Even though these last few days have left us feeling bleak and helpless, with time passing so quickly, yet so slowly, there have been good moments. You might expect two dogs to be behind one or two of them.
Here’s Ellie, Phil and the twins’ dog Brian letting off steam with his best friend Betsy. Luckily for them, Betsy’s owners are among Phil and Ellie’s best friends too. So there are lots of playtimes for these two energetic dogs to look forward to.
Phil is still being cared for at home during his final days.
This seems the time to come clean about what’s really happening in our lives.
My son-in-law Phil – the husband of my daughter, and father of those twin boys – has been given only days – at most a week or two, to live. He’s never had much of a mention on this blog and it’s tough that this is how he’s introduced to you.
We hadn’t been back in England long when he was diagnosed with cancer. With a mixture of surgery, treatment, chemotherapy and sheer bloody-mindedness he kept it more or less at bay, though never defeated it. Suddenly last week, cancer took over, irrevocably.
He and my daughter have – or had till yesterday – a respected and successful voice-over business, which they’ve temporarily closed with immediate effect, though my daughter will relaunch it.
There’s plenty to say about Phil and his life and times. But not today. Ellie has said it all so much better than me, on Facebook.
I’ve been writing this blog, firstly as ‘Life in Laroque‘, and later, when we returned to England, as ‘From Pyrenees to Pennines‘ for eight years now. I’m beginning to feel the ‘brand’ is becoming a little tired, and that I may no longer post quite so regularly.
But I shan’t stop writing. I’m planning to start a blog that I’ll call ‘Notes on a family‘, which will mainly be for family members to read. I can’t think it will attract many followers from further afield.
Mine is a relatively small family. As a child, I had no brothers, no sisters, no grandparents, no aunts, and only one uncle, whom I met once. Obviously then, no cousins either. I didn’t mind. I listened to my schoolfriends moaning about the torments of having a brother, how annoying their sisters were, and how embarrassing they found their Uncle Norman and Auntie Elaine, and took their comments at face value.
This makes me feel very old. It’s my mother with her younger brother. Such a period piece.
One of my regrets when my mother died was that I’d asked her so little about her family. Her father, for instance, who’d died when she was 19. He was one of 8 siblings born to a poor London family. Alone among those siblings, he was sent to Grammar School, which can’t have been at all easy. He won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he did exceptionally well, and became a parish priest. What’s the story there? I shall never know now.
My father too. He came from Poland during World War II. His family were well-to-do landowners at one point, but his father died when he was 12. Because his mother remarried and I don’t know what her new surname was, I have no means of tracing any family members there.
But there are leads I can follow, and I have started to do so. My new blog will not be organised chronologically. Rather I’ll tell tales as they occur to me, recount results of research when I have any successes. Here’s the first post.
Eighteen days to go, and entirely typically, I haven’t started my Christmas shopping. I have made the cake, the puddings and the mincemeat though. And today, we made some Christmas presents too. I can’t recommend this panforte recipe too highly: It’s quite hard to make yourself give it away. If you decide to make some for your nearest and dearest, they’ll love you forever. The halva’s pretty good too.
When we first made this recipe, we were in France, hiding from the snow. Now we’re in England, hiding from the rain. You’ll know about the devastating floods that have hit Cumbria. We too have flooding, but nothing like so serious. Closed roads, large lakes where there ought to be farmers’ fields, and mud, mud, everywhere. Just the weather for licking the bowl out after a serious session in the kitchen.
I’m getting a bad case of cabin fever at the moment. The snow is turning to hard packed ice and/or slush and is not much fun to walk on. We’re not getting out much. So I’ve turned to comfort cooking.
About a week ago, my favourite food blogger, David Lebovitz wrote about his take on that wonderfully decadent Italian treat, Panforte. Two days after that, Kalba’s blog dropped into my in-box. She’d been tweaking his recipe whilst hiding from the snow on her side of the Ariège. Today it was my turn- and here’s my tweaked recipe
40g unsweetened cocoa powder, plus extra for dusting the tin
200g chopped toasted nuts- I used the hazelnuts I gathered with some friends early last Autumn, and the last of my walnuts
I don’t really do dogs. There. I’ve just lost more than half my readership, just like that.
