Went to Halfords to enquire about buying a cd player for my car the other day - I think I blogged it already? We walked out in disgust when the four members of staff failed to even acknowledge us.
Went to Franky and Benny's after the cinema the other day - it took fifteen minutes for our drinks to arrive - after prompting from me - food - when it came - was dreadful - I told the chap who enquired after we'd finished and left food - he had a script that went something like - I am sorry - I'm very sorry - I am sorry - sorry....
Sigh
No refund. No satisfaction.
Today - satisfaction guaranteed - an afternoon's painting. We had a spare lobster from Christmas - how decadent I hear you say - a lobster spare - long story... but - I have a chance to put something into an exhibition at the nearby Oriental Museum - I wasn't going to bother - nothing I have seemed to fit the brief - but what about one of these watercolours - they could pass as oriental yes?
There - all done - what's the collective noun for lobsters?
A stranger dropped by my blog this week - (Hi Doug) and drew my attention to this website - and the succinct, accessible, non-preachy message about our doomed consumerism.
It seems a perfect time of year to remember its vital message - stop buying stuff! Resist those sales - you don't need more stuff.
Am feeling a bit - 'holier than thou' this week sorry - A and I are hosting a workshop at our local retail outlet on making garments from waste materials/packaging. Watch this space.
Of course - in the interests of supplying materials for the workshop I was required to supply the above wrappers - boy it's been a tough holiday sacrifice :-)
There are few benefits to growing older - but one small one is that you get to know yourself a little better with the passing of each year. I can remember a time when I would have been stressed at being only this prepared one day before Christmas (see mess in lounge below) but I now know that I take life in little daily bites and am content to know that each day I do what is necessary to get by.
I couldn't post this pic earlier because the more astute of you might have seen your unwrapped present and that would have spoiled your surprise and that's not good - it leaves a hole instead of a moment.
Teaching right up til the 21st meant a lot of last minutness and well - that's unavoidable so why stress. Christmas kinda landed - but so did Tris so that's cool. I love his spontaneity - like his impression of David Bellamy in the jungles of Bourneo while we cooked tea one night. He makes everything so much nicer - Tris that is - not David Bellamy - though I would guess that Bellamy's mother felt much the same about her son... although - yes - there are no guarantees in this life.
So the day came - and much cooking of things went on in the kitchen - but there is always time to smell the roses - or in my case - enjoy the endless fascination of the innards of the red cabbage plucked that morning from my veggie patch in the garden.
I was more pleased than I ought to have been that our starter was colour co-ordinated with the Champoo that M brought to our festive table.
A good time was had by all and now the real relaxing begins. Except - another thing I have learned about myself - relaxing is only relaxing - if you want to relax. Really - I want to paint - so I get this kinda antsi feeling - can't settle to anything...need to do something - shift from one activity to the other until I find the thing that pleases me. A small drawing occured in bed last night - maybe this small innocent looking piece of seaweed is the thing that will occupy me this holiday. I hope so - am annoyed with myself for taking so long to become embroiled in a real art project - life just gets in the way - and I let it - and that's not good - which clever shite said life is what happens while we make plans?
Not a contagious disease - but for some - just as bad, the Geminids are meteors- they've been colliding with earth this week and they do other scientific stuff. In days of yore folk thought they were harbingers of doom and brought catastrophe - which if course is nonesense... but don't even try telling that to my sister.
Her husband has been admitted to hospital with suspected heart failure - at any age this is bad news but the guy's only fifty and they were planning on emigrating soon and everything has gone haywire. Driving home from spending the day with him at the hospital - a guy pulled out in front of her at an island and has written off her car.
Good news is she's shaken but otherwise fine and he has admitted it was entirely his fault... and she has a witness to confirm this.
PS - Rumour has it that Christmas is closing in...anyone confirm this?
Not his, mine - I finally got off it and signed up for a weekly life class. Feels good. Costs a fiver a time - beats the hell outta coughing up £50 to hire a cap and gown for my grad ceremony which was today. Money better spent me thinks :-)
A serpent came
and ate my moon.
It made my bedroom
very dark.
I hope he has a horrid tummy ache
After a couple of false starts to the weekend, Tris and I endeavoured to make a success of Saturday. We headed for Craster. The wheel of fortune turned our way.
At last there is a nice place between Newbiggin and Craster to sit and sip and watch the sea. This is a feature of Widdrington Farm and Coffee Shop. The building is a converted granary. There is a gift shop full of local crafts, and culinary delights and a farm shop with meat... and exotic things to eat.
