Day 298: Walking with a Dog and a New Toy

After many months I’ve finally bought a new camera. I’ve just about got to the point and shoot stage but understand that it does a great deal more. I intend to slowly read through the booklet and the Dummies’ Guide that I bought. In the meantime I’ve taken it for a walk and tried to capture a rather dull (weatherise) late June day in North East Derbyshire. All the glorious spring colours have gone and the mellower summer shades are slowly emerging. Jolly came along to offer moral support and encouragement. We had a rather lovely time.

 

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:

Elder has so many healing powers it is called Queen of Herbs

My name is constable Knapweed, and I keep law and order.

I watch to see that all is well along the garden border

Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

 

WeeWee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!

 

Day 294: Kitchen Gardening

Tags

Queensland

Mostly Concerning Food

It’s been a delightfully busy week. The pick axe has replaced the pen and I’ve sat down in the evening with every muscle sore. I’ve watched a bunch of world cup matches. I’m not an Eng-ger-land fan as such but I enjoyed the group of young fellows put up a good effort for the country. Made a change from the over paid clothes ponies we’ve allowed to disappoint us in the past. The sporting highlight was a sixty minute thump fest from Sydney where New South Wales and Queensland were determined to prove themselves as tough as iron. Once the fight was over we got 20 minutes of rugby to finish off the match. Absolutely riveting!

Food has all been on the hoof except a decent sit down roast dinner when Charlie and Frances paid a visit. The most delightful two hours of my week. An enormous amount of house and garden work remains to be done

I enjoy risotto enormously. Handling  and chopping good vegetables is a treat in itself.

 

 

Garlic, chestnut mushrooms, orange pepper, celery and red chilli.

Add onion and Basmati rice and a pint or more of chicken stock. A very generous cupful of frozen seafood towards the end. Half and hour of pleasant cooking and half an hour of sitting in the sun eating.

I will never get bored of poached eggs. There is no finer breakfast.

The toast needs to be good toast and it must be butter melting on the top.

Hot Pot with a choice of chutneys made earlier this year. Both the beetroot chutney and the spicy Rhubarb chutney went superbly well with this dish from my homeland.

There are very good raspberries available this year. I suppose this is a sort of Eton Mess. I prefer to think of it as a simple and delightful pudding. Yes, that is clotted cream in amongst the meringues and raspberries.

I’ve varied my snacks. I’m eating alone five days of the week (at lunch times). One day it is a simple punnet of apricots.

The next it is steak with potatoes and green beans. Both leave my feeling full and happy.

Another risotto. When the sun comes out I feel an urge to cook with rice. To take an hour off from my labours and sit and enjoy good food and  sunshine has been a regular pleasure this last fortnight.

This tortilla with melted cheese and tomato filling was my almost instant treat to eat while watching the State of Origin rugby match. There is no finer sporting occasion. If the world cup has shown football to be ninety minutes of people pretending to be hurt, them this was eighty minutes of strong men pretending it didn’t hurt. It bloody well did. It hurt to watch it. Especially if you came from Queensland.

A choice of apple sauce or crab apple jelly.

Roast pork, carrots, Jersey Royal potatoes, broccoli and delightful company. I don’t recognise father’s day… it was created for commercial reasons and has no place on my calendar. But, if I happen to have two children come for dinner on that day then I am more than capable of enjoying the occasion.

Happiness is a trifle made by my wife and enjoyed as a whole family.

Real happiness is having a second helping.

Roast pork and rocket sandwich taken on a dog walk in the sun.

A sneaky steak lunch with fried potatoes, grilled tomatoes and an egg laid by a hen called Pertelotte. In the background the geology text book that I pillaged for much of my recent series on the history of geology in Scotland. Geology is the perfect introduction to science. I plan on living long enough to be able to consider myself a scientist.

While digging a huge amount of concrete slabs out of the front garden I get the urge for a tin of soup. It serves me well for a quick and tasty lunch. It isn’t a patch on soup you make yourself, but sometimes it is just what you fancy.

Yet more steak but this time it is shared for an evening meal. The asparagus this year has been exceptional.

My favourite meal of the week. A classic. Despite eating well I have actually lost two inches around the waist in the past fortnight. There hasn’t been a lot of fat or sugar and there has been a heck of a lot of exercise. The garden looks much better for it, and I think I do too.

Addendum:

Enjoying the football. Have a nice week folks.

Day 293: Summer Solstice North Nottinghamshire

Tags

Langwith Colliery, Nottinghamshire, Pentax, summer solstice

Most of the highest points of Nottinghamshire are old spoil heaps from the coal mines that once dotted the county. There is only one working colliery left but plenty of glorious hills that are less than a hundred years old. Jolly and I take a midsummer early morning walk up the old Langwith Colliery tip. It’s thirty years since the pit closed and the hills are now a haven for wildlife. The dawn is greeted by blackbirds, yellowhammers and pheasants. There is no-one else. I wash my face with the midsummer dew and sit and watch the sun come up.  Many people travel much further to experience the event. The sun looked just fine from North Notts! The pictures are taken with my £60 point and shoot pocket Pentax.

 

Day 285: Over Bridge of Sighs

Tags

Cape Wrath, Cycle tour of Scotland, Durness, John Lennon, Kylesku Bridge, Lewisian gneiss, Scotland, Scourie, sitka spruce, Sutherland, Yoko Ono

A Journey into Scotland … Part 48

This road has taken some building. Transport communications this far north don’t come easy. Railway lines have to be floated on rafts of tree roots and heather across the vast moorlands. Roads here in the north west have to be blasted through tons of rock. The geology is revealed and anyone wishing to start a collection of rocks and minerals could fill their first shelf from the chippings from lay-bys.

At one time travel was slower. The great sea lochs add hundreds of miles to the Scottish coastline. At one time ferries or thirty mile detours were the only way across or round the tongues of water. This slowed the journey and caused bottlenecks even at quiet times of year. One of the worst bottlenecks was at Kylesku where a ferry transported cars and lorries across 150 yards of salt water.

In 1984 a bridge was opened that not only shortened the journey, but which brought a little piece of human beauty to the highlands. This is the sort of construction that gives concrete a good name. A deal of thought and one of the more respectable architectural firms (Arup) crossed Loch à Chairn Bhain with a bridge that  fits in with the landscape around. I’m so impressed that I forget my poor head for heights  (It isn’t a scary bridge) and stop in the middle to get a bird’s eye view. It doesn’t disappoint.

