Matters meteorological, dental, political, artistic and grammatical.

Well, for the last few days the wet weather seems to have stopped and has been replaced by crisp and cold. The frost may not have shifted from the back garden in two days but at least it has been mostly bright and clear. A big improvement.

We have had visitors over the weekend, preventing any real chance to take advantage of the fine weather and go for long walks as our visitors are not great walkers. While Phil took one of them off to play in a chess tournament yesterday - winning a nice prize in the process - I entertained the other half of the couple, only abandoning her briefly to go and buy us a newspaper so that she had the crossword to work at.

This morning I was up bright and early to see our visitors on their way and to phone my dentist and arrange to go for an emergency consultation. A crown fell out of my mouth and into my breakfast yesterday morning. Nothing like a gap-toothed smile to make you feel good! Fortunately I was able to arrange an appointment for early afternoon. So I will be able to go for a walk in the crisp and cold snd bright with my daughter and her little ones and she can then drop me off at the dentist’s, hopefully to simply stick the crown back in place.

Meanwhile the general election approaches and arguments flood back and forth about this and that. Boris Johnson’s family situation gets an airing from time to time, his refusal, or perhaps inability, to say how many children he has being held up as an example of his unreliability. Personally I don’t really care how many children he has fathered. Neither do I really see that it is any of our business. However, he shouldn’t be passing judgement on the way other people live, particularly single mothers, unless he is squeaky clean himself.

And then there is the terrorist attack in London. Inevitably this has been used as an opportunity for the Conservatives to blame Labour for yet another thing. One news report tells us:

“Boris Johnson has been accused of trying to create political capital out of the deaths of two people in the London Bridge terror attack. The prime minister was accused of twisting the facts of the London Bridge terror attack in a “distasteful” attempt to turn it into an election issue.
Despite the family of Jack Merritt, one of the victims, calling for the murder not to be exploited for political gain, Johnson sought to push a perceived political advantage on the issue, claiming that “a lefty government” was responsible for Usman Khan being freed.”

So it goes.

On to other matters.

I have never heard of the Danish artist Tal R but apparently he is “esteemed by experts”. These last are the words of Dann Thorleifsson who, with Arne Leivsgard, has a company that produces luxury wristwatches. They bought a painting by Tal R for £70,000 and plan to cut it up to make the decorative faces for a line of watches which will sell for around £1,500 each. The painting will make the backing for between 200 and 300 watches. Do the maths!

“We needed an artist that was esteemed by experts because we also needed to get a reaction,” Thorleifsson said. “If we just took a $100 canvas, no one would really care. It needed to be a true masterpiece.” It seems a shame to cut a paining up into tiny pieces, so small they will not be recognisable as anything. Would it not be possible to cut up a print of the painting and sell the watches for a little less? But who am Into comment on such things? I would not spend that kind of money on a watch anyway. A Danish court now has to decide whether the pair, described as “art provocaters” have the right to destroy the work of art.

Still on an art theme, of sorts, it seems that Amazon has been selling Christmas ornaments decorated with images of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The museum at the site of the former camp in southern Poland has ctiticsed Amazon for this tasteless marketing. “Selling ‘Christmas ornaments’ with images of Auschwitz does not seem appropriate. Auschwitz on a bottle opener is rather disturbing and disrespectful,” the museum tweeted. It added later that Amazon appeared to have removed the items – but then posted a follow-up saying it had discovered others. 

The mind boggles!

I have been known to rant and rave about matters grammatical or punctuational, especially regarding the apostrophe. I was unaware that there was such a thing as the Apostrophe Protection Society but it seems it was started in 2001 by a retired journalist called John Richards. And now that I am aware of its existence it is closing down. Mr Richards has now announced: “With regret I have to announce that, after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society.
There are two reasons for this. One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language."

Now,  Phil and I have been known in years gone by to sneak out and change notices outside the local pub, removing rogue apostrophes. The Apostrophe Protection Society may be no more but we shall continue in our small way to fight for its ideals.

Some pre-Christmas nonsense.

