ENJOYING NEUVILE-ASK & SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP

Today, The Grandma got up early so as not to miss the plane that took her to Brussels where Joseph de Ca'th Lon was waiting for her to drive to Neuville-Ask where they plan to attend the France-Italy Six Nations match this afternoon.

It has been an intense morning of accumulated sleep and coffees, but now they will rest a little at the hotel, write this new post, watch the first half of the FA Women's Cup match between Manchester United and Chelsea, and Joseph will give her a summary (if possible) of their stay at the Olympic Games. Then, they will go to the Stade Pierre-Mauroy where they hope to experience a great rugby spectacle, possibly the most honest sport and with the fairest play in the entire sports panorama.

Joseph is a fan of Ireland and The Grandma of the U.E.Santboiana where she has great friends like Toni, Susanna, Àngels or Mima, who have made her enjoy this spectacular sport. If you like rugby, any Six Nations match should be watched, and if possible, lived.

Tomorrow they will make a quick visit to Lille before returning to Basel and Barcelona, where both must continue with their respective lives.

Neuvile-Ask is a very beautiful city, where Picard is historically spoken, with a great sporting tradition where its women's basketball team stands out, but it is also one of the headquarters of the French national rugby team when it plays in the Six Nations. 

Neuvile-Ask in Picard or Villeneuve-d'Ascq in French  is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. With more than 60,000 inhabitants and 50,000 students, it is one of the main cities of the Lille metropolitan area (Métropole Européenne de Lille) and the largest in area after the city of Lille itself. It is also one of the main cities of the Hauts-de-France region.

Built up owing to the merger between the former communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers-lez-Lille, Neuvile-Ask is a new town and the cradle of the first automatic metro system in the world (VAL).

Neuvile-Ask is nicknamed the 'green technopole' thanks to the implantation of many researchers, including two campuses of the University of Lille and many graduate engineering schools, and companies in a pleasant living environment. Owing to its activity centres, its Haute Borne European scientific park and two shopping malls, Neuvile-Ask is one of the main economic spots of the Hauts-de-France region; multinational corporations such as Bonduelle, Cofidis and Decathlon have their head office there.

Outside its academic, scientific and business facilities, Neuvile-Ask is known for its sporting events, boasting two stadiums (Stade Pierre-Mauroy and Stadium Lille Métropole), some top division sports teams, its museums, its green spaces, and its facilities for disabled people.

Its name means new city of Ascq in French. Ascq is possibly derived from the Dutch word for ash. The name of the city is generally written without the customary (official) hyphen.

The city counts approximately 10 km2 of greenspace, lakes, forests and arable lands. It is located between Lille and Roubaix, at the crossroads of the principal freeways towards Paris, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels.

Development on what is now Neuvile-Ask can be traced back to the Celtic Gaul era, and are anchored in two feudal mounds, a Gallo-Roman site and a Carolingian one.

The area was selected in the 1960s to accommodate a new town then designated the name Lille-Est, which was to channel the growth of the agglomeration of Lille city and development of institutions based in the area. The commune of Neuvile-Ask was created in 1970 by the amalgamation of the communes of Ascq, Annappes and Flers. Its name evokes at the same time the new (neuve) and the old: former commune Ascq and its memory as martyr town of 1 April 1944, date on which the Nazis massacred 86 men (Ascq massacre).

The city's merger with Lille was contentious and failed twice (1972 and 1976). The Hôtel de Ville was completed in 1977.

The Stade Pierre-Mauroy, also known as the Decathlon Arena-Stade Pierre-Mauroy for sponsorship reasons, is a multi-use retractable roof stadium in Neuvile-Ask, Metropolis of Lille, Northern France, that opened in August 2012. With a seating capacity of 50,186, it is the fourth-largest sports stadium in France and the home of French professional football club Lille.

Initially named Grand Stade Lille Métropole, the stadium was renamed on 21 June 2013, after the death of the former Mayor of Lille and former Prime Minister of France Pierre Mauroy (1928–2013).

