Earthtongue

The other day, I noticed some things on the lawn, near to the rotary clothes dryer. I thought perhaps they were blackened pieces of newspaper blown from somebody's garden bonfire or maybe feathers evidencing a cat's dawn assault on some unsuspecting blackbird. Returning from my digging expedition, I observed that the stuff was still there. This time I crouched down and quickly realised that I was looking at strange black fungi spears poking through the turf. I'd never seen such a fungi before - or maybe I had seen it but just didn't take the time to notice it.

As we all know, autumn is the best time for fungi. In forests, on rotting trunks, in meadows and on lawns, toadstools and mushrooms quietly appear poking their strange little heads at the sky. One day you don't see them and the next day you do. Mostly we expect them to have little stems supporting heads of different hues with little gills beneath. Unless we are fungi foragers or botanists specialising in the field we don't expect fungi to look like the odd black growth shown in the photograph above.

There must have been at least thirty of the little black spears within about a square metre of lawn. They were all between half an inch and two inches tall.

Internet research tells me that not only are there over 100,000 different types of known fungus in the world with thousands more still to be catalogued but it also tells me that the little black spears are commonly known as "Earthtongues". However, there are many different sorts of "Earthtongue" and ours may be either "geoglossum cookieanum" (as in the photo) or "geoglossum fallax". In reality, I think it would take an expert with a microscope to say for sure.

I come to realise that it would be possible to spend a lifetime simply studying "Earthtongue", recording its geographical distribution and the characteristics of the many different types. Apparently, this odd fungus can be found in many parts of the world but until Thursday morning I had no idea of its existence. And it wasn't in the Serengeti or the wilds of Alaska - it was just outside our back door.

Aching

Zebedee with Dougal

There was a time when I felt invulnerable. Never ill, I worked for thirty years without a single day off. My body was my obedient servant. It did what ever I commanded it to do. Lift a heavy weight - no problem. Stay awake for forty eight hours - easy! Why was I surrounded by so many weaklings - snivelling and moaning - what was wrong with them?

Once I emerged from a potentially fatal car crash. The vehicle had turned over two or three times on a bend in a Scottish country road. I was lying on the ceiling. I wound the window down or up and crawled out. Seeing the car on its roof and being in a state of adrenalin-fuelled shock, I decided to turn the car back on to its wheels so I could push it to the verge. I succeeded.

In contrast, on Friday, I found myself prostrate on my son's small bathroom floor. I was tiling some unfinished floor level boxing for pipes - around the bathroom "furniture". This meant I had to be up and down like a yo-yo but every time I got up from the floor, the effort involved was strenuous. Back in my salad days I would have been zipping around like a spring, leaping from the floor as Zebedee did in "The Magic Roundabout".

Frustratingly, since I "retired" from my last school I have had to contend with a catalogue of physical "issues" including:- urine infections, a frozen shoulder, returning gout, broken ribs, an abscess on a tooth, an e-coli infection, two hospital operations. I am well and truly peed off with this stuff and just want to get back to how it was before when I was pretty much a suburban superman. But I'm honest enough to accept that time has been catching upon me. I'm getting old and though it would be nice to think that getting old meant sitting in a rocking chair on a verandah watching the sun go down, I rather think it has much more to do with aches and pains, faculties reducing, the body starting to shut down.

Tonight, as I write these words, I'm confident that for the first time in seven or eight months my frozen left shoulder will not wake me in the early hours and I'm pleased that for the first time in a month I did not limp home with pain caused by uric crystals in the joints of the big toe on my right foot. On Thursday, I felt strong enough to finish digging over the vegetable patch - allowing frosts and winter weather to contribute to the development of a finer tilth.

So the aches and pains are at bay but I recognise they haven't gone away for good. Just round the corner there will be something else. I guess it's payback time. When you are younger you think you will last forever but it isn't so. We are only here for a short while.

Request

This coming Sunday evening, a special event will be held in Millennium Square in Sheffield. It has been organised by The Stroke Association and its principal aim is to raise money for that praiseworthy organisation's work. What is it it? It's a firewalk over burning embers and participants are asked to achieve as much sponsorship as they can muster.

Don't worry, the writer of this request wouldn't be brave enough to even consider such a challenge. However, a fellow Yorkshire blogger has signed up for the firewalk. Her name is Elizabeth and if you can spare a fiver, ten pounds or more it would be excellent if you could sponsor her. I am proud to have regular blog visitors from America, NZ and Australia but I must confess I am not sure about the feasibility of sponsorship from overseas. Perhaps you could try it via the link at the bottom of this post and see.

