Question time

How many questions? And where to start?

The day began outstandingly, and unexpectedly, thanks to Karen, Dolan, Joel & the new washing machine. It continued rather well with some ridiculous blips (life really can be ridiculous sometimes) and overall I still have no real idea what day of the week it is. Yesterday I was convinced it was Wednesday. Today I've been convinced it's Thursday. Tomorrow? Who knows.

But what is certainly true is that my brain is on overdrive for reasons I can't quite comprehend. Such as: being terribly excited at the realisation that my response to the outside world at the moment is mainly judged by my cheeks (if my cheeks hurt when I'm outside, it's REALLY cold. If they don't, it's just cold. I love my digital thermometer and it's seen me through some merry judge-the-weather-right-and-not-be-freezy-or-too-hot-on-my-bike times, but right now, my cheeks are thermometer supremo).

And speaking of the cold, at what temperature does water freeze immediately? I know it *freezes* at zero, but not very fast. What's the temperature at which it just doesn't survive as liquid?

I hope I get a grip on the days tomorrow. It's been a confusing week.

Some Girls Love Handbags

Some girls love handbags. But I am not some girls. Oh no, I am in the beginnings of a brand new love affair with a bag. A bag of such marvellousness I am astounded by its brilliance. A bag I find out more about every day...and love more and more. A bag unlike any other I've had before. A bag of joy. Of yellow linings and waterproof zips. Of velcro and clip fastenings. Of more pockets than even I would have thought of. A bag that is, quite simply, the C bag.

For a while now I've been yearning for an alternative bag for my Brompton – the one I inherited with the bike is great (can't remember what they call it, but it's basically a big boxy type affair you can get shed loads in...but is a nightmare to carry around when not attached to said Brompton) and after being alerted to the fact (in fairness several years ago, but good things come to those who ponder) that there are manufacturers of super cool panniers out there, I thought I'd go on the hunt. Now, the market for designed-for-Bromptons bags is fairly limited but it seems I've managed to be in the right era – because the C bag is a “second generation” bag. And it seems the improvements on the first go round are just plain marvellous. There's even a pocket I've yet to decide how to use! But I'm sure it'll be very useful when I do get round to deciding. Anyways, it's a super marvellous, very carryable, with bonus reflective bits to keep me safe while pedalling around courier-style bag made of super strong stuffs and it looks entirely durable. How it will fare with my kind of (ab)use time will tell, but it's ace all the same.

Even more so because my dearest Papa bought it for me for my birthday. Warm fuzzies all around.

However, somewhat more topical to the rest of the world is this whole affair of the snow. My fingers are very cold just now but that's more due to inadequate glovage than the snow specifically. My biggest concern has been whether or not to bring Billy (my Brompton) down to London for this weekend's jaunt and whether London had gone silly on the snow front but on reflection, London's proven more silly as a pedestrian than a cyclist in the snow previously and I expect it'll be much the same this time around. Plus I love the self-sufficiency of having a bike in London. No having my life determined by night buses and train timetables, or striking tube workers or, well, any of it. Huzzah. I've got a particularly vivid memory from last winter of walking back in the snow from Brixton one evening and the pavement being an absolute (and entirely unfun) ice-rink whereas the road had been well gritted and was a much better option. Give me a bike in the snow in London any day.

That said, give me a job within walking distance of my house with snow the rest of the time. I've really enjoyed living so close to work this past 7 months or so and in “extreme weather” it seems even more marvellous. (Marvellous seems to be the word of the day today. I make no apologies. Marvellous.) Yesterday as the “blizzard” was setting in and the folk I work with were being sent home I was merrily settling in for an afternoon pootling around in the office on my own. Bring out the Bose and with relatively little coming through on the phones I had a brilliant afternoon which ended with a rather unexpected chat which gave me a big ol' hunk of food for thought.

