Attempts at fresh air and fun from an endangered species in North Yorkshire
Thirsk, England
Joined December 2008
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QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
PBS' CEO Diana Collins' letter in today's Daily #Telegraph. Evensong the gateway drug to the Book of Common Prayer. pbs.org.uk
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
Ripon is home to a horn blowing tradition that has taken place nightly at the city's obelisk without interruption for over 1,000 years, dating back to 886 AD.
King Alfred the Great granted Ripon a charter that year, in the form of a ceremonial horn, and advised locals to appoint a "Wakeman" to patrol the city and protect it from Viking raids.
Every night at 9pm since, a hornblower has sounded the horn at all four corners of the market obelisk to "set the watch" even through two world wars, and even from hornblowers' own back gardens during lockdown.
One of the oldest unbroken civic traditions anywhere in the world, still happening tonight, exactly as it has for over 1,100 years 🏴 – at Ripon, England
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
Walker: "I nearly bought a wool jumper in town. £140. Nice work if you can get it."
Farmer: "I got about £2 for the fleece."
Walker: "£2?"
Farmer: "Per sheep, per year. Clipped it off her in two minutes, rolled it, bagged it, drove it to the depot. The cheque for the whole flock didn't cover the diesel."
Walker: "Then who's getting the £140?"
Farmer: "Not me, not the shearer. He costs me more per sheep than the wool fetches. I pay to have it taken off."
Walker: "So you lose money shearing."
Farmer: "Every year. And I can't not shear, or she cooks in July and the flies eat her alive. The wool's a welfare job that used to be an income."
Walker: "Sell it yourself, then. Cut out the middleman."
Farmer: "Not allowed. By law it goes through the board. Has done since 1950. I can keep a fleece for the wife to knit with, and that's about the extent of my freedom."
Walker: "So where does it go?"
Farmer: "Washed in Bradford, if we're lucky. Shipped to China, spun, knitted, shipped back, and sold to you with a label about heritage. By the time it's in the window there are eleven people between us and I'm the only one who met the sheep."
Walker: "That's mad."
Farmer: "My grandfather paid the rent on the wool cheque. I pay a man to take it away. Same sheep, same hill, same jumper in the window. Only the price of the farmer went down."
Walker: "What would fix it?"
Farmer: "You buying the jumper. And asking them where the other £138 went."
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
"Sześć lat. Właśnie w tym miesiącu skończyła sześć. A jednak tamten dzień, kiedy ją znalazłem, wyrył się w mojej pamięci z ostrością rzeczy, których nie da się zapomnieć. Była maleńka, drżała, z wciąż zamkniętymi oczami. Może miała zaledwie jeden dzień. Pamiętam, że pomyślałem: „Nie dożyje rana”. A jednak przeżyła. Walczyła z niewiarygodną siłą, z wolą zdolną podważyć każde rokowania. Stała się najodważniejszą, najbystrzejszą i najczulszą kawką, jaką kiedykolwiek znałem. Gdy nauczyła się latać, nieraz dawałem jej możliwość odejścia. Życia w wolności, tak jak chce tego natura. I rzeczywiście była wolna. Latała nad okolicą, badała niebo. Ale każdego wieczoru wracała. Siadała na parapecie i dziobem stukała w szybę, jakby mówiła: „Hej, wróciłam!”. Jakby minęły dni, choć w rzeczywistości — tylko kilka godzin. Swoje pierwsze gniazdo zbudowała na dębie za domem. Gałązki, źdźbła trawy, skrawki tkanin, które w tajemniczy sposób znikały z mojego prania… wszystko stawało się częścią jej małego arcydzieła. A gdy wykluły się pisklęta, przynosiła je do mnie — jedno po drugim. Jakby chciała powiedzieć: „Popatrz, co zrobiłam. Razem z tobą”. To był jeden z najsilniejszych i najbardziej poruszających momentów w moim życiu jako rehabilitatora. Z czasem przyszły trudne próby: drapieżniki, urazy, nawet zatrucie, które wydawało się beznadziejne. Ale i wtedy walczyła. Wyszła z tego bardziej krucha, z pewnymi następstwami neurologicznymi, które nie pozwoliły jej wrócić na wolność. Lecz to nie był koniec. To był początek nowego rozdziału — łagodnego, pełnego sensu. Od prawie czterech lat mieszka ze mną. I nie da się słowami oddać, jak głęboka jest nasza więź. Każdy dzień to dar. Budzi mnie cichymi nawoływaniami, bawi się sznurówkami od butów, kradnie przekąski z miną kogoś, kto już wie, że mu się wybaczy. Podąża za mną wszędzie — ciekawa i uważna. Siada mi na ramieniu, gdy robię kawę, a wieczorem układa się na mojej piersi. Dziobem poprawia mi brodę, a potem spokojnie zasypia. W takich chwilach czuję wdzięczność, której nie potrafię ubrać w słowa. Przed nią było całe niebo. A jednak wybrała, by zostać. I każdego dnia dziękuję jej za ten wybór. Bo ona nie jest „po prostu” kawką. Jest rodziną. Jest domem. Jest małą, spokrewnioną duszą z piórami, która jeden gest ratunku zamieniła w jedną z najbardziej niezwykłych przygód mojego życia. Dziękuję, że przeczytaliście jej historię. I dziękuję tym, którzy — tak jak ja — odkryli, jak wyjątkowymi mogą być ci zdumiewający skrzydlaci przyjaciele. Bo czasem prawdziwa miłość nie hałasuje. Ale rozpoznasz ją w cichym trzepocie dwóch skrzydeł, które wybierają powrót. Zawsze. za Kawa z mlekiem"
