The iPhone tries to hide the terrain. It’s a bit steep. it’s a bit bumpy. It’s also hardly ever used these days. But yesterday I was around about here when I came across a dismounted mountain biker, someone who initially looked like he was taking in the view. As I passed him, he asked if I knew anything about fixing knackered bike gears. After I said ‘a little’ and started aimlessly tapping the bikes chainring, he painfully explained ….
“If you heard any screaming noises a few minutes back, it was from my lungs, my knees and my backside. My wife said I should take up this as a hobby, she said it would be fun, good for me. Strangely she didn’t buy herself a bike…. The first time I went out I fell off and dislocated a finger. Since then I’ve been lost, bruised, angry, tired, broken but never ever has it felt like fun“
His bike was beyond my expertise…
The poor chap groaned …. “this hobby just keeps on giving”.
LIFE IS FUNNY SOMETIMES
Just then, in the distance, a bit of a dust cloud coming up the usually quiet hill lane. One bike, two bikes, three bikes, four bikes, five bikes. All flying up the steep climb, heading towards us. It was like a scene from a modern day remake of a Spaghetti Western.
Unbelievably a professional mountain bike team, all in matching team kit, out on a training run. Not just one bike expert, FIVE EXPERTS. Within seconds the fallen bike was as good as new.
In the words of Monty Python, the Lucky, Lucky, Lucky B………
Yes Lucky but I also suspect, he is now a FORMER Mountain Biker…….
Sat in a surprisingly quiet cinema, watching Despicable Me 4. I could hear Hawklad laughing, along with his fellow Minion Movie Goers…. I smiled then slowly an emotion swept over me. One I’ve had before in these nearly 8 years of single parenting but never this strong, this striking. Would she recognise his laugh, it’s been 8 long years, so much has changed.
His mum never got to see or experience this moment, all the moments. In 2016, when he was just 8, she left this stage. She has missed out on so much, the highs, the lows, the laughs, the tears, the struggles, the adventures, the family time, seeing all the great strides he has taken. Would she even recognise him now.
She missed so much.
Missed so much precious time.
I know the value of that now, I didn’t a few years back. Maybe that’s the thing about LOSS and BEREAVEMENT. You get to see the fragility of life and what is lost. You start to develop a better focus on the value of time and the pricelessness of the precious moments.
Our local Market town, Malton, occasionally mentioned in Downton Abbey TV stories. There has been a town here ever since the Romans decided to build a fort here one day. Could have found somewhere a tad warmer….
Just down from this bridge is a small children’s play barn. One of those places that goes through repeated name changes but nothing ever changes inside. It’s a site of much parenting inspiration for me.
The play barn is really tight inside and the owners somehow squeezed in an even tighter adventure climbing maze. The kinda maze that every few minutes a young child loses confidence and cries out for a parent to rescue them. Mums often heading into the maze to make the save, Dads often opting for a non intervention, low risk strategy. Declining to enter the maze, just shouting and pointing approach from a safe distance.
On one trip years back, when Hawklad was a toddler, he went climbing there. Yep he got stuck. As much shouting and pointing as I tried, Hawklad remained stuck. Time to face my mini Dantes Inferno, I had to go in. Uncomfortably claustrophobic, having to climb over toddlers with the bite strength of an African Crocodile. Eventually I made it to where Hawklad had been. Now he was outside, giggling, watching his Dad go through this instrument of torture. I had been done like a kipper…..
But then the parenting inspiration after being the butt of the joke…..
A few minutes later, a toddler properly stuck and needing help. Eventually a rather exasperated Dad decided he had to go in….. I’m no Thor but this Dad was even less of a Thor. Well actually he was way bigger than Three Thors round the belly region…. Seeing this poor Dad get slower and increasingly more stuck was strangely fascinating. The inevitable eventually happened, Dad got stuck. Properly wedged in. His toddler now filled with renewed courage and unable to turn down this unique opportunity to inflict torture, he came in for the kill. Toddler made it to his stuck Dad and started to draw random patterns on his Dad’s bald head with chalk and non marking pens. Other parents now gleefully supplying more and more ammo for this unrelenting assault. Dad unable to move his hands so unable to offer any defence to this unprovoked attack. Finally the Barn owners dismantled part of the maze to free this poor, broken colouring book of a parent.
What’s the patenting inspiration from this….. as bad as things have got for me, and they have frequently been very embarrassing. It’s never ever got close to being as bad as it got for this poor, randomly tattooed Dad. A Dad whose only crime was to CARE…..
I was sat quietly trying to figure out some bizarre game Hawklad had loaded onto my phone. It wasn’t going well, I can now add not being able to cross strange characters across busy roads to my litany of other incompetences….
As I unintentionally squashed more and more characters, a couple that looked about my age came into the sparse waiting room. Sounded like their daughter was having a counselling session at the same time as Hawklad. Unlike me they weren’t particularly quiet…. As my character death toll climbed relentlessly I had to listen to a families not so private backstory. Let’s just say it’s a family dealing with some stuff.
But one thing the bloke said stood out.
For whatever reason he had clearly missed quite a lot of stuff, important stuff and he knew it. To something his wife said, he mentioned having to miss his daughter’s school concert because he had a meeting. His wife pointed out with clear frustration that he missed last year’s concert as well. This year he had also missed her awards ceremony and sports day. To this he responded with
“Work is work, I will make it up to her, definitely NEXT SCHOOL YEAR.”
The sigh I heard from the woman to that sounded like she might have heard that before.
Maybe Work is Work but LIFE is DEFINITELY LIFE. Time rolls on. You only get so many chances to show up to things life school concerts, award ceremonies and sports days. All too quickly the chances end for good and you are either left with wonderful memories or painful regrets. That is inevitable.
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 TopDeck 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.
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.
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. 