According to a piece in the paper yesterday, nearly one third of parents feel it is "too dangerous" to let their children play in the snow in case they slip or are hit by a snowball. One in five parents actually ban their children from building snowmen or taking part in snowball fights "in case they catch a cold" and keep them wrapped up warm indoors.
Makes me wonder how we ever managed to win a war ...
-o-
In a similar vein, just to put their ridiculousness into some sort of context, fifty years ago this country suffered the 'Big Freeze' one of the coldest winters on record. It started on Boxing Day 1962 with a blizzard that was whipped up by bitingly cold East winds a couple of days later leaving drifts up to twenty foot high in many places and even the centres of big cities had up to six inches of snow. This was followed in the January by temperatures well below freezing - I believe as low as almost -20c in some places. The upper reaches of the Thames here in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire froze solid, and even as far down as Windsor people were able to skate on it. In some places even the sea froze for almost a mile off shore. Without the benefit of modern 4x4 vehicles etc., farmers struggled to feed, or even rescue, livestock and many, many thousands died of exposure and/or starvation. Added to the problems underfoot, all the lying snow gave rise to almost daily fog.
A thaw came towards the end of January but, within a couple of days, the snow was back again with a huge blizzard that lasted for almost two days, again leaving drifts of up to twenty foot. This time, the winds remained, so it was a constant battle against swirling snow in sub-zero temperatures. And all this during a time when few houses had decent central heating (if they had any at all, and most didn't!), road gritting wasn't commonplace, communications links were reliant on overhead telephone wires - many of which were brought down - and besides, many households didn't even have a telephone, electricity lines were also mostly overhead and, again, many were brought down leaving entire communities without power and lighting for considerable periods of time. And people coped. They also coped with the huge floods that followed in early March when the temperatures did a quick reversal and soared to the mid-teens!
From the top: Wales, Kent, the Thames at Windsor, and Somerset. Now THAT is bad winter. And an entire generation of children came through it largely unscathed. FFS.
Amelia, Chicken Nugget has done it!
This morning she also produced her first egg. Much rejoicing was there in the nest box (well, just outside it, on the floor of the roosting chamber actually, but then she's a bit slower to catch on than her sister).
Turned out they were talking about a new eye cream and not, as I initially thought, using some hideous euphemism ...
Have I mentioned that I keep chickens? I keep chickens. Bantams, Partridge Pekin Bantams to be precise.
This is them when they arrived at eight weeks old last August. Scrawny little devils.
This is them grown a bit.
From left to right we have Olga, Chicken Kiev; Amelia, Chicken Nugget; and Artichoke, Chicken Dinner. Dinner is a Frizzle, which means the majority of his feathers curl backwards towards his head rather than lie flat as the girls' do. He's a really rather fine chap, with a fabulous ginger ruff and green/black wing tips.
Anyway, they're even more grown up now than they were when the picture above was taken and we reached a milestone on Thursday when Olga produced her very first egg!!
It was delicious!
She's produced a second one today equally as tasty. And Amelia, Chicken Nugget is showing signs of being ready to lay now too!
I've posted this on my FaceBook page, but feel it deserves an airing here, too.
Saw the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at The Tate yesterday afternoon. Fabulous. Although I've seen a lot of the items on display many times in the past, they remain breathtakingly beautiful: the talent and the work is just exquisite. An added bonus was having the chance to see some items I'd never seen, including a range of sketches by Lizzie Siddal and quite a number of paintings by Millais I've not seen outside of books before - or at all - many of which were quite breath-takingly lovely. Surprisingly (for me) the one that seems to have stuck in my memory the most was a landscape of his: Chill October. I suppose, really, I'm a greater fan of the Aesthetic Movement than I am of the works of the Brotherhood themselves. Much of what has been seen as being Millais more commercial work - Bubbles, The Childhood of Raleigh - leaves me cold. I know he was acclaimed for his paintings of children but I find them too cloyingly sweet, too 'of their era' for my tastes. However, there were a great number of his works in this exhibition, some that quite definitely prefigure The Aesthetic Movement. And there are still a great many of his works I've yet to see. I'd love to see his 'Twins', two young women (twins) but I think it's probably in a private collection (lucky owner!). Still, several of the greatest Pre Raphaelite works are owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and he's very generous in lending them to exhibitions so maybe there's hope yet.
But back to this exhibition at Tate Britain: I liked the fact that it wasn't limited to simply paintings and drawings, but included photographs, sculpture, furniture, textiles, pottery, tiles and stained glass (Burne-Jones of course!). Did the exhibition achieve its stated aim to show that the Brotherhood was a wildly avant garde movement that influenced art at home and abroad more profoundly than most people have hitherto realised? I'm probably not the best judge, given that I've recognised for a long time, albeit unconsciously, how very different they were, in terms of British art, from that which had gone before. I hope the exhibition managed to show that to at least some people. It certainly made the case for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood having influenced many of the 20th century's greatest artists and taught me something I hadn't appreciated: that Picasso owed a debt to the PRB!
