Fifteen

I first began blogging fifteen years ago. I didn't really know what I was doing or why I was doing it or whether or not I would be blogging fifteen weeks or fifteen months later. But here we are. Fifteen years of my life have passed under the bridge - much of it documented via this blog.

Here's my very first post:-

As you can see, I even attracted one comment. It was from someone called Hadashi in Japan. To receive that comment from faraway was kind of magical. Encouraging too.

Four days later I posted a picture of myself being interviewed at work and the first verse of a poem about work by the late Philip Larkin who spent his most productive days in The East Riding of Yorkshire.

That post also attracted a single comment - from Zandrea! in Brookline, Massachusetts. Zandrea! was in fact two people - Zara and Andrea. Perhaps they were lovers or someone with a split personality. They or she stopped blogging four years ago.

In fifteen years I have created 3421 blogposts, receiving 1,822,114 visits. It has been quite a journey - something to look back on with a degree of satisfaction. I did that!

Only sometimes do I pause to think: Should I have done that? All those hours of blogging and reading other people's blogs, perhaps I should have saved up that energy and poured it into writing - stories, novels, poetry. Precious time has slipped away like sand in an hour glass. Fifteen years older and the end is nigh. What is there left to say?

Poem

Up North

Ragged sheep graze moortops
Midst windbent gorse and heather
Lowry figures trudge to work
Heads bowed against the weather.

Stone walls form the skeleton
Of our blue remembered hills
Where terraces crawl up valleysides
From dark satanic mills

I heard a curlew calling
Her plaintive song of yore
Above these hallowed counties
Where Vikings went before

Her chorus contained questions
Of where our truth might be
Embroidered in our accents
Or lost to history.

We are the children of Captain Cook
And of Emily Davison too
Heirs to soil and industry
In this landscape that they knew.

To grinning caricaturists
We never shall succumb
Up North is where the heart is -
Great Britain’s beating drum.

___________________________________________________________________

I wrote this poem today - June 29th 2020. The photograph at the top is of John Crowther Mill at Marsden near Huddersfield. It was taken on November 7th 2013.

Lowry - refers to the northern industrial paintings of L.S. Lowry (1887-1976)

Captain Cook - James Cook, the Yorkshire seafarer and explorer (1728-1779)

Emily Davison - suffragette martyr buried in Morpeth, Northumberland (1872-1913)

Petty

The late Tom Petty - "I Won't Back Down"

Western leaders are meant to uphold the law, to lead by example. Somebody should have told the forty fifth president of the USA. Not only does he arrogantly refuse to wear masks in environments where masks are required, he and his support team blatantly defy music copyright laws in their efforts to whip up their circus-like rallies. They just do not seem to care that the rights to "You Can't Always Get What You Want" are owned by The Rolling Stones and the rights to "I Won't Back Down" are owned by the estate of Tom Petty.

In this matter, Trump has been legally instructed to desist before  but he appears to believe that he is above the law.

Ironically, the two songs highlighted here are most un-Trumplike. Take that Rolling Stones song. The message is that sometimes you simply have to make do, lower your expectations because life is such that "you can't always get what you want". You have to move on in spite of your frustrations. One thinks of the southern border wall which will never be completed.

The Tom Petty song blasted out at Trump's recent and embarrassing rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma is a song about digging in, holding your ground and general defiance.  Tom Petty died in 2017. His philanthropy was well-known and he supported causes that are clearly at odds with Trump's main interests - including adoption, fostering, orphans, at-risk/disadvantaged youths,  creative arts education, environment, homelessness and unemployment support.

Trump will "back down" because fair-minded Americans will vote him out in November - proving that you really "can't always get what you want".  To paraphrase The Gospel of Matthew - he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. I wonder if there's a song with that message in it. If there is, they should play it at future Trump rallies - with permission of course.

YouTube links:  "I Won't Back Down", "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

Birdlike

They often say that some people are owls and others are larks. Larks rise with the morning light and are out and about doing things while owls languish in their beds. And while owls inhabit the night hours, buzzing with ideas and mental energy, larks slumber in their nests.

I am very much a night owl. Always have been. In this sense I am rather like my mother who always seemed to be up late making things - lampshades, leather gloves, baskets or simply knitting. All my childhood, it was my father who was up bright and early to make his sons' breakfasts. Mum was always in bed. Unsurprising really as she had probably climbed the staircase to bed in the early hours of that morning.

I like the peacefulness of the nighttime. For me it's a good time for reading, writing, surfing the internet, watching a late film or looking up at the night sky. Sometimes I will even lock our front door and toddle off on a short  night walk through the silent suburbs - with very few lights to be seen in windows. It can feel as if I own the night and everyone else has gone. A fox will dart between cars. A faraway train will rumble towards Doncaster or Derby. Perhaps an owl will swoop by - a night owl like me.

