Category: Uncategorized

Ellie’s Marathon

The London Marathon.  Sunday.  The hottest on record.  40,000 runners, 100,000 spectators.  Team Support Ellie, all members of her wider family, split into manageable units to chase from place to place all over the Marathon route to spot her and cheer her along.  Malcolm and I, as the oldest supporters joined up with two year old William and his mum, as Team Slow.

We all had the Tracker App.  All the runners had a device on their shoe to report where they were, and how fast they were going in real time.  100,000 users in London, and thousands more beyond ensured the poor overworked app was often on strike, so we often guessed at her whereabouts as we zipped about over London trying to  get to a vantage point before she did.  WhatsApp messages kept us all in the loop.

 

We didn’t spot her at the start……
…. but we did spot these rhinos, who amazingly, all completed the circuit.
  • ‘We didn’t manage to spot her at the start.’
  • ‘ We missed her at Greenwich.’
  • ‘Couldn’t see her at Cutty Sark’
  • ‘Never saw her at the Isle of Dogs.’
  • ‘Where was she on the Mall?’

    Hmm. Maybe it’s not all that surprising that we didn’t spot her at Greenwich.

Which was all a bit disappointing for us, and more so for Ellie, who having trained in sleet and frost wasn’t looking forward to running in the temperatures of high summer and must have thought we’d all pushed off to the pub.

But Tom and Alex reported spotting her at the Tower of London, and sent a picture to prove it.  Team by team we reported our successes – Team Slow finally saw her only yards before she finished.

Ellie draws breath at the Tower of London.

She did it.  She got her medal.  And thanks to many many friends – and quite a few of you – she’s smashed her fundraising target to raise over £6000 towards oesophageal cancer research.  She says she’s done her first -and last – marathon.

 

It’s over. She’s got the medal.

Snapshot Saturday: Prolific plastic

It was on a day out in Sitges near Barcelona that I had my light-bulb moment.  It was a gloriously sunny January day, and we had the beach almost to ourselves: a clean, sandy and utterly unpolluted beach.  Here it is.

Sitges, one bright January morning.

And yet …… I took it into my head to spend just five minutes having my own personal Plastic Litter Pick on this apparently plastic-free beach.  Here is my haul.

From the beach in Sitges, one bright January morning.

When we got back to Ripon, we found that a new group had been formed.  Initially a group of two, it quickly grew.  These are  local people  looking for a Plastic Free Ripon.

Plastic is part of all our lives (you try eliminating it and see just how hard it is), but single-use plastic doesn’t have to be.   We’re 60 miles from the nearest beach, but it’s coastal communities who have perhaps woken up to the threat that plastic in our oceans represents, and Surfers against Sewage who have provided Ripon, and dozens of other communities with a toolkit to help us begin eliminate needless plastic from our city.

Thanks to a small group of foot-soldiers marching to local businesses and spreading the word,  neighbourhood shops have committed to discouraging customers from having plastic bags.  Some takeaways have invested in compostable food containers.  There are bars that have decided against issuing plastic straws.  Commit to taking three decisive steps to eliminate plastic, and your business in Ripon can be awarded plastic free-status.  Many have eagerly responded to the challenge.

There’s much else to do.  Hotels and bed and breakfast establishments are still providing little single-use plastic bottles of shower gel and lotions.  School dinner providers still issue single-use bottles of water.  Garden centres sell their wares in single-use plastic plant pots. Residents and passers-through who should know better sling bottles and packaging from car windows or outside take-aways.  So that’s why there will be regular community litter-picks.

I wish I could say I was in the vanguard of all this action.  I’m not, though I’m a small part of it.  There’s a small gang working utterly indefatigably, and already they’ve made a huge difference.  All the same.  Like so many others, Malcolm and I have gone old-fashioned and eschew the plastic milk cartons in the supermarket.  The early-morning milkman delivers us our early-morning pinta in a glass bottle for us to rinse out and return.  Just like the good old days.

Drinka pinta milka day. (1959 slogan from the Milk Marketing Board)

‘Prolific’ is this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge.

