Cartoons

Trump remains an absolute gift to political cartoonists. Hardly a day goes by without some new stupidity that they can caricature. But what a tragedy that this oaf, this liar, this bully, this felon, this laughable narcissist operates beyond the confines of comic fiction. Sometimes all that you can do is to shake your head in disbelief. How on earth could this moron become the political leader of  what is arguably the greatest country on Earth? It doesn't make sense.

Reflection

Mirrors tell it like it is. We look in them and we see mirror images of ourselves. It was often said that the camera never lies but surely that is more true of mirrors. They reflect back the truth.

It is the same with still water. You look upon the surface and see a mirror image of  the sky above. If birds or aeroplanes fly above the water you will see them too.

Back in 1922, in Washington D.C., a very large reflecting pool was completed between The Washington Monument and The Lincoln Memorial. I suppose its fundamental purpose was to reflect those two stone edifices - endowing them with even greater visual significance and drama.

It was there by that reflecting pool that The People's March on Washington terminated on August 28th, 1963 to listen to Martin Luther-King delivering his iconic "I have a dream" speech. A speech by a reflecting pool that reflected the state of civil rights in America at that time. Later that decade, anti-Vietnam war protesters in their thousands reflected upon a pointless war by that same reflecting pool.

You can see that the Washington reflecting pool is not just a place for literal reflection - like a bathroom mirror, it is also a place for a more figurative kind of reflection about the state of the nation, wars, civil rights and suchlike.

And so we arrived at April 2026. Probably on a whim, the current president of the USA decided that he would have the famous reflecting pool renovated ahead of Independence Day celebrations that would mark America's 250th birthday.

He wanted to see clear water and a bottom surface that might be described as "American blue".

The job was rushed and ill-considered. Contractors did not have to bid for the work. Instead they were simply appointed by the president - trashing normal protocols. It was a case of "jobs for the boys" with one of the lead contractors being one of the president's Mar-a-Lago neighbours down in Florida.

Almost as soon as the upgraded reflecting pool was reopened it began to deteriorate. Algae bloomed rapidly and the floor coating began to peel away. The failure of the hugely expensive project was absolutely down to bad and rushed workmanship . Of course it did not help that a presidential cavalcade  drove over the empty reflecting pool in May. This probably caused damage to the recent paintwork.

One thing is for sure - Olympian canoesist David Hearn did not cause any of the damage even though the current regime tried to nail him in the courts. Eventually the case was thrown out but it should never have been brought in the first place. The cruel vindictiveness shown towards Mr Hearn was terrible and I understand he has not received a word of apology from his accusers. They had no evidence whatsoever.

The reflecting pool that the current president sought to renovate remains murky and green with algae blooming. It's like the water in the nearby river basin which feeds it. And there is no sign of the American blue paint that the president was desperate to see. Nobody cut the new surface on the pool floor and there was no  sabotage. The embarrassing failure of the project was  down to pressure of time, an absence of proper professional advice and research, inappropriate materials and shoddy workmanship.

The reflecting pool accurately reflects America's current political malaise under the leadership of a reality TV host with an enormous ego. The story contains blatant lies, superficial yearnings, cruelty, unjustified accusations, lack of apology and an obsession with the appearance of things rather than fundamental truths.

The pool is like a poem with physical form. Stubbornly, it still mirrors what is going on.  They tried to make it clean and sparkling blue but instead its reflection remains unchanged and familiar as Abraham Lincoln's pinnacle looks down accusingly on the hideousness of the current government with its self-obsessed, lazy and terribly ignorant leader

Summer

Here in northern England, we have been enjoying a record summer. There have been five official heatwaves and even between them the days have still been hot and dry. 

Gardens and parks have been suffering and our poor farmers have struggled with animals and crops. Their fields have become cracked and desert-like with the greenness sucked away. When we flew back to Birmingham from Majorca on July 25th, we looked down upon a very un-English straw-coloured landscape.

Even our trees have been suffering - shedding leaves or simply drooping. Trees are only big plants. They need water like other plants. Up our garden the branches hang heavy with small apples. Their swelling growth has been slowed to a halt and many have fallen as the trees switch to survival mode.

You do what you can. I have constantly put food and water out for our avian friends and  areas of the garden - including our vegetable plot - have been watered regularly. Surprisingly, we do not have a hosepipe ban here in Yorkshire even though most  of our reservoirs are only 50% full.

Doom-mongers will say that this has been a frightening summer that continues to demonstrate the future impact of climate change and global over-heating. They may be right but for me this has been the best summer of my life.

I think of many summers past when the grass stayed defiantly green and hot spells were limited to a day or two if we were lucky.  I call them green summers and it is, I think, very likely that we will experience plenty more of them in the next two decades.

