Week-end

Week-end spelled in the old-fashioned way is Saturday and Sunday. Nowadays, of course, the two words usually run together as weekend, but people take the meaning generally as the same thing, apart from bank holiday weekends, which run into Monday.

It’s the end of the conventional working nine to five week. In our collective mentality in the UK, it conjures up images of day trips out for the family with the children. For some, this means hikes in the countryside up mountains or across dales, museum trips or visits to aquariums, zoos or the seaside.

However, many find comfort and pleasure in home time. On freezing cold days, all ages like to curl up with a hot drink to get lost in their favourite novel on Kindle or in hard copy, lounge on their bed or sofa listening to their favourite music or a podcast or maybe text friends and surf the Internet for good online shopping offers in clothes and footwear to click and collect later.

Summer, thankfully, offers the opportunity for good family time, such as barbecues with grandparents, while the kids play on slides or go in the paddling pool in the back garden.

I have many happy memories of such days. I remember out pet kitten called Toby leaping up at a butterfly, while my amazing Gran, who lived with us sunned herself in a deck chair and I pottered around in a cotton dress my Mum had made.

Out of the two days, Sunday has a character of its own. For those in my own ethnicity (white northern and British), it means a roast dinner; mainly roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with roast potatoes and two or three veg, followed by a pudding with custard or apple pie with cream and ending with a drink of tea.

As a poet, here is my own take on weekends.

Week-End

1.
Saturday, Sunday,
Chill-out time days,
Laze and lie in ways,
to savour your novel
over cocoa
and a biscuit bar
for dunking,
Lunch with friends
a blaze of chatter
in artsy cafes.

2.
For families,
Away-days beckon,
Seaside haunts with fairs,
Fortune tellers, fish shops
or forest trails
Cracking with bracken,
Cities with story,
Back-in-time tours,
a window into the why,
how and who of today.

3.
For those with cash,
the beckoning break,
Reality paradise,
Driveaways, fly-aways
Coasts, Coves and Castles
to rediscover romance
and each other,
Say the things you should say,
Find harmony in love,
But these things have a price.

If you don’t believe me, maybe you should take a look at Taylor Swift’s account she shared online about her holiday stay in actor Dominic West’s Irish castle (at the cost of £14,000 a night).

She didn’t spend a weekend there, but at £28,000 for two nights, I am sure many people would be tempted to make their holiday there a short stay!

Taylor Swift's week-end

From the pop star’s account, the holiday she enjoyed sounds fantastic, from photographs of the property, it looks like a dream and being a historical tour guide in London, boy, would I like to stay in that castle!

It would make me feel like a queen in somewhere like Hampton Court.

However, even if I had that kind of money, I personally would feel guilty because of the amount of people suffering homelessness and facing illegal evictions on account of the lax laws of our land that don’t protect innocent citizens.

For the more normal people that people like you and I are likely to run into, (unless you have your own caravan), holiday companies go full belt with temptations to potential customers. They promise city breaks, seaside locations or country hideaways. Another option for some is to have their own holiday pad – an apartment or holiday cottage – which means, of course, you always have to go to the same place, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.

It is the latter situation that inspires creative writers and composers.

Fiction writers seem to enjoy exploring the dark side of humanity through this short break, the weekend from hell.

Weekend, a short story by Fay Weldon is set in a weekend cottage where the central character finds herself in the same situation as her female forbears, in spite of being allowed to earn money.

It is a feminist take on 1970s Britain, when gender roles were still clearly defined.

The other female in the story, Katie does not offer empathy based on gender to the downtrodden wife and mother. There is no sense of sisterhood.

The protagonist, Martha, whose point of view the story revolves around, is also shown as being complicit in people using her.

The work offers a cynical view about human nature, as though sexual relationships are all about power struggles and there is no room for the fine sides of human nature like tenderness and romance.

In a similar vein, the page-turner set in Lisbon, A Weekend Away, by Sarah Alderson conjures up a sense of the Saturday and Sunday from hell when the central character’s horrible friend goes missing and sleazy, vile characters pop up all over the place.

Personally, I found the ending rather too far-fetched for my liking and implausible that all these horrible people could come into contact with one decent person, or that the subject of the book would not have concluded far sooner than she did just how awful her so-called friend was.

Nevertheless, there is a good chapter-by-chapter hook to want you to read on and it is certainly entertaining reading.

The reality for many is that weekends are pretty uneventful for most people.

It seems appropriate to end the blog on a happier note, especially considering how things have been moving internationally.

Something to lift peoples’ spirits in these uncertain and shadowy times is surely the great song Weekend in New England.

The song reflects New Yorkers’ liking for a short, romantic coastal holiday accessible by a drive up the coast to the states of New England where, as the song says, they can enjoy the “long rocky beaches.”

