Tea And Sympathy Please

I am feeling rather sorry for myself having contracted the dreaded lurgy which has robbed me of my voice - not necessarily a bad thing, or so say various friends and relatives.

So I have been staying indoors and pampering myself.  I have to pamper myself as I work from home and there is no one else to dispense tea and sympathy along with the paracetamol. Not that I've taken any paracetamol. I never take cold or flu medicine as I believe that if you let the lurgy run its course without impediment, the sooner it disappears. I swear this is true. My colds usually last way under a week while the better half's seem to go on for ever. Well it feels like forever as he's such a bad patient. One sniffle and his usual jolly countenance disappears in a cloud of moaning, sniffing and sighing - and nose-blowing loud enough to wake the dead.

One downside is that everyone has been keeping their distance not wanting to catch my germs. I've only had the cat to talk to and, quite frankly she’s not a great conversationalist although her pained look when she’s hungry and her bowl is empty speaks volumes.

When he is ill the dearly beloved flops about like a marooned sturgeon but I have tried to keep busy to keep my mind off my not-wellness.

I have even been cooking a proper tea every evening. By "proper", I mean something vaguely hot. I'm not Nigella Lawson. Or even Fanny Cradock. Some of my American and younger friends had never heard of Fanny Cradock, one of the first television cooks, so I directed them to a YouTube video where she is wittering on about lubricating a dry bird (oo-er) - you can watch it below.  They’re now fans. Look at the state of that Christmas tree at the beginning and the way she refers to the turkey, native to America, as "the British national bird"! 

Anyway, my voice is getting back to normal now, thank you for asking. It’s still a bit husky which I thought sounded sexy. The dearly beloved, however, says I sound like a raddled 70-year-old emphysemic chain smoker.

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Foaming At The Mouth

I am somewhat annoyed.

What has rattled this normally placid person's cage? It's the vast number of angry people out there, that's what. And I mean they are REALLY angry.

I know people whose default setting is permanent peevishness but it’s gone beyond that. Look on the internet and you will find video upon video of people losing it. They are trolling on Twitter, furious on Facebook, incensed on Instagram, wicked as a snake on WhatsApp and snapping on Snapchat.

I have a wide circle of friends of all political persuasions. Lovely people. Lovely, that is until some political issue rears its ugly head. Then many of these perfectly pleasant people metamorphose into ranting ideologues completely unable to tolerate another person's point of view.

My Facebook pages are full of vitriol.  I expect people to be passionate about their political beliefs but some of the posts transcend that. People "de-friend" others right, left and centre for being politically too right, too left or too centre. 

They regurgitate fake news and unsubstantiated statistics in the manner of Moses descending the mountain with tablets of stone.

I read a post and think to myself, "That can't be right, surely?" Then, just a couple of minutes’ research show that the statistics quoted or the story shared are fabrications. Or they shout FAKE NEWS at everything, fake or not. Why don't people check things before sharing them? See, now I'm angry too.

Then there are the cyber-bully trolls who viciously attack anyone who doesn't share their narrow view of the world. God help you  if you are blessed with less than average looks, any argument you put forward will be immediately nullified because you are fat, old, bald, have a big nose, whatever. If you are a woman in the public eye you could be threatened with the most heinous of "punishments" from rape to murder for having the temerity to offer up an opinion.

Who is this army of cowardly judgemental people with so much time on their hands they can be bothered to write a tweet or fill in a comment form to write something inane or just plain nasty? Who sits down to write horrible things about people they have never met? It's the only time I feel sorry for celebrities who come in for blistering attacks because of the way they look or some inadvertent slip of the tongue.

The sound of teeth gnashing and the sight of veins popping assault my senses daily. I am metaphorically covered head to toe in spit spewing from the mouths of the splenetic.

Turn on your TV and you will see angry people shouting at angry people. Look in your local newspaper or read the local groups on Facebook and you will see people incandescent with rage because there is a van parked with one wheel on the pavement or their packet of 50 turkey twizzlers contains 49.

Anger knows no religion, social class, political persuasion or gender. Various Christians, Jews and Muslims are angry at people who don't share their views. The poor are angry at the rich for not sharing enough, the rich are angry at the poor for taking too much. Political parties are angrily tearing themselves apart. The jobless are angry they are unemployed and the employed are angry they are being exploited. Men are angry at women and women are angry at men. Reasoned debate has been replaced by clashing horns, the winner the person who can shout the loudest.

Of course, not all anger is bad. There is positive anger when we rage at the injustices of the world and vow to do something about it.

