Floating down to Camelot

Only a month late...

Our wedding anniversary in mid-August usually coincides with the joust at Carisbrooke Castle, so we've taken to going there on or near the day. It's always the same - we're getting to know the minstrels' songs very well by now (mind you, many of them are the Steeleye Span versions of traditional songs) - but always fun. It's a "real" joust - i.e. a genuine test of skill, not a scripted drama with heroes and villains - and very proud of that. They repeatedly told us how authentic they were, not at all like other co-called "jousts" around.

This amused us very much, since a few days later, we were planning on going to just such a so-called "joust," and were expecting to have a whale of a time. Which we did. :-D

But first... Comical lions! (With bonus comical kings, comical nymphs, comical nakedness and comical being ripped to pieces by dogs.

( Comical lions! )

We were on holiday in North Wales the week before last - a week in Criccieth, followed by two days on the borders on the way home. I'll write up the rest of the week one day, but I have so many pictures of the various comical creatures of Plas Newydd that I thought I'd put them in a separate post.

( Comical creature carvings )

For a while now, Facebook has been giving me adverts for a Walking to Mordor virtual challenge, and I've been very tempted, but put off by the ridiculously high price. However, half way through January, I decided to give it a go. Ever since I finished my Walking All The Paths project a couple of years ago, I've done rather less walking than I used to do (although still quite a lot) and I was keen to encourage myself to do more. I'm very, VERY motivated by challenges like this.

(TOO motivated, really. There was that time when I resolved to walk 1000 miles in a year. Lazily refusing to spend even two seconds working out the actual monthly average, I thought, "that's about 100 a month," which quickly became "I have to do at least 100 miles every month, or I have Failed," which quickly became, "I need to get to 100 miles as early as possible in the month, so I reassure myself that I won't fail," and quickly saw me doggedly striding around Cowes at all hours, come hell or high water, determined to get my miles in. I'd reached 1000 miles by early July, if I remember correctly.)

Anyway... Justifying it by the fact that we always do Dry January and February, so were spending less, I bought all five challenges for the price of 4. (The Shire to Mordor is broken up into 5 stages, each one sold separately.) I'm now nearing Rivendell.

It is indeed ridiculously expensive, and I'm not that sure what you get with the money. You get an app, but it doesn't live track your walking; that has to be entered manually, or else by synching with other exercise apps. I'd kind of hoped that I'd be out walking and my phone would ping me to point out that I'd just escaped being eaten by a murderous willow tree, or something, but the synching only happens at the end of a walk. You can engage with a community, but I don't want to do that. Every now and then you get "postcards," but they're just stills from the movie, with a new sentences of description. (The same company does loads of real-world virtual challenges, too - Land's End to John o'Groats etc. - so I guess postcards from the real world places you were "visiting" would be more interesting.)

But, even so, I am enjoying it a lot, and it's definitely getting me out walking a lot more. I reached Bree (140 miles or so) and got my first medal, then moved on to Challenge 2: Bree to the Doors of Moria. This is when it got odd. Since I was walking, it put me in "story mode" - 90 miles, in which you walk a few miles on either side of a key location, then teleport a hundred miles on to walk a few more. This was not at all in the spirit of "walking to Mordor," so I switched to "long mode (recommended for cyclists)" and was promptly hit with a 680 mile challenge instead. Cue a LOT of extra walking. I've started doing a mile before work and a mile straight after, as well as the mile at lunch I was already doing, but I think that's quite a good thing for me, really. And I guess it means I'm getting more of my money's worth, since the whole thing will take a lot longer.

The medals are undoubtedly lovely, though. The first one is large and shaped like a hobbit hole surrounded by green scenery. On the other side is a metal envelope with a hinged metal flap, beneath which is a little hidey-hole that contains a real One Ring. :-D

And, yes, if you're wondering if I've learnt the lessons of my Walk 1000 Mile obsessive behaviour, and have learnt how to be rather more measured this time... Of course I haven't! "Got to get that Ring a little closer to Mordor," I say as I head off into torrential rain at lunch, determined to get that mile in OR ELSE. (Although, to be fair, I'd planned to walk a quick 2 mile circuit round the block this morning, before heading off to an afternoon of dancing (we're walking there and back - 5.5 miles each way) but am writing this instead, so perhaps there's hope for me yet.

It's just a shame that the countryside is full of unmitigated squelch and all the interesting paths have fallen into the sea over the winter. I'm getting rather fed up of cycle paths, old railways and pavements.

