Irish celebrations. Collecting granddaughters. Stuff children enjoy.,

It’s Saint Patrick’s Day. My daughter tells me she went past two leprechauns as she drove her small daughter to school this morning. The leprechauns almost certainly worked at a nursery not far from her daughter’s primary school. She said the two women were walking rather embarrassedly along the road. We agreed that what you should do in such circumstances if you are in fancy dress is ham it up a little and cheer everyone’s day up. This was especially so as the traffic was stuck at traffic lights and so everyone was looking at them.

Years ago we never used to hear about Saint Patrick’s Day. Well, I suppose that in Ireland they have long celebrated his day but in recent years it has become an excuse for partying all over the country, indeed, perhaps all over the world, or at least the western world.

When I was a child growing up in Southport, one day a year the Orangemen came from Liverpool to parade through the centre of our town - with lots of girls waving orange-paper shakers, for all the world like American cheerleaders. This was a different lot of Irish to the St Patrick’s Day celebrators. This was an Ulster Protestant celebration, held on July 12th to commemorate the “Glorious Revolution” (1688) and victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne (1690).

My father would not let us go into the centre of town on that day. Too many people going in and out of pubs! I suspect he would have felt the same about St Patrick’s Day if it had been celebrated then. Nothing to do with us was his opinion!

My daughter and I had this conversation on our way to York to collect Granddaughter Number Two who was returning home from university. It was a last minute arrangement that I should keep her company during the drive. We also had musical accompaniment provided by her three year old. There is a limit to how many times you can listen to Incey Wincey Spider and the Alphabet Song but at least he was cheerful.

When his oldest sister, Granddaughter Number One, was his age, on car journeys we used to have to keep rewinding a tape of Carly Simon songs so that she could listen to Incey Wincey Spider, which then morphed into “Coming around again”, over and over again. Some things don’t change!

Here’s a link to an article about the children’s cartoon Bluey. Both our smallest grandchildren watch Bluey. The appeal seems to be that it portrays a fairly normal family life, along with some discussion about the gender of Bluey and her sister - both girls, although some assume they are boys. They watched it one day at Granddaughter Number One’s house. Since then Granddaughter Number One’s housemate, another 25 year old, has watched ALL the episodes of the children’s programme with enjoyment! So it goes!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Childcare stuff!

 This morning, for the first Thursday in a while I had a lie-in. Well, a relative lie-in. I set my alarm for 8.00 instead of 7.00 and then snoozed it! Quite a luxury for a Thursday morning. As a rule I have to make sure I am up and about when my daughter drops her smallest off to spend the day with me. Today teachers are on strike and so she is not dashing off to work. I suggested she might take the small boy to stand on a picket line. She took it in the semi-joking fashion it was intended. I’m not sure he could stand still for long enough. 

She and her brother, by the way, were quite small when we took them to London to march in support of the miners back in the 1980s. We stood feet away from Labour’s John Smith in Hyde Park  - I think it was Hyde Park. Those were the days, when top Labour politicians turned out for demonstrations and were not given instructions to stay away! 

So, anyway, today I had an extra hour in bed and then got up and ran round the village. It was very grey and damp but not actually raining. We have a 50+% chance of rain today though. In fact, looking at my weather app, I see that most of the coming week promises us “light rain and a gentle breeze”. I don’t think I’ll be out in the garden doing the tidying up work that I have been telling myself I should do for the last two,or three weeks. 

Yesterday we spent quite a long time listening to Jeremy Hunt droning on about his budget. (Odd facts: Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt is the sun of a navy admiral, and a descendant of Sir Streynsham Master, a pioneer of the East India Company. He is also a distant relative of the late Queen Elizabeth II and of Sir Oswald Mosley. Wikipedia says the Hunt family were “landed gentry”. He was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Well, that should make him very understanding of the concerns of ordinary working folk!) At least we only listened to it on the radio; I’m not sure I could have stood watching his face on a television broadcast. I don’t think many of us are really going to be much better off as a result of this budget. 

Much has been made of proposals to improve childcare, making it feasible for more women to return to work. Terms like ‘free childcare for three-year-olds’ have been bandied around boastfully for a good while. Now there are plans to extend it downwards to babies from 9 months old. While our daughter welcomes the onset of her dose of free childcare - which does not kick in on the child’s third birthday but at a date which may be a few months later - she tells there are other nursery costs not covered by it, such as lunches and various activities. And it applies to term time only but, even though as a teacher she has school holidays, she needs to keep her little boy’s place open by sending him for at least some of that holiday time. So it’s good, but not perfect. 

