Books, Brutality and Blincoe

1 Reply

I have an interesting book on my desk. Well, not actually on my desk, hovering a foot or so above my desk, balanced on another book and a box of medallions and another book and a plastic basket which, in the way of plastic baskets, has very little in it to justify the space it takes up.

Figs at Wilford Mencap Garden

That is either the way a creative mind arranges his desk, or an example of why I don’t get more done.

It’s an interesting book I came across while I was researching slavery. It’s a subject that keeps intruding on various things I do and I decided to give it a bit of time recently, when the subject came up with some medallion research. It was going to be part of my talk about the various unpleasant stories behind medallions, but that had to be shelved when I was ill and I’m starting to use some of the material for other things.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In addition to slavery I have recently finished a book on the Preston textile industry and another on miners in the Great War.

This all led me to one point – this book – The Real Oliver Twist.

It’s the story of a boy called Oliver Blincoe. He ended up in the Workhouse in what is described as “rural St Pancras” on the book jacket. Now it is better known for being in the middle of London. At the age of seven he was apprenticed to a Nottinghamshire Mill as a “parish apprentice” (also known as a “pauper apprentice), to serve until he was 21.  The Statute of Apprentices of 1563 gave Justices of the Peace the power to send out pauper children to masters in various ways, and the power to fine people who refused to take on apprentices.

Blue Iris

In 1799, Blincoe was one of a group of 80 children apprenticed to a mill at Lowdham near Nottingham. In 1803 the mill closed and the children were sent to a mill in Derbyshire. From what I have read so far they were often sold by the overseers, as the textile factories of the North needed a steady supply of child labour, but I’m not sure how common that was. Even if they went for nothing, it was good for the overseers of the poor to lift the burden from the ratepayers.

I will be making a start on that tomorrow.

Blue Iris

 

 

Failing to Fork Lightening, Again

8 Replies

I am feeling pleased with myself. I sent three poems off to a journal on Tuesday night and had one of them accepted this morning.

Cactus, Malta

Even better, the two that weren’t required can go elsewhere, which saves considerable effort.

I had to look at the punctuation again, as requested. I wasn’t sure whether the problem was an errant comma or something else so I checked it all, wondering if this was a test. I found two other possible errors – I hadn’t hyphenated the number thirty-one and I’d lazily put a hyphen where some editors prefer an em dash. A hyphen (-) requires hitting a key, an em dash (—) requires two hands – depressing the Alt key whilst typing 0151 on the numerical key pad. I should probably, in the name of precision, have used one where I stuck that hyphen in front of depressing.

CActus hedge Malta

And talking about depressing – I know that an en dash is the width of a capital N and an em dash is the width of a capital M. There is something very sad about a man who has spent 68 years getting to the point. I wanted to catch and sing the sun in flight, but I ended up knowing the difference between two sorts of dash and getting excited about taps (read on to find out about that, or fall into deep slumber as the tedium of my life washes over you).

Then I started looking at a comma with a view to making it into a full stop. At that point I decided that I was getting altogether too involved and thought about telling him I was an avant-garde surrealist poet in the mould of e. e. cummings.

Memento Mori

Then I started to wonder why cummings signed himself e. e. cummings instead of e e cummings, did he have a quibble with upper case letters but not punctuation?

He died when he was 67 which, since my last birthday, is something I have beaten him in. On the other hand, he wrote 2,900 poems. I’m not sure I’ll ever write 2,900 poems. Even if I do, it’s not a measure of quality.

We’ve had quite a lot of blustery rain today and a sharp hailstorm this morning. English hail isn’t generally too much of a problem as it’s quite small. However, it’s unusual in May.

Malta

We also had a handyman, which was a surprise. He had said he would fit us in for new kitchen taps as soon as he could, and he finished a job more quickly than he expected, so dropped in on us. It was a bit of a surprise as I was halfway through preparing lunch, but we now have a nice mixer tap with levers, which makes it a lot easier for me to work. The previous taps were a bit stiff and inconvenient for a man with arthritic fingers. It’s a tricky social situation as I was pleased to get the job done, but not pleased that lunch was interrupted.

Another day gone and a bright start ends with me quoting Thomas and talking of poetry and plumbing and punctuation when I should be writing.

Blue Lagoon

Pictures are from Julia’s May 2018 trip to Malta to visit No 1 son while he was working there. She went with No 2 Son while he was still living in UK. Now he is in Canada. Was it something I said?

