Ilkeston

Swingate Water Tower

With a promising weather forecast, I caught a train down to Ilkeston in Derbyshire. The station is on the eastern boundary of the town and close to the county border with Nottinghamshire.

At first I was cursing the weather people because no sooner had I alighted from the train than a big grey cloud  sprinkled holy water upon me. But it didn't last long. Soon I was plodding by the disused Nottingham Canal.

Then along to the pleasant village of Cossall where D.H.Lawrence's girlfriend Louie Burrows lived. In 1910 they were engaged to be married but it didn't work out. David Herbert had other romantic diversions.

Church House in Cossall - childhood home of Louie Burrows

Onward to Strelley Hall then back over the M1 motorway, following Robin Hood's Way to Swingate where there is a magnificent sandstone water tower. It was built in the middle of the last century next to a reservoir that serves the city of Nottingham.

Prancing horses at Turkey Fields Farm

On to Grasscourt Farm then down to Babbington. From Awsworth into the Erewash Valley and then into the edgelands of Ilkeston. I doubt that any overseas visitors would have ever made a beeline for Ilkeston unless they had become lost or had relatives there. It is, how shall I say it,  a "working town".

Four hours after arriving, I was back at the railway station and on my way home to Sheffield. An annoying  passenger with a mobile phone and a piercing tone of voice made reading almost impossible so I checked out the forty or fifty photographs I had snapped on my latest ramble while fantasising about making the passenger eat his Apple.

War memorial and Church at Strelley

Kindness

Sitting here on a sunny Wednesday morning with sunlight streaming in to our cosy front room, I decided to blog about something nice. Something drawn from the past.

It's the evening of Monday August 31st 1970. I am standing outside a fish and chip shop with my friend Lee in the small Hampshire city of Winchester. In order to eat our bags of chips we have removed our burdensome rucksacks and rolled sleeping bags from our shoulders.

We should have set off earlier - from The Isle of Wight I mean. Midday ferry across to Lymington and then thumbs out hitching north. But the fish weren't biting that day. It took all afternoon to travel forty miles up to Winchester.

Less than twenty four hours before, we were watching Jimi Hendrix's last gig in England. Carving out a slow and distorted version of "God Save The Queen" and then my favourite number, Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower". Before too long Leonard Cohen greeted the dawn at the very end of August... "And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind/ And you know that she will trust you/ For you've touched her perfect body with your mind"

The entire festival was pure magic. Sometimes you live life intensely with total relish, eating up every moment. That was one of those times. Far more people attended The Isle of Wight Festival of Music in 1970 than attended Woodstock in 1969. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

So there we are eating our chips and darkness has fallen. With good fortune we would have been back in East Yorkshire by now. But there we were stuck in Winchester, wondering where we were going to sleep. At eighteen, Lee was two years older than me.

Then a thirty something fellow in a white shirt comes out of the fish and chip shop.

"Have you lads been to the festival?"

"Yeah. Yes we have."

"Have you got somewhere to sleep tonight?"

"No. No we haven't."

"You can come and sleep at my place if you want."

We accompany him to some Victorian villas down a leafy side street. He takes us up to his first floor flat. There was nothing sinister - quite the opposite in fact.

It turns out that he is a junior doctor at the local hospital and he shares the flat with his girlfriend who is "away at the moment" . He tells us that he will be on an early shift in the morning then he points out where the bathroom is and invites us to make our own breakfast and then push the spare keys through the letter box as we depart. Such trust. Such kindness.

We leave him a thank you note on the old pine table and then trudge out of the city to point our thumbs at the sky. It is the first day of September.

We have three hundred miles to go. 

Again the hitch-hiking isn't the best I have ever known and it takes us all day to get to Hull. The last bus out into the countryside has gone and it is thirteen miles back to our village. We are trudging along Holderness Road like emigres from Oklahoma in "The Grapes of Wrath" or like hobos in a song by Johnny Cash.

We bump into two young men returning from a pub. They are brothers and they work on fishing trawlers. They ask us if we have been to The Isle of Wight and we say yes. Then they invite us back to their parents' house where they make us tea and toast and we unfurl our sleeping bags and sleep on their living room floor.

They are still upstairs in bed when we leave after scribbling a thank you note and leaving it on the old pine table. 

