A trip out for Hawklad to a World Heritage Site in Yorkshire. To Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. Is it the only SOCK related site on the esteemed list.
Maybe that is what Captain Chaos is working on, just his will involve way more socks….. AND his socks will be way more CHEWED….
With a bit of great planning by those who decide things, 1st August finds two rather special NATIONAL days.
Swiss National Day . A Nation who brought to the world staggering landscapes, politeness, precision transport, chocolate and Roger Federer.
AND
Rhubarb National Day otherwise known as Yorkshire Day. Yorkshire who brought to the world moaning, rain, wind, rhubarb, chocolate and Michael Palin.
Happy National Day here.
Happy National Day to Switzerland.
It’s Friday…
It’s Friday in JULY…
It’s the last day of the school year.
And WOW am I going to have a WHINGE. A RIGHT WHINGE. A Guinness Book of Records size WHINGE. Yes a REALLY REALLY REALLY big WHINGE. But this time it’s not about School. It’s not about my so called Football Team. It’s not about the rising price of everything. It’s not about clothes manufacturers making the size of clothes I normally buy, smaller so I don’t fit in them anymore….. It’s not about U2. Its nit about Alvin and The Chipmunks. It’s not even about the incompetent, corrupt Government.
It’s July. I will say it again. It’s Pigging JULY ……
So how come someone sent a CHRISTMAS related email this morning. Castle Howard you have officially made the NAUGHTY LIST.
NO I do not want to buy tickets today for Christmas.
The Elf’s are hibernating. Santa and Mrs Santa are on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean. Rudolf and buddies are busily making little reindeers in a field somewhere hot and steamy. It’s not Christmas for another 156 days, SO WHY have I got a Christmas Email in JULY.
BAH HUMBUG………
Somebody likes a good old water fight. Sends the crazy one even crazier.
Being crazy is hot work, especially when it’s HOT. The little garden weather station reached the big four zero.
That is ridiculous. Maybe not for some places but for Yorkshire, seriously ridiculous. I know it’s unofficial and inaccurate but for what it’s worth, that temperature would have smashed the old UK hottest ever recorded temperature. Many places here officially smashed the old record on Tuesday.
What’s the old Kipling line – mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
Well briefly…..
A quick water fight and a well earned ice pop under the shade of the old apple tree, then it was back inside again. NO this is not just a summer thing. This has never been a Yorkshire Summer, not even close.
What have we done.
When are those in charge going to take this seriously.
Our so called Prime Minister skipped an emergency weather planning meeting so he could focus fully on organising a celebration party for himself……. Surely no sane person would ever vote for these self obsessed chancers.
That thought should make all our blood boil. It better do and fast because if it doesn’t then the blood of our future generations will definitely BOIL.
The farmer playing real life MINECRAFT.
Day One of the Two Day Heatwave. Todays garden temperature from our mini weather station hiding in the shade was….
That is ridiculously hot for Yorkshire, unheard of. The forecast is that it goes even higher tomorrow. At this rate I might have to take my jumper off. Unbelievably, it was so hot that Hawklad put shorts on, WOW, the last time that happened was when he was at nursery.
You can only fire water pistols for so many hours. Well if the school doesn’t send any work, you have to improvise the learning day….. So as we sheltered inside for a few moments and dried out, I tried to get my head round the Government’s latest ideas to sort out the Special Education mess. From what I can see it’s about replacing one mess with another mess while saving a bit more money….
Currently parents have to jump through a seemingly never ending number of ever shrinking hoops until their child gets a Plan approved (or mostly doesn’t). It’s a process which forces shellshocked parents to take on the mighty big bureaucracy. The lucky few emerge with a plan that is supposed to identify needs to be met. A personalised budget is then awarded to the child to help fund this. Sounds promising but what then tends to happen is that the big bad bureaucracy then says
You now have to give us that money back and that buys you a place in a mainstream school. No money no place. That money then pays for general teaching assistants who the school then use to help out teachers. They provide no dedicated help to Special Needs pupils. Then the big bad bureaucracy talks up the idea that PUSHY parents get this gold plated education for the lucky child. PUSHY parents are taking money from the majority of other pupils. This sets parent against parent while the special need pupil is mostly left without support. That’s the current system.
