News from Potters' friends
Petit fait divers à Penzance Cornwall
Nothing ever happens in Madron, nobody gets eaten by sharks or even cougars, trees don’t seem to fall down on people, houses do not collapse in the night .....in fact there is nothing to laugh at all!
Then a couple of days ago, a VERY NAUGHTY BUS arrived in the village from Penzance. It drove through the village to the last stop outside the cemetery. Normally, it stops, picks up passengers and then reverses into the adjacent road and goes back to Penzance Bus Station without leaving a trail of destruction and chaos. But......this time. It crashed into bus stop SHELTER, and ran over the lovely and fairly new stainless steel reducing it to complete devastation. Wasn’t it a naughty bus??
Today the men came from the Council to remove the wreckage, nothing was worth salvaging, apart from the seat that seemed to miraculously escaped injury or destruction. The problem now is that the people are too scared to sit on it, in case the naughty bus comes back to finish the job.
I saw some regular bus passengers waiting about 50 meters away today, where they said they felt safer!! They said they would wait for the bus to stop before nervously approaching it.
Needless to say this has created a major talking point in the village. The men from the Council, gave the shelter a good funeral, and said it was total scrap metal. They also said that the village might get a new one for Christmas....if they are lucky. A cheaper alternative would be some umbrellas perhaps, in a nice umbrella stand??
I forgot to tell you this earlier..
Regards Battered but survived
John
Postscript: I did not hear what happened to the naughty bus, but I will guess it will be a long time before it is “well” enough to come back up the hill to Madron. John Shute 31 oct
Cette page est réservée à nos amis anglophones. Ce second texte a été écrit par Patricia Thompson qui anime avec Rob et Yannick le groupe d'anglais de 18h. Un très beau texte sur le cinéma.
On Monday, the Spanish group went to the cinema, and that made me think about my favourite films.
I like films that make me laugh and films that make me think! My 2 favourite films are called “Made in Dagenham” and “Hidden Figures”. They are very different films but they are both about groups of women who are discriminated against at their work but who brought about huge changes in the workplace.
Made in Dagenham is set in a car factory in England. The women in Dagenham made the car seat covers for Ford cars. It was a skilled job but they were paid only 2/3 of the wages of male skilled workers. So they went strike. Very quickly, the factories were unable to produce any more cars because they didn’t have any seats to put in them, so the men could not work and were not paid! Eventually Ford gave in and paid the women at the same rate as men and eventually it was made the law that men and women should have equal pay!
Hidden Figures is set in USA at NASA; the three woman... all black and all discriminated against because they were black and female. One of the “Hidden Figures”, worked on the computers who managed the unmanned space flights, one of them did the calculations for the trajectory of the space vehicles and one of them was in the team who were designing the space module ready for a manned flight. None of them were allowed into their departments team meetings. All three were paid less than the men in their team ... and indeed were not even allowed to share bathroom facilities with the white women. BUT... all three succeeded. The engineer managed to go to university for a degree, (but only after going to court to persuade a judge to let her join a class of white students). The computer figure was the only person who could understand the working of the giant IBM computer – so large that it filled a whole room. The mathematician did all the calculations for the space flight. She had the absolute confidence of the astronauts. In fact, when the computer took over the calculations for his flight, the astronaut who was the first to fly around the earth, Alan Shepherd, would not take off till the computer figures had been verified by the mathematician!
Patricia Thompson le 12 octobre 2022
On Sunday, I went out in lovely sunshine, for my daily walk. We have of late, been having some very stormy weather. Tail ends of tropical storms that lash our shores relentlessly.
It must be said, that Saturday evening was no exception to this, and for two or three hours, horrific torrential rain was falling from a near horizontal plane, in the gale force wind. To my surprise, as I awoke on Sunday, the sun was shining, the storm had passed.
I set out on my walk and went through the village of Madron, passing the lovely early English style church, and onto the footpath system across the fields. On my way, I met an old farmer who actually owns the land on which I was walking. He gave me the latest “news” of his now practically inactive farming life and business. He told me that it was no longer worth “farming” as such. “Diesel is the same cost of gold” he said “AND....nowhere near as shiny”. He still has his Massey Ferguson 35hp Tractor, a near relic of the past. He went on to say that equipment that goes with it, is no longer really serviceable or big enough or fast enough to make economic sense. That, I conclude, is his excuse for not farming. To be fair, he is 75 and has a lovely bungalow just above his fields, and a Ford Focus to drive to town in. So, life for him seems sweet enough, and he even told me he has over a million British Pounds in his bank. I wished him a good day, and with such lovely sunshine that was hard to fail to achieve that, even at 75 years old.
Just along the path a short distance, a man was walking his dog. He spoke perfect English but with a slight German accent. He told me that he “worked” with his dog, all day, everyday. The dog was a German Pointer. He then revealed that he was a German Customs/Excise Officer. His beautiful dog was his tool of the trade, as a DRUG sniffer. He was trained to sniff all the common drugs including Heroine and cocaine, ketamine and so on. The man and his dog had worked very effectively together for the last few years. The man told me that his dog had detected Millions of Euros worth of drugs, and prevented them from reaching their destination, the streets of Germany.
His dog was very friendly, but very obedient. He was allowed to go and play chase with other dogs when they came along and played very gently with them. The other dogs seem to know that the German pointer was a friendly visitor, and a good time was had by all. Eventually, we reached a place, where I went one way, the German Customs Officer went the other. I said “Auf Wiedersehen und Alles Gut” or Farewell and all that is good!! He replied “You should come and live in Germany, you speak German well. I replied that I might speak it, but I cannot write it!! He then asked how had I learnt it. I replied that I worked in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and “picked it up”, as does a child. To me this is the only way to learn, spoken language. Once a language is written it changes into another dimension.
This all, is true, and I never had a German lesson in life. Not in this life, but a Psychic Medium Lady in France, told me that I was a WW2 German Navy Officer in a former life. I had explained to her that I had a weird creepy feeling when I visited St Nazaire Submarine Base. She said that the reason was simple for her to see. When I asked her how I died in this former life, she replied that I was most careful “near water”. So I was left to assume that I drowned, when my submarine either sunk or was blown up!! I also have claustrophobia, a fact she soon told me, when we met. This would be the reason that I showed fear, near submarines I guess. Even when I just see them, I get a strange feeling.
Life often brings unexpected surprises, but for one lovely German dog, when he sniffed me, he was surprised too, when he DID NOT find any drugs on me!!
John Shute le 3 octobre 2022