For Elizabeth, the firewalk isn't just about raising money for The Stroke Association, it's also about fulfilling a long held spiritual ambition and perhaps more importantly reaching a milestone in her personal recovery from a debilitating fall some four years back. That fall caused a brain injury which Elizabeth has been battling to overcome. It has been a long and difficult road back.

So come on folks! Please support Elizabeth on her firewalk by sponsoring her. Every little helps. Go to:- http://www.justgiving.com/Elizabeth-Stanforth-Sharpe

Then

On Sunday, our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, rather than driving straight to the supermarket with the list that Lady Pudding had given me, I took a detour to the Crookesmoor area of Sheffield in order to take a few pictures for the Geograph project. It was a lovely, bright autumnal day. It may be just me, but I find the sunshine on clear autumn days to be more intense than in summertime or spring. It makes photography very easy.

In 1981, I had been teaching for three years and Shirley had put in just a year since qualifying as a State Enrolled Nurse. Times were hard as they probably always are but we did the arithmetic and found that we were just about able to buy a modest house in what was a traditional working class owner-occupier part of lower Crookes. It was an end terrace, recently updated by a builder and the address was 40 Leamington Street. It cost £15,250.

In the weeks before our wedding we worked hard to paint the place, lay carpets, get in some furniture and a second hand cooker and fridge. The three-piece suite cost us £50 from a posh house at Abbeydale. We had seen it advertised in the evening paper.

Returning from our one night honeymoon in Lincoln, I carried Shirley over the threshold to begin our married life together. We lived happily in that house for eight years and it was where our children were conceived. Frances wasn't even one year old when we moved across the city to the more salubrious Sheffield 11. This time the house sold for £45,000.

We both have happy memories of Leamington Street. We had lovely neighbours and friends in the area - Ruby and Glyn, Kirk, Tony, Colin and Lorraine, John and Irene, Mrs Harris, Paul, Scottish Joe and Maureen, Harold and Sylvia. Though you can't tell from the photograph, the view from the back of the property was quite wonderful - over the central bowl of Sheffield with its twinkling lights, tower blocks and chimneys. Just round the corner was "The Closed Shop" pub where many's the pint was consumed amidst raucous laughter and idle conversation. It was a home from home.

It's over twenty one years since we left there. We sold the house to a university student's parents. Many terraced homes were being bought up in this way so that now the area is almost exclusively a student ghetto. See the brick red rendering. I painted that twenty five years past. It would make a great advertisement for the long-lasting qualities of "Sandtex" masonry paint.

Walking around the old neighbourhood was like stepping inside a personal history book. Echoes of old times. The social webs that were woven. On that wall Glyn sat and wept as he told me that after thirty five years, he'd been made redundant from his job as a steel turner. He never worked again. That's where the old corner shop used to be. This is where the DIY man fell from his ladder and died. That's where Colin and Lorraine's cats would wait for them after closing time. Number 40 Leamington Street became part of my very DNA. And it seems just like yesterday...

Anger

In job interviews of a certain ilk, a member of the smirking interview panel might sometimes ask: "And what makes you angry?". You'd like to say - "Interviewers like you! People who dangle stupid questions as if taunting donkeys with carrots. People who probably don't even know what being angry means!" Instead you say: "Anything that stands in the way of meeting targets", or, "Realising there are not enough hours in the day to achieve all you want to do".

Is anger a bad thing?

I think it would be bad if you spent your whole life in an angry state. Angry at the supermarket checkout woman who's talking to her colleague at the next till, angry at Simon Cowell's "X-Factor" media-cult, angry at dog owners allowing their mutts to foul the street, angry at racism, sexism, plagiarism, fanaticism, terrorism. If you were permanently angry, your life would hardly be worth living. In spite of it all, we need to chill out, laugh, find time to be calm, ride over the rocks that appear before us as we bounce down the rapids that we call Life.

But I wouldn't dismiss anger. I think anger has its place and is often more healthy than neutrality. When you get angry about things - these may be the times when you feel most alive. You're engaged with issues - either at a personal level or in relation to wider local, national or international matters. I'm a devout atheist but I recall from "The Bible" that even Jesus got angry when, for example, he allegedly overturned the moneylenders' tables. Calmness, karma, level-headedness, chilling out, not being "bothered" may occasionally be inappropriate, unnatural responses to situations that deserve anger's fire.

"Cat Devouring a Bird" by Pablo Picasso 1939

Why deny anger or try to disguise it? If it's there inside you, what's wrong with allowing it to surface? Surely that's healthier than letting it gnaw away at your insides like a cancer.