Watering my lavender plant got a lot easier – I could just open the velux, scoop up some snow / icy snow and pop it in the pot to melt in due course. Unlike my usual trick of watering too quickly and it going everywhere but the soil of the plant pot.

Hmm. Curious. Wakefield Westgate northbound platform has a bunch of luggage trolleys in the snow along the snowy bit of the platform. Seven that I can see, in fact. But why? I don't normally see them on platforms and the one closest to me should, apparently, not be taken away from York Station. Mystery.

Anyway, yet again the country has been gripped (or the media leads us to believe has been gripped) by snow panic. I love the snow. It doesn't panic me. Yes, extra precautions should be taken and recklessness is just silly, but overall snow, and particularly this amount of snow, is really magical. It's water. But frozen in a special way so it piles up in white mounds which, at their best, are fluffy and powdery and sparkle in the light. Of course, it does cause real problems for many people, in particular making moving around even more treacherous than usual, but it's also one of those magical things about nature / the planet / the existence we reside in.

My ability to move around in the midst of significant snow-fall in Britain is also an interesting reflection. Factoring in an additional hour or so on my journey, travelling during Snowville periods is often more pleasant than usual – what would usually be a very busy commuter-time train to London is sparsely filled with passengers – I have a table of 4 seats to myself and from what I've seen at stations we've already passed that's not going to change much. There are a number of windows in the train (including the one opposite mine) where the outer pane has shattered through an impact – I heard someone say they thought it was people throwing snow balls at the train. If so, boo. Not good form in the slightest.

So that's me. Snow and bike bags. The essence of marvellousness.

Often it's the Small Things

Merry Morecambe again - hurrah. I really must remember that when getting to my weekend location I should just write off Friday night - yesterday was a particularly prime example of this. I was exhausted. Hungry. And travelling. However, having made it to my destination, had some food and just *arrived* life felt immensely better - and waking up this morning in the location I most like to be in was definitely worth the slightly-grotty feeling I subjected myself to on the train.

And the internet seems to have fixed itself, which is always a bonus.

Glorious sunshine met me this morning and as I wandered out into the world it was positively balmy (for November). A slow expedition into town resulted in various little purchases including new clothes, new boots and the ingredients for "bread-roll pizza" (like baguette pizza...but on bread rolls). It did not, however, result in me finding some pyjama bottoms which was one of the main reasons for the shopping trip (or, indeed, cheap coconut milk) but having got home I've discovered some fabric which should be up to the job and I think a little sewing session this afternoon is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered. (Not that there's a doctor or any ordering going on, but the point stands).

I also verified that the tide today is higher than I've ever seen it - it looked higher than usual as I wandered along the prom into town (did I mention the glorious sunshine?) and on heading down the Serengeti (or Stone Jetty, depending whether you're me & my parents or the rest of the world) the bottom "offshoots" were partially submerged and the water was only a foot or two from the platform at the very bottom of the jetty. Clearly I have still got lots to learn about the tides here! Having found myself a bench down there a spot of sunshiney reading was in order before continuing my wander around.

I also did something I've never done before just as I was wrapping up the shopping trip - but more on that at another time.

There really isn't anything quite like pottering around in a comfortable environment - top marks, Morecambe!

Scotland always makes in better

After a day of epic proportions yesterday (mentally, emotionally, volume-of-stuff-done-in-short-space-of-time-ly) there's nothing quite like settling into a sofa in a comfy living room of a *gorgeous* B&B and knowing that the furthest I need to travel for the next few days is a couple of miles. Hoo har. Made it up to Pitlochry on the sleeper overnight (after a "last chance saloon" hurtle to the train station and a rather cold wait at Preston before jumping on the sleeper) and found my way to my accommodation for the weekend, Wellwood House, very easily. Even better: they let me in, showed me to aforementioned very comfy living room and then offered me breakfast! Woo!