Larks might claim that the best part of the day is the early morning and may cajole night owls for missing it. But I feel no guilt for I cannot help my attraction to late nights. I haven't been to bed before midnight in a long, long time. This was even true during my working years when I needed to be up and about soon after 7am. I would have been much happier if my working day had begun at 10am and finished at 6pm but frustratingly I didn't make up the rules.

It seems to me that larks and owls are at the extreme ends of a spectrum. I guess that most people are somewhere in the middle - neither a lark that rises in the early morning nor a night owl in the moonlight. If I am right then I think those in-between people require a different bird symbol. Let's call them crows. They sit on fences between fields.

Which are you? A lark? An owl? Or a crow?

Picnic

I hadn't had a proper picnic in years. Yesterday, Frances, Stew and I  drove over to Redmires Reservoirs for a picnic lunch. Unfortunately, Shirley was at work - no doubt sticking needles in babies.

The three of us donned our boots and set off along the mile long track that would take us to Oaking Clough Reservoir - a tiny facility below Oaking Clough Plantation. I have been there many times but Frances and Stew had never ventured there before. There was nobody else around.

The ruinous building beside the little reservoir has two separate rooms with two separate entrances. In one of them we found a ewe with her lamb, sheltering from the thirty two degree summer heat. It must be hard having to wear a woolly coat all the time. Other sheep in the area were seeking shade by old stone walls and down in gullies that run from the moors.

We spread a blanket on the soft grass and picnicked in the sunshine. I had brought tuna mayonnaise and cucumber sandwiches made on fresh low GI cob bread, cheddar cheese crackers, ripe peaches and cold Sheffield water in flasks. Sheffield water is excellent for drinking straight from the tap and ours actually arrives from Redmires Reservoirs.

We talked over baby names even though it's early days yet and such thoughts are probably premature. Frances is very keen on Phoebe for a girl which is a name that we toyed with giving her before she was born. Stewart does not want a "biblical" name if the baby is a boy. I guess that's quite understandable as he is the son of a vicar. I suggested Steve, Dave, Bob, Graham, John, Roger or Tasker  - all names which they rejected out of hand, calling them "old-fashioned" and "silly"! And when I said the name Adrian - well they laughed like dervishes, claiming it was a girl's name anyway.

Frances and Stew had sensibly applied suncream before our lunch outing but silly me hadn't. As protection I  did wear my  sunbleached sunhat from Malta but still I ended up red-faced like a ripe tomato. You would think I might have learnt by now. After all, yesterday's temperature felt like The Australian outback, somewhere near Alice Springs.

Prepositions

Prepositions are usually thought of as common workmanlike words that allow writing to flow. But sometimes they have surprising significance.

Let's think about coronavirus deaths and death certificates. It might be said of a victim that he or she died of coronavirus or from coronavirus. In both cases the preposition indicates that the death was down to coronavirus. It was COVID that done it.

But equally it might be said that the deceased passed away with coronavirus. In this case COVID may not be the villain. It could be some other condition that caused the death - like heart disease or cancer. Just because coronavirus was present does not mean it was to blame.

When it comes to counting the dead, the selected preposition becomes important. Increasingly, it seems that there are arithmetical disparities between nations that result in both under-counting and over-counting of the dead. A lot of this is to do with how prepositions are interpreted.

Currently, Russia is admitting to just over 600,000 COVID cases. Great Britain has had just over 300,000 cases. And yet when it comes to death tolls, Russia indicates that as few as 8513 citizens have died of the disease but Great Britain has lost 43,081 citizens. Where is the mathematical logic in that? It doesn't make sense.

Clearly Russia is playing games with the truth. Quite possibly, it is scared by the truth, fearing the vulnerability it would reveal to all and sundry.

Walking

The beautiful River Wye near Litton Mill

Yesterday. Socially distanced walking with my son-in-law. We walked for eight and a half miles in beautiful summer weather. How green was Mother Nature's mantle and how pure the limestone filtered waters of The River Wye. 

Bull above Monk's Dale

Our eight and a half mile Derbyshire walk took in historic Cressbrook Mill and Litton Mill - now both converted to residential and holiday units. We saw trout in the river and up on the opposite bank of the steep-sided valley we walked a section of The Monsal Trail - once a railway from Bakewell to Buxton. Too many cyclists. Too many walkers. We soon returned to the river below.

Tideswell Church

Stew and a Dominic Cummings scarecrow in Tideswell

From the little village of Miller's Dale we slogged up The Limestone Way and then along farm tracks that led us all the way to Tideswell where Stew married Frances last August - a few months before COVID came a-creeping into our lives and our collective consciousness. Looking back upon those halcyon days, it's difficult to recognise what has happened in the intervening period of time.

The world seems fundamentally changed and you wonder if we will ever get back to where we were. Thankfully, we can still go out walking - immersing ourselves in the natural environment, forgetting for a while all the stuff that has been going on.

River Wye swans