April and poets. Artists and writers in conversation, Two Michaels’ thoughts and opinions.

 “April is the cruellest month”, said T.S. Eliot in “The Wasteland”. So far this year, however, it has been a very nice, sunny, blue-sky month. Mind you, it’s only the 2nd of April, so we have a way to go yet. Of course, the neighbours and I have been doing that North of England thing, washing everything that is not folded up and put away. The gardens are full of washing blowing dry in the wind and being warmed by the sun. It’s forecast to remain bright and sunny for the next few days too! 

Last night we caught the tail end of a programme about the artist David Hockney. He was being interviews by the writer and presenter Melvyn Bragg, two old gents well into their eighties (David Hockney was born in 1937 and Melvyn Bragg in 1939) having a conversation about the artist’s life, still full of ideas and enthusiasm. Two old gents each with a distinctive and easily recognisable way of speaking! David Hockney now lives and still paints in Normandy, mostly doing landscapes of his property there, especially now that he feels he “knows” his trees properly. He gets up and paints for hours every day - an example to us all. 

It was David Hockney who inspired me to “play” with he drawing programme on my iPad. Oh, to be able to produce the kind of works that created!

Now, here are some thoughts from two Michaels. First there is Michael Foot:

“We are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer “To hell with them!” The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.”

Maybe today’s leaders need to look back at the likes of Michael Foot.

The second is Michael Rosen:

“Here's a thought: imagine all the alleged mistakes or even actual mistakes the non-parliamentary left in this country has been accused of making or actually making over the last 25 years. Call to mind the thousands of miles of newspaper print and the thousands of hours of broadcast time devoted to saying what terrible mistakes these are. Now compare these alleged or real mistakes with the death and destruction our leaders have brought through bombs and guns, either directly or indirectly. On the one side, words, demos, articles, social media posts. On the other the most ingenious and up to date ways of destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings and killing hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people.  

I imagine a Martian coming to Earth and hearing about this mis-match between the two sides and the difference between how the two-sides are regarded in the public arena. On one side there are people with banners in all sorts of outfits and looks. On the other are people in beautiful suits and uniforms, feted in TV studios, but, as the Martian notices, their hands are bloody. 'Why's that?' the Martian asks. 'Oh, don't worry about that?' say the suited and uniformed people. 'Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that.'”

We should listen to him as well!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Reading or not reading the news. Artists. The madness of the world.

 I complain about losing an hour’s sleep when we put the clocks forward, as we did at the weekend, but I have to confess that I like having longer afternoons and lighter early evenings. Persuading myself to leave my warm bed in the morning remains a slight problem. The trouble with lingering in bed before getting up and going for a run means that by the time I have showered and we have had breakfast, half the morning has slipped away.

We have been having some nice mornings, however, even if the cloud moves in later. Today we have blue sky and sunshine. There’s a bit of a breeze and the air is still cold but if you find a sheltered spot to stand in the sunshine, it’s very pleasant and you can make believe that summer might arrive eventually. 

Over breakfast I skim the headlines in the newspapers online. Sometimes you have to go on and read the article as headlines can be misleading, with words chosen for dramatic effect. According to the head of BBC news, there is a “growing trend of news avoidance”. “I used to have the news on the TV every morning for an hour or so as I got the children ready for school and completed my household tasks,” said one person they spoke to. “Now it has literally been switched off and unplugged. I can’t cope with it any more. It’s just too much and there’s nothing I can do about it”. There are even columnists such as Eva Wiseman more or less advising us to avoid the news if we want to stay sane. Actually, she’s mostly advising turning off those annoying news alerts that pop up far too often on your mobile phone, the senders fully aware how difficult it is to resit looking when your phone goes piiing!.

As this article points out, news producers are concerned about falling audiences. People are turning away from established media news outlets. Some of that may be because it’s hard to find an unbiased source. So a lot of people get their news off social media. That too is biased, of course. You end up receiving material that is selected to match what AI perceives as your area of interest. And of course, I too get information from social media, but I try to keep things balanced. 

