Writing

 

Phoebe is asleep upstairs. She is five years and one month old. All Sheffield schools are currently on their half term holidays.

Late this afternoon, she showed keen interest in what Grandma was doing on her laptop. In her capacity as secretary of the local Women's Institute, Grandma was writing up some minutes. Phoebe began to help and under close supervision did a line or two of typing.

I invited her into the study to practise her growing writing skills on my desktop computer. I brought up a fresh "Word" page and we agreed that she would make a short Christmas wishlist.

Though I guided her closely, I did not actually touch the keyboard. It was all her own work. This was the very first piece of writing that she has ever done with the aid of a computer keyboard.

When it was done, I turned our printer on and explained to her what she needed to do to create a print off of her work.

Very soon the page was churned out and I showed it to her. With wide eyes, she asked, "How did it do that?" It was a moment of revelation.

As writers, we all have to start somewhere and it seemed to me that those few lines will be the first of thousands to come during the course of her life. It's a significant step forward from slowly writing her own name with a pencil.

The other day I was quite surprised when she used the words "camouflage" and "nocturnal" perfectly correctly. Again her little face lit up when I praised her about this.

An hour ago, I read her a bedtime story as she settled down for the night. It was, "There's No Such Thing As Monsters" by Steve Smallman and Caroline Pedler. I don't know about you but I am not totally sure about the premise of that story. However, at five years and one month old you don't need to learn about the real monsters of present times and history. Not yet anyway. That can wait.

Jesse

"Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up" - Jesse Jackson

⦿

Jesse Jackson shared my birthday so, ridiculously perhaps, I felt something of a bond with him. He knew Martin Luther King Junior well and carried on his work after the great man's assassination. It would have been easier for Jesse Jackson to live a quiet life, away from the media and the hurly burly of current affairs and politics but he chose to stand up and be counted. All his adult life, he fought the good fight in the name of justice, freedom and equality.

If you want to know more details about his life, please go to his Wikipedia page.

Straight after the American presidential election in November 2016, Jesse Jackson wrote an article for "The Guardian" newspaper. Much of what he said was prescient:-

"Based on Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the Republican party platform, the social, racial and economic progress America has made over recent decades is in danger: gender equality, the fight for a living wage, affordable healthcare, the struggle for sensible gun control laws, immigration reform and the regeneration of urban communities.

We can only hope he will not govern the way he campaigned – a steady diet of retrograde fantasies and divisive talk about taking the country back. Back to where? When Jim Crow and American apartheid ruled the land; when women could not vote or serve on juries?

I have known Trump for years and, until this bruising campaign, always thought him a decent man. We had our political differences, but I was surprised he turned so quickly and sharply to the right in his quest for power. It saddened and alarmed me that his words resonated so deeply with the racist right that the Ku Klux Klan’s leading newspaper endorsed him."

Although our American cousins are all familiar with the historic  term, "Jim Crow", European and Australian visitors may be puzzled by it so let me explain...

Jim Crow refers to a legalized system of racial apartheid and segregation in the Southern United States from the late nineteenth century until the mid-1960s. These state and local laws enforced the separation of black and white people in public spaces, including schools, transportation, and restaurants, effectively ensuring a second-class status for African Americans. The term stems from a nineteenth century minstrel character who denigrated black Americans for the amusement of largely white audiences.

Jesse would have been the first to admit that he was imperfect but compared with most public figures, he lived a good life and sought to do what was righteous on behalf of his fellow human beings - not just in America but around the world.

Reflections

At Dale Dyke Reservoir on Saturday, the surface of the water was unusually still. This, along with the sharpness of the light, ensured that any reflections were mirror-like and true. I took several photos.

Above, where small trees have been inundated by a surfeit of water from the surrounding hills, it is hard to see where the trees meet their reflections. Although I took the picture, I also struggle to differentiate between the two. Even when enlarged to full capacity, the image remains a visual brainteaser.

Reflections... Isn't the English language itself a puzzle? We think of reflections in mirrors or water surfaces but of course  there are other kinds of reflection, including: "careful thought about something " which mostly happens within the secret confines of our brains.

