Active for the Greens - and allotment, year 2, post 1

On Saturday I was active for the Greens - leafleting in Redhill West. As I have missed loads of meetings recently I was very keen to get out and help. That was a lot of walking on Saturday but I did walk with Liz - whom I liked very much and I met a super guy called Derek who sorted out our leafleting routes. We had lunch in a pub together. Ended up all walked out, exhausted!

On Sunday I was active in the allotment shop, and then, went home with some compost and did my own garden, which involved moving some self-seeded forget-me-knots and some campanula, also self-seeded, to places where I hope they will look lovely.

On Monday it was pouring down and I didn't do much except suffer with my bad cold and buy food at Sainsbury's.

Today I went to the allotment and dug up the last of the potatoes - quite a lot of them - and a few were rotten because the frost must have caught them, but a lot of them were buried deeply so they were fine. I gave some to Bill.  I moved one of the gooseberry bushes so we can put a fence around them and protect the fruit from the birds and the rats. Anne came up and told me that after storm Doris she and Bill had collected our black compost bin from where it had blown to and showed me the sheds that had blown down. Our shed was fine and its roofing felt was fine too, hallelujah. I put some rubbish out for the collection on Friday but I could do with putting out more. I put out a rusty old incinerator. Some of my stuff would be good to burn but we never get a good, calm, dry day!! So I think I will just put it out for rubbish collection.

Hidden Figures - a movie

Again we were persuaded to go to the cinema by our son. I had heard good reports of this film and it didn't disappoint. I am pretty sure that after last year's Oscars, which were all white people films about white people, the industry would have been encouraged to make some films about black people. This was a bio-pic about some real women who worked at NASA. They were pioneers, truly, the first women to have beaten the odds and got to positions of responsibility in their workplace. But my God, it was hard for them, and the white people of America should hang their heads in shame.

I thought I knew about segregation - black people had to sit at the back of the bus, for example, - but I didn't know they weren't able to borrow the same books from the library as white people. This shocked me more than anything else - in fact I couldn't take in the implication at first. It is this. White people didn't want to touch the books if black people had touched them. It is so horrible. They didn't want black people to touch their coffee pots either. (This is illogical because they all had black maids who could touch everything in their kitchens and why am I trying to understand the logic to something so horrible and stupid?)

Then white people made it so hard for black people to get a good education. It was illegal for a black woman to go to university and become an engineer. Illegal. Americans have never really been sane. That's what I took away from the whole story. They only wanted to get to the moon, really, to show the Russians that they could do that. That they had great mathematicians, too. That they had heroic young men, too.

For some reason, one really bad misrepresentation of pre-computer engineering mathematics was that, in this film, no one used a slide rule. There seemed to be log tables but the slide rule - gone. Rubbed out of history for no good reason.

There is quite a lot of suspense to the movie - it's written to a formula, to some extent, but it's very good.

A good day - Savill Garden

Yesterday was horrible with a strong wind called "Storm Doris" that went on all day - people are calling it Doris Day.

Today I got out for a good walk. The mild weather has brought out all the spring bulbs - and more!

A huge camelia

Wall of flowers

 Today the gardeners were busy raking up twigs and sticks after the storm. I talked to one gardener who is always polite and talks to me - he said that three trees came down in Windsor Great Park - two birch and one pine. The pine has smaller roots than the hardwoods.



It's hard to believe this flowers in February

Hellbores "Moonshine" - very bright today

A day in Hull

Husband and I had a good day ( and two nights) in Hull. We looked online for what to do in this City of Culture (it has been awarded this title for one year only). Sadly, we had come at a time of little cultural activity, so we were not able to find anything we wanted to see at the theatre. However, we found that we could do a Philip Larkin Trail (a walking tour) (Philip Larkin was a 20th Century English poet whom I like) and rocked up at the tourist information office at 9 a.m. ready to collect the guide. But sadly, the tourist info office didn't open until ten. So we photographed the Blade (a turbine blade given by Siemens in lieu of a sculpture) and went for a walk, by the waterfront to the old town (cobbled streets and old warehouses, now rather chic student lodgings).

Turbine blade only just fits in the square.

This is the City Hall, in which tourist information has an
 office, and where P. Larkin went to listen to concerts. 

The river Hull here flows into the Humber.  The building on the right is a new shopping centre. Like many towns, Hull has built three shopping malls with adjacent car parks, thereby rendering their pleasant pedestrianised shopping streets redundant. Own goals.

A lift bridge in action, and a boat moored by the historic dockside.

Boat coming through the lift bridge.

We then found the William Wilberforce museum. This MP was born in Hull and is best known for his campaign, based on his religious convictions, to pass laws making the slave trade illegal. (I am sorry to say that the wealth of the British Empire was built on slavery, amongst other abuses.)  Wilberforce found out all the facts about the disgusting trade and his campaign made them common knowledge so no-one could say they didn't know how cruel it was. However, he didn't campaign to end slavery - that only happened in the West Indies 30 years later.

