Mission

Woburn Abbey under a blanket of thick cloud

On Tuesday night I stayed in "The Woburn Hotel" forty miles north of London. Arriving there at midday, I donned my trusty walking boots and set off on a five mile route in and around The Woburn Abbey estate. 

It was somewhere I had never been before which is a factor that always increases my appetite for walking. New sights. New vistas. Everything a bit different from my usual plodding territories.

Though it did not rain, a thick quilt of cloud hung above the land and beneath that canopy the air was still and cold. I wore my woolly fingerless gloves and a Hull City beanie hat too.

As I approached the big house via Basin Pond, I came across a herd of skittish red deer. There must have been a hundred of them and I felt a little apprehensive in case they panicked and ran en masse. In fact, they did that but thankfully just before I arrived. Unlike cattle or sheep, they were so quiet - only the gentle drumming of their hooves upon the grass as they ran away to another corner of the vast country estate.

Later I entered Palmer's Shrubs - a woodland north of the village of Milton Bryan. There I came across the badgers' sett shown below. It had at least three other entrances. After taking the picture I spotted the top of an old bottle poking out of the loose soil around the sett.

It was filthy but I brought it home anyway. Tonight I washed it  and discovered that it was produced by Chivers & Sons Ltd of Histon, Cambridge over a hundred years ago. It once contained lemonade crystals. How it got buried in the sett I have no idea but it was a great find.

Tired in the evening, and having eaten very little all day, I treated myself to dinner in the hotel restaurant. My choice was a classic burger with fries and a glass of Chilean sauvignon blanc. 

Delicious.

Afterwards, I went up to my executive accommodation - The Henry Holland  Room where I watched Arsenal v Crystal Palace on television before reading for an hour. For once, I was in the huge bed long before midnight and managed to sleep for seven hours. Fortunately, Henry Holland did not disturb me.

I was back on the M1 motorway before 8am and at Ian's place in Fulham by 9.30am - ready to bring him home with too much baggage to carry on a train.

Mission with side benefits accomplished.

"The Black Horse" pub in Woburn

Honour

Forget The Oscars and The Golden Globes, The Booker Prize and Sportsperson of the Year because just around the corner the winners of this year's Laughing Horse Blogging  Awards will soon be announced - including the identity of the overall winner and therefore the Blogger of the Year for 2025. Who will it be? Speculation echoes around the blogosphere like Keith Richards's guitar in Madison Square Gardens.

All around the world, blogger excitement builds. After all, a "New Yorker"  correspondent recently suggested that the principal source of blog writing motivation is, "the remote possibility of joining the prestigious Laughing Horse winners list".

Please listen to the music as you slowly scroll back through history...

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The Hall of Fame...

2008 – Arthur Clewley for “Arthur Clewley”

2009 – Daphne Franks for “My Dad’s a Communist”

2010 – John Gray for “Going Gently”

2011 – Ian Rhodes for “Shooting Parrots”

2012 – Kate Steeds for "The Last Visible Dog"

2013 – Tom Gowans for “A Hippo on the Lawn”

2014 – Meike Riley for “From My Mental Library”

2015 – Lee George for “Kitchen Connection”

2016 – Steve Reed for “Shadows and Light”

2017 - Keith Kline for "Hiawatha House"

2018 - Mary Moon for "Bless Our Hearts"

2019 - Jenny O'Hara for "Procrastinating Donkey"

2020 - Cro Magnon for "Magnon's Meanderings"

2021 - Andrew de Melbourne for "High Riser" (Now "From The High Rise")

2022 - Bob Slatten for "I Should Be Laughing"

2023 - David Godfrey for "The Adventures of Travel Penguin"

2024 - JayCee Manx for "Nobody's Diary"

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The venue for this year's Awards Ceremony remains a closely-guarded secret in order to thwart yet another plague of gawping paparazzi invaders. In addition, the unique designer widget for 2025 has not yet been revealed owing to fiery disagreements between top brass decision makers in Laughing Horse Tower. I have it on good authority that this matter will be sorted during the Christmas period..

Home

Chris Rea died today at the age of seventy four. Given the various health issues he had to deal with during his adult life, it is actually quite astonishing that  he made it this far. He was a Yorkshireman, born in Middlesbrough within this fair county's historical boundaries before those idiots in Westminster adjusted our borders without even properly consulting the citizens of Yorkshire. It still rankles.

