Good morning all,
Thank you Frybabe for that explanation of Steampunk - I have asked my daughter this question many times and have never understood the answer, yours is much clearer!
Jane, England is locking down from today. Wales is already well through a very severe lockdown their devolved government decided on a while back. Scotland is not locked down - even the worst numbers up here are not as bad as those in parts of England. Instead we have a 5 tier system. The Highlands, where my son and his wife live, are Tier 1 along with the islands and Morayshire, as they have so few cases. Aberdeenshire, where I normally am these days, is in Tier 2, as is most of the rest of northern Scotland. The Central Belt - Glasgow, Edinburgh and the areas between the two of them, are in a much more restrictive tier (I think it's 3, with Lanarkshire threatened with 4 if it doesn't show an improvement soon) as Glasgow and Lanarkshire (the area around it) have by far the worst numbers. The restrictions in Aberdeenshire are mostly to do with pubs, bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. I haven't even been in a cafe for ages so none of this really affects me. The only other restriction is that we must not have people outwith our households inside our houses. Again this is not something that affects me, though I can see that other people might struggle with it. Our Scottish government's medical officers have advised that research now shows that indoor meetings, and anything to do with alcohol in public places, are the key spreaders. Obviously we can still buy alcohol in our shops and take it home for our own household's consumption (thank goodness as I do look forward to my one tiny glass of wine with dinner...small pleasures are important) The Welsh government has closed all 'non-essential' shops, but their lockdown is time-limited and as I said, about to end. There was some complaint - justified in my opinion, but I am not Welsh so it is really none of my business...) because they closed down book shops and even had supermarkets - which were kept open - to block off the aisles that have books for sale. I do feel that books should be an essential, and I can't see why you can go into a supermarket to buy not only things like bread and milk, but also chocolate and wine, but not books. I suppose they had their reasons!
My daughter and her partner are the only people I know well who are in England - they are in London. She says their regulations are so complicated that she has trouble working out who is allowed to do what, so goodness knows how that is all going to work. She is working in a large inner London school but is OK so far, thank goodness.
I am glad to say that dreadful man David Icke has now had all his social media accounts permanently closed down, as he is one of the worst conspiracy theorists ever, going on and on about how all of this is a hoax, being sent via our phones, etc etc. He has caused so much trouble over the years with his very strange views about all sorts of things, and unfortunately some people believe what they want to hear even if there is no scientific basis for it.
To get off that subject (!), I have now finished the book I was reading, A Stranger on the Bars, the verbatim memoir of Christian Watt Marshall, a woman who grew up and lived all her life on the Broch - Fraserburgh - and worked, as all the working class people in the area did, in the herring fishing. The only choices open to working class girls there in the early 20th century were domestic service, working in a factory, or gutting fish - and they all seemed to have preferred the latter, horrible as it sounds (and they worked in grim conditions, often 18 hours a day in the season, their hands raw with the cold and the salt.) I think there was a great deal of camaraderie among the girls, most of whom began the job at the age of 14. In summer they were all jam-packed onto trains and boats and taken to Shetland to work with the boats in the Baltic Sound and what was then called the German Sea, then down to Yarmouth and round the coast, following the fleet and processing the fish as it was landed. In winter they came home and had to go into domestic service to make some money, but they were all glad to get back to the fish work as soon as they could. I suppose this gave them a lot of freedom, whereas when they were at home they lived with their strict Presbyterian, Methodist or Baptist parents - they seemed to have happy families, but being away with their friends (and the boys who worked the boats, made the barrels, etc) at that young age must have seemed like a great adventure.
Towards the end of the book, Christian talks about the advent of the Great War. Many, many local men and boys joined up, and few returned from the trenches. Despite all the promises of 'a country fit for heroes' they came back to no jobs, no assistance, and often no homes. She is scathing about the authorities, the empty promises that applied only for upper class officers, and the pointlessness of the war itself. Every family in this very tight-knit community lost men - she lost most of her brothers, her fiance, and many friends.
I'm not quite sure what to move on to now - last night I started The Gordonston Ladies' Dog Walking Club, but I was not taken with it at all; I thought it was about Gordonstoun, a small town in the north of Scotland, but it seems to be set in a smart housing development somewhere in Georgia. Anyway, I thought the style was poor so i gave up on it, and now I have turned to KM Peyton's Flambards, which is really a children's book, written in 1967. It opens before the Great War, when the heroine, an orphan, is sent to live with her crippled, irascible, uncle and his two sons at their dilapidated estate in Essex.The uncle and the elder son live for hunting and horses, the younger is delicate, hates hunting and wants to get involved in the new thing - aviation. I think this may have been a set book when I was at school, but I'm fairly sure I avoided it at the time!
The dentist beckons, and it's a long walk to get there, so I had better get off here and get going.
I hope you are all having as good a day as possible.
Rosemary
