Strange Conversation

Noted down at the time as part of a discussion about how lucky we are to have food.

Me: Grandpa (i.e. my father) said that when he was younger, if you were eating an apple in the street then children would come up to you and ask “Can I have your apple core Mister?”

Daughter aged 5: Why? Weren’t you allowed to eat apples inside?

Me: Yes, but if you ate them inside the children wouldn’t see you eating them.

Daughter: They could have looked in through the window.

Dominosteine

Mrs. D.’s homemade Dominosteine: an unusual thing to bake in an English kitchen.

When my mother-in-law was a teenager after the Second World War, her school organized food parcels to send to families in Dusseldorf. I imagine most of it would have been tins of meat, vegetables and condensed milk, and maybe a few perishables such as sugar, butter and cheese. Dusseldorf, like many European cities, had been bombed to ruins and the people were starving.

This, and similar schemes, were not universally supported. When the Mayor of Reading spoke about families in Dusseldorf living in dreadful conditions in bunkers and cellars, there were angry letters to the press condemning the Boche for not working to feed his children.

My mother-in-law’s family did support and contribute to the scheme. The school also encouraged children to write letters to send with the food parcels, and, as a result, there began a life-long friendship with a German girl called Ingeborg. There were visits between the families, and, during the nineteen-nineties, mother-in-law brought Ingeborg to stay with us for a few days.  

As Europe recovered from the war, the German children began to send Christmas presents to England. Ingeborg usually sent dominosteine, lebkuchen, stollen and spekulatius. You would have been hard pressed to find these delicious continental treats anywhere at all in Britain during the sixties, seventies and eighties. Later, my wife always managed to find them at Christmas, even if they had to be ordered by post from Germany. I had never tasted or heard of them before.  

Dominosteine and stollen are my favourites, but, this year, there were no dominosteine to be found anywhere except at exhorbitant prices. So, Mrs. D. made her own, baking the gingerbread, building up the layers of jelly and marzipan, cutting it into squares and covering them in soft, dark chocolate. They’re enormous. Four times the size of those you buy. And more than two tins full. Yummy!

POSTSCRIPT - coincidentally, Graham Edwards also mentioned German treats in his recent post, with a photograph of a box reminscent of what Ingeborg used to send: https://galenote.blogspot.com/2021/12/christmas-day-2021.html

The Inter-Varsity Club

It can be hard moving on your own to somewhere you don’t know anyone. Perhaps it’s not so bad when you are young, but I did it in my thirties. Things were fine at work, but home alone in the evenings, well, you don’t expect it to be like that.

I moved to the Midlands. I’d had enough of working in universities – that’s another story – and come to accept I was better on my own – also another story, a long and disagreeable one.

In universities, you think you are solving the world’s problems and work too much, but in this new job, when I went home, the time was mine. I looked around for things to do. I went to a couple of po-faced meetings of Friends of the Earth, but it was too much like work: sub-committees and working-group meetings. Then I saw an ad in the paper: IVC: ‘The Inter-Varsity Club’; it said something about “meeting people with similar interests” and “broadening your social life” with “concerts, meals out and other activities”. It met on Monday evenings in a scruffy room above a dingy pub. We carried our drinks up from the bar and mixed and chatted in small groups. It was full of eccentrics and misfits. I fitted in perfectly. 

The IVC had started in London after the Second World War when a group of Cambridge undergraduates wondered how they might “replicate their busy university social lives through the summer vacations”. Whatever could they have meant? They organised dances for students, graduates, teachers, nurses and almost anyone else with nothing better to do, and soon added other activities such as walks and theatre trips. By the nineteen-eighties there were branches all over the country and the focus had shifted to year-round activities for young people who had moved to unfamiliar places. Some remained members for years, even into their forties and fifties. It was definitely a mixed-age group that I joined.

I have never had such an active social life. Some weeks I went out every night. 

Activities were organised by members, with participation by sign-up. We went to films, plays and classical and pop concerts. We had meals out, days out and evening and weekend walks. Some events were in members’ homes, such as craft activities, coffee evenings, colour slide shows and parties. I went on a couple of long weekends away: walking in Exmoor and the Forest of Dean.

The walks were always popular: you tended to chat naturally with everyone else at some point along the route. I ‘hosted’ several myself, but also dragged people along to things like talks and poetry readings. One of ‘my’ events was a lecture about the Luddites by an almost eighty year-old Michael Foot. He shuffled on, steered by an assistant, wearing a shapeless cardigan buttoned out of alignment with a spare button hole at the top and a spare button at the bottom. Things looked distinctly unpromising until he began to speak, when he proceeded to mesmerize everyone in the theatre with a brilliant talk in the richest, most authoritative voice you could imagine.

Two twice-yearly events were especially well-anticipated: ceilidh dances and the ‘Galloping Gourmet’.   

The Galloping Gourmet, a miracle of organisation, was a five-part meal (sherry, starter, main course, pudding and coffee) with courses in different homes. It worked like this:

To take part, you either (a) host sherry or coffee, (b) provide a course for six people, or (c) are a driver.

Each starter, main course and pudding is served to groups of six in five different homes at a time. Everyone starts in one of two locations for sherry. They move on in threes to somewhere else for starters, joining with three from the other sherry location to make six. The threes are then re-shuffled and move on to somewhere else for main courses, and again for puddings. Everyone ends up at the same place for coffee.

