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December 2001 |
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Sunday 2 December I left the house soon after 7.30 yesterday morning to drive to Glenridding in the Lake District, where I was due to meet Nick and Simon at 10.00 to climb Helvellyn. It is about 115 miles from here, but there are good roads most of the way, and there was very little traffic. The weather was fairly promising when I left Leeds, but it turned black as I was passing Penrith, and there was a violent cloudburst. It did not look like a day for walking in the hills. But it had cleared up a bit by the time I reached Glenridding, and we had some sun for a while in the morning. Then it clouded over again, and there were a few showers in the afternoon. Not a bad day for the time of year, but it was close to freezing on top of the hills, with a strong north westerly wind, which made it seem very cold. I arrived in Glenridding ten minutes early, and was changing into my walking boots when the others arrived in the car park. They had been camping nearby overnight, not something that I would fancy doing at this time of year. They each have a one-man pup tent, but Nick had forgotten to bring his, and had to sleep out in the open in his bivvy bag. He rather fancies himself as a hard man, and I think he was secretly pleased with himself over this. He had also forgotten to bring his winter anorak, and had to buy another one locally. What a divvy. As the old saying goes, he would forget his balls if they weren't in a bag. The route from Glenridding over Striding Edge to Helvellyn is one of the best hill walks in England, and there is a clearly marked path all the way, with plenty of people on it. It is about five miles to the summit, with something like 2,500 feet of ascent. Nick and Simon are both much fitter than me (to say nothing of being about 25 years younger), and they climbed a lot faster than I did. I don't mind climbing at my own pace while the others go on ahead, but I have to admit I was feeling my age by the time we got to the interesting part of the climb, the scramble along the narrow ridge of Striding Edge. By this time I was feeling quite tired, and the others had to wait for me to catch up. The walk along Striding Edge is an exhilarating scramble. I have only done it once before (on my own, in summer). It can be dangerous if it is icy or very windy. There was no ice yesterday, and the wind was not so strong as to be troublesome. But it was cold and windy enough that I found it fairly exhausting. I picked my way cautiously along the ridge, and Nick and Simon again had to wait for me to catch up. We had lunch at the summit, eating quickly because it was too cold and windy to linger. I was glad that I had brought a flask of hot coffee with me, and the others were glad to share it. The way I'm writing this, it must sound as though I wasn't really enjoying myself. That's not so. I love the hills in any conditions. No matter if the temperature is freezing and the summit is in cloud so you don't get a view, I would still much rather be there than staying at home in the warmth. From Helvellyn we headed south along the main ridge to the next peak, Dollywaggon Pike, and down to the col at Grisedale Tarn. The original plan had been to continue up the hill on the far side of the tarn. But there wasn't time for that. The winter days are so short that it would have been dark before we got off the hills, and in any case I didn't have the energy for more climbing. So we returned to Glenridding by following the Grisedale Beck, down a long and very attractive valley. If the others had been on their own, they would have walked faster and would probably have completed the longer circuit. But I didn't apologise for depriving them of their exercise. They knew when they invited this old man to accompany them that it would slow them down, and they wanted my company. So I guess they didn't mind too much that they kept having to wait for me to catch up. When we got back to Glenridding at about 4.15 we passed a genteel looking tea house where they were serving afternoon tea. We thought that they wouldn't welcome us in our muddy walking boots, so we went back to the car park and changed into our trainers. Then we went back to the tea house and had a much needed pot of tea and toasted crumpets. I left the others for another night of camping (with a sharp frost forecast—I hope the bivvy bag was comfortable, hehehe), and went back to the car to drive home. By this time it was completely dark, the clouds had cleared, and a huge full moon was just starting to rise. Reflected in Ullswater, it looked very beautiful. I said that I would post some pictures of the walk, and I have done so. They are not on this page because I didn't want to make it too long. You can find them here. Today, my legs have felt very stiff. Apart from doing the weekly grocery shopping, cleaning and waxing my boots, and reading the Sunday papers, I have been glad to do nothing but process the photos from yesterday and update the web site.
