Bridgehopping

As Halfie correctly identified, I was in Hebden Bridge on Saturday. This was as part of an outing loosely organised by the Sheffield and South Yorkshire vegans. The only part of it that was actually organised was the meal in the evening, but most people decided it would be nice to spend a day in Hebden Bridge first.

In truth, there wasn't really enough to fill a whole day. I was a trifle disappointed. Not only because the streets weren't after all thronged with living Liberal Democrat Focus leaflet artwork from the early nineties (when I was a councillor, the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors was based in Hebden Bridge, so that was where we got our artwork from, on paper, ready to be photocopied, cut out, and pasted onto layout sheets with Cow gum. I wonder if young people these days realise that cut and paste was once a literal activity...) Furthermore, I was expecting it to be a lot more visibly 'trendy' and right-on. It's supposed to be the lesbian capital of Britain, for goodness sake, but this wasn't readily apparent. Nor was there a noticeable contingent of people wearing yak wool jumpers who knitted their own yogurt ((c) Alexei Sayle). Maybe Lewes just sets the bar too high.

Nonetheless, it was a pleasant enough little town, but not sufficiently special to deserve its reputation as a tourist destination. There was sufficiently good charity shopping to completely defenestrate my resolution to buy no clothes this year - I came home with a dress (East; my favoured successor to Monsoon), a skirt, a blouse, a jacket, a bracelet and a brooch. I didn't fancy eating here, vegan or not.

The town centre's possibilities exhausted, I took a stroll along the towpath, pausing to remonstrate gently with a hire boater doing useless and pointless things with ropes in the lock (Shire Cruisers, you don't really tell them to do that do you?) as far as Mytholmroyd, the birth place of Ted Hughes, squatting sullenly under a suitably leaden sky, before turning back.

In many places the towpath was collapsing into the water, taking the coping stones with it - presumably as a result of all the recent rain.

The evening's meal was taking place not in Hebden Bridge, but its neighbour Sowerby Bridge (I was very pleased when the woman in the Hebden tourist information centre confirmed, by her example, my pronunciation of this as 'Sore-bee'). Dandelion and Burdock is an entirely vegan restaurant, and the meal I had there was very nice. The starter of a garlicky spinach 'cream cheese' dip was very good; the main course South Indian Curry was fairly run of the mill (even though the guy sitting opposite me kept saying, 'I really enjoyed that okra'), and the dessert, ice cream sandwiched between oat, raisin and choc chip cookies was a bit special, and you would never have guessed it was vegan. Sadly, most of the assembled company at my end of the table had only one topic of conversation, which was 'being vegan', leavened with anecdotes about how hard it was to be vegan whilst on their foreign holidays.

Prior to dinner, while it was still light, I went to take a photo of Tuel Lane lock This is the deepest lock in the country, having replaced two former locks for which there was no longer space when the canal was restored in the 1990s.

The lock was all locked up for the night so I circumvented the sign prohibiting climbing over the railings by squeezing between them, to get a not very impressive photo - it was half full so the full depth of 19'8" was not readily apparent from the inside.

I've not boated on the Rochdale canal; must get round to it one day.

Dig deep, fundraisers

Have you got it yet?

Hilly!

I'm not sure whet happened to the sun...

Mystery destination

Tomorrow I visit a town that was for many years the centre of my little universe; my Mecca, my Shangri-La. It's on a canal, but I've never visited by boat, nor by any other means, even when I lived in the same county.

I know what to expect though. A smiling sun will preside over the scene. The streets will be thronged with harassed looking alarm clocks, dashing to appointments on stubby little legs. Looking benignly on, despite the discomfort they must be suffering, are herds of elephants with knots in their trunks. There will be a race course, but only a small one, as every race is a two horse race.

Gosh. I hope it lives up to my expectations.

Location:Mystery destination

Walkies

If you're a keen walker (which I've been known to be), and you live in Sheffield, then how can you not go walking in the Peak District? Well, in my case, by having no one to walk with, and definitely not being brave enough to set out on my own. But the other week I had an epiphany of the blindingly obvious.

As I got up at 5.30 am in order to get the train to Lapworth for the HNBC AGM, I caught a bit of Ramblings on Radio 4, a bit in which Clare Balding revisited groups of people she'd walked with ten years previously when the programme started. And I stood there open mouthed (and half dressed) and thought: I'll join a walking group!

A quick consultation of the internet revealed that such groups abound in Sheffield. Surfing the wave of enthusiasm, I'd joined the Ramblers before leaving to catch my train.

