Jetwashing

Not much to report from Pudding Towers today. The weather here in South Yorkshire has continued to be quite gorgeous and I am sitting at this keyboard in shorts with my muscular legs still fully exposed expecting another sunny day tomorrow.

We looked after Little Phoebe all day today and very soon I must share some more pictures of her here on this blog. She is not a baby any more but a fully fledged toddler. Shirley took her swimming this morning while I got on with some more jetwashing.

Investing in a jetwasher was one of my wisest investments. They are so good for cleaning paving stones, brickwork and wooden decking. Weather-stained, grimy and sometimes slippery surfaces can be quickly spruced up just by blasting water at them. Not only do you make a visual impact but you also improve safety. If you don't look after them, decking boards and indeed block paving stones can be lethal - especially in wet weather.

Phoebe and her parents will be heading off to Crete next week so Shirley and I have taken the opportunity to book our own holiday abroad. We haven't flown since September 2019 when we visited Croatia and obviously that was just before the pandemic hit us all.

We thought of going further afield but in the end we have settled upon a week in Sicily. It is a last minute booking and I noticed  there were hardly any seats left on our flight from Manchester. If a day's excursion isn't too costly we hope to visit Mount Etna and no doubt we will explore the city of Syracuse. We have never been to Sicily before. It is a big island with plenty of hiding places for the local mafia. I sincerely hope that we do not run into those guys.

Here in England the news is all about Boris Johnson, his resignation as an MP. his lies and his dissatisfaction with the parliamentary committee that was charged with exploring his past conduct and rule breaking during COVID. There's something very Trumpian about him even though Johnson purports to be someone who respects  democratic processes. He has been found out and he doesn't like it. I would be very happy to jetwash him out of existence.

101

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you

 knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 

is the worst thing in the world.' - From "1984" by George Orwell

"Room 101" is so much a part of British consciousness that we have even had a TV comedy show called "Room 101". This has now become a radio show hosted by Paul Merton. I was listening to an episode of it this very evening when the guest was another very clever funny man called Mark Steel.

The guest is asked to put five things into Room 101 - things that really annoy them or things they really do not like. Tonight Mark Steel's choices were tinned custard, unnecessary modern technology, old people who think that everything was better in the old days, people who don't get jokes and "my old angry self". Of course the guest has to present cases for each of their choices.

I was thinking - what might I choose to put into Room 101 - and came up with the following...

Jugs or teapots that do not pour properly. I mean, these everyday items have just one prime function - to pour. And yet so often they drip on the table or kitchen surface. This makes me growl every time it happens. Who designed them? They want shooting!

Boris Johnson. I have despised this puffed up Old Etonian since I first set eyes upon him on our television set.  He is an inveterate liar and hypocrite who loves the sound of his own voice. As prime minister of this kingdom, he never did his homework - preferring to wing it just as he did during his education at  Eton and Oxford.  Worst of all, he tipped the balance with regard to the Brexit referendum. Without his input, we would still be in The European Union.

Variations in airport security. Of course we need airport security but why does it vary from airport to airport? Shouldn't it be exactly the same the whole world over?  At some airports they make you take your shoes off - in others they don't.  Some security teams frisk every passenger but others never frisk anybody. In some airports you have to take laptops out of your cabin bag  while in others they insist that electronic equipment should remain in your bag. There are many other differences but I will leave it at that.

Ties (Neckties) I accept that women often have a raw deal and that historical sexism never truly went away but women were never expected to wear ties in their workplaces! The tie is a ridiculous accessory, requiring shirts to be buttoned right up to the top. Ties are often an unnecessary hazard when dining. If food drops onto a tie it is usually ruined for good as ties are not easily cleaned. Who ever imagined that ties look smart and business-like must have been completely bonkers! I say: "Ban the tie!" It's like having a noose around your neck.

Dentists  - Just as we need airport security, we need dentists. Not many of us have teeth that never require treatment. Most of the dentists I have encountered have wild eyes and bad breath. They attempt to hold conversations when your mouth has been filled with their stuff - including saliva syphons and drills that threaten to invade your hippocampus . Maybe I am a wuss but I have always been afraid of dentists and that unavoidable intimacy whenever we visit them.

What would you choose to put into Room 101?

Birds

Hedge sparrow feeding a cuckoo chick

©David Kjaer

Everybody on this planet who is of sound mind - with eyes to see and ears to hear - finds birds fascinating. From the Indian peasant in his loin cloth hoeing the soil  to the jet setting entrepreneur in her high rise office building and from me to you, we all notice birds and they frequently give us pause for thought.

We don't need to be passionate ornithologists or amateur birdwatchers. We don't need to know the names of all the bird species we see. We can still notice birds and be rather enthralled by them. (By the way, this is a "We" paragraph). We can watch their acrobatics in the air. We can observe their feeding habits. We can pick up their feathers or watch their squabbles.

They are the most common wild creatures most of us ever see. They are part of our folklore and our social history. (This is a "They" paragraph!). They are feted in songs and poetry. They are cousins of dinosaurs and reptiles. They can be found on every continent on Earth.

There are about 10,000 species of birds in the world but only 405 species in Great Britain. The country with the greatest number of different birds is Colombia with 1,878 recorded species.

We moved into this humble Yorkshire home 34 years ago next month and ever since then I have fed the birds - supplementing their diet to help them survive. I feed them in every season and i guess I have spent a king's ransom on sacks of bird seed and buckets or boxes of fat balls. In addition, waste bread and scraps of meat or bacon rind end up on our lawn and not in the kitchen waste bin. For birds, this is "The Yorkshire Pudding Diner"and it's all free.