I have always been a bit unobservant and unaware about my state of health. If I have a cough or a cold, I generally ignore it; and I don't like going to see a doctor unless I am seriously ill. In fact, Mary usually notices my ailments before I do. Recently, she has been concerned that I have been coughing a lot. Until she mentioned it, I hadn't noticed. But now that she has pointed it out, I have to admit that she is right. It's nothing serious, just an occasional cough. But I have had it, on and off, for a few months now, and Mary decided that it was time that something was done about it. Without asking me, she made an appointment for me to see her homeopath. *shrug* Who am I to argue? I don't understand how homeopathy works (nor does anyone else, as far as I know), and I wouldn't have chosen this form of treatment for myself. But Mary's homeopath is a remarkable woman, who seems to have a deep insight into people's ailments and disabilities. Mary has certainly benefited from her treatment. So I didn't mind being bundled off to see her. This took place last Friday, and in an hour-and-a-half interview she took my entire medical history. She reckons that she can prescribe some remedies that will cure the asthma and allergic reactions that cause the cough. We shall see. If the treatment is successful I shall be very pleased. Not content with fixing me up with the homeopath, Mary then made an appointment for me to see her osteopath, to see if he could do something about my neck. I sometimes wake up with a painful stiff neck, which can last for a couple of days. The strange thing about this is that, once again, Mary notices it before I do. You would think that a pain in the neck is hard not to notice. But on several occasions Mary has asked if my neck is hurting. I'll say No, and ask why she thinks so. She'll say that I am holding my head awkwardly. Sure enough, the following morning I'll wake up with a stiff neck. So yesterday I was bundled off to see Nathan the osteopath. I have not seen Nathan before, but I have heard a lot about him. He is a young guy in his late 20s, who has a magical touch when it comes to dealing with skeleto-muscular problems. We know several people who have been impressed by his skilful treatment. He is short, dark, with a very short, neatly trimmed beard, good looking in a non-sexual way. After asking about my symptoms, he told me to take off my shirt and stand with my back to him. He felt my shoulders and back, and mumbled some disparaging remarks about twisted spine, lop-sided shoulders, etcetera. Then I had to lie face up on the couch while he manipulated my arms, shoulders and head, sometimes massaging quite gently and occasionally giving a sharp pull that made the spine crack. This went on for about half an hour. I then had to stand up and move my head around. I was surprised to see that I could turn my head much further than before. I sometimes notice how difficult I find it to look over my shoulder (when reversing the car, for example), and now I can do that much more easily. Nathan reckons that I should now be free of neck pain and should only occasionally have to come back to him for further treatment. He said that if I wanted to be quite sure that the problem is cured then I could come back again next February. I immediately agreed, and made an appointment for the first of Feb. After all, it's not every day that a young man asks me to take my clothes off so that he can give me a massage. I think I'll have to develop some lower back pain next year, and see if he can deal with that.
Nick has disappeared. He has been staying with Simon in York for a couple of weeks, while they worked on various projects. Yesterday, he came to stay the night with us before returning to London. It may be the last time we see him in a long while, because he has taken a job in Auckland and will be going out to New Zealand some time early next year. He arrived at our house yesterday afternoon at the same time as I got home from work, and Mary immediately started to get an allergic reaction from something he was wearing. We soon identified this as his shirt, which he must have washed in some scented detergent. So he borrowed a shirt of mine. Mary had made a very good rabbit stew for dinner, after which Nick got out his laptop and showed me some pages that Simon had helped him design for an organisation that he belongs to. Then we talked for the rest of the evening and watched the TV news at ten. By then we were all feeling tired and ready for an early night. Nick asked what time we would be getting up in the morning. I said that since it was the weekend I would not be setting an alarm but that I would probably be up some time after eight, and Mary might get up some time after nine. I came downstairs at about half past eight this morning, checked my email and read the paper, and waited for the others to come down for breakfast. Mary appeared about an hour later, but still no sign of Nick. We waited for another half hour or so, by which time we were beginning to feel hungry. We knew that Nick wanted to make a reasonably early start to drive back to London, and Mary and I wanted to go in to Leeds to do some shopping. So I called upstairs to ask Nick if he was thinking of waking up. No reply. I looked into Liz's bedroom (where Nick was sleeping), and found that it was empty. Then I looked out of the window and saw that his car was no longer in the driveway. That was the last we saw of him. He didn't leave a note, he hasn't phoned to explain why he left, and we have no idea when he went. Mary's first reaction was that we might have said something that upset or offended him, and he went off in a huff. But I don't think so. My guess is that he couldn't sleep, or else woke very early this morning, and decided to drive back to London overnight while the roads are empty. But he might have left us a note to say what he was doing.
