Monthly Archives: January 2017

Reasons to be cheerful

27 Replies

I’ve been working on my positivity, and I have many reasons to be cheerful. I have my health (well, most of it), I have my own gardening tools and I have plenty of room for books. I also have friends, a tolerant wife and a laptop.

What more could I want?

Well, I suppose the joints and bladder of youth would be handy, but I’d probably have to be ambitious and hard-working again, which isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Anyway, the joint aches started when I was still in my teens due to various accidents, so unless I’m prepared to set the clock back to 1968 and re-live the unpleasantness of my teens it’s not going to happen. In the absence of a time machine it’s not going to happen anyway, but you know what I mean.

That’s another thing to be cheerful about – I don’t have to go through all that teenage angst again.

Mainly, if I’m honest, I’m cheerful about having a digital camera. Compared the the old-fashioned film camera, which could hold thirty six exposures at a time, and where the film needed developing before you could see the results, the digital camera is cheap and efficient. I’m now able to take thirty six shots, instantly see the results and store hundreds of good shots on one small card. Due to the marvels of modern data storage I can also store thousands of poor shots – I really must learn to be more organised.

With a digital camera I can spend my time watchng birds, looking at old buildings and blogging. One day I will have to start earning a living again, but until that happens, I have plenty of reasons to be cheerful.

The pictures I’ve used here are just a selection of my favourites from the last few months.

Adjusting the lathe
Frying sausages
Nuthatce at Rufford Abbey
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Derelict factory in Stoke
Ciabatta with the shadow of rosemary
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Peppermint Creams – the finished article
Poppies and corn wreath

 

 

Idle Valley Nature Reserve

11 Replies

Let’s be honest, doesn’t Idle Valley sound like a great place to be? It has to be up there with Happy Valley and Easy Street.

The walk was bracing , and there were some interesting birds about but as we sat in the cafe, eating Fat Rascals and drinking tea a member of staff came in and started to engage in protracted loud banter with the cafe staff. I could have done without it, but it wasn’t too bad. When he started moving chairs and tables, including the ones next to us, I began to have flashbacks to our visit to Attenborough NR.

It looked like he was preparing to remove the Christmas tree, which begged the question why he couldn’t have done it before 10 am or after 4 pm when the cafe was closed to the public. It just goes to show how assumptions can be wrong, because he was actually preparing to have a cup of tea and a twenty minute session of complaining about management changes.

What is it about me that seems to attract this sort of thing? All I want is tea and cake.

The lake is quite a big pit, the sun was in my eyes for most of the time and much of the lakeside path doesn’t run along the side of the lake so it wasn’t the easiest place to watch birds. Fortunately we started off with a big flock of Teal (thanks to one of the telescopes in the visitor centre) so we were guaranteed a new bird for the 2017 list. Part way round I picked a couple of Gadwall out of a small flock of ducks – they are quite dull, greyish ducks, but they stood out by body length and dabbling behaviour in a group of Tufted ducks. It’s another new species for 2017 and they were closely followed by a group of Shovellers and a couple of Pochard, which were also new species for the year. Let’s be honest though, on 4th January most species are going to be new for the year.

Shovellers with Coot at Idle Valley
Gorse is alreay flowering
Wren

Before we set off I’d checked up on the recent sightings and looked the rarities up so I wouldn’t get caught out if I saw them. Well, I didn’t get caught out, but that was due to lack of sightings rather than lack of preparation.

One day we’ll find something rare, some day…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Gadwall drake – a rather dull duck

 

A very strange day

30 Replies

Time marches on.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The day started with a visit to the farm – we are still tidying up as we had an enforced rest over Christmas due to my infection – and continued with a visit to Men in Sheds. They made us tea and offered to share their Lincolnshire sausages. We declined the offer, but donated half a dozen pullet eggs from the bantams, who seem to have sprung into laying action while we’ve been away.

LIncolnshire sausages
Adjusting the lathe
Frying sausages

On the way home we dropped in to feed the ducks at Rufford Abbey, which was the fun part of the day, and pottered home as the light faded. That was where we got our big surprise.

Julia opened her emails and was rendered speechless.

It’s quite strange seeing Julia speechless. she impersonates a goldfish and emits tiny mewing sounds.

I waited patiently, and after she recovered the power of speech she read the email to me.

When I recovered the power of speech she told me off for using bad language.

It seems that one of the teachers who has been visiting the farm has arranged to rent land on the farm to start a group using horticulture and animals for therapy. Sounds vaguely familiar. Also seems like it must have been organised during the time we were being thrown out.