The stadium, which hosted UEFA Euro 2016 and 2023 Rugby World Cup, can also be turned into an adjustable arena being expandable to 30,000 seats where indoor sports games and concerts take place. Therefore, multiple Davis Cup events, EuroBasket 2015 and 2024 Summer Olympics basketball and handball tournaments matches have been held in the building.

More information: Six Nations Rugby

 Rugby is a game that's constant. 
If you are not growing with it, 
you get left behind.

Owen Farrell

W. H. AUDEN. THE AGE OF ANXIETY, A BAROQUE ECLOGUE

Today, The Grandma has been correcting dozens of activities all day and her head is spinning. So, this evening, she has decided to relax her body and soul by reading poetry and has chosen one of her favourite authors, W. H. Auden, the British-American poet, who was born on a day like today in 1907, and who wrote The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, a masterpiece in literature.

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907-29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as Funeral Blues; on political and social themes, such as September 1, 1939 and The Shield of Achilles; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue; and on religious themes, such as For the Time Being and Horae Canonicae.

Auden was born in York and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English independent (or public) schools and studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928-29, he spent five years (1930-1935) teaching in British private preparatory schools.

In 1939, he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1946, retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.

Auden came to wide public attention in 1930 with his first book, Poems; it was followed in 1932 by The Orators. Three plays written in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood between 1935 and 1938 built his reputation as a left-wing political writer. 

Auden moved to the United States partly to escape this reputation, and his work in the 1940s, including the long poems For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror, focused on religious themes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1947 long poem The Age of Anxiety, the title of which became a popular phrase describing the modern era. From 1956 to 1961, he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford; his lectures were popular with students and faculty and served as the basis for his 1962 prose collection The Dyer's Hand.

Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological, and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. Critical views on his work ranged from sharply dismissive (treating him as a lesser figure than W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot) to strongly affirmative (as in Joseph Brodsky's statement that he had the greatest mind of the twentieth century). After his death, his poems became known to a much wider public through films, broadcasts, and popular media.

The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947; first UK edition, 1948) is a long poem in six parts by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.

The poem deals, in eclogue form, with man's quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialized world. Set in a wartime bar in New York City, Auden uses four characters -Quant, Malin, Rosetta, and Emble- to explore and develop his themes.

The poem won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948.

A critical edition of the poem, edited by Alan Jacobs, was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.

More information: The Guardian

A poet is, before anything else, a person 
who is passionately in love with language.

W. H. Auden

CAROLINE MIKKELSEN, THE 1ST WOMAN ON ANTARCTICA

Today has been an exhausting day at work for The Grandma, who has just arrived home and just wants to read a little and rest. She has always been fascinated by those periods of history where there were still places on the planet unknown to humans, by the explorers who risked their lives to reach the most remote places on the planet. Then, she has chosen to read about Caroline Mikkelsen, the explorer who set foot on Antarctica on a day like today in 1935. Now that the planet has become small and we have mapped it, we have a whole Universe waiting to be discovered and understood.  

Caroline Mikkelsen (20 November 1906-15 September 1998) was a Danish-Norwegian explorer who on 20 February 1935 was the first woman to set foot on Antarctica, although whether this was on the mainland or an island is a matter of dispute.

Caroline Mikkelsen was born on 20 November 1906 in Denmark, later she married her first husband Norwegian Captain Klarius Mikkelsen and moved to Norway.

In the winter of 1934-1935, Mikkelsen accompanied her Norwegian husband Klarius on an Antarctic expedition sponsored by Lars Christensen, on the resupply vessel M/S Thorshavn with instructions to look for Antarctic lands that could be annexed for Norway. Mount Caroline Mikkelsen is named for her.

