A Visit From Africa

I am almost back to normal and have some time for a short blog.

Micro sand dunes

I want to report that we were visited by the Sahara desert recently during the night. It left both our cars dirty and a few micro sand dunes on our patio table. This happens now and then when the wind is from the south and there have been dust storms in north Africa, lifting the dust to stratospheric heights. This can lead to yellow or red rain if it happens in the daytime.

The patio table top should be the same colour as the legs and shiny

This dirty rain fell overnight, so we were unable to see what colour the rain was. There was a particularly bad fall of red rain many years ago when I was working in London and one morning, when getting ready to drive to work, I thought that someone had deliberately thrown a bucket of muddy water over my car in the night. I later discovered that I was not the only one and lots of other cars looked the same. I am not sure how far these muddy rains extend up the country, because I never experienced it when working in the North of England.

I am back on Planet Earth again but my feet have yet to make contact with the ground. SNAFU does stand for 'Situation Normal All Fowled Up' and life is living up to my blogger name. Things have been happening at express train speeds and busy is not adequate to describe my life over the past two months. I have returned home to be faced with two major tasks that need most of my attention and I will have little time for blogging. There is a stack of posts lining up to be written but they will have to wait. My apologies for the sparse showing on other people's posts. Hope to be back in form after a few more weeks.

May Day

May Day lived up to its expectations of spring this year.  It was warm and sunny and being close to The Better Half’s (TBH's) birthday she chose a day out in her old home ground of the five valleys in Gloucestershire.

First we went to the Edgemoor Inn at Edge and ate lunch overlooking the Painswick valley, with the town of the same name in the distance.

Painswick on the other side of the valley.  The church has a very distinctive steeple, right of centre
Click to enlarge any picture

Now and again a large buzzard would fly past, low down in the valley, but never staying in view long enough for a photo.

After lunch, we went to St Mary’s church in Rodborough and looked for TBH’s grandfather’s grave.  She recalls his death and going there for the funeral in 1963 when she was a teenager.  

 We had no difficulty finding the grave, but TBH discovered that her grandfather had a sister and she, along with her grandmother have been buried in the same plot.   TBH had not known about his sister, her great aunt, who had died in the 1930s.  Another name to add to the family tree.

The ground slopes a lot and the graves are on narrow terraces.

   

St Mary's Church

 The graveyard overlooks the Stroud valley and almost dead centre of this picture, her old school is still there.

From there we went up onto Rodborough Common for a walk in the sunshine.  If you are not familiar with this area, it is one of the more interesting places to visit if you are ever in the Cotswolds. 

The common is quite high as hills go in England and this open area overlooks the Stroud valley and Stroud itself  on one side, the Severn valley with the Welsh hills in the distance to the west.

Whilst the sun was hot in the valleys, up on the top of the common, the wind was brisk and cool enough for TBH to need another layer.

 

Taking advantage of the breeze, a young man was flying some Japanese style kites he had just received an hour before, so he told us,  from a mail order company.  He competes in kite festivals and was getting ready for the forthcoming Weymouth festival taking place over the May bank holiday weekend.

 

His newest kites were quite spectacular and I could imagine the sight of hundreds of such things flying over the beaches at Weymouth. 

On one edge of Rodborough Common is a Fort built 1764.  It is not an ancient defensive building, but  was built as a ‘folly’ and is used as a residence.  In  1886 it was extensively rebuilt in a grander style.

 

Rodborough Common and the nearby Minchinhampton Common are renowned for the rare wild flowers and orchids that grow there.  There were the usual cowslips and daisies and several patches of anemones, but nothing else.  

On many occasions we have driven past these two commons and found them both carpeted with yellow dandelions, but this time, despite every grass verge in our local area being covered in them, there was not one.  

Dandelions nearer our home

 We can only assume that the commons being a lot higher than our home, the weather has not warmed up as much up there.

Today was the hottest day of this year so far and we went on a short trip and we had another day out in the sunshine.  I took some more pictures of the Cotswolds and I have added some of them to this May Day post.

  This is Fosse Way, an ancient Roman road that runs through the heart of the Cotswolds

Who says Roman roads are straight!  This one bends down a long way before climbing up the other side of Fossebridge.

