For the last week I have had a recurring dream, a vivid recurring dream. A dream about a place we’ve been to a number of wonderful times, the Gornergrat in Switzerland. A very high ridge in the Alps with a luxury hotel and beautiful stone chapel, set amongst the rocks, the mountain peaks and glaciers.
In these recurring dreams, we are sat on a bench, watching the clouds roll across the rocky landscape, as the sun slowly sets. Then we wander into the hotel’s observatory and look at the stars through the large telescope. That is something I’ve wanted to do for years.
One of the first things you notice living in the hills is that you don’t get many poles that are straight up. There is always a bit of a lean to them. Nowt wrong with that. It feels like I’ve had a bit of a lean for years.
There is a really apt song line that Roger Waters wrote a few years back.
You lean to the left but you vote to the right.
This morning I read a work email exchange. One guy was saying that he had voted for Brexit because it seemed cool but hadn’t voted for higher food prices and more expensive import taxes. He certainly hadn’t voted for the nightmare it had become to own his time share in Spain.
Ok…..
Maybe its just me. 😳
But I guess we all do a bit of that lean to the left but vote to the right thing.
I’m not immune to that. As a kid I fell in love with football. What an exciting game it could be if I picked a great team. I then picked Newcastle United to support. If I liked football so much why did I pick that bunch of numpties.
Then there was a time when I was a fully paid up member of CND. Proud owner of the ban the bomb T-shirt. I picked what look like a really interesting University option. All went well until I found out where my option was based. The National Atomic Weapons Research Facility…… I’m not making that up. How on earth did I get through the vetting.
But it goes much wider. I wanted desperately to be a parent but not sure I would have initially voted to be a single parent. Definitely not this way.
So I guess there are times when things are out of our control. Life happens. But there are times when it is down to our decisions, our actions. If that happens you just have to own the consequences….
It’s still not even midday on this stormy Monday and it already feels like it’s been a long week. Much shaking my head at the areas and topics Hawklad is having to learn. Really how will these facts and skills set him up for the future.
Then he listens to the news. It’s filled with talk of pandemics, nepotism and a country rapidly appearing to be an inwardly looking police state. Women having to protest because they don’t feel safe. A complete and utter Brexit shambles. Ongoing environmental disasters. Lots of waving the flag and saying we are better than anyone else. Look how much we can blame on immigration. Everything has a price. Profit is king. A world where the makeover of the PMs flat is more important than a pay rise for nurses. Leaders talking about bringing Victorian values back into schools.
Hawklad hears this. He talks about this.
Are we really happy that our children are being exposed to this. Being brought up in this type of world. Learning this stuff. Are we happy that the likes of these people are in charge of our child’s education.
Deciding exactly what they learn, how they learn it, where they can source there information from. What part of the economy they can be slotted in to.
Is it really about the children or is just about the economy. If it is really about the children then why don’t we ask them what they want. What interests them. What works for them. What world do they want to grow up in.
We needed something for the house. Where we would normally buy it from is out of stock and is unlikely to be getting any new ones in any time soon. It was a similar story in the other online UK stores. Amazon was a similar story. Finally I found an option from a German Store. But here is the new post Brexit reality.
The store were most helpful. If I had ordered the item before we left the EU delivery the store would have added £20 delivery to the £300 item. Now the store had to warn me that another UK customer had just been charged an additional £140 in Customs Duties and Tax. The store had also had to increase the delivery charge to £40 to cover the additional bureaucracy they had to deal with.
Well I’m not paying that….
So we will just have to do without it until some UK stores manage to source some stock – eventually.
Please tell me just one benefit we are getting from Brexit. So far the best one I’ve seen is from the pompous moron who is the Leader of the House of Commons. He said that apparently “The key is that we have our fish back. They are now British fish and they’re better and happier fish for it…..”.
This is the politician who claimed he had more common sense than the victims of the Grenfell Tower Disaster. Our PM kept him in the Government……
What a monumental prat and what a monumental mess….
I put my hands up. I might poke a bit of fun at my county of birth. Well actually a lot. Yes the weather can be grim, the people can be a bit odd (me certainly included), we might be a little behind the cutting edge, probably spend too much time focusing on the past BUT….
It is a great place to live and visit. So much history, beautiful brooding landscapes, welcoming, diverse, a wonderful quirkiness and a place that has definitely left its mark on the world. So maybe every so often I should really show and tell the good about Yorkshire.
So here goes. I give you just a fraction of what Yorkshire has to offer.
It’s dark, bit of blue sky, very windy. Good drying weather.
Friday was one of those days. Hassle from school. Missing items. Me being a walking accident magnet. My favourite music magazine, one I’ve been reading for ages, went out of business. And the washing machine….. it decided to eat itself. Two hours of fruitless home repair confirmed that in the words of Monty Python –
E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-WASHING MACHINE…..
A bit of disaster when we have such a heavy lockdown washing requirement. A replacement one was finally sourced that has an expected delivery window of less than 3 months!! So it’s the delights of hand washing for a while. Given Hawklads anxieties – lots of it. I guess it’s a good arm workout.
I need the weather to be nice and cooperate. Outdoor drying would really help. Please help me dry the washing, pretty please….
