Boosting

Here on the inscrutable internet, as well as churning out blogposts, I sometimes post reviews on TripAdvisor. To date, I have posted almost 700 items there - mostly reviews of hotels and eating establishments but also photographs.

It is easy to leave a review on a previously listed business but sometimes the establishment you wish to review may not be up so then you have the hassle of getting a new listing approved. That is what happened with "Urban Burger" on Ecclesall Road, Sheffield.

I had been in there four times in the last six months and each time the freshly made burger with fries has been truly scrumptious. Sadly, the place never seems busy and I wanted to give this homegrown Yorkshire business a boost with a glowing review  and a few pictures.

This was my review:-

James and Mel were happy to pose for me

Etcetera

Stone finial in the grounds of Thornbridge Hall

Well, yesterday I snapped sixty pictures on my walk out of Bakewell and I only showed you four of them. In this blogpost, I am just sharing six more of those images because I am an idle so-and-so and at the moment I cannot think of anything else to blog about. 

Phoebe is asleep upstairs for she is having a sleepover at "grammar n' granpa's house". No nursery school for her tomorrow. We picked her up at 5pm today - just the third time I have visited her nursery school. She has been very happy there but soon she will switch to our local primary school.

Rear view of Cracknowl House

I do not visit pubs as frequently as I used to do but tonight I moseyed on down to "The Itchy Pig" where I  guzzled two pints of Abbeydale Heathen. On Friday, a hosepipe ban will begin in Yorkshire so tomorrow I plan to  give our upper garden a good soaking - especially the vegetable plot. After Friday, I will no doubt be lugging buckets and watering cans  up to that top section. I have already filled the water butt up there but that water won't last long.

The city's reservoirs are less than half full but sometimes they are brimming in July. Not this year.  The weather has been pretty glorious for weeks on end. I am not complaining.

Rough limestone wall and cattle north of Bakewell

Path sign north of Ashford-in-the-Water

Upper window in Millstone House, Ashford-in-the-Water

The River Wye north west of Bakewell

218

Thornbridge Hall near Bakewell - has a long history

that dates back to the twelfth century

Shirley and I used our senior citizen bus passes today. We caught the number 218 bus at 9.54 from a bus stop that is just a three minute walk from our house. Three Chinese people had bagged the prime front seats on the top deck but even so we had a great view.

The bus took us via Totley, Owler Bar and Baslow to Bakewell in the Derbyshire Dales - a journey of some forty five minutes.

I was there to undertake a long circular walk but Shirley had come along to check out the shops and mooch around in the little market town. We expected that she would return to Sheffield long before me and so it transpired.

Telecommuications engineer up a pole in Bakewell

My most pleasant summer stroll took me three and a half hours to complete. It took in the village of Ashford-in-the-Water as well as Thornbridge Hall and part of The Monsal Trail - an old railway track that ran from Derby to Manchester via Bakewell.

It was a lovely, varied walk on which I had three or four conversations with strangers. The longest chat happened to be with a drystone waller called Simon. What a coincidence - given yesterday's post! He seemed to appreciate my curious questions but he would not let me snap his photo. He said he was too shy for that. Fair enough.

Cracknowl House

South of Cracknowl Wood, I came across an isolated house that has no track to it. Fortuitously, arriving from a long sheep pasture, I met a woman with a sheepdog who knew all about the man who has lived at Cracknowl House for thirty years or more. She has conversed with him several times.

Seems he lives "off grid" without mains electricity, gas or water. He collects rain water and forages for firewood in the adjacent woods. The woman reckons that he is something of an artist and has occasionally sold pictures to make a bit of money. 

We shared some envy about the fellow. There's something very appealing about his free lifestyle. Apparently, the authorities never bother him. Seasons come and seasons go and years go by.  I could find nothing on the internet about the man and his hermit-like existence.

After a pint of bitter shandy and a vanilla ice cream cone in Bakewell, I caught the 218 bus back home at 4pm. Again the inscrutable Chinese had bagged the front seats on the top deck. Somebody should impose tariffs upon them!

Betty Lane in Ashford - this is not a drystone wall as mortar has been used.

Walls

Over at the Geograph site, I have contributed  393  images in which the principal subject is tagged as "wall" or "walls". Mostly, the walls in question  are drystone walls which are an integral feature of upland landscapes in England and Wales.

Historically, wherever stones were easily available, our forbears would build walls - rather than planting hedges. The walls were to delineate ownership and to enclose animals or crops. It is estimated that there are over 170,000 miles of drystone wall in Britain - enough to circle the globe seven times over.

I am a sucker for these walls. Many are hundreds of years old and if you pause to look closely at them you find a certain rustic beauty. I suspect that the wall builders of yore never imagined for one minute that they were producing a kind of accidental art that would endure through the centuries as testament to their hard labour and craftsmanship.

