Godfather's come in all shapes

and sizes, points of view, levels of criminality and more.

My own godfather is tall and too thin and has never had as much as a speeding ticket. He is 95 and stopped driving three months ago  - with an unblemished record. 

The only problem with all this is that he cannot come to us. It is one of those times I regret not being able to drive, not owning a car and more. If I could get to him more easily then I could check  more easily. 

Yes, he has two children and they do check. His daughter calls in almost every day. His son calls in less often but phones him every day, sometimes more than once.  He has an emergency pendant too. 

He has lived alone since his beloved wife died and tells me, "I'm not used to it. I'm learning to live with it but I am not used to it." I doubt he ever will be.

He has, in his own words, not been "that sort of godfather". He has never remembered my birthday. He didn't provide presents and outings or spoil me. For years we had very little contact with one another. This was hardly surprising. Once he left the navy he worked very long hours in his own business. I was studying and researching just as many hours. There was the very occasional contact at clan events. He is an "honorary" member of the clan because he grew up in the same close knit group.

After my mother died though he would phone the Senior Cat. He was there without any fuss or bother or overt sympathy - just a little much needed support. The two of them would chat, meet over cups of tea and small jobs in the Senior Cat's shed. These would often be on the mornings his wife was playing bridge  with one particular group. We sympathised with his need to get away on those mornings!

And of course this last year has been different. We haven't seen him because of Covid. There have been phone calls but it hasn't been the same. I have been concerned recently even with his son and daughter checking on him. 

But  yesterday he phoned, sounding a little perkier. We have discussed getting Middle Cat to take the Senior Cat to visit. It will take a little arranging but it can be done. I will talk to his daughter, F..., and perhaps take lunch for everyone.

He may, in his own words, have been "the world's most neglectful of godfathers" but we have grown closer in the past  twenty years and he does mean a lot to me. He was there for the Senior Cat when he needed him and that counts for so much. 

Halloween has

descended - as a snowstorm of ghosts and ghouls and far too much sugar.

It is an American import in this country. Yes, I know it has its origins elsewhere and back in the mists of time. I also know that when I was a mere kitten we knew nothing about Halloween. It wasn't mentioned - and my family is of Scots descent. Not only do we have strong clan bonds  there was membership of the local Caledonian society and much more. Halloween simply was not "celebrated" in the way it is now. 

Halloween this way is a commercial event. There  are "wisps" strung across  gates, a sign on one which says "Enter if you dare". There are pumpkins, skeletons, effigies and more now strung in trees and along fences or around front doors. The shops are full of Halloween related "decorations", chocolates and other sweets "on special".

Tonight the children will go "trick and treating" - or that is what they believe they are doing. We have not yet reached the point where every house gets that treatment. If you don't indicate children are welcome they are supposed to keep away. Most do. 

This year the pandemic rules are going to make a difference too. Last year, after inquiring of parents in the street, I put out tiny "treats" for them to share. All the children got one each. It was enough. No, they were not sugar laden. Our paediatrician neighbour and I saw to that. Her two boys have "skeleton hands" up. I have just been informed by T... that they are to "grab you if you don't stop". He knows and accepts that there won't be too many sweets coming his way. His parents have the good sense not to forbid them but to limit the quantity. 

He is also old enough to accept the idea that you don't get something  simply because you demand it. He would like it but he knows that this is not how the world works even when Halloween, as celebrated, seems to suggest otherwise. 

And tomorrow, if you attend church, it will be "All Saints Day". I wonder whether any of the priests, pastors and ministers I know - and I know a few - will be talking about the commercial Halloween. Very few children will be there to listen. If they are  it is unlikely they will relate the two things. For them Halloween is about decorations and "scary" stories. It is also about "trick and treating" and chocolate and biscuits iced with spiderwebs.

Ms W was asked if she wanted to dress up as a ghost and go on a hunt with some of her friends. She thought about it and then told her father, "Why bother? I might have made biscuits to take back to school but we can't share that sort of food right now. I think I might make frogs with J.... and H.... We can have a jumping  contest. It will be more fun."

Ah  yes, little origami jumping frogs made with green paper.  It does sound a lot more fun. Her youngest neighbours will  enjoy that - and their parents are going to appreciate it.

 

Motorsport, more motorsport

and now, thankfully, less motorsport.

This is something Middle Cat and I strongly disagree on. She loves motorsport, so much so that she was one of those to volunteer her time at the racetrack for the Clipsal 500. 

For those of you in Upover and elsewhere this was a street race around a city circuit. It replaced the Grand Prix here. Every year it caused a major disruption to the lives of many people who lived nearby or needed to get around the circuit to get somewhere else. It was noisy - we could hear them from six kilometres away. 

