Fifth series, episode 11
All five series are available here on the HebWeb.
In this late July episode, George Murphy celebrates the Lionesses and a forgotten local star, explains how dragons mate, reviews classics he missed reading at school, shares names of famous people who championed murder and reveals why George’s Square is quieter these days.
Eurostars
When I didn’t watch the Lionesses first match at the Euros they lost. So, I thought I’d better get behind them. What dramas followed, falling behind, last minute goals, penalty shootouts.
Goal keeper Hannah Hampton, a funny, laid back, strabismus-afflicted media star, played with a tampon up her nose. You don’t get that in men’s matches.
Millie Agyemang, the powerful teenage, goalscoring, musically gifted, god thanking, match saving forward became part of a super sub duo with skinny Chloe Kelly.
Spain dominated most of the final. Lucy Bronze, playing the whole tournament with a broken leg, didn’t let anyone know, especially her girlfriend who was in the Spanish team. In the final she didn’t go off until she injured her other, unbroken, leg. Jess Carter, coming back after online racial abuse was a star in the defence.
PW, more of a tennis fan, looked up from her phone to remark, “England need to get it down that end.”
This advice must have been passed on by smartphone (technology hears our every word) to Serina Wiegman, the team manager, because in the second half England came out of their shell and attacked. Kelly centred for the admirable Alessia Russo to head home. 1-1.
There were two brilliant, unflappable goalkeepers in the penalty shootout. The losers would be the team whose players were most flappable. Spain flapped. Chloe Kelly did her mesmerising stick insect dance and blasted home the winning penalty.
My career as a stay at home women’s soccer fan was firmly established by watching the COPA 71 documentary in a packed house at the post COVID Picture House Film Festival. This was followed by Louise Wadley’s celebratory interviews with former England players, including Issy Pollard, a former Old Town schoolgirl who became an international. She didn’t go on to fame and fortune but played semi-professionally in England and Sweden and then coached in the States. These days, along with her business partner, she runs a raw dog food shop in Todmorden and a dog walking service in Hebden Bridge.
A dragon transitions
At Midgehole, on the edge of the woods, our pond was a magnet for wildlife. We miss seeing beautiful, iridescent, darting dragon and damsel flies swoop past us and their heart shaped couplings. So this July, I admired Andrew Smith’s brilliant close ups of a dragonfly above his allotment pond. Dragonflies spend most of their lives living in water, where they are ferocious hunters, feeding on tadpoles, snails, leeches and small fish. In To Paint a Water Lily, Ted Hughes writes of pond beds where creatures have not evolved, but live in ‘prehistoric bedragoned times’ where pond dragons have ‘jaws for heads.’
When it eventually emerges from its watery home, the dragonfly transitions from a larva to an adult. Andrew had to lie on the ground for two hours to capture that transition. Afterwards the dragon’s brilliant new body and wings must harden before they can begin hunting again.
Dragonfly photos with thanks to Andrew Smith
When mating, male dragonflies move sperm from near the base of the abdomen to the top. He then grasps a receptive female with his abdominal graspers and she tips the bottom of her abdomen to access the male’s genitalia. Sperm is transferred whilst in this ‘wheel position’. Apparently, this is a unique mating position, although gymnastic humans might well have made attempts to do so. If you try this outside, make sure you are not consummating on a slope.
Classics missed in classes
I’ve been enjoying reading classics I missed out on in my teens, including a novella by Tolstoy and Chekhov’s short stories. At the moment, I’m reading The Rainbow, although I’m skimming bits where the author flannels.
DH Lawrence ignores Ernest Hemingway laws
That say novels must show and not tell.
Henry James hardly pauses, writes too many clauses,
But I like DH and Henry as well.
(apart from the boring bits)
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Stephen Unwin, in Beautiful Lives: How we Got Learning Disabilities So Wrong, includes a list of famous politicians and cultural figures who thought children and adults with learning difficulties should be locked away, or worse. Viginia Woolf, in a diary entry noted passing a “long line of imbeciles who were residents of a local institution … It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.”
In reviewing the book, The Guardian’s John Harries lists some other advocates of murder, including Churchill, DH Lawrence, who had visions of herding people with disabilities into “a lethal chamber, as big as Crystal Palace,” Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, George Orwell and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, each believing in the non-science of eugenics. A few years later, the ultimate expression of this cruel notion was Nazism.