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
Golden Plover numbers building up at Flask lake at the moment.@NosterfieldLNR @HanbyAndrew @nybirdnews @HarrogateNats
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
At 9.15 this morning Aberfan went quiet, the way it does every year, and sixty years ago it was the sound of nothing that told the village something was wrong.
It had rained for days. The tip above the village, where the Coal Board dumped what it didn't want, had been moving for years and people had said so. At quarter past nine on a Friday, with the children just in from the playground and the register being called, it came down the mountain and through Pantglas Junior School and twenty houses. One hundred and sixteen children. Twenty-eight adults. A whole generation of a village gone before the morning milk.
The men came up from the pit still in their helmets and dug with their hands. Mothers stood at the edge in their aprons. Nobody was pulled out alive after eleven o'clock. The inquiry found the Coal Board had been warned and had not listened, and then the fund the public raised was raided to clear the tips that should never have been there. It took decades to put that right. Aberfan has had to be patient with everyone.
Sixty years on, the children would be in their sixties and seventies. Their brothers and sisters, the ones who happened to be in a different class or off sick, are the elderly of the village now. They have lived whole lives in the shadow of a Friday morning. They don't talk about it much. You don't, in the valleys. You turn up, and you remember, and you look after each other.
This morning the King, the Queen and the Prince of Wales turned up with them. Stood in the garden where the classrooms were. A prayer. The silence. Two wreaths and a posy. Then into the community centre to sit with the parents who are left and the brothers and sisters, and listen. Later William went to the primary school to unveil a tree.
Here is why that matters, and it's the Queen's story. She didn't come straight away in 1966. She sent Philip and came eight days later, and a little girl handed her a posy with a card that said: from the remaining children of Aberfan. She said for the rest of her life it was the thing she most regretted, those eight days. So she came back. In 1973. In 1997. In 2012. She paid for the organ in the chapel. She kept coming because she'd once been late, and she never wanted a village to feel forgotten by her again.
Her son was there for the fiftieth. Her grandson was there in 2023 with his wife. All three of them were there today, together, which they almost never are, because this isn't an engagement. It's a promise an old woman made to herself in 1966 and handed down.
That is what the monarchy is for in a week like this. Not the Sultan, not the tiaras, though those are the job too. This. A family that remembers a village sixty years after the rest of the country moved on, and comes back, and stands in the quiet, and asks nothing.
Aberfan did not need a speech today. It got exactly what it needed. Company.
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
The strip along the base of Brian's wall went rank in September, for the first time in six years, and that is how he knew to go and look for a sheep he does not own.
It took him a week to see it. Every morning the fescue along that wall is clipped short by a Texel ewe who comes through from the other side and grazes the base and goes home, and has done since she was five months old, and a man stops seeing a thing that is always there. Then one morning the grass was four inches long against the stone, and the damp was in it, and he stood at the gap and said her name out loud, which he does not do.
She had not come through on the Monday. Or the Tuesday. He had not noticed, and he is a man who logs her in a column.
Doris was on the far side of her own hill, in a hollow under the crag, on her chest with one hind leg stuck out, and she had been there two days. Foot abscess. A sheep on three legs on a fell cannot keep her heft, cannot get to the wall, cannot do anything but lie up and wait, and a ewe who lies up for long enough on a wet hill in September does not get up.
