Emotional Crashes

 

Dare to be Different (10/9/03)

As a child, paraded views of what went before,

This house, this hill, that battle, that wall,

This uncle, this cousin, and given little space,

To make connection.

A calculating machine, DNA programme,

Making just the same mistakes,

Duff data,

Make interesting connections,

Parading hill/house life choice loves and walls,

All of us have them, perhaps.

Left to create the internal being,

The centre to your life experience,

A pilot, driver, witness to the outcomes,

Or a soul, perhaps,

A created being.

Discarding much of it all,

Is miscalculated in some ways,

Making your own rules,

Making interesting connections,

Parading your own madness, before hills, and houses.

Choosing your own loves, and walls,

All of us have them, perhaps.

Duff data,

Interesting lives,

Walled, hill or wood-dwelling uncles, No DNA.

A Serious Truth

If you met yourself, would you speak ?

If you changed the eye colour, length of nose, hair,

Earlobes, moustache, pissedness, breasts, hips,

Silliness, speed of living-ness,

Loves, likes, etc...

No, its still just a person.

Change anything at all, and I still love you, the entire human race, with all your failures, pettinesses, loves, weirdnesses, obscure habits, obscure thinking patterns, bizarre dress senses, acute mental states other than zero, and the datum, etc, etc...

I can now see you all for what you are.

I can now see that its all alright, everythings just fine,

Its just not a problem.

Is that my doing, or hers ?

Or something more ?

30 New Pennies.

I'm alive

My ears, damn them to deep hell !

Chilling to a silent fire,

Melt to hear the phone bell.

I'm dead

Line busy, damn the thousand !

Slinking electron-node journeys,

To the tone of line-jamming.

My lips remember,

Damn the memory of intense mockery !

Memories of follies,

Games drawn in intermittent glance kisses.

The eyes bleed and weep smoke tears,

The lungs tighten on your (dying) breath,

And my mind-cage door is open

Walkabout in the outback of your dreams.

We're all fucking dead.

Dead, alive, alive, fucking dead !!

Your tongue remembers,

My face remembers,

My legs remember,

Your hair remembers.

We'll wake in dodgy dwellings,

Wide stinking alleys of Northern exposes,

And both at 150 arms lengths,

Parallel stretching miles to a call-box,

And the cold night star car dog fox rain frost.....

And your cloudy breathing.

Smoking in orange light pools,

Grubby country street hangouts,

(Sharing tenuous common moments with her memory.)

(Stone my village heart headless horseman snorting nightmares.)

I know I'm alive,

Walking through stone fields to

The stone badger with

My stone head in a felt cap.

Missed Again

Still not allowing details of my personal life to seep through, well, not too much, but focusing on the writing.

People often say that they can only really get it on with their creative side when they're a bit flat, or down, or whatever. I wanted to write when I felt optimistic, but maybe they have a good point. As with the other hand-written stuff, this will eventually get t(r)yped up and re-posted....

Am glad that Blogger hasn't been as infected with emoji crap like FB, as there are a few I could add right now.

Compliments of the season to all. x

Poem. Old.

I can't even date this, but when I was fiddling around with trying to get some of my thoughts on to paper I ended up coming back to the old archives, totally unfinished, and disorganised as they are...and saw this one, and it seems so bloody apt right now.

 

Forgive my handwriting, maybe I'll transcribe it one day.....

The recurring theme, and I have a long drive ahead of me again.

2016 you tested me, nearly as much as 2012. Not quite, but Jeez, work on that sense of humour, please......

Dungeon Wood (Real Place)

As a sort of follow-up to the post I did on local history, based around a wood near where I am currently living, a phone call earlier today caused me to go look up the Bridleways Group, and their claim across some land I'm involved with....then when I did, it turned out that it wasn't the land I had been lead to believe, so that was ok, instead it seems that the equestrians are trying to claim rights of way all over the place in anticipation of a major change in the law coming up in the not too distant future.... Kirklees Bridleways Group Looks a bit like they're "official" doesn't it? They're a voluntary group even if it seems they might be sanctioned by the local authority, when of course they're not.

 

 Still, the internet meandering that the whole episode lead to my turning up this one:

Dungeon Wood

I just get lost in old maps....

Most of Dungeon Wood appears to be a chunk of Beaumont Park these days...... Wish could see how it used to look 100+ years ago...

Archive Test

Exactly what the title says...


Old Blogger pictures

Older ones

Even older...

And more...

(That's over 2000...though there just might be duplicates here & there. I didn't deliberately upload them to these albums, it's just Google doing it's thang...)


