Marmite

A mate of mine emailed me the other day as follows: “I’ve just been notified of two new letters on my son’s High School website - I read them in order of timing, they were a minute or so apart. The first one gave notice of strike action by teachers on 5th and 7th July. The second was two pages long and gave dire warnings about attendance levels and the correlation with academic achievement.” The logical conclusion we both drew from these letters is that wilfully preventing a child from being educated is morally reprehensible, especially when those doing the preventing are the providers of said education and know without doubt that their actions are damaging the children.

This morning, I was enjoying my usual pre-breakfast WhatsApp-fest with my very good friend H, swapping Wordle scores and animal anecdotes: she has a dog and two cats; I had two hares, one bunny and a murder of magpies in the back garden. Yes, I know that’s not the correct collective noun, but it is for crows, and magpies are part of the crow family, and I wanted to murder the magpies because they were chasing the bunny. I notice they didn’t chase the hares, probably because the hares would have boxed their cowardly heinies to kingdom come.

A quick scan of Saturday’s Times to find a topic to blog about opened the floodgates, and by that I don’t mean the combined sewer overflows, although I touch on those later. Starting off with a doozie,  "Roxy Music model fights to stay after 73 years in UK" . An ex-model, married to someone related to someone famous, didn’t get her act together and is now threatened with deportation from Blighty. She didn’t get her act together and Brexit is blamed. I woke up in agony this morning with cramp in my calf – curse Brexit for that as well, eh? I admit that deportation for an accidental lapse of paperwork, by a seemingly harmless, law-abiding, if tedious, individual who’s lived here legally and peaceably most of her life, is a tad harsh, especially when the authorities turn a blind eye to others who intentionally ditch their paperwork so they can land here illegally. That’s not the fault of Brexit but of shoddy implementation and oversight by Mandarins pre-occupied with their rejo...

I woke up very early this morning, early as in 4.06am. Really wide awake. Feeling a little sad? low? Melancholy. Not because of health or other obvious reasons, but because Boris and Nadine have resigned as MPs, and the world of politics, if not the world itself, just got a bit more boring, a tad less colourful. Stale. For all their faults, I can't help liking both of them and am more tolerant of their failings and wrongdoings than I should be. Contrast that with my knee-jerk criticism of others, who probably don’t deserve it, well not all of it. Just as I’m willing to either disbelieve ill of, or forgive, Boris and Nadine (and Sir Jacob and Dame Priti), so I lap up the malicious gossip in the Daily Mail of the likes of Starmer, Sturgeon, whoever took over from her, the Lib Dem non-descript, and the Green thingy. Why?

This week, I saved the NHS a few quid, freed up several appointments for those in greater need, and emitted less carbon than I might have done. According to some, that was terribly wrong of me.  Say what? My crime was to go private, to eschew the money-blackhole behemoth that is the NHS, to jump the queue, to seek advantage over others because there was room on Hubby’s credit card. Needless to say, I don’t see it like that. For me, I was exercising my freedom of choice, and supporting wider society by tangibly helping the NHS and its patients. Polish my halo.

I recently remembered that a blog-fan had suggested I write something about a well-known passage from the Old Testament. What prompted my Total Recall was attending Sunday morning Chapel at my old college, with a thumping hangover and an unwelcome surprise. The surprise was that instead of a sermon, the chaplain announced that we would have a group discussion about the two readings (from Acts and Luke). Given that there were only four of us in the congregation, any silence from me would be well-noticed. I usually have an opinion about everything, even the Bible, but that morning I didn’t feel too bright, or brave. As it happens, I managed to hone in on the language as being too negative for the message and would either confuse or demotivate devotees. That thought seemed to floor everyone, which means it was either an excellent point or a really daft one.

This blog title is inspired by the famous spiritual song that was itself inspired by Ezekiel 37:1–14, where the prophet Ezekiel visits the Valley of Dry Bones and prophesies that they (the people of Israel in exile) will one day be resurrected at God's command. The connection to this blog is either superficial or very deep and cryptic. Reader's choice. It seemed like a good idea at the time, eating, drinking and chatting, dinosaur skeletons watching every move, perhaps waiting to pounce (the dinosaurs, not me). The venue was the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, much more alluring than an Ivy or a Stein or a Ramsay, and the service was better too.

I've blown the dust off this October-2022 blog and reposted it in the light of today's Daily Telegraph article here  and excellent commentary here exonerating Truss and Kwarteng. As I said at the time, the Blob was / is to blame for the extent of our economic ills, not Batman and Robin.

I was set a blog-challenge a wee while ago in the context of reparations for slavery: “…unless you are a person of colour or descended from immigrants at that time … you will have somehow benefitted from the proceeds of slavery… At what point in the long chain of benefits do we decide that individuals and organisations should not be held responsible for slavery?” If I were a Christian, I’d simply point to Ezekiel 18:20 (King James’ version, of course): “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”. Funnily enough, lots of Christians are demanding reparations – a hypocritical circle to square.

Another quickie blog while I put the finishing touches to the one on Reparations, which has been anything but a quickie! Apparently even the most able students have been traumatised by the Year 6 SATS tests. Teachers are claiming they were stumped by some of the questions. The Daily Mail reproduced a sample few and asked their readers how many they could answer. I love a challenge! Except it wasn’t a challenge. I aced each and every one of them, English and Maths, while making a Béchamel sauce for a fish pie. Anyone who’s ever made such a sauce knows that it’s easy to mess up throughout, from burning the butter to not stirring vigorously or for long enough.

