Category: General

I stick the squeezebox on random…and it plays a song. And even when it’s not right – not right for the era I’m transported back to that period where, for a hot minute I was a DJ at university.

I went from hiding in my room at parties, being the “DJ” and playing tracks to keep everyone moving to being in the box in the only student run social center off campus.

I hopped from track to track following a gut instinct of what would make people dance. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Then I’d hand over the decks to Richard – way more experienced, way more professional, way more skilled. And I’d go out onto that dance floor.

I’d feel the press of hot bodies, the smell of drink in the clammy hot air, the sweat literally streaming down the walls of the building.

And for an hour or two, with the benefit of some alcohol – often quite a lot of alcohol – I could wash away the body I hated. I could feel the music coursing through me (pretty much literally, Rich was an epic engineer and it was LOUD).

I could feel my long hair brushing my neck, I could dance with my friends and forget who society kept telling me I was. I would scream along with the female leads with my voice cracking and breaking as they tore from me.

I would dance my fucking soul out.

And music can take me back to that moment. But it’s better… no — it’s fucking phenomenal now because I can enjoy my body. I don’t have to run. I don’t need the alcohol to forget. I can fucking be me, and throw myself around the (kitchen) dancefloor and it’s fucking epic.

I had a whole bunch of over-exuberant plans about how much I’d get done today. I mean, they really assumed I’d be in the mood for fun and frolics, and that the weather would be good. It wasn’t…bad per-se. It wasn’t hacking down with rain – that’s apparently going to be next week.

But what it was, was foggy. And grey.

And that combined with a not super thrilled mood – just feeling vaguely down meant that the progress this morning was incredibly slow. I got stuff done – I’m switched over to my new phone (which gets security updates…). Because I only do that once every 6 or so years I forget how long it takes. Thankfully I did remember yesterday to start it copying off photos – because that took more than 6 hours. I actually finished it this morning because it failed to copy some videos.

I also got Logitech Media Server running again. For some reason it had tried to run an update on its docker and that had resulted in it failing. I ended up trading for a different docker of LMS, and it seems to be working fine now.

I also trimmed down one of the rails for the attic door, and realised that my original fitting plan isn’t going to work. I’ll need to come up with another plan… which probably involves me buying a bit of wood. It’s obvious now I think about it, but it’s designed for going inside a doorframe, not inside an attic… Kinda irritating but not the end of the world by anymeans.

I also finally got around to calling the maker of our cooker – which has had one ring failing for quite a while, and now a second ring has gone down in power, and last time we made Pizza we noticed it no longer gets Pizza-hot. Oh, and one of the knobs disintegrated…

…it is, obviously, not in warranty being as it’s all of 3 years old. I informed them very politely that it was inadequate, disappointing, and that I will tell everyone I know to avoid Bertazzoni stoves, because they’re lousy quality and don’t stand behind their product. So I will.

I also russled up a pre-cooked lunch for Friday and Saturday, which I’ve been meaning to do more consistently. I baked some eggs a while back, and froze them, so that plus a chunk of sausage and some rice and fruit should do me. The idea being I shouldn’t eat out so much… which is always a bit tricksy.

I also chased up some deets about our Solar install – it looks like we’re good to go ahead and so I called them and lined that up. So that’s good. It sounds like a reasonable amount, but I had hoped to do some other things…

… and yeah, it’s my day off. There’s no requirement for me to do anything. I just had plans, and my mood got in the way :-/

So the en-suite. We were all ready to seal it… and then.

When we installed the toilet, we installed it and used it for months without a problem. Before the rest of the bathroom was even finished, we were using it. Before the shower was installed, we were using it. Hell, before the sink was installed…we were using it.

It was just fine.

Then I installed the bidet – it’s a sprayer with a tee off from the toilet fill connector. It seemed fine for ages.

Then suddenly there’s water coming from under the toilet. Not unpleasant, dirty water. No. This – so far as I can tell is clean water. Initially I thought it was water from Kathryn and I cleaning the tiles. It was just a liiiiiiittle tiny trickle of mostly dried up water. So I mopped it up.

And it continued.

And it continued.

And so I hunted around – the tee valve that connects the bidet is dry. The connection from the wall is dry. The tiles around the toilet are dry. The run of pipe between the toilet and the quarter-turn valve on the wall is dry. The run of pipe between the tee and the bidet is dry. The dry doesn’t have any drips on it. Running my hand all over the inside of the back of the toilet is dry.

