Then

Of course there was no internet, no social media, no smartphones pinging with the latest news alerts. What was external rarely intruded. We mostly lived in our own local realities. Where was New York City anyway and did we really care?

Sometimes we waited at our village phone box to receive or make calls involving friends or sweethearts from other villages. It was hard to use the house phone because somebody else would surely be listening in.

Apart from word of mouth, there were no reviews of items or services we planned to buy. To a large extent, you simply had to dive in and hope for the best. This was true of lots of things from books to holidays and from new music to forthcoming television shows.

Nobody found boyfriends or girlfriends online because "online" meant on the washing line where underwear and football shirts fluttered in the breeze like flags.  To acquire  a new sweetheart you tended to use the grapevine along which secret messages were passed or you might visit a dance at local village halls and try to catch the eye of someone you fancied. It was like fishing for an elusive rainbow trout.

It's not that "Then" was better, it was just different and arguably more innocent, less exposed to the big wide world. The Media was in its kennel and generally obeyed honourable rules of engagement. Besides, it didn't matter all that much to us for we could generally hold it at arm's length.

And we didn't travel very much. Ordinary folk never rode upon aeroplanes or took foreign holidays. Many had never even been to London. And we were not in the habit of eating out anywhere. Pubs were for adults and rarely offered food menus. There were no Indian or Chinese takeaways. The best we could hope for, once in a while,  was  fish and chips doused with vinegar and swiftly wrapped in sheets of newspaper.

That was then but this is now.

Research

I found all four of these images on Trip Advisor. They were taken by previous visitors to the VOI Aranella resort south of Syracuse in Sicily. Checking out reviews and photos on Trip Advisor can be a very helpful thing to do before you travel somewhere. However, I am always very wary of reviews posted by people who have only ever left that one review. I mean - why?  Single reviews tend to gush with positivity and praise.

The low rise nature of the accommodation appealed to us. See above. The units are well spread out over a rural campus of ten acres.

The resort is close to the sea. The beach below will be about five hundred yards from our door...

And even closer,  by a rocky cove, the resort people have erected lounging platforms with steps down into the sea. We must remember our diving shoes - bought for previous sunshine holidays...

Our reservation includes "Half Board" - breakfast and evening meal. Here's an images of a desserts table taken by a previous guest....

We will be flying out of Manchester Airport on Friday afternoon - not at some ungodly hour in the morning. However, I am guessing that we won't reach the VOI Arenella until the evening dinner service is done so we may end up going to bed hungry. Snacks in our suitcases should help us to avoid starvation.

Burglary

There was a burglary on our street last night. A thief or thieves got into the garden behind Gary and Lynsey's house. There they have a secure shed where Gary keeps his bicycles or should I say - he used to keep his bicycles. They have both gone now.

As you know, modern bicycles can cost an awful lot of money whether they are mountain bikes, racing bikes or partly electrified. For the price of a new bicycle you could easily cover the cost of a Mediterranean package holiday - say in Cyprus, southern Spain or perhaps Sicily!

Co-incidentally, about ten days ago building improvement work began on Gary and Lynsey's house. They are having an extension. The builders put a big plywood gate at the side of the house because they have work equipment that they want to keep as safe as possible. It seems that the dirty rotten no-good thieves bust the padlock on that temporary gate to access the back garden and the shed.

It's hard not draw the conclusion that there is some kind of link between the building work and the robbery. I am not suggesting that the builders were in any way responsible but they get stuff delivered and how would the perpetrators of the crime even know that there were two expensive bikes in that shed?

Burglaries are very upsetting for law-abiding homeowners but at least on this occasion the guilty scumbags did not enter the house. Lynsey is about to give birth to their second son - he is due any day now. The last thing she needed was  the upset that this has caused.

I am pleased to say that in our forty two years of home ownership, we have never been burgled. The worst that has happened is that when we owned a Ford Focus it was broken into three times in a year. Each time they were after the car radio/CD player. They would smash the side window to gain access  and when  they did this on the third occasion there was no radio/CD player in the slot. I guess they didn't bother looking.

