Monthly Archives: August 2018

Self sufficient?

I had a great fly fishing trip this week with Probus friend Bill. A glorious evening (apart from a brief rain shower while we were tackling up). We startled a hare as we crossed a field on our way to the lake, and it zig- zagged away from us, causing a heron to rise! All before we had started fishing!
In no time two nice rainbow trout took a fancy to the pale green nymph I offered them! Fantastic (and extraordinary in my personal experience)! Bill also fooled a couple of nice fish, and then we had a short walk to the car with a background of a local church bell chiming the hour, and a beautiful sunset. The evening was finished off with a very pleasant drink in The One Eyed Rat in Ripon. Superb! You can’t beat Yorkshire!

The following evening being Friday, it was my turn to cook our habitual fish and chips, and the picture shows my home grown (and caught) meal – with the potatoes and the runner beans coming from the allotment!

I must stress that this level of self-sufficiency is very unusual – the fish are very rarely so cooperative, and the allotment only provides vegetables for a couple of months a year, including a very intense few weeks when runner beans and their picking, blanching, peeling and freezing is the only activity in my calendar. The freezer, and I, are both groaning!

Would you like any runner beans, climbing beans or broad beans? Please! They’re all has-beens!

Cut and Run – well … walk!

Lovely Probus walk on Tuesday. Six of us tackled a circular walk starting from Coldstone Cut, near Pateley Bridge.
Don’t know if you’ve been there, but it must be the best kept secret in Yorkshire! An unimpressive small car park just off the Pateley to Grassington road with a short-ish rising footpath leading to a fascinating ‘art installation’ that overlooks a massive working quarry! Information boards describethe geology and the history of use of the local stone – superb!
Already buzzing with interest, and we hadn’t even started the walk!

Bill, our walk Leader soon went ‘off piste’ from his planned and reconnoitred walk, so it was a ‘short cut’ across open moorland followed by some genuine footpaths past beautifully renovated stone houses with lovely gardens and matching views.
The advertised stile-free walk turned out to have quite a lot of unstable stone steps over crumbling dry stone walls, and a few more sturdy wooden stiles – apparently these don’t count!

The long distance views, it has to be said, were magnificent throughout, as was the wildlife. A hare darted across a field, a large flock of alleged partridges took to the wing(s), and a charming group of cows, their calves and a rather scary bull allowed us to continue on our way across their field.
A steep climb took us back towards the car park, and in the many opportunities we took to pause to ‘admire the view’ we observed the decision making processes of a flock of sheep, with the braver members (the sheep that is!) leaping over substantial stone walls into a much better adjacent pasture.
Our lunch at The Sportsmans Arms Hotel at Wath was one of the best meals we’ve had, fully matched by the entertaining discussion within the group.

A great day out – may there be many more like that!

Sets of Wheels

We had a great talk at Probus last week on ‘Iconic Road Cars from 1950s to today’.

In the Q&A session after the talk there was a bit of a murmur about what iconic meant in this context, but our speaker, Graham, made it clear that it was his personal choices – and he soon added quite a few more cars, based on suggestions from car-mad members present!

His choices from the 1950s included the Morris Minor, which drew sighs of remembrance from lots of members. His slide show of different models from the different decades acted as a quiz throughout the presentation – and Graham reminded us of the different market segments that cars were aimed at under different economic times, how they drove (as well as how easy they were to maintain), and the ways the cars were marketed through their use in films, in motor car rallies, and to the very wealthy.
The very recent 1500 b.h.p Bugatti Chiron at £2.1M and The Aston Martin Valkyrie that achieves Formula 1 speeds for a very reasonable £2.5M attracted many!

I’m not sure that I’d count myself as a car enthusiast. At least one of our members goers off on regular adventures all over the world in frighteningly old cars, but I have more of an “it’s a way of getting from A to B” mind-set! I tend to look at the ‘number of miles to the gallon’ indicator rather than the speed dial, now!
I do appreciate a stylish car, especially something a bit sporty. In my dreams my hair flows elegantly in the breeze as I accelerate away from the lights on Hookstone Road … Then I realise that my hair isn’t quite full enough to blow in the breeze, and I would have trouble getting in (and especially getting out) of a sports car now!
Still, one can dream….