Category Archives: Uncategorized

A “disingenuous grifter”

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Owl Sculpture – Harlow Carr

I started writing a post about the Gladstone family yesterday, but as usual I became bogged down with diversions, wikiperigrinations (yes, I just made it up, though it wasn’t difficult)) and trying to trace a lost reference. It’s in my head but I can’t retrace it on the internet – I should have made a note at the time. It will involve upper class privilege, grave robbing and the end of Empire. Hopefully, I will have it done in the next couple of days and keep it down to 500 words. That of course, is the problem, it takes a lot longer to write 500 words on the subject than it does to ramble on for 2,000.

This reminded me of Mr Gladstone and the “tax on knowledge“. Gladstone, who passed a number of measures to help the working man, believed that an educated working class was better able to vote and to help themselves without government intervention.

How very different to events in the USA where Mr Trump is involved in a battle to steal truth and keep voters in ignorance.

We have the same here. We have just had a by-election where Nigel Farage, a political charlatan of the highest order, faced off against a comedian dressed as a waste bin. Farage claims the victory, which is true, because in the absence of any other major party he polled the most votes. He uses this to back his claim that voters support him as the anti-establishment candidate who really doesn’t deserve to be investigated for trousering £5 million donated by a crypto-currency billionaire who lives in Thailand.

However, a lot of people, over 9,000 voted for Count Binface. He’s a joke candidate, but a substantial number of people preferred him to the snake oil salesman.

It’s not really a resounding slap down for Farage, but, of course, the enquiry will go ahead again. It makes you wonder if the election stunt was to allow things to be tidied up behind the scenes.

This week’s political question is which word from “crypto-currency”, “billionaire” and “Thailand” is the most helpful one in establishing the confidence of you as a voter.

And just for the record, Nigel Farage, the anti-establishment candidate was educated at a top private school, worked as a commodities broker in the City and had a bank account at Coutt’s bank. These are not generally regarded as marks of a man who is not part of the Establishment, though many, including a member of the Coutt’s Board, consider Farage to be a “disingenuous grifter”. That’s pretty strong for a banker.

And just to show that I’m not biased, here are some poll results quoted on his (lengthy) Wiki page –

“YouGov found that overall, 73% believe he is “very” or “fairly sleazy”, the highest figure among party leaders (51% for Keir Starmer, 42% for Zack Polanski, 36% for Andy Burnham and 34% for Kemi Badenoch). Even among recent Reform UK voters, 40% believed that Farage was sleazy.”

Sorry about the politics, it just happened . . .

Owl carving – Sherwood Forest

I added the owls to inject a bit of wisdom into the post.

 

 

Quail Eggs Descending Rapidly into Bad Taste

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A Bear in a Tree

You can’t buy quail eggs from TESCO, but you can get them from Sainsbury’s. I’m sure this is not a surprise for those of you acquainted with the nuances of British supermarkets, but I thought it made for a good opening sentence.

I have had them, because a shop in Southwell used to sell them. Again, no surprise there, for those of you who know the place. The only mystery is why people eat quail eggs. I suppose they make a good sized snack for a teddy bear’s picnic. but apart from that they are a bit of a waste of space. We had them twice, we had them hard-boiled with salad. It was fun, but the faff of peeling an egg the size of a marble tended to spoil the fun.

You can make them into Scotch eggs, but as I’ve rarely felt the need to make my own. Even when I have felt the need, I have resisted it. The trick of making your own is, it seems, to leave the yolk runny. I can’t think why, because runny yolks are one of those childhood aversions that has left me.

Bear with seed packet from Kew

I was once loading chickens onto a transporter when the man loading the top tier asked me a question. As I looked up and opened my mouth to reply, a defecating chicken scored a direct hit. A veritable, virtually unrepeatable, hols in one. Oh, the amusement I caused as an entire loading crew double up in laughter. I’d rather do that again than eat a Scotch egg with a runny middle. I’ve never been able to do that trick where you flick up a peanut and catch it in your mouth. Part of the problem, apart from diabolically bad coordination,  is that every time I try I have a flashback to that night . . .

Even that isn’t the worst story I know about such things. However, there are limits to what I want to write on WordPress.

I have been thinking about them because, when my mind was drifting recently, I started to wonder about pickled quail’s eggs. The only problem, as mentioned before, is peeling them. When I pickle a dozen hen’s eggs it seems like hard labour by the sixth one. I’d hate to have to do a couple of dozen quail eggs.

Bear in the Garden

Straw Bale Bowie Bear

Thursday Morning 7.29

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Did it really take an hour and seven minutes to write the previous post? Well, yea and no.

