A bit of organised family chaos for Sunday.

 Granddaughter Number Two is home from university for a couple of weeks. This is partly because it’s Easter but also because it’s her birthday this week. We find it hard to believe she’s about to be 21! We haven’t arranged a big party but yesterday we had a big family dinner at my house. I baked a cake, as I do for most of the birthdays. Indeed the last unbirthday cake I made was received with complaints from the smallest member of the family because it wasn’t iced and decorated!

Now, my daughter has a huge car because she often carries large numbers of family members around. As a rule, when they all come to dinner,  she collects Granddaughter Number One from the house where she lives with best friend/housemate and her assorted menagerie of pets. Granddaughter Number One’s chronic anxiety makes her reluctant to use public transport on her own - reluctant? No, a public transport refuser! But the huge car has developed a fault and is being investigated at the garage. Consequently she has been driving her partner’s rather smaller car, which only carries five people, including the driver. At least there is a second option for transport but not really big enoughk. 

Yesterday there was an added complication; Granddaughter Number One’s best friend/housemate was away for the weekend. Granddaughter Number One didn’t want to leave her dog alone at home for hours while she came to dinner. The dog also suffers from anxiety! Could she bring the dog? Was the dog allowed in her mother’s partner’s car? Yes, to both of those. However, there still remained the problem of fitting everyone (and the dog) into the car.

Granddaughter Number Two, birthday girl, volunteered to come on the bus. Hurrah! Grandson Number One (almost 19) could have come on the bus but, for reasons unknown, opted to walk the 6 or 7 miles to our house. Well, it was a beautiful day for a walk, but it meant he arrived late for dinner. We started without him! What I didn’t realise was that he was bringing the family dog. So we ended up with two moderately large dogs for dinner!

In the end all went well. Everyone enjoyed the food, even though Grandson number Two had mostly lukewarm food. We sang happy birthday - a few days early but never mind - most people are working or otherwise busy on the actual birthday - and ate cake. Then a further bit of chaos ensued. How was everyone getting home?

Granddaughter Number Two and Grandson Number One and dog set off to catch one of the rare Sunday evening buses … only to discover that the village centre was closed to traffic and that buses were omitting that section of their normal route. They returned to my house to consult about the best pet-friendly taxi service. My daughter set off with her other offspring - Granddaughter Number on and dog, Granddaughter Number Four and Grandson Number Two (who delayed departure in that way four year olds have of messing around putting his shoes deliberately in the wrong feet. 

I watched Granddaughter Number Two grow quietly more and more angry and frustrated with taxi companies, some of which didn’t operate on Sunday evening, some of which didn’t accept dogs in their cabs (fair enough - if I were a taxi driver I would probably refuse digs too), some of which didn’t have pet-friendly cab available! There was a lot of swearing between polite phone enquiries, Eventually she managed to book one. When it arrived, the driver harrumphed at the presence of the dog! Nobody had told him a dog was involved; that was an extra £2 on the fare! 

But off they went. We finished off the last of the washing up, most of which had been done by my daughter - credit where it’s due - and vacuumed up all traces of dog from the living room rug. 

Order was reestablished. We watched the last episode of the Mexican political thriller we have been following -Ingobernable - and of course it ended with more shooting and a huge cliffhanger. Will they manage to make a third series and will it tie up loose ends. 

Avoiding depressing news reports, and in the absence of Match of the Day for Phil, we found ourselves finishing off the evening with the film “When Harry met Sally” - always worth rewatching, even if it meant I went to bed later than usual.

I set my alarm for later than usual in compensation. It rang. I snoozed it … twice. I listened to the rain on the skylight windows and suddenly it was 9.30. Oops! But so it goes,

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

The digital generation - IT savvy toddlers. Disappearing old technology. And rubbish ideas for films.