[Still no word from Nick. Maybe I'm just old fashioned about these things. But I can't help feeling that if you're staying with old friends for the last time before going off to live on the other side of the world, it's a little bit odd to slip away in the small hours of the morning without saying goodbye. I'm sure there's a simple explanation.] Mary has been wanting to see this Harry Potter movie. To be quite truthful, so have I, though I wouldn't admit it to anyone except her. We went to see it yesterday, and we both enjoyed it. It's a simple feel-good tale of good versus evil, in which good triumphs not only at the end but pretty much all along the way. It is a very well made film, with excellent acting all round and impressive special effects. Apparently J K Rowling, shrewd woman, insisted on retaining enough rights over the filming to ensure that it retained an authentic English setting, with (woohoo!) no American accents to be heard. We thought that the cinema would be crowded to the doors, after all the hype that this film has received. But in fact the place was three quarters empty. I suppose everyone else in the universe has already seen the film several times, and is now saving up their pocket money for The Lord of the Rings (Part I), which opens here next week. I guess we'll probably go to see that too, eventually. I always enjoy a film more if I don't already know the book, and I have never read any Tolkien (or J K Rowling either, for that matter). The advantage of the empty cinema was that we could sit well away from anyone else so that Mary wouldn't suffer any allergic reactions. Even so, she was affected by a whiff of perfume from somewhere across the other side of the auditorium. And of course there's no getting away from the stink of popcorn which permeates the entire place.
As usual, Mary was right and I was wrong. She has far more insight than me when it comes to dealing with people. When our young friend Nick left early last Saturday morning without saying goodbye, I assumed there must be some simple explanation. Mary thought that he was angry about something that we had said to him. It's true that we had a fairly serious discussion the evening before he left, in which we talked about some of the problems he is facing. We thought that we were being sympathetic and supportive, but evidently he thought otherwise. He wrote us a very unpleasant letter, which arrived a couple of days ago, in which he accused us of ... well, I don't want to go into what he said, but it wasn't nice. I was very upset by it, and I still don't really want to think about it. Mary was less surprised. She knows that he has done this before, to other people. In fact, he does it so often that she says she has sometimes wondered why it hasn't happened to us before. Although Nick is in his mid thirties, he still has the mentality of a teenager in some ways. He flies off the handle very easily and then regrets it later. He says in the letter that he doesn't want a reply, and that he never wants to have any contact with us again. I don't intend to reply to such a letter in any case. But when things have cooled down a bit, in a couple of weeks or so, I'll send him a short email telling him not to be such a prat. I wouldn't really want to lose contact with him permanently, for all his faults. That's enough about Nick. I'd prefer to think about something more cheerful. Here's something that happened yesterday. There's a Chinese student in one of my classes. He comes from somewhere near Shanghai, and he studied for a year in a local university in China before transferring into the second year of our course. He's finding it fairly hard to adjust, and he often comes to my office with questions. After I had dealt with his math questions yesterday, he noticed the photos on one of my bookshelves. "Is that your wife?" he asked, pointing to one of them. "Yes," I said, "and those are my children. This one was when they were in elementary school, and these were when they were teenagers." "How old are they now?" he asked. I told him 30 and 32. His jaw dropped and he said "Oh! How old are you then?" Chinese people can sometimes be very direct. But as soon as he had said this, he realised that it probably isn't done to ask a professor quite such a blunt question, and he looked very uncomfortable. I didn't want him to feel embarrassed, so I casually told him that I'm 60. "Oh!" he said again, "When a Chinese man is 60 ...". At this point, his English, which is not fluent, gave out completely, and he mimed an old man shuffling along with a walking stick. I don't believe that Chinese men age any faster than westerners. In fact, given the respect that the Chinese have for their elders, they probably have a much easier time than the elderly here. I think this kid's reaction was probably the same as that of any 20 year old anywhere, for whom 60 is an unimaginably advanced age. But I really enjoyed his wide eyed look of astonishment when he found out my age. It made me feel quite young.