And today I read that student nurses do not qualify for the existing free childcare or the new extended version. Parents of children aged three and four in England are entitled to 30 hours of free childcare, provided they work at least 16 hours a week at the national living wage. Presumably the same will apply to the extended version. Student nurses have unpaid placements in hospitals which means that they simply cannot work the required number of paid hours, assuming, that is, that they have the energy to do so on top of studying and fulfilling their placement requirements.  Their placements make it impossible to earn enough to meet the free childcare eligibility requirement of earning £1,976 over three months.

I can only assume that the term “student nurses” makes decision makers think that they are all university-age young people without family commitments. 

Another little problem is the question of just who is going to provide all this childcare. Nurseries are having difficulties with staffing as things stand at present. So … lots of good ideas but can they be put into practice? 

Oh, and I just heard a young mother on the radio news explaining how she was delighted to hear about some free childcare for her youngest child until she realised that it won’t come into effect until her child is about to start school! 

Hey ho!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Cold Wednesday weather. Endometriosis. Definitions of vocabulary. And Michael Rosen on Gary Lineker.

 It was just a bit cold cycling to the market in Uppermill this morning. It was colder in Delph than in Uppermill though. As I got organised to haul the bike up the few steps that lead from the back garden to the side garden, I noticed that there was a quite thick layer of ice on the water barrel again. Not that far down the road I turned onto the Donkey Line, where the muddy puddles were not even remotely frozen, not even a trace of what I think of a s skim-ice, when the water is beginning to freeze and forms a kind of skin, rather like what you get when heating up milk in a saucepan. Uppermill itself was quite mild. This did not prevent my toes and fingers from feeling quite frozen by the time I returned home, despite warm socks and thickly padded cycling gloves! 

A good chunk of Wednesday disappears - I get up and go to the market, maybe stop to chat to a couple of people, return home and have a late breakfast, put the shopping away, tidy up a little, in today’s case do a load of washing, and suddenly it’s past midday! How did that happen?

Over breakfast, and beyond, I also skim-read the newspaper on line - that’s where some of the time goes! 

Somehow I got into an article about endometriosis, a nasty condition affecting surprising large numbers of women, and which often goes undiagnosed. Women still have a habit of downplaying plain and “putting up with it”. Hilary Mantel suffered from it. I have a young friend on social media, a former student, whose career, indeed her life, has ground to a halt as she spends so much time feeling ill, often bed-bound and occasionally hospitalised. One young woman described how she was diagnosed with the condition, having always assumed she just had much worse period pains than other women, when she took herself to ER after feeling as though she had “like a charley horse in my uterus that lasted, like, half an hour”.

I had to look up “charley horse”. It’s an American term for cramp. Explanations and definitions usually refer to the kind of cramp you get in the thigh or calf muscles after extreme exertion. I remember having to stop in the middle of a race in sixth form because my thigh muscle went into that kind of cramp. The woman who took herself to ER said it was worse than childbirth; my memory of being unable to move because of cramp would possibly confirm that. At least childbirth has a positive outcome in the end. 

One site promised etymology as well as definition of the term. It comes from American sport, most probably baseball and the first known use of “charley horse” was in 1886. Otherwise the attempt at etymology said it came from the name “Charles”. Well, I could have guessed that! Where the horse comes in, apart from maybe a good, strong kick, I can’t imagine. Useless etymology, but a new expression for me.

In other matters, discussion of Gary Lineker and his tweeting rumbles along. Someone I talked to this morning told me he had never guessed that Gary Lineker was a socialist, as he always thought he was a conservative. Gary Lineker is probably not a leftie but he is a decent humanitarian. Anyway, I came across this piece by the estimable Michael Rosen, most definitely a good bloke: 

“Peter Hitchens challenged people (Gary Lineker in particular) to justify why Gary had said that he thought the language being used around asylum seekers/boat people (etc) was 'not dissimilar' (Gary's words) to that of Germany in the 1930s.

Note: Gary said 'not dissimilar' ie he wasn't claiming that it was identical. And he said 1930s, which to be clear is not the 1940s. 

I've assembled a short checklist:

Rhetoric around citizenship and taking citizenship away from people eg Shamima Begum and Windrush generation. 'Fremdenrecht'  is a pre-Nazi idea but adopted by the Nazis to remove German citizenship from German Jews. Removal of citizenship was called ‘Ausbürgerung’.

By repeatedly declaring people 'illegal' before they've been tried, is 'not dissimilar'  to 'Willensstrafrecht' . This was a punishment for criminal intent, not the crime itself.  The law was called ‘Täterstrafrecht’.

