Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 27 Comments

Dark side of the moon

Early afternoon in the Dark Side of Yorkshire.

Our 98 month old puppy with his way too full Dark Side of the Moon toy basket. I wonder if Pink Floyd ever imagined that their iconic 1973 album cover would reach these heights in 2024.

That box has seen many uses prior to being a well chewed soft toy repository. From LPs to loose photos to work documents. The box started to spilt with the weight of my records (a few Floyd ones as well) ….Too many records bought over the years. Photos, too many photos taken over the years…. Finally they got filed away neatly in albums. Work documents, well to be more precise, problems to be sorted. Overdue invoices, out of balance accounts, complaints, that kinda thing. Lots and lots of staffing issues. A bit too often this box was mostly filled with what felt like scripts from The Office. Let’s just politely say larger than life characters. Our Yorkshire equivalents of an Angela, Ryan, Andy and unbelievably TWO Dwights. Add our human (I think) version of the paranoid android Marvin from Hitchhikers Guide and someone who could out swear Gordon Ramsey. Oh let’s not forget the chap who thought it was ok to use a work credit card to buy stuff for his house including a PlayStation. The problems that box contained, Dark Side of the Moon definitely the perfect moniker back then.

But now it’s full of dog toys that have definitely seen better days. The abuse those poor things take on a daily basis. How does that fit in with the albums original themes of time inevitably passing, madness and the conflict between light and darkness. When the mad pup stops chewing his tennis ball, I will ask him.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 29 Comments

30 minutes

Late afternoon walk on the North Yorkshire Moors.

A three hour walk and not one sign of another soul anywhere on these moors. Definitely felt like a proper wilderness only 30 minutes drive from our front door.

On the drive home we got stuck in a traffic jam, a farm tractor decided to break down on a steep, narrow hill road. Just goes to show that we are also less than 30 minutes drive from a traffic queue.

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Not at all

For days this part of Yorkshire has been weather stuck. Stuck under mist, grey clouds and no sign of the sun. Apart from a few dog walks, the kind of weather that keeps you not too far from the fire. Trying to keep warm, I was sat going through some old photos and came across similar greyness in Switzerland. Rather than sat by a fire, here we were sat inside a warm lake boat, with hot drinks and breakfast, watching the world go reassuringly slowly by. Not belting anywhere at 100mph, just leisurely making our way across lake water. Savouring the journey rather than just impatiently trying to get somewhere fast.

Too often I find life goes by way too quickly, way too much stress, feeling out of control with no time to contemplate life. Even when the weather was grey, I treasured those moments of stillness on that lake. A chance to quietly think and breathe.

Those boat trips are years back, definitely well beyond my rear view mirror now. They haven’t really been replaced with anything similar. Life happened, a new reality dawned. A reality which often seemed like constantly moving from one activity to the next. Constantly busy, constantly occupied, rushing, maybe not achieving anything, maybe not feeling like making progress, just always doing stuff. Feeling like I hardly had any time to stop and breathe.

I love nature, I find so much peace there. When was the last time I spent real time gazing at a real mountain, a lake, out to sea. Not just a a fleeting glance then off again, actually stopping and taking the time to take in the wonder and the beauty. I’m tempted to say I don’t do this enough, but sadly the real answer is NOT AT ALL….

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 32 Comments

Peaceful morning

Seconds from one of THOSE moments….

Walking along the peaceful Yorkshire roads. No cars, no people, just the sound of birds and a happy dog excitedly bouncing through a carpet of dry leaves. One of those times when the World seems still, peaceful. I try to capture the moment.

Then a dog does what a dog needs to do.

With Pop Bag in hand I bend over to deal with the smelly doggie gift. My mobile slips gracefully out of my jacket chest pocket and tumbles almost in slow motion to the ground.

Some things in life are INEVITABLE, Thanos was right about that.

Like a precision tool, my mobile scores a direct hit onto the newly produced Doggie Gift. Think of the sound welly boots make when squelching through inches of mud….

I am no physicist but there must be some universal laws at play here, but how does both sides of mobile get covered…. How does it get inside the protective case. How does it fill the speaker holes. For the first time my mobile has full coverage in Rural Yorkshire.

Then that realisation. No hankies, no tissues, nothing to begin to wipe it clean. A poop bag is absolutely no use here, it just spreads and smears. Dry leaves help a bit but they can only do so much. It’s a long winding two mile walk home with the smelliest mobile in the world and I’ve used my last poop bag

Do I just carry it at arms length like I’m holding some biological weapon….

Do I lose all self respect and just put it in my pocket……

Such decisions for a peaceful Yorkshire morning .

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 25 Comments

Huts

Tropical Scarborough on a blisteringly hot Autumn Day.

Forget the ice cream, hot soup was the order of the day.

Not sure if it was just the weather but when I offered to buy one of the brightly coloured beach hutches, Hawklad firmly declined…. The huts cost between about £70,000 to £160,000. You can rent them as well, Peak times set you back something like £300 for a week. For that you get a few kitchen items, a sink, deckchairs, use of the shared public toilets and free pet seagulls.

Peak includes Christmas, Wow that would be a brave call. Not sure the paper party hats would stay on too long with the inevitable Winter North Sea skin shredding sand blasting wind and icy horizontal rain.