We are pretty sure that our thieves were teenage boys. Shirley almost caught them one night when she went out to the wheelie bins in her house slippers. On more than one evening I grabbed a heavy torch and patrolled the neighbourhood on the lookout for these rats and for months afterwards we were forever looking up and down the street and listening for ominous sounds. It was unsettling.

Though the Ford Focus was a great car, I was kind of glad when I got rid of it. All over the kingdom they were being broken into for their radio/CD players but at the time Ford sought to downplay the issue. In the mid-nineties, it was rumoured that Ford  sound systems could be easily adapted to become satellite TV receivers.

Have you or any of your nearest and dearest been the victims of burglars?

Gaslighting

On several occasions I have come across the term "gaslighting" but have always struggled to know what it means and whether or not I should add it to my own vocabulary. I have been doing a little research.

The term is connected with a 1944 film called "Gaslight" starring Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton and Ingrid Bergman as his his wife -  Paula Alquist Anton.  Gregory secretly  searches in the attic of their inherited London home for precious jewellery and  when he puts the gaslight on up there, the lights in the rest of the house go noticeably dimmer.

When Paula mentions this Gregory dismisses her claims as nonsensical and this becomes the core of his campaign to make her think she is going crazy.

The term "gaslighting" is not in fact used in the film but it has come to be associated with psychological manipulation - undermining somebody's self-confidence and cause them to question their sense of reality.

You know when you look for a word in Google, the search engine starts to churn out related questions. I guess this is meant to be helpful though some of the questions that appear may be quite dubious. However, this came up:-

What is an example for gaslighting?

Gaslighting happens when an abuser tries to control a victim by twisting their sense of reality. An example of gaslighting would be a partner doing something abusive and then denying it happened.

"Gaslighting" was the "word of the year" for 2022 over at Merriam-Webster - the dictionary people. They defined it as "behaviour that's mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful."

The use of "gaslighting" in conversation and print has rocketed since 202o. Back in the late nineteenth century it was only ever used to describe lighting that was literally derived from gas but modern usage is all about manipulation and control.

Although I don't like writing his name in this blog, Donald Trump has shown that regarding gaslighting there are few who can compare with him. It comes naturally - bending the truth and making people doubt themselves. He has done it a hell of a lot since he arrived on the political scene. His failing communications website - reputedly an alternative to "Twitter" - is called "Truth Social" but the notion of truth seems to run counter to the very record of Trump's life.

With regard to  ease of use, "gaslighting" does not sit well with me.  I think I would feel more comfortable using terms like "psychological control", "mental abuse" and "manipulation".  I don't find "gaslighting"  especially helpful but it is always good to try to keep up with this constantly evolving English language.

Sorry

Simon aged 2 - on the beach at Filey in 1958.

The image was captured by our father, Philip.

Of course the dead are dead and there's no use in appealing to them. They have gone. But if I could, I would like to say sorry to my brother Simon with regard to some photographs.

Let me explain.

For several years he lived with our aging mother following the break up of his relationship with Linda. They had bought a home together and it seemed that Linda might save him from himself. She wanted babies and a normal life in her hometown on the Yorkshire coast but Simon couldn't handle it and everything fell apart.

He went back to our mother's house and at the same time lost his job. He became reliant on Mum who gave him shelter and put food on the table. Sadly, she was rather afraid of him. He became quite nasty to her and was frequently threatening. It stressed her out but he was her youngest son and she felt it was her maternal duty to help him - come what may.

Simon as a baby in 1956 with my oldest 

brother Paul who died in June 2010

Mum died in an old folks home in September 2007 but Simon continued to live in her house and one of my other brothers was most unhappy with this arrangement and wanted Simon out so that the house could be sold. In due course that is what happened. Simon left the house in late 2010. Mum's belongings had to be stored or rescued as Simon didn't yet have another place to live even though by now he was back in full-time employment.

I picked up some of Mum's stuff and shoved it up in our attic before heading off to Thailand on my first temporary teaching contract in Bangkok. I forgot about the stuff but in early 2019, Simon began asking about it. He claimed that I had all of the family photographs and he not only wanted them, he needed them. We looked all over our house for the pictures he was talking about.

