What an excellent Easter weekend. Indeed, the whole week’s been pretty decent – some excellent bright sunny days at the beginning of the week, a bit of rain in the middle and an astonishingly gorgeous weekend. What’s not to like? The blossom is beginning to show in the orchard so we very much hope the clear skies don’t lead to any hard frosts – if we do get a hard frost the greengage will be decimated. It’s the first blossom out and the tree is covered!
Home Thoughts, from Abroad
O, TO be in England
Now that April ‘s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That ‘s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
Robert Browning
Penelope and I visited a dear friend on Wednesday, Penny’s first Head of Department way, way, way back when. Indrani single-handedly eased Penny through her first teaching job and has remained a great friend ever since. It was lovely to see her doing so well after a couple of challenging weeks health wise.
Nick, Lucy and Annabelle set off on Friday for a week along the south coast of Turkey – I guess it will be a bit warmer there than here. When we drove along the south coast of Turkey all those years ago, it was lovely and isolated, not another soul to be seen apart from the occasional goat herder and the countryside was littered with Roman ruins. There were so many that we couldn’t keep up! Now, the whole of that southern coast is heaving with hotels. Glad we saw it when we did.
Penelope and I just finished watching Bad Sisters which we really enjoyed. The story revolves around five Irish sisters, one of whom is married to an absolute bastard who the other sisters fondly refer to as “The Prick.” Each of the other sisters has good cause to wish him dead and eventually the four agree to kill him. However, each attempt fails for one reason or another. Will they eventually succeed in getting him out of their lives? Will they get away with it? It’s on Apple TV here so, if you have access to that, give it a watch.
We’ve got a busy week coming up – next weekend we’ve got friends coming for an outing to Stratford to see the RSC production of Hamnet. Penny and I both loved the book so we’re really excited to see what the RSC does with it in this production.
I ran across an article in the Guardian about Good Friday skipping.
For centuries in some parts of England, people would get together on Good Friday – to skip. Men, women and children would mark the start of the Easter weekend by jumping over long lengths of fishing rope or washing lines, sometimes aiming to jump for the entirety of what became known as “long rope day” or “skipping day”.
The Guardian
I reckon I’d be pretty good at it.
This week’s You Could Not Make It Up comes to us courtesy of the marvellously good value Royal Family. The Guardian has revealed that King Charles and the late Queen extracted more than £1 billion from the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall during the Queen’s reign. The duchies operate as professionally run real estate empires that manage swathes of farmland, hotels, medieval castles, offices, shops and some of London’s prime luxury real estate. They also have substantial investment portfolios, but pay no corporation tax or capital gains tax. So, as well as receiving the sovereign grant, the annual payment the royal family receive to cover its official costs, which currently stands at £86 million per year, they also need to extract tens of millions of pounds every year from estates that their forebearers stole from someone and for which they pay nothing.
And then, on top of that, we’re paying £100 million for Charles’ coronation? Give me a break – in what universe in the 21st century does an obscenely wealthy individual whose position is due entirely to an accident of birth feel entitled to demand ordinary people pay £100 million for a bit of pomp and circumstance on his behalf?
Not only could you not make it up, it is obscene. Thankfully, we have arranged to be otherwise engaged during the Coronation weekend.
Stop Press: I had this week’s edition of the MPP all wrapped up and ready to go and then, on Saturday evening, I ran across the following which really should have been this week’s YCNMIU. Indeed, I think this is probably the best definition of YCNMIU we’re ever had:
Water bosses get ‘environmental bonuses’ in £14.5m pay packets despite 300,000 sewage spills
Yep, you read that correctly – in spite of overseeing more than 300,000 discharges of raw sewerage into our lakes, rivers, streams and coastal waters, the privatised water boards have decided to award their bosses an “environmental bonus.” You really, really could not make it up.
Meanwhile, keep happy, keep smiling, be careful, wear a f**king facemask in crowded places and keep your distance. And keep safe. And be gentle to wasps and bees.
Lots of love to you all,
Greg