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!

Flipside

Ross Dependency, Antarctica

Ludwigsburger Meike left this comment after my last blogpost:-

Now where does one get when staying on the same invisible 

line, crossing the South Pole and then heading back towards 

the North Pole on the "back" of our beautiful planet?

From The South Pole, we travel over Antarctica's Ross Dependency which is icy, inhospitable territory overseen by New Zealand. Striking north across The Southern Ocean we are well east of New Zealand and we only skirt outlying islands and reefs of the Fiji Group, before passing between the French dependencies of Wallis and Futuna. In fact, the line of longitude, which is by the way, 178.5 degrees East, does not cross any land until it reaches Great Sitkin in the Aleutian Islands before heading straight over eastern Russia's Chukota Peninsula..

Uninhabited Great Sitkin Island in the Aleutian chain.

Then the line crosses the eastern most tip of Wrangel Island which is also a Russian possession. It is famed for its large polar bear population. It has the largest density of polar bear dens on this planet. The island was also the last known haunt of the woolly mammoth. These legendary beasts became extinct on Wrangel Island around four thousand years ago.

Tusk of a woolly mammoth on Wrangel Island

Though the line on the other side of this planet does not cross much land or places of note, we should remember that it traverses the vastness of The Pacific Ocean which is by far the biggest ocean in the world. It still hides many mysteries including undiscovered creatures, unplumbed depths and unpublished human stories.

If you check out your globe - if indeed you have one - it is possible to position it in a manner whereby The Pacific Ocean appears to take up almost  half of the surface of The Earth. It truly is vast - 168,723,000 square kilometres which is double the size of the next largest ocean - The Atlantic.

From Wrangel, it's north to The North Pole and then back over the other side to the coast of Northumberland once again. From there, it's only ninety miles to Sheffield where I am sitting at my keyboard facing south. North of me, on the same line of longitude, Shirley and Phoebe are in the lounge reading a school book which is not titled "Wallis and Futuna". That is the subject of a future blogpost.

Basilica of St Peter, Futuna

Longitude

The North Pole

When we were in Louth, I spotted a plaque on a wall in the town centre with a steel line reaching to it across the pavement. I was standing on the Prime Meridian line upon which Greenwich Mean Time was devised down in London. It was adopted internationally as recently as 1884.

Anyway, Sheffield is located seventy five miles west of the line. Our longitude position is about 1.5°W. Louth and Greenwich are of course located at 0.0°.

Some regular visitors may recall that I recently painted the word "WEST" on our garden wall. In a follow-up post I tracked the places that sit on the same line of latitude as Sheffield. They included Edmonton, Alberta in Canada - home to blogger Nurse Pixie - the author of "My Life So Far".

So following on from that, using an idea suggested by Tasker Dunham, I wondered what places might sit on our line of longitude. Of course that invisible line begins at The North Pole and heads south across the cold stormy waters of The North Atlantic and The North Sea.

Durham Cathedral

It first crosses land on the English coast of Northumberland before heading to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and down to Durham. Then it enters The People's Republic of Yorkshire, crossing Leeds before Sheffield, then down to Coventry and Oxford with its dreaming spires.

Pamplona, Spain

Over The English Channel and into western France where the only major city that is crossed is Nantes. Then onwards - over The Pyrenees and into Spain - crossing the city of Pamplona. On to The Mediterranean and down to Algeria where our uniting line of longitude passes over the town of Maghnia.

Maghnia, Algeria

Kumasi, Ghana

Down to the Gao region of Mali and into Burkina Faso near Poedogo. Ever southward to Ghana where the line crosses Kumasi. Then leaving the coast of Africa, 1.5°W heads out across The South Atlantic. It does not pass over any islands that I can detect.

The next time the line meets land again is in Antarctica, at an area known as Queen Maud Land which is Norwegian territory. It would surely make a great holiday destination. See below:-

Queen Maud Mountains

Sunday

Rivelin Valley view showing the water treatment works

Well, it was little Margot's second birthday today. She shares November 2nd with the legendary blogger - Steve Reed  - and I guess a few million other people. She wasn't feeling too well as last week ended - perhaps it was COVID - so celebrations were low key. For instance, she did not go out to a fancy  steak restaurant in London's Docklands to spend a king's ransom - like the aforementioned Steve Reed.

For once, it was not down to me to prepare the Sunday dinner. Instead Stew was doing it to mark Margot's birthday. This meant I had some free time and co-incidentally, I needed a good long stroll so I drove over to the Lodge Moor suburb to the west of this illustrious city and parked Butch - the new car.

Path above The Rivelin Valley. It skirts Hallam Golf Course.

I had a circular walk  worked out and the weather was good. It was typically autumn with the leaves of deciduous trees revealing an array of vivid colours that ranged from red to green to burnished gold and bright yellow.

By one path, I watched a small moth secrete itself  amongst beech leaves that were the exact same colour as its wings and I again passed the sad  memorial bench that pays homage Sheffield's only 9/11 fatality - Nigel Bruce Thompson. Then I descended to the woody dell that contains Blackbrook stream where the rebellious Sheffield poet Ebenezer Elliot would often sit and ponder.

Soon I was heading across Hallam Golf Course watching out for flying balls and listening for cries of "Fore!" before  heading down Crimicar Lane. I passed "The Shiny Sheff" pub that was named after the battleship H.M.S. Sheffield. Nearby, I noticed the old gates to a former isolation hospital that closed in 1956. Through walking, one can often notice things like that that you simply miss when driving a car.