Not So Smart

Two things: energy meters and me. 

A succession of energy suppliers has been pestering us for years to have a smart meter. We’ve held out this long because we don’t see the point. It’s for their benefit, not ours. The energy suppliers are paid to fit them, and meters don’t save you any money if you don’t use energy unnecessarily. 

But we don’t think it will be all that long until they become compulsory, and as EDF were offering us a fixed rate tariff that cut £150 off the annual bill provided we had a smart meter, it seemed the right time to do it. We checked their calculations and signed up two months ago, made an appointment for the meter installation, and got the lower rate immediately. 

The installer couldn’t do it. First of all, there is not enough space on the electricity supply base board. Secondly, because the gas meter is in the garage at the other side of a double brick wall four yards from the electricity meter in the house, the signal strength would probably be too weak for the two to communicate. He took some photographs and said that EDF would be in touch about what happens next. 

They weren’t. All we had was emails saying we must have a smart meter to remain on the fixed tariff. So I phoned them. It seems we continue to wait. Apparently, they cannot alter the tariff while the matter remains open. 

I estimate it needs at least £500 of work to resolve the problem with the electricity base board. I hope they don’t say it is our responsibility. And that would not solve the issue with the gas meter anyway, so we would still have to submit manual readings. 

Smart meter roll out in the U.K. is a farce. It was all supposed to be finished five years ago. The mistake was to give the energy suppliers their way to fit them piecemeal, rather than have the national power grid install whole areas at a time. Private industry knows best, of course! We all pay for the inefficiency through increased bills, while the energy suppliers rake in the payments to give to shareholders. 

I am not so smart either. First of all I had another fit and a night in hospital. It was two days after flu and covid jabs, and I also got the fine balance of hydration, nutrition, temperature, and tiredness wrong that day, but whether they had anything to do with it, I don’t know. 

I am also struggling more generally. In addition to the reading difficulties written about previously, the pills I take to poison the tumours also poison me. One side-effect is to deplete blood albumin. It should measure 35-50 g/L. Mine is 21. 

Albumin transports all kinds of things around the body, so the consequences are challenging and many. When you have a serious condition you learn more about human biology than ever they managed to teach you at school. 

Reading with text-to-speech is slow, and I feel very tired much of the time. Posting and commenting take a lot of time and effort. I no longer comment as much as I would like, but I read more than I comment. I enjoy your posts, and continue to do what I can.

This is not to seek sympathy, but just to say how things are. I am more interested in your thoughts about smart meters. 

Farmwashing

I have a pre-school memory of going into town with Mum to do the shopping. She stacked it on and around me in the pushchair. 

In those days you had to shop for fresh food two or three times a week. No fridges for us until the 1960s. Meat kept only for so long in a mesh-fronted meat safe. Milk was delivered daily to the door. You had to buy from different shops: the grocer, the butcher, the greengrocer, and others. Nearly all produce was locally grown and in season. Life was simpler and less frantic. Most mothers did not work, and one ordinary wage could support a family. 

Now, of course, you can buy anything you want at any time of the year: fresh peas and new potatoes in Winter, strawberries at Christmas, and oranges at other times. You never saw blueberries at all. It is flown in cheaply from all over the world. 

Perhaps we expect too much. The toll on the environment is enormous, therefore many prefer to spend a little more and buy locally-grown, ethically-produced meat, fruit, and vegetables. To meet this need, supermarkets offer special brands with idyllic-sounding farm names on the front of the packet. It implies that the product is from those farms. 

This is deliberately misleading. Behind the image of quaint British family farms usually lies a reality of industrial-scale production, with much imported from abroad. Three of the biggest producers have a combined annual turnover of £4.8 billion. The ‘farm’ on the label, such as Tesco’s Redmere Farms, does not exist. It is just a marketing device. At the same time, the real farms this imitates are being driven out of business as their own products are devalued. Large numbers of small farmers fear having to give up their farms, and few believe that supermarket claims to support British farming reflect their actual behaviour.

This is in effect theft, stealing the goodwill of the small farmers. Such cynical manipulation of customers and consumers by big businesses of all kinds (we can probably think of others), with the pursuit of profit above all sense of morality, needs to stop. I can get very angry about it.  

