Parking

There was report on the BBC news last week about car parking:-

Shoppers in a mid Wales town have welcomed a temporary reprieve in parking charges after meters were damaged.

Some pay and display machines at locations across Cardigan, Ceredigion have been out of order since early June after they were smashed by vandals.

Traders claim business has boomed in their absence, with one business reporting a 30% rise.

I have listened to interviews with traders and car owners alike and it seems very clear that the temporary free parking situation has been a boon for the town - both in terms of business and in relation to the feel good factor experienced by car owners and shoppers And yet - the council are busily repairing or replacing their vandalised meters and pay stations. They obviously refuse to learn lessons from it all. Squeezing money from motorists has become an obsession with short-sighted and rather vindictive local councils.

Long term readers of this blog will recall that one of my flights of fancy was the development of a fiction about parking enforcement officers. Essentially, I kidnapped a dozen of them, kept them in our underhouse area and later had them shipped to Afghanistan where they were obliged to join The Taliban. Of course, it was a fiction that I played for laughs but underneath it all was a genuine animosity towards the whole business of paying hard-earned money to park cars. In my life I have visited over fifty countries and hundreds of cities and I swear that the most stringent, motorist-squeezing parking regimes are to be found here on the Island of Britain itself.

For those who missed my parking enforcement officer blogposts back in 2010, here they are in sequence:-

Chapter 1 - Stormtroopers

Chapter 2 - Success

Chapter 3 - "Star"

Chapter 4 - Stanage

Chapter 5 - Jackpot

Chapter 6 - Escape

Chapter 7 - Nine

Chapter 8 - Bingo

Chapter 9 - Deportation

Chapter 10 - Postcard

Chapter 11 - Update

Commenters

As I said recently, this blog is ten years old. Out of curiosity, I have just been looking back at the people who would leave comments back in 2005. Almost the first was Alkelda the Gleeful - also known as Farida Dowler. She lives in Seattle and is a children's storyteller. We read each other's blogs regularly for a few years until Farida became a little tired of blogging and departed the blogosphere. If I wasn't so shy I would have looked her up in Seattle last year. Through blogging I learnt a lot about her, her husband and her little daughter. She was a great advertisement for American womanhood and she read my posts with thoughtful interest.

Another escapee from the blogopsphere was Brad the Gorilla. Also based in Seattle, he cleverly sustained the alter ego of a gorilla. He ate bananas and swung his arms as he mooched around the streets of Seattle. He had a wicked sense of humour and blogging with him became a kind of intellectual  jousting tournament which I very much enjoyed. It is a shame that Brad moved on or simply ran out of blogging steam.

Zandrea, Occidentally, Simon Langer and Andrea Sousa Tavares all left comments on this blog by the end of July 2005 but they disappeared long ago. One blogger who stuck around was By George. She was into art and online gaming and she had a problem with food in that she couldn't get enough of it but she was another nice American woman and we kept in blogging touch for many months until she also got fed up with the medium. I still wonder what happened to her.

By December 2005, Friday's Web was on board The Yorkshire Pudding bandwagon. She wasn't wealthy. She lived in the backwoods of North Carolina with her husband and kids and she wrote some fascinating posts. At times I feared that she was tiptoeing on the boundary between sanity and craziness for she was tormented by dreams of the better life she would never lead. It was just beyond her reach. We were close in the way we exchanged comments for maybe four years but she vanished back into the blogosphere's ether. Just like By George - I wonder what happened to Friday's Web. There were drugs and drink and tattoos and bills. It can't have been easy for her.

Friday's Web in January 2006

Five years ago, in July 2010, I wrote thirteen blogposts - some of them were connected with my brother's death. Looking at the commenters, I note that some familiar people were now on board. Lovely Kate from The Bay of Plenty in New Zealand - "The Last Visible Dog" and the equally lovely Helen from Brisbane - "Helsie's Happenings" and handsome Yorkshireman Brian ("Tannu Tuva") and equally handsome Georgian fellow Bob Brague whose name "Rhymes With Plague", Elizabeth from North Yorkshire and Jenny from Wrexham, Wales, Daphne Franks from Leeds and Michael from Sydney Australia., Libby from the English Midlands and Jan Blawat frm Sloughhouse, California.

Nowadays I interlink a  lot with Adrian from "Adrian's Images" and Meike from "From My Mental Library", John Gray from "Going Gently" and Graham from "Eagleton Notes". There's also Carol from "A Small Life", Lee from "Kitchen Connection", Red in "Hiawatha House" Canada and sometimes Tom Gowans from "A Hippo on the Lawn" in Angola. And how could I forget my blogging sister Mama Thyme in Colorado ("Peace Thyme Garden and Weather Station") or Hilly in the woods of Washington State ("Hilltop Homesteader")?

