In an attempt to capture the Christmas spirit, I've been to three of the organised light displays that proliferate at this time of year. Here's what I thought:
HARLOW CARR
First up, P and I went to RHS Harlow Carr in Harrogate for their 'Glow' event. It was the perfect evening - cold, clear and just beginning to snow as we reached the garden. I would recommend the garden anyway as it's lovely - but lit up with multi-coloured lights, it was breathtaking.
CHATSWORTH
I love the gardens at Chatsworth but rarely go as it is so expensive. However, Great Neff wanted to go to Rufford Abbey, which had no outdoor lights this year, ao I suggested Chatsworth as it sounded a bit similar. I wish we'd taken him to Harlow Carr.
It was £24 for each adult and £12 for Great Neff, and that was only for the garden. Our tickets gave us no access to the house. The website led us to believe that the kids play area and animal No kids play area and animal petting zoo would be open, but it didn't seem to be.
The weather was atrocious with heavy rain throughout our visit. I was carrying an umbrella and a using a walking stick P had bought me a few weeks earlier, as my back was hurting, so I hobbled round the garden like a soaking wet over-burdened octogenarian, while P and Great-Neff went on ahead. There was a demarcated area to stroll round which didn't include all the garden features I love, and it was illuminated by strings of small yellow lights.
It wasn't very exciting, however, except for a brief period of interest in the rockery area where they had some cool lights and effects. There was also a large animated display which showed a human-sized fairy in a sparkly silver dress which swirled around and transformed into a sparkly red dress. I enjoyed that but Great Neff, being an eleven-year-old boy, wasn't really interested in pretty dresses.
There was a cafe which had been selling apple pie but it was shutting as we reached it, much to P's disappointment, and there were some firework type lights projected onto the wall of the buildings. But mostly it was too dark to see much of the actual garden, raining stair-rods, and generally quite disappointing. And the last part was like torture for me as my back was hurting so much and I was wet through to my undergarments despite the umbrella! We did get a hot chocolate in a marquis near the exit, however.
I was also irritated by the sour-faced woman in the kiosk who scanned our digital tickets as if she wished her scanner was a machine gun she could mown down the visitors with. Unlike many of the other staff, she had a relatively cushy role which included a seat and a rain-free kiosk, but she still managed to look like she was offended by having to do such a menial task. I mean, at £24 a ticket, the least you should expect is a friendly - or even just a polite - smile, surely? Maybe it was the Duchess of Devonshire filling in for a sick staff member?!
HADDON HALL CHRISTMAS MARKET
This was a lovely Christmas Market, not far from Chatsworth - beautiful old hall, quality [though expensive] market stalls [some excellent jewellery], busy but friendly cafe with nice food and best of all we went with two friends, D and J-M, who generously paid our entrance fee because they'd accidentally bought four tickets instead of two.
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Bah, Humbug!
t's Christmas, and I've already given £225 away to those who don't need it.
Back in the summer, I spent around £60 on some pull-on trainers from China which were apparently designed to help people with foot issues such as plantar fasciitis. They took ages to arrive and once they did I discovered they were well-made but too small. The company advised me that I could either 'just keep them' or I could return them, but they couldn't reimburse me unless they received the shoes back in pristine condition and they wouldn't pay for postage, which cost £25.
I decided to send them back as I know no one who would fit into these tiny shoes, and I figured that losing £25 was better than losing £60. Six weeks later the shoes came back - they'd never arrived at the company HQ in China, and had been returned to sender. So, basically, I lost £60 for the shoes plus £25 postage but, on the bright side, I do now have a pair of well-made shoes that my gigantic English feet can't fit into [I'm a size 4].
If any small-footed female reader is willing to pay the postage [much less than £25 if you're in the UK], I'll happily send them to you and you can have them for free.
I gave the rest of the money to the Police, or at least to one of the private companies they employ to deliver Speed Awareness Courses.
Yes, I've been caught speeding. I was driving at 34mph in a 30 zone. I was keeping up with the cars ahead of me so I hope they got caught too. But I accept that I was breaking the speed limit, and I understand that we all have to obey the rules or society would crumble.
This is the fourth time I've been caught speeding in the last decade, which is astonishing as my family consider me to be a painfully cautious driver. Each time, I've been driving three or four mph above the 30 mph speed limit. The first time, about nine years ago, I wasn't offered a Speed Awareness course. I had no choice but to pay the fine and have points on my license. The second time, which happened only about a week later, I was sent a letter telling me I'd committed an offence, but then a day or two later I was told that the charge was being dropped 'as a gesture of good will on this occasion' - it might have had something to do with the front pages of the local papers being full of stories about the local Chief Of Police being caught speeding.