I'm angry about George Osborne with his massive bulletproof personal inheritance fund telling his fellow citizens in melodramatically paused sentences that we're "in it together" as he cuts away at vital services. I'm angry about parking regulations and angry about every single scrap of litter that is ever dropped. I'm angry about university tuition fees, child deaths from diarrhoea, The Tesco Monster, Nick Clegg, Grumpy Old Ken, my last headmistress, mobile phone masts, the persecution of tigers and whales and pandas. I'm angry with myself for failing to follow certain things through such as song-writing, decorating the bathroom, writing projects, sifting through the stuff in the attic, reading "The Origin of Species" or simply wasting precious time.

I like the idea of "angry young men". When I was younger, I would occasionally express my anger not only verbally but physically. Even now, I recall things that happened back in the day that I have never shared with anyone and they all arose from anger. Of course, the only sure-fire way to maintain a secret is to keep it completely to yourself. So please don't ask.

The angry young man in me never really went away. He's still there sleeping lightly but I have learnt to live more happily and harmoniously than before. What may have made me angry in the past can sometimes seem like water off a duck's back these days. But I still recall Alcibades's pertinent question to the senators in "Timon of Athens" - "Who is a man that is not angry?" The day you lose the capacity to be angry is the day that you have finally given up on life.

Ten

This year I have taken many photographs with my trusty digital camera. As I have mentioned before, I like to contribute to a website called Geograph which continues to capture images of the British Isles. In August, the website logged its two millionth image. In an average week, Geograph receives around 8,000 images and every week fifty photographs are selected for a competition shortlist. You can imagine that to even make the shortlist of fifty is a great achievement - statistically you have a one in one hundred and sixty chance of doing that.

I am proud to tell you that so far this year I have had ten photographs in the site's weekly shortlists and, as I recall mentioning before, one of my photos was even picked to be the "Photo of the Week" back in February. So here are my ten shortlisted pictures:-

Power Station from Willingham-by-Stow

Wicken Fen - WINNER - Week 7

Holmesfield Common

Near Treeton, Sheffield

Samuel Holberry's Grave, Sheffield General Cemetery

Allotment Hut at Meersbrook

King Harry Ferry, Cornwall

Endcliffe Park, Sheffield

Stanage Edge, North Derbyshire

Near Brookfield Manor, Hathersage

Don't you agree that digital photography is a wonderful invention? Even now I can only dimly remember the tiresome business of buying films, loading them, winding them back, unloading them, taking them to the chemist for processing and then a few days later ripping open those amber Kodak or Agfa envelopes to be underwhelmed by my prints. Digital photography is much more faithful to whatever we see when we press that button.

Beware

Guilty your honour! I admit that during my years as an internet user, I have occasionally visited my preferred search engine and inserted my name. In case you hadn't guessed already, I will also confess that my real name is not in fact Sir Yorkshire Pudding! When I first did a search like this I got back no more than three or four references to yours truly. I was officially a cypher, a nobody, a veritable Yorkshire Pudding!

Last evening, after putting my name into Google, I was amazed to see a return of almost 1500 separate references. Search engines - especially Google - are far more capable and all-embracing than they used to be. Amongst my current results, I was a little alarmed to see that the BBC had assembled together any contributions I have made as a commentator on their news items. If you have been to this blog before you will be aware that I am prone to ranting without mincing my words. This is reflected in my BBC comments. Here's an example:-

Was Israel right to board the Gaza Flotilla? (May 2010)

How duplicitous and hollow is the Israeli propaganda machine! Immediately after their unlawful assault on the flotilla, government spokesmen were rapidly accusing the aid convoy of the very crimes that Israeli marines had perpetrated. In Israeli official-speak, wrong becomes right, black becomes white and innocence becomes guilt. Their cynical murders must have strengthened the Palestinian cause immensely.

Now you may not agree with my comment at all. That doesn't really matter. What bothers me is that Internet search engines are making it too easy for searchers to unearth potentially incriminating information about free citizens who have not given permission for these search trails to exist.

I'm not thinking so much about myself, more about younger people in the jobs market. Imagine a young adult being interviewed for a job. They get to the interview and find themselves being asked questions about what they have written about the attack on the Gaza flotilla. Perhaps they don't even get to the interview at all because the company have done a quick name search beforehand - possibly concluding: "trouble causer", "opinionated", "has the gall to comment on issues instead of toeing the party line", "anti-Israeli" etc..

In England, we have already seen a handful of workers losing their livelihoods because of incriminating remarks or photos placed on social networking sites like "Facebook". I guess there's a lot to be said for adopting pseudonyms and sticking to them.