Explanation

The Old Hall in Bellerby

The weekend's weather forecast was encouraging so on Friday evening I headed north to Carlisle, Then on Saturday morning I crossed over the border into Scotland and headed west to Dumfries before cutting south along the coast, meandering and stopping occasionally to explore what to me was unfamiliar territory. And beautiful it all was as I  followed the twisting road to Kirkcudbright.

At five o'clock I reached my B&B in the hamlet of Girthon. It is run by an artist called Sheena. Her paintings filled the walls of the old Kirk House. That was my base. And on a bright and summe
ry Sunday,  I continued my tootling around Galloway with various stops for photographs.

Such a lovely corner of this great island. So green. So peaceful and with so many wonderful coastal vistas. I didn't return to the B&B till ten thirty. Sheena had left a little note on the door asking me to lock up. It had been a brilliant and memorable day.

Some future blogposts will report this weekend in closer detail. I snapped more than two hundred pictures but don't fret, you won't have to suffer all of them!

Today, after lunch in England's highest pub - "The Tan Hill Inn" I thought I would pay another well-known blogger a visit. I sped into the  North Yorkshire village of Bellerby. That's where Pat, The Weaver of Grass currently resides. Unfortunately, she wasn't in but I peered through her windows and saw some of the boxes she has been filling ahead of her impending move to the nearby market town of Leyburn.

I left her a tin of salmon rather than flowers. If you read her blog you may have also deduced that Pat is seriously addicted to salmon. Lunching out regularly, she just can't get enough of  this particular fish species. It would have been nice to spend an hour with her and I would also have got to meet her trusty hound - Tess.

Instead, I headed back down the A1 towards Sheffield.

Statecraft

"Our republic is a responsible nuclear state that, as we 

made clear before, will not use nuclear weapons first 

unless aggressive hostile forces use nuclear weapons to 

invade upon our sovereignty,"

- Kim Jong-un speaking at The House of Culture 

in Pyonyang. North Korea May 1st 2016

Bellicosity

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power - the likes of which this world has never seen before..." 

- Donald Trump speaking at The Trump National

 Golf Center. Bedminster N.J. 8/8/17

Incarceration

Is it Art?
No - it's my designer decorating trews.

While George and Amal Clooney are snuggling up on their sofa, watching "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" on their mammoth TV set, I very much doubt that Amal cajoles George to re-decorate their bedroom. I just can't visualise George donning old decorating clothes and shifting the furniture or heading off to the local branch of B&Q to purchase paint, wallpaper, filler and all the other stuff you need for a domestic decorating project.

It's something that rich people never experience. When's the last time that Mick Jagger wielded a paint roller? When's the last time Donald Trump got barley white emulsion in his eye when painting a ceiling? When's the last time Queen Elizabeth II had to use white spirit to clean up her hands and brushes while standing over the kitchen sink?

All of this preamble is leading to the confession that I have finally succumbed to the psychological pressure cleverly applied by Lady Pudding to achieve her target - the redecoration of our bedroom.. 

For three days, I have been a virtual prisoner, crawling about, up and down the step ladder. scraping, sanding, pasting, glossing, re-coating, wiping down. These are practical actions unknown to The Kardashians or Kim Jong Un. And at sixty three I begin to feel various aches and pains connected with decorating. I especially dislike having to lie on my belly on the floor, simply because it's bloody hard to get up again. I need to keep protecting my right knee from injury.

My unwelcome incarceration and the slavish drudgery have been slightly relieved by BBC Radio 4. It has taken my mind away from the bedroom of punishment. I wonder if Nelson Mandela listened to Radio 4 on Robben Island. Perhaps that's what got him through quarter of a century of unjustified imprisonment. He might have broken rocks there but I doubt that he ever glossed any skirting boards.

The job is still not done. The final act will be to wallpaper the wall at the head of our bed. I have already put good quality lining paper up on that wall. The top paper we chose cost £39 a roll and there are blue peacocks on it. In months to come, I will probably experience nightmares in which I hear the late night alarm calls of peacocks from my dingy cell before waking up in a fevered sweat.

Today I am being allowed out on parole so the papering will have to wait till tonight or tomorrow. As usual on a Wednesday, I shall soon be off down to the Oxfam charity shop to do my bit for an organisation that has done so much great work around the world through the past seventy five years. I just hope that the manager - Catherine - doesn't ask me to paint anything.