It certainly took that length of time from stating to finishing, but in that time I also attended to a couple of comments, read my emails and searched for photographs that were badly labelled. Or, in truth, not labelled at all. I developed lazy habits early on in my blogging career and regularly waste time as a result.

I also searched for a couple of links and read the review on my poem, rejected a couple of ideas for things to say and rewrote a couple of paragraphs.

Here, halfway through my second blog post of the day, I note that I’m about halfway through and it has only taken six minutes.

My conclusion is that I can still write reasonably quickly, but waste time with all the peripheral activity.

Nella Last with Clifford, the son who went on to be a sculptor

 

Nella Last, or Housewife, 49, of whom I have written more than once, wrote 12 million words in her diaries, including 2 million during the war. If she wrote at 20 words a minute, as I have just (approximately) done, it would have taken her 417 days.

Of course, I doubt that she wrote as fast as that. You don’t do you? There’s thinking time and musing time and simply staring into space time. I’m doing a bit of that now.

I’m on 224 words and have taken sixteen minutes. Several of those have just been spent wondering how to finish this off with a point.

There is no point, simply a reflection on how much “writing time” is spent on things that aren’t really writing. And that’s before you start to consider the endless writing and rewriting involved in writing something decent.

Julia is up now and it’s 7.48. Probably a good time to put the kettle on. But first I have to add tags and photos. At least I don’t need to find a witty title.

 

After doing the links etc it’s now 8.03 and it’s becoming clearer where my day goes. Fifteen minutes just disappeared as I looked for a link to Clifford Last.

Poetry, Pigeons and Purple Emperors

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Yesterday was the last day of the month and several submissions windows drew to a close. I was rushed and badly prepared. The worst bit was that I paid for a competition entry and realised when I looked at the receipt, that it was just past midnight, meaning that I had missed the deadline. I wrote and told them to accept it as a donation. The Ancient Idiot rides again!

Baby rabbit in the garden

In the end I made nine submissions of the ten I had intended. August is a quieter month, with only five submissions planned. I’m hoping to catch up, as there are 12 planned for September. I have very little completed work at the moment. What is worse is that I have very little that I actually like, and if I don’t like it, I don’t know why anyone else would.

We have had Stock Doves in the garden several times recently. They are modest birds, not much different from a feral pigeon in many ways, and come to feed on the seed spilt by the smaller birds on the feeder.

Stock Doves and “grass”

It’s been a good summer for seeing new bird species in the garden but it has been a thin season for butterflies. Having said that, one of my sister’s friends saw a Purple Emperor in the country park. They are found over the border in Northamptonshire and have been spotted in Lincolnshire.

I’ve been reading about them, and about a memorial to a crashed aircraft near one of the woods where they can be found, and am feeling enthused to make a trip.

Note on the photographs – the rabbit photo was taken on the 19th May, the Stock Dove photo on 31st July. The grass in the last picture actually looks a bit greener than it really is – what a difference. Apart from the colour, yes it does look scruffy in both pictures, but there doesn’t seem a lot of point mowing when it is already under stress.

Always close to hand

Sorry about the title (which I forgot to add in the first instance) – they are doves, not pigeons, and Purple Emperors hardly get a mention, but I am driven by a need to alliterate.  Yes, it is a word, I checked.

 

Poetry, Procrastination and Pampas Grass

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I am now on a 62 day activity streak. I know this because WP tells me so. To get this one I have had to log in and procrastinate for two months. It doesn’t rank up there with the Nobel Peace Prize, Oxford Professor of Poetry, or a Blue Peter Badge.

The Oxford professorship is still in my mind from a conversation I had with Julia recently. I can’t remember how I started on the train of thought but she asked me what I was thinking about, as she sometimes does. The honest answer, much of the time is “absolutely nothing”, but I try to make something up. If she can be bothered to ask, I really ought to make the attempt to be interesting.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A couple of days ago I was honestly able to answer “I was just thinking that I’m glad I never applied to be Oxford professor of Poetry. It’s too political.”

You also need to be good at poetry, but I never let that sort of thing intrude into my thoughts.

To Julia’s credit, she didn’t miss a beat, just asked me more about it. From there we got onto the subject of Simon Armitage’s haircut. It’s not so bad at the moment but a few years ago it looked like a cross between a mop and a desperate cry for help in the midst of a mid-life crisis. I’m clearly not one to talk as both my hairstyles are questionable (billiard ball or “rough sleeper” being the two options), but it was very noticeable. Even Julia noticed it, and she is usually quite accepting of hirsute horror shows.

Thinking about it, I should probably have made something up along the lines of “How lucky I am to be married to you dear.” but I missed my chance and only just realised.

