Little Weed

Question. When is a weed not a weed?

Answer. When it is feast.

This bee was carrying so much pollen I was starting to wonder if it would mange to get airborne and make it back to the hive.

The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale; as a child I used to spend hours in the fields collecting these flower heads, by the bucket full for my Dad, who used to make dandelion wine from them, just taking that photo has wafted back in time, to the smell of them being boiled up in a steamy kitchen and gluup, gluup noise of the air locks on the demijohns as it brewed.

nezza has a lovely photograph of a dandelion ‘clock’ on her Flickr site

New Moon

I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have, POWER

The photographs that have been sat in my Flickr box in the side bar, have been bugging me, they reminded me of something, a painting but I couldn’t quite place it (and I hasten to add, that I am not making any artistic pretensions about my ‘point and shoot’ photo, it was just that the images were niggling at me; if you stumble across this post later, here’s one of the photographs)

Then the penny dropped, I got it! The artist I was thinking about was Joseph Wright,1734-97 who is famed for his dramatic lighting effects in his paintings,

I first stumbled across his work (well a reproduction) when I was working in a house that had this painting, hung on the wall, Its entitled ‘An Experiment with a Bird in an Air Pump’ *

(do you think the chap in the red robe looks a bit like Peter Stringfellow?) by coincidence I was, at the time reading The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow Wright was part of the Lunar Men,they were awesome a group of guys who in the 1760’s got together once a month, they included

Erasmus Darwin, a doctor, and grandfather of Charles, Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham metal-goods manufacturer, and the porcelain man Josiah Wedgwood -they were at the centre of a society that met in Birmingham on the Monday nearest each full moon (so they had enough light to get home in the evening) for, as Darwin put it, ‘a little philosophical laughing’.

Along with James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen, the conjuror Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Thomas Day, a follower of Rousseau. Together, they classified plants and isolated gases, they built clocks and telescopes, they flew in hot-air balloons and invented machines that could speak, performed tricks with magnets and dreamt up recipes for disappearing ink. Many of them were self-taught, some were dissenters and radicals, all were ingenious. (full article here)

So I invite you, if you were to put the equivalent group together now in 2008, to meet on the first Monday in the month, sharp, adroit, visionary minds for ‘a little philosophical laughing’. who would you choose, I’ll kick off Tim Berners-Lee ,inventor of the World Wide Web,where would be with out him, not blogging that’s for sure, the inventor James Dyson

* I doubt the bird lived to tell the tale.

Technorati Tags: Lunar Men, inventors, moon light, experiment

Celebration

It was party time at the weekend, an 80th birthday

we gathered at the Severn Valley Railway

It was an ideal location as we are a scattered clan; as well as the most senior member of the family the very smallest were in attendance

But it wasn’t all sepia tones, we had Champagne

and the birthday girl had, colourful gifts, flowers

     

and a magnificent cake, (the map is of a favorite family holiday location)

We had a lovely meal on the train and the staff were all excellent and equally as colourful as the party.

 

 

As well as chuffing up and down the line I had chance to play arty with the camera.

 

I even got to have a look around on the footplate

 

After a very pleasant day out, the journey home was enhanced by the fact we had been able to hand over the sails to BiL, that we collected for him the other week,therefore we didn’t have to share the car with them on the way home, or listen to the boys complaints that they smelt like wet dog.

 

Technorati Tags: Steam trains, party, flowers, Champagne

Yesterdays Snow

We got snow and I’ll post some photographs in a little while, but first to prove that snow ain’t what it used to be; some images from the depths of my mums sideboard drawers, this one is dated 1901 and is of a local pub, (essential services must be maintained.)

And this  the big freeze of 1947, that lasted from the  21st of January until 4th of March  it’s the main street of a local village

Family legend has it that my dad drove an Austin Seven on the ice of a frozen reservoir, during this time, being of the generation that had just returned from active service in the Second World War, I suspect he thought he was invincible, he would have gone demented if I or my siblings had tried such a prank.

 

Technorati Tags: Austin Seven, Snow, Ice, 1947, 1901

Banging on

Spatial awareness and a bit of creative thinking have been called for, to accommodate a guest and a drum kit in to the spare room.

Yesterday was bright and clear, but cold;

Mr UHDD, had risen at 5:30 to go to the Lake District, for a bit of a Christmas hill bash with his fell running mates. Kindly he bought me a mug of tea before he left, I am not sure I really wanted to be awake at 05:50 on a Sunday morning, but I never turn down a mug of tea; in my experience you never know when you will be offered another one, and a mug of tea in the hand is worth two in the pot. There will be many more weekends like this, because Mr UHDD is about to take on a bit of a challenge, he thinks he has been ‘considering it’ for a few months now; I on the other hand have known for a few months now, that he ‘will do it.’