The Wilberforce house and museum - very idiosyncratic architecture

William in the garden - apparently he had a big nose
 and was small
but here he looks gorgeous.

Went back to the square and went to the historic city toilets, which are under the city square. I made Husband take photos of his toilets as they were rather quaint. I also took some pics of mine which didn't come out well.

male toilets

female loo showing wooden door with real brass fittings.

traditional taps

random tile design

The Larkin tour took us into Marks and Spencer, which inspired a poem mentioning baby-doll nighties, and a street famous for its name "The Land of Green Ginger", which was the legal district and all the old legal chambers were down there. It inspired a novel by Winifred Holtby which I haven't yet read.

The tour took us to another historic area - Trinity Square - has a lovely church in the centre and the old grammar school.

A more recent school



The old grammar school

Boys were not encouraged to look out of the window.

 Although we did not photograph them, the large number of council workers laying new pavements was a huge feature of the city. I have never anywhere seen so many workpeople (there were girls amongst them) wearing hard hats and hi-viz and busying themselves with fenced off areas of pavement. Hundreds. There were a number in this square.

We then had a longer walk to the pier where Larkin used to catch the ferry across the Humber. Apparently what he liked about the city was the way the clouds pile up in the large skies. It is true that we had lovely skies on the day that we were there but I imagine it is often quite grim.



This aquarium is apparently brilliant - it is called The Deep and looks like the bows of the Titanic when sinking - or like a shark's tooth.

This sculpture looks out to Europe. It is not a Gormley.

There was another quite seductive-looking toilet in the neighbourhood but no café open.

We then went to the historical area and visited a pub called the Sailmakers' arms (nice drinks) and two museums, the Streetlife and the William Wilberforce. We enjoyed the Streetlife museum with its old trams and shops.

Hot chocolate

The trouble with Hull is that most of its pubs, which are very historical and decorative from the outside, don't serve food, so that they go out of business and look very run down, and this is true of one of the Larkin trail pubs, the White Hart. You can't see its lovely ceramic bar (there is a photo online), and general cosiness, because it is closed.

This picture shows a particularly good, elaborate, but empty pub

The picture above also shows an area of the street fenced off for re-pavementing.

We saved one of the best things to see until the end of our day - at the station is a good sculpture of Larkin by Martin Jennings.

The station is not called a station, but the Paragon Interchange. This is because there is a bus station as well. But for heaven's sake! I think Hull needs to get its feet back on the ground (and stop building shopping centres and get more of its pubs to do decent food.)

Amongst the other things to look at is a barrage (a dam that goes up and down on a huge gantry) and a memorial to Wilberforce on a column.

La La Land

I went to see this movie a couple of weeks ago with Stan. He adored it.

The first part showed a traffic jam in a mocked up version of Los Angeles, with a dance routine that went on and on and on.

Then we discover there are two main characters. After about half the movie of singing and dancing they fall in love. They don't have confidants with whom to discuss the plot because there is no plot, but they do have very similar characteristics - great self-belief and a steely ambition. It is  easy to believe in them as a couple - she is quite chirpy and he is a bit sullen, even though they are firmly placed in a parallel (fantasy) universe where people do singing and dancing ad nauseam.

Then difficulties and conflicts come into their relationship and at long last the film becomes quite interesting. The film breaks all the rules of screenwriting. For most of the time, there is not a lot happening and the story doesn't really start until about halfway through the movie so....

...what does anyone know about anything? People love this film and it's a huge hit. The songs are very good (I go around singing "City of Stars" and my son plays a lovely version on the guitar (it works very well on the guitar)).

The screenwriting BAFTA went to Manchester By The Sea and I was so relieved. MByTheS is a really good film and the screenwriting is amazing and Casey Affleck did it justice. Fantastic film, not feelgood but, important.

Dead Dad envy

This is quite funny, in a bleak way. When I was sixteen my father fell in love with another woman, and left my mother, me and my three brothers to go and live with her and her daughter. My father adopted the daughter and she became his favourite child (in fact he pretended that she was his only child, and why not?) After a lifetime of resenting this stepsister I suddenly decided that she'd probably had quite a hard time with her mother and my dad not always being the easiest of parents (very irresponsible) and I friended her on Facebook.

As my father died two months ago she is writing a lot on her wall about how much she misses him. Hey. We missed him too. We missed him a long time ago for a more heart-breaking reason. She is annoying me again with her "I was daddy's girl" thing. I was too!! God, yes.

So I put a picture of our original family up on Facebook. She will probably just laugh at my demented outfit (but it was the fashion!)

Here is my original family, from my first life, when there were six of us and we lived by the river in Walton. After I was sixteen we had to leave this place and my second life began.

Books, and Howard Jacobson

The main problem I have with Howard Jacobson is that he doesn't make me laugh, even when his books are endorsed all over with words like "hilarious" "wit" and plain "funny". This is not problem for him because lots of people find him amusing, but it is for me because I love to laugh and I feel sad about missing the joke.

