Parental Autumnal Weekend Number 2

(Okay, I wrote this post before Christmas, when Autumn at least still seemed vaguely topical. But then couldn't add pictures. But now have discovered that blogger seems to play nice if I use IE. So here we go.)

So, two weeks after going away with my dad, I went away with my mum. She, however, did not come all the way down to Derbyshire, so we met approximately halfway (by time, not by distance) and went back to Embleton, near Alnmouth near Berwick, which those of you with long memories may remember as the location of the caravanning holiday that I only wrote one post about way back in August sometime before forgetting all about it. And I'm clearly never going to finish that one off now, so I'll let this one stand in for it as we did several of the same things. Except that this time we stayed in a hotel - which was good, as it was icy. I have once been in a caravan while there were minus temperatures outside, and it was fun but I have no desire to repeat the experience any time soon. Although at least these days I don't wear contact lenses and so would be spared that very cold and nasty experience.

Anyway. Weekend. Yes. We did many things...such as going for a dog walk on moorland with a view across to the largest hill in the area, the Cheviot, which you can't actually really see in this picture because a snow cloud is sitting on it. I liked the blasted moor effect, though.

We went to Scotland accidentally.

We took Cara out first thing in the morning (so that she could have her meal and her insulin jab at 8am before we went for breakfast) and nearly fell over on the icy roads at sunrise.

We walked round Bamburgh Castle.

Where some rather dumb ladybirds were trying to hibernate in a fencepost...

...and Cara looked cute on the beach.

And we rounded off the weekend on Sunday by driving as close as we could get to the snow, and freezing our little noses off in the ice-cold wind. This is where the earlier puppy/snow photo came from, but this is a slightly better picture of the landscape I think - although it was dusk by this point, which I couldn't really do much about.

A long, long time ago...

...I can't remember, because I wasn't there.

Andrea and Frances, Woolacombe, ~1953. Knitted bathing suits, oh yes.

I never thought of this as funny; it speaks another world to me

So, as you may have been able to tell from the previous picture, I went out on Friday night for a Christmas dinner with the new graduate intake. It was a very fun evening, for me mostly because of chatting to one girl who I get along with pretty well, but everyone else was having a good time too. And the objectives of the evening, for at least 80% of them, seemed to be to get drunk and pull. I left at about 11, when I think there were 10 or so of them that continued on round other bars/clubs. Of those, one guy pulled two girls, one girl pulled two guys, even just within the group. One of the girls has a new (work) boyfriend, one of the guys has an established girlfriend who he is looking at buying a house with. This guy in particular was being all over anything female that came within arm’s range even by the time I left – which is part of the reason I left as I honestly like the guy and was beginning to get the undeniable urge to punch him for being such an idiot.

And on my walk home, as I contemplated the pretty frost patterns on the cars, I listened to my mp3 player. It, gauging my mood correctly, played me R.E.M. And this line made me think, appropriate as it is.

How much in the minority am I, that I don’t see the opposite gender as a big fishing pond with lots of options? That I don’t just wander round sampling anything attractive that comes my way? (Now okay, as succinctly put by Keppet the other week, there is also the pre-requisite of the other person being agreeable, but I’ll ignore that one for the purpose of argument and also because clearly everyone likes me. How could they not? My point here is that I don’t think I’d be any different even I had wider options…)

I’m not saying I don’t see the attraction. It is good to feel wanted, definitely enjoyable to have someone attractive give you a hug, or more. But…I wouldn’t be me if I gave into it. The next day, I don’t think I’d be able to see myself as the person I like to see myself as. I also know that, in my case, I have trouble splitting out anything physical from more idealistic, romantic I guess, thoughts. Physical safety implies emotional safety and…this is what my question to myself (it’s a twenty-minute walk home, I had time for quite a lot of thought) revolved around. Are other people really that good at disconnecting it? Does this particular guy really see it as no big issue that he kissed two other girls (and was more than suggesting each should go back to his, too)? Okay, he wants to make sure his girlfriend doesn’t find out, but that seems to be as far as it goes – he knows he gets like that when he’s drunk, and his problem is damage control rather than prevention. And I wonder whether he’d care about his girlfriend behaving the same way? There’s no…no introspection, no attempt at self-knowledge, certainly no thought of judging his behaviour against anything but that considered okay by his peers (who are of course now all refusing to let him live in his happy state of alcohol-induced amnesia and filling in all the blanks for him).

