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)

December. Trains

World So Full

September

Time Out (cont'd)

Across the valley.

18th August, after the tornado....

Time Out. more to follow, perhaps

 Perhaps my most sacred & favourite place.

 Fell Ponies. No comment.

I'm not going to name it, as I don't want it to get spoiled or desecrated by non-believers. I believe. Do you?

"Tour De...." Well, not France.

All hell is steadily breaking out in Holmfirth and the surrounding district..... "Le Tour" is imminent.

 So, we've got new roads, bunting and yellow bikes and things done out in a strange red-spotted livery everywhere.... silliness abounds....and it's hard to be negative when there's so much frenetic activity going on, so I won't.

 Instead of facing the anticipated hundreds of thousands of people expected to land in the district in the next 48 hours, closed roads, restricted roads, (not even allowed to cross the road in front of the house fer gawd's sakes... ) and all the shenanigans expected.. it seems that the best idea is to hit the road before it all gets too mad and go seek tranquillity. The East coast is calling..........

 Briefly we went for a quick look-see at the nearby area, dozens of fields converted into campsites, marquees for beer, barbecues, bands, goodness knows what else.... and crazily enough the third or fourth cycle race of the last couple of weeks, together with a running race up Holme Moss at the same time...it's a wonder nobody has died yet..

I got dropped off and went and harassed a few rabbits, a hare, and a dozen over friendly cows, with their disinterested if extremely well built bull. To be fair we didnt really harass the cows, they were more interested in the dogs than the other way around, and it was a bit of a relief to make it to the stile in one piece.. Gwyn needed a cool off afterwards on the way home after that.....

 

This last is totally unconnected, apart from the fact that it was from a couple of days ago, and in the same folder as the above, which were today's. Sheds, can't beat them.

 



 There really is a collective madness infecting the area though, and if there's one category of film that I've seen too much of it's the whole post-apocalypse scenario....kind of leaves you feeling edgy when people all start acting out of character at the same time. 


  

The shed was going to be the last picture, but then I saw that this was the 100th post on this incarnation of the blog, so I thought I ought to mention it.... this is the view of the far side of Holme Moss, for those who don't make it that far. Just see what you missed. Happy 100th post though.