When I awoke yesterday morning, it was to be of those days when, as you look out of the bedroom window, the sky appears to a mixture of grey and a light murky yellow. The day promises to be quite a fine one in the morning once the cloud has burned off but we are to expect increasingly cloudy conditions into the afternoon. Whilst was preparing my early cup of morning cup of tea, I decided to see what my forthcoming musical presentation would sound like if played on my ancient iPad. To my surprise, it came out as quite an acceptable sound and, despite the occasional advert as we are relying upon YouTube, and a combination of the videoclips accompanying the arias I have chosen and the music itself will give me the overall effect I am trying to achieve. Of course, I will be making the point that my love of Mozart operas is not only a treat for the ears but a visual as well as an emotional journey as each entry is played. I have to admit that playing my iPad in my kitchen gives a slightly different effect as there are plenty of hard surfaces from which the sound can rebound, rather than the soft furnishings of a living room, but nonetheless playing the presentation over to myself reminds me of what I intend to say about each item on the agenda.
Quite a shocking and unusual accident is being reported upon as I write as a plane flying from Montreal in Canada has crashed into a fire truck in La Guardia airport in New York. As the nose of the plan struck the fire truck, the nose of the plane reared into the air and both the pilot and the co-pilot have been killed outright whereas all of the passengers appear to be safe although some are injured. This is one of the most unusual types of aeroplane accidents that I can ever remember as it is often the case that passengers who suffer most badly in an air crash and not the pilots. No doubt many more details will emerge but it appears that the firetruck was responding to a separate incident at the time. One would have thought that a firetruck is more than capable of getting out of the way of a large plane rather than the other way around but we will have to see what emerges. According to the news breaking last night, The American ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is planning to enter every airport in the United States and arrest those they deem to be illegal immigrants almost the minute they step off the plane. There is already an agency within the US charged with the tasks of ensuring security and it is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) which is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that has authority over the security of transportation systems within and connecting to the United States. However, the Trump administration has transformed ICE into a practically private army which roams around American cities to do Trump’s bidding and, of course, it was ICE agents that killed two American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis before the local population rose up and effectively demanded that their city be left alone. What is so frightening about the personnel recruited to ICE is that they are very heavily armed, are masked to avoid identification, do not appear to have any IDs evident to the outside world and appear to have been recruited in great quantities from a much increased budget. Congress is deadlocked over the issue of the deployment of these ICE agents as the Democrats are trying to block the funding stream that has allowed so many to be recruited and deployed but Trump’s private army appears to be not an inaccurate description. To British eyes, this seems absolutely horrifying but the Trump administration and ‘modus operandi’ are actually quite admired on the far right of British politics and one wonders if Reform were to win the next election whether this American import will be replicated on the streets of Britain. I think the time has past when we can say to ourselves that ‘it will never happen here’ as the world appears to be evolving in such dangerous directions.
After a light salad lunch, my son, daughter-in-law and I continued our investigation into my grandmothers (and hence my mother’s) origins but we have precious little to go on. Part of the problem is that we not have birth certificates or even town of birth to go on ad there happen to be quite a lot of ‘Alice Maud Ward’s around in the 1890’s. But we have a 1911 census form entry which we know is genuine as it matches up with some of my grandmother’s writing in a book of poems given to my mother when she was 15 years old. We are currently working on one line of enquiry where it was possible that my grandmother was ‘passed around’ the family because we have located a record where she may have been living with her grandfather in the Hull area at the time of the 1890 census at the age of 10-11 but I need to contact my sister to see if she has the slightest fragment of information that might help us in or searches. As with all historical records, it is possible that errors were made at the time the data was collected – we have found a record, for example, where my mother’s name may have been entered incorrectly as’Maria’ rather than Marie and then corrected later as the final type written ‘e’ does not align with the rest of the name. My son and I very carefully removed a picture of a sailing ship from its frame to see if we could find a provenance or a date but nothing was yielded up so we taped it all up again. In the late afternoon, I thought I really needed to get on and carry on with 30-40 minutes of patio clearance (scraping moss from between the slabs) so I now have about one half of this job completed. My son and daughter-in-law invested in a good home-produced outdoor reared chicken so this will be the first of many meals that the bird will provide for us in the next few days.