Quiztime

Okay. It's time for another quiz with your genial host and quizmaster Mister Yorrrrrrrrkshire Pudding! (Sound of riotous applause and stomping of feet). Grinning like a Cheshire cat, he steps up to the microphone in his gold lamé suit and purple dickie bow.

"Good evening quizzers! Let's not hang about. It's time for "Quiz Time"! And for tonight's quiz, the theme is food! After all, we all eat food don't we? And looking at tonight's audience I would say that some of us eat too much of it!  (Gales of laughter) Food is something that all human beings have in common.":-

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1. With which staple food do you associate these names  - basmati, arborio & jasmine?

2. No British Sunday roast is complete without a pudding made from plain flour, milk and an egg or two but after which English county is that pudding named?

3. In 2002, Donald Trump appeared in a TV commercial for a particular fast food company, but which one was it?  (a) Taco Bell    (b) KFC   or (c) McDonalds

4. Which farm animal do both Jews and Muslims refuse to eat according to their holy laws?

5. Jambalaya is made from cooked rice, vegetables and meat but with which southern American state would you mostly associate this creole/cajun dish?

6. Shaped like little wagon wheels, rotelle is a form of which staple Italian food?

7. Zwiebelkuchen is a savory onion cake made of steamed onions, diced bacon, cream, and caraway seeds on either a yeast or leavened dough but with which European country do you associate  Zwiebelkuchen?

8. What is this berry fruit called? (see picture)

9. What is the main ingredient in hummus?

10. Coq au vin is a traditional French dish from the Burgundy region. Which colour wine is nearly always used in traditional recipes for this dish?

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As usual, answers are given in the Comments section. How did you do?

Missing

It's easy to miss things. 

Last Friday, when I visited Bradford, I was very close to the house shown at the top of this blogpost. It was the marital home of one of Britain's most infamous mass murderers - Peter William Sutcliffe whose tabloid nickname was The Yorkshire Ripper. He killed at least thirteen women and was at large between 1969 and 1981. He terrorised the north of England until he was caught here in Sheffield in January 1981.

He married Sonia Szuma in 1974 and a few years later they were able to buy the house on Garden Lane in the Heaton district of Bradford.  I understand that Sonia  Sutcliffe, at the age of 74,  still lives in that house.  It may seem ghoulish I know but I would have liked to walk down Garden Lane to snap a picture of my own. The image at the top was snipped from Google Streetview.

It is tempting to wonder what drove Peter Sutcliffe to commit his terrible acts. So much has been written about him but when it comes to motivation a lot of the verbiage is pure speculation - guesswork. Sonia was a respectable primary school teacher but nearly all of The Ripper's victims were prostitutes. The couple never had any children though Sonia suffered an unknown number of miscarriages.  At some stage she was judged by health services to be impaired by paranoid schizophrenia. 

After this past Wednesday's visit to Barnsley, I realised I had missed something else and was reminded of this by blog chum Dave in County Cork, Ireland. It wasn't a murderer's house I had missed but the statue of a boy from a novel holding a kestrel.

The novel concerned is "Kes" or "A Kestrel for a Knave"  by the late Barry Hines. The hero he created in that book was a teenage boy called Billy Casper - born into an obscure and challenging life on a Barnsley social housing estate. Billy had nothing going for him but he managed to train a young kestrel. I sometimes say that if you want to understand the real England you should read "Kes". The statue is located on Cheapside in Barnsley. I must have been within twenty five yards of it.

So frustrating. I can see that another day trip to Barnsley will be required.

Babies

Babies may be notorious for crying but they also love to laugh. They laugh at the silliest things and of course because they are babies that laughter is not pretentious. It's 100% genuine. 

There are plenty of compilation videos of baby laughter over at YouTube. If you are feeling down or blue and  need  a bit of cheering up, perhaps those videos would be just the ticket. Doctors could potentially stop prescribing anti-depressant tablets and just recommend laughing baby videos instead.

In this area of hilarity, babies probably have an advantage over adults in that they wear nappies (American:diapers) so that when the laughter causes temporary loss of bladder control, those babies will not be embarrassed but adults - well, that's another story.

 

Oddballing

Inspired by my blogging chum Bruce Oddball in Arizona, today I am simply sharing a bunch of memes - all picked because they are just plain silly and have no serious or political undertones. Bruce  (see above) is the author of "Oddball Observations"  and every Friday he posts his "Friday Funnies" - just for laughs.  I hope you get at least one chuckle from this bunch...

That's all Folks!

Barnsley

 

Barnsley is Sheffield's little brother. It is a town some fifteen miles north of Sheffield and home to 72,000 people. It was at the heart of the South Yorkshire coalfield and so it is very familiar with poverty. Barnsley people have no airs and graces. They are considered to be the salt of the earth and they call a spade a spade.