This is one of the tributaries of the river Thames, which is not too far away.  

That is it for the time being.

Quote of the Day

I looked outside this morning, just before my Internet went down for a few hours and what I saw made me think of this.

 “The more it

SNOWS – tiddly pom

The more it

GOES – tiddly pom

On

Snowing.

And nobody

KNOWS – tiddly pom

How cold my

TOES – tiddly pom

How cold my

TOES – tiddly pom

Are

Growing.”

“Pooh” Piglet replied solemnly, “it isn’t the toes so much as the ears.”

The ‘outdoor’ hum by Pooh Bear, from the House at Pooh Corner.

Weekend Trip - Young Voices

We have just had a rather different weekend. The Granddaughter (TG) is in her school choir and their school has put their choir into the Young Voices concert. The Young Voices organisation founded by David Lewis is designed to get children involved with live music at an early age. Follow the link.

The concert had been planned for January and we were planning to go then, but the weather prevented us even leaving home, which was a good job since the show was cancelled and was then re scheduled for Friday February 8 th. We had also re-scheduled to travel to this later date and meet TG’s parents there and attend the concert. So Friday morning we set off by train to Manchester and arrived around lunch time.

We were quite lucky to arrive so soon because we had a problem getting there. We had arrived at the station with a good twenty minutes to spare before the train we had booked should depart. Since we were to leave the car overnight, we tried to get the car parking ticket machine to issue the required ticket. But we could not find any way of getting two different days parking from it. The parking firm, had a sign that gave the option of paying by phone and so after about tem minutes of getting that to work, we went into the station to collect the tickets which we had pre booked. The ticket machine was the slowest printer in the world and after nearly five minutes produced the seemingly twenty or so tickets you apparently need for a return journey and we arrived on the platform where, most unusually and I may even say miraculously, our train was just leaving exactly on time.
For the rest of the trip, every single train we used was almost five minutes late. Only the one we really needed to be delayed was on time. The tickets we had bought, were only valid for the train we had just missed, so seeing the porter, we asked if it was possible to use them on the next train or should we buy new tickets. He said it was entirely up to the individual train manager and he would ask when the next Manchester train arrived. This was almost an hour from then, so we went and had a coffee in the Pumpkin café. For the Harry potter fans reading this, they do not serve pumpkin juice, nor was it pumpkin shaped, despite the curious name. When the next Manchester train arrived the train manager asked and we were allowed to use his train with our existing tickets, so we set off at last of the big city. This put my estimation of the Cross country service up a lot. However, the train was fairly empty, so there were lots of un-booked spare seats available, I am not so sure we would have been so lucky if the train was full.
So we were in Manchester and booked into a hotel, where we had a rather grand view across the canal to Salford from our eighth story window.

The view from our hotel window - The pink sign reads Welcome you are now in Salford

 TG’s parents who had travelled down alone were already in the hotel, TG had travelled with the school earlier. We met up with her parents and one of her older brothers, who lives near Manchester and later went for an early meal in a rather nice Italian restaurant, very close to the hotel. We then went on to the Manchester Arena to the concert. Being new to all this, we were not quite sure what to expect. When we arrived, the arena was thronged with people and at the far end there werewhat seemed to be thousands of children, all around the ages of eight or nine and the din was terrific before the concert started.

Rows and rows of young performers

The concert consisted of a number of medleys sung by all the children interspersed with professional acts which the child singer Connie Talbot who did a couple of numbers too. Whilst some of it was not part of my kind of music, much of it was very good and it was worth the later trip to the phisio required to get the kinks out after sitting in the tiny folding seats for two hours.

The children were all given torches and they waved tham around creating a constantly changing constellation of lights when the main lights went down

I was impressed that all the children were expected to sing a very large repertoire of songs and did so very well.  Now and again the less tuneful songs they sang, trailed off into a bit of mumbling, but the more memorable tunes were sung nice and clear.
At the end of the concert, we were let out of the Arena block by block, just like at school and after being re-united with TG, we all went back to the hotel.  Most of the other children returned home in the coaches that brought them, but TG's parents wanted to stay in Manchester to do a bit of shopping the next day.  Back at the hotel we sat and talked whilst the excitement of being in such a big event slowly turned into tiredness and after a while she was taken up to their room and to bed.

