Suburbia

Sheffield's southwestern suburbs sprawl towards The Peak District and the rural lanes of northern Derbyshire. Within ten minutes of our house, Clint can whisk me to the starting points of several  circular suburban walking routes that I have worked out over the years.

Yesterday morning, I  got out for one such walk before I had to set to preparing the family Sunday dinner.

I parked at the end of Totley Hall Lane. Clint said, "Don't be long!" and indeed I wasn't. The walk only took eighty minutes but it was good to get out with my boots on. I was  once again experiencing the wonder of two legged motion that most of us take for granted. Looking back through this blog I note that I began a similar walk from the same spot back in March 2018.

In the image at the top of this blogpost, you can see Gillifield Wood  with the pleasant suburb of Totley beyond and beyond that the Peak District hills. Through Gillifield Wood runs a stream called Totley Brook which in this district has long marked the boundary between Derbyshire and The West Riding of Yorkshire.

In the picture below, I haven't ambled far from the viewpoint of the previous photo. I was standing close to Woodthorpe Hall which Frances and Stewart considered as a wedding venue back in the summer of 2019 but in the end they made a much better choice. 

If interested, here's the Woodthorpe Hall website. If the truth be known, you don't get much for your money there. You don't get to use the old hall itself and you have to pay extra for the erection of a wedding marquee. This isn't made clear in the promotional  text.

Rhiannon

Mick and I won the pub quiz up at "The Hammer and Pincers" tonight. Just the two of us. It's nice when things come together and hunches work out. In "guess the year" I knew that Cruise missiles first came to Greenham Common in England before our Ian was born. I drove down to Winchester to attend the wedding of my friend Jock and his lady - Sally. I stopped at Greenham Common to tie one of my father's old handkerchiefs to the wire fencing. I had drawn  on it in permanent marker the "Ban the Bomb" peace symbol: ☮. The year was 1983.

Riding home on the Number 88 bus I heard the voice of Stevie Nicks playing in my head - a voice that was and remains very evocative. It speaks of vulnerability and tenderness and simply being human. I suspect we all hear old songs in our heads in idle moments. They rise to the surface like fish and we listen to them all over again. Sometimes they just play in the background - rather like radio music in a taxi cab.

Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night

And wouldn't you love to love her?

Takes to the sky like a bird in flight

And who will be her lover?

All your life you've never seen

Woman taken by the wind

Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

Will you ever win?

Albert

Remember my old chum Bert? He has been in hospital for three weeks now. I went to see him again this very afternoon.

He's quite confused and hardly thriving in the hospital environment. He doesn't seem to know what day it is and as for his treatment or any future plans, it is hardly worth asking him. You would get more sense out of a bowl of fruit.

With regard to his hip fracture he has been standing up and has made some steps with the aid of a walking frame and a physiotherapist. In addition to this issue, he has had a pacemaker fitted because, as I understand it, he may have collapsed in his kitchen because of an irregular heart rhythm.

Will Bert ever get back to his terraced house ten minutes down the road from me?  There's a steep staircase and of course his bedroom and sole bathroom are both up those stairs. I understand that the hospital might put him in a residential home temporarily so that he can improve his mobility but I fear that he is on a downward slope and may never get back to independent living.

Not so long ago he was a sharp, well-built little fellow with his wits about him. Now he is looking frail and thin. He's also very forgetful. The rapidity of the decline has been astonishing. I am in contact with both his ex-wife and his youngest son now.

Today I took him a packet of McVities dark chocolate digestive biscuits, a can of Pepsi Cola, a carton of rice pudding and a colouring book for adults. I was going to say an adult colouring book but that might have suggested X-rated images. I also took him some pencil crayons but I very much doubt that he will tackle even one of those pictures. 

At English hospitals, visitors have to pay to park their cars. I  had to pay £2.80 for four hours even though I knew I would only be visiting Bert for around an hour. In the car park I saw a young driver heading for the pay machine...

ME Are you going to buy a parking ticket?

HIM Yes I am.

ME You can have my ticket  if you like. It's got three hours left on it.

HIM (Pause) No you are all right buddy, I'll get my own.

ME Suit yourself then if you prefer to waste your money.

Perhaps I should also have said, "And don't call me buddy!" I hate being addressed that way. Like "mate" and "bro", the term "buddy" has crept into modern English usage in the last decade. Somebody who uses it doesn't really deserve a free parking ticket in my opinion. The young man may also be suspicious of acts of kindness from strangers. Stranger danger and all that.