A short rise and fall on the other side brings you flush to the coast and views that send the spirits soaring once more. The massive bulk of Quinag stands with its three peaks in the shape of the milking pail that gave the mountain its Gaelic name. In England this would be a sight to see. Here it is just one more of those mountains that fail to meet the 3000 feet required to be a Munro. Each peak stands out differently. Even in the overcast swirl of a Scottish day in October, this mountain twinkles with different colours. Once you’ve collected your pile of stones from the Sutherland car parks, head up this bulk of a mountain and see for yourself the massive outcrops of Torridonian sandstones in their sedimentary layers, the Cambrian quartzites in their glittering array and the old as time Lewisian Gneiss that underlays the region.

Gorse and heather and boulders mark out the next few miles. Past lochans that make you feel like a swim but which would just about freeze the skin off you if you tried. Loch Creag an Eich looks no bigger than an ornamental lake with water lilies. My ankle is doing fine. I’ve got into the rhythm of the day and feel I could keep going til dusk. I have no plans for where I’m going to stop and as long as the weather holds and the world keeps looking as wild and rugged as this I don’t bother making any. The biggest hills are behind me. There are even long stretches of flat road which, with the wind behind my back, are as good as stopping for a rest.

The first trees for a while are Scot’s pine and they look just right in this wilderness. All too soon they change to Sitka spruce. There is little that is attractive about this tree other than its fast growing, straight trunks; and they only appeal to the sawmill.

Quinag and the Kylesku Bridge

At one time most of this land would have been a natural forest of scot’s pine and native species. I’d always thought that it was the action of people that had cleared away the trees. And certainly people have de-forested much of Scotland. The biggest cause of deforestation in Scotland though is climate change. Four thousand years ago it became colder and wetter. Scottish trees are well suited to surviving the cold, but the wet raised the water table and turned ground to bog. Trees are renowned as the lungs of the world. They seemingly create oxygen from carbon dioxide through that life giving process called photosynthesis. But trees need oxygen themselves. They take it up through their roots. But not when the ground becomes permanently water logged. Four thousand years ago most of Scotland’s trees literally drowned.

Huge efforts have been made in the last three hundred years to re-forest the hills and moors but these have been driven by market forces rather than with an eye to needs of the countryside. Eighteenth century planters saw a huge fortune waiting in supplying spruce for the British navy. Thousands of acres were planted. But even these fast growing trees didn’t grow fast enough. By the time they had reached maturity people like Brunel had shown the world how to build ships out of iron.

Throughout the twentieth century the Forestry Commission became obsessed with planting more and more Sitka spruce. Landowners, with some famous name pop stars among them, were given huge tax incentives to cover the world with this abomination of a tree. Even the positive and enthusiastic professor Iain Stewart described the plantations (they were not forests) as, “Square, dark, dingy, ugly, silent, unappealing, unattractive, lacking in wildlife… Frankenstein forests”.

Happily its time is passing. The felling of the last Sitka spruce should be declared a public holiday.

And then a first for me. Just past Loch Bad Nan Gad the main road, an official A road; one of the main arterial highways of the nation, narrows and crosses a cattle grid. These are common enough on farm roads or country lanes but to find one on a main route comes as something of a surprise. Beyond is untamed land where sheep and deer graze. The two look so peaceful and at home on the sides of the fell, yet the two are responsible for the lack of a human population up here. Thousands of families were forcibly removed because it made more money for the landowners to populate the north with a source of wool and an opportunity for the idle rich to come up once a year to maim stags in the name of sport.

At Scourie I’m taken by an outward bound adventure centre run by Tom McLean. He found a certain fame rowing the Atlantic and then sitting on Rockall, the lump of granite that sticks out of the North Atlantic as a perch for gannets and a gift to comedy, in order to claim it for her Britannic Majesty. McLean is Irish born so any claim by means of possession would itself be open to dispute. I went to one of these adventure centres run by  someone who had made a name making canoes on children’s television. The outward bound course was no better than you could devise for yourself and the whole thing was just another way of exploiting wilderness to make money and satisfy ego.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono a few days after the Scottish car crash in 1969 Photo credit unknown

In my father’s letter he said that John Lennon had crashed his Rolls Royce at Laxford Bridge in 1965. Other reports say that he got the car crash and the driver right but that the accident actually happened in Golspie in 1969 and that the car was an Austin Maxi. The incident hospitalised both Lennon and Yoko Ono and delayed the recording of the Abbey Road album by several days.

I keep going and going. There is a magnet that switches onto a particular destination after you’ve cycled a certain number of miles. This destination was Durness and the northern coast of Britain. I wanted to pedal out to Cape Wrath and stand on the corner of the country but neither time nor ferries would allow this. There is no road that goes right up the west coast to the cape. But even as I approach the Kyle of Durness, with the northern seas ahead of me, I find time for a last picnic stop on the high ground that commands the most inspiring view. I’m contemplating a night in the youth hostel and want to have a little bit of quiet time on the tops with a mug of tea before returning to the populated world.

 

 

Day 284: Happiness and Hurry Seldom Go Hand in Hand

Tags

Ardvreck Castle, Calda House, falling rocks, Loch Assynt, MacLeod, Mermaid of Loch Assynt, Sutherland

A Journey into Scotland … Part 47

The shores of Loch Assynt are undoubtedly beautiful, but this must be a tough place to live in anything other than the mildest weather. There is no visitor centre to destroy the lonely atmosphere of Ardvreck Castle. Just a sign to tell you to beware falling masonry. Plenty has fallen. The castle is a focal point for the glen but it hardly dominates it. Even close up it feels like a tiny place in a huge world. It’s built on a promontory that takes you out into the loch itself. When the rains come and the waters of the loch rise, it can become an island. I imagine that that would make it feel even more remote and desolate.

Once these lands were fought over. The very presence of the castle tells this story. It isn’t as old as it looks. Shakespeare was already in London writing plays when this was built. And it didn’t last all that long. This is MacLeod country and the castle was originally their assertion of ownership. The castle played its part in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (that we in England, with characteristic insularity, tend to think of as The English Civil War). In 1672 the castle was seized by the clan MacKenzie. It continued for a while in a less than warlike state. The MacKenzies had seen  that the future lay in living in houses rather than castles and built the first classical house in Sutherland. Calda House was rather more comfortable against the strength of a Sutherland winter. But, it too was short lived.

Local folklore tells of the house and the castle rather better than the recorded history. Both buildings are ruins now. The castle was damaged in capture but rather left for the elements to destroy. The house burned down in 1737 in mysterious circumstances. Some suggest arson while a story is told of a lightening strike in the early hours of a Sunday morning. This being a place where religious fervour meets the supernatural, the story was one of punishment for failing to observe the Sabbath Day. The MacKenzies had been partying on a Saturday but continued with the feasting, the music, the drinking and the dancing long after midnight. The sole survivor was a piper who had refused to play on once Saturday night became Sunday morning.