Thus it was that on Sunday I found myself locating (with far less difficulty than I had anticipated) a car park on the Chatsworth estate for the start of a ten mile walk entitled 'Around the Carlton Pastures'. I'm afraid this didn't mean much to me; I know we took in the village of Edensor and passed Bakewell station (deceased; the railway line is now a walking route) and ended up where we started in Carlton Lees car park, seeing fields, sheep, sparkling water, dry stone walls, and in the distance, Chatsworth House. The walk was graded B1, meaning (B) that it was between 8-12 miles, and (1) that it wasn't difficult; no steep or sustained climbs. I managed it easily in my trusty Boating Boots, which was a relief. The weather of course could not have been better.

En route I chatted with a few new people, all of whom seemed very nice. After we finished, we found our way to the Rutland Arms at Baslow for a well earned drink, soaking up the last of the sun on the terrace overlooking the river Derwent.

Next Sunday I am bestowing my favours on a different group, The Sheffield Wanderers, who are doing the Sheffield Canal and Five Weirs - down the canal to Meadowhall (or Meadowhell, if you're local) and back via the River Don, with a buffet on the way! And I have an outing planned for Saturday as well. Hope we get more than one weekend of nice weather!

Incredible claim

Not really a book review, but it was the HNBC AGM on Saturday, and I was one of two members to take advantage of the meeting's new Lapworth venue, chosen for it's railway station, to travel by train. On arrival I had nearly finished the book I'd brought with me, so had to choose something from the second hand book stall to occupy me on the way home. I settled on Iris Bryce's trilogy of memoirs of travelling the system in the 1970s and early 80s, Canals are my Home, Canals are my World, and Canals are my Life.

These proved to be a pleasant enough and undemanding read, containing nothing earth shattering - apart that is, from the shocking claim made on page 97 of the final volume, viz: 'We enjoyed Worksop very much.'

Sorry, I forgot...

Belated happy birthday Chertsey...

Amy and James celebrated Willow's birthday at the weekend, yesterday being the 79th anniversary of its first health registration.

Chertsey is a couple of years younger, celebrating its 77th birthday on January 29th. This is the date given in Alan Faulkner's book which I have always assumed to be when the boat was handed over by Harland and Wolff to GUCCCo, although I realise I don't actually know exactly what it signifies.

Sunday sunrise

Impossible to capture of course, especially with just a quick snap of the iPad (2). In reality as I sit having my breakfast looking out of the kitchen window it looks completely monochrome, bands of grey and the trees stark black against the glare of the new sun, which twenty minutes ago I watched creeping over the horizon. Sheer luck, but I'm so glad my flat faces east. Every morning now, the first thing I do on getting up is stand and have a long look out of the window.

Resolution update

OK, how have I got on with my new year's resolutions so far? Let's have a blow by blow update on all five of them. The results may be surprising.

1. Not buying any clothes
So far, so good. I have not bought any clothes all month. I have seen maybe one thing that I would have bought, had it not been for the resolution, but mostly I am avoiding temptation by trying not to look.

2. Being vegan
The big success story, this, because it looks the hardest, but I haven't strayed once and am loving it. I will definitely aim to keep it up for another month now, and fully expect to do so for longer.

3. Not drinking beer in January
There was one glitch in this one, as we all went out mid month to celebrate a colleague's promotion at the Bath Hotel. However, I have drunk only two pints of beer (Brother Rabbit, IIRC) this month. I have to report that I have not experienced any beneficial effects from this abstemiousness, other than in my wallet and my recycling bin.

4. Reading classy books and not trashy detective novels
Better make this a month rather than year long one. I have read no detective novels in January, and have read quite a few Good Books, of which more later. But I miss those simple comforts, even though the more literary offerings can be rewarding.

5. Doing the cryptic crossword
This is looking like the big fail. After a couple of weeks I found that it just wasn't grabbing me any more and I have stopped attempting it. Some days I would get no clues, others up to a dozen, but all that struggling just wasn't interesting enough. I think I'm not really much of a one for puzzles full stop, much the same as I don't care for Airfix kits. They just don't seem productive ways of expending effort. I found it boring. Sorry.

Wonder where they got that idea....

Diamond Geezer features a brilliant spoof today...

I thought it had a kind of familiar ring....

Another Willow, another Duck

Inspired by Amy's post, I dug out these photos from May 2012...

Very restrained.

A note on quantities

As no one has remarked, my recipe the other day was unashamedly couched in pounds and ounces. This is not because I am a frothing Europhobe; no indeed.

