"There's Nothing Like Your Own Bed" - Elvis, Cuisine and Ceilings

Life Matters News Digest No.066 October 2023

I recently returned from a trip to Scotland and the Outer Hebrides (a series of loch/lake-filled islands off the northwest coast of Scotland for the uninitiated).

Quite why we went there, I am not sure, but my partner, Tricia, likes the "elemental" - and elemental it sure was! We like the odd adventure into the "unknown" now and again; it helps to break the routine and is always interesting, sometimes for what happens rather than the landscape. This adventure was a case in point.

Our first major stop on our way north was not far from Liverpool, at the entrance to the River Mersey, to view the spectacular "Crosby Iron Men" - 100 cast-iron figures on the beach facing out to sea along a two-mile stretch of sand.

The controversial installation was created by the well-known artist Anthony Gormley ("Angel of the North" among other works), controversial because the identical statues are of a naked man (modelled on Gormley's own body). I liked them a lot, each statue immersed and uncovered by incoming and outgoing tides and rusting at different rates, some covered with barnacles.

The work was previously installed at Cuxhaven in Germany, Stavanger in Norway and De Panne in Belgium, but finally found a permanent home at Crosby near Liverpool, a major place of both immigration and emigration, where men and women may have looked out to sea imagining their origins or their futures.

Our first night's stay on the long drive from Suffolk was halfway up the UK in an Airbnb. The spacious room above a double garage was well decorated (if somewhat overdone with sparkles, including the towels!) and fitted out with a giant TV screen (which we rarely turn on) in front of the super-king sized bed, plus a kitchen & bathroom.

In a telephone conversation, before we left, Tricia (who is an expert in downloading your life story in 5 minutes flat) discovered that our hosts were having a party on the night of our arrival to celebrate their forthcoming wedding.

The wedding was to take place the following week in Las Vegas, in the "Chapel of Love," presided over by an Elvis Presley impersonator who was going to sing two Elvis songs! We were duly invited to the pre-nuptial party scheduled to continue to 3.00 or 4.00 in the morning. Sounds like an interesting start to the holiday I thought!

Fortunately, the party was taking place on the other side of a substantial manor house in a small complex, complete with its own bar and pool table. Having settled in and had some food, we thought we had better "put in an appearance".

Apart from a large and noisy screen showing music videos, making normal communication difficult, the place was packed - or seemed so as the pool table took up three-quarters of the room. "What would you like to drink - we have almost everything." And they sure had.

We chatted with the hosts, asked about the wedding, and were introduced to others whose names we quickly forgot, and made our escape after an hour or so.

After a night of trying to sleep on a very hard mattress that left us feeling as though we had been beaten up, we packed the car, loaded the dog plus all his luggage, and drove away with not a single late-night partygoer in sight.

Our next target was a hotel on the west coast of mainland Scotland which we had booked for 5 nights, the satnav guiding us through some spectacular scenery along the way and a ferry crossing shortcut that we had not anticipated.

We arrived at the hotel late afternoon. It sat imposingly on the edge of the Loch but as the week progressed it quickly turned into a version of "Faulty Towers" - but with much better service and food!

The first evening's food was exceptional; Scottish Blue Mussels in a delicious sauce, washed down with a good white wine for me. We expressed our appreciation of the food to the chef, whom we shall call "Kyle", and that seemed to set the standard for the rest of the week.

Another delicious meal followed each delicious evening meal, Kyle even going off-menu and asking at breakfast, "Which country would you like to visit tonight?" A seafood platter (we don't eat meat) was followed by dishes from Spain and Italy on other nights, accompanied by half a dozen shots of gin or liqueurs to enhance the flavours!

Pity about the bed - also hard and with the unique feature of being two single mattresses side by side, one mattress slightly higher than the other!

During the day we made several short expeditions, in between rainy downpours, to local forests and a nearby island. Plus the wind was so fierce it was difficult to stand up straight most of the time. We also watched a local Shinty match - sort of like hockey, but much more violent as the very hard ball can be played in the air as well as along the ground.

The local team won 5-0, so the bar at the hotel was busy well into the night.

As the week progressed and conversations took place, it became apparent that there was tension between Kyle together with his partner who managed the hotel, and the director of the company that operated it. Then it turned out that Kyle, his partner, the waiter and the kitchen trainee were all leaving the hotel on the Sunday morning shortly after our scheduled departure.

Towards the end of our stay, we chatted to a young lorry driver who had become stranded after the drive shaft on his truck gave way, and was staying the night. He said he was being picked up very early in the morning and would miss breakfast.

I suggested he speak to Kyle, who I knew started work really early, to see if he could arrange some breakfast for him. Kyle later told us he had given the man his phone number and said, "Phone me in the morning when you are ready and I will get something together for you."

This was fortuitous, as at 03.30 in the morning, the ceiling of the room the lorry driver was in, right next to our bathroom, fell in, the plaster narrowly missing the man fast asleep in his bed! Kyle, it later turned out, had been running around in the loft above our bedroom at 4.00 am trying to find out what the problem was.