Middle Cat would be there in the thick of it...as the physiotherapist. Yes, they do need such people at these events. There are strains and stresses on the human body when driving at high speed for hours at a time. Getting sense out of Middle Cat during that time was impossible. They are possibly the only times she has willingly risen early in the past few years.

I loathe motorsport. I freely admit that sport does not interest me - apart from a passing interest in cricket - but motorsport is something I cannot support. The amount of money spent on it is obscene and it is possibly the most environmentally unfriendly activity on the planet. 

The amount of fossil fuel consumed by this activity is frightening.  What is more many of those involved and who spectate are people who would claim to be concerned about the environment and about global warming.

So the news  that next year's race has been cancelled because of falling numbers and Covid concerns could only bring a silent cheer from me. I know not everyone will agree. I know I will be told "other people like it" - as if that somehow justifies it. I will be told I need to be more "tolerant". Do I?

People can take a walk in the park lands next year and the birds can have the trees back. We don't need this sort of "sport".

Club rooms are a part of the

sports world. They are considered essential places for people to change from muddy sports gear to other clothes after a football match.  They range from simple sheds with nothing more than a bench to sit on while you pull off your boots to buildings which have toilet facilities and showers to even bigger buildings which have bars, gaming machines, a food service and a meeting area. 

There may be even more facilities. I don't know. I don't belong to any clubs like that but I have been thinking about them all recently. 

I belong to another club. It has, like many other similar groups, been meeting in a hall which belongs to another group. Recently we were informed that we had to move. The building is required for other purposes at the time we meet. An alternative has been offered in a nearby location. I imagine it will all work itself out.

What occurred to me though was the number of non-sporting clubs that do not have their own facilities. It is a rare thing to find a gardening club, board games group, or craft group with their own facilities.

There are exceptions but they are few and they struggle to maintain their premises. They do not get government support in the way that sports clubs get funding. 

For many years the Senior Cat belonged to a "magician's circle". It meets in an old air raid shelter next to a bowling club. The last time I looked the bowling club had wonderfully manicured lawns and well maintained buildings.  The Senior Cat has not been able to go to a meeting of the magicians for some years now. The steep stairs into the basic underground facilities have been too much for him. The group is getting smaller, the members older. It won't be long before it ceases to exist. Their attempts to get younger people in have failed for a number of reasons but one of them is the location and nature of the place in which they meet. The bowling club is probably doing well and getting government funding as well.

There is an embroidery "guild" which has its own premises. This is sheer good fortune. The house was left to them in a will. I don't imagine for a moment that it is easy for them to maintain it despite their large membership and many activities. They have had a small grant for a specific purpose but there is no large scale government funding the way there is for some sports groups. A lace "guild" has much smaller premises but I know they struggle to maintain it. The premises do not belong to them as such but they do have sole use of it. 

I know of no other gardening, games or craft group which have premises solely for their own use. They all seem to pay rent to other groups. Our library knitting group can only meet if nobody else requires the room. We can't meet in November for this reason. As we don't meet in December because the library is closed for the Christmas and New Year break and January is usually far too warm we won't see one another until February next year...if nobody else requires the room. At present I am trying to organise we do meet in November - out of doors. It is however difficult.

And I wonder about all of this. Sport has always been revered but do other activities really deserve such second rate treatment? Surely we should be doing more to encourage people to create things, grow things, think things? There should be more places where people can meet on a regular basis and they need government funding just as much as any sports group. It would almost certainly encourage others to join such groups - and that has physical and mental health benefits for everyone.

 

Origami boxes,

little boxes made of paper, little boxes on the table, little boxes all the same....with apologies to Malvina Reynolds (and Pete Seeger).

I doubt the Senior Cat knows the song (our family was more likely to be listening to Gilbert and Sullivan or Mozart). It is one of the few I was familiar with during my teenage years but it comes back to haunt me at times.

The Senior Cat and the Activities Officer (AO) have been making little boxes. This is part of the long, slow lead up to Christmas with Covid19. They cannot have the normal Christmas party and activities so the AO  has been trying to think of other things, including a tiny present for everyone - even those who won't remember anything about it.

The Senior Cat has fiddled around with origami for a long time. He is not particularly good at it but the idea fascinates him. He was the one who introduced MsW to a couple of simple designs years ago.  It is now one of her hobbies. She can make what seem to be incredibly complex designs - often surprisingly useful things too. 

The Senior Cat  has not attempted such things but he tried a new box.  I found him and the AO working on it when I went in to see him.  They had his i-pad propped up between them and were talking about "mountain folds" and "valley folds" and  other such mysteries as they tried to follow a little video. 

