I also took the time to go inside, for which I offer thanks here.
I do love old ecclesiastical architecture.

Side by side their faces blurred, the Earl and Countess lie in stone...

No idea who these people are, although they must have held a title to be so prominently remembered. I will look it up one day, I do have an enquiring mind after all.
And definitely no idea about what seems to be a severed slave's head on the monument! Maybe someone just left it behind one day when they were shopping. Imagine their consternation when they got home and unpacked their bags... Beans, salmon, catfood, hairnet, wait - where's that stone head?

(Oh, the first line in my post is from Larkin's An Arundel Tomb)

Something old
Something blue

Ooh ooh the blue houses!


Sent by thought transference

They just don't come out that well in photos!
You and I know how arresting they are to the naked eye, but this is about the sixth photo I've taken of them yet.

I walk past this pub every work day.
Never been in, looks too blokey.
And I walk home the other way, through the churchyard.

But I told you that pubs in Otley like their plaques, so here is another one.

Does this help?

John Wesley and the Ritchie Family

More window-dressed windows for the Carnival.
This bakery has two and split between the usual Tour theme and the World come.

Come on England!

Tell you what Carr, you come up to Otley with a compass which tells you where the North-West corner is and you take a photo.
And I expect you to wear your bestest silver flipflops too!

ETA sorry, that was meant to sound silly and flippant and instead sounded like drunken spousal abuse :eek:

Sorry my dears, we may have missed the boat on this one.
There were lights on inside and work vans in the covered yard.
I have a feeling we've been gazumped.

Someone has decided to make Thomas Chippendale look less 'umble.
Although I am worried about Mr Flibble having his ear.
At least I'm on the second floor; even with earplugs I'd hear him doing a Talos.

Yeah, good luck disentangling my references ;)

Kirkgate Arcade. Even if the mosaic tiles at the entrance idenify it as Jacksons Arcade :rolleyes:

There are places like this up and down England, but I've never seen one thriving like this. There's summat to be said about stubborn Yorkshire folk. We sell so much local produce on the Deli. If the Partnership was run by bean counters they'd be baffled, but their business model has always been about local and independent, as much as a countrywide business can be anyway.

I fell in love with these salt and pepper bunnies.
Don't need them, can't justify the purchase.
I just love the cheeky evil little beings.

Yorkshire and America reuinted.. pssst, you're looking the wrong way!

I promise you I have not taken a photo of every single shop in Otley.
And I know I am overloading you with photos.
It's just it's all new and exciting to me.

If I get a few years it will all just be standard.
If I get a few years it might be hospital interiors.
But you get what you buy.

Anyway.
Bike dipped in chocolate.
Of course it's chocolate.
Why would you think it looks lik anything else?

Just for the record, you do realise it's the Otley Carnival on Saturday, right?
More photos.
English carnivals do not follow the Roman tradition, but instead are held in the Summer. I was born on Carnival Day in Aylesbury, which used to be the first Saturday in July. No wonder I'm a meat eater (although I am mostly vegetarian and anyway the origin of the word is disputed)

So, last pic for now.
Don't cry.
Baksun.

I love your pictures, Sundae.

And your camera was just fooled with the red brick near those blue houses. When you dampen the red highlights, the blue comes out more.

Attachment 48155

Somebody here may need this http://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/now-then.


Sent by thought transference

I'm enthralled with your photos. The stain glass in the church is wonderful. Plus, I loved the twisted tree in the cemetery.

I see in Masham, Health & Safety strikes again. :rolleyes:

I suspect when one becomes a member of the Health & Safety SWAT Team, everything becomes a health and safety issue, and the biggest orgasms come from trumping another authority. But that's just a guess. :rolleyes:

Maybe. But I also maybe buy it. Ever pulled a wet comforter out of the washing machine to put in the dryer? And that's been spun free of as much liquid as possible. Depending on how thickly the fabric was layered on the lampposts, I could see it maybe actually being a significant amount of weight added, when rained on. Knitting can also be very thin, though, so who knows. I bet it had a ton of bugs living in it though, after a month...

We did have a brief (hahahaah) period of very, very heavy rain just recently

http://cellar.org/2014/wimpyposts.jpg

I don't doubt the string of knitting gets considerably heavier when wet, it just amazes me that their light posts are so wimpy. Also, I suspect the posts are a lot stronger than they think, although they should know best.
The posts bend under load? Ever see a light standard in a heavy wind, they'll whip like a willow.

My viewing Health & Safety with a jaundiced eye comes from reading an almost steady barrage of ridiculous stories, in the Brit press, with maybe 70% stemming from what I would call questionable rulings/enforcement from that agency. They could be a Monty Python division.

