Well, that was a change I wasn’t exactly expecting. We had Spring followed by Autumn and then Winter returned, all in the space of a week. We missed Summer altogether. After last week’s glorious sunshine and wonderfully acceptable temperatures, this week has been cold bordering on very, very cold (for us), quite breezy and we had hail and snow on Thursday and Friday. I just hope the Greengage blossom in the orchard, always the first to show, doesn’t get hammered by the cold and wind (heaven forbid we should get a frost) as those are the most delicious of the plums we get.
Sunday morning update: We did, indeed, have a hard frost last night. If that’s buggered our Greengages I’m going to be pretty cross/disappointed.
The spell of fine weather lasted through Monday when I was able/obliged to give the lawns their first proper mow of the season. Tell me, why the f**k am I having to mow the lawns in f**king March? This is not right, I tell you! I used to be able to hold out until the middle or even the end of April. Not this year and, although I don’t remember, I am sure I probably carried on mowing well into November last year. This climate change thing is real, folks!
We had Jessie for the day last Saturday to give her parents and younger sister a bit of respite. And, because we love having her here – she is so entertaining!
When she got here, she told me she had a poem for me that she had learnt at school and then proceeded to flawlessly recite the following:
My Grandpa
I’ll tell you a bit of my grandpa.
I think he’s a thousand years old.
He must keep his hands in the freezer;
I’ve never felt ice cubes that cold.
The hair growing off of his earlobes
is more than the hair on his head.
His eyes are all baggy and bloodshot.
His nose is the same shade of red.
His voice is like rickety floorboards.
It crackles and groans when he speaks.
Whenever he bends down to hug me
it sounds like his skeleton creaks.
He says that his memory is failing.
He thinks that he’s losing his mind.
He’s always misplacing his glasses;
without them he’s legally blind.
My mom says his hearing is normal.
I kind of believe her, but then
whenever I tell him “I love you,”
he asks me to say it again.
— Kenn Nesbitt
Such an accurate description and so eloquently recited. Brought tears to my eyes, I can tell you.
It was Moreton Pinkney Film Night on Thursday, for the first time in more than two years! We were very much looking forward to attending even though the film, Dream Horse, was not one about which we were terribly excited – probably not an Oscar contender. However, the previous evening Penny came down with a dreadful sore throat and I was feeling not on top form either. We both took Lateral Flow Tests which came back negative but we didn’t think it was sensible to sit in relatively close proximity with our lovely neighbours and potentially pass whatever it was on to them so we were obliged to cancel. Penny also had to miss her book club meeting on Wednesday evening which was doubly disappointing – she was really looking forward to discussing the book they read this month (Still Life by Sarah Winman) which is excellent, she says. And, book club gives her a welcome evening’s break from me for a couple of hours once a month!
I’m on the home stretch on my Virtual Route 66 Cycle Challenge. This week I reached San Bernadino, a town with which I was relatively familiar as a boy – we used to regularly drive through San Bernadino on our way to my grandmother’s cabin at Lake Arrowhead. Also, as a high school student, we played football, basketball and baseball against Aquinas High School in San Bernadino and we also drove through the town when we played against Big Bear Lake High School. Whenever we played Big Bear in basketball during the winter, I was struck by the number of skis which were parked outside the school. While most schools have bicycle racks outside the school, this was my first experience of kids skiing to school during the snowy weather.
San Bernadino also happens to be the site of the first McDonald’s restaurant. Like many, I have (in the past – not any more) consumed many of the gazillion hamburgers they claim to have served. Many of you will know much of the history of McDonald’s:
In 1937, Patrick McDonald opened “The Airdrome”, an octagonal food stand, on Huntington Drive (Route 66) near the Monrovia Airport in Monrovia, California. Hamburgers were ten cents, and all-you-can-drink orange juice was five cents. In 1940, his two sons, Maurice and Richard (“Mac” and “Dick”), moved the entire building 40 miles (64 km) east, to West 14th and 1398 North E Streets in San Bernardino, California. The restaurant was renamed “McDonald’s Famous Barbeque” and served over forty barbequed items.
In October 1948, after the McDonald brothers realized that most of their profits came from selling hamburgers, they closed down their successful carhop drive-in to establish a streamlined system with a simple menu of just hamburgers, cheeseburgers, french fries, shakes, soft drinks, and apple pie. The carhops were eliminated to make McDonald’s a self-serve operation. Mac and Dick McDonald had taken great care in setting up their kitchen like an assembly line to ensure maximum efficiency. The restaurant’s name was again changed, this time to simply “McDonald’s,” and reopened its doors on December 12, 1948.
The rest, as they say, is history.
According to my spreadsheet, there are only about another 76 miles to Santa Monica Pier – whoo-hoo!
Penny and I joined our lovely neighbours in a sometimes/occasional/semi-annual litter picking morning on Saturday. We’ve done this a few times in the past – we had been doing it every year but due to Covid we’ve not done one since 2019. Our neighbour Graham liases with the our District Council and collects high-viz jackets, litter-picking contraptions and large and extra sturdy rubbish bags. And, off we set. Some of the villagers proceed along the road towards Banbury and those of us up at our end of the village make our way up towards Canons Ashby, scouring the verges and hedgerows for any offending litter. And boy, is there a lot of offending litter. In the hour we were out we easily filled our rubbish sack and there were about twenty others filling similarly large rubbish sacks.
I have to say, I have never understood how people can casually discard rubbish as they drive along the road. Surely, it’s just as easy to keep the rubbish in your car until you get home. If you choose to willfully litter you have to finish whatever you are consuming (lots and lots of diet Coke cans, crisp packets [potato chips for my American reader], candy bar wrappers, and more), roll down your window and make the effort to sling it out onto the verge. That seems to me to be a lot more effort than simply finishing your snack/drink, placing it on the seat beside you and put it in the bin when you get home.
Apart from the effort involved, it’s just plain anti-social. I just don’t get it.
The highlights of Saturday’s collection were a garden chair and not one but two pairs of knickers/underpants. I leave you to imagine the context in which one comes to discard one’s knickers along the roadside. Twice.
YCNMIU
I was somewhat gob-smacked to hear on the evening news on Thursday that the privatised water companies in the UK dump raw sewerage into UK waters an average of 1000 times each day. Apparently, this they are allowed to do. Although, they are only supposed to dump sewerage when there is excessive rainfall. Funny, but I can’t remember excessive rainfall occurring three times every day over the past few years.
The government is now going to take action! The water companies will be compelled to reduce the number of times they dump raw sewerage by 40%. By 2040.
So, they will only be allowed to dump raw sewerage into rivers, streams, lakes and the sea twice a day. Meanwhile, shareholders of those water companies continue to take about £2 billion each year in dividends. And that’s not all. When Thames Water announced the appointment of their new CEO a year ago it was announced that she would be paid a miserly £750,000 basic salary with an annual bonus of no more than 120% of her salary and a long-term incentive plan with an annual award of up to 200% of her base salary. No wonder they have to dump shit into the rivers – she’s having to get by on a mere £3,150,000 a year.
Oh, and by the way, more than 70% of the UK water companies are owned by foreign companies. So that’s what the Brexiteers meant by Taking Back Control – allowing foreigners to extract bucket-loads of cash from British consumers and crap all over the place.
You could not make this shit up.
Meanwhile, keep happy, keep smiling, be careful, wear a f**king facemask in crowded places and keep your distance. And keep safe.
Lots of love to you all,
Greg