A Son of the Auld Grey Town

OMG

2011-06-03T16:24:00.001+01:00

You can tell at a glance how long ago it is that I wrote on this blog, and I was enjoying doing it. Time to get off my bottom and get it going again.

I've had a very long, lazy day. The first day in nearly six weeks when I have not been charging off to somewhere in Manchester to invigilate an exam. However, we are nearly finished, with this stint at least. I have one exam to do on Monday Morning and then, unless they give me any extras I will be finished for now. I have no idea when, if ever, there will be any more. Still, it has got me out and about, feeling at least a little bit needed and they have actually paid me money for doing it.

I'm going out with my dear lady wife this evening. We are going to be reunited with some of my ex-colleagues from School Teaching days. It ought to be fun.

Maybe I'll tell you what happened tomorrow. If we are spared.

Kiss, kiss.

A Visit to Haughton Green

2010-05-30T22:09:00.000+01:00

This is Haughton Green Methodist Church. It is two hundred years old this month and today we went to a service that was part of a series to celebrate that venerable age. Unfortunately it is showing real signs of age, and this winter, which was one of the hardest winters I can remember, has played its part in damaging the fabric of the church. If I understood what I was told, the congregation will soon have to leave this old building and move their church across the road into what is currently the Church Hall. That will be a huge wrench for a lot of them, and many of the congregation are getting older.

We were there because one of our friends, John, was taking the service and preaching there today. John is Australian and lives in Adelaide, normally, but he, and his wife Janette, are over here on a twelve week holiday. Back in 1998, when Pat and I were still both teaching we both ended up having surgery within a week of each other. So we were both off work for an extended period of time. While we were off work, the School had to find people to do our jobs. Pat's replacement was Janette who was living in England while her husband, John, was over here as a Missionary. I always loved the idea of this Australian minister coming back to the Mother Country to bring the word of God to the savage Brits.

John is a minister in the Uniting Church of Australia. I believe that the Uniting Church was formed in the 1970's by the amalgamation of the Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist Churches in Australia. So when he came to Britain, he took a post as a Minister in the Methodist Church. Pat and I are Anglicans, Members of the Church of England. So we actually attend a Parish Church in Mottram. But the two churches are really quite close, the Methodist Church broke away from the Church of England in the 1800's. So I don't think that we will get kicked out of our Church for heretical actions.

The Church at Haughton Green was having a Flower Festival this weekend. I think that they have them every four years or so, though I must admit that I'm far from certain. There were lots of very substantial flower arrangements there today and I admire the work that has gone into creating them. I'll put a photograph of one of the arrangements at the bottom of this post, which is coming up rapidly because I'm running out of things to say. well, no, I've got lots to say but not enough energy for tonight. I think that part of it is my taking anti-histamine to stave off the hay fever that I often suffer at this time of year. I take pills that are advertised as being non-drowsy, but every year, when I take them, I feel really tired compared to most times.

So anyway, we parted from John and Janette and we probably won't see them again for another two years, but it's always nice to know that on the day that we meet up with them again, it will be as if we had never been apart. They are really good people. I just wish that I was anything like as good.

Ah well, another day, another taler. See you again quite soon, if we are spared. Sleep well.

28 days later

2010-05-29T21:51:00.000+01:00

The phrase, "Hoist by his own petard" springs to my mind. I have always thought that phrase had something to do with a small naval flag. I must admit that I never really saw why being hung up by your own flag was such a bad thing, but I've always thought that "hoist by your own petard" meant that you had got caught out doing something you were ashamed of.

Like going on about how good you had been putting a post on the blog every day. And look at this. I think that it is actually more than 28 days later, but that was the name of a film, it seems appropriate, though I think it was a film about "zombies" taking over the earth, so it is not at all appropriate really. Oh, to damnation with it!

Anyway, getting back to being "hoist by my own petard", I discover that it means something else entirely. It appears that a petard was "an explosive charge or grenade that was used to blow a hole in a door or wall or even a fortification". Being a French word, Danielle will be sitting there saying "I knew that, it is a french word". I also discovered that it is related to the French word peter which means "to break wind". So finally, after many, many years I understand something that a young Frenchman called Jean-Francois who was staying at my parent's house when I was about 13, apologised for saying, when my Dad thought he had simply been calling out his name. (My Dad was called Peter.) Aha!

So anyway, to be hoist with your own petard means to be the victim of your own attempt to hurt someone else, and I was not trying to do that, so it was an inappropriate thing to say. Neh mind, eh!

I've discovered two other things that I want to share with you all, (all two or three of you readers). The first is about today. I was messing about with Wikipedia. I read an article the other day that told how to use Wikipedia to create PDF books which can be read off-line. About a week ago I happened to be surfing through some of the hundreds of TV channels that you can receive on SKY, when I came across a TV station that was rebroadcasting "Babylon 5" from the beginning. Babylon 5 was one of my favourite series when it first came out and I watched it from beginning to end, quite religiously. By chance I came upon this channel just as it was showing the first episode of Series 2 when Sheridan first arrives on Babylon 5. It really took me back. I am quite a fan of Bruce Boxleitner and I rather think that he is a much under rated actor, but that is just my opinion. So I was looking up details of the characters and I found quite a lot of information on Wikipedia, which, as you will know, treats the characters in some TV and novel series as if they were real people. Daft but fun. Then I found this thing about making books in PDF format using Wikipedia. So I was just having a play when my eye fell on the "THIS DAY IN HISTORY" tab. I am a history freak, only right and proper when you have been a History Teacher for so many years.

So what caused my attention to be caught, I hear you bellow in exasperation. On this day, 350 years ago, Old Rowley came home from his holiday in Holland. That makes sense doesn't it. Old Rowley is the familiar nickname that was used to speak of our most illustrious King Charles, the second of happy memory to bear that name. Charles Stuart, King Charles I was executed by order of the Commonwealth Government in January of 1649. For Eleven years and a few weeks England was a Republic. No King or Queen. No President either, the idea being far too new. Instead we had the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell (who happens to be a bit of a hero of mine, but more of that another day.) Cromwell died in 1658 and there was a bit of a mess for the next two years while various people tried to sort things out. Then in 1660 General George Monk marched his Regiment of the New Model Army towards London. The rest of the New Model Army just sort of faded away, leaving Monk's Regiment, a Guards Regiment, raised in the village of Coldstream on the Scottish border, as the first Regiment to be formed in the Modern British Army. Once he signed the Declaration of Breda, the dead King Charles I's son, Charles, became King and England was restored to a Monarchy. And this happened on 29th May, 1660. There you jolly well go.

Here is a picture of Charley:

One of my favourite Kings of England. I have always believed that he had a good sense of fun, and he was very fond of Oranges!

The other thing that I have discovered today, and this is a lot smaller and more significant in many ways, is that the translation engine in Microsoft Bing appears to be a damned site better than the translation engine in Google that I have always used up to now. I was looking at Danielle's Blog, and noting that she has obviously given up on me because everything is in French, and I was getting to really enjoy her Paris Travelogues which were usually in English. Anyway, I started using Google Chrome the other week as my main Browser, just to give it a good trial. And I have been using Bing as my main Search Engine. I'm reading Danielle's Blog when I see a little message at the top of the screen. It says "This Page is in French. Would you like to translate it into English Yes / No". So I clicked on YES. Well you would, wouldn't you. And it really didn't seem to bad. It did seem better than the last time that I used Google Translate when the result appeared to be in Serbo Croat. So I'm quite happy really.

So not at all a bad day. I've written in my blog for the first time in a month. I had a really nice walk with my dog, Jasper. (We went out at 6.10 am and got home at 8.15, he had two good runs off his lead and we walked around the woods above Gamesley.) Had a lovely meal accompanied by a delightful glass of Rioja. (Now you know why I have written such a load of old drivel tonight.) Watched Doctor Who. and I have avoided the Eurovision Cheating Contest by dint of writing my Blog.

It has been a good day. See you all soon. Keep the faith!

Sun day. Ha, that was a misnomer if ever there was one!

2010-04-25T21:14:00.002+01:00

Okay then, I failed miserably. I was intent on putting in a blog every day, but I missed Saturday out. Shame, but there you go. On Saturday I don't think that I even sat down at the computer. I had a very enjoyable Friday Evening out, visiting a Chapter in Manchester. An exceptional meal to celebrate St George's Day but a late night return to my home and fireside.

So I got up late on saturday and took Jasper for a good run on the local school field, before the local youth took over the field in the afternoon. Then we had a pleasant shopping trip to one of the Supermarkets in Hyde, including lunch after which I snoozed away the rest of the afternoon.

Patricia cooked me a wonderful meal of steak and salad and I enjoyed a couple of glasses of the most wonderful crisp, light Sancerre. OK, you should not drink a beautiful white wine with beefsteak, but I don't care, it was lovely.

Then Jasper and I went for a second walk, including another run on the field, and I returned to watch various low and uncultured episodes of TV, such as Dr Who. I do like the new Doctor, Matt Smith, there really is something "alien" about him. And so to bed.

Today the whole of the morning was spent at Church. It was our Annual Church Meeting after a truncated morning service. I'm Secretary of our Parish Church Council so I had to take minutes. Then home for a bacon sandwich. Then we settled down and watched an episode of "The Good Wife". I don't know what it is about that series, but I really do enjoy it. Julianna Margulies, who we used to watch in the early days of "ER" is really very good. So an enjoyable hour spent lounging around.

Then doggie walking time including another good free run on the local field followed by one of our usual shortish walks along the paths in Dinting Vale. But there wasn't anything really that I found interesting to photograph today, so I will go without a photo rather than using a photo that doesn't belong to today.

Then Dinner and the monthly ritual of paying Bills over the Internet Banking system. And here we are.

The weather has not been good today, though. After some two or three weeks of glorious sunshine, today the rain returned with a vengeance. So jasper and I both had a shower this afternoon. The weather girl says it will be drier again tomorrow. I'll be sure to let you know!

Sweet dreams!

The Calico Printer's Clerk

2010-04-23T11:23:00.000+01:00

I think that under normal circumstances I would have left the blog today. I have a great deal to do and I have been invited to a meeting in Manchester this evening. I'm looking forward to it a great deal but, since it is in Manchester it will take organising. Parking alone can be a nightmare in Manchester and the place I'm going to was built in 1900 and so does not have any parking of its own. So I will park in the carpark of what used to be called Kendal Milne. Funny that, they changed the store name to House of Fraser ten years ago, but everyone still salls it Kendals. Ho hum.

I thought that I'd share two pictures with you today. The first is a stile. I like stiles as they usually let you have access to places that they don't really want you to go. So they let you walk through farmers fields where vehicles cannot go, and where they don't want the animals to go to either. The funny thing with this stile is that it is at the bottom of the path down the back of Oakfield Road. It stands to one side of the path and you don't need to use the stile because there is no fence alongside it. You just walk down the path. So I think that this stile must be a hangover from those days when the whole of the Green lane Estate, which Oakfield Road is a part of, was farmers fields. I don't think that was too long ago. My friend Alan, who lives in a lovely little cul-de-sac called "The Rushes" tells me that he can remember when the space behind hadfield Roadm which is where the Green lane estate is, was just farmer's fields. I guess the estate was built in the 60's & 70's, but that was a long time before we moved here in '83.

Anyway, I like stiles, so you can enjoy it with me. The second picture is of something much older, but how old I have no idea. Down at the bottom of Dinting Arches, just before we turn off to walk along Triffid Alley to the back of Carpenter's Foam Factory. The land dips towards the river. This very old piece of wood stands there. There are various bits and pieces of things around that suggest that there might have been an industrial past to this bit of river bank, but nothing really substantial. To me, this looks rather like an old gate post, but there is no sign at all of its partner and it would be a very strange gate if it only had one post. But I cannot think of anything else it might have been. To see what remains, it is too substantial to be a fence post, but I really do not know.

I like Industrial Archaeology. In this part of the world, the North West of England, one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution, there are all sorts of remains of a very different past. Not far from this piece of wood is the building that, until about 1900, was a Calico Printing Factory. There were never very many of them, I think.

Which brings me to something else. We haven't had a poem for ages, so I thought that I'd include not exactly a poem, but the words of a Broadside Ballad. I heard this folk song for the first time sung by Mike Harding many years ago now. I rather think that it was this song and one or two others that set me on my love of folk music and Industrial Heritage. Anyway, to tie in with the Calico Print Works, here are the words of

The Calico Printer's Clerk

In Manchester, that city of cotton twist and twills,
There lived the subject of my song, the cause of all my ills.
She was handsome, young and twenty, her eyes were azure blue
Admirers she had plenty and her name was Dorothy Drew.

Chorus (after each verse):: She was very fond of dancing, but allow me to remark That one fine day she danced away with the calico printer's clerk.

At a private ball I met her in eighteen sixty-three;
I never will forget her, though she was unkind to me.
I was dressed in the pink of fashion, my lavender gloves were new,
And I danced the Valse Circassian, with the charming Dorothy Drew.

We schottisched and we polkaed to the strains the band did play;
We waltzed and we mazurkaed and she waltzed my heart away.
I whispered in this manner, as around the room we flew
Doing the Varsovianna, "Oh I love you Dorothy Drew.”

For months and months attention, unto her I did pay
Till, with her condescension, she led me quite astray.
The money I expended, I'm ashamed to tell to you
I'll inform you how it ended with myself and Dorothy Drew.

I received an intimation she a visit meant to pay
Unto some dear relations who lived some miles away.
In a month she'd be returning, I must bid a short adieu
But her love for me was burning, oh deceitful Dorothy Drew.

At nine o'clock next morning to breakfast I sat down
The smile my face adorning it soon changed into a frown.
For in the morning papers, a paragraph met my view
That Jones, the calico printer's clerk, had married Dorothy Drew.

She was very fond of dancing, but allow me to remark
That one fine day she danced away with the calico printer's clerk.

The notes in the book where I find these words say, " The Calico Printer's Clerk is a broadside ballad unearthed by a group in the Preston reference library and set to a tune by [Dave] Moran. It tells the tale of a twee young gentleman, a cruel but beautiful young lady, and the eponymous clerk, who quite literally waltzes off with the girl in the end. It is full of rich, period detail from the 1860s, including lines like the gentleman's remark: “I was dressed in the pink of fashion; my lavender gloves were new.” It also details the trendy dances of the time, mentioning schottisches, varsoviennes, polkas, mazurkas, waltzes, and circassians as it relates its sadly comical tale."

Ah dear, unrequited love, it gets me every time. It would have been me, you know, spending all of my money on the flighty flibbertigibbet, only to see her ride off into the sunset with the callow, unfeeling Calico Printer's Clerk. By gad sir!

See you tomorrow, if we're spared!

An Adventure

2010-04-22T19:41:00.001+01:00

Jasper and I had a real adventure today, a complete first. We started off by walking to Broadbottom, which is nice because if we go along Hague Lane it is really quite an easy walk, but there is almost no traffic at all, so Jasper gets to walk loose on his 7 metre lead. The sun was shining and it was another absolutely glorious day.

This is a view along part of Hague Lane, getting on towards Broadbottom. We did this walk at the end of January. Then it was a beautiful, but cold day. Today I was in shirt sleeves and it was glorious.

When we got into Broadbottom we turned up the Hill and had a quick look at Gibble Gabble. This picture is just to prove it is there. As far as I can tell it is a real street, but it looks more like a small lane. It's called Gibble Gabble because it twists and turns as it rises up the hill. Where I come from we would call it a "Ginnel", which is also a path or lane. I love the old dialect words that are dying out.

Then we walked up to the Railway Station and bought our tickets. I went to the ticket window and asked for one and a dog to Dinting, and Jasper jumped up alongside me as if to say, "I'm the Dog", but I didn't get a picture of that. The picture above shows Jasper waiting for his train. Isn't he sweet.

Jasper seemed quite impressed by his first Train Adventure. He thought that it was Magic that when he had walked to Broadbottom, he jumped into a magic box that made some strange noises, but didn't bother him at all. Then when the doors opened, he jumped out and he was in Dinting. It was definitely magic, getting from Broadbottom to Dintting without walking.

Then we walked home. Nice adventure. Also, it opens up the door for other adventures, because now we can take the train to lots of exciting places and then do our walk from there, or take the train to somewhere and then walk home. There are some lovely walks in and around Broadbottom that I have never done so far, but now I can, and all for a couple of pounds.

I'll finish off with a picture of one of our Orchids. I'm really proud of this. We bought it 18 months ago in Tesco for 10 pounds, a cheap one left over that didn't even have a posh base. It had three flowers and they stayed for about five months, then it died. Both of its stems dried out and went brown and there was nothing left but three green leaves. I was going to throw it in the compost heap, but a friend told me to keep it and keep watering it. All through last Summer, Autumn and Winter it was just three green leaves. Then just after Christmas, a new stem began to form, buds formed on it and about two weeks ago it started to burst into flower. It now has more flowers on than when it was new.

I think it is gorgeous and I'm dead proud of it. So here it is, the Pink and White Orchid.

Love you and leave you, then! Till Tomorrow! By the way, Pat had a fall yesterday and has grazed her face quite badly. Her left eye is turning purple and she has large red patches over her eye, but she won't let me put a picture on the blog in case it gets an X certificate. Poor lamb!

The Nab

2010-04-21T22:46:00.000+01:00

Bit late in the day for blogging really, at least at my age, but I want to try and put something on every day for now, even if it is just a trial.

I didn't get out with Jasper until quite late this afternoon, just other things to do in the morning.

I walk along this path almost every day at some point, this is the point when you come out of the back lane that runs up behind the school, and head across to the path that goes down to Dinting. Maybe not everyday, but very often. I've taken photographs of this on several occasions, but today, the sky was so blue and so clear that I just had to take a picture.

The hill in the distance is, I think, The Nab. I'm not terribly good at the names of hills and such like, there are, after all, a lot of them about, but as a name The Nab will do for now. It isn't a brilliant photograph, but I think it is rather nice. On a day like today, I think that I am a very lucky boy.

See you tomorrow.

The Day of the Triffids

2010-04-20T12:21:00.002+01:00

Just a brief one today, I've got a lot on, but I'm trying to put something on the blog each day. It won't last but if you don't try.

Walking down by the pool at the back of Carpenters, alongside the Brookfield Brook, these things are growing fast, all over the place.

I am convinced that they are Triffids. If you don't know what a Triffid is then I'm ashamed. The killer plants out of John Wyndham's classic SciFi novel. But this is certainly them.

There are millions of them. Soon I will not be able to walk along this path, until Autumn, and that is a real shame because the alternative is walking along the main road, or finding another short walk.

Seriously, I assume that they are just weeds. They aren't Japanese Knotweed or anything more perfidious are they. I shall stick with Triffids. Does anyone know what they really are? Daniele, you are a gardener?

Hopefully, If I'm not eaten by the Triffids whilst sleepwalking, I shall see you tomorrow.

Sithee.

A Passionate Woman

2010-04-19T17:10:00.004+01:00

Okay, my taste in television runs to Science Fiction and Adventure. So I like things like 24 and Battlestar Galactica and the like. It takes a lot to get me to write about Romantic Drama, but here goes.

I've been rivetted to the BBC on Sunday Evening watching this wonderful drama. Written by the inestimable Kay Mellor this was the story of Betty who, when she was a young bride in the 50's, fell in love with, and had a brief "affair" with the young Polish man who lived downstairs from her.

The program showed over two, 90 minute episodes. In the first episode Betty was played by Billie Piper and her husband Donald by Joe Armstrong. The Polish love interest Crais was played brilliantly by the smouldering Theo James. At one time Billie Piper was a bit of a teeny pop star, but since her acting career took off I've been more and more impressed by her.

In the second programme, Sue Johnstone took over the role of Betty and Alun Armstrong that of Donald.

The story takes up something like 30 years after the events of the first programme and one of the remarkable things is the similarity of the appearance of the different actors who take the parts. In the case of Alun and Joe Armstrong, that's because they are father and son, but the women and some of the minor parts have a strong familial look as well.

An excellent play, based on real life, brilliantly written by Kay Mellor. You might like to read her thoughts on the story on the BBC Blog at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2010/04/the-inspiration-for-my-passion.shtml but whatever you do, if you get a chance to watch this superb play, take the opportunity. You will not regret it.

To the Woods, To the Woods

2010-04-19T16:48:00.001+01:00

I have no idea what happened to the blue skies today. I got up this morning and the rain was falling quite heavily. Breakfast TV said that it was another warm dry day, shows just how little the Meteorological Service knows about the weather. It's now tea time, or it will be soon, and it is still heavily overcast. So today, I thought that Jasper and I would walk to Glossop over Castle Hill. Castle Hill sort of looms up in a fairly quiet way as I look out of the window of the Pig Sty. (I need to explain that in case you think I'm some sort of Pork Farmer. Our little bedroom at the front of the house is my "study", but since I'm one of the untidiest of God's creatures, I call it the Pig Sty. It's also because I sort of collect Piggy Banks, but not as many as I used to do. That makes sense, doesn't it. Doesn't it?)

So we set off at about 11 am and walked up the hill to Bankswood Park. Our park is not a pretty park with flower beds such as they have in Glossop. It's more of a green field or two on a slope. At the back of the park is a wood. So you walk up a footpath at the side of the park, then walk up another footpath at the top of the wood. It's nice when it has been dry, which it has, when it has rained a lot the footpaths turn back into streams. Today it was nice, but it will be nicer still when the trees get their leaves on them. The picture at the top of the blog is taken from the top of the park looking down the slope into the body of the wood.

When you get to the end of the wood you can follow a footpath that leads along to the cemetry, but it is still too muddy to go along that path as yet, so we turned up the path and ascended to the top of Castle Hill. Here is a picture of the turning point.

It may not be pretty, but it has a rugged charm all of its own. You follow this path up for maybe ten minutes, and remember that I'm still not walking that well, but it really isn't too steep. Anyone who is a good walker will regard todays walk as a gentle stroll to get the morning paper. Castle Hill is reputed to be an Iron Age Hill Fort and it is marked on the O S Map, but not as an antiquity. It is certainly the highest place around us and you do get a lovely view from the top. I didn't take a picture of the view today as it was bleak, cold and quite miserable. However, on the top is what I think may have been a bit of a quarry at some time in the past, so I took a photo of that. I'll stick that at the bottom of the post.

Then it is up and over the summit, past the repeater mast for our Television Broadcasts and then a steady descent down Ashes Lane. At the bottom of the lane you come out onto Dinting Road so I returned home by way of one of my usual shorter walks through the fields below Dinting Road.

A very pleasant walk taking about 2 hours. Back home just in time for a lunch of Pitta Bread with salad and Caramelised Onion Houmous. Very nice indeed.

I think that my Digital Photography Class resumes at Evening School this evening, so I am looking forward to that. Here is the picture I promised you, and I'll sign out until we meet again.

Down By The Riverside

2010-04-18T20:55:00.001+01:00

I've got 30 minutes before "A Passionate Woman part 2" is shown on the BBC and I don't want to miss it, so I'll try to be quick.

After what I said in my previous post, the photographs in todays post were taken on Thursday. I spent Friday and Saturday working on the computer but on Thursday, Jasper and I had a good walk. We set off towards Broadbottom again, following Hague Road, as we have done before. Today, though, I didn't want to go all the way to Broadbottom because it seemed like a long way, I didn't want to struggle back home along a different and quite difficult path and I didn't have any money with me. If I had I would have walked to Broadbottom and taken the train home.

So we went halfway and I saw a Public Footpath sign to Woolley Bridge, which is a mile from home. A new path, a new adventure. So I took it. About a third of a mile along I was pointed over a stile and into a wood with a tributary of the River Etherow running through it. At first it was easy going, but it got steadily worse. Lots of little bits of water running down the steep hillside had turned stretches of path into almost liquid mud. Ground that looked flat and solid under a coating of last Autumn's leaves turned out to be soft and clingy mud under a thick coating of last Autumn's leaves. At times I was quite worried because my left knee is still not terribly strong and I was worried about slipping and hurting myself. Still, I had my walking pole with me, and my mobile phone (though God alone knows how anyone would have got to me if I had really hurt myself.

Still, we persevered, Jasper and me. Some of the mud must have had some rusty iron in it because he scrambled through one patch of mud and came out of it the colour of saffron. Eventually, we got out of that marsh bit. I had to climb a wall to get back onto solid footing, then lift Jasper up and over the wall as it was just a bit too high for him to jump. But he enjoyed it very much, as did I. It was very, very quiet, with just bird song for company. Lots of farm fields, but no animals despite the lovely weather. Don't seem to be many farm animals about anywhere in the valley this year. That is probably a telling statement. We were back home by 1 pm, Jasper had a shower in the garden with the hose pipe, which he hated, and I took my boots off and put my feet up for an hour.

