Thwarted

As you will know yourself, in these lives that we are leading things do not always go to plan. And so it was yesterday when Clint and I drove out to the flat lands north of Doncaster. We parked up in the village of Sykehouse which claims to be "Yorkshire's longest village" and I have no reason to doubt that claim. After all, from one end of the settlement to the other it is just under eight miles.

I had just taken a couple of pictures of the brick-built Victorian church  when the heavens opened and Clint was bombarded with repeated sallies of hailstones. I jumped back inside him for shelter as he screamed "Ouch!", "Aargh!" and "For ****'s sake!" as the hail bounced off his silvery bodywork. Soon it passed and I donned my boots ready for the long circular walk I had planned. It was meant to be around seven miles, finishing with a mile and a half stretch north of The River Went.

But please see this snippet from the A4 map I took with me:-

The broken black line along the blue river marks the 

boundary between North and South Yorkshire

By this point I had already tramped six miles or so.  The black line heading north is England's main east coast railway line connecting London with Yorkshire before heading up to Newcastle and Edinburgh. The railway passes over The River Went at the very point that a public footpath crosses a deep V-shaped drain and then goes under the bridge. 

The path goes under this bridge on the left

However, the footbridge over the drain is presently  totally kapput and the path under the bridge appeared so treacherously muddy that it would have been easy to fall into the river.  I decided against it and headed south by the railway track hoping to find another route back to Sykehouse.

Oh lordy! I was now off the map I had printed so I had no idea where any paths might be or where they might lead and there was nobody about in the tiny village of Fenwick to ask. It was like a small ghost town.

Holy Trinity Church, Sykehouse

Following local lanes that crisscross the flat agricultural landscape I found myself plodding an extra six miles back to Clint who was still smarting from the hailstone battering. And to use a term favoured by my German blogging friend Meike, I was well and truly "knackered" when I turned the ignition key to head home.

So that was a plan that went wrong, simply because a small section of a footpath was more or less impassable. It doesn't happen very often and I have already reported the issue to North Yorkshire Council - Public Rights of Way Department. I wouldn't want other walkers to face the same problem.

The Aire and Calder Navigation Canal seen from Pollington Bridge

Lurking

By Derbyshire Lane, there's a cemetery that  had not registered with me until Wednesday when Clint and I took Frances and the heavenly babe along that route.

I returned yesterday to spend a pleasant hour exploring the cemetery. It opened in 1869 in response to the fact that the old Norton churchyard had more or less run  out of space for the dead.

Norton Cemetery sits on a ridge above the suburb of Woodseats, looking out to the moors. It is a long, oblong shaped site and I was pleased to find it pretty tidy and well-maintained. 

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth century, there must have been an awful lot of skilled stone masons expertly carving gravestones by hand. It would have taken endless hours for very many of the carved adornments are stunning. Take the grave of  Susan Jane Tippett for example. She died at the age of twenty nine in September 1908:-

Another grave that caught my eye was that of  Arthur Hebblethwaite and his wife Ada Beatrice. Arthur died on October 29th 1914 at a military hospital near Southampton. He had been badly injured a month before at The Battle of the Aisne. He was thirty when he passed away. Ada, on the other hand, did not depart this earthy life until 1972 - reaching the ripe old age of eighty six.

Perhaps it is fanciful to imagine that Arthur was never far from Ada's thoughts. She was a widow for almost fifty years. For her, World War One lasted much longer than the history books claim. You can read many similar stories from old gravestones.

Guest

Hewo evweybody! Itz me Phoebe! I yam neawy 4 munths hold now. Gwandpa sed I cud right a guess powst on his bog which is cold Yorkshire Pudding.

I hev had alot to lern sins I caym owt of mummy's tummy.. It  hasbeen vewwy vewy hard 4 me. At frost I dint even no wot coulors where. I dint no wot light fittins were or windoes or curtins or anyfink, anyfink at hall. I hev had 2 lern it hall an I yam still lernin evwee day. Its vewwy vewwy hard,

I like mum's milko. Its vewwy nice. Hall I hev 2 do to get my milko is 2 go gwumpy an cwy a bit. Then mummy givs me my milko.

