Fuss

Over there - across The Atlantic Ocean - the rapidly ageing President of the USA  has his own social media channel that he named "Truth Social". Quite an ironic title in my opinion as the "truths" that he tweets out night after night in the manner of a ranting teenager only reflect his "truth" - not any kind of fair-minded or balanced truth coolly based upon proper evidence.

He derides respected TV channels such as CNN and MSNBC, preferring to align himself with the right wing Murdoch-controlled tabloid channel called "Fox News" in which Trump can apparently do no wrong and all Democrats are woke liberals. He has also targeted America's best newspapers.

And then there are the now legendary Epstein Papers that undoubtedly contain painful truths. Trump and his oddball team have used every trick in the book to delay, block and hide those particular truths.

Being what several learned psychiatrists have described as a "malignant narcissist", Trump does not take kindly to any one or any organisation that tells a different truth from his own. He barks them down with playground declarations of "Fake News!" and "Fake Media!" and he misuses the judicial system to pressure media organisations for revenge or compensation.

Here in Great Britain, there is currently a lot of fuss and media noise about how  Trump's January 6th 2021 speech was edited for a BBC "Panorama" documentary called "Trump: A Second Chance?" aired a year ago - several days before the US presidential election. If you didn't know - you might think that somebody had died or that some terrible wrong had been wrought upon the present occupant of The White House. Such has been the fuss.

Even in Russia and China, leaders' speeches need to be selectively edited by TV News channels. It would be unrealistic to broadcast the entire thing. And on January 6th 2021 while seeking to belligerently dispute a fair  and democratic election result, Trump's rabble-rousing speech was fifty eight minutes long! For the purposes of the documentary, the makers just wished to give a flavour of what Trump had actually said.

With hindsight, I would say that it was unfortunate that the programme makers did not flag up that the two small segments of Trump's infamous speech that they had stitched together were, in reality, delivered over fifty minutes apart. It was a small mistake. However, the documentary as a whole was intelligent and pretty well-balanced. There was no sensationalism. It was in character with healthy BBC reportage.

All my life I have known the BBC like a brilliant friend - always there for me, reliable and true. It is a jewel in Great Britain's crown - a wonderful media organisation that has paved the way for other broadcasters in countless respects. Its simple mission is to "inform, educate and entertain" and as a recipient of BBC TV and radio programmes for seventy years, I can confirm that that is what it has always given me.

Of course, any broadcasting organisation will be imperfect when it comes to political reporting - simply because that service is delivered by human beings. Absolute objective neutrality is impossible. To be frank, I have always thought that, if anything, the BBC is biased towards conservatism, London and the educated middle classes so in the fuss about "Trump: A Second Chance?" I have been quite gobsmacked that several right wing voices have implied that the BBC is some sort of woke, leftist entity. I just cannot see that at all.

Trump's vindictiveness has become infamous and I suspect that the BBC will have to cough up a lot of money to appease the litigious old fellow. As I pay my TV licence fee every year, I very much resent the prospect that a tiny portion of my fee will now end up in Trump's bulging bank account. Even a penny will be too much.

God Bless The BBC!

Mounjaro

Over in Yorkshire, England, new Mounjaro user Lord Yorkshire Pudding has reported a miraculous seven pound weight reduction in just one week. We sent our roving reporter Belle Taco to meet him in his quaint medieval castle deep in The Yorkshire Dales.

Pudding said that his wife, Lady Arabella Pudding had given him his first jab last Monday, charging across the kitchen with his lethal new Mounjaro spear pen - shouting "Geronimo!" before fiercely embedding it in his belly just west of the famous fluff-filled navel that has famously featured in several women's magazines.

Asked about his eating regime in the past seven days, Lord Pudding said, "For breakfast each day I have had a banana and an easy-peel orange along with my habitual pint of tea. For lunch, I have eaten - for example - small tins of mackerel in spicy tomato sauce along with a handful of kale cooked in the microwave. Evening meals have been pretty much as normal though I have kept  a sensible eye on my portion sizes. Also, there have been no desserts and the only snacks I have had have been grapes and sugar-free liquorice gums."

He continued, "These are early days yet. I hope to lose around three stones with the assistance of Mounjaro but we will see how it goes."

Asked about how Mounjaro had affected him so far, Lord Pudding replied, "I have felt no ill effects. The drug has definitely reduced my food cravings and I simply have not missed my usual snacks - such as the occasional biscuit or bag of potato crisps. In seven days, I have not had a single slice of bread so it has been an auspicious start but as I say, we will see how it goes. Many other people have reported successful and significant weight loss within six months so I am hoping I can join them."

