Photos

Lille caught unaware just about to play hearing aids with wine glasses 

Row of Georgian Houses

Cobbled alleyway down to small cottage

West Pier with placid seas 

There are so many shapes on the skyline 

Whitby  early morning 

A belated Matilda birthday party.

testing

The rain in spain stays mainly on the plain hopefully......
Still testing sadly

Christmas trees at St.Mary's Church, Whitby

This is the church that stands next to the ruined Whitby Abbey, and I do not find it particularly pleasing though Jarmara defends and likes it, its not exactly beautiful or churchlike in its proportions but nevertheless it is striking and very impressive.  It is very unusual in design, this part of old Whitby had been given the name of Prestibi by the Danes and it is said in the handbook that this represented the 200 years between Saxon and Norman times, and its unusual proportion lies in the fact of the earlier church at this particular time  dictated  the layout of the present church  The church itself is aiseless and has been so for its 876 years to date, it was first mentioned by name in 1120 AD, the galleries were put in at a later date to provide more accomodation for seating, and there is a great central iron stove with its iron pipe running right up to the roof in the centre of the church.

The Christomas trees are decorated and donated by local businesses, the high boxed pews and gallery are the show pieces that stand out, barley twist pillars at the beginning of the chancel which is an old part of the church, and I managed to capture another old set of pillars, not easy amongst the decorated trees.

Those two black paddle like things (hearing aid) were for the vicar's wife in the 19th C as she was deaf. Can't actually believe that because they are enormous but that is what is said on the plaque.

http://www.fortuneskippers.co.uk/history/fortunes_history_a.html

Egton Village and St Hilda's mortuary chapel

This will be a ramble through my photos;

I have, since childhood in fact, played the game of where would I like to be buried, my love thinks it is morbid, but as death is our ultimate end I think we should have a say in it, it is a bit like ghost stories and sci-fi, all of which I am interested in. 

So this expeditionary drive took us through some villages outside Whitby, I think we were heading for Guisborough.  Egton village was small and neat, typical for the area, but we turned down a lane following a large hedge cutting machine and then spied on the right along a grassy lane this small mortuary chapel.  Grey and bleak it was, as was the weather, but interesting to note on the notice board that the mortuary had replaced an earlier church.  The gravestones had that weathered mossy look beloved of all graveyard fans;) and it was very peaceful with views over the moors.  It captures times past a place of peace and rest, and no its not on the lists of 'would be', I am not sufficiently acclimatised to Yorkshire. But it also captures for me the grey rugged air of Yorkshire, you see it in the farms you pass on the moors; stout stone walls, small windows huddling away from the prevailing winds, a hard life in the depths of winter but beautiful at times.

East Pier - Whitby

Well this is the East Pier which lies under Whitby Abbey, a storm thrashed sea on the 18th December, LS's birthday wish for an early morning walk. The streets are empty and the sea is magnificient, the pier itself has great slabs of pavement stone in shades of browns and creams. We had gone down Henrietta Street to find the smoke house for kippers a small shop with the smokehouse behind and a very strong smell of kippers, they are delicious but do tend to smell the house out. Jugged kippers with bread and butter is the way to eat them. Edie the butcher who has a small shop down from where my daughter lives also smokes his bacon here - completely different from supermarket 'smoked'.

Storms seem to be the flavour of the weather at the moment, we delayed our journey back on tuesday, came back wednesday, and now another storm has raged through the night in Essex.

Henrietta Street is mostly cottage holiday homes, smartish and expensive, though I must admit would not like a great crumbly cliff at the back of our cottage.... It was a memorable walk on the pier, as waves washed across the path and the early morning sun which rises behind the Abbey tinged the world. The two piers make a very safe harbour for the boats, the water so still on one side and the great thrashings of the sea on the other. Whitby has this gift of showing what life was like for the hundreds nay thousands of sailors that sailed into this safe harbour and those that did not make it. There is a photo in St.Mary's, of a sailor wearing the first cork safety life jacket, the sailor was the only one to survive out of a crew of 12 when they went out to rescue a boat that had come aground.

Henrietta Street leading to the East Pier

Rough Seas off the Pier

Again

It seems an age since I wrote anything on the computer, mostly because the small netbook we took up did not work most of the time and I must admit a holiday from the computer screen is well worth taking, especially when this computer UPDATES, which this one has and has now lost all my old settings though apparently I can restore back but it is all a bit of a worry. 