The ruins of Calda House with Ardvreck Castle in the background.photo credit inch-lodge.co.uk

A story is also told of the devil coming to Loch Assynt to wreak vengeance.  He had helped to build the castle in return of a promise of the MacLeod’s daughter in marriage. The daughter, Eimhir chose rather to throw herself into the lake rather than become the devil’s bride. Eimhir was transformed into a silkie, or mermaid, and still lives in caverns under the water. When she cries over her fate the waters rise, cutting the castle off from the mainland. The devil took his revenge by hurling meteors into Sutherland. The stories are good ones and fit in with genuine phenomena: the waters do rise, there are caves beneath the waters and a large meteor did hit the region. The dates cause a bit of a problem. The castle was only built in 1590 and the meteor landed around 1.2 billion years earlier.

The lowering cloud casts shadows even on a sunless day. The surface of the water changes shade and colour every minute as the sky overhead changes. I see neither devil nor mermaid but neither would have surprised me. It is an enchanting place. But the chill wind brings my impromptu picnic to a close.

I thought I’d be wanting to push on. After all I was now within a day or so of my destination, but this land of mountains is having the opposite effect. Happiness and hurry don’t go hand in hand. My whole being has slowed down and I’m more than contented. The road forks: one road heading for the west coast and Lochinver and the other heads into the most magnificent mountains yet. Here the geology is revealed as moorland and munros. On my left the dark peaks and on my right the white. I find a hundred different ways of expressing amazement. Britain is a small island, so how can it be so vast? And I practically have it to myself.

I’m told that in the summer these roads can be bumper to bumper caravans driven by resolute couples (always the man driving) who have very carefully attached special extending mirrors to their vehicles and never seen the need to look in them. I’d originally planned on making this journey in the summer. It made more sense. Longer days. Warmer days. But I’d had to shelve those plans. At the time I’d felt that September and October were very much the second choice. I had actually hit the jackpot. The autumn weather was fierce at times. It was certainly ever-changing. But it was inspiring and invigorating. You felt you’d been out in it and you felt better for having been so. The real bonus was having the roads to myself. For much of my journey, the asphalt ribbon was just about the only man made thing I could see. The rest was silence. Slow, solitary cycling at the back end of the year was the way I saw this splendour and it would be the way I would choose to see it again. Except next time I’d take longer. I’d park the bicycle more often and I’d get myself a mile or two away from the tarmacadam  and up onto those peaks.

The road never runs straight for long in Sutherland. It bends and winds between the slabs of rock, past lochans and peat bog. Every so often a boulder the size of several busses shows that ice has played its part in shaping this magnificence. I pedal along emitting a different way of saying “wow” every minute.

Sometimes the clouds lift and sometimes they descend. The aspect is changed completely. All landscapes look different is sunshine or rain. This landscape became different places. With a hint of brightness it welcomes you. With a hint of rain it becomes very forbidding indeed. Under heavy cloud all the rocks were dark. When the sun broke through it brought with it a range of colours that had been hidden. The white uplands and the dark peaks would be joined by scars of pink and ridges of yellow and rust and gold.

Where the cliffs were next to the road the falling rocks road sign would blaze out its warning. It is the most eye catching,  the most comical and the scariest of the British road signs. Boulders falling off a mountainside are eye catching. Depicting them with such a literal picture is both scary and a gift to humour. It may also be the most useless of the road signs. It’s very nice that the road engineers have drawn your attention to the fact that half that hillside may suddenly fall on top of you, or that a half ton rock is about to bean you out of the saddle. The question remains as to just what precautions you are supposed to take. I don’t take any. Leaving my well-being in the hands of the mountains I plough on slowly and steadily through beauty that, to my mind, is the very best that Scotland has to offer. For ten days it had been getting better day by day. It had finally arrived at perfection.

 

 

 

 

Day 283: Away From It All

Tags

Ardvreck Castle, Ben More Assynt, Blue Peter, Chris Bonnington, Inchnadamph Hotel, John Noakes, Loch Assynt, Muriel Gray, Scotland, Ullapool. Chris Bonnington

A Journey into Scotland in 1987 … Part 46

The loquacious fellow is there at breakfast. I try to take my toast and jam to an obscure table but he’s obviously used to people walking away from him. He picks up last night’s conversation at the exact point he’d left off. He’d read my mind and knew that I was dying to hear his views on rock climbing. He hadn’t read my mind very well.

“Yes Bonnington!” he practically spits out the syllables as separate words; his Ayrshire accent adding plenty of definition and spittle to the consonants and the spirit. “He’s nothing but a scribe. He can’t climb mountains. All he can do is write about it.”

I know it would do me no harm to pretend to agree with him, finish my breakfast and get on my bicycle as quickly as I can. But I can’t do it. Chris Bonnington was something of a boyhood hero. I’d seen him climbing, on the telly, since I was little. He’d even shown John Noakes how to go up a lakeland cliff on Blue Peter for God’s sake.* I found it rather hard to understand why anyone would pick an amiable mountaineer as his bête noire. It was almost like taking a pathological dislike to Henry Blake from M*A*S*H.

“You can’t call him just a scribe. He led the successful expedition up Everest.”

“Oh aye,” he responds with menace and threat in his voice entirely out of keeping with the atmosphere in the room. Some other hostellers looked across and I got the distinct impression that I wasn’t the only one to have experience of this fellow. “He managed the administration, but he got the other men to do the climbing. He just writes about climbing. Has no idea how to do it himself. Christopher Bonnington!”

The last two words were drawn out and used to salute the incredible piece of oratory he had just accomplished.

I couldn’t resist questioning his argument on the flimsy premise that he was talking utter bollocks.

“He was the first man to get to the top of the Old Man of Hoy. He’s well respected by other mountaineers and he seems a perfectly pleasant man.” I wanted to add, “Did he murder your parents and sleep with your girlfriend?” but didn’t.

“The Old Man of Hoy!” the whole tone of voice fills the room with scorn. “The Old Man of Hoy!” Once wasn’t enough for him to convey the contempt he wanted to pour onto the Orcadian sea stack. “Anybody could climb that. It’s nothing!”

It was around this point that I remembered that this fellow was a cyclist and that, if he was going away from Ullapool today, there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would be taking the same road as me. The prospect of spending the day with him was appalling. And then the gods smiled on me. He looked at his watch. Announced that his ferry left in half an hour and was gone. All of a sudden the room felt brighter and the jam and toast took on an Ambrosial flavour.