One day I will post something that isn't a belated holiday write-up, but today is not that day. Once again, there will be far too many words and pictures, and a good few comical lions. There is also a guest appearance by my other favourite art thing: the drunken eagle.

So. Four weeks ago, we had a week in Derbyshire, staying in Ashford in the Water. My grandma lived in Derby throughout my childhood, and my mum is a very proud Derby... um... Derbyite? Derbist? ("The best county IN THE WORLD!"), so I had many childhood excursions to the southern reaches of the Peak District. However, I have to admit that our main reason for choosing Derbyshire wasn't nostalgia, but convenience. We'd vaguely intended to go to Suffolk, but Pellinor had a conference in Birmingham on the last Friday in September, so it made sense to choose somewhere for which Birmingham was en route.

( Derbyshire dales, rain, mines and, naturally, comical lions )

The week before last, we walked Hadrian's Wall. This being a National Trail, it meant following the sign of the acorn. Within a few hours, we started calling this "the unicorn," accidentally at first, but soon deliberately. "Hadrian's Wall Path" became "Hadrian's warpath," so here is an account, with pictures, of our adventures following the warpath of the unicorn.

( The warpath of the unicorn: a truly enormous account )

Yesterday I posted 8 months late about a short holiday we had in Jersey last October. By that standard, today's post is barely late at all, since it's about a holiday we had in early May, in the Wye Valley.

Yes, early May. That time when it rained virtually every day - remember the Coronation? - before turning to non-stop sun the day after we came home.

( Dodging rain showers in the Wye Valley: an overlong account, with pictures )

Back in the winter of 2019, we were discussing holidays and said that we fancied walking Hadrian's Wall. However, the trouble with that is that we would need to book accommodation months in advance - we're not prepared to do the full on "carrying your tent on your back and camping in the wild" option - which would mean that you're then committed to each day's walk, no matter what the weather.

Then I was flicking through a colleague's Country Walking magazine and saw an advertising feature on the Raad ny Foillan, the Isle of Man coastal path. It had never occurred to me to go to the Isle of Man before, but it looked really good, and since it's a circular walk around an island, it could easily be done by staying in a central location and travelling back by bus every day. It occurred to us that this could be a very good test run for Hadrian's Wall, but one with a get-out clause, in that we didn't HAVE to walk every day, if weather and/or sore feet intervened. We went from initial idea to booking it within just a few days - very much an impulse holiday.

As I said, this was back in the winter of 2019. Then 2020 happened, followed by 2021, so our "impulse holiday" ended up being the holiday of Damocles, constantly there, constantly being postponed, constantly looming over us with its possible Covid-related complications. As the much-postponed date drew nearer, I really doubted we'd ever get there. We were flying there by Easyjet, who were cancelled planes all over the place. We were due to take the train to Gatwick, travelling on a train strike day. Several colleagues got Covid the week before the holiday. But we got there in the end. I almost kissed the ground in relief!

( Days one and two of a walking holiday on the Isle of Man )

Here is the last installment of our North Devon holiday. I never got round to writing up the holiday we had last summer, which is a shame, since my memory is dreadful, and unless I make a written record of what I've, I forget all about it. I've frequently had to refer back to my old holiday write-ups to remind myself of where on earth we went and what on earth we did when we got there.

Anyway. Here goes:

( North Devon: the final part, with a short guest appearance by Cornwall. )

We had a week in North Devon the week before last. We broke the journey en route with a night in Tiverton, with visits to a Victorian Gothic pile and a bee farm.

( Gothic fancies and the bees )

As well as spotting comical lions, last weekend we made Bronze Age swords!

But before that, we revisted the Weald and Downland open air museum, which was basking in glorious weather. The main attraction of the place is the many dozens of historic domestic buildings which have been carefully demolished and carefully reassembled on the site, minus all the modern additions that they had acquired over the years. Confronted with all this history, what did I photograph? Ducks and a fence.

( Duck bottoms and a wiggly fence )

And then, on Sunday, we made swords! This was an all-day workshop at Butser Ancient Farm, done with a backdrop of battling Anglo-Saxon re-enactors and a half-built wicker man. (I meant to photograph the massive nestbox on a prominent dead (or dead-looking) tree overlooking the farm, but forgot. It truly was an enormous nestbox, large enough for a small dragon. Apparently it was there for owls, but no owls had bought it yet.)

