Every once in a while I like to write these blogs, mainly to remind myself that in amongst all of the reasons to moan about life, there’s always something to smile about. It’s nice to send some positivity out to readers too though. We all need to moment to smile about, don’t we?
So, what was turning the frown upside down in June then?
The weather. I don’t know about where you live, but here in the UK, in our little corner of West Yorkshire, it was wonderfully sunny for a while. The British joke about this, of course, is that we spend most of our year complaining that it’s too wet or too cold only to then complain that it’s too hot when we get our annual 5 day heatwave! It seems the weather gods can’t win! However, the sunny weather made me smile. And while it doesn’t make running or working in the garden any easier, it does make the whole place look better. We had a few afternoons spent just sitting, reading and chatting in our back garden and the colours are fantastic. And then you look up and see a clear, vividly blue sky. How could you not smile?
The Borrowdale Banksy. If you don’t already know, then Borrowdale is in the Lake District here in the UK. It’s a National Park and an area of outstanding natural beauty. Borrowdale itself is a particularly remote area but for the last couple of years, slate sculptures have been appearing; the work of the Borrowdale Banksy. No one seems to know this Banksy’s identity, but the sculptures are fantastic, as you can see below and news of the latest one made me smile.
The latest Borrowdale Banksy sculpture in the Lake District
Eating Out. June is a very busy month in our house as there are two family birthdays within 3 days. So, much of the first part of the month gets taken up with planning and buying presents and it just feels like we’re rushing around for weeks. This year however, we decided that rather than just eat out to celebrate both birthdays at the same time, we’d go out twice. This was smile-worthy for two reasons – delicious food and drink and no dishes for me to do! And then, having enjoyed the meals so much we decided to end the weekend with a Sunday roast in the pub!
A Science Cover. Covering lessons is one of my least favourite things as a high school teacher. You often don’t know the class or have the faintest idea about the subject and you’re usually required to move halfway round the school to get there, meaning that you often arrive late with a chaotic cluster of children waiting for you, excited by the fact that their teacher’s not here. It also means that you’ve lost a free period. On a delightful Friday last month, I walked into my room and turned on my computer to discover I’d been given a Year 7 Science cover. My only free of the day, gone! I was gutted. However, a few minutes later, things got better when a member of the Science department came down to tell me about the class being moved. She asked if I’d like them to come down to my room, so of course I said ‘yes’! First problem removed. Then it turned out they were doing an exam; a peaceful cover almost guaranteed. Sadly – but much to my amusement and hopefully yours too – once I’d settled the class and got them going with their exam, my inner teenager came to play. I had the brainwave of thinking I might try to do the exam myself. Why, I don’t know. I was appalling at Science at school. But when I opened the first page I was delighted. The first section was human reproduction and try as I might to have a proper go at the questions, all I could do was attempt silly answers. The results, below, had me stifling giggles and holding off smiles for what felt like the rest of the day. And yes, to confirm, I am a 51-year-old man.
Local Legend on Strava. Lots of you will know that I love running. It’s been important for both my physical and mental health, especially over these last 5 years or so and it’s been something I’ve done on and off all my life. Nowadays I track my runs via the Strava app on my watch and was thrilled on a recent run to find that I’d earned a ‘medal’ for an achievement. Eager to see if I’d beaten some kind of personal best, I was straight on the app in order to have a look. Imagine my surprise to discover that I’d become a ‘Local Legend’ on a stretch of my run that others in my town must use regularly. Imagine my surprise turning to fits of laughter though when I discovered what I was the local legend of. My official title is ‘Local Legend of Poo Bins to Topcliffe’, a stretch of path that leads up to a local mill building at Topcliffe from…well you can work the rest out for yourself.
Let’s concentrate on the ‘legend’ rather than the ‘poo bins’.
The Leeds 10k. I’ve written about this already in another blog post, but June was the month that I completed the Leeds 10k, which would have been reason enough to smile in itself. However, I also managed to run it in the fastest time I’ve managed since my heart surgery – 56 minutes, if you insist on asking! – and this kept a smile on my face for days!