As I skim headlines and dip into articles, I bookmark things of interest and occasionally copy the odd paragraph, intending to come back to it later. In such cases, I sometimes forget what the original whole article was all about. Here’s an example:

“Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction. The Italian conceptual artist has been provoking and delighting audiences in equal measure since the 1990s. Cattelan has a new show, Bones, opening at the Gagosian in London in April and, to run alongside this, a set of posters will appear in Tube stations. For these, Cattelan has used the tropes of classic Greek myths to portray the trials of modern life. So next time you’re on the central line, look out for Sisyphus with a shopping trolley or Atlas dressed for the 9-5 with the weight of the world on his back.”

It was the image of Sisyphus with a shopping trolley that led to my saving that paragraph. 

Reading the introductory sentence, “Maurizio Cattelan will need no introduction”, had me googling him, as I had no idea who he was. It turns out he’s the artist who duct-taped a fresh banana to a wall as part of an exhibition in 2019. He called it Comedian and it sold for $6.2 million in 2024. Not bad for a self-taught artist. 

I have to say I find the Sisyphus picture more interesting than the banana. 

In the wider world, and in the world closer to home, craziness continues. April is being dubbed “Awful April” because of price rises. Medics and journalists are being targeted by the IDF. The Met police are breaking into Quaker meeting houses and arresting young people for discussing the state of things. And Palestinian teenagers arrested without charge are dying in Israeli prisons.

That’s why people avoid reading the news. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Albatrosses. Mice. Tinkering with nature. Dating vocabulary in the modern age.

 I’ve been reading stuff about albatrosses.

I only ever knew about albatrosses from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which we studied at school. All I gathered from that was that it could be a bird of ill omen and that to kill one brought dreadful bad luck down on the albatross-slayer. I gathered that it was quite a large bird, but I had no idea of how large. After all, you don‘t tend to see many albatrosses when you walk along Southport beach (I grew up in Southport) or when you stroll on the hills and moors of Saddleworth (where we have lived for more years than I ever lived in Southport). I only knew they were definitely larger than the average seagull (which you do see in both Southport and Saddleworth) - in fact a seagull itself is surprisingly large. 

Then, the last time my daughter and I travelled down south to visit my son, we took a family trip into London to visit The Natural History Museum. The main attraction was, of course, the dinosaur exhibition but once we had endured the crush of that very popular feature, we went to look at other exhibits. And there it was: an albatross, a huge great thing. They stand at over 4 feet tall and have a wingspan of 10 feet or more - i suppose you need that wingspan if you’re going to soar over the ocean. 

Which brings me to the power of mice, very small creatures. Half of the world’s wandering albatrosses breed on Marion Island, some 1,180 miles south-east of Cape Town, and on neighbouring Prince Edward Island. But Marion Island is infested with mice, it seems, accidentally introduced into the island by sailors in the 19th century. Now it seems mice are attacking albatross chicks, literally eating them alive! En masse the tiny creatures are lethal; they are attacking other birdlife on the island as well. 

The mouse problem is not new. Back in 1949 they released 5 unneutered cats onto the island, with the idea that would eat all the mice, or at least control the mouse population within reasonable bounds. Unfortunately the cats found it easier to hunt the native seabirds and didn’t understand their brief to keep the mouse population down. And cats, of course, reproduce. By the 1970s there were 2000 feral cats. The solution had become a problem in itself. They had to eradicate the cats. And now they plan to eradicate the mice by dropping poisoned bait. They need to get rid of all of them if they miss one breeding pair the problem will be back in no time at all. 

The mice are a supreme example of the power of apparently weak creatures when they work together! And these were fearless. Biologists taking photos of the attacks on chicks found that the mice just scrambled over them and their equipment, which must have been a nasty experience in itself. But at least the photographers had hands to bat the mice off them; young albatross chicks, still unable to fly, could not do that.

And so humans, who unintentionally disturbed things by bringing mice to the island in the first place, plan to step in again and try to solve the problem. It is to be hoped that this tinkering with nature does not create yet another problem! What happens, for example, if the birds start to eat poisoned mice?

Now, I have some new vocabulary:

Heteropessimism is a term coined in 2019 I understand, to describe women’s feelings of disillusionment with the male of the species. Heteropessimists, I read, are giving up looking for boyfriends on dating sites and are concentrating on other aspects of their lives.

Boysober is the term used for opting not to bother with boyfriends and dating and sex and looking for a life partner and so on. 

Maybe it’s time to go back to just letting “romance” happen, getting to know someone in the old-fashioned way, maybe beginning to “go out together, again in the old-fashioned way, and letting the relationship develop of its pwn accord, rather than specifically looking for a particular kind of potential partner on an internet site, 

Anyway, here is a link to an article about heteropessimism. And here is link to an article about ‘going boysober”.