Walking along the beach we passed a few groups of teenagers clearly starting the Half Term Break with some beach fun. I couldn’t help think about how Hawklad might view these scenes. It’s a part of teenage life that has so far eluded him, spending far too much time with his ancient relic of a Dad. Not sure those teenagers would spend too much time discussing beach huts…..

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Castle walk

Living in the UK has many negatives, things like the weather, road potholes, useless Water Companies, Nigel Farage, Fuel Prices, Morris Dancing, late running trains, Brexit, did I mention the WEATHER. But then again we have some beautiful landscapes and CASTLES. Lots of Castles.

So when the clouds parted we headed off to one such castle. Helmsley Castle, over 900 years of history. It’s a wonderful adventure.

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Like buses

There’s a saying here ‘You wait ages for a bus and then three come along at once’. For decades I went without ever seeing The Northern Lights, then suddenly over the last year, they just keep appearing, again and again.

This was last night’s show….

And here’s the thing, every single time, they never fail to take the breath away.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 18 Comments

Diverted

Maybe it’s like this everywhere but wow there is a shed load of roadworks right now. A few weeks back a motorway trip from here to London was like a Chris Rea, Road to Hell video. On this weekday, the 200 miles we travelled was for over half of them within roadworks. 3 lanes down to 2 or 1. Most of that done at crawling speed. Usually you can divert down the other possible motorway but that was basically a car park due to its own road work hell. A 4 hour journey ended up being double that. We even had traffic jams on the way back, at 2am…

It’s not just the motorways sadly….. Around our little bit of the Yorkshire countryside, the road work plague has gone into overdrive. We don’t have many roads here and at this time of year they should be muddy but quiet. They are definitely quiet as a good proportion of them are closed, partially blocked or about to be hit..

The Weather is fighting back and vandalising.

Mr Saddo got his map out and counted. I really need a life….

Our village has basically one road which then eventually branches out into 10 smaller roads heading out in various directions. Of those 10 branches 6 currently have road works badly effecting them, 2 more are closed for months and one of the last untouched roads is about to be hit for weeks…

Here when a road closes down the diversion takes you miles and miles in completely the wrong direction. So much worse when the diversion has to avoid other diversions. Deep sigh.

But there is a scary underlying thought here. All these roadworks around the world need lots and lots of signs, cones, barriers, speed cameras, portacabins, trucks, lighting, diggers, steamrollers and traffic lights. A mind boggling amount of stuff. For that motorway I mentioned at the start, apparently someone worked out that in the last 5 years it’s had over 100,000 different road works…. Imagine that spread across all the roads. Now imagine road utopia and there are no roadworks anywhere. WHERE DO THEY STORE ALL THE SIGNS and BARRIERS and EVERYTHING.

They can’t store it, we don’t have the storage capacity anywhere. There won’t be anywhere we can put this stuff except on the roads and motorways. Put the stuff on a road and it becomes a road works…. So we have to have roadworks and lots of them just to put stuff somewhere never mind if we actually need to fix a bit of tarmac.

We have created a Frankenstein Invasion, the Roadwork Monsters are among us permanently. All those dystopian movies about AI being the biggest threat to humanity and actually we end up losing control to ROAD CLOSED signs. I guess we had better just get used to being controlled and diverted in wrong directions.

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Boarded up

A few hardy souls braved a distinctly cold and windy Yorkshire beach.

Definitely felt like Autumn.

Definitely looked like Autumn. The small rides, the cafes, the ice cream vans had mostly all closed down and boarded up for the year. No more intrepid crazy golfers until next year.

I wonder what it feels like to be a resident here in Filey right now. Sadness that the summer season is over with the crowds departed OR relief to get their seaside town back again. The chance to walk quietly along the seafront again, to breathe.

I guess it’s a similar feeling that this time of year brings to our little hilltop village. With no village shop or school or pub or cafe. A church with only one service a month. It’s not unusual to not see another village soul for week upon week upon week. The short days, bleak weather and zero street lighting all ramp up the feelings. So what’s it going to be this time around. Peaceful solitude or suffocating isolation…..

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 22 Comments

Destination

I don’t know just how many times I’ve driven past this reservoir and never stopped. Decade after decade of driving past here, always wondering what it’s like. Well finally, with Hawklad, Scaling Dam became the destination. Now I know.

It’s one of those reservoirs that looks natural apart from one side which is a bit too artificial.

I once knew someone who bought a sailing boat here. Apparently he saw an advert for it in a newspaper. Yes that was in the time before THE INTERNET….

He had no interest in sailing, I mean ZERO interest. To my knowledge he never once sailed his craft, it just sat tethered to where he found it. Yet virtually every Sunday he would drive here and spend hours sat on board. He would do nothing apart from eat his packed lunch and just relax. It worked for him. Maybe it saved him. I know that he had suffered from mental health issues for years. I remember at least two breakdowns and one suicide attempt. Nothing seemed to work for him. But suddenly on this boat, he found a place he could relax. A place he could actually enjoy. He talked about finally having something to look forward to, something he could rely on. This made such a difference to him. The last time we spoke he had even started to plan his next unmoving boat purchase. This time somewhere warm, maybe The Mediterranean.

I wonder where his boat is tethered currently.