Yesterday evening they switched on the Christmas lights in our village centre. This caused some problems for some friends of ours who were due to arrive because it is not possible to drive directly to our house because of the roadworks. Normally we would just tell them to drive round the village but this was closed off. So Phil went and met them and took them on a long detour. The fireworks at the end of the switch-on were impressive though.

Christmas is coming on apace. Are the frosty mornings a sign of this? I am not sure. The fact remains that I must think about organising myself. The weekend magazines are full of (helpful?) suggestions of possible gifts, including such things as a sleepmask for £55.

In an article about what people spend at christmas one gentleman stated: “I spend £10,000 on Christmas presents for my family.”

This is a Mr Phil Smith who lives in Salisbury with his wife and two children, 22 and 24.

“I’m not a rich man as such” ( but he does own a haircare brand!) “but I always like to spend at Christmas.”

He has bought a Gucci bag for his daughter in the past, Chanel for his wife. “They all get new iPhones each Christmas”.

Amazing! 

Another person, Marguerite Spina from Edinburg stated: “We make gifts for each other.” From one extreme to the other!

Eva Wiseman writes today about receiving news of Marie Kondo’s new online shop. Like Eva Wiseman, I am intrigued and a little disappointed. Surely Marie Kondo was all about decluttering, not about selling us more clutter to fill the spaces we made by throwing stuff out.

It’s Christmas, you see, making us buy stuff nobody needs.

Words - I read that crazy originally meant full of cracks or flaws. Interesting that we also talk about someone being cracked or crackers. It comes from Old French “acraser” meaning to destroy or smash to pieces. Hence crazy paving - which I always thought was so called because it is a crazy way of putting paving stones down but actually refers to their being broken. Who knew!

Silly facts! The black labrador is the second poshest dog breed in Britain. The poshest is the chocolate labrador. I must tell my granddaughter, who has a black labrador.

She will be impressed.

Getting stuff done - one way or another. Making choices. Public displays of ignorance - some amusing, some tragic.

Out and about the other day I got into conversation with a neighbour who had just been redirecting yet another lost driver who either could not understand that Road Closed meant just that or felt the need to go beyond the sign in order to get help to find an alternative route to his destination. We both agreed that far too many people need redirecting and that there should be some more explicit diversion signs for the lost drivers and those led astray by sat nav. He then went on to comment that, of course, if the work were being done by a private contractor instead if the local council it would be more adequately signposted and would be completed much more quickly. Of course?!?

Oddly enough, if you walk past the roadworks you notice that the trucks and heavy machinery all have the names of private contractors plaster all over them. Local councils no longer have the kind of infrastructure that keeps heavy plant available for such work. So they tender it out to private contractors. Who do the work more efficiently??

And this morning I spotted, in a collection of stuff belonging to the roadworks contractors, a whole lot of big yellow “A62 DIVERSION” signs. All they need to do now is put them up in useful places! 

Ah, well, on to other things. Most of us have at some time or other thought about what we would choose to be our desert island discs. Writing in today’s paper Hadley Freeman decided that she was not likely to be selected as a candidate for the island and so she gave us her list. One of them was this:-

“Both Sides, Now, Joni Mitchell. I fell in love with this song when I heard it in Love, Actually, a film so bad I was left traumatised. But the song inspired me to try novel-writing, which ruined the next few years of my life. So the moral is: don’t see Love, Actually.”

My feelings exactly.

The presence or absence of our PM from debates and interviews continues to be a matter of discussion. For a while the BBC were holding out and saying that he would not be interviewed by Andrew Marr on prime time TV if he continued to shilly shally over the Andrew Neill interview. Now the BBC are getting some stick for backing down on that.

Among the letters in today’s Guardian was this:-

“Michael Gove, interviewed by a Channel 4 journalist, said that he should be allowed to replace Johnson at the leaders’ climate debate because he was “a” leader (Johnson’s absence from debate mars milestone for environmental politics, 29 November). Challenged that he as not “the” leader, he said: “Let’s not quibble over prepositions.”
It appears that the former secretary of state for education has failed master the year 3 curriculum and has made a definite article of himself.
Patricia Thorpe.
 Brigg, Lincolnshire.”

 Oops!

But not as seriously ignorant as the lawmakers in Ohio where the state legislature has introduced a bill to ban abortion which requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus or face charges of “abortion murder”. Medical people have tried to tell them that such an operation is currently medically impossible.