We are almost home. The bus weaves around the bends from Ganstead to Coniston then on to Skirlaugh and Long Riston before we pass White Cross to the south of our village. The music called and we went. We were with our tribe and life was never quite the same after that. 

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds her mirror

Coronavirus

The news is all of coronavirus these days. It continues to sneak invisibly around the planet like a witch's death spell. It has leaked into Bhutan and Brunei, Gibraltar and The Vatican. It's like we have all been involuntarily entered into a worldwide lottery though the jackpot prize is not a shed load of banknotes, it is something else entirely. Prepare to Meet Thy Maker folks!

These are the current statistics from Britain - 321 cases, 5 dead, 18 recovered. It's going to get worse, much worse before it gets better. You only have to look at Italy - 9172 cases, 463 dead, 724 recovered. The country is now in a kind of lock down. British Airways have just cancelled all flights in and out of Italy.

Meantime, over in the USA, Trump's response to coronavirus has been absurd. He tries to make political capital out of the crisis. In a recent off-the-cuff interview he was bragging that he should have been a virologist or some other kind of scientist. Maybe if he wasn't being president he would have sorted out the problem. His inflated opinion of himself is as breathtaking as it is unjustifiable. What a clown! This is no way to lead a great nation during a health crisis.

Questions are being asked about the accuracy and validity of COVID-19 statistics emanating from the USA. How much testing is happening and how is it being organised? It plainly cannot be easy to organise a comprehensive and effective testing programme in a country of 327 million when public health systems are broken and access is based on wealth not health. Current declared US stats - 729 cases, 27 dead, 15 recovered.

In the background, I imagine that Trump's on the phone urging government agencies to suppress the true figures as he looks to secure a second term in The White House. It's bad enough that shares crashed in Wall Street yesterday. He didn't need that did he?

At a personal level, Shirley and I decided not to click the "pay" button when looking at an Eastertime holiday on the island of Madeira. One of our daughter's best friends is meant to be getting married in Seville, Spain over Easter. The arrangements are all in place but will it happen? COVID-19 may have other ideas. Current stats for Spain - 1235 cases, 31 dead, 32 recovered.

How is it for you?

Cedric

In Britain we call the tough doormen and doorwomen who wait outside night clubs "bouncers". They "bounce"  troublemakers back out into the street. 

Yesterday we were at Carsington Water - a vast reservoir near Matlock in Derbyshire. The automatic doors to the visitor centre were guarded by a bouncer called Cedric Swan. We managed to slip inside while his back was turned. He took a particular dislike to a small but muscular grey dog on a lead. The dog may have never encountered a swan before. The stunned expression on his canine face said, "What the hell is that?". The expression on Cedric's face said, "I'm gonna kill you you ugly mutt!"

The weather was changeable so we did not undertake the seven mile circuit of the reservoir. We just strolled about and managed to get rained upon for five minutes when on an exposed section of the lakeside path. I noticed these teasels in the water. They demonstrate perfectly how Carsington Water has recently been overfilled by flood water.

 Sometimes there were dramatic bursts of sunshine as in the picture below.

With soggy trousers, we got back in Clint's comfortable cockpit and headed for nearby Cromford where we visited a wonderful bookshop called "Scarthin Books". Upstairs there's a small vegetarian cafe in which we ordered delicious homemade soups with fresh wholemeal rolls. Mine was tomato, roasted butternut squash and basil. Shirley's was split pea soup.

As we were waiting for our soups to arrive we noticed these bookshelves. In fact, we chuckled when another customer picked "Bish Bash Bosh!" up and took it downstairs - presumably to purchase it. I had to restrain Shirley from  yelling after the woman, "Our son wrote that!"

Pictures

Above, near Chelmorton Flatt Farm, a rabbit cloud (right) prepares  to do battle with a duck cloud (left). above a tumbledown limestone wall. Like the other four pictures in this batch, I snapped the photograph on Friday afternoon as I was rambling east of Buxton in North Derbyshire.

Below you can see Burrs Farm which you may find in the map I added to the bottom of yesterday's blogpost. What a peaceful place to live - on a high limestone plateau but close to the rather lovely village of Chelmorton.

Below - in another lovely village called Wormhill I took this picture of St Margaret's Church. It has an unusual tower with an almost unique roof in  a German or Rheinish Helm style. This was not a feature of the original thirteenth century design. The tower was remodelled in 1670. Unfortunately, the church doors were locked so I was unable to snoop around inside.

