GETTING STOPPED ON THE WAY HOME BY THE LITTLE PARADE

I was driving home, minding my own business and the traffic started to slow down until it stopped.

The car in front moved a bit and I folowed it, then it stopped again and I waited...

and waited... and waited... then this happened:

SOME MORE BOOKS JUMPED OUT AT ME AND I WAS FORCED TO BUY THEM

I went out this afternoon and I had a couple of minutes to kill, so I went over to the Oxfam second-hand book shop.

I just can't resist buying a book or two when I see them... and these are real class, books should be like this with plain covers, because it's all about the words you know.

DUNCAN TEACHES THE WORLD HOW TO MAKE A POACHED EGG... WITHOUT A POACHER

More of my crazy 'semi-domesticated male' stuff again today.

This is especially for Richard Vobes who, like me, is a fan of that great British dish...

THE POACHED EGG!

My late mother taught me how to make a poached egg without using one of those strange egg poacher pans where you have to put fat into the pan to stop the egg from sticking to it. Mum always said that you might as well have a fried egg if you were going to sit it in fat, so here's how to make a no added fat poaced egg.

All you need is a small pan, some water, a splash of malt vinegar and an egg.

All you do is boil some water with a big splash of vinegar in it and crack an egg into a saucer or small bowl, take the pan in one hand, tilt it towards you and gently plop the egg into the side of the pan.

The vinegar holds the egg together, so as it starts to cook you put the pan down and just boil the shell-less egg in the normal way making sure that it does not stick to the pan.

After three minutes or so, just remove the egg, drain the water off it, put it on a piece of toast and eat it.

Survival cooking for men... you can't beat it!

BREAK

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If you saw that I was taking a break from Twittering you will undrerstand why I'm also taking a break from Blogging...

More later.
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BIG BROTHER IS REALLY WATCHING YOU... AND HAS BEEN FOR YEARS

It's 45 years since the British government passed the Marine (Etc.) Offences Broadcasting Act to outlaw the offshore 'pirate' radio stations that broadcast from abandoned forts and ships that were outside of British jurisdiction in International Waters.

All but Radio Caroline defied this idiotic law that was the first of many high profile laws that all 'western' governments have been using to take your freedom away from you little by little.

Freedom to broadcast is no different from freedom of speech.

One day you will wake up to find that you have no freedom left.

That day is not so far away as you might think.

How long do you think it's going to be before they regulate the Internet?

... for your own safety, of course...

The Brirish government already 'monitors' email, someone from the security services is probably reading this Blog, and you can bet that there is someone in MI5 whose job it is to sit at a computer all day to monitor Twitter...

the lucky sod!

DAY OUT AT THE GARDEN CENTRE

Today we went to visit the garden centre, in the small village of Bamford which is just over the Snake Pass road near to the Ladybower Reservoir.

WE are planning a new garden, no trees, no plants, no flowers...

just somewhere clean and tidy where we can sit out and look at something that isn't bloody nature.

We live out in the countryside and just a little bit of something in the landscape that isn't nature makes a change...

... and there is the added bonus of NO GARDENING!

As befits a garden centre, this one in Bamford is surrounded by the spectacular countryside of the Peak District National Park.

They do an interesting trade in 'tubs,' these appear to be whisky barrels that have been sawn in half to make planters.

The building in the background is the BAY TREE CAFE where you can get a bite to eat, we had sandwiches and salad, very tasty.

Out here on the moors nature is absolutely everywhere, and so the garden centre sells a lot of concrete artifacts to go along with all the flowers.

We bought some flowers last year, I dug a flower bed and planted the little 'pottings' or whatever you call them and I spent the whole of last spring and summer tending them and watching them grow. Then the autumn came and they all turned into green slime.

My flower bed ended up as the place where the dog went to dig instead of me.

