Derwent

The east tower - Howden Dam

Don't worry. No more ranting about retired politicians today. Instead let me take you ten miles west of Sheffield to The Upper Derwent Valley. Until 1902 it was a peaceful cleft in the earth with moorland streams running down into the babbling River Derwent as it began its winding journey towards the city of Derby. There was a handful of  sheep farms and two tiny villages - Derwent and Ashopton but their remains are now hidden from view under three large reservoirs - Howden, Upper Derwent and Ladybower.

The construction of the reservoirs with their three sturdy dams took over forty years. It was a massive engineering project, punctuated by two world wars and the economic slump of the nineteen thirties, But finally on September 25th 1945, King George VI planted an oak tree near the head of Howden Reservoir to mark the completion of the work.

In the early years of work in the valley a temporary labourers' village was built near Birchinlee Farm and it was known locally as "Tin Town" for obvious reasons. Very little of that encampment remains but one of the tin huts was dismantled in the nineteen thirties and transported to the village of Hope where it is still used as a hairdressers' salon to this day.

Commemorative plaque at the site of Tin Town

On Monday I woke to bright sunshine even though the radio announcers were talking about widespread fog around the country with many flight cancellations and chaotic motorways. After my morning shower, mug of tea and toast with honey,  I was off in my car - westwards to the Upper Derwent Valley on the A57 road which crosses the Ashopton viaduct over Ladybower Reservoir. There was cloud in the valley and soon after I had turned right to travel north to Howden Reservoir, I  just had to stop to take this picture looking back at the viaduct:-

I completed two walks that day. The shorter first walk saw me scrambling like a commando through thick pine forest, fields of bracken and clinging brambles over barbed wire fences, knowing that if I fell nobody would find me for months on end. The second, much longer, walk took me along the River Westend and up on to the windswept moors which lie west of the Upper Derwent Valley. They are the haunt of grouse and blackface sheep. Up on the top the November sunshine was warm upon my skin and so I was pleased that I had chosen to leave my jacket in the car. But down below the Westend Valley was rapidly being plunged into shadowy darkness. It was time to head home.

The end of Ridge Clough

Remains of an old field wall now deep in a pine plnatation 

The track to Dry Clough - up to the moors

Guardian of The Moors

Grouse butt Number 9 on moorland above The River Westend 

Bob the Blackface Sheep says "Baaaa!"

Blair

Messianic Tony Blair
Photo from his official website

Back in 1997 when Tony Blair became our prime minister, I was delighted. It meant an end to Conservative rule under Thatcher and Major and the possibility that the British state would once again adopt a kinder approach to the poor, the needy and the downtrodden and a more imaginative approach to commerce and industry. No more "I'm alright Jack - pull up the ladder".

The next few years were good. The ship of state did indeed appear to have changed course. "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland were soothed, a massive programme for the building of new schools and hospitals commenced and in  general people seemed a lot more optimistic than they had done under the "no such thing as society" Tories. We were perhaps in Cool Britannia.

But then those aeroplanes hit The World Trade Centre in New York and everything changed. Anxious to remain best buddies with America, Blair was drawn into vengeful and highly questionable military adventures in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It wouldn't have been too bad if he had parachuted in on his own wearing a helmet and a khaki flak jacket but leaders so rarely go to war themselves do they? They just view warfare from afar as other people's sons die.

In 1986

All that killing. All that misery. All that harvesting of bitterness. The British people had made it very clear to Blair that we didn't want our forces to go into Iraq or Afghanistan but he ignored our protests. He ate barbecued meat at George W. Bush's Texas ranch where no doubt he strummed a guitar and sang, "Home, home on the range" as Dubya, in his barbecuing apron, drank a six pack of "Rolling Rock".

It was around that time that I changed my opinion of Tony Blair and began to see him for what he has become - a messianic, unapologetic, self-absorbed, contradictory Catholic convert who has developed dangerous addictions to both wealth and the intoxicating smell of power. He is now as far away from socialism as his £8 million Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse in West London is from Mount Buggery in Australia.

Nowadays, Blair often charges £250,000 a time for public speaking jobs - nine times the average annual salary and heaven knows how much he earned as the blundering United Nations Middle East peace envoy for eight unfruitful years. As "The Independent" said when he resigned from this lucrative post in May of this year - "Only Israel will miss him". 

Blair was born in the same year as me but unlike him, I am unable to buy London homes for my children. Blair bought his three older children homes that cost £1.35 million, £3.62 million and £1.2 million. So much for learning the life lesson that you have to work for what you get. Blair and his scatty wife Cherie own several other properties and it is widely estimated that their combined fortune is around £100 million though naturally Blair would dispute this with his habitual weasel words.

