22nd October 2026

 

John  Atkinson Grimshaw - Stapleton Park.

Grimshaw, he even has the name for these dark miserable mornings in Yorkshire, or maybe it is Lancashire because Tod sits on the boundary?  He hasn't captured the wet shiny pavements that can often be seen in his other paintings.  The light fall of misty rain or fret as it is called down here.(and it does make you fretful!)

The photos below are taken from Dorothy Hartley's book - The Countryman's England, 1935 and is probably a perfect time capsule from the 1930s to capture a beautiful England that would soon disappear into two World Wars and forever more be changed by the relentless march of progress.  I know many people think of these times as golden, but they weren't.  Poor housing, cold and damp, limited food and illnesses still waiting for the cure that would banish them.

Somehow all this talk about warfare has brought these books to mind.  Yes Hartley wrote another book Food in England, perhaps we may need it in the future as we learn how to go back to the land and learn how to use the apples of our orchards and the vegetables from the fields.

Washing spring onions in the stream

The 1930s was a fascinating time in our history, the painters, poets and theatre actors represented their country, no silly tv programmes and constant news from all corners of the world, just a simple life style captured by the authors of that time. 

Funnily enough one of my favourite poems captures the ending of one way of life to the life we now experience (sometimes with great reluctance).  The Horses by Edwin Muir...... Make of it what you will for there is plenty of discussion as to its message.

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

A couple of other books.

H.J.Massingham - The English Countryside. Also English Downland. Massingham wrote a famous book call Prophecy of Famine but it never happened ;)

Links

 Ian Rae  "The man known for lechery is up for treachery"  Words that make you laugh.  Such a beautiful pairing.

One green shoot at a time: the women restoring mangrove forests in the oil-ravaged Niger delta | Global development | The Guardian

Sometimes there is good news.  Just seen a woman skating down  a busy road, somewhere in America, probably New York.  She holds a banner 'Abolish ICE' behind her two ICE  men are in  hot pursuit.  But everyone is cheering her on.  Small sparks igniting people.  

How can all this mess that America has found itself in happen?  Apparently Winston Churchill said of democracy. 

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"

 I quite like the quote about if there is a knock on your door early in the morning, it is probably the milkman.  That is the sort of country we live in now of course, we are not fearful.

Whether you believe any of the stuff written at the moment, the thought that democracy is under threat is scary.  That it's removal is being deliberately engineered by those in power and those who are rich but hopefully it becomes manageable by the people who vote them in or out.

Rebecca Solnit has written one of her long essays  The Democracy Vs Oligarchy Show.  She seems to be in Japan out of harms way at this important time of voting but they are still protesting there.

On a lighter note, The Green Witcher's are holding a meeting tonight, it will be about foraging.  A nice easy foray into things to eat from the countryside.  Debby in America will no doubt be foraging for deer:) but here in England we just forage for the 'greens' found in nature.  All I can think of is  blackberries (season now over) bilberries and even wild raspberries.  There are the mushrooms of course but this can be a dangerous game.  I have always fancied trying the Amethyst Deceiver a pretty blue mushroom, we had been on a couple of mushroom foraging with an expert but I have never had the courage to try one.

Laccaria Amethystina.  Taken from Wikipedia

The other thing I love is crab apple jelly, it's golden translucent in the jar reflecting an amber/gold colour.

An over abundant crab apple tree

But on the whole, unless you resort to killing wild animals the British flora is rather scarce for eating purposes.

17th October 2026 Creature Comforts

Nick Park was on the radio this morning.   If you remember he and his crew produced Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Creature Comforts and other films.  In 1985 he had joined Aardman Animations in Bristol and their clay figures given life by human voice dubbing was to go on to win awards.

As I  lived in Bath at the time the local news station was often on and these strange little zoo creatures (Bristol has a zoo) would feature at the end of the news under 'Creature Comforts'  They were hilarious at the time.  Real human speech dubbed with animal characters.  So my offering for today.