THE TRAGEDY OF GRANDMA'S ALUMINIUM PAN

My grandma had a set of aluminium pans that she got in the 1930s, before the Second World War.
During World War II there was a drive to collect all the scrap iron (that's why you can still see where the iron railings used to be outside many British houses) and more to the point aluminium pots and pans to make Spitfires.
Grandma was most put out by this, she was prepared to sacrifice as much iron-work for the war effort as Mister Churchill could get his hands on, but war or no war she wasn't going to let anyone get their hands on her set of aluminium pans and they were hidden away (probably on grandad's allotment) for the duration.
After the war the pans came out again and grandma used them through the 1940s, 50s and 60s, right into the early 1970s when she left Yorkshire and came to live in Glossop with my aunty.
The set of pans got distributed amongst various members of the family in Yorkshire and as a teenager I would often see on of these aluminium pans withtheir Bakelite handles in the kitchen of one aunty or another.
Grandma kept one pan, a small saucepan that she intended to use when she moved in with my aunty, but somewhere along the way it got passed on to my mother.

Well, the pan that had survived the war and and something like 70 years since grandma got it has finally died. The ravages of the gas stove has finally burned through the bakelite handle and the pan is of no further use...

They just don't make things to last anymore!

SALLY WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER AND THINNER THAN SHE IS TODAY

Sally has just gone on a diet, so in recognition of the fact these are a few pictures of Sally when she was a pup...

Wow! Look at that, a negative tum!

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Sally being protective of her nylon bones

These are just snack size nylon bones.

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Baby Sally in the back garden.

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Medium sized Sally...

before she filled all three seats.

SALLY'S STORY PART TWO - THE JOYS OF OWNING A LABRADOR

Sally's Story

Part Two

Sally had a big problem, she was bad tempered, she bit anything thateither moved or didn't move and she scared thelife out of most people that met her.

There was a time when we feared that she might have to be put down...but we were lucky.

Sally was not mad or bad, she had a small lump of wax in one of her ears and she was in more or less constant maddening pain.

Imagine having the worst earache ever, and having it all the time.

That was what was wrong with Sally.

One day I noticed a strange smell in one of her ears, I couldn't miss it because I had got my nose stuck in her ear as I wrestled her to the ground when she was having a particularly bad episode.

I recognised the smell, we once had a dog who picked up an ear infection and the smell is like something that has been dead for a long time, too long.

So we took her off to the vet and she had an operation to remove a great lump of hardened wax from her ear.

---

I have always said that if I had not seen the two crooked teeth in the front of her lower jaw I would not have believed that we were getting the same dog back.

What we did get back was this;

A lazy Labrador!

Suddenly we got the pup that we expected in the first place, she was a rather bigger pup than we bargained for but she was soon making up for all the time that she hadn't been able to have as a pup, and she hasn't stopped yet.

Labradors really so have the capacity to sleep all day, but you have to be prepared for the occasional

MAD HALF HOUR.

This is Sally after she discovered the Yellow Pages.

SALLY AFTER THE 'DEVIL DOG' PHASE

SALLY HOTPOT

the Yellow Labrador

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This is what Sally was like when we got her and for a long time she was a very light coloured Yellow Labrador with a very dark black nose.

Labradors grow, they get bigger, bigger still and then they get to be absolutely enormous, like this...

Labradors are supposed to be great big bundles of energy, Sally has the occasional crazy half hour or so, but she is a little too fond of her liesure,

that is when she can find the time...

... between sleep and

more sleeping and

pretending to be invisible.

I don't think she is very fond of the camera.

SALLY THE YELLOW LABRADOR (EXPANDED VERSION) PART ONE

The Hellhound !

Or, surviving the early years of a Labrador.

Sally's Story

--- Part One ---

The story of how we got Sally is, on the surface, quite simple.

Whether Sally was looking for us or we were looking for Sally has become just a little blurred over the past few years.

You could say that we found Sally in an adverisement in the paper, you might say the adverisement found us.

What is absolutely certain is that Sally was an unwanted pup and we wanted a pup.

---

About two weeks after our Black Labrador Ebony died

we had been just long enough without a dog to have gone through the 'never again' stage and we were ready to have another dog in the house.

Sally's original owners did not want her, they wanted the money, but not the dog and so we bought Sally off of them.

What we got was an adorable looking Labrador.

No two ways about it, Sally was a gem...

She was cute, with an almost white coat and a pure black nose.

Sally was a picture perfect Labrador pup,

but Sally had a problem and within a few hours she turned into

a wild-eyed creature from Hell.

It looked like we had got

a Devil-Dog, a real life monster, a

Hell-Hound !

