Strengthening Tonic

The first weekend of Heritage Open Days has just ended, and it's a great opportunity to see places that are not normally open.  Yesterday we went to see the church at Ripponden, not far from here in Calderdale.  It's mainly 19th century, but has a medieval window, surviving from an earlier church on the site, that was restored by the York Glaziers Trust in the 1970s.

St Bartholomew's Church, Ripponden

Next to the church is a packhorse bridge leading into the centre of the village. The other side looks very rural, with the River Ryburn running alongside the churchyard, in a wooded valley.  It wasn't a good day to appreciate the surroundings though - grey and rainy, and not very warm.

Some interesting documents had been put on display for the occasion - registers, minute books, programmes for the unveiling of the First World War memorial, and so on.  One  of them was a booklet of recipes contributed by women of the parish in 1933 to raise funds.  They mostly seemed to be cake and biscuit recipes, but I was intrigued by one for 'Strengthening Tonic'.

STRENGTHENING TONIC.

5 lemons, 5 eggs. Put the eggs whole into the lemon juice for 5 days.
Then beat them up with ½ lb. brown sugar, 1 gill rum, 1 gill of cream (or new milk), and strain.
One wineglass to be taken between meals. 

A gill is a quarter of a pint, or 5 fluid ounces (in the U.K. - British pints are larger than American pints).  That's about 140 ml.  I'm not sure of the point of steeping the eggs in the lemon juice for 5 days.  Would that help to preserve them?    It sounds a bit like the Dutch advocaat (my Grandma's favourite tipple at Christmas) but that doesn't include lemon, and I think advocaat has more alcohol. It sounds as though it should taste good - I like the idea of drinking something delicious because it's good for you.  If anyone feels inclined to try it, I'd love to know how it turns out.

We were also in Ripponden a week ago, when we walked from Ripponden up the Ryburn valley, round the Ryburn reservoir and back again.  It was a warm and sunny day then, and we enjoyed our walk.  It also happened to coincide with the Sowerby Bridge Rushbearing Festival, when a tall cart laden with rushes (originally to strew on the floor of the church) is pulled around the area by a team of men, with a young woman seated on the top of the cart.  Over the course of the weekend, the cart visits several churches and (very important) several pubs, and ending up on Sunday afternoon at the church in Ripponden. The rushcart arrived at Ripponden not long after we got back from our walk, so we had a good view of the final stretch when the men run with the cart down the slope from the main road and through a 90 degree turn into the area in front of the church.  (If that sounds alarming, it looked it.)

At the point where they need to turn towards the church, the man at the front puts his right arm out to signal that this is where they should turn left.  (That sounds wrong, but I suppose he is indicating that each pole (with a pair of men) behind him should turn at that angle at that point. Maybe.) 

Here's the first pair of men just starting the turn.

And here's the rushcart as it goes down the slope towards the church, with  the young woman perched on top of the rushes.

A lot of people had turned up to watch, there were various stalls outside the church, and a fair amount of beer being drunk.  There were Morris men and mummers accompanying the cart, and a good time was had by all.  (Though we didn't stay for the Morris dancing and mummers, but left for the pub up the road.)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

It was my birthday earlier this month, and we went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park - one of my favourite places.  It was a hot, sunny day - as most days have been this summer.  (Though today it's raining - the first serious rain we have had in weeks.)

One of the current exhibitions (until April next year) is of work by Giuseppe Penone.  There are bronze trees around the park, some in the open, some in the wood, surrounded by other trees.

Giuseppe Penone - "Tree struck by lightning" 

Albero folgorato is a bronze cast of a tree trunk, split in two by a bolt of lightning.  The split in the tree is covered in gold leaf - a beautiful sight in the sun.

Idee di petra - olmo is in next to the path through the woods,  around the upper lake at the Sculpture Park. It is a bronze tree, with a water-worn boulder caught in its branches, positioned between two of the natural trees of the wood.

The bright sunshine showed off the sculptures in the open areas of the park very well .  Here's Nigel Hall's huge Crossing (Horizontal), one of the long-term exhibits.

Even without the sculptures, the park would be a good place to be.  In a clearing in the woods, the teasels were coming into flower. 

They flower very oddly, starting usually with a band of florets round the middle of the head.  Insects love them, evidently.

The upper lake

Landscape with sculpture

We ended our visit with James Turrell's Skyspace - a peaceful place to sit and watch the sky for a while.