The first ten miles were hard. My accident on Skye had taken its toll and steep hills were difficult. There was no shortage of hills that pointed upwards. The route was stunning though. Right from the start I was following the Loch Broom up to the open sea. A perfect white beach at Ardmair would have had the primus stove off the back of the bike if I’d done more than five miles. This was picnic paradise. The road hugged the shore for a mile more and then took its way into the interior and once more Scotland played that trick. I’d seen the finest landscapes it was possible to see again and again over the previous days but this was finer. This was what I had come all this way to find. A landscape so unutterably beautiful as to speak straight to the soul and feed it full with the spirit of the earth. It is difficult to truly express just what it is we are looking for when we go out into the countryside, but whatever it is, there was an abundance of it here on the border of Wester Ross and Sutherland.

My first target of the day is a place called Ledmore. It is marked on the map with the same sized dot as Halifax. I’m hoping for a place to sit down and savour my first ten miles. I seem to miss the town and see a couple of buildings standing locked and uninhabited and remembered that there has been a second highland clearance. One that has happened more recently and is indeed still happening. The buying up of holiday homes by rich southerners. In her marvellous book The First Fifty: Munro Bagging Without a Beard, Muriel Gray talks of Sutherland as being an outlying estate of Surrey. A Scottish county where you will hardly ever hear a Scottish accent. A place of blazing loveliness and spiritual charm owned by the Home Counties Volvo set. She knows Scotland much better than I do and I highly recommend the book to anyone who loves the Scottish outdoors. It’s a joy to read. Funny, disrespectful, delightful and incisive.** I was travelling through the county and only really saw the physical beauty. I hardly held a conversation all the way up to the north so I don’t know the extent of the de-population by the wealthy. I do know that it is a serious problem throughout Britain though. Thousands of villages have lost their soul (and often their village shop and school) due to the buying power of the affluent in search of a weekend retreat.

Not long after Ledmore I am granted an opportunity to do a decent thing. A cyclist heading in the other direction has punctured and has no means of repairing the damage. It seems a careless piece of planning; to be so far out in the wilds without a spare tube or some repair patches. He’d simply been unlucky. He’d stocked up in Thurso but has suffered blowout after blow-out and used up his stock. (Any cyclist will tell you that you either go a thousand miles without a burst tyre or you get three in the space of an hour). He was  by the side of the road contemplating riding on the rims of his wheel  and hoping against hope that someone would come along with a spare repair kit. I was more than happy to be that person. We fixed the tube by the book. The little piece of sandpaper, the glue, the patch and the grated chalk were all used. I gave him my spare repair kit and he cycled off relieved and I pedalled away feeling virtuous almost to the point of being smug.

Riding up onto the tops on a damp day was like breathing in love and health. Over to my right I could perhaps make out the peak of Ben More Assynt. To my left Loch Awe and then the meandering downhill road that followed the River Ioanan towards the Inchnadamph Hotel from where Peach and Horne had set out to prove that these mountains had been pushed  up by a tremendous sideways force. I pedal past under skies that suit the location and, skirting Loch Assynt come across the peaceful ruins of Ardvreck Castle and succumb to the desire to sit for a while and contemplate it all while the primus stove brings the water to the boil for what I still believe was the best mug of tea I have ever drunk.

 

 

* Blue Peter was a much-loved, long-running,  magazine programme on the television for children who liked to watch birds, canoe rivers and make models of Tracey Island out of cereal boxes, toilet roll holders and sticky backed plastic.

** I was only made aware of the book by a fellow blogger (Andrew: see Day 259 Munro Bagging) about a week ago  and I thank him most warmly. I read it over the weekend and it filled me with even greater longing to go back and climb some mountains. I cannot recommend the book highly enough. I’ve always been a fan of Muriel Gray but that was as a television presenter who brought something new (honesty) to our screens, a perceptive journalist and as someone who has played a huge part in Scottish academic life. I didn’t know she was a mountain girl. She writes about them better than most.

Day 282: A Matter of Convection

Tags

Alfred Wegener, Arthur Holmes, Charles Lapworth, Charles Wyville Thompson, continental drift, convection, Einstein, James Hutton, Peach and Horne, plate tectonics

A Journey into Scotland … Part 45

A Diversion into the History of Scottish Geology Act V

The idea of continental drift goes back to 1912 and credit must go to a German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. He picked up the clues that Scottish geologists had found and noticed that they were replicated in different parts of the world. The clues were all in the fossil record. Near identical fossils found thousands of miles apart suggested two possible solutions. Either the creatures had travelled thousands of miles or the continents had. The fossils were often of animals, fish and crustaceans that lived in fresh water. A fresh water organism cannot cross a mile of salt water let alone four thousand miles of it.

Sometimes breakthroughs in science cause rejoicing and acceptance. Often they prove controversial and inspire aggressive refutation. Some scientists are good at aggressive refutation. In the case of theories that turn out to be true, the scientists who are best at aggressive refutation are not necessarily the best scientists. Everything to do with continental drift was contested. Correctly and rigorously by those keen to prove or disprove. Pig-headedly and wrongly by those whose intention was purely to rubbish the theory. Scientists claim to be governed by facts that are provable by experiments that can be repeated. If the experiments are repeated again and again with the same results then theories slowly become accepted facts. In reality good scientists follow these principles. There are plenty of people, who call themselves scientists, who appear to draw conclusions from belief and prejudice rather than an adherence to the truth.

Alfred Wegener

Poor old Wegener had no means of proving his theory. He couldn’t explain how it happened and, even if he could, he had no way of measuring whether it was happening or not. North America and Europe are moving apart at a rate of less than 4 centimetres a years. I’ve had joiners and plumbers working in my house who struggle to measure 4cm accurately. Measuring the same distance from New York to Brittany was simply impossible in the pre-global positioning world of 1912.

So everything was known except whether it happened or not and how it happened. Which is a bit like saying I’ve finished building the house except for the walls, roof, floors and learning how to do it.  It’s one thing to know the different elements that led up to the theory of continental drift. It’s quite another thing to piece it all together and come up with an explanation. It was natural, given the history of geology from the eighteenth century onwards, that it would be a Scotsman who solved the problem: his name was Arthur Holmes.

We like to feat our scientific heroes. We name colleges, professorships and school houses after them. Newton, Darwin and Einstein are well known names to most of us. Even those who can’t tell their evolution from their laws of motion and their awareness of gravity from their mc2 know that what they did was important. What Arthur Hughes worked out was every bit as impressive and every bit as relevant to an understanding of the world around us. It seems to me that we might be being a little selective when we hand out fame and fortune.

