Verification

Get ready for a hot-headed rant! Am I the only blogger who is becoming increasingly irritated by the current Blogger comment verification process that some of our fellow bloggers have left switched on? For me, apart from the time involved in typing out the characters I see on screen, I am mostly irritated by the fact that very often I can't even decipher the characters as they are presented. Invariably, I have to keep refreshing until I find a number and a mumbo jumbo word I can actually make out. Look at these examples:-

Many times I have tried to carefully type out the presented characters only to discover that what I thought was an "i" was actually a "u" shoved up against the next letter or what I thought was an "n" was actually an "m" in disguise. So you have to start all over again. Who came up with this particular verification idea anyway? Who ever it was needs shooting. I bet he or she is either French or Nick Clegg!

Besides, why do we need this kind of defence? What is Blogger trying to protect us from? After all, any psychopath or Frenchman can set up a secret Blogger account and make comments on our blogs so why have this stupid verification hurdle anyway? And if we must have verification, please make the "words" and numbers easily readable and recognisable. What are "owspirs", "recokmck", "oerpril" and "ndzedi"? Albanian swear words? Very hard "words" to copy down that's what they are. The previous verification process was easier to cope with.

So what's it all about Alfie? Can somebody enlighten me?

Peak

Peak Forest is a small village high in the Peak District National Park. Its little primary school accommodates just thirty five pupils. In wintertime, it can be very bleak up there. Drivers speed through - usually heading for Buxton, Manchester, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Chesterfield or Sheffield with their heaters fanning out warm air. Mostly they don't stop.

Yesterday, I drove out there and parked at a remote crossroads, near to the course of the Batham Gate Roman road which once led legionnaires back and forth from northern defensive fortifications to the mineral baths at Buxton. I undertook a wide circumnavigation of the village having planned the route beforehand. The greyness of the Pennine morning gave way to a delightful afternoon with more blue sky than clouds.

It took almost four hours and led me past hill farms, sturdy stone houses, old lead mine workings, windswept coppices and a network of ancient limestone walls. How beautiful and how very lucky I am to live close to such loveliness though I am not sure I'd have said that if rain had been pelting down. Here's a selection of yesterday's photographs, please click to enlarge:-

Traffic crawling up Hernstone Lane

Cattle posing near Mount Pleasant Farm

Looking towards Mam Tor from Old Moor

Typical Peak District vista

Cutting the grass south of Peak Forest - my favourite picture of the day

This section of road is on the course of Batham Gate Roman road leading up to Kemp's Hill but mostly the old road strikes across fields and is difficult to decipher - even from aerial imaging

Driving sheep down the main broad in the hamlet of Wheston

Adulation

At Barker's Pool, Sheffield city centre

On Friday afternoon, 20,000 Sheffielders descended on Barker's Pool to welcome home our own golden girl - Olympic heptathete Jessica Ennis. I wasn't there as I was making Shirley's tea and besides I'm not very good at hero worship. We watched it all on the TV instead. 

Anyway, today we were in the centre of town - trying to buy new brushes for our Panasonic vacuum cleaner. I remembered to take my camera. I wanted to make sure I had "bagged" pictures of the huge Jessica canvas on the façade of the  "John Lewis" department store along with the gold postbox on Division Street - specially repainted to recognise Jess's remarkable gold medal achievement. She seems a lovely young woman - natural in her many interviews and genuinely proud to hail from Sheffield - a true Yorkshire lass. This blogpost is dedicated to her Olympic success and to confirm that the city of Sheffield and the Republic of Yorkshire is immensely proud of her. After The Revolution she will be our Minister of Sport.

Jessica's golden postbox

The 1925 war memorial with Jessica behind

Potato

A potato

Surprisingly, one of my regular correspondents - a certain R.Brague of Canton, Georgia - has requested guidance in the art of potato peeling. Coming from "The Americas" - the natural homeland of the humble potato - I had assumed that he would already be conversant in the aforementioned skill.

Now I am going to let him and other lucky readers of this post into a little known secret about potato peeling. It was one passed down to me several years ago by my late and much-missed mother - Doreen (nee   Jackson). In a quiet whisper, with eyes looking nervously to the left and right, she told me that the best implement for peeling potatoes is in fact a cheese slicer! Yes my friends - a cheese slicer of the variety pictured below!