I was talking to someone on the bus, as I do, about backward-facing and forward-facing buggies for toddlers. She had been unable to find an off-road buggy (she does a lot of walking on messy bridle paths) with the child facing the buggy pusher, and so ends up leaning round the hood to talk to her grandson. We agreed on the importance of talking to children when you take them out for walks, and on the dangers of the common practice of giving a toddler a phone to play with in the buggy.

Now, Séamas O’Reilly writes about his children in the Guardian at the weekend, revealing their little lives and his responses to their actions. Today he began with this:

“My son likes YouTube. A lot. Most of the videos he watches are inoffensive, some are excellent. We’ve sat together riveted watching videos on everything from craft-making and sea-life to web-skills and basic coding.

His reading and maths comprehension have been demonstrably enhanced by ingeniously constructed tutorials on spelling and multiplication. I have a lot of time, too, for some of his favourite Minecraft and Lego tutorials, but for every lucid and witty piece of programming, there are several thousand which scream and blare hot nonsense directly into his brain.

I’m sceptical about screen-time panic, and the idea that all our children are addicted to digital heroin, but I must admit that it is the latter genre of videos he loves best. I’m forced to wonder about the narcotic effect all those screeched voices and seizure-inducing hyper-edits are having on his brain because it’s irrefutably true: he’s watching a type of programming that simply did not exist when I was a child.”

I agree with most of what he says. Grandson Number Two, now aged 4, used to want to watch Monster Trucks when he was smaller. Now he prefers things with stories and facts. Octonauts is a firm favourite. This is, I think, the truly digital generation, IT savvy from an early age. After all, they’re growing up with it. 

Grandson Number Two has just discovered DVDs. Apparently they no longer have a DVD player at their house. If they want to watch a film, they download it. So we can’t lend them DVDs of classic films. Some time ago my brother-in-law gave the smallest grandchildren a few DVDs, Octonauts and other such stuff. My daughter finally brought them here - she’s been doing a bit of de-cluttering - so that the children could watch them at my house. He quickly learnt that it is possible to select episodes and, indeed, to repeat favourite episodes. But he has not yet mastered the remote control, for which we probably should be thankful

The other day, having watched his favourite episode, Octonauts and the Colossal Squid, he asked his mother to repeat it for him. She selected the wrong episode, much to his annoyance, and he set about explaining how to choose the right one. She misunderstood and tried adjusting the position of the screen. A moment of frustration ensued, on both sides, until they went back to the main menu and he explained clearly that she needed to move the selection arrow to the right! Oh, boy!  And my daughter is extremely tech savvy but perhaps not with “old” technology.

Here’s something else on what people (not toddlers this time) watch. Actress Gillian Anderson says she is cast as clever women because her “resting face” always looks as though she is thinking deeply. Okay! In her latest role it seems is going to be playing British journalist Emily Maitlis, in Scoop, a film about the process of securing her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. This was the interview in which he discussed his friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his inability to sweat, and the Woking branch of Pizza Express, and, in 50 fast minutes, managed to do more damage to the royal family than five seasons of The Crown. Why on earth, I ask myself, would anyone want to watch a film about that? The mind boggles!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some things about women.,

 It might be officially spring but nobody seems to have told the weather. I ran through hailstones this morning. Between showers we have blue sky and sunshine but unless you are sheltered from the wind it still feels very cold. Okay, not midwinter cold but still almost-April cold! 

One of the articles I read online this morning was about MP Diana Johnson, who chairs the home affairs select committee, and her proposal to the houses of parliament to abolish the criminal offence associated with a woman ending her own pregnancy. The legal situation dares back to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which outlawed terminations and is still used to prosecute women today. Which is odd because I remember reading some time ago that it was quite common for women from wealthy families using early stage abortion as a way of controlling their fertility. Things changed in 1967 - yes, 100+ years later - when abortion became legal under certain circumstances but still not a “right”. And in England and Wales it is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Clinics have been investigated by the police. Women have been arrested and prosecuted, usually without cause, at a very traumatic time in their lives. Diana Jahnson wants to change things, to decriminalise it. Others oppose this idea, some completely, others wanting to keep the illegal status but to prevent women getting a criminal record as a result. 