And finally, here is a link to an article about “inheritance-dating”, a trend to choose a partner, a possible life partner, because they happen to own a house or flat already, an important consideration in the modern world. 

 I am rather glad to be a baby-boomer!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some thoughts about time, and “pranks” and padel.

 The clocks went forward an hour overnight. It always feels vaguely as though an hour has been stolen from me when the clocks move forward, rather than having a bonus hour when they move back. In future I shall refer to this operation as “procrastination”, which we all know is the thief of time.  

On the subject of thieves, Granddaughter Number One lost her glasses the other day, or rather the other night. They disappeared from her bedroom overnight. Eventually she found them … in her kitten’s “bed”, not really a bed but a sort of “room” at the top of one of those climbing towers that cat-lovers buy for their pets. Together with the glasses she found several pairs of socks and one pair of knickers, stolen from the clothes drier. The kitten was making a nest for herself. Quite what purpose the glasses served in such an arrangement remains a mystery. 

And on the subject of time, it seems that some time back in the 1930s students removed the hands from the clock of Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, and replaced them with cardboard ones, which according to the granddaughter of one the perpetrators, worked well until it rained. The cardboard hands were long ago replaced with proper metal ones but now the original hour hand has been returned to the college. The minutes hand is still missing. The aforementioned granddaughter inherited the hour hand from the perpetrator, who died, aged 83, in 1999. So a quarter of century since then the granddaughter, who must be getting on years, has decided to return the hour hand. She must have been having a clear-out and thought it was time to send it back to where it belonged.

Such student “pranks” sound like the kind of thing you might read about in stories of yesteryear. Do students still indulge in such behaviour? I wonder. When we were in our late teens, one fairly regular “prank” perpetrated by young men on their way home from the pub was “gate lifting”. Gates, usually fairly solid wooden gates were removed from their hinges and hung from a nearby lamppost … just for fun, or maybe to upset a cantankerous older neighbour. Modern street-lamps are far too tall for such antics but I wonder if people still steal traffic cones and leave them in preposterous places. Somehow such activities seem rather less obnoxious than sending someone a nasty text message: more like an innocent trick!

I saw a notice somewhere recently who read as follows: 

The biggest padel facility in the North of England featuring covered and open-air courts has arrived in Greater Manchester 🎾

A few weeks previously I had seen something going on In Manchester, between Selfridges and one of the entrances to the Arndale Centre, in what I assume is Exchange Square as that is the name of the tram stop. A court, rather like a tennis court was set up and passersby were invited to try a new racket sport: padel. Now, some 15 years ago, when we were arranging to rent a flat in Vigo, Galicia, the landlady pointed out to us that she was leaving her son’s padel rackets in the flat and that we should feel free to use them in the padel court in the gardens of the block of flats. An excellent form of exercise, she assured us. That was the first time we had heard of the sport. We never made us of the rackets. But we did use the swimming pool! 

And here it is in Greater Manchester!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Immigration. Deportation. Employment. And fear of spiders and other monsters.

 One of the problems with expelling and deporting large numbers of immigrants is that suddenly there is nobody to do the jobs, often menial and poorly paid, that those same immigrants formerly did. In the UK market gardeners, soft fruit growers, discovered when suddenly there were no foreign students available to do the seasonal work that British folk didn’t want to pick fruit. They seem to be having the same problem in Florida, with a shortage of people wanting to wait tables and do cleaning work or agricultural work. 

Governor Ron DeSantis suggests that they should change the laws regarding child labour and allow 14 year old to work nights if necessary. “What’s wrong with expecting our young people to be working part-time now? That’s how it used to be when I was growing up.”

Opponents to this relaxation point out: “It’s important to remind people that teens can work. They can get that experience and some extra money if they need it. But there have to be protections in place to protect our most vulnerable, and if we pass this that’s absolutely not going to happen.”

There’s basically nothing wrong with teenagers working to earn a bit of money and even incidentally gain a few life-skills along the way. When I was 14 I used to babysit for a number of near neighbours. When I was a bit older I worked part-time in a shoe shop in the town centre. But it’s not the same as doing a full shift in then tourist or agriculture industry. 