Representations

Playing around with Microsoft Image Creator, I put in the titles of some of my favourite blogs along with a simple further instruction. Take the image above for example - here I added  "in the style of Grant Wood". Can you tell which blog it represents? Answers at the bottom of this post.

For this one I added "in the style of Maud Lewis":-

This one is "in the style of Beryl Cook":-

This one is "in the style of Frida Kahlo":-

This one is "in the style of Rembrandt":-

And finally, this one is simply "as an acrylic painting":-

Which blogs were they?

(a) "Bless Our Hearts"  (b)"Hiawatha House"  (c) "From My Mental Library"

(d) "Oddball Observations" (e) "Going Gently" (f) "I Should Be Laughing"

Phones

King Canute trying to turn back the tide

In the first two thirds of my career in secondary or high school teaching, none of my pupils had mobile phones. However, in the last ten years that changed. Phones were creeping in. My school made a policy that if youngsters were caught using mobile phones in classrooms then teachers should confiscate them.

It was perhaps twenty five years ago when I was teaching a Year 8 class one morning. I was speaking to them from the front when I heard a mobile phone go off in somebody's bag. Of course this interrupted my talk and everybody's attention was diverted.

A girl in the middle of the room took the phone from her bag and began to answer the call. I stood in front of her and said, "Give me that phone now please!". The girl refused and said, "It might be important. It's my mum!" And I said, "I don't care who's calling just give me that phone now!" With great reluctance and with the eyes of her classmates watching, she handed over the phone and was soon blubbering in her seat.

Later the mother contacted the school to complain that I had confiscated the phone and her daughter had been upset by the incident.

In a senior staff meeting a few weeks later, I argued that mobile phones were insidious in classrooms and needed to be stopped. The way that one or two of the other participants responded made it clear that they did not share my opinion. Perhaps they thought I was becoming an old fuddy duddy and needed to catch up with modern times.

Since those early days, mobile phones and smartphones have caused many unwelcome incidents and concerns within schools, including:-

• deliberately winding up teachers in order to film them having angry outbursts
• messaging other pupils in threatening ways (i.e. bullying)
• calling unsavoury outside characters to enter the school with a view to meting out punishment
• up-skirting photography and making other imagery of a sexual nature
• cheating during tests and exams
• simple distraction - checking out social media etc. instead of paying attention to teaching and learning.
• losing expensive phones or having them snatched by other pupils

I am sure that my list is not exhaustive.

Of course the horse bolted long ago but I was delighted yesterday to read this headline:-

It has taken the thinking world and educational strategists far too long to recognise that mobile phones are not entirely wholesome or desirable in secondary school classrooms. The damage they cause far outweighs any potential benefits.

Troubled schools might try some sort of storage system whereby pupils' phones are dropped off in a secure facility in the morning and retrieved at the end of the school day.

I would also say that phone restrictions should impact on teaching staff and visiting inspectors too. Sometimes you have got to lead by example.

Binged

The actor Éanna Hardwicke and the real Ben Field (right).

Is it possible to "binge watch" a television drama that consists of just four episodes? I am not sure. Anyway if it is possible, I just binge-watched a gripping drama called "The Sixth Commandment" - courtesy of our wonderful BBC.

It was the dramatisation of a real life murder story. The victim was a retired English teacher called Peter Farquhar. He was murdered at his home in Buckinghamshire in 2015 by one of his students - Ben Field.

This wasn't a simple common or garden murder, it involved great cunning and planning and chilling psychological elements of control, exploitation and cruelty. It is also believed that Field murdered one of Peter Farquhar's neighbours - a retired primary school headteacher called Ann Moore-Martin. However, there was insufficient evidence of this to convince the trial jury in Oxford in 2019.

Of course I could easily rabbit on about the plot and bore you to tears but I would rather just say that "The Sixth Commandment" was probably the best show I have seen on television this year. Thoroughly entertaining and rather disturbing too.

It did not give in to sensationalism. The four episodes were subtly constructed  and the characters were given depth. A real sense of place was developed. The police enquiry was not slated. It was shown to be thorough, sensitive and professional like the dedicated officers involved.

Dominating the drama is the charismatic figure of Ben Field played quite brilliantly by the Irish actor  Éanna Hardwicke. I wouldn't wish to meet him down a dark alleyway - I can tell you. There were other outstanding performances by Timothy Spall as Peter Farquhar, Anne Reid as Ann Moore-Martin and Annabel Scholey as Anne-Marie - Miss Moore-Martin's beloved niece.

Directed by Saul Dibbs and based upon a book by Sarah Phelps, "The Sixth Commandment" shows what is possible in TV drama when talented teams of actors supported by dedicated film crews and support staff come together on suitably funded missions they believe in.

