Tynemouth Priory

While The Man of the Place and our little one were at the footie, I nipped up north of Newcastle to Tynemouth. I had to drop my diving regulator off at the dive shop and get some beeswax for Henry's dry suit zip. That took about 10 minutes and then I had some time to kill. I had been planning to walk Polly along the shore but it was too foggy.

This is the High Street in Tynemouth. You can see it was a foggy day. The dive shop is on the left side of the street, half way up. On the way to our walk to the sea we met Jake who was going our way. He was a very friendly fellow carrying his favourite toy. His owners would throw the toy down the embankment of the castle's earth fortifications and Jake would run after it and then bring it back up. Good way to exercise the dog without breaking a sweat!

Imagine that while you are walking up to this old Priory on a cliff overlooking the North Sea, the fog horn is going off at very regular intervals. It made it very atmospheric.

These are the earthworks in front of the Priory.

This is the beautiful Tynemouth Priory in the fog.

The North Sea from the cliff.

What the wind will do if it blows against a stone wall for hundreds of years.

With all this glorious fog and ancient ruins, I was compelled to pay the entrance fee and go in.

I knew there was a huge cemetery just on the other side and I knew it was going to look fabulous in this thick fog.

Time and wind have carried away most of the decoration, but left their own.

This must have been a beautiful part of the Priory.

Most of the large headstones are from the Victorian age. The wind has rendered some of the headstones illegible. I remember being here years ago and there were some tombstones with holes in them, I couldn't find those.

There were some that were from the1700's but they were difficult to photograph.

You can still make out some of the words on this tombstone. The names William and Joseph are still legible.

It is a beautiful place to spend all of eternity and a wonderful place to walk your dog on a foggy September Saturday afternoon.

Auntie Phyllis

Since Henry's mother passed away a few years ago, I have all but ceased going with them to Sunderland every other Saturday. I would visit Vicky, Henry's mum and they would go to the game. I'd pick them up after the game, and we'd drive home.

Today, there was a visit to be made before the game and I decided to go along.

Henry's Auntie Phyllis is 92 and is as bright as a button. She's slowed down a bit now. She gave up smoking only recently because she couldn't get to the shops anymore.

Phyllis was married to Henry's father's brother, Will. We've made arrangements to get over to see her again very soon. She's so much fun!

Sorry about the picture quality. Auntie Phyllis was sitting on the sofa with the big picture window behind it. I wasn't going to ask her to move, so we just have to deal with the photo being back lit.

Mushrooms

It was so beautiful this afternoon, that I was compelled to go for a long walk with Polly, my faithful hound. She had a grand time, especially when we got to the forest, climbed over the stile and I could unhook her from her lead. This is the road as seen from our drive going north. If you walk up that road a bit to Charlie's place, this is the view of Whitelees. Whitelees is to the right and you can see the hills of the Lake District in the distance. It's beautiful in the winter when they're all snow capped. The English Lake District, home to Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth. Visit in the spring and you can wander lonely as a cloud as you go to view a host of golden daff-o-dils.

These are some of the mushrooms I saw on my walk. Its that time of year again. Most of the mushrooms were found under beech trees and had been nibbled. I'll post the names of them if and when I figure them out. I must have seen over a dozen different varieties.
When we got to the woods, the air was wonderful! It smelled like walking through a Christmas tree farm. Very piney. I could feel the roses being put on my cheeks.


The ponds up by the hunting hides.

As you know from my blog entry yesterday, it has been rainy. I really should have worn my wellies, but I didn't. This a photo of the mud -
There were other creatures walking in the same mud. . .

Pheasant

Fox

Deer



and Polly





I have been inspired by fellow bloggers to try adding in a bit of video footage. Here is my daft dog on our walk. I sure hope this works. . .

End of the Summer

The place is still very very green. With the days getting shorter and the dew in the evening creeping more steadily towards light frost, the end of summer is here.

Does anybody else besides me think that the summer was pretty short? We had a few weeks of fine weather and that was it!. I don't remember a summer ever whizzing past so quickly. Come to think of it, 2006 on the whole is moving along at quite a clip.

I went outside to snap a few photos of the place and in the comfrey behind this chicken run, there were bees! Bees out in the drizzle! These must be hardy Scottish bees. They were large, furry looking ginger bees. I tried to get a photo of them, but they wouldn't sit still long enough for this camera to focus. You'd think the bees would be slower in the cool weather. I got the impression that they were in a hurry to fill their stores for winter.

