Monday, May 01, 2006

Hold the Front Page - Country Park discovered !




Blogger can be a bogger at times. Uploading these pictures has been the very devil and taken me at least 20 minutes which, to us bloggers, seems like an eternity. And then, when I stopped getting 'this page cannot be displayed' the pictures were there, repeated 7 times.

Amazing when you have lived in an area for 15 years that you can discover something new but we have. Neither of us had ever been to Burnstump Country Park which is about 200 yards from where I used to work. Yesterday evening we had driven along Sherwood Lodge Lane to find somewhere to park so that I could get out the car and ease my leg-ache. And there it was ! So when the sun came out this afternoon we decided to go and explore, and it's lovely. A gem. Very reminiscent of Clumber, with a little pond, woodland walks and a playing field surrounded by picnic tables. It was nice to see young people playing footie with lots of shouting. That's what they are supposed to do. Yvonne shot off a couple of times to explore highways and byways. She was reassured by the presence of young ladies by themselves walking dogs. In fact there was a complete cross-section of ages and we shall definitely go again. Considering that it is Bank Holiday Monday it wasn't at all overcrowded. When we got home I researched it on Google Earth and MultiMap and, as the crow flies it is only a mile or so from Dorkett Head a landmark for our, hopefully, new home.

Picture 2 instantly reminded me of one of my favourite Gerard Manley Hopkins quotes :
"Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in a stipple upon trout that swim"

[Pied Beauty]

If we stop the car to make a drink when we are on holiday, we always hope for a quiet spot with a little dappled sunlight. Perfick !

For lunch we had the cold gammon with a salad followed by Yvonne's signature dish 'Orange Jelly with Mandarin segments suspended in it. Does a phrase including the words 'second childhood' spring to mind? Never mind, we aren't releasing foreign criminals from prison instead of deporting them, and we aren't making a balls-up of the NHS and we aren't having affairs with our secretaries. So there. This morning was cold and not too promising so, although it remained cold it was a suprise to have the afternoon sun. This morning I downloaded a prog. from a link on WUforum called 'Quick shutdown' which apparently will safely zap anything that's stuck, and although I've not needed it yet, it sounds great. One guy rather huffily said that he didn't want to download a programme to compensate for something his computer should have been doing in the first place. I suppose he's got a point but most of us get so irritated by 'programme not responding' messages, it sounds like a godsend.

Bob sent me some good pictures of the swan's nest and eggs (which I could easily see) and his grebes (which I could see magnificently). Just as an experiment later on I'm going to find them and try Blog This and see if it will insert them into the text. So I sent him some back, of Burnstump, and timber which I have asked if he can identify. Caroline (Hello_There) arrived out of the blue on Google Talk this morning and we exchanged pleasantries. Ray said later that he didn't think she had the full download. But he will sort it. He always does.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you get my comments or did I wipe them out?

Anonymous said...

I have already made clear in gmail that GTM did not 'discover' Burnt Stump country park. Columbus paid a visit in 1588 and one of Sandra's many nieces used to (funny phrase that 'used to')travel all the way from Chesterfield to play there. There is a gastropub on the site too - of the Captain's Table chain, I believe, so only for the desperately ravenous or easily pleased (I don't mind sounding pompous, which explains why I was happy to take a unilateral and quite arbitrary decision to use a very narrow definition of the word 'discover').
Should Hopkin's cow not be 'brindled'?
I am waiting for news that all the programmes downloaded onto GTM's laptop have become involved in a power struggle - a sort of mini Armaggedon.
The recent photo was not Grebes, it was Tufted Ducks. The drakes are black and white like fat floating magpies with pale green bills (possibly dollars?). The underside is white and the top black but their habit of swimming on their side can confuse identification. The Grebes are much smaller and whinny like a distant horse.