I didn't realise it was so long since I last updated. The past week has been busy.
It is seven feet tall and only cost £36, about three times the price of a real tree of that height, so if it lasts four years we'll have made a profit on it. (Don't you just love my materialistic approach to the season of goodwill?) It looks okay from a distance, but to me it feels as though it's cheating, to have a Christmas tree that didn't actually grow in a forest. We had a visit last weekend from a couple that we met on holiday a few years ago. They live across the other side of Leeds from us, and they come to see us once a year or so. They have just bought a new car, which has one of these satellite navigation systems. I had not come across this gadget before, so Brian took me for a drive to show me how it works. You just type the address of your destination into the on board computer, and as you go along a confident female voice gives you exact instructions on how to get there, while a display on a little monitor shows you the road layout ahead. The instructions are impressively precise and detailed, such as "Stay in the right hand lane, and turn right at the traffic signals 400 metres ahead. ... Prepare to turn right 50 metres ahead." and so on. If you take a wrong turning it doesn't shout at you, it simply works out a new route for you. If you are going to a strange town, it will suggest hotels, restaurants, places of interest, and tell you exactly how to get to them. It covers the whole of the UK in this sort of detail, with information from a single CD that can be updated each year. Can I have one of those for Christmas please? (If I had had a gadget like that in the past, it could have saved us from some very tense moments. Mary is not the world's best map reader or navigator. And despite my normally placid manner, I can get really ratty when I'm at the wheel and not quite sure where to go next.) Liz has been staying with us for the past few days. Her boyfriend Paul couldn't get off work, so he was not able to come with her. But Liz wanted to be here for Mary's 60th birthday, which was yesterday. We usually go out for dinner on Mary's birthday. But she can't cope with any kind of restaurant food at present, so we had a dinner party at home, and invited Lorraine and David and Christine and Simon. For dinner, we had a couple of roast guinea fowl in a cranberry and orange sauce that I concocted, and everyone enjoyed the occasion. For the next few weeks, Mary and I are both 60, so she can no longer make fun of my advanced age. Too bad that Liz couldn't stay for Christmas. This year, she and Paul are going to spend the holiday period with his parents at their family mansion in Devonshire. This morning, I drove Liz to the bus station for her eight hour bus ride to Exeter. Christmas day here will be very quiet. For the first time ever, neither of our kids will be with us. (Well, not the first time ever, of course, but the first time since Steve was born, in 1969.) Our Chinese friend Francesca and her daughter Fiona will come here for Christmas dinner, as usual. Another friend of Mary's, an M.E. sufferer who has nowhere else to go for Christmas, may also come round if she is feeling well enough. Apart from that, both of us will be glad enough to have a quiet time at home. I'm feeling tired after a busy term at work (and I think I may have a cold coming on), and Mary also needs to take things easy. That's okay, though. As Mary said a few minutes ago, yesterday's birthday dinner was the best Christmas celebration we could have had. I hope yours will be as good.