After leaving the railway station, I strolled to a large open space called Glassworks Square. I swear it wasn't there the last time I was in Barnsley town centre. My eyes were drawn to a statue on the other side of the square so I went over to investigate. 

It was unveiled at the end of 2021 in memory of those who died during the coronavirus epidemic and those who helped. The seven  figures include a little girl, an old man, a volunteer, a nurse, a carer, a police officer and a teacher. I thought it was brilliant but I wish I had hung around to take some better pictures of it than this one...

I was mostly in  Barnsley to "bag"  three specific squares for the Geograph project so I needed to move on. I had about two miles to walk. Below - market stalls in the street with the tower of Barnsley Town Hall beyond...

Barnsley has many old terraced houses in unremarkable  streets like this one - Fife Street...

Not far from Fife Street there are two large public house that would have once allowed hard-working miners and others  to slake their thirsts and spend big chunks of their wages. This is "The Shaw Inn" at the corner of Shaw Street and Racecommon Road...

Below, the date on the parapet tells us that this pub -  "The New Longcar" was opened in 1914 - possibly replacing the old "Longcar". On the side of the pub, the Barnsley Brewery Company is still advertised...

Finally, you might be wondering about the seven foot fish at the top of this blogpost. It's a salmon! It stands outside Sheffield Midland Station  and was commissioned a few years ago to mark the return of salmon to The River Don which was once terribly polluted by industry but finally, through human intervention, the fish came back.

Reflections

As a blogger, one develops a unique network of firm supporters, casual supporters and occasional visitors. In turn, one belongs to other bloggers' networks in different capacities. If someone were to represent all of this connectivity in diagrammatic form, the final picture would be hellishly complicated.

When I set off blogging nineteen years ago, I had no idea if anyone would even find "Yorkshire Pudding" in the blogging galaxy we occupy. But gradually it started to happen. Visitors came as I visited other blogs and before you knew it my blogposts were not lonesome sailing boats upon a deep, dark ocean but part of a flotilla that seemed to grow. I was not alone.

Back in 2005, I had no notion of what my visitors might be like. Would there be a typical profile?

Nineteen years later, it seems to me that this blog has attracted generally mature, literate people. Most visitors are over fifty years old and most are white. The majority own their own homes  and most live in western countries - The United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, The British Isles etc..

This was never planned but it is what happened. I think of the saying, "Birds of a feather flock together" and I wonder - was there anything I might have done to appeal to younger people or to bloggers from non-western nations? How could I have made the profile of my visitors more diverse?

Perhaps younger people do not blog and if so, why is that? Perhaps their urge to reach out and connect with others is satisfied through other channels like "X", Facebook and Instagram. Perhaps their lives are too full-on to find time for blogging or visiting other people's blogs.

Just occasionally, I stumble across interesting blogs I have never been to before and scanning down the commenters, I might find no names that I recognise. It is as if I have stepped into a parallel universe and I guess that there may be hundreds of such hidden places in the blogosphere. After all, it is estimated that there are 600 million blogs in the world - not all of them facilitated by Blogger I hasten to add.

Standing back from the fray, I wonder if you have any reflections of your own about blogging? 

Top picture: A lock keeper's cottage on The 

Chesterfield Canal near Retford 

(December 2020)

Triangulation

Roseberry Topping

Triangulation pillars, are columns made of cast concrete or cemented stone. They are typically four feet tall, with a large part of each pillar commonly buried below the earth's surface. They are also known as trig points.

There are more than 6500 of these pillars located throughout Great Britain - often in pretty inaccessible places. They were mostly erected in the 1930's and were vital to the process of accurate surveying. The iconic trig pillar was designed by Brigadier Martin Hotine in 1935.  Hotine designed them to assist with triangulation - separating our country into a network of triangles, allowing precise mapping of  the landscape.

Burbage Moor

In modern times, better surveying techniques have been developed - to such a point that the little pillars are now redundant. However, they still dot the country and appear in "Ordnance Survey" mapping. They are often a focus or indeed a diversion for walkers. People will frequently pause by them to lean and look around.

Bagging trig points is a passion for some country lovers and there are even websites devoted to this hobby. Every pillar has its own unique reference information usually shown on a metal flush bracket secured to the base of the trig point.

Birchen Edge

Over the years, I have visited dozens of triangulation pillars - not because I am a crazy trig point enthusiast but just because they happened to be on or close to my walking route. Some pillars sit in very prominent positions while others are hidden  away in hedgerows.

Accompanying this blogpost, I have picked five of my images of triangulation pillars to share with you.

Mam Tor

Stanage Edge