I do not understand where this f’kin water is coming from.

I have turned off the water supply to the toilet. It still creeps out, so it’s ooozing out from either the cistern (which we flushed, but which still has about an inch of water in the bottom), or the bowl. Of course – being a single piece toilet it shouldn’t be able to leak from in-between.

So where the hell is it coming from?

So now we’re just waiting to see – when it does finally stop – which bit is empty. If it stops and the cistern still has water in then…we have a significant problem. Although we can unmount the toilet, but because it hadn’t leaked we sealed around the back edge of the cistern…so it’s going to be a spectacular pain in the arse to get it moved.

Anyhow, so there’s that.

We have, however, spent some time at the weekend cutting…the fire doors for the attic! These, plus the bathroom being functional* are what are required for permit sign-off, and they’re done! Well, they’re cut:

We also cut the pantry door, which is a bit more of a complex beast. I’m going to need to run around the edge of that with the trim router, which I should do before we oil it.

Then, in a spurt of unexpected productivity today – I cut some more skirting boards.

Quite a lot of skirting boards… and other random trim pieces.

I have, in fact, finally hit the point where I need to get more wood. Which is pleasing, because this stuff has sat here for nearly a year. Possibly more than a year. I also – almost – got up the enthusiasm to do some work on the kitchen shelf. Although for that I need a 2 x 12″ board, which I don’t have yet. But the thought did actually enter my head, which it hasn’t until now.

But, yes. I spent a lot of time today measuring and cutting – and working out what bits I could do without other bits. But now I need to get the wood for the trim around the en-suite bathroom door which is a bit of a complex beast. That and the bathroom (main) also needs trim. BUT – I’ve realised I do, in fact, have a rabbet bit – which is something I didn’t think I had – which will suit (I think) the trim that has to overlap the tiles. The whole trim-thing continues to be a total mare because to get stuff to fit the plaster – I had to plane the backs of the trim that’s around the doors. That means it’s a weird thickness…

Which means that the skirting boards need to have some sort of finishing corner on them to make them not look stoopid.

We won’t talk about the other corners, because the part of me that knows I should round off the cut end with the 1/8″ rounding bit is shouting louder and more incessantly.

I keep telling it to shush, and that no-one… *no one* but us will care. But it keeps whining about it. It’s most upsetting and means I’ll probably have to do that too on Saturday, before we can oil these bits of wood.

But it’s quite exciting. There’s quite a few bits left to go, but the stuff we had in the garage has made a big dent in the remaining complicated bits of skirting. After this it’s the bedrooms which are a mare because they’re full of stuff, but less of a mare because they’re mainly just two or three straight walls. A single cut-to-length, then oil, then install.

In other-other news, I finally replaced the temporary wire that ran to our second charger with a new correctly rated wire (the old one was…suboptimal and running near capacity). I also buried it to the proper depth, which was a bit of a mission:

I also *finally* got around to changing the faulty breaker…for another faulty one. Irritatingly, it turns out that the used breaker I got to replace the breaker turned out to be faulty, and the person selling it declined to take it back (which was only an issue because COVID meant I spent 2 weeks not changing it and went outside the return period). I gave up and… y’know what, I bought a brand new one. From Amazon. Because… well, in other expensive news, it turns out my aged phone is no longer getting security updates.

It’s about 6 years old, and I’m rather peeved to have to replace it because it still seems to be fast enough and works really well. But – I do use it for my job, and so it’s pretty handy to have something with a really good camera. The OnePlus 6 has done incredibly well – producing some astonishingly useful footage since it manages pretty good 4K with stabilization. But… yeah, it’s time with no security updates coming.

So… I took the plunge, and now I wait for the shiny expensive object to arrive. Meh.

* ish

So, if you’re wondering about the radio silence… it’s because I finally brought COVID home. Ironically not from the hospital. The repeated exposures there didn’t get me.

No, it was a perfect storm of misfortune. We went to Fully Charged Live down in San Diego – and while we were there we went for a dinner. We thought it was going to be outdoors, but it wasn’t. It was in a small back room, and just by sheer shittyness of timing, it was the same night as a game in the stadium. That meant that I dropped the rest of the team off – and they went in ahead of me. Had we all been together, it’s likely our collective panic would have driven us out of the place.