How it is done.

Today Friday 16th October 2026

 Friday morning.  Sam our cleaner and her daughter are here.  This because she is helping her mother through the day so that they can go to a funeral this afternoon.  Sam draws my attention to the tiles round the Aga, she has cleaned the grouting and they do look better.  She must despair of us as a household not noticing things, though I shall draw people's attention to her marvellous cleaning.

Yesterday we had two lots of builders around.  One filled the holes in the basement with gravel they had dug to see where the water level was.  The other to finalise the work they will be doing next year in January and to look at the damp patch on the ceiling, which turned out of course to be leaves cluttering the top guttering.

Come the weekend and Tanaker will be here to go walking on Saturday with Andrew and then football on Sunday with Leeds playing Manchester United.  Isn't that the club in trouble?  I am glad I do not have a busy life.

Substance keeps throwing questions at me, I do believe it is a social experiment to see who we are.  It has a high note, you have to answer questions from the Roman philosophers, Cicero for instance.  I remember years back when we had a whole bookshelf  of Roman and Greek Penguin books but I don't think I read them and definitely can't quote.

Talking of experiments, my tablet has the cheek to write blogs for not only me but for others. It calls itself AI mode, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and definitely wasn't asked for. Can you not imagine one day in the future when people will read your blogs but it won't be YOU just some mindless computer chugging out words.  It was a great help though for North Stoke in Oxfordshire. ;) These computers will really have to size up if they can't understand the original task.  Still I know exactly how to create a Yorkshire Pudding!

Doodling

 

where to start? Well drawing two blogs together.  Today Steve Reed goes to Nottingham too listen to Owen Jones talking about his new book.  I always feel very motherly about Jones, he is so articulate and bright but he does tend to squirm around on his seat when in full flow.  In fact he has 'ants in his pants' as the saying goes.  Ants are something Jabblog has been talking about.  The saying, probably coming from America is early 20th century - 1930/1940 and of course came from really having ants in one's pants - I suppose from sitting on the grass.

I would love to see a green woodpecker once more on the lawn jabbing the grass furiously to make the ants appear from the ant's nest.

It reminds me of Tom when he was about four years old.  He had decided to make a 'tent' on a slope in the garden.  He worked busily away and finishing went and sat inside his abode. Only two minutes later to come fleeing out chased by an angry queen bee.  He had built his safe place on top of a bumblebee's nest hole.

I had my eyes tested on Monday, I now need glasses for distance, computer and reading, four pairs with my sunglasses.  Opticians have really moved forward with their equipment.  I was taken through my examination by a sweet Asian girl, sadly the young all look too young to be doing adult jobs;)

I am listening to A.S.Byatt - The Virgin in the Garden at the moment.  The story is set in 1953, the year of the Coronation of the late Queen.  On reading whether anyone had criticised it. Well they had.  Basically because of its cleverness and clever references to Shakespeare, etc.  I have never been enamoured by Shakespeare so will I be able to hear the book to the end as some say they never finished it.  It is all very 'loves lost dream', fumbling at suspenders but never going further.  A group of young people who live in that quiet, very English way, so many people want to go back to.  It is the time of D.H. Laurence's book - Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Which eventually broke the barrier of being able to be read by the public and which probably launched the 1960s.

Not to worry, but cyber attacks on fridges and freezers in French Supermarkets here? are slightly scary.

Edit.  Professor Tim Wilson, someone I listen to'  it is about the terrible tragic death of the young man who got killed by a tiger.  Trump that morally degenerate man is totally despicable in making fun of this tragedy.  The tiger will live.

Time to sleep for butterflies

 

A butterfly from a few years ago taking nourishment on a cotton wool ball.

Butterflies do not hibernate like mammals; instead, they enter a state of dormancy known as diapause. This physiological state allows them to survive cold temperatures and lack of food by reducing metabolic activity.

