Rain

This is not a pleasant week here in northern England. All wet and grey and as I sit in our front room at eight thirty on this Thursday morning, rain is teeming down outside. The weather people tell us that it has set in for the day and tomorrow doesn't look much better either.

The spongy moors between here and Manchester will be sodden and streams and rivers will be swollen as they cascade, trundle and gush towards the sea. Reservoirs will be brimming and the footpaths I often walk will be treacherous.

This is not a day for going out. Shirley went out half an hour ago - off to catch a public bus into the city centre. She'll be working all day at the Sheffield Hallam University health centre - vaccinating dozens of students. Many will be from China. The increasing presence of Chinese students in this city is clear to all and there are several  building projects associated with this influx.

Meanwhile, in  British news channels, all the talk is of the forthcoming general election. It will be held on December 12th and no doubt I will be invited to work as a poll clerk. It will be a busy day with perhaps a 75% turnout. The day's pay will be rubbishy but it's nice to  be engaged in the processes of our so-called democracy.

Brtitain's Trump

Last night Odious Johnson launched the Conservative Party's campaign in Birmingham. It was stage-managed for television just like an American primary event. Supporters waved pre-printed party placards as Odious Johnson stood on a raised dais with the faces of intoxicated supporters behind him. The blunt and misleading  slogan, "Get Brexit Done!" was everywhere. I would prefer "Get Johnson Done!"

The path to December 12th will be bitter and unpleasant with accusations, lies and false promises. Odious Johnson has suppressed a major intelligence report that sheds light upon Russian involvement in the European Union referendum of June 2016. And it is patently obvious why he does not want that information to come out before the election. An army of Russian bots and Facebook infiltrators were working overtime before that referendum to cunningly swing the country to "Leave". It was all good practice ahead of the last presidential election in America.

Calm down young man - I say to myself - calm down!

There are many things I might have blogged about this morning but as the rain continues to pour I will simply leave you with some annual rainfall figures that demonstrate that England is not as wet as outsiders and indeed insiders sometimes think:-

Sheffield, England - 29.4 inches

London, England - 22.9 inches

New York City - 45.2 inches

Tallahassee, Florida - 59 inches

Stuttgart, Germany - 28.5 inches

Florence, South Carolina - 45.0 inches

Bangkok, Thailand - 65.1 inches

Mumbai, India - 95.3 inches

Red Deer, Canada - 19.6 inches

Seattle, Washington State - 38.4 inches

Tamborine Mountain, Australia - 61.5 inches

Auckland, NZ - 50.5 inches

Nowadays

The Turners

Weatherwise, yesterday was miserable so at midday I took myself off to the cinema, There were two films I would have liked to see but I plumped for "Sorry We Missed You" - directed by the legendary Ken Loach.

It was powerful stuff. Very English but not in a Downton Abbey or Dr Who kind of way. No - this was about the real England, gritty and true with all pretence stripped away. It is set in The North and focused upon one particular working family - the Turners. The plot follows their travails as the parents - Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and Abby (Debbie Honeywood) - try to forge a decent life within the current economic landscape of zero-hours contracts and diminished workers' rights.

He is a delivery man and she is a carer, visiting needful elderly "clients" in their homes. Abby says she hates that word. Ricky has no contract, just the illusion of self-employment. He is ruled by the hand-held tracking device that shadows his journeys and bleeps continuously.

Reviewer Beth Webb in "Empire" said this of the film: "Though relentless at times, this is a crucial, empathetic rally cry of a film that holds a mirror up to the swelling crisis of the gig economy with admirable intention."

The film contains many tender moments and the Turner family seem real and whole. They are not cardboard cutouts simply used to make a series of socio-political points. They laugh and they cry and they have hopes and dreams. That is why the audience is able to feel for them them as they fight their good fight.

"Sorry We Missed You" was spellbinding but I was not convinced about the ending. Where was Ricky Turner going to in his van? Back to work like a soldier - tying to "keep calm and carry on" - or was he instead seeking an edge to drive over?

____________________________________________________

Secondly, I wish to share news of a personal triumph. Some of you will remember that I contribute regularly to a geographical website that continues to illustrate every square kilometre of The British Isles with photographs. Every week there is a "Photo of the week" competition and for Week 43, one of my pictures was chosen as the overall winner - selected from three thousand eligible images. You saw it here first but here it is again:-

And here it is as it appears on the geograph website.

Whoopee-do!

Guy

Guy Fawkes was a Yorkshireman and a rebel. Born in York in April 1570, he died from a broken neck after possibly tripping upon the gallows. Following his very public death in Westminster, London on January 31st 1606, he was "quartered". Afterwards, his body parts were distributed to "the four corners of the kingdom", to be displayed as a warning to other would-be traitors.