Thus, with 30 participants, there are 3 sherry/coffee hosts, 10 drivers, 15 course providers and 2 organisers who get a free ride. Instructions to drivers are prepared ready to be handed out by the hosts, e.g. “Please take Margaret and Jim to Margaret’s at 1 Sandy Street, Wibbleton, to arrive by 7.30 for your starter”, where the next instruction might be:  “Please take Jim and Sue to Bill’s at 2 Rocky Road, Wobbleton, to arrive by 8.15 for your main course”.

Apart from one or two legendary mess-ups (such as the clueless chap who asked “what do we do now?” when he and five others arrived at his bedsit expecting a starter) it worked brilliantly. 

But you know what happens in clubs like IVC, don’t you? You find that those with similar interests attend the same things, and you make friends, and they ease into your thoughts and you begin to wonder what if you had a special friend. One, with laughing blue eyes and a liking for Bushmills whiskey, looked delighted when the clockwork of the ceilidh brought us together. I began to go to all her events and she to mine. The Galloping Gourmet organiser sent us to the same places most of the way round. One warm evening in peaceful Leicestershire ridge and furrow, where heron rise and kingfisher flash along the Kingston Brook, I offered a hand over a difficult stile. “What are men for,” she wondered, “if not to help you over difficult stiles?” Her hand lingered a little longer than necessary and I went kind of shivery and weak all over.

Herons and kingfishers bring luck, peace and love. After that, Dear Reader, we had a few private events of our own. We’ve been married now for thirty years.

It wasn’t all that long before I had another university job, too.

Dill in Mustard Sauce?

(first posted 12th January 2017)

“But dill is a herb!” Mrs. D. gave me that withering look she normally reserves for her ageing mother. 

 I still thought I was right.

“They’re little fish - dill in mustard sauce.”

“It’s a herb! You wouldn’t get dill in mustard sauce. That would be like having basil in Worcester sauce or parsley in pineapple marinade.”

I sighed. “There was a tin last year in the Christmas hamper your mother gets from the pension company: a tin of dill in mustard sauce. They were little fish. Your mother gave it to us and they were really nice.”

“Sure it wasn’t sild?”

“It was definitely dill. As in a shoal of dill.”

There was nothing in the dictionary about dill as fish, only as Anethum graveolens, a European, pungent, aromatic, umbelliferous, annual, yellow-flowered herb of the celery family Apiaceae, used in flavouring pickles or to relieve excess wind, although in Australia and New Zealand it colloquially means a fool. Mrs. D. said that’s what I was being - or doing. I said we needed a better dictionary.

At Christmas, I can usually guess what’s in presents before I open them, but this one had me puzzled. It was too thin for a dictionary and the wrong shape for DVDs. I unwrapped it still wondering. 

It was a tin of John West herring fillets in mustard and dill sauce.

phoebe's wee blog

miaow everyone,

i'm phoebe. if other cats such as tigger can have their own entire blogs then at least i should be able to have one blog post. even takser wrote a post about some cat called sooty.

i've got chance while takser has gone to the shop and left his computer thing on the table. i don't know why he has a cat's name and i've got a people's name but i'd like to see more about cats and less about nasty dogs.

i'd better get back to work in the garden now before takser comes back. my job is to keep blackbirds off berries and pigeons off peas but takser won't miss one or two. 

i can't work out how to do big letters but i am an expert at playing with mice. i like my picture. it shows my stripey head. sorry if this post is boring. if anyone wants to comment i'll answer if i can.

miaow for now,
phoebe

Occupational Therapy Corners

The last post about the stair rail attracted more comments than usual. They ranged from the resigned to the resolute. The gist seems to be ‘hold on tight as you descend the slippery slope.’

As mentioned once before, Mrs. D. is an Occupational Therapist. Not everyone knows what they are or what they do. When I went to register our son’s birth, the clerk asked for the mother’s occupation and then wrote “Occupation Therapist” on the certificate. “No,” I said, “it’s Occupational Therapist – it has ‘al’ at the end.” If I hadn’t checked again, I would have left that office with a certificate showing the mother as an “Occupation Therapistal”.

Occupational Therapists provide equipment and therapies to help people regain their daily lives after serious illness or injury. Mrs. D. therefore very much approves of stair rails and anything else that make homes safer. She also informs me that our stairs, being straight, will be perfect for fitting a stair lift.  

Another previous post, from 2019, included this picture of our kitchen. You may notice that the cooker hood protrudes at just the right height for clumsy tall persons to hit their heads. It has quite sharp corners. Heads tend to bleed rather a lot. I’ve now done it once too often. It’s much better today, thank you. I’ve just spotted that the cooker hood now has these neat enhancements. I call them “occupational therapy corners”. What next?

Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

I know I keep going on about the folk band we are in, but here’s a confession: I don’t really like folk music. Well, that does depend on what is meant by folk music. I am certainly no big fan of those relentless jigs and reels played at breakneck speed on fiddles and flutes without any light or shade.

One thing I am a sucker for, though, is the music of what is often called The Great American Songbook: the melodies of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin and others, written roughly between 1930 and 1950. They really knew how to get your heart. 

Next time I get chance at our Zoom folk meetings, I’m going to sneak in Brother Can You Spare a Dime on the pretext that the tune is based on a Russian-Jewish lullaby the composer’s mother had sung to him as a child. His family had fled when he was nine to escape the pogroms in what is now northern Poland.

Here is my MuseScore arrangement for guitar and bassoon. The bassoon sounds great. It sounds even better when Mrs. D. plays it for real. 

OK, I’ll shut up about MuseScore now for a couple of months.