Here’s a link to Simon Armitage’s poem Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass.  The commentary accompanying the poem says the poem is about overkill. That commentary is clearly written by someone who has never had to manage pampas grass in a garden. The last one I removed needed a hedge trimmer and an axe. The hole it left looked like the garden had been the victim of shellfire.

 

 

A Good Start to the Day

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Poppy

Compared to Nottingham, Peterborough is a joy to drive around. It is smaller, to be fair, and the road system is newer. The roads were built to serve the new townships and industrial areas as they6 were built as part of the expansion plan for the city. Nottingham’s roads are simply an attempt to impose order on a sprawling built-up area that already existed. It’s even better during the school holidays when traffic is lighter.

There were roadworks on the way – they are filling in an underpass, using 418 cubic metres of cement (192m lorry loads) and topping it off with  18 cubic meters of what they describe as “grout”, though I don’t suppose it is the same stuff they use to fill the gaps between bathroom tiles.

Poppy and chamomile

They have removed 35 trees as part of the process (I didn’t know there were 34 trees there, and can’t see where they have gone from) and will replace them with 49 new trees. These must be very small trees.

Anyway, all this is just to say, I took Julia and my sister to the station this morning. They are going to an art exhibition in Nottingham, to see the Monet exhibit, though “exhibition” may not be the right word.

Meanwhile, I have been to the pharmacy and laid down drafts for five poems (which I managed to remember before they faded away), so I am feeling quite pleased with myself.

I am now going to have a cup of tea and watch a little TV whilst a fan blows cool air over me. I shouldn’t really watch Tv in the morning, but Julia is not here to talk to and I am fed up of typing.

 

Wild flowers

Night Falls

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I just wrote a political manifesto, but as Julia pointed out, my plan for making sweeping changes to the way the country is run is impractical as we don’t have capital punishment or guns. And merely shooting the makers of reality TV programmes won’t immediately make the participants and viewers go out and take up education again.

She’s probably right, after all, in the USA they have lots of guns and capital punishment and their current political system has chosen to attack education rather than roll it out for everyone.

I’ll leave politics to other people.

Damsel Fly – Wilford

Instead, I will devote my thoughts to haircuts. My hair looks neatest when it is in a waste basket, and my head looks best when emulating a billiard ball. It is a tidy style to maintain with my excellent head shaver. Unfortunately, I don’t always keep it shaved. My recent experiences with the sun stopped me shaving for a bit, as my head was sore for a while. It was also dry, which is exacerbated by electric shaving.

Yes, I can moisturise, but I hate the idea of having small bits of passing debris  taking up residence on my head.

So, I now have hair. It has gone through the phase where it sticks out and makes me look astonished, and has become long enough to lay down and look like very short hair. Well, it does in patches. That’s the problem with being bald. It’s not the lack of flowing manly locks that worries me, or the visible manifestation of old age, it’s the untidy nature of partial coverage of the scalp. It’s untidy. Shaving tends to even things out and looks smarter.

Insects on Thistles

It is just unfortunate that a shaved head and the attendant folds of flesh at the top of my neck tend to make me look like prison officer from one of the less liberal countries of the world. Allied to a small, indistinct photograph (like the one of my driving license) I begin to look less like I’m involved in law enforcement and more like I’m involved in organised crime. I just don’t have the boyish good looks of a romantic hero.

And so, ruminating on what my life might have been if I had charm, good cheekbones and a cheery demeanour, I will go back to plotting world domination by means of light verse.

It’s likely to be an uphill struggle.

Marmalade Hoverfly

Marmalade Hoverfly

 

 

Conservatory – the Final Fix

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Just after Christmas we had our new conservatory roof fitted. I nearly cried. It was the most I’d ever paid for something, and I hadn’t been expecting to pay that much so soon on maintaining the new place. But at least we had a waterproof conservatory. The temporary repair/bodge we had had done by our first builder (estimated to give us two or three years based on the last time he had done it), proved to be as good as the rest of his work.

Allium Flower

Unfortunately, one of the new panels, by March, had condensation in it. Julia immediately set to work on getting it replaced. It took around two months for them to come out and see it and another two months to actually get the part and fit it (which took about 20 minutes once they actually arrived). I am now worried that we have spent a large sum of money on something that is going to be a problem for the rest of our lives, though I’m hoping that I’m wrong.

They are nice people, and the standards of workmanship, when they actually turn up, seem to be good. Part of the delay is because it’s a family business and one of the parents is ill. I sympathise.  But having said that, I can’t bring myself to leave a review of their work.

Garden Flowers

I don’t want to be overly critical of the work, which is generally good, but I don’t want to be responsible for someone else spending a lot of money and getting similarly slow service (seven months and many missed appointments to get it properly finished). It is a modern dilemma.

