From Pyrenees to Pennines

Hmmm……..

My laptop has decided that the letter after ‘a‘, & also the letter after ‘m‘ are superfluous & refuses to type them. Accept the call to do without!

The weather is far too glorious to sit inside reading and writing blog posts. Let’s just go for a walk round the grounds of Castle Howard, which everyone of my generation knows as the star of the 1981 production of Brideshead Revisited on ITV. If you want to know more about the building’s real history, just look here.

For a closer look at any photo, click on the image.

Snapshot Saturday is being replaced by Ragtag Tuesday: watch this space.

This Brexit Business: marching for the People’s Vote

The march, as seen in a plate glass window.

On Saturday morning, we got up at 4.30 a.m. and didn’t get to bed again till 12.30 on Sunday morning. In between, we drove to York; forked out £60 for tickets and travelled in a coach to London where we spent the day marching, before reversing the procedure in the early evening. At our ages – we’re both long past retirement age – you don’t do things like that unless it’s for something really important.

It is. For us, and on behalf of our children and grandchildren, this Brexit Business matters more than almost anything else.

We are members of North Yorkshire for Europe, and joined for the day with York for Europe. We came to London to march and campaign for a People’s Vote on the Brexit deal.

York and North Yorkshire organise themselves.

Don’t talk to us about the Referendum being the last word on The Will of the People (a barely more than 50% of those who voted changing the course of a nation’s history?). Don’t tell us what The People voted for – nobody exactly knows. Don’t tell us that when companies like Airbus and Siemens warn they may have to leave the UK in the event of a no-deal, that they are simply part of an irresponsible Project Fear. Yes, we are fearful of Brexit: for us, for our families, for those in insecure employment, for those European citizens now resident here who had considered the UK their home.

On arrival in central London, we joined 100, 000 others on a slow two hour march down Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and Whitehall and into Parliament Square, which completely failed to accommodate us all.

Despite our serious purpose, we had fun. Look at the banners, the flags, the posters, the facepaint and wigs; the young, the old: marching, hobbling, manoeuvring wheelchairs and buggies – you’ll even spot one fellow being carried by Donald Trump (as if …). We enjoyed Mexican cheers (the vocal version of a Mexican wave), bouts of chanting (‘What do we want?’ ‘A People’s Vote!’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Now!’). We chatted with marchers from Wales, Devon, Germany, Reading, France, Lambeth, Scotland…..

Then speeches. Rousing, energising speeches from the likes of Caroline Lucas MP, Tony Robinson, Vince Cable MP, David Lammy MP. Passionate speeches from a hospital consultant, from the young people of OFOC (Our Future, Our Choice). Video contributions from a WWII veteran and from Chuka Umunna MP. We cheered them all, and at the end, especially the courageous Tory MP Anna Soubry.

OFOC speak …..

… and David Lammy MP ….

…. and finally Anna Soubry MP.

What we want is a People’s Vote on the final Brexit deal, because apart from a principled few, most MPs are obeying the Whips and toeing the party line, regardless of either their own beliefs, or those of their constituents. If you voted for Brexit, and the government comes up with a good deal for the British people, you have nothing to fear from a People’s Vote. The government will win the day, and we Remoaners will have to shut up.

If you think that, having learned the terms of the Final Deal, the people should have the Final Say, please sign the petition for The People’s Vote. It’s here.

PS. The Daily Express front page on the day of the march….. there are no words…. don’t they read the news?

Click on any image to see full size.

Snapshot Saturday: a pond and a hungry heron

In the garden is a pond. And in the pond there are some fish. We live near the River Ure. So near our home, some hungry herons live….

Back at Christmas time, William and family gave us a trail camera, wildlife-filming-for-the-use-of, mainly at night. This week, we decided to site it near the pond, to see if a Hungry Heron would visit. One did …..

The camera is still set to GMT. He really visited at 03.57.

This post is in response to the Ragtag Daily Prompt. Let’s let them introduce themselves: ‘RDP was started by a ragtag collection of bloggers who weren’t ready to give up on the Daily Prompt when Word Press was. So, seven of us agreed to provide a prompt once a week, and we began on June 1, 2018.’ Good luck, Ragtag! This is the kind of party I’d like to join.

London Gasholders

I was in London yesterday, but due to travel back to Yorkshire from King’s Cross when Judith’s blog Beyond the Window Box tumbled into my in-box. She’d been exploring the area round the station, just alongside Regent’s Canal, and found some gasholders…..

As a child, these fascinated me. Those circular cast iron skeletons, housing storage cylinders which telescoped up and down depending on how much gas they contained were a source of wonder to me. Though assertively industrial, they were graceful too, rising above the narrow terraced houses and the factories and trades which grew up alongside them. But ‘Gasworks Street’ was nobody’s idea of a smart address.

The King’s Cross gasholders in their workaday world.

How things change. Gasholders London is a site transformed from its dirty, workaday past into a smart desirable residential quarter. All but one of the gasholders now contain not gas cylinders, but luxury apartments. The remaining one has become a small park with a gleaming reflective canopy with grass beneath.

Nobody seems to want to hide the area’s busy industrial past. The über-smart shopping quarter, just being developed on the site of the cobbled streets and railway sidings where coal from the North of England was received and sorted is called Coal Drops Yard.