Don't get me wrong, I am not denying the seriousness of climate change. It is very real but I will not be weighed down by that burden in the years I have left. I would rather just say quite simply that the summer of 2026 has been the best one I have ever known.

But we may be reaching the end of it. This evening was a little cooler with an ethereal bright pink western sky perhaps indicating changing conditions. After weeks without precipitation, it seems that rain is predicted in the next few days. It will be very welcome that's for sure.

Scorched Rosehill Victoria Park in Rawmarsh last week.

My mother often played here when she was a girl.

Nature

On Sunday night Mike's wife Jill dropped me off at the top of our street. And as I walked home down the left-hand path (American: sidewalk), I saw an animal hurrying up towards me. What could it be? At first I thought it might be a domestic cat but very soon I realised it was a badger.

Knowing they have poor eyesight, I quietly stepped into the road and watched as the creature motored past unaware of my nearby presence. What a privilege! Badgers have lived on the island of Britain for half a million years. Traces of them have even appeared in ancient fossils.

For some reason, these wonderful creatures have often been persecuted. There have even been government-led culling operations. The anti-badger lobby have worked tirelessly to promote the myth that badgers have caused widespread TB in cattle but I am a badgerman through and through and I cherish the fact that they still live amongst us - often occupying setts that are two or three hundred years old. God Save The Badger!

On Tuesday afternoon, I went to see Richard Hines once again. As a boy he trained a kestrel and his brother Barry Hines created an iconic novel inspired by his brother's hobby. That novel was "Kes".

Once again Richard referred to a book that had stirred his love of birds of prey. I have not read it myself but I hope to acquire a copy before this year is out. It's "The Goshawk" by Terence Henbury White - about the writer's obsessive attempt to train a wild, fierce northern goshawk named "Gos" in the mid-1930s using archaic, centuries-old falconry methods. The book was published in 1951 and it meant the world to Richard Hines. Without "Gos" there would probably have been no "Kes".

I promised that I would send Richard some images of goshawks I spotted on my favourite photo-mapping website - "Geograph". Such noble birds and of all British hawks the goshawk is the biggest. What gifts evolution has given us! Here's just one of the pictures I sent him.

© David Dixon 2019

English bluebells have figured several times within the confines of this blog. Magically they burst into the light every springtime in shady woodlands often creating a magical blue haze. These native flowers and their bulbs enjoy legal protection. Digging them up is against the law but you can order bulbs from licensed growers.

Yesterday, the four year old bulbs I ordered from Wildwood Bluebells in North Wales arrived. The accompanying advice indicated that I should plant them out as soon as possible. Today I soaked the designated planting area because of our continuing hot, dry weather. Then this evening I planted all twenty five of the bulbs with the aid of a dibber. The instruction was to plant them about five inches deep so that is what I did.

Afterwards, I filled the holes with a mixture of soil and compost before brushing it over and stomping on the area. Fingers crossed we should see some flowering native  bluebells late next April. I hope so because we both love that special spring flower.

In other nature news, we believe that a fox has chewed the tennis ball off our new swingball stand. Our neighbour Tony found it in their garden. Now I have a replacement problem. Phoebe is not happy. Thank you so much Foxy Loxy!

Noises

You never quite know what you will hear on BBC Radio 4. Just last week, after my shower , I  listened to an item about personal noises. It made me chuckle.

We all make noises - especially as we grow older - farting, belching, coughing to clear our  throats and some of us make involuntary noises when we get up from sitting positions or when we are straining to complete physical tasks - umphing and ahhing.

Mind you the central premise of the item was that in general men make more personal noises than women. Men sneeze more wholeheartedly and if a man wants to fart he just lets go but a woman muffles the fart so much so that you don't know she's dropped one. And when was the last time you heard a woman emit an unrestrained belch?

The item pushed the notion that in a paternalistic society where men still seem to rule the roost in a world built on sexist division, a man considers it is his God-given right to produce loud personal noises without apology. In contrast, women are rather repressed and weighed down by long-standing cultural assumptions about how they should behave - quieter, more discreet and less drawn to self-announcement through personal noises.

There are exceptions to every rule of course but I think that the item got it pretty right. Men simply are more noisy. Take my Shirley for example. In all the years I have known her, I have never once heard her fart - apart from when she farts unknowingly while asleep. That always sounds like air whining from a balloon. On the other hand, she is used to hearing me trumpeting like a bull elephant or the foghorn at the mouth of The River Humber. I refuse to constrain my gas emissions. Let 'em rip is my philosophy.