Sinister Signs and Other Stories

18 Replies

I wrote this yesterday but watched TV and fell asleep instead of posting it. As it’s easier to add a note rather than rewrite it to keep the timeline consistent, that’s what I’m doing. The lazy ways are often the best.

In my first post today I said that the brain is a strange place. I’ve just been on the phone to the doctor – the phone system of the NHS is an even stranger place.

Bear with seed packet from Kew

I have just had a text from the doctor to tell me to make an appointment to talk to her about my recent MRI scan. So I did. It seems I can’t make an appointment to talk to the doctor now (4pm) I have to ring tomorrow morning at 8am. At that point I can join the queue, or, if it’s a long queue, I can be denied a place in it by a robotic voice and a theatrical click signifying they have cut me off.

As I said, it doesn’t really seem worth overloading the system and involving other people when all I need is a phone call telling me what I already know. How do I know, they asked? Because it’s already been entered on my records, which I have access to. It says “Abnormal but expected”. That’s exactly as I expected because I had an X-Ray months ago which told me that. The nurse also told me that. The receptionist checked. “It says ‘abnormal but expected'”, she said.

Bear in a tree

It means that I have arthritis in a number of joints. They were expecting that. They were actually looking for an infection in the bone. There isn’t one, but that was also expected as I had an X-Ray nearly three months ago.

It’s a good thing, when you look at the timescale, that there is no  infection. If there had been, it might have been quite serious by now. But probably not, as I’ve had the swollen toe for two years now without incident. Doctors worry. Sometimes they worry about patient welfare, at other times they worry about being sued or struck off. Either way, I’ve always had more treatment than I want from doctors. They live to find illness and give out pills, but I won’t go in that direction today.

Bear in the Garden

Doctors like to be certain about these things, which I appreciate, but the system creaks a bit in practice. It’s like the urgent X-Ray I once had. Twenty four hours to get the X-Ray, 28 days to get the results. That came back marked “No sinister signs” It felt like I’d been X-Rayed by Dracula.

You don’t even need a highly-trained doctor to read out the results anyway. I’m sure it’s a simple admin job once the report is done. If I can understand it, it can’t be hard.

Bear with pansies

Sometimes I think what the NHS needs is just a bit of common sense and someone who can spot bottlenecks. It doesn’t need doctors and highly paid management consultants getting involved, they could just ask me.

Maybe I should write and see if they need any help . . .

Photos are from May 2018

 

 

 

More Poor Time Management

14 Replies

I’ve just checked my count. This is the 132nd day of the year and this is the 132nd post. A few years ago, I swear I would have had no trouble keeping up. The problem lies in my relationship with time.

Julia is out reducing some poor, helpless piece of wood to shavings, so I thought I’d better do some tidying while she was out. It’s not a significant amount compared to her contribution, but it just means I can feel a little better about myself when she returns.

So I pulled the duvet flat and wished the breakfast pots. It took about ten minutes and I begrudged every minute of it, because I want to be writing.

St Joseph and the Angel c 1920 by Wilhelmina Geddes.

Once I sat down at the keyboard I checked the Facebook page for the Numismatic Society, read my emails (little had changed since 20 minutes ago) and checked if anything was new for sale on eBay, I realised I’d just wasted more time than doing a bit of washing up, and hadn’t worried about it at all.

Time management, like diet, is a  flexible concept in my world. They are also susceptible to the vagaries of memory. I don’t mean to waste time, or eat too much, but I do. It’s not because I want to fritter my life away, or be fat, it’s just that I forget I have time management and health constraints.

I actually used to have nightmares about that when I gave up smoking – after about a year, I’d start dreaming that I’d accepted a cigarette from someone because I’d forgotten I’d given up. I haven’t had one for a while now, but I kept having them for years, and would often wake up frightened that I’d really started and had wasted all the effort of breaking the habit.

I once had a job I hated, and for years after I left it I would wake in the middle of the night thinking I was still there and had to get back to it in the morning.

The brain is a strange place.

Octofoil window – Angel by John Hungerford Pollen 1863 Our Lady of the Assumption, Rhyl, Denbighshire

 

 

 

 

Absolutely My Last Word on Politics

13 Replies

OK, I know I said I was going to stop writing about politics, but what better way to start a blog post on politics than by breaking a promise? I was also going to blog every day and I have messed that up too.

Today I will talk about democracy. It is, as we have been told many times, the worst system of government available to us, apart from all the other models we have tried.

I won’t take much of your time as I am aware it’s a limited resource and I can’t hang about chatting if I’m going to solve the problems of the world and get some poetry written.