So, in terms of good stuff happening, June was an excellent month. Even getting a cover lesson ended up with me smiling, even though it was a very juvenile reason! I hope you enjoyed reading about it all though!
So clearly being not very good at titles doesn’t just afflict me with poetry! But I’m hopeful that as a feature, not only will this grow and become regular, but I’ll come up with a better name for it.
Anyway, while I was sitting trying to enjoy the sunshine this week I found myself reflecting on stuff I’d enjoyed over the course of said week. That and worrying that I’d burn or just end up reduced to a puddle on my patio that would swiftly evaporate and leave my wife and kids forever wondering about the mystery of my disappearance! And so, I thought I’d write a blog about the stuff I’d enjoyed! It was a good excuse to get inside before I melted. So, here we go.
Julie’s Facebook post. My friend and former colleague Julie moved all the way from Yorkshire to Devon a short while ago. It was a complete lifestyle change and a huge gamble and I was full of admiration for the bravery that it involved. Anyway, this week on Facebook she posted this and it really made me smile. Definitely some evidence to say that she made the right decision!
2. Sanding. Sad, but true. This week, in the midst of a heatwave, I got up early . and sanded all of our garden furniture down in preparation for applying some wood oil. I did wood work at school and always enjoyed it and there’s a bit of me that regrets not persuing this type of thing as a career. I always enjoyed it and was good at it too, but I guess it didn’t seem like the kind of career choice I could have faced my parents with, so there you go. The sanding was really hard work and I was far too pleased with myself by the time I’d finished. Probably far too sweaty and hot too! But it made me genuinely happy. Here’s one of our benches – have a look!
3. Nick Pope. On Friday, a Newcastle United site on Twitter (Toon Polls) set off on a mission to get the name of our goalkeeper Nick Pope trending. They replied to a poll on a Burger King post with the alternative answer of ‘Nick Pope’, who if you don’t know is a goalkeeper for my team, Newcastle United. Lots of Toon fans joined in and then after that it’s safe to say that things went a little bit mad as football clubs, global brands and celebrities got involved and it made me smile…even if my own attempt to join in was spoilt by predictive text on my phone. Not to worry, it made for a good day on social media and was a cracking effort from our fanbase ad the internet in general!
4. A conversation. A simple one this. On Wednesday after training with my Under 14 football team (I’m the coach, not a 13-year-old for those who don’t know) I had a lovely conversation with the parents of one of our new players. They’ve recently arrived from Armenia and it seems, are loving life in Yorkshire. I was really pleased for them. They were also asking for help in getting their son some friends, obviously through football and I promised to try and help. Again, it gave me a bit of a warm glow to think that I’m lucky enough to be in a position to be able to help.
5. A notification. Now these things can be the bane of all our lives, but this one made me laugh. It was a notification from my own phone offering me the chance to view highlights of my recent trip home to Whickham, which is the village just outside of Newcastle where my parents live. I’d gone to visit my mam because she’s been poorly for months and is housebound. So literally, all we did was sit in their bungalow drink coffee, eat and chat for about 6 hours! It was lovely, but I didn’t really see the need to view the highlights, not least because I was there! I had a lovely bacon sandwich though, which my timeline didn’t pick up on!
So there we have it. Five simple things that I enjoyed this week. Hopefully I can find some more for next week and hopefully I can come up with a better name for it all!
A confession before we start this one: I actually quite like Winter. Fresh, clear mornings, the sight of snow blanketing the landscape, the relief at walking into a warm house. So, you might think maybe I’m being a bit contrary in writing about the things I hate about it. Well, let me explain what it is that irks me so much about Winter and gives us that love/hate relatiomnship.
Having to scrape frost or ice off the car in the mornings is something I really can’t stand. I should expect it really, but every time I open the front door and discover that icy covering on the windows of the car, I’m surprised. My heart sinks. It’s hard enough getting out of the house on those freezing cold, dark Winter mornings, but then to be greeted by frost or ice is just a step too far.