I'm now somewhat procrastinating before packing up all my stuff and pootling into town to meet a friend (who lives locally but I haven't seen in well over a year) then catching up with Cousin-Who-Lives-In-Australia plus husband this afternoon. After that, my plans will change with the wind, I'm sure! But really I should get a wriggle on and get myself to the place I need to be for the time I need to be there. Off I go...

If anyone ever tries to claim that the English Summer Holiday is dead...send them to me!

As ever, this is brought to you from yet another train journey. And yet I'm finding something immensely satisfying about my current predicament. I'm at Preston with my 50 minute wait for the train through to Hebden (a staple of journeys from Morecambe to Hebden – unfortunately the services from Lancaster get in mere minutes after the previous hour's service has gone) and although I sometimes find this a veritable pain, today, it's almost pleasurable. I have a rucsac of stuff next to me, along with my intrepid Tardis Bag, and, most amusingly, I am now using the laptop bag from a Compaq the Gardiner clan had years and years and years ago as my laptop bag – because it's the right size! Means the gorgeous black and orange fluffy “envelope” my Mum & I made for my Accenture laptop will probably be retired for the foreseeable future, but it was just a rather happy coincidence. Anyway, it now means that I can slide my laptop in and out of said laptop case while it's still inside aforementioned rucsac – which may not sound much, but I find immensely satisfying. Along with just a general feeling of calm as I sit here surveying a rather quiet (and yet still with plenty of trains passing through) Preston station on a Sunday evening. Maybe it was the homemade houmous pitta I have just eaten. Or perhaps, the glorious week long English Summer Holiday I've just had...

And so to the blog title: my holiday this year was spent in Morecambe it was outstanding. I was there for a week (including 2 weekends) and there was glorious sunshine pretty much every day – there was only one day that stands out as really not being sunny, and even then it was pleasantly warm. I remain utterly blown away by Morecambe Bay – even more so now I have a growing interest in the band of kite surfers who go out from the Battery. I had friends visiting throughout the week and they all loved it – both Chez Tigs and Morecambe as a whole. The days when I was on my own I pottered around the house, sat on the beach in the sun reading, or went wandering across the sands (near the coast, I'm not off on intrepid / stupid expeditions across the sands on my own. That'd be crazy) or rollerblading on the prom. Even when it rained I was out on my blades – and somehow ended up at a roller disco at the infamous Carleton on Saturday night. Next challenge: learn how to go backwards!

Point being, there was loads of sun, sand, sea and just a fabulous place to spend time. I had more sun on this holiday than I remember having in France on family holidays when we sometimes ended up resigned to another day playing cards in a soggy tent (not that said days weren't enjoyable in their own sweet way, but the key point here is the sunshine factor). I'm probably more tanned after some short reading sessions than my colleague who spent a week “in the sun” earlier in the month. It was just brilliant. The simple pleasures of a beach holiday combined with being in my fabulous house made it marvellous marvellous and marvellous. And had I wanted it, I had historic Lancaster on my doorstep to amuse me with cultural heritage and the like – but all I wanted was sun and beach and Morecambey goodness. Good times.

I've also had a lot of success creating more patchwork curtains for some of the rooms in Chez Tigs, most notably in the front room bay. All the windows in the house (except in the basement which doesn't count) have curtains at the moment but some are curtains I inherited with the house which I'm not particularly fond of. Until about 6 hours ago that included the front room bay window curtains – they were OK, but had no fullness, were bit faded and just somehow didn't bring the funness to the room I wanted. Now, when I started my epic mission to get curtains I liked throughout the house I had various options – including buying lots of fabric and the agonising decisions of what fabric to buy. Having a large quantity of fabric already, just not sufficient of any one pattern / colour to make “matching” curtains I opted for patchwork curtains – with large chunks of different fabrics sewn together to make the size I needed. The same went for the lining fabrics too occasionally, but thankfully not too often. Not only has this meant I now have wonderfully colourful curtains which combine fabrics I've bought, inherited (some of which I remember being curtains when I was growing up) or otherwise acquired, it also means I've made significant headway in reducing the Fabric Mountain which I've been carting around with me for the past few years. I think I'm almost there on the curtain front now – next on the list? Patchwork bedspreads and / or quilts. Hurrah!