Penned by Randy Edelman, an American musician, producer and composer, he recorded it for his 1975 album Farewell Fairbanks.

How it became a hit recorded by Barry Manilow, well, thereby hangs a tale.

Edelman made changes to his composition after the President of Arista Records, Clive Davis, who wanted Barry Manilow to record it convinced him that simplification of the verses could make it a hit.

The rest is history.

So why not click on the link below, lie back and enjoy this great song?

Barry Manilow - Weekend In New England

Thanks for reading. Have a good week-end,

Anne G. Dilley

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Strange But True

At 2:10 pm on 5th December 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.

Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6:20 p.m., apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel.

By this time, several land radar stations finally determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast, and at 7:27 p.m. a search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its home base that its mission was underway. The Mariner was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion seen at 7:50 p.m.

The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.

Although naval officials maintained that the remains of the six aircraft and 27 men were not found because stormy weather destroyed the evidence, the story of the “Lost Squadron” helped cement the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to disappear without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from the southern U.S. coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo Domingo.

There is a long catalogue of missing aircraft and ocean-going craft lost without trace in this notorious region of the Atlantic.

• 1945: July 10, Thomas Arthur Garner, AMM3, USN, along with eleven other crew members, was lost at sea in a US Navy PBM3S patrol seaplane, Bu. No.6545, Sqd VPB2-OTU#3, in the Bermuda Triangle. They left the Naval Air Station, Banana River, Florida, at 7:07 p.m. on July 9, 1945, for a radar training flight to Great Exuma, Bahamas. Their last radio position report was sent at 1:16 a.m., July 10, 1945, with a latitude/longitude of 25-22N 77.34W, near Providence Island, after which they were never heard from again. An extensive ten day surface and air search, including a carrier sweep, found nothing
• 1945: December 5, Flight 19 (five TBF Avengers) lost with 14 airmen, and later the same day PBM Mariner BuNo 59225 lost with 13 airmen while searching for Flight 19
• 1948: January 30, Avro Tudor G-AHNP Star Tiger lost with six crew and 25 passengers, en route from Santa Maria Airport in the Azores to Kindley Field, Bermuda1948: December 28, Douglas DC-3 NC16002 lost with three crew and 36 passengers, en route from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. 1949: January 17, Avro Tudor G-AGRE Star Ariel lost with seven crew and 13 passengers, en route from Kindley Field, Bermuda, to Kingston Airport, Jamaica. 1956: November 9, Martin Marlin lost ten crewmen taking off from Bermuda.

The list continues into modern times. The explanations given for the disappearances range from the sublime to the ridiculous;

1. The paranormal -  Some writers have blamed UFOs for the disappearances. They believe that aliens use the Triangle as a portal to travel to and from our planet. The area is like a gathering station where they capture people, ships and aircraft to conduct research.

2. The lost city of Atlantis - Theorists believe the fabled city once resided under the Triangle and mystical crystals which powered Atlantis are still resting on the seabed transmitting huge waves of energy that destroy the vessels on the sea above.

3. Gigantic structures under the sea - Paranormal explorers claimed they found a massive crystal pyramid lurking beneath the ocean within the triangle. They implied that this might be responsible for crashing aircraft and sinking ships.

4. Souls of African slaves - One of the most significant theories is that the Triangle is made up of the souls of slaves who had been thrown overboard by sea captains on their journey to the States. In his book Healing the Haunted, Dr Kenneth McAll claimed that a haunting sound could be heard while sailing in the notorious waters.

5. Government testing - The US Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC) is located in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. It's used as a hub to test submarines, weapons, sonar, secret projects and reverse-engineered alien technology, and some say it is behind the phenomenon. 

 

A more recent theory was posed by scientists investigating strange hexagonal patterning in cloud formations over the 440,000 square mile area of the Bermuda Triangle. While looking at satellite images of coastal clouds above the North Atlantic Ocean, the meteorologists reportedly noted strange patterns of hexagonal gaps as large as 88 kilometers (55 miles) in the cloud formations, according to Science Channel. It just so happens, this bizarre phenomenon was found on the west tip of the Bermuda Triangle, as well as a precarious point in Europe's North Sea.“These types of hexagonal shapes in the ocean are, in essence, air bombs," Dr Randy Cerveny, a meteorologist from Arizona State University, told the Science Channel’s What on Earth show. "They’re formed by what is called microbursts and they’re blasts of air that come down out of the bottom of the cloud and then hit the ocean and then create waves, sometimes massive in size..."

The scientists believe that these “air bombs” could pump winds to move at over 273 kilometers (170 miles) per hour, which could account for the handful of reports of ships going missing in the area.

Whatever the real reason for these tragedies, I have always found the phenomenon totally fascinating.xAnd of course, Barry Manilow wrote and recorded a song about it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIsdMO6TBx4

Thank you for reading. Adele  

 

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