Our peacock paper.

Medallists

You might recall that I was recently  lucky enough to win my third "Picture of the Week" over on the geograph website. As usual my reward was to pick the next winner from a shortlist of fifty images. Below is the photograph that I picked as the bronze medallist. It was taken at Nostell Priory which I visited just last Friday:-

 In second place, I picked this picture of an oak tree up in the Scottish Highlands. It's near a small lake called Lock Achilty which is not too far from Inverness:-

And the next picture was my favourite so it was the overall winner. It was taken by a gentleman called Alan. The location was just east of Ilkeston in Derbyshire. Alan was standing on a footbridge that crosses The Erewash Canal. I admired the geometrical symmetry of Alan's image and how this was assisted by the reflections on the water.

 Sorry that I forgot to take Yorkshire Pudding visitors through the voting process this time.

Sideshow

In this mad world, we put certain people on pedestals. Mostly, these people, these stars, are engaged in activities that shouldn't really matter. They are separate from real life. Real life is the channel that the rest of us swim along - farmers, engineers, nurses, teachers, factory workers,  shop assistants, dockers, lorry drivers, soldiers and all the rest.

Without these people doing the real work, living the real life, there would be no pedestals for the famous.

I am thinking about film stars, actors, pop artists, best-selling novelists, TV people, sports stars. They are only there to distract us, an embellishment - like the travelling circuses of yore that were set up on village greens to entertain the local populace. With a few spare pennies jangling in one's pocket one could afford admission to the big top. But it didn't really matter. It was not the real life. When the acrobats and the clowns were gone, normal life resumed.

You might say that we have all been signed up - willingly or otherwise to join the cult of celebrity. They have become modern day gods from Lionel Messi to Meryl Streep and from Stephen King to Little Mix. We are meant to bow down before them, follow their stories, compare the glorious light of their exciting  lives with the anonymous shadows of our own drudgery.

When quizzed about their ambitions, many kids are magnetised by the sideshow. They want to be famous footballers, reality TV stars, actors.  But those people - the ones we see in magazines and tabloid newspapers - they represent such a minuscule proportion of humanity that it ought to make them irrelevant.

Adulation, admiration and aspiration should really be reserved for the everyday people we see around us. They are the real heroes - our fellow citizens including family members. It is far more heroic to swim in the river of reality than to dance like a moth  in the deceptive limelight of fame.

Nostell

 On Friday, my trusty steed Clint carried me deeper into Yorkshire. Up the M1, then through Barnsley on the A628 and then speeding onward through Lundwood and Cudworth until I saw the sign to Hemsworth. Then on through Kinsley and Sir Geoffrey Boycott's home village of Fitzwilliam until I reached my destination - Nostell Priory.

I had no plans to look inside the grand Palladian mansion - built for the very wealthy Winn family in the late eighteenth century. My aim was solely to stroll in the extensive parklands that surround the grand house.

To secure a parking ticket at Nostell Priory I had to give The National Trust £4. They don't employ car park attendants any more as that would involve paying wages. You put your coins in a machine that begrudgingly spews out the precious paper token. Presumably wages have to be paid to a snooper who wanders around checking car windscreens.

Anyway, I wandered around the grounds with the aid of a very inaccurate map. The highlight of this walk was the Obelisk Gatehouse designed by Robert Adam in 1776 - the year that America was kindly granted its independence by Britain. Sometimes called The Pyramid Gatehouse, it was once the main entrance to Nostell Priory but when a main road was constructed in the mid-nineteenth century between Wakefield and Doncaster - passing south of the estate, the previously favoured gatehouse fell into disuse.

For a hundred years different gatekeepers and their families lived in the gatehouse. There are rooms to each side of the arch with an offshot kitchen to the left.

Another highlight of my wandering was The Druid's Bridge which passes over a tongue of The Lower Lake. I recently saw a lovely picture of this bridge and in fact it was that picture that gave me the idea to drive up to the Nostell Estate.

You might wonder why is the grand house called Nostell Priory? Well in the eleventh century there was a small religious settlement here - founded by Augustinian monks. They built a priory that was more or less razed to the ground during the construction of the estate we see today with its lakes, its woods, its follies, its lawns, its stable block and of course the jewel in the crown - the big house itself.