Brother Can You Spare a Dime was composed in 1931 by Jay Gorney with lyrics by E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg (his middle name was Yipsel). It has been called the anthem of the Great Depression. It asks why honest Americans who served their country building railroads and skyscrapers, ploughing fields and fighting wars, “always there right on the job”, have been abandoned to the bread lines. Some saw it as anti-capitalist propaganda and tried to have it banned. Recordings by Rudy Vallée, Bing Crosby and Al Jolson were massive hits at the time and may have influenced the 1932 election of President F. D. Roosevelt and his ‘New Deal’. 

It is said that when Harburg and Gorney were writing the song they had struggled to find consistent meaning. They went for a walk in New York’s Central Park, where a destitute young man with collar up and hat down approached them and begged: “Buddy, can you spare a dime?” They looked at each other and knew they had their hook and their title. 

Bing Crosby’s version was the most successful. I prefer Rudy Vallée’s – he sticks to the tune whereas Crosby bends it slightly to his own interpretation. But then, I like lots of things by Rudy Vallée. Al Jolson, to my mind, goes too far in that it starts to become more about how dramatically he sings it. The song is supposed to be about fear, grief and anger rather than sadness and loss. We have gone from relentless jigs and reels towards weeping sentimentality, which I don’t like either. However, Jolson does not go as far as George Michael’s more recent makeover. The YouTube video of one of his live performances, in which the audience whistle and cheer every time he sings a long note, just looks and sounds wrong. It might be less unbearable in audio-only. There are well over fifty other recordings, too. 

For those who like lyrics as well as melodies, perhaps to sing as a lullaby to imbue their grandchildren with a sense of social justice, Harburg’s words are powerful and moving. I especially like the line about “Half a million boots...” This is the guy who went on to write the lyrics for The Wizard of Oz including Somewhere Over The Rainbow, who only became a lyricist after the Wall Street Crash put his electrical business into bankruptcy.  

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plough or guns to bear
I was always there right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodly dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum

Oh, say, don't you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal
Buddy, can you spare a dime?
 

In the nineteen-seventies, the New York Times invited Harburg to write more contemporary lyrics. He came up with:

Once we had a Roosevelt
Praise the Lord!
Life had meaning and hope.
Now we're stuck with Nixon, Agnew, Ford,
Brother, can you spare a rope?

Perhaps we need an update for today.

Moon

The phases of the Moon viewed looking southward from the Northern Hemisphere (Orion8, Wikimedia Commons)

Earlier this month, Sue in Suffolk mentioned on her blog that there are two full moons in October this year. The first was on the first: the Harvest Moon. I like her posts about country ways and the natural world. She even provides a link to a moon calendar in her sidebar.

Two or three days later, we were taking Mrs. D.’s new Fitbit out for an evening walk. She commented how white and bright the moon looked but that it did not seem quite full. I was able to respond that the full moon had been on the first of the month – “the Harvest Moon,” I said knowledgeably – and that there would be two full moons in October this year.

There ensued a discussion about how you could tell whether a moon was new or old, whether a J-shaped moon came before the full one and a C-shape after, or whether it was the other way round. It turns out to be JC in the Northern Hemisphere, which seems easy enough to remember.

How on earth have I got this far without knowing that?

Diaries always used to contain little symbols for the phases of the moon: ☽ ○ ☾ and ● for first quarter, full, last quarter and new (assuming your browser renders these symbols correctly). There are none in my present diary (I still use a paper one), nor on the kitchen calendar. A diary from 2000 does not have them either. I had to look back to one of my father’s from 1986. 

Needless to say, I never paid them much attention. At one time it would have been one of the most important things you needed to be aware of for planning work outside. 

 

Traffic Cam

I have been watching the post (or the mail if you call it that) in trepidation.

Recently, we took daughter back to university: you can’t do art studio and ceramics stuff at a distance online. So she has to chance it with our hurdy gurdy covid policy – let all the students catch it otherwise we’ll have to bail out the universities, and the private landlords will go bust and we can’t upset them because they vote for us and donate money, and we’ll just have to cross our fingers that not too many students develop serious chronic health conditions.

Anyway, that’s a digression. On the way back, after leaving the motorway, you have to run the gauntlet of speed cameras. I know where they are and have learnt to be careful, but you know how it is: you have been going along at 70 and have to re-adjust to slower roads, and you are tired after five hours driving and are nearly home, and perhaps you relax too much and don’t pay enough attention. I got through most of the cameras unscathed but was left wondering about the really nasty one which is obscured by bushes just after the speed limit changes from 40 to 30. It is one of those high-tech, bi-directional Truvelo D-CAMs with no flash and hardly any road markings. I was watching out but when I thought about it again it was half a mile behind and I had crept back above 30 with no memory of passing the camera or checking the speed.

I hate the things. They caught us on Lendal Bridge in York during the first week it was restricted to buses and taxis only. There were few signs or road markings. By the time we realised where we were going there was no alternative but to proceed across. A similar thing happened in Newcastle. We found ourselves unable to turn round with a choice of either entering a private car park or going through a ‘bus gate’. At least they provide nice photographs of you driving where you shouldn’t. And at least Newcastle let us off with a first-time warning, and York council had to refund the penalty after the Lendal Bridge restrictions were challenged and judged unlawful.

    

Remember how it used to be? There was a time near Selby in the blue mini (see blog header), in the days before servo-assisted anti-lock brakes, when, foot-down, I came round a bend to see a parked car on my side of the road and a bus coming towards me. I scraped past with a deep scratch along the side. There wasn’t a mark on the parked car but the man who had been peeing behind it had a dripping wet trouser leg. It gave new meaning to the phrase “making a run for it”.