You will be pleased to know that Ben Field was sentenced to life imprisonment in October 2019 with a recommendation that he should serve at least thirty six years.

Pronunciation

I believe that the film "Our Souls at Night" came out in 2016. Starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda it  was a light-hearted suburban feel-good romp with many comical moments. If you want to know more about it  you can search on Google. You might even have watched it.

Over here in England, for reasons I could not at first understand, the title of the film caused much amusement. I remember that chat show host Graham Norton tittering about it during his interview with Jane Fonda. She looked as non-plussed as I felt.  What was so funny?

Here in Yorkshire we pronounce our vowels clearly. Let us focus on the first word of the title. If someone accidentally hit you with a cricket bat you would probably shout out "Ow!" not "Ah!". Taking the "Ow!" that's how Yorkshire folk would pronounce the first part of "Our". In contrast posh southerners in the London area would say "Ahr".

Southerners have similar difficulties in pronouncing "flower" and "tower" for example. The way they say "tower" is almost  exactly the same as  the "tar" that you find on the surface of  paved roads. Anyway, when reading this film title aloud  they would say  "Arseholes at Night". It's no wonder that up here in Yorkshire we did not get the joke.

A film about arseholes in the night would not appeal to me but I guess that some visitors to this corner of The Blogosphere  (mentioning no names) would be gripped by it.

By the way, as well as having a literal meaning that involves buttocks, hairs and pimples , an "arsehole" can be a certain type of obnoxious human being - as with the American word "asshole". Examples of "arseholes" are trolls who patrol Blogworld, spammers,  Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage and Elon Musk.

Finally, Robert Redford and Jane Fonda are definitely not arseholes in my humble opinion. They have made some great films and in addition to that have both done a lot of good in the world.  She is now 85 years old and he is 86.

Illustrating

Some of you may recall that for quite a few years I have been contributing photographs to a British photo-mapping site called Geograph. In total, I have contributed over seventeen thousand five hundred pictures. The site itself has received 7.5 million images from 13,761 contributors. I am just a small fish in a large pond.

Now when you submit your photos to Geograph, you do so on the understanding that your images will be available for others to use as long as copyright is always acknowledged. Many organisations such as news services or publishers have come to view Geograph as an incredible free resource.

Let's say you need a picture of a particular village to illustrate a news report about a fire or a car accident. All you need to do is go to Geograph and press "Search". No need to send a photographer. Or maybe you are writing a book about English cathedrals and you need photo-illustrations. There's no need to drive up and down our motorways because you can find the pictures on Geograph. Free to use.

Several of my pictures have been used by others including the BBC News website. Though no payment is received, it gives me a bit of a buzz to find my images being used elsewhere. Here's just a small sample of my BBC pictures....

From January of this year, a picture I took of the island of Little Ross in South West Scotland - "Holiday homes plan for lighthouse murder island near Kirkcudbright":-

From November 2022, a picture I took on The Isle of Man back in 2016 -  "Onchan: Man dies in Mountain Road crash":- 

From February 2022 a picture I took in the centre of Boston Lincolnshire during the Year of The Plague (2020) -  "Boston to get £3.9m facelift to attract shoppers and tourists":-

And from December of last year a picture I snapped when walking past a South Yorkshire prison in 2020 -  "HMP Lindholme inmates placed orders for drugs, court hears":-

My picture below of The Royal Dart Yacht Club in Devon was used to illustrate a story in an online magazine called "Yachts and Yachting":-

⦿

Top photo of Grindslow Knoll on The Kinder Plateau used by an online outdoor magazine called "Grough" to illustrate this story: "Lost Kinder Scout walkers rescued by Buxton team members on training exercise".

Extracts

Simon was twenty three years old when he went off the rails and hastened my father's death. I am absolutely certain that his strange mental state  was exacerbated by habitual cannabis use. Amongst the thing he left behind, I discovered six pages of writing he had drafted about that painful time in the summer of 1979. Those words have helped me to better understand both what happened and indeed Simon's mental health at that time.  Here are four  extracts...

⦿

Simon writing about his arrest in the Bridlington pub:-

"I may have been out of my mind. I still believe I was closer to myself than for a long time.I was happy but nervous which prevented me from sleeping..."

"My parents came in the evening and took me home. They were beside themselves. So many mixed up feelings. There was grave sadness, incomprehension, fear of me, disgust? And I was seemingly unconcerned about the whole business at all. I wanted my belongings to be left in that pub but my mother just wanted to get away from that town. The journey home brimmed with feeling. I insisted on being dropped off at the local for a drink. My father did this. They must have told Brian what had happened for he came and sat by me, drinking lager."