Here are some photographs of things I saw along the way.

This picture shows the stream through the woodland. You can see the carpet of Autumn leaves. The ground along the river bank looks solid, but it was deceiving and very muddy.

A bit further on there was a rather nice bridge over the Etherow and I just thought that this view down the stream was pretty neat. Look at the sunshine on the branches and the blue sky reflected in the water.

I saw these huge fungii growing off one of the branches of an old tree. Maybe the tree was dead, but I don't know. The fungii looked like plates, or flying saucers, growing out of the side of the tree. Fascinating.

And right in the middle of the wood we found a rather strange little stone build box with two windows looking totally unused. Just outside was a small bridge (on the right of the picture) and a strange iron pipe. Inside the building (the picture didn't work) was some more iron work. maybe at one time this was part of some sort of pump. Who knows.

Anyway, it was a hard but enjoyable walk on a beautiful day. Let us just hope that we have many more such days this year.

Until we meet again, sweet dreams. Jasper says "woof" and I'll leave you to work out what he means, but he had two very good runs today so he is probably dreaming of rabbits that run fast, just fast enough to chase.

M67 on a Rainy Day - A critique

2010-04-18T20:29:00.000+01:00

I'll start with a bit of a moan, which will get me nowhere at all but it will make me feel that I've said what I believe. About a week ago I came across a blogsite called "Paris Daily Photo". This led me to a site called "City Daily Photos" and thus to a network of blogsites which provide a Daily Photo from cities round the world. I've bookmarked a few to keep an eye on, and put myself in as a follower on one or two. At first I was really interested by the idea of chronicling my town by taking a photograph everyday, and I might still do so, even though Glossopdale does not meet with my concept of a "city". After all, the thing that takes me so long is typing all of these words. If all that I did was take a photo and bung it onto a blog, perhaps with a few sentences of explanation (but not even that most of the time) it would be quite easy. Certainly easier than writing a small essay every few days.

But one thing has rather spoiled that for me. About four days ago the website for the "Hyde Daily Photo" featured a picture of the M67 Motorway on rainy day. Now I won't criticise the photography, after all I don't claim to be a good photographer myself, but I do question the subject matter. You see, on the day that photo was published it was one of the nicest days of the year so far. It was a blue sky day, it was warm and the day was clear and bright, and on this day the daily photo for Hyde shows a miserable rain drenched stretch of the M67 Motorway. But Hyde is just over the hill from Glossop. I can drive to that point on the motorway in ten minutes and the motorway was not rain drenched on that day. And hadn't been for at least a week. I'm afraid that I regard that as a cop out. What is the point in having a Daily Photo Blog if your photo is not taken on that day. To me it is cheating. If you ever read this Gerald, please don't do this. I don't care if you have been running your photo blog for four years or forty. If you cannot show photos of that day, why bother at all. Mind you, I don't think that you will ever read this anyway.

Picking Up The Pieces

2010-04-17T11:53:00.004+01:00

If you have come along and looked at the blog in the last 24 hors or so, you'll have found a blank line here under the date, and nothing else. So I am going to try to put that right and pick up the missing pieces.

It started out from reading an article somewhere that explained how putting photographs in blogger uses up some sort of user space and said that eventually it would mean that the blog would eventually run out of space. It went on to explain that putting the photographs into Flickr first, then putting a link to the photograph into Blogger saved this space. It went on to explain how to do it. However, there was one snag, it didn't work. I tried every single method suggested in the article but none of them worked. And I ended up with a single line on the blog.

I'm up a bit earlier this morning so I decided to get the blog back into working order, but I'm using Pat's laptop in the Living Room, instead of the computer upstairs and my photographs are stored on the other computer. I thought that I could grab the photograph that I wanted from Flickr, but I guess that I cannot even do that.

So this morning you get a blog with no picture at all. Never mind, as my pictures are not that good that you'll miss one. I'll have to pause in a minute because Jasper, who has got up with me, is now mooching around looking for his breakfast. I can put him off with threats and promises for the moment, but I'll have to go and feed him soon. I think that may mark the end of this Saturday Blog that is actually being written on Sunday.

Haven't written anything on the blog for a couple of days because I've been doing a project for my friend. Before I took up being retired as a career move last September, I used to enjoy teaching in a Girl's School, worked there for 36 years and mostly enjoyed it every day. My friend asked me to put together a presentation on "The American West". Since this was one of my favourite courses for the Year 10 & 11 GCSE History Course, I gave it a stab. I just hope that what I produced after 3 days was good enough and will help her achieve what she set out to do. That is for her to decide, but I did my best. It certainly forced me to revisit using pieces of software that I haven't used for a year. Not a lot, but enough for the moment. It will have to keep you going, because I've stopped.

Me and Jasper, Down by the Waterside.

2010-04-13T11:36:00.000+01:00

Hello and Good Morning World. I had a bit of a shock yesterday evening, a blog related shock at that. I've often wondered at the fact that my friend Daniele can tell me when I've looked at her Blog, or indeed when I haven't. I've had a page counter for a while now, just so I could actually see that there was more than me reading what I write. Yesterday evening my beloved was busy watching her soap opera of choice, Coronation Street, and I was feeling a little bored, so I filled in some time by looking at the page that you get when you log into the page counter. It's called StatCounter by the way, and it's the little red number at the bottom of the left hand column. I had not realised that the 174 visitors it shows were actually unique visitors, I had it in mind that this 174 was Me, Daniele, Ann and sometimes Pat, but that nobody else ever had a look. On the StatCounter webpage for my "Project" you can see a map and it tells you where the people who have visited your site come from, and they are all over the world. Utterly Amazing. So I found Daniele, and I found Ann, and I even found me, though I have no idea why the thing thinks that Hadfield is a suburb of Leeds. But the strangest one was a visitor whose ISP was shown as "APO Military Forces USA" and appeared to come from the sea bed about 200 miles off the coast of West Africa. I mean, they don't think that I'm a threat to World Democracy do they. Mind you, British Prime Ministers often seem to get scared by teachers, we must be a truly scary lot.

I have to say that most of these putative visitors only ever appear to come back here once, so I assume that my rambling style bores the pants off them big time. Ho Hum. Nor do I seem to get any visitors at all from South America. I guess it would be the writing in English that does that. Not a lot of Russians read it either, though I appear to have had one hit from someone in Kiev, but they didn't come back for more. Well, all I can say is that if you are reading this from somewhere a long long way away from Glossopdale, WELCOME!

Yesterday was a funny old day. I got up at about 7 am as usual and the sky was the deep grey lead colour of imminent rain, except it didn't rain. But the weather girl on the BBC said that the sun was cracking the pavement flags. Ah well, she was in London, not Glossop and we always seem to get strange weather in our little valley. Jasper and I went out walking anyway, but I put my fleece back on as it was cold.

Yesterday, as we do so often, we walked along the Longdendale Trail, the once upon a time route of the railway from Manchester to Sheffield. But this time we dropped down from the Trail at Padfield and followed the side of Bottoms Reservoir to the dam, then on and up until I rejoined the Trail some 2 miles from home. Then returned along the trail. It made for a nice walk and it reminded me that the things we see, and are used to seeing, often look very different when seen from the opposite direction. Anyway, I've bought myself an Ordnance Survey map of the Dark Peak, so maybe I will start to look for different walks.

I often walk along roads and wonder where Public Footpaths might take me. I'm not enormously adventurous and the last time I took such a path I ended up walking about half a mile through ankle deep mud and ended up no more than 50 yards from where I had started. So the map is supposed to give me an idea as to where these footpaths go. However, the last time that I used an O S map in anger I was in the 6th Form at school, some 40 years ago, and I was not terribly adept at reading the damned things then. After all, the representation of the ground you are walking on, as deduced by a cartographer and drawn as if seen straight down, often looks nothing at all like the bit of field that you are walking through.

I tried using Google Maps because you can always switch on the overhead photographs, but the problem is that it does not go off the road, so when the road stops, so does Google Maps. I found out not long ago that just because Google Maps said that there was no way through, didn't mean that there was not. Following the road to Broadbottom from Brookfield you are not supposed to be able to get through, according to Google. However, in reality, there is a perfectly good footpath, it's just that you would never get through in your 4x4, or SUV as I believe these monstrosities are called in America. They may be wonderful vehicles in the open parts of Middle America but there is nothing more awkward than a Dodge Pickup on Church Brow in Mottram where the road is actually narrower than the vehicle. Some things should be preserved from the onward march of monstrous technology.

Anyway, just to finish off, here is another photograph of Jasper the Spaniel enjoying the walk yesterday. He didn't mind the cold and the overcast, but then he doesn't mind what the weather is, he just likes going a walk. Here he was on the path running alongside Rhodeswood Reservoir yesterday. Funnily enough, by the time we got home the sun was shining and the rest of the day was beautiful. I planted two new rose bushes in our front garden, I just hope that they thrive. Today, the sun is shining and all is looking pretty right with the world. I don't know where we will go our walk today. We will just have to see.

See you all soon, wherever you are. Have a good day!

April come she will, When streams are ripe and swelled with rain!

2010-04-11T19:57:00.062+01:00

I realised this morning that I have been quite remiss with the writing of my blog. It was in church, after an excellent service with a really good sermon, and Tony commented on my blog. I must admit that I hadn't realised that he had read it. It made me very happy to realise that there are people out there who read this blog. I know that Daniele reads it, and Ann, because they both comment on it from time to time, but three people. Gosh, that's an audience!

I haven't written much of late because it seemed quite uniformly drab in the valley. Each day it seemed to be raining, or it had just finished raining or ..... you know what I mean. I seemed to be walking through mud a lot of the time and Spring just never seemed to be getting any nearer. But then we have had a couple of days of glorious sunshine and suddenly things seem to be happening. So I went for a really enjoyable walk with Jasper, on Saturday. I took my camera and it was just great.

I just bought Panorama X4 from those very nice people at Serif. They make really good software at very reasonable prices. Panorama stitches photographs together to make scenes and the day was so nice that I thought I'd give it a try. The photographs are a bit on the small size but if you double click on them then you'll get a bigger version in your browser window. The photo at the top of the this blog is taken looking over Shire Hill from the junction of Woodhead Road and Cemetry Road at the back of Glossop. The one that I will put at the bottom of the blog is a panorama looking over Padfield and on up the Longdendale Valley.

You know, I actually feel really blessed to live here. We live in an industrial village on the very edge of the Peak District. I can be in the centre of Manchester in three quarters of an hour, so we really have all of the amenities of the city should we want them, but I can walk to the places where I took these two photographs, from my house, in ten minutes. It is truly a wonderful place to live.

Yesterday, when I took these photographs, the sun was shining and it was so warm that I decided to forego my fleece jacket and went walking in a T shirt. We were out for just under two and a half hours, but I'm still not walking so very fast so I have no ideas how far we walked, probably no more than 3 or 4 miles I guess. We went along the back of the School and down to Dinting Arches, then turned left and followed footpaths along to Surrey Street and rejoined "civilised" society. Then up Spire Hollin and up through Howard Park, then cut across another footpath and out onto Woodhead Road near the junction with Cemetry Road. Then back along Cemetry Road and down through Bankswood Park and home. That bit is for me really, if you live in Middle America then you won't get a lot out of these street names, but it helps me to remember.

And now, at last, there are real signs of spring. Huge, bulbous, sticky buds are just about to burst open at the tip of the tree branches. The plum tree outside Les' garden on our close has come out in it's pink livery in the last day. Interestingly, our plum tree, and our neighbours plum tree are still devoid of all blossom and yet they are no more than 30 metres away from Les' blooming one. I had a look at our feathery Acer this morning and it's leaves are just about to pop into view. I think that by Friday many of our bushes will look radically different from the way that they have looked for months.

There is a sad note though. We were out in the garden doing a bit of tidying up yesterday. Pat was mowing the lawn for the first time this year and I was trying to convince one of our Honeysuckle bushes that it would look and feel better standing up against the fence rather than lying on the ground. I had just about succeeded when Pat pointed out that our Californian Lemon Tree was not looking its best. I don't know what the proper, Latin name for the Lemon Tree is, and it has never looked even vaguely as if it might grow lemons, but I really loved that tree. We've had it maybe 4 or 5 years at most and it has grown really well. When we planted it, it was maybe 18 inches high and last year it was at least 6 feet high and that much across as well. I thought it was well established. But when we looked at it yesterday, it did not look so good at all. All of it's leaves from last year were still in place and had gone totally dry. So dry that you could hold a bunch of them in your hand and just crush them to powder. I cut off a couple of branches, about as thick as my thumb, just to see if there was any life in there at all, but to me they looked totally dead, no sign of green at all.

It always seemed so healthy. I just cannot imagine what could kill a healthy tree like that. Nor, we think, is it alone. An Acer bush also looks as if it has succumbed to the winter. I won't do anything drastic just for the moment because Andy the gardner must be coming any day now, he hasn't been around the garden for months, but he must be due this week. I'll let him decide if the poor tree has shuffled off this mortal coil. I shall have to resurrect the incinerator bin from behind the Summer House, then, if we must say goodbye to the Lemon Tree, we can cremate it decently.

It seems such a shame. With all this new life about to burst forth, there are some of the plants that just won't burst. That, I suppose, is life.

But it has been a beautiful day. We had a marvellous salad at lunch time and Pat cooked up a stew that was so very tasty for Dinner. With a nice glass of Sancerre, crisp and cold from the fridge. An enjoyable walk with a little dog who doesn't care where he goes but enjoys going anywhere.

Life doesn't get much better. Here comes the other photograph I promised you. God Bless!

Summer Time

2010-03-28T13:47:00.000+01:00

Don't worry, I haven't entirely lost it. I know that it isn't Summer yet, but last night we moved the clocks on an hour and so went from Greenwich Mean Time to the wonderfully named British Summer Time. Six days ago we passed the equinox and so now we are moving steadily towards the Summer. Certainly the days are longer now and, from today, it will still be daylight at 7.30 in the evening. I do like this time of year! Now, if the cold winds would calm down, maybe we would start seeing a few more spring flowers. I have noticed that the buds on the trees are beginning to grow, so we'll soon have the trees back dressed in their green plumage.

I don't have time to write much for now, but I thought that if I missed this chance I'd probably not end up writing for ages, so I'll write something, even if it ends up being brief. Pat, my wife, has had a very full week this week, I hardly seem to have seen her and today she isn't doing anything. We have even skived off Church. We are going out for lunch to one of our favourite restaurants, even though it is called a Tea Room. We had Christmas Dinner there this year and it was wonderful. However, I only rang them up on Friday so I should be very grateful that they could fit us in at all. However, I'm off out for lunch in less than an hour, so be brief Kevin, be brief.

I've just had a very enjoyable walk with Jasper the Spaniel. We dropped down into the valley by walking down the path to Dinting, but when we reached the bottom dip in the path we cut off along a path that leads back up towards the old railway track. I've mentioned before, I think, that our little local railway used to be one of the arterial routes out of Manchester. The railway used to run from Manchester to Sheffield through the Woodhead Tunnel. The Woodhead was opened in the early 60's, I think, and closed again not long before we moved to Glossopdale. there was a huge fie in the centre of the Woodhead Tunnel that I think must have destroyed it's integrity. Anyway, the railway closed down because it no longer went anywhere.

When we first moved here the railway lines were still in place and the old line was just fenced off, you could not get near it at all. Then, in the early 90's, I think, they decided to lift the rails and turn it into a long distance walking route. It means that it is now the Longdendale Trail and is the main part of my favourite walks. But I've put pictures of the trail on here before.

Today, though, I was well away from the Longdendale Trail. When we came out of the path that led up from Dinting Arches we came out of a little gap in the fence and onto what I took to be another pathway. I turned left, back towards home, but I was bothered because I was on the wrong side of the railway lines and I couldn't think of anywhere that this path recrossed the railway. Here is a view of that path at this place.

There is something in the distance, but I wasn't sure what. Anyway, it was worth a walk. This is what I found, over to one side of the path was this building.

Now, I'm not a railway spotter or anything, but I think that this must have been an engine repair shed from the days when the railway was much bigger and important. Down the middle of the building is a long pit where I suppose workmen used to be able to get underneath the engines. It is very dilapidated, but completely open. There are no fences to keep the unwary or witless out of the place or out of danger. When you look inside the place, the pit is full of drink bottles and other worrying things.

I walked on a bit and found the remains of the old station house. The curious thing here is that this building looks Ok from the other side. You see it from the train when you pass this place. So they have kept the far side of the building in some sort of repair, but left the roof off this side. It just isn't going to last, is it.

Anyway, we turned round at that point and made our way back out of this old, industrial archaeology site. (I wish it was.) I really don't like it when I find places where our heritage is being allowed to crumble. Anyway, one last picture, so you know that I am still taking bad photographs despite my evening class. Here we are, back on the original pathway, looking up the lane called Little Dinting. Back up this lane puts you back on Dinting Road. Today, though, we carried on along the path to Glossop. Nothing eventful happened and about a hour later we were home. Tired but full of a sense of having had a bit of an adventure, my doggy pal and me.

See you soon.

Wednesday Evening at 9 o'clock.

2010-03-24T21:20:00.001Z

I just don't know what the problem is. After all, I'm no longer working. I do nothing much all day. I get up at 6 am and watch TV programmes that I've recorded during the week for about two hours beforee breakfast. I go out for a walk with Jasper every morning, for about an hour and a half, then have lunch and afterwards, fall asleep in my chair. Then when I come to switching on the computer I haven't got the energy, or the interest, to write in my blog. I find my eyes drooping. What is happening to me. Is it old age, dementia or just laziness. When I was working I did a full days work and then still had time to write something in the blog.

If you don't read Daniele's blog, then you ought to do. There is a link in the margin, but if you cannot see it here is another http://danerard.canalblog.com . The only problem with Daniele's blog is that she will insist on writing a lot of it in French. I know the secret you know. I understand that the French really speak English all the time when they think we aren't watching, then start talking in this strange language when they think we are. Anyway, I often struggle with Daniele's cinema and art reviews, after all, it's one thing to speak six or seven words of French and another thing entirely to read it properly. I wonder if the local Adult Education Centre do Advanced Conversation. I bet they don't.

Anyway, back to the point. Without doubt, my favourite bit of Daniele's Blog is her little visits to some of the streets of Paris, and she has started to write them in English. I love reading about all the different places and Daniele sprinkles them with little photographs. Excellent stuff. My favourite just recently was this little bit, "A courtisan of the 19th century, famous and rich. She left this square and had a bigger place built on the Champs Elysees when it became fashionable, under Napoleon the Third.. Now her last home is the Virgin Megastore..." I shall not tell you where to look, go and find it for yourself. It just tickles me that this famous courtesan, (now what would we call her today??) building herself a posh place on the Champs Elysees, and what has become of it.

I think Daniele is a little wicked, because when she sees a locked gate into a yard, she tries the latch and when it is open she goes in to have a look. So she visits some stunning squares and yards and the buildings that are tucked away from view. If it was me I'd walk past, bemoaning the fact that the door was locked and unwilling to try it. I think that may just be a fundamental difference between me and Daniele, or is it between the Brits and the French. I know that I would assume that somewhere was private, while others assume that a place is public unless it is locked.

There haven't been many photos of late because since my fall in February and my second operation on my knee I have been restricting my walks with Jasper. I tend to do the same walks again and again and there is little change at the moment to photograph. There are still very few flowers growing and the trees are still only in the early stages of budding. It has been a hard winter. Still, we've had some nice days of late. Anyway, on the walk from Padfield to Hadfield there is a small, new wood by the side of the road. It has been grown quite deliberately and it is rather nice. It is fenced in, but the other day I noticed that while the gate is bolted, it is not locked. One of these days I shall take my courage in both hands and go into this little wood. Soon.

For now, here is a small picture of an open area that runs alongside Dinting Road. It is unfenced and open and I think that someone has suggested that it become a village green. This is despite the fact that the nearest village is Dinting and that is down on the main road. I always think of village greens as compact, maybe with a duck pond. Not this...........

You can see what I mean, can't you. It's more like a bit of grass surrounded by the industrial zone. I mean it's not like it was the middle of Manchester. we've got plenty of grass around. Yesterday I walked all the way from Glossop back to Hadfield without walking on the main road for more than 5 yards. But still, a bit more public access green land won't go amiss.

See you all again, quite soon, if we're spared. Night, night.

Musings on a Wednesday Morning

2010-03-10T09:56:00.000Z

It isn't laziness I can assure you, though I don't appear to be doing very much at the moment. A combination of things have quite overcome me at the moment, and I wish that I could see my way out of them. Oh, nothing very bothersome, nothing nasty, just minor irritants to be honest.

Pat's Sister had a hip replacement about a week and a day ago. It's the nature of the thing that she had the job done in one of these new NHS facilities that seem to pop up now and again, small, ultra-modern and usually run by Canadian, Australian or American Health Companies. They look like private hospitals but are actually part of the NHS and you don't have to pay to use them. But what is wrong with us doing it for ourselves and under the NHS. What is it with our government in recent years, it seems that the attitude these days is that if it's British then it's not to be trusted, but if it's an American idea then it is the best thing since sliced bread. I realise from watching the news over recent months that our American cousins are not enamoured of our NHS system. I think it's regarded as Socialist or even Communist, but I think I'd rather be middle class and poorly in Britain than America. I always get the impression that going into hospital in America requires an explosively large amount of money. Yes, I realise that they have Insurance to pay for medical treatment, but my experience of Medical Insurance came when I applied to BUPA for Health Insurance a few years ago and they finally said that they would be prepared to accept me as a customer as long as I agreed to pay them a vast amount of money every month and I agreed that the only part of my body they would treat would be my left big toe. That's an exaggeration of course, but not a huge exagerration. Sorry, rant over!

No it's not. the other thing that I find fascinating is that these super clinics get set up in leafy Cheshire. I know of two of these places and they both serve Cheshire. Why don't they build one in Gorton, or Ancoats or some other less well off part of Manchester. Cheshire! To them that have shall more be given! I've always thought that they should relocate Cheshire somewhere south of Surrey.

So anyway. All of that has absolutely nothing to do with my lack of blogging. Being on my own in the house with Jasper the manic spaniel has not prevented me from blogging or anything else. Not that I've done anything else. When Pat went away I said that I'd clean the house while she was away. So far I've cleaned nothing at all and it's Wednesday morning. She'll be back home on friday. Added to that, barbara is coming round to visit this afternoon and the house looks like it's been hit by a dust bomb. I must go for my constitutional with Jasper, then get a bit of cleaning done. At least the lounge and the kitchen, or I will be in deep doodoo.

In the last three weeks the computer has died on me twice. About three weeks ago everything started to go wrong. Programs would not load and then it simply refused to start up at all. I decided that it was me loading a piece of wonky software and it was my own fault. So I rebuilt the computer from scratch, software rebuild, nothing at all to do with screwdrivers etc. Then about ten days ago it did the same again, so I've had to rebuild it all from scratch again. This takes time because every piece of software has got to be reinstalled. This time I've taken more time over it, put each piece of software on one at a time, rebooted the computer every time and then done a system backup to make sure. So far, so good, but it all takes a lot of time.

But you don't expect this from a brand new computer do you, well a four month old computer anyway. It was my retirement treat to me from me and I spent too much money on it. Now I'm beginning to wonder how big a mistake it was. And no, Daniele, I have not treated myself to several new computers recently, just this one, and the last new computer I bought was eight years ago. That is a very old computer.

But I shall get to the bottom of this, even if I have to ring up Hewlett Packard in the USA and moan at them. I wonder if they sell Health Insurance as well?

The Preston Wigmaker

2010-02-27T21:25:00.001Z

Today's post nearly didn't happen. You would think, wouldn't you, that a new computer would be reliable for a good while. I got my new PC just before Christmas and, on the whole, I've been happy with it. However, over the last couple of weeks, strange things have been happening with it. I found that I couldn't load programs that I had been able to use before and one new program kept crashing. I would have thought it was a virus, but I run Norton 360 and I've never had a problem with it in the past. The obvious thing to blame was the new program, the one that kept crashing, so i tried to remove it using System Restore, and it failed. It claimed to have moved the computer back by 10 days, but all the software was still the way it had been that morning. So I bit the bullet and this morning I wiped the Hard Disc and reinstalled Windows. At the moment the only thing running is Office, but Pat neded to do something that only needed Word and the Printer, so I picked up the laptop that is Pat's and here I am.

The day after my walk in Manor Park that is described below, we set off for a weekend at Willersley Castle near Cromford in Derbyshire. Here is the view out of our bedroom window on Saturday Morning.