All went swimmingly with the hansumest son in the world... isn't he gorgeous?
Then, in his...'don't give me no shit, mum' voice... he produced from his pocket an innocent seeming plastic object. 'You're going to learn to use a compass' he informed me, over our victuals.
He tried. I tried. I listened and nodded and didn't glaze over once. Honest.He drew diagrams. Numbers just jiggle about in my head like flotsam on the shore. He twiddled his dials. Hazy things did appear now and then out of the mist of noncomprehension. But I am firmly of the opinion that I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I DO and I understand. So let's just say - I've had my introduction to Using a Compass 101 - but between you me and the demerara - I know as much about map reading as the dregs left in that Earl Grey. Delicious though it was. And the coffee. And more importantly - the coffee and walnut cake.
See how soon the pain of carrying all that extra weight up and down the moors last Sunday fades in the light of a new weekend and fresh cake? What a fickle creature I am.
We soldiered on. We took the wiggliest road to Craster (on purpose - stop giggling in the back row) and parked in their unique disused quarry.
It forms a glorious geological amphitheatre of Whin SIll Rock in the midst of which is a fascinating rusty roofed shed that I just needed to take pics of. I couldn't reach over the fence. I balanced my camera on top of the fence and Tris stood back and said helpful things like - left right up down... and - what can I say - he's very good at reading maps.
In Craster there is no public parking... 'cept if you're a coble.
On the right you can see a reputedly fine fish restaurant. If I ever win the lottery I'll let you know how fine it really is. They do also have a shop for poorer people at which you can buy delicious kippers and other things from the sea. The same guy who owns the restaurant owns the owns the delapidated shed in the middle of the quarry car park. Sensuous though I find rust I can aslo appreciate how the frustrated villagers feel that the rusty shed is occupying useful space where land is at such a premium.
Mick Oxley (my watercolour artist friend in Craster on the Art Tour) has tried on several occasions to start a gallery and studio by buying bits of land in Craster - and finally - he hasaquired a shed of his own.Yeah!
It is very beautiful in my eyes - but no doubt a damned eyesore to the villagers - so Mick will soon replace the beautifully textured rusty corrugated iron of his shed with dark, hard Craster Rock and convert it into a shiny new studio and gallery space. Won't that be nice? I took some pictures of the existing shed because it soon won't be there anymore.
It was good to see Mick again and if you're up that way next spring, do call in and see him in his new space. It will be opposite this entrancing shop...
Wherein you can still buy other kinds of culinary delights to those of Widdrington.... Sherbet Lemons, Pear Drops, Sasparella Tablets... ah...nostalgia.
At the other end of Craster lies a building fascinating for entirely different and much grander reasons. Here's a moody shot of Tris in front of the romantically situated, Dunstanburgh Castle.
Isn't he gorgeous? Did I say that already? Sorry.
Here's a full colour shot - with out Tris .
We called in on another of the Art Tour artists where I thoroughly embarrassed myself by going gaga over a piece on her wall that she had purchased - not made. :-(
Time to go home. A meandering drive down the coastal route at sunset then home in time to catch the moonrise over the sea. A fantastic day.
Thanks, Barry. This is where we went off piste last weekend. The black line. It looks so mall on the map. It doesn't show all the up and down bits. It could all have ended so much worse. Tris was appalled. He visited me this weekend with a compass.
It was a strange, mystical day yesterday, brought on I suspect through lack of food and extreme exhaustion. More about that later. Here's what brought on the deja vu.
We stumbled upon this magical place down a dead end track while trying to find our way back to the car park at High Force near Middleton-in-Teesdale. 'We' being Des and the gang he works with during the week. Come out for a stroll with us on Sunday he said. We'll not go far, he said. Couple of hours he said.
To be fair I don't suppose he thought we'd miss the path. I hesitate to use the words 'lost on the moors' cos it sounds dramatic and well, frankly, altogether too scary. When the mists and snow closed in...well perhaps I ought to start at the beginning.
Here's what we went to see. High Force in the upper Tees Valley - reputedly Britain's Highest waterfall - unless as they say - you know better. It was impressive in its noise and energy and we watched it open-mouthed for a while. Here's a shot with a couple of the group in to give you a better sense of scale.
