From the recommendation of my friend Ian I am reading Shakespeare's Hamlet at the moment and, surprisingly, I am really enjoying it. I find it harder to understand than the Lord of the Rings but it is a very engrossing tale. The expressions and metaphors and such literary devices I have not got a clue what they are called that Shakespeare uses are really good. This is a book I know I'll have to read two or three times to really get it but I also know I will do exactly that. I'm not looking at any of the interpretations or explanations for the words and I feel my 21st-century mindset does not equip me for the 16th century English audience that this work was written for. I have never thought there was ever any hype about Shakespeare it just is really good no doubt about it. I do not think anybody could ever hype it up enough. People will be talking about and reading Shakespeare thousands of years from now.

With my wife and my youngest son we have just had a 5 mile walk in the Cow Green Reservoir area in upper Teesdale. This was in part to celebrate our wedding anniversary. There were quite heavy showers and we were soaked to the skin beneath the waist within 10 minutes because we had forgot to take our over trousers. Bad doggies but mostly my fault because I usually make sure everybody has got all of their equipment. I have always found horizontal rain very interesting! The whole area is made up of limestone and the famous Great Whin Sill a intrusion of basalt which when it comes in contact with the limestone changes it into a sort of marble locally known as "sugar limestone". I am doing all of this from memory so pick me up please if I've got it wrong! The reservoir was very low indicative of the drought that we have had and when we walked across the dam and looked down at the confluence between Maize Beck and the River Tees the water levels were very low. We intended to walk a couple of miles up Maize Beck so we could see the very beautiful water erosion of limestone, the shale and sandstone commonly called the "Yoredale Series" but unfortunately those formations were several miles away and the part of Maize Beck that we looked at was just full of small rocks. So we headed back and looked for fossils and found some very small ones but only on the un-weathered surfaces. It is not good form to hack away at rocks so we did not do that. I asked Clifford to pull up this medium-size boulder but he could not yank it out because I suspect it was still attached to another rock further underground. Still, nice to know children are useful sometimes! As usual, the best geology is actually right next to the road, so in a quarry we got to see some fossils although I have no idea what the animal originally was. What was interesting was that the limestone was exactly horizontal, that is, in the same position it was laid down 360 million years ago. Totally amazing. Just down from the quarry we saw the early formation of clints and grykes the ground being at the stage of slightly rounded humps about the size of paving stones with grooves around them about the size of half a drainpipe. What was really good was seeing the profile of this formation because Yorkshire Water had put in a drainage ditch alongside the road so you could see how the rainwater was dissolving the limestone. Very exciting. A quick note has to be made about the excellent information boards which the tourist people have put up. There were six of them covering culture, nature as well as the activities that are done in the area. There was also a fair bit of geology that was nice although I would've liked to have seen a geology trail in this area like there are in other parts of Teesdale. A nice few hours out and I always feel my wife looks at her best when totally rainsoaked, bedraggled but not in this case tired for once because we never went far enough! Nice lady.