A few days later in Scarborough:-

"I wandered around the castle walls, a Bible under my coat and a black-tipped feather in my hair. The ancient temple. I was barefoot in that early morning. I smeared my face with the sandstone mud. My guts ached for I had yet another hangover. I came down the hill and had tea and a scone by the shore."

Before being sectioned under The Mental Health Act:-

"My brother said I should see the psychiatrist. He was wrong. They all were. I stormed off on a long hike to the river and back again. A social worker called Cherry came and she was very fair. I saw the psychiatrist. She had a young protege with her I became nervous when they came. The asked me: What do we mean when we say you shouldn't throw stones at a glass house? Like a fool I tried to answer and got muddled and anxious and that was that. They said - You've now got to go into hospital under a section. You are dangerous but I never really thought so. It was their thinking that I was crazy that really narked me."

In the mental hospital:-

"One day Nurse B called me in the foyer and said something like - "Your father has had to be taken into hospital - it isn't serious". I could have cried for I knew that my father's weak old heart would be under strain in those days. They let him out after two weeks and I was let out a week after that for the weekend."

⦿

There were more painful extracts I might have lifted from those pages but I decided to suppress them. Simon did  not choose to become the man he was. It just happened -  with the assistance of cannabis of course. Twenty eight years after my father's premature death, my mother died too and once again Simon had played a big part in her demise. She had become afraid of him and yet supported him to the end of her life. I don't think he ever really knew what hurt he had caused. He was a hard brother to love.

1979

The summer of 1979 was significant in the history of my immediate family. Things of consequence happened before my father died at the age of sixty five on September 14th. He had been retired for just one year.

He had suffered from angina for a couple of years and took prescribed blood thinning tablets but otherwise he enjoyed good health. The number one worry in his life was my brother Simon and how things were turning out for him. He was often nasty and aggressive to both of my parents and some of his behaviour was just plain weird.

In July, the day after my second teaching year finished in South Yorkshire, I headed home to East Yorkshire. My father kindly came to Paragon Station in Hull to pick me up. He was looking pasty and sad and he said he had something he wanted to talk to me about. We stopped at "The Duke of York" pub in the village of Skirlaugh and bought two beers.

Dad said that Simon had been arrested in a pub in Bridlington the night before and was still in police custody. Someone had seen him rolling up a joint at the bar and then smoking it. They had in effect shopped him. Dad was suffering from a range of conflicting emotions including increased worry about where Simon's life was leading and self-recrimination for somehow failing his youngest son. In truth, the arrest did not come as a surprise to any of us.

That night Dad suffered his first major heart attack and was whisked by ambulance to a hospital in Hull. Luckily he survived. The following Monday the magistrates court in Bridlington "sectioned" Simon - putting him in a local mental hospital for I believe two weeks for assessments.

I went to visit both of them in their separate hospitals.

Dad came home after a few days with more heavy duty medication while Simon still languished in an austere Victorian building that  had once been called a lunatic asylum.

My other two brothers were now around to give practical support and so with my father's blessing I headed off to the island of Rhodes for a delayed two week holiday. I was supposed to go the day after the heart attack  but had cancelled my flight.

One Sunday while I was away and Dad was  recuperating, a bare-chested and wild-eyed Simon arrived back at the family home with his face and torso deliberately smeared with mud  and bird feathers in his hair. He had been in touch with God and had visited places in North Yorkshire that he believed to be associated with family ancestors.

It was a very disturbing episode as witnessed by my mother and father, my older brother and his former wife and two of my parents' best friends who happened to be visiting that day. 

Two weeks later we were into September and I received a phone message through my school to say that Dad had had another heart attack and was once again in hospital. It was a Friday and after arriving in Hull by train but before carrying on to the family home, I went to the hospital to see him. He was heavily medicated but it was clear that this second attack had taken a lot out of him. He just wasn't himself.

He died the following morning and I drove my mother to the hospital to see him. Behind the green hospital bed curtains she fell apart and I left her with him for a few minutes  believing that my presence might be an intrusion. They had been through a lot together and were in love till the end.

Vale!

Tony Bennett 1926-2023

Oh, the good life, full of fun seems to be the ideal

Mm, the good life lets you hide all the sadness you feel

You won't really fall in love for you can't take the chance

So please be honest with yourself, don't try to fake romance

It's the good life to be free and explore the unknown

Like the heartaches when you learn you must face them alone

Please remember I still want you, and in case you wonder why

Well, just wake up, kiss the good life goodbye

And here's the original....

