With a north-easterly wind blowing some remaining winter breeze pushing along the winter white puffy clouds, myself and the family had a nice walk around the languid and quiet Durham City which for the next two weeks has no students. We saw very few birds because of the breeding season so we had several stops sniffing at blossom to see what they smelt like. There was a lot of humour amongst us today not least because Fiona is feeling a lot better and it was good to see that healthy glow back in her face at the end of the walk rather than the very drained look she has had for the last several months.

I sit here writing this, or should I say speaking it in with my voice recognition, having just listened to "Songs of Leonard Cohen" cuddled up with my lovely wife, the lads are playing games on their computers and the meatballs, tomato sauce and pasta conchos are progressing to that eventual deliciousness which I manage to squeeze out of them on a weekly basis. I have spent the last 30 years of my life trying to improve my brain and my wisdom and the two best products of that have been becoming a good cook but best of all a wise and loving husband and father.

A smashing day and really nice to have my beloved wife on the footpath back to good health. Pretty soon we will be treading many footpaths!

I have had a very good day today filling in application forms online for several jobs working with learning disabled people. There are a couple of applications to fill in with pen and paper that are to be done tomorrow after I have printed them out. It feels good and is absolutely the right thing to be getting on with, with regard to the working side of my life. It has been a bit tricky knocking up my CV because I have been a househusband for the last 20 years but my experience working with learning disabled people in the 1980s as well as the music therapy work I did in various psychiatric hospitals at the time, including a stint where I was actually paid for doing it for once by the WEA, Workers Educational Association, is putting me in a good light. This work was offered to me at the time by my former A-level Sociology teacher from Darlington College and it came out of the blue whilst I was at York University and the money was very handy.

It is really good applying for jobs using the Internet and I can see vacancies just arise by the time I have got to the bottom of the webpage when something has come up at the top of the page as a "New Job". It feels good, looks promising and is the best I have felt about the "What am I going to do now Fiona is retiring from teaching and the lads need very little input from me any more?" issue, in a long time. I still haven't quite given up on the mathematics teaching and I am also looking at Teaching Assistant jobs but going my observation of what the teaching assistants did in a local secondary school a while back there may be too much typing for me to do there as well.

Well, it has been an interesting day. I applied for a job with MENCAP, filled in the web form which was in PDF format, took quite a while getting my personal statement together so it reflected what I have got and then clicked "Send e-mail". Nothing appeared to happen and I was pretty dam sure it hadn't been sent. Not only that if you leave the webpage everything on the PDF form is lost. So, I e-mailed MENCAP to make sure my application had got there and it hadn't so he quite helpfully sent me an application in word format which I can use with my NaturallySpeaking. It is too late now because the closing date is 5 PM today. Just to really rub it in I had to type in information in the PDF form because NaturallySpeaking will not work and that completely screwed up my left hand and my neck for the whole of the morning, I got a mammoth headache as well, had to break my Baha'i Fast because I needed medicine, actually I'm not sure if I took the medicine and was pretty annoyed.

This is a really nice welcome and first step to the world of applying for work! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Still, even though it ended up in a total failure today I really enjoyed filling the form out and doing my personal statement. I have another job to apply for tonight but the web form with this page can be done with NaturallySpeaking and is not a PDF form. I feel I am totally on the right track and my personal statement is nicely saved and very safely saved on NaturallySpeaking which does save things because it is a proper program not like those nasty PDF Adobe Acrobat wickidos. I was going to say may Adobe Acrobat crash and burn but I do not want to wish anything bad on myself just in case this nice shiny new laptop I have got crashes and then the Bantry catches fire! But it would be funny!

Yesterday morning, I got up well before sunrise to get a load of food down before sunup as part of the Baha'i Fast. It has gone very well this year. I intended to do my usual Baha'i stall in the centre of Darlington for a couple of hours but the weather forecast was not too good for the morning so I called it off. Sometimes the weather frustrates me.

Nevertheless, it looked better for the afternoon and with the family I headed up to Upper Teesdale and dropped the lads off at Bow Lees and they were to walk up to the side of Cronkley Fell near Widdybank and then up to the car park overlooking both of those. Fiona and I drove up to the car park and headed off for the middle part of lower Cronkley Fell right next to the River Tees. On the way down to the river we saw huge flocks of Lapwings circling around about a 4 square mile area and then plonking themselves down for a while only to rise up and start circling again, several Curlews who were definitely trying to mate by gloriously following each other around the sky and then gliding so close to each other that they looked like they were going to mate in the sky, a handful of Red Shanks again making a serious amount of noise and flying around as part of mating behaviours and as we passed a small conifer plantation there was so much bird noise coming out of it I swear somebody had set up some amplifiers to broadcast these wonderful sounds across the valley. The interesting thing is we could not see any of the birds in the plantation at all and occasionally one or two would suddenly appear on the fence but it was hard to say whether they came from plantation or were going to it.