We buy some of our own vegetables from Riverford who have created a website and four short videos with more about Farmwashing. You will never look at a supermarket vegetable aisle in the same way again. 

The website and videos are at www.stopfarmwashing.co.uk and also on YouTube:  

Knitted

I am constantly amazed by what some bloggers make in wool and fabrics. They have spent a lifetime on crafts I would not know how to begin. But it does not stop me from writing a post about knitting. 

The village of Upper Denby not far from where we live has a knitting and crafts group that has been busy creating a display on the village green for Remembrance Day, this weekend. Here are some of the things they have made. All are either knitted or crocheted. 

Meanwhile, Mrs D is busy knitting little Santas and Snowmen to sell and provide raffle prizes for the school Christmas Fair. 

I sometimes think there are satisfactions in life us blokes miss out on. Surely I could knit a rat. 

Solar System

But the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down
And the eyes in his head see the world spinning round

I have been watching Brian Cox's series Solar System in absolute astonishment for the past five weeks. Our solar system is bigger and far more complex than we could have imagined only just a few years ago. 

I write this from memory, so may have some things wrong. Whatever I write cannot possibly do the series justice. 

Most of us grew up with nine planets, more recently reduced to eight, but the latest telescopes and space exploration reveal infinitely more objects within the sun's gravitational field than this. Many are very small, while others are quite large. 

And while we may have thought there was little beyond the dwarf planet Pluto, there seem to be millions of icy objects in the same region, known as the Kuiper belt. The largest known so far, discovered only in recent years in the darkness, has been nicknamed FarFarOut. All these objects, like the planets, orbit the sun in the same plane, but even further out lies an enormous sphere of rocks and particles a light year across. It contains mobile objects that travel across the heavens and approach the earth from all directions. They are the comets. 

It is not just the number of objects that is astonishing. It is the variety. They can be made of rock, gas, water ice, nitrogen ice, or something else. Ice can form mountains and canyons ten times the size of those on Earth. Other objects have internal heat sources that create violent monsoons, dust storms, or volcanoes that shoot out into space. 

How these phenomena have formed can often be deduced from space probe photographs and other data. They are subject to similar physical and geological processes whatever they may be made of. Underlying it all are just a small number of forces, mainly gravity. But the gravity of different objects can interact in numerous ways. Some are heated by gravitational friction, alternately squeezed and released by the gravity of a larger planet. 

There are some very strange objects indeed. Once above a few kilometres in size, objects will be shaped by gravity into a sphere, but one body has been seen to defy this law. This is thought to be because it rotates at eight times the speed of the earth, which flattens it into an elliptical shape through centrifugal force. 

The strange rings of Saturn are also down to gravity. They consist of particles of various sizes, possibly from a decaying moon. They orbit at different rates, and the larger objects are gradually speeding and slowing the others with the eventual outcome that all the particles will fall down to the surface of the planet. They have not been there forever, and will in time disappear. It is only coincidence that we are here at the same infinitesimal moment in time, able to see them. 

Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter, has a salt lake of water beneath the rocky surface, more than all the water on Earth. This was deduced from the magnetic aurora of the moon, which does not behave as it otherwise should. It has all the conditions we think necessary to support life. What form aqueous life buried deep inside a moon or planet might take, we cannot begin to guess.

But the strangest planet of all is the Earth. It is the only one with liquid water on the surface, maintained by a combination of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. If different, the water would boil away into space, or freeze solid.

What I like about Brian Cox is that he explains these processes, and how they have been worked out, in lay terms, without exaggeration or the loud, overenthusiastic excitement that spoils so many documentaries these days. Give him the concentration he deserves, and you are rewarded. What he is telling us speaks for itself. It is outrageous. And he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe it either. 

Then I thought about looking into the night sky and the millions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, probably most with solar systems of their own as complex as ours. And the billions of stars and planets in all the other galaxies there are. And the time scales involved: thousands of billions of earth years. 

Unimaginable. Beyond belief. Beyond understanding. 