In the early hours of November 5th, 1605 Guy Fawkes was found in an "undercroft" beneath The House of Lords guarding some thirty six barrels of gunpowder. He and his fellow conspirators had placed them there - planning to blow up the parliament building above. Specifically they wished to assassinate the Protestant monarch - King James I and pave the way for a return to Catholic rule.

As I am not a religious historian, I find it difficult to fully understand the Catholic/Protestant tensions of those times but I do know that the animosities were not purely about religious belief. It was also about power, wealth, land ownership and relations with Rome where of course The Pope resided.

Guy Fawkes was acting on behalf of an entire movement. He didn't just wake up one day and think, "Oh, I'm going to blow up The Houses of Parliament". Underscoring his actions were years of intrigue and division as different political philosophies clashed or secretly  ate away at each other like bone diseases.

The Catholic/Protestant division was rife throughout Europe too and in his twenties Fawkes had fought for Catholic Spain in its Eighty Years War with the Protestant Dutch Republic. The bitterness went very deep.

On November 5th 1606, following The Gunpowder Plot, bonfires were lit all across the land and effigies of Guy Fawkes were burnt. All over England, that tradition has continued - for four hundred and thirteen years.

When I was a boy, Guy Fawkes Night - often called Bonfire Night - was one of the eagerly anticipated highlights of my year. It ranked alongside my birthday and Christmas Day. There were fireworks and toffee apples, baked potatoes and sparklers and of course "guys" stuffed with straw or old newspapers sitting atop our bonfires.

Every November 5th, I remember those old bonfires of yore. My father lighting rockets and shouting "Stand back!", my biscuit tin containing bangers and "traffic lights" or "volcano" fireworks, cinder toffee and Yorkshire parkin in the oven and the excited cheering when the lapping amber flames eventually reached the guy...

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November

Gunpowder treason and plot

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot

Penny for The Guy - London in the nineteen sixties

Congratulations!

On Saturday morning, English rugby union supporters left their beds with much expectation. We hoped to see our national rugby team beat South Africa in the final of The Rugby World Cup. England had beaten both Australia and New Zealand to reach the final in Yokohama, Japan. Surely, we could overcome South Africa too.

But it wasn't to be. South Africa were stronger and more determined in their forward play and, as the game went on, they ground England down. The final score was England  12 South Africa 32.  We were well-beaten and I believe that  all England rugby supporters will generously admit that on the day, the best team won.

In years gone by, the South African national rugby team was bleached entirely white even though 90% of the population of that country is non-white. But at this year's final their team was multi-racial, led by their very first black captain. That man was Siya Kolisi, pictured at the top of this blogpost. He grew up in poverty in the Eastern Cape region. To see him lead his country to a world cup victory was bigger than sport. His captaincy was a symbol of hope for for all township dwellers, for barefoot children skipping in the street, for hotel cleaners and agricultural workers, for the very prospect of equality.

Kolisi's father, Fezakele Kolisi, attended the final and witnessed his son lifting the golden cup. He had never been on an aeroplane before and had never previously left South Africa. It was quite a moment for him too.

I admit that I felt pretty blue at the end of Saturday's game. My facial muscles turned the corners of my mouth down for the rest of the day but when all is said and done it was just a rugby match. Congratulations to South Africa!

Fezakele Kolisi

Marianne

On Friday night, I watched a documentary film called "Words of Love". It was all about the fifty six year long relationship between Leonatd Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. I found it tremendously moving but then I was always a Leonard Cohen fan - ever since I  heard his first album in the autumn of 1967. By the way, that record included a song called "So Long, Marianne".

They first met in their mid-twenties on the island of Hydra in Greece in 1960. Marianne had been living there since 1958 and had a baby son called Axel. She was in a village grocery store when Leonard appeared. She said this:-

I was standing in the shop with my basket waiting to pick up bottled water and milk. And he is standing in the doorway with the sun behind him. And then you don't see the face, you just see the contours. And so I hear his voice, saying: ”Would you like to join us, we’re sitting outside?”

At first, in the unearthly sunlight of Hydra, far from the hustle and bustle of the so-called"real" world, they were a devoted couple. He wrote his novel "Beautiful Losers" on Hydra and Marianne supported him through that process.

His first instinct was to be a successful, published writer but in the mid-sixties he was drawn to songwriting and with the encouragement of American folk artiste Judy Collins he transitioned to the stage.

Gradually, he spent less and less time with Marianne on Hydra and they were often estranged. It wasn't the life that Marianne wanted and at the end of the sixties she moved back to her native Norway where she found an oil engineer to marry while she worked in oil platform administration.

But her special bond with Leonard continued through the decades. They remained in touch and you might say that Marianne was the only woman that he ever truly loved. It certainly seemed that way. She had cast a spell over him, similar to the one that he had cast over her.

In the spring of 2016, Marianne was dying in an Oslo hospital. She asked a friend to send Leonard the news. He was also on the path to  lifelessness but he sent a heartfelt letter that was read out to Marianne on her deathbed:-

Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.

