Bulldog...

As I walked up to the bar in a Bakewell pub, a bulldog raced from the opposite end of the room and launched himself at me. I told the owner that his dog didn’t seem to like me (a jocular way of suggesting he might want to keep it under control). He fixed me with a pugnacious stare and said “My dog’s a good judge of character”...

Death raffle...

In Leek last night. I popped into the pub where they have the Death Raffle, to find that John from Congelton was £88 to the good, having picked Zsa Zsa Gabor for imminent extinction. You can’t choose your own celebrity. There’s a list of names behind the bar, which includes such luminaries as Nicholas Parsons, Kris Kristofferson, Sean Connery, Roger Moore (the battle of the Bonds?), Paul Gascoine, Una Stubbs and Steven Hawking (“Die?”, said one local. “Nah, you just switch him off”)…

Business as usual for the C of E...

Church of England bishops have upheld traditional teaching that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. I’m not sure which is more depressing: the C of E’s witless bleatings on the subject - bishops calling for a “fresh tone and culture of welcome and support” for lesbians and gays, but without any change of doctrine - or Islam’s more dogmatic, dead-eyed insistence that homosexuals should be killed. Timid vacillation or total intolerance: take your pick. I look forward to the day when the pronouncements of both bishops and imams are treated with the contempt they deserve. Why do they think it’s any of their business what consenting adults do when they take their clothes off?…

Meeting...

I’d like to be a fly on the wall during today’s meeting between Donald Trump and Theresa May. At the very least I hope our PM will introduce the Grabber-in-Chief to the concept of shame.

The van was getting overloaded… mostly with books. I’ve been able to unload a few bags-full (thanks, Chas), and the Romahome is now as sprightly and responsive as it was a few months ago…

Robin...

Had a couple more days in Coventry with son Chas. His kitchen and dining room are now finished, so we ate our meals in the grand style. I made a bird table and set it up in the back garden; the first bird to help himself to free food was a fat robin...

B & Q...

Popped into B & Q today, hoping to buy a plywood off-cut (to make a bird-table for son Chas’s garden). I went to a guy busy cutting wood to customers’ requirements to see if he could help me. I didn’t need a whole sheet, just something about 15x20cm. He grimaced and said he’d been told not to sell off-cuts any more; they had to go into the skip round the back. That just seemed so wasteful.

I gave him a sob story about all the songbirds that would starve to death if I didn’t get my bird-table finished, and that did the trick. He gave me what I needed - no charge - and even escorted me through the checkout. So a big thank-you to the guy in B & Q… and a big raspberry to B & Q management…

Squeezebox...

Left Coventry yesterday, and let the sat-nav lady direct me to Midland Street, home of Birmingham Accordians. Midland Street sounded like a perfectly good address for an accordian shop in our second city, but, as I got closer, the neighbourhood got more and more run down. By the time I got onto Midland Street, a dreary, weed-strewn cul de sac in the back of beyond, I assumed the sat-nav lady was mistaken (it wouldn’t be the first time). I went under a smoke-blackened railway bridge, with each arch of the bridge occupied by a different ‘metal bashing’ business, and passed a canal full of abandoned shopping trolleys. I was just about to turn round when, beyond some vacant lots and piles of fly-tipped rubbish, I saw a house on its own and a sign, Birmingham Accordians.

I walked in to find a guy mending an accordian in a little workshop. I climbed the stairs to a showroom, hardly any bigger, with accordians of all shapes and sizes - and a few concertinas - displayed on shelves all round the room. A man was sitting on a chair, with an accordian, while his wife looked on. It was a late Christmas present from her to him, apparently; he played a polka, as she brandished her credit card. I had to go downstairs again to find someone to help me; they seemed to have forgotten I was there. The guy in the workshop - think Manuel from Fawlty Towers - said his English wasn’t good enough to offer me any advice. He would find the boss.

A tiny concertina had caught my eye. Could the boss play something, so I could hear how it sounded in the hands of an expert? Er, no. He told me a long story about playing his father’s home-made accordian, which meant he couldn’t play any other instrument. Did he know the price? He had to check. He returned, eventually. £120. I said I’d take it. Did he have a book for beginners? He might have one “somewhere”, and went to look. Meanwhile, the guy from the workshop asked if I’d like a cup of tea, by miming the act of drinking. The other guy came back and said he didn’t have any kind of book for beginners. I should just pick it up as I went along.

The guy in the workshop drew a diagram, showing the chord names of each button. To represent each button on the concertina, he drew circles on a piece of paper, using a ten-pence piece as a template.

Strange, mis-shapen men wandered in and out, and the boss disappeared for minutes on end. A downstairs room was laid out with a tiny stage and a couple of dozen chairs, ready for some kind of performance. Everywhere there were accordians, with labels attached, ready to be mended.

