Chocolate

At Christmas, The Beloved Daughter gave me a chocolate bar she had bought in New York in the autumn. It was a Donald Trump chocolate bar. Politely, I thanked her for the gift and then put it in a drawer. Secretly, I imagined that the chocolate within would be like the esteemed president himself - bitter, sickly and liable to cause indigestion or vomiting.

Returning to the drawer a  month after Christmas, I pulled the chocolate bar out and mustered sufficient courage to unwrap it. And there in front of me was my chocolately miniature  Donald J.Trump looking as brown as Bill Cosby or Joe Frazier.

It was time to bite Trump's head off. As I masticated Trump's head I was surprised to discover that its taste was not unlike Cadbury's Dairy Milk which has been England's favourite chocolate for a hundred years. I ate almost half of Trump's body but baulked when I saw that his nether regions were next. No there's no way I will be tucking into that section!

Online I have searched for Theresa May chocolate bars. I mean, if American can produce Donald Trump chocolate products then surely we can do the same for our esteemed prime minister but all I could find was Theresa May silverskin pickled onions and Theresa May bitter lemon throat lozenges. Needless to say, they have not been selling well.

Revitalisation

Overstones Farm and the hills of North Derbyshire

The horrible virus is definitely on its way out now. Yesterday afternoon I felt well enough to drive up to Stanage Edge in order to pay homage to the millstones. It  was good that I was well wrapped up because the winter wind was bitingly cold. The Belted Galloways were huddled together for warmth. 

I chuckled as a rambler entered their field. She was yelling at them "Keep back!" as she loitered nervously on top of the stile.

Not far to walk. Just half a mile there and half a mile back. Good to be breathing fresh air and not recycling stuffy oxygen in our bedroom or front room. So much television has washed over me these past few days because I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for reading. The virus turned your faithful correspondent into a couch potato.

A fellow geograph contributor once referred to me as "The King of Stanage Edge" because of the number of photographs I have taken there. I know that long time visitors to this blog will recall previous images of Overstones Farm and of the abandoned millstones at the southern end of the edge.

They speak of lost industry and hard working men of the past and of the incredible ingenuity of human beings - hand carving heavy disks from a tough base rock and then arranging their transport through the length and breadth of this land. They were used in metal industries as well as flour mills.

Remembering the very first time I visited Stanage Edge in 1978 or 79 - I had no prior knowledge of the millstones. Chancing upon them was a big surprise. Forty years later they remain in the selfsame position - unchanged and somewhat enigmatic. 

It was good to get out and to breathe again. 

Ranting

There are many things that I could rant about today. However, my random ranting spotlight has fallen upon electronic signature devices. Have you experienced them?

Very often parcel delivery workers shove them in front of  parcel recipients to demand our signatures. The trouble is that it is virtually impossible to produce anything that even vaguely resembles one's signature on the slippery little screens we find in front of us. When ever I write my "signature" upon them it looks more like the scrawl of a chimpanzee in a laboratory experiment or the mark of an illiterate peasant from the highlands of New Guinea.

How could that mark ever stand up in a court of law? How could the parcel company ever be able to use it as proof that the parcel was indeed delivered? Anybody could have made that mark.

Ever since I could first write, I have written my name. As the years passed my signature evolved to become a part of me like my fingerprints or the colour of my irises. That signature is a symbol of  my identity. It is in my passport and it is how I still very occasionally sign cheques. And yet the parcel delivery companies are clearly not interested in our real signatures any more. They just want the hopeless screen scrawl with their little electronic sticks like the illegible scrawl that everybody else produces for them.

What I would like to see is this. When asked to provide a "signature" on one of those devices, members of the public should start saying "No! I will give you my proper signature on paper but I am not going to sign anything on this device as I find it impossible to write upon. Go back to your company and tell them so. From a customer's point of view the device is useless and I do not wish to compromise myself by even touching the thing. Who ever invented it needs shooting!" 

Peregrination

It was as if  hairs were growing in my throat. The coughing made me flee from the bedroom. The next night Shirley slept in the front bedroom while I faced the night alone with a glass of water and a bottle of "Deathwatch"cough linctus. Radio 4 hummed on low volume like a never ending bedtime story.

On Thursday I was a big lump stranded on our sofa, waiting for the next cough to rise up from The Great Pudding Volcano. My energy was in retreat and my rib cage felt sore with all the coughing exertions. I hardly moved all day.

On Friday morning I felt slightly better and seeing the bright skies outside thought I might risk a little motorised peregrination in order to snap some photographs of the countryside west of Sheffield. Long time visitors to this blog will have been there with me before so I apologise if some of the pictures that accompany this post seem a touch familiar.

In Underbank Chapel's graveyard west of Stannington I had an awful coughing fit and steadied myself against one of the stones. It crossed my mind that I could have saved Shirley some money by falling into a coffin shaped hole near the perimeter wall. But I lived to hopefully get through another weekend.

It's Sunday morning and though the beastly condition has still not fully departed it is certainly on its way out. Fortunately I am generally strong and healthy but it is clear to see how a virus like the one that I have just been fighting could easily kill a weaker or more elderly human being. The physicality of the coughing and chest heaving itself has been a feat of endurance - like a four day cross country run.