Comfrey makes a brilliant natural fertilizer. Simply fill a bucket with comfrey leaves, add enough water to cover the leaves and let it rot for a couple of weeks. It stinks to high heaven, but it is great for the tomatoes. Dilute the stinking mess so that the diluted solution looks like tea and you're set to go. I usually keep the stinky bucket covered up in a corner of the garden where it won't get tipped over and just pour amounts out as I need it.

This is a photo of the low cloud in the hills behind Whitelees. The picture isn't out of focus, everything here has lost its edges.

This is out the window by the computer and you can HEAR the rain hammering down. It's even coming down the chimney a bit.

It could be that the first fire of the season is lit tonight. . . . but it really isn't that cold, just damp.

Creative Blogs

I wanted to bring to your attention the new and expanded blog roll to the right of your screen. These are blogs that I patrol with alarming regularity. For those of you with site meters and notice that some insomniac in London keeps checking your blog, that's probably me. I'm not stalking you, I just can't sleep. I'm also terminally nosy and I like to read the comments left on other people's blogs.

I'd like to express my gratitude for those who have included my blog in their blog rolls. When I've noticed that this has happened, I have reciprocated by adding your own blog in my growing list.

As I posted in a comment to one of these blogs recently, to me a blog doesn't have to be fiction to be creative. There is little fiction in these blogs but I find them just as fascinating, creative, funny and thought provoking as any work of fiction that has ever passed under my nose.

At some point, I'll try writing fiction. Until inspiration points its fickle finger at me and I can think of a story, I'll get the connections between my head and the keyboard sharpened by blogging away to my kind readers.

Grandpa's Shop continued- mystery lady in photo

My mother wrote back to me about the woman in this photo. I didn't know who she was, but my mother suspected that she knew who it was. Here is what my mother wrote:

Maybe that woman sitting at the counter is Lillian, who was Grandpa's clerk. He used to tease her mercilessly about her boyfriend. One time he said, "Lillian, Doc says every time he goes to the hospital at 5 a.m., he sees Ed's [not his real name] truck parked at your place. That's mighty early for Ed to call...." Lillian answered that Ed hauled her ashes regularly before he went to work. "Oh, I see," he said. Thereafter he'd greet her now and then with the friendly question, "Good morning, Lillian. How's Ed? Still hauling your ashes?" That gave rise to one element of the Carew vocabulary in which "getting your ashes hauled" = getting laid.

Another time she had a cold sore, and he asked her "What's wrong with your lip, Lillian?" She said, "Oh, that's nothing...just a cold sore." "Hmmm...looks kind of like a bite to me," he said, with great concern.

Interesting to see the interior of the store again. Brings back many memories. One time the phone rang at the house in the wee hours after the bars closed. It was the Langlade County sheriff. Somebody had broken into the drugstore and stolen the safe. Problem was, the thieves, who apparently had been planning to open the safe once they got it home, had tied a rope
around it and started to tow it out of town on the road to Post Lake. The wheels of the safe had gotten stuck in the railroad tracks, the rope broke, and the thieves took off, leaving the safe sitting there on the tracks. Somebody came along and saw it and called the sheriff, who called Murray, who found someone to pick it up and bring it back to the store.

Remembering The Victims

I'd like to remember of ALL the victims of terror today, the anniversary of the World Trade Centre disaster.

I guess that the whole of the US will be inundated with the media focusing on the anniversary of the two airplanes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Remember that lives have been ripped apart and five short years on, there are still still people grieving. I'm not going to put up any image of that. You know what it looked like.

My sister Sally and her husband live in New Jersey. My brother-in-law commutes into Manhattan every day. I was so frightened for them that day. Thank God I managed to get them on the phone early on. They have heartbreaking stories of parents of my nephew and nieces' friends not coming home that day or any day afterwards. Cars in the parking lot of the train station that were never collected.


I don't live very far from Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway. If you remember, we had our own airplane disaster right here in December 1988.

The nose cone of Pan Am Flight 103 fell in the field right in front of Kevin the plasterer's house. He was the first person to walk out and see this: If you come to visit us here at Whitelees, you can talk to Kevin about that night if you want. He doesn't mind talking about it but I haven't brought the subject up in years.

Sadly, there are more terrorist incidents than my two highlighted incidents. The list of victims keeps growing and we don't seem to be able to either stop the terrorists or prevent this sort of hatred from building.

Don't believe lies about why terrorists do these sinful things. People don't do these things out of jealousy. They are not envious of our freedoms, they have real hatred and anger. There isn't a metal detector in any airport that is going to detect hatred. You can prevent passengers from taking fingernail clippers on board or liquids that might be explosives but you let them on the plane with a heart filled with hatred.