The butterfly above was not let out though he had woken up to bright sunny skies but it was too cold to let him out into the cold March air.  They will hide in your wardrobes, cupboards or curtains so give them a quiet place and allow them to survive.

Our first butterfly has moved into the kitchen and now takes up residence on the curtain.  Completely immobile he must live through several months of dormancy before the spring sun wakes him.  Actually I am not sure whether he is a she but whatever he is definitely a butterfly seeking the warmth.

translucent blue

I am actually rather worried about the butterflies peace here.  Will the builders start work early next year?  My daughter is already sorting her books out for the charity shops.  Andrew takes a bag every day to one of the shops, and cookery books are the latest.  Though Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson remain.  

10th October 2026

The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking, and yet it comes to meet us.  Martin Heidegger

I start with a book which ordered has now arrived.:  Which has been nagging at the back of my mind for ages.  I read it years ago and was taken somewhat with Louth Gur, a lake which nestled in a sacred landscape and one of the most important prehistoric sites in Ireland.  Dames spun a story around it with Aine as the goddess who protected it.  As a sun goddess she made the grey waters of the lake sparkle.

Trees often float by in my memories, the tree up on Bath Downs with the barbed wire used as fencing tied tightly round its trunk, The wire had grown deep into the bark, of an ash tree and I was never quite sure that trees felt pain.  It was an ash that had had the wire tied round it like the Norse  Yggdrasil Tree probably the tree that Odin hung on for nine days......

Brian Bates sees the Yggdrasil Tree as representing Sleipnir, the spirit horse of Odin, a great eight legged creature that takes him down to the otherworld. Bates works his way from the word Yggdrasil, Ygg being a nickname for Odin and drasil a word for horse. Odin of course famously hung from the tree for 9 days but it was during this time, a time of spiritual quest and dreaming that the tree transformed into Sleipnir. And Bates points out that the gallows in Anglo-Saxon times were also known as "a 'horse' upon which its victim rode to death"

But to get back to Louth Gur, it has the most beautiful circular stone circle in existence, and had I read that it had been done with a pole in the centre and a rope to get the evenness of a perfect circle.  You can see the gateway on the right, an invitation into what? what happened in this circle, surely not a market but a place where the priests watched the happenings of the sun, moon and stars.

Borrowed from the Louth Gur Holiday Cottages web site.

The other thing that I had remembered, half unconsciously, was the Stone of the Tree,  Cloch A Bile which was also nearby.  You can find it on The Modern Antiquarian  a strange beast of a stone with its moss and lichen. 

Louth Gur also has a' dead hunt' at night occasionally through the skies a bit like the Cw Annwn Hunt of Halloween Night.  But the person in the Dead Hunt is the hunted quarry  selected by the spirits of the underworld and who are chased from one world to the other.

Apparently there was also a 'silent coach' which belonged to Aine and the tale is told of how Sean O'Shea, a herdsmen, was summoned by Aine to play the bagpipes at a ball she was giving, a party of good food and wine. I bet he never returned.  The coach was called Coitose Bodhar and, according to Dames, was similar to the one that carried Nerthus in Denmark, Mother Earth of Northern Europe

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 Found this, a Seamus Heaney old video.  At one stage I collected his archaeological poems called 'North' from a book I found in Bath library.  The poems were so profound, imagining the prehistoric world.

It is strange how old myths build up through the stones.  Heaney whilst studying archaeology at Queen's University wrote this poetry.  He was inspired by Ted Hughes, how strange that things revolve in a circle and Hughes bleakness is somewhat captured in Heaney's writing.  I have written some of the poems down and they can be found through the blogs.

North Stoke: Kinship

North Stoke: Seamus Heaney

Life: interesting but scary.

 

This is what greets me this morning on my computer, Milan Cathedral square.  A glorious over the top elaborate wedding cake of a cathedral shining white against a blue sky.  A beautiful example of what humans can build.  Yet today we remember all the Israeli young killed on the 7th October in a brutal butchery by the Hamas group.  Andy Burnham made a statement last night here.  