But instead, they sat down while I drove off to park the car, finally making it back about 20 minutes later. By which time, when I walked in, I felt like they’d been exposed and I was feeling social-obligation.

I tried to keep the mask on and eat safely – and maybe we caught it somewhere else, but the timeline of everyone’s illness points to a single point of exposure. And that’s the only true single point of exposure.

It’s been miserable, and I’m so very frustrated that I brought it home and got Kathryn sick. 2 weeks in and I still have a lot of snot, frankly, and an irritating cough. I get fatigued quicker than I should. Kathryn’s about a week behind… so that has spectacularly sucked. Thankfully the vaccines did their stuff, and neither of us have been dreadfully ill. But at nearly a year since my last vaccine my body’s had to do a lot of heavy lifting to get me better.

I went back to work on day 11, because, well – frankly – it was that or engage with the fucking atrocious US healthcare system to try and get some more time off. Today was my second day back at TE – and I can’t say as it went super smoothly. But stuff was filmed, and offloaded, and lo I shall have a ball editing next week.

In chicken news Thelma and Louise seem to have integrated pretty well. I mean, there’s definitely still Astrid and Pippi — and Thelma and Louise — but there’s not a bunch of fighting. Thelma and Louise are way more tractable, which is handy, although they do try and get underfoot. And Astrid is no longer broody – but is now molting. As is at least one of Thelma or Louise. The place looks like there’s been a chicken murder. It’ll be intriguing to see if there’s any big changes, because last time there were some pretty noticable shifts before and after in their feather patterns.

In other, other news, I need to get the shower finished still. Kathryn cleaned off the tiles, so I need to do the last bits of sealing around the shower pipework, tighten up the plumbing on the radiator, and then grout over the top of the shower pipework seal. Then it’s just sealing the tiles and the grout and trim. Endless trim.

But doing that and the attic doors means the permit can be signed off, so I’m gonna try and do a bit of that tomorrow. Unfortunately, just to drive us completely over the edge, the fan in the main bathroom has now died. I can’t believe that 3 years is as long as it’s lasted, and I kinda want to fix it – but I also kinda just want to get a replacement and throw the fucker in. I mean, seriously. 3 years.

We had a plan. It was a solid plan. The two new chickens (Thelma and Louise) were ready for their next step in flock integration. In where they can interact with – but not actually get to our other chickens.

1. We would take the temporary run in which they’ve been acclimatising down – it’s made with roughly 4×6 panels (of ABS pipe with chicken wire zip-tied to it… we’re fancy here). We’d move the panels into the main run.
2. We’d also move Thelma and Louise’s little portable coop into the main run, inside the newly erected fence panels.
3. Thelma and Louise, being more tractable than our older chickens would be allowed to roam free while this happened and then we’d catch them and pop them in their kind of sub-run.
4. We’d move their water and food in with them too.

Simple.

And it went flawlessly, until as we carried their water in it became apparent that while the easy-to-catch Thelma and Louise were now safely ensconced in their sub-run, Astrid and Pippi were enjoying the excitement of the garden having found an escape route through a previously unknown hole in the fence.

Astrid and Pippi are not tractable chickens. They do not crouch to be picked up. They sprint rapidly around the garden.

Apparently the average top speed of a human is 8 miles per hour. A chicken? About 9 miles per hour.

We did eventually herd Astrid back in, and Pippi – I caught her but with my arms wrapped around a shrub, which meant that Kathryn had to come and grab her from me in a careful chicken hand-off.

…well, valves. But that’s not so alliterative.

So as is so often the case as the deadline for our project being signed off approaches (or us getting *another* extension) I put a bit of effort in to trying to get things finished – at least enough – to get signed off.

The bathroom is the main obstacle, that and what turns out to be the terrifying price of CVG fir plywood. Dear lord.

So over the past few days I’ve made a more committed effort to getting the shower installed (a job I’d been putting off because I suspected it would be hideous), getting the bidet installed (a job I put off because it involved disconnecting work I’d already done), and getting the sink plumbing installed (a job I put off because I hate American FIP threads – despite the fact I used them everywhere because I didn’t know the US has finally discovered compression joints).

The shower – actually turned out to be (as far as I can tell so far) far less of a nightmare than I expected.

It took a fair bit of gnawing at the tiles to get the sort of wobbly stubouts (they’re kinked so you can adjust the width to make up for – fairly big – imperfections in your pipe placement, but actually mine were pretty much spot on because I spent bloody hours getting them to the spec on the piece of paper).

