Garden News

This is how the vegetable garden looks at the moment. We have finally had some mange-tout peas, and the onions and shallots are going down well. On the left at the front of the photo are the parsnips and beetroots, while the cavallo nero is under the netting [after last years attack of the giant catepillars]. The courgettes are just about kicking in, the leeks are starting up and there are lots of potatoes waiting to be "new".

Mixed bag

Work this week has included:
- A visit to Rochdale with Bev, my associate.
- Despatching the first lot of photos to Katy's school
- Doing another photo for a playgroup
- Revising a consultancy report in the light of comments from my client
It's a busy time, with Mother and Rowan here as well.
So that is my excuse for loosing at badminton to Edward...
The photo is of the cattle on the main old track on the moor

The end of the experiment

After one year the Great Gym Experiment has come to an end, and I have decided not to renew my membership. Danielle is carrying on with hers. I enjoyed it, but the novelty lasted about 10 months, then I realised I would rather have an hour on the bike than an hour in the gym. Anyway it was a good experience, and it feels good not paying out each month any more.
Granny and Rowan were on the moor today - here they are

Meadow Brown

Saw a Meadow Brown butterfly in the garden for the first time this year

http://www.butterfly-conservation.org/species/bdata/meadow_brown.html

so far the log for first sightings this year is
17 April - Peacock
23 April - Red Admiral
25 April - Small Tortoiseshell
25 April - Brimstone
4 May - Orange Tip
4 May - Blue [Holly or Common]
8 May - Small White
10 May - Speckled Wood
May - Large White
3 June - Wall [Hob Moor]
24 June - Meadow Brown

this seems like a lot, bearing in mind there are bound to be a few that we have not recognised

Tandem

Danielle and I went a ride on the tandem this morning. It really is a great bike, and we now use it in three configurations - me and danielle, me and rowan, danielle and rowan. It won't be that long before rowan and danielle becomes the next line up.

Busy but missing someone

Had another great meal at Vanilla Black

http://vanillablack.co.uk/

restaurant last night. A restaurant that is vegetarian rather than a vegetarian restaurant [so great food rather than grumpy lentils] We went with JZ and Edward just back from France and had a great evening.
Today a friend of Danielle and her family came for a cup of tea, she is up for a job interview so the family wanted the low down on York.
Lunchtime we went to the CTC cycle rally

http://www.ctc.org.uk/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=4377

which is our annual chance to get lots of cheap inner tubes etc, and bump into people. Saw Andy and Josh who are setting up a cycle recycling scheme in York, and the parents of one of Rowan's classmates who were missing Douglas as much as we were missing Rowan [back tomorrow].

Growing Up

Rowan is off for the weekend at an activity centre at Bewerley Park

http://northyorks.outdoored.co.uk/bewerleypark/

so I left her this morning with her suitcase and home-clothes. All the kids were very excited about it. This parent feels a little bereft...
The photo is of a path through the buttercups on Hob Moor, they and the Hawthorne blossom are on the wain now, with the elder flowers taking their weeks in the limelight.

Onions

The garden is finally yielding some produce - it has been a strangely slow season so far. The winter oniions [planted last autumn] have been lifted and are lying out to dry in the sun [make that , "freezing cold june wind"]
The peas and beans are coming up nicely and the lettuce is feeding us with one a day.

Al Gore

Danielle is in London tonight. She has co-ordinated a lecture by Al Gore

http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=1864

at the RSA. Lots of people trying to get on the guest list all day.
Meanwhile Rowan was in action at sports day yesterday. She did really well, you can see her straining hard in the photo.

Allotment Picnic

When Danielle was away Rowan and I went to some friends' allotment where they were having a birthday picnic for John. It was a great hot day and we spent the time drinking wine [me] or having water fights [rowan] and eating from the fire [all of us].