Had a lovely weekend in London and Essex with my old pal, Pansy Smilso, and The Gorgeous God Daughter. We went to the Valentino exhibition at Somerset House. They were in raptures. I confess to being wholly underwhelmed. Sure, I appreciate the quality of the garments; the skills and the work involved in producing a couture garment (although the lighting was as subdued as a bunch of five year olds who've just been told the class hamster is unlikely to make it through the weekend, so it was pretty hard to see the detail of any of the garments sufficiently well to actually appreciate much). It was just, I think, that no matter how much money I had, and assuming I could put aside my revulsion at spending god alone knows how many thousands on a single garment, Valentino is just not my style. To my mind, it's the Per Una of haute couture: perfectly acceptable garments utterly trashed by the addition of unnecessarily fussy details. So that was that.
We ended the afternoon at Brasserie Zedel with a pot of tea (both of us) and a rather fabulous Mille Feuille Vanille (me). In all truth, that was just to kill time until The American Bar in the basement opened and we could hit the cocktails. Honestly, Pansy is such a lightweight these days: I downed four White Russians in the time it took her to wade her way through two Clover Clubs!!
Back in Essex, Trev Bang Tidy (Pansy's husband) was commissioned as taxi to collect us from the station and, as luck would have it, picked up a chinese takeaway on the way home. So I helped him out with the leftovers and tucked into a couple of spoonfuls of chow mein and half a bowl of chips, which Pansy helped me with (the chips) and followed that with a tidy slice of christmas cake. I think I might have been allergic to something in the chow mein ...
Anyhow, whilst quaffing cocktails and being our usual slightly off-the-wall selves (never let it be said we let a joke die: if it was funny then, it's still funny twenty or thirty years later. We are loyal to our shared humour for sure!) we did actually get around to some serious conversation. Turns out, according to Pansy, if you can get past the prickly exterior, I have enormous depth; I'm multi-layered like an onion; although the second layer is almost totally demented.
My eye was caught just now by an advert for a pair of stockings from John Lewis. They looked rather nice, so I clicked on the link ... and they're £43 a pair!
Yes, you read it correctly: £43 pounds. For a pair of bloody stockings!!!!!
I'm gobsmacked!
Overheard on the commentary from the races this afternoon that a Stable Lad has won £1 million on a 5 way accumulator. Good for him. Bet the bookies are feeling seriously sick. But it got me thinking how far that amount of money wouldn't go.
Obviously, how much one needs to maintain a comfortable/secure lifestyle depends on the age at which one acquires such wealth but the younger you are, the more you'll need.
Thinking about how far £1 million would go, if you did the sensible thing and invested the capital and simply lived off the interest, you really wouldn't be living the lifestyle that most of us imagine to be that of a millionaire. I've no idea how much interest that amount of money would generate, but I doubt it would be a substantial sum in the current economic climate, and I don't know that you'd be looking at an income of more than say £50,000 pa, if that. And that's quite a sobering thought, really.
Ok, so as incomes go it's about twice the national average in the UK, but it's not astronomical; it's not way, way beyond the imaginations (and earnings) of a substantial proportion of the population. And that's presuming, of course, that you didn't use any of the capital to say, buy a house - just a pretty average family home. £50k a year would, of course, give you a fairly comfortable life. It would allow you to offer a certain amount of financial help to family and friends, but only in a fairly modest way. Likewise, it would enable you to support more charities and good causes than you might otherwise do, but again nothing that would really make a big difference. The amount of money any one person would need to win on the Lottery, or whatever. is really quite substantial if they have dreams of making a big difference to more lives than just their own. And that saddens me tremendously. Because it's a very frail hope that an awful lot of people hold on to.
It also takes my breath away inasmuch as it brings home just how very wealthy the wealthy must be. And I'm not really talking about the affluent middle classes with big houses who can afford private schools for their children or fund them through Uni. I'm talking about the people who can afford to buy the £several million plus country homes advertised in the local paper here each week. Or the houses and apartments in London where they then dig down below basement level to install a swimming pool, underground garage and a cinema room - at the very least. I can't begin to imagine the levels of wealth they possess. And it's wrong. Certainly when 17% of all UK households of working age are in receipt of Working Tax Credit to supplement their income (and 30% of those are STILL classified as being low income with WTC) something is very wrong. Note: That's people IN WORK who receive benefit to 'top up' their earnings in order to be able to live, not simply people in receipt of benefit.
I'm sick of hearing about how the feckless and work shy are draining this country of its resources whilst those with a work ethic support the weight of the world on their shoulders. Yes, ok, so maybe the public school fee payers do work hard to earn their money. But the inference in that well-worn and oft trotted out statement is that everyone else who doesn't earn as much, by definition, doesn't work as hard. And that's utter bollocks. And it really, really pisses me off that they fail to see the inherent, underlying inequality. Or, rather, they ignore it or make fatuous statements to support their positions of privilege. (Yes, I'm having a rant!!)
And then we go to the other end of the scale where the (soon to be ex) wife of Silvio Berlusconi has been awarded around £29 million a year in their divorce. Not as a one off payment, but per year. It's an obscene amount of money. It's reported that the adjudicating judge ruled against her having any claim on his property portfolio so ... what the hell must that man be worth??? Of course there are those who would argue that she deserves every penny/euro for putting up with him for as long as she has. Well, maybe she does. But what ever possessed her, or the soon-to-be-new Mrs Berlusconi to marry such a repugnant, immoral little scroat in the first place? Oh yeah ...
Which leads me to the question ... just how vile, twisted, perverted, ruthless, morally bankrupt an individual does one have to be before your money ceases to attract people to you? An unanswerable question I'd guess.