The third time was a year or so later, when I was invited to a Speed Awareness Course at a local football stadium. The only thing I learned from that was that a road which looks like a dual carriageway but doesn't have an actual barrier between the two carriageways, just paint on the road, is actually a single carriageway and therefore has the same speed limit as a normal single carriageway.
My fourth speeding offence was the recent one where I was again invited to attend a course, but this time I had the option of doing it online. It cost £96, but despite my downloading Zoom, as instructed, 24 hours in advance and carrying out all the tests before the session, as instructed, my laptop started playing up as soon as I attempted to join the group. I could not get the bloody thing to work so in the end I had to ring the DriveSafe helpline where a nice woman made me pay a further £41 to book another session ten days later.
I did finally get onto the course and it was fine. The course takes three hours, but you have to log on fifteen minutes before it begins. Then they tell you that each student has to be registered individually and privately, which might take up to twenty minutes for each person. I think there were nine of us on my course. The course officially began at 2.30 but it actually began about 3.00.
The course leader knew his stuff and was pleasant, but he had a Liverpudlian accent, one I used to love when I was young but which I now find difficult to understand, so I struggled at times to work out what he wanted us to do.
Again, the only thing I learned was exactly the same thing that I'd learned on my previous course, the thing about some double carriageways actually being single carriageways, which I'd forgotten since the first course. This time, I tried to find out why, but they're not actually interested in that type of question. The course leader attempted to explain it to me by saying 'As you can see from the picture, you would be able to cross this road from the kerb on the left to the kerb in the middle and then from there to the kerb on the right, whereas on a dual carriageway you wouldn't be able to get over the barrier between the two roads'. I tried to say that the painted lines between the two carriageways on the picture he was showing me wasn't a kerb, and that I couldn't actually imagine anyone crossing the road and standing on it [particularly as there was a footbridge over the road a few yards further on], unless they were suicidal or moronic, but I think he thought I was being deliberately facetious when in fact I was genuinely confused. To me, and I suspect most others in the room, the road on the picture looked like a dual carriageway. 'You wouldn't be able to get over the barrier on a proper dual carriageway, remember,' said the course leader, to which someone else said 'You can. I've seen people do it'. This threatened to get everyone else involved in a pointless group discussion so I didn't persist as I had no desire to hold up the session.
So, two speed awareness courses under my belt and I still don't know the difference between a dual carriageway and a single carriageway that looks like a dual carriageway. And anyway, none of my speeding offences have been on dual carriageways. I honestly don't believe that the Speed Awareness Course will actually prevent anyone from speeding in the future, or at least not for very long, or teach anything drivers don't know. An example: one of the sections was about controlling your emotions, but it seems to me that all you can really do to prevent yourself driving badly because you're stressed or angry or excited or distracted by being in love is to not get in the car in the first place. If you've just had a blazing row with your partner, a bit of triangular breathing isn't going to calm you down much. And I wasn't in a high emotional state when I was caught speeding, though after I saw the flash of the camera I became mightily peeved, so that's a good way of provoking dangerous emotional states in drivers.
Anyway, I've managed to spend £137 by being caught driving four miles above the limit. Added to the £85 I spent on a pair of teeny-tiny shoes, that means I've spent £217 to no purpose...
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Christmas Adverts
This year's Christmas TV adverts don't seem particularly appealing. I guess the strange romance between Keira Knightley and Joe Wilkinson that is promoting Waitrose is quite engaging, though why is Keira called Keira while Joe is called some other name that isn't his own? We know it's just make-believe. We're not going to blab to their real-life partners, are we?
The ongoing saga of the anthropomorphised carrots still suffers from the problem that it is a really weird idea that vegetables want to be eaten - it's like those blackcurrants that were desperate to get into Ribena, or the peas that were excessively keen to be frozen and eaten, in adverts from my childhood. Two of the carrots are having a wedding now, and the groom - Mr.Bean-like - only just gets there on time, but I have no idea what supermarket they are representing [T told me it was Aldi earlier]. I have the same problem with the BFG adverts - is it for Tesco? Morrisons? Lidl? Asda? It makes you wonder whether these adverts serve any useful purpose.
And giving carrots personalities doesn't make me want to eat them, wherever they're from.
I quite like Amazon's three little old ladies sliding down a snowy hillside on plastic sleds which one of them has thoughtfully ordered from Amazon. It's nice that Amazon are able to deliver the three sleds to these women while they are sitting on a park bench, and even better that they include helmets. In a few years this might be me, B and T [the BLTs], sliding down the hillside and then gleefully trudging back up for another go... except that, even with the helmets on, with B's sense of balance, my arthritic fingers and T's bad back, we'd never be able to slide down a hillside in the snow without seriously injuring ourselves. And we'd never manage to climb back up!
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And finally, here are two pictures of my latest baking endeavours - Bread Pudding and 'Leftover Cookies', two of the beige-est baked goods in existence :
Merry Christmas, One and All!