Here’s a link to an article about the Florida situation.

Even the pope has spoken out against the USA’s treatment of migrants. He has issued a rebuke of Donald Trump's mass deportation plan, stating that it removes the migrants of their inherent dignity as people and "will end badly."

Reminding them about Christian virtues and values, the pope wrote in a letter to US Bishops: “all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa,".

Vice-President Vance, baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church in 2019, interprets those values in his own way: 

"As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens," Vance told Fox News. "That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world."

There you go. Maybe you just have to be the right kind of Christian!

Our youngest granddaughter has been infected with her older siblings’ dislike, nay, FEAR, of spiders to the extent that she sits cross-legged on her chair at the dinner table. This is because someone told her recently that there was a spider under the table and now she doesn’t want to put her feet on the floor … just in case! No amount of reassuring her that the floor is swept and mopped makes any difference. In her Digested Week in today’s Guardian Emma Brockes writes about the fear of bogeymen and the like: 

“I haven’t had to sleep with the hall light on since the Blair Witch Project came out in 1999 – oh man, that was a bad one because my flatmate was away that weekend and after seeing the film, I felt the dank presence of something watching me from the corner of my room. This week a babysitter in Kansas tried to vanquish a child’s fear of monsters under the bed by showing them there was nothing there. Unfortunately, in this case a 27-year old man called Martin Villalobos Jr was hiding under the bed. After a scuffle that knocked over the child, he was arrested and charged with aggravated battery and child endangerment. A mere externalisation of what, at the moment, we know to be true: the monsters are real.”

Good grief! 

Hopefully Granddaughter Number Four will grow out of her fear of spiders, or at least learn to keep it under control. I won’t tell her about the Kansas babysitting incident!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Rain. Reining in children. The strange immorality of modern warfare.

 For the first time in a good while I was woken in the night by heavy rain on the roof. I considered staying in bed instead of running but by the time my alarm was ringing (and being snoozed) the rain had stopped. One of my nodding acquaintances on the newly puddly footpath through the trees commented that we needed some rain. Maybe so but personally I need some more sunny days. 

I skim-read an article by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, another one about how hard life is for new mothers, how much pressure there is to  meet certain standards - in this case: “New mums are being ‘strongly encouraged’ to take regular exercise and get more sleep. Hahahaha”. Is it really more difficult than it used to be or are today’s new mothers less resilient? 

I suppose she has to go on about the problems as she is writing a column about life with small children. She always ends with a “What’s working” and “what’s not” section. Today’s positive comments was about her three-year-old’s enjoyment of the trampoline. This is the negative one:

“What’s not
Several good friends are dealing with toddlers who run off, sometimes towards traffic. Reins are largely frowned upon by this generation of parents (one friend even received judgmental comments for using them in the vicinity of actual lions while at a safari park), but it got me thinking how they did perform quite an important safety function. Is it time to rehabilitate them, or at least be a bit more understanding of one another?”

I have come across a number of “runaway” toddlers in my time. My Spanish nephew, now at least 30 years old, used to run off in the supermarket, which was fine in their local supermarket back in Spain, where everyone knew who he belonged to. During visits to the UK it was more of a problem if he ran off in the middle of Tesco, for example! He needed reins. Living in Spain, I knew one who was given free rein,as it were, to run around in cafe areas, apart from the rooftop cafe by the docks in Vigo. This cafe had automatic doors which opened at the approach of even the smallest pedestrian.

Personally I felt the need for reins for 6-year-olds when Grandson Number One was that age. i used to collect him and his sister from school and catch a bus to their house. If something annoyed him he would set off at a run, impervious to his surroundings. I would have to drop everything, shout to his 8 year old sister to look after our belongings, and set off in hot pursuit. He definitely needed reins! 

In the violent wider world, Israel has bombed Beirut again today, for the first time since a ceasefire with Hezbollah was signed in November. Before the bombing, Israeli’s military issued an evacuation order and warned it would attack a building in Dahiyeh. A spokesperson posted a map on X, with a building marked in red and warned residents to flee more than 300 metres away, reminiscent of the daily maps the Israeli military would issue before bombings during the its war with Hezbollah.

What about people who don’t follow 'social media? Well, apparently guns were fired into the air to alert those who hadn’t seen the warnings on social media. It seems to be a fact of modern life that “everyone” follows social media and those who don’t have younger relatives who do and who can let them know stuff they need to know. What a strange world?