 Where do you begin to deal with lawmakers like these?

Reacting to famous people being, or not being, interviewed on television.

Emma Brockes, writing in a Guardian article about how the whole Prince Andrew scandal and interview had made her rethink her attitude to the TV series “The Crown” wrote this, “Perhaps as long as the show was set beyond my living memory, it was easy to go along with the romance. Now it seems phoney and absurd.” Which reflects my own reluctance to watch any of the series at all. The series has been recommended to me by quite a lot of people, including my daughter, but I find I have no interest in watching a romanticisation of stuff that has gone on in my lifetime. Kicking around in the house somewhere is a coronation mug and a book about the then new Queen Elizabeth. Maybe they are worth something now. Who knows. I also have a vague memory of a party in a park to celebrate the coronation when I was a small girl. And that’s it for interest in the royal family.

I’m not averse to historical novels and dramatisations. “Wolf Hall” is magnificent as a book and a TV series. But I prefer my historical stuff to be historical and not stuff that I remember from my childhood onwards. Having said that, I recognise that for younger generations my childhood probably seems like ancient history.

Nor do I want to see films of events such as an experienced airline pilot successfully and safely landing a plane in the Hudson River, or similar goings-on. Those are news items. Of course, I might be misjudging that film completely, maybe it concentrated on the question of whether the pilot was right to land his plane where he did, the drama of his being in danger of being blamed for putting lives at risk. For nowadays we do like to have someone to blame. Did nobody think to blame the flock of geese who caused the problem to begin with.

Anyway, getting back to the lives of the rich and famous, apparently BBC Politics has been tweeting a video of Boris Johnson eating a scone. As this article points out, there is really no reason for anyone to see Johnson eating a scone. Why is it out there? Is it intended to make him appear humanly cuddly and funny? But funny is a friendly sort of way, not embarrassingly so as when Miliband ate a pasty from Greggs?

Of course, it might just be to prove he is not averse to being seen in public, just not in interviews or debates. The latest has seemingly been his refusal to take part in Channel 4’s leaders’ debate on the climate emergency.

 “Boris Johnson refused to take part in Channel 4’s “leaders debate” on the climate emergency, just as he has refused to be interviewed by the BBC’s Andrew Neil, and also refused even to be interviewed about whether or not he has refused the BBC’s Andrew Neil.
 Where his podium should have been, Channel 4 placed a melting ice sculpture. The Conservative party sent Michael Gove in his place.” (Tom Peck in the Independent)

Michael Gove was not accepted as a substitute.

Tom Peck went on:- “Still, the actual grownups over at the Conservative Central Office have responded by launching a formal complaint with Ofcom, and threatening to have Channel 4’s public broadcasting licence revoked. This is the country we are now.
Who knows, perhaps, once we’ve “taken back control of our own laws”, other people being sanctioned entirely for Boris Johnson’s own failings will be the standard run of things.”

 Oh dear!

Words. Wordsmiths. Who wrote what? Dangerous weasel words from the past.

Here’s a little something I overheard in a cafe yesterday. A young mother was having coffee and a snack with her grandmother and her small daughter, probably about ten months old. The mother’s grandmother had been at pains to make sure the wriggly child was properly fastened into her high chair. After a while she noticed that the wriggler has extricated herself from the straps and was turning around in her chair to look at everyone else in the cafe. She commented on this to the mother who responded with this: “She’s a proper little ventriloquist!”

Oh dear!

Three deaths were announced yesterday. Clive James. Jonathan Miller. And Gary Rhodes (59!!!). That’s two wordsmiths and a chef.

Here’s Clive James on Jeremy Corbyn:-

 “I admire the way his principles are uninhibited by reason. I also like his beard, which reminds me of one of the beards I grew at various times in my life when I wished to prove I was still a student, even though the years had passed. Corbyn is a student at heart. I was part of the press corps that followed Michael Foot’s kamikaze 1983 general election campaign, and I recognise the look. Foot didn’t have the beard, but he had the same eyes, glittering with goodness.”

You have to like him.

Here’s a question: Molière - did he write his own plays?