It’s not that I don’t like them though. I can think of few greater pleasures than a tramp over the hills on a cold and frosty morning with a cheerful dog bounding ahead, truffling around the undergrowth and enjoying all the sights and sounds and experiences of a fresh new day.
It’s just that hell can be not other people, but other people’s dogs. You know the sort. The ones that leap up and knock you sideways, muddying your nice clean jumper in the process. They’re the ones whose owners smile indulgently. ‘He’s just being friendly’, they explain. These are the very dogs that may also try to lick your face. Then there are the ones that are left alone and bark, bark, bark, as the dog-next-door in France did. Or the ones that bare their teeth and frighten me half to death. Or the smelly ones.
I think there’s a pattern here. It’s not the dogs. It’s the owners. And I seem to have raised three children who apparently think much the same as I do on the dog question.
And then, the other week, Daughter Number One announced they’d decided to get a dog. Not just any dog. But a puppy. One that would become a big (ish) dog. An active dog. A feisty dog. A dalmatian. Ellie’s is a family of two busy working adults and ten-year-old twin sons with the sort of after-school schedule for which you need a very large calendar, and a smart phone that reminds you at frequent intervals who has to be where when, with whom, and wearing what kind of kit.
They did their research. They chose and visited a breeder and looked at a litter of ten newly-born pups. And they chose Brian. He’s been living with them for ten days now. This week, we went to stay, and we met him.
We’re converted. I’ve never in all my life been greeted with such enthusiasm as I was by Brian when I turned up in the kitchen the other morning to get some breakfast. Look at this wagging tail. I remind myself he’d probably have greeted a burglar with equal joy …. but still.
Brian’s so pleased to see everyone in the morning.
He’s charmed us all. But he’s not going to get away with simply being charming. Right from day one, training began. No leaping up on furniture. No leaping up at people. No shoe-savaging. He learned immediately to ‘sit’ on command, and Alex’s first party trick was to teach him to shake a paw. We’re all busy keeping him entertained in these slightly restrictive weeks when he can’t go out and about because he hasn’t had all his jabs yet. But everyday pleasures are enough for this young chap. There’s a garden to explore. Rotting leaves and springy grass. Rustling dried-up autumn plants. Tantalising glimpses of birds. Misty-moisty autumn smells. And there’s a whole tick-box in the training manual to worry about. Checklist: he must meet a baby (no), children of various ages (tick), the elderly (tick), someone in glasses (tick), someone bearded (no), someone in uniform (no), and so on, and so on.
Project Exhaust-a-pup bears fruit.
Dog-training proper starts next week. And then before long he’ll be a dog-teenager. And then an adult, prepared to offer many years of companionship and pleasure to Ellie & Co. and who knows? Maybe to us too.
I was out walking near Ripon this morning. For once it’s not raining – and it has been, more often than not, for days and days. But the river, viewed on a gusty but mild Autumnal morning, offered proof of all that recent rain. The Ure raged and surged at the bridges. Every bank had been breached, and trees were paddling in several feet of water. Impromptu lakes formed in fields and too-close-for-comfort to urban streets. Riverside paths, usually solid affairs of beaten earth, were slick and slippery with sludge: or worse, deeply hidden under soft ribbons of oozy mud. How very like an English November, I thought.
But then I remembered a November in France, only two years ago. It made our current Autumn weather look rather OK, especially as it’s unseasonably mild: 16 degrees today. Nobody’s talking about snow …… yet.
I think we’ve had enough. When I last posted – three days ago – we’d already had a week of rain. It’s barely stopped since. During the night, we can hear dull thudding as the roof tiles take another sodden pounding. We get up in the morning, raise the shutters, and immediately the rain batters the windows. Going for the breakfast loaf, usually a good way to begin the day, seems unattractive. We make a comforting pan of porridge instead. And so the day wears on. We go out when we have to, but there’s no pleasure to be had in scurrying down the street, heads down, coats spattered by any passing car. And I don’t know when we’ll ever have a country walk again. The fields are waterlogged, the paths sticky and slippery with thick deep mud.