I will be driving our Ian home for Christmas on Christmas Eve morning, having lodged on Tuesday night in Woburn, Bedfordshire. I didn't fancy two 3.5 hour drives in one day. Besides, I hope to manage a long walk down there on Tuesday afternoon. Cloud is promised but not rain

"Driving Home for Christmas" is an easy, laid back kind of Christmas song that has endured through the decades and it's kind of fitting that Chris Rea finally shuffled off his mortal coil just three days before Christmas. His song will live on for many Christmases to come. Much better than a chiselled gravestone or a black urn. Take it away Chris...

Solstice

Yesterday - near Sand Hall

On the morning of this winter solstice, I lay in bed for an hour after I had woken up. Together, the quilt and the sheets had created a snug cocoon around me and I had no pressing reason to leave it. Over the radio came sweet Christmas songs from Belfast and those monotone perennial readings from "The Bible".

Pulling back the curtains, I looked out on a misty neighborhood. Fog hung like static white smoke and colours had been drained away as if the world outside was fading just as underexposed photographic paper in a dark room is liable to do.

On the morning of the solstice, I came downstairs to boil two eggs which I ate with a single rice cake and a dash of seasoned French sea salt that I bought in 1998 somewhere in the Réserve Naturelle Nationale de la Baie de l'Aiguillon north of La Rochelle, France.

On the morning of the solstice, I thought of yesterday and how I walked in dank river mist down to remote Sand Hall along a bend in The River Ouse, not far from Saltmarshe Hall in East Yorkshire.

Then I drove on to Hull where my beloved Tigers were playing the Birmingham club - West Bromwich Albion. I met up with my old friend Tony and a newer friend - Karl. Both have their own ongoing health issues. Tony had a small stroke earlier this year and because of cancer Karl has had a kidney removed and is beginning a second course of chemotherapy. His prospects are not bright but he is still fighting for the privilege of life.

What a trio! Cancer, Stroke, High Blood Pressure etc.. watching healthy young men battle it out on the pitch. By the way, we won by a single goal - a deft penalty scored just before halftime by Oli McBurnie.

In the early darkness, aboard the "park and ride" bus back to Butch, I sat with a very nice man who lives on the south bank of The Humber. He told me that for forty years he had run his local football club as chairman, secretary, treasurer, bus driver, shirt launderer, counsellor and whatever else might have been required.  At first, he suspected that I was just jossing when I remarked that he deserved a medal but then I explained the huge beneficial impact his unsung work would have had upon the lives of generations of lads and young men. I was being perfectly sincere.

I drank coffee from a flask after I had opened Butch's boot (American: trunk) before driving home to Sheffield on the eve of the winter solstice.

On the morning of the solstice, I sat at this computer keyboard in my study with the anglepoise light shining down as I typed. And I thought of smoky feasts and yule logs burning and dancing and drums and flutes and flagons of cider and holly and ivy and a suckling pig roasting on an iron spit in a bleak midwinter on a day that marked and celebrated the turning of time and the gradual return of light and warmth and snowdrops and tender green leaves and renewal and hope .

Goole Bridge - ten days apart from different banks

Stanage

Yesterday afternoon, I drove over to Stanage Edge. Leaving Butch parked up by a road called The Dale at the southern end of the escarpment, I then walked three miles north to  the triangulation pillar at High Neb. As per normal, a lot of the walk was squiggly and up and down as I negotiated puddles and ancient stone slabs.

It was bitterly cold with the prevailing winter wind buffeting from the south west. I was wearing my orange "Mammot" coat with a hood and I was also glad that I had remembered my woolly fingerless gloves. For me, fingerless gloves are best because they allow me to operate my camera properly.

I watched a kestrel expertly hovering on the wind above the rocks. Intermittently, the bird plunged down with its wings tucked in. It was clearly on the look out for prey but I do not know exactly what it was after. Perhaps a weasel or a resting songbird.  Nearby eleven sheep were half-hidden in the heather as they sought nourishment

At this latitude in mid-winter, the veil of night descends before five o'clock. After a well-deserved rest at High Neb, I realised that I would have to quick march it back to The Dale as the golden orb was already sinking behind the Pennine hills and sure enough by the time I pressed the button on my car key there were only a couple of minutes of murky daylight left.

It was completely dark when I walked into "The Norfolk Arms" at Ringinglow where I ordered a latte and a glass of tap water. Stupidly, I left my car keys on the bar and by the time I had confirmed this one of the barmaids had already phoned Shirley about the discovery. You see, on my keyring I have my name and phone number - something that I would highly recommend to all car owners - just in case.

Some of you may recall that I am currently brewing a poem called "Stanage Edge" and on yesterday's walk some related words came  into my head  - "buttress", "ramparts", "wild" and "defiant" for example. I will mull them over in case, in a poetic sense, they have some purchase.