'Madagaskarplan' - the plan to ship Jews to Madagascar. The idea of shipping 'unwanted' people to other another country 'not dissimilar' to the Rwanda scheme.

As an aside, the press have called shipping people to Rwanda as the 'Rwanda Plan' or the 'Rwanda Asylum Plan', unknowingly imitating 'Madagaskarplan', perhaps? Don't know if Ms SB has expressed it as that. Perhaps not.

Ms Braverman has used the phrase 'cultural Marxism' . This owes its origins to the Nazis' word 'Kulturbolschewismus'  though Ms Braverman may only personally know its roots to US politics.

Ms Braverman and her colleagues are engaged in some kind of culture war(s). This is 'not dissimilar' to the 'Kulturkrieg' which started before the Nazis but was very much engaged in by the Nazis.

'60,000RM kostet dieser Erbkranke die Volksgemeinschaft auf Lebenzeit. Volksgenosse das ist auch dein Geld'  = "This hereditarily ill person will cost our national community 60,000 Reichmarks over the course of his lifetime. Citizen, this is your money." This is an example of people seen as 'costing us’. 

Ms Braverman's persistent labelling of migrants as criminal (and/or the 'traffickers') even though many migrants are granted asylum is 'not dissimilar' to the Nazis' adoption of 'Asoziale' (noun) ('Asocials') which created a category of perpetual criminality in people.

The Nazi word 'Fremdmoral'.  'Fremd' translates roughly as 'alien' . The Nazis believed that lesser, foreign people had worse morals. Suella Braverman says police chiefs have told her "that drug supply... is now connected to people who came here on small boats illegally".”

There you go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Sun and snow and thunder. New words. What if there were only 100 people in the world.

 Well, the weathermen were going on last night about warm fronts and cold fronts and what that does to the weather. All I know is that I woke up to blue sky and sunshine. I had an appointment at the doctor’s and the possible buses would get me there either too early or too late. So I was glad to see the fine weather as I planned to walk over the hill to Uppermill. 

By the time I set off sleety rain was falling. As I approached the top of the hill, almost in Dobcross, the sleet had become snow and there was thunder rumbling around. When I came out of the doctor’s not too much later surgery the blue sky and sunshine had returned. So I called Phil and he set out to meet me half way. By midday I had met my daily step goal easily!

And by 1.00pm it was snowing again. The weather is crazy!

Now for some words. A friend has sent me a word he thinks should be revived. It comes from the 14th century apparently. To “sparple” means to deflect attention from one thing by making a big deal of something else entirely. In the 14th century, therefore, they were already aware of “dead cats”.

And then there is “greedflation”. This is a word to describe the way large corporations have fuelled inflation with price increases that go beyond rising costs of raw materials and wages, pushing shopping bills to record highs. It seems that supermarkets, food manufacturers and shipping companies are among hundreds of major firms who have improved their profits and protected shareholder dividends, giving an extra lift to prices, while the cost of living crisis has meant workers face the biggest fall in living standards in a century. There you go - “greedflation”.

Now, here’s a link to an article about looking at the world as if we had a population of 100 instead of 8 billion. 

Interesting reading. For example:

“How many of us have brown, blond or red hair? And what are the most common eye colours? If, like me, you grew up in Ireland, you may think the world is full of people with red hair and green eyes; but it turns out we’re as rare as unicorns, globally speaking. People in Britain may think blue eyes are as common as brown, when in fact our brown-eyed global villagers outnumber them nine to one. Facts like these, universal and immediate, can help children realise that the world is much bigger than the place where they find themselves. And not just children.”

Thus writes Jackie McCann, author of the book “If the World Were 100 People”. She also says, “My book makes daunting statistics easy to understand, opening young people up to different ways of thinking about the world” but maybe grown-ups should read it too. Her hypothetical village of 100 people is made up like this: “10 of our villagers are European, five are North American, while 60 are Asian.” It might make us all more tolerant to remember that. 

As someone who has been a person with red hair and green eyes - the eyes are still green but the hair has some help from my hairdressser - I also find this article interesting.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Being a laundry service. No snow - more rain! BBC solutions. And childcare.

 My daughter dropped a load of washing off at my house at 8.00 his morning. Well, actually, three loads for my washing machine, the accumulated washing of a household with two children, an active teenager and a husband who only wears things once before throwing them in the washing basket - not to mention her own clothes. It began to feel a little like Groundhog Day as it was last Monday that she woke me with a similar load of washing. At least this time I was forewarned. However, it’s time she got her act together and found the necessary paperwork that shows she’s entitled to free repairs to her own washing machine. Fortunately her tumble drier still works so I’m not hanging everything up to dry. 