The week also found me spending some time clearing out the basement – I've a long way to go but there's now one room which has been cleared, swept and sorted. As well as giving me the satisfaction of clean and tidy space, it's also got me thinking about the bits and pieces in the house that I just don't need – and so I've started Freegle-ing them (same principle as Freecycle: an email list that you can tell people about stuff you are giving away for free, folk who are interested get in touch and then you arrange between you the best pick up time etc.). Some fishing kit I had in the basement was immensely popular, as were some baby items. Some furniture I offered up had more mixed responses – one piece proved entirely undesireable and the other I had 4 “yes please”s for, 2 of which I offered it to and they never got back to me. Ho hum – shall try the third and, if necessary, the fourth and see if they fancy a collection next Monday when I'll be back...after an exciting adventure in Barrow in Furness where I'll be learning how to kite surf! Woo!

More basement shenanigans came in the form of having 3 different builders come round to get an idea of some jobs I need doing – and to give me initial thoughts on basement conversion costs. Which in itself got me thinking about a whole host of possibilities which would require the services of an architect – but could be really fun and could bring the basement back into use with a vengeance.

And overall I feel like I've started making headway on how to make Morecambe work for me. I've loved it for well over 2 years now, and Chez Tigs has been in my life for 2 years next weekend, but other than a somewhat unexpected and unexplainable love, it hasn't made much sense. Now I find myself discovering Morecambe-specific fun to entertain myself with (rollerblading on the prom, the potential of kite surfing) and really settling into the house. Which only leaves...working out what I can do in Morecambe which means I can actually be there for a larger chunk of time. Thoughts so far: start my own company / co-operative so I'd be working in a team doing....something. Perhaps some kind of consultancy for businesses in Lancashire / Cumbria so Morecambe wouldn't be an entirely crazy place to base myself from, but at the moment that's where the idea ends. It's definitely not setting up a massage business, although there will likely remain elements of that in my life generally. And it won't necessarily happen overnight – in fact, I don't expect it to happen for a couple of years, but it really feels like a seed has been planted and now it just needs nurturing.

Watch this space.

The Long Way

Today has very much been a day for doing things the long way. Be it distance, time or both. But it has also had some interesting revelations. And lots of ponderance (possibly more than was required, but these things happen). And *now* the day has chocolate. Which always makes things infinitely better.

So, as my weekends are beginning to do on a fairly regular basis, it started earlier than was entirely necessary which resulted in a relatively prompt departure from Hebden off on the day's first adventure. Yesterday was my last day at work for a week and I'm now looking forward to a week in Morecambe with various friends visiting during the week. However, there was no particular urgency to get over to Morecambe today so I thought I'd take the opportunity to take the scenic route to Morecambe....via Carlisle.

You see, the tourist board people would have you believe that the line between Settle & Carlisle is one of the most stunning in the country, so much so they do regular "go on a steam train and make an outing of it" trips up there. Anyway, bit of a diversion for my usual trips to Morecambe, but thought I'd see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately my overwhelming sense is that it is, in fact, a lot of fuss. The countryside is nice, but as a train-views connoisseur, it wasn't outstanding. The coastal line up to Aberdeen, and the track between Perth & Inverness would be higher up my list - actually, probably even the Lake-District-and-further-north bit of the West Coast mainline. So in some ways it was a bit disappointing, but I was glad to have done it as I now have my own informed opinion of it...

So that was long way round numero uno.

Having got to Carlisle I thought I'd have a wander around - found an art exhibition at the cathedral, wandered in the cathedral itself and was going to go in the castle but after a "no thank you, I'm happy perusing on my own" conversation not ending and resulting in me having to decline assistance repeatedly, I decided sitting in the sun just outside the castle reading was a much better option. Carlisle seems to be a very tourist-friendly city: there are a number of different sites within very easy walking distance and if you're there for longer there's plenty within easy reach as well. A house which is now a museum (name of which I now forget) had a lovely medicinal / edible garden in the style it would have been a couple of hundred years back which I enjoyed - although the champagne flute hiding in a flower bed was a tad random.