For twenty years I have used this implement in preference to any others or any sharp knives to denude many hundreds of potatoes - stripping away their dirty outer skins to reveal the creamy white flesh within. Of course, the hand you choose for holding the cheese slice depends on your dexterity. Normal people are of course right-handed but there are a few freaks out there who are left-handed. Being normal, I always hold the potato in my left hand and the cheese slice in my right hand.

One of the advantages of using a cheese slice is that the instrument reduces wastage of potato flesh that will often occur with knives or other useless types of potato peeler.

When peeling potatoes it is important to wash them in clean water and it is unwise to peel your "spuds" well in advance of  potato cooking. The stripped potato can discolour quite quickly so my advice is to chop and boil or fry soon after the peeling process has been completed. Of course, over in Ireland, families will often scorn the business of peeling - boiling any old potato with skin attached. I put this down to their prudish Catholic heritage. Priests must have told them to avert their eyes from the naked spud of God.

Over here in Europe, it is hard to imagine a diet that did not include potatoes but they first came to our continent in the latter part of the sixteenth century and were not widely grown until the eighteenth century. Imagine a life without chips or mashed potato, jacket potatoes, potato croquettes or scallops. It doesn't bear thinking about. The potato comes with its own special, protective skin waiting to be undressed. If you didn't know already - please remember the humble cheese slicer! Just as "a dog isn't just for Christmas", so "a cheese slicer isn't just for cheese"!

Rotherham

Following my last post - about Princess Anne's birthday - I was considering producing a new post that visitors would find doubly boring. For example, I might have devoted several paragraphs to the peeling of potatoes, the poetry of Alexander Pope, the history of lard, the early life of George W. Bush, how to raise guinea fowl or the travels and life habits of a carefully observed woodlouse called Patrick. That's the thing about being a blogger - within certain limits you can more or less publish what you want - and be damned!

Making boredom has its attractions and I am sorely tempted... but instead I will get back to one of my usual themes - hiking tours in South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire. Or are they boring too? I know Libby at least likes them and Shooting Parrots seethes with envy when he compares the brilliance of my photography to his more humble snapshots.

You may recall that on Sunday I marched from Sheffield city centre along the towpath of the old Sheffield and Tinsley Canal and then turned back to follow the Five Weirs walk back into town? Well, yesterday I returned to Tinsley by car and then continued the walk along the River Don to the fascinating town of Rotherham. Actually, it wasn't long before the Don was bypassed again by another old canal that runs parallel to the river but avoids its shoals and unpredictable waters - The Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation Canal (1751).

The weir at Jordan Dam on the River Don

Ickles Lock - South Yorkshire Navigation Canal

Non-boring Rotherham is home to some 250,000 souls - not all in the town itself but also in the estates and villages that make up the metropolitan district. It is very close to its big brother - Sheffield - which is twice its size. On the surface, Rotherham may seem like a sad kind of place. In the past it owed its prosperity to the production of steel and steel products and it has never wholly recovered from the butchery that the industry suffered in the early eighties. Having the vast Meadowhall shopping mall on its doorstep has also not helped commerce in the town centre.

Old Guest and Chrimes works with the New York Stadium behind

Painters at Rotherham Central

I saw the new Rotherham United football ground - called the New York Stadium and spotted teams of painters at the refurbished Rotherham Central railway station. I remember alighting there in 1966 from a Hull City football special train - before walking half a mile to the old ground at Milmoor. It was a dark and grimy, industrial town and even the old ground looked like a ramshackle steel factory. The town was once famous for the production of cannons - on Nelson's flagship "Victory" the majority of cannons were made in Rotherham. But that sunless Victorian afternoon they were blasted by a couple of Hull City cannonballs!

Tree and nice house on Clough Road, Rotherham

From the town centre, I headed across the fields to Wingfield and Kimberworth where social housing estates designed in the nineteen sixties still accommodate hundreds of socio-economically challenged families. Moving at the same pace, I walked a few yards behind a burly young man with i-pod earphones and orange shorts. At Kimberworth, as pre-arranged by mobile communication, he met a young woman with a little boy of four or five and from the few words I heard as I walked by I realised that the couple were separated and the happy  little boy was the product of their defunct relationship. This was his afternoon to be with "daddy".

At Grange Park golf course

I bought a can of Diet Coke from the Co-op in Kimberworth. What a rip-off at seventy five pence! And then I crossed Upper Wortley Road before cutting through Grange Park golf course and down under the M1 to Grange Mill Lane - which is much uglier than its name suggests - home to several dirty industrial enterprises. It runs parallel to the ever-humming M1 motorway before pointing you towards the temple of Babylon - Meadowhall where there are no meadows or halls - just glass and marble stores and the ringing of tills as hordes of circling worshippers pay homage to Mammon.