“For at least a century, scholars have argued that the supposed lack of education of Molière, the French playwright responsible for seminal masterpieces including Tartuffe and Le Misanthrope, means he could not have written them. Now academics say they have resolved the controversy once and for all, using an algorithm to find that Molière – born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622– was the author of all his plays.”

Just as Shakespeare’s plays were written, some say, by Marlowe, so Molière’s plays, some others say, were written by Corneille. I studied both of them for A-Level and at university. Nobody suggested to us that Corneille might have written everything. Now the experts say this was really not the case. But the researchers say that they “acknowledge that they have not proved that another ghostwriter did not write all of Molière’s plays. But their research, they say, shows the plays are “very likely written by a single individual”.” ‪‬

So it remains a mystery. In the end, however, does it really matter who wrote them? After all, it’s so long ago that they won’t get any royalties.

I was talking to a friend today about Strictly Come Dancing, a programme I have never watched but which several of my friends find quite addictive, in a relaxing kind of way. I don’t watch the Eurovision Song Contest either, although on e again a number of my friends find it riveting. Now I read that Hungary will not participate in next year’s Eurovision song contest, amid speculation the decision was taken because the competition is “too gay” for the taste of the country’s far-right government and public media bosses. I have to admit that the friends who are most fanatical about Eurovision are mostly gay!

Much has been made of Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil. Here is something from the Labour supporting but independent news website Labourlist:

   Boris Johnson cannot be allowed to get away with his latest ruse - Sienna Rodgers.

 “Labour activists are furious. It was widely assumed that the difficult interview of Jeremy Corbyn by the BBC’s Andrew Neil would be followed up with one featuring Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister could then finally be confronted with robust criticism, as Neil – although a Tory himself – is known to give every politician a tough time. Nicola Sturgeon has already had her turn, and there was no reason to think that the BBC would broadcast two interviews with party leaders before getting all of them signed up. We were wrong to make that reasonable assumption, it turns out. The BBC has said: “For those asking when Boris Johnson’s interview will take place, we’re in ongoing discussions with his team but we haven’t yet been able to fix a date”.
Johnson could well decide that being called a chicken is less damaging to Tory electoral prospects than an interrogation that would surely be seen and shared more widely than the Andrew Neil interview of any other party leader. Johnson has been careful, after all, to take limited questions from journalists throughout this campaign period.
Labour was assured that Johnson’s own interview was going ahead next week, a party source has told LBC’s Theo Usherwood. LabourList has been told the same. This saga raises serious questions about the BBC’s judgment.
The other interviews should not have been broadcast without dates being fixed for every party leader. If Johnson does refuse to go ahead with an interview, a substitute such as Rishi Sunak cannot be accepted. Andrew Neil should empty chair the Prime Minister, and read out a long list of typically cutting questions. Stick a tub of lard in Johnson’s place. Nothing less dramatic would do.”

One rather gets the impression that Mr Johnson is avoiding in-depth interviews.

 Meanwhile, various news media are finding stuff that Mr Johnson has said in the past. Back in 1995 or thereabouts, he described the children of single mothers as "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate" in a magazine column. In the same column, he argued it was "feeble" for a man to be reluctant or unable to "take control of his woman."
He apparently said it was “outrageous" that married couples should fund "'the single mothers' desire to procreate independently of men.” And he said a way needed to be found to "restore women's desire to be married."
The comments, made in a 1995 issue of the Spectator, were unearthed on the same day the Tory leader will pledge to "support women to reach their full potential."

 Oh dear again!

Earlier this evening I heard the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg advising that anyone who has any political ambitions should keep away from social media ... and supposably from writing columns in newspapers.

Words from your past have a way of coming back to bite you!

A bit of a rant about bias.

Well, I have finally got round to a bit of a rant about bias. I have been ignoring it for a while.

We’re seeing a lot in the news about the chief rabbi condemning Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for antisemitism. Nobody, at the BBC at any rate, seems to be making the connection that the chief rabbi appears to be a bit of a Tory and regards Boris Johnson as a friend. But then the Archbishop of Canterbury has come down on their side as well. It begins to look as though once you are accused of something there is no real way of getting out of it. You have been tarred with that brush and the tar has stuck.