Produce

The gooseberries from the garden have done really well this year. We had a gooseberry pie last week, and I made a gooseberry fool today [gooseberries, creme fraiche, brown sugar, water mmmm]. Then there is the elderflower. Rowan found a recipe for elderflower cordial on the net, we picked the elderflowers from the garden, and were all set, save for the citric acid.
Ever tried buying citric acid if you look a bit dodgy?
"Hullo can I have some citric acid please"
stage silence followed by
"Why do you want it?"
me, nonplussed,
"er for making something..."
she
"we haven't got any"
When I finally got some I found out that it used by heroin users [the citric acid not the elderflower cordial] but I will send a less suspicious person out to get it next time [if I know any].

Black Hair

We all went round for tea outside at Bev and Steve's.. Rowan played with her friend Ella and her brother Tom, then Danielle and I went off to a gig, whilst Rowan stayed for a sleepover. Everyone was happy!

The gig was a modern music concert at the National Centre for Early Music given by Black Hair

http://www.ncem.co.uk/cgi/events/events.cgi?t=template.htm&a=622

http://music.york.ac.uk/ensembles/guest/black_hair/

It was weird [insturmentaion included ping pong balls bouncing and a clarinet without a reed] but fnatastic, we really enjoyed it. A friend Marco, who worked part time at the gym selling us coffee, was having his peice Trombone premierred, so there was an added intersest there. Great gig.
The early music centre was converted from an old church and is a beutiful building. We had a drink in the grounds at half time [photo] To cap a great evening off we got home to find that USA had got a point off of Italy in the World Cup.

Back Home

Danielle has spent the week in London doing a course on equities at the London Business School in Regents Park. She seemed to enjoy it, but it was a lot of work. Rowan and I got on fine in the meantime. We spotted a froglet looking lost in the dry arid wastelands of the vegetable garden, so Rowan helped it into the pond - [photo] - hope it can swim.

Art

On Saturday, when England were struggling to get Paraguayan, we went to one of Rowan's friends' mum's art exhibition. http://www.heatherniven.com/ Her paintings were really good. If we had a lot of cash lying around then one of her paintings would look good in our new room upstairs [if/when]. That is quite a lot of ifs. There was a particularly good painting of some bee hives in Greece that would complement Emma's bee painting that we have hanging in the dining room. The photo is of Emma's painting

Book Group

At Book Group last night we were discussing Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haller.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312421133/qid=1150374479/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl/026-9171611-9974034

which is a memoir written in 1939 about the rise of Hitler. We had a really good discussion, not everyone liked it, but I did. The usual mixture of wine, chat and Gwen's cakes! The next book is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson which is a bit more current.

The photo is another of Riddlesden Hall. On my way back from Riddlesden I saw a Red Kite

http://www.rspb.org.uk/birds/guide/r/redkite/index.asp

flying above the woods at Harewood. It is a great sight that used to be confined to mid Wales but is now as common in the Chilterns and the West Riding.

Snickets

I love nothing better than finding a good snicket [a small passageway] London is full of them, and York has insitutionalised them as snickleways

http://www.yorkstories.co.uk/york_walks-3/narrow_lanes.htm

which have become a leveraged tourist attraction [official guidebooks and so on]. But some of the best are in the West Riding of Yorkshire. When I was taking photos near Halifax last week I came across this cobbled snicket between fields.

Trust

On the way back from doing the photos at the school last week, I stopped off at the National Trust place at Riddlesden Hall

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-eastriddlesdenhall/

which was a beutiful place to have a cup of tea. It was the first time I had been there, and it is well up to the standards set by Yorkshire and the National Trust. Great.