Oh boy! The debate about women’s bodies goes on. 

I must say that when I saw the headline “Senior Labour figures seeking to water down plans to decriminalise abortion”, I found myself thinking this was another case of Labour not wanting to appear too left wing and socialist.

Today must be a day for me noticing articles about women. Here’s a link to an article about a talk given by a PhD student as part of the Cambridge Festival. Alexandra Zhimova has been researching poerceptions of women’s appearance.”Many of the ideas that govern how we perceive women’s appearance today have their roots in the middle ages,” she maintains. It all goes back to religion to some extent, of course. It’s strange how many religions feel the need to control women and how they look and behave. So often it seems that if a woman makes herself look attractive she does so to provoke men. Thus she needs to cover her hair, wear no makeup or jewellery, dress in sombre colours. I think most of us dress up to please ourselves above all! Perhaps the men need to learn to control themselves. 

Then there is this article about the difficulty women still have convincing courts that mental abuse is as harmful as physical abuse. Apparently a frequent question or justification for ruling against the complainant is , “But he didn’t hit you, did he?” This in 2024.

And finally, there’s Kate Middleton, as she will undoubtedly be forever known, and her revelation that she has cancer and is having chemotherapy. It’s not a fate you would wish on anyone. Various cancer charities are declaring that this will perhaps help others deal with their own illness. Probably so. 

And maybe now the conspiracy theorists will stop speculating on her absence from the public eye. On the whole she and William have done quite a good job of keeping their private life private. There really is no reason why we should know their intimate secrets but it seems to be part of the life of almost anyone in the public eye. A bit of them becomes public property. 

It’s very harder nowadays to remain private. Equipped with our smart phones we are all amateur paparazzi. In the midst of the attack on the concert hall in Moscow yesterday people were still getting their phones out and filming it! But I find myself thinking of another Princess of Wales, “hounded” by the press. There’s a part of me that has long maintained, and still does, that if Diana and her driver had driven away from the press, quickly yes, but calmly, not at the breakneck, racing through the streets of Paris as if in a thrilling film, then the crash in that tunnel might not have taken place and she might still be alive today.

But then, who am I to speculate on such things. I’ve never been the object of media scrutiny. The most that seems to happen is that someone sees my comment on a Facebook post and decides to request me as a “friend”. Esay to ignore.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Things children learn at school! Apostrophes! Equality! The price of food!

It’s been a cold day … mostly. However, when the sun came out, if you were in a sheltered spot, you could convince yourself that spring has really started. 

After I came back from my run, in the cold wind, this morning my daughter phoned me, mainly to update me on what she’s been up to. She and her partner had just been to an assembly at the school Granddaughter Number Four attend. She had been awarded a certificate for memorising all the grammatical terms a Year 2 child should know and for consistently applying them correctly. I’ve no idea what the grammatical terms are that she needs to know. However, I do know that it seems odd to me that a 7 year old needs to “know” grammatical terms and rules at all. It will be interesting to see if this generation who have been asked to memorise all these rules will be any better at using apostrophes correctly in the long run. Will they avoid putting up shop signs like this one?

                                      HOWARDS FURNITURE

                        BED’S     CHAIR’S     TABLE’S     SOFA’S

Now, here’s a link to an article about women and equality, especially in academia. Here are some facts and figures:

1874 - the first two women were allowed to sit finals at Newnham College, Cambridge, in what was then called moral sciences.but they weren’t given a degree.

1948  - Cambridge University began formally awarding degrees to women.

1988 the last all-male college, Magdalene, grudgingly voted to admit women.

2004 (approx) - the then Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith – not one of nature’s more radical progressives – rejected honorary membership of the Carlton Club on the grounds that the Conservatives’ oldest gentlemen’s club denied full membership rights to female MPs. Good for IDS!

Slow progress! 