Is that cathedral a pointless reminder that religion is just a waste of space in any bodies mind.  Well that is a pointless question because the answer is all around us.  And in this country, churches are slowly slipping away from religious teaching whilst other religions gather their war like forces to fight.  We seem to have made gods since time began.

Many would argue as I do myself that religion is all to do with power play.  Keeping a social order through the offices of religion, royalty and government.

 Yet I love my gods and goddesses.  Captured for eternity in Greek and Roman statues.  Conveniently silenced by the marble they are made of. Celtic gods more crudely made, but given names and their own land, cleverly merged by the Romans with their own gods.

We imagine these gods into our physical world and give them names and duties to perform.  So that the old Germanic thunder god Thor still gets mentioned 2000 years later.  They travel with us through time.

An interesting biblical quote came into my head as I wrote the above, 'am I my brother's keeper? A question asked by Cain after murdering Abel.  How much must we as humans take responsibility for the fate of the people around us?

And now for something lighter (no not really) we discussed last night what our fortnight of spare food would be like that the government is asking us to set aside.  Are we talking about WW3 here, or a very violent El Nino.  Andrew said that the amount of water needed to be kept each day for each person would be colossal.  I suggested we did have a sort of well in the basement, I think it is the ground water level, the builders had dug a hole to see what foundations these terrace houses sit on.

Apart from that we are in the middle of party conferences, the Conservatives today.  John Crace is so wicked over Kemi Badenoch, their leader that he restores my faith in the human race.  

Interesting that Zac Polanski did not vote on the Zionism is racist motion of the Green Party but was out canvassing for another Green seat, voting of which takes place tomorrow I believe.  But then 4 of the 5 Green MPs did not vote either.

Thor, the Norse God of thunder

Celtic Gods

3rd October 2026

 Saturday Morning:  The family buzz around me.  Andrew off for a 10 mile walk.  Up to Gaddings Dam where he will then join the Pennine Way.  A sort of roundabout way which will end up in Hebden Bridge.  I told him about Geograph and the mapping out of every square yard.  But funnily enough he already knew it as he had done some work for the Ordinance Survey people.  Which was analysing the language people used to describe their photos.

Lillie got home late last night from London she is off to camp one night somewhere.  She emptied a bag of goodies on the table.   Apparently the train staff had handed out these bags because there was no restaurant car onboard.  She has an app that allows her to bid for a first class ticket, it costs an extra £12 and she always gets a seat in first class.  A message pings on my phone, leave the back door unlocked, because Lillie hasn't got a key.  I am going to the doctors for my jabs this morning.  Which means standing in a long line as we shuffle through but it is very quick usually.  

My daughter is off to work to wrangle with the customers at her charity shop.  Many amusing tale comes out.  Last week Ben had sent a pile of famous racing drivers clothes for the shop.  But they hadn't arrived,  but one day a little old man struggled into the shop carrying a very large parcel, the parcel had been delivered to him by mistake.

What did I hear on the news this morning.  The Conservatives are going to build more prisons with 50,000 places for inmates.  I have been hearing that all my life, and it is has been a long life!  You would think that a  different solution would have been arrived at by now.

Otherwise a quiet week, watching how other people live their lives out on You Tube, knitting away and quietly sinking away into a land where everything is serene and gentle.

Guess what this is?*

Tom and Ellie  are taking their six month trip at the end of this month.  As always I worry when members of the family travel.  It is good to hear that Ellie's parents also worry about the trip.  They will end up in Japan, which they have both fallen in love with and hopefully explore more than Tokyo.  Kyoto is really old Japan and has that flavour of spirituality that is part of the Japanese culture.

* It is a rug loom.

30th September 2026 - Dean Merewether found

 Well where do you start with the 'Fairford Incident'? Definitely go down in history.