Lord Pudding was motivated to give much-publicised Mounjaro a try in order to help him in his ongoing battle with high blood pressure and the threat of becoming a Type 2 diabetic. "I am taking five different hypertension reduction pills and to a degree they have worked but losing weight would greatly benefit this campaign ," he smiled.

Meanwhile in the castle kitchen, Lady Arabella was cackling as she prepared his lordship's next dose of Mounjaro - the three inch stiletto needle catching the electric light like a diamond ring.

Leaves

Japanese maple in Whirlowbrook Park

They call it The Fall in North America but here in England we only call it Autumn. Trees draw  in their breaths and summer becomes but a memory. Deciduous trees deprive their leaves of sustenance and many of them change colour as they prepare to fall.

Leaves. That's a funny word when you come to think of it. Leaving is about goodbyes and endings and autumn leaves are also about that. Leaves leave us speechless at times - such is their autumnal beauty. Beauty in death. If only it was always that way.

This lovely autumn, I have frequently walked amongst or upon leaves without a camera, failing to record a lot of the loveliness I have seen - the colours, the patterns, the way that leaves have been blown into beautiful collages - each leaf a little different from the next. No two leaves are ever quite the same.

I came out of this house on Thursday and saw a leaf attached by moisture to the bodywork of my new car - Butch. It was the underside of the leaf I was seeing - paler and far less vivid than the face side. . You might be able to see me and our house reflected in the metallic grey paint...

And when I walked at Lodge Moor last Sunday, this gateway to a path was kind of framed by autumn leaves.

These crinkly leaves were in the grounds of Kenwick Park near Louth during our long weekend break last month...

I think we are past the best of the autumn leaves now - especially as more rain is predicted to  fall in the week ahead. Last week, Shirley and I swept up all of the leaves that had gathered upon the little  block-paved  driveway in front of our house. Out back I tend to gather the leaves up and store them to create nutritious leaf mould  after several months have passed by.

And now, taking a leaf out of your book,  I shall leave you.

Giles

Let's call him Giles - Farmer Giles. That's not his name but Giles will do nicely for the purposes of this blogpost. I saw him today at the football match I attended in Hull. He was sitting on the row in front of me and even after almost fifty years I recognised him straight away.

In the seventies, he was my late brother Simon's best buddy. With a bunch of other kids in their late teens they got into smoking marijuana. They would drive to remote locations in the East Yorkshire countryside to prepare and smoke joints. With cassette music playing, they would get stoned together. It became a kind of exclusive club. 

This regular use of marijuana changed Simon forever. Instead of the free and easy, cheerful lad my family had known, he became sullen with strange imaginings about his ancestors and God. It was a kind of psychosis that scarred his life right up to July 19th 2022 when he died. Simon always knew best. You could not argue with him.

Anyway, following a tip off from a pub landlord one summer, he was arrested in Bridlington. He had been brazenly rolling a joint at the bar and it contained grass that had been grown locally. The police were very interested in it and two members of the drug squad came to my parents' house to see if Simon had been growing it in their garden. Fortunately, Mum and Dad were away in Spain on holiday when the cops conducted their search.

The police found nothing but in Beverley police station, they kept quizzing Simon about the source of  his marijuana.

Soon after the police visit to my parents' home, Farmer Giles appeared at our door seeking Simon. I think he had heard something on the grapevine. I told him about the drug squad visit and his face went deathly white. In a panic, he urged me to accompany him to his family's farm.

In a hidden hollow, near a wood, he had constructed a  greenhouse using wooden framing and strong, opaque polythene. There was a padlock on the door and it puzzles me to this day how other members of Giles's family were not more curious about his secret horticultural project.

Inside were perhaps thirty vigorous marijuana plants - four to eight feet in height with stems as thick as a child's arm. The powerful smell in there took me aback but there was no time for admiration. Giles was desperate to get rid of the plants and to destroy the evidence of his wrongdoing. In those days, I am sure that if the police had visited the hidden greenhouse, Giles would have received a custodial jail sentence.

Together, we  uprooted all those plants and dragged them to a nearby cesspit where we sunk them all.  It was only then that Giles's panic began to recede. Later, I believe that he planted tomatoes in the greenhouse and besides the police never did knock on his door.

Today, I plucked up the courage to talk to Giles at halftime and I was glad to hear that he still lived in the old family farmhouse and that he and his wife of thirty five years had raised two children there - one now a social worker and the other a doctor - training to become an anaesthetist.  Neither of us mentioned the marijuana greenhouse incident but we did talk about Simon's death and Giles said he was sorry he had not attended the funeral. He said he had not heard about it till a couple of weeks later.

