Edge

Long time visitors to "Yorkshire Pudding" may recall that one of my favourite stomping grounds in the local countryside is Stanage Edge - just over the border in Derbyshire. It is a 3½ mile millstone escarpment running north to south and over the decades I have taken many photographs there.

A few years back, another photographer who used to post to the "Geograph" website referred to me as The King of Stanage Edge and that is a sobriquet that certainly meets with my approval. 

I had another walk up there on Tuesday afternoon and of course came home with yet another set of  digital images in my Sony bridge camera. The top and bottom pictures show abandoned millstones carved long ago. It is thought that the hand carving of millstones along the escarpment had ceased by World War One. The industry was at its height in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The picture above shows a stone "window" close to Robin Hood's Cave

Stanage Edge is very popular with rock climbers. In fact, it is a veritable magnet for them. When my late brother Paul was at Liverpool Polytechnic in the second half of the  nineteen sixties, he travelled  over to Stanage more than once with other members of that institution's  climbing club. It is a pursuit that has never appealed to me because of the very real possibility of falling and ending up in a wheelchair or a cemetery.

Thinking of brothers... my younger brother Simon (aged 66) has finally been told by an oncology consultant that he has no more than six months left to live. A chemotherapy regime could perhaps extend his life for up to a year but Simon has declined that treatment. I guess he is thinking: What's the point? It is highly unlikely that he will reach his sixty seventh birthday. I am his "next of kin" so of course I need to be available for him as his life ebbs away through the coming  months. We hope and expect that he will be given expert support by MacMillan cancer nurses as he travels his final journey.

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Downton ( Spoilers)

 

 I felt like a Sunday afternoon film today.

Nothing too taxing.

Just something to wash over me .

It had to be Downton Abbey a new Era .

Now watching Downton is a bit like attending a works reunion or a night out with old school mates. 

You are visiting with people that you like but you haven’t really got enough time to talk to.

24 main characters within a two hour storyline? 

Therefore everything plot line is hurried and save for a couple of scenes, most of the pathos and drama is lost.

It must be slightly annoying for some to watch their favourite characters, for instance  Anna, Mr Bates and Danka who just stand around muttering the odd word and I had to smile at Imelda Staunton who popped up in three scenes only to say something like I need a cup of coffee and I’m off to a sleep before exiting stage left.

But it’s very silly and lovely to look at , what with Downton being used as the  backdrop for a cinema shoot as most of the toffs relocate to the south of France to take possession of a villa left to Dowager some seventy years previously.

And in good fairy tale style all the romantic loose ends are tied up with Baxter, Mosely, Mrs Padmore and 

Barrow finding happier endings.

Of course it is Maggie Smith’s swan song as the wisecracking Lady Dowager and rather movingly her final scene with the glorious Penelope Wilton ( her nemesis for all of the tv series ) is sweet and unhurried and incredibly poignant 

Take your tissues

It was sunny in Chester when I left the cinema and it was nice to sit in the sun on Northgate street and listen to a busker playing a Spanish guitar

I fell asleep 

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🥰

 Swinging from the rooftops 

Singing from the treetops 

May the light

Shine through 

That darkness 

Tries

To cloud

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