What really stopped us speaking though, were the words “As I understand it, the timing was right for change for all of us”. The timing, as you may recall from previous posts, was not right for us, but was forced on us. However, it seems to be a growing belief within the farmer that he did us a favour as we were working hard and not making a living from the project. That, of course, makes him feel better at throwing the group out. It also highlights the difference in our approaches, as we don’t need a lot of money if we’re doing something worthwhile.

Anyway, now I have recovered the power of speech I’m not going to waste it.

The lake at Rufford was still partly frozen, providing hard standing for a variety of birds. We had bird food with us and, as you can see from the video it inspired some enthusiastic feeding.  The light was fading, so we restricted ourselves to the lakeside. I did try a couple of photos of squirrels under the trees but the light was so bad that camera shake rendered them useless.

I’m currently trying to improve my bird identification skills so I had a good look at the gulls and was pleased to find two that were different from the mass of Black Headed Gulls. They were both immature birds so they have lots of brown feathers and their beaks and feet are different colours from the mature adults. I took plenty of photographs and checked them against pictures on a gull ID website. Yes, there are such things.

immature Common gull
greylag Goose
Black Headed gul
Immature Herring Gul

One of the gulls seems to be an immature Common Gull. As you may gather from the name, it isn’t a rare gull. The other is an immature Herring Gull. They are even commoner than Common Gulls. It would have been nice to have spotted a rare gull but at least I managed to see them amongst all the others.

 

 

Rufford Abbey – another stone face

6 Replies

I’m finally catching up on last year’s posts, so please bear with me if things seem a bit disjointed. After this post things should be up to date.

On our latest visit to Rufford Abbey we decided to look at some of the areas we didn’t see last time. This includes more buildings, the kitchen garden, some sculpture, another stone head (which I noticed sticking out from the kitchen garden wall) and the pet graves. Generally the pet graves are a bit dismal, though they have been done up for Christmas to make it look like Santa’s reindeer are in residence.

Sculpture at Rufford
Sculpture at Rufford
Sculpture at Ruffird – I will say no more…

This photo shows the story behind the hand sculpture.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The story of The Hand

That should really cheer the kids up, hanging name plates on the graves of dead gun dogs. They also have a horse buried there – Cremorne, who won the Derby, the Grand Prix de Paris and the Ascot Gold Cup. It’s a dismal stone so I’ll wait for a brighter day before photographing it. It seems a little out of balance that animals got better treatment in death than the estate staff, but as he was sold for 5,400 guineas when owner Henry Savile died I suppose he was worth more than the staff. (That’s £ 5,400 plus 5,400 shillings. At 20 shillings to the £ that is £5,670, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the guinea.) If you’re interested in the history of the guinea here is more information.

Pet Graves at Rufford Abbey
Pet graves as reindeer stalls
Where’s Dasher?

We can probably do two more visits and still show something new. There is plenty to see.

Meanwhile, there are other buildings including the craft centre, information centre and bookshop round the courtyard of the stable block (not to forget the toilets). There is a cafe, which does a decent bacon cob, in the old coach house, plus an orangery and a kitchen garden. There’s also a water tower – it’s more like a small town than a house – and other parts you can’t visit.  There’s a restaurant at this end too, in addition to the cafe.

 

 

 

New Year, new struggle…

17 Replies

It’s a New Year, and I’m having a struggle with finding a suitable title. So far, then, there is little difference between 2016 and 2017.

You can tell the holiday is over because we took the boys back today, one to Victorian splendour in Leeds (where he has a flat in a listed building) and the other to student squalor in Sheffield. Julia is currently sitting and looking lost – she says it’s too quiet.

That’s not actually our normal measure of the ending of the holidays. The official start of our Christmas is the day we buy the cheese footballs, and the official end is when we finish them. We finished the last few tonight, on our return from Leeds.

I’m not really sure how we came to develop this “tradition” – Julia asked me to get them for our first christmas together and it grew from there. Does anyone else have family Christmas traditions? We can’t be the only ones.

The start of a new year is always a tempting time for resolutions but I have a poor record with resolutions so all I’m saying this year is that I’m going to take a positive attitude to things.

I was going to try posting every day but I’m already an hour and a quarter late for that.

As for the weight loss/health resolution – see my previous comments on cheese footballs.

The beauty of looking on the bright side is that I enjoyed the cheese footballs.

🙂