What about the underlying causes of this problem? We can increase security and minimise the symptoms, but what about the root of the problem? Has there been a drastic improvement in foreign policy? Has there been a change in how we deal with smaller, less powerful nations or have we tightened the screws on them? The entire world was horrified by the attack on the US in September 2001. There had never been a larger outpouring of good will. What happened to that good will?

Remember ALL victims of terror today. Remember the Egyptians, Turks and Jordanians who get exploded while going about their daily business. There have been French, Spanish, British and German victims too. Remember the Israelis and Irish who get exploded by hidden bombs in restaurants and shops.

I still feel sad every time I see the New York skyline. If there is an older photo and the towers are still there, I think. "It hasn't happened yet. " More recent photos with the towers no longer there saddens me too. The New York skyline was a wonderful thing. It was celebrated. Now the famous skyline with its missing towers is just a reminder of pain and suffering. The terrorists ruined that too.

Grandpa's Shop

My granddad was the town pharmacist in Elcho, Wisconsin. Elcho is so small, I doubt if it even qualifies for town status.


He had a shop in the town. It was one of those drugstores that had a soda fountain in it. Very similar to Mr Gower's drug store in It's a Wonderful Life. This is my Uncle Paul behind the counter. This series of photos of Grandpa's store were taken in the 50's. It was obvious that it was just before Christmas. All the Christmas decorations and a Christmas tree are in the store. Uncle Paul always had a flat topped or G.I. haircut and it seemed to me that he was always stuck in 1955.

There were some tables and chairs in the front of the store where you could sit and have your ice cream soda and in the back of the store you got your prescriptions filled.


You can see my Uncle Paul posing in the back where prescriptions were handed in. To the left you can see the swivel chairs you could sit on if you wanted to sit at the counter. He also sold other bits and pieces. Camel toothpick holders, souvenirs of Wisconsin, postcards, pens, writing paper, perfume etc . . . These things filled the shop. They weren't necessary as such, but they kept the wolf from the store. I would love to have a chance to talk to Grandpa now about the store. I'd also like to have better pictures, perhaps a photograph of the prices of the ice creams and sodas.


I don't know who this woman is. It isn't Uncle Paul's wife, my Aunt Penny and it isn't my Aunt Mary Ellen. Perhaps she is just a customer.

This is a photo of the outside of the store. After Grandpa died and the store closed, the big neon DRUGS sign was stored in the back of the garage. It just got dusty and covered in cobwebs. I'm sure that after Grandma died, it just went to the dump.

This is a closer look at the front of the store. You can see my grandfather's shadow. He was wearing a hat as all men did in the 50's. I can see the big weighing scales through the window. These windows had big clear yellow plastic blinds that were rolled down in the summer to protect the stock from being sun bleached.

The only thing I have from the old store are these four soda glasses from the soda fountain and the faded photographs that I have just shown you.

All Better

Thank you for the concern you've all shown for my poor Dad and lame dog, Polly.

They're both fine and fighting fit again.

I will probably start to take Polly out on walks again. She's had her bandages off for a week or so and hasn't re-broken her toe. I really need the excercise. I'm sure she could do with a bit of exercise too.

Dad is planning a trip to Greece this autumn. I sure hope they can stop by here on their way past.

Dust & Noise Management

They are bringing in what will probably be the last silage cut of the season. It's a glorious early autumn day and perfect for getting outside jobs done. The tractors and the silage machine are making a bit of noise, especially when the go right in front of the house. To be fair, they waited until a descent hour of the morning before they made a start.

Sorry it's not such a great photo. The sun was in my face and I couldn't get above the hedge enough for the camera to stop focusing on it rather than the tractors. I just wanted to show you the tractors over by the south eastern corner of the place.

Note to self: Call to get gardener guy in to cut the hedges.

I'd cut the hedges myself but I 'm too short and weak in the arm to deal with our petrol driven hedge clipper. If you think I'm being a big baby about it, try this. Hold a petrol powered hedge trimmer in your hands. Holding the machine at shoulder height extend your arm fully. Now hold it there for a couple of hours, on top of a ladder. I can't do it.

The other noisy thing is the big circular Stihl saw that The Man of the Place is using to slice through concrete this morning. More details here.

This is also creating more dust than I though could exist.

It reminds me of one of my favourite lines in A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle; "Drink your coffee before it gets dirty."

