Xmas

And so my 72nd Christmas feast day arrived. Yesterday the diners assembled at Frances and Stewart's house. There was me and Shirley and Ian, Frances and Stewart, Phoebe and Margot, Stewart's parents - Peter and Cheryl and their other son Richard, his Australian wife Cindy and their little children - Alexander and Florence. They live in Perth, Western Australia.

Stewart had volunteered to take care of the cooking and he did a good job of it. There was roasted turkey crown, beef, ham, roasted potatoes, parsnips and carrots, peas, Brussels sprouts, red cabbage, pigs in blankets, Yorkshire puddings, gravy, cranberry sauce and various stuffings including chestnut stuffing made from the chestnuts that Shirley and I gathered for free from the floor of Sherwood Forest at the beginning of October. They were falling even as we picked them.

Afterwards there was Shirley's excellent vegan Christmas pudding with brandy cream and scrumptious chocolate cake that Cheryl had made.

Gifts were exchanged and everybody was happy. It was a chilled-out, stress-free day. A few alcoholic beverages were consumed but nothing excessive. Our son Ian has not drunk any alcohol throughout this calendar year so when the time came to come home, he volunteered to drive Butch back up the hill through traffic-free streets. It made sense.

A highlight of the day for me was when I got Richard talking about his work as a senior geologist with an international mining company. Essentially, that is why he went out to Australia in the first place. 

As you can imagine, there's much more to mining copper, nickel or gold than might at first meet the eye. Assessments have to be made about the viability of a mine, environmental factors, access to water, international competition and demand as well as the basic geology of the target area. It is never about heading for the hills with a pick axe, a few sticks of dynamite and a heart filled with hope. Richard is clearly both passionate and knowledgeable about his vocation that began with a degree in Geology from The University of Leeds.

And so after the anticipation and the preparation, the gift buying, the wrapping, the eating and the drinking, the carols and the cards, Christmas 2025  drifted away. Let's hope we are all still around a year from now and in good health to celebrate yet another Christmas.

Bottle

Today I received several Christmas gifts but the best present of all was the one that the badgers of  Palmer's Scrubs Wood gave to me down in Bedfordshire on Tuesday afternoon. 

You can see the little bottle in my top and tail images. It is four inches tall and I say "inches" because my brain is still not au fait with any foreign metric systems of measurement. 

At first when I saw the word "Lemonade" embossed on the side of the bottle I was confused. I mean - it's such a little bottle - what would be the point of such a tiny amount of liquid refreshment?

Later, internet research taught me that when the bottle was sold over a hundred years ago,  it would have contained lemonade crystals or powder that could then be used to make up several pints of lemonade.

On laptops in their woodland setts, wild badgers will often trawl through the blogosphere on cold winter nights. If any of them happen upon this humble Yorkshire blog  and see this blogpost, I would like to thank them heartily for their antique glass Christmas gift. Much appreciated.

Mission

Woburn Abbey under a blanket of thick cloud

On Tuesday night I stayed in "The Woburn Hotel" forty miles north of London. Arriving there at midday, I donned my trusty walking boots and set off on a five mile route in and around The Woburn Abbey estate. 

It was somewhere I had never been before which is a factor that always increases my appetite for walking. New sights. New vistas. Everything a bit different from my usual plodding territories.

Though it did not rain, a thick quilt of cloud hung above the land and beneath that canopy the air was still and cold. I wore my woolly fingerless gloves and a Hull City beanie hat too.

As I approached the big house via Basin Pond, I came across a herd of skittish red deer. There must have been a hundred of them and I felt a little apprehensive in case they panicked and ran en masse. In fact, they did that but thankfully just before I arrived. Unlike cattle or sheep, they were so quiet - only the gentle drumming of their hooves upon the grass as they ran away to another corner of the vast country estate.

Later I entered Palmer's Shrubs - a woodland north of the village of Milton Bryan. There I came across the badgers' sett shown below. It had at least three other entrances. After taking the picture I spotted the top of an old bottle poking out of the loose soil around the sett.

