Backtracking

Wood Lane, Legbourne

All that I have got for you today is ten more photographs that I snapped during our family weekend in Lincolnshire two weeks ago with some extra words related to the final picture in this selection.

The beach at Mablethorpe

Sundial at Clayworth. It reads, "Our days on The Earth are as a shadow"

Behind an abandoned house on The Lincolnshire Wolds

Legbourne village scene

Troll in the Land Rover at Legbourne

Legbourne Mill and the mill house

Miscanthus near Little Cawthorpe

Phoebe in the gazebo at Kenwick Park with our lodge behind her

Some words about the last picture. "R.N.L.I" stands for "Royal National Lifeboat Institution". Around the coast of Great Britain there are some 238 lifeboat stations. Staffed by incredible volunteers, their aim is save people's lives when they are in or on the sea and in trouble. One of these stations is at Mablethorpe and there we got to go in to check out their two lifeboats.

I also had a conversation with the leading lifeboatman. One thing that really stands out in my mind about what he said concerned suicide and attempted suicide. It seems that he and his crew have regularly been called out to rescue individuals who have deliberately swum out into the water intent on death.  Quite often those terminal missions are successful and sadly it's dead bodies that the RNLI  retrieve.

In general, the RNLI does not publish figures or details about this aspect of their work for fear of upsetting families or encouraging copycat actions. It is a feature of the service that I had not previously reflected upon. What a sad and tragic way to go!

Flipside

Ross Dependency, Antarctica

Ludwigsburger Meike left this comment after my last blogpost:-

Now where does one get when staying on the same invisible 

line, crossing the South Pole and then heading back towards 

the North Pole on the "back" of our beautiful planet?

From The South Pole, we travel over Antarctica's Ross Dependency which is icy, inhospitable territory overseen by New Zealand. Striking north across The Southern Ocean we are well east of New Zealand and we only skirt outlying islands and reefs of the Fiji Group, before passing between the French dependencies of Wallis and Futuna. In fact, the line of longitude, which is by the way, 178.5 degrees East, does not cross any land until it reaches Great Sitkin in the Aleutian Islands before heading straight over eastern Russia's Chukota Peninsula..

Uninhabited Great Sitkin Island in the Aleutian chain.

Then the line crosses the eastern most tip of Wrangel Island which is also a Russian possession. It is famed for its large polar bear population. It has the largest density of polar bear dens on this planet. The island was also the last known haunt of the woolly mammoth. These legendary beasts became extinct on Wrangel Island around four thousand years ago.

Tusk of a woolly mammoth on Wrangel Island

Though the line on the other side of this planet does not cross much land or places of note, we should remember that it traverses the vastness of The Pacific Ocean which is by far the biggest ocean in the world. It still hides many mysteries including undiscovered creatures, unplumbed depths and unpublished human stories.

If you check out your globe - if indeed you have one - it is possible to position it in a manner whereby The Pacific Ocean appears to take up almost  half of the surface of The Earth. It truly is vast - 168,723,000 square kilometres which is double the size of the next largest ocean - The Atlantic.

From Wrangel, it's north to The North Pole and then back over the other side to the coast of Northumberland once again. From there, it's only ninety miles to Sheffield where I am sitting at my keyboard facing south. North of me, on the same line of longitude, Shirley and Phoebe are in the lounge reading a school book which is not titled "Wallis and Futuna". That is the subject of a future blogpost.

Basilica of St Peter, Futuna

Longitude

The North Pole

When we were in Louth, I spotted a plaque on a wall in the town centre with a steel line reaching to it across the pavement. I was standing on the Prime Meridian line upon which Greenwich Mean Time was devised down in London. It was adopted internationally as recently as 1884.

Anyway, Sheffield is located seventy five miles west of the line. Our longitude position is about 1.5°W. Louth and Greenwich are of course located at 0.0°.

Some regular visitors may recall that I recently painted the word "WEST" on our garden wall. In a follow-up post I tracked the places that sit on the same line of latitude as Sheffield. They included Edmonton, Alberta in Canada - home to blogger Nurse Pixie - the author of "My Life So Far".

So following on from that, using an idea suggested by Tasker Dunham, I wondered what places might sit on our line of longitude. Of course that invisible line begins at The North Pole and heads south across the cold stormy waters of The North Atlantic and The North Sea.

Durham Cathedral

It first crosses land on the English coast of Northumberland before heading to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and down to Durham. Then it enters The People's Republic of Yorkshire, crossing Leeds before Sheffield, then down to Coventry and Oxford with its dreaming spires.

Pamplona, Spain

Over The English Channel and into western France where the only major city that is crossed is Nantes. Then onwards - over The Pyrenees and into Spain - crossing the city of Pamplona. On to The Mediterranean and down to Algeria where our uniting line of longitude passes over the town of Maghnia.

Maghnia, Algeria

Kumasi, Ghana

Down to the Gao region of Mali and into Burkina Faso near Poedogo. Ever southward to Ghana where the line crosses Kumasi. Then leaving the coast of Africa, 1.5°W heads out across The South Atlantic. It does not pass over any islands that I can detect.

