Away

Our rental in Llandudno

Health appointments have been coming thick and fast for me. If it's not one thing it's another. They have prevented us from planning holiday time away. It would have been a great opportunity to go just now as Frances, Stew, Phoebe and Margot are presently in western Australia visiting Stew's brother Richard, his Australian wife Cindy and their two children. They live in the suburbs of Perth.

However, today I booked three nights in Llandudno, North Wales. Our spring weather has been stunning for the past two weeks and it is predicted to carry on like this for several more days. It would have been a shame not to take a little advantage of it before my next doctor's appointment on Tuesday.

I have been to Llandudno before but it was long ago. There's a hospice there now - where John Gray works. I e-mailed him earlier - suggesting meeting up but I haven't heard back yet.

To tell you the truth, I am nervous about meeting other bloggers. Knowing them via a computer screen is one thing but seeing them in the flesh is another. Will they measure up? Will I measure up? It's a funny thing. I have met three other bloggers in "real life" before and all went very well. They were happy events.

I have "known" John Gray for about fifteen years and have followed his blog story. I admire the fact that he wears his heart on his sleeve and is open about his life and feelings. It's no surprise that hundreds of others have great affection for him and "Going Gently". Apart from anything else, he's a funny guy.

Today I had to go back to the garage on Sharrow Vale Road to get Clint's window washers fixed. I was there by eight fifteen. I said to the mechanics, "Will I need to go home or can I just go for breakfast and come back?" I knew the job would be a quick one.

"Oh you'll need to go home and wait for a call".

So I trudged a mile, back up the hill that is Ecclesall Road. As soon as I got home, Shirley said, "Oh, the garage have just been on the phone. The car's ready!"

Grrr!

If I ruled the world, stuff like this would never happen.

And so, yeah, we'll be heading west tomorrow - setting off mid-morning. No blogposts have been "scheduled" so this humble Yorkshire blog will be in mothballs until Monday night. As they say in Wales, "ffarwel!" Can you guess what it means?

Quiztime

QUIZTIME WITH MEIKE

Today we have another guest quizsetter. It's my friend Meike from Ludwigsburg, Germany. Her long-running blog is called "From My Mental Library". You can find it here. As usual, the answers will be given in the comments section.

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1) What is the tallest free-standing structure in Great Britain? 

(a) Arqiva Tower (Emley Moor transmitting station) 

(b) The Shard  (Office block in London)  

(c) Brighton i360 (Observation tower in Brighton, Sussex) 

(d) Blackpool Tower (Constructed in the 1890s)

2) What is the African country of Swaziland now called? 

(a) Zimbabwe (b) Egypt (c) Narnia (d) Eswatini

3) Meike asks, "How many cyber attacks against hospitals in Germany were officially registered in one single week in November 2020?"

(a) 29 (b) 295 (c) 2,950 (d) 29,500

4) What is gelotology? 

(a) The study of the effects and uses of gelatine in food production.

(b) The study of rocks and how they form through 

both volcanic and sedimentary activity. 

(c) The study of laughter and its effects on the body, 

from a psychological and physiological perspective.

(d) The study of icebergs, glaciers and  ice sheets

5) Who is this woman? She was the first female artist  to top the British pop charts with a self-penned song - back in 1978.

6) What was the longest song that the Swedish pop group ABBA ever released? 

(a) "Eagle" (b) "Dancing Queen" (c) "Waterloo" (d) "Fernando"

7)  Worldwide, which female artist has sold more records than any other?

8) What does the L in Samuel L. Jackson stand for?

(a) Leviticus (b) Leonard (c) Leroy (d) Luke

9) Which film star  was born in 1921 in the USA, the eleventh of fifteen children of a poor family of immigrants from Lithuania. His birth name was Charles Dennis Buchinsky.

(a) Mickey Rooney   (b) Charles Bronson 

(c) Charlton Heston  (d) Marlon Brando

10) What is this? (clue - it is thought to be 3750 years old and was unearthed in Germany in 1999)

(a) The Frankfurt Frisbee (b) The Dusseldorf Drum 

 (c) The Stuttgart Shield (d) The Nebra Sky Disc

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That's it folks! How did you do?