Once that was up the assembly proved to be fucking evil – because it didn’t seem like the people who designed it were actually aware that ceilings exist, or that it’s not possible to pass a screwdriver through a pipe to tighten up the screws. However, after a fair amount of pondering I managed to work out an order that allowed me to actually assemble it – and incredibly – it so far has not leaked.

The bidet was the work of a few minutes in the end. It’s awkward, because the toilet is incredibly tight against the wall – a combination of me not really understanding that in the US people often seem to mount their toilets with a noticeable gap between the toilet and the wall – which is probably because the floor mounted drain doesn’t allow for any position adjustment, so the plumbers probably rough it in with more of a gap than I allowed. A combination of that – and the fact that our wall ended up being a good half-inch thicker than we intended.

Anyway, so it’s tight – which makes plumbing anything around it fecking evil.

But, it actually came apart and went back together just fine. So now we had a shower and a bidet. I mean, we can’t use the shower until we seal the floor, but we *have* one.

That left the sink.

Now look, I am able to admit that I am no exceptional plumber. I can make things work – and I’ve got a grasp of the rules that I think is probably good enough to do most basic things. But I do hate FIP joints. Loathe and despise them. So I wasn’t…thrilled to be doing it. But off I went. I knocked the tape off that covered the holes, and took a chunk of time with the hole-saw cutting through the tiles to make a bit more space because I wasn’t wholly convinced by the alignment. And then I pulled the old plugs and inserted my brass stub outs.

And then I spent the entire rest of the fucking day in an unbearably tedious struggle with – mainly – this fucking valve.

It was sat on the hot pipe, and it leaked.

I tightened it, left it a bit, it leaked.

I took it apart, replaced the tape, it leaked.

I tightened it, it leaked.

I took it apart and I replaced the tape again – with a different brand of PTFE tape, it leaked.

I tightened it, it leaked.

At some point in this process, the cold line started to weep too – and I took that apart, retaped it with the new PTFE tape… And it was okay.

So I took apart the hot line a sixth time and coated it in the PTFE goop – and it leaked a little. So I tightened it up – and it seemed to have stopped. And a few hours later I went to bed.

Then I woke up in the morning…and it was weeping again.

So I decided it wasn’t me, I went to Bob and got a replacement, and I replaced it, taped it up, and… so far it hasn’t wept.

Before I ran to Bob this morning I had the great sense to plumb in the waste water, which incredibly, also does not appear to be leaking. Which just leaves the towel rail to install, for which I will have to get a hex whatsit adaptor because last time it was a pigging nightmare without it. And then… we’re done. Well, then there’s trim.

There’s always trim.

Oh! But I also picked up some chisels to install the new pulls for the sliding doors. I do have a couple of chisels somewhere, but I’m pretty sure they’re blunt as hell and I don’t have the patience or skill to sharpen them well (although I do have an India stone somewhere). I also worked out what bit of wood I’ll use to fill the void that was drilled in the door (because I didn’t realize that they’d pocket it for something stupid).

And I ordered the fucking expensive plywood for our attic doors. Which is the other job we need to be signed off as done. Which would be epic.

Our final day in the Lakes we thought we’d relax, take a nice short walk, something not too taxing and without too much height. That went about as well as usual, as we wandered up Muncaster Fell. Our map made us think that it was about a 600 ft climb, iirc, and then a faaaairly flat walk across the top – maybe losing a hundred feet, before climbing up, skirting the summit and then wandering down to a stop on the Ratty which would take us back home.

It turned out that the paths have shifted a bit, they now basically go to the top of the two peaky-bits (I mean, it’s not a very pointy fell), then wander most of the way down between the two, making the upy-downyness much greater. We made it longer trying to avoid the inevitable, and then when we had the chance to skip the highest point, we didn’t, because having come so far we thought it’d be nice to actually see the view from the trig point. It was.

The next day was, leaving the Lakes super early and driving. And driving. And charging. And driving. And Driving. And Charging. And Driving. AND DRIVING. AND CHARGING.

Yeah, renting a shortish range slow charging EV may not have been the best choice. But, it did it, we did it. And we made it to Brizzle where we caught up with one half of a couple of wonderful friends and their kids. We chatted and caused child-related-ink-chaos (one of their kids discovered that the pen we gave them allowed them to draw not just on paper, but also on themselves! Awesome!), drank tea, ate cake and then piled back in the car to drive the last few hours down to my mum’s.