The boss wrote out a receipt and then searched for the card-reading machine, which took at least two minutes to authenticate the sale. I left with my concertina and a smile on my face, after one of the more surreal shopping experiences I can recall. I am now the proud owner of a squeezebox; I hope I can “pick it up as I go along”…

Coventry...

Spent yesterday evening in a Coventry pub with son Chas and an extraordinarily animated Italian woman, Stefania, who is a reader at Birmingham University. In comparison to her, Chas and I looked so English, so undemonstrative, so immobile. Her face registered two or three different emotions every second, and she backed up her words with sweeping hand movements, which were so descriptive that I could probably have followed her gist even with my fingers in my ears. When she talked about other people, she seamlessly 'became' them. If I ever wanted to illustrate a book on body language, I could just set up my camera on a tripod, ask her about Donald Trump, or Brexit or middle-eastern politics, and keep on taking pix…

Shepherd's Pie...

Had a boozy evening in Scarborough, followed by a more abstemious evening in York (I was assured that no animals were harmed in the making of the excellent Shepherd’s Pie). On the road again now, heading south to Coventry…

The beach at Whitby...

Shopping...

I don't do much shopping, because I'm trying to lighten the load in the Romahome rather than adding to it.  Even though I now have a Kindle, I have too many books. But I went on a spending spree yesterday and bought a new towel. Happy days...

Whitby...

In Whitby last night, or, rather, above Whitby, because the road down to the harbour was closed due to the ‘tidal surge’ that was expected about midnight. I walked down to the harbour, but, apart from a few sandbags, things looked pretty normal.

I was back down by the harbour again this morning, with my camera. People were dealing with sand, mud, debris and standing water along the harbourside road, but, fortunately, the tide hadn’t been high enough to get into any buildings that I could see…

Winter draws on...

Still in East Yorkshire, where a light covering of snow and a biting wind make the flat landscape seem rather bleak. I’m dressed for the cold - long johns and fingerless gloves - which make me look like I’m going to rifle through the bins. A good opportunity to write, and keyword pix…

Transfer of power...

Donald Trump still seems like a fictional character; it’s hard to believe he will occupy the Oval Office in the White House next week. I don’t hope he’ll be assassinated; I’m not even hoping he’ll have a heart attack. He’ll have four years in the job, though I’m not sure he’ll last that long.

In his last speech as president, Barack Obama talked about the importance of “the peaceful transfer of power from one freely-elected president to the next”, which, if he never said another word in his life, would still make him ten times the man that Trump is…

Fish & Chips...

I found a fish & chip shop in Patrington purely by smell, following my nose around this tiny market town in rural Humberside. A poster on the wall announced that you could buy Fish & Chip Vouchers, adding - unnecessarily, I thought - that they were an ideal present for anyone who loves fish & chips. On what particular occasions, I wondered, as I waited for my haddock, chips and scraps, would a Fish & Chip Voucher make an acceptable gift. Birthday? Christmas? Wedding anniversary?…

Hull Marina...

Blade...

Took some pix of a wind turbine blade being wheeled, inch by inch, into Victoria Square, Hull… as some kind of artwork to mark the start of the city’s ‘year of culture’ (or maybe just as an advert for Siemens). It was huge, though the pix don’t really capture the size of it... and the weather was gloomy. It must have been an expensive manoeuvre, to judge by the number of cranes and other pieces of machinery, plus loads of guys in hard-hats and hi-vis jackets, who were presumably on good overtime pay for turning out on a Sunday. I’d left before the blade was fully and finally in place…

From hell to Hull...

I finished Rev Pawson’s book on hell: perfect reading for a gloomy day in January, when the sun sets just after lunch. My encapsulated review? It’s gibberish from cover to cover.

“Before moving on,” he writes, “it is worth noting that Jesus speaks of the destruction of a ‘body’ in hell after the death of a body. He is not referring to the putrefaction of a corpse, which takes place in the grave rather than hell and does not affect the soul at all. He is clearly anticipating a resurrected body that can be ‘thrown into hell’. This raises again the speculative question as to why God would bother to give the wicked new bodies only to annihilate them immediately afterwards! His act of ‘re-creation’ would be more understandable if the raised body were for continual existence rather than complete annihilation”.

Passages like this raise other “speculative questions”, such as: why do so many believers claim to know things they can’t possibly know? And… how does it feel to concoct an entire book which, from start to finish, is entirely speculative, drawn from a feverish imagination without evidence of any kind? Oh, and can I suggest that introducing children to the fires of hell should be categorised as child abuse?

In Hull today, photographing the siting of a massive wind turbine blade in Victoria Square…

Skipton...

Hellfire...

While researching material on belief and reason, I’m not just reading books by stroppy atheists; I’m reading books by believers too. Which is why I found myself in a small campsite last night, turning the yellowing pages of The Road to Hell, by David Pawson. Yes, a whole book… about the torments of hell.