And here’s a link to an article about the price of vegetables in Gaza. We should not complain about the cost of food in our UK supermarkets after reading that! Someone is inevitably making money out of a bad situation. Of course, some people have used up their savings and have no money to buy what little food is on sale. And food aid is still not getting through. Indeed, aid distribution is hampered by attacks! 

"Hani Mahmoud, reporting for Al Jazeera from Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, has told the news network that there have been more deaths at the Kuwaiti roundabout during aid distribution. He writes:

Another aid tragedy took place in the early hours of last night at the Kuwait Roundabout. Twenty-four people were killed and we were told there are still more injured people on the roads. The attack destroyed not only the aid trucks and the people gathering but also the vicinity, including public facilities.

This is not the first time we have seen deliberate and direct attacks on humanitarian aid trucks and people gathering in large groups around them, given the fact that famine is spreading widely in northern part of Gaza."

A friend posted that yesterday.

Of course, if things were fairly organised they would not need to depend on food aid. It’s doubly demeaning that Palestinians not only are prevented growing their own food but have to rely on aid package - packages inspected and sometimes (often) rejected by Israeli forces. Another way of removing people’s dignity!

The world is seriously out of order. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone! 

World Poetry Day. The importance of “days”. Blossom. Trees. And street art.

 It seems that today is World Poetry Day! Founded by UNESCO in 1999, on the occasion of its 30th General Conference held in Paris to “give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.” Poets, both past and present, are honored, and oral traditions of reciting poetry are revived. Reading, writing, and teaching poetry are encouraged, and converged with other mediums of expression such as music, dance, painting, and more. 

There you go. 

Another “day”. 

Is there, I wonder, a “day” for every day of the year? I suppose that to some extent there is; after all every day is somebody’s birthday. If your birthday falls on a “day” is the importance of your birthday somehow overshadowed?  Not unless you allow that to happen. Personally I never suffered unduly for sharing my birthday with Robert Burns. It must be a lot more troublesome to have your birthday coincide with Christmas, especially when you are a child. Ideally we should all have our birthdays mid-year to give people time to think up interesting things to give us as presents. 

Anyway, today is World Poetry Day and Simon Armitage has published a new collection of poems, all about spring and blossom. He’s been going round looking at blossom in National Trust Places. His new collection, and an EP of some of the poems as songs, is called Blossomise. Here’s an excerpt.

Profusion

We plucked a poem
out of a book,
scissored it off
while the words and letters
still popped,
while the lines and stanzas
curtsied and blushed.

We dried and pressed it
between the years,
between cherry leaves.
That makes no sense.
Then folded and folded it,
posted it into a hole
in a stone-fruit tree.

It was an old-style,
home-style poem.
Meaning what?
Meaning blossom as light,
blossom as hope
after winter’s tunnel,
after the narrow dark.

The plan was to reignite
the living flame
if the flame went out.
Hey presto, in April
the poem budded and bloomed
and we read it, chanted it,
knew it by heart.

But it blossomed again
in July, then again
in December, drunk
on meltwater, drugged
with the tepid milk
of the winter sun.
What had we done?

It must be odd, though, being Poet Laureate, and being expected to produce poems to order. Does he have a separate collection of poems that just come as inspiration, needing work but not made to measure for a particular occasion? 

I suppose artists of all genres must have that kind of dichotomy. Painters have long had to rely on commissions to keep themselves going, especially as their works often only gain value after the artist has died. Which brings me to Banky and his latest work, a person spraying green paint on a wall behind a severely pollarded cherry blossom tree. A comment on what local authorities do to urban trees, it gives the impression of the tree back in leaf. 

Local residents have wondered if their rents will go up now that there is a Banksy in their street.  

The local authority put railings around the mural to protect it but already someone has been and sprayed white paint on it. I wonder why.

As regards the tree, there is a strong possibility that it will regrow. A couple of trees on our road were severely pollarded some time ago, looking for a while like huge catapults, the kind that the Bash Street Kids brandished. Last spring they started to grow new shoots and before long their catapult shape was hidden. There is hope for Banksy’s urban tree. 