It wasn't the best weather in the world that weekend, but I still wouldn't mind waking up to that view every day. I won't bother describing our weekend much for we went for a Parish weekend with people from our Church. Had a really good time, listened to some interesting talks, ate some very good food and had a good, quiet and interesting time.

The point of the blog, though, is not to talk about our weekend, but about Cromford Mill. The mill is about a half mile from the Castle and I think it is really special. Here is a picture:

So why would I think that this scruffy little pile of bricks is in any way important. Well, in 1732 in Preston, Lancashire, a young man was born who, to my mind, was going to change the world. He is no hero of mine, I actually think he was an unprincipled rogue, but at least he was no Adolf Hitler, just a rogue. His name was Richard Arkwright and he grew up to be a wig maker. I always thought that being a wig maker was an odd sort of occupation to be a world changer. But around about 1765 Richard Arkwright invented an ingenious Cotton Spinning Engine called "The Water Frame". Up until that point all the machines that had been invented to speed up the process of making cloth had been operated by human power or animal power. Machines like the Spinning Jenny were small enough to be used in the home. The water Frame was not. It was a big machine and it needed an external power supply, running water (hence its name). So it made more economic sense to have a lot of them, all together in one place, and use one water source to power them all. So Arkwright borrowed money and set up the very first "manufactory" in the history of the world.

This is him, Richard Arkwright, the Preston Wigmaker who changed the world. The reason that I don't particularly like him is not because he became rich and famous, good luck to him. Not because he built his mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, that he became Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire (I think) or that he built, and lived in Willersley Castle. But I rather think that his Waterframe was actually built by someone else, a man called Lewis Paul, whose name does not feature in the History books at all. So it goes, I suppose.

I have one other gripe really, and this is not about Arkwright. The mill he built at Cromford is in a pretty dire state. It just strikes me that in this country we want to preserve our heritage, but we are quite selective about the heritage we want to preserve. Go to Styal Mill and it is well preserved and draws in crowds like nobody's business in summer. It's a pretty mill you see, and Cromford is not.

And that is just about that, for this evening. Jasper, by the way, spent his weekend in a doggy hotel in Denton, Manchester. Poor dear, he was loved to bits. Jasper's fan club extends to Denton as well. See you soon!

Da spring is sprung

2010-02-25T15:42:00.001Z

Okay then, here we go again, I hope. This post harks back to the 11th February, a Thursday. I remember it well. That night I knew that we were holding a PCC Meeting at Church and, for my sins, I'm Secretary of the PCC as well as the other things that I do. So I really fancied a walk. I knew that the PCC Meeting would be a long one and I also knew that it was going to be cold. Our Church is about 800 years old and it gets cold on a cold winter's night. So the thought of a walk was great. However, I was still suffering with the twisted knee and twisted ankle that I had done the other week.

Then there was my doggie, Jasper. I mean, look at this little face, how can you say "NO" to a walk with him.

By the way, this picture arises from the teacher at my Evening School class in Digital Imaging suggesting that I get in closer to my subject. I think this is a lovely picture of a very wayward dog, but then I'm biased.

So, anyway, I needed a fairly short walk, and a fairly level walk. It was my lovely wife who suggested Manor Park. That was a good idea. Manor Park is in our local town, Glossop, a couple of miles away from where I live. Actually, it's not in Glossop, but rather in Old Glossop which is just outside the modern town of Glossop itself. I'm not going to pretend to know the history of the park really well, because I don't. However, up until the early part of the 20th Century the park that now is formed a part of the manorial holdings of the Howard Family, who are the Dukes of Norfolk. The Norfolk family are the ones who feature throughout British History as one of the central families. To this day the Duke of Norfolk is the Hereditary Lord Marshall of England. I think that means that he organises state events like Royal Weddings, Funerals and such, but anyway that is getting away from the story.

In the early part of the 20th Century the, then, Duke must have given up on Glossop and left. I must look it up in a local history book. However, in leaving, he gave away parts of his estate to the people of Glossop, and part of his gardens became Manor Park. Interestingly, (well it's interesting to me, you can still see bits of stonework, arches and lintels and that sort of thing in the garden walls of quite ordinary houses.) There is no Manor House, though, or at least none that I can see, and I have no idea what happened to it. Maybe what happened to the House is why he left. Or maybe he just gave up on killing grouse.

So Jasper and I were dropped off near the entrance to the park and enjoyed a very pleasant hour wandering about among the frozen puddles and frozen plant beds. But it was a lovely day, the sun was shining, there was no wind, it was very pleasant indeed. And here is the first herald of Spring that I have seen in Glossopdale. We were just walking up a path almost smothered in bushes when there, almost at my feet, we saw some snowdrops.

I don't doubt that this is nothing special to anybody else who reads this, you've probably had snowdrops out since December and are now into the full bloom of roses, but we are quite high up here in Glossopdale and we often realise that our plants and flowers are weeks behind other places. This was a real fillip to me. makes me think that Spring is really only a little way away. Despite the fact that it snowed quite heavily the day before yesterday, it didn't stick.

We wandered on, don't worry, Jasper avoided trampling the snowdrops into the ground by dint of the fact that I kept him on a short lead until we got away from them. He was very much more interested in the ducks and geese that were having fun on the duck pond. Here is one who kept on having great fun splashing water all over every other duck.

Jasper wanted to chase, Oh how he wanted to chase, but I am a right meanie.

Then we walked up the back of the park. The ground rises quite steeply at the back of the park, and I got a picture of a rather grand set of steps that come from nowhere and go nowhere either, but clearly, once upon a time things were different.

Then we walked home. Looking back on it, though, it was a lovely walk that we both enjoyed. Jasper and I have long conversations on these walks of ours. I must admit that they do tend to be rather one sided and I think this may be the reason why I am shunned by all the right thinking people of Glossopdale, but who cares. I am fed up of winter. I've had winter up to the back teeth and now I want Spring and the promise of better days to come.

We have booked our holiday, we are off to Ireland in June. Life is good, I hope.

By the way, I must just add my thanks to Ann for the lovely comment that you left. It is really nice to know that anyone but me reads this. Not that it really matters as I write this for the fun of it, not because of who may, but probably won't, read it. My knee is feeling better and better every day following last week's surgery. I have a follow up appointment to remove the stitches or whatever, next week, then I can get back to the regimen of walking. Just in time for spring.

Mea Culpa

2010-02-23T20:55:00.001Z

Don't really know what the title of this post means, to be honest, but if it means "Sorry" then it will do. It is now some two weeks since I last posted to the blog, and I really don't want to get any more out of touch with it than I am. In that last couple of weeks I've done a few things that I want to write about, just not tonight.

I managed a couple of good walks with Jasper that I want to mention, and I got some nice photographs at the time as well. I discovered the helpful soothing effects of Ibuprofen on a twisted ankle. Pat and I went on a weekend away in Cromford, further down in the county of Derbyshire, and I spent a couple of days in Hospital having minor surgery on my knee. It may have been mionor but it hurt quite badly at first. Also, as my friend puts it, being a fairly substantial sort of bloke, they bung more anaesthetic in me than they do in skinny people. That has left me feeling rather listless and lazy for a few days, but hopefully I am starting to come out of it a bit now.

So, hopefully, I will be back with a vengeance in the next few days. Unfortunately, my laissez faire attitude has not just extended to the blog, but to just about everything else in recent days, so I need to do some other jobs as well, and just at the time when the new computer has decided to have a hissy fit. Something has gone wrong in the Registry and all sorts of odd and weird things have started to happen. This may be the herald of a rebuild, which will be long and painful, but which will work.

At least a rebuild will not destroy all my data, fiungers crossed.

Normal Service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Sunday Evening

2010-02-07T20:39:00.000Z

I'll be honest, I don't really feel like writing much today, but it's been a couple of days and I mustn't let things slip again. It's rather murky tonight, a bit damp but not raining at least. I felt really sorry for the eastern coastal states of America yesterday. The news had pictures of the snow in DC. Now, I don't know anyone in Washington, but at the end of the news piece they showed a graphic of the weather covering everything from Washington upwards. I have a friend from College days who works at the University of New Hampshire and lives in, I guess, a small town called Lee. I feel a bit worried for him and his wife. Still, I think that they have a nice house so I'm sure they will be OK. I must remember to email him tomorrow.

Borrrrrrrrrrrris' book, "Lutte Majeur" turned up in the post yesterday afternoon. I haven't "read" it yet, but I looked through it and I have to say that I am very impressed by the drawing skills. I can't comment on the storyline as it's all in French, but then I only ever bought it for Borrrris' drawings. I will comment more on this book in a day or three. However, one very interesting point, for me at least, was the provenance of the book. I originally tried to buy it from Amazon.co.uk but, while admitting that the book existed, they said that they did not know when, if ever, it would be available in England. So I had to buy it from Amazon.fr the French site. I had to pay French prices which Danielle tells me are higher than English prices, and I believe her. However, isn't it interesting that when it arrived on saturday it came from the Amazon Warehouse in Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, in an Amazon.co.uk cardboard book cover, delivered by the Royal mail. That book has never been to France but they had the nerve to charge French prices for it. I have a good mind to send them an email of complaint.

Huff!

My knee and ankle meant that today's walk with Jasper was quite short, over a familiar route, and the weather was not very good for photography, so no picture today.

I feel the need to go into Manchester soon. Knee and ankle willing. I love looking at the pictures Danielle takes on the streets of Paris, and I feel the need to go looking for something similar in Manchester.

I'll keep you informed. A tout a l'heure!

Plus gris que le gris de ma vie

2010-02-04T11:30:00.001Z

Unfortunately we don't have a lot of parrots living around us in North West England, for I could have done with a picture of a poorly parrot this morning. Then I could have used a heading like "Sick As A Parrot!". However, as I say, with a singular lack of parrots I have had to fall back on this group of inordinately brassed off looking sheep. I took this on, what Monday or Tuesday when the rain was pouring down from leaden skies. Sheep in this neck of the woods are hardy beasts, after all they live outdoors in all weathers. At the start of January, with 16 inches of snow on the ground, they were out there foraging for food, but when I took this picture they were huddling. I feel a lot like them today.

They say bad things come in threes, so yesterday counts as a bad day plus.

It started with Jasper. Like an awful lot of Spaniels he suffers from glands at the bottom of his bottom that get full of something which smells like you wouldn't believe. You can tell when they become painful because he starts running in circles trying to bite his tail. When that happens we just take him to the vet who cleans them out, it takes about 45 seconds and costs us twenty pounds. I must learn how to clean them out myself as it will save me a fortune. At the moment they seem to need cleaning about every six weeks.

So I made an appointment at the vet's clinic for 2 pm. I thought, I'll save on going out twice, I'll walk there and back, about two miles each way, and that will be the Loony Dog's walk for the day as well. So I set off at 1 pm, by 1.30 |I was well on the way, just turning into Spire Hollin (that's a road), stepped on a patch of ice I hadn't seen because the pavement looked fine and down I went. At the moment the big muscle in my left leg is not strong enough to fully support me, so if I slip on my right leg, my left just collapses under me. Yesterday I went down pretty hard. A passing Carpenter's van pulled up and this young bloke of mid twenties got out and helped me up.

However, as soon as I was on my feet I realised that I had twisted my ankle. Not awfully badly, but badly enough for walking to be uncomfortable. Is there a good reason why mobile phones stop working when you really need them, or is it just mine. I could have done with a lift to the vets at that point, but no phone meant no lift. So I had to walk about a half mile, or rather hobble, to the Adult Education Centre where Pat was having her art lesson. Then we went to the vet's together in her car. Twenty minutes later and twenty pounds lighter we were back home. What else can go wrong today?

About five o'clock Jasper threw up the entire contents of his stomach all over Pat's feet and the kitchen floor. Poor love, he had not looked right all day. That was thing number two. Not much of a disaster as they go, except for Jasper. He is such a bouncy, vital dog that when he is off form he looks really awful. He spent the rest of the evening cuddled in to whichever of us was sitting nearest to his bean bag.

So, what else can go wrong today? About 9 pm I was upstairs messing around with photographs on my computer when Pat called me downstairs. In the middle of our snug, the new room we created from what was once our Dining Room, water was merrily dripping from the electric light and making a pretty puddle in the middle of the new solid wood flooring. Now the ceiling that the water was dripping from was newly plastered last summer, when the roof gave way and the ceiling collapsed. That new roof had only been in place for six months and the guy who fitted it promised us it was guaranteed not to fail for twenty five years.

I rang him up, by now it was ten o'clock because I'd turned off the power, using a flashlight I had taken the light fitting down and disconnected the electric cable from the light and up twisted the cables so that water was no longer dripping from a live wire. Then put the electric back on. So at ten at night I rang Alf, the roofer. He is a good bloke and lives locally, which was one of the reasons we employed him in the first place, but I don't think he expected a phone call at ten pm saying that a roof he fitted six months ago was leaking.

But it has to be the roof. The only thing up there is ceiling boards, insulation, electric cables and roof. It's an extension, so there is no upper floor with central heating pipes that can leak. The funny thing is, it hadn't rained all day. We've had some awfully wet days and no water dripping down the lights, then on a dry day it starts to drip. What is going on.

Anyway, he has promised to come round today. If it had been me I'd have been round first thing, but it's now getting on for twelve noon and there is no sign of Alf yet. Ah well.

That's three things though. Yes. Please agree with me! I can't take another day like this!

See you soon. Oh, I'll include this rather nifty piece of ornament I saw at the edge of someone's garden yesterday, before I fell over. It's not exactly your usual garden gnome. See you soon.

Rainy days and Tuesdays always get me!

2010-02-02T21:42:00.000Z

Absolutely pouring down today. Drenching. Still, it doesn't put Jasper the Loony Spaniel off his stride. I have no idea why he was limping on Sunday, probably just being mardy. By Monday he was ready for a walk so we went up to the park, over the hill and down into Glossop and then home along Dinting Road. About 90 minutes and very enjoyable, except the bit coming down Ashes Lane which must be close to 40 degrees, and on Monday it was quite icy. Still, we survived.

Today we just went a shortish walk again, along the Transpenine Trail to Padfield and back through the village, probably no more than 2 or three miles. I managed to fall over quite dramatically though. At one point on the trail there was a rainwater puddle across the entire track. I stepped into the puddle only to discover that the bottom of the puddle was a sheet of ice, and down I went. My leg just isn't strong enough to stop me from falling in a situation like that. Still, I was already wet from the rain so I just got up and carried on. The walking probably kept my knee from going daft.

Jasper and I very nearly came to blows though. There is a very big field on the walk and in better weather the farmer keeps his sheep or cows and sometimes both in this field. Today, though, there was nothing, or so I thought. So I let jasper have a run because I thought we were far enough away from the main road. What I hadn't noticed, though, was a flock of Canada Geese roosting on the ground a couple of hundred yards away. Jasper had spotted them and played dumb. So when I let him off he ran after the geese as fast as his little legs would carry him. No way was he catching the geese, but he would not come back to me either. He is a stubborn little devil at times. At one point I thought that he had run away, but he was only way off in the distance having found a puddle of mud to jump in. When he eventually came back he was not a brown and white Spaniel, but a solid brown one. I have learned my lesson, he won't be running loose in that field again for a good long time.

I heard one of my favourite songs on the radio the other morning. Piaf singing Aznavour's song "Plus bleu de le bleu de tes yeux". One of these days I will tell how I came to fall in love with Piaf's singing, but not today. I really love songs because they are a poetry all of their own and, certainly with many songs, the words are not too difficult. I was looking at the lyrics of "Plus bleu" on an internet site and comparing what I thought it meant with what Google Translate threw up. As usual Google Translate is okay for giving you a general feeling for what something is about but naff all good at all for telling you a good translation.

Then I found a translation of the song done by Monique Adriaansen & Mel Priddle. Now, the words are not a straight translation but I actually like the way that they have put the song / poem together. I mean, if you take the first two verses of the original song, ...

Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux
Je ne vois rien de mieux
Même le bleu des cieux
Plus blond que tes cheveux dorés
Ne peut s'imaginer
Même le blond des blés

You get, I think, something like this: ......

More blue than the blue of your eyes
I see nothing better
Even the blue of the skies
Fairer than your golden hair
Cannot be imagined
Even the golden corn

That, by the way is me and my French / English Dictionary trying to work it out, but it just doesn't work in English.

Now here, is the transliteration done by Adriaansen & Priddle, and even though they have taken the words a bit of a way away from the original, I think it preserves the feeling of the original song. Well, that's what I think anyway, and you can disagree with me all you like, this is my blog after all.

A BLUE LIKE THE BLUE OF YOUR EYES

A blue like the blue of your eyes
When they're full of surprise
Isn't found in the skies
A cornfield in clear open air
Couldn't hope to compare
With the gold of your hair

A softening wind in July
Would be foolish to try
To compare with your sigh
The strength of a storm on the sea
Couldn't possibly be
Like the strength of my love

A blue like the blue of your eyes
Isn't found in the skies
Or the glow up above

If one day you decide to go your merry way
My life would become filled with dismay
Filled with dismay

A sky full of rain wouldn't say
It was nearly as grey
As the grey of the day
The darkest of nights wouldn't dare to claim
It could compare
With my aching despair

You laugh at me when I'm like this
Then you softly dismiss
All my fears with a kiss
My fool of a heart then takes flight
Almost mad with delight
Like a skylark above

The blue that I see in the skies
Can't compare with your eyes
When their shining with love

I will happily admit that there are bits of the transliterated song that I think are weaker, but on the whole, I think that it is a good attempt, and I like it. Kind of reminds me of "When we walked in fields of gold", but that is probably only the reference to wheat that slips in there. It doesn't have quite the rhythm and cadence of the original French, but it's not bad. Not bad at all.

I went to my evening class on digital imaging, by the way. There were four students and the teacher, and I really enjoyed it. Nothing much to tell for the moment, but as we go along, I'll let you share some of the things that come out of this class. No pictures today, it was too wet and miserable to be bothered taking my camera out of my pocket, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Till we meet again

Faites des beau reves.

Sunday Again

2010-01-31T20:48:00.000Z

I wasn't going to write anything today, but then I thought, "Just when you're getting into the habit of writing in the blog most days it would be a shame to miss out the last day in January"

So here I am. Jasper and I, and Pat as well today, just went for a short walk today. I forgot the camera so there are no photos on todays blog. We went over old paths, but had time to let Jasper have a good run around on the school field. Don't worry, he had already relieved his inner tensions, and anyway I was armed with a large array of black plastic pooh bags. He ran, and he ran and he ran for about ten minutes, then came to enjoy a fishy treat and was caught. So I took him around Hadfield for the rest of the hour.

He is limping ever so slightly this evening, so maybe yesterday's 7 mile walk may just have been too much for him. It was nearly too much for me I tell you! So I think that tomorrow he can have a quiet day with just a short walk and we will see if his limp is gone by Tuesday.

Tomorrow I start my Adult Education Class on Digital Imaging. I don't even know what it is as yet, never mind whether I'll be able to do it, but we'll give it a go.

So another quiet Sunday, no meal out this time, just me cooking Spaghetti Bolognese. Aparently, SpagBol should really be cooked with Tagliatelle! However, since I dislike Spaghetti as much as Tagliatelle, they are just too long and I end up always making a mess with them. So I make it with pasta Spirals. Maybe it should be called Spiralli Bolognese instead.

Right, enough, see you soon???? I hope so!

Broadbottom, there and back again.

2010-01-30T21:24:00.001Z

It has been suggested that I am becoming addicted to walking. In some ways I think that is right. I started out quite resenting the time that the walking was taking up, but, especially on nice days, I find I'm really enjoying it. So, when today started crystal clear and bitingly cold, I wondered where to walk today.

Hadfield, the village where I live, is, if you like, on the right hand slope of the Longdendale Valley. On the opposite slope are the two villages of Mottram and Broadbottom. Mottram is where we go to Church, and it's a lovely village. Broadbottom is, perhaps, just a bit more industrial in nature, but that was a long time ago now. I decided to walk to Broadbottom and see what time I got there, then I could decide whether to walk home, or get the train, for the Manchester Train come through Broadbottom on it's way to terminating in Hadfield. Useful!

The route I chose looked easy, following a road along past the Communal Waste Disposal Site (The Tip) and then went past the Sewage Works and eventually into Broadbottom by way of an area called "The Hague". Sounds wonderful, doesn't it. With just a few words you think you know what it's going to be like. but it isn't. Have a look at this.

This photo was taken about two thirds of the way to Broadbottom. Way away in the distance you can see Hadfield. (You'll see it better if you double click the photograph!) But isn't this gorgeous. It was one of the most pleasant walks yet. I do feel so lucky to live where I do. I can be in manchester in about 40 minutes by car, and I live in the middle of all this beauty. How lucky can you get. Nor is it hurt by having a walking companion like Jasper the Lunatic Spaniel who enjoys himself wherever we go.

Anyway, I got to Broadbottom in about 75 minutes. really happy with that, so I thought that I'd walk home again, but by a different route. That's where things went wrong. Basically I made two bad choices out of ignorance and effectively rejected shortcuts in favour of going the long way round in both cases. As a result I had to walk up one of those long, slow hills that really kill you, especially when you are still suffering from a weak knee, as I am. Having walked up the hill I then had to walk along a really long, hard road. I think that Jean Paul Sartre was probably thinking of the road from Charlesworth to Gamesley when he wrote "La route est dur". It certainly was today. Then when I got to gamesley I followed the wrong signpost for the Trans Pennine Trail and ended up walking all the way around a fairly extensive housing estate.

All in all the walk took three hours today. jasper got home and collapsed in a corned and slept for an hour. For an 11 month old Loony Spaniel that is going it.

So I will certainly walk to Broadbottom again, but next time I shall find a different road back. By the way, I was so happy to discover that using the photographic mode in Google maps let me discover that a road that was shown as not being continuous, was actually one piece of road. Now all that I need is for the GPS mapping system on my mobile phone to actually work for me next time. Today it decided to run out of battery power just at the moment when I really needed it. Just my luck.

I thought I'd just stick another nice scene in for you to have a look at. I just cannot remember what that long hill is called, but it's pretty neat. Unfortunately the sun was strong and quite low, which accounts for the glare at the right hand side of the picture. I take a lot more photographs than I show on the blog, so I think that I may have to start uploading more of them onto my Flickr and Picasa Accounts so that you can see, and criticise them more easily. I'll have a think about that, and let you know when I decide.

I was talking about talking books yesterday. Two of my recent favourites have been "Storm Front" and "Fool Moon" by Jim Butcher. I have to say at this point that I am, and pretty much always have been a fan of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I was actually part of the organising committee for a British SF Convention when it was held in Manchester around 25 years ago. The two book above concern two of the early cases of one Harry Dresden who is a real wizard working in a variant of modern day Chicago. I really enjoy the books, which are enhanced by the reader, James Masters, (He played Spike in the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who really reads them well and adds enormously to the stories. After I wrote my blog last evening I was looking on the Internet and started browsing. I found Jim Butcher's web site and that led me to Amazon. There I discovered that three of the stories have been made into TV films, but they haven't been shown on this side of the pond, or not as far as I know. However, they are available on DVD and Amazon were selling all three together for just 11 pounds. I decided that had to be a bargain, so I ordered them. I've got an email this evening telling me that they have been shipped, so there is another thing to look forward to this week.

Have to go now. Jasper is walking round with his legs crossed so I must go and take him a little walk up our Close so that he can use the doggie facilities. (The grass on the other side of the road.)

See you soon.

Longdendale

2010-01-29T20:43:00.003Z

Today was the most beautiful day. I got up just after 8 am and sat looking out of the window at the blue sky. When I went to bed last night it was throwing the rain down at the ground and I thought that my idea of taking the Lunatic Spaniel for a long walk along the Longdendale Trail was just blown out of the water. Then today, it was just so perfect that I had to go walking out into the countryside. I was out by 9.30. The picture above is taken about 2.5 miles along the Longdendale Trail, just as you descend to the dam that cuts across between the Valehouse and Rhodeswood Reservoirs. The picture above shows the bottom end of Rhodeswood. I took this picture at about 10.45 am and Jasper, the Lunatic Spaniel is actually tied to the signpost that you can just see in the bottom right of the picture.

Here is a picture of Jasper, on his own, just so you can see him.

You'll notice that despite the sun that was shining so nicely today, the rain that we have been having lately, following the deep snow we had not so very long ago, have left the paths as very muddy. Jasper loves this. You can see that his "feathers" and feet are more black than white which is very much how he likes it. As he lies here at my feet as I write he is back to his pristine whiteness. I used to wonder where all the mud went to, until Pat pointed out that it falls off him and into the carpet. Ah well, that's what vacuum cleaners are for, I guess.