The new proposed system seems to be, keep the same nightmare approval process, make it harder but add in a bit of mediation when the application is almost inevitably rejected. If you do fluke it through to getting approval then rather than bothering identifying individual child need, parents are just offered a standard ‘one size fits all’ solution. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t suit the individual child, at least we are saving money and it’s much easier to administer.
So it’s a mess and if it changes it’s going to be just another mess, but cheaper.
Sigh, breathe deeply and slump a bit lower in the chair. Definitely time for water pistols…..
There are the words that no self respecting Yorkshire person ever thought they might have to utter. No it’s not saying ‘Lancashire is actually quite nice’. No it’s not saying that you can get ‘decent beer down South’. And no it’s not saying that ‘cricket is actually really really, mind numbingly boring…..’.
Here goes….. the words we never thought would be uttered here are.
Yorkshire has an extreme heat weather warning…..
Currently we are just about covered by a Red warning. That is ‘Threat to Life and Serious Risk of disruption to essential services.
WOW
This is Yorkshire. It damp here, it’s windy here, it’s a tad chilly here, often nithering here. It’s a two vest and thermal knickers kinda place. Never extreme heat.
We are the top of the purple bit under the top 42C. Ok it’s not the heat that many places regularly get BUT this is YORKSHIRE. The UK’s highest ever temperature is 38.7C
I know it’s a forecast and this is Yorkshire. We could still ignore the trend and pull out a damp, misty, chilly day but it’s a sobering thought.
A really good friend mentioned about not being able to see the stunning Switzerland glaciers in a just a few years time. They will be gone.
What are we blindly walking into. What are we losing for future generations.
I probably don’t do that much for Yorkshire Tourism. Actually I might even kill it off a tad. Face it, just how many times do I drone on about the dreadful Yorkshire Weather and rhubarb. Basically I’m screaming – “if you like Rhubarb Crumble with huge dollops of freezing horizontal rain, then Yorkshire is the place for you. “
Well let’s buck the trend. Time for a bit of Mr Blue Sky Yorkshire in the form of a very warm (YES I did say VERY WARM) walk around the countryside surrounding Castle Howard.
Now let’s rewind the Tourism Promotion clock, back to the mid 1970s. I was living in Redcar, a quirky Yorkshire seaside town, surrounded by heavy industry, it was a place that was sadly in decline. The town decided to run a competition amongst its various schools, let the pupils come up with posters and slogans to promote the area to tourists. The best ideas would get displayed in the town’s public art gallery.
Well guess what, this muppet, was awarded a ‘Runners Up’ badge. Looking back they probably awarded ‘Runner Up’ status to hundreds and hundreds of kids. I can’t remember the winning entry but mine is engraved on my mind. It was a really bad painting of the sea front with my catchy catchphrase painted in black across the top. I captured the essential essence of Redcar in B’s.
“COME TO REDCAR – BEER, BINGO AND BEAUTIFUL BEACHES”
How did that not win………
Yes maybe I do need to work on my Yorkshire Promotional Skills. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Here’s a little known fact about Redcar. The Oscar nominated movie Atonement was partly filmed here. One of the movies most iconic scenes is of the troops waiting in Dunkirk to be evacuated. That part of the movie was filmed on Redcar Beach.…..
I was just a few steps away from this sea of purple. It’s was warm, yes Yorkshire can do that sometimes. Deep Blue Skies, rare but yes it can happen even here. So I decided to do the morning yoga (yep I’ve gone full on hippy) under the shade of the apple tree. I found a small patch of grass which hadn’t been dug up by our active tunnelling Mr Mole and off I went twisting, bending and groaning.
