Rainbow

A rainbow in the suburbs of  our northern city. Late yesterday afternoon. Taken from our garden.

"Over The Rainbow" was written specially for the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz" with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by Yip Harburg. It has been recorded many times - most notably perhaps by Eva Cassidy but this post will finish with  Israel Kamakawiwoʻole's version. Hawaiians knew him as Iz and its his ashes that are lovingly cast into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the video.

Scientists may be able to explain why rainbows happen but the bottom line is that they are magical and human beings have forever glimpsed at their passing, simple beauty with wonder. They come and they go. Briefly arching over us like a protective arm. And lord knows we need one of them right now.

Enjoy:-

Fly

Meet Ralph. He's a fly. On Tuesday evening he landed on Vice President Mike Pence's snowy head during his televised debate with Kamala Harris.

Training Ralph was no mean feat I can tell you. Having him transported to the debate venue in Salt Lake City, Utah was also very challenging. Please don't tell anybody else but I used a  carrier called Helen Schultz who I discovered online. She is a student at The University of Utah majoring in Librarianship. She was a member of the invited audience and Ralph secretly accessed Kingsbury Hall in Helen's mop of curly red hair. Security did not think to check there.

At the assigned moment, Ralph flew bravely into the glare of the television lights and made a perfect touchdown on Mr Pence's head. It was reminiscent of July 20th 1969. As instructed, Ralph stayed on Mr Pence's head for exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds. There is no truth  in the rumour that Ralph defecated on the snow white orb during his mission.

A similar procedure has been arranged for the next live presidential debate if  it ever happens but this time it will not be Ralph landing on Mr Trump's ridiculous hairstyle. It will be a six year old fruit bat called Vera. She has a five foot wingspan and weighs in at just over three pounds. Lord knows how Mr Trump will react when she lands. Perhaps, like Mr Pence, he will not notice her.

Norwell

Oak trees near Bathley

Good weather yesterday so your intrepid reporter travelled east of here into Nottinghamshire for another delightful four hour walk in the countryside.

I unsaddled Clint by St Laurence's Church in Norwell and left him grazing there as I set off into the autumnal day. Just north of Newark the agricultural landscape rolls gently. Because there is little accessible stone in the area, old houses tend to be made from bricks and unlike Derbyshire and South Yorkshire there are no stone field boundary walls - just hedgerows.

In Norwell

However, ancient village churches were generally built from imported stone. That always makes me think about how challenging ecclesiastical construction projects must have been. We're not just talking about a few stones but countless tons for each church - long before any form of mechanised transport appeared. I understand that barges and rafts on waterways were vital to the transportation of stone.

Bus shelter with book swap in Caunton

And so I rambled - first to Bathley and then on to Caunton before heading back over the fields to Norwell and the completion of my circle. All three were delightful villages, tucked away in a hidden corner of England. Until Tuesday evening, I shall admit that had never heard of one of them, yet there they were all the time. Lives were being lived there, fields were being tilled.  Seasons came and went in an endless chain. Year after year.

Duck sign in Caunton

Heading back to Norwell

Rose Cottage in Norwell

Review

Though I had never seen film or TV versions of  "The Handmaid's Tale", I was aware of them. After all, Margaret Atwood's novel crept into our cultural consciousness some time ago.  Out of curiosity, I was keen to read it. Co-incidentally, I saw it amongst my daughter's university books when she was thinning them out. Frances's honours degree is in American and Canadian Studies.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is commonly referred to as a "dystopian novel". That word - "dystopian" is regularly connected with "1984"  and "Brave New World".  It means "relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice".

The narrator is a handmaid called Offred. We never learn her real name. In effect she is the property of a "commander" called Fred and her purpose is to become pregnant by him. Society has become patriarchal - almost medieval in character. There are daily executions and fear hangs in the air like mist.

I found the novel eminently readable and I loved the clever way that past and present were interwoven. Offred is a survivor and we feel her anxieties and her loneliness. There seems to be no way out of her situation. She is trapped, relying upon small mercies to get by.

When the story's action is effectively over, an afterword section appears in which readers are jettisoned even further into the future. A conference is taking place in which academics are looking back on  the dark interlude in North American history contained in the first forty six chapters. Audio cassette tapes were apparently found in a US Army  footlocker - containing the handmaid's tale.