It’s half term this week. It seems to have become a bit of a tradition to have the twin grandsons – now ten – over for a few days. This time though, all plans got thwarted by almost a week of constant unremitting rain. No fresh air and fun for us this time.
An hour or two at the local adventure playground was rejected in favour of a visit to the local swimming pool.
The boys were charmed by the antiquity of Ripon Baths – built 1903.
We spent hours playing old-fashioned board games like ‘Go for Broke’. This involves trying to lose the million pounds with which you started the game. In ‘The London Game’, you have to blunder round London’s Underground system whilst your opponents do their best to prevent you reaching your destination. ‘Stone Soup’ means lying through your teeth about the cards you’ve just placed, face down on the table. All useful worthwhile life lessons, I’m sure you’ll agree.
It’s a tradition that breakfasts have to involve ‘Grancakes’ – pancakes to you. Here’s a shot of Ben tossing his – and that one didn’t end up on the kitchen floor.
Well caught, Ben!
A more recent tradition insists that during every stay, a traditional English Roast Dinner has to make an appearance, and the twins have to do much of the hard labour: roast chicken, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, carrots, broccoli…and the all-important gravy. I find the timing of all this a bit stressful. No wonder roasts don’t make a frequent appearance in this house.
Spud and carrrot peeling.
And of course, we had to have a Grand Day Out. Malcolm had communed with timetables to plan our journey by train and bus: public transport’s a rare treat for these young twins. But the weather on the day was so evil, we abandoned the idea. Walking through town to stand in the rain waiting for a bus that would almost certainly be late suddenly didn’t seem that exciting. So we took the car to Elvington, home of the Yorkshire Air Museum. It was a Bomber Command Station during World War II, and was also the only base used by French heavy bomber squadrons. With one twin passionately knowledgeable about planes – his future career as a pilot is already mapped out – and the other fascinated by World War II, we thought we had a hit on our hands. We did. They clambered in and out of uncomfortably chilly, uninsulated, uncomfortable and draughty cockpits, trying to imagine how it would feel flying long hours through winter skies to the industrial heartlands of Germany, always on the look out for enemy craft, fearful of being shot down in enemy territory. We remembered that only half of all pilots survived the war. We looked round workshops and period displays. And we watched a few films, moving accounts of the lives of those young men who gave their youth, their normal careers and loves and often their lives to the war effort. Lunch at the NAAFI however raised our mood. We were glad not to be placed on wartime rations.
That night, Ben slept for 12 hours straight, and Alex managed 10. Result.
So that was Project Exhaust-a-Gran (& Grandad). No, wait……. it was meant to be called ‘Exhaust-a-Twin’.
I was looking on the internet for something just now, when I found myself staring at this blog post that I wrote more than three years ago. And it suddenly made me homesick for a little bit of France. Not the friends, or the food, or the scenery or any of the finer things that France can offer. No, what I suddenly missed was the mangled version of English which is the stock-in-trade of every magazine and newspaper article there. I wonder what the must-have words of 2015 are?
Stuck in a waiting room with a pile of magazines between me and my appointment time, my idea of hell is a choice between fashion mags and ones about cars.
Less so in France, at least as far as the fashion ones are concerned. It’s not that I’m more interested in being stylish and chic here. I simply have fun reading the articles and noting the ‘English’ words and phrases on almost every line.
Are you a sophisticated lady? Cool? Relax et sexy? Show-off? Perhaps you aim for le twist sporty-glam, or like le mix et le match, le style ‘street’, or le fun et le trash.
Down at the shops are you looking for un look color block, le style boyish ou girly, arty-trendy, crazy doll, grungy girl? If you’ve any sense, you’ll have made a…
We went to London yesterday. We didn’t visit Tate Modern or take a trip on the London Eye. We didn’t look at the Tower of London or visit the Wren Churches, or wander round Spitalfields, or Petticoat Lane market. We had no interest in galleries, palaces, parks, museums, shops or going for a meal
We went straight to the home of my son and daughter-in-law, Tom and Sarah, and we arrived shortly after Sarah’s parents, Brian and Sue. They hadn’t been sight-seeing either.