On 20 February 1935, the expedition made landfall somewhere on the Antarctic continental shelf. Mikkelsen left the ship and participated in raising the Norwegian flag and in building a memorial cairn. Mikkelsen never made any recorded claims to have landed on the mainland, but was initially thought to have landed on the Vestfold Hills not far from the present Davis Station. She did not publicly speak about her Antarctic voyage until sixty years after her landing in 1995 when she spoke about her journey to the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten having been contacted by Davis Station Leader Diana Patterson.

In 1941, her husband Klarius died and in 1944 she married Johan Mandel from Tønsberg. Mikkelsen-Mandel died in 1998.

In 1998 and 2002, Australian researchers published historical articles in the Polar Record concluding that the landing party from the Thorshavn -and thus Mikkelsen- landed on the Tryne Islands where a marker at Mikkelsen's Cairn can still be seen today. The landing site is an approximately five kilometres from the Antarctic mainland. No alternative mainland landing site for the Mikkelsen party has been discovered, in spite of years of searching by Davis Station workers.

Consequently, Mikkelsen is regarded as the first woman to set foot on Antarctica, and Ingrid Christensen as the first to stand on the Antarctic mainland.

More information: Ocean Wide

 Problems will arise should it ever happen 
that women are admitted to base complement.

Caroline Mikkelsen 

THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE & ABDUCTION OF ADULTS

Today, The Grandma wants to share this following story by Roger Ballescà i Ruiz, and extends it not only to adults but also to teenagers who only live on social media; who base their self-esteem on the number of views they have; who have no criteria of their own because they don't make the effort to consider whether what they see or read is true or not; who let go of all their insecurities and complexes by writing toxic messages against other people; who have no ethical or moral respect for the lives of others; who have enormous emotional and social shortcomings that they believe they can make up for with followers and opinion groups; and who, without realizing it, are social prey for a future that will ignore them when they don't know how to recognize themselves beyond a tweet, a post or a like.

Several Mental Health projects nowadays treat these young people, already addicted, and the diagnoses are mainly grouped into 'the culture of the perfect image', 'body shaming', anxiety, depression, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), different eating disorders and body dysmorphia.

The challenge is great because as teachers or health personnel, we can only guide and advise these young people, but they must be the first to be aware of the situation and their families, the main ones involved in avoiding these situations and, if they are already real, in working to reverse them.

Social Media or AI are not bad per se, but it is the use that is made of them that determines their positivity or negativity: teenagers addicted to screens, famous people in their sectors who do not know how to control their degree of exposure to social media, companies that take advantage of easy customers to place their products to an audience hungry for content, or simply, adults who have begun to disappear...

 

No one knows exactly how or when it started happening, but one day, the children realized that the last of the adults had disappeared and that, definitively, they were alone as owls.

It was not a sudden or spectacular disappearance. No sirens, dramatic headlines or committee of experts. They did not all disappear at once in a big puff of smoke. They disappeared little by little, with a subtle, almost imperceptible discretion.

The first to fall were those abducted by the screens. They took up space, breathed and even said things. But their gaze escaped into a parallel universe of notifications, emails and cat videos. The children spoke to them but the words bounced off them softly.

Then the ones swallowed up by work disappeared. Adults with their agendas as a natural extension of their bodies who always promised to be there "soon", "in a while", "maybe tomorrow..." Adults in a state of promise.

Others disappeared when they decided to stop setting limits. They confused education with "do whatever you want but don't yell". They decided that children would self-regulate and would know how to decide for themselves what was best for them.

There were also those who dissolved into educational protocols, into documents full of arrows and boxes. Some were transformed into algorithms, others into international diagnostic manuals, where each discomfort found an appropriate label.

Finally, the most disturbing of all: adults who became children. They dressed the same, talked the same, wanted to be colleagues and called you "bro".

When the children noticed this, they celebrated with enthusiasm. Chocolate, unsaturated fats and screens without stopping. Not a single "no" in sight. Absolute freedom with sugary taste and video game music.

