All the Queen’s Horses

Back to the country fair, one of the arena attractions was a display by the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment;

it was an impressive display of horseman ship, that delighted the crowd

tightly choreographed, fast paced and ‘viewed by the forces as the pinnacle of military equitation’ (what a wonderful word) but I have to say it was an absolute pig to photograph! most of it just came out as a sea of horses legs and blurred uniforms, I had much more fun photographing the painstaking preparation that goes on back stage to produce a display like this. Our armed forces do ’scrub up nicely’ and after all this regiment have been the sovereigns personal bodyguards since the 1600’s so they should be good by now. It starts off low key,

   

but as the morning progressed things got more colourful

 

The guys (and girls, although it was difficult to tell, once they were in full uniform) were relaxed and some were more than happy to pose (his mum must be very proud)

Once ready they were sat around chatting, a lady commented to me that she ‘could just imagine them sitting around  like this,in camp before battle, during the Crimean war.’

And looking at the embroidery on the drum horses ‘furniture’ there have been a fair few campaigns since (As well as ceremonial duties these guys do ‘real’ solider work)

There are a few more photos I want to post, I’d best do a separate post or I’ll never manage to upload this.

A Bird in the Hand

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so the saying goes

The falconry display at the Country Fair was very good indeed, it was by CJ’s birds of prey

I would never have thought a bird of prey could be such a delicate shade of peach, quite a nice colour to decorate the bathroom, you could stride into your local branch of B&Q  bird in hand and ask them to mix a  2 litre tin of paint ‘just this shade please; egg shell finish, obviously .’

If this were my ear I am not sure I would want it quite so close to this beak

  

It might end up a little more than pierced

I think when we watch a display like this, we are almost waiting for something to go wrong, the fact that the birds are in essence wild and the nature of the work means the handler has to let go, and let the bird fly free. Will it come back? do as it’s been trained? or will it take wing off over Chatsworth house, never to be seen again or perhaps  more entertainingly for as blood thirsty crowd;  take out someone’s pet West Highland terrier, from the edge of the arena, fly to the top of the nearest tree and have a raptor lunch, as  little wisps of coarse white dog fur drift across the arena, there can be no doubt that this  Steppe eagle is capable of doing such a thing, for goodness sake look at the legs on it, powerful or what. A ‘toy’ breed of dog would be a mere snack,  a small deer main course, not sure what the Duke would make of that.

That’s why the handler kept the eagle on a line  (it was the birds first ‘flying’ performance at a show)

Falconry is an ancient sport, and some of its terms have entered the English language, here the eagle is displaying a defensive/protective pose, known a  ‘mantle‘ as in, cloak, mantelpiece or gas mantle. (see, as educational as the Archers this blog, an every day tale of country folk.)

    

If  I was going to hold one of these birds, I’d want an extra long gauntlet thank you very much, just as well they have sold out of my size then.

I leave you with a couple more shots of this majestic beast, no wonder they are symbols of power.

  

Home Sweet Home

There is a moment,just before we leave, when I am checking over the holiday cottage, one last time

(to see what we might be about to leave behind this year, it didn’t work I have since remembered I left half a bag of oven chips and some peas in the freezer) it’s when we have got all the dog hairs off the carpet, cleaned the sand out of the shower tray and everything is back just as we found it when we arrived, it fact it looks like we have never even been there: the children are in the car and we are already to go home, this is when I get the ‘butterfly’s’, a shudder of emotion and wonder just for a moment what the year ahead might bring. Will be able to come back again next year, how will things be then, what might have changed and how, this feeling never happens in quite the same way at any other time of year, not at say Christmas or New Year, only as I close the door behind me and we set off home.

No matter how good the holiday (and this year has been a ‘very good vintage’) I am always the one who is just a little ‘home sick’ by the end of the holidays; we’ve been away three whole weeks this year (maybe it’s my northern working class gene pool leads me to feel that this is very decadent, ‘Nay lass, you’ll hav’ the Wakes week and be grateful.’ My Dad used to have to be dragged away on holiday, he never liked it and with hindsight it might have been better if he stayed at home pottering in his garage and garden.

Mr Uhdd and the boys would be happy messing about on boats and excavating the beach for the rest of the summer.

But for me there is no place like home.

Reflections on a Picnic

We have a tradition on holiday of going by boat for a picnic,

this year we had to be a bit flexible as we are an inflatable short so we couldn’t get everyone safely on the water at once (we usually fix an outboard motor on the back of a sailing dingy and tow the inflatable behind it, you can spend an awful lot of money messing about with boats, but we are definitely  at the economy end of the market)  Our party numbered 16 in total, so some went by road, which was a bit of a shame because it’s just not the same, we go to a little village called South Pool, it’s chocolate box pretty.

 

The planning of the expedition goes on all week, it’s all very ‘Swallows and Amazons’) you have to catch the tide right, to get as far as possible up the creek, thus avoiding the mud and arrive at  a time when the pub is open, as a beer or a cider is found to enhance the picnic, for the grown ups at least.

Below is ‘Glebe Farm’ you can find farms of this name all over England, it’s a name that was given to land which belonged to parish, the revenue from the farm  contributed towards the income for the parish expenses

The children had great fun trying to catch the leaping fish as they came up the creek on the tide, they were unsuccessful in catching them, just as I was in trying to photograph the silver flashes of fish.