Maybe, just maybe they're not all lost forever. I know there were hundreds that got deleted a while back, but some managed to be auto-saved by Blogger, so when I lost the first of the four seperate hardd drives along the way, some got salvaged. Still, I reckon about 20,000 plus disappeared permanently.....

Maybe I'm relying on the external 2Tb drive too much now....

Eeek!

G+,Google Drive, Google Photos, Picasa etc etc.

How very confusing. Since Gooogle acquired Picasa, my old "Blogger" albums have now been archived. They're still "there", they just aren't obviously shareable anymore.

I probably still have the majority of the photos, and the text that went with them has all gone anyway, some of which I admit was my own doing when I tried to reinvent myself after leaving Lower Chatts Oakenshaw, 4 years ago, and some of which I repeated the exercise on when things at Cliff Road didn't go the way I thought they might. Like all the Paxos photos, and Crete and so on. Silly really.

Now I think that I wish I hadn't done either of those things. A picture of two, five, fifteen years ago, in context was always just that. A snapshot of things past. Why be ashamed, embarassed even? If someone new comes on the scene, can't they accept that at nearly 50, I'm bound to have some sort of history.....?

It still feels as if the Google acquisition is editing my past, albeit inadvertently, and to an extent, with my assistance.

I have often speculated about where this blog should go, as it has long lacked direction. The people I have shared it with over the years know my identity, so I can't suddenly turn it into an anonymous diary thing, which was a thought at one point. Facebook gives you a good dumping ground for "sharing" found links/stories/items/news, so it's not going to repeat anything from there. So what? Maybe I ought to steer it towards the creative side again, photos and writing. Leave the "god what a great band this is..." and "OMG how shocking" sort oif stuff to FB.

I cleared the decks at home for a big life-move to the West Country lately, which has all gone totally tits-up, and that really is another story, so watching my old Blogger photos disappear into  the ether, for about the fourth time, is hardly a new thing, it's just an opportunity to start again....

This is me, taken relatively recently near Yateholme, Holmbridge, with Gwyn. 2e is there somewhere, in the undergrowth, after I had retraced my last-twenty-minutes-or-so steps to find a lost item, a fit-bit watch or similar. Happier times.

It's less than a week to Christmas, and I can't help but feel a bit bloody wretched about how things are panning out. It's hard to be optimistic at the moment. Sod 2016, you were a bugger. 2017, I sincerely hope you've got something nice in store.

There is a little cottage far away.....

Goes Without Saying.

Three Years Ago

A lot has happened in the intervening time.

 Castleshaw res. 28/1/12

Heights Crossroads.

How can I sum up my life for these three years? I can't. Loss, finding, endless self-blame & loathing^10, lots of dog walks, endless self-destruction, endless work, the pages flying off the calendar, the clock spinning round and round, new diaries, unexpected trips to unexpected places, Lindisfarne, Cumbria, Flamborough, "Center Parcs", Wales, Whitby, Malham, to name but a few. Reading glasses.....

I decided long ago not to share my private life in any way that could be misread and thrown back at me, as so many times before, so won't change that rule.

It's been rocky, as roads go, hopefully 2016 might be a bit smoother......

Sunday Sun

My view on Sunday. Taken after the first dog walk of the day....

After diddling and daddling, catching up with my books, trying to get other bits & bobs sorted, a dozen coffees and a bacon sandwich it was time for the second walk...

Via Upper Stubbin to Flush House....on the way I came across the galaxy as captured in a burr on this ancient fallen tree....

 

In the wood next to it I found an enormous Yew tree, could it be the actual one that Yew Tree Lane is named after? They're reputed to live for hundreds of years, if not even more than that, so possibly.... There was an excruciating scream, Gwyn had located a snare....and got it firmly round her neck. Nice, not. The wood isn't shot, and the nearest shoot is miles away.... There are many many holes though, and the whole place stinks of badgers & foxes. 

 

 

Over the top and down into Black Sike.....

Now I don't know how to tell if these taddies are frogs or toads, but I know there are natterjacks in the area, and those ones that turn white, though beyond that my toad knowledge runs to nothing..I'd like to think these are going to transform into a million toad one day though.....

  

They're not going to get any interference from the anglers....seeing as how the club that used to rent the dam seem to have abandoned it.....

 

I sat for a while waiting for the dogs to come find me. The fish were jumping, but I couldn't see if there was any cotton to be high... I say they were jumping, it's funny that whenever I put the camera down they started, then the second I thought I'd like to get a snap of them, they turned shy.

Nearly got this one...

