Picture

I wandered down to "The Itchy Pig" tonight. There I drank two and a half pints of Abbeydale "Heathen" and had a nice chat with Alan who is a significant figure in the local CAMRA group. CAMRA stands for Campaign for Real Ale.  It is a national organisation. They act as a pressure group for beer drinkers and a source of information about real ales and the local pub scene.

Because of this, all that I have for you tonight is a picture  of me taken by my father in 1957 when I was four years old. I am on my tricycle eating an apple. Beyond me is the field that was adjacent to our garden. I remember being in that field at harvest-time and sitting happily with two farm workers in the sunshine drinking sweet coffee from an enamel mug.  Between 1963 and 1964, the field became a large building site and a private housing estate grew up there.

Dad was a pretty keen amateur photographer and even had his own dark room where he could develop and print his own pictures. I was the only one of his four sons who showed the slightest interest in this process and when I was about ten he taught me the rudiments of this alchemy.  How magical it was to see one's pictures emerging in the chemical fixing bath under a red light.

He died in September 1979 and even now  I think of him every day and still miss him.  Mourning is never over and done with in a week or two. It can go on forever.

Mishmash

The Summer of 1954

"I'm just going up the garden to paint the cat's eyes."

That's not something one says every day.

Yesterday I had painted the flaking Buddha and used the same  black paint to refresh our old stone cat.  He had been crouching on a paving stone for twenty five years. Under that slab is the grave of our first family cat - Blizzard. We acquired him from the RSPCA animal shelter at Bawtry one snowy day in January 1982. By the time we got back to Sheffield  that night,  a full-on blizzard was making driving conditions dangerous. We ditched the car and walked the last half mile back to our terraced house with me gripping the handle of the cardboard pet carrier in which Kitten Blizzard was miaowing in terror. This is how he got his name.

You can't have a black cat with black eyes so I painted them green using oil paint from a tube. And I decided that from now on, he won't be crouching at ground level, he will sit on the stump of  our old horse chestnut tree which we now use as an extra bird table.

I am happy to report that the scaffolding finally came down today and  that the three scaffolders took it all away in their flatbed truck. Now we can see properly that our rendering is the smartest and whitest on the street. It was looking rather shabby beforehand. I am so glad we bit the bullet on that one. I have just got the rendering below our front bay window to paint but before I do that I shall jetwash the block paving in front of our house.

I made a nice spaghetti meal this evening with bacon bits, courgette, cherry tomatoes, fried onion and chopped mushroom with grated parmesan cheese. There was some left - mostly from Shirley's plate. Instead of casting it into the kitchen bin, I chopped it up and chucked it on our lawn. Sure enough, as dusk was descending, I looked out and saw that a fox was cleaning it up for us. The other day the same fox was chowing down a chicken carcass.

Sorry I didn't take photos of the restored Buddha or the stone cat to accompany this writing. Instead I'm sharing two of the pictures that were re-discovered in our attic. That's me with my mother in the summer of 1954 when I was ten months old and the other one is of me with my late brother Simon on my wedding day in 1981.  There were reasons why I asked him to be my best man when there were three or four other blokes I might have picked - including Tony who I went walking with last week.

October 1981

Rugby

Some treasures were discovered in our attic ahead of the installation of a new roof. I found the photograph displayed above. It was taken in 1941 at RAF Padgate near Warrington in what was then Lancashire. It shows the rugby union team and there's my father Philip sitting third from the left.  He can't have made many appearances for the RAF Padgate XV as he was only there for twelve weeks of intensive training   before being shipped off to India.  Prior to volunteering he had been a primary school teacher for four years but had resigned his post in order to join the war effort. I guess that all the other team members had done the same and that a number of them never came home.

Below you can see the Under 16 rugby squad from my old secondary school in Hull. The picture was taken in 1969 - probably around Easter and this time sitting third from the left it's me - the author of this humble Yorkshire blog. I enjoyed rugby and though I say so myself I was good at it  - being picked to play for my city and in the following year  I was the youngest player in the school's first team. I was once described as "tigerish". It's funny but after all these years, I can name nearly all of the other boys... Foster,  Carleton, Tarbotton, Wilkie, Lund, Sumpton, Hawley, Harrison, Hirst, Hawtree. There were a lot of "H's".

None of my three brothers took to rugby but Simon was a pretty good footballer. Paul was into rock climbing and rowing but Robin really only showed prowess in swimming and still enjoys it very much today. Like Cro Magnon, he has his own pool way down in the south west of France.

Snipped from the team photos, there's me and Dad below. Can you tell which is which?  Dad would have been twenty seven in 1941 but in 1969 I was fifteen.

Border

In a shady part of our garden, under aged apple trees there's a border I created a few years back. It contains a laurel bush, a couple of hostas, a couple of ferns, a spotty plant that Old Bert gave me, a garden gnome and a Buddha statuette.

The other day I noticed that this border was becoming overgrown. Fortunately, today I had an urge to tackle it. At our local Lidl store, I bought two bags of decorative bark chippings and then set about the border by carefully weeding it. Actually, most of the plants I took out by hand were not weeds at all but border plants that had extended their territory without permission.

I also pruned back some of the laurel bush and nearby holly.