 

I think it is because there is a male sense of humour that I have no access to; a snorty sort of humour based on a feeling of power and superiority, and I have never had that. Anyway, at present I am reading the collection of his column in the Independent and I knew I liked that - I like his writing. One feels he showcases his skill in the newspaper.

I am particularly taken by a column about books. What to do about one's possessions is a problem that perplexes me. If your possessions are just for you to enjoy right now, you shouldn't worry, but if you are thinking of some future time when you will enjoy your possessions you are probably barking up the wrong tree because many of your things will have deteriorated in condition - the yellowed, fading postcards or pictures, for example, and if you are thinking someone else, in future, will enjoy your possessions when you decide to pass them on, you are also barking up the wrong tree because that other person will not share your taste and will probably only take a mild and passing interest in the things you treasure so much. I am thinking about this particularly in the case of books, because of having to dispose of my mother's possessions and this included a long period of re-reading her books to see if I should keep those by a certain author, and because, although I said that my collection of books would get no bigger and I have imposed a limit, which is the number of bookshelves I already have, I have just authorized the building of three more shelves. The thing is: I have a Kindle. I do not need to buy books unless there is no electronic equivalent and by the way, I have joined The Open Library which is a library online where you can get books that are way out of date, of the kind which previously I had to order through the public library system. One does not need to go out anymore!!

So Jacobson starts by pondering a Montreux prize for a television programme displaying the strongest "human values". He wonders what these are and whether "Getting em off in Ibiza" does not show even more human values? Then he wonders if perhaps we are trying to dignify ourselves but we actually mean something more like spiritual values, or God, even. But if we say spiritual values the words are too light to actually mean anything.

So he's pondering on this while packing up his books; he's moving house. Ah, but his actual words are "relocating his library". That's how many books he has - a library, and he started collecting them from second-hand book stalls when a mere slip of a boy. And people say to you - as his father said to him "How many of those have you read?" They always say that. I remember showing someone who asked me that question a couple of books that I hadn't read. But really I was mystified by the question because I have read more books that I possess, far more. Howard says:

"How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to for reference, as and when. But also somethings you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are, or more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own."

That's neat, it covers the accusation of being pretentious.

He says: "... books worth owning speak to us of our humanity as vexedly as the drunk returning to his own vomit in Ibiza. [OK this is a bit stupid as no-one ever returns to their own vomit, only dogs, in the proverb. But give him some poetic licence.] It's trouble, being human. It's bad for us."

Then he says "books made a bastard out of me, as they are meant to."

Very puzzled about this as it doesn't sound like much of a claim for literature. This very much depends on the books you choose. I know Howard J loves Middlemarch but I can't really see how reading Middlemarch can make a bastard out of anyone. I will have to think about it. However, literature is full of everything you need to know, or think about, and I didn't know that for a very long time, but I was able to tell a young friend of mine, who loved literature but was thinking of studying History and Politics, - don't. Because I did exactly that. The part of politics you love is probably Political Theory and if you study Politics you have to do Comparative Government and things like that which are as boring as can be - leave it to the lawyers - and everything you want to know about is covered in Literature. So she went to the University of Durham and did well in Literature and now she is working in publishing in London. Which was my dream when I was young. So I feel my experience was not in vain.

I think where Howard went wrong is that he didn't try to name the values that he thinks are meant by "human values". The ones I believe form a bridge between man and God are courage, compassion, honesty and humility. These didn't just come into my head. They came from studying art in art galleries. If you get them all in roughly equal quantities you have an awe-inspiring piece of art. But they are not all four displayed together, usually one quality is pre-eminent. But of human values, these, I believe, are the most important.

Horse dung

Yesterday I arranged to meet a woman in my home town who said she had some horse manure. So today at 3 p.m. I met her at the end of a lane. She was older than I am and told me to follow her in her vehicle and I was in mine. We drove up a track to a yard lined with large sheds, stables and horse boxes. She got out of her car, and when I was standing holding my spade and my plastic sacks, she disappeared. She was wearing a wide brimmed black hat, and horsey lady welly-boots, and her hair was dyed a nice dark red, so she should have been visible. It turned out she had gone into the stable yard. I followed her and felt a bit of a fool as I went following her here and there while she did a running commentary into her mobile phone. She then told me we'd be driving into the field in a truck - because the path was very muddy. I looked around for a truck - there were several enormous vehicles standing around. She gestured to a toy-size tractor. She got the keys and then it seemed she didn't know how to drive it. But she had a Spanish man in tow - and he spoke very little English but did know how to drive the truck. He drove me up and down through the troughs of mud into the field and then it turned out that there was no pile of manure - I was to scrape it off the field where it lay! But luckily the Spaniard helped me and I collected as much as I could get into the sacks and put into the tiny boot of my tiny car.  The horsey lady told me she wanted all my friends to call her and come and get the wonderful organic compost.

However, I don't think many of them will want to come and clear up the horse field for her. I was quite amused by her cheek.