Summer Time Ends

The clocks went back an hour this morning and many of the 'clocks' around the house updated themselves automatically - radios, computers, mobile phones.  But a hundred years ago, when 'daylight saving' was a very new idea, putting the clocks back was a cumbersome business, and one that had to be explained to the public.  I just today came across this timely article warning the people of Leeds about the end of Summer Time in 1917.   It appeared in the Yorkshire Evening Post on the 10th September (summer time ended earlier in 1917 than it does now).

 SUMMER TIME ENDS THIS WEEK.

CHANGING CLOCKS IN LEEDS.

Daylight saving, at all events for this year, comes to an end this week. The Home Secretary gives notice that summer time will cease and normal time will be restored at 3 a.m. (summer time) on the morning of Monday next, Sept. 17, when the clock will be put back to 2 a.m.  The hour 2-3 a.m. summer time will thus be followed by the hour 2-3 a.m. Greenwich time.

The act of putting back the clock will, in the average household, be performed by paterfamilias before retiring to bed on Sunday night.  None but the most particular stickler for order will sit up till 3 o'clock for the purpose of restoring clocks and watches to Greenwich mean time.

Even in regard to the Leeds Town Hall clock, which gives the accepted time to all the work-shops and factories of the city, not to mention the public houses, there will be no need to go to all the trouble of setting back the clock at the hour named.  It might have been necessary if the clock had continued to give forth its chimes and show its face at nights, but as the possibilities of air raids have stopped all that, the demands of the times are such that the clock man need only stop the 4 cwt. pendulum for an hour.  He may do that precisely at 3 o'clock, or he may study his own convenience in stopping the clock any time during the hours of darkness and nobody will be the wiser.

Actually the putting back of the clock will impose no hardship on anyone. On the contrary, those who retire on Sunday night at the usual time will have the comfortable feeling that they are granted an hour's extra sleep for the sixty minutes which the Government took from the people in April last. The only people who will need to "get busy'' through the change are those who have to do with the regulation of clocks in public places, railway stations, post offices and Government establishments.

 One Leeds firm, besides holding up the "works" of the Town Hall clock, has to restore Greenwich time to nearly a score of tramway traffic clocks, to a dozen churches in Leeds and to sixty or seventy other clocks in public places, including those on hotels and in the arcades.

In regard to the ways of manipulating the clock, the public are cautioned that the hands of ordinary striking clocks should not be moved backwards; the change of time should be made by putting forward the hands eleven hours and allowing the clock to strike fully at each hour, half hour, and quarter hour, as the case may be.  The hands should not be moved while the clock is striking.  An alternative method in the case of pendulum clocks, is to stop the pendulum for an hour.

So if you had a striking clock with no pendulum (the sort my grandparents had on their mantelpiece) that chimed every quarter hour, you had to let it chime 44 times in order to put the clock back an hour. I think I would rather have had it an hour wrong until the following April.

Holiday in Greece

I haven't written for a while - that's because we've been on holiday.  We went to two of the Greek islands in the Cyclades, Sifnos and Milos, with Naturally Greece, and afterwards John and I stayed on in Athens for a few days. We've had a wonderful time - good weather, beautiful scenery, amazing archaeology, excellent food, good company.   John has come back with thousands of photos to sort out - I would have contributed a lot more myself, but the camera I was using wouldn't recharge, so I only took a meagre 200.  Here is a very small selection of the total.

Sifnos is an island for walkers - still very rural, with few roads, and many muletracks and footpaths.  The hillsides are terraced and scattered with white-painted buildings.  There are 235 (or is it 237?) churches on Sifnos, all well-maintained - even though in many cases there is no road access.  

  

And here's the transport:

There are dry-stone walls everywhere, which reminds anyone from Yorkshire of home (though the rock is completely different and I imagine the wall-building techniques aren't the same).  Here's one in front of  a very common type of Sifnos building - a dovecot.

I liked the dovecots a lot.  They are usually well-maintained and often still occupied by pigeons, though I doubt if the pigeons are used for food these days.

 
The dovecots usually have a little turret at each corner of the roof - they are very distinctive.

And everywhere there are olive trees.

The houses on Sifnos have very characteristic ceramic chimneys, sometimes fancy ones specially made for the purpose, but often looking like an ordinary storage pot, re-used.