Oh and by the way - the result of the football match was Hull City 3 Portsmouth 2. Up The Tigers!

Quadripoint

 

In relation to earlier geographical posts, Bob Slatten and another American visitor informed me that there is a point in The United States where four of those states meet. I was intrigued and went away for a massage google. Indeed, the four states in question are Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.  They meet on Native American lands in a remote, desert-like area.

The Four Corners Monument has become  a tourist attraction in recent years. There are stalls and concessions there plus "restrooms" (English: toilets) and plenty of car parking. See the image above that I snipped from Google Maps.

Above, a father and son have created an aerial image using a selfie stick at the very point where the four states meet and below Google imagery proves that some weird stuff happens out there. Perhaps there's an alien presence for we should remind ourselves of the wise old saying: "The camera never lies":-

The nearby main road is Highway 160 and below you can see the sign just ahead of the side road that eventually leads to Cortez, Colorado (population 9151)...

Another dusty side road off the road to Cortez leads you to the site of The Four Corners Monument - shimmering in a heat haze in the middle of nowhere.

Now that I have researched the location, I would love to go there but I do not suppose I ever will - especially with a deranged right wing tyrant occupying The White House.

By the way, there is also a quadripoint in Canada. It is even more remote than the place mentioned above. The two provinces and two territories that meet in central Canada are  Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North West Territories and Nunavut. 

The location is very hard to access as there are no roads nearby. Back in the 60s, a survey team placed a small aluminium obelisk at the spot. On the top - these words have been imprinted as a warning to Keith Kline, Nurse Pixie, Debra Who Seeks, Jenny O'Hara and other would-be Canadian souvenir hunters: "5 years imprisonment for removal"...

Incubation

 

I have set myself the task of writing a poem about  an escarpment that curls across the moors west of Sheffield. It is a feature that I know very well because I have often walked upon it and taken photographs there. It is called Stanage Edge and in Victorian times it was little visited because it passed through "private" shooting land. Ordinary people did not get to go there.

In the clip above you can see Keira Knightley in "Pride and Prejudice" (2005). She played Elizabeth Bennet and there she is standing precariously on the very edge of Stanage Edge in a state of wistful reverie before visiting Mr Darcy at Pemberley.

As I say, I have taken many pictures of, from and around Stanage Edge as the these old blogposts demonstrate - here, here and here. And here are just four of my Stanage Edge images:-

So yes, I have it in mind to write a poem inspired by Stanage Edge and I am deliberately taking my time about it. Elsewhere, I have written down words and names that I associate with the escarpment and I am letting thoughts and ideas simply stew in my mind.

The poem's direction could be serious or meditative - perhaps peppered with history or it could be light and quite descriptive, celebrating an edge that serves as a getaway playground for walkers, runners, rock climbers and hang glider enthusiasts.

The incubation period will be as long as it takes because  I want to be  personally satisfied with the end result before I publish it here in the blogosphere.  All I know for sure so far is that the title will be "Stanage Edge".

Backtracking

Wood Lane, Legbourne

All that I have got for you today is ten more photographs that I snapped during our family weekend in Lincolnshire two weeks ago with some extra words related to the final picture in this selection.

The beach at Mablethorpe

Sundial at Clayworth. It reads, "Our days on The Earth are as a shadow"

Behind an abandoned house on The Lincolnshire Wolds

Legbourne village scene

Troll in the Land Rover at Legbourne

Legbourne Mill and the mill house

Miscanthus near Little Cawthorpe

Phoebe in the gazebo at Kenwick Park with our lodge behind her

Some words about the last picture. "R.N.L.I" stands for "Royal National Lifeboat Institution". Around the coast of Great Britain there are some 238 lifeboat stations. Staffed by incredible volunteers, their aim is save people's lives when they are in or on the sea and in trouble. One of these stations is at Mablethorpe and there we got to go in to check out their two lifeboats.

I also had a conversation with the leading lifeboatman. One thing that really stands out in my mind about what he said concerned suicide and attempted suicide. It seems that he and his crew have regularly been called out to rescue individuals who have deliberately swum out into the water intent on death.  Quite often those terminal missions are successful and sadly it's dead bodies that the RNLI  retrieve.

In general, the RNLI does not publish figures or details about this aspect of their work for fear of upsetting families or encouraging copycat actions. It is a feature of the service that I had not previously reflected upon. What a sad and tragic way to go!