Anyway... There were just two of us on the workshop, and we both worked together to make one sword, then another. A lot of the time was spent making the mould out of sand - piling it in, pressing it down, hammering it down, putting in more sand, hammering it down again, rinse and repeat. Then we made bronze out of copper wire and old tin tankard fragments, poured it into the mould... and within less than a minute, there was a sword, solid and ready to pick up with pliers and plunge into a vat of water. Yay!

But now comes to hard part: polishing it. We started the job on site, filing away the thin edges where the metal had seeped out beyond the edges of the mould. My sword didn't have much of this, but Pellinor's had a lot. But it will be hours and hours of hard work sanding and scrubbing and buffing before they're good shiny bronze. I've done odd hours here and there. The sword's getting quite a bit smoother, but my fingers seem to be, too, since the fingerprint recognition on my phone has stopped reliably recognising my fingerprint. (Time to rob a bank, perhaps?)

( Sword pictures )

And, finally... while we were sitting on top of Portsdown Hill near Fort Nelson (a lovely view of Portsmouth; I could have sat there for hours just looking out at the vista below us - a view that was too big for a photograph to do justice to it)... Anyway... we were talking about comical lions, and Pellinor, whose live roleplaying character (one of them, anyway) has a winged lion as a badge, said it would be nice to have a winged lion on his helmet. "But I don't know if it would be possible..."

Challenge accepted.

( A winged lion sitting on a hat )

At Christmas, my parents had rediscovered some school work books from my first couple of years at infant school. I was particularly amused by my "book on travel," which started unsurprisingly with pictures of transport, lists of travel methods, drawings of road signs and short accounts of walks around the local area.

And then suddenly, with no explanation, is this:



It MUST be Wordsworth, surely. There's the Lake District scene in the background. There's the daffodil. There's the... wellies? Why is Wordsworth suddenly gatecrashing a project on modes of transport? The pages on either side are no help, since they're both about pirates. To be honest, I'm not really sure what the pirates are doing there, either, but at least they hang out on ships, so might presumably have been introduced by a teacher in a ship-themed lesson.

I was clearly enamoured of these pirates, since they do rather take over the rest of the project, elbowing their way into odd spaces in between dull pictures of road signs. The piratical stories do leave something to be desired, though. Just before Wordsworth, we get this: "Once upon a time there were some pirates they kept on fighting with some people." Afterwards we get "Once upon a time there was a red pirate he was very poor for he did not have very much money so he looked very thoroughly and saw a cave."

The project ends on this note: "Once upon a time there was some bad pirates he had lots of money and gold he stoal Mr Catley's car he was cross he hit the pirates croo he was mad he did not like it at all." (I don't know who Mr Catley was. Not my teacher, anyway.)

( A few more pictures )

So I REALLY didn't do well, when, inspired by reading my ancient diaries, I said I'd try to post a lot more often. Then, of course, the longer I left it, the more daunting a prospect it seemed to resume things. (Not that I've really done anything noteworthy for ages, except for slaying multifarious nefarious monsters at the command of Odin himself, and building a Viking metropolis. Which, granted, would be pretty impressive, had it been remotely real. ("You have played Valheim for 393 hours. Would you recommend it?" Steam rather amusingly asked me the other day.)

So, anyway (and, as I've said before, I should really stop starting sentence with "so," but today is not that day), rather than bother trying to catch up (and, really, the last three months can basically be summed up by "Valheim") I'll just launch straight in.

I got a new camera for my birthday. This has actually added rather to the daunt of posting, because the camera has been sitting there staring at me, saying, "hello! I'm new and complicated! You can do such things with me, what they are you know not, but before that you have to learn how to use me and I am HARD!" Then there was that knowledge that even if I DID work out how to take a picture with it, I wanted to find a non-LJ alternative for photo posting, and that, too, was full of daunt.

But last weekend ("But." Probably not much better than "so." Oh well.) Pellinor went off to the mainland to hit people over the head with swords, so I girded up my lions (comical ones, naturally), grabbed the camera, and went up a Down.

( Up a Down with a new camera )

Between the ages of 12 and 18, I kept a very detailed diary. It mostly fell by the wayside when I went to university, although I did manage occasional bursts of activity here and there. Over the last few weeks, I've reread the entire lot of it - all 55 A5 exercise books, filled with very small writing and no paragraph breaks. It wasn't that embarrassing an enterprise, since I kept it completely free of teenage angst. I gushed about things I loved - mountains, Orion, Tolkien, history, Star Trek etc - but drew a discreet veil over anything negative or embarrassing.