This yarn bombing thing has jumped the shark.

Oh, that's way less yarn than I was imagining. I take it back; they're full of shit.

I'd say about 70% is actually made up by the media.


Health and safety, along with 'political correctness gone mad' are staples of the press. Most of it is bullshit - like the war on Christmas ('can't even put a Christmas tree in Bradford any more!' yes you can)

Some stories also come from misunderstandings of Health & Safety legislation, or establishments blaming it because they do not want to carry out a Risk Assessment/ get adequate insurance/ actually be bothered with the event in the first place.

There was a report issued recently regarding stories which had come up through the local press which had nothing to do with Health & Safety.
For example Local Child's Party Cancelled; Health & Safety Concerns because it's in a pub garden and a glass might have been left on a table from the night before. So family calls up the local fishwrapper, who go to the pub in question, who say blahblah health & safety. Picked up by a national because the Mum is fit and the child is a curly haired moppet with big eyes. Big headlines, then buried in the last line of the article is a quote from the Council saying they had not been approached regarding this issue.

When properly investigated it turns out that the pub in question just thought it might be a bit dangerous and you know what Health & Safety is like these days you're not allowed to do anything, and they were going to be short-staffed anyway...
So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The report I read locally re the bunting was that there was one lampost which was affected. So rather than pay for repairs to ensure it was safe, far better to remove the efforts of volunteers :rolleyes:

It's the same thinking that cuts funding for successful patient treatment clincs (asthma, diabetes, obesity etc) where patients are helped to manage their own conditions by a pharmacist and a nurse prescriber. Save money in the short term. Increased medication costs and hospital admissions will happen in another fiscal year and from a different budget after all.

I was going to post earlier, but went off to paint the fence instead (Oh joy!)

In the meantime, Sundae has neatly covered the subject so I'll just add this from the Daily Telegraph.


Let’s fly the flag for the life-saving health and safety law

Given the Telegraphs's general outlook on life, it's surprising to see the article published there. However, some of the more forthright comments do tend to redress the balance.

Incidentally, I suspect that the term 'jobsworth' might not survive a trans-Atlantic exchange of electrons so allow me to assist.

Today I went up The Chevin. Or at least that's how they say it here.
I haven't worked out whether it's the range of hills, or the forest, or just one part of the one hill, so I say it the way they do. Pronounced SHEV-inn.

On the way I passed passed the launderette, so I know where to go when I want my heavy duvet washed - the light one fits in my machine but the one I use as a mattress cover is much thicker. I wouldn't have anywhere sensible to dry it even if my machine did cope with the wash.

I also went past this decorated street. No knitted flags, but bicycles on top of bay windows.

Next a car boot sale setting up on the Cattle Market - pleased I know where it is now. Also I didn't go into the car boot sale as they charged a nominal entry fee and I wanted to save my worldly wealth for later in the day. I don't even know if 30p would have got me admittance.

The road up to the forest is very steep. I expected that, from the way the hills seem to stand like a wall from close to the end up the High Street.
I just hadn't expected to climb so high for so long. Perhaps it was because the view forward was uninspiring. You had to turn and look behind for the view. Which I did.

Cool, thank you, and thanks for the jobsworth explanation. I'd posted the story here because of the proximity to Sundae's new stomping grounds and references to the bike race decorations. But since it's a bigger issue on both sides of the pond, let's stop littering Sundae's thread, thank her for being a lovely hostess, and take it over here... or over there. :blush:

Don't worry, you have to set threads free and accept they might drift.
I just happened to have done something today!

So, into the forest.
One of the charming things they've done is to carve stumps/ logs into seats and posterns. They are on the official paths and bridleways but still seem to happen unexpectedly.

The first I saw was an elephant, which was so cool.
Why no photo?
Because a little girl was sat on it, crying and bleeding from a scraped knee which her mother was trying to clean with spit and a tissue.
I did ask them to move so I could take a photo, but the Mum seemed to have a have a more robust view of propriety than she did of first aid and chased me away with a stick.

Joking of course (it was a rock)

Doe and deer.
My selfie didn't quite work out, but there were a number of people passing and I felt it would look vain t take shot after shot trying to get the angle right.

I got my fix of being amongst trees.
But not the peace and certainly not the running water of Arran.

People, dogs, bikes and horses. Not all in this photo, but in the woods in general.

Maybe I'll go again wearing boots in the Autumn.
It's just quite a long steep slog up a busy featureless road to get there.
I suppose I can get a bus on my day off and use all my energy up tramping through mud. Because there were boggy parts despite the fair weather we've had for the last week or so.

Lovely!

The one with the deer looks very similar in style to some of the sculpted seats (gotta use up those fallen/chopped down tree trunks!) in the park near here - wouldn;t be surprised if it was the same sculptor.

