“The Times They Are A Changin..”

Life Matters News Digest No.069 January 2024

I recently helped to arrange a funeral for a lovely lady called Nancy, who died at the age of 98. This meant she was born in 1925, such a very long time ago.

So I did a bit of research. In 1925, a 4lb loaf of bread cost one shilling and sixpence (English old money), the equivalent of seven and a half pence now (around 9 cents US).

The average wage was £260 ($330) a year and a luxury car, like a Crossley 7 seater Buxton sedan, cost £1350 ($1716). For the price of that very expensive car, you could also buy 2 houses - the average house price in the UK in 1925 was £619 ($787) - and still have money left over to buy furniture for both of them.

How times have changed! The average house in the UK now is around £285,000 ($362,206).

Do things have to keep rising in price to keep pace with inflation? Will we eventually end up paying £50 ($64) for a loaf of bread and a million to purchase your average, ordinary home? It all seems a bit insane. We need something better than current capitalism, the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is now far too great.

I am almost uncomfortable to admit I was born in the 1940s - 1948 to be precise, three years after the end of the 2nd World War. It seems such a long time ago. The 1940s for God’s sake!

I have a birthday card that tells me, among other things, that Britain opened its first supermarket, in London, in 1948, and Sir Laurence Olivier’s film “Hamlet” won the Oscar for Best Picture. These days “Hamlet” wouldn’t stand a chance against Hollywood blockbusters.

In 1948 the Olympic Games were held in London and Great Britain won 3 Gold, 14 Silver and 6 Bronze medals, a very modest haul by today’s standards (541 medals in London in 2012).

Judicial corporeal punishment (birching and flogging) was abolished in Britain in 1948 (sounds so medieval!) and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was born.

King Charles lll was also born in 1948, in November (he’s almost 7 months younger than me) and the poet T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The average wage in the UK in 1948 was £300.18 ($381.50) a year. Not a huge change from 1925. Even when I started my first job in an office in London in 1966, working for a major chemical company, I was only paid just over £9 ($11.44) a week! How did I survive, I ask myself?

Change of course is the one thing (along with death and taxes they say) that we can be sure about.

So many people fear change whether it is physical, emotional, psychological, social or philosophical. But change is inevitable, it’s how life rolls forward and without it we would be …. Well, stuck in the Dark Ages.

Just look at the countries around the world that are resisting change, like Afghanistan and Iran, or at least their governments. Desperately trying to hold onto male dominance and control, they suppress the other 50% of their population, the female part, and all in the name of religion. Religion has a lot to answer for.

They seem to have forgotten that what had existed before their current religion, had to evolve to a point where change could take place. Now they need to change again and embrace feminine energy, wisdom and strength. They would be in a much better place if they did.

What happened in the year you were born and what changes have taken place since?

I want to live as long as possible to see what new changes occur. The last few years have been miserable for most and daily the news is pretty grim.

That will change too - at least it will if we go with the flow and allow it to, just putting the difficult times down to experience. Holding onto the negative experiences just leads to depression, anxiety and despair. That’s probably an over-simplification, but always being optimistic about the future helps.

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Moving House!

This is rather alarming - or is it? Scientists have discovered that 10 out of 16 species of land hermit crabs, from all over the world, are abandoning beautiful snail shells to make the their homes in plastic bottle caps and even a piece of a light bulb.

When scientists first saw these photographs, gleaned from social media, they were heartbroken, but then realised that the animals were adapting to change and making use of what was available to them.

Does it cause them any harm? Nobody at the moment knows. Groups of crabs often fight over the available snail shells to protect their fragile bodies. Here they have discovered a whole new source of potential homes, especially as the availability of snail shells has declined.

The lighter, plastic shells may even help smaller, weaker crabs survive because they are easier to carry.

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The bigger problem of course is the 171 trillion pieces of plastic already floating in the oceans, which could triple by 2040 if no action is taken.

Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at University College, London, says perhaps, like the crabs, “We should be reusing plastic much more, instead of discarding it.”

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Travel Photographers of the Year

When I first started travelling on my own, back in the 1970s, I got this idea in my head that I would do without a cumbersome camera and just record all the memories in my head. This was long before mobile phones of course, which make the process of taking photographs so much easier.

However, without photographs, what remains in my head of crossing the 2nd highest snow-covered pass in the world at Marsimik La (18,314 feet) in Ladakh, India or navigating narrow Himalayan roads with multiple kilometre drops over the side for instance, is just limited sensory memories.

So I loved some of these images from the Travel Photographer of the Year competition. Firstly, I liked this photograph by AndreJa Ravnak of a field of out-of-season hop trees in South Moravia, near Cejc in the Czech Republic. To me it looks like a piece of cloth with stitching on it.

Young Travel Photographer of the Year, Lilly Zhang, aged just 17, produced this stunning scene of autumnal tranquility in Creek State Park in Pennsylvania, USA.

Martin Broen is a technical diver and cave explorer based in New York who works in design, innovation and sustainability.

With this photograph he won Best Single Image in the Nature, Wildlife & Conservation Category. Following my earlier theme, it shows a tiny iridescent yellow Goby fish claiming a discarded bottle in the ocean at Anilao, Philippines, as his home.

Best of all, I liked this shot of strong men on the beach in Lagos, Nigeria, taken by Jack Lawson and winner of the Best Single Image, People and Cultures Portfolio.