She had persuaded my sister to stay an extra night, kipping on the camp beds in the study which meant that we got to see my sis and her husband as well. It’s been at least as long since I saw her as it has since we saw my mother, so it was a really lovely surprise and lovely to catch up. They stayed that night and so the next morning we got to have a bit more of a catch up before they headed off to the beach and then home. We – Kathryn, my mum and her husband and me, obviously, then went for a long wander on one of my mum’s favourite walks at the moment. One where a wild flower and grass meadow she walks through has turned almost red as the seeds have reached readiness…

The next few days were chatting, eating and walking for the most part… Enjoying the Cornish countryside, taking in some of my mum’s favourite places. We headed over to the Dutchy of Cornwall nursery where we, of course, partook in a cream tea. My mum also got some lovely plants, because – well – otherwise they’d get lonely. And we got some really nice ideas for plants for us to get for our front garden. That evening we headed out on a bat walk – as the light fades, the bats come out from the trees on the rural roads near my mum’s house, and as you walk along they’ll flit around above your head. It’s a wonderful experience that we couldn’t safely have here in the US (‘cos, no rabies in the UK).

That next day the rain was intermittent and we mainly hung out at home, just heading out with my mum for a brisk walk and some pony petting. I took a bit of the afternoon as the weather cleared up to film the drive review for the car we’d rented, having promised Nikki I’d try and review it since it’s a car we can’t get in the US.

We grabbed our swimming cossies the next day and headed out to the coast. We first headed out to Hollywell, which is a popular beach for both surfers and swimmers – first having a bit of a walk down the head before turning around and coming back having realised that we would run out of time before lunch. Paramito, my mum and me had a quick paddle while Kathryn guarded stuff and did some drawing – the timing didn’t quite work out so Kathryn didn’t get a swim there (sadface), and we headed back to the pub for fish and chips. After lunch we headed over to Cubert Commons – and walked down to Poly Joke beach, where after some lovely paddling I was attacked by a Weaver Fish.

Well, that might be an overstatement. I was stung. My first thought was that I’d been cut by a sharp shell, and I started walking out of the water…then the pain just kept escalating. It crescendoed and then I decided to have a little lie down for a second as I felt a weeny bit faint as the pain eased. After a couple of minutes I stood up and we decided that maybe we should head back to the car because it might be a sting that needed checking – since I really had no idea what it was.

As we neared the top of the beach we checked my toe and it had gone unnervingly white, with the rest of my foot swelling a bit – before mostly resolving by the time we got back to the car. To be honest it’s still not 100% now, but it shows no signs of infection and there’s no pain when I apply pressure. It just feels a little teeny bit off. Anyhow, we think it’s a Weaver fish sting based on the symptoms… next time I’ll be wearing shoes.

On the 2nd we popped around town grabbing some of the things we miss that we can’t easily get in the UK. KP Skips, Eccles cakes, chocolate digestives… We also picked up some bits and bobs for friends and family here in the US. Then in the afternoon I made good on my commitment to film – with Kathryn helping as camera person (lucky, because the wind was fierce) I rattled off the walk around from the car and rapidly shot some more B-roll to drop in the review. I’ve rough cut that today and it’s…surprisingly not terrible.

That next day we spent a chunk of the day – the morning – playing a fun packing game. I repacked the lawnmower I bought so it might make the flight intact, and we played an entertaining game of shuffle the item. Our pre-purchasing things weighing of the cases suggested that we had tons of space. Our post-purchasing of snacks and treats meant that we had to shuffle things very carefully between them to get them under the weight limit. It took much longer than we’d hoped, but we still managed to get out in the afternoon to Goliatha Falls which we’d not been to before and which is very, very beautiful. Unfortunately for us it was super busy that day, but my mum got to clamber about all over the rocks and utterly terrify me.