It turned out that all the roof struts were sopping wet, and a planned replacement roof was weeks, if not months away. I had already reported a loose mixer tap unit in our bathroom that floated around when you used it, being concerned that the only thing holding it in place was the water pipe below.

Kyle moved us to a similar room on the floor below as a precaution and reported a day later that the window ledge in our original bathroom was extremely wet. The quirk in the new bathroom was that you turned the cold tap off - and then it kept turning and came back on again, an interesting feature of getting the precise placement!

Come Sunday, we duly left thanking Kyle, his partner and the staff for their excellent care and food, but kept in touch. By Monday, we were told, that the hotel, which already had 3 rooms out of action because of a smoke alarm circuit problem, had gone into "administration."

By Tuesday or Wednesday, the lorry driver's former bedroom ceiling had completely fallen in, the ceiling in our original bathroom had collapsed and the ceiling of the bedroom on the first floor, immediately below the lorry driver's room, had also crumbled.

We now hear that the hotel is for sale, so if would like to take part in a sound investment with excellent prospects, please get in touch ..... But without Kyle's cooking, it just won't be the same!

Continuing our journey on Sunday morning, we drove for 90 minutes, with a short stop in stunning Glencoe, and took a long ferry journey across the water to South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. The ferry throbbed its way over a mildly choppy sea and even had accommodation for dogs, complete with a water bowl.

Arriving in South Uist we headed to the north of the island and across the causeway to the island of Benbecula, which is connected by another causeway to North Uist. Unpronounceable Gaelic road signs, with English names printed in very small letters underneath, do their best to confuse you, but a reliable satnav got us to our Airbnb destination.

Again, braving 35 mph winds and avoiding downpours of rain, we made several excursions to beautiful, almost empty white sandy beaches, though some of the beaches had unusual hazards, Benbecula, unknown to us (but presumably not the Russians), being a NATO communications and rocket hub!

We also explored North Uist and found some interesting churches, crofts, local craft shops and a gin distillery which required some serious investment. The Airbnb was reasonably comfortable and uneventful other than a lot of heavy swearing coming through the next-door neighbour's wall on the morning of our departure.

Although we were as quiet as possible, we had to get up at 5.00 am to get to the ferry which was now leaving extra early, we had been informed by email, because of incoming inclement weather. The sea was thankfully calm, but it rained all the way across back to the mainland and rained continuously, all day, down through Scotland, around Glasgow, not subsiding until we got well into Cumbria.

24 hours later, Storm Agnes blew into western Scotland and took out many of the already saturated roads we had driven down a day previously on our journey south. There were reports of a dozen people having to be rescued by helicopter, and all ferries to and from the Western Isles were cancelled. Escape in the nick of time!

Our stay in a friendly pub in Appleby, which gave us our own small cottage to stay in next to the pub garden, was uneventful and we completed our journey back home to Tricia's house the next day, gratefully relaxing into a softer mattress after nightfall.

I returned to France two days later. There's just nothing like coming back home to your own bed, is there?

I don't think it's just the hardness/softness of the mattress, depending on your taste, but the security and familiarity of your own surroundings, as well as being back in your own space. That sigh of satisfaction as you sink back into your own bed after an adventure is just bliss!

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Reflections on the Israel-Gaza-Palestine Crisis

Having written a short while ago about my time living in Israel in the 1970s, I can not go much further without commenting on recent ongoing events in the Middle East.

Let's be clear: Hamas's attack on peaceful kibbutzim villages and a music festival in the south of Israel, killing 1400 people, mostly unarmed civilians, and the removal of over 230, including children and the elderly, as hostages, is brutal terrorism.

The history of Israel/Palestine is a complicated business. Firstly, I think we have to make a distinction between Judaism and modern Zionism. One is a religion and identity and the other has become a right-wing zealous obsession to expand Israel's territory to incorporate the whole of Palestine.

For most of its history, the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland, especially after the Holocaust horrors of WWll, was led by the left-wing politically, and they wanted to create a secular-led government and trade Israeli-held land for peace with their Arab neighbours.

After the 1970s, that began to change and gradually the right-wing and extreme religious groups took over the government. Now they brazenly ignore UN mandates not to build on the Palestinian West Bank and for 3 decades have only paid lip service to calls for the development of twin states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, in my mind the only sensible solution.

Even with the current Gaza situation, West Bank Jewish settlers are shooting and killing Palestinians, stealing their land, and chopping down ancient olive groves. Meanwhile, the Israeli Army stands by and does nothing other than to allow its snipers with their hi-tech rifles to pick off angry stone-slinging Palestinian youths, shooting them dead.

This has been going on for 75 years, and the Palestinians have a right to be angry. 6 million of them now live permanently in or near 68 squalid refugee camps around the Middle East, and too many children are growing up there knowing nothing else. Many Israelis, and Jews around the world, including extremely religious ones, oppose current Zionism and support Palestinian rights.