Liberation

It's Liberation Day!

Hip hip hooray!

All of out troubles will fly away.

Tariff time is here at last -

Our future rises from the past

With thanks to number forty seven

America is bound for heaven.

So dance my fellow patriots

Dance and laugh and proudly sing

Liberation Day means everything!

Illumination

Lightning

Let me be gentle. No, I am not frothing at the mouth. Yes. Let me smile and provide the following guidance with cheery goodwill. After all - in the end - does it really matter? It's only symbols on paper. I am not blowing a gasket. No I am not.

In my defence, I will say this... I was an English teacher for thirty eight years. I marked thousands of books, assignments, exam papers, essays, stories, letters, fake job applications, poems, playscripts, answers to questions. They all passed under my bridge, like autumn leaves upon the surface of  a river.

One red pen said hello to a new red pen and another and another. Sometimes there were green pens - lines of them stretching out to the horizon. I was doing my best to help. Never belittling nor being superior. The ability to spell accurately is born into some of us but not into others. I know that very well.

The psychology of spelling is often interwoven with our sense of self.

And now I come to the main meat of this blogpost. Settle down everybody. I would like you to look at the following two words:-

lightning

&
lightening

Can you see how they are different from each other? The second one has an "e" in the middle, Not only do these words look different - they have very different meanings.

lightning  - This refers to the natural phenomenon of a bright flash of light in the sky during a storm, caused by a discharge of electricity. It is also widely used figuratively to describe fast movement. Examples:-

During the storm, a bolt of lightning hit the church tower.

The pop fans ran like lightning to the front of the auditorium.

lightening - This is connected with the verb "To lighten". That verb may concern either light or weight. 

Light examples:-

The make-up artist was busy lightening the actress's 

cheeks with some white powder.

Over in the east, I observed a subtle lightening of the 

clouds as night gave way to a new day.

Weight examples:-

At the airport, Pixie tried lightening her suitcase by 

removing her bowling ball.

Lightening one's mind may often be achieved by sharing one's troubles.

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So that's that. I thought that my teaching days were over but repeated evidence of lightning/lightening  confusion in the blogosphere caused me to dust off my mortarboard and academic gown  once more. Class dismissed.

Lightening

Colonoscopy

 

I feel sure that the title of this blogpost will have sent dozens of visitors fleeing to the hills. However, Yorkshire Pudding is a blog that does not shirk away from potentially unpleasant or controversial subjects. One day The 47th President of the USA, the next day a colonoscopy. Very similar subject matter when you stop to think about it.

Okay so why did I need a colonoscopy this morning? Let's recap. On the night of March 14th my face became a ghost's face and I fainted - collapsing on the floor in an unseemly heap. In addition, when I sat on the toilet shortly thereafter, I discovered that I had deposited bright red blood. This continued for the next twenty four hours. Both highly unusual events were most certainly linked to my first dose of an anti-hypertensive drug that was new to me. It is called doxazosin.

And so I was referred to The Royal Hallamshire Hospital for a colonoscopy which happened this very morning. Yesterday, I had to starve myself and drink two litres of a special polyethylene glycol-based laxative called "Moviprep". By the way, "Moviprep" has nothing to do with settling down on the sofa with a bucket of popcorn and a fizzy drink to watch a movie (British English: film). Instead, it has everything to do with effectively flushing out one's bowels ready for examination by a gastroenterologist.

And so I lay there with my knees up on the trolley as a nice Polish doctor called Anna pushed an endoscope way into my rear end. I was sedated and calm and I watched the entire show on a big colour screen without wincing with any kind of pain or discomfort. Surprisingly, there were no advertisements for "Bran Flakes". It was like a mini-starship was venturing  deep into a nether world in search of distant civilisations. I had never had a colonoscopy before.

They found a polyp that was cleverly removed with a tiny metal claw that lives right next to the camera lens. Anna's supervisor - an oriental gentleman with thinning hair and gold-rimmed spectacles said that he thought this might have been the source of the bleeding event. The polyp will be sent for analysis and I will later have a follow-up appointment to receive the informed verdict.