In a later car, when I lived in north-east Scotland, I would do the 750-mile round trip home several times a year. In those days you could dash along for miles at ninety without much fear of offending the police. I once managed the one-way trip, with one rest stop and one petrol stop, in less than six hours. The smooth slate-grey colour of my exhaust pipe was the envy of every motor sport fan. On other occasions, when there was no traffic on the three miles of gradual descent on the motorway between Sheffield and Doncaster, that little car could do a hundred.

Still later, in 2001, I had a new Golf funded by travel expenses. Once it was well run-in I wondered how fast it could go but chickened out at a hundred and twenty (193 km/h) on the M1 south of Sheffield. Nowadays, the cameras would have you straight away, followed by a court appearance, a heavy fine and disqualification. Do it too many times and you would go to prison.

I only did that kind of thing a few times and would not do it at all now. These days, there is no alternative but to observe the limits. That’s a good thing. I know of too many tragedies to think otherwise. And I do try to keep to the limits all the time, we both do, particularly since someone close had to go on a special course after getting caught by a camera.

The university trip was nearly three weeks ago. You should be informed of camera transgressions within fourteen days. The post lady has just walked by. Nothing for us. I think I’m safe for now. But, it’s probably only a matter of time.

Ties Teens and Sells

Emptying the household waste baskets, I interrupted my son’s video call. He continues to work at home most days. He had put on a smart shirt and tie, and was talking to some important-looking blokes in suits. 

“Sorry,” I apologised when I went back later.

“We were in conference with coun-sel,” he explained. That’s how he said it: “coun-sel,” with too much emphasis on the ‘e’ of the second syllable.

He could see I was looking to mock him. “Just emptying the bas-kets,” I was about to say.

“I know it sounds pretentious,” he said. “I thought I would never say it like that, but we have to avoid confusing coun-sel with coun-cil. It wouldn’t do to be asked to phone the council and to phone the counsel instead, not at the rates they charge.”

“It’s like when I started work,” I said, dredging up a memory from the distant past as usual.  

I told him about two people checking over a set of accounts to make sure they had been typed correctly. The one reading out loud from the handwritten draft kept saying things like “thir-tie” and “for-tie” instead of thirty and forty. I thought it sounded silly until it was pointed out that if the typist had typed thirteen in place of thirty, or the other way round, it might be misheard and wrongly passed as correct. Soon, I was pronouncing all my -ties and -teens too. Some you didn’t really need to change, such as twenty because it would never be confused with twelve, but we changed it anyway: “Twen-tie pounds, fif-teen shillings and eleven pence.”

“That would be so easy to carry through into everyday life,” he said. “You don’t usually talk about barristers outside work, but we’re always talking numbers. You could end up saying it without thinking. We deal with about thir-tie or for-tie coun-sel and thirt-tie or for-tie coun-cils.”

“It’s so powerful,” I said, “that even when you tell someone about it, they start doing it themselves, even after fifty years.”

“Fif-tie,” he corrected me.

North Yorks Walks

It was great to be out on the North York Moors again, although there was a time when I would not have said that. It is where my first proper walks were, with boots, cagoule and rucksack, fifty years ago. My friend Neville used to drive us up on Saturdays in his Ford Anglia and we would spend the day walking. Don’t ask me where: the names Helmsley and Chop Gate sound familiar. Neville had been walking for longer than me and knew all the routes. He persuaded me along and I just followed – literally. 

More often than not he would disappear off into the distance and leave me trailing behind in wretched misery, with swollen ankles, and feet blistered by badly fitting boots. That first pair was fine for a few miles but I could never get the right combination of thin and thick socks to avoid rubbing. Nowadays I wear just one thick pair and stick on a piece of micropore tape at the slightest hint of trouble, which is not very often. As for ankles, from quite an early age I was forever going over and spraining them. I once jumped half way down the stairs and went over with a crunch. The pain was unbelievable. I always went over at least once on Neville’s walks, and still do sometimes, but it doesn’t usually hurt now. Mrs. D. says I’ve got lax ligaments. People cringe when I put the soles of my feet and my knees together at the same time.

On one walk, on Fylingdales Moor near the strange radome “golf balls” (replaced in 1992), I was so far behind I took a wrong fork, and rather than backtrack two hundred yards took a short cut across an area signed “Ministry of Defence. Danger. Unexploded Mines”. I was past caring. Another time, Neville organised a group of us to attempt the Lyke Wake Walk – a 40-mile crossing of the moor from Osmotherly to Ravenscar – but I had to give up less than half-way with one ankle puffed-up like a balloon, and red-raw heels and toes. My heels had blisters upon blisters and my toes looked like they had been stripped with sandpaper. It showed the world for what it is: the beauty and the pain.

The beauty won: the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside. Somehow, I persisted, and my feet, ankles and even I toughened up. We walked in all weathers. I must have been very warm-blooded because, even in the coldest winds and wettest rain, I wore only a cagoule over t-shirt and jeans. I would even go out like that in ice and snow. Now, maybe ten pairs of better-fitting boots later and owner of warmer clothing, I wish I got out more often. So, on holiday last month, it was great to be out on the North York Moors again. One walk was around the enigmatically-named Hole of Horcum.

