Sometimes even I can’t totally mess up something. Coming from Yorkshire, it would be the stuff of excommunication if I couldn’t cobble together an edible Yorkshire Pudding.
They might not be the biggest, or crispiest or most golden in The Land but in my defence they are egg, dairy and gluten FREE.
One old legend states that these puddings got the name YORKSHIRE from COAL. Originally these were made over an open fire and because of the Yorkshire Coal, the higher coal fire temperatures made for a crispier, bigger pudding.
See everyday is a school day…..
Surely you can do way better OR maybe you are truly a Generational Talent and can actually lower the bar even lower than ME.
The EXPRESS YOURSELF Great Bloggers Bake-off is back. (26th-27th August 2023).
If you fancy having a go either wonderfully well or worryingly woefully, you can send photos of your creations or monstrosities to
crushedcaramel@gmail.com
Check out Mel’s wonderful site for more information and the latest baking creations.
As places go for a bloody battle, this one is rather picturesque. This one was definitely Scotland 3 England 0 but nothing like the Mel Gibson history movie lesson.
Deep sigh. The College Hawklad is hoping to start in September has been sending some pre joining information packs. They are definitely one of the better places round here for providing special educational support. But there is still a sigh.
I was reading the pack explaining how the College is really proactive with dyslexia support. Definitely way more than his last school. But here’s the problem. The College is forced to set course entrance requirements for Hawklad’s preferred subjects. These mandate good results in the GCSE exams which Hawklad had just sat, in particular English Language. The very exams that are most definitely Dyslexia Unfriendly. The exams that desperately try to penalise students like Hawklad. That’s Government Policy.
So it’s fingers crossed for the next few weeks, hoping the results allow Hawklad to follow his chosen path.
Yesterday was Yorkshire Day. A Day when we celebrate all things marvellous in the White Rose County just like the tropical weather, rhubarb and Sean Bean. The perfect day to go a high viewpoint and take in YORKSHIRE…..
At least Yorkshire Folk are always modest….
I might be biased but it’s not a bad view…..
And yes that Lake in the distance is BOTTOMLESS, HONEST.
The kinda weather not for hanging off the side of a fast moving train….
We ventured off to the cinema to watch the latest Mission Impossible instalment. Here if you go to one of the early afternoon screenings it’s usually pretty quiet but by the end of the movie, the cinema is mobbed. It was this way today, when we arrived we had the food and drink counter to ourselves.
What could possibly go wrong….
“Can we have a medium sized sweet popcorn bucket….”
The chap on the till helpfully pointed out that for just extra 50p more we could get a LARGE tub.
‘No thanks, medium is good”
The chap looked puzzled, ‘but you can get twice as much for just 50p more’
‘No it’s ok, we won’t even finish the medium’
The chap was unrelenting, ‘but it’s better value for just 50p more’
‘We never finish the medium, it would just mean more food wasted’
The chap wasn’t letting go, definitely trying to be INEVITABLE. ‘Well if I was you I would get the larger one, makes sense, as it’s much better value’
‘No, it would be a waste’
‘But much better value…’
‘Well only if we eat it all’
After what seemed like an age the MEDIUM bucket arrived. Guess what. Asking for a medium Dr Pepper, then a medium Coffee brought about the same philosophical debate. I was exhausted before the movie. Well at least this made us miss the annoying pre movie adverts.
Medium sized snacks in hand we enjoyed the frantic Tom Cruise ‘Save the World’ madness. Enjoyed with the added spice of picking out the parts of the movie filmed just a few miles from our house. The Alps Train segment was partly filmed on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I hope when Tom was hanging off the top of the train that he had his thermals on…
It’s getting a bit of a common theme as the latest Indiana Jones movie had Harrison Ford visiting our local train line.
Back nearly six decades and Hawklad’s Grandad helped reopen the Steam Railway after it had been closed by the Government. After the movie we mused over what he would have made of all this. Movie stars hanging from the side of his beloved Steam Trains, with explosions, gunfire and much carnage.
We agreed, his Grandad would probably have ‘tutted’, ‘sighed’ then made sure that Tom and Harrison had bought a ticket for the journey.
Hawklad was watching The Simpsons today in between some seriously heavy summer showers.
It was the episode where Milhouse gets to watch ALL of FINDING NEMO. Hawklad was not impressed….
‘DAD, I need a serious word with you…”
“Say that again….. NEMO had a mum…..”
“I can’t believe you did the same as Milhouse’s parents.”
YEP, Hawklad has only seen that famous fish movie once when he was really young and yes I did that Milhouse Parent thing. I started the DVD at chapter 2. He was blissfully unaware of the tragic parent carnage that happened in the first few minutes. Blissfully unaware until today….
I wonder how many parents did the same thing.
But here’s the thing, who was I really protecting. I suspect it was ME. I would have definitively blubbed….
Sunset on the Moors, on the longest day, just a short walk from a Neolithic historical site. That’s almost Druid talk around here. I was also wearing some rather fetching brightly coloured shorts with a hint of a seventies bell bottom about them, That surely would fit in perfectly with modern Stonehenge Solstice dress code.