Christmas Greeting

A Happy Christmas to everyone who reads my blog and let's hope the New Year will not be too bad. X

Lemon balm

Melissa Officinalis - Bee Balm

Geoffrey Grigson writes in The Englishman's Flora "The rain may long ago  have washed out a chalk cottage in Wiltshire, a cob cottage in Devon or Cornwall, but as likely as not a thick thicket of bee balm will survive"

Morning Minion mentions it in her blog, and it reminded me of my old garden, lots of lemon balm everywhere not only did it travel happily around  but I also planted it in bare spaces. I have a love affair with plants and trailing and bruising the leaves through one's fingers of this particular plant was a joy on a summers day.

Many years ago I kept angora rabbits of different hues, and they also enjoyed eating the young leaves, especially my first rabbit Daisy who would savour the various plants like a connoisseur and showed a remarkable intelligence for a rabbit!

So what else does Grigson say; it comes from Southern Europe, early botanists identified it with melissophyllon 'bee leaf' of Dioscorides and the apiastrum of Pliny.  You can drink it as a tea, though there is no real taste to it and Grigson says it was by no means as nice as the smell of the leaves,  I haven't got any here in Essex, have not seen in the nursery centres..

Pliny's words; It is profiterablie planted in gardens about places where bees are kept, because they are delighted with this herbe above all others.. for when they are straied away they do finde their way home again by it..

Gerarde added that you should rub the hives with the leaves to attract more bees and also which causes the bees 'to keepe togither'

Plasauduon, Carno, Powys

An animation of a typical 17th century 'Severn Valley' house in Powys, Wales, might even contemplate doing a miniature of one of the rooms....... it's so pretty.

Ted Hughes

Curlews in April

Hang their harps over the misty valleys

A wobbling water-call

A wet-footed god of the horizons

New moons sink into the heather

And full golden moons

Bulge over spent walls

Ted Hughes has the final honour of being immortalised at Westminster in Poet's Corner this week, not sure how  he would have felt about it, Thomas Hardy did not want it after all but there we are great men get remembered for past deeds.  Two of my favourites of his poems are Hawk Roosting and the other Pike.

He is a favourite poet of mine, just love his incisive gloomy words, have a taste for morbid poets such as, Hardy, R.S.Thomas and Hughes.  When we travel up North we pass through, or at least go by a sign for Elmet, the old British Celtic kingdom in West Yorkshire or though it probably stretched out over the vale of York in its heyday.   Its particular geological situation makes it a hard place.  One of his book of poems is called 'The Remains of Elmet' and we have a copy illustrated by Fay Godwin's black and white photographs bleakly and darkly sitting side by side with Hughes poems.  It was a gift from an Irish friend a couple of years ago over here for a meeting at Avebury, he had crossed over to Wales and stopped off at Hay-on-Wye to look at the book shops there. So when ever I take down the book I think of the meal we all had at a little pub near Avebury;
I suppose his love of fishing echoes some of my childhood exploits fishing for trout on the farm near Pumpsaint in Wales, accompanied by the farm's friendly pig who snuffled around whilst we fished and then wandering home through the fields with the farmer, on one occasion with a very bouncy live eel in his knapsack that was fried when we got back.  This farm was the place my grandfather would come down to at weekends and catch salmon when they were around, these salmons would fill the fridge at home...  I once ate some pike as a child, it is supposed to be muddy to eat, but I'm sure I can only remember its teeth,  it was caught from a murky lake if I remember rightly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16055750

The River Ter

Finished

The Cottage; It is finished, at least my son-in-law's hard work, various photos arrive through the day of the carpet as it is laid, him sprawling on the newly arrived sofa, waiting for his lunch at the garden table we carted down last time.  Emails, phone calls, funny texts and photos have arrived daily so I'm going to miss them and I expect he is going to miss going down to the cottage as well.  Sad times ;)

Yesterday I wrote something else but news flys by at the moment interceded by migrainal headaches which seem to cluster in that familar pattern the last few days.  One of the things i wrote about was Layman P'ang, so I will carry it forward.....