Seven Summers

 

It’s now seven years that we have taken our summer holiday in the Salcombe  area, as well as making ‘beach friends,’ other families who like us return here each year we also pass the time of day with some of the locals, sadly earlier this year one such gentleman passed away, he was a lovely gentleman, who we would see most evenings

He had a fantastic knowledge of the area, the tides and the weather, and he seemed to know the ‘pedigree’ of  each and every one of the distinctive local boats, the ‘Salcombe Yawl’; this is probably because he built many of them,

He also grew wonderful raspberries, if he had a surplus (some years he would claim even the birds were over faced by them, so bountiful was the crop) he would arrive on our door step with a  margarine tub full of them, just for us; velvety,juicy, jewel cloured gems to be eaten with clotted cream of course.

His passing, like his friend the year before, takes something special out of the village.

Wood and Willow

Tom is a keen cricketer, he plays at school and for the village team; unfortunately for Tom, his Mum and Dad aren’t as up to speed with this very British game as he would like, but luckily his Grandma is, and she eagerly awaits news of the results of any fixtures. She played cricket at school, because there weren’t enough boys to make up a team, family legend has it that she fell down a flight of steps, because she had the pads on upside down, but it did nothing to put her off cricket especially village cricket, it seems once it’s in your blood, cricket is for keeps.

 

One of the problems of playing cricket up in the hills

is the lack of a flat pitch, here are the boys, notice the batsman appears to have no feet, this is because this pitch is best described as ‘terraced’, he’s way down the hill.

  

But even from the nets the view is green and pleasant, it’s rather a nice place to spend a sunny Sunday morning.

Bears in the Belfry

An unusual approach to fundraising for a parish church,

Take money off children and then throw their teddy bears off the top of the bell tower, it’s all in a good cause you understand.

But only after adding a parachute;

it caused some tense moments

But it was Ok in the end

No soft toys were injured in the raising of this dosh, although some bears were a little ‘hefty’, they never the less made a safe decent.

It wouldn’t be a church belfry with out bats ( I love and champion bats, well some one has to, they are very ugly) however a rather beautiful velvety bat glove puppet made an elegant decent before reinforcing the myth, that bats get caught in you hair,

they don’t; well not real ones, their echo location if far to sophisticated for such an error

There has been a church on this site since the 12th century, one of the bells, still hanging in the tower but no longer rung, was cast in 1506. I love to hear church bells across the valley . The clock doesn’t seem to work, but never mind, it’s just marking time and that passes with or without a clock; take a look at the window (now blocked up) from a much earlier period than the clock, and gargoyles that surround it, they have been watching the passing of time for many years now.

Technorati Tags: Bell ringing, Parish Church, Norman, Teddy Bears, Bats

Pushing Up Daisies

From the grave yard of a little chapel, built in 1673, that’s tucked away, between the forest and the hills; a beautiful place on a beautiful summer evening: pushing up daisies? to be dead, buried beneath the ground.

Double delight

 

This evening at 8:30. Why is it always lighter  on the ‘inside’  of the rainbow? the answer may be in here but I’ve yet to read it all; as this is a post it in the moment sort of post, you will have to work it out for yourselves.

One of my favourite painters, Joseph Wright of Derby, I have written about him before,  must have been a bit quick with the brush, seeing as he didn’t have a digital camera in 1794

Dotting and Crossing

I have spent the morning in an exam, don’t ask what on, I won’t tell you (sorry, it’s half a story, I know)

It’s the first time I have ever sat down at a proper, grown up exam, that starts at the top of the page and goes on and on, until, you either run out of time, things to compare and contrast, apply theory to, or just waffle about.

Readers who have been calling here for a while, will know, that I don’t like writing without the comfort blanket of Microsoft Office and the F7 button, I’ll stand up and talk to and for England; but ask me to put pen to paper, it brings up all sorts of demons. So you can imagine I wasn’t looking forward to the exam; now that my dyslexia has a piece of paper to prove it’s existence (and we could debate that topic ’till the cows come home, but please not now) I have an entitlement to some extra time in exams, to check my work. I must admit I was glad of it and used every second.

I wasn’t alone, another candidate was in the same situation and we placed ourselves at the front of the examination room as far away as possible from the door, so that when everyone else left, it would be less distracting for us. So when the time came and the invigilator said ‘ Everyone, put down your pens, except the two candidates with additional time.’ And everyone else filed quietly out of the room, before bursting into relieved and excited chatter as they dispersed down the corridor, I was transported back to being a child again, its a beautiful summers day, I am still inside the classroom redoing my work, my classmates are out in the sunshine, playing.

I hate my hand writing, its not good at the best of times, but under pressure, like this morning I like it even less, and whilst I’ve got used to writing essays, assignments and reports over the last few years, and goodness, I’ve even been known to enjoy it, but it’s only because I can ‘cut and paste’, edit and generally tidy things up; but no matter how hard I try, I remain convinced my messy writing and poor spelling, will have antagonized the examiner and the outcome will come back to not what I have written but how I’ve written it.

Rereading my work at the end of the exam, I discovered that my writing of the word ‘that’ looked like ‘t*at’ (for * insert ‘w’) and you can see this makes the word takes on an entirely different meaning (overseas readers, on a need to know basis, can read a definition of t*at here.) So it was not just the ‘I’s’ that needed dotting and the ‘T’s’ that need crossing, the ‘W’s needed a bit of remedial work too.

So back home, and not one, but two fried egg butties and two mugs of steaming hot tea later, I am both replete and exhausted, but I am still going out to play.