Stuff

GYM
Well, all that working out seems to have made my back stronger already, as I was only incapacitated for a few days, rather than the usual couple of weeks. I can actually feel some of these new muscles. If I lie on my back it's like I'm lying on something hard, until I realise it's a couple of muscles that run vertically down the back on either side of the spine. Heh. I've lived all this time without noticing they were there!

The gym has big wide-screen tellies in all the rooms, tuned, with subtitles, to BBC1, a channel I hardly ever watch, apart from the 6 o'clock news. Why are all the characters in Eastenders so ugly? I thought it was supposed to be a reflection of real life, but real people aren't so consistently unpleasant to look at. I can't follow the story at all - no idea who is who or what is what, nor do I care, but you find your eyes being drawn to it as you pedal away furiously on the upright bike or run, boringly, on the spot on the treadmill.

The reason they need subtitles is that they also have piped pop music. I tried using my phone's built-in radio with headphones so that I could listen to something of my own choice, but it's not loud enough to compete. I see people using iPods, but I don't really want to splash out that sort of money just so I can listen to the Archers.

RIGHTS OF WAY
They've recently erected a couple of new signposts in the village, proclaiming a Public Bridleway between Crosby and Crosscanonby. It's been a Public Right Of Way for a very long time, and I've known about it since we've been here, but it's been more or less impassible. Seeing these new signs I thought, "Aha! They must have made some improvements to the path! Hurrah!"

Last time I tried this path, you had to go through a big gate and through the seemingly private drying-green belonging to a farmhouse, and then into a big boggy field, with nothing to show where to go next. If, by dint of much searching, you actually discovered the spot in the fence with the stile, you still had to negotiate deep mud and broken wooden steps over the fence. When I discovered this I had to go back the way I came as it was impossible to get dogs over this stile and there were no dog-gates.

Seeing it was now described as a 'bridleway' I assumed it would now be improved to the extent that you could get a horse through. Hurrah! Entering from the bottom of the path, rather than the top, we made our way across the field to the place where the stile had been several years ago. It was gone. The only way you'd know it's the place to cross the fence is the absence of barbed wire for a couple of feet. I guess I could have climbed over - I'm quite good at climbing over fences - but the dogs wouldn't. It was too high to jump, even for Ghyll, who's happy enough to jump over things of reasonable height. No dog-gates, no holes in the fence, no way to get through. And as for horses? Well, yes, I know some horses do jump, but they'd have to be pretty accurate to jump that little gap, and if they missed they'd be impaled on the barbed wire on either side, or crash unceremoniously into the hawthorn hedge.

They say that if we want to keep our Rights Of Way open, we must use them regularly. How are we supposed to do that?

NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS


Just when I thought there weren't going to be any noctilucent clouds this year, I spotted a nice display the other night, as I was on my way to bed. Dropped everything, grabbed me trusty tripod and took a few pics. It's amazingly hard to get a camera to focus properly when the subject matter isn't very bright but I did manage a couple of good ones, of which the photo above is the best. I could sit and watch these mysterious phenomena all night - they're beautiful and fascinating, and, interestingly, a pretty recent thing. They may be related to climate change, in which case we should be worried, but in some ways I feel sorry for my ancestors who may have had darker skies and therefore a better view than we have of the winter stars, but who never even imagined the possibility of these beautiful nebulous things in the summer sky.

Making besoms!

Spent the morning at Ashgill Quarry, Plumbland, learning to make birch besoms. Quite a contrast to my previous learning activity, but a lot of fun, and it was nice to be able to go out wearing scruffy old clothes for a change. Bloody cold, so warmth was more important than haute couture.

Got stuck behind a flock of escaped young herdwicks on the way, which was fun, as I love herdwicks, and they did seem to be rather revelling in their newfound, but probably short-lived freedom.

Helen rests her weary legs: Hannah shows off a newly-made besom as one of the students watches in admiration.

The sun shone, the resident border collies brought sticks to be thrown, and we tied birch brushwood together and stuck poles through the middle. I now have a besom HP himself would be proud of, though, sadly, none of us managed to rise so much as a couple of inches off the ground.