The next time the line meets land again is in Antarctica, at an area known as Queen Maud Land which is Norwegian territory. It would surely make a great holiday destination. See below:-

Queen Maud Mountains

Sunday

Rivelin Valley view showing the water treatment works

Well, it was little Margot's second birthday today. She shares November 2nd with the legendary blogger - Steve Reed  - and I guess a few million other people. She wasn't feeling too well as last week ended - perhaps it was COVID - so celebrations were low key. For instance, she did not go out to a fancy  steak restaurant in London's Docklands to spend a king's ransom - like the aforementioned Steve Reed.

For once, it was not down to me to prepare the Sunday dinner. Instead Stew was doing it to mark Margot's birthday. This meant I had some free time and co-incidentally, I needed a good long stroll so I drove over to the Lodge Moor suburb to the west of this illustrious city and parked Butch - the new car.

Path above The Rivelin Valley. It skirts Hallam Golf Course.

I had a circular walk  worked out and the weather was good. It was typically autumn with the leaves of deciduous trees revealing an array of vivid colours that ranged from red to green to burnished gold and bright yellow.

By one path, I watched a small moth secrete itself  amongst beech leaves that were the exact same colour as its wings and I again passed the sad  memorial bench that pays homage Sheffield's only 9/11 fatality - Nigel Bruce Thompson. Then I descended to the woody dell that contains Blackbrook stream where the rebellious Sheffield poet Ebenezer Elliot would often sit and ponder.

Soon I was heading across Hallam Golf Course watching out for flying balls and listening for cries of "Fore!" before  heading down Crimicar Lane. I passed "The Shiny Sheff" pub that was named after the battleship H.M.S. Sheffield. Nearby, I noticed the old gates to a former isolation hospital that closed in 1956. Through walking, one can often notice things like that that you simply miss when driving a car.

Earworm

Every few days, unrequested songs appear in my mental jukebox . Mostly, they come from way back in my life. It's as if I have no control over their re-emergence.

 Regarding the song I shall share with you today, I first heard it one winter in my village primary school. By a big black stove, we clustered around the old walnut wireless clasping our copies of "Singing Together" produced by the BBC.

We didn't just listen, we sang. Those schools programmes were thoughtfully constructed so that we could rehearse each song in chunks. Later, we might sing what we had just learnt without radio accompaniment.

The song is "Bonnie Charlie", more commonly titled, "Will Ye No Come Back Again?" It's a song of Scotland from the middle of the eighteenth  century, written by Carolina Oliphant (Lady Nairne). It refers to the young pretender - Bonnie Prince Charlie and the tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism - including The Jacobite Uprising and its suppression.

But I don't think of it that way. I think of the people that I have lost  and the people that you have lost. Family members and friends and acquaintances. It is a silver thread running through the tapestries of our lives. And though we might often ask "Will ye no come back again?" the answer is silently negative.

Bonnie Charlie's now awa'

Safely owre the friendly main;

Mony a heart will break in twa,

Should he ne’er come back again.

Will ye no come back again?

Will ye no come back again?

Better lo'ed ye canna be,

Will ye no come back again?

Halloween

There are no ghosts or spirits on the loose and Halloween is a load of old bunkum. Witches, skeletons, scary scarecrows, spiders and suchlike - it is all what the Irish might call bollix.

When I was a lad, growing up in the heart of East Yorkshire, Halloween was hardly a thing. After all, just four days later we had Mischief Night to look forward to and on November 5th - one of the most momentous days of the year - Bonfire Night which is sometimes called Guy Fawkes Night. Compared with that, Halloween was a mere blip on the calendar.

When our kids were little, it was with much reluctance that we allowed the Halloween nonsense to seep into our lives. After all, the commercial hype had gradually become unstoppable. There were costumes to buy, parties to attend and scary films to watch. Halloween had got everywhere - rather like COVID19.

The presence of swollen pumpkins in our supermarkets was quite distasteful. Shouldn't farmers grow things we can eat and not orange orbs to be carved for Halloween and then discarded? It didn't seem right so I was a dad who never carved a pumpkin... until yesterday afternoon.

Partly, I carved it for the granddaughters but mostly  for my own creative satisfaction. I had bought the pumpkin from Sainsburys for a mere £1.75 (US $2.30). Bigger ones cost £2.

I wanted to give my pumpkin a happy face. He or she should not be scary. There is enough scariness in the world right now so why should I add to that climate? Besides, as I said at the beginning, there are no ghosts or evil spirits. That is pure poppycock.

I planned the face and used one of Phoebe's water-based felt-tips to mark out the features - knowing that I could later wipe those lines away. Phoebe got on a step to watch the pumpkin artist at work but, annoyingly, she kept leaning on me, threatening to jolt my right hand in which I held a sharp kitchen dagger.

The insides of my very first finished pumpkin's head were thrown out for composting. In that sense I felt rather like a lobotomist. I found a large tea candle in a tin container and lit it just before teatime, placing the head on a table next to the French windows in our dining room. It was already dark by then.

Phoebe and Margot were called to the unlit dining room to see the glowing happy face outside and of course they were as impressed by old grandpa's artistry as  Rembrandt's grandchildren were probably impressed by "The Night Watch".  Happy Halloween everybody - whatever that stupid greeting might mean to you!

Quiztime

It's that time again. Try not to get too excited. Yes! It's QUIZTIME! On this occasion, I am giving you ten random images but can you decipher them accurately enough to win the points? No multiple choice answers this time round. As usual, solutions will be given in the comments section.

⦿

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

⦿

That's all folks! How did you do?