So what I had decided on writing back there at the top of the page before I deviated, was the problem that I have began to acquire 'stuff', if you put a carpet down you need a vacuum cleaner, beds need sheets, kitchen china and pans, so there I was complaining and then learnt of a 9th century Chinese monk called Layman Pang getting rid of his worldly goods. The book was found in the study, and the story goes that this monk decided to turn his house into a temple, he filled his boat with all his worldly goods (and his wife and daughter but I learnt later they survived this clearout) rowed out into the middle of the lake and threw everything overboard. And then with his daughter wandered round the countryside, all his sayings and poetry collected into a book. I must say mostly the sayings are too cryptic and of its time in history but he was instrumental for being a Zen 'ancestor'.

The book is called The Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang (a Ninth Century Zen Classic) and is translated from the Chinese by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Yokita Iriya and Dana R.Fraser. Given as a present to my partner in 1971 with a warm dedication for help in choosing the illustrationa of the book. Ruth Fuller Sasaki, an American who intrigues me and I shall go on to explore her character eventually, she was the person who invited LS to Japan and I wrote about her here.

One verse of P'angs musings

To preserve your life you must destroy it;

Having completely destroyed it you dwell at ease,

When you attain the inmost meaning of this,

An iron boat floats upon water.

Funnily enough it brings to mind 'Jesus' of Whitby who wanders around wrapped in a cloak completely oblivious to the world around him, muttering to himself and homeless he manages to get looked after by the community, another personality that needs exploring may be.

Photos

Today a parcel arrived with the new blue enamel coffee pot that is going down to Whitby,a sort of house present for the house.  It is a lovely deep blue, and not very well taken by me the photographer, but in gathering some of the photos taken over time, came up with a beautiful white capped blue sea at Skinninggrove, and the wool roving I am spinning at the moment, pale shades of blue, two greens and a pink.

This idea of combining wool colours with what you see around is beautifully photographed in  Alison Daykin and Jane Deane's book of Creative Spinning.  Taking the seasons of the year and the colours you see around in nature.
My external drive with all my photos refuses to work at the moment, and I'm not sure how to get the photos back except inviting a computer expert to extract them - costs money so its been put on the back burner at the moment.

This is a photo from the roof when the great plan was hatched to put up a camera there

These are the gypsy ponies taken late summer, gently snoozing at midday

Tuesday photos show them sleepy once more

her mane is a tangle of burrs, a good groom would not come amiss

The Cottage

Not sure if I should think of as 'the house that Jack built', or perhaps I see it more like a pyramid being built from the top downward - impossible I know! Everything depended really on the chimney being fixed from leaking into the attic bedroom, this was done a couple of weeks ago (after the much waited arrival of the scaffolding), so now guttering and chimney fixed, the plastering was finished off last week and final painting is almost done.  Then after all that, the carpeting will go down and the SOFA will arrive on the 29th of this month, so hopefully we will spend some time in Whitby in comfort this Xmas.

 A tv bought a week ago, a satellite dish has already been fixed discreetly on the roof which means I lose two aerials on the front of the house (one belonged to my neighbour) and all my neighbours are getting excellent reception because their tvs are feeding off my dish (I think) any way reception in the yard was pretty bad apparently especially the little cottage in the corner. Did I get threatened by the tv licensing people, for not buying a license this year (£1000 fines for goodness sake) till I negotiated a stand-off period as the cottage was empty but I got one this month so I'm legal in that department.  One idea that had been mooted was to have a camera fixed to the chimney so that you could see over the rooftops to the harbour, I have photos somewhere its pretty spectacular the view but that idea has fallen by the wayside. 

Lots of things we have all learnt along the way, firstly vegetative growth on the roof, the birds must bring seeds which they generously drop in the gutter which then sprouts and blocks the water going down the drain- yikes an ongoing thing.  Now as I walk round Whitby my eye is always caught by plants growing on roof tops. Dampness; now apparently old cottages always have this, no damp barrier as in new houses, but it is not that serious, after all the cottage has been standing for 300 years.   The builder said cottages were kept fairly dry in the past by the fire in the main room which was kept going all the time. One of the things that made me fall in love with Pottery Cottage was the narrow tiny twisting staircases (bit dangerous though) and the door to the stairs down below.  It reminded me of my grandma's door to the stairs  covered with its thick chenille curtain.

