Yorkshire summer….
Suddenly for some reason I can’t comment on quite a lot of my friend’s blogs. I can like the post but when I try to comment, the input box goes blank and freezes. Randomly a few blogs still work perfectly fine.
Hopefully can figure out really quickly what on earth I’ve done to it this time.
Sometimes I’m Dumb and Dumber rolled into one 😂😂😂😂
A trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a country estate with a large range of art scattered around the countryside. Some small pieces, some giants. Some by leading artists including the controversial Damien Hirst. Hawklad wouldn’t even let me take a photo of one particular statue ….
A sometimes mystifying but frequently stunning few hours. Unbelievably it was almost warm as well….
Definitely worth a visit.
As a child I could eat most things as long as it was covered in at least 1 inch of Tomato Ketchup… even pesky vegetables. Now all these years later,Hawklad has upped the ante. Seemingly everything on his plate is edible as long as it’s found submerged in a sea of the red stuff. But whereas I would be fine with the cheapest ketchup, Hawklad has to have Heinz…. And when I say a sea of the stuff, it’s at volume levels which create destructive pressure levels. The Swiss Hotel we would stay at on more than one occasion had to order more ketchup as someone had completely exhausted their stocks.
A trip along the wonderful North Yorkshire Moors Railway. The very same railway that featured in the recent Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible movies.
Built in 1944, this locomotive did a grand job pulling my large backside over the Moors. Trust me that’s some mighty effort required up those hills….
As a kid I had a treasured Hornby Train Set. It was one train that looked a bit like 44806, two carriages, one small platform and a few track pieces. Just enough track pieces to build one really small loop. That train went round and round and round and round and round, getting nowhere fast. Yet hour after hour, lost in my dreams, that little loop track became a train winging across countryside, through cities, over huge bridges, through cavernous tunnels under great mountains. Mile after mile, endless possibilities.
That was several decades ago. Where did that boundless childhood imagination go as I got older. I miss it…..
Driving along a certain road, a route I frequently venture down. It’s not a bad trip at all, nice country views, not too much traffic and memories. Just on the outskirts of the city, the road runs by a little road side cafe.
A smile. Always a smile.
Mum’s 70th.
That cold, frosty and beautifully clear morning, Mum had just landed in a farmer’s field….. A so called bumpy landing, ‘came in a bit hard’ …. A hot air balloon flight over the city and countryside. Mum now had a tale to tell, so the family gathered to listen in this small roadside cafe. Tea and Cream Scones, sat huddled on the wooden benches outside. Much laughter. All the funnier as mum revealed a secret, she was scared of heights… If we had known earlier she might well have had a birthday boat cruise down the river.
Over the proceeding years the cafe has physically not changed much, maybe the wooden benches are looking a little more creaky. But one change is that it’s increasingly become a bit of a biker pit stop haunt. Yamaha’s and Motörhead Jackets reside on the wooden benches alongside couples and families, cream teas still being consumed by all. Mum would find this amusing.
Feels like a timeless memory to me.
There is another road, often ventured as well. Nice road, very like the other road. This one had another memory.
But no smiles this time, they have slowly faded..
This road runs by a derelict pub, one that’s been up for sale for too many years. Sadly the years have not been kind to the old building. Windows broken, part of the roof have collapsed, weed filled car park. Surely it can’t be too long before the bulldozers move in and put it out of its misery. Yet this was still the site of a memory. For weeks we had kept our work romance quiet but finally it was time to come clean. A Christmas office quiz night and meal at an old country pub. Back then it was a place full of life and character, really well kept and stylish. The big reveal ended up probably not being a romantic one, rather that the seemingly clever bloke from Finance in the three piece suit was in fact a monumental idiot whose useable pub quiz knowledge was limited to football and football…. Plus wow, was he an embarrassing dancer. Little did they know that it took years of practice at the Top Deck in Redcar to get this bad….. WHAT on earth could she see in him…… What she did do that night was to convince me to go on holiday with her to Switzerland, our first trip. That old pub and that night proved to be our gateway to The Alps. And as we left, it started to snow, snow just a couple of days from Christmas.
That memory would bring a smile every time I passed this pub. But that was when it was a busy, working pub, when it had life. Watching it fade away started to change the feel of the memory as well. As the life slowly ebbed from the pub, the gloss and magic went from the memory. The memory became less vivid, less colourful, faded, transient. Now when I pass here, I struggle to see the memory anymore, I just see a sad old derelict building. When I do try to recall the memory it feels really ancient, from a different world, almost artificial. Compare that with Mum’s birthday memory which feels alive, vivid, as if it was yesterday. But heres the thing, both memories were born just a few months apart.
Memories are delicate, can’t be taken for granted. Yet is it also possible that some memories are intrinsically tied to something like a location, a sound, a smell. Things that stimulate a certain reaction from our senses that link to a memory. If that thing is damaged, the memory is also damaged. But surely it might also be possible that we can find memories that are more embedded, tied to things we pick up on which feel like that have more permanence. Let’s say locations that appear untainted by time, places where we can still talk about timeless personal memories.
