote. Some of them have voted different ways at different times on essentially the same issue. They have even in some cases switched political party. So why can’t it be recognised that the people can also change their minds about things?

I quoted figures recently about people over 100 years old in Italy. Now I have found some for the UK. Apparently there are 820 people alive today aged 105 and over compared with 330 in 2002, and more than five times as many women aged 105 and over than men: 690 females to 130 males. Going down the age range, there are more than 400,000 women over the age of 90 in the UK compared with 183,000 men.

So if there is something women can do better than men it’s live to a ripe old age.

Of course, these statistics say nothing about the quality of life of all these old biddies! More disturbing is the fact that in some parts of the country life expectancy is going down. “But we must not be complacent. Life expectancy remains lower in less well-off parts of the country and many people in their 50s and 60s now, particularly those who are less well-off, simply won’t reach these older ages,” said an expert. “They will experience poor health and disability much earlier and will die much earlier too.”

Now, I wonder if austerity and cuts have anything to do with that!

Prime Ministers and Presidents. Weather extremes. And the value of vintage.

MPs are back in parliament today. Michael Gove says his boss has no need to apologise for seemingly lying to the queen. Others are calling for the PM to resign but, despite having lost any kind of parliamentary majority, he appears to be determined to bluff it out.

On the other side of the world Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the US House of Representatives would begin a formal impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump, setting the stage for an extraordinary constitutional clash over allegations that the president sought the help of a foreign country to harm a political rival.

The house of cards might be tumbling down around us.

And we currently have no service on our mobile phones around here. They are trying to tell us that it is a problem with a local telecom mast but personally I think it’s Boris Johnson’s fault. If we have to have him as PM I think we should be able to blame him for just about everything.

Someone on the radio has just suggested that all MPs should be locked in the House of Commons and not allowed out until they have thrashed out a Brexit solution. An idea?!

Yesterday afternoon I began to wonder if it was possible to drown standing up, so hard was the rain that was falling on Market Street in Manchester. It was like the worst of Galician rain, a proper “tromba” as they say! Commentators on climate change say that we are having weird and extreme weather all over the world. I would agree with that from what I have seen. So bad was the rain yesterday that I went against all my own rules and caught a tram from Market Street to Piccadilly station, where I proceeded to take a taxi from there to my Italian class.

Once the class was over we found the rain had stopped and it had turned into a very pleasant evening. You would not have thought it had been so bad earlier if it were not for ongoing traffic problems. Everyone and their grandmothers had come out in their cars. As a consequence they rerouted my tram back to Oldham - its normal route was clogged up with heavy traffic. I had already encountered travel problems as the train I expected to catch from Manchester Piccadilly to Greenfield failed to materialise. This meant that I had to catch a tram to Manchester Victoria and from there another to Oldham. However because of the earlier rerouting - and goodness knows what other nonsense that was going going on - there were too many trams trying to access Victoria on one line and I had to wait almost half an hour for a tram going my way. Then, typically, three came at once.

A total nightmare! Can I blame the PM for this as well?

Yesterday I wrote about a Cimabue painting found in a French kitchen. Now there are suggestions in this article that this painting may not be a Cimabue at all but a painting of the same age done by a Cimabue disciple or student or simple copier. I have mixed feelings about this. Does it matter if it’s not a Cimabue? If it’s a very old and pleasant to look at painting, does it not still have value? You only need to look at the number of tribute acts going around singing songs by Blondies, the Eagles, Elvis and many, many more and in some cases making a good living out of it.

It’s odd how we put value on things. Here’s an article about people finding bargains in charity shops, prompted it seems by Meghan Markle wearing charity shop earrings. Judging by the sort and quality of things people in that article have found i charity shops I can only conclude that some parts of the country have a better class of charity shops than we have around here.

This goes along with my general feeling that newspapers cater for a posher part of the world than the one I live in. First of all there are the clothes at ridiculous prices - shoes that cost hundreds of pounds are just silly! Then there is the pretentious stuff they put in recipe articles! The latest round of suggested recipes for autumn includes advice on the best way to serve white truffles.

 White truffles!? Really!? You don’t find them in our local Tesco!