In a cavern, in a canyon

I am being incredibly slack about blogging these days. I even loaded these photos last week and then just couldn't be bothered writing a few words to go with them until now. How pathetic is that? Anyway, last Sunday, my friend Lauren and I decided to do something with our day. Something beyond watching Countryfile and The Crystal Maze, that is. As it was cold and grey, we decided we wanted something indoors-y. It being midwinter, obviously, all the big houses and stuff are currently shut. So somehow we managed to turn "indoors-y" into "underground-y" and went up to Castleton to go down an old lead mine.

Anyone remember the hill where the road has fallen prey to landslip, Mam Tor? No? Thought not. Well anyway, Castleton is the village nearby, and Speedwell Cavern's entrance is on the road which one now has to use instead of the road over Mam Tor. I love this road. There aren't enough passes in England.

So there you have the weather as we went in - fairly overcast, windy and temperature hovering somewhere just above freezing. Brr. Let's go down the mine.

Said mine was a lead mine (ooh rhyme) in the 18th century. It was a huge failure as a mine, losing the investors the equivalent of several million pounds today. The part of it that is open to visitors now is the first tunnel they blasted (before bumping into the natural cave system and using that to make life easier) - it is only a few feet high and is kept full of flowing water to allow shallow, narrow boats to pass along it (this was true when it was a working mine too, apparently, although how you run from a blast in a boat I'm not entirely sure - I'd guess that, when doing that, you actually ran. Or splashed, anyway).

Here is our boat, full of wide-eyed hard-hatted tourists with nothing better to do on a January Sunday than have cold water dripped down their necks from the rocks above.


We had a tour guide whose name I have now forgotten, but he was fairly amusing. He sat on the prow of the boat, even more hunched over than the rest of us (although he had a bump cap rather than a hard hat and seemed happy losing the occasional brain cell to outcrops every so often), and told us such hilarious facts as the average life expectancy of a Derbyshire lead miner in the 18th century being 28 years, and the like.

Here is a better idea of the tunnel shape and size, taken in the one part of the whole tunnel where two boats can pass each other. Tour guide: "called Halfway House, for the logical reason that it is exactly one third of the way down the tunnel..."

We waited here for another group to pass us on the way back. Tour guide instructed us to laugh loudly so the other group would think he was a great guide. We did as we were told.

And so, after some more fun tunnel facts (eating tallow is Bad for you, children, as is blowing yourself up), we emerged into Speedwell cavern, which is what you're really paying the money to see I guess. Unfortunately, it's fairly low-lit, and too big for a flash to work, so my camera struggled a little. Here's the best I could manage of the cavern looking up:

(there were stalactites hiding at the back there but somehow they seem to have gone missing)

- and of "the bottomless pit" looking down:

- although neither of those pictures really do justice to the cathedral-y height of it. But anyway. On the other side of the cavern, here is the tunnel going on, and it was so well-lit and reflect-y that I couldn't resist another photo:

(oh who am I kidding, I must have taken about forty photos in here, but only about 5 of them came out).

Then back in the boat and back along the tunnel, where tour guide ran out of fun facts to share. He suggested we sing, but was met with resounding silence. Well, never mind, he gets paid to bump his head all day. As we exited up the hundred-and-something steep stone steps that must have actually been the best part about working down that mine all day, we passed another group and tour guide coming down. "It's snowing!" said the tour guide. "Yeah right," said we.

"Aaaah! Snooooow!!!" said Lauren and I, and proceeded to go crazy and jump around the car park laughing. Other tour members ushered their small children into their cars and drove away as fast as they could.

Turn to the right, and the view up the pass has become:

So of course we had to drive up the 1 in 5 gradient in the snow. In a Fiat Punto. Heehee. It was fun. Especially swearing at all the other motorists who didn't understand snow and insisted on dropping into first gear. By the time we got to the top of the pass (i.e. about 5 minutes later, tops), the snow had settled a bit more. The sun had also started to set, and as a result the world looked like this:

(to my camera, at least. Hey - it was having a hard day.) Of course, with snow lying as thick as this, we couldn't just drive away. Nope - we had to use the last of the light to get out and throw snowballs at each other across the road (occasionally hitting passing cars by mistake). It was great fun, except for the totally numb hands that resulted within about 2 seconds. I tried to take lots of photos, but made the surprising discovery that when the wind is blasting snow into your lens, your photos don't come out so good. My only decent one is the one I put on Flickr - but it's so pretty you can have it again.