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Pictures: 1.In Underbank Chapel's graveyard with views over The Loxley Valley  2.Eighteenth century milepost on Bolsterstone Road   3.A view of Hill Top with St Nicholas's Church, High Bradfield beyond   4.Sheep above Agden Reservoir  5.The Post Office and Village Shop in Low Bradfield

Recognition

At work and elsewhere, it's nice to receive recognition for endeavour and/or loyalty. On Wednesday, Catherine, the manager of my local Oxfam shop, presented me with a copper lapel badge and a certificate. I have worked there every Wednesday for the past three years but it doesn't seem that long.

I worked at my last Sheffield school for twenty two years. Most weeks I put in fifty to sixty hours and many holidays involved me going in to the school for days on end. For the first twenty years I didn't have a single day off and in the last two years I missed five days for health reasons. And yet I didn't receive a copper lapel badge or a certificate. In fact I received nothing but my monthly salary slip.

When it came to managing staff, that school and the education system in general seemed much better at criticism than praise even though, ironically, they expected teachers to dole out more praise than criticism in their classrooms. This week I noticed that my old school with its state-of-the-art new buildings finished bottom of the Sheffield performance league table for secondary schools. 

People need to feel valued. In my estimation, organisations that  meaningfully praise workers for years of service and for going beyond basic expectations will find that their workforce will be better motivated and probably more productive. Thank you Oxfam.

Frisco

Continuing the account of our California family holiday in 2005...

The Golden Gate Bridge seen from Alcatraz

We descended the snowy Sierra Nevada Mountains, leaving the majestic sequoias behind us. Soon we passed through Fresno to meet The Golden State Highway and then continued heading northwards along The Central Valley.

Increasingly, the landscape seemed colourless, tending towards desert and not green and colourful like the California dreaming of my youth. Where were the orange orange groves and the red tractors ploughing rich, black earth? We passed Merced and Modesto - flat, low-rise working towns and then onwards towards Highway 580 which curves westwards through humped and sunburnt hills  towards San Francisco.

The Bay Bridge took us from Oakland, across San Francisco Bay. There was Alcatraz Island to the right and beyond it in the misty distance the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. I was wishing that Frances's road trip CD had included that Scott McKenzie song..

All across the nation

Such a strange vibration

People in motion

With minimal navigational difficulty we made it to The Travelodge on Lombard Street. It was dusk by now with street lights blinking on and so we set off to find an evening meal in our bohemian neighbourhood. How cool to be in San Francisco at last! The hilly geography reminded us of Sheffield. Further up Lombard Street we strolled to the summit of that famous snake-like section that careers downhill like a slalom course at a ski resort. I intended to drive our black jeep down there before we left!

The next morning we headed for Fisherman's Wharf where blubbery seals were basking and we  soon found the pier from which ferries leave for Alcatraz. It was a diamond day and soon we were disembarking at the famous prison island.

On Alcatraz Island. Can you see the word "Free"?

Audio headsets enriched our tour. We saw where so many bad men were once incarcerated. It was good to observe that the place has not been gentrified or turned into some kind of Disneyland attraction. There's a palpable sense of decay and  emptiness at Alcatraz and if you closed your eyes you could almost hear the echoing of prisoners' footsteps and the shouted commands of the prison guards.

The next day we crossed the famous Golden Gate to visit Tiburon and later I took my family on a selfish pilgrimage to the famous Haight-Ashbury district which was once the very core of the so-called hippy movement of the late sixties. What is a hippy anyway? Did people who were labelled "hippies" ever describe themselves in that way? I doubt it. They were just people seeing the world in a different, kinder way. They said "Make Love Not War" and "Bring Our Brothers Home" and some of them tie-dyed their T-shirts or smoked pot.

My family at Haight-Ashbury

I loved San Francisco. It felt so "right" to me. In another life I could have easily been a San Franciscan. I had plenty of conversations with local folk and we saw terrapins in Golden Gate Park, dodged roller skaters, rode on a tramcar, visited The Mission and walked around Russian Hill and saw the Camera Obscura at Cliff House and watched Pacific waves crashing on Ocean Beach:

I left my heart in San Francisco

High on a hill, it calls to me

I have visited many cities in my life - from New York  to Johannesburg and from Bangkok to Marrakech - but of all those foreign cities only San Francisco felt like it might have been home. Frank Sinatra sang that Chicago was "my kind of town" but to me it would be San Francisco every time. Oh, and I did drive our trusty jeep down the west end of Lombard Street...Wheeeeeeee!

The Camera Obscura at Cliff House

Halfway

Yesterday afternoon I finished drawing my football crowd. It has taken a long while. I found that I was only able to work on it when I was in the mood, when there was nothing else to do and when I was on my own. Getting these three stars to align was not always easy.

Usually, I have put a CD on the stereo and listened to it while creating a few more faces. For the past few sessions I have listened repeatedly to Ed Sheeran's latest album - "Divide". There's no doubt that musically he is a very gifted young man but some of the lyrics seem quite juvenile to me, emphasising the fact that he is only twenty four years old. When you have known and loved the songwriting of Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Robin Williamson, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan - other writers' lyrics can often seem inferior.

Now that the basic drawing is done, I need to start adding colour. Every character is wearing a football scarf and originally it was my intention simply to colour every scarf  in black and amber - the colours of Hull City. 

As the crowd increased in size, I began to wonder whether or not I should colour in the entire scene - different flesh and hair colours as well as clothing. A big task involving many hours of patient work. However, when I finished the drawing yesterday afternoon, I looked at it and thought that maybe I should return to the original vision - scarves only.

I am now in a state of hesitation. And here I am to the rear of the crowd - watching the game and wondering how to proceed with the picture...