DannyBoy

I'm not from the kind of family that ever had silver to polish: being of working class origin my father a carpenter, my mother an embroideress. Though according to my maternal grandfather, visiting the town swimming baths on a weekday using a tram to travel the 2 miles into the town centre, its terminus located around Kay Gardens, he once told me aged maybe aged 6 or 7 how John Kay, the inventor of the Flying Shuttle (in 1733) was his Great Uncle, and how we should be proud of this fact, being descended from John Kay's sister, i.e. ppl reputed to be the local gentry as the Industrial Revolution when the ppl left the land in order to work in the factories gathered momentum, John Kay followed some years later by Robert Peel, perhaps the town of Bury's greatest sons? This, on one of the Wednesdays, or Thursdays, he used to visit us principally to meet his wife, who had departed Manchester to escape Germany's Blitz of the City during WW II, retiring aged 65, himself a life ...

1) First off I felt contrained to send a link of the following item "Victor Orban Leaves the EU Parliament After a Scandal Wth Friedrich Merz" to our WhatsApp group entitled Pats and Ex-Pats. Principally because he, exceptionally, has been siding with General Secretary, or is it President Putin of the Russian Federation, and is at variance with the whole of the EU Leadership. (The message is all about EU corruption, from within, and Orban's long-held descension which, I for one, have to admit to being of similar mind. Von der Leyen is going to have us all in the poor house the way she and her unelected Brussels' Commissioners are going...or what do you think?...( vid receiving 20.1 K likes, 3209 comments) 2) "Eva Vlaardingerbroek - destroys Ursela Von Leyen in an explosive speech" subtitled "Your time of immunity is ending". This vid recording 5194 likes, 498 comments. To which I add my opinion: More power to Eva's elbow!! 3) "#charliek...

Hoi Polloi, from the Greek meaning "the many" or "the masses", where it was a neutral or positive term. But in modern English just the opposite and used by those who see themselves as superior to the masses and/or rabble. Which really approximates to my situation here in this part of Finland: a commoner who has been surrounded and so treated by the more well to do. Not to confuse matters further I will just add that it is the common ppl who live in the town where I now reside and write, but on the three sides of our house here: ahead to the east sits the house of the ppl we refer to as the Grankullaläiset from a town near Helsinki, also called Kauniainen, where the host for most of his working life perhaps was a London Banker, who with his wife occasionally visit the enormous fully detached family house that is their "summer cottage". The host has from the outset appeared to be of a friendly and civil disposition whilst his wife has I would venture to sugg...

... this blog perhaps a sequel to "A naïve man..?" first published 2017 12 14 when all in all it took 18 hits, and subsequently 2025 1 30 when so far it has taken only 1 fresh hit... But like our mother I could never take humiliation lying down... When J.E.S. K our Dad didn't return like many of the fathers on our row of 2 Up and 2 Down pre-WW II, and probably pre-WW I, terraced houses in England's North West town of Bury, Lancs., and the Minister of War's telegram, or letter, arrived to say our Dad had died from natural causes, our Mam knew differently and so began her war with the British Establishment That her 1/2 English 1/2 Irish husband of 39 had volunteered for war service out of a mistaken idealism, too old to be drafted for war service, a man with a wife and 2 children, who in any case was already contributing to the war effort, constructing packing cases for the Aircraft manufacturers AVRO of Manchester, where we lived at the outbreak of WW II. It wa...

whilst most ppl only wish to read what other ppl have written? ...something of a gross assumption but there you go! Living in a family where, apart from one of my granddaughters whose degree course was entitled "Creative Writing", I am the sole writer of material other ppl get to read, as a blogger. Some noted in their more formative years to be able to string words together in well constucted sentences and excelling in learning other languages but overall prefering to keep their own council than share a lot of personal knowledge with others? A difference then perhaps to do with extroverts and introverts? But essentially one is talking about one's wife and her two sons and my two sons for that matter which is to say someone who would qualify as being my opposite and our two sons who on the whole take after their mother rather their father... But already I am stepping on thin ice because my eldest son, who of the two in this regard to writing is possibly most like me, w...

On the 14th of October 2025 the day my sister Marion would have been 82 had she like me survived her heart attack, aged 78, but unlike our Aunty Lily who also went in hers, aged 52, like her father and grandfather before her, all of which is to say coronary artery disease is in the genes of the male side of our family. But today's "tic toc" story concerns this tale about how beneficial walking is for one's health even talking of what happens during the course of an hour's walk each day... And this just after I had returned from my daily walk, cut short this day because I had loaded up the boot of my car yesterday with 7 bin bags of pine needles from our 12 mature Scots Pine trees on our 1/4 acre of gardens surrounding our house, so today I could off load them dry at the town's yard again in dry weather conditions. How in the first 10 minutes of walking one's heart becomes oxygenated as more than the usual amount of oxygen is inhaled begins to take effec...

By say the age of 85 when one can no longer hold one's self "age is just a number", because one is being stripped of everything one once held so dear: just like William Shakespeare once observed "sans teeth, sans everything", "sans" meaning "without". In the year I finally lost my one remaining tooth, again in Arctic Norway where, was it two years ago, I lost my 2nd last tooth, this year for the first time I had to get hearing aids because of impaired hearing in my left ear, to do with some bones growing together, and so one's ability to distinguish a greater range of sounds diminishing. Not to mention the increasing numbers of people who have died, belonging to one's inner circle, some of whom one would consider to be relatively young, at say 75!? But if that represents the down side the upside is more to do with the days, per se, becoming more precious because, well there are not so many left for one thing. So as a consequence I n...

When I first came to Finland in 1960 I had worked 5 years in the British Paper Industry for a company owned by British American Tobacco, a BAT Company, and I got to work at Kymene Aktiabolaget as it was known to the Swedish speaking owners, or alternatively as Kymin Osakeyhtiö, to the greater Finnish speaking population: a company which manufactured one of the many wood pulps, their "Bond Special" grade of fully bleached spruce softwood sulphite, BAT used to make a part of their range of wrapping papers. So successful was our collaboration that as I was departing, after working 6 weeks in the company's Central Laboratory, I was invited to return another summer, together with a good many other students, who provided cover while the more permanent staff and workers took their summer holidays, during the months typically June through August. Perhaps unsurprising I returned the following year in July and stayed on until September, maybe 2 months altogether. And in the follo...