It was filthy but I brought it home anyway. Tonight I washed it  and discovered that it was produced by Chivers & Sons Ltd of Histon, Cambridge over a hundred years ago. It once contained lemonade crystals. How it got buried in the sett I have no idea but it was a great find.

Tired in the evening, and having eaten very little all day, I treated myself to dinner in the hotel restaurant. My choice was a classic burger with fries and a glass of Chilean sauvignon blanc. 

Delicious.

Afterwards, I went up to my executive accommodation - The Henry Holland  Room where I watched Arsenal v Crystal Palace on television before reading for an hour. For once, I was in the huge bed long before midnight and managed to sleep for seven hours. Fortunately, Henry Holland did not disturb me.

I was back on the M1 motorway before 8am and at Ian's place in Fulham by 9.30am - ready to bring him home with too much baggage to carry on a train.

Mission with side benefits accomplished.

"The Black Horse" pub in Woburn

Honour

Forget The Oscars and The Golden Globes, The Booker Prize and Sportsperson of the Year because just around the corner the winners of this year's Laughing Horse Blogging  Awards will soon be announced - including the identity of the overall winner and therefore the Blogger of the Year for 2025. Who will it be? Speculation echoes around the blogosphere like Keith Richards's guitar in Madison Square Gardens.

All around the world, blogger excitement builds. After all, a "New Yorker"  correspondent recently suggested that the principal source of blog writing motivation is, "the remote possibility of joining the prestigious Laughing Horse winners list".

Please listen to the music as you slowly scroll back through history...

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The Hall of Fame...

2008 – Arthur Clewley for “Arthur Clewley”

2009 – Daphne Franks for “My Dad’s a Communist”

2010 – John Gray for “Going Gently”

2011 – Ian Rhodes for “Shooting Parrots”

2012 – Kate Steeds for "The Last Visible Dog"

2013 – Tom Gowans for “A Hippo on the Lawn”

2014 – Meike Riley for “From My Mental Library”

2015 – Lee George for “Kitchen Connection”

2016 – Steve Reed for “Shadows and Light”

2017 - Keith Kline for "Hiawatha House"

2018 - Mary Moon for "Bless Our Hearts"

2019 - Jenny O'Hara for "Procrastinating Donkey"

2020 - Cro Magnon for "Magnon's Meanderings"

2021 - Andrew de Melbourne for "High Riser" (Now "From The High Rise")

2022 - Bob Slatten for "I Should Be Laughing"

2023 - David Godfrey for "The Adventures of Travel Penguin"

2024 - JayCee Manx for "Nobody's Diary"

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The venue for this year's Awards Ceremony remains a closely-guarded secret in order to thwart yet another plague of gawping paparazzi invaders. In addition, the unique designer widget for 2025 has not yet been revealed owing to fiery disagreements between top brass decision makers in Laughing Horse Tower. I have it on good authority that this matter will be sorted during the Christmas period..

Home

Chris Rea died today at the age of seventy four. Given the various health issues he had to deal with during his adult life, it is actually quite astonishing that  he made it this far. He was a Yorkshireman, born in Middlesbrough within this fair county's historical boundaries before those idiots in Westminster adjusted our borders without even properly consulting the citizens of Yorkshire. It still rankles.

I will be driving our Ian home for Christmas on Christmas Eve morning, having lodged on Tuesday night in Woburn, Bedfordshire. I didn't fancy two 3.5 hour drives in one day. Besides, I hope to manage a long walk down there on Tuesday afternoon. Cloud is promised but not rain

"Driving Home for Christmas" is an easy, laid back kind of Christmas song that has endured through the decades and it's kind of fitting that Chris Rea finally shuffled off his mortal coil just three days before Christmas. His song will live on for many Christmases to come. Much better than a chiselled gravestone or a black urn. Take it away Chris...

Solstice

Yesterday - near Sand Hall

On the morning of this winter solstice, I lay in bed for an hour after I had woken up. Together, the quilt and the sheets had created a snug cocoon around me and I had no pressing reason to leave it. Over the radio came sweet Christmas songs from Belfast and those monotone perennial readings from "The Bible".