Late Fruit

From the garden today. Unusual this late in the year.

John Merrill, Alport Castles and the Horbury Cut

In the days when every town had a bookshop, with several in larger towns and cities, you would find shelves full of walking guides written and published by a chap called John Merrill. He produced over 500 titles, initially about Derbyshire and Yorkshire, but later about other parts of the country too, such as The Lake District, The Isle of Wight, and Devon. He also became known as a long-distance walker, and walked the 6,824 miles around the coast of Britain, the 4,260 miles across America, and marathon walks in other parts of the U.K., Europe, and the world. He just wanted to go walking, and found a way to do it full-time. 

One of his first books, possibly the first, was about the Peak District around Kinder Scout and Bleaklow. My friend Neville bought it, and one interesting-looking route was around Alport Castles off the A57 Snake Pass road. Alport Castles is the biggest landslip in the United Kingdom, so called because from the valley below its gritstone mounds look like castles. The largest is known as The Tower. 

The Tower, Alport Castles, with Alport Castles Farm in the valley below
Geograph, (c) Neil Theasby 3 February 2012

Alport Castles route (click to enlarge)

I think Neville and I first went in 1974. Merrill suggested parking at the side of the Snake Road where a style in the hedge accesses the lane to Alport Castles Farm. After passing around the farm, the route ascends behind The Tower and up on to Alport Moor. It then crosses the moor via the Alport trig point to the head of the valley, and makes a large high-level anti-clockwise semi-circle across Bleaklow to return to the starting point. We found it pretty tough, and on later occasions returned directly down the valley from the point marked on the map as Grains In The Water. Sometimes we went up the valley first, and on two occasions I remember climbing up from Howden Reservoir. It became a favourite walk which I did with Neville or others, or alone, in all kinds of weather, from warm summer days when you could sit quietly on the peat moor and bask in the sunshine, to cold wet days when there was so much water up there it was almost impossible to find a way across. This, as you may know, is Yorkshire Pudding territory and he has written about it several times. 

Neville and Dudule descending the Alport Valley
with Alport Castles on the hillside above, August 1975

Neville plods up through snow towards The Tower, February 1977

and eventually reaches the moor top, February 1977

The top of the Alport Valley near Grains in the Water, August 1975

Not all of John Merrill’s routes were in such wild and bleak places. When I moved back to Yorkshire with Mrs. D., over 30 years ago now, we bought his “Short Circular” guides to walks in south west Yorkshire. Soon, we had done so many that Mrs. D. was able to send away for a John Merrill walking badge that until recently was stitched to her small rucksack. 

The River Calder near Horbury Bridge

I remember a September morning not so long ago when we did a quiet route east along the banks of the River Calder from Horbury Bridge to Calder Grove, fighting our way back through the rampant vegetation along the Horbury Cut of the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Barges were moored at the lock where the canal joins the river, and hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms grew under the trees. The route is also memorable for forbidding footpaths that tunnel under huge railway embankments, and one built into the railway bridge across the River Calder. Of course, Pudding has also been there too. Is it possible to go anywhere he hasn’t?

The footpath built into the railway bridge across the River Calder

The Horbury Cut on the Calder and Hebble Navigation

Hallucinogenic Fly Agaric Mushrooms grew under the trees

Back home, I wondered what had become of John Merrill and looked him up. There was a site for his books to which I sent a short email expressing how much we had enjoyed his guides through the years, and that although we had had the Horbury Bridge book for at least 20 years, we were still able to find our way. He had also found his way. In replying to thank us, he said he had been ordained as an independent multi-faith minister of religion in London. Clearly, all that walking brings you closer to God. Yorkshire Pudding had better watch out. 

Penistone

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th June, 2018.

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd
                                  (Tom Lehrer)

I came across a previously undiscovered great-great-great aunt in the family history resources, and have been tracing her descendants. This sounds obsessive, but I find it intriguing because most of my ancestors were from the same area, and so many of us remained there that I keep finding people I know who are not-so-distant relatives. For example, one lad with whom I went all the way through secondary school in the same class turned out to be a third cousin, as was another who stayed with a family near to where I was on the school foreign exchange trips to Belgium, although we had absolutely no idea of the connections. 