    "Join us," the AO suggested. Did she know I had left last time with instructions to work it out? I am not in the least skilled at origami. My paws are much too clumsy for the sort of precise folding and tucking required. 

Despite that I do find it fascinating to watch how a piece of origami comes together. You can have what looks like a complete mess. Then one piece will go into another and, with a little gentle pulling or pushing perhaps, you suddenly have the box, the bird, the animal, or the object you have been working on.

There is something to be learned from all this. I must keep trying to do it.

 

Cutting down trees

is never something I am happy about.

Years ago a former neighbour cut down a tree in his front garden. His only reason to do it was, "I didn't like it."

He ignored the fact that it was the home of a wide variety of birds. When that was pointed out to him he simply shrugged and said, "They'll find someone else to go and annoy."

The people who moved in after he left quickly planted something else. It's still growing but it has reached about the height  it will be when it has fully matured. The birds are back. 

We have multiple trees on our average suburban block. We might have more than most people. Last summer we lost the apricot tree. It was there before the house was built. My mother asked the builders to save it if they could. They were Italians and understood the importance of fruit trees. They shared the crop that year. There were buckets of apricots. Last year there were none. The tree was simply too old. It died quietly. 

Do I put another one in? Will the next people to move in here feel the same way about trees? Possibly not.

The local councils have banded together to tell the state government that not enough attention is being paid to trees. I agree but they could do more to preserve trees. They need to plant the right sort of trees too. 

There are people who believe that "only natives should be planted" but this is in fact one of the worst things we could do. Someone I knew proudly showed me the gum she had planted in her back garden years before.

   "It's more than two metres around now. The next owners won't be able to remove it."

No, they can't. The law does not allow it. What she did not consider is that there is no space for anything else. The clothesline is covered in bird poop. The lawn does not grow and the new owners have had to do an expensive renovation because of cracking caused by the tree. Yesterday I went past and there was a "tree doctor" parked outside. I could see someone high up the tree. Almost certainly there are limbs which need to come off because gums do lose limbs. Close to other things they can cause immense damage. 

It was the wrong sort of tree to plant in that space. It doesn't do the job it is intended to do. We shouldn't be planting gums in urban areas. They are trees for the bushland, the banks of waterways and the like. 

I have long maintained we should be planting more trees. We should be planting trees which provide food for humans and other animals. This can be done in ways which still provide for a diverse but balanced landscape. They don't need to be giant redgums or other trees unsuited to the urban landscape.  The trees we plant should be of value to the landscape and everything which lives in it. They need to be trees children and animals can climb, which feed all living things, which provide shelter and more.

This morning our neighbour at the back has just looked over the fence between us and asked me,

       "I'm trimming the bottlebrush. Would you like me to take that dead branch out of the fig tree? It should help it."

My answer was a ready, "Yes please." 

It will help to preserve a precious part of my immediate environment. 

Books are essential to mental health

and I was appalled to see that the Covid lockdown in Wales had apparently caused bookshops to be closed, libraries to be closed and the shelves selling books in the supermarkets to be taped off.

The library here was closed for some months but some ingenuity allowed a service of sorts. You could go to the online catalogue and, if the book was in your own library rather than simply in the system, you could ask for it. You went to the library door and, with a complicated dance of social distancing measures, you could borrow it. Books were returned in much the same way  if the returns chute was not open. 

Were there health risks attached? Probably but the mental health risks of not having a library service at all were far greater. 

The local indie bookshop was closed for about the same amount of time. It then reopened  in a similar fashion to the library. A..., the shop's manager, told me that they had been busy throughout even though the regular deliveries from the suppliers had to stop. 

I have lost count of how many people who told me they read more, especially more books, throughout the worst of our "isolation" times. There were thoughtful people who left boxes of books on their fences. The tiny "street" library did a rapid turnover as people borrowed and added to it. People passed on books they had read. They borrowed (and hopefully returned) more books. Fiction and non-fiction were borrowed.

"There are audio books if you want that sort of stuff," a non-reader told me of fiction.

I looked sadly at him. He doesn't understand the reading process at all. Yes of course there is a place for audio-books but reading a book is not about listening to a book. It is something entirely different. I find it hard to listen to an audio book. The voice gets between me and the words.  I like to fill the silence with my understanding of what has been written.

As for non-fiction? My books tend to look like a hedgehog of post-it notes and slips of paper when I am working on something. No audio book can describe a diagram  in the same way as the picture. 

So many other people have told me the same thing. Not all of them are aware of it but physical books were and are an essential part of their mental health and well being. People need books for good mental health.