Democracy, to me, means that everybody has a vote and the people with the most votes get to make the decisions, though they do have to make sure that the minorities are treated fairly.

That’ the tricky thing to get right – the old two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch dilemma.

That’s why I get annoyed when I see politicians declaring that they won’t work with Reform. There are a number of things that I don’t like about Reform, I admit. But it’s undeniable that they did get a lot of votes – being  the equal second largest party in Scotland (alongside Labour) and the second largest party in Wales by a considerable margin.

Is it right that to just disregard that amount of voters because they are in a party you disagree with? Or is that the way to cause more bitterness and division in an increasingly fractured world?

Having said that, what do voters think of coalitions, I sometimes wonder. When the Tories were burning through Prime Ministers in their final years we had a lot of people saying they hadn’t voted for the new PM and should have a general election. That, unfortunately, betrays a general ignorance of the way our government works, and the creeping Americanisation of the UK, when people think they vote for a PM rather than a party.

And that is definitely all I have to say on politics.

 

 

 

 

After the Election Part 2

11 Replies

Love Locks at Bakewell

The light, when I woke at 6.42 this morning was beautiful, like the sun was shining through a jar of honey. Like Mole in Wind in the Willows, I felt the need to get up and frolic.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them.

Of course, it soon passed. It’s quite ordinary now and I am wishing I had tried to catch it on camera. It’s quite an optimistic way to start the day after an election.

Don’t worry, my temporary interest in politics doesn’t extend to writing about it more than twice in two days, so it will soon be back to normal on the blog.

Bakewell, Derbyshire

You have to sympathise with Kier Starmer. He came to power with a lot of expectations building up behind him, and then found himself in the real world, the one where things cost money, people don’t always do the right thing and foreign countries (no matter what they say) are not your friend.

Suddenly he’s giving money to strikers when schools need more funding and he’s having to buy missiles instead of hospital beds. And then he took the winter fuel payment off pensioners.

So he’s a typical spineless Labour politician to the Tories, he’s a disappointment to the voters who relied on him to produce Utopia like a rabbit from a hat and, uniting everyone against him, he’s Scrooge.

Add that to the fact that some of his MPs have already been revealed to have the morals of Conservatives and that sitting governments always do badly in council elections (it’s just a tradition like the Ceremony of the Keys – entrenched in British life but not really important –  I’m fairly sure that the important bit of Tower security is the Setting of the Alarm – we don’t want Thomas Blood trying again, do we?).

The river Wye at Bakewell – clearly not in May as the Black Headed Gull is in Winter plumage

I thought about doing a Guy Fawkes reference here, but decided that would be a little tasteless with so much of the world already being blown up.

 

 

After the Election

30 Replies

The Artist – Charlie Uzzel-Edwards

Well, I voted. I then wrote about it several times. My views on compulsory voting (with musings on enfranchisement and the Chartists) tend to take me off message).

So do my thoughts on Police Commissioners and why we don’t need such as elected law enforcement personnel and no win-no fee lawyers. I deleted them.

So, I will treat this as third time lucky and try to stick to the results. The Green party seems to be doing well. Reform is doing even better. To me that means that people are more concerned with illegal immigration than they are with climate change.

OK, fourth time, as the third time was a bit dull.

The local Green candidate won. We also got an extra Green councillor in Peterborough, meaning we now have six. . So far, so good. There are 8 Peterborough First councillors and 9 Independents, plus Conservative, Reform, Labour and LibDem. It is a very fragmented council and nobody has overall control. At one time, according to  newspaper article last year 25% of sitting councillors had been elected for a party that was different to the one they were currently claiming to be in. That often happens where you have Greens, Independents and someone in  a party with a town name and “First” after it.

Nationally the Greens did quite well, despite the fact we are supposedly anti-semitic and Reform did even better because they are riding a wave of populism.

And that is a summary of politics in England today – the big winner is a party led by a man who accepted a £5,000,000 gift from a businessman who wants nothing in return, is a friend of Donald Trump and has, several times,  been caught out for using anti-semitic and racist language.

In Wales Reform is going to be the second biggest party but in Scotland they did not prosper. The Greens won two seats in each country, which is a start.

Counting is still proceeding.

However, despite the shifts in power I don’t expect much will change, because they never do, The political climate will probably become less compassionate towards refugees, and to those with immigrant backgrounds, parties which promise a lot in opposition often fail to life up to the rhetoric when they come into contact with reality.