One family name I have been investigating is Penistone. You might find this, with its rude connotations, implausible or amusing, but it is very common in parts of Yorkshire. 

I do see the funny side of it myself. My brother had a friend called Penistone, whose wife was appalled when, newly married, she received her new driving licence to discover that in those days the driver number always began with the first five letters of the surname. And a group of us from school had to suppress our sniggers when travelling between Sheffield and Manchester by train on the now-closed Woodhead line in the presence of a teacher, and the train stopped in the small Yorkshire town of Penistone (near where we now live). Two girls were adamant the station sign had a gap between the S and the T. Then there were the tales of people in the early days of the internet, who were unable to enter their names or addresses on internet forms because filters were cruder than the words they were supposed to filter out; those named Penistone from Penistone or Scunthorpe particularly affected. Yes, I’m glad it’s not my name. 

My research, however, has been made unnecessarily difficult by inaccuracies in the data on Ancestry.com – the genealogical resource I use. Time and time again, Penistone has been transcribed at Penestone or Panistone or numerous other variations, with the effect that searching the indexes produces incomplete results. For example, if you look for all the Penistones in the village of Snaith in the 1891 and 1901 censuses, you will find Panistones and Pennistones, even Kenistons, but hardly a Penistone in sight.

There are so many spurious entries in the indexes – literally hundreds and possibly thousands – that it cannot be due to error. A handful, perhaps, but not hundreds. Most of the original sources from which the indexes are drawn are clear as the top line of an optician’s chart, so it is as if some transcribers have deliberately chosen not to write down the name Penistone, but written something else instead. It would also be difficult to mistake Penistone for Penestone when transcribing an index because they appear in alphabetical order, so Penistone would be after Penfold and not before. 

Some of these records came from another resource called FreeBMD where they appear correctly. Thousands of volunteers contributed to its transcription – I was one – which is why it is a free resource on Ancestry. But they have been altered. Has someone carried out a global substitution? Could it be prudery – bowdlerisation on a massive scale? Could it have anything to do with Ancestry’s Mormon origins? Without insider knowledge, one can only speculate about the history of these mistranscriptions. 

The first rule for any genealogical transcriber is that you record what is there, even if obviously wrong. If someone’s name appears in an original source as Taster Dunman, you record it as Taster Dunman, even if you know it should be Tasker Dunham. There is no excuse for recording Penistone as Penestone or Peinistone or Panistone. If it says Penistone you record it as Penistone, and if it says Stiffcock, you write it down as Stiffcock, no matter how offensive you think it is.  

Inflation

The minute Starmer gets in to power, prices go up. Just what you would expect. The Conservatives were getting inflation under control and it was coming down, but as soon as Labour gets in, it goes up again. And we have not seen the effects of the public pay rises yet. Did people realise what they were voting for? 

This is what I hear Conservative supporters saying. But is it really true that prices have risen since Labour was elected, and were going down until? 

On the face of it, yes. The monthly inflation figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that inflation rose to 2.2% in July 2024, up from 2% the month before, and remained at 2.2% in August. That was much lower than a year earlier when it was 6.8%. 

I do not find the percentage rate all that meaningful on its own. If a bag of oranges went up to £2.10 from £2 the previous month, most of us would say they had gone up by 10p, not that they had gone up by 5%. If that continued with 10p increases each month for a year, so that oranges were then £3.20, few would say they had gone up 60%, or that the annual rate of increase had slowed from 5% per month to only 3.1%. We would say “Bloody hell! They’re expensive compared to what they used to be”, and think twice before buying than. 

We need to know about prices as well as inflation to properly understand what is happening. Prices are measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). ONS calculates this each month by statistically combining the prices in a typical shopping basket. The percentage as usually reported is not the index. It is the change in the index over the previous year. The index itself is rarely reported. It is as if journalists think it would confuse us, or maybe they are confused about it themselves. 

The CPI was set at 100 in 2015. In August, 2024, it was 134.3. In August the previous year it was 131.3. The increase of 3.0 over the year is an increase of 2.2%, which is the inflation figure reported in the media. (Actually, it works out nearer 2.3 than 2.2, but let us not get paranoid). 