Not so the Israeli government and their right-wing majority. They see all Palestinian opposition or interference in their plans as an existential fight for existence. They must, therefore, take a large part of the responsibility for the current situation.

Having said that, Hamas, who control the Gaza Strip, are not an elected government and many Palestinians who live there do not want them in control. Hamas is an armed group, probably weaponised and funded by Iran, that killed and drove out the more moderate Fatah officials in 2007, many of them fleeing to the Fatah-controlled West Bank. Hamas also have little hesitation in placing their military bases in residential buildings, hospitals, schools or next to UN aid buildings.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which is understandable, but their way of going about that is not acceptable. To drive 1.2 million out of the 2.3 million citizens in Gaza southwards towards the closed Egyptian border, where they are still not safe, and to cut off their food, water, fuel and electricity supplies is beyond inhumane.

Even worse is the mass bombing of Gaza City, turning it into rubble and killing numerous elderly, children and whole families who have no choice about where they can be. As I write, the latest figure for deaths in Gaza has topped 8,000. I doubt if many of those could be classed as "Hamas terrorists," as they are far more likely to be innocent civilians. Bombs don't discriminate. The official sites to bury people in Gaza were full long ago and are now closed.

Israel is threatening a ground invasion of Gaza, which could result in even more deaths, but PM Benjamin Netanyahu hesitates because of world opinion and the political consequences. He is right to hesitate.

Support for the Palestinians and their right to have a proper homeland of their own is growing, marked by massive demonstrations in cities all around the world. Given Jewish history, Israel should know better than most the consequences of attempted genocide.

The one small hope in this for the long term is that perhaps the UN and the stronger countries of the world, plus world opinion, will force Israel to see sense and carve out two states for Palestinians and Jews, both descendants of the same Semitic tribes, to live side by side in peace. It has been done before - it can be done again.

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Reconnecting With the Past

One of my favourite podcasts, Heavyweight with Jonathan Goldstein, is back after a long break.

We have all had childhood friends that as we grow up into adulthood, we completely lost touch with. Then as we get older we think about them and wonder what sort of a life they have had.

In this edition, Jonathan wonders about his best friend in childhood, Lenny, and decides to get in touch. I found this story really moving, HERE or on Apple or Spotify.

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Relentless

Sharks invariably get bad press, and although they can still be dangerous predators, they are also crucial to deep-sea ecosystems.

So meet "Relentless," a nurse shark that has been interacting with the same diver for more than 10 years. Not sure about the "love and affection" bit, but she sure likes attention.

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Walking With Wolves

If you thought petting sharks was a little bit hairy, how about spending 72 hours living with wolves?

Here three young people go to stay at the Apex Protection Project, which seeks to get wolves relisted as a protected species after the Trump administration removed such protection, leading to many killings.

They even take them out for a walk in the wild, off the lead, and they happily return home.

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Unveiling the Mysteries of Plankton

Probably, like me, you have heard the phrase "they feed on plankton" when referring to whales and other large sea creatures, but never really known what "plankton" is, other than a "microscopic organism."

Turns out they are tiny fish or fish-like creatures but sometimes more like prawns or jellyfish, between 2 and 40mm in size (check that out on a ruler) and fortunately, there are trillions of them in the oceans. Japanese underwater photographer Ryo Minemizu has spent 20 years photographing them off the coast of Japan.

Through trial and error, Minemizu developed a night dive he calls the Black Water Dive with underwater lighting and spends 2 - 8 hours a day beneath the surface photographing these minute creatures.

As you can see, it is a whole new world of diverse and extraordinary beauty.

​You can see more of Ryo Minemizu's "Jewels in the Night Sea," HERE:​

Credits: My thanks to Karen and Tricia for their input as always. Photo Credits: Peter Clifford x 18, Chris Howells/Antony Gormley/Wikimedia Commons, John Locher/AP/NPR, Neil G Paterson/BBC, Geology.com, Mohamad Trokman/Financial Times, Andalou Agency/Andalou/Getty Images/The Guardian, Toby Melville/Reuters/AlJazeera, Heavyweight/Gimlet Media, Ryo Minemizu x 6/My Modern Met.

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END PIECE

The war between Israel and Hamas has continued to expand as I have been putting together this newsletter. Israel claims to have bombed more than 450 "military targets" in the last 24 hours and started a ground attack on the northern part of the Gaza Strip enclave.

Phone communications and internet, which were disconnected by Israel for a couple of days, have been restored, but the pictures of distressed, injured and killed Gazan children are almost impossible to look at. Medical authorities say more than 3,000 minors have died. This is too much to bear - innocent lives needlessly wiped out.

"An eye for an eye," is a lousy philosophy, and all Israel will end up doing is creating yet another generation of Hamas-like fighters who will pursue the Hamas-declared manifesto to "exterminate the Israeli state." Somehow, we need a Mandela or a miracle to stop this destructive, murderous cycle.

Until the next time, take good care of yourself - and be kind, caring, generous and patient with those less fortunate than we are - and live in peace with your neighbours, however difficult they may sometimes be!

All good wishes,