As regular visitors to this blog may recall, I am a lifelong atheist - having "seen the light" when I was a child. On the other hand Christianity has apparently played a big role in Blair's life. He agonised for years about converting to The Church of Rome and made that leap in 2007.

In addition to his appetite for money, Catholicism has become his guiding light. For example here he is at a conference in Rimini, Italy  in 2009:- "In seeking this path of truth, lit by God's love and paved by God's grace, the church can be the insistent spiritual voice that makes globalisation our servant, not our master."

And now I reach the notion that sparked this blogpost in the first place. Isn't religion supposed to be about goodness, love of one's fellow man, humility, recognising that personal wealth is a false and dangerous idol, living a decent life - things like that? As Tony Blair travels between his luxurious Buckinghamshire mansion and his equally luxurious London townhouse, as he refuses to apologise about the killing he helped to unleash in Iraq, as he leaves Labour's core values way behind him, as he signs copies of his odious autobiography "A Journey", does he ever stop to consider that it is all at odds with his purported Christian beliefs - his starry-eyed Catholicism? Personally, I very much doubt it.

HDR

In photography, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. It is a technique used in imaging and photography to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard digital imaging or photographic techniques. The aim is to present the human eye with a similar range of luminance as that which, through the visual system, is familiar in everyday life. The previous sentence was lifted directly from Wikipedia because I don't really understand what HDR is. All I know is that when you use it you can create some rather eye-catching pictures that appear to re-interpret reality.

Above you can see a photograph that I took near Stanage Edge last Thursday. What I saw that afternoon is what you get in that picture - untouched and unaltered - just the gate, the rough pasture and beyond that part of the rugged escarpment that is Stanage Edge.

Back home, I put that same picture into Lenovo "Photomaster" on this laptop. Then I looked at a range of possible "effects" and selected the following two HDR preferences to show you how a relatively ordinary photograph can suddenly become rather eye-catching and other worldly. Of course you wouldn't want to apply this visual chicanery every time you present a picture to other people for very often what we want to see is untainted reality - the truth and too much messing about with pictures can prove quite tiresome.

What do you think?

Chapel

On Friday afternoon, as I was rambling near Stanage Edge, I looked down into the North Lees Valley from Bole Hill and zoomed my camera in upon the ruin you can see in the picture above. It is all that remains of an old Roman Catholic building called Holy Trinity Chapel. Long ago it served nearby North Lees Hall and was built, like numerous English churches, close to a holy "well" or spring that was venerated for hundreds of years before Christianity appeared on the scene.

Yesterday (Saturday), I decided to make a closer investigation of the chapel site. Shirley came with me instead of going shopping in the city centre. It is only ten minutes by car from our house to North Lees. We parked up near Bronte Cottage and headed north for a few hundred yards.

Sheep were grazing around the chapel, ignorant of its history but co-incidentally, as we were mooching around the ruin, a young farmer from North Lees Farm appeared at the top of his field with a sheepdog. The flock of a hundred or more were quickly rounded up and moved on to a higher pasture, leaving the old chapel to us.

Naturally, I snapped several photographs and later used the internet to research the site.

A lot of mystery surrounds it but it is thought to have been built in the fifteenth century. Its destruction - possibly in 1688 - may well have been a symptom of continuing antagonism towards The Roman Catholic religion and its influence on British life. This is essentially what The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had been all about and there are hundreds of other examples of violent rebellion against a religion that had once dominated virtually all aspects of British society since the time of William the Conqueror whose invasion of England in 1066 had been sanctioned by Pope Alexander II.

There isn't a lot to see at the ruinous site of Holy Trinity Chapel. The destruction was pretty comprehensive but the place remains evocative in its lovely, remote setting. You sense the presence of those who once knelt here and if you close your eyes you might hear the sound of their papish prayers. Opening your eyes once more, you might wonder about the fury that once drove men to destroy churches, great abbeys and even little field chapels like Holy Trinity. And if they could do that to buildings what were they doing to their Catholic cousins?

Religion had and still has a lot to answer for. So much anger. So much killing. And all this from people who purport to subscribe to holy creeds that champion love, tolerance and prayer.

Time

Another grey morning in Sheffield but at least it's mild outside with a breeze from the south. Tomorrow will be the last day of October and we still haven't  had a frost. Even so, putting the clocks back last weekend has made everyone very aware that winter is lurking just round the corner.

I have never been able to appreciate why we continue to mess about with time in this country. Spring forward, fall back and all that. What's the point of it? Very recently it was still broad daylight at 6.30pm but now it's pitch dark. I would rather ease gradually into winter's inevitable darkness than to have it foisted upon us so abruptly. It's so unnatural. Mr William Willett (1856-1915) has got a lot to answer for.