"The Royal Oak" on Grange Mill Lane

Anne

I expect that bloggers around the world will be anxious to join with me in wishing her noble majesty Princess Anne, the Princess Royal, a very happy sixty second birthday. Yes our beloved princess was born this day at Clarence House in London back in 1950. In the picture above our blessed queen is holding our royal princess in the music room at Buckingham Palace which is where Anne was christened in October of that year. Little Prince Charles is looking on mischievously and beside our beloved queen is Queen Mary (not the ocean liner of that name!) and Queen Elizabeth, wife of George VI who of course died so tragically in 1952.

Princess Anne is married to Sir Timothy Lawrence having divorced her first husband - the caddish womaniser Captain Mark Phillips in 1992. They had two children together - Peter and Zara. The latter was a member of Great Britain's equestrian team in the recent Olympics - following in her mother's footsteps for Anne you will certainly remember was a member of the 1976 Olympic team.

A little known fact about Princess Anne is that she is a keen pharologist - having visited all of Scotland's 215 lighthouses. There is no truth in the rumour that she bedded a protesting lighthouse keeper on each visit... This is possibly the most boring blogpost I have ever written so to enliven the ending, here is a recent photograph of the esteemed princess showing off her exquisite and much imitated hairstyle. Lady bloggers (& Arctic Fox!)  - if you're looking for a new hairstyle - this is it! The Recumbent Badger!

Happy Birthday Anne!

Waterways

The biggest "river" in Sheffield is the Don but in the centre of the city it is little more than a fast flowing hill stream that tumbles over weirs and shingle banks on its way to Tinsley where it settles down and becomes deeper, more slow-moving and navigable. At the start of the nineteenth century, as Sheffield grew into the world's premier steel producing town, industrialists saw a need to cut a canal that would link the town centre with the first navigable section of the Don. 

It was a major engineering project and involved the construction of eleven locks along the four mile long canal. This was not about making a waterway for pleasure craft. It was about bolstering steel profits, making the inbound carriage of coal and iron ore and the outbound haulage of steel products much easier. And so on February 22nd 1819 the canal was opened to great ballyhoo, a public holiday was declared in the town and around 60,000 spectators turned out to witness the transformational event.

On overcast Sunday afternoon, I walked the length of the canal, passing narrow boats and fishermen and the crumbling remains of Sheffield's old industries. In this city many "special steels" were developed and foreign visitors to this blog may like to know that it was in Sheffield that stainless steel was invented and first produced. The city is also famous for high quality cutlery - in both stainless steel and silver plate.

At Victoria Quays - Sheffield Canal Basin

Dilapidation by the old canal

"Matilda" passes under the M1 viaduct at Tinsley

I returned to the city centre via "the Five Weirs Walk" which follows the winding course of the Don referred to in 1936 by George Orwell - "the shallow river that runs through the town is usually bright yellow with some chemical or other". But on Sunday I saw an angler in waders fly-fishing in what was once little more than an open sewer for industrial waste. No bright yellow chemicals any more - just the silent echoes of long dead men and women who gave their blood and sweat and ultimately their lives to the Sheffield steel industry.

"The Five Weirs Walk"

Fisherman seeking brown trout in The Don

BBC

In Great Britain we have an affectionate nickname for the British Broadcasting Corporation. It's simply "Auntie". When I look back, I can see how the BBC has been as constant in my life as a close family member. It was in the year that I was born that television sales in our country mushroomed ahead of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. I remember that as a small boy I delighted in  "Andy Pandy", "Bill and Ben" and "The Woodentops" - all courtesy of the BBC.

In my travels around the world, I have never discovered a better provider of television than "Auntie". It is so nice to watch programmes all the way through without the irritating interruption of commercials and that's just one reason why you will very rarely find me watching any other channels. There's no way I would subscribe to "Sky" with its associations with Murdoch and News International. They have stolen so many of the BBC's innovations - achieved over decades.

But my main reason for  writing this post this morning is to praise the BBC for its marvellous and comprehensive coverage of the London Olympics. So much of the camera work was brilliant - from quivering slo-mo arrows at the archery to shots that fell in synchronisation with the high board divers. All sports were covered with technical imagination, passionate and knowledgeable commentary and visual excellence. Expert studio pundits like Michael Johnson and Denise Lewis provided helpful insights into the techniques and pressures of top class athletics.