 

Someone's been in to the bit where the anglers used to park, seemingly to nick some hefty branches....I could be wrong, as my current info is that the owner is someone I know, though I didn't know he was the owner until later on that day...Maybe he fancied some firewood....

 

I'm embarrassed that I don't know more than a tiny percentage of the 600+ species of wildflowers, what with being a gardener and that..but am hoping over the course of time to increase my measly repertoire as best as I can...Whatever these are though they're very eye-catching...

 

Up to the main road, past what used to be Newlands, a collection of wild memories from the 90s when it was a pub/restaurant, now it's two houses, but the people are nice... Then across what some know as "Randall's field" and into the village for a couple of pints at the Oak...Very civilised.

 

Downhill all the way, more or less, here looking back up the Daisy Field, where are the blooming daisies then? Into Liphill, up to Booth House and down into Hinchlife Mill....Sunday, sorted.

The Internet of Local Things

Apologies to the one or two contributors who added some of the following pictures to FB, (and an odd one or two might be mine, but hey.) but I just wanted to use them to try to illustrate an odd tangent that things can suddenly go in...


There are, I'm sure, 1000s of similar "closed groups", that are equally well meaning, but haphazardly run and worse off for it. Enthusiasts, who eventually dare to come out and give/lend their private pictures, I'm talking local interest/historical types here, nothing weird, though you never know of course...The one most pertinent to me is "Huddersfield Then And Now" (sic).

The sheer scale of the newly realised power to connect things, such as FB, is immeasurable really. If we concentrate on "local history" for a moment though, by way of an easy example...Most people have some old photos, their own, inherited, or other hand-me-downs, or whatever, collecting dust in an old shoe-box or something somewhere, and long-forgotten. An impossible job to collect & collate them all perhaps, but given the nature of "social media" the ambition is less of an Everest and more of a Ben Nevis as time goes along....The same is clear for any kind of data, music, stats, art, documentaries or whatever I suppose, but this is so much more democratic than ever before. The ability for any jumped-up little or big, wannabee, to "have their say" is a mixed blessing obviously, as not everyone has something worth saying in the first place, but bear with me...

The way I'd like to see things develop is for FB to facilitate the joining up of the various contributors to a given subject to work outside of FB itself, say via a Blog or other format, to produce a more polished and 3rd-party user-friendly experience. To cut out the speculative nonsense, the chaff if you like.

Clearly a one "dedicated person type blog" has a lot of merit, but surely a group effort might be more than the sum of it's parts?

I have a lot of ideas, just not enough time to realise them without help. Maybe it's just easier being an observer rather than a doer.. I am a doer, just most of my "doing" is trying to keep sane, solvent, and satisfied, and so on....maybe I don't always get the balance just right.

..oh, and side-tracked, of course, that's a given.

I can't post a link to the current thread that's "grinding my gears" given the "closed" thing, but going back to 1850ish:

These are more or less all the same area, hopefully that's obvious in context....

What I want is for the many old established historical families locally, to root about in their attics and cellars or sheds, or wherever, to dig out their own old pictures of the area, going back to as far as possible, like the dawn of photography....so that this shit doesn't get completely lost.

FB is helping, but this is an uphill thing....

I can't shed much light on the pictures apart from they're all more or less centred around "Digley" which in the 21st Century is only known as a local reservoir, but was previously a village/area that is now mostly forgotten. As I walk my dogs around here a lot I see odd hints and remains of the past, it's pictures like these that put flesh on the bones of that past,and I do think it's a potentially fabulous use of the collaborative nature of the internet that needs some urgent polishing.....

 

Like when did "St James's" (sic) become "St David's"?? Ha! Riddle me that internet....


Happy June people.


  





 

Pedantry part two.

When the BBC say that "You're listening to the news on Radio 4" how do they know?

Sure, I've got the radio on, and it's playing the news, but how do they know I'm actually listening?

I may well be hearing it, but surely listening requires active participation? A definite "effort"? 

Splitting hairs? Pedantry at it's finest.

(Again, definitely Not one of mine, but I am (slowly) clearing our my "tags & miscellaneous sh*t" folder...)



  

Pedantry....(UK)

Given the amount of chatter on the air-waves and other media with the UK election approaching at a rate of knots....There seem to be more and more opportunities for mangling of the English language.

Time for pedants to get extremely warm around the neck region...

My own current gripes are not so many or varied, but do irk increasingly as time goes on.

vis-à-vis

 (vē′zə-vē′)

prep.

1. Face to face with; opposite to.

2. Compared with.

3. In relation to.

adv.

