#1 son completes the paperwork on buying his first home today. In Northampton. Really pleased for him.
#2 couldn’t afford to buy a shed where he lives in Central London. Still, he’s reviewing the papers on tomorrow’s breakfast show on TalkRadio. Not the classiest of stations but he seems to be getting out there
We, meanwhile, are off to see Maggie Bell sing blues tonight. Yes … as far as I know she IS still alive.
… and I’m making Xim-Xim for tea. A chicken & prawn, coconut & mild spice thingie, with coconut and lime in the sauce. Originating in Brazil. It’s a first for me soI’ll let you know
Congratulations to Son! Soon he will know the joy of hearing every sound in the house at night and wondering what it is and whether what it is will be Expensive.
Other Son sounds as if he is doing well; he has chosen a career with small chances, so if he is getting them he’s well over the curve.
Yes, do let us know about the Xim-Xim: it sounds lovely and I want to know more.
Birds are clearly not human, so not a problem about climate. According to (probably) Costing The Earth the other day, Spring has been 26 days earlier this century than last. I can’t say I have noticed or am noticing.
Well, the patient is home and doing well. Turned out to be a great ball of long grass, which ended up blocking the crop so she couldn’t get enough food. Cleared now, but she’s on soft food for a while because there’ll be a bit of soreness. Another week of meds then a return for a check-up. Have left her with her sister for company.
Am I the only person beginning to get fed up with remembering stuff which happened before my parents were born, and which is no longer part of the conscious life of anyone now alive? I know it was important that two lots of idiots managed to make many millions of other people die for their ideas, but when even the D-day commemorations are starting to run out of people who were there on the actual occasion to go along for them, isn’t it coming round to time to start winding them down a bit?
I don’t remember when I was a child having interminable reminiscence going on every second year about wars which happened in the nineteenth century.
A friend of mine is planning to keep an all-day silence this 11 November (a Sunday), and that seems reasonable to me. It’s precisely because it’s not part of the conscious life any more that it’s worth remembering: what went wrong and how easily people can be led to do horrible things.
I do not see that public grief-fests help the dead (hence my objections to plastic-wrapped flowers on roadsides) nor that communal competitive remembrance prevents future bad behaviour.
I very much dislike, but don’t condemn, the plastic wrapped flowers thing. However, I do believe that remembrance of past horrors and the weaknesses of we humans that caused them is valid.
Having been shopping without OH (his birthday is looming large) I was delighted to find my favourite Spanish taxi driver turning up to take me home. He is tolerant of my pathetic attempts to talk to him in his mother tongue.
I do feel respecting the World Wars is legitimate. It would be a brave/foolhardy politician who said “well, it’s 100 years now, maybe we should step it back a bit”.
I don’t agree with public figures getting harrangued for chosing not to wear a poppy for a month. Though the White poppy is a deliberate antagonism.
But public grief … & I blame Diana for this … has ever since become mawkish & collective. It’s now everywhere. I barely see a football match without “a minute’s aoplause” & black arm bands.
The gathering of all sorts of deadwood moping over the death of another waste of oxygen and writing simpering notes telling them they were the light of the Earth … well, I assume you can guess my view.
This ‘Poppy Cascade’ is in the Crooked Spire Church in Chesterfield & there is one felt/crocheted/knitted Poppy for each of the 1,507 men from Chesterfield who died in WW1
It looks simple, yet stunning
The other 25,000 + Poppies, will, when they are made, be used for a display in/on/opposite the Town Hall at the War Memorial, which was carved by my Mother’s Uncle as his ‘Apprentice Piece’ when he was 17
This will be the last really big Commemoration we make as a country
Despite being Catholic, I don’t do Shrines, & certainly not flowers wrapped in cellophane, but I have always loved Poppies, both for themselves, & what they represent , which to me is Remembrance.
Poppies, and buying them, is not in fact only about the two World Wars. They are to help provide for every person who has died or been wounded in the services: for the dependents, and for those who have been left disabled. Now, as well as then; the Falklands war as well as Ypres. So I have never minded those.
