Michael

As I walked up the beautiful Limb Valley late this very morning, I noticed another walker ahead of me. Gradually, I caught him up and as I slowly overtook him he asked, "How fast are you going?"

I said, "35 mph".

"I'm only doing thirty," he chuckled.

We fell in stride together and started conversing as we walked along. We were both on our way to the hamlet of Ringinglow. And when we reached the place, we both had a notion to go into "The Norfolk Arms" for liquid refreshment. He ordered a pint of bitter while I asked for a pint of orange cordial and soda water with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps (American; chips).

We sat at a spare table together, talking for a further forty minutes.

He was a complete stranger to me as I was to him but we soon learnt a lot about each other and discovered several things we had in common. He said his name was Michael and I told him my name was Neil. Furthermore, jokingly, I informed him that I was heartily sick of meeting men called Michael.

"They are all over the place. My two quizmates are called Michael and so is my oldest nephew. Why couldn't the parents give them different names like Linus  or Archibald? But not bloody Michael!"

Michael laughed. He knew that I was kidding.

We talked about his late wife. Eight years ago, they had been on a walking holiday in north west Scotland and both of them came back with summer colds. Michael's cold quickly cleared up but his wife's cold remained troublesome.

She visited her doctor and was then admitted to hospital. One thing led to another and she finished up on intensive care with a life-threatening respiratory complaint. But sadly, though she was in good hands, there was to be no happy ending. She died and Michael was left on his own.

But eight years on the fellow was chipper, upbeat and sharp. I  very much regret not exchanging contact details. We share a kind of philosophy when it comes to walking and I know that it is a  philosophy that keen walker  Meike Riley in Germany would also subscribe to.

Walking is not just about putting one foot in front of the other. It's about absorbing the natural world around you and letting your thoughts wander where they will. It's not just about physical well-being it's about mental well-being too - working things out, problem-solving, remembering, thinking creatively as you plod the miles.

Before we shook hands and went our separate ways, Michael told me that he will be ninety next year.

He walks every day come rain or shine but still misses his beloved wife. His sixty four year old daughter Sarah and her Liverpudlian husband Kevin have just retired to a big house in North Wales and they want Michael to go over there to live with them. He has told them that he will think about it but first he wants a month's trial.

He said, "I need to check out paths and walking routes over there before I say yes."

I told him that the trial month was a very good idea.

How lovely it was to meet that man. I could have talked with him for hours but the truth is that I will probably never see him again. We were like ships that pass in the night even though our time together was in the middle of the day.

Victory

Nobel Mendy scored the second goal for Hull City on his debut

Regular readers of this humble Yorkshire blog may recall that my football team - Hull City A.F.C. were promoted to The Premier League last season. We won the play-off final against Middlesbrough at Wembley on May 28th.

Well today we played our first match of the new season. It was a home game against the redoubtable Manchester United. You may have heard of them. There are several individual players on Manchester United's books who cost more than Hull City's entire squad. Their top players are paid about £170,000 a week or $232,000 US.

The stadium was packed and in a section that was once occupied by home fans there is now a media facility that accommodated dozens of journalists with their laptops, microphones, producers and cameras. The Premier League is a big deal with interest all over the world. Today's game was watched live in approximately 900 million homes in 126 different countries.

My mate Tony and I had more hope than expectation that we would secure  a draw or even a win against Manchester United but we should have had more faith. Our lads were deservedly two goals up by halftime and that was the final score.

We were as delighted and thrilled as the rest of The Tigers' Tribe. What a way to start the season!

Over in the far corner were three thousand travelling Manchester United fans. How we laughed when the stadium announcer told them that the 15.05 and 17.05 trains back to Manchester had both been cancelled! It was like rubbing salt in their wounds.

Regarding their star-studded team, it was as if they were half-asleep or operating in third gear. But our cut price team of assorted characters from here and there were really up for it, playing like true Tigers with desire and togetherness. Two nil - so brilliant!

It was tonight's headline match on the long-running BBC football highlights  programme, "Match of the Day".

We might be relegated at the end of this season but at least we will have  golden memories of today - City beating Man United in a league match for the first time in fifty two years! Up The Tigers!

Defender Semi Ajayi scored the first goal

Monolith

Four miles west of Bridlington is the village of Rudston. Within its churchyard, there is something quite stupendous. In my judgement, it deserves the label "awesome" when so many things that purport to be awesome are not really awesome at all.

Standing twenty six feet above the ground, it is the tallest standing stone in The British Isles. Furthermore, some experts have concluded that another eighteen to twenty feet of stone lie below ground level. Quite amazing.

Nobody knows for sure how long The Rudston Monolith has stood in that place but it was there many centuries before All Saints Church was built next to it by Normans. Knowledgeable archaeologists have determined that it has probably been in situ for over four thousand years.

Carefully studying the surrounding landscape, others have suggested that the monolith was once central to a pagan cult and that the current church stands on the very ground where there was once some sort of pagan temple.

Early Christians were very cunning that way - commandeering pagan sites in order to win over local inhabitants whose associations with paganism went right back through the mists of time. Normally those early Christians sought to obliterate evidence of previous belief systems that were invariably connected with fertility, water sources, the sun, the moon and the skies above.

However, at Rudston they left the huge stone and probably affixed one of their crosses to the top of it. That might be what saved the monolith.  Another name for a cross is a "rood" and so the village became "Rood-stane" which evolved into the modern name Rudston.

But where did the huge gritstone come from and how was it made to stand upright?  It is estimated that The Rudston Monolith weighs approximately thirty tons. It was probably hauled to Rudston from Cayton Bay - some ten miles away. If that is true, it was an incredible feat but the actual process involved remains unknown and how the stone was made to stand upright is also pure guesswork.