The Longdendale Trail follows the route of the old railway that used to run from Manchester to Sheffield by way of the Woodhead Tunnel. That tunnel closed in the 1960's after a fire destroyed the integrity of the tunnel and the railway line beyond Hadfield began to fall into disrepair. We came to live here in 1983 and the railway line was fenced off and totally unused. I cannot remember when they transformed it into a walking trail, sometime in the 90's I think, but I'm not sure. However, it is a wonderful place, even though it still bears all the hall marks of a railway line! It is long and, on the whole, very straight. Still, that makes it good for walking along. It has been reforested in parts which makes it very comfy on a hot day in summer, when we get them that is. However, on a cold day the wind whistles along the trail, steered by the embankments of the old railway line. It was very, very cold at times today, but warm when the sun was shining.

Today I walked along the trail for 2.5 miles and then turned off to return to Hadfield along a road that runs on the other side of Valehouse Reservoir. The picture above shows the route just before we turned off. So I guess we did about 5 miles in total today and, with stops for photographs and chasing rabbits (I took the photos and jasper chased the rabbits, though the rabbits are a good deal better at running away from him than he is from chasing them. Still we both had a lot of fun.

I must admit that I am really enjoying these extended walks with Jasper. He enjoys them as well and is spending a lot of time sleeping today, so I guess that is a good sign.

The walks also give me an excellent opportunity to listen to my talking books. I love reading and talking books let me read and have a good walk at the same time. I get my books from Audible and I always choose the full versions. I often have the same book playing while I walk that I am reading at home and since the readings are word for word I can synchronise between the two amazingly well. At the moment I am listening to a book called "A Talent for War" by an American Science Fiction author called Jack McDevitt. It's a book that I chose on spec, as I liked the write up that Audible gave it. I am ever so glad that I did as it is a very good book, well written and well read. It is set some 9,000 years in the future, but like all good SciFi it really talks about the world as it is, and people who cannot get along with other people. But it won't suit everyone. Jane Austen it is not, though I love Jane Austen too.

Anyway, that brings me back to the present. I need to finish this so that I can log onto Audible and download some more books for when I finish this one. These longer walks mean that I am finishing books ever so much faster than I was doing. I used to listen to them on the way to work, but now that I don't go to work ..... Anyway, I'll leave you with one last photograph, this one looking back down the Longdendale Valley, along the length of Valehouse Reservoir.

See you soon.

Meandering

2010-01-28T19:11:00.003Z

I started my current phase of watching my weight some five weeks ago now. Joyce, one of the nurses at our Doctor's Surgery, told me it was time that I lost weight. Well, I am very, very, very heavy at the moment. I won't tell you how heavy, but it is scary. Maybe not in the league of the World's Fattest Man, but pretty scary. Anyway, I decided that I really needed to do something about it, but for the first four weeks, despite trying half heartedly, nothing happened. Then I decided that I needed to get walking. So for the last ten days I have been taking Jasper the Lunatic Spaniel for extended walks around our valley. So far I manage to average between 90 and 120 minutes each day.

I live in a village called Hadfield. Don't get gooey eyed at that, it isn't your typical English village with dancing round the maypole, it's very much an Industrial Village which may well date back several hundred years but really owes it's growth to the Mill working days of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Hadfield is at one end, and quite high on the side of the Glossopdale valley. Glossop is what, maybe two miles down the valley. There are lots and lots of Public Footpaths around, so I have started to investigate them.

Above is a photo of Glossop Brook which runs along the floor of the valley. I went along a path from our house that drops down into the floor of the valley, meeting the main road from Manchester to Sheffield at Dinting. As I took this picture the huge viaduct that carries the railway over the valley is right above my head. A huge brick structure that dates back to the days when the railway carried on along the Woodhead line into Yorkshire. Those days ended in the late 60's and most of the old railway line is now the Longdendale Trail. More about that another day. But just at this point the brook caught my eye. I rather like this picture. It's gloomy, but then the day was rather gloomy too.

I came out of the path at Dinting and turned left to walk along the road into Glossop. I have probably only walked along this road a couple of time in the 25 years we have lived here. Isn't it amazing what you see when you are walking that you don't see when you are in the car. I hadn't been on the road more than 10 minutes when I saw these two buildings.

Neither of them really seems to be inhabited at the moment, but it's the building on the left that intrigue me. It might even have been a shop once upon a time, but I cannot see it ever having been welcoming. Still, that's two intriguing buildings in a week. Walking is paying dividends it seems.

Now this is a very different house but it shows a feature that I find very interesting. Bear in mind that I'm not an architect, or indeed anyone who knows anything about buildings, but I just like certain things. This house is further up the valley than my village, in another village called Padfield. Not a misspelling, I assure you. This house is on the corner of Post Street which is a really steep hill going up to the top of the village. But look at the corner of the house, which is, by the way, very much lived in and obviously well loved. The corner of the house is curved and this is a feature that is very common in Padfield, Hadfield and Glossop as well. I have no earthly idea why they built these buildings like this, but they did. You may notice that the windows of this corner house are a lot bigger than those of the terraced house next door. One reason for this may be that it housed the "overlooker" from the Mill that was built further down the street. That was quite common in the 19th Century, to put the overlooker, or "foreman" on the corner of the street so that he could be incharge of the workers at home as well as at work. Some of the owners of 19th Century Mills liked to think of themselves as guardians of the public morals. Ho hum. The other reason for the big windows could bve that it was a corner shop, but I don't really think so, the windows don't have the look of shop windows somehow.

A little further along the road I went up a side road and discovered a public footpath that runs alongside the old railway line heading into Glossop. You'll notice that I've started taking my little pocket camera with me every day. I've got a very nice program that stitches individual pictures together to make panoramas, so I tried it out. Here is the view from the footpath down towards the main road into Glossop. You can see it was a horrible day by this time, drizzling away. I was quite thoroughly soaked to the skin by this point, but both Jasper and I were enjoying ourselves. I don't know how much you can see in this picture, but I think it looks quite good.

By the way I ought to say that when I went to see Joyce on Tuesday, to be weighed, I had lost 4 kilos or 8 pounds in the previous week. So I guess that all this walking is not doing me any harm at all. Certainly I plan to keep it up. So I'll keep walking, with Jasper, my camera and my walking pole and this weekend we will walk out of January and into February. Already it's getting lighter in the evenings, it's now light till just after 5 pm. Already I'm just beginning to see the first signs of the bulbs springing up from the ground. Before you know it , it will be spring! Now isn't that something to be looking forward to!

That reminds me. I haven't quoted my absolutely favourite poet for ages. Here is the first verse of the poem "in just" by e.e.cummings. If you have never read any of cummings poems (the non capitalisation of his name is not an error by the way) then I urge you to try him. He may be an acquired taste, but I love some of his imagery. Anyway, here's the first verse of the poem. The second and third verses go in a different direction, so I'll just ignore them for the nonce. In the meantime, I think that tomorrow I shall take my Spaniel along the Longdendale Trail and maybe, weather permitting, I'll get some nice pictures of the countryside. See you soon.

in Just-
spring       when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman 


whistles       far       and wee 


and eddyandbill come 
running from marbles and 
piracies and it's 
spring 


when the world is puddle-wonderful

Reflections on a Sunday Morning

2010-01-24T10:39:00.001Z

I'm going to have to be quick today. I'm skiving off Church. I should be there, but some friends invited us for lunch and, though they said that we could take Jasper the Lunatic Spaniel, I think it is asking too much. However, it would be unfair to lock the little boy away in his prison cell, sorry crate, for the time it takes to go to Church and then lunch as well. So I'm skiving off. I shall take him a decent walk, though not the length we have managed the last four days, and then get ready for lunch. So I cannot waste time.

I do not know how I do it, you know, I write a post and correct it when Daniele tells me what I've got wrong, and I still get things wrong. Ah me, it's what comes of being English. She won't comment on the blog itself, but sent me an email. I really enjoyed reading that email and so I'm going to quote from it here, so you can get a flavour of our conversations. " "Square" in France, has a different meaning from the English word. It means a little park...So, the place is "Le Square du Ranelagh". It's the same with what you call gallery is a museum in France! In France, a galerie can be a private shop where you can buy art works, or a big corridor in a castle, a manor or a museum... like "la Galerie des Glaces" in Versailles. By the way, les Anglaises, refers only to women.. A male, is un Anglais.. Take your pick. About Bon, ben... Don't forget the comma between the two words, to mark a pause.. and I forgot to tell you that ben is pronounced bain...

So if you say it without making a pause between the two, it might mean "have a good bath!.... French is a difficult language!" I've made one or two further corrections to yesterday's post, but anything else can stand.

Mind you, I think that English is just as difficult a language, and we have just as many words that have multiple meanings. Mostly because we've stolen them from French. Maybe if I enjoy going to evening school for Digital Imaging, (which starts for me a week on Monday, though it started for everyone else about three weeks ago) I can start doing Beginner's French in September, or maybe "French for the merely stupid". Or I could do like the lady I read about last week. In order to make sure that her son grows up speaking good French she has sent her 9 year old son to live with a family in France for six months. In that time the boy will call, and treat, his French "parents" as Maman and Papa and will have almost no communication with his English family. No email, no phone calls, no letters. Drastic perhaps but I bet he comes back speaking beautiful French. Now, I wonder if Pat .........

I only took one photograph yesterday. I walked a route that I often walk and nothing really caught my eye, except this one little building by the side of the main road. Have a look at this.

I've seen this building many times before and never really stopped and looked at it. It's obviously quite old, built of stone, not bricks. The door is planked up and looks to be nailed shut. All the windows have white cloths over them, except the top floor. I don't think anyone can be living there now. But there are big, strong stone lintels over the doors and windows. Between the tarmac pavement and the front wall is very old cobbling. It exudes an air of fatigue as if it is a little tired of it's decline into old age. But I think it has a real story to tell. I think that it is a weavers cottage from the days before weaving moved into the mills. It stands opposite an area that was once full of cotton mills, so in the early days it would have served them by weaving goods that were spun in the mill sheds. A big house like this might also have been the home of an overlooker or floor manager in the mill.

At the moment I have no answers, just questions, but I just might try to find out a little more.

Ah well, not the world's best posting today, but it will have to do. Bye bye for now!

Bon, ben (pronounced bain). Fait des beau reves!

Le Manege de Monsieur Barre (Corrected Version)

2010-01-22T17:27:00.004Z

I realise that I haven't written anything for a week so I thought that I needed to write something. As it does, something caught my eye, so I decided that it would be the subject for the day. I wrote that yesterday, and, as I expected, I got some of the details wrong. But thanks to my very good friend Daniele I can correct them and get them right in this updated version of the blog.

A few years ago we were visiting with our friend, Daniele, who lives outside Paris in France. One day, she took us to see an exhibition of Monet's Waterlilly paintings in a little gallery. The Gallery is called the Musee Marmottan and you can see a picture of the Museum just above. You can find this Museum at 2 Rue Louis Boilly, 75016 Paris, France. You can phone them on 01 44 96 50 33 or go to their website at www.marmottan.com

(Thank you very much to Google maps and the Internet in general)

I have to say that the Monet painings blew me away then, and I still find his paintings sublime, but that is not the point of the post.

When we came out of the Gallery I can clearly remember there being a small park at the bottom of the street that the gallery was in. Daniele tells me that the park is in Le Square du Ranelagh, I don't recall that, but I do recall being amazed by what looked like a clockwork roundabout that was running there. It looked so odd and very much out of time that I remembered it.

This morning I took Jasper Spaniel for a walk into Glossop because I had to go to the Adult Education Centre. I'm very interested in taking better photographs and thought that it might be interesting, now that I've got some time, to go on a Photography Course. Of course there aren't any. But there was a course called, Computing: Digital Imagery, so I thought I'd give that a try. It might be fun.

I love looking at the photographs taken by really good photographers over the years and this is one thing that the Internet seems to be very good at, images. So, this afternoon I was looking at some of Robert Doisneau's photographs. I am particulary taken by a photograph I found called "Baiser Hotel de Ville 2002" which is lovely. I do like the way that he gets the central figures to stand out from the background, and yes, I do realise that it is a reworking of an older photograph.

But while I was looking at this website, what do I find

but "Le Manege de Monsieur Barre" of 1955. Do you realise that when this photo was taken I was just four years old. (By the way, when I first wrote this yesterday, I mistakenly used the word Menage, instead of the correct Manege. Later that day I got an email from Daniele that pointed this out, as follows."By the way, under the photo of the roundabout in your blog, you wrote "ménage" instead of "manège" and it means something else. "Faire le ménage" means doing the housework... but it can mean marriage as well.. So it changes completely the meaning of the photo...le ménage de monsieur Barre would mean Mr Barre's marriage..." or, I guess, it might mean Mr. Barre's Housework, and that puts yet another spin on the picture.

I'm not even sure if this is the same little roundabout that we saw in Paris that day, but it does, at least, remind me of it. Daniele also pointed out to me that she has not seen the little Roundabout (By the way, another name for this would be "Merry Go Round") working for some considerable time, apparently it was run by two old ladies and, I guess, if it hasn't been working then the possibilities might be grave. Isn't it awful when something that has been working for a very long time just ceases. Sometimes I wish I had a time machine!

Probably when she reads this, Daniele will write me an email that begins..... " You stupid boy ......" But I can take it, I have broad shoulders, .............................. and a broad tummy .......................... which is why I've taken to going on 2 hour long walks with my doggy in the pouring rain. (She wrote me the email, and the title line read "You stupid boy" but she was just kidding. I love my French Friend very much!)

Ils sont fous ses Anglais, totalement stupide.

Ah well.

Bon, Ben

Another day

another blogpost.

See you soon.

Deux artistes ou/or Two Artists

2010-01-16T11:04:00.001Z

I am utterly smitten by those who have artistic talent. I used to be able to sing quite well, but age and twenty years of smoking have taken their toll on my voice, but that was it. Pat, my wife, has taken up painting and is really very good, despite her oft repeated claims that she isn't. I am envious of that. I've tried one or two crafts, but I don't think that I have the patience for them. So those who have talent and real artistry fill me with amazement. So I thought that I would write about a couple of artists that I know, today. At least it saves you from another paragraph about the weather in England. By the way it has been raining on and off for two days now, so the snow is rapidly disappearing. By Tuesday we'll have the newspapers complaining about flooding!

My friend Danielle's son, Boris, is a really talented draftsman, and artist. I must say, by the way, that he is no longer called Boris, but rather BORRIS. An interesting name change and obviously plus cool que l'autre nom. But anyway. I really started admiring Borris' work a few years ago now, I simply don't remember how long. But his mother and I were having an extended conversation by email at the time. Sometimes my conversations, like this blog, can be a bit surreal. I had read something about the french penchant for hunting just about anything that swims, crawls or flies at certain times of year (probably all 365 days of it, truth be told.) This conversation had wound around my liking for piggy things, a forthcoming visit to france by air from Manchester, the recurring phrase "pigs might fly" and the probability of being shot down by some French hunter sitting on top of the Tour Eiffel.

Then out of the blue, Boris sent us a picture that he had done. We have it framed, hanging in our kitchen and it is still one of my favourite pieces of original artwork. I took a photo of it this morning but the photo does not look too good. I obviously didn't do a good job of photographing it. I might try again later and amend the blog, but for now, this is what that piece of work looks like.

I was, and still am, greatly taken by the way that the young artist has captured my wife and I as the passengers in the plane! What is fascinating is that, several years later, Borris is still drawing anthropomorphic pigs. I would urge you to look at Borris' Blog at http://jolyerard.canalblog.com/ where you will see a great deal more of his excellent work. I like to think that maybe I had a tiny hand in introducing him to this piggy theme, but I am sure that I am kidding myself. You should also have a look at Hippolyte et Jeremie, which you will find at http://hippoetje.canalblog.com/ and which is, itself, quite surreal! Have a look, you'll see what I mean.

However, the reason for writing about Borris today is the fact that he is just about to have his first Graphic Novel published in France. Called "Lutte Majeure" it is, I think, published by Casterman and comes out at the start of February. It is available through Amazon.fr (I did try to buy it by way of Amazon.co.uk, but despite admitting that the book existed it had a notice saying "but we don't know if this book will ever be available in the UK" or some such.) In this internationalised world that we now live in, I was quite happy to purchase it from Amazon France, and I do believe that the French Postal system is probably capable of getting the book to me.

Don't get me wrong, my French is not very good and, like most BD titles it will be filled with colloquial French, so I probably won't understand it, but I will sit in my archair and look at Borris pictures with wonder in my eyes!

So, anyway, here is an opportunity to support a young and very talented artist. Even if you hate pigs, buy the book, just for fun, you might like it!

The second artist I thought I'd talk about lives in a different world, literally. Hollywood. I first met Charlie when he joined my Lodge, probably about three years ago now. He is a smashing young man, full of life, good humoured and unfailingly pleaseant. At the time he said that he "made films" for a living. So I sort of pictured him making little short films and putting them on the Internet, or some such. He has been away, out of the country, for quite a while, but I bumped into him at our Ladies Night Dance just before Christmas. We got chatting and I asked where he was currently working, expecting him to say somewhere in Europe, for the last time I knew where he was I think he was in Prague. But I was quite taken aback when he said that he was working in Hollywood.

Actually, as a little aside, Charlie is partly responsible for restarting my blogging. He actually admitted that he read the blog and said he liked it as it kept him in touch with home. I think he was probably just being nice, but it was kind of him to say so.

I asked what film he was working on and he told me. The he said that the film starred Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman and my ears pricked up a bit. I really rate those two as actors. I was even more impressed in my own little way to hear that Frances de la Tour, who starred in that seminal TV comedy "Rising Damp" so many years ago, also featured in the cast together with Michael Gambon. Well I suppose he will have to find more work now that Dumbledore has kicked the proverbial bucket!

Then I was even more impressed when I started seeing trailers for the film over the Christmas Holiday. The film is called "The Book of Eli" and it is another entrant into what seems to be a group of post apocalyptic movies that are coming out at this time. There was "2012" at the end of last year, "The Road" a couple of weeks ago, and now "The Book of Eli" fits in with them.

I think that the film opened in the UK yesterday, and I must admit that I am very tempted to go and see it, as much because of Charlie's involvement as because I want to see the film. Mind you, I looked the film up on IMDB just to see what Charlie's title was. He told me that he was Second Unit Director which sounds very posh indeed, and I just wanted to see it in print. No mention on IMDB, I found "Freedom" (Mr Washington's Body Double" and "Safari" who is probably the bloke who purchases Mr Washington's cupcakes, they mentioned the Make-up filler artist and the Foley Artist (and yes, I do know what the Foley Artist does. They should have a bumper sticker that says "Foley Artists do it with half coconuts") but no Charlie Parish. I sent him a message on facebook and apparently you have to tell IMDB that you have a credit in a film. You probably have to pay them as well. Such is life.

However, to continue the theme of this blog, this film "The Book of Eli" is now on release in the UK and the States, and it may even appear in the arthouse cinemas in France pretty soon. So for Charlie's sake, go and see it. As he said in his post, you might even enjoy it. Yeah, I must go!

So that, I think, is it for today. Hopefully, more than two people might read today's blog and decide to help a couple of fine, young artists. Who knows? See you soon!!

The Blogger's Dilemma

2010-01-11T10:54:00.000Z

I'm just including this cartoon from the 4th November 2006 from Cox & Forkum, because I like it and I wanted to share it with a slightly larger audience. As far as I know only Pat and Danielle ever read this blog, though Charlie Parish tells me he reads it, so this will be a test, to see if he really does read it at all. Still, that is three extra.

2010-01-10T21:05:00.001Z

This cartoon was first published on 5th December, 2006 by Cox and Forkum. I came upon their website the other day. At the moment I don't really know anything about it, except it features political cartoons and as far as I can tell it allows the free use of it's cartoons in blogs. That seems ever so friendly of them and I do hope that I have not misunderstood the instructions.

The only issue for me will probably end up being that it is quite clearly an American site and the cartoons tend to match up to American issues and the American world view. So I might not use their cartoons very often. That doesn't mean that they are not appropriate in some cases. I mean, the cartoon above tends to mesh in very nicely with my attitude to global warming. If we are seeing global warming, why have we had more snow in my village than I can remember in twenty five years.

Oh yes, I know, the global warming experts have lots and lots of answers, usually beginning with "You must not confuse climate with weather.", or "You have to consider weather patterns over several years, not just a couple of weeks." Thrice damned scientists always have an answer that doesn't make sense to me, at any rate. Richard Dawkins is another scientist who I have little or no time for, either, but that's another story.

As a Historian, which I am, let me just point out that in the middle of the 17th Century they had a series of very cold winters when the River Thames froze. There are numerous pictures of Frost Fairs held on the middle of the river. Not being a scientist I do not know what the hell that proves, but it tells me that the weather changes all the time.

I still think that at some point they will decide that the whole global warming thing is a load of old tosh, and then they'll just come up with a new theory. A bit like that period in history when everyone "knew" that the sun orbited the earth, which was flat. That knowledge extended from the core group of scientists that existed at that time. Later on they decided that it was actually the other way round and they then decided that the first group of scientists was wrong and they were right.

20 - 20 hindsight is a wonderful thing to have.

I'll put my soap box away now, shall I. Bye Bye for tonight.

A high wind from Jamaica (Sorry, no, that should be Leningrad!)

2010-01-09T20:50:00.001Z

I got up this morning and looked out the window. Against all the evidence I had hoped that the world would have changed. An overnight thaw, was that too much to ask for. YUP! The last thing that I saw on Television last night was the weather forecast. "More snow can be expected tomorrow, mainly along the east coast from Dundee to Felixstowe" (or to put it another way, all along the eastern coast of Britain from top to bottom.) "But what will be worse is the icy wind that is going to drive across the country coming in from Russia."

What have we done to the Russians lately to deserve their wind.

Anyway, I looked out the window and it looked the same as it had done the day before. White!

About 10 am Patricia asked me if I'd seen the icicle outside the kitchen window. So I had to go out in the snow to get a photo. It's an awful photo because you just cannot see the icicle. It's that picture at the top of the post. If you look carefully the icicle is almost perfectly line up with the centre bar of the window and as such you just cannot see it. However, take my word for it, it was spectacular, almost 4 feet long, or about 120 cm. Hanging from the gutter, straight down. I could not go and take another picture because as soon as I'd photographed it, I knocked it down. I would not want it falling off and hitting Jasper, it would go right through him.

I thought that was a spectacular winter photograph until someone sent me a powerpoint. You know how people find powerpoints, I do not know who creates them and equally I don't know who has the time to find them and send them out, but I was impressed by this one. I was particularly taken by this photograph of some ice covered cars. I don't know where they get weather like this, probably Miami, but I was impressed.

I took Jasper out onto the field where he had another extremely good run around. He is certainly enjoying the snow at the moment, though he does suffer terribly from the balls of ice and snow that he gets in his coat from running in the powdery snow. I managed to lose his lead as well today. He did a poopsie in the middle of a patch of untrodden snow, about 50 yards away from me. As I've said before, I am a great believer in picking up after my dog, so I went over to collect his little donation. While I picked ip up, I put his lead down, it's one of those hard plastic leads with an expanding tape. When I had picked up the poo I looked to see where he had gone and, typically, he was running around a good way away from me. So I set off to follow him. Two minutes later I realised that I didn't have his lead, I'd put it down, in the snow. This thing is big and bright red, but could I see it, no, lost in the snow. It will turn up when some enterprising lad trips over it while playing football. But how do you lose a dog lead like that. If jasper is a noolie then I'm a right plonker!

Anyway, I think that will do for the moment. Unless I think of something else to say. See you soon, tomorrow, the day after, or maybe July. Who knows! Have fun.

Sno' Joke

2010-01-07T19:17:00.000Z

The theme as you can see is once again snow. I just watched the news and they had a picture on showing the whole country, from space, and it is just white. Quite amazing really. They also had a bloke on saying that of course this was all the result of global warming, but I just don't believe him. How can this level of snow be the result of our climate warming up, I mean, honestly.

So, anyway. I got up this morning and thought about clearing the driveway. The snow is still some 40 cm deep on the drive, well everywhere actually. If I clear the drive I still won't be able to get the car off the drive because the snow at the top of the drive is just as thick and I am not clearing our corner of the Close. So it can stay as it is for the time being. To add insult to injury, it has been so dry and cold since the initial snowfall that the snow is very powdery and difficult to clear with an ordinary shovel.