When all was done I  slit open the bags of bark chippings and poured them between the plants before raking in. I guess this all took me ninety minutes or so. It looked a lot better when I was done but the Buddha still has flaky skin disease. I am hoping to buy a new Buddha to replace the old has-been.

Before:-

After:-

Before:-

After:-

And as I am on the business of gardening, here's the top of our garden looking to the vegetable patch while before it runner beans are already climbing up my wigwam of bamboo canes:-

Versions

Recently, on this humble Yorkshire blog,  I featured "Up On the Roof" performed by The Drifters. It was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin in I think 1961. The Drifters' version came out in 1962.

For whatever reason, special songs like that one attract different recording artists. My fellow Yorkshireman, Tasker Dunham mentioned in comments that his preferred version is by Laura Nyro. She recorded it in 1970 but I must admit that I had never listened to it before. Here it is:

In the days that the song has been echoing around in my skull, I came across another great version - performed live by Carole King and her friend James Taylor. It is such a joyous performance. You sense the chemistry between the two of them, the feeling of enjoyment and indeed the respect they have for each other:

Which version do you prefer?

Laura Nyro died from ovarian cancer in 1997 when she was just 49 years old. Carole KIng is 81 years old and mostly resides in the state of Idaho. Still performing and recording, James Taylor is 75 years old and continues to live in his home state - Massachusetts.

"Away!"

Growing up in my East Yorkshire village, we were an ocean and many miles away from The American Wild West. And yet we were obsessed with cowboys and indians. When I say "we" I mostly mean boys. It was a story repeated throughout the British Isles.

The hats that cowboys wore seemed exotic. And we noted their leather chaps, the stirrups on their biddable horses and the leather holsters that carried their lethal handguns. Sheriffs wore badges in the shape of stars and so did their deputies. When they needed to sort out trouble, they frequently formed posses and together they would gallop off in plumes of dust to reestablish justice.

The indians or redskins seemed hardly human. They were fearsome savages who used tomahawks to scalp their victims. They could shoot arrows from their bows with incredible accuracy - even when galloping over parched plains. They said things like "White man speak with forked tongue" and bore names like Sitting Bull, Little Raven and Growling Bear. Their women were squaws who mostly stayed home in their tepees or tended fires.

Generally speaking the cowboys and the indians did not get along - with one notable exception being the relationship between The Lone Ranger and his faithful companion, Tonto. They were the stars of a Saturday TV drama called "The Lone Ranger" that involved plenty of cowboys and lots of indians too.

There were other dramas  that focused on this endlessly fascinating conflict - including "Rawhide", "Maverick", "Bonanza" and "Wagon Train". In postwar Britain, shows about cowboys and indians took us away from ourselves to a faraway fantasy world.  Later, I guess that space was to be  filled by science fiction dramas like "StarTrek".

In the late fifties through into the early sixties, toy shops catered for the cowboys and indians obsession. You could buy cowboy outfits, sheriff badges, non-lethal bows and arrows and even rubber tomahawks. Millions of small plastic figurines must have also been sold - cowboys on horseback, cowboys kneeling with rifles, indian chiefs with removable feathered headdresses, squaws and braves and even papooses. And there were little plastic wigwams and model ranches and war paint and silver pistols into which you could insert rolls of "caps" that banged when the trigger hammered down.

Nowadays children don't fantasise about cowboys and indians and there are no popular dramas about them but back then it all seemed to fill a void and a need. We lapped it up and to a big extent so did the adult population of these islands. I haven't mentioned all the cowboy novels and Christmas annuals. There were many.

Life was cheap in The Wild West. I am ashamed to say that I never realised that those "redskins" or Native Americans were terribly wronged. They were trying to protect their homelands from invaders who often arrived with fencing and huge herds of cattle. In general, the indians were the victims and not the aggressors. They were fighting back in self-defence. To a large extent they had previously lived in harmony with Nature for generations. They could have taught those goddamn cowboys a thing or two.

More

Looking to Castle Howard from the pyramid

Another midnight is fast approaching. Time to churn out yet another blogpost here at The Yorkshire Pudding Blogpost  factory. All I have for you today is  more of the images I collected during my two days away in the Ryedale district of North Yorkshire.

I woke up far too early on Wednesday morning. Perhaps it was the daylight that seeped into my room. I had hit the pillow quite late on Tuesday night after watching a charming film on BBC 2 - "One Way to Denmark" (2019) starring Rafe Spall as Herb and Simone Lykke as Matilda. One reviewer correctly described the plot as "sad and gently hopeful". There were no murders. It was about believable ordinary lives and set in both Wales and Denmark. There was tenderness, emotional integrity and humour too. I loved it.

I guess I had just four hours of proper sleep. After five hours of walking on Wednesday, I was feeling weary as I steered Clint homewards. My eyes were heavy and so after ten miles I sensibly pulled into a parking area by the A64 York-Leeds road and slept for ten minutes. It was all I needed to freshen up and get home safely.

"The Blacksmiths Arms", Flaxton. Sadly, the pub closed permanently earlier this year.

Postbox in Sheriff Hutton

Specially for Ms Moon - black headed sheep in West Lilling

Tony in front of South View - a cottage in Thornton-le Clay

Another view of the same windmill with hawthorn blossom