BLOODY COMPUTERS
Spent the rest of the day, on and off, trying to figure out why my external hard drive has suddenly become invisible to my PC. Yesterday morning it was working, but when I switched on the computer again later, it had vanished. Well, it's still there - I can see it - and the LED is lighting up, so it's getting power, but the computer isn't recognising it. Tried it on Steve's PC but it, too, ignores the thing completely. Seems to me it's a mechanical fault, rather than a software problem, which means (a) we can't fix it ourselves, but (b) at least the data is probably safe. So I phoned up Westcom, our trusty local computer repairers, and have booked it in for tomorrow morning.

SECURE BACKUPS?
In the meantime I am bereft. I'm searching through backup CDs for out-of-date copies of my price list so I can update them and send them to enquirers; found one at last, as well as an old copy of several other things I need. But there are a number of jobs I intended to get on with today and tomorrow, and they'll have to be postponed for a wee while now, as I don't have recent enough backups. That'll larn me . . . The question is, though - What is a safe backup method? Everything can fail. I don't trust CDs and DVDs particularly, but that's where my backups are. I thought the external HD was more secure, but now it's failed! I gave up on minidisks because of the nightmare scenerio of some of the drives turning rogue and destroying any disk that was put in them. I just don't think anything's 100% secure. Perhaps I should upload copies of everything to some secure online vault or something . . . but how long would that take? And why should I trust them any more than my own local drives?

NO NUDE FEMALE DANCERS HERE
Heh heh. I've just uploaded to Flickr a batch of photos taken this morning during the besom workshop, one of which showed a strange figure I discovered on site, carved from scrap timber, and depicting an ethnic looking female dancer, apparently unclothed. Among the Flickr tags for this were words such as, "nude, female," and "dancer". It's now an hour or two since I uploaded the photos. Unsurprisingly, since it's Feb 14th and many people probably have better things to do than browsing Flickr, I've had no views at all on most of my photos, except for one . . . guess which one has already had 10 views! I'd love to have seen their faces when, after following links leading to the "nude female dancer" they were expecting,they found this instead!

Loweswater, unexpectedly

Below - NOT Loweswater but Cogra Moss
For once it wasn't raining, and my new walking boots needed a good workout. Spent a little while poring over the OS map (English Lakes, NW area), and remembered we hadn't been to Cogra Moss for ages. Lovely remote little baby lake, undiscovered by tourists, and only used by a few peaceful anglers and many waterfowl. (See photo, left.) It's sort of beyond the village of Lamplugh on the other side of the fell from Loweswater.
There's a little off-road carpark, where we left the car, and the dogs and I wandered across the field full of disinterested sheep, which hardly glanced at us as we passed. At the top of the field you reach a gate, and beyond the gate we found an ominous sign, informing us that forestry work was ongoing, and for safety reasons the path down to the lake was closed. There was even a useful map (shown right) explaining exactly which bits of forest were to go. Bugger.

Oh well, not to be put off, we put a brave face on it, returned to the car, and made our way to the next lake along, Loweswater. This turned out to be rather a good idea, as it happens, because I normally only go there in summer for some reason, and at that time of year the water is infested with toxic blue-green algae which makes swimming for the dogs too hazardous to permit. Today the water was clear and bright and the dogs could happily dash in, swimming and splashing to their hearts' content.

Loweswater is quite a moody looking lake on a grey day like today, but in some ways I prefer it without the perfect blue skies you see in the touristy photos. There were plenty of wet and muddy places in which to test the waterproofness of my new boots, and they emerged with shining colours. Well, they emerged covered in mud, actually, but my feet remained dry.

Halfway along the lake shore we came across a lovely little bothy, all clean and tidy and locked up, though it looks like it gets used by whoever can find the key. Through the window you can see a basic kitchen complete with cooker, simple bench seating and an instruction sheet. In the other room there's a ladder leading up into a loft, where walkers or others presumably can sleep. It's a lot cleaner looking than the bothies you find in the Highlands, but those, of course, don't need to be locked up. This one is too near civilization to expect civilized conduct from all who find it.
These are not quiet woods. Further along we hear a commotion ahead, and an army of benevolent English pensioners comes streaming towards us, all outfitted by the best of Keswick's outdoor gear shops complete with backpacks and walking poles. (One of these days I shall devote an entire blog to the pointlessness of walking poles, but I digress . . .) They look happy and fit, chatting pleasantly to each other, and smiling in a genuinely friendly manner to me and my crazy dogs. Sometimes you can't help liking English people, however hard you try not to. Then again, maybe I've just lived here too long, and I'm getting sucked in.