It was both a sporting and televisual feast and in spite of the horrendous cost of it all, like most true Britons, I am immensely proud of what our country has just presented to the world. I'd rather see our money going to a brilliant Olympic Games than to pointless military confrontation in Afghanistan. The Olympics seem to have lifted the nation and it was kind of the BBC News to shelve many of the usual mournful topics for the duration of the Olympics. The greed of bankers was replaced by Usain Bolt playing up to the camera and economic stagnation was replaced by Sheffield's own golden girl - Jessica Ennis weeping happily on the medal rostrum.

The BBC attracts many knockers - not least the Public School Nasty Party (i.e. The Conservatives) who have regularly accused the organisation of left wing bias. I find that accusation flabbergasting as all my life I have detected something of a right wing public school bias in BBC arts and news programmes. Not surprising when you investigate the social backgrounds of key players at The Beeb. - they tend to hail from the south east having gained their education in the same privileged schools and universities that members of the Public School Nasty Party attended.

But today straight after The Games, British people ought to be immensely proud of the BBC's excellent Olympic coverage and give Auntie a great big smacker on her powdered cheek. It could hardly have been any better. It just goes to show once again what human beings are capable of when they work together in teams to achieve shared goals. Perhaps more impressive than the feats of outstanding athletes, Well done Auntie!

Luke

Sir Luke Campbell - another Yorkshire hero.

Arise Sir Luke Campbell! Olympic bantamweight boxing champion who outfoxed Irish opponent John Joe Nevin on the penultimate evening of the thirtieth Olympiad in London. Not only is Luke a tough and gritty Yorkshireman (like me!), he also hails from the East Riding and all the way along his journey to the top he has been proud to declare his fierce allegiance to the city of his birth - Kingston-Upon-Hull. Forget all those poncey middle class sports like rowing, modern pentathlon, shooting, sailing and dressage - boxing is of the streets and the council estates, often born of frustration and anger. It's a sport of the urban working class - controlled aggression. It's interesting to me that this evening's BBC Olympic coverage paid much more attention to poster boy diver Tom Daley's bronze medal achievement than they did to Luke Campbell's golden achievement in the boxing ring. Prejudice and bias can be so subtle. As I say - arise Sir Luke - yet another gold medal for the Republic of Yorkshire! At Rio in 2016 we should put out our own team!

Yes, even Yorkshiremen cry

More

More. More walking. More sweat dribbling into my eyes. More of the Peak District. Today I drove up narrow Shatton Lane to Shatton Moor and parked up near the TV relay mast that's up there. Then I walked for three hours solid - not an Olympic event - but I was pleased to be out there in the August sunshine taking in sights I had never seen before:-

Ruins of a farm near Offerton, Hope Valley

Siney Sitch on Smelting Hill

Abney seen from Abney Moor

The eyesore that is Hope Cement Works

The ford on Townfield Lane, Shatton

Bellmouth

Yesterday afternoon, I escaped from our Olympic sofa and drove westwards into the Peak District again. I parked near Cutthroat Bridge on the A57 and followed a track under Hordron Edge. My mapwork had told me there's an ancient stone circle on the plateau above Hordron Edge. I battled through lush bracken to the top and there it was, protected by a handful of sheep and rarely visited. Who knows what happened here? Did those Bronze Age people dance under the stars? Did they come to trade or to observe the shadows? And what did they know of the world beyond those moors?

At the stone circle above Hordron Edge

Half a mile to the north is Stanage End - the westernmost point of rugged Stanage Edge - a millstone grit escarpment that curls for four miles along the old border between Yorkshire and Derbyshire.  I tramped through marshy ground and vigorous bracken fronds, over rocks and down hollows until this sight appeared. If you click on the picture you'll see climbers to the left of the outcrop:-

Further along the edge at Crow Chin, I spotted this old grouse basin - Basin Number 20. It was hollowed out over a hundred years ago to allow breeding grouse access to fresh rainwater rather than acidic moorland pools:-

A lovely view from Crow Chin westwards to the Derwent Valley:-

Much later after tramping from Bole Hill, past Bamford Clough and along New Road, I descended to "The Yorkshire Bridge Inn" where I guzzled a refreshing pint of orange cordial and soda water before standing on the dam wall at Ladybower Reservoir. When full, it holds over six billion gallons of water. Below you can see a device called a "bellmouth" which drains away excess water when the reservoir is overfull. That's one hole I wouldn't want to fall down. AIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!   Plop!