It was a short, pleasant leafy walk to get to the falls from the car park, so the plan was then to walk from High Force to Low Force - about an hour down stream, and then back to the car park via a circuitous route... all in all about two hours. The day was young. I liked the sound of that. Walking alongside a fast flowing river - I especially liked the sound of 'down' stream.
And so we set off down stream. It was spectacular and the Tees churned away alongside us the whole time, a fine example of an angry young river. I was amazed to see canoes, mostly with people still in them, negotiating the swirls and eddies.
Brave, hardy folk - there was snow on the moors, lawd knows what temperature the water must have been.There were a few hairy moments as owners were ousted from their canoes unexpectedly, but they seemed happy enough to retrieve the wayward vessels and climb back in again. One gal did lose her paddle - no idea how she'd spend the rest of the afternoon. Presuambaly hunting the bank downstream? Hmph, I remember thinking - what if they got into difficulty? Some poor mountain rescue team type person would have to leave their cosy fireside post Sunday Lunch scenario to come out in the cold and make things right again. What a pompous twit I can be sometimes.
As we left them at this fall to cross over the bridge, one of their number capsized and there was lots of fuss until they got her out of the water - I am glad I was too far away to help. Selfish? Yeah - very.
And so we crossed a neat suspension bridge, found a picnic site and had an impromptu rest before setting off back to the carpark. We trusted the kind old guy who took our car parking fee up at High Force. Mistake number one. He told us a neat footpath to take over the fields which would take us about an hour to get back to our car park starting point. He seemed genuine. I was with outdoorsy folks who I presumed knew about directions and stuff. That was mistake number two.
So wet set off along a smaller tributary of the river... pretty rugged terrain and my short legs meant I lagged behind the others mostly. .. that and my excess weight and the fact that I am 30 years older than some of them. We came to a dead end... a beautiful dead end. With the waterfall you see at the head of this posting. It was a bizarre feeling to know this place yet at the same time I knew I had never been there before. Then I realised how.
About four years ago at the watercolour evening class I attended we had a water theme going. We were given a choice of images to use. I painted the waterfall you see at the top here. Weird knowing I knew every rock crevice without even being there.
A new experience - pleasant. But I digress. I used to hate it when Ronnie Corbett did that when telling his stories so I won't do it anymore. I promise. Today.
But the bad news was - in order to get out of this dead end and avoid going back to the start - which no one wanted to do - meant scrambling up a steep, muddy hillside. Des looked at me. I know what he was thinking. He was wondering if I would make it. Hell - I was wondering if I could make it. Stubborn pride meant I couldn't decline graciously and say I'd go back to the start and take the safe boring road route back to the car park. Mistake number three.
I scrambled. It was quite impressive. I was last. But I made it. Red faced and heart threatening to explode out of my chest but I made it.
The next bad news was that at the top of the cliff we'd just climbed - there was no sign of any car park - just more and more fields disappearing up into the snow line. We needed to turn left. We couldn't - a huge dry stone wall blocked our way. We crossed more fields. Not neat turfy fields. Deep squishy fields of huge tussocky grass. I had to lift my legs high to walk. And more valleys to descend into a climb out of - all the while feeling in my gut we were headed in the wrong direction. It was 2pm. We'd been on the return leg of the journey for an hour - we should be back at the car park.
We weren't.
The rest of the group we laughing merrily at the prospect of being lost - they clearly don't get out much.
Far be it for me to label myself as a boring old fart - well - in truth I was the oldest there - and far from the wisest - I was following people who had no idea where they were going. An hour into the return journey and I seriously began to consider going back to the start. Every hill and valley made it more difficult for my legs and heart to carry me. I was hot and tired and all the time the rest of the group failed to get any nearer.
At last we reached a road on top of the moor. It wasn't where we wanted to be, but at least it was a road... not one with lines or understand - but at least it was tarmacced and seemed to be heading for a building.
The bad news is it was still headed upwards and the car park clearly was - well - not. The building turned out to be an empty barn.
The snow on the moors looked bright and clear and fresh against the greying sky. It didn't rain. The wind wasn't too bad. I was warm. All positive things I told myself. If we had to spend the night here - huddled together, it might not be so bad.
I began to feel guilty thinking that the gal who fell out of her canoe might have needed rescuing when she had brought her plight on herself. I realised we as a group had done exactly the same thing. 2 o' clock turned into half past and at last we headed downhill - but leaving the relative comfort of tarmac. Over a style or several and back onto fields. Squishy marshy sucky soil that threatened to remove my boots. My boots hurt my feet. My laces refused to stay fastened. My camera was heavy around my neck - I wanted to throw away everything I carried (yes - even my camera - that's how desperate I was) and remove my heavy coat. Foolish - even I knew that would be foolish.