In ten years the players on my blogging field or stage have all changed. Comings and goings. Some people stick around for ages and others move on very quickly. Sometimes bloggers just get fed up with each other. Isn't that a bit like life itself? Nothing last forever. Everything changes.

Presentation

Over the years, I have prepared thousands of meals. Whenever I plate up a meal, I take a little trouble over it because the savouring of good food is not just about the tastiness of what is is on the plate - but it is also about its appearance. I don't like to see the elements of a meal just dumped carelessly on a plate - say with vegetables on top of the meat or with the gravy idly dripped on the plate's edge. No - to me it should look nice.

Television is awash with cooking programmes. Nobodies like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson have become well-known celebrities - on a par with rock stars or Olympic athletes. Viewers who are probably munching on pizzas and ready meals find these cookery shows spellbinding but I am utterly fed up with them and I would like to see nearly all of  them banned. Their relationship to real life cooking and the reality of ordinary people's lives is extremely tenuous.

One of the things that really irritates me about many of these cookery shows is their obsession with how dishes look. That plonker Heston Blumenthal is probably the worst exponent of this "food as art" cult with his swirls of red wine sauce, his globules of balsamic vinegar and his pomegranate foam. Herbs are often used for mere decoration and there are blow torches and piping bags. It is all too much.

In the suburbs of Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Kampala, children are scrabbling in the dirt, not knowing if there will be anything to eat back in their tin shack homes but if there is it won't be five star and it won't look as if it has come from some glossy coffee table book. The gulf between the diets of the world's poor and the plates shown on "Celebrity Master Chef" is outrageous and arguably an indictment of our times.

There's a big difference between making a little effort to present meals nicely and viewing the presentation of food as some kind of art form.

I'd like to see a whole new breed of cooking programmes - "How To Make Best Use of Your Microwave", "Saving Money by using Leftovers", "How to Use Your Freezer Better", "Good Meals from Cheap Ingredients", "Cooking When You Haven't Got Much Time", "Takeaway Food", "The Sandwich Show" etcetera. And we'd get rid of the celebrities. Instead there'd just be a rasping and anonymous northern voice narrating for the TV audience as ordinary mortals take centre stage, -showing us genuinely helpful cooking tips. So farewell Rick, Nigella, Chef ****ing Ramsey, Jamie and the odious Nigel Slater! We don't need you any more. In fact, we never did.

Roving

 "I've been a wild rover for many's the year/ I spent all my money on whiskey and beer"

Roving to the north west of Doncaster yesterday. I stopped to have a look at a beautiful Grade I listed parish church in a small village called Marr. It's The Church of St Helen and was mainly constructed in the twelfth century. See above.

Then I parked in Pickburn, donned my boots and set off northwards to another small yet equally historical village called Hampole. On the way I saw a few more of these ubiquitous wind turbines:-

They are like monuments to something but I am not sure what - perhaps to desperation or to optimism. I walked through Hampole Wood where there were several signs - "No Public Access", "Private Land", "Keep Out" etcetera. I was wondering what they had to hide but the track itself is a public right of way.

From Hampole Wood, the path to Hampole was chest high with tall grasses and other vegetation. Clearly not many rambling rovers plod that way. And then I came to Hampole itself where I was immediately struck by this abandoned building:-

It's called Ivy House Farm and it is up for sale for £400,000 but any would-be buyer would surely have to factor in another £200,000 to bring the ancient property back to life. I wandered around the back but the tumbledown state of the place put me off going inside.

Back home I discovered that Ivy House Farm, also known as The Doctor's House,  has some intriguing secrets which were reported in "The Daily Mail" back in 2013. You can read about it all here.

Miles

The bull

Yesterday I could see for miles. Before my afternoon shift at the Oxfam shop, I drove  out of the city and parked just east of Ringinglow, near the alpaca farm. Summer had returned. Warm and sultry.

Down Greenhouse Lane and then along Harrop Lane. I stopped to admire a stocky brown bull with a ring through his nose. He grunted at me - deep and guttural - as if to say "If you want to steal my harem of cows I will fight you to the death". Then up Andwell Lane, turning into Bassett Lane where I saw a strange vehicle approaching. I recognised it after just a moment - it was a Google Streetview car, collecting fresh imagery so I snapped him back. I guess that before very long there will be a blurry Yorkshire Pudding in Streetview for all the world to see. Fame at last. Maybe.