Once I've put this f%^&ing thesis to bed, me and you should go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. If you haven;t been there yet, you'll love it.

Nice park. Most of the carvings look like stumps that became available, but this one looks like it was carved elsewhere and anchored with angle iron. Maybe they wanted someplace to sit with a certain spacing between the last one and next one.

Given the spaces between tem I completely concur.
They are not uniformly spaced, but still a little more so than coincidence would allow.

Dana, you and me and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park sounds like a great day out.

SO.
The Chevin has a lovely sculpture trail. Can't fault it on that.
But when it comes to forks in the path/ major intersections on the bridleways (courses for horses) it is peculiarly mute.
They may issue maps, but I didn't see any. And the wooden signposts do not helpfully point out the Quarry Walk or the Jubilee Way or whatever they call their suggested walks on the few information boards I saw.

I didn't get lost. I got where I wanted to go, although not via the route I thought I was following at each turn. But all I wanted was a vaguely circular walk anyway.

When I decided to make my way home I didn't want to walk back down the main road. I'd seen that already and there was more to see in a Chevin kinda way.
The dotted black line denoted a path. The path went past a tearoom and WCs and even though I couldn't afford one and didn't need the other I figured it would give me a marker I could ask other walkers about. I was right.

Except.
Ex
Ept

The last lady I asked directions of (late lady, as I went back and hit her with my copy of A Feast for Crows) said amiably, "If I was you, I'd take the steps. They'll take you right into Otley."
She was right in one way. They took me into Otley.
Via a steep dizzying hell.
If I were you. Huh. That's like me trusting a stranger who says, "If I were you I'd relax with a bottle of wine tonight", not knowing (or caring to know) that it could be a horrible problem for me.

So if she was me she would know how absolutely terrified the steps made me. Descending about a mile in about 1/2 mile (I may be wrong but it's not intentional exaggeration) they are stone, tilted forwards, uneven and with an uneven tread.

I have previously documented my horror of heights, my inability to descend even normal staircases and my general fear that one day terror will render me insensate. All came into play here. I could not look beyond my feet because the further stairs just kept appearing, turn after turn. I could not look ahead because Otley was still laid out before me, like a place I could fall into.

I just had to take one step at a time, try to stop shaking and do it.
I didn't stop shaking (by the bottom that was just fatigue in my legs) but the closer I got to ground level the better I felt.

Would I do it again?
I bet you're thinking I'll say something like - would I buggery!
But yes, I will. same way I would climb St Peter's Dome in Venice, or bungee jump again. Because if things scare you this much, even if you hate them, you have to be open to beating them. And this challenge comes for free.

Photos from when I thought I was dealing with it and was able to turn around to document my [progress. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
This was just an aperitif. Note, they are earth here, not stone. And I can still see the top aka escape route.

It is locally known as Jacob's ladder.

Those aren't steps, that's a hilly path made more difficult with the addition of some pieces of wood!

There were steps later. Stone.
All tilted forwards.

Why do you think I only ever sit in the Stalls when I go to the theatre?
Not because I am rolling in money, but because I was terrified by my first ever West End trip. We had seats in the Gods, where it felt like a trip would have had me in the orchestra pit, via the two Circles below.

Footsore and sweaty, I walked past some lovely houses. Of course.
I don't think they had back gardens, because many people were out in the front.
All saying hello and acting as if a blistered women with the shakes and a wild-eyed look was completely normal of a Sunday lunchtime.

I want to live in one of these.
Someone I know and love can live in the one next door.
Form an orderly queue please.

The second pic is for Sarge, who is obviously a Wesley fan ;)

They went and did it; they bought The Black Horse out from under us. I was mere hours away from getting the finances together as well. Tchah.
Overheard a lass saying, "We'll see how long it lasts this time" so perhaps it's not the money-spinner I'd been picturing. Then again perfectly viable places can have a run of poor management.

More Tour-related decoration.
Gosh I won't recognise the place when it's all done and dusted.
Although during the two weeks after Le Grand Depart I am working my little socks off, as other Partners are getting their holidays in before schools break up and prices spike. So by the time I miss the things which I am familiar with, it will be old news.

Mum is in love with Otley.

She really wants to bring Dad here when the house finally sells. Her only worry is getting him across London. They have to come into one London station and leave from another, and although Undertoad recognised that the signage on the Tube is excellent - and Mum knows it better than the back of her hand anyway - it's hard getting a man with mobility problems and dementia on and off trains and platforms while juggling a case and bag and tickets.