Then we went to Milos (an exciting journey by small boat, as the ferries were on strike that day). Geologically it's very different - the rocks are volcanic. These are the cliffs at Sarakiniko, where the soft rock is eroded into fantastic shapes.

And at Mandrakis, boathouses have been cut into the rock to shelter the fishing boats in bad weather.

There are many windmills, or windmill stumps, on both Sifnos and Milos.  This hill, at Trypiti on Milos, must have been particularly windy as it has seven:

We went to Plaka, the capital of Milos, a couple of times.  The Red Bicycle cafe claims to have very good coffee (see the blackboard outside) - I can't confirm that, but its ice-cream is excellent.

And later we watched the sun setting beyond the island of Antimilos from the courtyard of the church in Plaka.

We were too late for most of the spring flowers, but the caper bushes came into flower while we were on Sifnos.  We were told that capers cannot be cultivated, but there are plenty growing wild in the dry-stone walls - and there was no shortage of pickled caper buds in the salads served in the tavernas. The flower looks quite exotic.

And at Filakopi, the site of a Bronze Age settlement by the coast on Milos, there were large areas of sea lavender in flower.

And there was bougainvillea flowering in gardens and on houses in the islands, and in Athens.

So then we had four full days in Athens, and visited the Acropolis of course, and the Acropolis Museum, the Agora, the Olympeion, the Archaeology Museum (a wonderful place - we spent a whole day there), the Kerameikos and its museum, the Filopappus Hill....    

Here are just a couple of the less familiar things that I particularly noticed.  First, a strange object from the Archaeology Museum.  It's called an epinetron, and it fits over a woman's knee and thigh, and the rough area on the top is then used to card wool.

It seems a bizarre and not very efficient way to card wool, but is also notable because the lives of women (apart from goddesses and courtesans) are not very evident in the museums of Athens.  The Acropolis Museum has a display on marriage in ancient Athens, and from that and elsewhere it seems that women from well-to-do families really didn't have any life outside the home - and in the home, once married, they ran the household, raised children and did a lot of spinning and weaving.  Not much of a life.

There are hundreds of Greek vases and other ceramics on display in the various museums of Athens - mostly from tombs, or votive offerings to temples.  The workmanship is astonishing, and here are two vases from the Kerameikos Museum that demonstrate that:  they are only about 4 inches or 10cm. high.

The one on the left shows Athena wearing what the Acropolis Museum says is her aegis - a goatskin cloak with snakes around the edge.   (Don't try this at home unless you are a goddess.)   But how the potter made such tiny vases and then painted such detailed images on them, I can't imagine.

And finally, another aspect of women's lives: pots of face powder, again from the Kerameikos Museum and again from a tomb.

But how do they know it was face powder?  And why would you wear face powder if you never went out?  I don't know.

We did also see some interesting wildlife in Athens - a kestrel from the Acropolis, a couple of tortoises on the Filopappus Hill.  And, most exciting, we heard two hoopoes calling to each other, and eventually saw one of them on a dead branch at the top of a tree.  It spent several more minutes hoo-hoo-hoo-ing to the other bird, so John got some good photos of it.

A wonderful holiday.

Another Year in Books

Last week, one of my book groups had our Christmas dinner (at the Olive Branch, Marsden, where we had a very good meal).  Very sadly, we have lost one of our members this year - she died in the summer after a short illness, unexpectedly and far too young.  We thought of her and remembered that at last year's Christmas dinner, she was with us.

As is now traditional, I gave everyone a Christmas card, showing the books we have read this year.

The books are:

• Anna of the Five Towns, Arnold Bennett
• On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwyn,
• Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín
• Me and Mr J, Rachel McIntyre
• The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
• An Officer and A Spy, Robert Harris
• Sweet Caress, William Boyd
• Exposure, Helen Dunmore

A good selection of books - there were none that I really didn't like.  (That has happened in the past, when some books have been very hard work to read.)   I enjoyed the last three very much, and I think my overall favourite was An Officer and A Spy.   It's a fascinating account of the Dreyfus Affair in France, which I knew nothing about at all.

Our next book (for our meeting in January)  is Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.  I haven't read it before, and haven't seen the 1947 film with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie,  either.  I'm looking forward to it.

Autumn Colour

Yesterday the weather was forecast to be dry and sunny, and it was. So we went to Harlow Carr garden near Harrogate to see the autumn colour.  A little bit late, because many trees had a carpet of fallen leaves around them.  But we haven't had much wind lately, so there were still a lot of leaves clinging on.