The author admits that hell is seldom talked about these days, except as “a mild expletive”. You can get through a whole service in most churches without the vicar referring to hell even once. Hell does not appear in the Old Testament. The punishments - and they are many and frightful - end with death. It’s “gentle Jesus meek and mild” of the New Testament who introduces the noxious idea of punishments extending into the life to come. Jesus threatens sinners and unbelievers with the prospect of spending eternity in the lake of fire, and Pawson quotes chapter and verse. He has no truck with symbolism. Hell is is real place (not just “a separation from God”, as some liberal clergy may suggest). “The modern mind, considering itself sophisticated and refined, rejects hell as barbaric and primitive”, he warns, before confronting us with the uncomfortable truth.

He recalls the first time he tackled hellfire in one of his sermons. “My records tell me that I began to do so in the Methodist church at Addlestone, Surrey, in July 1955” (these “records” sound like a riveting read). He agrees that most Christians talk about hell as a destination for other people rather than themselves, while suggesting we should reconsider our complacent assumptions. We have to face up to the prospect of hell, because “there can be no final comfort in delusions” (an odd thing for a man to say who privileges faith over reason). He writes about an “alarming” move away from “a traditional understanding of hell as endless torment”, from which there is no appeal, no clemency, no parole. He may be alarmed; I am relieved. It takes a particular quality of mind to invent a punishment that is, literally, “a fate worse than death”.

Pawson quotes a Weslyan Cathechism (written for “children of a tender age”):

What sort of place is hell?
Hell is a dark and bottomless pit of fire and brimstone.
How will the wicked be punished there?
The wicked will be punished in hell by having their bodies tormented by fire and their souls by a sense of the wrath of God.
How long will these torments last?
The torments of hell will last for ever and ever.

Sleep well, kids; sweet dreams!

Pawson takes hell very seriously, mentioning “the high temperatures and consequent thirst”. He mentions “the obnoxious smell” of brimstone and sulphur. Jesus stated that the fires of hell are inextinguishable. Oh, and it’s dark, and filled with acrid smoke, and the torment never ends. “Prayer will be futile” Pawson warns, “for there will be no God to worship”. In the absence of God, hell is populated by Satan and his fallen angels (though Pawson reassures his readers that the Bible makes no mention of pitchforks).

Our “loving God” will judge us on the day of reckoning, when all souls will be weighed in the balance. Pawson goes into lip-smacking detail about the consequences of being found wanting. The lists of punishable sins is long, and includes ‘thoughtcrime’: not just committing adultery, but also “looking at a woman with lust in our hearts”. He was about to give his readers some good advice about how to avoid the fires of hell, when I fell into a deep, untroubled (and, thankfully, dreamless) sleep.

If the Rev Pawson was preaching hellfire and brimstone back in 1955, he’s probably dead by now. I wonder where he’s spending eternity…

Ye Olde Naked Man Café, in Settle...

Epiphany at Arnside...

Please be safe...

Licensed this pic today. Wonder who bought it, and for what possible reason...

Bohemian Chatterers...

I never expected to see rare birds in Todmorden, but last week I saw a guy with a camera and long lens trained on the trees surrounding the car-park in the middle of town. They were waxwings (though, from a distance, on a gloomy day, they could have been starlings). It’s an 'invasion year’ for waxwings, apparently. Some birds ventured closer, to trees laden with yellow berries, and, when the sun came out, they looked exotic: more like parrots than starlings.

I haven’t seen this many waxwings (I counted around thirty) since I was in short trousers. I read about a flock of waxwings stripping the red cotoneaster berries from trees in Golden Acre Park (though the Yorkshire Post journo had tried to ‘sex up’ his account by calling them ‘Bohemian Chatterers’). I got on my bike and peddled to the park, to find the flock of waxwings still in residence. They weren’t bothered by a young lad with a monocular (and they weren’t bothered by an old guy with a monocular, in Tod). Two special moments, half a century apart…

A new year...

Parked up in Carnforth last night, assuming that locals intending to celebrate new year would go to the fleshpots of Lancaster and Morecambe instead. 2017 arrived, on cue, without any need for me to usher it in. I don’t think many people would say that 2016 was a vintage year. I backed the wrong horses in both the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, so my prognoses for 2017 ain’t worth a hill o’ beans.

Mentally, I haven’t felt this grounded and balanced for maybe 30 years. I haven’t had a full-blown panic attack for years, and even the low-level feelings of anxiety, which used to be present through my waking hours, have gone. It’s the difference between shadow and light, night and day. Physically, though, I’m overweight, drinking too much, and - despite the photographic forays - not getting enough exercise. So this is something to address in the months to come…

Santa on his own fitness regime: either scaling a pile of presents, or abseiling down...