As the sun set we listened to those well known Druid bands, The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys.
Hawklad likes to come to the same spot on The Moors, a little parking bay on a deserted road. Miles from anywhere. Few humans. Just a couple of isolated farmhouses and a not so secret, secret military base.
Hawklad loves the feeling of isolation here and the familiarity of this little parking spot. The more times we come, the more we get to know the free roaming sheep, the birds, the butterflies. We seem to see the same characters. Almost timeless.
We are going to see a lot of this place. There are worse places to visit.
One of those mighty motorways that cut through the North Yorkshire Moors. This is rush hour….
It’s rush hour with Hawklad’s exams now. Two weeks of mayhem, 12 exams in 10 days. It’s an official slog now. That’s how it’s designed to be. Zero marks for coursework, everything on final exams. Exams squeezed into just a few weeks
Hawklad has officially got to the ‘hit the wall’ stage. He has really tried, tried to catch up on being out of the classroom for over two years. Tried to catch up that time, with let’s say ‘patchy’ support from school, over just a few weeks. Too much cramming, trying to force in so much information. And now, with two weeks of exams to get through, he is zonked out, brain fudged. He is still trying to learn, revise, but it’s not going in anymore.
It feels like running a marathon. At the starting line you stand with high hopes, focusing on running a great time. You set off and it feels ok. Then at some point, it all changes. It starts to hurt. After that it’s just about survival. The mind and body have gone. Any thoughts of a decent time have gone, it’s now about just trying to get to the finish line in one piece.
So one particularly bad day for Hawklad when he was tired, nothing was going in. He felt like he was going backwards. STUFF IT. We went for a drive on the Moors. Exams are supposed to be everything, but life goes on. Exam Rush Hour will never give you views like that.
Stood in the middle of the road, in the middle of the North Yorkshire Moors. It’s rush hour….
Who can spot the vital national security establishment which they haven’t really bothered hiding….. how did they get planning permission for that. Us mere mortals living in these parts struggle to get permission to build even a small coal bunker these days.
Coal bunkers, I remember them. As a child our outside toilet was built next to the coal bunker. The toilet always had a faint hit of black soot covering the seat, the floor, the walls and the toilet paper. Probably not the only things covered as well…
So Hawklad’s exams are fast approaching. In Maths, History and English Literature we have just about made it to the revision stage. For the other subjects sadly we are still scrambling about trying to complete as much of the syllabus as possible. Just need to keep reminding Hawklad that each day, more progress is made. Even if sometimes it just feels like one small step, it’s still helps, it’s still moving forward, it all adds up.
There is so much additional stress and anxiety that’s why it’s so important that Hawklad gets a chance to breathe, to enjoy some of each day. And that’s why we found ourselves stood on an empty Moors road . He fancied a trip out to somewhere quiet, miles from anywhere, miles from the EXAMS.
Do you think I would get away with this in my garden as a bit of a water feature. You don’t think that it might be a tad pretentious. My current water feature is me walking about with a watering can….. Imagine the fun Captain Chaos would have with this.
We were in the garden (without a water feature) playing table tennis and trying to lift Hawklad’s spirits after a demoralising couple of hours revising. He was frustrated and dispirited because we had picked up that he had been using the wrong method to calculate something in mathematics. He’d apparently been doing it the wrong way for a couple of years but as the teacher hasn’t been looking at his submitted maths work, it wasn’t picked up until we spotted it.
He had an Easter Egg, I had a coffee with a BUTTY.
I came from a family that survived on Butties… Dad would always say only POSH people called them sandwiches. Most items could be placed between two slabs of bread for a tasty meal. Family favourites included
Fish Finger butties
Chip butties (My favourite)
Crisp butties (Mum’s favourite)
Baked Beans butties (don’t wear a white shirt eating this one)
Sausage butties
Yorkshire Pudding and Gravy butties (a particularly messy one)
Mushy Peas and Vinegar butties
Fried Egg and Tomato Ketchup butties
Last nights Pizza butties
Pork Pie butties (Dad’s favourite)
At one stage I even started having Pot Noddle butties
All things butties. I even once remember a debate about whether a slice of bread sandwiched between two other slices of bread counted as a Bread Butty or just three Slices of Bread. Whatever the answer to this philosophical point, we had so many butties as a family for one good reason. Bread was cheap, it was a cheap way of padding out our meals.
Now a thought has crossed my mind. Sitting in our garden, it’s summer, after the exams, next to that giant water feature, having a butty. That works…
Welcome to Yorkshire, apparently it is SPRING.. That stream is the road.
And yes we still have a hosepipe ban in place.
Funnily enough Hawklad had just been revising the effects of flooding for his Geography exam. Geography is a bit of a issue at present. The first exam is 4 weeks away and we are still waiting clarification on what areas Hawklad needs to work on in terms of the field study trips that he didn’t go on. There will be a number of questions on the exams about these trips. Hawklad doesn’t even know where the trips went and what was looked at. Any time soon School would help…..
Apparently the teacher is away and we won’t get an answer until next week now.
Having said that, Hawklad has more than enough other subjects to keep him busy.
Shame one of the field trips wasn’t about flooding, we could no that one.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 