Panorama of the Hole of Horcum, 2007 (Adam Jennison, Wikimedia Creative Commons)

The Hole of Horcum is a huge natural amphitheatre 400 feet deep and three-quarters of a mile across, just west of Fylingdales Moor. Legend has it as ‘The Devil’s Punchbowl’, formed when a giant threw a handful of earth at his wife. That doesn’t make much sense to me. Apart from the fact that no one would even dream of throwing a handful of earth at his wife, the giant was called Wade, not Horcum. I think Horcum must have been his dog, one of those enormous English Mastiffs, and the hole is where he buried a bone and then dug it up again. In any case, curmudgeonly geo-morphologists have to go and spoil things by telling us the Hole was formed by a process of water-erosion called spring-sapping? 

The Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

My own picture is from roughly the same viewpoint as the panorama, taken from the edge of the hole soon after we began circling anti-clockwise. The purple heather was putting on a better show this year. On reaching the far right-hand side we went off at a tangent along a path to a five-way junction at Dundale Rigg (what a name for a folk band!). From there you can divert to Skelton Tower (an 1830s shooting lodge) and marvel at the steam trains on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway far below. However, we continued on to the sleepy village of Levisham and then looped back East and North along the side of a wooded valley, picking our way through nettles to reach the footpath across the floor of the Hole, visible in the above photograph. In seven miles we had walked the whole of Horcum.

Levisham Village

Entering the Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

Another day we walked along the cliff top, along the track bed of the old Whitby to Middlesborough Middlesbrough railway, which closed in 1958. Some of the now-dismantled structures along the line, such as the Staithes Viaduct, were remarkable. At Staithes you can still make out the brick abutment on the hillside across the valley from the village car park that was once the site of Staithes railway station. The viaducts survived as potential Second World War targets only for unaffordable maintenance costs and declining passenger numbers to achieve what Hitler did not.

We joined the track at Sandsend, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Mr. Yorkshire Pudding who was there last year, and also ourselves in 1997, with the same two people in the next photograph as above. Whereas Mr. Pudding’s group continued the six miles north to Runswick Bay, we turned inland towards the village of Lythe and returned to Sandsend by a higher path across fields, giving a bird’s eye view of the resort.

The old railway track north from Sandsend, 19th September, 1997, looking towards Whitby Abbey

Looking down on Sandsend from the higher cliff path, 16th August 2020

The final photograph is from the cliff tops south of Whitby near the Abbey, which gives fine views in the opposite direction, north towards Sandsend. You can see Sandsend and the wooded cliffs where we walked.

Looking north to Sandsend from near Whitby Abbey, 21st August 2020

From the Abbey you descend the famous 199 steps back into town.

For more photographs, this guy’s web site is a real treat:  
Sandsend to Runswick Bay
Hole of Horcum (he starts at Levisham). 

Whitby, Staithes and Scarborough

Kite Flying, Raithwaite, Whitby, 1997

I never visited Staithes or Whitby as a child, nor did we go to Scarborough much, probably because Bridlington and Filey (see previous posts) were nearer.

We have since been to all three quite often. In the nineteen-nineties we stayed twice in cottages in the grounds of Raithwaite Hall about two miles north of Whitby: not then the luxury hotel and spa complex it is now. The cottages were new, but the hall itself was the decaying former home of two Whitby shipping families. Pictures of the ships and their histories were displayed in an outhouse. When the last of these shipping magnates, William Headlam, died at the age of 81 in 1990, he cut his estranged wife out of his will and left his £7m fortune to a fifty-six year unmarried nurse who had cared for him for twenty years. Offers of marriage flowed in from all over the world, but she rejected them all.  

We also stayed a mile further north at Sandsend during a memorable week when the temperature soared and we spent most of the time playing in the warm pool that forms where East Row Beck crosses the beach to reach the sea. I towed the children round and round in an inflatable dinghy for hours. We flew kites in the longshore winds, one a stunt kite bought while rushing to catch a train, making me mangle my words in the shop. The Reverend Spooner would have been awestruck.

Another year, we stayed yet a further ten miles north at Staithes. There’s a place to get fit quick. You won’t find much of it on streetview. You have to leave your car at the top of the village and walk down the hill with your bags, or park briefly at the bottom and carry them up steps. You walk up and down to the car, and down and up to the harbour all week. Your leg muscles swell out like mooring buoys. 

Staithes: we rented the house top middle with three skylight windows, to the left of several white ones.

As for Scarborough, I went a couple of times with my parents when little, but have no photographs. My strongest memories are of Peasholm Park on the North Bay, where I learnt to row round and round the island in the boating lake – a skill later to impress my children. Several times a week there was a re-enactment of the Battle of the River Plate with miniature battleships, culminating in the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee, celebrating the days when Britain liked to think it could wup the Germans over and over again without really trying. The special effects – the smoke, the explosions, bombers dropping torpedoes as they whizzed across on a zipwire – were phenomenal. Most of the model boats were operated by people hiding inside and walking on the bottom of the lake. There’s a job for some people I might name.  

We saw all three places again last week while staying in Whitby. They were crowded. There were no rowing boats on Peasholm lake, only dragon pedaloes. Where is the skill in that?

Dragon Pedaloes, Peasholm Park

And then there were the walks on the North York Moors …

Trains and Boats

We are just back from a week in Whitby where we stayed in a third-floor riverside apartment watching the clockwork of the tides, Northern Rail and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway (NYMR). It was not the usual kind of country cottage we stay in, but a wonderful location nevertheless, and an unexpected family holiday in a year when the offspring had planned things of their own. 