For a while everything seemed magnificent. But then things started happening.

Some children didn't know when to stop. Others didn't know what to do when there was nothing to do. Anxieties appeared without an instruction manual, sadness that was difficult to explain, anger that shot out in any direction. Without adults, no one helped put words to what was going on inside and give it meaning. No one said: "this is not right", "this is scary but it happens".

They discovered, with perplexity, that freedom without limits does not always liberate. That growing up without guidance is dizzying.

Some children began to play the role of adults, with little trace and little success. Others showed symptoms in the body, thought or behavior. Still others, sadly, faded away, without making a sound.

And the adults? Well, no one really knows where they are. Maybe they're still looking at a screen. Maybe they're working overtime. Maybe they're "on a random schedule."

The thing is, the children are still alone like owls, looking around and waiting for someone to play the adult again. And with each passing day, the question becomes more uncomfortable:

What if the disappearance of the adults wasn't a passing accident, but the natural state of things?

Roger Ballescà i Ruiz

Psychologist and psychotherapist

Centre de Salut Mental Infantil i Juvenil de Martorell

 

The challenge is great, enormous, colossal, but from the teaching and training point of view we do not give up despite being fighting against everything and everyone, despite suffering an enormous lack of prestige, despite always being the bad guys in all the stories, but we will continue working to reverse these situations and help train people of present and future generations because it is our profession, and therefore, our obligation as teachers and as citizens of the society in which we have to live.

More information: University of California

 It is okay to own a technology, 
what is not okay is to be owned by technology. 
In an overwhelming attempt to capture memories, 
people have forgotten to make memories.

Abhijit Naskar

AMALIE SKRAM, NATURALISM & NORWEGIAN LITERATURE

Today, The Grandma has been preparing new educational projects. After an intense morning of work, content creation and planning, this afternoon, she has decided to relax a bit with a good read and has chosen Scandinavian literature because she is a fierce admirer of its authors.

 

If we look at Norway and ask about its most recognized authors, they will probably tell us about The Four Greats: Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910), Jonas Lie (1833-1908) and Alexander Kielland (1849-1906), who was born on a day like today, but The Grandma wants to talk about an author who was contemporary with these four writers, Amalie Skram, the most important female writer of the Modern Breakthrough.

Amalie Skram (22 August 1846-15 March 1905) was a Norwegian author and feminist who gave voice to a woman's point of view withher naturalist writing. 

In Norway, she is frequently considered the most important female writer of the Modern Breakthrough (Det moderne gjennombrudd). 

Her more notable works include a tetralogy, Hellemyrsfolket (1887-98) which portray relations within a family over four generations.

Berthe Amalie Alver was born in Bergen, Norway. Her parents were Mons Monsen Alver and Ingeborg Lovise Sivertsen. She was the only daughter in a family of five children. Her parents operated a small business, which went bankrupt when Amalie was 17 years old. Her father emigrated from Norway to the United States to avoid a term of imprisonment. Her mother was left with five children to care for.

Her mother pressured Amalie into a marriage with an older man, Bernt Ulrik August Müller, a ship captain and later mill owner. Following thirteen years of marriage and the birth of two sons she suffered a nervous breakdown, in part attributed to his infidelity. After several years in a mental hospital, she was divorced from Müller. Together with her two sons, Jacob Müller (born 1866) and Ludvig Müller (born 1868), she moved to Kristiania (now Oslo) and began her literary activities. There she met the bohemian community, including writers Arne Garborg and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, with whom she remained in contact for many years.

In 1884, Amalie Müller married again, this time the Danish writer Asbjørn Oluf Erik Skram (1847-1923), a son of railroad director Gustav Skram. She moved to Copenhagen, Denmark with her new husband. They had a daughter, Ida Johanne Skram (born 1889), from this union. Her obligations as housewife, mother and author as well as the public's limited acceptance for her then-radical work, led to a further breakdown in 1894, after which Amalie lived in a psychiatric hospital near Roskilde. In 1900 her second marriage was dissolved. She died six years later in Copenhagen and was buried at Bispebjerg Cemetery.