Back to the station (having studiously avoided the many charity shops I saw - only to see a friend had specifically mentioned them on my return to a computer!) and the first train departing going my direction was one...that went all the way around the Cumbrian coast. Another long way round: this time both distance & timewise. When I'd looked up train times Carlisle - Morecambe earlier it was either 1 hr and 7 min, or 1 hr and about 30 min. This train took 3 and a half hours just to get to Lancaster. But that was the way today went - so on I hoped!

It being Cumbria the train went right past Sellafield which brought back memories of going to peace camps there - and turning up by train with a huge heap of stuff! I spent the journey variously snoozing, gazing and reading (a book of little essays on the philosophy of various little bits of life - the easiest-to-read philosophy book I've come across thus far) and found myself in Lancaster just after 7pm. The next train on to Morecambe wasn't for half an hour or so, so I thought I'd pop into town to get some food...

...popping into town turned into failing to get food and walking back to Morecambe, it being a gloriously sunny evening and having spent most of the day just sitting watching the world go by. Don't think I'd choose to walk it again (it's a nice cycle, but a bit longer than I'd choose for a walk which isn't taking in amazing vistas) but it felt like the right thing to do. Albeit the longer (time wise) one. As well as taking the long route, today's journeys have all been a continual "going forward" - none of them have gone back over the same ground. There's something I quite like about that feeling.

The Morecambe house is still standing although I think everyone's out tonight as it's rather quiet - which suits me. Walking along the front I saw one of the flats in the block at the end of my street which look out on the sea was for sale...which reminded me of another property for sale I'd seen in Hebden. I looked up the Hebden one and it was pretty much the price I'd expected it to be. I looked up the Morecambe one and was both pleasantly surprised to see that the property prices seem to be making a bit of a recovery and also completely befuddled by the fact that 2 bed flats were on the market for more than I paid for my lovely lovely house. Craziness.

And after all today's fun and games, I seem to have decided it's time to make a serious dent in my chocolate supplies. Which I'm succeeding in doing rather well :)

And this weekend I am mostly surviving on...

...teacakes and lime marmalade. Yum! Another quiet weekend in Tiggerland and this weekend I did actually manage to make it over to the cheap supermarket in Tod - which does fabulous vegan teacakes and also stocks my favourite lime marmalade - Roses. It being a lazy weekend I wasn't really in the mood for cooking hence the teacakes are almost gone but I'm feeling good on it!

Also did something I haven't done since starting this job this weekend - which was going into the office. Now, part of me really was resisting going on because I thought it would be the start of a slippery slope but actually, it was spot on. I went in because I wanted to - because there were a couple of loose ends I wanted to tidy up before next week started (which I normally would have done on Friday evening, but I had a massage at the end of the day and it just doesn't make sense to go back to work after a massage!) and because actually, I felt like I was festering at home and wanted to *do* something. Working for NO HANDS is very different from previous jobs - because I actually believe in what they're doing and want to support it. In actual fact, there are very few weekends when I'm around in Hebden and hence won't really find myself in the position to go in that often on weekends but overall I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Also just given my room the once over with a duster, my "noodle" mop (works wet & dry!) and even cleaned my windows. Get me and my domestication! Unfortunately one of the windows has condensation between the two double glazing panes but they both had quite a lot of lichen on them which has now been cleared off and the one over my bed is looking infinitely better - well, they both are but it's more noticeable on that one. Again, noodle mop came into its own although it's now very much in need of a thorough wash. That's on the menu for a little later in the day as I've a friend coming over for a massage swap.

These quiet weekends really are novel - not sure I want them to become the norm, but now and then is pretty nice!