January is Tax Return Month - but where's the snow?

grrr..... b)(*&£(*$^) f")*£%£&%)(%@>!!!!

Right, that's got that out of my system then.

It seems to be snowing. Well, it's been snowing in Canada (well, of course) and Edinburgh, and north east England, and up in the Pennines, and even Rex in Rutland is watching ominous clouds approaching, but here in NW Cumbria by the coast all we've had is a few tantalizingly lovely flakes, drifting down, lying on the picnic table, and waiting in vain for enough more of the same to turn things white.

I know I could get all the snow I wanted if I was daft enough to drive to Edinburgh - I'd probably get stuck half way again, like last winter, and I'd have ample time to take as many photos as I wanted while I awaited the snow ploughs.

Look - this is what I mean:
Above - the Pentlands under snow, January 2003.

Here's a photo of the Pentlands taken when I was travelling to - or perhaps from - Edinburgh, 4 years ago. You always get loads of the stuff between there and here, and even quite a bit there, but never here. Well, we have had a little over the years, but only just enough to make me gasp for more . . .

I know. I know. I should be careful what I wish for. I'll probably get stuck in a blizzard on my way to hand in my Tax Return at Whitehaven and end up getting fined for handing it in late . . .

Back to work

Fed up with all this gratuitous holidaying, I decided it was time to get back to work. It's all very well for people with jobs, who get paid leave at this time of year, but if you're self-employed you only get paid if you work, so unless there's something more important to take up your time (like morris dancing, for instance) you might as well be earning a living.

I'm in the middle of repairing at least 3 woven seats at the moment. There's the big ongoing project of course - The World's Biggest And Slowest Double-Panelled Cane Sofa - and I keep trying to do bits on this so that eventually it will be finished. This one is taking somewhat longer than I suggested to my long-suffering client when I took on the job, and I'm feeling suitably guilty about it. So I'm now trying to clear the decks and get all the smaller ones out of the way, so that I can concentrate on the big one.

Nearly finished the bamboo rocking chair, which, after giving me several weeks of wondering what on earth I was going to do with it is now turning out to be rather fun. It had originally been covered - seat and back - with ready-woven rattan webbing of a type I can't get, and although the owner was quite happy for me to use a different type I realised that removing the framework in order to install the new stuff would involve taking out rusty nails and trying to put back new nails in the very dry bamboo, which I didn't really want to get into, as this sort of thing is a recipe for disaster. So, having had a chat with the customer, and his blessing to do anything I liked with it so long as it ended up usable, I'm doing it in a completely different way, and it's turning out really well. I'm using Danish cord. It looks great. Just a little more to do tomorrow, and lots of loose ends to tuck in and tidy up, and maybe a few bits of lapping cane to replace over the joints, and it'll be done.

I'd have finished it if I hadn't had to go to Workington with my leaky tyre. The nice man at KwikFit discovered it was punctured in the tyre wall, which is, apparently, unrepairable, so I had to have a new tyre. Bugger. Oh well, at least it's safe again.

Above - boats in Workington harbour. A tripod would have made this photo sharper, but I love the colours. It's my mission to try to improve the image of places normally thought of as ugly and industrial.

Took a detour via the harbour on the way home and took a couple of photos of the boats as the sun went down. I really must start leaving a tripod in the boot, just in case, for occasions like this. Anyone would think I don't take photography seriously.

Hello 2008

Well, here we go - another year and still alive.

When I first moved to Cumbria from Scotland I couldn't believe anyone would be mad enough - no, I really mean sober enough - to go out morris dancing on New Year's Day. I grew up in a world where sensible people didn't emerge from the safety of their duvets until late afternoon. In England, New Year's Day is a bank holiday, and most people go back to work on the 2nd. In Scotland both the 1st and the 2nd are holidays. Even if they were supposed to go back on the 2nd, very few people would, so there's no point.

Anyway. I'm used to it now. It's a tradition now. We go out on New Year's day, meet up at a pub somewhere (yes, there's still a little drink involved) at about noon, and perform a few dances in the street outside before wandering back to someone's house for a bit of a party.

This year it was the Bush in Cockermouth Main Street. It rained, but the landlord refused to let us dance inside on the nice wooden floor in case it upset the 2 customers who were sitting there. Fortunately the rain eased off a bit so we were able, in the end, to dance outside.

It could have been a lot worse. Two years ago we danced at the Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, on New Year's Day, and the rain practically washed us away (see photo, left).

So, everything seemed to be going nice and smoothly. We all sloped off to Susie's house for food and wine and good conversation. Two of Bridget's beautiful granddaughters (they have 5 - so far!) were there too, one aged 6 and the other 2½.

Phil got talking about his electric guitar, and before we knew it we'd all got our instruments out - my guitar emerged from the car, Bridget's accordion, Gin's concertinas (she's got a new one for Christmas too), Pete's bouzouki, and Chiara joined in with her shakers. There were probably more songs than usual along the lines of The Wheels of the Bus or The Bear went over the Mountain, but we managed some grown-up stuff too and everyone had fun.

It wasn't until I was on my way home, driving up the really wiggly, narrow, dark bit of the road between Dearham and Crosby, that I noticed the regular thumping noise from under the car somewhere. Not the best place in the world to stop, on a nearly-single-track road in the pitch dark where drivers are trying to negotiate several tricky bends, so I crept gingerly along until I got to the lights of Crosby and found a safe place to stop.

We'd just had a leaky tyre recently, so my first thought was that the spare, which Steve had put on the other day, was also leaky and had gone flat, but it looked OK. Couldn't see anything obviously wrong, but the thumping sounded serious and worrying, so I heaved both the sax and the guitar out of the back, strapped them on to my back, and trekked homewards on foot. (Not as bad as it sounds - something like a 10-minute walk.)