Pulling back the curtains, I looked out on a misty neighborhood. Fog hung like static white smoke and colours had been drained away as if the world outside was fading just as underexposed photographic paper in a dark room is liable to do.

On the morning of the solstice, I came downstairs to boil two eggs which I ate with a single rice cake and a dash of seasoned French sea salt that I bought in 1998 somewhere in the Réserve Naturelle Nationale de la Baie de l'Aiguillon north of La Rochelle, France.

On the morning of the solstice, I thought of yesterday and how I walked in dank river mist down to remote Sand Hall along a bend in The River Ouse, not far from Saltmarshe Hall in East Yorkshire.

Then I drove on to Hull where my beloved Tigers were playing the Birmingham club - West Bromwich Albion. I met up with my old friend Tony and a newer friend - Karl. Both have their own ongoing health issues. Tony had a small stroke earlier this year and because of cancer Karl has had a kidney removed and is beginning a second course of chemotherapy. His prospects are not bright but he is still fighting for the privilege of life.

What a trio! Cancer, Stroke, High Blood Pressure etc.. watching healthy young men battle it out on the pitch. By the way, we won by a single goal - a deft penalty scored just before halftime by Oli McBurnie.

In the early darkness, aboard the "park and ride" bus back to Butch, I sat with a very nice man who lives on the south bank of The Humber. He told me that for forty years he had run his local football club as chairman, secretary, treasurer, bus driver, shirt launderer, counsellor and whatever else might have been required.  At first, he suspected that I was just jossing when I remarked that he deserved a medal but then I explained the huge beneficial impact his unsung work would have had upon the lives of generations of lads and young men. I was being perfectly sincere.

I drank coffee from a flask after I had opened Butch's boot (American: trunk) before driving home to Sheffield on the eve of the winter solstice.

On the morning of the solstice, I sat at this computer keyboard in my study with the anglepoise light shining down as I typed. And I thought of smoky feasts and yule logs burning and dancing and drums and flutes and flagons of cider and holly and ivy and a suckling pig roasting on an iron spit in a bleak midwinter on a day that marked and celebrated the turning of time and the gradual return of light and warmth and snowdrops and tender green leaves and renewal and hope .

Goole Bridge - ten days apart from different banks

Stanage

Yesterday afternoon, I drove over to Stanage Edge. Leaving Butch parked up by a road called The Dale at the southern end of the escarpment, I then walked three miles north to  the triangulation pillar at High Neb. As per normal, a lot of the walk was squiggly and up and down as I negotiated puddles and ancient stone slabs.

It was bitterly cold with the prevailing winter wind buffeting from the south west. I was wearing my orange "Mammot" coat with a hood and I was also glad that I had remembered my woolly fingerless gloves. For me, fingerless gloves are best because they allow me to operate my camera properly.

I watched a kestrel expertly hovering on the wind above the rocks. Intermittently, the bird plunged down with its wings tucked in. It was clearly on the look out for prey but I do not know exactly what it was after. Perhaps a weasel or a resting songbird.  Nearby eleven sheep were half-hidden in the heather as they sought nourishment

At this latitude in mid-winter, the veil of night descends before five o'clock. After a well-deserved rest at High Neb, I realised that I would have to quick march it back to The Dale as the golden orb was already sinking behind the Pennine hills and sure enough by the time I pressed the button on my car key there were only a couple of minutes of murky daylight left.

It was completely dark when I walked into "The Norfolk Arms" at Ringinglow where I ordered a latte and a glass of tap water. Stupidly, I left my car keys on the bar and by the time I had confirmed this one of the barmaids had already phoned Shirley about the discovery. You see, on my keyring I have my name and phone number - something that I would highly recommend to all car owners - just in case.

Some of you may recall that I am currently brewing a poem called "Stanage Edge" and on yesterday's walk some related words came  into my head  - "buttress", "ramparts", "wild" and "defiant" for example. I will mull them over in case, in a poetic sense, they have some purchase.

The triangulation pillar at High Neb