We need trees in our cities. .

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Spring equinox - but still raining. Market. Bread and the snobbery that accompanies it.

Today is the spring equinox, one of the two days in the year when the day and the night are of equal length. From now until midsummer the days will keep on getting noticeably longer. Not that this will make it rain any less than it has been doing around here for what seems likes months and months. I was going to say it wouldn’t make any difference to the weather, but in fact when the sun breaks through the cloud cover you can feel the extra warmth that wasn’t there, for example, in the January sun. 

In fact, although I complain about the rain, over the last week or so we have had a fair few days when it has brightened up considerably after a very poor start. Maybe today will do the same. Certainly it began with rain. Phil had checked my bike for me, giving it the once-over to be sure the tyres were pumped up and the brakes working. He had moved it closer to the back door to help me on my way this morning. And then I had taken one look at the weather and decided not to cycle after all. 

So I walked to the market, and what a depleted market it was. The flower stalls were there to brighten up the day but Jenny Biscuit, the cheese and biscuit seller had not set up her stall (she finds it difficult to do so in wet weather) and neither had the chap who sells shoes and slippers and, incongruously, vitamin supplements. He likes to talk to me about his progress in learning Spanish, so maybe I will refer to him as Pepe Zapato from now on. I bought fish from the so far unnamed fishman and various fruit and veg from Michael Fruit’n’Veg and moved on to the Italian frutivendolo (greengrocery).

There I bought, among other things, a small white bread roll, continental style. Which brings me to “Oh!Those Vigo breakfasts!”, which is what my daughter says occasionally when she waxes nostalgic about the years when we lived on and off in Galicia and she and the children would come and visit us. Wherever we rented a flat (several different places) I would set about discovering which bakery sold the best bread and would go out, accompanied by various children when they were with us, and buy freshly baked bread for breakfast.

I like bread. Not in enormous amounts but a slice of good bread and an apple make a very good snack. This article goes on about different types and, in particular, different prices of bread, from 45 pence for a small sliced white loaf at the supermarket or even your local corner shop to £5 for a sourdough loaf from what the writer refers to as “bougie” bakeries. 

I was a little confused as “bougie” is the French for candle, whereas this was clearly making a reference to “bourgeois”. So I did a little research. Of course, as I expected, it’s a mispronunciation, or at least it began as a mispronunciation,  of “bourgeois”. And some people spell it, if they spell it all, as “boujee”. Here’s a bit of what I found: 

“When people use the word now, they are talking less about class struggle and more about middle-class people who are obsessed with looking wealthy and chic, rather than a group of people destroying society.” 

And then there’s this, about the difference between “bougie” and “boujee”:

“According to Urban Dictionary, bougie means people who are pretending to be rich or high class when they really aren't or don't realize they aren't. On the other hand, boujee means the actual high class and elite, the ones with swag.”

Who knew? Who really cares?

The status thing about bread is amusing. As a child I read “Heidi” - I was the kind of child who read all those classics, “Heidi”, “Black Beauty”, “Alice in Wonderland”, moving on to “Jane Eyre” and “Withering Heights”. I was quite intrigued by the fact that Heidi only tasted white bread when she went to be a companion to Klara, the poor little rich girl who was so unwell. White bread was a luxury, which intrigued me because in our house we had both white and brown bread but were encouraged to eat brown (wholemeal) as it was “better” for you. Heidi and her grandfather and her friend Peter’s grandmother ate “black bread”. It was a treat for the grandmother to eat white bread rolls, softer and sweeter, when Klara went to spend time in the mountains with Heidi and recovered her health. 

There you go. It’s a “bougie” thing.

As regards black bread, a German friend of mine used to bring back suitcases full of it from her visits to Hamburg and store it in her freezer here, eking it out until her next visit. We all have a measure of nostalgia for the things we ate as children. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!