Brownlees

Alistair Brownlee - Olympic men's triathlon gold medallist London 2012 and his younger brother Jonathan - brave bronze medallist in the same gruelling event. And where do these tough, talented and generally admirable young men come from? Can you guess? Why - Yorkshire of course! Our Yorkshire nation is currently ahead of both Australia and New Zealand in the medals table and without all the magnificent Yorkshire medallists, Great Britain would probably be down near the bottom of the medals list with Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands!

I watched nearly all of this morning's triathlon from the idle comfort of our sofa. Don't you also detect a certain irony in the contrast between couch potatoes munching snacks and Olympians busting their guts on the television screen? It's like obese kids playing computer games in which they control physically active cartoon heroes smashing through walls and leaping between buildings as mum sticks another pizza in the microwave and yells "Do you want Coke or Tizer?"

The strapline of the London Olympics is "Inspire a generation" - but although I enjoyed the Brownlee lads' performance this morning, there's no way I'm going to be taking up triathlons. I'd still be swimming around the Serpentine in Hyde Park long after the Brownlees had travelled back to their Yorkshire homeland and I don't think the wetsuit and green swimming cap would suit me either.

On behalf of Yorkshiremen everywhere - huge congratulations to Alistair and Jonathan! You have done our White Rose nation proud as these magnificent Olympic Games continue. My instinctive fears about a terrorist outrage appear to have been ill-founded and I just hope that this week continues in an untroubled fashion  -allowing yet more Yorkshiremen and Yorkshirewomen to add to Great Britain's amazing medal haul. 

The Brownlee brothers in Yorkshire

Jessica

She's Yorkshire. She's Sheffield. She's an Olympic champion. She's our own Jessica Ennis! The evening of August 4th 2012 was surely the finest in British sport since England won the football World Cup back in the summer of 1966. And the thing about Jessica is that she is so pleasant, so cheerful and unassuming. In spite of all the hype and the media pressure - she managed to deliver. Her parents live a stone's throw from this house. Arise Dame Jessica - heptathlon gold medal winner - there ain't nothing like a dame!

Painting

I apologise for blogstipation this week. I have been scrabbling around on the floor of a terraced house in the Highfields area of Sheffield, close to Sheffield United''s Bramall Lane football ground. Scrabbling on the floor and working a paint roller on the ceiling.

In addition, I have masked windows, unscrewed curtain poles. Wallpapered over an unsightly area under the window. Unscrewed shelving and later screwed it all back into position. Covered furniture with dust sheets, washed out brushes, visited B&Q three or four times, scoured drips away with white spirit, washed windows, checked for areas that needed retouching and worked on second and third coats before reassembling the room. Then finally, by 7pm on Friday, it was all done and I could walk away, pleased with our efforts.

The house is where our son, Ian, used to live. With our help, he bought it in 2007 and paid the mortgage month after month with the assistance of two friendly lodgers, He's been working with me on the front room re-decoration and it has been good to spend time with him this week - working together on a practical task. He is such a lovely young man, with a happy heart and an appetite for life but he has recently made a momentous decision. Like Dick Whittington, he's heading for London.

His girlfriend Ruby is already there having graduated from St Andrew's University earlier in the summer. She secured a media internship with a leading cosmetics company. Very quickly, Ian and Ruby managed to find a little flat near Shepherd's Bush Green and now he's going down to The Smoke to join her. He has no job to go to but I am confident that he will quickly find something - gain a foothold in that awesome antheap - probably in men's fashion.

Sometimes in life, you have to be ready to follow your heart - declining the safe and sensible path. Shirley and I are right behind him and we will do what we can to help him and Ruby to establish themselves in the Olympic City. On Sunday, I shall be driving a hire van down to the metropolis with the few worldly possessions they need to begin their London life. Perhaps we will stop at a motorway services so that I can take a leak and perhaps  write another poem...

Poem

Song of the Middle Ages 

Let us grow old together
Let us rock synchronically
On this verandah
Looking westwards
To the setting of the sun
Where memories of the lives we've lived
Troop by like soldiers
On a passing out parade.

I recall, I recall
The sweetness of your lips
In our salad days.
We seemed so green then -
Our eyes so bright
And our hopes so plentiful
And all of our tomorrows
Were but banquets to devour.

Let us absorb what happened
Let us count our blessings
In this wilderness
Looking eastwards
To the rising of the sun
Where futures we shan't see
Sing like lamentations
On a long-forgotten scratched  L.P..