Face to face.

n. pl. vis-à-vis (-vēz′, -vē′)

1. One that is face to face with or opposite to another.

2. A date or an escort, as at a party.

3. One that has the same functions and characteristics as another; a counterpart.

 

I nearly scream at the radio at times, that what you really meant to say was "Viz". You are hardly ever "comparing" or relating to, but usually...oh no, you're right. It means that too....

 

 
viz. is used to introduce a list or series. It differs from i.e. in that what follows normally expands upon what has already been said, rather than merely restating it in other words; and from e.g. in that completeness or near-completeness is suggested, rather than a small selection of examples. (From "Wiktionary"

Ironic? Didn't meant to be, it's been a long few days....

Or did I?

Visage-a-visage, can hardly lead anywhere else....

I was an instant fan when "Fade to grey" hit the TV in the 1980s, but became even more or during a family holiday to France (& Switzerland, & Italy, & Germany albeit briefly on the last two counts, just to get the stickers to say we'd been...!) when I bought a cassette of theirs, which turned out to be a Euro-ri-off with tracks from various sources stitched together in "homage" to The Anvil..Still, it played well enough on my cheapo imitation Walkman.....

Then Ultravox, then Gary Numan, then Depeche Mode etc etc Oh, and Flock of Seagulls, "I Ran" was my favourite for a few years.... Treat yourself, but turn it up, and imagine your favourite not at all related distant cousin, who's two or three years younger than you, and in thrall to your every (slightly more mature) view on the world....and foxy with it....Who then emigrates to Canada, so you never actually see her again........

 

 

I dallied with Jean Michel Jarre too, but we'll keep that quiet for now I think.....Those home-made speakers of my Uncle Richard's were simply awesome though....Not quite ear-bleeding, but not far off.

Ha.

Life.

 

(Clearly not one of mine, so don't think it is...)(Does that count as adequate copyright dissociation??)

 

 

 

 

 

Farms & Council Tax

Dry title isn't it?

This post was prompted by a number of things. Firstly a recent visit to Malham, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. but also by an ongoing itch that I ought to be writing more, and getting some of the issues in my head out onto "paper". I still want to show off some of my pictures and so on, but since so many of them have back-stories, I think I ought to share some of those stories, maybe an odd one or two might actually be interesting, who knows?

After graduating back in 1993, as a (potential) Chartered Surveyor, from Sheffield, with no real focus on what I wanted to do, nor where, I ended up via a series of dead-end Estate Agent type jobs, and a long spell or two in a factory making shelving units, but I'd rather not talk about that now, in the Valuation Office in Harrogate. This was a initially a six month "short-term contract", the fore-runner of the zero hours contract perhaps in some ways, but I digress.




There had been a national re-valuing of the entire housing (and commercial) property market, overseen by the VO, and given the scale of economies, a lot of corners were cut. The old style "Rateable Value" had to be updated, it was pretty basic and archaic to put it mildly, and Maggy's ill-considered, or at least implemented attempts to bringing in a "Poll-tax" base on everyone paying their fair share towards their local authorities' spending had gone badly awry, to put it mildly. That's ancient history now, but I suspect the finer details of the subject will raise their heads again before we all get too much older, again I digress, but bear with me.

The rush to re-value everything was bound to make mistakes, "market value" which was the basis for the work, was such a subjective thing after all, and trying to value a whole housing estate on a £ per square foot basis a recipe for controversial valuations. People, quite rightly, objected in many, many, many cases, and so a scheme to allow them to appeal had to be created. Cue an onslaught of tens of thousands of appeals, per local authority, per VO, for many, often more than justified reasons.

Somehow, I can't quite remember now how, I found myself getting through an interview, and starting work valuing houses in the Harrogate District. Nearly two hours away from home, but a fairly straight forward job based on inspecting houses, meeting their owners, and hearing their objections, and drinking copious amounts of tea.....

 

In time the office dealing with this had to expand, the scale of the issue was simply just too huge to cope with, more graduates were brought in to augment the stressed out existing civil servants, all of us on the short term contractual basis, and all keen to make a go of it.

After not a huge amount of hand-wringing and  constant reviews of how the appeals were going, a few of us were taken to one side to "specialise". We'd shown an aptitude for dashing through dozens of appeals in a day, way ahead of our civilian counterparts, and the team had come to realise that there was a particular peculiar type of property that only currently had one, albeit senior, valuer working on it. Farms and other miscellaneous rural business related "composite" properties. Composite in this context meant that they were made up of business AND domestic living units, more often than not in an indistinguishable fashion.