So here’s the new sport. It’s great for endurance and reactions. Much bending over and sprinting. It’s called ‘catching my pants as they hurtle across the farmers field’. The sizeable wind was clearly trying to turn my underwear into a new post brexit export to Belgium. In fact given the colossal size of my pants they would constitute a bigger new trade deal than anything our clowns of a government have secured in one year…..
It’s a hard life for some. Not sure if the hard life applies to The Cap or to that old sofa. The Cap is resting after a hard morning of causing chaos. This sofa is 17 years old. Over the last few years it has had to endure sustained cat and dog attention. Currently it’s covers are being washed for the millionth time.
It’s a hard life for my bottom as well. This morning I was blasting out a few miles on my equally old exercise bike when it basically fell to bits. It collapsed. One minute I was dreaming of summiting the Alpe d’Huez and leading the Tour de France. Three seconds later I’m sat on the floor surrounded by bits of exercise bike. Oh how the mighty fall. Now I know what it feels like to fall of your bike and forlornly watch the peloton scream past you.
Thankfully ten minutes later the bike was reassembled and the snapped retaining bolt replaced. The rest of the stationary ride was completed while I sat on an ice pack and a soft cushion. Bruised buttocks are not fun. But on the bright side, it’s much easier to ice pack your posterior than it is to ice pack your ego.
Bizarrely we were watching the Dora The Explorer movie last night. Yorkshire really knows how to live the dream. Near the start of the movie, poor Dora was dancing at a school ball. It was such a random odd dance that all the other kids were laughing and poking fun at her. Poor Dora, I really felt for her.
“Dad she dances like you.”
Really, I’m not that bad am I….
“In fact worse, much worse. At least Dora is coordinated. Your dancing is that bad, that if I’m within 50 miles of you, you are banned from any dance floor.”
The shame. How the mighty have fallen. I’m telling you that I once won a New Years Eve Blues Brothers dance competition.
I’ve always wanted to be multilingual. To effortlessly switch between languages. To hold actual flowing conversations in another country. So far that goal has eluded me. But there is always hope. There has to be hope. Es muss Hoffnung geben.
At the moment German is my hope. I’ve found a memory technique which is for the first time allowing me to learn words and the tricky part – the gender. So my hopes have started to rise. So how many words do I actually know. So I counted them. Around 450…. Sounds good but apparently you need about 10000 words to be truly fluent. What’s the German for oh pants. Possibly oh hose…
Still it’s a start. Once I’ve mastered German, I’m going to move onto my next big challenge. Master English. Actually that might be beyond me……
Yes an excuse to sneak in a Switzerland photo when it’s not Sunday. A country which just does things better than here in England. When the Swiss organise a bird lineup it is always going to beat ours.
I was racking my brain to think of stuff my country can do better than Switzerland. It’s not an extensive list so far,
Queues,
Road pot holes,
Darts,
Football hooligans,
Classic Rock,
Rust,
Stuff being late,
Crap customer care,
Cheaper basic drugs like cold remedies,
The NHS, a big plus……
Charlatans like Boris Johnson,
Litter,
Royal Family (depends if your a republican or not)
Nigel Farage,
Katie Hopkins,
Fox hunting,
Badger culls,
Over fishing,
Child poverty,
Mental Health Crisis,
Care Home Crisis,
A shocking pandemic death total,
A Government proud of killing so many people,
Becoming insular and xenophobic,
Key service cuts,
Large school class sizes,
Navies,
Seaweed,
Inability to speak a second language,
Shouting and swearing,
Cricket,
Morris Dancing,
Fish and chips,
Potato Crisps,
Rhubard,
And raspberries.
Will stop now as the longer this list gets the more depressed I get at the thought of living in England. Yes we have some things we can be rightly proud of but the list of not so good stuff is rapidly expanding. Bring on my weekly Swiss Sunday…..
It’s not quite the Wall from Game of Throne’s. It’s hardly Hadrians Wall, the stuff of history. But it’s our barrier. Our symbolic wall. Marking the edge of our current world.
Yes it’s got nettles growing against it. Even on our side. Ok it was too cold for the Game of Thrones Wall to have nettles but Hadrians Wall has some stinging beauties lurking next to it these days as well…And that’s a World Heritage Site.
“Dad our world is pretty small but it does seem to have its fair share of weeds and nettles.”
Well not that many.
“Dad it took us three days to find my football when it went into hedge. The language I learnt when you had to retrieve the ball from the bush. Apparently you got stung a quite few times .”
Yes quite a few times. It’s not big or clever to use bad language. But in my defence we back onto farmland. It’s a haven for weeds. Our fence does feel like a not so big wall trying to keep out the marauders.
“That feeling we got when we visited Hadrians Wall last year. I can remember the date. 15th August. When we imagined what it must have been like for those Roman centurions stood on the wall. Hadrian came to Britain and ordered that the Wall was to built in 122AD. It took 6 years to build and stretched from sea to sea. It was 80 miles long.”
Its definitely an epic wall.
“Our farm fence is not 80 miles long. Maybe 20 paces long. It certainly doesn’t keep out the weeds. But at least it keeps the world out. So it does it’s job.”
Yes it really does. It allows a space for an Aspergers mind to flourish. A place to breathe and feel safe. So yes it’s an epic wall. A wall to be so thankful for.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 