Never seen together in same room …

The TV says it’s ‘Nadhim Zahawi’ … 

… but all I see is …

Abu el Banat ●

There’s always a laugh, a real out-loud snort, in any issue of Private Eye. One merely has to look and read long enough.

This time I had to go as far as page 38;

• The title of this post is a cryptic reference to The West Wing (aren’t they all?) It’s the series 5, episode 9. This was the 9 December 2003 broadcast, in the run-up to Christmas, and so — by tradition, with a lighter touch. The title translates (it says here) as ‘Father of daughters’.
• It helps to decode that, to realise I have been married for decades to a strong-minded lady from the County Armagh. And, together, we generated three equally strong-minded daughters of full-on dragon-slaying capacity.

Senecan thoughts

Seneca was Hispanic, and a stoic: already, then, a contradiction of our prejudices. Since his writings (when he wasn’t writing plays) were generally in the form of letters, each is long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to stay interesting. 

He sets out to define the ‘law of nature’, which amounts to how the world around us is subject to reason. Even the unexpecteds are part of that reason. 

Seneca places that ‘reason’ in the divine personality of Zeus — so the modern deist can still take Seneca as a reflecting a planned cosmos, while a non-believer (like me) can look to natural science.

His particular example of the unexpecteds involves earthquakes — which were planned in the reasoning of Zeus. Rather like Covid, then: pandemics come along every century or so, may not be predictable, but surely can be anticipated.  And viruses evolve, rapidly: which must come as a shock to the 4004BC/#DUP crowd, still coping with the intellectual problem of dinosaurs.

In these interminable days and weeks of ‘lock-down’ each day comes along as a natural division of … well, something. Or, as the commonplace version of Seneca goes: Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. The law of the dialectic, later first century A.D.

So yesterday began in this old city of Old York with an inch or so of snow. My first view of today was fog.

Today, after a hasty bit of calendaring investigation, turns out to be 3rd February. In the French revolutionary calendar that would be Pluviôse — or, as country lore (and my Mother) had it:

February fill-dyke, be it black or be it white,
But if it’s white, it’s the better to like.

And then, as yesterday, all that white turns to slush, and the result is this:

That’s the Viking Recorder, mentioned in previous posts, tracking and anticipating the levels of the River Ouse in the centre of York. It’s our local version of Zeus’s ‘reason’, or an obvious example of ‘natural law’ — precipitation on the hills to the west, sooner or with snow-melt later, comes down the watercourses and the ings go under.

Whoa!

Pause to interpret.

York is not Saxon. It’s Danish and Angle. It’s another country: they do the language differently here. The ‘gates’ are streets (geata); the bars are gates; and an ing is a meadow, particularly a low-lying water-plain. An ing is in Jane Eyre, chapter 9:

How different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow! — when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down ing and holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck! That beck itself was then a torrent, turbid and curbless: it tore asunder the wood, and sent a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or whirling sleet; and for the forest on its banks, that showed only ranks of skeletons.

OED: A common name in the north of England, and in some other parts, for a meadow; esp. one by the side of a river and more or less swampy or subject to inundation.

Origin: A borrowing from early Scandinavian. Etymons: Norse eng, enge. And it also says there:

Etymology: < Old Norse eng (feminine), enge, engi neuter (Danish eng, Swedish äng), meadow, meadow-land; from the same root as Old High German angar, Middle High German anger grass land, meadow-land. (Not recorded in Old English.)

OK: in this year of gracelessness, we have arrived at 3rd February. Now that Punxutawney Phil has lumbered out of Gobbler’s Knob (and you think we have funny place-names in the north of England?) and foreseen six more weeks of winter, is there anything uplifting here?

Well, Japan reckons it’s Setsuban: the last day of winter. In Switzerland it’s Holmstrom, which amounts to the same. And if you have a sore throat, get Covid tested, or resort to the patron saint of sore throats, St Blaize, whose holy day it is.

We’re doomed! (again)

That American branch (daughter, husband, four offspring and two dogs) are about to cope with as much as a foot-and-a-half of real snow.

The youngest son, presumably spared from the Academy, will doubtless cope — provided the cable and internet do. When the last storm struck, all power went out for days. Which prompted his declaration of Armageddon (as in the title above).

I gather something has upset the ‘polar vortex’ (apart from that link, search me). Certainly here in ‘old’ York we seem to have more frosty days than I remember in recent years. We don’t like too much snow up on the dales or moors, because in due course it can all melt — and that means bits of York near the Ouse and the Foss get rather wet.

Even so, there is something about snow that gets to us. A blanket covers many a visual sin. Very quickly, though, one feels there’s too much of it.

Anyhoo, the point of this post is to acknowledge what I reckon to be a classic image. It’s one I’ve never seen before. It’s in the New York Times coverage:

Major Storm Slams the Northeast, With More Than a Foot of Snow Expected in Some Parts

It’s from 1913:

And now, I understand, the NY Times has been selling that picture for some time.