Its the shortest route home from the office in distance, and longest in time, but by far the most lovely. The road is breathtakingly beautiful all along the route.

This shot has been fiddled with – a false river-scape from the bridge at Lazonby.

And these two gorgeous setters belong to a friend in the village. Meet Ruby and a gurning, grinning, Stan!

One of those really special days out that we have together…..

Felt well enough again (with the aid of several pills and potions) to go for it on our planned day out to Beamish museum. I forgot a coat of any sort so was flippin freezin’! We took sarnies and teacakes but I still joined the queue at the Victorian sweetshop – tho gave up when the smell of hot sugar made me squishy. The museum is a fascinating insight into the life of a pit village in the early 1900’s.

Beamish open air museum – all about the early 1900’s and coal mining in the Durham and North East coalfields and the lives of the men and women who lived and worked in the mining villages. At Beamish a village is there to see, the houses, schools, chapel and even an open cast mine to crouch your way into.

The life underground for the miners was dangerous, hard and in terrible conditions. Their little cottages as recreated at Beamish were pretty, comfortable and pleasant, though crowded if they had children. The shops were an eye-opener. Victorians liked their gadgets and little luxuries. The Coop ironmongery/haberdasher was a treasure trove of the newest innovations of their day. So much iron and dark colours.

I was surprised that so many day-to-day items were familiar to me, things my Grandparents, and even my parents, had owned and used. In fact all my grandparents were already born in the early 1900’s. It was all a fascinating insight into another era, but one that still echoes in our lives today.

We came home on via Consett, Stanhope and the upper Weardale moorland routes that seem to be in the middle of nowhere. The sun was out here and there and the sunset wonderful.

Bearing in mind that watching TV is a large part of my life and takes up a lot of my free time I am surprised I haven’t used these pages to talk about it.

For me the BEST TV of the last year:

Larkrise to Candleford BBC1

To quote one of the wonderful characters…. ‘My one true weakness’. Set in the small hamlet of Lark Rise and the wealthier neighbouring market town, Candleford, at the end of the 19th Century, the series chronicles the daily lives of farm workers, craftsmen and gentry, observing characters in loving, boisterous and competing communities of families, rivals, friends and neighbours. Lark Rise to Candleford is a love letter to a vanished corner of rural England and a heart-warming drama series teeming with wit, wisdom and romance.

Ladies of Letters ITV3

Fantastic offering from ITV with genius performances by Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid. Artful direction and production. Two widows who become pen pals after a chance meeting at a wedding. Their correspondence begins as a friendly exchange between two lonely souls, but soon takes on a more acid flavour as both women act out the sort of passive-aggressive sniping they probably used to inflict on their dearly departed husbands.

Wallendar BBC4

A Swedish detective with his own problems. Morse-meets-Wire in the Blood-meets-Monk. Kenneth Brannagh is superb as the scratchy, not-so-perfect, all-too-human detective.
Opening scene first episode: Wallander has waded up to his shoulders into a field of rape. He watches in horror as a teenage girl pours petrol over herself, flicks on her cigarette lighter and disappears in a fireball. He is middle-aged, puffy faced and unshaven. His hair is unkempt and his clothes scruffy; his eyes are red and he seems permanently on the point of tears. Say hello to Inspector Kurt Wallander, the new detective on the TV block.

Coronation Street ITV

What can I say? Clever comedic scripts disguised as a soap opera.

Lewis ITV

Off shoot of Morse and a really lovely way to spend two hours in front of the TV. I heard it had been dropped from production with ITV feeling the credit crunch. A tad short-sighted I feel when garbage TV is still so plentiful! Even the music is as delightful as the Morse series.

On a road I discovered traveling home from our new offices….

I just love the colours in the stained glass window above the altar in the church next door to us. I can’t believe I haven’t got a shot of it before.

Spring has come in as a soft warm playful lamb of a season. Super sunny fragrant weather and a full week of it. This weekend is forecast for the same so its more time in the garden and maybe even a first meal outdoors for 2009.

This year, spring started yesterday, Friday March 20, because that was when the so-called vernal equinox occured. Equinoxes (which mark the onset of spring and autumn) and solstices (which mark when summer and winter begin) are points in time and space that mark a transition in our planet’s annual trip around the sun.

At each equinox, the sun crosses the Earth’s equator, making night and day of approximately equal length on most of the planet. At the equator, the sun is directly overhead at noon on either equinox.

Glorious spring weather. So, soft top down on the car and the scenic route home on the lanes that run through the river valley and little villages. It was a joy to hear bird song and smell the green shoots of the season. A delight too was to see two red deer dash across the road in front of me and into the woods. Then a man cutting his lawn – what better harbinger of approaching spring.! Spring, spring, spring, spring, spring. To cap it all the first bumble bee of the year stumbled into the house. A day to gladden the house.

Wow! Look what you can see of the milky way in a clear and perfect curve and stars where there is no light pollution (Death Valley) in this 360degree panorama. Its amazing. Take a look at it at full size….

Dangling the camera at arms length and pointing it up to the sky underneath these shy Helebore flowers was worth it…. isn’t it a lovely thing?

pure lime white and lovely

I was rapt by the contrast between these signs being trapped behind a high barbed wire padlocked fence and and their true role as pointers to freedom to explore. These are in an area near our new offices, chained and jailed in case they escape. I thought of all the places they will go and the people who will use them to discover new places and views and nature. There’s a little bit of magic about what they might be and see.

March 10th and a fine and almost warm day so I took the long way round to drive home through the country roads with the TOP DOWN! Yay! It was wonderful. That same day my best friend, after years on her wish list, got herself a VW Beetle and a blue soft top at that! Me blue soft top, her blue soft top……

Finally this week we seem to have got to grips with the wood burner. Slow burning, not much smoke on the glass, glowing wood and the holy grail of stoves ‘hanging’ flames.

And on 12th lovely Niece Clare reaches 21. Crikey.

This sums up my weekend of inactivity. Headache, sore throat and feverish so didn’t do anything really…..

Only Wensleydale B’Eer, my bear, manned the desk (bought at the Wensleydale Heifer hotel where we stayed for H’s beer themed birthday treat)

At last! Cracked it with the stove. Glowing, warm and efficient. Its only taken 3 weeks, but after doing our homework we now know its about the type of wood we use…. YAY!

I got the train (fab Settle – Carlisle line) to meet He (who’d been there 2 days for work) and Ross to go to his family shindig to celebrate and welcome home Nicola, her team mate Gillian, and their stunning crystal trophy. Kev had done a brilliant job of organising everything and just about everyone was there. It was held at a buffet Indian restaurant and the food went down well.
Father and Son……… World Champs Gillian and Nicola………..

Father and Son…. Mother and Daughter with Grand daughter and team mate