Currently our main visitors are hedge sparrows, house sparrows, wood pigeons, magpies and crows but we also get blue tits, long tailed tits, coal tits, rooks, jackdaws, wrens,  robins, jays and an occasional sparrow hawk. Once I even spotted a pheasant out there although we are a mile from open countryside. Of course the swifts, swallows and housemartins of summer disdain our avian diner as they swoop for insects in the air.

A month ago I was walking on the moors of Staffordshire when from a nearby wooded dell i heard another summer visitor - a cuckoo with its familiar and insistent repetition of it's name in song "Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!" across the quiet heathland, calling for a mate. That precious sound - that was once heard so widely in English summers - made my heart skip a beat. 

When the last cuckoo sings - that is when England will be  lost for good.

Decade

It's hard to believe that a full decade has passed by since I returned to England following a second six month teaching stint in  Bangkok, Thailand. It was June 2013 and one of the first things I did was to take a long walk in The Peak District with my friend Tony.

As I recall - and the pictures prove it - it was a lovely summery day. Above is one of the pictures I snapped at The Magpie Mine near the village of Sheldon. It is a long-abandoned lead mine but the manager's house is in good repair as you can see.

Typical limestone scenery above The River Wye with ancient  drystone walls dividing the sheep pastures while below - not far from the village of Monyash - farmers are bringing in their newly cut hay for winter fodder.

In the middle of the month, Shirley and I packed our suitcases and headed off to the islands of Malta and Gozo in The Mediterranean Sea. We had never been there before. I took a hundred photos or more and here's a random selection  of the images I brought home:-

Above I spotted that shadowy illusion while below a man sits fishing on the edge of the old salt pans. At high tide the rock pools would be filled with salt water and after the tide had receded and hot sunshine had done its job, bags of sea salt would be raked up.

Below - I took this picture on the island of Gozo and it's still my favourite image from that holiday. It must be very hard to grow vegetables on sun-baked Gozo but the men in the foreground are doing their best. On the horizon is Ta' Ġurdan Lighthouse where later that week I came across a local man shooting passing birds. Many Maltese and Gozan men call this hideous activity "sport".

Yes it was a decade ago and I was only 59 years old and there was no war in Ukraine and we had never heard of COVID and if you had told ordinary Americans that one day Donald Trump would be their president, they would have split their sides laughing.

Weekend

 

Lisle Street, in Chinatown, Soho

We are back home after two happy nights in London - staying at Ian and Sarah's house in Fulham. After twenty weeks of pregnancy, Sarah is positively blooming.

We just chatted away on Friday night. The evening felt quite Mediterranean as we took advantage of their newly updated outdoor space. We drank wine as Ian ordered in a delicious Lebanese takeaway.

On Saturday morning Ian made us a lovely brunch with toasted farmhouse bread, hummus, grilled tofu and salad seedlings. This was mine:-

It was so hot in London this weekend that we were anxious about having too much sun. Sarah phoned up about the theatre tickets she had reserved at The National Theatre only to discover that the preview show of "Dear England"  had just been cancelled. This was a real bummer so we decided to book another show and managed to get tickets for the musical "Ain't Too Proud" - all about the Motown singing group The Temptations.

Before venturing to The West End, we visited Ian's new "Bosh!" office in Hammersmith and were all duly impressed. It has a kitchen studio, two meeting rooms and a big workspace with several computers. Amazingly they now employ a team of sixteen people. From little acorns grow mighty oaks.

After the show which ended so impressively, we left the theatre and where revellers thronged the Soho streets, Ian spotted a black cab pulling up and was able to grab it as the previous fare disembarked. Soon we were heading back to Fulham where Ian and I watched a recording of The European Champions League final without knowing the score. We got to bed at around one in the morning.

Before heading home this afternoon (Sunday), we strolled out to "The Mitre" pub in Fulham for a delicious Sunday dinner and here we all are, warts and all...

Driving home up the M1 motorway took an hour longer than expected as there was a big hold up just north of Northampton. There had been a vehicle fire and traffic was being directed into one lane of the four lane motorway. For more than half an hour we were completely stationary but at least Clint was not on fire though he was positively fuming because of the hold-up!

London

The National Theatre, London

Contributions by the author of this humble Yorkshire blog will be suspended for two days from today as the aforesaid author will be in London with his spouse visiting his only begotten son and his London-born mistress* who has bought us tickets to see a show at The National Theatre.

* - to clarify, the author of this blog does not have a mistress. The young lady in question is the only begotten son's mistress..

Englightenment

The newly painted Buddha sits by The Path of Enlightenment. He is watched over from The Stump of The Tree of Knowledge by the freshly painted Black Cat of Vigilance...

Also serving and protecting Lord Buddha is The Hosta of Fertility....

And The Gnome of Loyalty...

Further up The Garden of Munificence and just starting to grow are The Courgettes of Zucchini...

At the end of the garden we have an oak tree that I grew from an acorn I had collected  at The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin. In the last ten years that tree had  grown too big for our liking and was becoming problematic both for next door and for our vegetable plot - creating too much shade - so in March I sawed and pruned  it back  pretty severely. I didn't want to kill it and sure enough new but delayed growth began to emerge from what remained.

You may not get this but some of the oak leaves that have appeared are massive - about the size of my hand. They are seven or eight times bigger than a normal oak leaf. Perhaps a botanist could explain the phenomenon. It may be that in its panic to survive, the tree has sent out bigger leaves to absorb more sunlight and guarantee its survival. I have never before observed anything like this

If only The Lord Buddha could speak. He would surely be able to enlighten me about what is going on with that tree.