In 1882, Amalie Skram debuted (as Amalie Müller) with the short story Madam Høiers leiefolk, published in the magazine Nyt Tidsskrift. An excerpt from her first novel, Constance Ring, was first published in the magazine Tilskueren in 1885.

Her works continued until her death. She dealt with topics she knew well. Her work can be divided into three categories:

-Novels concerning marriage, which explored taboo topics such as female sexuality, and the subservient status of women in that period. These works were perceived by many as overly provocative and resulted in open hostility from some segments of society.

-Multi-generation novels, which dealt with the fate of a family over several generations. With these she explored the social institutions and conditions of the time and campaigned for change.

-Mental hospital works such as Professor Hieronimus and Paa St. Jørgen, which dealt with the primitive and brutal conditions of such institutions of the period. Her novels created a major stir in Denmark and precipitated improvements in these institutions.

She is recognized as an early and strong proponent of what has come to be known as the women's movement, setting the early European trend. Her works, which had been generally forgotten with her death, were rediscovered and received strong recognition in the 1960s. Several of her works are currently available in recent translations to English.

The Amalie Skram prize is a travel stipend that has been awarded annually since 1994 to Norwegian authors who show exceptional skill in addressing women's issues. 

The street Amalie Skrams Allé in the Valby district of Copenhagen is named after her.

A statue of Skram by Maja Refsum was unveiled at Convent Garden (Klosterhaugen) in Bergen 1949. A bronze bust by Per Ung was installed in Bispebjerg Cemetery in Copenhagen in 1996. A marble bust by Ambrosia Tønnesen is in Bergen Public Library.

More information: The History of Nordic Women's Literature

 

Hva ville det egentlig si å være sinnssyk? 
Man kunne jo glatt vekk kalle hinannens særegenheter 
og mer eller mindre brysomme

eiendommeligheter for sinnssykdom.

What would it really mean to be insane?
 One could easily call each other's peculiarities 
and more or less troublesome

peculiarities insanity.

 

Amalie Skram 

CORTO MALTESE. LIFE IS A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION

Anyone who knows The Grandma even a little knows about her passion for literature, art, history, sports, nature and graphic novels. And anyone who knows her well knows that her platonic love is an enigmatic sailor born in Valletta, with no future line in his hands and a tremendously attractive life.

Today, the postwoman has brought a very special package to The Grandma. It was a shipment from Joseph de Ca'th Lon from Italy and upon opening it, she has gone crazy with love to find there books, stickers and a puzzle of his beloved sailor, the incomparable and mysterious Corto Maltese. Thank you very much, Joseph, for always thinking of her despite the distance. Next Saturday you will meet again and share hobbies and emotions as always.

Le sere azzurre d'estate, andrò per i sentieri,
Punzecchiato dal grano, a calpestare erba fina:
Trasognato, ne sentirò la freschezza ai piedi.
Lascerò che il vento mi bagni il capo nudo.

Non parlerò, non penserò a niente:
Ma l'amore infinito mi salirà nell'anima,
E andrò lontano, molto lontano, come uno zingaro,
Nella Natura, -felice come con una donna.  

Corto Maltese is a series of adventure comics following the eponymous protagonist, an adventurous sailor. 

It was created by the Italian comic book creator Hugo Pratt in 1967. The comics are highly praised as some of the most artistic and literary graphic novels ever written and have been translated into numerous languages and adapted into several animated films.

The series features Corto Maltese, an enigmatic sea captain who lives in the first three decades of the 20th century. Born in Valletta on the island of Malta on 10 July 1887, the son of a sailor from Cornwall, and a gypsy from Seville.

In his adventures full of real-world references, Corto has often crossed with real historical characters like the American author Jack London and his nurse Virginia Prentiss, the American outlaw Butch Cassidy, the German World War I flying ace Red Baron, and many others.