Arthur Holmes as a young man

It started with basic physics. There are three means of heat transfer. I know this because I was making notes in Mrs Delamere’s Physics lesson in 1970. They are conduction, convection and radiation. We were told to list examples of each for homework. I copied of Graham Holmes. He’d written down conduction: a pan on the cooker. Convection: our radiators. Radiation: the sun. I had to copy his down. We didn’t have central heating.

We were left with the impression of conduction and radiation being pretty powerful and convection being swirls of dye dancing gracefully in a beaker of water as it was warmed with a Bunsen burner. We were told that it  means that heat rises and we struggled to cope with this being true given that it is always colder on top of a mountain. We lived near the Lake District; there were lots of mountains near us.

The physics is simple. If you heat a gas or a liquid it becomes less dense and rises above the more dense colder fluid. Hot always moves towards cold. Dig out that lava lamp you were given fifteen years ago and watch convection in action. The blobs of oil are heated by the lamp at the bottom and slowly rise up. At the top they cool and descend again to be replaced by fluid that is warmed in turn.

Holmes knew that beneath the earth’s crust was a huge molten layer called the mantle. Beneath that was the outer core and in the centre of the earth was the solid inner core that contained most of the heavier elements. The heat of this inner core was some 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. (We understood Fahrenheit in 1970). The heat was caused in large part from the energy from a huge collision between the Earth and a Mars sized planet 4.4 billion years ago. That may seem   like enough time for it to cool but we are talking astonishingly hot temperatures and an astonishing amount of energy*: the impact was big enough to knock enough of the Earth out into space to form the moon.

Just in case any cooling was going to take place many of the heavy elements that sank into the inner and outer core are intensely radioactive and heat producing. They ensure that there is plenty of heat. (Incidentally among all the iron, lead and nickel in the earth’s core there is enough gold and platinum to cover the earth’s surface to a depth of over a foot). On top of that (both figuratively and literally) the earth has developed a crust which has cooled enough for us to stand on, but which keeps the heat in.

Holmes knew that this gave the necessary conditions for convection on a monumental scale. A scale big enough in fact to move continents. During the Second World War he volunteered for fire watch duties. Compared with Glasgow and the Clyde,  Edinburgh wasn’t heavily bombed and this gave Holmes a lot of time to work on the calculations that made him pretty sure himself that he had found the answer. The phenomenal heat from the earth’s core heats the molten rock (magma) of the Earth’s mantle setting up a convection current that rises strongly to the surface where it has nowhere to go but along the top until it has cooled sufficiently to make its way back down to the centre. In effect a conveyor belt is created and carried along this conveyor are the continents of the world. There were points where this hot stream of molten rock reached the surface and these were at the edges of the bedrock that the continents were built on. It was some time before these were more closely identified and given the name of tectonic plates.

Arthur Holmes

Suddenly the mid Atlantic ridge began to make more sense. This was a place where the molten centre was forcing its way to the surface and creating new crust as it cooled in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a time when pieces of the jigsaw suddenly started fitting into place. You didn’t even have to go right down to the bottom of the sea to observe the process. You could actually see part of the enormous mid Atlantic ridge for yourself. It is called Iceland. Here you can actually stand on a point where Europe and America are being pulled apart. And, yes, you can actually measure the process. Professor Pall Einersson of the University of Iceland spends a good part of his working life doing just that: with the benefit of satellite GPS technology.

Holmes had provided the explanation of the near eternal destruction and renewal observed by James Hutton. (Hutton had also been proved right about his theory that the driving force behind this process was great heat from the centre of the earth). Charles Lapworth had said that an enormous sideways force had pushed up the mountains of Scotland. Holmes had provided this force. Horne and Peach had said that the fossils on different sides of the Atlantic suggested that they came from the same place. Holmes had explained this. (At least he had provided the means of explaining it). Edward Bailey had demonstrated the incalculable power of the molten rock beneath the surface and Charles Wyville Thompson had discovered the under-sea mountain range where, in the words of Professor Einarsson, “The earth’s crust is being made.”

Holmes knew that the idea wasn’t going to be universally well received and he seriously contemplated not publishing it. In his 1944 book, The Principles of Physical Geology (I have a copy of the fourth edition on my bookshelf) he leaves it until the last couple of pages before he mentions the whole convection theory. And he takes care to couch it in the language of a theory to contemplate. If this was to be how the continents were moving, then this might be how it works. The diagram he had drawn to demonstrate the process is the last one in the book.

Note the words “purely hypothetical” in the 1944 diagram

Holmes greatness and modesty go together. It took until the 1960s when the Cold War resulted in hundreds of seismic measuring stations being used, by Soviets and Americans, to monitor nuclear testing that they inadvertently also produced an accurate record of the world’s volcanic and earthquake activity. We didn’t know about it at school. The teachers didn’t know about it. For a few more years it was argued over and disputed. And then, quite suddenly it was all accepted as a truth of geological science and geo-physics. So much so that today it is taught to year 8s. I suppose it’s simple once you know how.

And much of the story of geology happened up here in north west Scotland. On a single day I cycled from Ullapool to Durness. It was further than I could ever remember cycling before in one go. As well as the best part of a hundred miles pedalling I was also travelling though 300 years of the history of geology and through 3.2 billion years of geological history.

 

* energy can change from the kinetic energy of the impact to other forms of energy; heat, light, gravitational potential, electrical or nuclear, etc etc but energy cannot be destroyed or created.

Footnote: Much as plate tectonics seems to be the cause of the world being a dangerous and explosive place, it is actually a stabilising phenomena. I leave the last words to Professor Sam Bowring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think that plate tectonics is virtually inescapable on this planet. It is an exceedingly efficient way to cool the interior of the Earth.”

Day 281: The Big MacBang

Tags

British Geological Survey, Charles Lapworth, Charles Wyville Thompson, continental drift, Edward Bailey, Glencoe, HMS Challenger, James Hutton, magma, Peach and Horne, plate tectonics

A Journey into Scotland … Part 43

A Diversion into the History of Scottish Geology IV

There were many theories to explain why the fossil record of North West Scotland should more resemble North America than England. Scientists and theologians alike, stood side by side and, put forth explanations that allowed them to retain pre-existing beliefs. The idea of a land bridge linking Sutherland with Newfoundland was popular for a while; the Bible literalists adding the nice touch that it had been washed away by Noah’s flood. Unsurprisingly nobody put forward the idea that Scotland had once been part of the American continent and had somehow floated across the Atlantic Ocean to join up with England. Such an idea would have been preposterous.