I freely admit that I am enamoured with such places, such ancient evidence of past human life and if I hadn't been with Shirley and Phoebe on our Bridlington mini-break, I would have been doing some proper walking and exploring in the surrounding district. Mind you, there would have been no answers to stumble across - just a tantalising sense of what once was - long, long ago.

Shirley, Phoebe and Lam-Lam by the monolith.

Pictures

Frankly, I have not got the energy to write a proper blogpost tonight. Instead, I am simply sharing a bunch of images from our mini-break in Bridlington. Above a "dire wolf" made entirely of Lego bricks in Sewerby Hall gardens. There was an outdoor Lego exhibition on the theme of extinction. The dire wolf was native to the Americas but became extinct thousands of years ago.

A view of Kilham from Kilham churchyard

Phoebe delivering a sermon from the pulpit in Kilham Church (With Lam-Lam)

The harbour wall at Bridlington, looking to the chalk headland at Flamborough

Pirate ship heading towards Flamborough Head

Where you used to buy your tickets for the pirate ship at Bridlington Harbour

Bridlington seagull on an old cannon

Coastal observatory at Flamborough

Phoebe and Shirley walking to the old foghorn station at Flamborough Head

Seals seen from Flamborough Head with plenty of camera zoom

Pygmy goat in Sewerby Park Zoo

Our cottage at Marton near Bridlington

Bridlington

 

In East Yorkshire, everyone refers to the seaside town of Bridlington as "Brid". The village of my birth was halfway between the city of Hull and Brid so I have had a fairly intimate relationship with the place all my life.

Anyway, tonight we are staying in a little rental cottage just outside Brid and this my friends is a scheduled post that I  prepared on Tuesday evening. Brid is about two hours from Sheffield. We are staying in two-bedroomed Kibbletree Cottage with Phoebe. With my Booking.com "Genius" account I secured a healthy discount.

During school holidays (American: vacations) many grandparents find themselves undertaking a lot of child-minding duties and this week we were earmarked to look after Phoebe for three days in a row so that's why we came up with the idea of a night away at the coast. 

Mind you, rain is in the late summer forecast so no doubt our coastal activities will be affected. Being in rain will be a real novelty for us after two months of drought.

All being well I will be back to normal blogging duties on Thursday night.

Blessed

Sunday afternoon in our garden before  our long hot summer began transitioning into autumn. That picture says everything. It reminds me just how much I am blessed. Reminds me that only a fool would take it for granted.

Life. For any of us it could all have taken a different turn. The crossroads we arrived at. The bullets we dodged. Health issues. Relationships that broke. The choices that we made - not knowing how things might turn out.

Yes. Blessed. It's those people that I really care about. Not politicians. Not musical heroes or favourite writers or ghost people who remain in my memory nor even Hull City's players!

It's always lovely to see Margot and Zach together. Born just nine days apart, they are very much on the same mental wavelength. Their faces light up when they see each other again. To Margot,  Zach is "Zachie-Boy" and he calls her "Margie".

They can both be unco-operative when it comes to having their pictures taken and on Saturday afternoon, Margot was sulking for England - her bottom lip protruding like the keyboard cabinet of on old upright piano. I should have offered her a couple of chocolate buttons. She would have smiled like a Cheshire cat.

They are both Scorpios - not that I believe in any of that astrological nonsense. However, it is frequently said of Scorpios that "they can be stubborn" so maybe there's something in it after all.

Do you feel blessed?

Potatoes

 

These potatoes were grown on an allotment in Blackburn, Lancashire. The variety is "International Kidney". To tell you the truth, I had never heard of that variety before.

I received them this afternoon as a rather special gift from the long married couple who had grown them, a couple I had never met before. They are currently staying in the Peak District village of Foolow which I have mentioned several times before in this humble Yorkshire blog.

The lady is called Christina and her husband's name is Morris. We talked for three hours - both in their tiny rental cottage called "Villager Jim" and in the nearby village pub - "The Black Bull" which for a few years was called "The Lazy Landlord" before reverting back to its traditional name.

Very generously, Christina and Morris paid for my pub lunch and as I know that Christina will be reading this blogpost I want to send out a big public "THANK YOU" both for the potatoes and the lunch. It was so kind of you and quite surprising really as I previously thought that all Lancastrians were mean-spirited. There are, it seems, exceptions to every rule.

And here's the lovely connection with blogging... The only way I "knew" Christina was that she has been visiting this blog for two or three years and has often left kind, intelligent and supportive comments. She is the same when responding to other blogs too.

Today I told her that the only reason I had agreed to meet her in Foolow was her history of leaving pleasant, thoughtful comments. She seemed like a "nice" person and I was right about that. She was!

And so was her husband Morris - lovely people. It was great to get to know two "strangers" and I hope they were not disappointed with the glowering Heathcliff-like Yorkshireman in front of them.

We learnt more about our families, our histories and the things that make us tick and Christina trustingly showed me a phone picture of her much-loved 96 year old father who has had to go into residential care because of a facial cancer that weeps and seeps and threatens his life. All the more tragic because his mental faculties are as sharp as ever.

And so this is what blogging can do - bringing people together in "real" life. To tell you the truth, I am a bit nervous about in person meetings with other bloggers or blog visitors but today's happy occasion proves that such hook ups can be uplifting and good. There are far more well-meaning people in this world than ne'er-do-wells.

Now for three picture, taken outside "The Bull's Head":-

Christina and Walter

Christina and Morris

Christina and The Incredible Hulk