Here are some pictures of the NYMR post-lockdown ‘Optimist’ service arriving from and departing for Pickering:

Arriving with heritage diesel-electric locomotive D7628 ‘Sybilla’ at 11.00 on 18th August

Leaving with 4-4-0 steam locomotive 926 ‘Repton’at 16.30 on the 19th August

Leaving with the unnamed 4-6-0 locomotive 825 at 16.30 on the 21st  August

I love the NYMR heritage railway. It runs for eighteen miles through the North York Moors National Park from Pickering to Grosmont. At the northern end, trains can then join Network Rail tracks to run the six miles from Grosmont through to Whitby. Regrettably, the eight miles of track connecting Pickering to Malton at the southern end was lifted after the Beeching cuts of the nineteen-sixties. If still in place, trains would be able to run all the way from York to Whitby without having to go round by Middlesbrough, which would be very popular. Hopefully, one day it will happen. 

In past years we have had many happy days out on the NYMR. We have driven to Pickering, caught the train to Grosmont, eaten in the pub, walked back to Goathland and returned on the train to Pickering. We have done a similar walk between Newton Dale Halt and Levisham station. We once used it to visit to Whitby. A lot of people like to visit Goathland as the location of Aidensfield in the television series ‘Heartbeat’ which is set in the nineteen-sixties, and its railway station appears in the ‘Harry Potter’ films as Hogsmeade station. 

You can do all of this, of course, by car, which costs a lot less, but that way you don’t get to ride on a steam train. Some love it so much they just travel back and forth along the line. We’ve done that too. I could spend all day just watching the wooden railway gates at Grosmont: proper swinging gates that make a satisfying clunk when they come to rest against their wedges. Here are some past pictures.

Grosmont, August 2002

Goathland, July 2014

Grosmont, July 2014

Grosmont, July 2017

Last week was the first time we have stayed in the area without visiting the railway. They have had to introduce COVID-safe restrictions, such as non-stop services and pre-booked seats only, making it difficult and inconvenient. I don’t know whether there is any more risk of catching the virus on a train than in walking the crowded streets of Whitby, Scarborough or Staithes, which we did. If, say, one in twenty thousand people is infectious, then you would be unlucky to encounter it at all, and even unluckier to catch it.

The trouble is that lots of small risks combine to make bigger risks, so that if an infectious person is around in the community they could easily infect someone, somewhere. You just have to hope it won’t be you. I suppose that one infected person on a train could infect several others, whereas in the street, provided you and most others are sensible, you would only be near that person for one brief moment in which you are unlikely to get it. I really do not want to catch it. Even those with so-called mild cases, such as the son of one of my cousins, a fit young man in his thirties, have had unpleasant and worrying symptoms persisting for months.

Anyway, I didn’t just think about trains. I thought about boats as well. Even Mrs. D. was fascinated by the activities on the river and in the boatyard:

“Look! There’s a gap now next to the greeny-yellow one. I wish we’d seen them lifting it back into the water. And there’s a chap with a hose pipe on top of that black and white one [see first picture]. And that couple are still on the white boat this morning. They must have been there all night.” 

What fun to have a little boat moored at Whitby to live on board whenever you fancy a few days away. 

I became especially interested in the boat resting on the mud bank in the first picture. She usually re-floated at high tide but not always. One morning she stayed on the bottom with water over the sides and spouted like a leaking kettle as the tide went out. But hoo-ray and up she rises come the next tide.

06:00 a.m. 20th August

Later the same morning - 09:30 a.m. 20th August

The following day - 07:00 a.m. 21st August

Ignoring ridicule from my family (“Oh no! He’s obsessed with clapped out boats as well as clapped out trains!”), I walked round over Whitby swing bridge to take a closer look. The boat turned out to be Sunderland-registered trammel net trawler SD403 ‘Our Mellissa’, built in Denmark in 1979, previously named the Norlan and the Kraefrihed, which seems to have been active in Whitby until around 2016. Here she is with our ‘Whitehall Landing’ apartments across the river (on the site of a former shipyard, they were supposedly designed to look like traditional dockside warehouses), and in happier times in Whitby Harbour in 2010.

SD403 Our Mellissa at Whitby, 20th August 2020

SD403 Our Mellissa in Whitby Harbour 2010

I didn’t just think about boats either. The North York Moors around Whitby is wonderful walking country, but that’s another post.

Filey

Dad with my brother, Primrose Valley, Filey, around 1957

Filey, like Bridlington, is another Yorkshire seaside resort with a long family association. There are pictures of my dad there with his parents in the nineteen-thirties and then with his own family including me in the nineteen-fifties. Later I took my family in the noughties. We had some good times there, and some not so good ones. 

Primrose Valley caravan site 1950s

My earliest memories are of Primrose Valley, the caravan site just south of Filey near the Butlins camp: not the modern fixed caravans there now but the old towable tin boxes with fold-away beds, sickly calor gas, a long walk to fetch water and cell-block toilets. We spent most days on the beach with proper metal buckets and spades, digging and building sand castles with paper flags and sea-water moats.

A fresh-water spring bubbles out of the sand near the cliffs and washes down the beach begging to be dammed before it flows away. No matter how much sand you pile up, the weight of water accumulates until it inevitably breaks through. You have to watch out nobody is sitting on a picnic rug lower down the beach.

And there is Filey Brigg, a long, low neck of sandstone and limestone sticking half a mile out into the sea, covered in shells, fossils and rock-pools. It makes for a breathtaking walk on a warm day at low tide, with gentle waves, seaweed smells and lazy seals, all at one with the enormity of the earth, sea and sky. On other days, at other times, it would be foolish to defy the power of the wind and tide.