The triangulation pillar at High Neb

Gingerism

Peter Baker 1939-2019 (aka Ginger Baker)

On Wednesday afternoon, I collected Phoebe from her primary school playground and walked her back to our house. This journey takes less than ten minutes.

On Glenalmond Road some pupils from our local secondary school were passing by also on their way home. They were younger pupils - probably from Y7 or Y8. There were three boys and two girls. One of the girls had red hair - not bright ginger but a colour that contained some honey and copper tinges too.  I suppose that some might refer to her hair colour as "strawberry blonde".

There was some playful after-school banter going on between the kids. Then one of the boys called ahead to the strawberry blonde girl that was she was ginger-haired. "Ginge!" he called and "Ginger!" The girl yelled back that she was most definitely "not ginger". On the surface at least, she took the taunting in her stride. I imagine that it was not the first time that she had had to deal with gingerist banter.

Back in 2009, I blogged about another example of gingerism. It concerned Christmas cards being sold in "Tesco" supermarkets that bore the very unfunny legend, "Santa loves all kids. Even GINGER ones" followed by a picture of a little boy with red hair sitting on Santa's knee. Go here.

In that blogpost I alluded to my past observations of the treatment that ginger-haired schoolchildren frequently have to suffer in secondary schools.  Why should they have to tough it out?

Around 10% of people in both Ireland and Scotland have red hair. The figure is much lower in other European countries, including England. Teasing red haired people is simply not nice and shows a kind of dismissal or disrespect that is invariably very hurtful. In that sense, gingerism belongs in the same bag as sexism, racism and disablism and I mean this most sincerely.

Historically, many people with red hair have even lost their first names - replaced by the label - "Ginger". This does not happen to folks with brown or black hair.

Take the superstar drummer of the progressive rock band Cream for example. Everybody knew him as Ginger Baker but how many were aware that his real name was Peter - yes - Peter Baker? He wasn't "Ginger" at all. The unimaginative nickname was foisted upon him and it became inescapable though he did not choose it and he did not like it.

So my Christmas message to the world is STOP GINGERISM! Treating other people as your equals includes refusing to mock or perhaps even mention the natural colour of someone else's hair.

Neuropathy

On Monday of this week I learnt a new word: "neuropathy". If I had heard it before, I certainly did not know what it meant. The alarming reality is that it was being applied to me by a physician's assistant down at our health centre.

She had my bare feet on her lap and she was testing my reactions to a simple instrument I had never seen before. It is called a monofilament. Please see the top picture.

I kept my eyes closed as she poked the filament on and around my toes, asking what I could feel. I am afraid that this is one examination that I did not pass with flying colours.

In the past fourteen months, I have been teetering around the threshold of Type 2 diabetes. That is why I stopped taking sugar in hot drinks, reduced my alcohol intake and even paid good money for continuing weight loss reduction injections.

Monday's meeting has added impetus to my efforts and the next time I see my doctor I am going to be asking about a prescription for a drug called metformin which helps to reduce blood sugar levels. All my googling makes me wonder why it was not prescribed last year.

As some of you may recall, I recently finished reading "Entangled Life" which has a strong focus upon the underground characteristics of both fungi and plant roots. At the extremities of both systems there are tiny filaments. If the plant or fungus suddenly starts to retract, it is those tiny hair-like threads that die back first.

It is the same with the human body. When able-bodied people are in the vigorous health of youth those internal filaments - our blood vessels and nerves are in prime condition - reaching effectively to every part of the body and functioning well. However, if diabetes starts to creep inside us then those tiny threads begin to retreat and well, die.

We can be like deciduous trees that shut down every autumn, dropping leaves from their extremities as arboreal energy is drawn back into the heartwood. But unlike trees, we will not see spring returning for ahead of us is just the end - sooner or later.

I can walk for miles and my feet look pink and healthy but the physician's assistant was painting a different picture. She warned me about cuts to my feet, told me not to use scissors to trim my nails, be scrupulous about washing and drying my feet and said she would be referring me to a podiatrist. It all came as a shock - I can tell you, especially as the appointment was allegedly for an "annual  hypertension review" which is what I wrote on our kitchen calendar.

Hell, I do not want to end up with amputated toes or sores that will not heal but that could so easily be the way of things. Those who crept into the diabetes nether zone before me never imagined that such things might happen to them.

Throughout my life I have been blessed with good health. My body was just a purring vehicle that carried the inner me through life - into adventures, pubs, love, foreign lands, jobs, libraries, dining rooms, oceans. I guess I took it for granted that it would always function like that until it simply conked out but that might not be the way of things and tonight I feel quite fearful.