I have a million and one things to do today so this blog is just a collection of short takes: no research, no ‘clever’ logic, probably more typos than usual. It’s my disparate thoughts on the Coronation of KC3.

Given that I can’t get the blessed music out of my head, day or night, awake or asleep, I might as well blog about it and compound the agony or, should I say, “the double agony of man”. I shouldn’t describe it as agony, to have something of such sublimity playing with my head like an ethereal pinball machine but, honestly, if ever the adage ‘less is more’ should apply, it’s with the rattling around of this piece of work. And what a piece of work it is.

I blogged about climate change last summer (no longer available but I might post it again in due course) shortly after the really really hot spell. In a nutshell I said climate change was real, but we needed to keep on top of the science and continue asking difficult questions, otherwise we’d get our solutions wrong. That made me a climate change denier. Daft, eh? Not only daft, but dangerous. Here’s why.

I hate surprises. They come in many shapes and sizes and I hate the lot of them. Our marriage got off to a rocky start when Hubby refused to tell me where we were going on Honeymoon. He wanted it to be a surprise. I insisted I needed to know where we were going to plan what clothes to take. He told me to ask Mother-in-Law. Seriously? My soon-to-be Hubby suggested I take fashion advice from his mother? I think on some level he didn’t want to get married.

I ought to walk more than I do. It’s the best exercise for physical and mental health. Unlike cycling or weight-lifting it’s safe, as long as you don’t: twist your ankle in a pothole; get run over by a tipper truck (the way I feel about certain tipper trucks, they’d come off worse); pick up a tick in the spinney; get cornered by a cohort of curious cattle; or, as happened today, get pooped on by a pigeon. As for me fending off axe-wielding psychopaths, at least the village newsletter would have a gripping front-page story.

I’ve been struggling with my latest blog. Since Easter weekend! That’s usually a sign I should abandon it and start something new, but on this occasion I was so irritated, I had to get back on an even keel by flushing all the cr-p out of my system, a bit like a textual enema.  Most discussions I have with those who hold opposing views, either in the pub or by email, are constructive, productive and enlightening. Where I struggle is when, as happened on Good Friday, I'm confronted with statements akin to ‘the Earth is flat’ or ‘1 + 1 = 3’ and the more I - politely - present my iron-clad facts and logic, the more I'm dissed, impolitely. There's only one conclusion: They can’t handle the truth! That’s my First Favourite Frase, with apologies to Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.

After Mum passed away last May, I found myself not having to drive to hospitals, GPs, sundry health clinics and out of-hours’ chemists. For therapy (mine), I once blogged about a particularly frantic weekend (always a weekend), mentioning that a chemist was ‘foreign’ and I couldn’t understand her accent; we were talking about Mum’s meds so it was crucially relevant to the situation. For that I was called 'offensive'. What? How? Why? Christ knows. Actually, He probably doesn’t, poor chap. He'll be slumped on a cloud with His head in His hands, wondering when ‘Thou Shalt Not Call A Shovel A Shovel’ became the eleventh Commandment. Yup. Jesus was a Northerner.

I first published this piece under the old regime in October last year. I was planning to republish it on Marmite at some stage as promised in a previous blog (here) , but not just yet as I have a lot of new material swimming around my noddle. However, one of the best-ever LinkedIn posts (here) appeared in my feed just now and I just had to HAD TO respond to it with the old blog (slightly upated). So here 'tis. My phone rang recently. It was one of my many gentlemen-friends (don’t tell Hubby) to whom I shall refer as ‘G’. I really enjoy our phone conversations. They follow a familiar pattern. G asks if I have anything to add to the agenda of a forthcoming meeting, or if I can help him with the minutes of the previous meeting because he can’t read his handwriting, that sort of thing. After these committee-niceties, he changes the dynamic with a searching question, along the lines of: • Can you see a way out of the cladding crisis? • Do you think we should have another lockdown?...

This blog title sounds incongruous, but we’re used to the mantra ‘death is part of life’; ‘change is part of stability’ is simply a non-morbid variation. John Lewis losses One thing that got me thinking about this was the current predicament of John Lewis and the possibility, floated by Chairman Dame Sharon White, that a necessary cash injection might be needed from outside investors, which is at odds with the long-standing model of employee-only ownership. The company lost £234m last year and has to do something, but those who ought to know better don’t even want to consider Dame Sharon's obvious and sensible idea.

I love the English language. It’s versatile, poetic, adaptable, complex, intriguing. And difficult. By comparison, the German language is easy. It’s rule-driven; there are lots of rules and they are applied and obeyed consistently. Well, it is German. Once you get used to the fact that in certain circumstances some verbs go at the very end of the sentence, and other verbs separate and only the first part goes at the end of a sentence, it’s a doddle. Mark Twain would disagree. He hated German and even made some money out of his loathing. As with many other languages, all German nouns are designated male, female or neuter. I would have made a joke about the wokerati looking to banish such non-inclusive language, but Cambridge University has stolen my thunder by already teaching non-gendered German. Hello! It’s not Cambridge’s language to bastardise. In any event, I thought the woke* were only too ready to shout ‘cultural appropriation’ at the drop of a hat. Well, Cambridge has dropped a ...