Silly Me
Our MP shared a recording on FaceBook: Josh questioning Wes Streeting in a select committee. Fair enough. It seems the government has told its backbenchers to reconnect with voters. About time too. But in response a woman wrote that Josh is despicable and is being paid by American backers to turn our NHS into an insurance based health service based on the American model!
Which isn’t true. He’s not doing that. I think we would have noticed. I suggested that she was mistaking Josh Fenton Gill for Nigel Farage. UKIP espoused an insurance model during the Brexit campaign. Farage repeated it in the run up to the last election. In response, she wrote, ‘Stop being silly’. Which I’ve heard before, from a local ‘Independent’ councillor. Whereas, being an uninformed slander-monger is being sensible, I suppose.
Swearing, buskers and noise abatement
Well, no sooner had I posted my item on swearing, which my Editor enjoyed, than said Ed sent me a Guardian news item about a ban on swearing in a Kent seaside town, prefaced with his terse comment: “Ffs!”
I read the article in George’s Square on the day when the busker with the loud speaker and cracked, affected intonation returned at full blast. I think buskers should perform at a volume low enough for people to sit outside and be able to chat to each other, or listen if they so choose. Once a shopkeeper, artist, hatmaker, poetry performer friend got so fed up of over emotive man’s racket that she went to the top of the steps at Innovation and bellowed, “Shut the fuck up!”
But recently our buskers are performing at a more acceptable noise level. Here’s why:
Nymphs – and buskers, come away!
Not many people have seen nymphs,
Except in museums on plinths,
But if they want to see um,
Outside a museum,
They should drive around here for a glimpse.Folks know about nymphs and their mania,
From Greece to Mesopotamia,
But nymphs Anglo Saxon,
Got just as much action,
That’s why our nymphs chose to remain here.I wouldn’t tell this to reporters,
But nymphs still inhabit out waters,
I know for a fact,
On a rolling contract,
Are Nixie the Nymph* and her daughters.It’s buskers they like to attract,
But each cull is done with great tact.
Our nymphs say, “Your so cool,”
To each amplified fool,
Then wrap t’ amp lead around t’ vocal tract.But you don’t need to witness this ‘crime’.
Our nymphs sneak through a snicket in time,
As you sip your latte -
At some riverside café –
They take out young men in their prime.
Some say it’s a monstrosity, that young men’s curiosity, at nymph’s voluptuosity, should lead to such atrocity. But I just shake my head and shrug, say, “If they cared about our lugs, and amplifiers they’d unplug, then would be Dylans and Jake Bugs might get more generosity.”
*Nixie: Anglo Saxon term for water nymph.
Ah yes, I remember it well
In the last episode, PW asked for a right of reply when I claimed to have taken turns to feed our daughter every other night. Well, I should point out, this was true. But not for our daughter. I took turns to feed Jude and later I was a stay at home dad for him. So, I was only 12 years out. I rest my case.
Get fit quick tip
Online, I shared my new take on the standing on one leg challenge:
“Whilst boiling the kettle for that well-earned cuppa, stand on one leg to improve your balance. Try this every day until you don’t fall over before the kettle boils.”
Readers wrote:
My old school mate Dave Jackson, now bald but impressively bearded, asked, “Would holding the kettle over your head increase your motivation to succeed?”
Mmm … my kettle only has a short lead. Nice try.
Jacqueline Davies Hughes confessed, “I haven’t been able to stand on one leg for long since I was in my 60s!”
I replied: “Try it with the other leg, Jacqueline.”
Marco Nizzardo (who gained an award for his lovely café this week) offered a tip to save energy. “Boil water and then bag it and put it in the freezer, so that next time you need it, tadaa it’s ready!”
Reply: Mmm. Yorkshire Water hasn’t cut me off from the mains water yet. And I prefer my tea hot rather than iced.
Jenny Nicholson: If you can get up and down the steps to your front door without holding onto the rails I reckon you deserve to prepare your cuppa on two feet.
Reply: Nice tip Jenny. I tried going up and down but kept ending up at the bottom of the steps again. I felt a bit fitter but a lot thirstier.
And finally …
I enjoyed the free Pride Abba party in the park in glorious sunshine. So did our granddaughter and her pals. Rosie saw me dawdling past with a wrapped up bottle shaped item under my arm, came over and asked, in her newly husky contralto, “What have you got there grandad? It’s a bottle of wine, innit?” To which I responded, “It’s medication for granny.”
Cheers.
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