Melonhead

In the hills of Yorkshire and Derbyshire, I often come across old stone gateposts like this one. Soon I am wondering about who hewed it and when. I am thinking about the men who manoeuvred it into position and how they talked to each other. What were their values? How far were their horizons? Of course I will never know - I can only imagine.

Weatherwise, July has been very unsettled here in England but today a dry day with some sunshine was promised so I planned a walk east of the village of Holme up in the Kirklees district of West Yorkshire. I was last in that neighbourhood in September 2020.

Above, I was walking along a track to Yateholme Reservoir when I spotted this photo opportunity.  Deep pink blooming willow herb with the village of Holme beyond. Below, I was looking down on Ramsden Reservoir. There are several small reservoirs in this district - saving water for the populous West Yorkshire region. You can see that the reservoir is only half full.

By Brownhill Reservoir, I stopped to admire somebody's creative handiwork A planter in the shape of a swan has been fashioned using three old tyres. I don't think I have seen such a thing before. The world is filled with old tyres and perhaps more of them could be used in this way.

Below, specially for Ms Moon, a picture of a mama sheep and a lamb born earlier this year. In the background you can see Emley Moor TV mast - the tallest free standing structure on this island and the 25th tallest tower in the world.

It was at this curious gate that tragedy almost struck when I stopped to snap the picture. Halfway down the hill I realised that I did not have my precious hat with me. It is a cheap bucket hat that I bought in Malta a decade ago. It is precious because I have an unusually large head - the size of a water melon - and so I can never find hats that will fit me. 

I decided to trudge back up the hill, telling myself that I had a 50/50 chance of finding my hat and there it was lying on the path near that gate. The smile that split my face in two suggested that I might have just won a million pounds on The National Lottery.

It was a lovely walk but I was zonked out at the end. Use it or lose it as they say.

Anniversary

It is exactly one year since my brother Simon died in Dove House Hospice, Hull. July 19th 2022 was the hottest day of the year in England but Simon was cool in the windowless Princess Diana Suite. He had been taken there by ambulance the previous Friday and whether or not it was caused naturally or by the administration of end-of-life medication, he very soon entered a nether state of apparent unconsciousness.

Shirley and I saw him the following day and he was more or less unresponsive but when I tried to ply him with water, his lips moved and he bared his teeth. He seemed to want it. Before we left I stroked his hair as I softly sang, "Are you going to Scarborough Fair?"

The following Tuesday, having never regained consciousness, he had gone off to Scarborough Fair. A lovely nurse phoned me and explained the minute details of his passing. It was so kind and her compassion and dedication came a-humming right down the telephone line. He had died in good hands.

At death, Simon was more or less a skeleton. He hadn't eaten properly in months. He just couldn't do it and the nutritional drinks he was prescribed made little difference. He had cancer in both his trachea and his oesophagus. It is unlikely that he will ever be recorded as yet another tragic victim of tobacco smoking but when all is said and done - that is what severely shortened his life. Fifty years of smoking.

In the days that followed, Shirley and I worked like Trojans to clear his humble rented cottage. We tried to be ruthless but in the end we brought some of his stuff home and as I sit in this study typing, I still look down to my left at two boxes  of rescued remnants.

I have tried several times to deal with it but most of it ends up back in the boxes. I just can't bring myself to cast it out. It's not all about Simon - it's about the rest of my birth family too. Old Bibles that belonged to my father and to my maternal great grandfather. Fading photographs - some of them in frames. Sports badges, certificates, birthday cards, Paul's rowing cap, newspaper clippings, a baton, a brass crab and so on. It's like the flotsam that washed up on the shore after my family's boat had been wrecked in a storm. Only Robin - my brother in France - and I managed to swim to the the beach.

Amongst those rescued things, I found six untitled pages of Simon's handwriting - jotted down in the summer of 1979 - the year that our father died. There were periods of Simon's life that were very difficult and that was one of them. I am not in the mood for relating the contents of that writing just now. Maybe tomorrow or maybe another day.

I put in an order for his gravestone weeks ago - following his instructions. It will be very simple - a Norman shaped slab of Yorkshire sandstone with only his name  and 1956-2022 carved upon it. It will be a hundred yards from where he was born and a hundred yards from his rented cottage. I am not expecting the stone to be in place until October.

Four brothers with Simon in the middle - 1958

Imagery

 

Some time yesterday evening, this blog's recorded hits surpassed the three million figure. Thanks to everyone who has called by here apart from Russian bots, trolls and spammers. Special thanks to regular visitors who have stuck with me for years. You know who you are. Your loyalty is most endearing and I am grateful for it. It puts fuel in my tank that's for sure.