Finding the political point scoring irritating, I wanted to understand the figures better. This is my attempt to do so. 

I plotted prices against inflation over the past three years. What is most obvious is that they do not always move together. While prices over the last three years marched relentlessly upwards from 112.4 to 134.3, inflation increased and then decreased again, varying between 11.1% in October, 2022, and 2.0% in May and June, 2024. 

To see why, I imagined a scenario in which the price index remains unchanged at 100 for over a year, resulting in an inflation rate of 0%. The index then jumps suddenly to 130, causing an immediate rise in inflation to 30%. It then fluctuates between 100 and 130 in steps of 10 for the next 24 months. This is shown in the blue graph below. 

The red graph shows the effects upon annual inflation. 

As one might expect, for the 12 months after the first price rise, inflation and prices rise and fall together (A). This is because prices over the second 12 months are being compared with prices over the 12 months before, when they remained steady at 100. 

But the effects then become less intuitive. In week 25 (B), despite prices climbing back to their highest level, inflation falls to 0%. And in week 28 (C), as prices begin to go down again, inflation jumps back up. 

Another quirk is that inflation becomes negative in week 31 (D), and then falls further in week 34 (E), but this second fall is only marginal (from -8.3% to -9.1%) despite a fall of 10 in the index, and much less then the further fall in week 37 when the index is unchanged (F).

The scenario shows that prices can go up when inflation goes down, or down when inflation goes up, and when they do move in the same direction, one can change by a large amount while the other only changes a bit. Prices and inflation do not always change in the same direction, or to the same extent.

These effects occur because they compare current prices with those of 12 months earlier. There can be a time-lag between price changes and their effects. The percentage rate of inflation reflects what was happening a year ago as much as what is happening today. 

Are such month-by-month fluctuations found in the real ONS data? Indeed they are, but they are harder to see because the CPI goes up and down in small steps. You have to look more closely. This third pair of graphs shows the monthly changes in CPI and inflation in the ONS data. 

The largest CPI increase was in April, 2022, when it went up by 2.9. The smallest, actually a fall of 0.8, was in January, 2023. The large increase immediately showed in the inflation figure, which shot up by nearly 2%, but the fall had little impact. Most monthly changes are much smaller, but it is still fairly easy to find contrary movements, as in January and February, 2024, or movements of different sizes, as in October, 2023. 

Returning to the original questions, did inflation come down under the previous government, and will it go up under Labour? Yes and yes. But this begs the question as to whether this is caused by governments, or is it a simple statistical side-effects? 

Statistics plays its part. Inflation was bound to decrease as it fell from the previous highs, and if the CPI continues to increase at its current rate, inflation will climb to over 3% by the end of the year as the earlier falls drop out of the numbers. One reason for the July increase in inflation was that prices did not fall as much as they had twelve months earlier. 

Prices are also influenced by other events and phenomena beyond government control. The peak in inflation in October, 2022, was largely caused by international events. The new public sector pay awards will be inflationary, as would have been the costs to not awarding them. 

Political point scoring will no doubt continue on both sides, but it might be helpful to report monthly inflation changes as well as the annual retrospective. 

I think I understand it slightly better, now.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Being quite tall, our kitchen work surfaces are a little on the low side for comfort. We would have preferred them to be higher, but they are against the long side of the kitchen which is nearly all window, so they couldn’t be. Recently, Mrs. D. has been experiencing twinges in her back, aggravated by chopping vegetables and other jobs. “Is there something we could put on the surface to raise them up a bit?” I asked. A bit later we found this raised chopping board from Ikea (their image).  

Her back is now much better. 

There you go! If you require advice about such issues, you should ask the husband of an occupational therapist. 

Ten Years

I started this blog on 11th August, 2014, which means it has been going ten years as of today. The idea was to write a kind of autobiography covering how life has changed in England since I was little. 