Acer

Tulip tree

As well as garden trees like the acers, including some with bright red leaves, and the tulip tree with golden leaves, there is a large area of woodland at Harlow Carr, and mature woodland trees around the garden, mostly oak and beech.

Some of the dead flowers and seed heads are just as attractive, too.

Teasels

 A grove of aspens had lost all their leaves, but the bare trunks looked beautiful when the sun caught them.  (According to the label, they were the European aspen, Populus tremula, and not the North American aspen, Populus tremuloides.  They are both called Quaking aspen, hence the Latin names, and both propagate by suckers, forming groves.  It's very confusing.)

Aspens

 Close to, the bark is beautifully patterned.

Aspen bark

   And a few plants were producing out-of-season flowers.

Primula vialii

 But it was much colder yesterday than it has been, so in spite of the rose and the primulas, winter is just around the corner.

Leeds Print Workshop

On Friday, we went to the opening party for the Leeds Print Workshop, on Vicar Lane.  Our daughter is one of the founder members, so we've known about it from the very beginning.  A good party - lots of people there, good beer, a tombola (I won a bracelet)...  It was impressive to see how much equipment they have already got, mostly donated.

They are still fund-raising to buy more equipment.  On Friday there was a display  of the prints available as perks to donors.

We have already made a donation, and our perk is the second from the left -- 'In the 50s' by Kirstie Williams.  I love it - it does remind me very much of 1950s furnishing fabric, and the colours are just right.

The first programme of workshops starts this week, running on Saturdays  (including two bookbinding workshops, tutored by our daughter).

 
It's a very impressive start, and I'm sure the Print Workshop will flourish.

A nice article about the workshop, with a photo of the outside of the building, is here.   And just to show that print-making is a messy business, here are some aprons, hanging on the workshop wall.

 

  

Naples

I haven't written anything for a while, because we've been on holiday in Naples.  Actually, we got back over a week ago but it takes me some time to get myself back on track after a holiday.

The plan was to visit Pompeii, Herculaneum and other Roman sites from Naples, by train, and that worked out very well.  We started with a day in the Archaeology Museum in Naples, where a lot of the finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum are kept - frescoes, mosaics, statues, .....

Here's a beautiful bronze statue of Diana as an archer, from Pompeii.  (I haven't shown the whole thing, because her left hand, holding the bow, is missing, and the gaping hole in her forearm grabs your attention.  If you can't see that her hand is missing, she looks as good as new, I think.)

Then we went to Pompeii itself.  There were crowds of people, but it's such a large site that it's easy to find quiet corners.

 Here's a street sign.  The "REG VII INS IV" is modern, but the two men carrying an amphora is original - perhaps ancient Pompeiians gave directions like "Turn left at the amphora carriers."  

A lot of the frescos have been removed from the walls where they were found and moved to the museum, but some are still in situ, like this one in the House of Julius Polybius.

We went to one of the cemeteries outside the city walls  (because of John's interest in cemeteries of all kinds).  Here's a family mausoleum, with some of the portrait busts of the people buried there, still in their niches.    

  

On another day we went to Herculaneum (modern Ercolano).  The upper floors of many buildings have survived there, and some of the wooden structures on the upper floor that project over the street. Here's one of the streets, with a colonnade either side.  The buildings at the top are in the modern town, so you  can see the thickness of the lava that buried the ancient buildings - and of course the people of Herculaneum.  

Even better in some ways, because less familiar, was Paestum, about 100km. south of Naples.   I knew that it has three wonderful Greek temples, roofless but otherwise fairly complete. The stone is a beautiful golden colour.

But there was a complete town as well as the temples, now mostly just small walls, and the objects that were found there are now in a museum, next to the site.  It has some wonderful things, including a collection of stone tomb panels, two rectangular panels and two gable ends for each tomb, all painted with scenes of banquets, chariot races, mourning, and so on.  They are beautifully drawn, and the colours look so fresh.

 

We spent time in Naples, too - a favourite site was the cloister of Santa Chiara, which has tiled columns and tiled benches alongside the paths, with scenes of rural life that are very charming.

It is a cool, peaceful oasis away from the busy traffic of the city centre.

The weather was perfect - sunny, warm but not too hot.  And we had some very good meals - some pizzas, of course, but also very good fish. A great holiday.