World Cup World Cup

Friday evening I was in London, having been working in the day. I met up with Rob and Mark at Rob’s club in Soho, to watch the first couple of games there. Great to see them and to enjoy a few beers as the world cup kicked off. 20 years ago the world cup was on when I moved into my first house in Tottenham. 8 years ago England lost to Argentina on the day we moved up to York. 4 years ago England beat Argentina on the day we moved into Hob Moor Drive. This year who knows what will happen, but I am prepared for phone calls from various “we don’t have a TV…” friends who need a home when the knock-out stages come around.
Rowan is keenly filling in the wall-chat, the excitement marks.
The photo is from Kirtlington

Tandem

Rowan and I on the tandem, Danielle on her bike and Dave and Emma all went a bike ride to Bolton Percy http://www.doylys.co.uk/village.html , a small village south of York where there is a great café, that is rapidly becoming a cyclist’s favourite – there were about 4 different groups of cyclist there when we stopped for a cuppa. The route goes on a bridle way to Tadcaster, passing Healaugh Priory http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=36265 which is in the middle of nowhere. The weather was perfect and we had a great ride. The photo is of Knaresborough from when I rode to Harrogate a couple of weeks ago.

Butterfly News

Saw a Wall butterfly on the moor this week

http://www.butterflygarden.co.uk/butterflies/wall.htm

then Rowan found a Cinnabar moth at school

http://www.rspb.org.uk/gardens/guide/atoz/c/cinnabarmoth.asp

we had never seen one of these before, so it was well spotted.

The photo is of the Wheel

The Wheel and the Moor

Sunday we finally went on the Yorkshire Wheel at the National Railway Museum http://www.york-wheel.metaltype.co.uk/top.html . It is impressive but definitely looks small beer compared to the London Eye … until you get into the air conditioned pods. It is surprisingly vertigo – inducing, the tough looking bloke in the pod next to us had to press the alarm and make an early exit [ this involved the wheel reversing round for him to get out in a sheepish manner]. The views are great, and you get a good view of Hob Moor as well as of the Minster and the station complex.

Dog Show

Saturday we all went to Hob Moor Day, amongst the excitement were Birds of Prey [looses its appeal after 3 years on the trot] and an open-access Dog Show. This was more fun, but we were sure that Californian Ted would have cleaned up if he was there. The beauty of it was that the owners were truly a cross section of York life. Nice to see people we knew at the event, felt like a really good local thing.

A Rush

It has been a busy few days. Down to London on Sunday. I stayed at old friend Maria’s in a regenerated bit of Hackney – very pleasant to catch up with news. Her son Ricki who I took cycling in Ireland when he was 10 year old is now 27 married, with his wife expecting in a few months. Time moves on. Monday I started on a new piece of work in London – involving mapping a business process that crosses lots of Chinese walls and treads on lots of feet. This is great fun – honest. Back late and then up [very] early for the next round of photos.

Pond Life

Whilst Rowan was at Running Wild on Thursday I went a walk around the woods and brick ponds of Acomb. There are lots of ponds around York that were formed when clay was dug out for the brick building industry. Most of the ponds are tucked away and secret places. Chapman's Pond is unknown to a lot of people in the area, and is a real treasure [photo] I saw a Great Crested Grebe there, looking magnificent with its crest.

http://www.rspb.org.uk/birds/guide/g/greatcrestedgrebe/index.asp

Treescape

A beautiful day today. All the trees are now out, except the Lazy Ash which seems to be going for a new record, and the birds are busy. The photo is of a treescape in the garden.
Been chatting to nieghbours since I got back from Oxford. Gwen is back from a holiday in China, Robert is off to Arizona for work, and Ken is off to Abu Dhabi for work [and I'm going to Halifax for work, that's Yorkshire not Nova Scotia].... and this in a far-from-posh bit of York - globilisation or what?

Pollen

Rowanand I spent the last three days at my mother's for half term. Usual mix of things. We saw cousin Sarah on Monday, and discovered pollen flying off of pine cones [photo] in the Parks. Then on Tuesday we went to the Roald Dahl museum

http://www.roalddahlmuseum.org/

in Great Missendon in the Chilterns. It was a good [if small] museum. I liked the architecture a lot and the grass roof in particular. Rowan bought a copy of Revolting Rhymes

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/d/roald-dahl/revolting-rhymes.htm

which reworks fairey tales in funny ways.