I found this device unnecessary and difficult to accept. After all, the grammar of Offred's tale had never had an obviously oral quality. It did not seem anything like a transcript. 

Yes. I could have done without that end section. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Margaret Atwood's novel. Each time I returned to the book, I looked forward to getting through three or four more chapters. The vision of the future was both convincing and chilling, containing many echoes of more current times.

I  conclude this short review with a fragment of the novel:-

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

Margaret Atwood

Conkers

Autumn is the time for conkers. They hold a special place in my heart. Yesterday, I mailed a conker to our son Ian in London. It was still in its husk and it came from his own horse chestnut tree - grown from a conker he picked up when he was three years old. That tree is now almost forty feet tall and I am thinking of having it professionally felled.

Having churned out blogposts for over fifteen years, I have of course blogged about conkers before and I don't really wish to repeat myself. To read those old conker posts please go here (2013) and here (also 2013).

The pictures that accompany this post were taken yesterday in the late afternoon after I had picked up a seed husk that was almost as big as a tennis ball.  By the way, it is unusual to find three conkers in a shell. It's normally just one or two.

Books

You probably heard the 45th President of The United States say this over the weekend:

"It’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn't the 'let's read the books' school. And I get it, and I understand it, and it's a very interesting thing, and I’m going to be letting you know about it."

What I want to comment on with this is the aroma of anti-intellectualism and the apparent dismissal of bookish knowledge. Isn't that him all over? He doesn't read books and even the business-related books he has allegedly "written" have been composed by ghost writers. All fakery.

Dismissing the "let's read the books school" will chime happily with a large number of his supporters - perhaps the majority - who probably also found the reading of books pretty tiresome and overrated as they were suffering formal education.

Thank heavens for him that the medical staff dealing with him at The Walter Reed Medical Centre in Washington D.C. most certainly read books during their training. Without their bookish knowledge they would not have the foundation of knowledge that is essential to become effective medical practitioners. They belong to the "let's read books school" and that is why they have been able to help the 45th president to cope with his personal COVID19 health crisis... So far.

Not only does the president sneer at books, he also fails to follow clear guidance about self-isolation as was shown when he cruised around the Walter Reed hospital in his armoured vehicle - known I believe as "The Beast" - waving to his mainly unmasked supporters. Evidently, he belongs to the "let's break the rules school".

Finally , in contrast with the 45th president's dismissive attitude to the "let's read books school", this is what Barack Obama had to say about the value of books back in 2005: ""Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible, from complex word problems and the meaning of our history to scientific discovery and technological proficiency." 

I agree with that.

Distancing

Throughout this pandemic, I have almost always gone grocery shopping in the hour before supermarket closing time. At 9pm, very few people choose to shop so the aisles have been really quiet and I have felt very comfortable about social distancing.

However, this morning I needed to buy a chicken for tonight's Sunday dinner. I was outside "Lidl" on Chesterfield Road before opening time at 10am. To my surprise, a queue was already forming and I was fourth in it. When the doors finally slid open, there must have been thirty other shoppers behind me and more cars entering the car park.

I grabbed my chicken and a few other bits and pieces. By 10.20am I was at the checkout. standing on a two metre social distancing floor sticker. Ahead of me was a woman of my age or slightly older.. She was in fact beyond the next sticker so more than two metres ahead. She turned to me and spoke through her face mask.

"You are supposed to be two metres back!"

"I am two metres back!"

"No you're not. You are endangering my safety."

"What do you think these floor stickers are about?"

"Just get back will you!"

"I am two metres away from you. Do you know what a metre is?"

"Of course I know what a metre is! Don't patronise me!"

"Well don't tell me to get back when I am already two metres away from you!"

"You're upsetting me now!"

And then the pink-haired checkout boy butts in with, "Isn't it a bit early to be arguing like this?"

As he deals with the complaining woman's shopping, I notice that he is comforting her as if she has somehow been wronged and I take this up with him when my shopping has gone through. Meantime the woman, who has been filling her shopping bags on the side bench, passes me on her way out. She is maybe two feet from me.

Why do I allow such things to get under my skin?  Why do I relive them? Why do I get upset? It's always been this way. Hypersensitivity. One of my demons.

Needless to say, I shall stick to late evening shopping in future. Crowded supermarkets cause tensions that I can well do without.