Google Streetview car on Bassett Lane

Up on to Fulwood Lane and back to its junction with Greenhouse Lane. There's a little stone viewpoint cairn there. You know the sort I mean - with a big engraved steel disc on top of it - rather like a compass. It  informs you about distant landmarks and their distances and yesterday morning the visibility was magnificent. I had heard that you can see Lincoln Cathedral (43 miles away) and The Humber Bridge (52 miles away) from this road junction.

And sure enough, over to the east I could just make out the distant shape of Lincoln Cathedral and though I couldn't see the only bridge of The Humber, I could definitely make out The Yorkshire Wolds - almost sixty miles away. Amazing.

Looking from Fulwood Lane to Sheffield

Milestones

Last month two milestones were reached. June 28th was the fifth anniversary of my brother Paul's death. He was only sixty two and died unexpectedly in his sleep. I blogged about it all. For example - here and here and here. Though Paul is no longer strutting about in the land of the living,  he remains very much alive in my memories of him. Death? You could never get rid of Paul so easily. I hear his fiddle and his jokes and his frenetic "Bye-bye-bye-bye..." whenever he finished a telephone conversation. Mostly he lived life in overdrive - keen to feast on it all. Quiet relaxation was never his forte. I remember him most days and I smile for Paul really and truly lived and not all of us can claim that.

Very much in the shadow of Paul's death, on June 23rd I reached my tenth anniversary of blogging. Yes. It was on June 23rd 2005 that I wrote my first ever post for this humble Yorkshire blog. It was called "Beginnings" and this is what I wrote:-

So this is England in mid-summer. Lovely warm weather and you know what, they're all bloody well complaining! "Oooo it's too hot!" "Open a window!" "Oh I feel faint!" Whingeing whining wimps! I just love to barbecue, walk out in shorts, sweat, wear flip flops. If only all of our summers had long hot spells like this! Leather on willow. Swallows performing acrobatics in the evening sky. A glass of ice cold light white wine with condensation running down the side. "Oh! It's too hot! I couldn't live in a foreign country if it's like this!" As my old mate Trog used to say - Knickers! Knockers! Knackers!

The firsr ever photo posted on this blog

When I composed that first post I had absolutely no idea that I would still be blogging away ten years later but the ideas keep coming and the course of my life keeps unfolding through these endless blogposts. There have been 1808 posts so far and at least 448,000 visits - over half a million according to Blogger. Perhaps I will still be blogging on my own deathbed, tapping away my very last blogpost on a laptop:-

"The light is fading. I can hear the ticking of the hospital clock. My heart is faltering but I can see St Peter ahead. He is opening the pearly gates. He is about to speak to me - "Welcome my son! What's the password? It must include at least one capital letter and a numerical figure" I can see Paul just inside the gates and Mum and Dad and all the others I knew but I cannot remember the freaking password and now St Peter is looking stern and he is pointing to the other place. Shit!"

Old milestone on  Houndkirk Moor near Sheffield

Pigeonholing

"What do you do?"

This is a question that often surfaces soon after being introduced to new people - at parties and other social events. But for years it is a question that I have deliberately refrained from asking. I am of the opinion that knowing what somebody does for a living is not of prime importance.I don't wish to define my fellow human beings by the jobs they do.

It may be unintentional but asking the question, "What do you do?" is surely a way of  pigeonholing people. If they reply, "I'm a butcher" or "I'm in insurance" or "I'm a surgeon", the cogs in the questioner's brain will whirl instantly as presumptions are silently logged. Presumptions about income and education. That kind of thing. And the questioner will be subconsciously rank ordering - assessing your position in the vocational pecking order.

If somebody asks me "What do you do?", I  am often deliberately obtuse. "Oh I like walking and photography - that kind of thing and I am quite keen on cookery. Do you like cooking yourself?" I have also been known to respond, "Why? What do you want to know that for?" which can induce dropped jaws and awkward silences.

For most of us, work is something we do to make money that pays the bills. We can't all be Pablo Picassos or Saul Bellows and what the vast majority of us end up doing is usually an accident of upbringing and circumstance. It shouldn't define us.

I used to rage inside when I heard people making sweeping generalisations about teachers and usually felt like yelling back, "But that's not me!" I was always more than that person at the front of a classroom, teaching lessons and marking books. This was only what I did for a living. It wasn't me.

In my philosophy, road sweepers are equal to magistrates, captains of industry are equal to the cleaners who vacuum their offices and celebrities are no better than the unknown.

Of course, in the passage of time, information about what somebody does for a living will emerge naturally. It's knowledge you can pursue or not but I will never be the first to ask, "What do you do?"