Gasholders London, seen from the Regent’s Canal.

Round here, if you need to know the price, you can’t afford it. A hundred and fifty years of dramatic social change.

Canal boats and houseboats are part of the local scene.

Day to day life goes on. Here’s a bike park round the corner from Gasholders London. It’s next to the local primary school.

Click on any image for a closer view.

Snapshot Saturday: Walking and vertical

We found ourselves tussling with the fag-end of Storm Hector on Thursday, as it exhausted itself gusting round the neighbourhood. It closed the market early as stallholders gave up the battle to keep their goods and stands in one place, and dumped leafy branches in the path of unwary motorists.

It reminded me of a more than breezy walk last February. Look! Here are the grasses edging the wetlands at Staveley Nature Reserve.

But some of us, and some plants, are made of tougher stuff. Perhaps we knew that there might be a starring role in Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge: columns and vertical lines.

Here’s a telegraph pole, a battered shed door on a local farm and – it is a nature reserve after all – grasses and bullrushes standing (nearly) to attention.

In the absence of the popular WordPress Challenges, Cee Neuner has generously offered to compile and maintain lists of challenges and the bloggers who host them. You can find them here.

Finds on an evening walk

We don’t often go walking in the evening. But yesterday we did, and found ……. orchids – I only know the last one, the bee orchid, by name…..

…… trees stalking the skyline……

…… inquisitive young calves huddled together: they thought we were scary ..

….. and best of all, this sheep. Naughty thing, she’d escaped from her field, and was having a high old time eating the contents of this wheat field. We told the farmer when we saw him later. Was he bothered? Not a lot.

I wonder if she left this wool behind?

Snapshot Saturday: some seaside sandals

The WordPress Photo Challenge is dead. Long live the Photo Challenge.

I enjoyed that weekly photo challenge. It was fun looking for ways – for photos – to meet the challenge. It encouraged me to think creatively, and to flick through my albums, reviving memories of walks, holidays and days out.

But WordPress, for undisclosed reasons of its own, has given up on it. So I’ve had a bit of a hunt for others. Here are two that I’ve found, and one – Cee’s Challenges – has several different themes. Another that interests me is Sunday Stills, hosted at Second Wind Leisure aided and abetted by Mucho Spanish.

This week, Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge is ‘Shoes or feet’. And I remembered a sunny day in Whitstable last summer, having a properly happy family day at the seaside with my son and his son, my grandson William. I remembered our lining our sandals up on the breakwater as we went hunting shells and stones and baby crabs, and paddling, and generally being Brits at the Seaside. Here is the evidence:

Fellow former users of WP Photo Challenge. Please share your finds, if you know of any other good challenges.

‘There’s no such thing as bad weather only unsuitable clothing’*

I’ve always been a fair weather walker. I never see the point of trudging through mud as dripping waist-high grasses lash at my already sodden trousers. In heavy rain, my waterproof anorak proves powerless to stop rivulets of rainwater trickling down my neck. And since windscreen wipers for glasses have not yet been invented, I have no view of the path ahead, much less the landscape. Really, why bother?

Then last week, watching ‘Springwatch’, I saw the wonderfully evocative nature writer Melissa Harrison, encased head-to-toe in a black, heavy-duty oilskin. She was tramping across a rain-drenched landscape as she explained the peculiar pleasures of a wet walk, on camera.

So when Saturday arrived with murky skies, I stuffed my best all weather gear into my rucksack, and set forth with my friends on our planned walk. And the rains came. We strode through woodland, protected by all those newly-leafed trees canopied overhead. We relished the fresh sweet earthy smell of the rain as it reached our leaf-mould path. We remarked on the leaves, glistening with raindrops. Even the birds seemed happy and continued to trill and chatter above us.

We hit meadowland. How subtle the tones of green and grey in the misty landscape! How muted the colours! Let’s watch the rain as it soothingly patterns the surface of that pond, a thousand concentric circles at a time! Yes, walking in the rain, we agreed, brought pleasures well worth seeking out.

The rain continued. Our weather proof gear kept the rain out, but perspiration in. Our legs got soggy from walking down narrow paths marshalled by soaking nettles and grasses. Someone’s boots began to leak. Someone else commented we still had six or seven miles to go. Yet another of us was hungry, but didn’t fancy a squishy sandwich. The plastic-encased map revealed that in a mile or two, we could make our escape to the nearest bus route. Let’s do it! Heads down, we traipsed on, only wanting to get it over with now. Every now and then, one of us would get in touch with our inner four year old – ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

Finally, we were. We dripped onto the bus, at which point it (briefly) stopped raining.

The cows thought we were barmy. By then, so did we.

*Alfred Wainwright MBE was a British fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator and something of a National Treasure to keen walkers.

Snapshot Saturday: ending where I began

This is the last Snapshot Saturday. WordPress has decided to discontinue its weekly photographic challenges. I’m a bit sad about this. It’s been fun tussling with choosing images for each week’s idea, and through it, I’ve ‘met’ fellow-bloggers and made virtual visits to all parts of the globe.

This week, we’ve been invited to bow out by posting our all-time favourite shots. That’s far too difficult. Instead, I’m taking you to the Ariège in France, where my blogging journey began when we lived there for some years, and offering you some favourite shots from there.