A few more pieces were needed for this puzzle before even a genius was going to be able to see that there was a jigsaw at all let alone piece it together.

HMS Challenger

A jigsaw is a good metaphor though. It was something that had been noted from the time of Columbus. As late medieval cartographers started producing maps of the world, there were people looking over their shoulder saying things like “The west coast of Africa fits rather well into the east coast of South America”. It took a further four hundred and fifty years for someone to point out that there was a very good reason for this.

Just before Christmas in 1872 a ship, the HMS Challenger, set sail from Portsmouth on a voyage that would last four years and cover over 70,000 miles. The vessel was on loan from the British navy, had had many of her military features such as her guns removed and had been kitted out to make the most thorough survey of the world’s oceans ever carried out. An awful lot of the experiments  involved lowering things over the side of the ship; either to take samples of the water or the seabed or to measure the depth. To this end the ship set sail with 291 kilometres of best Italian rope.

Charles Wyville Thompson

The whole expedition had been suggested by Charles Wyville Thompson of Edinburgh University and the scientific work of the ship was done under his supervision. It was one of the great fact-finding missions of the nineteenth century. One heck of a lot of science was to emerge from that ship. For our story we are mostly concerned with the mapping of the ocean floor. In the Pacific the ship was the first to realise the immense depth of the ocean and located both the Marianas Trench and what is still known today as the Challenger Deep. In the Atlantic it wasn’t just the depths that surprised the scientists but the fact that the ocean seemed so much less deep in the middle. They had located an unbelievably huge ridge that ran all the way down the centre of the Atlantic from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Though under the waves they realised that they had discovered the longest mountain range on the planet. What they didn’t realise is that they had discovered one of the key pieces in the geological jigsaw.

Meanwhile back in the mountains of Scotland we move into the twentieth century and an Englishman. Edward Bailey was part of the British Geological Survey’s work in Glencoe. We’ll overlook Bailey’s Englishness and concentrate on the work that he did in Glencoe. It should appeal to geologists and tourists alike. It certainly appeals to me. In his documentary Professor Iain Stewart spends a good deal of time establishing Bailey as a “gung-ho nutter” and it seems certain that he was a maverick. He did things his way and he did them full-bore. It was an attitude that saw him collect a double first from Cambridge, a heavy weight boxing championship and, later, medals of a different sort, and even greater honour, in the First World War where he lost an eye. He eventually succeeded to the chair of geology at Glasgow University and was director of the British Geological Survey from 1937 to 1945.

Edward Bailey

Professor Stewart likes him as someone who toughened himself up by taking daily plunges in ice cold lochs and getting his school friends to hit him in the face. I like him because he used to eat his lunch straight after his breakfast to avoid the need to carry it around with him all morning.

His discovery rather changes the complexion of Glencoe. Its geography and geology is stunning enough as it is. Its history was about to become a whole lot more explosive. He made two discoveries in the field and was able to step from these to an almighty conclusion that changed our view of the highlands and filled another piece in the geological jigsaw.

The team knew that the area contained a good deal of volcanic material but were not able to explain how it came to be there. There were two sorts of such rocks; large crystalled granite that had cooled slowly and small crystalled basalt that had cooled much more quickly. The mystery was how the rocks could be found side by side and in such quantities.

Bailey and his team carefully followed a large crack that led up a mountain out of the glen and mapped it carefully. When they brought their readings and measurements together they discovered that the crack formed a huge circle, eight kilometres across. They realised that what they were looking at was a giant volcano which had grown so huge that the cone had collapsed into itself releasing millions of tons of magma in one of the biggest explosions ever seen on earth. The huge circle mapped by Bailey was a new type of volcanic feature; a caldera. These occur when so much magma is erupted in a volcanic explosion that it empties the magma chamber and there is nothing to support the weight of the mountain above and this collapses into itself. 420 million years ago the west of Scotland was one of the most volcanic areas on earth and Glencoe was the biggest volcano of them all.

Glencoe – Inside the caldera

This discovery moved the science of studying volcanoes (vulcanology) forward but its full significance for geology was yet to be realised. It still needed a true genius to see the bigger picture (and here I mean it in its proper sense of being able to make intellectual and imaginative leaps that would be beyond most of us to see a pattern that led to an explanation). But, by now all the main pieces of the jigsaw had been assembled.

• James Hutton had observed that the creation and destruction of the earth was a continual process that went back further in time than had ever been conceived or imagined. He also put forward the idea that the force controlling this system was likely to be great heat from the centre of the earth.
• Lord Kelvin had established that the earth had an age that could be measured.
• Roderick Murchison made some errors (who didn’t) but established that the various ages of rocks could be measured accurately.
• Charles Lapworth had discovered that solid rock had been pushed sideways to form mountain ranges.
• Peach and Horne had found fossils in Scotland that matched fossils found 5000 miles away in Newfoundland and Greenland.
• Charles Wyville Thompson had discovered an unexplained ridge of mountains running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
• Edward Bailey had revealed the incredible power inside the earth, and found that the highlands and islands of Scotland were full of volcanoes.

Horne and Peach outside the Inchnadamph Hotel Sutherland

All of these discoveries were incredible leaps forward in the understanding of what made Scotland the place of such indescribable beauty. Individually they advanced learning by leaps and bounds. Collectively they were about to change both the academic world and our way of looking at the physical world. It is the idea that explains how whole continents can become divided by oceans, how volcanoes form and why earthquakes can be expected in some parts of the world and not in others. It was an idea that was to give us new expressions: continental drift, plate tectonics and the Pacific Ring of Fire. It was an idea so huge that it upset as many people from the scientific  (and religious) communities as it satisfied. And the man who came up with it was a Scotsman.

Day 280: Women of Rock

Tags

Benjamin Peach, Charles Lapworth, Elizabeth Anderson Gray, Jane Donald Longstaff, John Horne, Maria Ogilvie Gordon, Scotland, Scottish Geology, Strong women, Victorians

A Journey into Scotland in 1987 …Part 42

 

A Diversion into the History of Scottish Geology Part III

 

The photograph shows a large party of Victorian men and women on a grassy hillside. Some are dressed to impress; there are a number of top hats for the truly distinguished and a dapper straw boater or two. The women are perhaps more sensibly hatted. Their hats are lightweight, wide brimmed and, in many cases, fastened on, either with ribbon or with formidable hat pins. These hats are suitable to the outdoors in the north of Scotland where the sun shines brightly, when it shines at all, and the wind blows most of the time. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the photograph is the fact that there are women there at all; in fact women make up nearly half the party; for this is a group of geologists in Sutherland. The man at the centre is Charles Lapworth who has taken his place in the history of geology. When that history is told it tends to stick closely to the pronoun at the beginning of the noun. Geology is all too often told as HIStory. The story of the men who revealed the secrets of the rocks. In fact, women played a significant role from the outset. And did this despite being discouraged, disadvantaged and often denied the roles they deserved.