To celebrate this moment in history, I am sharing two AI images I have recently made with Microsoft Image Creator. At the top that's "man with a Yorkshire Pudding head" and below  - that's simply "iceberg on fire"...

And while we are thinking about strange images, here's another one. It was passed to me by Ed in Iowa - the author of "Riverbend Journal". One of Ed's relations posted the picture on Facebook. However, Ed was rather bashful about sharing the bell pepper picture image on his blog.   In contrast, posting it has proved no problem to me. It reminds me of something but for the life of me  I can't remember what.

Homosexuality

I didn't know there was such a thing as homosexuality until I was twelve years old. Growing up in an East Yorkshire village, nobody had ever spoken to me about homosexuality and if there were any gay people in the village, I was certainly not aware of them.

In those days the term "gay" had everything to do with happy summer days, Enid Blyton adventures and light-heartedness. for it had not yet been adopted as an alternative name by the very well-hidden  homosexual community. No television or radio programmes ever referred to gayness and as far as I knew there were no gay characters in the books I read.

Given this context, it was perhaps no surprise that later on I  became somewhat homophobic. I was quite  disgusted by it all and occasionally shared schoolboy tales of what we imagined  gay men did together. Because of our  ignorance there was much smutty laughter. Probably, the worst insults for other boys were "pufta" and "shirtlifter".

I loved girls and I loved women and I could not imagine any other kind of loving. I didn't have a single gay friend at university or through my teaching career and when I come to think about it, I don't believe I really got to properly know a gay man until I was in my sixties. That's when Steve became a regular at our local pub and I would often converse with him though interestingly the topic of his sexuality and LGBQT+ battles  very rarely cropped up. We were more likely to talk about his singing or my country walks.

It's still a little strange to me that through blogging I have got to know several gay men. There's Andrew in Melbourne Australia, Bob in South Carolina, Travel Penguin in Washington D.C., John Gray in North Wales and  Steve Reed in West London. For whatever reason, it seems that blogging is a medium that many gay men are drawn to.

The aforementioned men have taught me a few lessons  - the first one being that each gay man is different from the next. They are not all the same. Another important lesson they have taught me is that private sexuality does not define someone. As in the heterosexual world, sex is just one facet of somebody's life. There's a lot more to be said - about gardens, dogs, holidays, books, trams, journeys, politics, the arts, childhood memories, food, friends, current affairs and so on and so on.

To those particular men and to the other gay people I have encountered through blogging, I just want to say a massive "Thank You". You have educated me and diminished my homophobia - like tackling a cancer with laser beams, reducing it to the size of a frozen pea. Other people's lives matter - black people's lives. women's lives, the lives of the disabled, African lives, the lives of those who live in poverty and now at last I recognise that this also applies to LGBTQ+ lives. I am just sorry that I took so long to get here.

Tiddlers

In the middle  - that's Phoebe enjoying bathtime in Marbella, Spain with her two little playmates. Because of the nature of the world that we live in, I am not allowed to name the other two little children nor to give any clues as to where they might reside. They are all two years old. Let's say that the curly headed little boy on the left is called Gandalf and the little girl on the right is called Esmeralda and they live in  Narnia. I love that picture. They have been having a happy time in the posh villa in Marbella spending a great amount of time in the swimming pool. As you can see, their respective parents have been pretty diligent about protecting their skin during a time of searing heat.

Below - evidence of what I did with one of the conjoined courgettes. I know that one or two of you were interested  in how the twin plants were connected. After slicing them, I brushed the slices with olive oil and seasoned with pepper, salt and dry basil. Then I put them on an oven tray before roasting for twenty minutes in the oven - turning  once.

Just a reminder to self - today was the day that Shirley and I went up to "The Sportsman" at Lodge Moor on the edge of the city for Sunday lunch. It was as good as it was twenty years ago - all home cooking. That's so hard to find in pubs these days. Usually there's a sense that frozen or ready-made elements are present but not so at "The Sportsman". Delicious and I even left some beef as I had been given too much at the carvery counter. For me that is unheard of.

I came home to watch the Wimbledon men's singles final on TV, not imagining that I would spend five hours on our sofa  but I enjoyed all of the twists and turns and ups and downs and in the end I was happy that the young Spaniard - Carlos Alcaraz had won. It was a fantastic battle.

Elsie

That's Elsie Allcock that is. She is 105 years old. I stumbled across her story on the BBC News site where they sometimes squeeze in feel good human tales.to counterbalance all the usual gloom and doom that news services are obliged to pump out.