The changes are many. After the war we still had ration books, bombed buildings, gas lights in the street, and Prefab houses. Later, in Leeds in the 1970s, my job took me to banks, building societies, manufacturers, merchants, shops, publishing and entertainment concerns, and businesses of all kinds that packed the city and further afield. Nearly all have gone. You could take evening classes in almost anything, and there were four or five cinemas in the city centre. The Leeds trams were no more, but sometimes I had to use the trolley buses in Bradford. 

I then went late to university, which led to a new career near the edge of the computer revolution, and saw change as it took place. I suppose I played a small part in it. I also came late to having a family, which has been great fun. I wanted to write it all down. 

There were few readers at first, but when I began to comment more on other blogs a few years ago, and chanced upon this friendly community, things began to pick up a bit. 

At times during the last two-and-a-half years I thought I would not see this day. I was as good as told it, but I am still here. The next milestones are more fruits of the garden, my birthday, and then Christmas. And then we will be into 2025 and hopefully it all comes round again. Or will it? That sounds gloomy, I know, but it is what it is, and that is all there is to it. 

It does not get easier, as my comment and response rates are beginning to show. The list of what I can no longer do, am not allowed to do, or would be stupid to try, is depressingly long. My reading difficulties make blogging slow and difficult, and I have thought of giving up, but it is one of the things that keeps me going, and I still have posts to write. I enjoy the exchange of humour, ideas, and opinions, reading what others have posted, and writing creatively. I am amazed others read it. Thank you so much, everyone. 

The White Stool

I keep this stool in the greenhouse. It is a bit too narrow to be stable when you stand on it, so I use it mainly to sit on. The greenhouse is a lovely bright warm place to sit on your own for an hour or two, not talk to anybody, and do absolutely nothing. 

The stool is very old, at least a hundred years I would guess, possibly more. It came from my mother’s parents and might have been made by her father or an earlier relative. The legs are fixed by nice tight mortice and tenon joints. Rough and ready, but not many could knock up something like that now. 

I painted it white as a child in 1964 or 1965 when I developed a craze for painting things. Well, it’s better than gawping at a screen all day as they do now. Weren’t we lucky to be able to play with tools and messy and dirty things in untidy sheds, rather than having to live in the empty, pristine houses and gardens that seem to be fashionable now. 

We used to use it as a cricket wicket. Here it is with my eight-year-old brother in 1964 in front of the coal house. He has his eyes tight shut. I said his bowling was so rubbish I could hit it with my eyes closed, and proved it. He said that mine was no better, and had to prove it too.

Bathtime Fun

Update: Here are some stills from a different angle the following day:

Accident

This salutary video has emerged of a fatal crash near where we live on 6th July. Only one car was involved. 

I realise there is an element of judgemental voyeurism in posting this. It must have been devastating for the driver's family and those who knew him. However, the video has been re-posted many times on various platforms, and watched with appalled horror by many who live here or know this junction. 

It is the most dangerous junction I know: a staggered crossroads across a major road with a petrol station on one corner and a pub opposite. The major road is a steep hill. The junction is complicated by vehicles entering and leaving the petrol station which has entrances on two corners. There is a high volume of traffic in all directions. The major road has a 30 m.p.h. speed limit which vehicles often disregard, especially descending the steep hill. Many local drivers make a long detour to avoid having to make a right turn here. 

A 20-year-old lad in a black BMW with heavily tinted windows, may have tried to cross the staggered crossroads at high speed. Either that or he did not notice the junction. He failed to make it, hit the pub wall opposite, and flipped his car over. Cars in the pub car park were also damaged. Fortunately, no one but the driver was injured. 

In the security camera video, the car shoots out from the side road on the right beside the petrol station. The accident is then seen from a second angle. Arguably, all new young drivers should be made to watch it. 

The driver died in hospital. A day or two later, residents of the nearby area, including children who had to go to school the next day, were woken by loud, prolonged, late-night fireworks organised by the driver's family and friends. The owners of a local field in which animals are kept said they had had to clear up rubbish left behind. Complaints about noise by parents on the local Facebook group were met with comments such as "at least you can still hug your child". 

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

Cheery Little Pansy

I love a cheery little pansy.

These four are called Ed, Nigel, Keir, and Rishi. All have their points, but which is best? 

