All Change

I decided I needed to exercise,  so on my day off,  I used the morning to walk around my childhood village of Cottingham. 

The day was chilly but bright and calm,  but I got wrapped up and set off at a reasonable pace.  Cottingham is a pleasant and friendly place a couple of miles north of Hull and several people who I passed wished me a good morning. 
I walked along Priory Road,  a country road between Cottingham and Hull.  A single magpie flew across my path and I saluted it,  although I'm not sure what the motorists though as they passed me,  but at least I didn't spit and turn around like some do.  There were many horses busily grazing in the fields,  some with horse blankets,  some without. "Do not feed the horses,  they bite"  signs are abundant on the ranch fencing.  A bunch of pretty plastic red roses were tied to an elder tree,  in tribute to a loved one killed in a road traffic collision there some years back. 

My mobile phone exercise application informed me I'd walked a mile,  so I turned round and headed back and into the village centre.  A quick coffee and a couple of texts and I meandered through the east of the village.  Childhood memories came flooding back,  Hallgate where I lived looks familiar but in truth,  everything has changed. 

The old fashioned butchers which had sawdust on the floor and half cows hanging from the ceiling is now a deli.  Cottages are now a pub.  The long demolished vicarage is an old folks home.  I passed by St Marys church,  largely unchanged and along the snicket passed the tiny village hall,  the charity cottage bequeathed to the village in the 1700s and the even smaller church hall.  Another cottage along the snicket,  now restored and modernised was where I used to buy free range eggs as a child. The chickens no longer roam the area.

Continuing along Hallgate, I passed my childhood home  which now has a blue plaque to recognise Jacob Bronowski,  humanist,  scientist and broadcaster (The Ascent of Man) who lived there in 1942. Rounding the corner into Beck Bank,  the huge gothic and dark house called Cherry Garth has gone and now replaced by a modern set of flats with the same name.  The original house was so large,  it had a ballroom at the back which is where I used to rehearse when I belonged to the Cottingham Dramatic Society (CDS).

The large wide beck which carried water from Cottingham to Hull is all covered in and hides where we used to play as kids.  A tiny park at the end of the road which was really just a patch of grass and a few trees is still there.  My adventurous and country brought up dad used to climb to the top of the chestnut trees hunting for conkers for me. 

So,  2.5 miles walked,  fresh air and an enjoyable experience starts off what I hope will be a positive and pleasant week. 

Chat soon

Ta-ra

Fun on the Slope

I set off this morning to visit my parents in Cottingham in East Yorkshire, about seven miles away to take a few pictures of the village bathed in sunlight accompanied by my son. We set off in glorious hot sunshine with clear skies quite early on, but with the threat of rain forecast later in the day around 1 pm.

As I sit here and write this as tea is cooking in the kitchen next door, it is literally chucking it down. God is throwing water down in bucket loads! The cats, sensibly, are curled up indoors.

Now what does the above picture mean to you? It is slightly confusing because it on an incline downwards away from me although this isn't clear on the picture. In some places it's called a 'service road' behind some houses; some call it a ten-foot (because it's ten foot wide) or an eight-foot (same theory) or a snicket.

It's a slope. It's the 'slope.' That's what we called it when I was a kid. It's a path from Exeter Street in Cottingham towards a footpath that leads you either to the railway station nearby or towards Hull. The Hull University grounds are on the other side of the wall at the bottom which carries a lovely lake, woods and botanical grounds.

Where it leads to is not so important as what that 'slope' meant to me and my childhood friends. My grandparents lived in a house to the left of the picture at the top and I spent a huge amount of time there during my childhood and formative years. The 'slope' was a race track, for running competitions, for barrow racing (a plank of wood with old pram wheels), for rolling pennies and marbles down. You could watch the trains pass just thirty or forty yards away across the gardens on the right hand side of the 'slope,' (and yes I can remember steam trains!)

You could hide in the hedges either side of the 'slope' while playing hide and seek, and we built dens in the overgrown gardens (where there is now wooden fencing.) We drew hopscotch grids with chalk and used stones from the gardens for our throws, we drew faces and wrote funny things. You could reach through a gap underneath the concrete panelled fence at the bottom of the 'slope' and catch tiddlers in the stream that fed the lake in the University grounds.

Ah, joyous and innocent years.

31 years ago in a couple of weeks time, I moved into my first marital house in Exeter Street, just thirty yards from my beloved 'slope.'

Below is just a quick picture of St Mary's church in Cottingham where I got married, and it looked lovely in the sun this morning with the flag of St George flying aloft, probably still acknowledging the official birthday of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth ll.

Hope you have enjoyed the weekend, Monday beckons! My last week at work before a fortnight off.

Chat soon

Ta-ra.

The way we was brung up

Not one mention of the weather today - whoops - ignore that last remark!

A time for reflection today prompted by one of these e-mails you get now and then with a bit of useful philosophy rather than sickly pyramid e-mails that seem to come in bursts from friends or relatives that you feel obliged to pass on. I don't I'm afraid. If someone wants to tell me they think a lot of me - send a personal e-mail! But that's not a criticism and perhaps no-one thinks of me in that way in any case.

I suppose this is for the benefit of anyone born before the 1980s and takes a look at life as it used to be. I have edited it for content to make it less... racy and I can't acknowledge the originator because there isn't one.

Now you might think, when you read this list, that the reason we have so many laws and nanny state rules in the UK is to avoid facing some of these things on the list. Indeed you might recoil in horror at some of the tricks we used to get up to. Never the less even if we only did a few of these things, we survived. We faced 'character building' moments, some of which we may never forget, but they made some of us what we are today. It's meant to be a giggle and be thought provoking. Don't get too wound up.

First, some of us survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can. Our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos.

Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on the weekends, somehow we didn't starve to death! We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. We could collect old glass bottles and cash them in at the corner shop or the 'beer off' and buy toffees, blackjacks, salted crisps (with the little bag of salt in a blue wrapper) gobstoppers, bubble gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with (I never did!)

We ate white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because... WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. We put liquorice sticks in bottles of water to make them look like cola which most of us couldn't afford.

No one was able to reach us all day and we were okay. We would spend hours building our go-carts, made out of old prams or old wooden floor boards and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY , no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms... WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones, lost teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. Only girls had pierced ears!

You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time.We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house - no MSN or Yahoo Messenger then!

Most mums didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet! RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment; imagine that! Getting into the team was based on merit, not on who your dad was.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! Most of our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids either which made their offspring's life at school unbearable.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. And if you are one of them, congratulations!

Have a think about that one.

Chat soon

Ta-ra.