These Victorians may surprise you if you share the belief of many, that they were a prim and proper bunch who had fixed roles for men, women and children. The men to go out and build factories and empires and to come home to a tidy house and soup served from a tureen. The women train to be the angel of the hearth; to busy themselves building a home and providing children for the man. The childrens’ job was to be seen and not heard. And, not seen until after supper when they’d be presented to their father like prefects to the headmaster on founders day.

Expectations were certainly there and social conventions were strong; and where this is the case you will often find strong women to defy the rules and to move outside their proscribed role. By strong women, I don’t mean the battle axe or the rottweiler that have made themselves prevalent in business, schools and politics since the time of Margaret Thatcher, by bullying their way to the top by confusing the word feisty for emotionally illiterate and praising their ability to see things clearly when in reality  they don’t see much at all.

http://www.scottishgeology.com

By strong women I include the idea of capable women. Those who were both good at what they did, and determined to do it, despite enormous pressures to conform. Strong women, like genuinely strong men, tend to be pleasant, amiable, intelligent, determined and driven.

Such a woman was Mary Jane Donald. (Better known as Jane Donald Longstaff). Born in 1856, and denied by her gender from becoming a professional palaeontologist, she devoted her life to the study of fossils. Her amateur status meant that she never became connected with a museum or academic institution which in turn meant that she was denied access to the literature and study material she needed. She divided her time between field work and a systematic study which resulted in her gathering one of the more impressive collections of fossils (which are now an important part of the collection at the British Museum) and making a significant contribution to the classification of fossils into genera and families. Her work was at first centred in Cumberland but later travelled extensively around the world, including spending time in Scotland. By her thirties she was publishing papers with the Geological Society. She married an entomologist, G B Longstaff and continued to make accurate contributions to the fossil record until her death in 1935. The fossil record was the first accurate measurement of the age of rocks. The classification of rocks into different ages was the vital link in moving geology from a science of classification into a means of understanding the world around us.

She was a close friend of Elizabeth Anderson. (Elizabeth Anderson Gray). A true Scot and another woman who was happy collecting evidence and samples in the field. Like her friend, she found the active life led to a long life. She lived to be 92 and was still collecting fossils until shortly before her death. She is almost certainly in the photograph with Charles Lapworth though I am afraid I am unable to identify just which is she. She collaborated with the more famous geologist on his work which established that older rocks could be found on top of younger rocks. Lapworth was to establish how this came to be, but the fossil hunters were the people who established the age of the rocks. Anderson Gray was regarded by her peers as being among the foremost experts on Scottish fossils of her time. Her reputation in this field still stands.

Both she and Jane Donald Longstaff received grants from the Murchison Fund to extend their work. Both published extensively and accurately and both were recognised for their work by the leading geologists of the day. It was a great pity that neither were accepted into a university or museum to continue their work with all the benefits that that would have brought, but neither allowed it to slow them down or dampen their enthusiasm. We often (mistakenly in my opinion) regard the first to achieve something as the pioneers, the trailblazers, the archetype. Often overlooked, and all too often forgotten, are the people who constructed the path that allowed the breakthroughs to take place. By the early years of the twentieth century women were being allowed to study at university, women were taking up teaching posts and becoming fellows and dons. Women, in short were being allowed their own status and their owns rights to pursue a path in academic circles; to develop their talents to the full and to make a lasting contribution to their chosen field.

This didn’t suddenly happen. Women like Anderson Gray and Donald Longstaff never had the opportunities. Without them the opportunities may never have arrived or would have been delayed for yet another generation. Not only were they important figures in geology and palaeontology, but they were also key figures in the feminist movement. We may think of Victorian women as being the angel of the hearth. The fact that we no longer consider this to be the female role is down to those very Victorians.

Going a stage further with her work and receiving the recognition of degrees from the universities of Edinburgh, London and Munich (the latter two being doctorates) was Maria Ogilvie (Later  known as Dame Maria Ogilvie Gordon).

She was also a close friend and correspondent of Charles Lapworth and had contributed to field work that he had done in Sutherland. She  knew and worked with John Horne and Benjamin Peach. She may well be on the photograph but again I am unable to identify her.

Dame Maria Ogilvie Gordon receiving an honourary degree from the University of Sydney in 1938

She is described on the Scottish Geology website as having become a promising pianist. (At what point do you become promising?). She decided against music in favour of science and studied at Heriot-Watt University and at University College in London. Her main research work took place in central Europe, first in Germany and later in Italy and Austria. Access to the field sites was difficult and required her to learn how to climb. So she did. Starting with studies of fossils she went on to give new interpretations and insights into the tectonic structure of mountains. Independently of Lapworth she worked out that mountains had been subject to enormous sideways force that she referred to as thrust movements. She was quite simply a brilliant geologist and a true pioneer of science and of the place of women within that science. In 1883 her work led to her becoming the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D in Geology by London University. In 1900 she became the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D in any discipline from the University of Munich. She published more than thirty scientific papers during her career, was described by her biographer as “probably the most productive female geologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries” and was awarded the Lyell medal in 1932 by the Geological Society in recognition of her outstanding work.

Oh, and after leaving the climbing boots and geological hammer behind she became active in politics, standing as Liberal candidate in the 1923 Hastings by-election, she became president of the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland, played a strong role in the negotiations that followed the First World War and in establishing the Council for the Recognition of Women at the League of Nations. For this she was made a Dame of the British Empire by King George V.

The role of women in the development of geology in Scotland has been immense. They haven’t always gained the recognition they deserve but that is hopefully changing. I’m enormously thankful. My geological knowledge has always been that of the interested layman but even at that level the pleasure of cycling through these remote parts of Sutherland is greatly enhanced. You can’t help being astonished at the landscape up here. You can’t help wondering how it came to be the way it is. Without these women we might still be wondering.

