Sunday

A last fling of honeysuckle

Words; "Rionnach maoim": shadows cast by clouds on moorland on a sunny, windy day (Gaelic). Robert Macfarlane.

This weekend my daughter and Lillie are visiting, we went for a drive to Hutton-le-Hole yesterday and stopped at the very busy pub there. My daughter is a good storyteller, and kept us amused about the 'London trollop' who moaned about the train they were all on. The first train had been cancelled and so the second was crammed, K is like me, we accept the fate we are offered, why yell and scream about something you can't change?

Her second tale was about the Hebden Bridge charity shop, someone had bought in a turkish instrument, she marked it up as £80, then the next week halved the price, a man came in and offered £20, nope she said I will go down to £30 and thats it. He eventually agreed to the price but she was so cross with him and said 'you can forget the b***** bagpipes as well which he had his eye on, probably a dealer.

Hebden Bridge is of course an elite area full of hippy types so bagpipes seemed a strange thing to be in the shop. Charity shops attract a lot of stuff, mostly cheap clothing, especially at this time of the year when everyone sorts things out before the children go back to school. A whole room of donations will have to be sorted, mostly the stuff will end up with the 'ragman' or on the £1 rail.

The Opper great Aunt's,  Tom is playing chess with his uncle, even as a young child he was very competitive and I remember playing chess with him when he was about 6. 'I'm going to win granny' and of course he did

If you were to too guess the nationality of each and everyone, you would find an American, a French man, English of course and Marc whose father was German.  The aunts have lived all over the world and Switzerland just happened to be the home of their mother who was Dutch.  Very UnEnglish as grandpa would say.....

Sunny Switzerland

The last story she told was about their Swiss holiday taking the paddle boat to Saint Gingolph on the other side of the lake, she decided to treat the children to filet de perche, cheaper in France then Switzerland. So they ended up in a hut on a busy road, never seen decoration since 1950s, and their meal was brought from the other side of the road via the pedestrian crossing by a very old woman hobbling over. They enjoyed the meal, the equivalent of fish and chips but much nicer, the perch come from the lake and the fries are always frite.
My daughter has a sarky tongue (inherited from me) but the cruel eye in the family is teenager Matilda, although she has inherited my shyness will stand down any head teacher on what clothes she should wear, and wins.....

And the last words culled on this day's reading of emails, from George Monbiot.. how apt.

The media avoids the subject of climate breakdown – to do otherwise is to bring the entire infrastructure of thought crashing down