With regard to personal noises and gender differences, what is the best way forward? Men working to quieten and control their noises or women letting go and being less self-conscious, less restrained in their noise making?

⦿

Before I climb the stairs to bed at the very end of another hot summer's day, I just want to leave you with this picture I snapped on Monday when I walked through Endcliffe Park.  Through a gap in the trees I spotted Queen Victoria's head. Her statue sits close to the Hunters Bar entrance to the park...

Song

In the early summer of 1967, in the same week that "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" surged to the top of the British album charts, Procol Harum's debut record became the best selling single. It was titled, "A Whiter Shade of Pale". Enigmatic and rather haunting, the song remains in the nation's consciousness when so many other hit singles have been buried in the past and largely forgotten.

What was "the light fandago" and why all those vestal virgins leaving for the coast?  The music was certainly influenced by Bach as the chief composer Gary Brooker later admitted and the lyrics created by Keith Reid have a dreamy, metaphorical quality - suggestive rather than clearcut.

Keith Reid once said that he had been at a party when he heard someone tell a stoned partygoer that she had lost her colour and turned "a whiter shade of pale". That odd phrase stuck in his head, only to emerge later when he was crafting the lyrics for Brooker's music.

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" might easily have been the theme tune for that so-called "Summer of Love" - 1967. It's getting on for sixty years since the song was first played by British disc jockeys. Now it is part of our modern cultural heritage. It has its place and in my humble opinion,  it remains kind of magical.

By the way, the band's odd name, Procol Harum was an error. For some odd reason they wanted to name themselves after a breed of pedigree Burmese cat with the official Latin moniker - procul harun. Apparently, a friend had one.

We skipped the light fandango
Turned cartwheels 'cross the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
But the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought a tray

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

She said, "There is no reason
And the truth is plain to see"
But I wandered through my playing cards
And would not let her be
One of sixteen vestal virgins
Who were leaving for the coast
And although my eyes were open
They might just as well have been closed

And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale

Ghoulish

The grave of a local hero - Samuel Holberry

Even though I claim not to be ghoulish or obsessed with death, I seem to have done a fair amount of hanging around in graveyards recently. If you are not quite sure what "ghoulish" means - here's the definition: "an unhealthy, morbid fascination with death, disaster, or horrifying things. It also describes things that look or act like a ghoul—a mythical, evil creature that robs graves and feeds on dead bodies". Interestingly, the word has Arabic roots.

Anyway, today I needed to burn off a few hundred calories so I donned my walking shoes and set off down Ecclesall Road aiming later to turn down Cemetery Avenue en route for the northern gate of The General Cemetery. This Victorian civic cemetery was opened in 1836. Some of it remains overgrown but it has an active "Friends" group and on a hot summer's day it is a pleasant place to stroll in the shade of mature trees.

The grave of Mark Firth 

Significant people who are buried there may seem insignificant to outsiders. One of the giants of the Sheffield steel industry was Mark Firth (1819 - 1880) and his impressive grave is Grade II listed. The grave that means the most to me is that of Samuel Holberry (1814 - 1842). He died of consumption in York Castle. He was a key figure in the Chartist movement that sought better conditions for working people and that is why the establishment had him arrested and imprisoned. It is said that over 50,000 people attended his funeral during a time of social upheaval in this country.

Not far from Samuel Holberry's grave, in an area that was specially reserved for children, I came across this gravestone:-

You might need to enlarge the image to read the inscriptions.

What we are looking at here is heartbreaking tragedy and of course it was not at all uncommon in past centuries.  Ebenezer and Sarah Adams lost five children after they had been born.

In 1839 William Abraham died after just twenty one days of life. In 1846, young Joshua died at the age of six. He was followed by Elizabeth Mary Ann who was only two years and two months old when she passed away. And then in 1855, little Selina died at the age of fourteen months, followed in the same year by her sister Sarah Hannah who was six. 

In the modern western world we expect babies to live - perhaps to a ripe old age. After successful births, we do not anticipate early deaths. But back then it was different. Ebenezer and Sarah would have been very aware of the possibility of infant mortality.  Plenty of families were touched by this shadow. Life was a precious gift that could be snatched away in a few days. Just imagine how Ebenezer and Sarah Adams must have felt when Sarah Hannah left them. The pain must have been unbearable even if it seemed to prove that "God" did indeed move in mysterious ways. Perhaps not just mysterious but downright cruel.

I walked all the way along Psalter Lane and back to Banner  Cross. In an alleyway next to The Banner Cross Hotel, I spotted this graffiti. If only William, Joshua, Elizabeth, Selina and Sarah Hannah could have lived forever - but sadly they didn't. Far from it...