But that's not really the point. The point is that I have forgotten SO MUCH! Obviously, I wouldn't expect to remember that what I did in Maths on a particular day in 1984, but I'd completely forgotten people who I chatted to in school every day, or enormous school-related dramas that dominated weeks, TV series I loved, or clubs and societies I was a member of. If I hadn't written it down, it would be lost forever. Which is arguably no loss at all, really, but it's nice to be reminded.

LJ served that same purpose for years, and I still frequently refer back to it to remind myself of things we did on various holidays, and so on. But for the last few years - ever since I started using my phone more and more for consuming things on the internet - I've written hardly anything. So I hereby resolve to write more. I've no idea if I'll be able to keep this resolution, but I can but try.

Rather than starting with anything daunting, like catching up on the last few months, I will instead start with the very scenic walk I did today. I've got the whole week off, using up some spare leave before the end of the year, and today the weather couldn't have been better. So have some autumn leaves, plus a random headless cow.

( Pics )

I didn't take as many pictures as usual on holiday, for various reasons (weather, shortage of comical lions etc) but looking at them now, I see that almost half of the pictures I did take were taken at the same place: Woolbeding Gardens. To reach these National Trust gardens one must engage in quite a Quest, since there's no parking at all at the site (except for pre-booked disabled spaces.) It's only open two days a week, and is strictly pre-bookings only, in which you book a 10 minute slot with very stern warnings that you Must Not Be Late. There's a free minibus from a car park in Midhurst, but since the Gardens were only about 5 miles from our cottage, we decided to walk. I mean, Galahad never took a courtesy minibus to take him to the Grail, did he?

Obviously, doing a 5 mile walk in unfamiliar terrain to reach a strict 10 minute time slot is not really advised. But Midhurst was en route, with many eating options, so we decided to walk to Midhurst in the morning, have lunch outside the tea room on the Cowdray Estate, then, depending on how long lunch took, walk either 1 mile along a lane or 2 miles along the river to our destination. We took the river route in the end, and arrived right on the dot of our arrival slot, much to the surprise of the person at the ticket booth, since the minibus for our time slot hadn't yet arrived. "How did you get here?" she asked in astonishment, as if we'd arrived by magic.

Anyway, to the gardens. ( They're great! )

A couple of months ago, we booked last week off work, but I didn't want to book a holiday away. There was just too much anxiety and uncertainty about lockdown easing, and I didn't want to worry about a booking that might end up cancelled, or a holiday taken during spiralling infection rates, being glared at by furious locals. But if things were going well, we decided, we'd consider going away for a few nights mid-week, since - unlike whole weeks away in nice cottages - such things can usually be booked last-minute, if one is prepared to relax one's usual long list of holiday cottage criteria.

(Which, to be honest, can pretty much be summed up by: Balcony. Or, if we want to go into details: 1. Balcony with nice view. 2. Or, at the very least, a terrace. 3. But, really, balcony. 4. And a windowseat would be lovely, too, if you can manage it. 5. Oh, and free wifi and stress-free parking, and a pub within walking distance would be nice, although less important at the moment, and in a nice location, and ideally detached and quiet, and with lots of walking from the door and castles etc. within half an hour's drive, and... and... and... 6. But, really, just a balcony.)

So, anyway, with a week to go, with vaccines achieved and local infection levels at such a low level that I felt we could go the mainland with minimal feelings of guilt, we decided to book a mid-week break in Dorset. Various options presented themselves at us: boats moored in harbours, yurts, shepherd's huts - what's with all these shepherd's huts? - but most of the availability was on holiday parks. I've never considered a holiday park before, since the ones I've walked through or past on the coastal path have looked rather unappealing - vast ranks of characterless caravans fairly closely packed on expanses of featureless grass - but we found one that looked quite nice. This was at Osmington Mills, on the coastal path a few miles east of Weymouth. It was a smaller park than most, with wooden lodges on a wooded site, carefully arranged amongst the trees so as not to be too overlooked by the others.

( So off we went )

Books read since the last time I posted about such things - some historical, some fantasy, some children's book re-reads.

( Books )

Books read since last time: 1920s mysteries, a Victorian mystery, Regency mysteries, with a brief diversion through a hedgerow.

( Books )