Humans devote a lot of time to reflection, mulling things over - sometimes wondering how we might have spoken or acted differently. Reflection often happens upon the pillow at night or in the morning when we wake. It accompanies walks and runs and journeys and unless we are wholly brutish, reflection is impossible to dodge.

I  suppose that I am not unusual in that I tend to reflect much more  upon my mistakes and my failings than upon my achievements and successes. When Edith Piaf sang, "Non, je ne regrette rien" (I regret nothing) she was totally out of synch with humanity in  general. To regret nothing is in truth just a wistful notion, a pipe-dream.

Though we cannot change the past, we can certainly kick ourselves for things that we said or did and wish that we could press a rewind button as on an old videotape player. The important thing is not to allow those self-recriminations to overwhelm us, obscuring  our victories and our better traits.

With these thoughts, I find myself reflecting once again. To be alive is a ceaseless puzzle, like the picture at the top of this blogpost.

Bulls

 

Let me introduce you to Tony and Joy Bull.  Last week they celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary - seventy five years of wedlock and not a cross word between them  They have lived all their lives in North Yorkshire but now their place of residence is a care home for the elderly . Tony is 95 and Joy is 94.

I know all of this because they appeared in  a feelgood item on "BBC Look North" - our regional television news programme. Local news services like to cover that kind of story don't they?

Of course the couple were asked about  the recipe for a long and lasting marriage. Tony said, "Two people's chemistry is different everywhere but most of all you've got to be totally unselfish, give and take. It worked for us."

And here we come to the point of this blogpost. Shirley and I both laughed out loud when Tony, looking adoringly at his wife, added, "There's only one thing that can compare with a pedigree, prize-winning Hereford bull and that's a well-dressed woman!"

What a co-incidence that Tony should make such a politically incorrect remark when his surname is Bull!

My apologies to any well-dressed women readers who feel offended both by this blogpost and by Tony's declaration. After all there are other things that can compare favourably with a healthy Hereford bull such as a prizewinning Aberdeen Angus bull or the overall winner at the Cruft's dog show in 2025 - a four year old  Italian whippet called Miuccia.

And as for well-dressed women, maybe Tony had Melania Trump in mind rather than his wife Joy who never said anything to camera because dementia is eating away at who she  once was.

Walk

The promised Saturday weather came true. Blue skies and sunshine with the February air as clear as crystal. But where should I walk to take advantage of such a day?

I went somewhere I had not been in a good, long while - Dale Dyke Reservoir to the north west of the city. It takes about twenty minutes to drive out there. The last three miles are narrow lanes where meeting vehicles need to slow right down to get past each other.

The unremarkable reservoir sits peacefully in the cleft of a valley but once its name was infamous across the kingdom.

Not long after its initial construction and following heavy rains, the massive earth and clay dam sprang a leak which turned into a cleft that was soon split apart by the weight of water behind it. It is estimated that 700 million gallons of water were released. I previously blogged about this terrible event  back in 2010. Go here.

The torrent  thundered to the nearby village of Low Bradfield before surging down The Loxley Valley towards Hillsborough and The Wicker in Sheffield city centre. Along the way, 600 homes were destroyed, fifteen bridges and several work places. More than 240 people were killed, many through drowning.

The Great Sheffield Flood was the biggest civilian disaster of the Victorian period in Great Britain. It occurred on the night of March 11th 1864. In its aftermath, many changes to reservoir and dam construction occurred. Important lessons had been learnt.

Nowadays, The Sheffield Flood is a mere footnote in history and even within this city, many Sheffielders have never heard of the disaster. That unremembering simply adds to the tragedy.

Victorian pump house close to Dale Dyke Reservoir

Today, with boots on, I circled Dale Dyke Reservoir. In places the perimeter path was muddy as hell and I had to pick my way carefully through those sections. However, it was a delight to walk beneath a blue sky once again.

Lots of other people were out and about, taking advantage of a diamond day after what has seemed like weeks of gloomy skies. They are set to return in the week ahead but today we were reminded that there can be light and colour and sunshine - combining to make a special healing remedy for needy humans.