I took Jasper the Spaniel out onto the local field again. He had the time of his life. I'm still quite unstable on my left knee, which was set back when I slipped quite heavily on wet grass a few weeks ago, before the snow started. So I'm having to go carefully. So I go out with dog lead and poo bags, walking pole and camera, but only two hands. So rather than taking the big Sony camera, I've been taking my little pocket Canon, which takes good pictures and, fortunately, is quite good at taking pictures of spaniels running past you at full speed. This was a piec of snow where it was quite shallow, a rareity I assure you, so he was floating on the surface. Most of the time he was doing his "Spaniel Bounce" to move through the snow.

What I call the Spaniel Bounce is most often seen in Summer in fields full of long grass. said Spaniel disappears into grass and will then be seen bobbing up and down. Jasper has not yet had a chance to bob up and down in long grass, but the last three days he has demonstrated his ability in snow, so he'll survive.

Me. I just struggled for the most part. Snow that is 42cm deep and is soft is very difficult to walk through because you have to lift your leg really high at every step, and my left knee still struggles to lift as high as it needs to as easily as it needs to. Fortunately I was able to take a leaf out of King Wenceslas book for part of the time, and follow in the footsteps of someone who had done much of the heaviest work for me.

Apparently, last night it reached -18 degrees C not far from here, just over the other side of Stockport. It would seem that tonight could be just as cold. So the chances of all this snow going any time soon would seem to be remote. Ah well. Another day, another Taler!

Hope everything is a good deal better where you are, dear reader, if there is actually anyone there at all.

FotoSketcher

2010-01-05T11:53:00.000Z

Here is another little free and downloadable application for mucking about with Photographs. Similar to the one I pointed out some time ago, but it was mentioned in WebUser Magazine, which is one of my favourite reads. Since it is downloadable, I'm not sure that it will work with your Mac, Danielle, but you can have a look.

Anyway, if anybody else ever reads this, have a look, it may be worth your while.

The address is www.fotosketcher.com

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

2010-01-05T11:46:00.002Z

When I woke up on Saturday Morning, (this is last Saturday and was, I guess, January 2nd in this the first year of the new decade) it was to discover that a giant had used an icing sugar shaker to lay down the finest, thinnest, most gauze like layer of snow on the ground. I thought nothing of this. After all, on the Sunday before Christmas we had been hit by some 4 inches of snow, so a little Icing Sugar on the ground was nothing.

About three quarters of an hour later, just before 8 am, it started to snow, heavily, and it just kept on snowing for most of the day. By about 12 noon on saturday I went into our front bedroom and took this photo. Now I'm not soft in the head, I know that the 5 or 6 inches of snow that we had last Saturday was nothing to what they get all winter up in Northern Norway or Lapland, but we live in Glossopdale in the the North West of England. You just don't expect to get snow like this, not twice in one week anyway. So what is all this twaddle they've been going on about in Copenhagen in recent weeks. GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!! I've lived in this house for twenty five years and we have never had a winter like this one, not in my time here. So if we are seeing a 2 degree rise in global temperatures, why is it still snowing like this???

Okay, some clever brain is going to come up with a reason about changing weather patterns, but it is only about a year ago that they were telling us that Britain was going to have Mediterranean stle weather patterns due to global warming. Does it look like this in Greece at the moment.

I wrote that last night, finishing just as the Broadband Connection decided to give up the ghost. I went downstairs and had a cup of coffee whilst listening to the weather forecast. "There may be some chance of snow along the southern edge of the Pennines." We aren't actually on the Southern Edge of the Pennines, we are on the western slope of the Pennines a bit to the North. Oh well, we might get a bit more snow.

I think that it must have started snowing just after I went to bed. When I got up this morning the snow was deep, for me. As I say, the Finns and Norwegians will be sitting around their log fires, killing themselves laughing about the way that a little bit of snow brings England to its' knees. Looks like a lot of snow to me! My next door neighbour just tried to go out in her 4x4 (or SUV if you are reading this in Murica). She got nowhere and after 5 minutes of engine revving, she went back inside.

Let us see if I can add a photograph of the back garden this morning. Now what do I press ......

Oh well, I've got some pictures in there. I took these at 8 am this morning, and it looked really bright, but now, looking at the pictures again, it looks like I took them in the middle of the night. By the way, in the third picture you have also got a shot of jasper the wonder Spaniel. He adores the snow, he seems to think that it has been put here just for him, and maybe he's right!

The last few days have been wonderful for jasper. We have been going onto the School Field. The school is just behind our house and the field is on the other side of the school. There is this huge field, and I do not exagerrate this time. It is pretty well fenced, but it is so big that I can afford to let him run free without too many anxious moments. Don't worry, by the way, I always go well supplied with poo bags. We follow the old adage of leaving nothing but footprints and taking nothing but photographs. I wish that every other dog owner followed the same dictum, then I would not get shouted at by mean spirited bigots who hate dogs.

I've taken a number of photographs of Jasper on his walks out in recent days, but they are not always clear since he travels so fast that all that you tend to get is a rather blurred impression of something Spaniel-like. Let us see what I can do though, just to bring today's diary entry to a close.

Hopefully, I'll be back again before too long, but the last time I said that I didn't write anything for 5 months. See you soon!

New Year

2010-01-04T17:38:00.000Z

Oh dear. I've come to the conclusion that I am just hopelessly lazy. That's what it is. When I came out of hospital last April, with my leg in a cast, I was convinced that I would be so bored that I would keep this blog up to date. But I didn't. I cannot say that I do lots of useful things, I don't. So where does all of the time go to?????

I think that I waste time. I get up later than I used to do, almost two hours later. Even if I get up earlier for some reason I don't get stuck into something, I just wallow around watching the Television. Too much TV and all that it is doiung is addling my brain. No, I have got to get going. So I must try and keep the blog up to date, for who knows who may be reading it. Actually, that's one of the reasons for being so useless at writing in the blog, the feeling that nobody at all is reading it.

I am so happy to have stopped working. I am now sort of retired, though the fact that I'm not even 60 yet gives me pause for thought. I will soon be in receipt of my pension from the Government by way of the "Teachers Pension Agency" but I'm becoming increasingly worried that it won't be enough to keep us in the style of life that we want to be accustomed to. So I really do want to get another job. Lots of my friends say, "Oh, it'll be easy. They're always looking for Supply Teachers to cover for absences. But that is exactly what I do not want to do. Having been a teacher, I've seen how the students treat Supply Teachers, and I will not be treated like that. So I'd rather find something else I can do. Besides, If I teach then anything I earn could be taken off my pension. But if I do something else, such as stack the shelves in Tesco, then it won't affect my pension at all. So I need to think about the life of a jolly shelf stacker.

Right, enough waffling, write something worthy!

Maybe a bit later. I think I'll go and see if Tea is nearly ready. It is my dear wife's turn at cooking. I made us a Chicken Curry yesterday evening, so she is doing something today. Since the New Year has brought a new diet with it, I am really looking forward to my Evening Meal. I'll let you know.

What a Week Part Deux

2009-07-14T20:26:00.002+01:00

Actually, after Monday, it started to get a bit better. Let's face it, it would be difficult for it to get worse. Though, (thinks off stage right) maybe that is no quite accurate.

Clint has been fabulous, and I really think that without him we might have fallen to bits. Clint, by dint of living no more than 75 metres away from us, has a tendency to arrive at about 7.30 in the morning, with an enormous cup of tea in his hand. He arrived on Tuesday Morning and I was still sitting around in my jimjams. Clint isn't perplexed by anything it seems. "Right", he said, " I think we'll get that door down and then they can take the Skip away. You are throwing this carpet away aren't you. It'll only get destroyed with all the plaster dust when I start plastering, and it will fit on the skip just perfect!"

You can see the logic, though I must admit that I had not actually given thought at that moment to the concept of replacing the lounge carpet. Oh, to hell with the carpet, you only stop working once, I hope, so there will be some lump sum money to pay for a new carpet ....... I hope.

Ever since we moved into the house we have been plagued by the door between the lounge and the dining room. These two huge pieces of wood and glass, one fixed and one which slides, depending on the phase of the moon and, whenever the patio door is open wafts in the slightest breeze making a booming noise reminiscent of Big Bertha in World War I.

We ripped it out. It took about three quarters of an hour, it nearly brought the wall down. There was plaster everywhere, but, Oh how good it felt to have the verdammtetur gone on the skip.

You don't know how liberating it is having a plastered in the house helping you to demolish walls and things. There were holes in the wall, plaster everywhere and both Clint and I looking like we had been in a snowstorm, and Clint just looked at it and said, "Right, have you ordered the new doors yet. We need to see how they are going in. Don't worry about the holes, they are easily fixed!"

The doors were actually being delivered that morning. When they arrived Clint went out to help carry them in, and I'm so glad he did as each door weighed a ton, or seemed to. Clint was so impressed that he decided that, contrary to the original plan, he would not install the new doors. He said that while he didn't mind fitting ordinary doors he was worried about spoiling these.

The doors had to be installed in the next three days, because Clint had to be able to plaster up to them. Have you ever tried to get hold of a carpenter at three days notice, without him wanting you to take out an extra mortgage to pay for his services. Well you don't know Clint. "Oh, leave it with me, I'll give Phil a ring, he'll call round this evening"

And he did!

Yes, he could install the doors, build a case to fit them in, create a new stud wall to fill in the gap that would be left behind, provide all the fixtures and fittings needed to install the doors. Would the day after tomorrow do? How much, amazingly little for a whole days very hard work! Let's put it this way, the mechanics at the Ford Garage down the road charge more to service my car than Phil the Carpenter charged.

And, by the end of the day, we had two whole walls skimmed and starting the slow process of drying out. Two lovely walls. All smooth and pink.

Maybe Hell isn't so bad after all!

But then, that was only Tuesday. More to follow on this story. I'll have to try and find you a picture!

Quelle Semaine (Part I)

2009-07-13T20:31:00.002+01:00

Whoeeeee. What a week that was.

First, the backstory. Couple of weeks or a bit more ago, one rainy, rainy evening in June, your hero, Kev the Magnificent, was alone in the house with only a small Springer Spaniel puppy to keep him company. It was a wild and stormy night when he discovered that water was drip, drip, drippety drip, drip, dripping through the kitchen ceiling. With great aplomb our hero put a bucket under the drip. Next day, a phone call to the mighty Alf got a visit and some mastic tipped into the hole that had appeared in the roof.

The next day there was a new leak in the dining room. Two different leaks in two different parts of the flat roofed extension. Alf came out again and put some blue tarpaulin over the whole roof.

Over the following two weeks it quickly became apparent that, despite the blue tarpaulin, whenever it rained the rain came on an extended visit to the Dining Room. We begaan to get used to a life that featured buckets littered around the floor. Two weeks ago today, Paul the Stripper came to remove the wallpaper in the Living Room. Redecorating the Living Room has been in planning since before our Superhero fell down the stairs with such winning style and rupturing speed. All the paper was stripped off by the end of Tuesday th July. That gets us up to the start of the week from ............

drum roll at this point from the looney drummer who lives across the back lane and who gives us a virtuoso performance on the drums on every occasion when the sun shines.

from ....................................................... HELL

or at least Stevenage! (Don't ask, Danielle, I've gone INSANE. I cannot explain it either.)

So twas on the Monday Morning that the Plasterer came round,
with his trowel and his Float and his Merry Plasterer's Song.

Well, Clint arrived!

No, not Clint Eastwood, Clint the Plasterer and, YES, before you ask that really is his name.

Clint lives just across the Close from us and, when we decided that we wanted to replaster the Lounge, he was recommended to us by the quality of his work in other houses in the Close.

The week began by Clint inspecting the ceiling in the Dining Room and Kitchen and deciding that the best thing to do was to begin by pulling down what remained of the ceiling. So Pat, Me and the Doggie went off to live in the Summer House (It's really a big shed in the garden but Summer House sounds better.

We'd been sitting there about an hour when Clint popped out and said, "We have a bit of a problem. You have a couple of Wasps Nests in the Kitchen Ceiling and they were not best pleased when I pulled the ceiling down." The kitchen and Dining Room were now filled with very energetic wasps out to kill, or at least sting mightily.

I pointed out that there was no problem because we were covered by a special vermin insurance policy taken out with a local Utility Company.

So I rang them. I'll cut a very long, involved and aggravating period of time down to size. After a couple of hours of aggravation the Insurance Company told me that the Vermin Extermination Company could deal with my Wasp infestation on ..... Wednesday. So there we were, three of us and a Spaniel sitting in the rain, in the garden, while the House was occupied by a couple of swarms of mad wasps, and the extermination company were suggesting that they solve the problem by killing the little BEEs (sorry, Wasps) a couple of days later.

I think I will leave it to you to work out what I told them to do with their Insurance contract, but it involved folding it into a multi-pointed tesseract and sticking it somewhere interesting!

Clint, bless his soul, went off to the local builder's merchants and bought a paper suit and a can of wasp destroyer spray mousse (also sold as hair gel in a similar but subtly different can) and, after a merry chase obliterating the wasp nest. I feel sorry for the wasps, but not very sorry.

So Monday ended in a house with no ceiling in the kitchen or Dining Room and a leaky roof above the no ceiling, together with a faint smell of wasp destroying chemicals.

But at least it wasn't raining.

PAUSE

Sound of Thunder and Lightning right over head. Oh Bu****.

Pitter, patter, pitterpatterpitterpatter splosh! Drip

Drip

Drip

Tell you about the rest of the week tomorrow!

Maps of Manchester - I quite fancy going to see this!

2009-07-07T15:26:00.002+01:00

Saved from www.library.manchester.ac.uk

quote link screenshot

Mapping Manchester: Cartographic Stories of the City

Historic Reading Room of John Rylands Library in Manchester
25 June 2009 to 17 January 2010

Maps can tell us many different stories about the places where we live and work. This exhibition shows how mapping is particularly ingrained into urban life; it demonstrates how maps work and how they have evolved over time - reflecting changes in technology, society and economic conditions.

Mapping Manchester explores the growth of the city, road networks and public transport, Manchester as the industrial powerhouse of the nineteenth century, the social geography of housing, changing moralities illustrated by statistical maps, and leisure mapping such as plans of Belle Vue - arguably the world's first theme park.

On display are maps, plans and photographs of Manchester published over the last two hundred and fifty years. These range from the first large-scale survey of the city, published in 1794, to a 2008 statistical map of binge-drinking hotspots.

This celebration of cartography and the city presents a unique opportunity to see highlights from the collections held by the University of Manchester alongside material generously loaned by Chetham's Library and Manchester City Library and Archives.

Saved with deepmemo

Jasper the Spaniel at 15 weeks old.

2009-06-22T17:31:00.003+01:00

I finally managed to get the whole set of pictures uploaded onto Flicr. Something had gone wrong with the uploader so I had to wipe it off and reinstall. I'm sure Picasa works better than Flickr, but I don't think Danielle can use Picasa with her Mac, and I'm too lazy to upload pictures twice.

So here is the web address for my Flickr Account.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwhall/

And here is another picture of Jasper just to keep you going.

Jasper at 15 weeks

2009-06-21T21:14:00.006+01:00

I did not think that I would write about Puppy Jasper again, not until he was a good deal older anyway. Then I took my camera outside with me this morning and took some pictures. He has grown up so much in the last three weeks that I thought that I weould record this change in the blog. So here we go. Here is a picture of Jasper just three weeks ago at 12 weeks old.

I mean you can see that he's still a puppy. But look at him now.

You can really see the dog that he is going to grow into. I found this picture quite exciting.

I had a few other thoughts about the little so and so today as well. Especially when I found him merrily digging his way down through the rockery on his way to Australia. I am quite sure that he has his own agenda, but I wish I knew how to stop it. This evening, having rebuilt the rockery. (I did it standing up, very slowle, as I still cannot kneel down.) I discovered that he had dug a hole in the middle of the lawn. I say lawn but it is really a clover patch.

He manages to get up to naughty things every now and again. He is never going to sit on the chairs we said. Came into the room the other day and, yes,

At least he looks a bit guilty, wouldn't you say!

One last picture. He has loads of toys, but what does he get the most fun from? An old plant poy holder. But Oh does he have fun!

And he fills your days with joy.

Puppies leave paw prints on your heart

and on your kitchen floor, dining room floor, even the floor of the shower (and I haven't worked that one out !)

I'll try and upload all the 15 week pictures to Flickr. If I succeed I'll put a link to the page on the Blog!

2009-06-20T21:41:00.001+01:00

Saved from news.bbc.co.uk

quote link screenshot

Schools to rethink 'i before e'

Some obey and some disobey (pic: wordle.net)

The spelling mantra "i before e except after c" is no longer worth teaching, according to the government.

Advice sent to teachers says there are too few words which follow the rule and recommends using more modern methods to teach spelling to schoolchildren.

The document, entitled Support for Spelling, is being distributed to more than 13,000 primary schools.

But some people believe the phrase should be retained because it is easy to remember and is broadly accurate.

Bethan Marshall, a senior English lecturer at King's College London, said: "It's a very easy rule to remember and one of the very few spelling rules that I can remember and that's why I would stick to it.

RHYME IN FULL

I before E except after C when the sound is EE

and sometimes followed by:

or when the sound is A as in neighbour and weigh

"If you change it and say we won't have this rule, we won't have any rules at all, then spelling, which is already terribly confusing, becomes more so."

Judy Parkinson, author of the best-selling book I Before E (Except After C), told the Daily Telegraph it was a phrase that struck a chord.

"There are words that it doesn't fit, but I think teachers could always get a discussion going about the 'i before e' rule and the peculiarities of the English language, and have fun with it. That's the best way to learn."

The guidance is being issued as part of the National Primary Strategy for under-11s.

Spelling bees are very popular

It says: "The i before e rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound. Unless this is known, words such as sufficient and veil look like exceptions.

"There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words." These include receive, ceiling, perceive and deceit.

The document recommends other ways to teach pupils spelling, like studying television listings for compound words, changing the tense of a poem to practise irregular verbs and learning about homophones through jokes such as "How many socks in a pair? None — because you eat a pear."

Some education experts have supported the government and questioned the effectiveness of the rule.

Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, said words such as vein and neighbour made it a meaningless phrase.

"There are so many exceptions that it's not really a rule," he said.

He added that it would be helpful if spelling was allowed to evolve.

Saved with deepmemo

Parking problems

2009-06-19T10:29:00.003+01:00

This comes under the heading of, "I found this and thought it might be of interest". This one I found on Google's Easter Eggs page. Go to Google.com, type Google Easter Eggs in the search box and click on the "I Feel Lucky" button.

Auto Antics

Think parking is tough where you live? In Westenbergstraat, Netherlands, drivers apparently have to park on the sides of walls (Google Earth coordinates 52.069207,4.3139865).

A Rainy Day in Olde Glossop

2009-06-19T09:34:00.005+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Oh boy did it rain yesterday evening! Despite the BBC Weather Service telling us that it was raining at 8 am yesterday morning (it wasn't - at that time we had the curtains closed to cut down on the sunlight!). Nothing stops the BBC Weather Service. Once they get it into their heads that it is raining, they keep on telling you that it is.) It did not rain all day, but about 9 pm I noticed that it seemed darker than it usually is at that time of day in this part of the year. The rain had started. I can only think that somebody had told God that the BBC had been predicting rain at this time, in this place and He decided to get straight with the BBC.

It rained and it rained and it rained. It was one of thhose rainstorms that you read about, you know, "Plixford, Lincolnshire gets the whole of its rain for 2008 in 7 minutes!". Actually, that is an exaggeration, we probably got all of our rain for an average 2 hours in 10 minutes - but it seemed a lot at the time.

I went into the kitchen to get a coffee - Pat was out being a Trefoil Leader (I think) - and I thought, "Why is the floor wet, has that damned puppy turned his drink bowl over again?" I am horrible am I not. You, dear reader, being an intelligent person, have worked it out faster than me. It was at that moment that I heard the "plink" of a drop of water dripping from the middle of the kitchen ceiling, onto the floor.

He looks up in horror. <> As you have guessed I saw the kitvchen ceiling ever so slightly bulging downwards. Two cracks run across the ceiling that was only replastered ten months ago. From the point of the dip in the ceiling, water is dripping!

Thinks, "Can we stop the ceiling coming down??"

I should be called Bob! I grab a bucket from the garage, grab a favoured paring knife (Long slim pointed blade!) and dig a hole in the ceiling just where the drip is coming from. Hey, don't knock it. The ceiling is still in place, there is now a stream of water coming from the ceiling that looks like the cold tap running. But the ceiling stays in place. It's just that it now features a large hole in the centre. No, I have not taken a picture, but I might!

Anyway, with a bit of luck our local Roofer, Alf, will come and have a look at it today. No doubt we are now going to have to buy a new roof for the kitchen extension, but, hey, what is life without the occasional mishap.

Hobson Moor Road

2009-06-14T20:32:00.010+01:00

So, let's start with what happened yesterday. Well, I went to Leyland. Russel & his Dad gave me a lift in their beautiful, ten year old Mercedes Classic. If you bought a ten year old Foord it would be a bit rattly to say the least, but this was a beautiful ride. Plenty of room for the leg, it was very nice.

We went to Leyland for a meeting where a group that I belong to were making a presentation, and it all went remarkably well. We were congratulated on our work and had a splendid time. So a really useful experience. Got home for about 6 pm. Pat had been to a Guide meeting in the Lake District and she got back maybe half an hour later. Jasper had spent the day with Alan and Val, their dog Barney, various cats and a lovely garden. We went to pick him up and he was so tired he just spent the rest of the evening asleep.

We blew a couple of weeks diet by having a Chinese meal from our local takeaway with a very pleasant bottle of White Wine. (It wasn't French I fear, Danielle, but it was very light, very pleasant and pretty perfect for a warm summer's evening.

Today has been another nice day. I went back to Church this morning for the first time since my accident. It was a shorter than usual service with no clergy at all, run by the people who had been on the Alpha Course. I enjoyed bits of it and other bits I didn't but then that is life.

I suppose that the biggest problem was that I wasn't really comfortable. I still cannot bend my leg more than about 20 degrees at the knee and if I push it more than that it does hurt. So I found it quite difficult to sit comfortably in the pew. It's really quite a good job that it was a shorter service as I might not have managed to sit still much longer. Maybe I should behave more like the little kids who believe that appropriate behaviour in Church is to run around screaming during prayers. Cynical, moi?

This afternoon we took Jasper for his first walk on Hobson Moor Road. It is only a couple of miles away from out house, it's nice and flat so I was able to manage with my sticks, and it has superb views. Because I was carrying the two sticks I only took a few pictures using a little pocket camera, so I'm not sure just how good they are. Here is a view, if I get manage to insert it.

If you look carefully, you can just see our Church, just to the right of the centre of the picture and about half way down. To be honest, you can't because the picture is so small, but I think that you can also find all of the pictures on Flickr and you can see a bigger copy of the picture there. It's quite funny. When you are down in the valley the Church really stands out on top of the hill, but from up there, on Hobson Moor Road, it is not so outstanding! Hmm. Interesting.

Here is a picture of a bit of the Road. It really is not all that impressive, but we rather like it and it makes a nice, and easy, walk for a puppy.

Which brings me back to the puppy. Jasper the Spaniel is now 14 weeks old. It is very easy to think that he has not grown since he first came to live with us, what, six weeks ago now. But he has grown a great deal. Unfortunately I did not measure him when he first came to see us, but the bed that he used to sleep in one corner of, is now full of Spaniel. And he is going to be big. Here is a picture of Jasper, today, at 14 weeks old.

So he had a good walk with the two of us, then I reached a point where I had gone far enough and Pat went on ahead. After about five minutes I saw the pair of them coming back, with jasper dragging Pat along. He still needs to know where we both are. Ah well. So here is the picture of Jasper towing pat towards me. You can't blame him, he's only a puppy! He doesn't know any better.

I ought to say that one reason why we like Hobson Moor Road so much is because it is nice and flat, and as such it was one of the places we took Rufus in his later years. He had his very last walk there on the last day of March in 2008. So bringing Jasper here somehow seems an appropriate thing to do. I'm ever so soft, am I not!

That will do for tonight. See you soon, maybe even tomorrow. You can find the rest of the pictures at the following address: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwhall

2009-06-13T10:35:00.001+01:00

Saved from www.barbados.org

quote link screenshot

When I Am Old.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens,
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat,
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go,
Or only bread and pickle for a week,
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats
and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry,
And pay our rent and not swear in the street,
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me
are not too shocked and surprised,
When suddenly I am old
and start to wear purple!

Jenny Joseph

I love this one. It is really fun!

Saved with deepmemo

Deepmemo

2009-06-13T10:31:00.004+01:00

I found this today. I like Deepmemo - it is an application that allows you to clip pieces out of web sites and send them straight to your blog. I like it very much. You can find it at www.deepmemo.com but it does not work with Safari. So to get it to work on a Mac you would have to be using Firefox.