Time for a little piece of Switzerland. So many memories flow from just looking at these photos. Memories that feel as fresh as ever.
Well the longest day came and went.
We have a bit of a tradition going now. On the Longest and Shortest Days, we head off to the Moors to hopefully see the sun slowly set over the distant hills. A favourite little parking spot on a hardly used byway is the perfect spot. We only share these moments with sheep…
We like this spot because quite often, immediately after the sun sets you get a few brief moments of optical illusions. Often it appears that we are now looking down on the coast. A golden sea with islands. This always takes me back, back to my climbing days and the trips to the West Coast of Scotland.
Always poignant thoughts. I vividly recall standing by my car, near Torridon, watching a stunning sunset over water. Then getting in my car to drive overnight back to the rat race in England. Thinking, I can’t wait for my next climbing adventure here, already drawing up plans as I drove. That was over 20 years ago and I still haven’t returned.
Time moves on….
Here’s the crazy thing, if I had been told back then, it could end up being at least 20 years of no returns, then I would have almost certainly made more of an effort to find the time. To actually make that trip way before now but life can have a habit of just slipping through our fingers if we are not careful.
Apparently there is a mysterious monolith that keeps appearing in various parts of the world. Strange Things.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/monolith-mystery-las-vegas-desert-b2564821.html
Looks impressive, well today I think we found the Yorkshire Mysterious Monolith which has randomly appeared in a similarly remote, exotic location… A Cow Field.
Same shape just a bit crap…. That kinda sums up Yorkshire sometimes 😂😂😂
That’s a proper sign post, although I’m not sure how feasible it is to walk to Canada or The US from this part of the world.
Most of the support had already started to be pulled from Hawklad when he approached his teen years, that’s how it goes in the UK. Now at 17 the inevitable letter arrived. At 18 he will be signed off from the last service still providing support to him and his care will be handed over to Adult mental health care. In other words, the day he hits 18 any support he may need will need to come in the form of self help, or from family, friends, internet, leaflets and a few overstretched voluntary groups. NOT from health professionals.
As a Paediatrician cautioned me when Hawklad first started receiving support
Some support and help could be required for life. The level of support required may diminish over time, sometimes no support is required but often the level of support can grow as people try to forge their own adult life. But when someone reaches 18, we stop asking as a society, in fact we stop providing the support almost completely. Child Mental Health will inevitably hand over virtually every child under its care to an adult service that doesn’t exist in the UK. After that if someone picks up the courage to go to see a doctor, in most cases that doctor will have little real understanding of areas such as autism and will probably just want to put a plaster over any problems in the form of Anti Depressants.
As adulthood fast approaches for Hawklad, I keep increasingly focusing on the immediate future, the next stages. Trying to develop that independence yet worrying about where he can turn to if he ever needs support. It’s a sobering thought sometimes.
Nearly the longest day and it still doesn’t feel like it’s nearly summer. A walk along the bitingly cold Yorkshire Coast.
These are really unstable cliffs. After high tides and especially after storms, you will see intrepid fossil hunters scouring the base of the rocks for fragments of a past world. Locally it’s known as the Jurassic Coast.
No T-Rex hunting for us this day, way too cold. Hands much better employed stuck in the pockets avoiding frost bite. Is it really the longest day in a few hours…. As we eventually headed back to the warmth of the car we passed a bare chested Surfer marching briskly towards his inevitable frozen doom in the North Sea.
“You might need a few more layers on….”
“Probably. The secret is to not scream too loudly and look like you enjoying it.”
“I thought the secret was to surf somewhere way warmer”
“It is but then you don’t get to surf round Icebergs. Plus if it was warmer my wife would have me cutting the grass….”
I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks back on how his view on life had changed drastically with time. He talked about how for years he desperately wanted to see the world, home was just not enough. Home time often felt like wasted adventure time. Adventure, adventure, adventure. But over the last few years, increasingly, his home, his garden, the countryside immediately around him, was his world, it was more than enough. He felt like he had done enough travelling and adventuring now, experienced enough of that in person. Now he could relax and fully appreciate that LOCAL LIFE which had previously seemed way too claustrophobic and restrictive for him.
Why take his paintbrushes and sketchbooks thousands of miles, through countless stressed filled hours in concrete departure lounges…
Why damage the world in search of ever more exotic adventures when there was more than a lifetime of adventures and wonderful subjects to paint, just a few moments from his front door….
For years he only went into the garden to have a barbecue and reluctantly cut the grass. Now he sits for hours in his garden, happy, relaxed and content.
He was even thinking about if he could get rid of his car, did he need it now he had taken ROOT.
This got me thinking, could I do the same here, take root in this part of Yorkshire. Possibly, there are definitely worse places to become rooted. But I kept coming back to this one thought…
I could take root in Switzerland, I really could. I would right now if I could.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 