 

 

Elections

20 Replies

I’ve been doing some work on a medallion this afternoon, and getting absolutely nowhere. The more research I read, the more interested I became, and the slower the writing. It’s now taken me two days to write 300 words, and a hundred of them are lifted from something else I wrote on a similar subject. They aren’t exactly the same, but they only took ten minutes to adjust.

While I’m doing this, of course, I’m not able to write other things, which is annoying. Of course, I was born angry and have continued that way, so no matter what compromise I have to make, it will always be irksome.

We have elections tomorrow. (Actually, it has gone midnight, so we now have elections today). It has been billed as a fight between Reform and the Greens. These are both quite new parties and it is a surprise that they seem to be the top contenders. Traditionally the party in power does badly so Labour is in a slump and the Tories, after years spent being unable to tell what they want to do have landed at the bottom of the pile with no hope and no direction.

That leaves the Liberal Democrats, the eternal bridesmaids.

In Scotland and Wales there are other parties and elections, which I have no real knowledge of, and in Northern Ireland there are no elections this time round.

The choice for me is easy. I decided to start voting Green some years ago and I will keep voting for them. I’ve never had a great interest in politics and learned years ago that they are all pretty much the same. It’s not the party that I have the most confidence in, but the one which I dread least.

The bottom one is meant to be a mole.

 

The Doings of the Day and Some Old Photos

8 Replies

Yesterday, I missed posting. I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t particularly busy but I didn’t do it in the morning because I had other things to do, and I didn’t do it in the afternoon because I had other things to do. In the evening I fell asleep in front of the TV, snoozed in front of the TV and, on waking, misread the clock as 10pm (“plenty of time”) and, after making a cup of tea, found it was  midnight.

And that was how it happened.

On the plus side, the man doing our garage doors got all the old paint off and undercoat applied. It’s 8.14 now and he’s back for a second day, putting the top coat on. He’s a good worker and does a good job.  He also restores my faith in human nature, doing a good day’s work for a fair price and showing there are still decent tradesmen about. I was beginning to doubt this after our initial experiences in the bungalow.

Julia is now calling me through for breakfast, but I will be back afterwards to ensure this post is published before I forget and do something else.

9.40. A leisurely breakfast and then a discussion on other jobs that need doing around the place . . .

When Mum and Dad moved in they spent what seemed like a lot of time and money on the place, but that was over 20 years ago. We seemed to spend a lot of money on maintenance while we were renting it out to pay for Dad’s care fees, but my sister arranged that through the letting agent. They used a builder they used for all sorts of work, who was the one we originally used when we moved in.

 

He was, as you may recall, expensive and we have had to have most of his work redone. The agents, meanwhile were just parasites who did very little for their monthly payments.

I just wiped 150 words out because I was starting to sound like an old-fashioned rack-renting moustachio twirling landlord. I’ll just say that the tenant fitted into the group quite nicely.

Rant averted.

Photos are some Julia took a few years ago. It was 2002 according to the date on the email. I must have forgotten to use them. They were on the farm where we used to stop for ice cream on the way to Llandudno. I will find the name for next time I use some of the photos (I have a few in reserve)

Thoughts on Fashionable Illness

14 Replies

If I don’t write this now, I will never get it done. If I do write it now I won’t get something else done. It’s a dilemma and it may also be a symptom of adult ADHD. However, although it’s fashionable for media personalities to have adult ADHD, it’s less fashionable for us ordinary folk, so I’m not going to worry about it. Though they idea I might be able to take a pill and become organised is attractive.

However, I have to be careful of wanting a bright and shiny (and fashionable) affliction, when I am merely lazy and disorganised (the symptoms are much the same) and am looking for a convenient excuse. It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon.

Soda bread

It used to be the same on the farm – people in baking classes claiming to be suffering from coeliac disease or gluten intolerance. When I read up on it I found that many cases were self-diagnosed and were simply Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I have IBS. It was originally caused, according to my doctor, by life as a salesman – stress, cigarettes and irregular meals. He told me that if I gave up smoking my stress levels may rise so there wasn’t much he could do for me.

So I became an antique dealer. Less stress, regular meals – it went away. It comes back from time to time if I have too much cheese but over the years even this hasn’t been a problem.

Wheatsheaf Loaf

I sympathise with anyone who has coeliac disease or gluten intolerance. I have sympathy for people who have IBS. It can be debilitating. But I have no sympathy with people who claim to have a problem with gluten, and disrupt an entire class with claims of gluten intolerance, when they don’t actually have it. If you have a problem with gluten you shouldn’t be in a room with flour in the air. Hence my reluctance to jump on a fashionable health bandwagon.