On Filey beach with the long, low neck of Filey Brigg piercing the sea to the right

Filey Brigg

On Filey Brigg

At the end of Filey Brigg

We had two family holidays at Filey in the noughties, staying in the rented cottages that nestle in the dunes beyond the caravans. It was a wonderful time: our children, born in my forties, were still under ten. That first year we found the fresh-water spring and dammed it, or tried to, and walked out along the Brigg searching for life in the rock pools. From the cottage windows, through binoculars, we watched the Regal Lady from Scarborough sail by in the evening sun on a coastal cruise.

It was so good we booked again the following year in a different cottage. That was one of the not so good times. We nearly went straight home. It was the most disgusting holiday cottage I’ve ever stayed in.

I still have a copy of the letter we sent to the agent. The cottage had not been cleaned. There were stains and spots of blood on the bed sheets and one of the children’s beds smelled of urine. The drawers and cupboards stank and were filled with the owners’ dirty clothing and other personal items such as half-used bottles of mouthwash. There was very little room for our own things.

In the bathroom there were soiled footmats, hairs around the wash basin, the bath needed cleaning, and the lavatory smelled appalling and had a broken seat. There was a note from the cleaner to say the shower was not working and would be repaired during the week, but it wasn’t. Other things in the cottage were also broken.

In the kitchen was a vase of dead flowers, the bin had not been emptied, there was rotting food in the fridge, a smelly dishcloth on the draining board and a grill pan full of dirty fat that tainted the oven. There were crumbs everywhere.

The sitting room stank of stale cigarette smoke and prominent in the book case were Alex Comfort’s ‘The Joy of Sex’ and other visually explicit sex books, hardly appropriate in a seaside holiday cottage where young children such as ours would be staying. We encouraged our children to read and take an interest in books, but not those at that age.

The cleaner and owners could not be contacted, nor, it being Saturday evening, could the agent. Fortunately we found clean bedding to make the beds usable, did some cleaning ourselves, and survived the week by eating out more than planned.

It took two weeks to get an apology. The cottage had been unbooked the week before ours but someone had been there without booking. It had been cleaned after the previous legitimate occupants, and the cleaner had then gone away on holiday. The owners, a couple from Sheffield, were also on holiday.

We got a refund eventually. The owners sent flowers, which seemed patronising, and offered a further week’s stay for free, but, frankly, at the thought of them enjoying the joy of sex in their pissy underwear, we politely declined. 

We have been back to Filey for days out, but have not stayed.

UMIST

Student life 1974 and now

UMIST Mathematics and Social Sciences Building (when new)

I have been meaning to post about this for some time. I thought of it again this week because we are going to have to take daughter to retrieve the rest of her possessions from her shared house at university (not UMIST). It will be the second chock-a-block car load. The first was in March when the university campus closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Two full loads of a family estate car! Indeed, some students hire Transit or Luton vans to move their stuff. The materialistic society! Not how things were.

Arriving at university, 1974

This lad is supposedly just arriving at UMIST (the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) as a new student in 1974. A suitcase, rucksack, soft bag and guitar case accommodate all his worldly goods (although one could question the feasibility of this). You can imagine he lugged it to Manchester on the train. 

It is from a 15-minute film (linked below) made by the UMIST film and television society to give an idea of student life. It’s a real time-capsule for those of that university or college era.

I went to UMIST myself a few years after this for a one-year postgraduate course as mentioned in the last post, and much is familiar, especially the Brutalist Maths and Social Sciences building with the letters UMIST at the top (12:46 in the film), where my course was based. I used to avoid the lift and huff and puff my way up to floor L feeling fit and superior until one day I was overtaken by a Ph.D. student running up the stairs with a rucksack full of bricks on his back.

For me, the film feels more like the three abortive months I spent at teacher training college in Leeds in 1973, or visiting friends at university around 1970 before I went as a mature student. The titles at the beginning say it was made in 1972, but the list of courses, cinema programmes, the name of the person running for election and the dates of rag week clearly date it as 1974.

Among the evocative things are: the dingy, sparsely-furnished accommodation; those electrical appliances; the A/V equipment; the Greenslade gig; the student societies; rag week (would health and safety let them use those floats now?); the cars – I recognise them all; the long gone shops such as Ratners which made the biggest PR mistake ever; “chalk and talk” lectures. And is that George Best who back-passes the ball at the start of the Manchester United match?

I love the background music tracks written especially for the film, accredited to Nick Rhodes, although not ‘that’ Nick Rhodes who would have been only eleven at the time.

It makes three years at university look the wonderful experience it can be, but, interestingly, less than a minute of the film (11.49-12.46) is concerned with academic work.

I have few problems with that. University is supposed to be a shared learning experience. You learn as much socially, by talking things over with other students, as you do from lectures and course materials. If you take away the social, there seems little point in being there.

And they are taking it away. Daughter has not had a good experience at her university this year. Firstly, there was no teaching because the lecturers were on strike, and then the university campus closed half way through the second term because of the coronavirus outbreak. She has been home since then. And for next year, some universities are now announcing that teaching will be online and there will be limited access to tutorials, laboratories, workshops and studios, and few student union activities.

She is doing art. Her particular interest is decorative ceramics. How can you do a degree in art if you can’t use studios and workshops, or show your work to other students? Similar questions arise with laboratory sciences, computing subjects, music and others. Is there any wonder students are beginning to say they are thinking of having a year out? They are not going to be saddled with student debt for lectures and tutorials through Zoom.

