Budget

That's our Ian on the right and his BOSH! partner Henry on the left. I rather like that picture. It appeared in the online version of "The Independent" just this week. It was in relation to the launch of their seventh book: "BOSH! On A Budget".

Last weekend there was a three page spread about their new book in the "Food and Drink" section of "The Daily Telegraph". They also appeared in a BBC 1 morning magazine show called "Morning Live" and in a few days time they will be back on a Channel 4 daytime show called "Steph's Packed Lunch".

Apart from all of this, one of the things that makes me especially proud  about their vegan journey so far  is that they have sold over a million vegan cookbooks worldwide. It is quite phenomenal. Just before Christmas a former teaching colleague told me that a good friend of his had seen "BOSH!" books for sale in a Moscow bookshop  - translated into Russian. I wonder if Vladimir Putin has tried out a few of their  vegan recipes? Possibly he only eats raw meat - like a lion.

I sometimes liken the BOSH! story success to surfing a wave. As long as they keep upright and avoid falling off they will make it to the beach. The vegan scene has changed a lot since they set out. More and more people are happy to embrace vegan cuisine and there are more vegan products in supermarkets. It would be so easy to get left behind but so far they are keeping up with the incoming tide.

Visit BOSH! and associated social media sites.

Cartoons

I have noticed how, from time to time, some bloggers like to post a bunch of cartoons they have discovered on the internet. Cartoons are meant to be funny but it is hard to laugh at the following five for painfully obvious reasons, including death, rising infection numbers, overwhelming hospital admissions and sheer defencelessness. We owe it to our fellow human beings and to overstretched hospital staff to get fully vaccinated. "One for all and all for one,"  as  Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan frequently pledged...

Backtracking

It's a few days ago now but in the afternoon of New Year's Eve I headed out to the nearby moors with my trusty partner Sir Clint the Cantankerous. It's very familiar territory for me  as I have walked every path and byway in this vicinity in all weathers and in all seasons.

Last Friday served up the warmest New Year's Eve on record in this part of the world.  One hardy fellow walked by me in shorts and a T-shirt but I was wearing my Hull City manager's coat - one of the best clothing purchases I ever made.

I parked Clint in a small layby that I have used a few times before. Clint grumbled as I put my boots on and asked me to push in the driver's side wing mirror. "If you are more than two hours I'm driving home without you!" he warned.

But the walk didn't last so long - more like ninety minutes. I headed up to a rocky outcrop known as Over Owler Tor that sits up on the ridge. There were too many people around for my liking. I prefer to have those moors to myself. A family group came puffing up the hill from the Mother Cap outcrop. You could hear them from afar because every step of the way their lively and excited dog was being berated quite angrily - "Come 'ere! RUFUS! RUFUS! Come 'ere NOW!" This carried on as they explored the rocks - disturbing my peaceful contemplation and it continued as I walked away. Poor Rufus!

Over the last three decades, I have photographed Overstones Farm countless times.  It sits photogenically below  the millstone grit escarpment known as Stanage Edge. You can see it from afar in the top picture. And here it is  - appearing much closer as I used the "zoom" button on my camera from more or less the same position...

 

Below there's a picture of Higger Tor - a rocky plateau that was also a defensive fort in distant times before the Romans invaded this island. In summer, the russet brown vegetation will be replaced by waist-high  bracken - its green fronds dancing in playful synchronicity upon the breeze. 

And here's Over Owler Tor, silhouetted against the western sky on the last day of the year. There's the tiny figure of a man on top. It might have been me or anybody else saying goodbye to 2021 and hoping for a less anxious 2022 when the coronavirus chains that have bound us may at least be slackened.

Carlton

Today I walked north of Barnsley in what was once coal mining territory. This area was known for its piles of coal waste or what were called slag heaps. Some of us knew the district as The Yorkshire Alps because of those man-made hills. A few of the slag heaps were levelled or taken away but most still remain and are now grassed over. Not much remains of a once proud heritage that fuelled Britain's industrial revolution, its trains and its shipping. Some say that without coal The British Empire could never have been established.

At the top there's a picture of two Victorian cottages on Chapel Lane  in Carlton. Below is the village's Anglican church -  dedicated to St John the Evangelist. It was constructed  in 1878/79 under the instructions of The Earl Wharncliffe who owned some of the local collieries and was fabulously rich.

An important social facility in any coal mining village was its working men's club. Many of these places have disappeared but I noticed that Carlton's working men's club was still operational...

And so was the Alexandra working men's club in nearby Royston. A working men's club was a place where both working men and their wives could socialise, enjoying reasonably priced alcoholic beverages. There would be weekend entertainment and attached sports clubs too. Most working men's clubs had their own football and cricket teams. There would also be outings to the coast for families and Christmas lunches for the elderly etcetera.

St John the Baptist Church in Royston was built in the 12th century and is Grade I listed.  A beautiful building, it predates the age of industrialised  coal mining by several centuries.

Finally, here's a photo I took of a lonesome tree and a pylon standing in the open land between Royston, Carlton and Athersley...