A view of Boots Folly above Strines Reservoir

Pissed

It was late one Saturday night. We had just returned to our red cabin deep in the woods of Ohio, in the countryside east of Cleveland, beyond Shaker Heights.

"God, I'm pissed!" I announced as I crawled into my bed.

Chris said nothing as he also hit the hay.

I had arrived at the summer camp just two days before. Somehow Chris and I had requisitioned a cabin all to ourselves, even though there would have been room for two other male counsellors.

We had been to "Skip & Ray's" bar by Route 87 - just a mile away and there we had consumed a couple of large glass pitchers of blonde American beer. That is why I was drunk or as English people will commonly say - "pissed". It doesn't mean that we are angry about anything. It just means we are inebriated.

If we are annoyed, irritated or angry about something we often  describe that state as being "pissed off". Adding the "off" is key to the changed meaning.

In the early summer of 1976, I had no idea that our colonial cousins in the USA used the term "pissed" differently. At some point during the week that followed, Chris and I laughed when we realised our linguistic misunderstanding.

Previously, I alluded to this same tale when I wrote a bunch of memoir blogposts concerning the two summers I spent as a camp counsellor in Ohio. Go here. Many of you will have never read that sequence.

Let me move on to the business of being "pissed off". I am writing the day after Mad Trump announced that he would be reversing Obama-era scientific rulings that underpin all federal actions on curbing planet-warming gases.

This is utterly crazy and flies in the face of solid scientific findings. It gives other hesitant governments the green light to rip up climate change legislation and carry on as ignorantly as before we truly realised the damage that mankind had done to this beautiful planet by burning fossil fuels. Yes I am definitely pissed off about this latest move by Orange Ignoramus but I guess it may have been just another card played as a way of deflecting continuing interest in  what we should start calling the Trump-Epstein Files. His farty name appears in those files over a million times.

As I am reflecting on the verb "to piss", I wish to report that it is still pissing it down here in South Yorkshire (i.e. it's raining) but tomorrow the weather people are predicting a day of blessed relief between meteorological systems. The sun will shine down upon St Valentine's Day and all will be well with the world as the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding walks out somewhere...anywhere to see Earth's colours revealed once more...

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain" - William Shakespeare 

"Venus and Adonis" (1593)

"Velcro"

Who the hell is that? I suspect you will never have heard of him. It's George De Mestral. Born in Switzerland in 1907, he died there in 1990. He was an electrical engineer but as you probably already guessed from this blogpost's title, De Mestral was also the inventor of "Velcro". That was the brand name of the inspired hook and loop fastening device that he developed through the 1940s and into the early 1950s.

One day, during World War II, De Mestral was out hunting with his dog. Upon returning home, he noticed that once again his dog had numerous burdock burs on its fur. It was irritating but why was it happening? How did the burdock burs cling to the animal's fur?

He investigated with the aid of a microscope and eventually concluded that the outer perimeter of the dying burdock bloom was covered with tiny hooks that could latch on to anything with a loop  - such as wool for example.

He pondered this for years until he began to see the possible applications there might be for humans. If he could somehow manufacture a fastening product that used the hook and loop concept, he might be on to a winner.

Original "Velcro" logo

After a lot of trial and error, he came up with a nylon product that consisted of hundreds of tiny hooks that could marry with loop-based strips. Just like the "Velcro" we see in modern life today.

"Velcro" is very useful as a shoe and coat fastener and it is also used in hospitals, various  industries, wall fastenings and  car interiors. It has also featured in spacesuits since manned space flights began.

Unlike many other inventors of great things, De Mestral's "Velcro" made him fabulously rich in his lifetime.

A few minutes ago, our little Phoebe got changed ready to go to her after-school "Tumble" class. The last thing she did before jumping in Grandma's car was to put her training shoes back on. This was easy to do because they have "Velcro" straps thanks to George De Mestral's brainwave and his dogged persistence in bringing that truly brilliant  idea to fruition.