Barometric pressures

“My Nan left me a barometer in her will. I have it hung on the wall and I tap it and announce to my family that the needle is going up or down. I haven’t a clue what it means.”

The message read out on the breakfast show would have found a resonance with many listeners for whom a barometer on the wall was a common sight in younger days.

The barometer occupied a place of importance inside the front door of the farmhouse. It was in the corridor in there was also the hall stand upon which rested the black Bakelite telephone. The number, Long Sutton 217, was easily remembered, it was recited every time there was a call.

The barometer was treated with a sense of gravity comparable with that with which the telephone was answered. Each morning my grandmother would tap on the glass of the barometer that hung on the wall of the farmhouse and ponder the result with a serious air.

Falling pressure meant the approach of changeable weather. In Somerset changeable weather meant rain and rain might mean the loss of hay or harvest.

It was not as though the weather forecast was not listened to on the wireless in the kitchen at breakfast and lunchtimes, or watched on the television evening news on the television in the sitting room. Certainly, weather forecasts lacked the accuracy of those now constantly available online, but how was the daily check on the barometer any more accurate?

Perhaps my grandmother had read the hall barometer for so many years that even the slightest fall or rise of the needle was enough to tell her the prospects for day ahead. To have looked out of the kitchen window would only have confirmed what the needle had told her.

On a small farm, where money was not plentiful and where mistakes could make the difference between a small profit and a significant loss, my grandmother could have given a ready explanation for the seriousness with which she approached the daily tap on the glass.

Presumably, before people’s Nans had barometers, there were numerous local ways of telling what the weather might be, ways passed down from generation to generation.

With three different weather apps on my phone, I would feel no need to tap the glass of a barometer, even if I possessed one. In a generation’s time, will anyone remember the significant part they once played in people’s lives?

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The anniversary of Rat and Mole

It is the anniversary of the publication of one of the most popular of children’s books of all time. On this day in 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows was published. It has remained in print ever since.

It is fifty years since I first read it, there are lines that still remain fresh in the mind from that first reading.

The ever buoyant Rat and the depressive pessimist Mole have gone to Mole’s house, from which Mole has been absent for some time. They make a good fist of restoring it to a homely condition, but Mole is then hit by a dark wave.

Mole promptly had another fit of the blues, dropping down on a couch in dark despair and burying his face in his duster. “Rat,” he moaned, “how about your supper, you poor, cold, hungry, weary animal? I’ve nothing to give you – nothing – not a crumb!”

“What a fellow you are for giving in!” said the Rat reproachfully. “Why, only just now I saw a sardine-opener on the kitchen dresser, quite distinctly; and everybody knows that means there are sardines about somewhere in the neighbourhood. Rouse yourself! pull yourself together, and come with me and forage.”

They went and foraged accordingly, hunting through every cupboard and turning out every drawer. The result was not so very depressing after all, though of course it might have been better; a tin of sardines, a box of captain’s biscuits, nearly full, and a German sausage encased in silver paper.

“There’s a banquet for you!” observed the Rat, as he arranged the table. “I know some animals who would give their ears to be sitting down to supper with us to-night!”

“No bread!” groaned the Mole dolorously; “no butter, no–”

“No pate de foie gras, no champagne!” continued the Rat, grinning. “And that reminds me, what’s that little door at the end of the passage? Your cellar, of course! Every luxury in this house! Just you wait a minute.”

He made for the cellar-door, and presently reappeared, somewhat dusty, with a bottle of beer in each paw and another under each arm, “Self-indulgent beggar you seem to be, Mole,” he observed. “Deny yourself nothing. This is really the jolliest little place I ever was in.

As someone of a Moleish rather than a rodentine persuasion, there is a tendency to note the half empty glasses, to see the cloud around every silver lining.  But I am glad I also have Rat moments, those times when there is great delight in small things.

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A card for health

Extraordinary as it seems to me, the date approaches when I shall no longer have to pay for NHS prescriptions. The National Health Service is something for which I shall always be grateful.

POVJ 46 was my National Health Service number. It is easily remembered because my encounters with the health service were very frequent. I still have an NHS card printed with instructions on how to avail of the services.

The autumn of 1974 seemed the worst of times; the asthma had become chronic, chest infection followed chest infection and the prescriptions seemed to come in quick order. Reduced to a pale shadow by bronchitis, days would be passed reading whatever books might lie around and reading newspapers from cover to cover.

Dr Ingram had been our family doctor for decades and when my asthma was especially severe he would arrive at the house with his wisdom and his old leather bag. Once he even appeared unexpectedly, peering in through the window to announce his arrival; he had just been passing. Dr Ingram would have time to talk about all sorts, even on horse racing on the television.