Mummy an Daddy an gwandpa an gwanma go 2 the toy-let 2 do there buzznest but i do it in  a  dispossible nappie that mummy or gwanpa or daddy chainges  when heather it is dirty wv my poo-poo or wee=wee. Gwandpa has knot chainged me nappie yacht but he sins to me vewy nice songs wen I yam lyin in his harms. It iz vewwy suggling an nice.  An he meks upp songs jus fer me.

Gwandpa is loverly . Vewy stwong an vewy crever 2. I yam looky to hev a gwanpa lark him.

Well I  am yorking now cos I yam tyred. Time 2 go 4 asleep in my cot. Nite-nite evwybody! Hoop you larked my guess powst.

Luv

Phoebe  x

Retrospect

Sometimes I could almost pinch myself. Did I really go to Easter  Island in the autumn of 2009? 

The photographs I took there prove that I did. It was a dream come true. There was nowhere on this planet that I wanted to visit more than Easter Island. You can hold a globe in a certain position and it looks as though half of Earth is The Pacific Ocean.

It is massive  and yet the tiny islands that are dotted about The Pacific were populated by Polynesians long before there had been any contact with Europeans. The most distant and remotest island they reached was Rapa Nui - later to be known as Easter Island or Isla de Pascua.

Everyone has seen pictures of the famous "moai" heads. The image is iconic. There are over nine hundred moai statues on the island  and they all faced inland - not out to the endless ocean. They were inward looking, not outward.

It was a world within a world, like a different planet. A society that thrived for perhaps three hundred years in isolation and then declined till when the first white sailors appeared its heyday was long gone. The people who made the moai were already beyond living memory.

I would go back in a heartbeat to walk about the moai once again, to hear the echoes of a lost civilisation, to look out across the wide Pacific, to close my eyes and imagine the first dugout canoes that landed there long ago. Easter Island - the stuff of dreams and legends. Yes - I was there.

Ordinariness

Mark Selby v Shaum Murphy in the 2021 World Snooker final here in Sheffield

I notice how some other bloggers are more  adept than I am  at reporting  everyday ordinariness. They can make their accounts of  relative mundanity eminently readable. It's quite a skill. When you think about it most days we tick off on our private calendars are quite unremarkable. This is the essence of life - its ordinariness. Days come and days go. Most are forgotten

Today, May 3rd, was a wet day. Chilly too. Lord knows that the land is in desperate need of water because April was amazingly dry here in Yorkshire.  Desperate farmers have been praying for rain to fall. At last God responded  kindly.

I watched the second day of  the final of The World Snooker Championship on television. The spiritual home of this prestigious event  is Sheffield's own Crucible Theatre. The relentless Mark Selby came out on top, beating the spirited underdog Shaun Murphy in a best out of thirty five frames match. At times it was really  gripping stuff as rain continued to fall on our suburban street.

I made a nice evening meal - vegetable lasagne with salad and cheesy garlic bread before returning to the snooker. Did you know that this quiet game was invented in India in the second half of the nineteenth century by British army officers? Once the coloured balls were made from ivory but now they use a kind of hard plastic known as phenolic resin.

We didn't see our lovely little grandaughter today. She is going in a swimming pool for the first time tomorrow. She has taken to lying in her Moses basket, happily kicking her legs and vocalising like a baby opera singer. She is such a delight.

Oh, I almost forgot. I had my second coronavirus vaccination today in the cavernous Sheffield Arena. The male nurse who gave me my jab asked if I had had any adverse reactions to the first jab and I said - No, none at all. Then he prepared the needle before asking, "Did you have any adverse reactions to the first jab?" Eh? The same question twice in ninety seconds!

Despite its ordinariness, this can often seem like a mad world.

Shuggie

Earlier today I sat out on our decking and finished reading "Shuggie Bain" by Douglas Stuart. This earthy novel was last year's Booker Prize winner. It was a book that I really warmed to as I kept turning the pages. The strapline on the front cover reads, "A novel of rare and lasting beauty" and I must admit that at first I could find little to support that claim but by the end I could see where "The Observer" reviewer was coming from.