As a result of the laundry-drop I was up and out of bed bright and early. It is always my intention to be up and out of bed bright and early but I must confess to “snoozing” my alarm with amazing regularity. So by 8.30 I had put the first load in the washer and was out running round the village in the drizzle. Not long after I returned home and showered, the drizzle turned into proper rain. Some time later I ventured out to put recycling stuff in various bins and was amazed at how wet and windy it was. On balance, I might prefer the snow. At least, once fallen it has a certain beauty which wet and windy does not have! 

The BBC appears to have made its peace with naughty Gary Lineker. There were calls for him to apologise (for what? for his opinions? For stirring up a load of criticism of both the government and the BBC?) but now it seems the BBC might apologise to him.

In fact, Gary Lineker appears quite unrepentant. Here’s a later tweet:

“A final thought: however difficult the last few days have been, it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away. It’s heartwarming to have seen so much empathy towards their plight from so many of you.”

Because, of course, one consequence of the BBC reaction to his original tweet has been that many more people have been protesting one waybor another about the government’s proposed actions. 

This was posted on social media, passed on to us all by a friend: 

“So, the Daily Mail states it is Gary Lineker's 'sacred' duty to be impartial. Sacred! - My answer to that: To be "impartial" when evil or injustice is happening is to facilitate the perpetrators or - worse - to collaborate with them. - “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.” “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case, he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” ― John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867 / On Liberty

There you go. Nothing new in the world!

It seems that sports commentators going on strike worked. If only all strikes could be as quickly resolved.

There has been much discussion in news programmes about the extortionate cost of childcare in this country and the impact this has on families with young children. In letters the Guardian I came across this:

“While acknowledging that the costs and lack of childcare provision are two major reasons why parents don’t return to work (A sick child means a £700 hole in our budget: that’s the reality of life as a working parent, 8 March), a third is rarely mentioned – the difficulties when parents of young children must leave for work before their children’s schools or nurseries open, or they have a late, overnight or early shift. Before Brexit, provided they had a spare bedroom, such families could employ an au pair.

In exchange for a room in London, full board and lodging, free internet use, free use of laundry machines, all work-related expenses, free weekends and £120 a week, our family’s au pairs undertook 25 hours’ negotiated light work each week. They managed the school and nursery runs and were available on inset days, enabling parents to attend meetings, parents’ evenings and so on before and after school, knowing the children were safe.

For shift workers such as doctors, nurses, transport workers and so on, there was always a responsible adult in the house in their absence. Our au pairs also taught the children their language and became such close friends that two are godparents and holiday visits to them all are the norm.

The government stopped that. No two-year visas unless studying for so many hours that au pairing is impossible. European au pairs feel too unwelcome here now. Exactly who has benefited from this insane, ideologically driven prevention? Not children, not working adults, not the economy. So: who?
Anne Johns
Derby”

Of course, for au pairs to be a solution you need to have a large enough house to provide your au pair with her (they tend, or tended in the past anyway, to be ‘jeunes filles au pair’) own room. This may not be the case for many families. 

Another working mother write about the problem of having twins who need caring for: 

“I am in the fortunate position of having a well-paid career that enabled me to chose to return to work. But I was surprised at how close to unlikely that (ultimately financial) decision was. As a parent of twins, it can be a shock to find that nurseries offer discounts of as little as 5%. We made the decision to pay just a little extra to hire a nanny.”

Again, most women wanting to return to work simply can’t afford to think about a nanny. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

Snowdrifts. Thawing? De-globalisation. Food production. Coming to a halt.

Yesterday afternoon we went out walking under the blue sky and sunshine. There was still a prodigious amount of snow all over the pavements and pathways, although the main road was clear. We turned down Rumbles Lane, one of the back ways into the village centre. The lane was clear as far as the houses went. Once we were past the houses, however, the lane was clearly full of snow drifts, a good five feet high with a narrow pathway cut through at one side. In one deep drift someone had clearly been digging a cave. There was a bit of me that went straight into health and safety mode, thinking of the danger of the pile of snow collapsing on children digging a  cave.

This morning I looked out of the window and decided there was still enough slippery-looking stuff on the pavement to put me off running. So I got dressed in cold weather gear, put on my boots and set off to walk round the village. At a pinch I probably could have run although there were still some treacherous patches. The temperature has gone up considerably. How long will this last?