But you have to pick your battles. Walk a mile in the other man's moccasins. And chill. Just chill.

• (I first published something similar to this a couple of years ago but have now rewritten and, hopefully (!) improved.)

Before you leave:

You can follow me on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. As you can see, I have far too much to say for myself.

• Please feel free to leave a comment. I love to hear from you and will reply and visit your blog, if you have one, if I can. 
• You really don't want to miss my next post. It could be my best one ever (or not... who knows)! Enter your email address  top right and FeedBurner will tell you every time there's an update.

The Past Is a Foreign Country

I RARELY ride in the backs of cars these days. The other day, though, I found myself in the back seat and had to be reminded to fasten my seat-belt. As I was clunk-clicking, a memory came to me of when I was a child.

My father was driving along the country roads and I was standing up in the back of the car, as we kids did in those days, so I could see where we were going. He met another car, a rare occurrence in my neck of the woods in the 1950s (yes, I'm that old!), braked sharpish and I went flying over the back seat into the well of the passenger seat. Luckily I was unhurt, and it was a lesson learnt. For years afterwards, though, the incident was never used as a salutary warning but as something to joke about - but that's my family for you!

It made me think of all the other madcap adventures we had as children. We tore around getting up to mischief before going home, dirty but happy and our parents none the wiser.

Living on a farm we were sent out to play in acres of fields where we climbed trees, built dens and generally created mayhem. There is a family picture of my brother standing up precariously on a branch of a tall tree. You can see from the picture that it is impossible to climb down from that tree. What happened was that his older sister - not me! - used a ladder to inveigle him up there, persuaded him to stand up and had then taken his picture.

We played on farm machinery with spikes and spinning wheels yet never hurt ourselves.  We crossed fields full of animals without a moment's hesitation. We played in animal pens no doubt full of harmful bugs. We built "houses" out of bales of hay or straw not worried that they would collapse on top of us.  Don't get me wrong, this is not the type of thing I am advocating. Looking back, it sounds foolhardy at the very least. I guess my brothers and sisters and I were just lucky that we never did ourselves any serious damage.

All these memories brought on an uncharacteristic nostalgic streak. I tend to look forward rather than harp about "the good old days"   when, to quote the cliché, we always left our front door unlocked. In any case, burglars would have had slim pickings in our house with my tenant farmer parents having seven children to bring up.  There was no family silver, no valuable heirlooms and no hidden safe, only a meat safe in the cool room (called the dairy, as all farming families know).

I hate to turn into one of those "everything was better in the good old days" people - but some things were. Our elders and betters seemed to be blessed with rather more common sense than they are today. You could climb a ladder at work without having a week of health and safety training, Food was food, My mother would  have mocked us unmercifully if we had all demanded different dishes at dinner. You ate what was put in front of you or you didn't eat at all. There were no food scares with certain items good for you one week and likely to give you a slow painful death the next.

In my little corner of North Devon there was very little crime, probably because there was a policeman living in every big village. We had one television with two channels, BBC and ITV (showing my age again) and we were not allowed to say we were "bored" - if you did, some job would soon be found for you.

There were no mobile phones so no trolling and sexting. If you made a fool of yourself it was all forgotten in a week and not recorded forever in a video that's gone viral.

I know that in my nostalgic mood I am looking back through rose-coloured glasses.

Plenty of things have improved since I was a child; I don't look back fondly on everything. There were lots of -isms knocking about when I was young - including sexism and racism. Homophobia was par for the course and no one thought twice about paying women less than men for doing exactly the same job.  I'm not hankering back to the days of polio and TB.

Now I just wish there was a happy medium and more common sense came into play rather than relying on rules and regulations.

You don't need a law to tell you that poking yourself in the eyes with a red-hot poker is going to make you blind.

*     *     *     *     *

Since writing the above I've received this email which has reminded me that back in the day there were no phone calls from people trying to scam you out of your money. There were no home computers so I never received an email from some poor African prince whose father had died in a bloody coup offering to give me hundreds of thousands of pounds in return for helping him to get his money out of the country. Of course, he'll need all my bank details...  Which reminds me I must reply to this email from Melania Trump. She inadvertently calls herself Melanin but I suppose she's got it wrong because English isn't her first language. Anyway, she wants to give me $60 million, which is very nice of her. I didn't even realise she knew me but she probably follows this blog. Off now to reply and get that $60 million.

And another thing... My diva cat has written a book (I know, I know, not everyone's cup of tea) but other people than my family have written extremely good reviews about it on Amazon. She's a grumpy little so and so but we love her to bits. Have a look at NOT SO SWEET TOFFEE.