As we walked alongside the River Tees it is always interesting to look at the very thin covering of glacial till over the rocks in some places very flat which doesn't always indicate that it is thick, because it isn't, just that the underlying rock is finally shattered more like a large gravel. In other places there are metre square bumps over an acre or so reflecting the large boulders which are underneath the glacial till and on it goes an endless amount of permutations of this, always interesting, worthy of comment and because the flora changes constantly throughout the year both in terms of growth and how it looks with the light reflecting off it, an amazing sight to behold. Paradoxically, it even looks good under 10 feet of snow. Now isn't that bizarre!

On to the Pencil Phil Quarry which I walked past several times in the past not realising its geological significance. The Quarry is a slate one and the slates were used to put in pencils hence Pencil Mill! But what is very unusual is that the rock is the same type which is found in the Lake District most spectacularly on Skiddaw the huge hulking Fell looming across Keswick. The rock is Ordovician and is what is known as an inlier that is older rock surrounded by younger and the rock around it is very much younger: that is what is so unusual. Surrounding it is Carboniferous rock from 360 million years ago whereas the Ordovician slate that we were looking at is from 488 million years ago. Why this mysterious 2 metre square chunk of rock slate is peering out right up through nearly half a billion years of Earth's history and staring over the River Tees is anybody's guess. I picked up a couple of samples wistfully hoping that I would find a grapolite or what is most likely a fragment of one but I am pretty sure I didn't although I have yet to look over my samples with my loupe because all you really ever get is tiny fragments of these planktonic animals. But my quest goes on and I will have a better chance of finding some in the Howgills!

After a couple of hours we met the boys back at the car park and they had, had a nice walk but were looking forward to their tea!Fiona was in better fettle yesterday and managed to walk 4 miles fairly comfortably although she got a bit dizzy towards the end. By eight o'clock that night she was totally exhausted the poor lady. I remain in crazily robust health as usual and it is a good job that I do like the small walks that I am now doing with my beloved wife and it is hard to convey the good feeling that I have just being around her but also the whole sense of walking in and looking at the Cronkley Fell area, the action that was going on with the birds going through the serious business of choosing mates and rearing young, I know exactly how they feel! I look upon these hills, as my knowledge grows of the fauna, flora and the geology and geography, as places of immense excitement.

Oh, and I must mention this I started applying for jobs yesterday working with Learning Disabled people. Any religious folk out there please pray for my success and for the godless: beam some good thoughts my way because working with learning disabled people for me, is more or less an extension of what I have done with my own children over the last 20 years. I have always seen the development of human potential, my own and others as a major goal in life if not the goal and whether human beings have a handful of ability or a bucket load like my eldest lad does it is still the same game: get ahead mostly under your own steam as well as with the help and lack of hindrance from others. And that is exactly how I intend to do one of these jobs which I will get. When I think about it, this way of thinking underlay a lot of how I thought and acted with the men at Juniper Communities a home for learning disabled people when I was doing stuff with them in the 1980s. Good fun and in some respects whilst disappointed with not going for Mathematics teaching I am looking forward to reliving some of my past in the 1980s but without the crazy stuff! Well, a little bit of it I had too many good times walking around the hills with the men from Juniper, camping, a way out crazy boat trip to know that the random unexpected can occur more often than I now might be comfortable with!

A very good day!

Last Saturday afternoon with Fiona and the lads I went off to Richmond to walk around Billy Banks Wood . Because Fiona was feeling a bit dizzy and washed out I dropped the lads off in the centre of Richmond and they did a three-quarter circle walk and they were to meet Fiona and I at the Round Howe car park a couple of hours later.

Fiona and I drove down to the car park and we did a very small walk around Round Howe and then a little way on the middle path up the banks of the River Swale. Because we were walking very slowly I noticed the large amount of birds making a lot of twittering sounds as they were dancing to and fro in the afternoon spring light no doubt with mating on their minds. We got about 300 m along the path and Fiona noticed a movement on her right and it was a Roe Deer just 50 m away up the bank in the trees. It hadn't seen , smelt, or heard us so we could watch it for a while as it moved between the trees. We walked off to the left and the Deer was walking and browsing parallel to us and then it just disappeared in the Woods. We knew it could not go to the top of the bank 100 m up and it would not break cover where we were so we expected it to just follow us on a parallel path.

Which it did and we got some great views of this Roe Deer but best of all was that it just stopped had a good look around and then sat down wriggled around a bit, got comfortable and just sat there. Totally priceless. I doubt whether I will see that behaviour ever again in my life unless I particularly specialised in going out to see Roe Deer of course. Just after it did this I looked up to the wispy white and blue sky above and a huge Buzzard was gliding a long way up over the Dale and that was brilliant as well.