Manchester at night

The following Saturday was shopping day and the three women, Grandma, Mum and daughter/granddaughter toured the clothes shops whilst the three men, Grandpa, dad and son/grandson stood around bored. Well, I did visit a few shops, like Waterstones and bee.com, but we did a lot less shopping than the womenfolk. By about three in the afternoon, more physio was required, because central Manchester’s shopping district seems to have a distinct lack of seats for tired shoppers. There are some outside, but Saturday was not a day to linger outside if you could help it. Inside the Arndale shopping centre there were exactly three seats that I could find. For a place that boasts of being the largest indoor shopping centre in the UK, I found this a serious flaw and a very good reason not to go there again. For anyone not able to walk any great distance, but not yet ready for a wheelchair, it is a serious flaw.
The journey home was uneventful, transport wise, with everything panning out OK, although the train was five minutes late in starting. Sitting opposite us in the same table seat we had booked, a single and seemingly rather lonely man got chatting and kept us talking animatedly for most of the journey. As he remarked, talking passed the time quickly and seemingly very soon we were arriving at our station. We found the car was still there with no penalty tickets, wheel clamps or broken windows and soon we were home again.

Sixty Years Ago Today...

The East coast floods which devastated much of the East coast of England, from Yorkshire down to Canvey Island in Essex took place on the last day of Janurary in 1953, destroying homes and killing around 300 people.
On the radio today they spoke of the small village of Sea Palling in Norfolk and that invoked a strong memory for me. In the years following WWII Britain was recovering and people had started to go on holiday by the sea again. The land mines and other beach defences were more or less removed and we were allowed on the beaches once more.

We had a caravan and one of my father’s favourite places was Norfolk, so we spent several of our holidays there. We often went to stay in a small caravan park close to Waxham, near Sea Palling, which was basically a field owned by a local farmer. There was water at the farm and fresh milk straight from the cow but no other facilities. To us children it was heaven.
 Between us and the sea were a twin row of massive sand dunes, which we had to trudge across with the hot sand almost burning our feet. Along the coast from the farm there was the small coastal village of Sea Palling and many summer visitors went there since it had easy access to the beach. Whereas at the farm you had to climb about thirty feet of loose sand studded with clumps of Marram grass and then you went down into a deep dip between the two rows of dunes, where out of the wind, the sand was even hotter underfoot to then struggle up over the remaining dune to run and slide down to the beach.

Marram grass on sand dunes

That part of the coast had seemingly endless sandy beaches. It was often windy and the fine sand would sometimes whisper whilst snaking along the beach and stinging your ankles with the North Sea bringing in big rollers, sometimes large enough to knock a child off your feet. But this was all part of the charm and excitement of a real sandy holiday by the sea and we loved it. At Sea Palling, over the years the holiday makers had worn a path down to the sea and the rows of cottages on each side of the short street that ran through the centre of the village almost ran into the sea. This was Sea Palling’s undoing. When the flood came, this easy access to the sea also gave the sea easy access to the land and it rushed in through this gap taking with it several of the cottages and many of those asleep in them at the time. The government of the time felt there had been enough bad news from the war casualties, so they did not allow a very full report in the news following the flood. They felt people would become demoralised if another disaster befell them and so we did not really know much about the flood at the time. I think that my parents would have looked for another holiday venue in 1953 if they had known more but instead, all unawares, we returned to the farm next to Sea Palling and found devastation. We were completely unprepared for what we found. The little village had become half its original size, so many houses were washed away. The sand dunes which had been such a challenge to small children to get to the sea were just a small remnant, barley fifteen feet high and only one stretch of dune between us and the sea. They had held the flood back from the farm, but only just. It was only where the village traffic had worn a gap in the dunes the sea came through. The sand dunes had been built by Dutch engineers several hundred years before and they had built well. All along the Norfolk coast, the protection those ancient dunes had provided had saved many more lives but this was not the case in many other places. In Essex near Clacton on Sea, a place I lived in for many years, these is a small area called Jaywick. Further along the coast there are a number of tidal creeks which stretch inland behind Jaywick and the sea, unable to breach the concrete sea walls along the sea front, it poured in behind them rushing up the tidal creeks and devastating parts of Jaywick. I knew one of the survivors, he lost his wife in the flood and described his wooden chalet bungalow as being like a matchbox in a drain. He was only able to save himself because by sheer incredible luck, he managed to catch hold of a small boat that was torn away from its moorings and happened to be still afloat and near him when his house finally fell apart. He never saw his wife again.
In Dovercourt, just north of Clacton, the police went around the town with loud hailers to warn people of the storm surge heading their way. Because of this many people were prepared for the flood and survived, but some older people, still in WWII mode and not quite sure what the police were saying, went into their cellars believing it was an air raid warning. A work colleague of mine who had been a naval diver in 1953 told me of the grisly job he and his colleagues had to do, to recover their bodies. So it was sixty years ago today and there are many who still remember, even if we were not directly affected. We went back to Norfolk for many years after, not always to Sea Palling, but we saw the feeble results of the rebuilding of the dunes. A concrete sea wall was built soon after, which was probably designed to be the right height to prevent another flood exactly like that one, but it only needed to be a few centimetres higher to overtop that and the dune behind it is nothing like the old Dutch built ones. It is now a single low dune, pathetic in size when compared to the one those old Dutch engineers built.