Snapshot Saturday: the happy bookworm

I’ve been smiling a lot this week, and it’s all thanks to Lucy Mangan, and her new book ‘Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading’.

Bookworm. And underneath it, another excellent read. Any guesses?

I’d thought that as a child, I was bookworm too.  Compared with Lucy Mangan I wasn’t even trying.  She resented the time wasted in eating a meal, and as for playing with friends – she never even considered doing that.

Yes, I can remember that Christmas when I was 10, when I was given 19, yes NINETEEN paperbacks, and had finished the first one before we’d even cut into the Christmas cake.

I can remember the row when my father, getting up for a night-time toddle to the bathroom, found me happily reading my way through another installment of ‘Jennings and Darbishire‘ or ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe‘.  Did it never occur to my parents to wonder how I could have got through a book a day any other way?

Lucy’s mother must be a few years older than me.  Lucy herself is only a couple of years older than Tom, and was brought up only a a mile or two away from where he lives now.

Because she was such a redoubtable reader, Lucy Mangan not only read the books that I enjoyed reading with Tom, Ellie and Emily, and now with grandchildren too: but she also discovered the treasures familiar to me as a child of the 1950’s.  I know she wrote this book just for me.

I was born before the Golden Age of the picture book.  Luckily my children weren’t.  ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’? Judith Kerr’s ‘Mog’ books?  Shirley Hughes?  Quentin Blake?  How had I managed without them?

 

 

Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar (Wikimedia Commons)
Judith Kerr: Mog the Forgetful Cat (Wikimedia Commons)
Shirley Hughes’ Alfie books (Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve wallowed this week in memories of ‘My Naughty Little Sister‘; ‘The Church Mice‘; John Burningham; Raymond Briggs; Roald Dahl; ‘The Secret Garden‘ and all those 19th century classics by – largely female – American authors.

 

 

John Burningham’s ‘Borka’ (Wikimedia Commons)
Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas (Wikimedia Commons)
Roald Dahl’s Matilda,illustrated by Quentin Blake (Wikimedia Commons)

You couldn’t keep the smile off my face if you tried.

This post is in response to this week’s WordPress photo challenge, ‘Smile’.  It’s a total cop out on my part.  I don’t think my photo of a book jacket is exactly rising to the occasion, do you?

Click on any image to view full size.

Running the marathon miles in memory of her beloved husband

Today, on International Women’s Day, Worldwide Cancer Research has shared my daughter’s story on its blog.  Many of you have read many chapters of this story, but maybe you didn’t know about the London Marathon training……

In 2016 Elinor Hamilton’s life changed in a way she never would have imagined. Phil – her loving husband and father to their two young sons – passed away. Press the link to keep reading.

Source: Running the marathon miles in memory of her beloved husband

Snapshot Saturday: a sunny face in the crowd of snowdrops

In the woods beyond our house it’s impossible to walk without risking crushing snowdrops beneath our feet.  They’re everywhere.  They thrust through the ivy, the mosses and last autumn’s fallen leaves, promising longer days and new life.

But they don’t prevent quite everything from getting a look in.  Just occasionally, a few aconites muscle in, their sunny faces a contrast with that crowd of snowy-white blooms.

A response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: A Face in the Crowd. I haven’t really stuck to the brief:

‘Create an image that represents being “a face in the crowd.” Explore silhouettes, shadows, orientation, and other ways to mask your subject. As you hide the defining characteristics of your model, notice which traits continue to stand out.’  I haven’t learnt not to be shy about including solitary strangers as I point my lens.

Click on any image to view it full size.

Life without TV

My Spanish teacher Javi wanted to know what life was like without TV.  It wasn’t a burning question for him. All he really wanted me to do was practice using pretérito imperfecto and pretérito indefinido, which definitely made the conversation more difficult.

All the same.  He was quite interested.  He discovered that I had first seen the television only a few hundred metres from his little flat in Sandhutton, because that is where I too used to live.  My mother was the village schoolmistress, and we, together with about a dozen other chosen ones, had been invited to watch the Queen’s coronation on the one television in the village, newly bought for the occasion by a more prosperous farmer. (Note to self: remember Elizabeth’s called Isabella in Spanish.)