A few moments later the helpful yoga instructor blasting out of the iPhone encouraged everyone to undertake a form of torture. Wrapping one leg around an arm, doing the same on with the other leg and then balancing on what limbs remained still free to move. I might have misheard her….. Anyways it wasn’t a pretty site. I felt like an iPhone which had just been permanently bent out of shape. Funnily enough we have a story on that one to come…. I thought yoga was supposed to be relaxing, this is just brutal.
Is yoga out to get me….
Yes it is….
A few hours later we were walking the mad dog down one of the narrow village lanes when a car headed our way. Hawklad went one way and I headed towards the other fence. I recognised the driver and waved. Unfortunately at the very same moment I stepped in a rabbit hole and suddenly entered into an out of control stumble, culminating in me trying to fall nose first over the fence. I clearly gave the driver a really good giggle. And here’s the thing. The driver is a yoga instructor. I’m clearly on the yoga naughty list.
Yoga is out to get me.
The weather is unusually settled here. The garden water tubs are nearly empty. What is going on, this is Yorkshire….
Not much of the much advertised heatwave so far. It finally arrived on Saturday and went Saturday. It was a bizarre day. Started warmish. Then just after midday the wind dropped and the temperature rocketed up. The garden thermometer hit 30C. Don’t laugh but that’s as far as the thermometer will go. Guess where that piece of technology was made. It didn’t have to travel too far… Yorkshire clearly doesn’t go past 30C.
But then just 4 hours later. We were outside enjoying an ice lolly and suddenly the wind picked up and changed direction . Within minutes we had to go inside for warmer clothes. It was Yorkshire cool again. A 4 hour heatwave…….
If only other things were settled.
Work is a nightmare as we are losing staff through COVID quicker than ever. Apparently it’s over……
Village life is in uproar as there are tentative plans to build houses on one side of the small village. How many. Well for a village of about 100 odd buildings, the idea is to add another new 130 homes ….. I can sense the pitchforks getting sharpened……
Car. The thirsty car now costs over £100 to fill up with diesel. The home fuel oil tank costs nearly £1000 to fill up now. Living is getting crazily expensive……
School mostly has disappeared. The work provided has in many subjects just completely dried up. Have they run out of things to teach Hawklad. Talk about feeling cut adrift…..
Yes definitely could do with some of that settled stuff.
The village went all Downton Abbey like last weekend. Can’t think why 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
Bizarrely we watched Downton the other night. Hawklad is rather taken by the whole thing. It’s fictionally set somewhere round here but filmed mostly outside of Yorkshire. Just like the cool start to an American Werewolf in London, that spooky Yorkshire Pub and foggy Moor was randomly filmed in Wales – clearly real Yorkshire is even TOO scary for a Horror Movie. The Earl, his family and servants keep visiting places right around us. It is most unsettling when they look nothing like the real place. They went riding just a few miles from us and I had a thought, I hope I remembered to pick up the mad dog’s morning constitutional poo. Would hate for the good noble family horse shoes to step in that.
It’s been one of those few days. Actually it’s been one of those few weeks. Not enough sleep, school issues, work issues, life issues, just ISSUES. Never stopping, running around in ever decreasing circles and actually achieving absolutely nothing. Where do those 24 hours go…..
So I walked through the village looking at the bunting while thinking, odds on that our mad dog will at some stage try to pull all that lot down and then bury it in our front lawn. Out of nowhere a villager stuck his head out of the village hall and shouted, “When are you bringing the cucumbers for the sandwiches”. This villager could have well been a head butler in a past life. A head butler with remarkably bad eyesight as his next words demonstrated. “Oh I’m sorry, you are not Margaret…”. Never been mistaken for a Margaret before. Never even mistaken for a woman. Even when I dressed in a full on and very well ventilated French Can Can costume and ended up walking through a town centre searching for the Uni Party, I was DEFINITELY NOT ladylike MOST DEFINITELY not mistaken for a woman.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 