Leaving Wormhill, I plodded west to another vast limestone quarry at Tunstead. Along the way I took the next picture of a tree and the limestone wall that bordered the track for half a mile. The colours  on  Friday were so clear and true but within an hour evening was beginning to elbow its way in.

And I took this last picture of a blast shelter above Tunstead Quarry in fading light. When blasting is forewarned by sirens from the quarry below, walkers and quarrymen are advised to shelter in these concrete igloos. It did not contain a fridge filled with an array of alcoholic drinks nor a flat screen TV and an easy chair. In fact it smelt vaguely of urine.

Maps

 For Mike Parker, maps have been  an obsession since childhood. He was the author of "Map Addict" - a book I finished reading on Thursday. I was drawn to it because I am also a lover of maps and possess many of them.

As well as being informative, the book was at times provocative and funny. Mike Parker's map passion comes over loud and clear. He sings the praises of Britain's Ordnance Survey which continues to produce what he believes to be simply the world's best maps. Incidentally, without them I would not have explored half the areas I have rambled in. The detail and clarity is incredible.

He considers the history of maps and how they have always figured in religious expansion and military adventures. He also reflects upon the difficult relationships that the majority of women have with maps.

I laughed out loud when Mike Parker vented his antipathy towards satnav devices. I quote:-

I despise satnavs. I tried hard not to because I didn't want to mark myself quite so obviously as a crusty old Luddite, but my God, they really are a loathsome invention. When I go in friends' cars, and they reach to turn on the satnav, it takes every shred of self-control not to rip the thing out of their hands  and beat them to a bloody pulp with a road atlas. (page 279)

If you don't like maps, I doubt that this book would be for you but if you are also a bit of a map addict then I suspect you could, like me, happily while away a good few hours turning the three hundred + pages. It has a British bias but also considers mapping in several other countries. An appealing, idiosyncratic style of writing as perhaps suggested in the satnav quote.

Derbyshire countryside I walked through yesterday. The green
lines on the Ordnance Survey map are public footpaths and the
red line is an A road. The black lines define field boundaries.

Badgers

Badgers. They were here when our ancestors lived in caves. Long before farming began. Before cattle and certainly millennia before guns were invented.

Down in the south west of England something terrible has been happening for the last seven years. Secretly funded by the government, a team of marksmen have been scouring the countryside of Gloucestershire and Somerset to seek out badgers and kill them. Many of those badgers will have been easy to find because badger dynasties often occupy the same setts for centuries. 

As recently as last  September, the "cull" was extended to several other counties including Cheshire, Devon, Cornwall, Staffordshire, Dorset, Herefordshire and Wiltshire. And what's the reason for this killing spree? It's because some landowners say that the badgers infect cattle with TB. This might have happened from time to time but most experts agree that culling badgers is not the solution. A programme of inoculation would be the best way forward. Besides, the badgers were here first. Shouldn't that give them some protection?

If the news is to be believed, it seems that the government have now finally accepted that culling is not the solution. We are told that the shooting campaign has been brought to an end. We do not know how many badgers were shot in the last seven years - nor how many of them died in terror and long drawn out pain. We do not know how much the marksmen were paid and we do not know how often they used dogs to track down the badgers.

The whole programme was built on questionable premises. But more than that, to me it speaks of monstrous cruelty and noxious disrespect for the country's  wildlife. Badgers are beautiful creatures that we should be cherishing - not murdering in the dead of night at the say-so of a handful of ill-informed farmers and mindless politicians.

Last Sunday night I was walking home from "The Greystones" public house at around eleven thirty. There was little traffic about and the night was still. As I turned from Greystones Drive on to Dobbin Hill I saw something scurrying down the pavement towards me, under the streetlights, passing parked cars. And as this creature came closer, I realised it was not a dog or a cat, it was a badger!

He or she was furtively sniffing the ground, motoring along on stubby little legs. Where he/she was heading I have no idea. As the badger continued moving in my direction I stayed stock still. He/she passed by within three feet of me. My heart skipped a beat.  And when about twelve feet past the brock stopped in its tracks, turned to look in my direction and whispered, "Please write a blogpost about badgers my friend" before continuing that particular nocturnal journey. A magical encounter.