I said if money isn't an issue (not megabucks, but enough not to be scared of small bills) I'll come down early and meet them at Marylebone to travel back up. I've always been more patient with Dad than Mum, just because he is my Dad and not my life partner. I can get them across London. I'm not saying it will be easy, but it will be less stress for Mum that way.

She came up first class. Never travelled on an Inter-City train before, and never first class. Don't get me wrong, the 'rents have been all over the world. You may remember that Mum went literally half a world away (Australia) on her own. But Dad was a driver until recently, so any significant distances in the UK were by car. And there is no first class between Aylesbury and London because the trip is too short (so why would you?)

She loved it. She said Dad would love it. She said she felt so important and so spoiled. And it was the weekend, so all she got was a sandwich, a muffin and a cup of tea! And we would get a taxi from Leeds because the buses are shit (her words).

Anyway, she says that Otley is perfect for Dad because you only have to walk 50 yards in any direction to find a bench, a pub, a tearoom etc. All on the flat (in the town centre at least) and lots of places are OAP friendly and accessible. And he would love seeing the planes take off from Leeds/ Bradford airport - they suddenly appear from over The Chevin. Far lower and closer than he is used to.

He gets so tired now. Possibly because he isn't eating.
One of those little individual packets of Kelloggs is two breakfasts for him these days. He gets up, showers and dresses, finds the kitchen and has a few mouthfuls. Then he has to go and sit down for a while :(

Anyway. I'm glad Mum came up on her own.
It would be wonderful if Dad comes up too, because if he does at least Mum will have an idea of what there is for him and where it it etc.

Farmer's Market yesterday.
Didn't get any useable photos because there are so many stalls packed into such a small space. No room to stand back and take a pic. This stall specialising in mushrooms was on the edge of the market. I was fascinated by the shapes and colours. The pink ones look like offal.

I don't know if you are familiar with the concept of love locks?
It's where you attach a padlock to a bridge as a sign of your love for someone.

I noticed some on the Wharfedale Bridge, the bridge I walk over nearly every Sunday to feed the ducks (not with bread!) and read on a bench and have the occasional ice-cream. So knowing Mum was coming up, and knowing she probably wouldn't know about this, I got a padlock and had it inscribed.

I stopped on the bridge and drew her attention to those already there, explaining what they were and why they were there. She thought it was really sweet. Then taa-daa! From my Mary Poppins bag I brought out ours. I did it so every time I go across the bridge I will look at it and think of home. It was like I hit her with a big love pillow.

It has our initials on it and the day she came to Otley (TC Hardware is the manufacturer, not some sort of code!)

I don't even.

.

Imagination, life is your creation...

Those monogrammed locks are brilliant. I hadn't seen that before, but it's so obvious in hindsight. What a business idea! The hardware store isn't going to get rich, but once the kids see that, they are going to also have to get the monogramming or they will look cheap. And the store makes a little extra coin.

Nice to see that shitty art cars are a worldwide thing.

I bought from one place and had it engraved in another. Even when making a loving gesture I still have to get the best deal...
(is this where I admit I find some parts of it well planned and whimsical? No? Okay then :bolt:)

Harrogate.
And you can't see my eyes.

Verry pretty like your Mother.

You make it look effortless, lifting that bike.

That's awesome!

Harrogate was great.
No problems with the bus in either direction, yay!
And the sun came out even before we left Otley. It would have been double-plus-good if we'd had the same weather the whole time Mum was up, but even just having it on one day showed her how God's Own County can look.

Harrogate is very very, darling.
But in a Yorkshire way. It's a bit like the Stockbroker Belt in terms of shops and money. These are places where the main money comes in from elsewhere - the husbands go off to work insane hours for insane amounts of money and the wives stay at home and be as effortlessly attractive as I am. Except that I don't think anyone in Harrogate is commuting to London. It's a bit precious, but precious in a Northern way, which is more down to earth. Genteel.

No-one annoyed me. That's something, what with me being a bitter old crone and all.
But of course I was with my Mum, who I've missed terribly. And we were there to have tea. And the sun was shining. I'd have had to be a dried up old cherry indeed to be grumpy.

We had tea and toast in Wethspoons before we left, even though Mum had already had breakfast the greedy fat pig :p:
Well she deserves it [ETA I meant she deserves a treat]. And you can't eat toast in front of someone without making them hungry! Also, it meant she got some little packets of marmalade; her only complaint about the B&B is that they don't have marmalade, only jam.

Mum in the sunshine.
Harrogate street scene.

In arcadia ego.
And a lady dressing a window pour le tour.

Another Wetherspoons, although we didn't go into this one.

Harrogate reminds me a little of Oxford.

Just places that caught my eye, really.

Does David Jason come to Harrogate?
Two TV tie-ins. It's been a funny old day...

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