Peter Rhodes on ticks, apps and a relative with 11 children
We can’t have a proper English summer without some terrible seasonal threat (drought, fire, famine, rabies, malaria et cetera) to worry about.
Bang on cue comes TBEV, a virus carried by ticks which has been discovered in Yorkshire, Hampshire and Norfolk. TBEV comes with all manner of vague of symptoms including “confusion and reduced consciousness.”
Sounds much like any other summer holiday.
A grovelling apology arrives from Nick Slape, chief executive officer of the Co-operative Bank, after the bank’s app crashed for a few days. As is customary with mass inconveniences such as this, the CEO begins his missive to customers with a dose of corporate cobblers: “I would like to thank you for your patience.”
Listen. Patience is a virtue, entered into willingly. Tearing out your hair because you can’t access your bloody account on the bloody smartphone for bloody days on end is not patience. It is seething, incandescent fury.
Interestingly, while this hi-tech disaster was unfolding for customers using smartphones, the Co-op’s old but excellent telephone banking service was as reliable as ever. Spot the moral?
A few days ago I referred to Aunt Maude, the lady who opened her home to my father, a child evacuee, in 1939.
I have never been able to find out who she was.
The hunt goes on, aided by a reader who is a genealogist and has kindly delved into the cobwebby corners of the Rhodes / Horsefall families in the early 20th century. It is good to be reminded of where we come from. In the 1911 Census we find my great-grandfather living in a four-room house in Leeds with his wife and 11 children aged between a few months and 20. It sounds like hell on earth.
Yet huge families and gross overcrowding were the norm. I once met a woman who was one of 11 children born to a bargee and his wife living on a canal narrowboat in Coventry.
After the 11th baby, the parents decided the boat was too small and moved to a terraced house – where they proceeded to have a further 11 children.
During the current debate on slavery, it’s a timely reminder that the riches of the Empire didn’t reach everybody.
In the days when Britain had the biggest empire in the world, we also had the worst slums in Europe.