Time moving on. Day by day. Drip after drip. Till now those two spells I spent teaching in Thailand seem like history. They have lost their immediacy and my increasingly hazy memories could easily be from a film I once saw or from the story of someone else's life. But there is evidence in the form of digital pictures that I really was there and just now I spent a pleasant hour looking back through some of my photo folders from 2011.

Longterm visitors to this blog might recall that I spent a long weekend on a tiny island in the Andaman Sea. It  is called Koh Poda and you can only arrive there by longtail boat. I was the sole guest at the little resort - a complex of some thirty basic wooden bungalows and a restaurant. Occasional boats from the mainland would bring day visitors but mostly I had the island to myself. 

This is how it was:-

Resort bunglaows on Koh Poda

Andaman sunrise from Koh Poda

One day the American girls came - for a couple of hours

View from my beach towel

I don't know. Perhaps I need another faraway adventure before too long. Before I get old and cannot manage it any more. Maybe I should investigate the possibility of going out to see an Oxfam project as some shop volunteers have done. Mozambique...Guyana...The Philippines. I can feel the old hunger stirring and sometimes The Peak District will just not cut it.

Confessions

There are a few things I want to confess this miserable grey morning. They have been preying on my mind but finally I have mustered the courage to share my confessions with you. They are probably the things that prevent me from being a fully contented human being and up until this moment they have been private - gnawing away at my very soul like rats upon a ship. So here goes...

1) I have never seen a James Bond film. The idea of sophisticated spies in dinner suits chasing ridiculous villains in fast cars before bedding a queue of glamorous women simply does not appeal to me in any way and the hype that precedes the launch of any Bond film makes me grimace with distaste. However, my lack of knowledge about Bond can be a genuine handicap in pub quizzes.

2) I have never seen a Starwars film. Science fiction has little appeal for me. I prefer films that are about real life - stories about believable human experience that are set in the here and now or back in time. I believe that Starwars has robots and aliens and laser sabres etcetera. To me this stuff would be totally boring and even if I bought a ticket for a Starwars film, I would probably fall asleep.

3) I was around twenty three years old when I learnt what toilet brushes were for. Nobody had ever explained their purpose to me and I guess I thought that the smelly things were left for cleaners to use when bleaching or scouring the lavatory bowl. After one particularly successful  evacuation, my then girlfriend complained about the gruesome pattern I had just  left behind on the porcelain. In the ensuing quarrel my ignorance re. toilet brushes was flushed away. It was what you call a Damascian moment.

4) I have been to nearly every big town or city in Great Britain but I have never been to Southampton, Wolverhampton or Northampton. I guess that "hampton" must mean "forbidden city". Do child emperors live in protected secrecy in these places I wonder? And is my cultural experience somehow diminished by not having visited these particular "hamptons"?

5) A few years ago I called in to a motorway service station on the M6. It was late evening. In the entrance area I spotted what seemed to be a bundle of banknotes on the floor. As quick as a bird  descending on a swimming pool, I scooped the bundle up and stuffed it in my pocket. A few minutes later as I sat down with a mug of tea and a sandwich, I slyly inspected my lucky find - £165! That's about $250 (US) or $350 (AUS). But here's the thing that has eaten away at me ever since - I did not take the money to the information desk to hand it in. I kept it for myself! If only I could go back in time to right that wrong!

Is there anything you would like to get off your chest? Why not take a deep breath and spill the beans to Father Pudding? 

60th

Dot and Chubb last Saturday

On October 22nd 1955, a bride and a groom walked down the aisle of St Martin's Church in Owston Ferry on The Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire - the very same aisle that Shirley and I walked down in late October 1981. The bride was Dorothy or Dot - one of Shirley's many aunties and  the groom was Chubb - a young electrician from the nearby village of West Stockwith.

They held their reception in The Coronation Hall, hardly guessing that one day they would become the parents of three daughters and later grandparents to four grandchildren. Nor would they have guessed that sixty years later they would be gathering in the very same village hall with family and friends to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.

That's where we were last Saturday afternoon on what co-incidentally was our own thirty fourth wedding anniversary. The three daughters had put on a fine buffet spread and of course there was a big iced cake that the happy couple cut as cameras clicked and everybody applauded.

Chubb and Dot have spent their entire lives in the same rural backwater, west of The River Trent. Though life is never entirely simple anywhere, they have lived happily, away from the hurly burly of city life, largely unaffected by the world's troubles. It was all about raising a family, earning a crust, getting along with others and laughing whenever the opportunity presented itself. A solid, decent life in which the demon dreams of "what if" and "if only" were kept very much in abeyance like dogs consigned to the outhouse.

Sixty years. To Dot and Chubb. Cheers!

At Epworth on route to Owston Ferry - The Old Rectory
Home of the Wesleys - founders of Methodism

Looking across The River Trent to East Ferry

Landscape by The Trent - south of Owston Ferry