All any of us wanted to do was to play ‘Pass the Parcel’. All day. Because we had a very special parcel indeed. This one.
Just….William.
Meet William Francis, born a whole fortnight early, last Tuesday. We grandparents all raced to London the first moment we could, and spent the whole day quite simply passing him round….. and round. You may disagree if you’ve had babies of your own, but to us, he’s the very best baby in the world.
There have been other ‘best babies’ of course. Those twins, Alex and Ben, born 10 years ago fitted the bill then. Sarah and Tom’s nephew Lucas claimed the title five years ago. But this is William’s moment. Here he is, all 7 lb. 2 oz. of him, being passed from granny to grandma, back to Sarah to be fed, to grandad,and step-grandad then back to Sarah to be fed again. Through all of this, he slept contentedly, only waking occasionally to stare fixedly at whoever was cuddling him at the time…. or to demand yet another feed. We thought it was a pretty fine way to pass a summer Sunday.
Recently, we became members at High Batts Nature Reserve, just down the road. Many of those who join are enthusiasts, well able to name every bird, bat, butterfly, moth and insect that inhabits or passes through this area of mixed woodland and open clearings. We can’t, but that’s rather why we wanted to join. We’re keen to learn.
Close-packed trees at High Batts.
We had a bit of a chance the other evening. And yet High Batts wasn’t our destination. Instead it was one of the local quarries, normally closed to the public, but open for one night only to members of High Batts. It’s Quarry Central round here: lorries hauling gravel hither and yon are a common sight. But once exhausted, and in fact in many cases while they’re still actively being quarried, these places become nature reserves, havens for native and migrating water birds, and creatures of every kind, pleased to find tracts of undisturbed, unfarmed countryside where they can live and prosper.
Rabbit housing estate.
This verdant corridor is home to thousands of butterflies and moths during the warmer months.
Home to a badger.
So the other evening we were at Bellflask. A still very active quarry, it’s not open to the public, and hidden from view down long and fairly inaccessible tracks. But it’s very much open to wildlife. Our guides on a cold and blustery May evening were the quarry’s manager, Bob Orange, and Brian and Sue Morland, whose passion is for the flora and fauna of the place.
Bob’s role is to ensure that as each part of the site outlives its industrial usefulness, it becomes a housing and holiday destination for as wide a variety of wildlife as possible. He says that even where gravel is actively being extracted, sandpipers, martins and so on fly within inches of the giant-sized machinery and immense trundling diggers with no fear at all.
A larger than life digger at the quarry.
But it was Brian and Sue who were most endlessly fascinating. They live in a cottage on site, where they have a lease on a large area of riverside. Their income comes from the fishery they’ve developed, but their real passion is in creating a favourable wildlife habitat. Largely, this means leaving things to grow unimpeded. Every evening for many years, Bob has set moth traps. Because of the richness of habitat on the site, undisturbed by farming and pesticides, there are moths here that are found nowhere else in Yorkshire, and hardly anywhere ‘up north’. This is important, he says. ‘What a lot of people don’t understand is that if you take, say, a pair of blue tits, to raise a family they require about 35,000 caterpillars and each one of these moths lays three or four hundred eggs. This is the bottom end of the food chain. Take your moths away and your birds starve’.*
Their secluded address means that they are the ones who have found a grey atlantic seal here, quietly fishing after having been swept nearly 60 miles up river one summer in unusual flood conditions. On a summer’s evening, Brian may go looking for lampreys in the river, and find himself at the centre of a group of gambolling and playing young otters. He and Sue are keen to allow nature to take over, but they’re not above giving a helping hand. They’ve planted reed beds. That way, the increasingly rare reed warbler is thriving, and they even hope to have the bittern that now pass through breeding here.
We saw nothing like this. The cold and slightly dismal conditions kept wildlife at bay. But just as interesting was the sight of all that machinery: the 24-hour-a-day pumps keeping the water level in the gravel pits at a level that permitted working to take place, the mammoth diggers with their immense caterpillar tracks.
Excavator at rest.
A working quarry……
…. starts to return to nature….
… becoming greener with each passing season
We’ve noticed a few more sessions when this place will be open to the public over the next few months. We’ll be there
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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