Summerisation

The tulips were getting a bit unseasonal. And I wanted to draw a big proper oak tree or something but... discovery of the day is that I suck at drawing leaves. So you can imagine the little bits to be buds or leaves, whatever takes your fancy.

And I know it's white and grey and dull. And I know I'm back to tree doodles like an unoriginal person. And it doesn't quite fit in the left hand margin on a normal page view. But you know what? Don't care. This is just a stopgap to remove the tulips and let them die away into their bulbs in time to recover for next spring.

Any requests/ideas for better doodles will be considered...

Identity Crisis

Yup: skittledog as barcode.

For clocking-in purposes at work.

I find myself with an urge to push it under a barcode scanner in a shop to see what kind of grocery I am (and how much I cost).

Twenty thousand miles to an oasis; Twenty thousand years will I burn

As the title sayeth. A few weeks ago (I have been delayed by holiday blogging), the mileage on my car passed 20,000 miles. I have had said car from new, September 2004, and have driven every one of those miles myself (except for what was possibly about a mile's worth of my mother trying it out round an industrial estate because she wanted a play on my new toy, but even then I was in the car).

Twenty thousand miles. Twenty thousand miles.

Very nearly far enough to get right round the world at the equator. More than far enough to get right round it going due east/west from here.

Approximately the total length of all public railway in Britain.

Assuming the mpg figures given by Ford are correct, I should get 10 miles per litre of petrol, so I have used 2,000 litres of petrol. I have probably used more than that as I do not drive the poor thing kindly.

With a 1.25 litre petrol engine in my car, enough to create 5 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which I think equates to 500,000 litres floating around out there in the atmosphere which are mine.

Creating this grand total has included...several parental round-trips home to Scotland (including side-trips to see the mountains), another parental visit to Brighton, friendly visits to Southampton, Manchester, York and Oxford/Abingdon, weekend trips into Wales and the Peak District, holiday driving up to Thirsk, grandparental forays into Rutland, three different trips to the Lake District, journeys to airports to catch flights to Paris and Barcelona, and let's not forget the 30-mile round trip to work I have been doing every day for nearly a year now.

I love my car. But the appearance of that little 2 on its mileometer still staggered me. A milestone, of sorts.

Day Off

Well, I intended to write this the day after my earlier post. Look at me and my motivational skills. Anyway, as I mentioned, on our holiday we had a day off. And on our day off we trundled over the North York Moors to Helmsley. Which I'm sure has an interesting enough history itself as a little town but mostly I only had to time to use and abuse it for its sausage-roll- and ice-cream-vending facilities. Because what I did with my three hours there was visit Helmsley Castle - or rather the ruins of it.


I can't be bothered being its tour guide...its official site and brief history is here although 'dismantled the defences' is a bit of a euphemism for 'blew up almost everything in sight.' Including, as can be seen above, the side of the keep facing the town (symbolic, obviously, to watch that come crashing down if you were a peasant in the time of the Civil War). That tower really is very high, especially considering that it is 12th- and 13th-century workmanship.


Still standing on the other side of the inner bailey is the old living quarters, remodelled into an Elizabethan house. This is the view from inside the higher part, looking back up at those windows you can see:


I do love the way social standing was determined by fireplace size.

Inside the part that is still protected from the elements (note all the bricked-in windows thanks to the window tax), there remain traces of the Tudor lifestyle. Wood panelling, a little ceiling plaster and even a section of a frieze displaying their coat of arms.


But mostly, what was there was ruination and more than that - destruction. The very human thing of saying 'this was yours and it showed you had power. If I destroy it, I'll feel good.' Maybe they did fear it could be used as a Royalist stronghold again...it's possible. But I think mostly it was just rebels tearing down the strongholds of the old regime - see that other tiny little bit of wall left standing higher in front of the tower? That's all that remains of the castle's chapel. Which was catholic, obviously, and hence deserving of Roundhead demolition. Ah, how the UK loves its traditions...of religious hatred...