2009-06-13T10:31:00.001+01:00

Saved from www.uvm.edu	quote link screenshot
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

And this quote comes from .................

Saved with deepmemo

A Saturday in June

2009-06-13T09:27:00.002+01:00

I seem to do this often. Turn on the laptop and look at the Blog and wonder why I've done nothing for, what, 6 weeks. This is just ludicrous because I actually like the Blog and regard it very much as a private diary. I thought thta sitting in enforced idleness for so long, with the leg, would allow me to do all sorts of things. Read those hundreds of books that are piled up, watch a miriad of films that are stacked on DVDs waiting to be watched. Certainly I would be writing the blog every day.

I've done none of it. I still have not read one book in the last six weeks. I've watched about half of the movies I wanted to watch, but not great movies, just tat. Well, that's the sort of Movies I like. I often read Danielle's Blog with its mix of eclectic this, that and the other, and wish that I was more like that. To add to the turmoil, I realise that once again I haven't kept up with the Blog.

Today I have too little time. I'm off to Leyland with a group of friends for the afternoon, my first real trip out since the accident. Pat has already left. She's has gone off the Ambleside for the Regional AGM of the Trefoil Guild. That's what you get for being County Chair of Trefoil, you get to go off the an AGM in distant misty Ambleside.

So puppy Jasper, who is now 14 weeks old but essentially looks the same as he did on Day Zero, is going to spend the day with a friend. He doesn't know it yet, but it is going to be an eye opener for him. Puppy Jasper is the reason that nothing else has got done. Until the last two weeks he could not go out, so he has had most of his exercise around the home, and that takes up one's attention.

Ah well, at least I've made a start on the recreation of the Blog. Hopefully I'll return to this tomorrow. We'll see.

2009-06-13T09:00:00.001+01:00

Saved from www.google.co.uk

quote link screenshot

We had a meeting at work yesterday, and it was the usual yada, yada, yada. We have a few problems that need to be addressed, but for the moment they are being solved with band-aid solutions. One person suggested fluorescent Post-it notes, someone else suggested white-out, I don't remember what some of the other suggestions were. We will try them and they will work for a while. It's just the usual growing pains, of course, but trial and error... However, at one point in the meeting I glanced across the boardroom table at one of my co-workers, and she was sound asleep. She was sitting up straight, her hands folded in front of her on the table -- asleep. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

Today she said to me, "Did you happen to notice that I nodded off during the meeting yesterday?"

"Yes, it did not escape me entirely..."

Today I found ten excuses folks can use if they get caught sleeping at work:

1. "They told me at the blood bank this might happen."

2. "This is just a 15 minute power-nap like they raved about in the last time management course you sent me to."

3. "Whew! Guess I left the top off the liquid paper."

4. "I wasn't sleeping! I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm!"

5. "This is one of the seven habits of highly effective people!"

6. "I was testing the keyboard for drool resistance."

7. "Actually I'm doing a "Stress Level Elimination Exercise Plan" (SLEEP). I learned it at the last mandatory seminar you made me attend."

8. "The coffee machine is broken."

9. "I was doing a highly specific Yoga exercise to relieve work related stress."

10. "Darn! Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out a solution to our biggest problem."

Number 4 is my favorite. Now it's late, and I'm off to get some sleep.

I found this snippet on a blog that I really enjoy, called "A majority of Two". I like the snippet, even though I suspect that it is not new. I wish I was as good at blogging as this person. Maybe I'm just lazy!

Saved with deepmemo

Photographs

2009-05-04T06:16:00.001+01:00

You'll find my Day Zero photographs are now on Flickr. The address of my Flickr Account is http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwhall/

The Chronicles of Jasper, Day Zero

2009-05-04T04:41:00.003+01:00

So here we are, ten minutes to five in the morning and here I am writing my blog. Well, I might as well. I have been up all night and it's now so late that it is just about Morning.

This is Jasper. I keep thinking that I just might start an entirely new blog and call it "The Chronicles of Jasper" but can I really keep two blogs going when I often seem to have a problem with one.

OK. Start with the back story. We had two amazing Spaniels called Rufus & Daisy. Daisy died two years and three days ago and Rufus died one year and thirty three days ago. For a long time we contemplated the fact that their deaths might mark the end of our dog owning years. Then, as the year following Rufus death went along we began to realise that we wanted another dog.

We missed out on two rehoming dogs, but that is another story. Then eight weeks ago we saw an advert on the Internet for some new puppies in Carnforth, not very far from the Auld Grey Town.

To cut a long story shorter, a long story that I will tell if I get round to starting Jasper's own blog, Jasper arrived yesterday morning. That's him in the photograph at the top of the page.

We had a thoroughly enjoyable day. Took a lot of photographs which I will put on Flickr when I get a chance. We have got a crate and decided that we were going to try Crate Training with Jasper, so we introduced him to his crate, just like the book says. While we had lunch, and later dinner, Jasper went in his crate. Both time he howled for five minutes and then settled down. That didn;t seem too bad. The problem came when we settled him down for sleeping at night. We put him in his crate, covered the crate with a blanket and went to bed. And Jasper began to cry, and cry and cry. The book says that you must ignore the crying, that you have to let him adapt, but I guess it was just too new or something. I could have lived with the howling, but our house is a semi and it was the idea that it was not just us that was being kepr awake by Jasper, but Grahame and Mavis next door as well. He howled steadily and without pause from 10.30 pm until 2.30 am.

At that point I had had enough. The book says that you must ignore the crying, or the dog has won. Well, if that is true I guess that Jasper has won, but we shall have to see. Personally, I think that it was a mistake to expect him to settle in on his first day with us. Poor lamb was lonely on his first day away from his mother and his litter. I think that we will just have to have another think about this. Maybe when Pat gets up in about three more hours, I can get a few hours of sleep to catch up, but lets face it, I'm not exactly doing a lot to get radically tired. I'll cope!

Another Week Older and Deeper in Debt!

2009-04-29T19:09:00.004+01:00

That's our back garden and our Plum Tree full of Blossom. There was me in my last post being very negative about the chances of the blossom lasting. Usually the blossom come out and is washed away in a couple of days, but this year the weather has been remarkable really and very pleasant.

I went out on the Patio to take this picture despite dire warnings from Pat. She is quite right, the steps down from our Patio Door are quite steep, but with care I managed it, though I won't do it very often. Lovely to get outside the house, and quite stunning. Not just for the blossom, but the last time I was outside, just before my accident, there was not a great deal of green in the garden and now suddenly it all seems to be there. Still a lot of growing time for the plants, but that is OK.

So I went to the Hospital last Wednesday. When they said that they were going to take the stitches out of my operation scar, I assumed they would take the whole plaster off, but they didn't. Just a letter box shaped piece cut out of the knee of my cast. So the scar runs in a shallow S shaped curve from about 3 cm below the knee cap to about the same above it. Amazingly it was closed up with metal staples, I guess they use those all the time these days, but I would have thought it would be painful to have a cut in your skin stapled up, but it wasn't, and it didn't even hurt taking them out again. So they took out the staples, patched up the plaster with some more of the stuff and I was sent on my way rejoicing. Come back in 4 weeks and we'll see how you are doing.

So we went out for lunch at a lovely little Cafe on Woodseats lane in Charlesworth. Had a very nice Panini and a pudding and went home. They were very nice and got me a foot stool, but it still was less than comfortable. I guess that going out is really going to have to wait until my knee is better.

And that is really it. There is only so much that you get to do sitting in the house waiting for your knee to get better. I'm in the middle of my third book, though they are not anything to write home about, so I won't even mention their names. I've been watching a fair few DVDs as well, many of them recorded off the TV at a time when there was so much going on that I didn't have time to enjoy TV. My favourite so far is "John Adams" which was made by the American HBO Channel and shown here on Channel 4. The actors are brilliant and the story is subtle and gentle. Instead of trying to get a substantial story dealt with in two two hour shows they devoted seven disparately long episodes to this story. I really, really enjoyed it. I never really knew anything about John Adams, the Second President of the USA, but I have found his story to be enriching. Well done HBO!

And with that, I will leave you for a while. Hope none of you succumb to the Swine Flu pandemic!

See you soon, if we are spared!

April, Come She Will

2009-04-21T19:53:00.003+01:00

I was just sitting there for a moment, trying to think about what to write. I said only yesterday that I was definitely going to put something on the blog every day, but sometimes I sit here and there is nothing I really want to say.

Then I just glanced out of the window for a moment and I realised what I could write. Here in Glossopdale we are well up the country, reet Northern, nehthen! And also quite high up in the air, living pretty much on the top of the hill. The last few days the weather has been gorgeous, with warm temperatures and lots of sun. Just the time to have a buggered up knee and get to sit indoors all the time.

Anyway, our next door neighbours have a plum tree in their front garden, we have one in the back garden but I cannot see our tree from where I sit. I suddenly realised that the tree has come into blossom and sitting here with the sun going down, it looks wonderful. Surely this is what the promise of Spring is all about.

It made me think, fleetingly, of the Simon & Garfunkel Song, so I did a quick Google search for the lyrics and here we go:

April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain;
May, she will stay,
Resting in my arms again.
June, she'll change her tune,
In restless walks she'll prowl the night;
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight.

August, die she must,
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold;
September I'll remember
A love once new has now grown old.

Rather poignant and apposite that. While I was writing about the blossom on the plum tree I realised that almost every year the blossom comes out and three days later we have storms, high winds and driving rain and after three glorious days all the blossom vanishes. My wife says that I'm a born misery guts. I always seem to be saying that the glass is half empty and the holiday is almost over before it is started. Maybe this year will be different. Who knows.

I'll report on the continuing medical condition from time to time. Not that any of you give a damn about me and my knee, but it's my blog so you can suffer.

I went out yesterday, me and my two NHS Elbow Crutches. I walked up the close as far as Wilf's House. Wilf lives in the house next to the house next to us, so I must have walked, ooooooooooooooo 40 feet (or about 12 metres for you continental types reading this. But what a sense of liberation, out of the house again, even if I was accompanied at every step by my lovely wife. She is determined that I won't make even more of a mess of my knee.

Then we managed to get me into her car, a lovely little Renault Clio called Poppy. Poppy is a three door car so the front door opens wider than it does on my car. With some hustling and bustling I got in, we went for a twenty minute car ride. Not the most comfortable way to travel, but suddenly I don't feel as if I'm going to be stuck indoors for evermore.

Spring is coming.

That makes me think of a little poem, often attrbuted to e.e.cummings, my favourite American poet. It is also attributed to Ogden Nash, but I don't think either of them actually wrote it. Does anyone know, or care????????

Here it is, a jolly little poem to finish the day.

Da Spring is sprung

Da grass is rizd

I wonder where de boidies is

Da boidies on da wing

But dat's absoid

I always toit

Da wings is on da boid.

Pieces of Eight, Squawk.

2009-04-20T09:57:00.002+01:00

This is really dreadful, isn't it. I haven't even looked at the Blog for ages and when I do, another two months have gone by without a posting. I'm fortunate in that so few people read this that they probably won't notice.

Don't have an excuse either, not really. I could say I've been too busy, but let's face it, being too busy is usually just a cop out for "I couldn't be bothered." I did look at the blog once or twice and think,"What can I write about?" then when nothing came to mind I did something else instead.

I think that I now have an extended period of time when the range of things that I can do has been vastly reduced, so the Blog may keep my Sanity together.

A week last Friday, Good Friday here in the UK, I did something remarkably silly that is going to have repercussions for several months.

We, Pat and I, had decided to redecorate the little front bedroom. Theoretically it is my study, but to be honest that is a misnomer. I call it the "Pigsty" which tells you a lot about how tidy I am. To decorate it, we have to remove all the books, hundreds and hundreds of books, and the bookcases, the computer and ADSL Router, The Filing Cabinets and so on. A huge job in itself. By tea time, most of the books were gone and I decided to take one of the fold away Oak Bookcases down and put it in the garage, out of the way. Pat told me not to be stupid and just put it in our bedroom, but I, (the man, you see, ((You know where this is going don't you!))) knew best.

I got down most of the staircase, but three steps from the bottom I felt my foot slide off the front of the step. I don't think I thought about anything, just reacted. I assume that I pushed the bookcase away from my now falling body to stop it falling on me, and instead I fell on the bookcase. When I stopped falling, and screaming (It seemed like a good idea to scream because something hurt badly) I decided first that I'd broken my leg, then I decided that my knee felt odd, so I thought that I'd dislocated my knee.

My wonderful wife grabbed the phone and dialled 999 for an ambulance. Meanwhile, I had rolled over and had sat up against the staircase - I told you, I'm a man, I'm stupid. However, I hadn't hit my head or my back and, rather curiously, nothing seemed to be hurting. My knee was aching but I thought that might be a twist or a sprain. The ambulance was there in less that 10 minutes and by that time I was already thinking that I was a fraud. My leg did'nt really hurt.

The paramedics got me sitting on the step, then they got me standing with all my weight on my right leg, the one that I hadn't hurt, then one of them said, "OK, let's try putting some weight on the other leg and see how bad it is. Dutifully, I put some weight onto my left leg and I went down like a sack of potatoes. There was no strength in my leg at all. Oooooooooooooops!

So I'll now cut the long story short. Off to Hospital in the back of an ambulance. Four hours in an assessment bay while various doctors came and prodded me at intervals. A very nice young Doctor called Nick, who looked old enough to be one of my pupils, told me that he thought I'd "broken" my Quadriceps Tendon and that was quite bad. He suggested an operation and said, "Would you like us to operate on you and put it right?" Now what would you say? I thought it was a bit of a no brainer but I asked what would be the result if I refused an operation. He smiled at me, "You wouldn't walk again!" See what I mean, at least he said it with a smile.

So I was admitted to Orthopaedics. I had an operation the following afternoon. They fitted me with a proper plaster cast three days later and sent me home after just six days in hospital.

The Consultant Surgeon, another very nice man, tells me that this is going to take time, lots of time. So I will be in plaster from my ankle to my naughty bits fot eight weeks. Oh yes, it turned out that I have not bust my Quadriceps Tendon, but "partly torn my Patellar Tendon", so it could actually have been worse, there is an awful lot of power in that Quadriceps Muscle and I rather think that you let that go at your peril.

Philip, the Vicar at my Church, popped in to the hospital on the day after my operation. Lovely to see him. In the course of our conversation he said, "Of course, you do realise that this is His way of telling you that you need to take a rest." This, of course, could well be right, but, why didn't He just send me a postcard.

Like I say, I hope that I'm going to have a lot of time to keep the Blog up to date in the next eight weeks or so. However, with a pot Leg on I cannot see me going very far at all! But we'll see. I might write a bit more this afternoon! See you then!

And the winner is .............

2009-02-15T20:30:00.002Z

I have to tell somebody, so I'll tell you all. (That's Danielle and just about nobody else in the entire world.)

We've just won the lottery! Yes, it's true, and if Patricia is reading this at the moment, we really have won. Honestly!

Ten Quid!

Ever since the lottery started we have bought a couple of tickets every Saturday. Then we check the numbers on a Saturday Evening and miss out. You can guarantee it that if we get 22 and 24 then 23 will come up. This afternoon we were looking at nice cars parked outside John Lewis' Incredible Store at Cheadle. I'd love a BMW, I've no idea why, maybe I want to pose as a poseur, who knows. So we keep saying that when we win the lottery I can have one, and a new computer and ............

We never win. But this week ...... On Thursday Night I won a litre of Johnnie Walker Red Label Whisky at Stanley House. (Admittedly I don't drink Whisky, but never mind, it's the thought that counts). So, last night we were out at a Valentine's Dinner in Whitfield (the other side of Glossop) and so I took the litre of Johnny Walker for their raffle. I won a bottle of Epernay's finest soft drink. You know the one Danielle, it comes in a green bottle, bubbles slightly when it comes out and it's manufactured by the Widow Cliquot's Heirs and Successors. Well, not the Widow's actually, in fact I don't recognise the label at all. But it does say Epernay. So hopefully it's a bit better than plain grape juice. And I do drink the big C!

Then we win ten quid on the lottery.

Maybe our luck is about to change.

Maybe we are going to win the Lottery BIGTIME.

Maybe .......................................

What's that OINK OINK OINK sound up in the sky.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it Superman..................................................................

Retrospective

2009-02-14T16:19:00.002Z

You'll recall that I wrote in an earlier post, a couple of weeks ago, that we had gone into Manchester on Saturday morning to see the new Gormley sculpture that had been aquired by the Manchester Art Gallery.

I took some photographs on the little, pocket Fuji Camera and I'm really glad that I didn't go swanning round with the new DSLR hanging round my neck. I'd have looked like a proper little plonker.

Still, I haven't got around to looking at the pictures that I took until today. So I have just spent half an hour working on them in the photo application.

Everyone goes on about Photoshop, but I use a program called Photo Plus 2 by Serif. I can't really see that I cannot do anything that I want with my photos, and for a fraction of the cost of Adobe's product.

Anyway, the first picture here was quite interesting. We always park in a car park at the back of Victoria Station. I think it is on Cross Street, opposite the Coop Buildings. We walked in towards St Anne's Square, across the new Square they have made outside the Corn Exchange. There was a bloke with a young boy taking photos. The adult was obviously showing the lad how to get a good picture, so when he'd moved on, I took a picture from the same place. I'm really quite pleased with it. Remember I am strictly an amateur snapshot taker, and I think that this is pretty neat.

Now, I thought that I would put two or three photos in here, but I'm struggling to get them scattered up and down the page. I still don't know how to get blogger to do what I want, so I'll stop right there and upload the pictures to my Flickr Account. They are also on my Picasa Account, but I prefer to use Flickr because people like Danielle, who insist on using Macs don't seem to be able to see Picasa (Or is it just D with her dislike of all things Google?) (She'll send me an email telling me why I'm wrong now, just you wait and see.)

So here I am going to put a link to the Flickr page. Try this and let us hope that it works

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinwhall/

Tautology and Teleology

2009-02-12T10:18:00.002Z

Hmmm.

I thought that these two words were similar, but they are nothing like each other. The word I wanted was tautology. That means:

tautology is an unnecessary or unessential (and usually unintentional) repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing twice (often originally from different languages). It is often regarded or thought of as a fault of style and was defined by Fowler as "saying the same thing twice".

Whereas teleology, which I seem to have spelled wrongly, means:

an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction — or some combination of these — in nature. The word "teleological" is derived from the Greek word telos, meaning "end" or "purpose".

So nothing at all alike, then. Never mind, they say that a daily advancement in knowledge is good for you! Well, it's good for me!

Learning Day

2009-02-12T08:26:00.003Z

I do feel ever so guilty really. Haven't written a thing in the blog since last Sunday. I did have a chance to write on Monday Evening, but I couldn't think of anything to say, and since I often think it's better to say nothing than write a load of drivel, I wrote nothing. Don't worry, by the way, I may be at work, but it's still before the start of the working day and I have a few minutes to myself, so I'll use them.

Yesterday was a "Learning Day". I'm sure that must be a tautology or a teliology or something. Isn't every day in a school a Learning Day, because it ought to be. However, our Learning Days are supposed to be something a bit different.

It seems that the current idea in education in England is that teaching "old fashioned" subjects such as History, or Geography, are old hat and ought to be done away with. The new trend is to do "project work" which I think I was doing at Junior School (or was it Primary or Elementary School - I forget the changing terms for the same thing) but of course the movers and shakers in 21st Century education don't remember that.

The School that I work in was built in the early 1950s and is a really beautiful school. It has a huge entrance hall, a vast Assembly Hall with a full sized theatrical stage, wide corridors and solid wood floors. In a couple of years it is to be pulled down to make way for a new 21st Century School. When the plans to do this were first produced one of our local politicians was heard to say, "I don't care if it has a medal from the Royal Society of Architects, that was 50 years ago, we want something that can inspire in the 21st Century." With thinking like that I can only say, "God Help Michealangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo da Vinci - they were 500 years ago"

So school will probably be pulled down and replaced by a glass and breeze block school which will have narrow, harsh corridors but which will inspire minds in the 21st Century!

Anyway, back to Learning Day. We had three classes, one each from years 7, 8 & 9, so 90 girls across the 11 - 14 age range. Split into teams of 3, one from each age group, each team was given a name out of history (the names ranged across history from good old Guillaume le Conquerant to John Lennon. An eclectic mix if ever there was one. The project group was from the History, ICT and Music Departments.

So the students were asked to work together as a team, each of them having a specific role within the team. They were asked to plan their work, gather resources, create a suitable slideshow using Microsoft Moviemaker and present it to the group. Their movie had to have pictures, a narrative, suitable background music and a speech track overlayed, and it had to be 3 minutes long.

That's actually hard work, three minutes is a long time. We showed them an example that we based on one of Terry Deary's "Horrible History" CD's. The one on the Tudors. It's very funny and has the refrain

Henry the Eighth was a big fat man
He ate all the food in the frying pan
If he'd have been a little bit littler
He wouldn't have ended up like Adolph Hitler

I know. Not excactly Shakespeare, but it is pretty funny and it gave them the idea that they were allowed to be entertaining with their work.

We had a really good day, or at least I thought that we did. Everyone worked really pretty hard at it and there were some very good results. Oh, I forgot to say that the students were asked to produce a resource for use by Year 7, 11 year olds, and the results, on the whole, did that job well. Yes, we got some oddities, like the group who consistently referred to the hero of Trafalgar as "Nelson Horatio". That tells you a lot about the value placed on History by the modern education system. When MP's find out that modern British students don't know who Horatio Nelson was, they will scream blue murder and demand that History is taught properly. (By properly they usually mean lists of names and dates). Nothing changes though. History doesn't matter in Britain these days. I've probably mentioned before that only two countries in Europe do not insist that all students study History to the age of 16, those two countries are Britain and Albania. It's so nice to be in such august company. Still, let us remember George Santayana, who, in his book "Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1," wrote the often misquoted words "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Not that that ever seems to bother politicians, or bankers for that matter, and I did say BANKERS.

Okay then, off to teach. Those who can, teach, those who cannot teach go into politics and tell the teachers what to do! Sayonara!

Get Funky

2009-02-08T18:12:00.002Z

Here is an entertaining looking website for those who like playing about with pictures. I'll bet that it doesn't work on Macs though.

http://www.befunky.com/

Bookcases

2009-02-08T16:31:00.002Z

This is one of the pictures that is part of the "Hidden Manchester" Exhibition at URBIS in Manchester. This picture, along with all of the other ones in this exhibition is the work of Andrew Brooks. You can see more of his work at the following website: http://www.andrewbrooksphotography.com. I cannot recommend this exhibition too highly and, if you live in Manchester, go and see it. If you don't live in Manchester, then have a look at the website.

I went to see the exhibition a week ago. I was blown away by the photographs in general, but I find that this one, in particular, keeps forcing itself back to the forefront of my attention.

The information that goes with this picture reads as follows:

In the eastern spire of the Town Hall, overlooking Saint Peter’s Square, a battered pair of shelves holds the forgotten records of Manchester’s bureaucratic past.

As sunlight streams in from the hidden courtyard outside, these books lie and rot, slowly turning to dust as they see in their third century. Whether put here to be secured, or put here to be hidden, their contents, that must have at one time seemed so important, are now merely a curiosity in a forgotten corner of the city.

I think that it must be this mysterious side of things that appeals to me. Whenever I go to a "stately" home, or a Cathedral or somewhere like Manchester Town Hall, (and I have not actually visited Manchester Town Hall despite the fact that I've lived here since 1969, a lot longer than I lived in Kendal, my home town.) I always want to go through the doors that are, inevitably locked and equally inevitably marked "Strictly Staff Only"

As a matter of fact I did once get the chance to go through a locked door exactly as I describe above. It was while I was visiting an old place in the Lake District. I asked one of the Guides what was on the other side of a particular locked door and he let me look. There was no floor! So sometimes I guess that it is a good thing that you cannot always get through these doors.

Anyway, to get back to the point, what fascinates me is the fact that, somewhere in Manchester Town Hall is a door, leading to a steep set of rickety old wooden stairs leading to this room. I mean, look at the picture. Here is a huge room full of the dust of ages and these two rickety (must be a favourite word) old sets of shelves full of crumbling old books of documents. Don't you just want to pull the books off those shelves and read them, 'cos I most assuredly do.

And look at all those windows running floor to ceiling. The room is full of light, unless it's one of Andrew Brooks' trick photos. I want to walk up to those windows and look down. In the exhibition there are pictures of the hidden courtyard in the centre of the Town Hall. I mean, I didn't even realise that there was a hidden courtyard. In the exhibition all of the pictures show places that people like you and me never get to go, and I want to.