Being 105 is  not in itself a huge deal any more. What is special about Elsie is that she was born in the very same house where she still resides in the former coal mining village of Huthwaite in Nottinghamshire. Her two-bedroomed house on Barker Street is pretty humble.  It's the one right next to the white house...

So many people live restless lives of aspiration - wanting more than they have got. However, that was never the case with Elsie Allcock. She had everything she could ever want in her little house in a back street of a very ordinary post-industrial village in the middle of England. As she said in a different video. "Why should I move somewhere else? I have always been happy here."

Perhaps there's a lesson there for all of us.

I acquired the video below from the BBC News website and I have a feeling that it might not work for aliens living in foreign lands like America, Canada, Australia, Germany and The Isle of Man. If that turns out to be the case, let me know and I'll replace it with a different video about Elsie  that aliens can access.

Conjoinment

I have been growing courgettes for the past forty years. I understand that Italians, Americans and Australians use the term "zucchini"  but here in Great Britain we side with the French. To us they are "courgettes".

Once established, they are pretty easy plants to grow and in a good year they will keep on fruiting for a few weeks as a succession of trumpeting yellow flowers summon bees and other pollinators.

Until this summer, I have never spotted conjoined courgettes. They have always been single specimens. But this year - on different plants - I have managed to produce two sets of Siamese courgettes. I had no idea that this was even possible.

As you know, the camera never lies, and after picking the twins this very evening, I decided to photograph them for you and for posterity too.

Visit

He was lying there by the window in a four bed bay on Huntsman 5 Ward at The Northern General Hospital. He was wearing hospital pyjamas with a small repeating word pattern: "Property of the NHS". I noticed that two of the other old men in the room were wearing the same. The fourth man was sitting up in a high chair next to his bed. He was wearing a white T-shirt and khaki coloured shorts. The fifth person in the room - apart from me - was an African nurse in a lilac coloured uniform.

I brought Bert a "Get Well Soon" card and a carton of seedless grapes that I had picked up at the local Co-op store. Isn't that what you are meant to bring hospital patients? Grapes. It always used to be the case.

At first all seemed fine - a continuation  of our lunch conversation at the Hungry Horse pub last week but gradually I realised that something was amiss.

Above the bed were ceiling panels and several light boxes plus curtain runners.

"Can you see them?"

"See what?"

"Those clouds in them boxes. Can you see them moving?"

"No I can't see a thing Bert."

"You must be able to see them. Can you see them webs then?"

"No I'm afraid not."

"They can bring those things down you know? They can lower the roof to flood this place. They've just got to pull that red cord."

It was getting weird and it struck me that Bert's head was all over the place. He didn't know if he had had an operation or not. He thought he would be getting out of hospital tomorrow. He implied that the staff were conspiring against him. He didn't know what day or time it was. This was a different Bert from the one I saw last week.

He pulled his bed sheet across and tried to show me the site of his hip injury even though I had just told him that I didn't want to see it.

Though his eyesight is quite good for a man in his 87th year, he still needs to wear spectacles for everyday use but there were none on his bedside table nor in his locker. It struck me that he was lying there in a hazy world - still sometimes unsure of what he was doing there and lurching between clear-sightedness, confusion and fantasy.

After twenty minutes I wanted to get the hell out of there and I was saved by the arrival of Bert's youngest son and his ex-wife Pat.

"Right I'm off now Bert. I'll leave you with your family. I hope you are home again soon. Take care!"

"Thanks Neil. Thanks for coming."

And I drove Clint back across the city at the very time that schoolchildren were pouring out of their various schools causing a consequent growth in traffic. Crawling along,  I felt sad to think that Bert will never get back to where he was before Christmas - thrice a week walking up to the pub he has visited regularly for sixty years and walking home again after four or five pints of Tetley's bitter. The wheel has turned and where he is at now, it feels like the beginning of the end. I hope I am wrong.

Bulletin

I have had a bit of a cold this week and as well as not wanting to do much, I have been sleeping more than usual. However, I am over the worst of it now. It's not been too bad.

On Monday, I received a phone call from Bert's ex-wife Patricia. He had had a bad fall in his kitchen that very morning and had been rushed to hospital in an ambulance with blue lights flashing. He's still in hospital now and it seems that he has broken one of his hips.

I don't know the full details or how serious the fracture is but I worry for him. Assuming he does get back home, his confidence will be shot. He will struggle to get up the steep staircase in his terraced house to get to bed and to use the bathroom. I know from past experience that an accident like this can change an older person's life forever. Before you know it, your independence is history.