Perhaps Deutzia or Philadelphus would be a better choice.

Diverticular Disease

I don’t like writing about health problems, but if it could help or inform someone else it is probably worth it. 

A difficult week: exhaustion and weakness, stomach and abdominal pains, bowel problems, sickness, too tired to do anything, even television and Blogger. Dark thoughts. Five days and you are sure the you-know-what is back. Is this how it ends? 

Then a flash of insight. It is probably a diverticular flare-up. Everything fits. This is not just diagnosis by Dr. Google.

Until about 15 years ago I had regular colonoscopies because of my brother’s early death. The last two times I was given a standard feedback form with the box ticked for diverticular disease. No other information or advice. We wondered briefly what it meant and then completely forgot about it. 

Mild symptoms have occurred infrequently through the years, but we never made the connection and assumed it was just me. This time it was worrying because of the severity. And I had a similar episode only a month ago. 

I said it felt like how people describe irritable bowel syndrome. A bit later, Mrs. D. asked what was that box ticked on the last colonoscopy form? 

Apparently, almost all of us have signs of diverticular disease after the age of fifty, but usually without problems. 

If you don’t eat you get weaker and weaker. You have to work out what sets it off, and avoid it. You have to eat small amounts until it starts to improve. Energy drinks help: there are some excellent ones made at Tadcaster in Yorkshire, and Keighley. Landlord Dark is good. One plus is that almost everything they tell you about eating lots of salads and vegetables and fibre is wrong. 

I hope I am right. You often have to work these things out for yourself. 

It is something to consider if you have these symptoms from time to time. And, if you find this diagram revolting, on no account look for any photographs. 

Diverticular Disease

The Deaf Duster

My wife was looking for a clean duster. I surprised her by producing a brand new one, forty years old. A BBC archive clip of programs I wrote for deaf children reminded me of it recently (the one-minute clip is here). Someone gave me the duster at that time.  

We decided the duster was much too nice to use as a duster, so it went back in the drawer. 

I never did manage to learn the sign alphabet. I can spell out my name, but little else. 

Memories churned around in my head, as often happens these days, and in the middle of the night, out of nowhere, there emerged a song.

To the tune of the old British music hall song Let's All Go Down The Strand: 

           Let's all go through the codes (Have a banana)
           Let's all go through the codes (Gertie Gitana)
           A B C D    /    E F G
           H I J K    /    L M N O P
           Q R S      /    T
           U V W X Y    /    Zee
           A B C D    /    E F G
           Let's all go through the codes.

What a great way to learn it: 

He's as daft as a brush. 

Right, who wants a part in The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights, or Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp? 

Marie Tidball

I find it astonishing how some overcome illnesses, difficulties, and barriers that to me would seem overwhelming. 

I think of a student on the university course I took. He had brittle bone disease, and at one time or another had broken just about every bone in his body. Despite the small stature and deformities that often go with the condition, he lived independently in the university halls of residence. He travelled in each day in his three-wheeled Invacar, and moved from class to class in a wheelchair, with books and notes hanging in a plastic carrier bag from the rear handles. We took turns to push. He always had a cheery smile. 

Later, there was Mahir who had muscular dystrophy. He had arrived in England in his early teens as a Bosnian refugee, speaking no English. By then, he had lost the ability to walk, which in Bosnia had excluded him from school. Once here, he did well enough to go to university, and enrolled on the course I ran. He struggled to control his limbs, used an electric wheelchair, and was accompanied everywhere, even to the toilet, by Brian, a full-time paid assistant. What incredible dedication that must have required. 

When you had a bit of a cold or headache, and looked out at the weather in the morning and it seemed tempting to crawl back to bed, the thought that Julian or Mahir would be there shamed you into getting up and going in. 

I came across Brian a few years later, looking after another special needs student. He said he’d heard that Mahir had died, still in his twenties. Julian did not have a long life, either, but lived into his forties. 