It also leaves me wondering if Mr Brooks sneaked into this room to take this photograph, or was he allowed in to take the photo in this hidden place. I mean, how many people in Manchester actually know about these secret, hidden places.

As I say, I desperately want to go and see these places, but I realise that I probably never will. I've looked at a couple of websites that talk about "Urban Explorers" but they are all young and fit and have names like Jazz and Bazz and Shazz. Something tells me that a 58 year old History Teacher who is fat, bald and called Kevin is never going to get the chance to go urban exploring. But I can dream.

A Matter of Logic

2009-02-06T20:41:00.003Z

I wrote a bit about my faith the other day. My friend Danielle wrote me an email after reading it, part of which reads as follows. Bear in mind that this is only a little of her email and it is taken out of context. Danielle wrote,"I don't know about England but in France, the churches are almost empty, and the last Christians who go to mass on Sundays are oldies. Which means that catholicism might soon or later disappear. Protestants are not a great many, and apparently, apart from the great ceremonies, temples are not full either.. Which seems to demonstrate that there is a crisis."

I won't dispute that at all. Back in the 1960s I was a Church Choirboy and every Sunday there would be two or three services and the Church, Kendal Holy Trinity (which is a big church) was full. But that was in the days when there was nothing else to do on a Sunday. The boozers had very limited opening hours. The only TV Channels didn't start till 7 at night. No shops, none at all, were open.

Over the intervening years all that has changed. We now have 24 hour a day boozing in pubs that never close. The TV is never off and the shops are open every day of the week. So we all worship the great god mamon by going shopping.

As a result, the churches are, as Danielle says, empty. The Church that I attend now has a regular congregation of about 90 for the one and only service that is held on a Sunday. Numbers are really on the decline, and maybe we are seeing the beginning of the end of religion as it has been in this country for hundreds of years.

I don't think that it is necessarily so, or at least I hope not.

Then, almost on the same day that I got that email from Danielle I found the following. I am currently reading a Science Fiction Novel, and military Sci-Fi at that. In this rather strange place, lying in bed reading my novel, I read the following.

"Staynair laughed softly. "It isn't a matter of faith, it's a matter of logic. Either God exists or he doesn't. Those are really the only two possibilities. If he does exist, as I believe, then ultimately anything that promotes truth will only tend to demonstrate His existence. If he exists then whatever happens will be what he chooses to allow to happen - even if what he chooses is to have mankind turn against him, for a time."

"And what if he doesn't exist?", Merlin asked quietly.

"If he doesn't, then he doesn't. But if he doesn't then none of it will matter anyway, will it? If it turns out that I've been wrong all my life, what have I really lost? I will have done my best to live as a good man, loving people, serving them as I might, and if there is no God, then at the end of my life I'll simply close my eyes and sleep. Is there truly anything dreadful, anything to terrify any man, in that possibility? I don't fear oblivion, I simply hope for, and believe in so much more."

This is back to me again. I have edited that passage but only very slightly and only to remove a few things that were not germane to this posting.

I thought it was amazing that, just at the point when I needed an answer to a philosophic question, an answer popped up in the most unlikely of places. Strange!

I will admit that I think that passage is rather appropriate. I found it, personally, very satisfying. I think that it kind of speaks for me.

Wednesday

2009-02-04T17:00:00.002Z

I'm going out in a minute or fifteen and I've been sitting here trying to think of something to write. After not posting anything for about three months I am trying to posrt something every day. I didn't get a chance in work today, just too much work, and I'm out in a bit. So this is really just a short post to keep me going.

Isn't that miserable.

Tomorrow will be worse as I have even less time.

Makes me think. I read a lovely novel a few years ago. It is called "The Dark Is Rising" by one Susan Cooper and it belongs to the genre of fantasy. I remember it because it's quite a convoluted story about a young boy who effectively travels in time. I remember it because it features a line "For tonight will be bad and tomorrow will be beyond imagining." Of course, being teenage fiction it never lives up to its promise. No that sounds horrible. There are a lot of brilliant books in that genre and The dark is Rising is actually pretty good, certainly a page turner for me. They made a film of it the other year and I watched it on Sky over Christmas.

Total Mess. I wish they had left it alone.

See you all tomorrow, if we are spared!

Walking in the Way

2009-02-03T20:56:00.002Z

Okay, I'll start with a bit of a declaration, then you can ignore this post if it makes you uncomfortable. I plan to talk about religion or faith, tonight. So if you don't want to read about that or pretend that I never said any of this, come back tomorrow and see if I've talked about something else in the meantime.

It seems to be a bad week for being a Christian, this week. I've no idea why this might be the case, but I'm beginning to feel that way.

So as a starting point, I'd better put my cards on the table. I'm a Christian. There, I've said it. I don't see myself as being a red hot Christian. I'm not a fundamentalist. I don't even have a fish on the back of my car. I go to Church most weeks and I love the feeling of reverence that I get when I'm in Church. I'm not good at praying so I usually end up having a chat with God when I get the chance. I just hope that He is listening, and I'm assured that He is.

I sometimes lie there in those bleak, lonely hours in the middle of the night and wonder if I've got it wrong. Maybe there is no God, maybe the whole thing is one huge cosmic joke. But I just don't believe that at all. I really do believe in God and, with a bit of luck, s(he) believes in me. I also rather like the reassurance that while I am not that clever, there have been, and are, a whole host of very much cleverer people than me who also believe(d) in God, so I guess I'm not in bad company. I'll cite people like Miles Coverdale, Desmond Tutu, Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, Bishops Latimer and Ridley, Archbishop John Sentamu and Martin Luther. So if I have got it wrong, then I'm not on my own.

But it isn't cool to be a Christian is it. You hear Meeja People on the Babble Box sniggering about people who are Christians. I rather object to that, after all, I don't snigger about them!

Somehow, my bad week for being a Christian seemed to start on Sunday when I was watching Andrew Marr's political show. I usually like him as he talks sense most of the time. On Sunday he was talking to Sir David Attenborough about Darwin and Natural Selection. At one point he asked Attenborough if Natural Selection finally disproved the existence of God and then, in a sort of throw away remark, he said something like "or perhaps it allows for wormholes to faith." I won't pretend to understand the point that the pair of them were making, but I rather resent the implication that all truly clever people don't believe in God, but worms might.

Okay, I'm a worm! Proud of it by the way!

Tonight I was watching "The One Show" which for those of you French People who aren't reading this, is a lightweight magazine program which is on at 7pm on weekday nights. Tonight the guest was Robert Winston who is a well known scientist working in the fields of Gynaecology and such like things.

At one point in the programme they ran a piece about declining Church Attendance in the UK and made a point that lots of people seem to be embarrassed to admit to being Christian, or believing in God. They did a VoxPop and seemed to decide that there were a lot of people who admitted to believing in God but not wanting to go to Church. Fair Dos - it's a free Universe. Anyway, back in the studio the conversation got around to Richard Dawkins, the Scientist who pours scorn of anyone with faith. He wrote a book called "The God Delusion". A best seller.

I thought that Winston might agree with Dawkins, but he didn't. He said that Science was really only one interpretation of life, the universe and everything. He also said that he was pretty sure that scientists were beginning to admit that religion or faith might well be "hardwired into our genes" and had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Doesn't mean that I'm in any better position vis a vis Dawkins, but it made me feel a touch better.

I'm not any sort of scientist but I do quite like reading scientisty books, as long as they are not too technical. I read the description of The Big Bang in Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything - which is based on more technical sciencey books. I really don't see a lot od difference between the creation story in Genesis and the description of the Big Bang in Bryson.

Is anyone absolutely certain that God did not "push the button" that started the Big Bang.

I'm not a creationist. I do not deny Darwin or Natural Selection. But I am yet to be convinced that God does not have a hand in the way that the world works.

Okay, you canlaugh at me, but to quote the original Martin Luther, "Here I stand, I can do no other!"

Except, of course, that he said it in German.

Nighty Night.

Living in the Arctic Circle

2009-02-02T19:18:00.002Z

Once upon a time I lived in North Derbyshire, but tonight I returned home (Yes fans, I got home safe) to find that my house has magically moved to just inside the Arctic Circle, probably on Spitzbergen.

Parked on the drive, got out of the car, opened the front door and turned around in time to watch my car slide down the drive and bump into Pats Clio.

So the car is now parked at the top of the drive. Bugger the next door neighbours tonight. So they cannot get on their drive. They never think about us.

I do love sitting in the warm inside, watching the cold, cold snow falling outside. But how do I get to work tomorrow if this keeps up. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to find that out, and so will you.

Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow

2009-02-02T12:03:00.001Z

You know, it never ceases to amaze me. In the UK a bit of snow seems to close the country down. Up in Norway, Sweden and Finland the same amount of snow that we've had today would be cause for a good giggle. I understand that the Inuit have five hundred words for snow (I am exaggerating!!!). So here I am sitting in front of my year 8 class. We are now up to about 80% attendance 45 minutes into the lesson, and these students have mostly travelled less than 5 miles (8 km for you Danielle). They were supposed to be here by 8.30 but, because of the snow, today it has taken an extra hour.

I must say that I watched the news last night with trepidation. News of massive amounts of snow coming over to England from Russia. It was clearly particularly bad because it was going to hit the South East of England and London. We get this amount of snow fairly regularly oop North, but when it affects London the BBC seems to believe that the end of the world is nigh. So we knew, in advance, that there was going to be "heavy snow". They even put out a "SEVERE WEATHER WARNING" from the Meteorological Office to say how heavy the snow was going to be.

So when I got up this morning I looked out the window and there it was, exceptionally heavy snow. It must have been at least, ooooooooh, 3 cm deep. I have to drive up a hill to get out of our road and, since we traded in our bigger, heavier Ford Focus for a more economical but smaller and lighter Fiesta, it has been noticeable harder to get out of the Road when it snows. To get to work I decided I needed to leave early, so I set off on my interepid adventure a quarter hour early.

I should not have bothered! I got out of the Road with a little slipping and sliding, but once on the main road things were a lot clearer. So I'm in School by 7.20. By 8.30 when we are due to open there are still 14 staff missing and hundreds of girls. Apparently the buses are having problems, they can't get from Ashton to Droylsden, but I drove through Ashton on my way in. So my little Fiesta can make it, but the buses cannot.

Makes you think, doesn't it. maybe I should have gone back to bed. The problem will be getting home as the bad weather is due to come back again.

Tonight I must write up the Minutes from the last PCC Meeting at Church, I'm Secretary of the PCC, but I'll find time to let you know whether I got home, or not!

Matthew Shardlake Rocks!

2009-02-01T20:22:00.002Z

I don't usually write about the books I read, the films I watch or the Music that I listen to. I don't pretend to know anything about literary criticism or any other sort either. I belong to that class of people who know what they like.

I like Matthew Shardlake.

Matthew Shardlake is a lawyer at Lincoln's Inn in the England of Henry VIII. He lives in a series of books by C. J. Sansom, and I believe that Mr Sansom is a god!

I think that Mr Sansom must have been writing these books for a considerable time now, but I came upon them much more recently.

I first came upon Matthew in the book "Dissolution" when he was sent to investigate some curious happenings at Scarnsea Monastery by Thomas Cromwell. I don't know how often I pick up a book only to be ultimately disappointed by it, but from the moment that I turned the first page, I was hooked by Matthew Shardlake and his world.

My next visit to Matthew Shardlake's world found him at home in London in the book "Dark Fire", investigating the rumours of Greek Fire being sold to somebody, by somebody else. This time he has help in the person of the redoubtable Jack Barak, a kind of 16th Century James Bond without the gadgets.

I'm currently three quarters of the way through the third of Matthew's adventures. "Sovereign" is set in York during Henry VIII's Great Progress in the North. This time the story revolves around strange goings on in royal circles.

These books are complex, involved, full of twists and turns. I like a good thriller, but I usually have a good idea who has done what by the halfway point. I don't have that feeling with Matthew Shardlake. He isn't the most sympathetic of characters. The hunchback lawyer who seems to be despised by everyone in power, but his humanity is palpable, his intelligence remarkable.

I am very happy to say that I have the fourth book, "Revelation" sitting under the coffee table waiting to be read, just as soon as I finish "Sovereign". And with a bit of luck Matthew Shardlake's creator is thinking up another 600 page turner, just for me!

Automatic Comments

2009-02-01T20:06:00.002Z

I wrote a piece, below, about the new President of the U.S.' Inauguaration Speech and received a comment. I've said before that I don't get many comments, so I was quite excited. Sad, aren't I. When I read the comment from someone called mberenis I discovered that it had nothing whatsoever to do with what I had written. It was just some electronic crawl that the President will never read, and I assume that it was an automatically generated comment which resulted from me using the word Obama in the heading of my post.

Well, just to say, if you ever read this mberenis, your comment was not appreciated. Stay away!

Obama's Speech

2009-01-31T21:01:00.002Z

I read the following in my NetUser Computer Magazine.

Last week, in his Inaugural Address, President Obama said, "To those who cling to power through deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history."

Apparently this part of President Obama's address was excluded by many websites in China.

I have only one comment to make. Shame on you, China. If you want to be part of the modern world, you have to live with the modern world, not try to pretend that the world is really the way you wish that it was.

Gormley

2009-01-31T20:47:00.003Z

Went to see the new Anthony Gormley piece in Manchester Art gallery, I didn't realise that they had bought it. It hangs in the air right at the top of the atrium. Made of mild stell hula hoops, it's life size and is full of air, and a heart. I'll try to edit some more photos of Kevin and Patricia go to Manchester tomorrow. Right now I'm going to watch Teevee with my darling wife, I just cannot stand the excitement of writing in my blog three days running!

Here is something that looks like fun

2009-01-30T20:44:00.003Z

Just read an article in Computeractive Magazine. I love it, lots of news and its not expensive like most techie computer mags. Anyway, I found a link to this web based application called "Wordle".

Wordle does "Word Clouds" that look like this and I think it is pretty damned neat.

Here is the link www.wordle.net

This is what it does

By the way, this isn't mine, just an example that I copied from the Gallery. But I will certainly have a go with it at some future time. It really looks like fun.

Hidden Manchester

2009-01-30T19:51:00.006Z

I watched a short program on the BBC last week. "Inside Out" is a magazine programme done by BBC North West and usually features bits and bobs about the North West. Usually I avoid it like the plague. Last week I spotted this little piece about Underground Manchester - so I recorded it on Sky+.

I have known about the Secret Telephone Exchange under Piccadilly Gardens for doneys years, but this piece on Hidden Manchester really amazed me. The best bit was about a place called "Victoria Arches" which must be around Victoria Station. Apparently it was build in the 1830's to support a new road into Manchester. So underground is this unbelievably huge open space, but you cannot get into it. They didn't show any external shots of entrances, presumably to keep the hoi polloi out.

During World War II Victoria Arches was used as a major Air Raid Shelter for Manchester. They showed one of the Gents Toilets. Huge. But after the war it must have been closed up again. It's silly really, it could be a real tourist attraction if only someone in Manchester had the foresight. I've been to Stockport's Air Raid Shelters with the kids today, and they attract a lot of visitors. So why shouldn't something similar in Manchester do the same.

Anyway, now, thanks to my friend Dianne, you can have a look as well. I mentioned, on facebook, that Pat and I are going into Manchester tomorrow to see the new Anthony Gormley statue in the Museum. He's the bloke who did the standing statues on Crosby Beach. This looks positively amazing on the tele. Diane replied with a message about the Underground Manchester exhibition at Urbis. She gave me the web address so I'll share it with you - Have a look at this:

http://www.urbis.org.uk/page.asp?id=3282

My comment to Diane was "These are exceptional aren't they. There was a 10 minute piece about these piccies on "Inside Out" on the Beeb, just over a week ago. I watched it. This bloke, Andrew Paul Brooks, took the photos by wandering about these hidden spaces with a flash gun. By triggering the camera remotely he built up hundreds of photos and then overlayed them over each other using something like Photoshop. Some of these photos are phenomenal. I might try to coax Pat to go to Urbis as well tomorrow morning to see this exhibition.

Just as an experiment, I've put the address of this blog onto my Facebook Page, so it will be interesting to see if anyone from Facebook has a look at the blog. I'm fed up of the idea of writing a blog that is only for me and Danielle to read. We shall see.

OMG

2009-01-29T19:19:00.002Z

OMG

I discovered from one of my friends on Facebook that this means "Oh My God" which I should have worked out on my own. Thatnks DMG if you should ever happen to read this. maybe I should put the address of this blog on facebook and let the cognoscienti read it. Now there is a thought!

I didn't think it was so long since I last wrote on this, but then It is. Oh dear. I'm just not doing any of the things that I really like doing at the moment, so I'd better get my act together again, hadn't I.

Today. Today we had a presentation from the new Principal of the new Academy that our school is going to turn into at the end of Summer. Our new Principal is an interesting bloke, who looks deeply scary at the moment. He looks several things as well as scary, but I have a feeling that he might actually be good for the school, in a scary sort of way.

The bad new is that his Curriculum Plan for the Academy does not appear to have any room for History in it, though I am prepared to wait and see. maybe when he gets a chance to explain things we might discover that History is still there, but disguised. I don't really see why I am so upset as I won't be there for very much longer really, at fifty seven (soon to be eight) I am within leaping distance of retirement. Who knows.

I discovered, a few years ago, that there are just two countries in Europe where History is not a required subject in some form for all students up to 16. The two countries where it isn't required are Albania and the good old United Kingdom. Sob, it makes me so proud to belong to a plonking country that wants to forget its heritage.

Anyway, we shall see as we go along what the future brings.

I'll be sure to keep you up to date.

Let me just try something. Just put this in here like this, and put that in there .....

2008-11-24T20:53:00.002Z

I was reading this thing the other day. It was in a magazine (at this time of the year I don't seem to have enough time to read ..... no that's a lie ..... I'll come back to that.)

I was reading a piece in a Magazine and it mentioned that in some blogging systems you can send things to the blog by email.

So I got out my copy of the Blogger engine and read the instructions .... and lo and behold, it appears that you can do just that.

This may be the answer to a prayer. I've not been adding to the blog for a good month now, but if I can send a post to the blog as easily as I can send an email to somebody.

That's a laugh. I don't even get around to sending emails to people who I really ought to send them to. I must write to Howard. He will think that I really am a total plonker. Saw him this Summer, had a really good couple of hours over a pint, then I've just never written back. So I must write to Howard very soon.

When I said I hadn't been reading much I forgot that I'm halfway through a really good SF novel, or series I suppose. One that I'm really enjoying. More of that another time. This really was just a trial, to see if the old email thingy really works. Oh please, I do hope that it does!

Love you and leave you for now.

OfSTED

2008-10-27T20:54:00.003Z

So here I am again. I just read the last bit over and I stopped mid post to go and watch TV. Never came back up that evening and carried on with another full week. The following Thursday evening, it would be October 16th, we got the news that we were having a new style OfSTED inspection. OfSTED is the Office for Standards in Education and is the Government Agency in the UK that inspects Schools. As is now normal we were given about 5 days notice that they were coming in.

They will jus wander into classrooms to observe lessons as the mood takes them. So everyone has to plan detailed lesson plans for every lesson in those two days. I was convinced that they would see me this time as the last time we were inspected nobody came to see me. The GCSE exam results for my calss were not too good last year so I was convinced they would come to see me.

I had good lessons planned. They went well. The students were attentive. Nobody came near. Not into one lesson on those two days.

It left me feeling really down, despite various people saying, "But it is random" "Not seeing you implies nothing." But I really did feel down when I was not inspected. As is normal with me I got really grouchy about it. I'm really not a very nice person I guess.

Anyway, the school was declared to be good. Which I could have told you before, but they have to check it out for themselves. But it still feels vaguely that it isn't me who was declared to be good, or even OK. Ho Hum.

And so we visited Chatsworth again.....

2008-10-12T19:55:00.009+01:00

We went to Chatsworth about two or three weeks ago. I think I mentioned in the Blog that we had Moses, our Parish Worker, from Church, for Dinner and we took him to Chatsworth.

They had an exhibition of Sculptures on show, part of a Sotheby's Exhibition, but I didn't have my camera. Moses had his phone and he let me have two or three photos, but I wanted more. So we have been saying that we would return to Chatsworth ever since. However, to do that you have to have a day free, and you had to have decent weather.

The weather forecast on Thursday suggested that the weekend was going to be nice, so we decided to go, as long as the weather stayed nice, on Saturday, because we were both free of commitments on that day.

Saturday dawned grey, iron clad, but the weather forecast suggested that it would be okay. So we decided to go for it. Chatsworth is about an hour's drive away, so we set off at just before 11 am and got there after a very pleasant drive, just before noon. I must admit that, having decided not to shell out for the visit to the House again, I was just a bit amazed to be charged thirteen pounds to go into the gardens, but it was well worth it.

The picture above shows my favourite sculpture. It is not part of the Sothebys exhibition. I assume that it belongs to the Chatsworth estate and for me it shows remarkably good taste. I love it. I call it the Dancing Hare, though I have no idea what it is called.

If you want to have a look at my photographs, you can find them in my online photo- album which is on Picasa. Just follow the link below. It currently features a rather snazzy piece which is supposed to look like Mao Tse Tung (Or is it Zedong nowadays) Jacket, but made out of rusty steel for some reason. I may try to change to picture for another one that works a bit better, but we'll see how we get on first.

Chatsworth on 11th October 2008

I have to admit that I was very taken by some of these artworks, while others left me rather cold. I think my favourite of the Sothebys pieces is the one called "Le Tres Grand Ours", or to put it in English "The Bloody Big Teddy Bear". Now just let me see if I can include a picture of Theodore Bear in this blog at this point. How do we do this....... You know, looking at this I don't think that looks too bad. The thing that you cannot see from these photographs, is the way that these pieces fit their suuroundings so very well. The Big Bear, for example, is the highest up the slope of any of the pieces. So you walk up this quite steep hill and you come out at the top by the side of a mirror pool. You'll see that in some of the photographs. It has a pagoda style building overlooking it. At the right hand end of the mirror pool is a stand of evergreen trees, and the bear is standing right in the middle of them. He looks so very much at home. I must admit that I sent an email to Chatsworth suggesting that they keep Big Ted because he looks perfect in place.

By the way the mad dancing hare is at the opposite end of the mirror pool to Big Ted. I wonder what they get up to at night.

What else did I like. I loved the Horse, but I'm not really sure that my photos of the Horse do him justice because he is bang in the middle of a path running through the wood and it was quite dark there. I did my best. I'm not going to put a picture of Horse in here, you'll have to go to the gallery to see him.

At this point I shall stop and go and watch the results show of Strictly Come Dancing.

So, till I get back to the blog, here is something to be going on with.

The Week in View

2008-10-05T21:16:00.002+01:00

I don't need to worry about not writing things in here for a week at a time. Unless there is a tool that I have not found, I have no evidence that anyone at all is reading this, aside from D who sends me a regular email, and my dear wife who reads it when she thinks about it. So I can treat this as an entirely private diary that I can write in once a week and be fairly certain that no one else in the world gives a damn.

So this week. Well, the high point has to be going to see Nurse Pippa for my blood test results on Tuesday to discover that everything that can be high is above what it should possibly be. So I was immediately signed up for more blood tests to see what is going wrong. I could have told them that. I am very, very, very obese, grossly fat and slovenly. I am greedy and lazy. So what am I going to do about it.

I AM GOING TO LOSE WEIGHT, THAT's A PROMISE. Well, it's lose weight or die and I have no intention of dying just yet.

Thursday Night should have been a night out with the boys, but some stupid person had chopped through the gas pipe so we had no heat and no food which meant that our meeting was cut down to just 40 minutes and then we all went home. British Gas we love you.

Friday was a training day when we looked at something called the "PEEL" chain. I'm not sure I understand it, and I doubt if it would interest you the none existent reader, so I will ignore it. But it was the first training day for a long time where I really felt that we got something useful out of the training.

I also went to the School Gym after the day ended to be inducted onto the Gym Machines. They are marvellous, better than I expected, really professional machines. So it's just getting up the enthusiasm to start using them after school. Remember, Kevin, you have promised to do something about that vast bulk you call a body, so get going.

On Saturday I spent 2 hours cleaning out the detritus in the old 17th Century Hearse House at Church. What I was cleaning out was mostly bits of rock and dust from the last repointing. Still. I had fun, and I do mean that.

Then we went book shopping at the big Borders Store in Stockport. Between us, the apple of my eye and me spent £80 on books. Got some nice ones. I bought a SciFi book I enjoyed years ago and lost, a new SciFi book that sounded as if it had some mileage and the book I really went for.