On YouTube a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the ramblings of a young Yorkshireman called Jack Roscoe. His  vlogging name is "Northern Introvert". He is a very pleasant guide to follow on his various jaunts. His most recent video sees him learning about drystone walling from a group of enthusiasts who are busy repairing a couple of walls on a North Yorkshire farm.

The video is over 23 minutes long so you might not have time to watch it all. Mind you, I suspect there will be some visitors who are already thinking, "A video about building drystone walls? I would rather watch grass growing!" Each to their own.

Remembering

Okay, I am back from "The Hammer and Pincers" quiz with four pints of "Stones" in my belly. Though we did not win the overall prize this week, we were still first to a line of five correct answers. I have just stripped tonight's roasted chicken of any remaining meat and I have put the resultant carcass out on the lawn for a passing fox to sniff before guzzling down.

And so what are we left with when it comes to blogging?

I thought I might use this opportunity to capture a memory from long ago in written words. Arguably, memories are the means by which we mark our presence upon this spinning planet. Here we go.

I am sixteen years old and I have been chosen to represent East Yorkshire youth clubs  at a special reception in St James's Palace in London. It is to mark sixty years of youth clubs in England and Wales - under the auspices of The National Association of Youth Clubs.

Before the main event, I get to meet the pop singer Lulu, Lord John Hunt who led the successful Mount Everest expedition in 1953 and the famous DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile. He jokes that it is nice to have another Yorkshire lad down there in London and we shake hands. Retrospectively, it seems most distasteful that he was a patron of The National Association of Youth Clubs but back in 1971 nobody realised the true nature of that self-obsessed sex monster.

I visit a lavatory in St James's Palace and it is like no lavatory I have ever been in before. The Victorian toilet bowl is like a throne on a kind of platform and there are lotions and potions and soft white towels for hand cleaning.

On to the main event where there is a finger buffet with china teacups and strict instructions about where we should all stand before The Queen Mother drifts into the room with her little entourage.

She was Queen Elizabeth II's mother and formerly the wife of King George VI who came to the throne by default when King Edward VIII abdicated.

She reaches me and puts out a gloved hand, smiling with her little brown teeth on display. She would have been my current age (71) that afternoon but she seemed older. She asks me where I am from and then she asks me if I know Hotham Hall where she enjoyed some happy times when she was a child but I don't know the place. She is most charming and soon moves on to the next youth club member - representing a different county.

I find my way back to Kings Cross Station and catch an evening train back to Hull. Looking back, I think I must have had some balls back then to negotiate the London transport system at the age of sixteen when I was a country bumpkin. Stuff like that did not faze me at all.

"Ratrex"

Really I wanted to produce a spoof ad using Microsoft Image Creator (AI)  but certain words are vetoed by that system, including Trump, Republican Party and condom. I suspect that the current but very occasional resident of The White House would find a discreet private use for "RATREX" condoms or maybe he already uses these:-

or these:-

Haircut

"Monks" barbershop, Abbey Lane

This morning, I had the idea of walking to my favoured barbershop in the Woodseats suburb of the city. Normally I drive over there. It's more than two miles and there are a couple of hills to contend with. I gave myself plenty of time - setting off a full hour and twenty minutes before my appointment slot.

Down Carterknowle Road, along Bannerdale Road to Archer Road and then up Fraser Road to Holmhirst Road. I arrived on the main drag at Woodseats well ahead of time and marched into the KFC outlet where I ordered a Diet Pepsi to quench my thirst. Then it was on to the barbershop. The same fellow has been cutting my hair for twelve years.

"Usual Neil?" he always says and I confirm that I do not want a perm, highlights or a crewcut. I probably have my mop of hair cut every two months. Since schooldays, I have never worn my hair short. Blame The Beatles!

The barber is called Danny. He's 48 years old and happily married with two children. I guess I have got to know him pretty well through our conversations at the barber's chair. He is a very experienced hairdresser  and takes real pride in his work even though he himself is as bald as a coot. He always does a good job.

After the haircut, I walked along the main drag to a food outlet called "Urban Pitta". Their freshly made filled pittas are very scrumptious. I ate mine while sitting in the window with a can of Diet Coke, watching the world go by outside.

Then I checked out the book sections in a couple of charity shops but no luck! I was seeking a particular novel by one of the Brontë sisters - "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë, written in 1848 in The Parsonage at Haworth when Anne was just twenty eight.

I decided to catch a No.75 bus into the centre of the city and headed straight for the "Waterstones" bookshop in Orchard Square. Fortunately, they had one remaining paperback copy of the novel I was after.

At around two thirty, I caught a No.88 bus back home.

Later I was in the B&Q D.I.Y. superstore looking for a galvanised bucket in which to place our repotted aspidistra. There I met up again with a man who has worked in the store for twenty two years. Our main conversation topic is always rats.

They target bird food and grass seed and it is an ongoing battle to suppress them. It was nice to hear my "friend" say that he does not like killing any animals - even rats  and wished B&Q would use rat contraception methods. I joked that I would not volunteer to be the one to put the rat-sized condoms on the little blighters!