Even stranger is modern warfare that operates on the lines of “we know there is an ‘enemy’ activist in a certain building, so we’ll target that building; if innocent parties get killed in the process, too bad”. But then, I suppose that for those sending the rockets and bombs there is no such thing as innocent parties. 

Maybe war was more moral (was it ever moral?) when armies used to line up at opposite ends of a field and then charged each other at a given signal! 

The world continues to be rather mad. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone?

On the buses. Stockpiling for emergencies!

 I seem to have spent most of today on buses. Well, that’s not strictly true. I got up reasonably early, after snoozing the alarm at least twice, and did my usual run round the village. A quick shower, some breakfast, a bit of tidying up  and suddenly it was time to set off for the bus to the dentist’s. My appointment was for 1.30 but I was planning to catch an early bus in the hope that, arriving there earlier than scheduled, I might manage to be sneaked in ahead of my allotted time. 

Manchester’s Bee Network buses were obviously against me!

The bus I aimed for never showed up. Or maybe it went very early, but I was at the bus stop almost 10 minutes before the timetabled time. If ir went at all it must have gone about 15 minutes early as I did not see a bus disappearing into the wide blue yonder as I approached the crossroads. And we have a clear sight of the crossroads as we approach. So, no, I reckon they just missed that bus out, which they sometimes do if they don’t have an available driver on that route. And to judge by the number of notices offering work driving buses that may well be the case. 

So my careful planning was all to no avail. I arrived at the clinic with a few minutes to spare, saw my dentist, and calculated which bus to catch to reach the smallest grandchildren’s school in time for the regular Thursday pick-up. Buses from my dentist’s to Oldham town centre are advertised as being every minutes. Going in the opposite direction I should say they were much more frequent, but I had to wait 15 minutes. 

At the bus station, in contrast, I was able to hop immediately onto a bus heading towards Greenfield, where the school is situated, or at least to Greenfield railway station, arriving there with just the right amount of time to walk down the main road to the school at the ether end of the village. Interestingly, the bus I caught from Oldham had a display, and an annoying voice, telling you which stop was coming up next. As the bus approached the Green Station stop, the screen gave information about which trains and at which times were available today from the railway station. What a good idea! All buses should do such things.

I collected the children and we eventually caught what was to be my final bus of the day. Arriving at our designated stop at the crossroads, we had a small delay, almost a rebellion, as the small boy determinedly tried to catch a ladybird which was climbing up the window inside the bus. Five-year-olds have no sense of urgency! We alighted in the end, apologising to the driver and the other passengers but leaving the ladybird behind. 

In compensation I let him capture a woodlouse from the front garden and put it into s jar for observation. I was a little concerned that he might drop the thing and lose it in my living room but fortunately this did not happen. How is it that a child who can confidently handle woodlice, centipedes, worms and caterpillars makes a great fuss if there is a spider within close range?

So that was today! Oh, and Granddaughter Number One, all alone in her house as her housemate has gone away on holiday, came for a family tea, our regular Thursday scrambled eggs and a bit of salad before my daughter gives her father a lift to chess club with his various bits of equipment. 

So here I am, writing an evening blogpost!

It seems that European Commission is trying tonpersuade people to be survivalists. According to this article, people in the EU are being advised to stockpile enough food, water and essentials for 72 hours as part of a European strategy that aims to increase readiness for catastrophic floods and fires, pandemics and military attacks. Because we have not been fighting each other we have grown complacent but natural disasters such as the flooding that devastated part of Spain and fires which caused major disruptionnin Greece apparently show that need to be prepared. Quite how having a stockpile will help if you are forced to evacuate your home remains a small problem. 

It’s not just natural disaster. We are also warned of danger from military attack. I assume this is a bit of reinforcement for the story doing the rounds that Russia wants to attack some, if not all, of the countries of Europe. As Mr Trump talks about taking over Greenland, by military means if necessary, maybe it’s the USA we need to watch out for. 

In the meantime, I have a couple of bottles of water, supplied by our daughter some time ago, maybe even years ago, when the water was cut off because of a supply problem. Is years-old bottled water still even drinkable? And we have a few tins of baked beans. Hardly a good survivalist stockpile. We might have to make use of the various Tupperware containers of home-made soup from the freezer. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!