I've got TWO sheets taped up to the doorway to try to stem the dust, but it's coming in anyway. I've shut as many doors as I can. We just have to wait for the dust to settle and start to tackle it.

Just to add salt to the wound, my cleaner Jill is away for a week's holiday on the Island of Arran.

My Favourite Brother

My mom has written a happy birthday to Tom on her blog too and it has included my all time favourite photo of Tom. He was such a funny kid.

Short growing season

Last night there was no cloud. That combined with clear high pressure brought us the first frost. It was a very light frost but this means that I will have to pick all the remaining green beans no matter what their size and either give the beans away, freeze them or eat them. The corn will have to be picked too. The last time I looked, the kernels weren't nearly fat enough, but there might be some that are fit to eat.

This means that I can get the entire garden cleared off and covered in black plastic again. (weed suppression system) Tucked in and ready for the long wet winter.

Life in the north has a very short growing season.

No Hurry

I had an errand to run at about 4 pm today. I had picked up a couple bags of sugar for my friend Helen when I was in town. When I got back from my day, I popped around to drop the sugar off. Helen's baby is now about 10 days old and she's still not up to going out for things, so I've been offering to pick up the odd item for her. It's no bother really, I'm in town and going to be in the supermarket anyway.

Between my house and Helens, there are a couple of dairy farms. I managed to get past the first one without incident, but when I got to the second dairy farm, I ended up waiting a bit. They were taking the cows in for milking. Geoff, husband of Pauline of Cream Teas fame was moving the cows. He didn't recognise my car and closed the gate to stop the stream of cows so I could get past. Wasn't that nice of him? He didn't have to do that. I was perfectly happy to wait for the herd to cross the road. As I drove on by him, I rolled down the window, waved and thanked him for holding up the herd for me. When Geoff recognised me, he smiled and waved back. I love living here.
Not only do I not mind waiting for cows and sheep to move along the road, I enjoy it. For sheep, I'll roll down the window and listen to them baa all around the car. If I'm stuck in a sheep related hold up, I've been known to phone my city-bound friends. After telling them that the road I'm on is blocked, I'll stick the phone out of the car window so they can here my "traffic". If there are cows on the road, the window stays up. Cows are nosy and they'll stick their big wet noses in the car. It's bad enough that they slobber on the car as they walk on past. I don't want it in the car as well.

Happy Birthday Tom

Tom is my brother, the youngest of the four and the only boy.

He's 38 years old today. Happy Birthday to my favourite brother! I love you Tom and I think you're terrific!!!

Blogger-beta - The Story So Far

Well now. I made the conversion to Blogger-beta. Here is what I have discovered so far:

When I first made the switch, I could continue to comment on other blogs using my old Blogger account. Now, I can't, I have to use my new Blogger-beta account and it won't let me make comments on blogs that are still in original Blogger (non-beta) format. They say that this is only temporary. After a couple of days, not being able to make comments on some blogs is v. annoying. Never mind. They say they're on it. This may also make it difficult for other bloggers to leave me comments. You can always go anonymous. I don't mind. I sure hope that Blogger sorts this comment problem out soon.

On the plus side, formatting is a great deal easier. The drag and drop stuff they have going on there is very cool and very very easy to do. It is also extremely easy to organize links and blog rolls without messing with html codes. HTML codes frighten and intimidate me as I have never taken a single class on them. (Ronnie - I have the HTML for Dummies book here at the house.) Blogger-beta will even put your blog list in alphabetical order for you. These are the best features so far.

Choosing a new style is simple to select too. You can also try different styles on to see if you like them before selecting a new colour scheme for your blog. You do have to be careful when changing your template, you'll lose any or all of the badges you've put on your blog. e.g. blogburst, flickr, sitemeter etc. . . I can't get my old Flick-r badge back just yet. I'm working on that one though. I don't know if it is my lack of formatting knowledge or a glitch in the formatting programme.

Uploading photos is much quicker and uploading your blog entries after you hit the "publish" button is also a lot faster. Faster for me in this instance means better.

The thing that freaked me out initially was, yesterday I noticed that visits to my site had plummeted to about six per day! I was really enjoyed watching the increased traffic over the past couple of months only to see it all taken away from me. I didn't notice that my little site-meter badge needed to be re-installed. I've reinstalled it now and normal traffic has resumed.

In closing, I would like to know who my lurking reader or readers are in Germany. You visit every day but you have never revealed yourself.