Could it have been an American, Israel or even Iran set-up, if so, it failed miserably.  As the news comes out in dribs and drabs and one of the five arrested men had actually phoned the police an hour before the farmer😎.  Or, just some young lads stealing farm petrol.  The saga continues but don't believe anything you read in the newspapers, well I might go and read the Guardian.  But rumours will abound - lets see where the next bit of the story works out.

There was a glorious drone photo of Silbury Hill this morning taken by a farmer.  Completely surrounded by harvested field, a faint dust of goodness know what on the empty fields and Silbury basked perfectly in the sun.  I have said this before, but Silbury was only one of three mounds built around a similar time. (mines bigger than yours, you can hear the tribal chant;)  one at Marlborough within the grounds of Marlborough College.  The third, now gone, was Hatfield Barrow set in Marden Henge.  

Marlborough College is an upmarket college in  the pretty town of Marlborough.  Always stop at the Polly Tea Room restaurant for scones and tea by the way, real traditional English fare.  And you can see the pretty schoolboys, immaculately dressed, strolling around the town.

Paul always wanted his ashes scattered over Silbury he had a deep and abiding love for the hill but strangely that changed when he came to Yorkshire and he fell in love with Normanby village, he was at his happiest there.  

I have actually climbed Silbury (you are not supposed to) but married to an archaeologist obviously obviously gave me credence.  Trying to remember who was one of the first amateur archaeologist. It was man of the cloth - Dean Merewether no less.  See this early 2008 blog.  I see I had been reading Michael Dames on the subject, his name has been nagging at the back of my mind lately.  Dames produced a beautiful book on Ireland, an author who looked for the magic and Celtic in archaeology but well worth reading.

28th September 2026

 "Someone has dropped the ball!!" words spoken by the farmer returning home late  one evening from a party.  Their words this morning, showed 'just how prepared we are' when terrorists set out to presumably blow something up at Fairford military camp, housing American bombers.  Listen to her words on the BBC this morning.  Ignore what Trump says about the affair he just tells fibs and then finds himself up to the chin in trouble.

Our farmer happened to notice three white vans parked and driving further on masked and hooded men slipping into the field.  Well sensibly the farmer called the military police, unfortunately they did not pick up the phone (heads are going to roll there for dereliction of duty) so she just dialled 999 and within ten minutes her village was buzzing with armed police.

Now if it had been me, I would have taken the vans as belonging to badger baiters, scum of the earth.  Who set their dogs on the badgers to fight and kill them - lovely sport.  Or maybe it might have been 'lampers' another sport when you drive your four wheeled drive into the field and paralyse any animal you shoot by blinding them with your lights. But white vans are not up to scratch for that sport. 

Anyways there will be a big hoo-ha about all of this and easily the most exciting thing that happened over the weekend, not for the villagers though.  They were evacuated during the night.

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The day of the great upheaval when this old house gets revamped draws nearer. The quotes have come in for the tanking of the basement.  Very, very expensive.  Adam the architect has produced 60 drawings of the basement Andrew tells me proudly of his old friend, I have nothing to worry about down there when a flat is crafted out of the space   He will also have an office at the back.  But the rest of the work in the upper part of the house will be put on hold for the time being.

This is future planning for the family, extending the living space and providing a source of security in the future, when they too reach the dizzying heights of old age.  There has been a conscious decision that the future is somewhat unreliable and Todmorden with all its advantages such as trains to major towns round here, the supermarkets in the town and the general attractiveness of the town itself is worth keeping the house.

Sunday

 A few photos because the mind is not working and on a Sunday we need a piece of quiet water to reflect.

The Canadian geese who live on the canal, not sleeping there of course that is why I hear them early morning flying over.

I bought this clock for Paul as a birthday present, it now sits on top of some drawers not ticking, must try to remember to get it working again.

I wonder where father Xmas went.  The Georgian silver miniature table and chairs needed a clean.

This is a church grave yard on a cold December day.  It is All Saint's Church, Kirbymoorside.