What basis do you value such properties on? They are nearly always unique, location, size, and a distinct lack of comparable properties to use to glean a potential resale value....

I could launch into an esoteric essay on the subject, and nearly have to be fair, but want to cut to the chase, as it were.

Farms, North Yorkshire, Craven District (Utterly gorgeous area), and a chunk of the Harrogate District too, (ditto):

Owner occupied? Some, sure, but far from all.
Tenanted? If so, on what terms? As in, who pays what?
Proximity of the "business end" of the farm, as in animals, related buildings and other miscellaneous matters to the "living accommodation" ....Think about cows/pigs/sheep/etc and their by-products in particular.....The layout of a farm was stressed as a valuation issue in the scheme of things. Did you have clean or dirty access to the house via the yard? (for example)

Services? Many of these farms weren't on ANY "Mains" services, their own water, their own sewerage, solid fuel, maybe even a windmill or something...

Accessibilty? Some of these farms were over 5 miles from the nearest village, let alone school/hospital/shops etc. What was their actual drive like? Some were miles long, which they would have had to maintain.....

To compare a rented six bedroomed farmhouse, in one of the most glorious parts of the country, with an owner-occupied former farmhouse of equivalent volume and acreage maybe, was simply put NOT comparing "like with like". While many, nay, most even, landlords might well look after their estates with beneficence and good husbandry, there a good few who just don't.... How then can we expect the occupiers to then pay the same as their wealthy neighbours?

 

I visited one farmhouse, which we passed when we went up to Malham, on the high roads over to Settle, that the occupier could only use three rooms, out of ten. On my visit Mr Logan showed me snowdrifts in three of the bedrooms.....He lived in the kitchen, in front of the Aga, as his landlord refused to accept that there was any liability on his part to repair. The dispute wasn't supposed to be taken into account in my valuation, but sometimes you just have to be real...

As a footnote, it turned out that he liked to down a bottle of scotch and then drive over to Blackpool, over an hour away when sober,  to "socialise" more than once a week...but that wouldn't have swayed my very generous valuation!

There were many cases throughout the spectrum, and I often wonder how many of my generous valuations were "corrected" afterwards, after I'd left the VO, but over-zealous but everso ruthless and efficient valuers.......

Still, that whole world still exists in my head, if not real life, and I like to think that I made a positive difference to a lot of North Yorkshire farmers along the way.... Visiting the area two or three weeks ago was a lovely tonic, and provided a lot of memory-lane wandering for this increasingly aging gardener, reminiscing about one of the best jobs I ever had....

One More "Learning Curve" Vid....

I can't specifically credit the soundtrack, but it's definitely Aphex Twin, just which track??? 

All I tend to do on random videos, well, any that I want a backing to, is to check out the video length, then try to match it up to a track-length in several different music folders....Sometimes the closest to it wins! Simple, yet effective, just not necessarily to everyone's taste.




Note to self: Update your CV.

Photobox Album

My Photobox Album

How on earth do pro photographers manage to keep up with all the computer admin? I know I take a reasonable amount of pictures, and delete a lot too, the ones I keep are sorted into categories, then sub-categories, and so on... The sub- that these came from is essentially "my pictures/scenery/Holme Valley & Area" but in "scenery" alone there is 10+ Gb and just under 2,500 pictures.... currently in "My Pictures" there are 75 Gb and over 27,000 pictures. What a mind-mash to try to go through them to pick out the ones I really think have "potential". How on earth did I think I could manage it in just a few days???? 

I'm tempted to bypass my current system, and instead rely on Lightroom's tags feature, but until I've used it on a substantial number of images how will I know if it's what I'm looking for? Even if it is, then I've still got the daunting task of (over the course of time) going back through everything and tagging/losing/binning/favoriting etc etc. 

27,000 images? Hmm, that seems high, even for a happy snapper... I tried Visipics to search out duplicates, and boy oh boy there are over 1000 of them to try to sort though too. Old scans mostly, ones which I'd kept the "hard-copy" and then forgotten I had already scanned them....then put them in a new folder to work on, then some new category and so on. I learned my lesson when I binned 100s of negatives after scanning them, WITHOUT properly backing them up sadly, so decided to keep the best originals after scanning. Great in theory, until you come to try to tidy the shelves up and can't be certain whether or not you've already scanned.....Cue chaos.

Anyway, currently there are 177 pictures in the above Photobox album. These will be added to as I go along.... The thing is I keep wanting to edit some of the older ones as I come to them, which kills even more time, this is more or less a full-time job!

Roll on Spring when the gardening really does pick up!

Learning Curve(s)