That would affect university finances, especially if overseas students don’t come. That’s a big chunk of Britain’s university income. I predict insolvencies in the sector. Will the government bail them out? Probably not. They are hotbeds of liberals and socialists.


MORE ABOUT UMIST

UMIST started out as Manchester Mechanics Institution, then Manchester Technical School and later Manchester Municipal College of Technology. It became a university college in 1956, able to award degrees on behalf of the University of Manchester, and changed its name to UMIST in 1966. It became a completely autonomous university in 1994 but merged back with the University of Manchester in 2004 and is now no more. The Maths and Social Sciences Building is due for demolition. Courses were mainly in the applied sciences, hence the male student majority. Look at that list (at 11.49 in the film): chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, polymer and fibre science, textile technology, management sciences, ophthalmic optics, mathematics, computation, civil and mechanical engineering, metallurgy, physics, biochemistry, mechanical engineering, building …

Funnily enough, I visited the Maths and Social Sciences building again around 2003 (although I did take the lift this time). As soon as I was inside it came back what a depressing building it was to be in.

Norn Iron

I had been asked (i.e. told) at short notice to give an outline of our business computing system to some new customers whose primary contact had been sent off to an urgent problem abroad. All I knew was that the four guys in front of me were from an outfit called NIPF and that they spoke with those throaty Northern Irish voices you sometimes hear on television. One, a big, confident man in his fifties with a shiny, shaved head and intense stare, was clearly in charge. Another was half his size and looked a bit shifty. I began, predictably, by introducing myself and asking their names.

“Con Cluskey,” answered the one on the left.

“John Stokes,” said the big, confident man.

“Eric Wrixon,” said the third.

“John Stokes,” said the little, shifty guy.

“Oh! That’s interesting.” I exclaimed. “So, you’re John Stokes as well? You’re both called John Stokes?”

John Stokes 2 looked flustered. “Sorry. It’s Morrison... Van… er, George… George Morrison… George Morris.”

“He’s very tired,” said John Stokes 1.

It was unsettling, but it seemed best to let it go and get on with the presentation. I showed them the system: how it could keep track of their computers and printers and other pieces of equipment, and would tell them when they needed updating or maintaining, and could record what things had gone wrong and repairs that had been carried out, and what parts they used, and so on. All went well.

When I got home that evening, I told the future Mrs. D. about the guy who didn’t know his own name.

“As if they weren’t using their real names,” she suggested.

It turned out that was indeed the case. In fact, they possibly did not even know each others’ real names. And it wasn’t just for maintaining computers they had bought the system. They had mobile communications equipment, surveillance kit and other stuff they’d rather not talk about.

Three or four weeks later, the Customer Support Director called me in. He asked me (i.e. told me) to go to Belfast to run a two-day training course for NIPF’s staff.

“It’s extremely confidential,” he warned. “They asked specifically for you. You have been checked out and granted security clearance. I would fully understand if you didn’t want to go. It would not count against you in any way .” Of course he would. Of course it wouldn’t. I started to feel very apprehensive. Not put too fine a point on it, I felt a bit sick. 

NIPF was a covert name for the Northern Ireland Police Force, then known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). It was the late nineteen-eighties and they were still dealing with the ethno-nationalist “Troubles” between warring paramilitary groups. Three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) had recently been shot by British security forces in Gibraltar, and at their funeral in Belfast a member of the opposing Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had thrown grenades at the coffin and shot three people dead. At one of the ensuing funerals, two British Army corporals were surrounded in their car, taken away and killed. It was not a place any English person would go for a holiday.

When I told the future Mrs. D. where I was going, not even giving the full details, she almost had a meltdown. It’s the kind of thing that brings home how much you love each other.

Well, I am still here. NIPF gave me strict rules to follow. I would be met at the airport and taken to a hotel. The hotel was safe, but I was not to leave it under any circumstances. I would be collected each morning and taken to NIPF’s HQ, and returned to the hotel again in the evening. They would take me back to the airport at the end of the second day. I should speak as little as possible so as not to reveal my English accent. Everything would be fine, they assured me. The effect was to make me even more queasy and apprehensive.

John Stokes 1 collected me from Belfast International Airport. The windows of his Ford Granada had inch-thick glass. He warned me to mind my hands as he heaved shut the heavy door. It was reinforced with steel plating. The car averaged about seven miles to the gallon. When I asked was it all really necessary he said the route between the airport and hotel passed through bandit country and it would be dangerous if we broke down. Otherwise, it was just like being at any other customers’ except for the armoured Land Rovers parked outside, and the canteen where uniformed squaddies piled their submachine guns and body armour outside in the corridor. I didn’t eat much.

One thing I did like was the Belfast accent: the way they say “BelFAAST” with a big, wide “aa”; how words like “now” and “flower” become “noy” and “floyyer” (“hoy noy broyn coy”); the way they pronounce Rs at the end of words; how “rain” becomes “reey-in’ ”. They gave me elocution lessons, although I was a poor learner. On leaving, they gave me a present, a book on how to speak “Norn Iron” (you sound both Rs in that).

My queasy apprehension did not lift until safely on the plane home. I gazed over Port St. Mary and the little island known as the Calf of Man glowing in the evening sunlight, and giggled on finding the phrase I might have used to buy medicine for an unsettled stomach without giving away my English accent (remember, emphasis on the big wide “aa”s):

“Do you hav’ a battle fer vamittin’?”