Anyway. A very pretty ruin it undoubtedly was, and interesting in its history. I wandered round it with the aid of an audio guide (rather excessively long-winded although it did have a great dry sense of humour and say things like "if you want, you can go down those steps to the cellar...if you like dark, and somewhat damp places.") until it was time to go back to the minibus and head back to our base village of Osmotherly. Where, and this final photo is included purely for jes, we found a village summer fair in full swing down the main street. Here is the traditional sport of welly-wanging*. (Welly exiting top of frame.)


* yes, now more often known as welly-throwing in those villages even peripherally aware of the outside world.

A Change is as Good as a Rest

Or so they say, and I am gullible. So I pay money to go and do hard physical work for a week, oh yes. And use up a fifth of my yearly holiday allowance.

Hmm.

Maybe 'gullible' isn't quite strong enough.

I went on a week-long 'conservation holiday' with BTCV. I have done two of these in the past - did the first one as the residential course required in order to complete the Gold level Duke of Edinburgh's Award (a working holiday is pretty much the cheapest sort of residential thing there is), and enjoyed it enough to do another one a couple of years later. This year it felt like time for another. (This may also have been influenced by severe need for a holiday but lack of local friends or a passport.)

So anyway. I was on a week up in Thirsk, with these lovely folks.


This photo taken on our day off, approximately ten minutes before watching England crash out of the world cup. Ahem. So anyway, this was an unusually small and rather eclectic little group which actually worked quite well together in the end. The two closest to the camera are BTCV employees who led the holiday, the rest of us are paying volunteers (crazy us). From L to R, we have Carl, Jamie, Gianpiero, Maria, me and Dan. (Yes, Gianpiero and Maria are Italian and were improving their english by being on the holiday. Although whether they will ever need to say 'stinging nettle' again I doubt.)

Carl is trying to hide his cigarette out of frame, which is why he's ended up looking a bit of a div.

So yes. 5 days' actual work and 1 day off, on the hottest and most humid week England has had this year. Clever me. We were in North Yorkshire, though, so at least were not as sweltering as daahn saaf was.

The business of the week was path clearance. In Thirsk there is a little path that runs through woodland beside a little beck, popular with dog-walkers and people just getting into the centre from one end of town. It had got rather overgrown and had disintegrated in some places, so our job was to put Humpty back together again. A little easier said than done, when there are 6 of you and 600m of path. But tasks for the week included:

Edge clearance: much harder work than it looks. Shoving a spade under encroaching vegetation and hacking it off. We nearly killed ourselves with a full day of this on our first day and still only cleared about 100m between us all;


Step building: the one little section which had had steps had turned into a miniature scree slope so we had to dig them out and install new ones. This is an entirely posed photo but I had just whacked that stake in (Maria, carefully hiding under the other helmet, had done the one the other side). And oh yeah, spot the t-shirt;


Path rebuilding: Maria once again in danger of being whacked on the head at any moment. This was done on a couple of sections where the old path had been put in badly and had subsided or just turned itself into a rocky trench: we took out the old edging boards and gravel topping and replaced them;


Lopping: there was a section at one end of the path where the extremely spiky tree/bush stuff (I have no idea what it actually was) was overhanging the path in somewhat meacing fashion, so with loppers and saws we took down some pretty big chunks of it (occasionally and somewhat painfully onto our own heads);


And of course collapsing. We were very fond of this activity. What you see here is a rebuilt path with a covering of new gravel, and you would not believe just how exhausted you can get pushing gravel around in wheelbarrows for an hour or two. Luckily, wheelbarrows also make excellent armchairs at lunchtime.


So there you go - a week of, as an oh-so-nice person at work put it, paying to have friends. But it was excellent - every time a muscle twinged I thought "well, at least it's not Excel." And time just stretched out, with lovely long lazy evenings, a huge appetite and the good sort of tiredness where you sleep through anything, even the crazy village cockerel who started crowing at about 4am every morning and then just seemed to forget to stop. I totally lost track of weekdays, and neither drove my car nor sat in front of a computer screen for 7 whole days (or nearly). And we managed to clear, rebuild or resurface approximately 500m of path out of the 600. Not bad, not bad at all.

*nods sagely* excellent stuff. I should do them more often.

Extreme Hairdressing

With profuse apologies to boppet dearest.

Before


After


*winces from both photos*