Not much to say about today as it has just been a busy work day for everyone. H had another exam this afternoon and thought it went OK. TG was at school, and both M and I had a lot to get through. I did some yoga before taking TG to school this morning but we didn't get a proper walk in - partly because I had too much to do and partly because the weather was miserable this afternoon. We did walk up to Tesco Express after I finished as we had run out of toothpaste. Always something! I cooked potatoes, mushroom and salmon from last week's fish box for dinner, roasted together in the oven, and then watched Elf (an old favourite) on DVD with the girls. I'm afraid I long ago gave up any attempt to avoid Christmassy things until December - with H and TG egging each other on it is a lost cause. Usually we start doing fun seasonal things in mid-November, with a trip to Birmingham for a gift fair at the National Exhibition Centre, the German Christmas market in the city centre, and ice skating. That can't happen this year, but I think there may be a lot of Christmas movies on the agenda during this second lockdown.
As I didn't take any photos today, here is a bit of local industrial heritage from our walk on Saturday. These little narrow gauge railway tracks were used by carts bringing sand from local quarries to the canal so that they could be loaded on to barges. Sand was a big industry here, and there are still working sand quarries though many are no longer in use. The lake in the photo below is actually manmade, and was originally a disused pit which has been turned into a waterside park. Another old quarry is often used as a movie and TV film set, and a three mile section of narrow gauge track is now run as a heritage railway.
For some reason I keep forgetting to mention here what I am reading. I am mostly in a non-fiction mood at the moment. I asked for a English Pastoral by James Rebanks for my birthday, which is about farming past, present and future on his Lake District family farm. Although their farm is in a very different part of the country, the farming methods his grandfather taught him were very similar to the way my father worked the farm where we lived until the mid-1970s, so that section was a trip down memory lane. The middle section, as he describes how industrial farming took over, stripping the land and plunging farmers into a debt as they borrowed to buy better machinery, fertilisers, weed killers and so on, was predictably depressing, but it was wonderful to hear how he - along with many other farmers - is now working to restore his land and to find ways to farm in harmony with it.
I am also half way through a biography of 19th century Quaker prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry, along with Neil Oliver's History of Ancient Britain. I can only read the Elizabeth Fry book on my Kindle, and can't close it down until it is finished as I borrowed it on Kindle Unlimited but have now cancelled my subscription (I tend to subscribe for a month or two at a time when I find books available on it that I want to read). I often read on my laptop because the larger screen makes it easier to knit and read at the same time, so have the Neil Oliver book open on that. I recently finished listening to a book on Audible about British Prime Ministers from Ted Heath in the early 1970s through to Theresa May, and have just started listening to The Frayed Atlantic Edge, in which historian David Gange kayaks along the Atlantic coast from Shetland around Ireland to Cornwall. Books about walking, journeying and landscape are a bit of a reading theme for me at the moment.
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