Yay for Sunday excursions, even if I can't be bothered writing them up for a whole week.

Repetition

Today was a very nice day. So I went for a walk. Are you surprised?

I went for the exact same walk I went for once before, though - except in reverse. So, along with the need to take a photo for Flickr, my photos are therefore less landscapey and more pseudo-artsy today.

See?

First, as always - to Markeaton Park! Derby may be the most central city in England, but that is as nothing to seagulls when bread is being thrown.


Just as January temperatures are as nothing to families out for a Sunday afternoon - this is the tea/cake/ice-cream shop. Our forecast high today was 8C, I think.


Tree.

The park was filled with small children and dogs, who I wanted to take pictures of...but they weren't my children or dogs, and I suspected the accompanying adults might give me odd looks if I started taking photos, so vegetation did seem the easiest thing to take pictures of...

...and what's wrong with a few poisonous berries anyway?

I don't think I'll be walking to London any time soon, though.

In the wonderful, amazing, beautiful blue sky, plane trails that looked like fireworks. I wonder where they were going?

The actual walking (two and a half hours of it) was very enjoyable. Woolly hat to keep the nip away from my ears, and cereal bar in pocket for fuel. I bought new shoes before Christmas that hadn't really had a chance to prove themselves as walking shoes yet. But, luckily for me - look! Plenty of mud/cowshit mix to test them out in.

But Nature, ever thoughtful, promptly provided me a flooded field (yes, a sloping flooded field) to rinse it off again. And no, they're not waterproof shoes.

However, I could still feel superior to other residents of the fields, who were without the prospect of a hot bath at the end of all the mud.

And - as you've probably guessed before now - yeah, I kind of like it anyway. It's nice getting out and getting messy. Although, Year of the Pig or not, still not quite this messy.

Watch with skittledog

AKA things I have on dvd or video and haven't yet watched.


Heroes eps 5 - 11
Due South, second half of season 1
Torchwood, eps 3, 5-10 and 12/13
Charmed, seasons 1 and 2 (not my fault)
Hogfather
MASH, season 1
Scrubs, second half of season 2 and season 3
Sex and the City, entire 6-season boxset
Lord of the Rings, extended editions of all three films
Drop the Dead Donkey, season 2
Back to the Future, all three films
Rent
Ladies in Lavender
Kind Hearts & Coronets
The Lavender Hill Mob
Black Books, season 1
The Princess Bride
Sideways
Donnie Darko
Trainspotting
Being John Malkovich
Red Dwarf, seasons 2 and 5
Pulp Fiction
Star Wars V and VI
Tea with Mussolini
Sleepy Hollow
Super-Size Me
Interview with the Vampire
Blade
Lola rennt
Solino
Das Experiment
HIGNFY, 'best bits' video from the early years
Maurice
Futurama, season 1


Hmmm. Oh dear?

Not Pictured

Okay, this idea surfaced in my mind whilst driving around the country, trying as I was to think of an idea for a blog entry that did not involve photos or excessive work actually having an opinion on a topic. And it occurred to me that there are now quite a lot of words which I cannot see/hear/read/think/smell etc without my mind instantly and unavoidably making connections which are usually neither relevant nor desirable. Some have been used in popular fiction, others have become hard-wired in my brain as parts of in-jokes or memories. I started trying to list these words in my head, and came up with quite a number.

Obviously, first and foremost, are those words which have been used as proper names in some way or other:

Fitz, serenity, skit, angel, bob, firefly, myopia, doctor.

But that's not so dissimilar to the way names mean different things in different contexts anyway. However, there are then those other words...words which, through no fault of their own, have been used so recurrently, prominently or perfectly in some place or other that they stop having any other meaning of their own for me:

content
champion
jackass
flagstone

Those were ones that sprung to mind - perfectly normal, everyday words from different walks of life which, whenever I come across them, zap me somewhere else entirely. I'm sure there are more which are not jumping to the forefront of my brain at the moment, but the point of my post wasn't really to enumerate them all (although tell me yours, please) - just to wonder at the phenomenon of pathways in the brain and words that stop being words.

Home Alone

Or: what happens to a Hippeastrum when you leave it with the flat to itself over Christmas.

Perhaps I should move house