Staying dry. Out and about. A bit of language fun. Sneaky photos. Bits of beauty.

 I fully expected it to be raining when I got up this morning but it wasn’t. So I persuaded myself out of bed and went for a run before the weather decided to live up to the forecast.

I put some washing in the machine to complete itself while we had breakfast. Tea-towels and such I hung in the garden to dry as it wouldn’t be the wind of the world if they were rained on. Other items I hung in the spare room. Hedging my bets seemed like a good idea. 

Later, as it was still fine, we decided to take ourselves out for a walk almost at once, the forecast percentage chance of rain going up hourly. We managed to go up the hill towards Dobcross, down the path through the woods (and up again) and back home along the Donkey Line bridle path without rain. Good timing! It started not long after we arrived home.

We admired autumn colours on our walk.

 

And I sneaked a look, and a crafty photo, of the old Delph Station as the owner had left his gate partly open. 

I have commented before that it is rather a shame he hides this treasure behind a wrought iron gate, which was all right until he backed it with ugly planks of wood. Still, his property, his decision!

It does seem to me, however, that there is an increasing tendency to erect fences around property.

Here’s a little something I read about D. H. Lawrence: 

For Lawrence, “a child’s apperception is based on wonder”. By contrast, “modern people” are “inwardly and thoroughly bored”; they “experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man, he is dead.”

(Incidentally, this was from an article about the writer Geoff Dyer’s admiration for Dylan’s song lyrics.

We need to keep seeing, and seeking out, those bits of beauty everywhere.

Granddaughter Number One commented on our family group chat the other day: “Tell me how highly educated men can type 'Had the court waiting on tentacles' in seriousness”. 

We all laughed - i.e. sent laughing emojis!

Tenterhooks, by the way, were used in the fabric industry to stretch damp woven fabric into an even rectangular form. This may explain why it is sometimes necessary to pull T-shirts back into shape after washing. 

On the subject of tentacles, we were sitting in Waterstones cafe the day when I noticed a young woman at the next table whose very, and I mean VERY, long pointed fingernails were quite astounding. She had to sort of scrabble on the table (the sound attracted me) to pick something up with these claws. Amazingly, they did not prevent her from typing stuff on her phone with her finger tips - well, not really the tips, more the fleshy pad above the first joint. Her claws, by the way, were artistically painted in a variety of colours and patterns. 

Mine are cut short and remain unpainted. 

I read that stoves and fireplaces cause about 29% of particle pollution emitted in the UK, but there are even greater problems in eastern Europe, where solid fuel heating is responsible for more than 45% of the particle emissions in many cities.now warnings are going out about people adding rubbish to their home fires, causing problems with air pollution and with the effectiveness of their heating systems.

Long gone are the days when we had a coal burning stove running our heating and cooking systems in this house. It was picturesque but time-consuming and not very efficient once I returned to full time work. Whoever arrived home first had to “wake it up” so that we had a warm house and the ability to cook the evening meal. And it was very poor for baking cakes! Eventually it sprang an expensive-to-repair leak and we replaced it with a gas-fired central heating system and an electric cooker - also probably bad for the environment!

So it goes. Here’s a cartoon, with an environmental message and possibly a hint at Brexit. 

Life goes on. Stay safe, everyone!