As soon as I see it I know that I’m going to be delayed. I can’t just get in the car and put up with the freezing temperature for the next few minutes before the usual drive to work. Oh no. Instead, it’s a race to start the engine, grab the ice scraper and then get to work at clearing my windows. Throw in the likelyhood of an icy driveway that may just see me ending up on my backside and we’ve got a pretty terrible start to the day. And then on my return to the car I’ll have to drive with a painful, icy numbness in my thumb for the next ten minutes. Not good.
Ice on the pavements and roads. That feeling of sliding uncontrollably in the car is just awful. It’s not too bad if there’s nothing around, but on one occasion, when I worked at a particularly rural school I managed to drive up a particularly narrow and steep road for a few hundred metres before getting stuck in the snow and ice. With no way forward this meant that I had to slowly reverse back down through the ice to get home a different way. Inevitably the car slid and we collided with a wall on the way down. On another occasion I fairly burst out of my front door laden with a few bags and ready to head to work only to find, as soon as I placed one foot on the front step, that the whole place was glazed with ice. I literally somersaulted onto the path, quite spectacularly. Arse over tit, we call it and bruised for days after. Bizarrely, my neighbour from two doors up emerged from her house at exactly the same and achieved exactly the same results. I think we’re both a lot more cautious in the Winter these days.
Putting the lights in the tree in the garden is possible the most dangerous thing that I’ll attempt all year. This isn’t because it’s a big tree or that the set of lights is particularly cumbersome. It’s because of the fact that we don’t have a proper ladder and that our front garden runs down to the tree on a bit of an uneven slope. Every time we put the lights up, I can sense curtains twitching, neighbours queueing up for what must be a combination of the most death-defying show they’ll see all year and the kind of act that a medieval jester would have put together in that it’s not funny, just kind of awkward.
Each year I dread the feeling of the step ladder legs sinking into the moist grass, wobbling as I get higher up the rungs and then veering dangerously sideways as I reach anywhere near the top. Many’s the time I’ve had to jump off before I fell off. In my head I’m something akin to Alex Honnold in the film Free Solo as he scales El Capitan. For anyone watching I’m probably a lot more like Stan Laurel or terrible circus clown; a lovable simpleton putting his body on the line in the name of looking slightly more masculine than usual. And that’s still just about as masculine as one of Steps.
The Winter wardrobe; particularly how I can’t manage a scarf. Some people are just stylish and the carrying off of a big coat or a thick jumper just seems to come naturally; they literally put on some of their Winter wardrobe and look like they’ve stepped out of the pages of Italian Vogue. They can trudge through the foot deep snow looking cool. They seem to almost levitate above the slush (that’s the dirty melting wet snow if slush is unfamiliar to you), their trousers immune to the water or the dirt, their cashmere overcoat unruffled by the wind. And then there’s me, either sliding about in trainers because I hate walking boots and wellies, or looking not unlike the Stay Puft man from Ghostbusters because of the sheer amount of layers I’m employing to fend off the cold. A few years ago I bought a new, expensive Winter coat and then almost immediately ripped the lining by one of the armholes, meaning that I couldn’t even put it on stylishly, preferring instead to choose the wrong hole almost every time and end up with one arm just stuck in the coat somewhere.
I’m a disaster when it comes to scarves though. Although it never puts me off buying them. Even this morning I made the latest in a long linesof attempts to wear a particular scarf that I must have bought in a sale a couple of years ago. It’s a bit of a Moddish affair and the kind of thing I’d expect Paul Weller or one of The Kinks to look fabulous in. Not me though. I still can’t decide how to wear it as it just seems about a foot too long. Thus, in my head I’m going to look great in it, but in reality I’ll stand in front of the mirror for 5 minutes trying different ways of wearing it before folding it roughly and returning it to the draw. I’ll wear a football scarf instead and just ruin whatever look it was that I was going for!