The image features the Nigerian National Amputee Football Team training on the beach. Tough men in more ways than one.

Lastly, I like this photograph from Kazuaki Koseki of Lake Shirakawa in early summer when it is filled with snow-melt water and reflects the early morning misty light. It makes me want to go there.

​If you would like to see the rest of the winners’ collection on the BBC website, go HERE: ​

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The Missing Cat - Round the Corner!

Last year I had a muscular back problem that was bugging me for a least six months and nothing I did, no exercise I tried would get rid of it. So I turned to Kat Owen, my partner’s Pilates Teacher.

Kat is also a qualified Sports Therapist and in no time at all, with some deep massage and a series of exercises, the muscle pain disappeared. Fantastic! Such a relief. I have continued doing Pilates ever since; a series of exercises that not only increases flexibility and muscle tone, but general health and well-being too.

Kat loves animals and currently has 2 dogs and 2 cats, as well as a busy Pilates practice and a young son, Max. Originally, she had 2 cats, brothers called Fred and George, but Fred went out one night and never returned.

Kat and her husband, upset by Fred’s disappearance, did all the usual things to try and find him. They put up posters and “walked around the streets like lunatics shouting his name.”

Kat says there was a lot of “ugly crying” and she could not walk past a ginger cat without checking it was Fred for about 2 years. She even had a dream that maybe a “little old lady” had taken him in and not let him out again and he was living “around the corner.”

That was 5 years ago and since then he has been replaced by Nigel, to keep George company.

A few weeks ago, while on holiday in Kenya with her husband and son, Kat received a call from a local number back home. She was reluctant to take it as she didn’t want her holiday interrupted but pressed the “accept” button at the last moment.

Turned out it was the local vets who had just scanned a microchip in a cat who was the missing Fred. After living as a stray, it appears an elderly man (living just a couple of miles away from Kat) had taken him in six months ago and decided to take him to the vet for a check-up as he had lost fur and was too thin.

Kat says as soon as they got back from Kenya, they went straight to the vets and when “Fred”, now called “GB,” was released from his cage he immediately jumped up on her lap. It was an emotional reunion.

However, when they met the current “owner” it was clear he loved “GB” as well and without a partner or children was rather lonely. So Kat and her husband, Chris, decided to let the elderly man keep “Fred/GB” and have kindly offered to pay any vet’s bills.

And to make sure they are never completely parted again, Kat has retained “visiting rights!” Though she has quite a menagerie already ….. All “Good Boys” as you can see! Plus one “Good Girl,” the new arrival, 11-week-old “Darcey”.

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The Very Tidy Mouse

Having talked about cats, I could not resist but tell you about the very tidy mouse!

Rodney Holbrook, a 75-year-old retired postman, and an avid wildlife photographer, noticed that things he had used the day before were mysteriously tidied up during the night, so he set up a night vision camera facing the workbench in his shed.

What the camera revealed was a mouse that routinely picks up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts, cable ties and other objects and puts them all together in the same box.

Rodney, who lives in Powys in Wales, UK, says the routine has been going on for 2 months and he has even tried leaving out heavier objects to see if the mouse can pick them up. He now deliberately leaves things on the bench so the mouse has something to do at night. Here is the little chap busy at work….

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Credits: My thanks to Kat and Karen for their contributions. Photo Credits: Crossley-Motors Org UK, The Washington Post, Yale Univerity, Shawn Miller/BBC x 2, AndreJa Ravnak/TPOTY.com/BBC, Lilly Zhang/TPOTY.com/BBC, Martin Broen/TPOTY.com/BBC, Jack Lawson/TPOTY.com/BBC, Kazuaki Koseki/TPOTY.com/BBC, Kat Owen x 4, Kat Owen/BBC, Rodney Holbrook/BBC, Rodney Holbrook/The Guardian/Youtube, BBC.

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END PIECE

Today’s news was extremely bad indeed. The BBC is reporting that there are now 19,000 children in Gaza who have been orphaned or have no adult to look after them. Some have lost their entire families including their brothers and sisters. 11,500 children under the age of 18 have been killed.

The report was heart-breaking, especially the bit about a month-old baby who has never known a parent’s embrace. She was delivered by Caesarean section after her mother was crushed in an Israeli air strike.

The baby’s family have not appeared to claim her and she has no name other than that of “daughter of Hanna,” her mother.

While I understand Israel’s need to eliminate Hamas, the destruction of so many children and their families is condemning them to lives of emotional and mental health problems and is savagery on the scale of the hordes of Attila the Hun.

All they have succeeded in doing is creating the next two generations of Hamas or whatever comes after it. Israel will never create a peaceful co-existence like this.

​If you have not seen today’s report, you can find it HERE:​

Some of you may have had trouble contacting me at my newsletter email address (peter@petercliffordonline.com) during December and January. My apologies for that.

Unbeknown to me, the company that hosts my website had moved it to another server and changed the IP address i.e. the location address. So any emails went to the old IP address which then no longer existed and they were rejected as you may have experienced.

Anyway, things are now back to normal and any email sent to me will automatically be forwarded to my private mailbox where I shall see it.

Until the next newsletter, take good care of yourself - and be kind caring, generous and patient with those less fortunate than we are.

All good wishes,