They put me in the recovery room for an hour and brought me a cup of tea and three bourbon biscuits. Because I had been given an intravenous sedative, Shirley came to pick me up from the hospital. It is less than two miles from our house - so very convenient.

I must say that the entire team in the endoscopy department were brilliant. Kind, competent and efficient - each performing his or her role in a proper, professional manner. I was in safe hands from start to finish. If I was rating the department on Trip Advisor, I would happily give them a glowing five star review. God bless the NHS!

Weekending

"The Visionary" (1989)

at Mar-a-Lago

Where is the 47th President of the USA this weekend? Do you really need to ask? He's at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida of course. He flew down there from Washington DC aboard Air Force One - a Boeing 747 - on Friday afternoon and he will be flying back on Monday morning.

It is the same most weekends. And why does he do this? Well, it is mostly to rest and relax, play golf and meet up with his chums. Apparently, he has taken to hosting dinners at which guests pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of dining with him.

The cost of each flight alone is about $1 million but there are many other costs surrounding security. The bill for these weekends away falls on American taxpayers. No thought is ever given to the blatant waste of aviation fuel and the 47th president's personal carbon footprint.

One might have imagined that a president's "to do" list would be as long as your arm, requiring very long working weeks at the political grindstone - but not so with #47. Effectively, he only puts in half a working week though I imagine that he still takes classified documents to his private mansion, scanning them briefly as he sits on what Americans sometimes call "the john".

As the Mar-a-Lago weekends are now part of an habitual presidential pattern, many of #47's fans now know when and where to wait for his motorcade - ready to wave and cheer.

One of them is a 31 year old landscaper and food delivery worker originally from Indiana. He is called Bradley Collier. After a recent presidential motorcade passed by he said, “Today was special.” This time, the limo seemed to roll slower and closer to the 'sidewalk', giving Collier a better glimpse of the president. “There’s nothing cooler than that,” he said, "other than Jesus Christ.”

Has there ever been a lazier president than the current incumbent? His time sheet speaks for itself and yet, as in the pitiful mind of Bradley Collier, #47 has in the eyes his doting support base taken on the character of a messianic figure who can do no wrong in spite of the evidence stacked against him.

By the way, the painting at the top in its ostentatious gilded frame is not some kind of jokey internet meme. It is genuine and hangs upon the barroom wall at Mar-a-Lago. In Trumpworld, truth is not only stranger than fiction but more horrific too.

Blanche

 "I don't want realism. I want magic!" - Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire"

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Blanche DuBois is one of the most significant female characters in modern drama and she is central to Tennessee Williams's 1947 play - "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Following a month long run at The Crucible Theatre here in Sheffield, the very last performance of Josh Seymour's version occurred this very evening with Joanna Vanderham playing Blanche. Shirley and I saw the show yesterday evening.

Blanche is a flawed character who finds it quite impossible to fit in. She is vulnerable and dreamy, partly aware of her weaknesses and partly in denial about them. It is almost as if she is not really of this earth but is perpetually seeking a higher plane of existence. She says, "I live in a world of fantasy, and it’s a much safer place to be" but she also recognises that she is a social being: "I need people to validate my existence."

Joanna Vanderham as Blanche

In The French Quarter of New Orleans, she come up against the aggressive obstinacy of her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. He is not prepared to pander to her whims and treats her like an unwelcome intruder, challenging her domestic habits and just about everything she says. His wife, Stella, begs him to be kinder to her sister but his cruel taunting persists. It is as if he can see right through her.

Oddly, in the Sheffield production, Stella Kowalski (née DuBois) was played by a black actress - Amara Okereke when she is meant to be Blanche's sister. I think that Tennessee Williams himself would have been surprised about this even though Amara Okereke was a very capable  performer.

The performance we witnessed definitely did justice to the text and to the spirit of the play and Joanna Vanderham certainly fitted the role of Blanche very well. However, I think that if I had been the director there would have been some subtle changes. 

Remembering that the setting is New Orleans in the summer, I would have had an electric  fan whirring silently and Blanche would have dabbed away perspiration with a handkerchief or cooled herself with a paper fan. That southern sultriness should contribute to the conditions in which the often  heated dialogue takes place. I would have also had a slightly older more battle-worn actor playing the part of Stanley Kowalski.