A 1950s TV set. Don’t be fooled by its solid appearance. It’s really quite tiny. (Steve McVoy Wikimedia Commons)

We all crowded into his sitting room, and peered at the screen, very likely a 9” screen, as fuzzy images of the Queen in her carriage, the Queen in Westminster Abbey paraded before our eyes.

This was the kind of image we saw. Black and white and fuzzy and small, it was still thrilling to see these moving pictures, even for a five year old. (Wikimedia Commons)

And that was that for me and television in my childhood, as my parents were fiercely opposed to having one of those contraptions in the house, especially when there was so much entertainment to be had from the radio – I mean wireless : so long as you remembered to turn it on some two minutes before your programme was due to start, so it could warm up.

Our radio was something like this. It had heavy batteries that had to be taken every now and then to be charged at the shop down the road. Tuning it was quite an art too. Hilversum, anybody?

There was the Home Service (pretty much Radio 4 in dinner jackets), the Light Programme (Radio 2), and the Third Programme (Radio 3).  And that was it.  Except for me, and teenagers everywhere, Sunday evenings on Radio Luxembourg with its  diet of pop music was required listening, under cover of pretending to be in my bedroom doing my homework.

At friends’ houses when I was little, I occasionally saw shows like ‘Andy Pandy’, or the distinctly odd ‘Muffin the Mule’ in which a wooden puppet clopped about on the top of a grand piano at the behest of his mistress Annette Mills.

Muffin the Mule (Wikimedia Commons)

Later, as a teenager, I’d escape on Saturdays and watch the hugely popular satirical show ‘That Was The Week That Was’.  My parents watched it too when they got the chance.  But they still didn’t buy a television, and I could have no part in the constant school chatter about what had happened in last night’s ‘Emergency – Ward 10‘.  The advent of colour television in the early 1960s passed me by.

David Frost, presenter of ‘That Was The Week That Was’ on the cover of the Radio Times, This magazine was obligatory reading for the dedicated radio listener or television viewer in the days before the schedules were published in the paper and online. (Wikimedia Commons)

What you don’t have, you don’t miss, and television didn’t form part of my life till the 1970s.  It’s not hugely important now.

As to Javi.  I don’t know why he asked.  He hasn’t got a TV.  There’s always i-player and his laptop.

Forty years of bedtime stories

My son Tom, born in 1977, was part of an early generation of children to be brought up on top-notch picture books. Puffin Picture Books, at £1.25 each, were an affordable treat for all of us. We didn’t tire of reading him ‘The elephant and the bad baby’, or ‘Not now, Bernard’, or anything illustrated by Quentin Blake or Allan Ahlberg.

The books we all loved were passed on to Elinor, then ten years later, to Emily.

Then they were carefully packed away for years. Elinor (aka Fanny the Champion of the World) married and had twins. Out came the boxes of books for Alex and Ben to enjoy.

Then these books, some almost as old as Tom himself, came full circle. His son William is enjoying them as much as his dad ever did.

Last night, this is what William picked to have read to him. Though there’s no need really. He knows everything off by heart.

Fanny for Grabs.

Many of you ask me how my daughter’s getting on. Well, her treatment is over, and her hair is growing apace. She’s decided to prove how well she’s doing by training to do the London Marathon next year, to raise money for Worldwide Cancer Research, and help fund further research into oesophageal cancer.

And in other news, here’s her latest blog post.

Fanny the Champion of the World's avatarFanny the Champion of the World

A few weeks ago, I did a deal with my son. My angry, grieving, difficult son. It wasn’t a deal I wanted to do, and – in many ways – it felt like a pact with the devil. I told him that if he would engage with a course of counselling, then I’d do what he’d been asking for, and start to look for a new partner.

I knew that it would take several weeks to sort out my son’s head, and, through counselling, he’d probably realise that his problems were not going to be easily solved by my acquiring a substitute for his dad. I wasn’t ready for a relationship, and was otherwise muddling along as a double – not single – parent, but at my wits’ end.

Both boys have been desperate to see me happy again – and that, they believe, means for me to be married…

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