The other thing is of course living in close conjunction with the neighbours and sharing a communal space, the delicate play of what we can and cannot do.  My son-in-law has been in charge of all the work and I'm very proud of him, his attention to detail is marvellous, even to the point of telling me off for shoddy work! Though it really doesn't worry me my love is also meticulously tidy and puts up with my untidiness without a complaint slipping from his lips and I really do believe we need a subtle blend of people in this world, those that are untidy and and those that are tidy......

Problems still to work out in a tiny space is there is no space for a washing machine, and various bits of furniture to fill in, though there is an auction house in the lane behind, plus of course a fish and chip shop, and Indian restaurant, food will never be a problem.  My daughter suggested going down from early December so that we could be there for Matilda who has a birthday on the 10th.  She has asked that as a birthday treat she spends a whole day alone with her mum without her sister, they are going shopping in York.  LS remembered something funny this morning about our ever curious Matilda, she had asked him did Japanese ladies keep their chopsticks in their hair? funnily enough he did not know the answer...

Mirror images

For years I have gone walks often following the paths by rivers, the small shallow Welsh tumbling rivers, the deep, large river Avon that snakes its way through Bath (often in a more sinister fashion taking a life here and there as someone slips drunkenly in at night) and now Essex rivers. Essex rivers flow placidly along the flat landscape, sinuously curving through the fields you only know they are there by the long lines of upright willows that trace their path through the fields. Sometimes I think they occupy my soul, their peace and tranquillity for ever flowing on, they are a source of comfort in a world that whooshes by.

Yesterday we went a walk from Paper Mill Lock, the weather is unnaturally warm, worryingly warm, and it has been very dry here in the East, blue skies, no wind and the trees reflected sharply in the still waters, the only time I had seen such clear transparency was on a cold winter day with snow around and the river trees were an exact replication of the real trees.

Friday

Every morning we wake up to the 'crisis', where are we going, what is going to happen, the end of the world is nigh, etc, etc. Try tackling climate change for a time for relief of Europe (and the world) going belly-up, there really is no peace from this continuing saga.  But..... there are people out there being positive as well.

Below is a statement from the Quakers in Bristol (a stronghold of Quakerism), though I have no creed to believe in, their strong simplistic moral approach always appeals, and I'm glad that they have thrown their weight behind the Occupy movement which has set up in various parts of the world.  After the closure of the Wall Street protest yesterday and today St.Pauls protest group we need people to at least highlight the problems.

“Quakers in Britain share the concern for global economic justice and sustainability expressed by the Occupy movement. We agree with the statement of Occupy London Stock Exchange that our current economic system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives. We, too, “want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich,” (as stated in Occupy LSX initial statement). We are grateful to the various Occupy groups for raising these issues so passionately and respond to the deep spiritual significance that we recognise in the movement.

“Those of us who have visited have been welcomed, and found the Occupy sites an exceptional learning experience. We honour the values and positive ways of working within Occupy communities: without hierarchy, based on care for others, open to the contributions of all and searching for the truth. These are in harmony with our Quaker practice and business methods.

“The idea that another world is possible is crucial for us too. We cannot accept the injustice and destructiveness of our economic system as it is. At the annual meeting of Quakers in Britain in August 2011 we wrote: “We need to ask the question whether this system is so broken that we must urgently work with others of faith and good will to put in its place a different system in which our testimonies can flourish”. We support the process initiated by the Occupy movement to create a path towards a different future, and to develop it democratically.

http://www.quaker.org.uk/news/news-release-quakers-express-support-occupy-london

On Facebook my choice of organisations to follow are few, even fewer friends because I think it is a silly business, but I can keep in touch with family and friends I know from long ago, but I'm meandering away from my point, Transition Bath has also been added, though I no longer live in that city.  There is always hope when the young band together to create city gardens and plant trees, mostly useful trees with edible fruits, around the city of Bath.  Transition Towns are slowly being set up around England, the latest sustainable idea that has taken hold.  Reading Bill Mckibben's Eaarth book also gives hope of community and localism taking hold in America as well.

His optimistic argument being that we will not descend into anarchy and civil disobedience but that the neighbourness of most people will prevail and each will help those nearest to them.  So we are moving away from that word globalisation to localism, the need for all of us to live in that immediate space that surrounds us and not to go hiking to the ends of the world to find our pleasures and sustenance.
So to two books I pulled out for future reading, Wendell Berry, another back-to-the-land person, I don't know how much I agree with him, but a strong philosophy by its nature dictates a moral and ethical stance......