Henry Allingham is now 112 years old and is one of the last survivors of World War I. He has written, with help, his autobiography, called The Last of Kitchener's Volunteers. I shall save it for half term as I want to be able to get my head into that book properly.

Today is Sunday, I spent most of the afternoon marking and planning.

Tomorrow Evening is Monday and I must spend most of that evening planning one lesson. Our Executive Head is coming to watch me teach on Wednesday and I must be ready for him.

I shall let you know how I get on. Love for now.

Oh yes, by the way, an old student told me, this week, that lol means Laugh Out Loud. Oh well.

See you all soon, all NONE of you.

Lots of love!

Azincourt

2008-09-27T21:39:00.002+01:00

Speaking of Books.

In Zermo's Blog recently, D wrote a review of Bernard Cornwell's "The Lords of the North" and I wondered if, having read "LotN" D had read the two books in the Saxon Series that came before it.

I agree with everything that D says about Cornwell's books, but she says it better, so I won't say anything here. However, if you read "Lords of the North" it makes more sense if you have already read "The Last Kingdom" and "Pale Rider"

Anyway, as it does, that led me to go skating on the Internet where I discovered that Cornwell's next book, which is out in England in October is called "Azincourt" (or, in the American edition, Agincourt") and tells the story of the events leading up to that seminal battle from the point of view of an English Archer.

I'm looking forward to it already. I'm salivating.

You might also try Cornwell's Grail Quest Trilogy, "Harlequin", "Vagabond" and "Heretic" which also tell the story of an English Archer loose in France during the Hundred Years War.

The may not be "nice and accurate" but they are a damned good read.

Good Omens

2008-09-27T21:31:00.003+01:00

I've just re-read Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

This is a story of Armageddon. The Devil's son has been borne on Earth. The end of days is coming! The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have ridden.

Unfortunately, the job of looking after the Antichrist was put in the hands of the Demon, Crowley, who used to be called Crawley, when he was a snake, or should I say THE SNAKE!

And Aziraphael of course. The Angel with the flaming sword who was put on watch to guard the gates of Eden, but who thought that Adam and Eve looked cold, so he gave his flaming sword to them.

It's also the story of "The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch", the only work of prediction to be a hundred percent accurate.

And the usual host of Pratchett, and Gaiman, characters.

It is a hoot. One of the funniest book I've read in a long time. I won't pretend that it is a work of greatness, but I love it. I would recommend this book to anyone in the world who enjoys reading and likes a laugh.

Smashing Time

2008-09-27T21:26:00.002+01:00

Do you remember Pyrex Dishes

When I was growing up you could put a Pyrex Dish on your head to wear as a helmet. Your mates could chuck bricks at you and the Pyrex kept them off. Never broke, even when you fell on your head.

What has happened to Pyrex. Today I dropped a pyrex bowl on the floor, and only from a height of six feet, and it exploded. Sharp edges bits of glass all over the floor.

Thank Ghod we don't have a doggy at the moment!

Is Pyrex less good than it used to be.

Has Pyrex been taken over by the French and all of its' strength leached away.

Or is it like long hot summers, longer and hotter in memory than reality.

Tuesday Night is Open Night

2008-09-27T21:12:00.002+01:00

So on Tuesday Evening we had Open Evening for the new Academy. Here comes another little rant. Just skip past this one D you know what is coming so ignore it.

So okay, the new school will open next September, so they have to hold an Open Evening to attract the scions of our town to attend the wonderful new school. But we had only just had a letter saying that new Year 7 students will attend the other School's Building. The brand new building will be open by 2010 (OH YEAH - just watch this space if it's properly built it will take more than 12 months to build, If it's built by 2010 it will probably be awful)

So if the promises are correct then the new Year 7 pupils will be at the other school until 2011, a full year after the new school has been built and the old one pulled down. So why in anybody's name would the parents want to come and look around our old school.

So why in heaven's name did we have to waste an evening sitting around while no more than 30 people came and looked around our part of the building?

What a fun and joy filled evening that was. To top it off the new Principal, in her address, told the parents that they could not ask the staff any questions about the new school because we knew nothing about it.

Really, honestly, truthfully! Why were we there?

Not Being There

2008-09-27T21:08:00.002+01:00

I knew that when things got busy I would struggle to get time on the blog. It happened this week. I was out in the evening on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and I just need time to write this. But I feel ever so guilty. I'm going to have to cure myself of that.

In any case, what is the point of feeling guilty about not writing on this when nobody but me reads it. And maybe D from time to time, and possibly the love of my life occasionally, especially now that she is writing her own blog.

She does it better than me!

Mamma Mia

2008-09-19T22:35:00.002+01:00

Unlike my friend D, I do belong to the Abba generation. I can still remember years and years of watching the Eurovision Screech Contest. At this point we will not get into why a person like me with a modicum of intelligence would ever have watched that Song Contest, but I did for years and years. I watched a series of songs with titles like "Bam bam Bam bam" and "Bong Bong Nong" won the stupid thing.

And then, one day, out of nowhere came Abba and Waterloo.

There was a time, a year or two later, when we were on one of our school trips to France. That year we were staying in Deauville and Trouville (Yes, both at the same time.) One night, we went to the Casino. I'd never been to a Casino and was astonished that I could not see any Roulette or Cards or anything. I never did find those things and a glass of wine cost a fortune. But I do remember them playing an Abba song over and over in the background.

I think that I fell in love with Agnetha and Anna-Frid (I'll own up to the fact that I never fancied the blokes, but grief, those girls were sexy.)

Then, in 2000, we decided to restart taking School Visits. We hadn't been for a year or three. We decided to take a group of girls to London and we arranged a variet of things to do. Being that it was the Millennium we took them to the Dome, the Tower, all that touristy stuff. I had promised the girls that we would take them to a show and promised them "The Lion King". But we couldn't get tickets to that show, it was too new. But the ticket agents said that they could get us tickets to Mamma Mia, which was quite new at the time and for some reason it was easy to get tickets.

I did not know what to expect. The kids were really disappointed but decided to enjoy whatever the show turned out to be. We talked about it before we went and we all decided to get dressed up and enjoy an evening out at the Theatre. So there we were, going to a Soho Theatre. A group of 40 Teenage Girls and five teachers, dressed up to the nines. The kids looked wonderful, I'm not so sure about the adults, but we set out to have a fun night, no matter how bad this Abba show turned out to be.

We found our seat, settled in, the lights went down.

AND WE WERE BLOWN AWAY!

I still get messages from some of the girls who went, on Facebook, saying how they remember that show.

It was breathtaking, exciting, gorgeous, hilarious, wonderful. And the music! Oh wow.

So when I saw that they had made a film of it, I obviously wanted to see it. We saw a couple of clips on the TeeVee on SuperWonderfulTeeVeeShows like "RICHARD & JUDY". I have not seen every film that Meryl Streep has made, but I have never been disappointed by one. I think that she is one of the best actresses that there is. I love Julie Walters and I think that Christine Baranski ROCKS! Colin Firth is a cracker, and the rest were unknown quantities. Except of course James Bond who clearly had the part of the song mangler in the movie.

Had to go and see it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pat and I went one day when we had been going to have a day drive into Derbyshire, but when it RAINEDANDRAINEDANDRAINEDANDRAINEDANDRAINED that day we decided to go to the cinema instead.

We went to the 4.30 pm matinee, on a Thursday, when it was raining, five weeks after Mamma Mia had been released.

When we entered the cinema it was empty. Utterly and completely empty. So we sat in the middle of the back row in the courting seats. By the time that the movie started we had been joined by THREE other souls. We watched Mamma Mia in a 300 seat movie cinema with five of us present. HOW COOL IS THAT!

D writes about going to see Mamma Mia in her blog. There is a link over on the left of the page. It's called Zermo's Blog. Ghod knows why, but there you are. She is, after all, French so you have to make allowances. D obviously knows what she is talking about when it comes to films. After all I go to the Cinema once in two years and the last film I saw at the Cinema was "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" whereas D sees 237 films every week! So she knows what she is talking about. So if she says this movie is "merde" (which she doesn't, but it's what she means if you read between the lines, which is quite difficult when you speak as little French as me) then that is almost certainly the case.

But on that rainy Thursday afternoon I wasn't going to see an arthouse movie, I wanted something that was fun, and mamma Mia fitted the bill.

I absolutely loved it. OK, Pierce Brosnan cannot sing. If he believes that he can then he is fooling himself. But I thought that the film, Mamma Mia was great. If you read this, and let's face it, I have no evidence that anyone ever reads this at all, and you want to see a bit of fun, not a cinematographic masterpiece, but a fun movie, then mamma Mia gets my vote.

Oh, by the way, in the middle of last week, Madame la Presidente de la Republique Francaises, whose name I forget, appeared on the Jazz Music Show "Later with Jools Holland". I tell you what, she can sing a hell of a lot better than Pierce Brosnan!

Forever Young

2008-09-16T21:52:00.003+01:00

I think Bob Dylan is brilliant. I see little difference between his songs and poems.

Here is a song / poem that I really like. I often write this one in the Leaving Books of my students. When they ask me to write something, which is not often. See what you think of this. A bit schmaltzy I guess, but I love it all the same. I'm soft hearted. This was first recorded on “Planet Waves” in 1974

Forever Young

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay, in ev’ry way, forever young,

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay, in ev’ry way, forever young,

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay, in ev’ry way, forever young,

Sky High

2008-09-16T21:34:00.002+01:00

See, I knew this is how it would end up when I started having work related things to do, like marking exercise books. However, you don't want to know about that.

I decided to go for broke and buy a Sky+ satellite Receiver. We have a Sky Satellite already, but Sky+ allows you to record satellite and do other magical things like pausing reality. So if the Swiss do destroy the world then I can pause reality or run time backwards until before the bang. And I know that this is true because the adverts from Sky tell me it's true.

Besides, later next year they are going to shut down the analogue transmitters in Glossop, along with the rest of Granadaland. At that point, if you have not got a digital system then you will have no TeeVee. HELL ON EARTH! Of course, we have Digital TeeVee, but what we don't have at the moment, is any way to record that digitalk TeeVee. The old analogue recorder will not do the job and our current Digital Recorder will end up only being able to record the one program that is showing at the moment. Which is not much good really.

So when I came into a couple of hyndred quid that I did not expect, Pat and I decided to splurge it on a Sky+ system.

Should be easy, shouldn't it. Read the adverts from Sky. Ring them up and buy on the telephone. Buy online using Sky.com. Use the Interactive Services on our Sky Box. Easy Peasy. Don't you believe a word of it. For starters the price of the box varies depending on where you buy it. Buy online and it is 99 pounds in real money. Buy over the phone and they wanted to charge me two hundred and ten pounds. (HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE) Well at least I thought Hee Hee Hee until I went to check prices in my local Sky Shop. There they told me I would have to pay THREE HUNDRED QUID. The funny thing is that some people pay three times the price and think they are getting a bargain.

So I tried to buy online - and the website crashed. Not my broadband connection, the Sky website. I tri3ed fifteen times and it crashed everytime!!!!

So I tried buying by Interactive Service and the Interactive Service crashed and told me it could not talk to the telephone. Funnily enough it had no problem talking to the phone if I wanted to book a movie.

So I phoned them up. The line connected immediately but it took 55 minutes for someone to answer the phone! The bloke who answered the phone had the intelligence of a small legume (a pea to be precise.) And was unable to sell me a Sky+m Box for the online price. He wanted to charge me £250 quid. Do I look like a Spaniel? Do I???

To cut a very long story short, before I, or you dear reader die of boredom, I finally managed to speak to a Lady who both works for Sky and had a lot of Common Sense. So I have bought my Sky+ box, for the Internet Price. But what about all those phone calls and the fact that the website doesn't let you buy stuff. I wrote a stiff email of complaint and I will assuredly let you know what comes of it.

I'll probably write the next Diary post in another week's time.

Have fun, and don't do anything I wouldn't do. But then, I have a very wide range of tolerances.

A Joke

2008-09-10T11:07:00.000+01:00

An atheist was taking a walk through the woods. "What majestic trees! What powerful rivers! What beautiful animals!" he said to himself.

As he continued walking alongside the river he heard a rustling in the bushes. Turning to look, he saw a 7 foot grizzly charging towards him. He ran as fast as he could up the path. Looking over his shoulder he saw that the bear was closing in on him. His heart was pumping frantically and he tried to run even faster. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw the bear raising his paw to take a swipe at him.

At that instant the atheist cried out: "Oh my God!..."

Time stopped.

The bear froze.

The forest was silent.

It was then that a bright light shone upon the man and a voice came out of the sky saying:

"You deny my existence for all of these years, teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to a cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light. "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps, could you make the BEAR a Christian?"

"Very well," said the voice. The light went out, and the sounds of the forest resumed.

And then the bear lowered his paw, bowed his head and spoke:
"Lord, bless this food which I am about to receive and for which I am truly thankful, Amen.

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

2008-09-09T21:25:00.003+01:00

If you believe the girls at our school, you'll be lucky. For some reasons ome of the Year 10 and Year 11 girls have decided that CERN are going to blow up the Universe sometime tomorrow.

This is interesting because they have no idea what CERN is or what the scientists there are doing, or anything else really. So just in case the kids are right, and most of the world's scientists are wrong. I thought I'd get in one last word.

DIMPLEX

Well, if you are going to have a last word, Dimplex will do just fine.

Okay, that's got that over and done with.

I'm sitting here watching the National Movie Awards. They are about to award the Best Actor prize. However, they just had a "Coming Soon" piece and it included a mention of what looked like a new StarTrek Movie. How have I missed that.

By the way, Johnnie Depp won. Good call.

I'm not in the mood tonight, so I'll stop there. See you soon!

And with a bright flash .... it was gone

2008-09-08T20:31:00.004+01:00

I can see a pattern developing here. WHAT HAPPENED TO SUNDAY?

So we've gone from Tuesday last week to Monday this week with only one post in between. If I don't watch it this will be the beginning of the end.

Saturday Night was smart. We went out with our friend Barbara & Richard and the other Barbara to the "Sweet Mandarin" in Manchester. If anyone ever reads this and lives around Manchester, give it a try. An excellent Chinese Restaurant opposite what used to be the Fish Market. Modern, superb food and not too expensive. They make a lot of money on drinks, though, but I suppose that is true of all restaurants. We had a very nice mixed banquet but we were talking about it today and the way prices are going at the moment, maybe we need to buy five dishes and share next time.

Unfortunately I was the designated driver this time, as was Rich, so we ended up on Coca Cola while the women put away quantities of white wine. Ah well, it will be my turn next time.

Sunday was a nice day, despite the fact that it rained none stop all day. At least we have the benefit of living on a hill in the Peak District. I pity the people of Morpeth in Northumberland who received all of September's Rain on Friday. With the following result:

How do you cope with sitting watching TV when your house fills up with water. And the horrible nature of the water at that. We watched the news on Sunday Morning when they showed what was left on the carpet on Sunday Morning.

It was a longer than usual service at Church on Sunday. Philip, the Vicar, was away and we had a visiting Canon. He may be missing having his own church and we got a service that laster 1 hour and 40 minutes. Too long for me. I'm sure that the sermon was very erudite, but he lost me after 20 minutes. Still.

I spent the rainy afternoon mainly doing School Work of one sort and another. It is the great joy of teaching that you get to mark all of this work. Ah I do so love correcting exercises ... NOT!

Then we went back to Church for the once a month service of Evensong. I'm not a modernist. I don't believe that Church Services have to be in "Modern" to be accessible. I am a great lover of the old, traditional, Book of Common Prayer that has been in use since, what, about 1605. It has stood the Church of England in good stead for four hundred years and I find it perfectly accessible today. To the modernists I ask, do we need to re-write Shakespeare as Rap to make it accessible to the yoof of the country?

Anyway, we had a lovely, gentle service that made me feel so very good. And thank you to the Choir for that perfect piece of an Anthem. I know that none of them will ever read this, but it was a great joy.

And so, back to work, another weekend bites the dust!

Home

2008-09-06T17:44:00.004+01:00

Time for another poem. This one is by Rudyard Kipling who is one of my favourite poets. Everyone else in the world hates him, 'cos he embodies the British Empire. However, he deserves more reading, try "Recessional" for a different approach. I might put it in the blog at some point, if I remember, but for now, here is

The Land

When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius-a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: "What about that River-piece for layin'' in to hay?"
And the aged Hobden answered: "I remember as a lad
My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll get her clean.
Have it jest as you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd dreen."
So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style--
Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,
And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,
We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.

Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,
And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.
Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main
And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.
Well could Ogier work his war-boat --well could Ogier wield his brand--
Much he knew of foaming waters--not so much of farming land.
So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood,
Saying: "What about that River-piece; she doesn't look no good?"
And that aged Hobden answered "'Tain't for me not interfere.
But I've known that bit o' meadow now for five and fifty year.
Have it jest as you've a mind to, but I've proved it time on' time,
If you want to change her nature you have got to give her lime!"
Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours' solemn walk,
And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.
And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in't.--
Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.

Ogier died. His sons grew English-Anglo-Saxon was their name--
Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;
For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,
And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.
But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy autumn night
And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.
So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:
"Hob, what about that River-bit--the Brook's got up no bounds? "
And that aged Hobden answered: "'Tain't my business to advise,
But ye might ha' known 'twould happen from the way the valley lies.
Where ye can't hold back the water you must try and save the sile.
Hev it jest as you've a mind to, but, if I was you, I'd spile!"
They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees,
And planks of elms behind 'em and immortal oaken knees.
And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away
You can see their faithful fragments, iron-hard in iron clay.

Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which-are neither mine nor theirs,
I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish-but Hobden tickles--I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.
Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot under which my conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.
His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.
Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.
"Hob, what about that River-bit?" I turn to him again,
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
"Hev it jest as you've a mind to, but"-and here he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Hobden owns the land.

A Moderately Happy Man!

2008-09-06T17:12:00.004+01:00

See. This is what happens. You miss writing in your diary / journal / blog for one day and suddenly it is the weekend.

Sorry, but then, as far as I'm concerned I'm the only person whoever reads this so it really doesn't matter at all.

Wednesday was a bit of a washout. At the end of school we had a Tutor Team meeting. It bothers me that all we seem to be concerned with these days is the statistical output of results from the girls, rather than considering each individual and aiming to do the best by her. So our meeting was mostly about setting targets for this that and the other. In the evening I spent my time typing up the Minutes from last months meeting of the Parochial Church Council Standing Committee. Oh yes, and Hayley, our friend and Podiatrist came round and sorted out my feet again. There is nothing quite so nice as having nice feet, and I haven't got them, but it's not because Hayley is at fault. So by the time that this, that and the other was done, it was time to sit down and watch "Who Do You Think You Are?" on the BBC. If anyone ever reads this and doesn't know what it is, it's a genealogy program tracing famous people's families. We love it. By the time it was over I could not be bothered getting the computer going, so one day wasted.

Thursday. Pleasant day at school followed by the evening spent out in good company with friends. And the blog didn't come into it! So ya boo sucks to you, blogspot!

Friday. I was dischuffed in School by a piece of paper asking me to account for the different teaching methods I had employed last year in teaching my Year 11 class. The fact that my classes results are clearly appalling, despite the fact that two of the 18 got A* grades at GCSE and several others managed ABC grades. Obviously I am now shit as a teacher. I don't know exactly what percentage of ABC grades my class got, but it was clearly very poor. Apparently my class gained 1 grade and lost 36. So I should be put up against a wall and shot! As I say, there were two A* grades, and it is impossible to get a better grade than that, so how come I only gained 1 grade, because the target for one of those girls was an A* and she got an A* so that is presumably a grade lost, but how the hell was she supposed to do better than an A* when that is all that there is. Okay, so a lot of the girls did worse in History than in their other subjects, but there might just be reasons for that, other than my shite teaching. However, take it from me, I am now clearly judged as being piss poor at the teaching game.

I'm glad that nobody but me reads this as they might object to my language. However, being judged like that on Friday morning does not leave you wanting to write the blog on Friday night.

So I drank a couple of cans of Newcastle Brown Ale instead and watched the new Harry Enfield & Paul Waterhouse Comedy on TV. To paraphrase the Prince Regent, rather than Bugger Bognor we'll go with Stuff School. Still nice and alliterative.

Today. Well, got up late, mooched around, had lunch and trolled into Glossop for a look at the shops. Bought one pair of shoe laces. Wowee!!!!!!!!!!

I have installed the latest version of Rainlendar on my home computer. It is a calendar program that sits on the desktop and shows all of the events from my Google Calendar, which is superb. Since I have several Google Calendars, and it shows them all, you cannot really complain can you. I just wish it did a separate colour for each calendar, that would be even nicer.

I do love software that does its job well. Microsoft Office 7 is superb, but it costs the earth. Rainlendar works very well indeed and does not!

By the way, I installed Chrome, the new browser from Google and so far I am impressed. It looks to be every bit as good as Firefox. Anyway, advert over. If anyone from Google is reading this I'll take any commission in the form of EUROs, as they are worth more today than they were seven weeks ago!

Tuesday 2nd September

2008-09-02T20:52:00.002+01:00

First day back for the students today. Only the new students started work at 8.30, the rest of them, the old soaks, rolled in at 11 am. My lot have just moved into Year 10, so they are 14 going on 20. In our school they change from a green uniform to a blue uniform when they go into Year 10, and today was the day. They look so nice in their new uniforms. Ahhhhh bless.

I saw my new IT Class in Year 9 for the first time today. There were just six girls present, but I'm only expecting 9 when the class is full. They are not terribly able students and they are with me in order to give them a better chance of doing well. The thing that upset me was that they are so very negative about their ability to use computers. We shall have to see how we get on.

Went to see the nurse at our local health centre today to be told that I am very overweight, which I know, and that my blood pressure is very high, which I suspected. I shall have to do something about it, before I explode. Right, if I announce on here that I am going to start losing weight, maybe I'll stick with it. Maybe.

It's good this, you can say anything that you like because nobody ever reads it. They are always saying that there are millions of blogs in the blogosphere. Does anyone ever read them or do all those millions simply write for self aggrandisement. It is habit forming, though.

See you all tomorrow, if we are spared!

;0p

A Son of the Auld Grey Town

OMG

A Visit to Haughton Green

28 days later

Sun day. Ha, that was a misnomer if ever there was one!

The Calico Printer's Clerk

An Adventure

The Nab

The Day of the Triffids

A Passionate Woman

To the Woods, To the Woods

Down By The Riverside

M67 on a Rainy Day - A critique

Picking Up The Pieces

Me and Jasper, Down by the Waterside.

April come she will, When streams are ripe and swelled with rain!

Summer Time

Wednesday Evening at 9 o'clock.

Musings on a Wednesday Morning

The Preston Wigmaker

Da spring is sprung

Mea Culpa

Sunday Evening

Plus gris que le gris de ma vie

Rainy days and Tuesdays always get me!

Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeuxJe ne vois rien de mieuxMême le bleu des cieuxPlus blond que tes cheveux dorésNe peut s'imaginerMême le blond des blés

Sunday Again

Broadbottom, there and back again.

Longdendale

Meandering

Reflections on a Sunday Morning

Le Manege de Monsieur Barre (Corrected Version)

Deux artistes ou/or Two Artists

The Blogger's Dilemma

A high wind from Jamaica (Sorry, no, that should be Leningrad!)

Sno' Joke

FotoSketcher

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

New Year

What a Week Part Deux

Quelle Semaine (Part I)

Maps of Manchester - I quite fancy going to see this!

Mapping Manchester: Cartographic Stories of the City

Jasper the Spaniel at 15 weeks old.

Jasper at 15 weeks

Schools to rethink 'i before e'

Parking problems

Auto Antics

A Rainy Day in Olde Glossop

Hobson Moor Road

When I Am Old.

Deepmemo

A Saturday in June

Photographs

The Chronicles of Jasper, Day Zero

Another Week Older and Deeper in Debt!

April, Come She Will

Pieces of Eight, Squawk.

And the winner is .............

Retrospective

Tautology and Teleology

Learning Day

Get Funky

Bookcases

A Matter of Logic

Wednesday

Walking in the Way

Living in the Arctic Circle

Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow

Matthew Shardlake Rocks!

Automatic Comments

Obama's Speech

Gormley

Here is something that looks like fun

Hidden Manchester

OMG

Let me just try something. Just put this in here like this, and put that in there .....

OfSTED

And so we visited Chatsworth again.....

The Week in View

Plus bleu que le bleu de tes yeux
Je ne vois rien de mieux
Même le bleu des cieux
Plus blond que tes cheveux dorés
Ne peut s'imaginer
Même le blond des blés