I could see Barry was struggling too. He dropped back to keep me company from time to time but disagreed with Des on the route we should take. Sometimes he'd leave me and Des would drop back to walk with me. I'm not dumb. I knew they did it on purpose to keep my spirits up. Barry insulted me and laughed cos I didn't have the evergy to tell him to sod off. Des confided he really had only a vague inkling of the direction we ought to head. As had I. I cursed myself for not looking at the map more closely - and for not listening better to the nice old man in the car park whom I dearly wanted to sit on a hot sharp spiked implement - the one who told us it ws an easy two hour round trip. We'd been walking for four and a half hours now.
Clearly something wasn't right.
Clearly the rest of the group couldn't give a shit. They were out for the day and joked and laughed and more importantly - they all walked faster than me. Only one gal - whom I shall refer to as Laughter - cos she did it constantly and loudly - at her own shortcomings which made her kind of endearing in small doses. She, like me, found the 5ft high barbed wire fences hard to negotiate. They do wobble so when you're balanced on top of one with nothing to hold on to.
Des and Barry and one of the guys from the group were chivalrous and helped the laughter gal and I over each time. I felt like a useless nuisance. Which I clearly was.
But I tell you - I was close to mutiny - and no matter how far we'd come - I still toyed with the idea of going back - at least I knew that way - whereas the way ahead was an unknown commodity.
Agreement couldn't be reached. Darkness was falling. It was 3pm and I knew the by 4 it would be pitch black. I also realised for the first time that it was vitally important that we stay together. As we stood and debated I was painfully aware of time passing - and that warm as I was - the air was growing colder and the cloud cover thicker. I looked at the snowcapped moors as the debate waged on.
A compromise direction was reached and we trudged on.
The trouble was we'd come too high and needed to get back into the valley but in between us and the main valley of the river bed, water run off had formed a series of steep sided depressions which we had to climb in and out off in order to make any progress downhill. Every time I climbed out of one the view was more disappointing. More hills. No car park. I realised I am not very good at ascents.
I was past caring about keeping my feet dry - mistake number 198, so I just waded through the shallow parts of the freezing tributaries at the bottoms of the valleys. Des, bless his heart, threw boulders into the stream at one point to make it easier for the short legs of Laughter and I to leap over to the other side. I salute him. I didn't even have the energy to take the wrapper off my toffee let alone throw huge rocks about.
At 3.30 with darkness closing in around us we came upon another bit of real road - it seemed to link to buildings together - and bless 'em - two little lads on bikes, red faced and smiling played on their bicycles. I wanted to hug one cos they looked so normal and unperturbed at the sight of our bunch of kagooled disoriented faces.
They pointed us in the direction of the car park we sought - they had clearly heard of it - that was a good sign - it meant we weren't in Scotland - yet. The bad news was - when asked if it was far, they nodded seriously in the affirmative.
Yes, it's a long way they agreed.
We needed to walk faster. No way I could. But now that we knew the way it didn't matter anymore and thoughts of mountain rescue teams having to be hauled out of bed at 1am began to fade reassuringly. I also found a wall to pee behind and that made me feel better too.
We trudged into the lost car park at 3.45 - as dusk fell. The 'nice' car park man had packed up and gone to find the sharp implement to sit on - at least that's how I like to imagine him.
That night I ached where I didn't even know I had places. I had a hot shower and was in bed by 8.30.
I dreaded getting up for scholl this morning. Strangely I felt okay. As the day wore on - I was filled with an inexplicable sense of well being. Part of me thinks I should do that kind of strenous exercise more often. But only a very small part of me. The rest of me still enjoys cake and chocolate.
I'd like to tell you the moral of this tale - but I think the best place to be in is as far away from situations where there is a moral to be had. Leave that to other braver, younger, fitter, people. Stay home next to the fire and read about them. Have lots of vicarious experiences. It's a whole lot safer.
Thanks, Des. I think.
When you live on the edge of the world you get to see stuff like this every morning, and the clincher is - it's never the same two days in a row.
Enjoy my wealth.
And I just noticed - after a year of living here - that the whole thing gets warped and distorted in the light outside my window. Double whammy :-)