Recently, we came across another inspirational figure, Marie Tidball. She was born with multiple physical difficulties, including no hands. It was unclear whether she would live. She did, but missed years of school through medical treatments, such as surgery to enable her to walk. She has just one finger. From school in Penistone, Yorkshire, she won a place at the University of Oxford where she got a degree in Law and a Doctorate in Criminology, and has since worked as a legal researcher, disability rights campaigner, and local councillor. She has now been selected as a Parliamentary candidate for her home constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge at the next General Election. Our ceilidh band played at the launch of her fundraising campaign.  

Going by last week’s local election results, she is almost certain to be elected, and will quickly make an impression as a Member of Parliament, not because of her difficulties but because she is every bit the fiery, determined woman her story suggests. You heard of her here first. 

“I learned there was no such word as ‘can’t’ and that you have to go out in the world and develop your own skills to use them for others.”   

So, let’s have no more whingeing and procrastinating. Just get on with it.  

https://www.marietidball.com/

Sunday Silliness

Silly Songs With Simple Chords
C and G7 

         Cows in the kitchen, moo moo moo,
         Pigs in the pantry, grunt oink ooh,
         Lambs on the landing, baa baa boo,
         Skip to my Lou my darling.

         There’s a horse in the hallway, neigh neigh neigh,
         A donkey in the doorway, bray bray bray, 
         Ducks and chicks in the chairs all day, 
         Skip to my Lou my darling. 

         Get all these animals out of this place,
         They make a lot of noise, they take a lot of space,
         There’s no room left for me or you,
         Can’t skip to the loo, you can’t get through.  

Blog Address

I have removed the custom address for A Yorkshire Memoir and reverted to the original taskerdunham.blogspot.com (instead of taskerdunham.com). If reading this, you are in the right place. 

This is to prevent the blog from becoming inaccessible when the subscription to the custom domain expires. It still has over a year to run, but I have made the change early because custom domains are often bought by others for illicit use. 

Thanks. 

Technical and Other Considerations (for anyone considering doing it themselves) 

Removing the custom address turned out to be easier than anticipated. I thought I would be wrestling with the technicalities of canonical names (cnames) and the like, but that was not the case. 

All I had to do was:

1) Delete the custom domain name in the blog settings. The blogspot.com version of the address worked straight away. The taskerdunham.com address began to be shown as unknown. 

2) I created a completely new blog called "A Yorkshire Memoir (Old Address)" saying what I was doing, and also a note in the title that the address had changed. 

3) Then, on the Old Address blog, I simply added www.taskerdunham.com as the custom domain. Surprisingly, that URL immediately began to redirect to the "Old Address" site. It did not require any change to the cnames on the domain provider's site. It did, however, take a few minutes before the https version of the address became active after I switched it on.

The outcome is that access to taskerdunham.blogspot.com now links straight to the active blog, and access to taskerdunham.com links to the "Old Address" site. I will leave it like that for now as a reminder to those who use that route to change their links.

Please let me know of any problems. 

Internal links within the blog - The blog archive, list of popular posts, etc. changed automatically. Links in blog posts that reference other posts still work correctly so long as they point to a taskerdunham.blogspot.com address, but if they point to taskerdunham.com a message appears saying either that the post does not exist or that the site cannot be accessed at all. It depends on how http/https and www are specified in the link. Fortunately, I have always used the blogspot version within the blog, so don't have to change them. 

External links -  Where others' blog posts or websites have included a link to one of my blog posts, these links now point to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. The same happens with sidebar links on other Blogger blogs until they are updated. 

Google, Bing, and other search indexes - Initially, the results from searches remained unchanged, i.e. they referenced the custom address. Clicking these links led to the "Old Page" site, i.e. taskerdunham.com, with a page not found message. I assume the search indexes will automatically update in due course, but it may take several months. 

I was soon receiving emails from Google to say that pages addressed as the custom domain could not be indexed, and they disappeared from Google search, but the .blogspot.com versions did not appear either. I have tried forcing the issue through the Google Search Console which appears under Crawlers and Indexing in the blog settings, but do not really understand what I am doing. 

UPDATE October 2024: Google search has not caught up yet. Some of the previously most visited posts no longer appear. Bing and DuckDuckGo seem better. The hit rate has gone down to at best a third of what it was.