Then our last full day we headed up to Cotele to see the gardens. While not the biggest or grandest gardens, they were definitely some of my favourites – being as they’re much more informal in their planting and the location provides for some really lovely views. On top of that it’s a rare National Trust property that I really would rather like to live in. Not all of it, that’d be far too much – but maybe a wing. NT – call me? ;)

We went with my mum and her husband out for a wander in the evening and during it, he pointed out something that we’d never noticed before. Kathryn had spotted that a slab of stone currently being used as a footbridge over a little beck looks like it was once carved with patterns, and we were chatting about whether it might once have been part of a grander building – maybe a church or an abbey that disappeared in the dissolution of the monasteries in 1530, or perhaps from some other grand building. And as we made our way up the hill, my mum’s husband pointed out that one of the dry stone walls on the walk was almost certainly part of something more… grand. While some of the wall looks like regular old Cornish dry stone wall, two sides and this particular corner are made up of much higher quality stonework, and the corner in particular is gently, but very evenly curved in the manner of the base of a tower or somesuch.

It’s fascinating because we’ve walked past it a bunch of times and had never noticed… we had noticed that the farm barn a little bit further down does feature at least one window that clearly came from something – maybe a clerestory window?

The next morning bright and revoltingly early we started our trek back across the country to the airport… it was, despite COVID a remarkably okay flight and we made it into bed about 24 hours after we got up tired and weary but glad to be back in our own home.

Well, fairly astonishingly, we did it. Not only did we do it, but we did it in time to get down and (thankfully) get the train back to our studio apartment.

After some debate, we decided to take Wainwright’s advice, and instead of just heading up to Burnmoor Tarn, which had been plan A, we instead took ourselves up through Low Holme, and the Miterdale Forest before making our way up to Whin Rigg and across The Screes, before creating Illgill Head and making the (it turns out) incredibly steep descent to Burnmoor Tarn.

By this point we were both pretty tired, but there’s no point to bring pretty tired nine hundred feet and a few miles from your destination. So down we went the rest of the feet, our feet complaining intermittently and my sodden five fingers squelching away (to be fair, they started squelching in the Miterdale Forest).

To our amazement we did the whole thing in about seven hours, which means we got to knock the last couple of miles off the walk by taking the train again from Dalegarth to Eskdale.

We did, however, opt to treat ourselves to dinner at The George IV pub, which was…pleasant. Not amazing, but solid pub food.

Tomorrow we’re planning a longer walk, so today we planned a more relaxed day of not walking.

Which meant that we didn’t walk as much, and also didn’t wear appropriate shoes for walking. Which may have been an error. At any rate we went to check out Ravenglass, where there stands the highest Roman wall in England. Part of what was once a Roman bathhouse, adjacent to what was a fort, although the evidence for that is mainly underground (and indeed under a railway line) – although a plaque conveniently tells of its existence and of the 1976-1978 excavation that revealed a little more of its secrets.

As it often is, it’s amazing to stand in these places that feel so human and so recognizable, and yet are so far distant in time from us. The stone arch way and block work making spaces that feel very relatable, despite the many centuries that have passed since it was constructed.

From there we headed up to Muncaster castle, a seemingly slightly tired attraction (well, some of the less popular bits). We watched them flying some birds of prey from their hawk and prey bird center, something I’ve never seen before which really drove home the beauty of these animals. They explained how poachers in various parts of Africa are poisoning corpses to posion the vultures, because the flocks of vultures reveal the poachers activity. That is a terrible side effect of poaching which is driving the vulchers to extinction — vultures, incidentally are incredibly beautiful. Anyhow, they explained about their breeding programs (hey, it’s okay that we’ve got animals in captivity! We’re doing good things! (Which was actually good to hear)).

The rest of the gardens were pleasant, but mostly seemed to be rewilding themselves. The old orchard looked like they’d put new trees in a few years back but now seemed to be unmaintained, and the gorgeous collections of Rhody’s are gradually disappearing into a more native woodland.

…except for the bamboo, which seems to be as per usual on a rampage.

Having meandered all over the grounds we headed to the church of St Mary’s in Gosforth. Home to a number of Norse artefacts (a Nordic cross with pagan imagery on the side, one free leaflet inside went to great lengths to explain how this was most deffo in celebration of the one true God — although several other leaflets in the church (which weren’t free and for which we sadly did not have money on hand) seemed to have a more measured tone that explored the presence of pagan and Norse religions.

Anyhow, that was a brief visit since the leaflets were something we only discovered after wandering around and looking at the objects which seemed to have little information attached, so we were just admiring them for their naieve beauty :)

Tomorrow is the day we’ve currently scheduled for our long walk. There’s been some debate, but we’re both tempted by one of Wainwright’s suggestions. Risky because we’re neither of us terribly fit. But it looks quite, quite stunning.

So we’ll see how that goes.