The weather can’t make up its mind. Time was, when I was much younger and lived in much more northern climes, that Winter meant snow. Nowadays, this is no longer the case. The sky tells lies. Take today, for instance. The weather forecast promised snow. Promised it! Sure enough the clouds arrived bang on time. It was freezing cold too. And then the rain started, accompanied by gale force winds and we were in the grip of another of our recent weather additions: one of those storms that the Met Office insist on giving stupid names to. And that’s the way of Winter these days; less of the kind of wonderful snowy landscapes that would block the doors when I was younger and more filthy dirty rain and horrible winds, designed to soak you to the skin and make it impossible to walk around the place! All of them given daft names – the last one was called Arwen and the one throwing us around like rag dolls today has the moniker Barras. I mean, who calls their new born baby Barra? Apart from anything else, you’re missing a trick in not adding a bit and christening it Badass, surely?
Linked to the weather is my sympathy for our PE staff at this time of year. Now I get that it’s all swings and roundabouts with PE teaching in terms of weather. I can’t help but feel envious when it’s a scorching hot summer’s day and they’re out on the fields. But in this weather, even a cold hearted old cynic like myself can’t fail but to feel a bit sorry for them. That is, sorry for them with a smug grin on my face as I sit in a lovely, modern heated classroom. Most mornings though, as I’m getting into my classroom, setting up for the first lesson of the day, PE staff are trudging out to the fields, loaded down with bags of footballs, poles and other kit like sporty beasts of burden. Then they’ll wander around said field, marking out areas with poles and cones before trudging back in soaked to the bone. And this is before they’ve actually taught a lesson. Do they ever get dry on these days? Is the only place where they’re not either frozen or soaked, their home? Is work just like one Arctic expedition after another for these poor souls? I love sport, but having to go through that on a daily basis just isn’t worth it.
This is the route to the fields for PE lessons. Runs right past my classroom window!
Sadly though, the weather isn’t something that I can avoid that much during Winter. As a volunteer football coach, I get to sample the sensation of being both frozen and soaked for what feel like endless hours, pretty much every Sunday in Winter (and Autumn…and Spring…and some of Summer; I mean we do live in England).
Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, right? A time for relaxing and preparing oneself for the demands of the coming week. And yet, for most of the year I’m up not long after 7am in order to start preparing for a game. Having spent some of Saturday afternoon loading the car with the equipment we’ll need, I’ll rush my breakfast on the Sunday in order to be at our pitch – which is generally a mud bath at this time of year – setting up for around 8.40. Often, in Winter it’s either freezing cold, pouring with rain or your caught in the midst of some ridiculously high winds. Often, it’s all three at once. This will mean that by about 8.50 I’m either soaked through or have pretty much lost all feeling in my hands and toes, making jobs like putting nets onto goal frames incredibly difficult. Sometimes, when I’m really lucky, I might not be able to find any nets or corner flags – on one occasion I forgot the matchball – or there might not be enough spare kit to go around for the lads who’ve only just joined the club meaning I get to run around the place searching stuff out, which is all made infinitely better by driving rain, sleet or ankle deep mud that our winters inevitably bring.
After that I get to stand on the touchline coaching my way through the game, quite possibly losing my voice in the process, while attempting to stay warm now that I’ve thrown in the towel in the battle against the rain! (See below for some images of our pitch on a recent rainy, winter weekend)
Even when I get home, it’s not over. While the rest of the family can get inside and start getting warm, I’ll still have to unpack the car and load all of the gear back into the sheds, all while saying a silent prayer that it will have dried out in time for training a few days later. Then, I’ll have to sit on our wet step and take off my muddy boots, as well as my soaking wet socks and probably a couple of wet upper layers before I can even go in the house! Yep, you’ve got to love Winter!
So there you have it. While Winter is the season of sledging, building snowmen (snowpeople?), Christmas and hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire, there’s also loads to dislike about it. Roll on Summer where I can be far too hot one minute ad then fed up of the rain the next!
Oh, and by the way, remember to tune in next week, when in the name of blogging and content, I’ll be writing about the many things I love about this very season!