Simon as some sort of cowboy when he was perhaps four

In the last five years of his life, he never phoned me unless he wanted something so it was down to me to phone him and whenever I called him he would always bang on about those bloody pictures. I really thought he was mistaken but it turns out that I was wrong.

We did have those pictures after all. They were kind of hidden up in our attic - the jumbled contents of which we tackled just last month ahead of  the installation of our new roof. The photos were in a white plastic bag with the name "SIMON" written upon it with a permanent black marker pen.

So yes, now is the time to say "sorry" to Simon and to share with blog visitors four of the photographs I found in that bag. Sadly, I cannot turn the clock back and tell him that he had been right all along. That is how it goes.

Simon in the school football team at Beverley Grammar School 

when he was fourteen or fifteen

Heathen

 

When the day was done. I decided to treat myself by toddling  off  down to "The Itchy Pig" for three pints of "Heathen" brewed by The Abbeydale Brewery here in Sheffield. If you have drawn the conclusion that I stole that beermat then I am afraid you are wrong because I asked the barman if I could bring it home and he happily agreed.

It was a lonesome day. I spoke briefly to Jill - one of our next door neighbours and later I spoke briefly to Anna - our next door neighbour on the other side. I didn't harness Clint today. Instead, I did some maintenance work and also watched some catch-up TV.

The work included the careful reduction of our little bay tree and application of decking oil to our upper decking. There was also some extra cleaning and sanding to do before the decking oil was brushed on.

The catch-up TV was all about "The Gallows Pole" - a new BBC drama series. I have read the book that it is based upon and that was bloody good. THe drama series is a very different experience. I blogged about the novel here.

Soon, with the help of my son-in-law Stewart, I am going to have to tackle the boards on our lower decking. There are thirty three of them and they were installed twenty years ago. Some of them are clearly rotting and unsafe. I have no idea what the structure beneath them is like but I am keeping my fingers crossed on that one. New boards alone  will cost me almost £400 (US $513) thanks to Boris Johnson's Brexit.

Tomorrow is Father's Day here in Great Britain and Frances has arranged to take me and Stewart out for a fancy Father's Day Sunday dinner. I must say that I am rather pleased about that as it will save me from cooking as usual. Shirley won't be back until midday on Monday.

"Heathen" is a beer brand name that suits me well as I am a heathen just like my Viking ancestors. What beer brand name would suit your character best of all.... "Smooth Operator", "Sexy Beast", "Nasty Old Git"   or something else?

Alone

I am home alone. Every year Shirley drives off somewhere for what she calls "The Cousins Weekend". She is one of many cousins and it's nice to meet up with some of them when it's not for example the occasion of a funeral.

Late this morning I decided to go for a six mile country walk in the vicinity of Bamford - a village in The Peak District. The area is very familiar to me. By a sheep pasture, I took several pictures of the same twin lambs. My favourite image is the one shown above which I have titled "Me and My Shadow"

Above you can see a stone bell-mouth in one corner of Ladybower Reservoir. Some people refer to these structures as plug holes because they do in fact serve that function when the reservoir waters are at full capacity.

Below - I was looking across the valley of The River Derwent below Ladybower. The rocks on the ridge are known as Bamford Edge where I have also rambled. You get great views from up there. I liked the larger cloud and made sure  that I caught it whole when looking through my camera's viewfinder.

In the small village of Thornhill - population 154 - I noticed that their old iconic phone kiosk now houses a defibrillator - like so many rural phone boxes in this country. It is the fashion but I wonder how many of these life-saving instruments have ever been used.

I stumbled across an area called "The Quaker Community Gardens" and within spotted this idyllic allotment - some distance from any house. To the right were small sections for vegetables and the plot seemed to be much loved. Somebody devotes many peaceful hours to the gardening here.

In Bamford I treated myself to a pint of bitter shandy and a packet of plain crisps (American: chips) in the community-run village pub. There I read a chapter from a book by TV presenter Dan Walker about elderly Margaret Keenan who in December 2020 was the first person in the world to receive a COVID vaccine.

And finally let's go back to the two lambs I showed at the top. You can see them in clearer context now but you can't hear them. They were saying, "Ma-ay! Ma-ay!" which means, "What are you looking at big boy?"