But not to get too dark, golden bamboo in Jack's Jungle garden

Asian Primulas

Perfect balance in a giant fern

Yesterday I received an invitation to join 'Substance' yes substance not substack.  They always seem as grown-up writing but it seems someone has nominated me to write on Substance,  Intriguing, not sure how it will play out.

26th September 2026 - End Times

 

Not that I am bragging, I do occasionally get a two with Wordle but this morning surprised me and I reckon it must have been precognition. 

But to more serious things.  This arrived in my mail this morning, Naomi Klein and co-writer have launched a book about 'End Times' and what idiots like Bezos, Musk and all those techies are aiming for as they try to remodel this beautiful planet we live on and then flee to the outer ranges of space to create another world.  Somehow I think they are completely ridiculous.  But it is scary for us people who actually want something much simpler.  And I ask the question can money really bring this all about?

"In short, we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. There is something treasonous in this. Treasonous not to an abstraction like a flag or a nation, for we are not nationalists. But treasonous to the unspoken pact made with the web of life that sustains us."

I love that word treasonous, it has such a historical tone, I notice it has been used more and more in just normal discourse.  How do we approach the billionaires, the baron lords.  How do we bring them down?  Well hopefully you will notice there is more of us than them.  All round the world people are demonstrating and protesting against those who would lay claim to power. 

The protestors outside the Kennedy Center, the marches all over the world, well attended marches against the ruthless and cruel Netanyahu's government.  Someone said in a reel I saw, seventy-seven million people voted for Trump - THINK ON THAT.  And yes that thought is scary.  But I am sure the flipperty nature of how people voted will be put aside when people begin to realise that they are being governed not for their good livelihoods but to enhance the large fortunes of a corrupt family, they will vote the Trumps and their sycophants out of office.

So as the wicked immigrants who flew over this morning to the canal - yes Canadian geese;)  So as to those small things that please us, like the owl last night hooting, or the people of Africa protecting the elephants.  Or, even my MP Joseph Fenton Glynn, as he stood up in Parliament and addressed Milliband on the miraculous turn of recognising the terrible crime that is Gaza, there is hope.  We just need to fight for a better world.

21st September 2026

 Whoops I just made an account on the Daily Mail.  Didn't mean to I was just looking round for gossip on Benedict Cumberbatch.  Of what I have seen of him he has a high handed attitude to life and he also has a shouty mouth.  The couple of videos I saw and he was arguing angrily with cyclists. 

Enough, the reason I was chasing him is that he fronts an environmental video that I have started watching which I will put below.  I have only seen a bit of it but (me on my high horse) talking about industrial  agricultural. Well I was rather shocked by great rolling orchards of pears in China which had to be pollinated not just by hand but with drones as well.  The bees have been wiped out by pesticides and herbicides.  What happens is they gather the first early pear blossom in absolutely industrial scale and then shake the pollen free from the flowers via human hand and then with soft brushes go out and pollinate the blossom by hand or by the drones.

It is weird this video coming out at this precise time, Wendell Berry died a few days ago.  A Christian man who devoted himself to the land and only used horses on it.  His first book 'The Unsettling of America' I read many years ago.  I have a couple more, he also wrote poetry, the famous one being of course "The Peace of Wild things"

Two men, one English the other American, I wonder what they would have said to each other.

Talking of books or videos coming out, isn't it strange the coincidental timing of Diana's brother's Charles Spencer's book coming out - Swan Song, Diana, My Sister, in which he attacks King Charles.  Plenty of publicity there no doubt to shoot up the sales.  The coincidence comes in that another branch of the royal family has moved back to England, Harry and Meghan with their two children.  The royals seem to be setting themselves up for another battle.  Why can't they do it in private?

The full video as promised, it is over an hour long but looks promising and as what I call the negativity bug is looking a little trashed and there is more hope for the future.  That is of course bar the wars that are threatening on all sides.

Happy Equinox to everyone.  Though apparently it is on Wednesday but I still prefer the 21st. xxx

Ironically it is the International Day of Peace