Naturally, I am happy that I took him out for lunch last week. What with painting the rendering on our house, visiting London  and holidaying in Sicily, the gap since our previous lunch rendezvous had been too long. Right now I would be feeling very regretful indeed if I hadn't taken him out. He was in great form that day.

In other Yorkshire Pudding news, Little Phoebe and her parents are flying to southern Spain in the morning. Frances's old boss bought a five bedroom villa in Marbella earlier this year and he's letting them have a week in that villa for nothing along with friends and Ian and Sarah too. Shirley and I could have gone as well but we decided against it. Perhaps some other time.

Meanwhile here in Sheffield where the summer weather has become pretty unsettled, I should be taking delivery of thirty three brand new decking boards tomorrow. Each of them will be 4.2 metres long and with delivery charges they have cost me £400 (US $520). I may not start on the lower decking renovation straight away but at least I will have the boards here ready for the task ahead. It doesn't seem like twenty years since we had the decking professionally installed. Twenty years ahead and I will not be here.

Peanuts

I love peanuts but I have never seen a peanut plant growing and I have certainly never consciously observed a field of peanuts. I love roasted peanuts, monkey nuts in their shells, chocolate coated peanuts, satay sauce, peanut butter, peanut oil. Given half a chance I would become a peanut addict but I have trained myself not to pop bags of peanuts in my trolley each time I go to the supermarket. I understand that they are quite fattening so I view them as a guilty pleasure to only be enjoyed once in a while.

Peanuts originated in South America in the north western region of that continent. There is evidence of their consumption in that area - going back over 7500 years. The Spanish conquistadors brought peanuts back to Europe in the sixteenth century  and now they are grown widely in sub-tropical zones across the world. The biggest commercial harvests are grown in China and India followed by Nigeria (4.5 million tonnes per year) and the USA (2.8 million tonnes per year),

The plant itself is quite unusual. Amidst the greenery of a healthy knee-high plant grow yellow flowers which will wither, leaving behind buds known as pegs in America. Ultimately. they send out thin descending shoots to the soil below and that's where clusters of peanuts start to form. In fact they are not really nuts at all - they belong to the legume family.

I think we should know as much as we can about the things we eat - where it is grown or how it is raised. Excessive use of pesticides and fertilisers, irrigation systems, farm workers' involvement, transport etc..

Almost fifty years ago I spent three weeks picking raspberries by The Cromarty Firth in Scotland . In a weedy field by the campsite I found potatoes growing so I picked some to boil on my camping stove. Ore day a Londoner asked me where I was getting the potatoes from. I said, "That field over there!" and he said, "Yes, but where are they?"

I took him over to the field, located a potato plant and slowly yanked it out of the earth with its creamy white spuds still attached. The Londoner's eyes widened with amazement. He had never seen a potato plant before and he had no idea that the tubers grew like that. That memory has always stuck with me - the idea that someone might eat potatoes most days and yet not know anything about how they grew.

Delivery

When I was a boy, the following things were delivered to our house - bottles of milk, sacks of coal, the daily newspaper and every two weeks or so bottles of pop from the Law's pop lorry - pop being what Americans call soda.

Nowadays it's different. Just about everything is delivered to our homes - from clothes to refrigerators. Here in England vast Amazon warehouses have been constructed close to motorways and delivery vans cruise up and down every street in our kingdom. Amazon alone have more than a thousand delivery vans in Britain and that fleet is forever expanding.

For various reasons, the most complained about delivery service in this country was a company called Hermes. They have reinvented themselves and changed their name to EVRI and it was this company that brought a parcel to our door this morning. Unusually it was for me as a few days ago I ordered a new pair of sandals from the Clarks Outlet store.

Barefooted, I came to the door in my dressing gown.  The delivery man thrust the package into my hands while simultaneously taking a photo on his smartphome - presumably to prove that the delivery had taken place.

It is at this point that I feel the urge to climb up on my soapbox. The delivery man did not ask for my permission to take that picture. It is not the first time that this has happened. I am sure that delivery staff are under instructions from their companies to take those pictures, I wonder if this also happens in The States, Australia, Canada, Germany and France for example.

On this occasion, the picture did not reveal very much but you can see one of my naked big toes. The guy was on our property and I think that if someone is on your property they should not be snapping any pictures without permission to do so. Perhaps next time I will get my own camera out and start snapping pictures of the deliverer. See how they like it.

By the way, the sandals are very nice and fit perfectly. All I need now is a pair of white ankle socks to go with my cool summer  outfit - khaki shorts and a navy blue Yorkshire Pudding T-shirt.