Snow on the Tops

Friday, 19th November 2004
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

It's cold but sunny, a change from the drizzly dull days we had earlier in the week. There's was slushy snow here last night and, today, you can see that it fell more thickly on the distant Pennines. There's even a difference in the few miles up the hill to Lepton where you can see the snow is lying on the pastures. Cars coming down the hill have an inch of snow on their roofs.

Listening to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on Radio 4 on Higgs Boson - the search for the God particle, I'm amused to be reminded that Lepton is one of the few places to share a name with a fundemental particle. Or are you going to tell me that there's a Quark in Indiana and Boson is, in fact, the port in Massachussets, after they threw the 't' in the harbour.

Another day, another café; I draw this while we wait for bacon and egg sandwiches at Sainsbury's café in Wakefield. No, it isn't as inspiring as the view from the Café Casbah yesterday, is it?

School Days

At the till, I meet a man who was at school in the year below me. He reminds me that he bought this picture of our old junior school, St Peter's in Horbury. I drew the Victorian building when it was standing empty prior to demolition. He tells me:

'That window means a lot to me because it's where I was hit with a ruler after I'd failed a mental arithmatic test. Mrs XXX hit me on the back of the legs and she'd broken six rulers when I collapsed and fell to the ground.

'The caretaker could hear what was going on and he stuck his head through the window and told her: “If you hit that boy again, I'll come in there and hit you!”'

My friend was more upset about this confrontation between the two adults than he was by the beating. He's so appreciative of my artwork:

'You do your drawings and you probably don't realise how much they can mean to people. It hangs at the bottom of the stairs, so I see it every day, and remember what it meant to me.'

Evening Trails

There's a lone mallard drake on the river, in the dimming light of the not so late afternoon. Vapour trails cross the sky by a half moon.

On the calmer stretch of water above the weir gulls have gathered.

Related Link

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk