Scenic Saturday - Lancashire

Number 40 in the series.



Lancashire these days is considerably smaller than it once was, having "lost" Greater Manchester and the area around Liverpool. But what it has retained is the most scenic part of the old county. The eastern border of the county is in the Pennine Hills, an area which is more often associated with Yorkshire even though Lancashire has its share of the moors and dales. It is here that we can find Pendle Hill where England's most famous witches lived in the early 17th century. On the opposite side of the county, on the coast of the Irish Sea, we have Blackpool, probably England's best known seaside holiday resort, while to the north we have part of the beautiful Lake District.

Although there are many country scenes I could choose for this week's picture, what we have is the famous Blackpool illuminations.

Being picky

I don't want to be picky, really I don't, but...

The television news last night and this morning's paper report what amounts to a third version of the event in Abbottabad last weekend when American special forces stormed bin Laden's "fortress" and killed the world's most wanted man. Or so we are led to believe.

I do feel that this could have been handled better, by which I mean the announcements. Now I'm not suggesting that things would have necessarily been different had it been forces from any other country who had done this and the news had therefore been released by a different authority, but surely in these days of instant communication we could have been given the definitive account at the outset? We were told at first that there was a 40-minute fire-fight and the bin Laden cowered behind one of his wives. Then it transpired that he didn't cower, the wife concerned had tried to rush the attacking forces. Now it seems that only one of bin Laden's supporters opened fire.

The differing versions of what happened do tend to lead to questions and doubts. Personally, I have no doubt that bin Laden is dead: if he had been in hiding somewhere else, he would surely have arranged for video footage to be released showing him with a newspaper dated sometime after his "death". But I don't think that will stop others questioning the reliability of the reports.

I have also to admit to some discomfort over what amounts to his execution. We are told that there were guns within easy reach but he was shot before he could grab one. Maybe he could not have been taken alive - and I'm not sorry he is dead - but I have to wonder if his capture and subsequent parading before a court would not have been more disheartening for Al-Qaeda.

As I said at the outset, I don't want to be picky, but I do find myself with, if not doubts, nagging questions.

A puzzle

There are a few other blogs I like to look at on a daily basis. I follow these through my dashboard and the reading list produced on it. There is, however, one thing about this which has me puzzled.

Nearly all the new posts on the blogs forming my reading list are shown there almost as soon as they have been posted - it seems to be pretty much instantaneous. Except for one blog. Why Uncle Skip should be singled out for special treatment by Blogger is what is puzzling me. Take his post yesterday. It is timed at 5.50am. Since that is Californian time and I am in Merrie England it works out eight hours later for me, say 1.50pm on Wednesday 4 May. Yet according to my reading list it was posted just an hour ago - 11.00am Thursday 5 May. But in the meantime I have gone direct into Skip's blog and found that post. Weird.

Don't take it for granted

There was a time when younger son worked at a posh hotel in St Albans, a city the other side of London. One time he came back home by train - I expect his car was out of action as it so often seemed to be. (All the AA patrols new him well, he broke down and called them out so often.) Now, there is a direct train from St Albans to Brighton which passes through London, crossing the Thames on Blackfriars Bridge. The views of the river, both upstream and down, as the train crosses the bridge are very good and YS expressed surprise that he was the only person admiring these views. I pointed out that many of the other travellers had seen the view so many times that there was no interest in it for them and they just took it for granted. I knew the feeling as I crossed that bridge twice a day on my way to and from work.

I hope that I never reach the stage where I take for granted the view from our house. I find it fascinating to see the changes of the seasons - and even of each day. Take, for example, these two pictures. The first was taken yesterday evening at about 9.00 while the second was taken only about five minutes ago.





But it is even more important that I never take the Old Bat for granted. This was brought home to me in a message from Les, Tina's husband. Tina has been a friend of the Old Bat since they were in Guides and is one of a group of five who, over the years, have got together on about a monthly basis. Tina was diagnosed recently as having a brain tumour and the prognosis is, frankly, not very good. Les's words: 'To the men I would say, treasure your wives and do not take the days for granted'.

Amen to that.

A wedding and two funerals

Well, we've had the wedding. In fact, we've already had one of the funerals - and a very quiet affair it was, especially in comparison to what went a couple of days before it. The other funeral will take place shortly although, as far as I am aware, no date has been announced.

For the sake of posterity (Who am I trying to kid?) I should explain that the wedding took place between Prince William of Wales and Miss Catherine Middleton last Friday. Saturday's Daily Telegraph newspaper devoted no less than 23 pages to reporting the event which millions of people had already seen on television. It might seem a little strange that they have managed to fill only 16 pages today on the death of Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist, at the hands of US special forces. It is his funeral that has already taken place, a burial at sea so there is no grave to become a shrine to his violent followers.

Bin Laden will not be mourned by many in the western world, nor, indeed, in the Arab world either. Sir Henry Cooper, however, will be. His death also occurred over the weekend. There will be many who have never heard of one of Britain's greatest boxers but there are equally as many to whome his name is synonymous with not only boxing but sportsmanship in general. I am not a fan of boxing although I have watched the occasional fight on television, usually because my father wanted to watch and I didn't happen to be out that evening. Somehow it was obvious that Henry Cooper, as he was then, was a natural gentleman. One of identical twins, he never lost his sarf London accent and always referred to himself as 'Enry. His well-deserved knighthood made no difference.

So, after a tumultuous four-day weekend (here in England), the world is both better than it was last week and poorer.

Torquay not for me

Torquay, Queen of the English Riviera - or so the locals would have one believe. I have actually been to the town three times but it is now a place I avoid. My memories of the town itself are not unpleasant; in fact, I have quite enjoyed my visits. But, despite my memories of the town itself not being unpleasant, the mere mention of the place certainly does give rise to memories that are less pleasant.

It was Friday's royal wedding that made me think of the town again. No, that's not really the case. It wasn't so much the wedding itself, but the fact that yesterday's news was that William and Catherine have postponed their honeymoon. I didn't spend my honeymoon in Torquay - well, not all of it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My first visit to Torquay was more than fifty years ago. I was just 12 and had been seriously ill with pneumonia. I think it was pneumonia that time: it might have been pleurisy - I had that as well - but I think on that occasion it was pneumonia. It had been bad enough for me to have been hospitalised, except that by the time it was realised I was that ill I was too ill to be moved. Quite why it took so long for the doctor to realise I needed hospital treatment I don't know. I was, in any case, too young to even think the question let alone ask it. Anyway, he - the doctor - told my mother that I needed a month on the French Riviera to convalesce. France was right out of the question on the grounds of cost but the English Riviera was accepted as a substitute. My father was at that time in the Navy and there was no chance of him taking a month's leave, so my mother, younger brother and I went off to a guest house in Torquay for pretty well the whole of May.

As far as I can recall, the weather was mainly fine and we spent much of the time on the beach. As a change, we would sometimes go into Tor Abbey Gardens where we might feed the ducks. The gardens were quite a long walk from our guest house and I certainly didn't enjoy that walk back after I had fallen into the duck pond one day.

I mentioned my honeymoon earlier and it was during that holiday that I visited Torquay once more. Torquay is on the south coast of Devon and we were spending our honeymoon in a village in the heart of Exmoor, which is in the north of the county. As I had sold my car to buy furniture, I had hired a car for the week we were away. The weather on one day was not good but we learned that it was fine on the south coast and we decided to drive across the county to Torquay. There were, of course, quite a few years between visits but I remembered a reasonable amount of the town despite the changes which had taken place. We drove on through Dartmouth and decided to take a route back to our village across Dartmoor.

We never did reach Dartmoor. We were driving along a narrow lane just outside Dartmouth when a lorry coming towards us pulled in to one side. In doing so, the driver managed somehow to bump the back of the lorry on the hedge or wall or whatever and it swung across the road, smashing in the bonnet of our hire car. We ended up leaving the car where it was and hitching several rides back across the county. At the end of the honeymoon we caught a train back to Brighton.

Years passed again before I went back to Torquay. This time I had not only a wife but three young children as well. We had for several years taken our holidays in a village close to Westward Ho! in north Devon, but the lady who provided bed, breakfast and an evening meal had given up so we had found a farm in south Devon that year. It was the sort of place we like - stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bus perhaps once a week. One day we decided to take the children to a larger town and decided on Torquay, some 30 miles or more from the farm. The children quite enjoyed the day, until we were on the Exeter bypass heading back to the farm, still 20 miles or so distant. It was then that the gearbox in my brand new car (just 3,000 miles on the clock) seized up. I got the car towed into a garage in Exeter and borrowed the telephone directory. Back then I was a Scout Leader so I looked up the local Scouts to ask advice on a suitable car hire company. The chap I spoke to insisted on leaving his meal and driving us all the way to the farm. This was kind of him, but it did mean I had to get somebody else to drive me back to Exeter the following day to hire a car. Once again I left a car in Devon only this time I had to go back for it two weeks later after it had been repaired.

I'm not prepared to risk Torquay again, nice as the town might be.

May Day

As I walked down the woods this morning with the dog, I was mentally drafting what I would write today. It was a longish piece about why I try to avoid going to Torquay, inspired by the news that their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, or Prince William and Princess Catherine as the Court has indicated they are happy for William and Kate to be called, have deferred their honeymoon and that William will be back at work this week. Then, as I arrived back home, I noticed that this rose is just in bloom. As today is May Day and the rose is Maigold it seems far more appropriate just to post a picture of it. If you look closely you may see a small drop of water left from the rain we had last night. Although it was welcome, we still need a lot more. This rose is the earliest one in our garden to come into bloom and it has a second bloom in late August and September. The bush is getting old - it must have been there for the better part of 30 years if not more.