So, despite my best efforts – well, perhaps my it turns out inadequate efforts to bring a keyboard to spur me into writing, it turns out my grotty cheap Bluetooth keyboard is dead or faulty. Its always been a bit odd, but connecting it today on day 7, I think, of our holiday – the first time I got around to getting batteries was yesterday – and it seems to be dead. It’s sending continuous zeros to the phone which doesn’t work very well for writing.

I mean maybe if you’re into a long string of zeroes, but for writing some kind of journal entry it’s kinda inconvenient. Also a bit annoying because I was hoping to get a bit of actual writing in and I’m unlikely to tackle that on my phone.

Annnnyhow, we flew over to Heathrow, with our fancy n95s on, because COVID. That, it must be said, really added to the je ne sais quoi of flying economy. After 9 hours of basically no sleep, no eat, occasional drink, we made it to London and forked out the nearly 100 quid for a taxi to Finchley where our hotel was. That was us trying to avoid another plague tube trip, especially given that we arrived on a 40 C day – record breaking again (actual wildfires in London), and didn’t really want to haul our cases through London on the tube, then on the train, in that kind of temperature.

The next morning our adventure began in earnest. A little late because the rental car arrived an hour and a half late, but we did eventually make it up to our Airbnb at Birley Farm in Derbyshire. From our base there we struck out on a couple of walks, the longest being about 5 miles, exploring a bit of the peak district I don’t think I’ve seen, and to which Kathryn had never been before. We took the time to visit Chatsworth House, which I don’t think I’ve been to in the past. Just the gardens and the grounds, obviously, although the weather was bad enough early in the day that we probably could have got away with a quick inside tour without it getting too COVIDy. The gardens are expansive and quite lovely, and in the grounds they had an interesting exhibit of Burning Man related sculpture. I’m still a little unclear on the exact relationship between the sculptures and burning man. There seemed to be some collaboration with Burning Man folks and local schools and artists, but the information they provided was pretty limited.

Then yesterday we brought the little rental EV up to the Lakes over Wrynose and Hardknott passes, which was a bit of an adventure, after stopping at Booths to get some provisions for our stay.

We’re minimizing inside time and contact with other humans in an attempt to reduce the risk of carrying COVID to my mum, and holed up in a little studio apartment in Eskdale, just above The Green station. Having done a couple of pretty long walks by our standards while we were in The Peaks, today we promised ourselves a gentle walk. Following along the banks of The Esk, we thought we’d meander to Stanley Ghyll Force waterfall if we felt up to it. Sadly one of the paths – the one to the lower viewing point – was lost to a couple of rock falls and is currently closed (possibly permanently, according to the sign). The upper viewpoint, which is very new and posh, was open though so we continued our treck up to the top. Of course it being us we decided not to come back down the way we went up, and taking our selectedly-revised-in-1980 OS map we decided to chart a course around the top and back down the other side.

That didn’t work – it’s possible that those paths were lost to rock falls at some point in the last 40 years, I suppose – but rather than do the sane thing we then decided to track across to Low Ground and then headed across to Whincop before following something that optimistically started out as a path before becoming marshland and then becoming “is this a sheep track”, and then experimenting with being a former path (the stile/climbey-over-wall thing was missing several rungs and looked thoroughly unmaintained and led to an area which was mainly just bracken and willful us going “well downhill is good”), before popping us out by a rather beautiful area that looked like it might once have been a small settlement now hidden beneath a woodland canopy.

Then a rather more intact stile later we found ourselves back on a clearly demarked path. All rather longer than we’d intended, but worth it to enjoy the remarkably good weather and the beautiful scenery.

Having survived our expedition we treated ourselves to a coffee / tea / cake at Brook House Inn before catching the Li’l Ratty back from Dalegarth. Something I think both our feet are grateful for.

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I’m still – as always – struggling with the fact that while I adore this place, the scenery is stunning and I just feel so – settled – in this environment, it’s also incredibly painful that the TERFs have made it clear that I cannot come back to live here, at least for the foreseeable future. Maybe Scotland, if they become independent, since the TERFs seem to have not caught on in the same way. But England? It’s simply not going to happen. And I never like having choice taken from me.

Add to that that the Republicans in the US have reportedly advanced a plan for legislation to forcibly detransiton trans adults if they get into power and things get a little angsty in my head.

Anyway, enough of that and back to looking at the pretty views.