Set in the mean streets of Glasgow, the novel is semi-autobiographical. Hugh Bain, known universally as Shuggie,  is an effeminate boy who loves his mother Agnes fiercely in spite of her alcoholism and the many issues that this causes.  Life is hard.  There's rarely any food in the cupboard and Agnes is seldom at peace with herself, her relations or her community. It is as if Shuggie has to constantly walk on eggshells.

The dialogue successfully captures the rough voice of working class Glasgow as once proud industries have declined. There are pubs and cigarettes, electricity meters to prise open, violent rows to be had, bingo halls and betting shops to visit, cans of strong lager to be hidden.  Of course such a life is especially challenging for an intelligent boy who is confused about his sexuality, only gradually realising that he is gay.

To give you a feeling for the language of the novel, here are a couple of extracts. This is the voice of one of Agnes's  male  friends - Eugene:-

“Ah have been lonely fur years now. Lonely long afore ma wife died. Don't get us wrong. She was a guid wummin, a guid wummin just like our Colleen, but we were jist stuck in our wee routine. When ye think about it, ah've been under the ground most of ma life. There wasn't much in me for sharing at the end of a day. After twenty years, what do you talk about? But she was a guid wummin. She used to make me these big hot dinners, with meat and gravy, the plate scalding hot cos she'd warm it up all day in the oven. We ate big hot dinners because we had nothing left to say. Nothing worthwhile anyway. Ah'm forty-three. That's four years older than when ma father died, so I should've been done. I should've been retiring from the pits, living the rest of ma days out with her and with nothing to say. When I saw ye I wasn't looking. I didn't know of you then, hadn't heard our Colleen lift your name. That's wummin's stuff, isn't it? They don't talk to the men about that. Gossip. Telling tales. Chapel. That's their club. All I know is when I saw you sat behind that glass, I saw someone lonely too, and I hoped we might have something to say to each other. I realised then. Ah don't want to be done.”

And this is  a short glimpse into what Shuggie's mother Agnes was like:-

“She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.”

In the end I was very glad that I decided to read "Shuggie Bain". Its author, Douglas Stuart, now lives in New York City where he has worked for several years as a fashion designer.

At my Scottish university I had a friend from Kilmarnock called Hugh Lynch. We all knew him as Shuggie. Co-incidentally, because of alcohol, his life spiralled out of control and he died in Glasgow in the mid-eighties.  Another  tragic waste of a life .

My final point is about proof reading. I found several grammatical errors in this much lauded   novel.  For example "retch" -  as in vomiting - was written more than once as "wretch". Perhaps publishers place too much store in computerised spell checking software these days or employ proof readers who no longer have an eye for close detail.

"Y"

Yesterday, Clint kindly transported me along The Great Yorkshire Way east of Doncaster. We were heading to Old Cantley in the eastern suburbs of the town ready for another long walk. Well I would be doing the walking, Clint would be left snoozing on Main Street with some other motor vehicles - including a sexy black VW Beetle called Deidre.

As we were travelling along The Great Yorkshire Way, I spotted a new feature in the landscape. Situated near the entrance to a new "park and ride" facility, it was a stonking great letter "Y" in yellow. The "Y" stands for Yorkshire. I resolved to drop into the "park and ride" on my way home in order to take photographs of this magnificent yellow letter.

I have driven by the east side of Doncaster countless times. Even as a young boy in the late fifties and early sixties I remember seeing a huge white water tower on the horizon. Yesterday - somewhat by accident - I found myself walking close to that landmark for the very first time and in spite of tricky light conditions I snapped it and its smaller companion several times.

Near the village of Auckley I made a long detour along the banks of The River Torne - the same river that I walked beside last Friday near Tickhill. A bank of threatening charcoal grey cloud was forming to the north as a biting Arctic  wind was stirred up. I thought I was going to get soaked but in the event there were just a few minutes of thin rain.

As is often the case, I walked further than I had intended to yesterday  but I love that feeling of exhaustion at the end of a long walk when your legs have become leaden and your pace has turned into a trudge. Clint was sweet talking with Deidre when I made it back to Old Cantley. Lord knows what they had been up to in the four and a half hours  I had been rambling. I didn't like to ask.

St Wilfrid's Church, Cantley - dating back to 1257