-  Your Leonard

The circle was almost complete. He was to die just three months later.

The documentary mapped a beautiful love story made all the more poignant because of the elements of tragedy that were part of it. For example, how could a singing poet truly settle down into a life of domesticity? This was not in his blood 

But the greatest tragedy of all surrounds Marianne's son - Axel Joachim Jensen. To me he seemed like a victim of instability and he ended up damaged by drugs, living in mental institutions in Norway. He must be sixty years old now. Leonard Cohen was very fond of him and what happened to Axel certainly wasn't his fault.

So long Marianne...

Marianne in old age

Reminiscence

My late brother Paul was a brilliant fiddler. As a teenager, he played classical violin in orchestras but in his twenties, when living and working in north London, he happened upon the Irish pub scene. It was there that he first heard Irish jigs and reels in which of course the fiddle featured prominently.

He went home, took out his violin and practised - learning a different way of playing. It was a style that was filled with raw emotion and clever improvisation and was part of Ireland's great folk tradition. Before very long he was playing in London's Irish pubs and within a few months was asked to join a semi-professional band called Dingle Spike. 

One thing led to another. He divorced his first wife and because of his love affair with Irish music went to live in Ireland. There he fell in love with Josephine from Galway. They married and had two sons after buying a remote school residence in the middle of County Clare. 

He kept playing his fiddle, joining "sessions" all over the west of Ireland. He became greatly respected in the folk music community. His fingers danced upon the fingerboard and his bow sawed away at the strings in a blur. With eyes closed, he was part of the music, intoxicated by it.

I visited the house in County Clare many times. Paul had amassed a collection of L.P. records that he kept in cardboard boxes. As you can imagine, they reflected his obsession with traditional Irish music. One rainy afternoon, I was thumbing through the albums when I came across a most unexpected record. It stood out like a sore thumb - so different from the rest.

It was "Tapestry" by Carole King. Later I asked Paul about it and he said it was "a masterpiece" and he had loved it from the first time he heard it back in  1971 - before his Irish odyssey began.

I still agree with him. "Tapestry" is indeed an iconic album that evidences a brilliant spell in Carole King's illustrious songwriting career. I have chosen this track to share with you. Like the lover that Carole King addresses in the song, my brother Paul is also now "So Far Away". He died unexpectedly in June 2010 at the tender age of sixty two...

Togo

All my life I have been interested in geography. Though I might not know much about physics or engines, when a geographical question comes up in a pub or TV quiz I will generally know the answer. As longtime visitors to this blog may recall, I have occasionally revealed my geographical passion by blogging about obscure countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Today The Yorkshire Pudding spotlight of geographical curiosity illuminates an African country - namely, Togo. Now there are fifty four countries in Africa and in terms of population, Togo ranks thirty third. Eight million people live there. The country is squeezed between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east.

The map below shows the exact location of Togo in West Africa. As you can see, it is a long, thin country with a short Atlantic coastline. That coastline is only thirty two miles across but it's 320 miles from the Burkina Faso border to the north.

The birth of Togo as a distinct and independent country was a relatively recent occurrence. It achieved independence from France in 1960. Previously, in the late nineteenth century,  it had been a German protectorate and before that, like most West African countries its borders were quite fluid. The very idea of a "country" as we know that concept today is largely a western construct. Once Togo was part of what is sometimes known as "The Slave Coast" for it was from this part of Africa that the brutal slave trade began in the sixteenth century.

Miss Aïda Yombo wins Miss Togo 2019

Ethnically, culturally and religiously, Togo is a veritable bouillabaisse of diversity. A third of all nationals are unapologetic animists and there are some forty distinct ethic groups - each speaking their own language. It must be an exceedingly difficult country to pull together as one with various cultural tensions. The current elected leader is a wealthy fifty three year old fellow called Faure Gnassingbé who does not necessarily appreciate all of the guiding principles of democracy. He certainly has blood on his hands.

Early morning scene in Lomé

Agriculture is vital to the country's economy but mining of phosphates is also an important feature. It ranks 145th in the world in terms of its national wealth. According to Credit Suisse it has a national wealth of just five billion dollars - compared with say Denmark which has a much smaller population but a national wealth of  1,271 billion dollars.

The capital of Togo is the city of Lomé, developed by Europeans as a trading port. It now has an overall population of 1.5 million. Like many African cities, its population continues to grow at an alarming rate year by year. Back in 1950, only thirty thousand people lived there. The burgeoning growth puts enormous pressure on infrastructure and the natural environment.

Until researching this blogpost, the only Togolese person I had ever heard of was the footballer  Emmanuel Adebayor who played for Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur in The English Premier League. He became African Footballer of the Year in 2008 and this season, at the age of 35 he is still playing the beautiful game over  in Turkey.

Togo is famous for batik art