On the Food Programme on the radio they have been talking about the need for de-globalisation. As we have become increasingly aware of the need to reduce ‘food miles’, in other words the distance that imported food travels, more and more people are preaching the need to get our food from closer to home. Some parts of the USA are very big on ‘on-shoring’ rather than off-shoring food production. And there is pressure to do the same here. Apparently even if we insist on strawberries in January it should be possible to grow them in heated greenhouses in the UK rather than importing them from the south of Spain. Well, I suppose some people MUST have strawberries in January.

One part of problem is that we have grown accustomed to having every food type all year round. We have forgotten how to eat seasonally. Another aspect is that we don’t actually grow enough to feed everyone. Ironically enough it seems that greenhouses are closing because growers can’t afford the energy bills. Orchards are being cut down because supermarkets don’t pay enough for the fruit to make it a viable business for fruit growers. And many farmers have just decided farming doesn’t pay and they have managed to sell off land to housing developers - it’s more profitable for the farmers!! What a mess! And what we really need is a global solution to feeding the world! 

I get the impression that in the UK we are grinding to a halt. There’s the farming situation, junior doctors going on strike, teachers continuing their strikes because the pay offer is no good, sewage is going into our water and even football commentators are refusing to tell us what’s going on in televised matches! Oh boy! 

I have, however, bought locally sourced rhubarb and baking apples. So we now have apple and rhubarb pie for dessert today.

I have come across a new word. Well, it’s new to me but I am told that it has been around for about twenty years. The word is ‘stan’ and it is probably a combination of ‘stalker’ and ‘fan’ - so a very obsessive kind of fan. It can also be used as a verb, as in “I stan … insert celebrity name of choice…”. Who knew? People who ‘stan’ Eurovision want to know why it has gone to Liverpool rather than Manchester, where we have a bigger venue and might have avoided the ticket problem. Not that it bothers me in the least.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The BBC storm. Some statistics. Snow reports.

Well, Gary Lineker’s tweeting has provoked a storm for the BBC. All they needed to do was not over-react and the storm would probably have passed over them and faded away, at least a little. As it is Gary Lineker is  not presenting Match of the Day and neither is anyone else. Other possible presenters have come out in solidarity. Or at least, they perhaps don’t want to be seen to be supporting the anti-immigration bill. Oh boy!

Here are some statistics: The UK granted asylum to 13,000 people in 2021, a fraction of the 60,000 taken in by Germany and much less than half of those admitted by France. Spain, Italy and Greece all took in more than we did. In other words, this is not some unique challenge faced by Britain. Far from it. Asylum claims went up across the entire EU last year, and globally we are scarcely doing the bare minimum. The biggest refugee populations are in Turkey and Colombia; Germany is home to 2.2 million refugees. In Britain, there are 232,000.

Of course, the UK’s chances of sorting some of this out - not all, because it’s really a global problem - would have been greater if we were still members of the EU. As it is Mr Sunak is proposing spending money to have France cooperate with us:

“Spending more money with France to stop small boat crossings is a "sensible investment", Rishi Sunak has said during an Anglo-French summit in Paris.

The PM has met French President Emmanuel Macron and the two men are holding a news conference later.

Speaking ahead of their meeting, Mr Sunak said giving France £63m a year to boost policing on its beaches was yielding benefits for the UK.

He argued it was better than paying to house migrants in the UK.

"I think everyone knows that we are spending £5.5m a day plus on hotels - we would rather not do that, and the best way to stop that is to stop people coming in the first place," he said.” From the BBC..

So it goes. 

We still have snow all over the places. And icicles where it has half melted and dripped off the shed roof, only to freeze as it dripped. Today the sky is blue and the sun is shining at the moment but “light snow” is forecast for later today. We shall see! 

Yesterday boys were throwing snowballs at cars just down the road from our house. They stood, one on either side of the road, pretending to hold a cord or rope across the road, no doubt confusing drivers who had the sun in their eyes and so slowed down. Then the boys pelted them with snowballs. The boys were old enough to know better. One of my neighbours gave them a tongue-lashing, swearing at them and telling them in no uncertain terms what she thought of them and their possibly crash-inducing game. They seemed unfazed by this verbal torrent and just carried on anyway.

We are about to venture out and see what things look now before anything changes. I have been reading again that exercise staves off dementia and other kinds of old age and decrepitude. So we’ll keep on keeping on. Recently as I’ve cycled back from the market on a Wednesday morning I have seen a group of elderly folk (ie probably my own age), mostly ladies, doing some kind of tai chi exercise routine in one of the park areas near the garden centre. They even do it in the drizzle. Good for them!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.