I am one of that fortunate, brief, generation to be bilingual in imperial and metric. The former was spoken at home, while I learnt the latter from my earliest days at school. I am therefore in the envious position of being to switch between systems and use whichever is best suited to the task in hand.

For linear measurement, this is nearly always millimetres. Except, CRT, when talking about the lengths of boats (or for that matter the diameter of records). If something was built according to one system, little good, and much confusion, arises from attempting to express it in terms of the other.

When calculating the weight of my water ballast, I find it much easier to work with litres and tonnes. In fact, I mentally convert gallons to litres and then equate tonnes with tons to get a rough approximation without too much brow furrowing.

But where I refuse to accept that metric can ever be superior is in the weights and measures of recipes. Nothing can be simpler - especially for scaling up and down - than a sixteen-based system, based as it effectively is on halving and doubling. I only have to look at a metric recipe, with quantities ending in '5', to glaze over. When did we discover the need to be accurate to within 5 grammes (that's somewhere between a fifth and a sixth of an ounce) when making a victoria sponge? The only reason we get presented with these absurd figures is because the damn recipe has been converted from an imperial one in the first place.

Cashpoint swamp

Lost in the New Year hangovers, on January 1st the Guardian reported that:

More than 300,000 of Britain's poorest people live at least 1km from a free-to-use cash machine, raising questions about whether the most disadvantaged can obtain cash without paying a fee, the government's adviser on poverty has said. Figures obtained by the Guardian from the Link network, the body responsible for running Britain's ATMs, show there are 269 low-income areas lacking a free machine within a 1km radius. These "cash machine deserts" mean people face a fee ranging from 75p to £10 to retrieve their money via an ATM.

In contrast, in one eight minute section of my walk to work, I pass no fewer than eleven free-to-use cash machines. Eleven. When I arrived here last year, there were eight, all except one attached to banks, but since then a new Sainsbury's Local and a Tesco Express have opened, each complete with cash machine, and just in case there still weren't enough, the Post Office added one to their front window.

Why? What's in it for them? Am I more likely to shop in Sainsbury's if I can get my cash from right outside the door rather than a few steps down the road? Does the Post Office have a policy of installing machines regardless of existing provision in the area?

Come to think of it, what does it say about an area that it has five bank branches within a five minute walk, in what is no more than a small suburb? Perhaps the dreaded Wikipedia points towards the answer - apparently my lovely little part of town was 'identified in 2003 as the highest ranking area outside London for overall wealth'.

I had no idea, honest.

How to be a fat vegan no. 2

Ginger treacle toffee flapjack

Over a low heat, gently melt together:
3 oz treacle
4 oz dark brown or muscovado sugar
4 fluid ounces of sunflower oil
Quarter teaspoon of salt
3 teaspoons ground ginger

When melted and combined stir in:
8 oz oats

Mix well and press into a tin about 8"/20cm square, well greased and preferably non-stick
Bake at Mark 4/150 for about 20 minutes. When slightly cool, mark out into portions; don't try to remove from the tin until cold because it will fall apart.

This is the first version of a new experimental flapjack recipe - suggestions for improvement welcome. It might be easier with marg. (in which case you'd want 4 oz by weight) but I'm still avoiding artificially hardened facts despite having foresworn butter, lard etc.

Silent Sunday

Disconcerting cruet

After the last HNBC meeting and 'social' back in November, an ever increasing number of us repaired to the Folly at Napton for supper. Jim and I had a most enjoyable meal, seated at a table with Amy and James of Willow. My meal was haunted somewhat by the ostensibly delightful, but actually rather disturbing cruet.

The bone shaped pepper pot was fine, but it did feel rather peculiar to invert the small terrier and see streams of salt pour from its blank eyes onto my chips.

Apologies for neglecting to get an action shot, but it was every bit as weird as you might imagine.

Christmas kitties

This Christmas I gave one feline:

And received a pair:

Bagpuss was rescued from the Save the Children shop (for £2!) and successfully rehomed with my friend Dean, while the wonderfully grumpy felt slippers were from No. 2 Son.

History underfoot (1)

I do find manhole covers rather fascinating - a bit of industrial history beneath our feet, usually made at a local foundry and proudly proclaiming its name. This one is a bit different, as it rather proudly bears the name of its commissioner instead ...

.... unless the Sheffield Corporation had its own foundry of course, which I wouldn't put past them, although I can't find any record.

Hopefully the first of an occasional series as they catch my eye.

(and apologies for it insisting on coming out sideways.)