Presidential Brains

Forgive me for deviating from the topic of my garden. The weather over the weekend was foul. Being driven indoors, I found myself along side The Man of the Place, painting the newly plastered walls. Blank white walls offer no stimulation at all and has caused my brain to wander, considering meaty topics like my personal spiritual journey and politics.

I may delve into the topic of spirituality later. Meanwhile I'll tell you that I have always been a fan of President Clinton. He was a president that understood foreign and economic policy. There were never any blank looks or grammatical errors when he spoke to the press. He could discuss political theory AND what was important to me, he had actually spent time outside the US before he went into politics. Did you know that he was a Rhodes Scholar? Having brains and a command of the language scores high with me.

Note: The section below is based on an e-mail my mother sent me. It was a hoax and I fell for it - hook, line & sinker. At best I am gullible, at worst I am too willing to believe the worst in people, especially presidents that I don't like. I was going to take it out but then, I thought I'd leave this in as it is a "warts and all" kind of blog.

As if she has been thinking the same thing, my mother sent me a link to a report by a group called The Lovenstein Institute. This group has compiled a report estimating the intelligence of the current and former US Presidents.

If the link doesn't work for you, this is an overview of the report:

According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 60 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking. The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:

147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
132 Harry Truman (D)
122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
174 John F. Kennedy (D)
126 Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
155 Richard M. Nixon (R)
121 Gerald R. Ford (R)
176 James E. Carter (D)
105 Ronald W. Reagan (R)
98 George H. W. Bush (R)
182 William J. Clinton (D)
91 George W. Bush (R)

The six Republican presidents of the past 60 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest IQ, at 155. President G. W. Bush was rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91.

The six Democrat presidents had IQs with an average of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126.

No president other than Carter (D) has released his actual IQ, 176. Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President GW Bush, his low ratings were due to his apparent difficulty to command the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary (6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents), his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.

The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis. "All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt, and most had written several white papers during their education or early careers.

Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein said. "He has no published works or writings, so in many ways that made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We had to rely more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking."

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton Pennsylvania think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F. Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist. This study was commissioned on February 13, 2001, and released on July 9, 2001, to subscribing member universities and organizations within the education community.
See Bush Résumé

In fairness, I have not read the full report, only the above synopsis. I have not seen the criteria set out for measuring a president's average vocabulary nor have I have read a single published work by any of the current or former US presidents.

On the Lovenstein Institute site they seem to be going for the current administration with all guns blazing. That's okay with me. Governments should be held accountable for what they do and don't do. It is NOT unpatriotic to roast the President or his cabinet. I believe it is unpatriotic not to do these things. It is our right and our duty as members of a democratic society to question the decisions our government makes on our behalf. If leaders live in a culture of praise and lack of accountability, they will rot in their own reflection.

Quelle horreur!

I am having trouble sleeping at the moment. I take the quiet time in the wee hours of the morning to patrol blogs. Sometimes I can get sleepy again and go back to bed. Other times I just can't. I'm glad I can type because it means that I don't need to have the light on to see the keyboard and that minimises the impact of my wakefulness on the rest of the family. When we get the extension finished, the computer will have its own room in the new office. Then I can have the light on, because even though I can type pretty well, I still have to look to type numbers.This morning, I remembered that there was one last piece of some lovely brioche in the kitchen and I thought I'd have that with a mug of tea. It wasn't to be. The tin that held the brioche is empty and in the dishwasher! So now I don't even want a cup of tea. Well, maybe I do . . .

Kettle in the new office? Good idea or bordering on extreme sluggishness?

Rockin and painting

This is The Man of the Place and young George painting the new front room. Can you spot Polly?

We all got our "painty" clothes on today, grabbed rollers and started painting. We drafted Henry's Ipod into service while we painted. My first and only request was a track by Rammestein. Los on their Reisen Reisen album. Henry was in despair and George thought it was okay. Then we were on to listening to Johnny Cash and Dwight Yoakam with a bit of Captain Beefheart thrown in. Excellent!

I got the brilliant idea that before we decorate all the new rooms, we should get some commercial white emulsion paint, dilute it and paint it on all the newly plastered walls and ceilings. Newly plastered walls absorb paint like a sponge. Let the plaster absorb the non-expensive plain white paint. When we go to paint the walls with the costly paint with insane names, then we won't have to buy nearly as much.

As we had some scaffolding and planks left here for the weekend by Kevin, our favourite plasterer/builder we thought we'd make a start.

We think with all these stark white walls, the new front room looks like an art gallery.

By the way, the plastering is now finished. Next stop the electricians final fix and the plumbing and heating guy.