*shrugs* I dunno. I don’t even know whether I’m trying to make a point, or what it would even be if I were. I just felt…perplexed and disappointed, I guess. And then very, very glad I have you lot as friends – because I know my own chameleoning tendencies and without an objective standpoint I would be far more likely to follow the crowd myself. And then my mp3 player played me Green Day: Good Riddance, which gave me an entirely different set of thoughts to throw into the mix, but they’re unimportant. Silly mind-reading thing.

I suppose I am just worried. Worried for my generation, worried for the world, if this is our response to being single, emancipated, individual people of the Western world, taught to take what we want and let someone else deal with the consequences. Are we losing all concepts of responsibility, shame, or honesty? Does anyone even believe in love? Can anyone let themselves?

Wha's like graduates?

Thank bob, not everyone.

Parental Autumnal Weekend Number 1

I like that acronym.

So, let's try and catch up over the weeks I lost while I couldn't transfer photos from my camera. Firstly, a month ago now - my father drove up from Brighton because we hadn't seen each other in a while, and we spent the weekend in Bakewell, which is in the Peak District, about an hour from here. It is quite a picturesque little town:


And it has this shop, which amused me.

The hotel itself was quite amusing, as it had a very odd obsession with clocks. There were at least 7 or 8 of them in every communal area, and they were all at slightly different times. I kept thinking of Ankh-Morpork's clocks when we were having breakfast and it took about quarter of an hour for them all to strike 8am. Here is probably the oddest but coolest one:

Yay for simple mechanics. I should mention that the hotel also has the claim to fame of being one of two possible places where Jane Austen may have written Pride & Prejudice (the other being nearby Haddon Hall) - it is at least generally accepted that Lambton is basically Bakewell. The bedside cupboard in my room had a magazine entitled Jane Austen's Regency World. I didn't read it (I know, aren't you shocked?). I think it should be a guest publication on Have I Got News For You though...

Bakewell on Saturday morning, the river Wye. That bridge (yes, the same one as in the previous post) is a packhorse bridge from circa 1300. See, this is why Boston didn't seem all that special to the Europeans...

Anyway. On Saturday we walked some of the Monsal Trail, which follows an old railway line from Bakewell north to Monsal Dale (and then on through it to somewhere we didn't go and I can't remember the name of). Pleasant walking, mostly completely flat except for the points where the line originally ran through tunnels:


(if only that were near Hollywood it would surely have become a base for the X-Men or something by now.) At such times we ended up quite high above the railway line and had to climb down to it again - here is the view from Monsal Head (there was an ice-cream van here. Of course I gave in. I'm not Myo) down into the dale.

All in all, we think we walked about 11 miles - but that's not as impressive as it sounds because really it was pretty much all flat. Took us about 5 hours, too, which is very poor. But then we did stop at ice cream vans and a bookshop and so on. Also kept getting delayed by the truly awful attempts at making it modern and touristy or something...I meant to mention this in a letter to Keppet at the time but forgot, but nonetheless it has stuck in my brain ever since. Along the trail, there were occasional wooden benches with bits of 'poetry' carved on the seats. Whether these poems were written by 5-yr-olds or by people who had had their brains surgically removed, I am unsure, but the one that stuck in my head ran:

The Peak Park is good
It is the best
I could dress it in
A little pink vest!

No, seriously. That is carved on the top of a bench just north of Bakewell. Argh.

As we walked back, dusk was falling, and the landscape was...very Derbyshire. Not the high peak, not the dramatic stuff, but mistily elusive and rolling. I can see Mr Darcy riding his horsie through these fields and woods.

This Saturday was also the fifth of November, so in the evening we got in my car and I drove us to Eyam to see their bonfire/fireworks. Eyam being 'the plague village,' they rather amusingly had not only a guy on the bonfire but also a wood-and-paper rat, which burned up rather well.

Fire pretty.

Fireworks also pretty but harder to take photos of.

On Sunday, it was very very windy and cold, so I drove us around a lot. We went up to Castleton to really get into the high peak because I wanted to see hills. This kind of rocky, cave-filled landscape is another thing that the peak district does well.

We went to Mam Tor, too, which I always think is cool - does anyone want an object lesson on the perils of building a road over a landslip that's been ongoing for the last two millennia? If so, go to Mam Tor - this is what happens to your road when you do.

To round the day off, we went even further north and drove most of the Snake Pass, which connects Manchester to Sheffield through the Dark Peak, and is usually the first major road in the country to get snowed up. We stopped off to admire the beauty of the Derwent Reservoirs in their autumn colours.

So that was my weekend with my father. Weekend with mother to arrive shortly.