Going to the surgery meant a journey to Langport, the small town three miles from our village. Once a week, though, a doctor would come to hold a surgery in our village. Lacking a suitable venue, the front parlour of the village pub was used as the consulting room for two hours each Wednesday afternoon.

How was there so much time? Why were we so unhurried? Was the medical practice very small? Were people healthier? The National Health Service was but a quarter of a century old, perhaps the demands upon it were less severe.

Perhaps the NHS Card conveyed a sense of the seriousness with which the service should be approached. It suggested that being unable to produce the card might  mean that the doctor would charge a fee for his services. In accident or emergency, one was to approach one’s own doctor first. Being absent from home for three months or less meant one could approach a local doctor and apply for treatment as a “temporary resident.” Should one wish to change doctor for any reason other than a change of address, one could only do so with the consent of one’s existing doctor.

While I love the NHS, we have moved from a medical system filled with a certain rustic charm to the point where we have reached a situation where it is impossible to imagine how a modern Dr Ingram would find a place in the health service. Perhaps we are less healthy than we were, perhaps medical care has become increasingly sophisticated, perhaps bureaucracy has expanded. How now could we run a national health service with a card system?

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Maritime dreams

In a cloud of spray, the lorry bearing the logo of Maritime Transport rolled steadily down the M5 motorway in Somerset. The  trailer was buffeted by the strong winds and surface water left by the heavy rain parted like a wake and was dispersed to the left and right. If conditions were like this on an inland motorway, they must have been considerably more unpleasant at sea.

Such days as these were the ones that put me off the sea. The slightest ripple on the surface of the water can leave me struggling with nausea. To be in the channel as a full storm struck would have left me feeling unwell for days afterward. A storm on the Irish Sea once forced me to seek help from the doctor in Langport who told me my seasickness had burned my throat and prescribed a bottle of Gaviscon.

Despite the painful reality of experience, the Maritime Transport lorry still evoked imaginings of the sea: sights, sounds and smells.

Perhaps John Masefield was responsible. A poet hardly read now, he was a writer who attracted both satire and respect from Siegfried Sassoon. Masefield was poet laureate for almost forty years, and his poems were among those we read at primary school in High Ham. For me, Masefield’s poem Sea Fever still has the power it had fifty years ago:

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Masefield embraced the very aspects of maritime life which gave me an aversion to the sea. The wind and the spray of the M5 motorway and a passing blue lorry are sufficient for my maritime dreams.

 

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An odd sign

It is some years since I last noticed the sign. Checking recently, it was still there.

Walking through Langport, you can cut from the church at the top of The Hill, past the old Saint Gilda’s Convent, and down Priest Lane to North Street. At some point in history, there must have been some reason for the lane, though it is unlikely that any priest would walk along it now. The parish church is closed, the parish being absorbed into the parish of Huish Episcopi, which encircles it, and the church of which stands only hundreds of yards from Langport church. The old rectory, at the top of the hill, ceased to be a clerical dwelling decades ago.

Priest Lane is more an alley than a lane, high walls line either side of it and it can be barely more than six feet wide at some points. Even as a pathway, it does not seem very frequented, though it is kept clean and its tarmac surface is well maintained.

Set into the wall at the top of the lane, there is a stern metal sign warning against misuse of the lane. It is cast iron and of some antiquity:

SOMERSET COUNTY COUNCIL
NOTICE
THIS LANE IS FOR THE USE OF
FOOT PASSENGERS ONLY
ANY PERSON DRIVING A MOTOR VEHICLE
HEREON IS LIABLE TO PROSECUTION

It seems an odd sign, what is a foot passenger? The Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “passenger” is “a traveller on a public or private conveyance other than the driver, pilot, or crew.”  The prohibition is not against passengers of non-motorised vehicles; presumably one might pass down Priest Lane in a pony and trap or on horseback, but that would not make one a “foot passenger.” To be a foot passenger seems almost a contradiction in terms, how can one be on foot and simultaneously be a passenger?

The sign would appear to be from times when prohibitions were taken seriously and when language was used in an exact way. What did they mean by foot passengers? The Oxford Dictionary definition of  “foot passenger” is, “a person travelling on foot rather than by car, especially one taking a ferry:” it doesn’t offer any clarification. Langport is at some remove from the sea and a long way from the nearest ferry, a foot passenger going down Priest Lane had a long walk before they might actually have become a foot passenger.

The county council official responsible for the sign undoubtedly had a precise meaning in mind when he chose the words for the sign: decades later it is baffling.

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