The character debuted in the serial Ballad of the Salty Sea, one of several Pratt stories published in the first edition of the Ivaldi Editore comics magazine Sergeant Kirk in July 1967. The story centers around smugglers and pirates in the World War I -era Pacific Islands. In 1970, Pratt moved to France and began a series of short Corto Maltese stories for the French comics magazine Pif Gadget, an arrangement lasting four years and producing many 20-page stories. In 1974 he returned to full-length stories, sending Corto to 1918 Siberia in the story Corto Maltese in Siberia, first serialised in the Italian comics magazine Linus.

In 1976, Ballad of the Salty Sea was published in book format and was awarded the prize for best foreign realistic comic album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival.

Pratt continued to produce new stories over the next two decades, many first appearing in the eponymous comics magazine Corto Maltese (published between October 1983 and July 1993), until 1988 when the final story Mu, the Lost Continent was serialised, ending in June 1989.

Corto Maltese is a laconic sea captain adventuring during the early 20th century (1900-1920s). A rogue with a heart of gold, he is tolerant and sympathetic to the underdog. Born in Valletta on July 10, 1887, he is the son of a British sailor from Cornwall and an Andalusian–Romani witch and prostitute known as "La Niña de Gibraltar". As a boy growing up in the Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Maltese discovered that he had no fate line on his palm and therefore carved his own with his father's razor, determining that his fate was his to choose. Although maintaining a neutral position, Corto instinctively supports the disadvantaged and oppressed.

The character embodies the author's skepticism of national, ideological and religious assertions. Corto befriends people from all walks of life, including the murderous Russian Rasputin (no relation with the historical figure, apart from physical resemblance and some character traits), British heir Tristan Bantam, voodoo priestess Gold Mouth and Czech academic Jeremiah Steiner. He also knows and meets various real-life historical figures, including Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Butch Cassidy, James Joyce, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Frederick Rolfe, Joseph Conrad, Sükhbaatar, John Reed, White Russian general Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, Enver Pasha of Turkey and Sergei Semenov, modelled after Grigory Semyonov. His acquaintances treat him with great respect, as when a telephone call to Joseph Stalin frees him from arrest when he is threatened with execution on the border of Turkey and Armenia.

Corto's favourite book is Utopia by Thomas More, but he never finishes it. He also read books by London, Lugones, Stevenson, Melville and Conrad, and quotes Rimbaud.

Corto Maltese stories range from straight historical adventure to occult dream sequences. He is present when the Red Baron is shot down, helps the Jívaro in South America, and flees Fascists in Venice, but also unwittingly helps Merlin and Oberon to defend Britain and helps Tristan Bantam to visit the lost continent of Mu.

Chronologically, the first adventure, Corto Maltese: The Early Years, happens during the Russo-Japanese War. In other albums he experiences the Great War in several locations, participates in the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution, and appears during the early stages of Fascist Italy. In a separate series by Pratt, The Desert Scorpions, Corto is said to be missing in action in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

More information: Corto Maltese

Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue:
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien:
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, -heureux comme avec une femme. 

 

Arthur Rimbaud 

SAILING HOME AGAIN, STORMY WATERS TO BE FREE...

I am sailing, I am sailing
Home again cross the sea
I am sailing, stormy waters
To be near you, to be free

I am flying, I am flying
Like a bird cross the sky
I am flying, passing high clouds
To be near you, to be free

Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
Through the dark night, far away
I am dying, forever crying
To be with you, who can say?

Can you hear me? Can you hear me?
Through the dark night, far away
I am dying, forever crying
To be near you, who can say?

We are sailing, we are sailing
Home again cross the sea
We are sailing stormy waters
To be near you, to be free

Oh Lord, to be near you, to be free
Oh Lord, to be near you, to be free
Oh Lord

More information: Sail World 

 I love what I do.

Rod Stewart