An inch or so of snow fell last night—enough to make the garden look pretty, but not so much as to cause any inconvenience. Looking back on the past week, I'm not quite sure how the time has gone. We haven't done much at all, but I have been glad enough to sit back and take things easy. On Christmas morning we had to collect our own presents from under the tree, because for the first time ever neither of the kids was there to fetch them for us. We actually rather enjoyed having just each other for company. Our Chinese friends came over at midday, and we had roast duck for Christmas dinner. In the evening we were on our own again, and we watched television together, something that we scarcely ever do. The TV film was Midnight in the garden of good and evil. When I read the book, I thought it was one of the most badly written novels I have ever come across, as I said in my review of it. I thought the film was a bit better than the book, but not much. It went on way past our bedtime, so Mary set the video to record the last hour of it, and we had an early night. On Boxing Day, our young friends Steph and Fran came for dinner. They are vegetarians, and Mary cooked one of her courgette [American: zucchini] and feta cheese pies, which was very good. After dinner we played Trivial Pursuit. Thursday evening, we took Steph to see the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Christmas show, a revival of Singin' in the Rain. Fran wasn't interested in coming to see this, but I think he would probably have liked it. It is a very good production. Yesterday, Mary and I finally got round to seeing the rest of Midnight in the garden .... But we only got to see half an hour of it, because Mary had set the timer on the video wrongly so we missed the final half hour. It seems I am fated not to know the ending of this story. When I read the book I disliked the author's style so much that I binned the thing without finishing it. I can't say I minded not seeing the end of this disappointing movie. The main characters all seemed totally unsympathetic. John Cusack as the reporter was particularly irritating. He seemed to spend the entire film wandering round with his mouth hanging open, gormlessly gawping at everything he saw. Staying at home all week, I seem to have spent most of the daytime doing crosswords. I have enjoyed solving crosswords ever since I was a kid, and at one time I used to attempt the Observer crossword almost every week. I don't have time for that now, but I like to do them occasionally, especially at this time of year. Unlike most ingenious inventions and discoveries (television, antibiotics, computers, for example), which originate in Britain and are then developed and perfected in America, the crossword has evolved in the opposite direction. The crossword was invented in New York, and the first one was published in the New York Sunday World in 1913. Since then, crosswords have scarcely changed at all in America. The clues are usually plain definitions, and there is very little satisfaction in solving them. But in Britain, with the development of cryptic clues and other refinements, the crossword has become a minor art form, and the best ones are very challenging and satisfying to solve. The Guardian and the Observer both published excellent Christmas competition crosswords. It took me quite a while to solve both of them. I have entered both competitions, but I don't expect to win anything. There will doubtless be hundreds of other correct entries.
We went to see the matinee showing of The Lord of the Rings this afternoon. A lot of other people had the same idea, and we had to queue for 15 minutes to get to the box office. There were no seats left in the gallery at the Lounge cinema, but we got two reasonably good seats in the stalls. Neither of us has ever read any Tolkien, in fact fantasy fiction isn't my scene at all. So we had no idea what to expect. For the first half of the film we were pleasantly surprised. The (New Zealand) scenery is spectacular, the main characters were very well played, and the story moved along at a good pace. But the whole of the second half of the film is one long dungeons and dragons sequence of fights against orcs and other unsavoury creatures. We both found this very dreary, and by the time it had finished we were more than ready to leave. For me, the only redeeming feature was that Elijah Wood, the young actor who plays Frodo Baggins, is exceptionally easy on the eye. But I doubt whether we'll be going to either of the other films in this trilogy. The main reason that I find dungeons and dragons scenarios so tedious is that our Steve was completely hooked on D&D when he was about 11-13 years old. He had no friends who shared this interest, so he used to plead with me to play with him. I was happy enough to do this for a short while, but somehow this game seems to go on hour after hour, night after night. Steve was always the dungeonmaster, and I had to lead my band of intrepid characters through an endless succession of dangerous ordeals that he had prepared for them. There is a limit to a loving father's indulgence in such circumstances, and it was not long before I came to dislike D&D role playing games vehemently. Thank goodness Steve eventually grew out of this, but it has left me with a lasting dislike for anything that looks like a dungeon or a dragon. And now for something completely different. The Biff comic strip that appears in The Guardian every Saturday is one of my favourites, and yesterday's was one of their best. I just love those singing camels. Shalom!
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For the first time ever, we have bought a plastic tree for Christmas this year. I love the smell of a real pine tree, even though it's a pain when the tree starts to die a couple of days after it's brought into the house, and sheds needles all over the carpet. But the smell of pine is one of the things that Mary has become violently allergic to, so we have had to invest in an artificial tree.