LEFTOVER RELICS AND CURIOSITIES IN MY HOME TOWN

Glossop's Relics

I don't suppose that there are many people who have heard of GLOSSOP HALL.

All that is left of the Duke of Norfolk's former residence is the rubble that was left after the place was demolished and is scattered around the park...

like this enigmatic set of steps that seem to be leading nowhere.

They were once the steps that lead to Glossop Hall...

and there are other relics, like this ancient and crumbling brickwork which was once part of the walled in garden, common to most large houses at one time, where the fruit, vegetables and flowers were grown for the Duke's household.

This is now part of what is known locally as the Rose Garden

and it looks like this. The rose garden is next to what Glossopians have called the duck pond for as long as anyone can remember, in recent times it has been given the much grander title of

'THE LAKE'

... well it still looks like a duck pond to me.

This is one of the many side entrances to the park, probably it once had a set of large gates to go with the columns,

I think that you might be able to find them somewhere in Buxton

... with all the other things that were worth plundering from Glossop.

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Glossop also has a few 20th century relics, like this strange structure that is on the side of a hill just next to a public right of way on a local farm.

There is not a lot to see on the surface,

just some weird looking, slightly raised access cover and

a couple of air vents.

What this used to be was Glossop's very own nuclear bunker.

There is a ladder inside that leads down to a small underground room whose sinister purpose was to accomodate one or two members of the Civil Defence Corps who would monitor the start of World War Three.

Apparently the bunker has a pinhole camera that would have been used to take a photograph of the first nukes to land on Manchester and Sheffield.

The pole behind the entrance to the bunker has its own telephone line so that the survivors could report the end of the world to someone more important in another, bigger bunker.

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A more sensible relic of the late 20th Century is this poor old neglected structure;

they say that a picture is worth a thousand words and this is somewhere that many thousand words have been exchanged, but now it is being overgrown by the local shrubbery and only 'used' by drunks on their way home late at night.

These red phone boxes used to be one of the great symbols of Britain, but time has passed them by and most have been killed off by the mobile phone.

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Another thing that seems to by dying out is the great British dry stone wall.

there is an art to building a dry stone wall, it's not just a pile of old stone that divides one field from it's neighbour. A dry stone wall is a wonderous precision structure where some stones lie on others and some lean against another and all of them lock together to make a perfect wall where the stones themselves are all that bind it together.

The farmers of today would rather let their dry stone walls go to ruin and are contented to have a few wooden posts and barbed wire on their land.

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A major Glossopian relic is the industry that used to be a great part of the area,

this is the former Volcrepe factory, it closed down a few years ago.

The buildings were one of the Victorian cotton mills and like many of the other great mills in the north west were occupied by different businesses when the cotton trade moved elsewhere.

Volcrepe used to make heavy industrial rubber products on this site, but when they moved on nobody came to bring a new trade to the old mill...

... and it's been left to rot away.

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This is the centre of Old Glossop, known as 'Old Cross' and it used to be the original market ground of the ancient town of Glossop.

Note the Celtic cross, a pre-Christian symbol that was used by the original inhabitants of this country to symbolise their god, the sun.

This photograph was taken outside the gates to the local parish church, it stands on the site of a grove of trees that was once the ancient site, known as the Sanctuary, where Pagan worship took place before Christianity appropriated both the site and the symbol of the sun-god.

AT LAST I GET ROUND TO POSTING MY HOME MADE BREAD PAGE

Home made bread

Proof that the simple things are the most important.

This is where you will encounter real home made bread.

This is what home made bread looks like:

Feast your eyes on a wholemeal loaf.

See the texture of the real bread, this is nothing like the stuff that you get in the shops

which is all air and moisture, you know all wind and... water.

This is the real thing, proper bread.

Please note that this is the last chance you will have to see this loaf because

I will have already eaten it.

Here is more bread for you to look at:

Oh, this is the same loaf from a different angle,

and this is a white loaf on the left and a multi-grain loaf on the right:

Fresh bread, there is nothing like it!

This is the Multi-Grain loaf, freshly baked with the crust sliced off,

and this is another view of the crust with butter...

oops... I just couldn't resist taking a bite...

... and I decided to have another slice.

Notice the disappearing art of cutting your own bread.

Remember: It's the simple things in life that are important, the things that you don't really notice.

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