In the old days, word of mouth, delivered face to face, was useful. But written words, constrained by a word limit, aren’t quite the same, and can come back to haunt you. Criticism on review sites always seems harsher, and good feedback often seems too good to be true.

Flower competition – Flintham Show

A Quiet Revolution

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We now have Andy Burnham as Prime Minister. He got off to a bad start with me when he promised a “circuit-breaker moment”. I’m guessing he’s not big on electrical work as the last time we had a circuit-breaker moment at home the freezer went off and the lights went out. Readers of a certain age may remember previous Labour governments where the lights (literally) went out and, in the Winter of Discontent, no bins were collected and people could not be buried.

As I’m not a great believer in party politics, I have to point out that the Conservative government also had trouble keeping the lights on.

I’m just saying that Burnham needs to look at getting a new speech writer. He needs all the help he can get as this is the man who came fourth in a leadership to Ed Milliband and lost his next one to Jeremy Corbyn. Ed Miliband, for those who don’t know, is to charisma what I am to the fitness industry. And Jeremy Corbyn makes me look positively modern in outlook. It’s a shame really, I like Corbyn because he has principles, despite it being an archaic and inconvenient concept.

He comes from a time when you could tell the difference between Conservatives and Labour. Now the only real difference is the cost of their suits, and as we saw when news about Starmer’s wardrobe surfaced, even that isn’t a sure-fire way to tell the difference these days.

I generally try to avoid politics, but sometimes I think I need to lay down a marker so a future student of politics can see what the man in the street really thinks of the clowns in power. Last time a man rose to power, wearing a big smile and promising a new style of politics it was Tony Blair. He’s a man who has, at times, been one of the most popular Prime Ministers we ever had, and also one of the least popular.  If you are bothered you can make your own mind up. I will merely say that in contrast to Jeremy Corbyn, I do not feel that Tony Blair is weighed down by principles.

No political pictures, as I don’t have any suitable ones and, to be honest, it’s a busy day. One look at Mallard and the world seems a better place.

Garibaldi – Biscuits, Brass Medals and Ballarat

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Garibaldi medallet – obverse

I’ve just been reading this post. Paol Soren is writing about place names around Ballarat, which he illustrates with photographs, including one showing a road sign saying Garibaldi. That was all I needed to reprint an article I wrote for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. I’m very lazy that way.

The first time I ever heard of Garibaldi was when I read Wind in the Willows around 60 years ago, and Mole, on revisiting his old home, was said to have a bust of him in his garden. In his lifetime, he was quite a famous personality. When he visited the UK in 1864, he was not allowed out of the capital, being regarded as a dangerous radical. The workers of Nottingham gave him an illuminated scroll, but they had to go to London to see him, as he was denied permission to visit Nottingham.

This is the smallest medallion in my collection, but one of the bigger figures from history. His home city was Nice At the time of his birth it was part of France, having been annexed by the French Republic in 1792 after 400 years as a possession of the Duchy of Savoy. It reverted to “Italy” in 1815, becoming part of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, before being returned to France as payment for the help of Napoleon III in helping to unify Italy.

Garibaldi medallet – reverse

Garibaldi was a leading figure in Italian unification. He fled after being condemned to death for his part in an abortive revolt in 1834 and spent 14 years abroad, fighting two wars in South America, before his return to Italy with his famous Red Shirts.
Traditional stories say the red shirts were meant for Argentinian butchers, but there is no evidence of Argentinian butchers ever wearing red shirts. It is possible that they were modelled on the red flannel shirts Garibaldi saw New York firemen wearing. What is more certain is that Nottingham Forest adopted Garibaldi Red as their club colour in 1865, and still use the colour, (and Garibaldi name), to this day. One of their old nicknames was The Garibaldi and the fan organisation set up in 2016 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the club is Forza Garibaldi. There was also an amateur football club called Nottingham Garibaldi and the name lives on today in Garibaldi School in Forest Town (named after a nearby plantation). For a time, red shirts became a popular fashion item in Europe and America.

Garibaldi medallet compared to a penny for size comparison

The medallion is 14mm in diameter and made of brass. They are sometimes found on watch chains, worn as fobs or charms, which is why most of them are pierced.

The Obverse design features a left-facing bust of Garibaldi with the words “Garibaldi ne a Nice le 4 Juillet 1807” (Garibaldi, born in Nice 3 July 1807) and the reverse has “Independence / Italienne/· + · ” within a wreath of laurels.
If you are wondering about the biscuits, yes Garibaldi Biscuits are named after him. They were launched in 1861 by Peek Frean’s, and although there were stories about them being based on the hard tack and wild berries eaten by the Red Shirts, it seems simply to have been a commercial decision to link the new biscuit to a commercially popular personality.
The famous Garibaldi biscuit