He is going to run a ‘Bob Graham’ two words, that sound innocuous, but translate to……

The Bob Graham Round of 42 peaks is one of the most demanding challenges in England.With a ascent of app’ 28,500ft and a app’ distance of 74 miles.

And did I mention that it’s all done in 24 hours? You will be hearing a lot more about this, I promise.

Christmas is going to a quiet affair, on the other hand we are having a house full at New Year, friends from near and far, no one will be driving or waiting for a taxi, so bed/ mattress space is needed. The boys and I take on the task of a bit of redistribution of the bedroom furniture, so that it is possible to get a full size drum kit and a guest in the spare room.

Ha ha, you think that the boys are having a drum kit for Christmas don’t you? Well the drum kit has been with us for over a year now, we have just never got round to sorting the room out around it. The drum kit was something of an unexpected arrival, we went out for lunch, with friends, on the other side of the Pennines, we took a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers, and came back with a drum kit and a crate of War Hammer figures and one less cheque in the cheque book; however I drew the line at the pet lizard and a snake that they also tried to palm off on us, a big NO! Our friends boys, have now fledged, and have student loans to support, (is there much meat on a lizard and can you ‘bar-b-q’ a snake? come on lads show the same sort of initiative that your parents did when they were at uni)

So having dragged Ikea ’smorgasbord’ book cases and ‘Slartybartfast’,chests of draws around the house the boys and I are rather pleased with our efforts. I always said that my children would learn to play something like the flute of clarinet; something they could carry themselves, so how did we end up with a drum kit? Well like many of the parental ideals you start out with, like ‘my child will never eat junk food’ ( have you ever taken your kids to a bowling party?) or ‘ I would never allow my child will to sit in parental bed with a biscuit and a beaker of milk , watching cartoons on Sky TV, whilst parents sleep’ Oh yes you will if you are THAT exhausted, you will you, you will do ANYTHING to get another 1/2 hours sleep. (and in truth it doesn’t seem to have done them much harm.) In the end you give in, well just a little bit.

I rather like the drums and the advantage of an old farmhouse is that they have very thick walls and no neighbours

As an aside what we call the ’spare room’ and the ‘bunk room’ were when we moved here, one long ‘dormitory room’, running from front to back of the house, (most traditional farm ‘long houses’ are one room deep) that was until Mr UHDD did whizy things with a few meters of 2X2 and some plaster board and made the space more usable as two rooms; legend has it and whilst it may be a ’sepia tale’ the story goes, that when this was a working farm, they used the ‘dormitory room’ to raise turkeys in, to sell at Christmas, so if in the small hours of Christmas day there is a ghostly roll on the drums, that will be the ghost of turkeys past. Woooooohooooo, squawk.

Have a happy and peaceful Christmas

Technorati Tags: Drums, Turkey, DIY, Ikea, Children, Sleep, New Year, Christmas

Creature comforts

There is nothing nicer on a winters afternoon that is as grey as a dishcloth, than to light a fire, and get all warm and snug, in a comfy chair with a warm cat on you lap; I’ve had to settle for the twenty first century equivalent of a cat on my lap, a lap top PC (our real cats are asleep on top of the boiler) I’ve plugged the ‘cats tail’ in to the mains and its eyes lit up a treat, the lapcatlaptop complete with built in mouse has after a bit of meowing settled into a contented purr.

I am content, well ’till I have to go out and pick my mums pension for her.

Let me tell you about our fire, in the ‘lounge’ or ‘front room’ its an open fire, we use logs and or coal for fuel, it is what’s called a hob grate, it has to be said that it probably isn’t original to the house, its a bit to posh for a farm house, to much fine detail in the casting, legend has it (handed down to us from the farming family, who lived here for generations, up until the 1970’s) that the fire place came from the ‘big house’ up the lane, that it was bought in the 1960’s when such things were being ripped out of buildings, as old fashioned; it is a genetic predisposition of farming families that they have an eye for a bargain, that they will ’skin a flea for it’s hide’ no doubt they got this for a song, I am glad they did; farm house rooms like ours tend to be small, the fireplace was most probably a bedroom fire place in the grander rooms of the big house

This post is interrupted by a violent squall of hail so heavy that it has set the car alarm off and there is hail coming down the chimney and spitting and fizzing in the fire, it will be a miracle if the electricity doesn’t go off, maybe the pension can wait till tomorrow

The legend also goes that one Sunday morning after a cold and wet ’shoot’ (one my dad was probably involved in, he was a close friend of the farmer, they would have been looking to catch rabbits and pheasants.) That they came home and set their remaining, damp shotgun cartridges to dry on the hob at the side of the open fire, they toppled in the fire and went off with a bit of a bang, there are plenty of pot marks and blemishes in the plaster of this room to make this a true story, but you never know!

Time to put another log on the fire