No yoghurt again at the Co-op? - 2

A friend with more political savvy than I (she has lived here all her life, and always applies the principle of Occam's Razor to any village goss) says it is obvious.  Spanish fisherman have infiltrated themselves into the crew of every boat that leaves Fleetwood, she says, and they are spiriting great crans of the silvery stuff back home at the dead of night.  But, homesick in the long months away from la casita, and anxious for news of the señoras and señoritas they have left behind in that land where hidalgos eat a lot of big fat sausagey things and slurp wholesome red wine at two pesetas (€0.000000001) a litre and then start getting naughty ideas, they thought they could slink over the river to buy their foreign newspapers and keep tabs on things without anybody noticing.

Ha!

If we act together as a community we can flush them out.  I suggest that a deputation of tough-looking gentlemen from the village assemble at the head of the jetty at 16:55 one evening when the wind in the north, and saunter down to the river saying in very loud voices "Gosh, Jeremy! It must be nearly five in the afternoon." (It sounds much better in Spanish, if everyone can manage it.)

If that doesn't work, we could next improvise provocative limericks about, for example, Lope de Vega or Federico García Lorca, and, in the last resort, make pointed observations about the probable sexual proclivities of professional football-punters from popular Spanish clubs  ("Sociedades Españolas de Futbol y Otras Actividades Interesantes, Nudgio-Nudgio"), not to mention  those of bullfighters (I mean, have you seen the way they stick their bottoms out?  Oo, ducky!)

Hordes of fishermen will eventually emerge on the opposite bank to find out what all the noise is about.  Ignore the ones in dirty blue T-shirts with half an inch of roll-up in their mouths and speaking a funny language. They are from Fleetwood.  Look for the bods from the bodegas -  huge waxed moustaches, voluminous pleated cravats, thigh-boots with floppy overhangs at the top, and funny looking hats.  If they are not from Pilling, despite all this circumstantial  evidence, then they are definitely Spanish.

One just hopes the Co-op manages to flog them those three copies of El País before we send them packing.  One is, after all, a card-carrying member of this worthy Society, and one must at all times keep a watchful eye on the divi.

No yoghurt again at the Co-op?

Bad news for the village (pop. 5314 at the last Census.)  The local Co-op has had a visit from the (wait for it, and listen in reverential silence) Area Manager and the staff are all of a flutter.  The Spar across the road is rubbing its little hands with glee, because the last time the Swat Team from HQ turned up at the Co-op Spar’s business increased dramatically, and it’s taken the Co-op, whose staff are local and very knowledgeable indeed about the sort of stuff villagers buy, a couple of years to woo customers back by stocking such exotic luxuries as plain yoghurt and Marigolds, in blatant defiance of Regulations.

I’m not quite sure where the Swat team emanates from, but I noticed in the Co-op today not one but three copies of El País, which as we all know is a newspaper published in Spain.

Buenas tardes, amigos.

Trinity Hospice, etc - 2

The BBC's 6:30 NW regional news programme did a nice whitewash job just now on behalf of the trustees and management of Trinity, with a lots of visuals to grab your emotions, but with a very telling parting shot - 'the pictures, bought last year, have already appreciated in value.'  Hm.  You could almost hear the 'so there.'  Well, if you're going to speculate with other people's money, I suppose 'art' is a slightly safer bet than the horses, but it is still a rather slippery argument which treats 'cost' and 'value' as though they meant the same thing. 


The point, surely, is that there are legitimate concerns about whether the hospice has acted ethically, for it has evidently not acted wisely, and there is certainly some evidence of hypocrisy in its defensive statements.  The 'chapel', for instance is 'non-religious', presumably as a sop to appease people of other faiths and those of no faith, but the artist is a Christian; the pictures were unveiled by the Dean of Blackburn Cathedral, which houses more of the same artist's work; and the hospice maintains a chaplaincy.  It really cannot have it both ways.


You can see more of Penny Warden's paintings on her website, and read about her method of working there.  It is quite astonishingly interesting.


More in the next post.

Trinity Hospice, Bispham, Engines, and Predestinate Grooves

You think, when you attend a fund-raising do for a hospice, that your contribution is going to be spent on equipment and essential nursing care.   We certainly thought so last Saturday when the do we were at raised £583 for Trinity Hospice in Bispham, Blackpool, where some of our friends have spent their last days.


What we didn't know was that two days earlier the hospice's trustees and management had unveiled seven pictures commissioned for the trifling sum of £50,000 to brighten up the chapel  (a chapel they describe as 'non-religious', which itself makes you raise your eyebrows a bit, for there ain't no such thing as a non-religious chapel.)


See today's Blackpool Gazette, and see also the Hospice's website for small pictures of the paintings.


The Gazette report notes that the artist spent a year working on this commission.  Even if she wasn't working on anything else, fifty grand isn't a bad return for a year's work, and I bet she's glad she switched professions when she came out of theological college and opted for the evidently far more lucrative job of painting in preference to parsoning, and for Heaven's sake, I hope no NSMs find out what she's getting or they'll be taking up the speculative brush as well.


The hospice has, I fear, landed itself with a PR disaster, because the reaction of the populist press was so obviously predictable, and the meeja has been handed a story on a plate (someone has already spotted the the ad on the Trinity website for a vacancy in the servants' quarters, at only a bit over £6 an hour.)


Only a few hours after the Gazette hit the streets there was a huge chorus of disapproval on the website, where comment is invited from readers, some of whom are even able to spell their own pseudonyms, and only a few defenders.  I waded through page after page of comments, and agreed with almost all of them, as one does when one does not wish to cause offence.  Then by chance I heard a bloke on a TV quiz show say, just as I was about to turn the wretched thing off, 'Once I've med up me mind, I never go back on it. 'Er were th'weakest link', and that, and the quality so far of the comment on the Gazette website, brought to mind Maurice Evan Hare's apt metaphor, this after all being Blackpool:

There once was a man who said, ‘Damn!

It is born upon me that I am

An engine that moves

In predestinate grooves - 

I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.'

Ah well. I am sure we get the press we deserve.

Boring music - 3

There were technical problems on R3 a couple of mornings ago (Rob Cowan had a puncture on his way to work, perhaps?), and it was wonderful.  Somebody with a deep gravelly voice introduced some Bach, and then let Bach get on with it, without being interrupted by trails or the insipid e-mails people issue when stuck in traffic jams.  It was a shame when 'normal' service was resumed, and we were back with Interactive Radio Three, ba-boom, Shazam.


What utter, utter crap the Third Programme has become.


And talking of utter crap, thank you to a few sane people who worked out my e-mail address and said 'thanks for the Schubert piece - it really is terrible, isn't it?'


Yes, it is.


Next time: more horrors from the 'it's classical, therefore it must be good' ethos - VW's sickly 'Serenade to Music', with a review by none other than St Cecilia herself.