A little further on we find two ladies in identical red anoraks sitting on identical folding camping stools, taking in a superb view across the lake while they share a vacuum flask of tea. Well, honestly, what could be nicer than sitting with a friend (actually they looked like mother and daughter) sipping tea in such surroundings? See what I mean about being sucked in to the niceness of the English? I sometimes feel they need protecting from all these scary immigrants who will surely destroy all this niceness and turn England into a wild and crazy place like the rest of the world. Maybe it's up to us Scots to protect our auld enemies from something much worse. Strange thought, that.

Well, back to the dogwalk. I take photos of all the little streams that flow into Loweswater. Some are named on the map, like Dub Beck and Holme Beck, but others are not. I intend to upload some of these pictures the the River Names of Britain group on Flickr, but I can't use unnamed becks. Not that anyone would be any the wiser if I just named them on the spot - I could call them Oscar Beck and Aineko Beck after my cats. I wonder how long it would take before anyone noticed? Actually they probably never would. The internet is full of errors, mistakes and downright lies, which people just blindly copy from website to blog to social networking site without ever checking their veracity. I used to try to correct things, but after a while you give up. People don't want to know. So the description of the world around us is changing before our eyes: those of us who know what's correct will gradually die off, leaving a generation who rely solely on what they read online to inform them.

Is it a new phenomenon, I wonder, where one has a gut feeling that one's parents' generation was probably the best one, (well, apart from the wars, of course), and things have been sliding downhill ever since?

Too late

. . . to be writing much. I want to go to bed. But I promised myself I'd write a bit every day so here is today's news.

FLICKR EXPLORE


Why does it seem such an honour to have some of your photos appearing in Flickr's Explore? It's a computer algorythm for heavens' sake. Why should it matter? But I've just discovered I've had 2 photos put there, having a high degree of interestingness (now there's a neologism that just slips smoothly off the tongue, isn't it?) Both are photos of the Cumbrian sky, and one of them wasn't even taken with a camera, but with my O2 Cocoon phone. I dunno. Really, I dun. But for some reason I now want more pics in Explore.

TRYING OUT NEW BOOTS
Took dogs down very muddy lane, wearing my new walking boots, purchased in Keswick at the weekend. Came back with dry feet and dirty boots. They seem to work, then.

PIPING HOT
Supposed to be 8 of us, but only 6 stayed to play. Helen turned up long enough to convey her apologies, but they've sold their house and will be moving away on February 1st, so she will, sadly, no longer be available to play with us. The rest of us played a Petite Symphony by Gounod, and a few other things, and laughed a lot. This is what it's all about, really.

It can be hard . . .

. . . to think of something new to say each day. Hmm . . . well, it's been Sunday, and a fairly sunny Sunday, at that, though some would say it was a bit chilly. (Oh dear, I've sunk to the level of talking about the weather.)

Above - the Shadow People
Took dogs down to Rose Ghyll, which I usually do on a Sunday lunchtime. Bit muddy down there, but not as muddy as last week. Must get new walking boots: either my old ones have shrunk or my feet are still growing. Whatever the reason, they are now too tight and my feet hurt in them. Unfortunately they are my only waterproof pair.

Above: Rose Gill (left) and Cowfield Burn (right) its tributary.
Our local river, the Ellen, flows through the field down there. Nice, minor river - I like it. It enters the sea at Maryport, and never gets particularly big, though it's big enough at its mouth. Down at Roseghyll, though, it's overhung with trees, and in summer a great place for dogs to swim. At this time of year I worry about them getting washed away in the torrent, though, so I direct them to its smaller tributary, the Rose Gill. Until recently I thought this little burn was unnamed, and tended to refer to it as the Cowfield Burn for obvious reasons. However, I have now recycled this name to refer to the even smaller tributary of the Rose Gill, which doesn't even seem to be marked on the large scale map.