Having changed into old clothes at home I brought Steve back to look at it, and eventually we discovered that the spare wheel had started coming loose. Oops. Just as well I drove slowly on it! I shall go see the nice man at KwikFit tomorrow.

I was once, many years ago, in the passenger seat of a car whose nearside front wheel decided to make a break for independence, and funnily enough, it was also on New Year's Day, though it would have been the year when I was about 19 or 20, and before I had a car of my own. Hilary had a mini (a proper mini - the original sort) and like all her cars in those days it was old and battered and, had the MOT test been invented then, would almost certainly have failed.

We were driving along Bucchleuch Street when I pointed out to her that there was something - oh, yes, it looked like a wheel - rolling along the road in front of us. Casually we both wondered where it had come from, and then the car seemed to realise something was missing and went, THUMP! SCRAPE! and sort of collapsed at the front left hand corner. The wheel, released from the burden of being attached to a heavy car, went rolling merrily off down the road, and we had to run after it to retrieve it once we realised it was ours.

Well, that's enough excitement for one day. I'll be glad to get back to work.

Charles Chaplin

It's easy to forget Charles Chaplin was also a well-respected composer, although his arguably most famous piece, the theme from the film, Limelight, is a tune many people will recognise though perhaps fail to put a name to.

I discovered a copy of the piano music for this theme in a box of music I acquired through FreeCycle. Here's my first draft of it as a piece for recorder quintet (Tr Tr T B B). Still needs a bit of proofreading, and most of the dynamics are still missing, but I think it'll work OK, and by the time Piping Hot Recorders reassemble after the festive season I should have a working version of it for us to try.

Listen to Limelight

This is an mp3 file created from the wav file generated by Sibelius Kontact player, so it's a bit artificial-sounding, to say the least, but somewhat better than a midi file I suppose. Not sure about the supposed 'recorder' sound, though: sounds more like flutes to me. I guess we'd better do it for real.

Nothing happened today . . . ?

I used to keep a diary when I was a kid. A page to a day, it always was, and at the start of each year I'd busily fill in everything that happened over the course of a day. Some days were full of things and others read something like this: " Got up. Had breakfast. Went to school. Came home. Did homework. Went to bed."

By the time February came along, those sort of days had degenerated into: "Nothing happened today." And by the beginning of April, most days would be completely blank. If a lot was happening in my life, I was too busy to write it down, and if nothing much was happening, I couldn't see much point in writing, yet again, "nothing happened".

Somewhere in the attic there's a box full of such diaries. Fully documented Januarys and Februarys, skimpy springs, and a big blank space for the rest of the year. Occasionally I'd write up my diary when we went on holiday, as there was no homework to do, and probably no TV to watch either, but other than that . . .

But is a blog the same as a diary? Probably not. And in those childhood diaries I suspect I had the wrong approach, anyway. It doesn't have to be a description of what you did all day, does it?
(Today - took the dogs for a walk in a waterlogged field; went to Sainsbury's; visited Steve's dad; watched yet more old episodes of Friends; read graphic novel; got legs squashed by heavy cat.)

So what is a blog for? Sharing my opinions with a largely uninterested world? Proving some sort of point? I really don't know. Why am I doing this? Um . . .

OK, here's a question: Is there any point in my arranging Charlie Chaplin's theme from Limelight for recorder quartet? Oh, wtf, I'll do it anyway. It's fun.

Stormy weather

Through the night the wind howled, the thunder crashed and the rain battered the rooftops. If you opened a window you could hear the roar of the waves crashing on the shore, just a mile away. I just couldn't wait to get down there with my camera!

There's not a lot else you can do in weather like this, and if you live near the sea it would be a crime to pass up such a fine opportunity.

Took over 200 photos in the end. Some of the better ones can be seen here. The sea is usually quite calm around here, so it was quite exciting to see real big breakers, crashing over the promenade or the pier. Anglers, hardy souls, were out in force in their gaily coloured jackets. I saw a swan, apparently surfing for pleasure, great flocks of seagulls (mostly the smaller gulls rather than the evil herring gulls) and oystercatchers.

Eventually the sun came out, making the big waves blue, but still just as loud and stormy. But the colour and quality of light that comes after a storm is quite beautiful, and even Maryport looked lovely for a little while.


It's a shame that Flickr was having an off day. Suddenly everyone was finding that only some of the photos they were uploading could be accessed, and chaos reigned around the globe for a while until they fixed it and we heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Laser cats

Picked up a laser level thingy in a sale for £1.87 - cheap fun for the cats! I've had them chasing it up and down for hours. It projects a line, rather than a point, so they don't know which end of it to catch. Great fun. And better still, it uses ordinary AAA batteries rather than those expensive coin-shaped ones that usually go into laser pointers, so it's cheap to run. I like it.

BODY PARTS PROBE!

Seen outside Tesco today
As my Aussie friend ObLiterated observed: "I bet the Coal Workers'll have something to say about having their body parts probed :)))"

FLOOD WARNINGS
Many people in this area are waiting nervously tonight for high tide, to see whether their local river will burst its banks (again) and flood their houses (again). It's the same places, too, that were inundated last time - the Warwick area of Carlisle, parts of Keswick near the River Greta, parts of Cockermouth near the River Derwent, and so on. The council knows what can happen, and yet not enough has been done, and people will once again lose property and have their lives disrupted. Of course it doesn't help that new houses continue to be built on flood plains.

This is what happened last time:

Above - Waterloo Street, Cockermouth, during the January 2005 floods.