People should take a look at this.

I am continually amazed at people’s capacity to believe one-sided stuff in the newspapers, given that so many drivers see the road closed sign a few hundred yards away from our house and disbelieve it completely. They carry on driving and are seemingly astounded to find that just beyond our house the road, the A62, is in fact closed. There is simply no way through or round the barrier. I am seriously considering having a notice put up by our garden gate giving directions for driving through the village and then back to the A62 to get back onto their originally planned route!

There may not be much in defence of Jeremy Corbyn on the television news but in the bits of social media that I see there is quite a lot. 

Here’s part of what Noam Chomsky had to say about the anti-Corbyn campaign in an article in The Canary.

“The smears against Corbyn rely heavily on misrepresentation. For example, mainstream outlets spent days accusing Corbyn of hosting an ‘antisemitic’ event in parliament in 2010, because speakers compared the actions of Israel to the Nazis. But at the meeting, a Jewish Holocaust survivor was addressing a room of predominantly Jewish people.

Broadly speaking, the total cases of antisemitism in Labour represent less than 0.1% of around 540,000 members.

With that in mind, widespread smears undermine the genuine instances and genuine concerns about antisemitism in Labour and wider society.

On 16 September for instance, Conservative environment secretary Michael Gove refused to condemn the openly antisemitic and Islamophobic far-right leadership in Hungary.

That’s after the Conservatives whipped MEPs to back Viktor Orbán’s dangerous platform in a vote at the European Parliament. This has received far less media coverage than allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn and Labour that just don’t stack up.”

Note the statistics in there: “Broadly speaking, the total cases of antisemitism in Labour represent less than 0.1% of around 540,000 members.”

And Michael Rosen had this to say:

“Has the Chief Rabbi expressed concern over Boris Johnson's time as editor of the Spectator, when he was editing the raving antisemite Taki? Has he commented on Johnson's silence over Rees-Mogg's antisemitic jibes (calling Letwin one of the 'illuminati', and using the Soros slur), retweeting a tweet from the Alternative für Deutschland,  hanging out with the far-right Traditional Britain Group? Or Johnson's congratulations of the election of Orban in Hungary - someone who again uses the Soros trope in order to flag up hostility to Jews?”

And then there is this stuff about the Conservatives and Islamophobia.

There does seem to be a bit of bias out there.

Cultural crossovers and being different.

Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here. It’s an American thing. Every country should have its special holidays but we don’t really need to celebrate everyone else’s.

Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving and marks the start of the Christmas shopping season in the USA. It’s important to note that that is in the USA! And they have lots of special offers and some stores, having been closed for Thanksgiving, open at midnight on Thanksgiving. Presumably, just as here for Boxing Day sales, there are loads of loonies who ruin a perfectly good family holiday celebration by going and camping out to be the first through the doors when the sales begin.

As I said already, it’s important to remember that this is an American thing. So why have we been hearing about Black Friday sales for the last three weeks? Is it really necessary to invent another reason to have reductions? After all, most stores have special offers and reductions almost all year round anyway!

Goodness knows why it has to Black Friday anyway. Why not some more cheerful or hopeful colour? Maybe it’s because of all the black eyes people get fighting over bargains they don’t really need.

We recently watched the latest series of the French crime series Engrenages (Spiral in English). This time there was a lot of material on money-laundering in the Chinese community in the suburbs of Paris, a very different Paris to the one most of us know from tourist visits to that beautiful city.

Today I found this article about being French and ethnic-Chinese, an interesting insight into the question of feeling French (or British or Spanish or German) but looking obviously ethnically different. I was struck by this comment about the “gilets jaunes” riots:

 “Intellectually, I can understand why the gilets jaunes are protesting – I’m French after all, I have the tendency to question the way other French people do. But when you know that your parents have survived one of the greatest genocides the world has ever seen, everything becomes relative. When people talk of life’s great problems being the price of petrol and only being able to go to a restaurant once a week, or only having one holiday a year, we can’t feel fully invested in these arguments, even if we understand them. My parents ran a restaurant when I was a child, and I can’t remember them ever taking a holiday. “

 Sometimes we have to look at life from a different perspective.