Leucism

My best picture of our leucistic blackbird

Several days ago I announced that I had seen a lesser spotted woodpecker in our garden. I was 99% sure of this but my friends, I was wrong. It was not a lesser spotted woodpecker after all, it was in fact a leucistic blackbird. Please accept my sincere apologies for this stupid error. Previously, I had only seen it in a tree and not on the ground.

Until December 30th, I  knew nothing about leucism.  To be honest, I had never heard the word before. Leucism is a rare genetic condition that results in the loss of some pigmentation. It can affect a wide range of creatures but has been witnessed most often with regard to birds.

We all know what albinism is. It is a total absence of pigment. Albino creatures are pink-eyed and usually have poor eyesight. In the wild, they tend not to last for very long. This is down to absence of natural camouflage and their poor eyesight. They are also often rejected by their own species.

You might say that leucism is halfway between albinism and normality.

Shirley and I saw "our" leucistic blackbird pecking away at an apple as blackbirds like to do in the wintertime. It was too far away for me to photograph at first but later it came much closer to our house and I was able to snap it through the glass of our kitchen door. If I had opened the door for a clearer view, I am sure the bird would have scooted off straightaway.

I am not sure which is rarer - a lesser spotted woodpecker or a leucistic blackbird but I may have lost a penny and found a pound on this one.

We haven't seen that most unusual blackbird since we spotted it on December 30th but I hope it comes back. There are fresh apples on the lawn  waiting for it to feast upon.

Regular British blackbird

Films

A modern Christmas tradition is for families to sit down together in order to enjoy a good film (American: movie). With Netflix and Amazon Prime the choices become almost endless.

Last night, I found myself sitting on the sofa ready to watch "The Departed" starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo di Caprio with a stellar supporting cast. Set in Boston, USA, the film focused on relations between the police department and the brutal underworld in which police double agents were planted. Made in 2006, the film was directed by Martin Scorsese.

An horrendous total of 21 people are killed on screen in "The Departed" which I nonetheless  found to be shallow and rather dull entertainment. There is no human depth to it, just lots of aggression and blood. It was quite boring and predictable in spite of the talented lead actors and the shootings.

Another film I watched was  "The Amazing Spider-Man" (2012). This contained many incredible special effects but ultimately I also found this film to be very tedious. It was as if it had been aimed at adolescent boys of limited intelligence. Fantasies about superheroes just do not appeal to me anyway. If I never see another superhero film in my life I will die happily in my bed. To me they are all utter rubbish even though I recognise that many other people like them. Box office figures cannot lie, can they?

The best film I saw through the holiday period was a low budget production  called "Once" (2007). Set in Dublin,  it stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová as struggling street musicians. In fact, that is what they were in real life for many years. It is a sweet romance with several twists but I suppose that what I mostly liked about it was that it seemed like real life - authentic and true. As you might imagine, "Once" has a musical soundtrack with songs by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. Of all of the songs, "Falling Slowly" was the most haunting. I had heard it before and now here it is for your personal enjoyment. Please turn up the volume and listen:-

Bestseller

Did you know this? Of all the many books published in the nineteenth century, the biggest bestseller after "The Bible" was "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, it sold well in America and even better over here in Great Britain. I don't think our literate ancestors read it because it housed an entertaining story but rather because it removed the veil that had previously kept hard truths about slavery shrouded in mystery.

It took me far too long to read it but towards the end I cantered along and finished the book in the early hours of New Year's Eve. I am so glad  that I took up the personal challenge of reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It was revelatory - not just in terms of shining a spotlight on some of the horrors of slavery in America's Deep South but also in the way it observes religious belief and the social mores of the mid-nineteenth century.

Unsurprisingly, the central character is an older slave known as Uncle Tom. He is civilised, dependable and kindly. His fervent religious belief allows him to tolerate trouble that might have broken lesser men. However, I found the book's title somewhat inappropriate for the "cabin" does not play a significant role. If I had been Harriet Beecher's Stowe's editor, I might have well suggested a more sardonic title plucked from America's Declaration of Independence. Something like "Created Equal" or "Our Sacred Honour".

The book's language is understandably quite formal and staid given the fact that it appeared in the mid-nineteenth century but I found it very accessible.

There are many moving passages and the author, in spite of her  northern and Christian sensibilities,  had clearly attempted to the best of her ability to present a true portrait of slavery. She met with Abraham Lincoln and it is often said that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" helped to launch and justify The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

Here's a small fragment of Mrs Beecher Stowe's writing:-

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervour, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.

But to live, to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”

There's lots more I could write about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - about how it has sometimes been dismissed or ridiculed by modern academics, about its religious optimism, about its cartoon-like portrayals of some of the characters - including Uncle Tom himself but in the end I must say I enjoyed this reading experience. It finished off 2021 very nicely. It was so good to tick off an important classic of the nineteenth century and 126 years after her death, I applaud Harriet Beecher Stowe for the illumination she brought to such a shameful subject.

Original illustration