She had not called. A sheep in trouble often does not. She had put herself in the one dry hollow on that side of the crag and had waited, with the composure of an animal who has never in her life asked anybody for anything, for whatever came.
What came was Brian, who had climbed a hill that is not his, for a ewe that is not his, because a strip of grass that is not his had grown an inch.
He got her onto the quad across his knees, seventy kilos of wet Texel, which is not what a quad is for, and brought her down the long way round, and the farmer met him at the bottom gate having been rung from the top, and the two of them opened the foot in the yard and let it drain, and she stood for it the way she stands for weather.
The farmer asked how he had known.
Brian said the wall told him.
She was back through the gap on the Saturday. Three legs and a bit, slow, and she went to the base of the wall and put her head down and started on the rank grass as though she had been away on business, and Brian stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets and watched her clip his wall, and did not log it.
He has rebuilt that twelve feet nineteen times to keep her out. He says he knows the stones by name.
He says he would have carried her through them.
Wonderful: quiet, serene, restorative…
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ALT St Lawrence’s church at Gumfreston, with its weathered stone tower among trees in a green churchyard. Photograph by Andy Marshall from his May 2023 visit.
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
It’s incredible. Every time I’ve heard it before it sounded like someone reciting some words for the sake of it. This is the first time I’ve ever heard it and properly understood it. He’s a tremendous actor.
Andrew Scott delivers this speech too slowly; I know some viewers will hate the way he breaks up the verse. AND YET even in spite of that I think this is the best delivery of this soliloquy I’ve ever seen.
He makes it sound like it’s not a portentous speech everyone already knows but a morally serious real-time deliberation, by a highly intelligent person in extreme pain, considering what it would mean to end his own life.
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
31 years later & I remember every line word for word! Oh when #Corrie ruled the soap world. No guns, murders, cop shops, drugs & hospitals, just 3 older actresses making history in ‘toffee shop’ taking the lead with their brilliantly scripted dialogue 🥇 *notes should be taken!
Today marks 31 years since Bet and Rita’s iconic PALS? PALS? showdown. Two absolute powerhouses, Julie Goodyear and Barbara Knox were superb. Two decades worth of friendship gone in two minutes. Incredible scene! One for the ages. #corrie
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
Here are some behind the scenes photos from the centenary broadcast of BBC Radio 3's Choral Evensong at the Abbey on Wednesday. It was a privilege to be a part of this historic occasion. You can stream the service on BBC Sounds until 5 November at the link below.
ALT The choir performs on a black-and-white checkered floor. A conductor stands on a wooden platform in the center, facing the left side of the frame with his back to the camera, wearing a long red cassock and raised arm. On the left, several choir boys in red cassocks stand behind a dark wooden screen, lit by red-shaded lamps.
ALT An eye-level shot framed by an ornate rood screen looks into Westminster Abbey where the Organist and Master of the Choristers in a red robe stands before a black music stand on a black-and-white checkered floor. Choir members in matching red robes line wooden pews to the left.
ALT An eye-level shot inside the Abbey shows a choir in red robes performing in the choir stalls. The singers stand in two rows behind an ornate wooden partition The conductor, in a red robe, faces the choir from the black-and-white checkered floor. A sound engineer in a dark suit stands nearby, facing the choir. In the foreground, sound equipment and cables are on the floor, and a tall microphone stand is positioned next to the man in the suit. The high vaulted ceiling and organ pipes are visible in the background.
ALT An elevated, high-angle view captures a choir singing in the ornate choir stalls of the Abbey. Ten boys and men, clad in long-sleeved red cassocks with white ruffled collars, are arranged across three tiered rows of dark wood pews. They hold open sheet music, illuminated by individual lamps with red shades situated along the wooden ledges.
QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦⬛ retweeted
The Rotherham Bugle never fails to deliver. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
"The BBC and whining health officials were being urged to fuck right off this afternoon. "We get this shit every year" one patient told The Bugle "but it's like fucking Christmas - it just gets earlier every year. It's not like Winter comes as a surprise - not that we've got winter yet. It's still bastard T shirt weather."
Another patient summed up the feelings of many others we spoke to "The NHS is supposed to be the envy of the world. Laughing stock more likely. You've more chance of surviving an American execution attempt than a stay in a UK hospital."
As The Bugle went to press, anyone over 65 contemplating going to hospital was being urged to just ring the undertaker to save time."
🤣🤣🤣🤣