 

 

Day 279: Eating Out Eating In

Tags

Aldi, Amoretti biscuits, Bolognaise, carrot cake, Cumberland Sausage, Dorothy L Sayers, hot-pot, Lancashire hot pot, Safeway, Sheffield, Sloppy Joes, strawberries and cream, Waitrose, winter gardens

Mostly Concerning Food

Occasionally Saturday morning takes us to Waitrose. It’s always been the supermarket that I’ve allowed in after Aldi. It serves good food at acceptable prices and seems to have a more enlightened approach to employment. The problem is the customers. Educated types, bearded in the old fashioned way; which largely means without sense of fashion (and bloody proud of it) with a young son or daughter who they are training to shop. You don’t get married couples. You do get a lot of the wrong shades of orange and pink and green. Aggressive, unpleasant women pushing their trolleys at you in an  assertion of superiority; students with up-market, designer, low slung  trousers, same sex couples and lots of very, very old people, who you take pity on, until they shove their trolley into your ankle. On the surface they look so benign. I used to fall for it all the time. “Oh they’re just a bunch of people who’d rather have nice food and are keen to get up early for it. Where’s the harm?” After three aisles I’m muttering darkly under my breath.

These are people I have something of a problem with.

T has a solution. She pushes the trolley round and I go into the café and enjoy the free cup of coffee that my temporary membership card brings me: and today I have a Cumberland sausage cob to go with it.

The café (you can’t call it a cafeteria … this is Waitrose Sheffield … it’s a tiny home counties colony … more of a bridgehead… in the north. From here special forces of highly trained, highly cultivated people spread out unseen and introduce the steel city residents to air dried ham and those marvellous Puy lentils) has its share of aesthetes in situ. This used to be a Safeway and a place to sit next to a woman with no teeth in a navy pac-a-mac scraping the remains of her four hour old lasagne from a not quite clean plate. Things have changed. Every aesthete has collected the newspapers that are provided. Not just one section, but the entire Saturday parade of supplements. They guard these jealously; shooting glances at anyone who so much as looks as though they might want to borrow the sports pull-out. I help myself to a weekly review  without asking and settle to my coffee and sausage sandwich. I am very happy with this arrangement.

We move into the city centre. T has a hair appointment. I sit in the Winter Gardens and cannot resist the offer from the little café there. Any cake and coffee for £2. I don’t often have two coffees in a day let alone in an hour. The coffee is, if anything, slightly better than the excellent coffee I had in the supermarket. The carrot cake is even better than that. Forty minutes pass most pleasantly. Genuinely nice people come into the Winter Gardens. Often families with young children who share unfeigned excitement at seeing colourful moulded snakes in among the palms and ferns. They practice kindness and caring and sharing. Add to that the wonderful aroma of growing plants and the well chosen architecture of the place and you have truly found an oasis of goodness in a (mostly) good city.

It’s the first week in June and the weather has been a mixed bag. It rained for four of the days without stopping once but the other days had more of a feel of summer. We ate in the garden. We ate well. Strawberries featured at least three times. These are strawberries picked with the sun on them not from some poly-tunnel where they have been forced. They taste as good as they look and they look very fine. These with a little Italian gelato (I forget the brand but it was very good) and Amoretti biscuits.

A Marks and Spencer passion fruit Swiss roll provides a suitable interlude to  wondering whether Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey will get it together; while all the time knowing the answer. If there is anything that makes a pot of tea and cake taste better it is a fine June day in the garden and a Dorothy L Sayers novel.

We stay in the garden all day. It’s the first of June and T has completed her meat fast for May. She’s had a fancy for Slopppy Joes but we don’t have any buns. We do have some good sized potatoes and baking them is a garden friendly activity. You just put them in the oven and go and read in the sunshine for a hour. The meat sauce is more or less a Bolognaise sauce if you are not a purist. (The purist will insist on beef flank, unsmoked pancetta and absolutely no garlic. I never have been a purist in anything and I see no sign of conversion).

The Swiss roll was fine by itself but it comes to life the next day with fresh pineapple, coffee ice-cream and Amoretti biscuits. More detective fiction is the order of the day.

 

It’s back to school on Monday for T and I’m left unchecked in the kitchen. There is bacon in the fridge. I restrict myself to two thin rashers and load the plate with courgette and chestnut mushrooms. I listen to Start the Week on Radio 4 and read the food pull out section from the free Guardian (Waitrose) where Henry Dimbleby tells me all about the rules for making Bolognaise. I also start reading up for the forthcoming football world cup.

Having a dog who likes to dig up the garden has restricted what we grow. I have managed to position a few gooseberry bushes where Jolly can’t get at them. I look forward to at least one good pudding from them in the next few days.

More strawberries. With bought meringue nests and double cream. Perfect.

It’s actually been a simple and rather frugal week food-wise. A whole week’s collection of photographs down-loading from the camera tends to paint a picture of plenty. The reality is that most meals this week have been simple. Typical is a toasted muffin with butter, a little Marmite and Red Leicester cheese.

On Wednesday I have the car and take myself off to Sheffield again. Breakfast is a croissant and coffee at a well known coffee shop that doesn’t pay much tax.

Lunch finds me the only solo diner in Cosmo. It’s a Pan Asian eat all you want buffet that attracts couples who take it in turns to over-load their plates and business men who sit in groups of three and eat with their mouths open. I have a bowl of gloopy soup with an assortment of Indian style snacks … well, it is pan Asian.

And a very acceptable lamb rogan josh with pillau rice and a little chutney.

The photograph of the Black Forest Gateau (yes you can still get this in Sheffield) hasn’t come out well as I’ve had to change sides of the table as I had just about enough of watching male open mouthed mastication.

By the end of the week I’ve got to make sense of this year’s nominees for the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book. I’ve really enjoyed four of them. If one of the other four win then there has been an injustice. My favourite is also the one I regard as the best book. Not always the case. This year I think the prize should go to Rebecca Stead for Liar and Spy. It compares favourably with the other contenders and holds its own with many of the previous year’s winners. Half of these books are better than last year’s winner.

Friday finds me making ice-cream. Strawberry of course. It’s early in the morning and the kitchen smells of good things. The iPlayer is giving me the Carol Kaye story and I’m singing along to the remarkable set of hit records that find her either playing guitar or bass. I’ve been a fan for quite a number of years and am happy that her name is becoming better known. You may never have heard of her but she’s probably playing on your favourite song whether it be You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling, Homeward Bound, Nutbush City Limits, Good Vibrations, The Way We Were or the Theme from M*A*S*H. Or a couple of thousand more. It’s a perfect way to start a day.

Once the ice cream is in the freezer I make a hot-pot using a packet of lamb chops from Aldi, a couple of pounds of Maris Piper potaoes and a couple of white onions. A half pint of beef stock and some salt and pepper are the only other ingredients.

 

This is the greatest comfort food of them all. The potatoes cook like a well-flavoured Dauphinois, the onions are soft and sweet and the meat melts off the chops. Served with a generous dollop of beetroot chutney from the stock cupboard. Impossible not to want seconds.