The beach near Waxham close to Sea Palling twenty or so years ago.  The sea wall is almost buried.

Now I hear the sea wall is crumbling too and they are considering letting the sea carry on destroying the coast on the assumption it is cheaper, and better ecologically, than trying to stop it. It is certainly cheaper, but not for the people whose homes are falling into the sea and whose farms are invaded by salt water but they are only a small number of voters, so who will listen? It seems sad to me that those communities that survived the flood are now unlikely to survive government policy.

The world according to Snafu - The triple dip

The media love sound bites and the latest one is a ‘triple dip recession’. As someone pointed out, if it were a triple dip ice cream it would be great, but for someone on a fixed income, it is not such good news. It is obvious from past recessions, that no one knows what to do about one when we have one and although politicians whose party has been in power during good times will claim it was their doing and parties in power during bad times get blamed for the recession, it is quite obvious to even the least politically aware that there is nothing whatsoever that the people in charge can do to make it better. Economic forces are like the weather, unpredictable and uncontrollable. They are the product of so many factors that no two economists can agree about any part of them.

They can of course make it worse. Mistakes like de-regulating the banks and so allowing huge unsupportable loans to be exchanged within the financial world being a good example. They also seemed to believe for years that covering a loan by taking out a bigger one was sound economics. Surprisingly this does actually work after a fashion, if you have sustained growth but it does not take much of a dip to turn this into an unending spiral of debt. The one thing that I find difficult to understand is why all these floundering people believe that it is possible for it to get better. They all talk of growth and how it is expected to rise/fall and so on as if growth is some magical force that must always become positive. In the past many civilisations have risen, become powerful economic forces and then sunk into oblivion, sometimes by force of arms but quite often just by losing trade to another part of the known world.
There is no guarantee that growth will continue to rise or indeed that it can. Growth anyway is not something that is infinitely sustainable, nothing in nature ever grows forever, it cannot. Everything has a finite limit on growth. If anything can keep on growing, it will eventually find a point where there is nothing left to sustain it, it has absorbed everything available.
Sharks have no limits on what size they can reach, but the bigger they become the more they need to eat and eventually they reach the point where they are so big they cannot catch enough food and they starve to death. So there are no super-sharks around.
In any closed system you need inputs and outputs, you cannot grow continuously or perpetual motion would be possible and it is not. So politicians and economists are all chasing something which is totally beyond their control and completely impossible to sustain forever.
It is well within historical precedent that our civilisation will not recover, but sink more and more into a depression that it will never recover from. I hope this is not the case, but there is nothing in history to say it won’t happen and there is no one in charge seemingly able to do anything useful, so welcome to the second Dark Age.
And remember,  no matter who  you vote for, the Government will always get in :)