I had a minor false alarm because I thought I saw a Red Squirrel but all it was, was a red patch on the trunk of a tree quite high up and a branch from another tree was rubbing against it colouring it red and the movement of the branch over the red patch I interpreted as a Red Squirrel. No chance they are not in the Richmond area.

We proceeded on to encircle Round Howe and the path we were on was actually the pre-glacial riverbed now nicely covered over with glacial till. The last glaciation cut a new path for the River right in the middle of the Dale at the lowest point and it has left what is in effect an oxbow lake but the lake has become filled with glacial till which we were walking on . The name of the hill we were strolling around , Round Howe just means round Hill. It always fascinates me how geology defines the landscape for the fauna and flora to grow on.

Fiona had biscuit break about halfway up Billy Banks Wood bank and there were many Tits of all sorts. We started to walk a short way up the Swaledale Valley but then cut down to the path that runs alongside the River. Just down from where we stopped there was a Gooseander all on its own but this was really good because I know it is there to mate having seen a whole family of them on that stretch of the River a few years back. Really nice!

When we got back to the car the boys were sat around a table having a good conversation about Lord of the Rings. A nice afternoon out and until Fiona is better these are the type of walks that we will be doing. It is not so bad because had we not gone very slowly, stopped several times and just looking and listening to the Woods we would not have seen the Roe Deer, the buzzard, heard the great variety of bird sounds or the Gooseander. We also had a good look at the plants and both of us have vowed to get our knowledge of botany up to scratch. There is always something to do and understand. Thank goodness for that!

Last Thursday Fiona and I after a fair bit of researching decided to buy two Futon sofa beds to replace our functional but not quite right furniture for having guests around. So, the previous day we went up to IKEA at Gateshead near Newcastle but we thought the Futons that were made by the Futon Company may suit our purposes better so we went down to York on Thursday to test out their sofa beds.

For us, this is a very big issue, because we rarely buy furniture and it was only a few years ago that we got rid of a smashing armchair handed over to us by Veronica, Fiona's mum, recently deceased, which was supremely comfortable as a reading chair and for guests. So, the Futon Company in York was our destination and we spent a very pleasurable one hour roughly, just sitting around on their furniture to ascertain whether it will suit our purposes particularly as we were going to spend what for us is a lot of money on something we would merely sit on!

There was another issue that we had to resolve because two of our friends recently mentioned about stopping over with us and we realise we would like to offer this to everybody. So, we had to make sure that the sofa beds were suitable for oldies as well as youngies. It was good fun deploying the sofa bed into bed mode and then just laying on it to make sure they would be comfortable enough. The saleslady, a fine woman from Belgium, who I mistakenly thought was American because of her American accident, which she had acquired by learning English through American radio, thought this was highly amusing. She had recently become engaged and was a bit wide-eyed about the way these two middle-aged customers were behaving. Not quite as dignified adults should? I hope so.

Anyway, after we had purchased 2 sofa beds we were going to have a mini walk around the highways and byways of York City but Fiona started to feel dizzy again so it was straight to Bells Coffee establishment, which revived her somewhat, as did seeing some nice pussy willows on the market, which she managed not to buy, and then further restoration was brought about by getting one of the excellent pasties from the Cornish Pasty Company. I get a bit worried about my lovely wife's health sometimes, considering last summer she was throwing yourself up and over 3000 foot mountains. The more I have read about sinusitis and these catarrh problems they are more widespread than I knew and some people can have them chronically. Oh well we are here to benefit from life as well as deal with the tests that it throws as.I am a cripple so I should know!

One observation I must make about the York trip is about busking. Because more musicians are using amplification, which I think is a good idea, it can get fairly loud, and there was a classical singer right at the top of Parliament Street in front of Browns shop and her amplification was that loud it dominated the whole of the street which is about the 300m long and 50 m wide. From my busking days, Parliament Street would take at least three buskers none of which could hear each other. I'm going to bring this matter up, even though I'm not a resident of York, with the excellent City Manager, who I have contacted before about a Baha'i stall, because it is a problem no doubt about it. I find it strange that I feel very connected with North Yorkshire, Richmond, York, as well as what goes on in the North East, Darlington, Durham,Teeside. I have a strong multiregional identity and care about both places. Good stuff!

Even though Fiona is doing more wobbling, because of her sinusitis, than a Liberal Democrat trying to make a decision, she came out with us for a quick walk around the Durham Woods. Within the first 200 m of strolling by the River Wear we saw a Little Grebe with what looked like a burgeoning summer plumage coming out. Nice and I hope he finds a nice mate and with that plumage I am sure he will.

The youngies were out rowing the river which was nice and always makes me feel very active myself. We got a smattering of a shower but a tiny bit of damping does nobody any harm. The woods were showing that very dark yellow purply colour of the buds coming out and on that subject we walked very close by many lovely catkins and pussy willows which had Fiona slavering and muttering about nature tables and "Where is my Bowie knife". I have no idea what it is about primary school teachers and pussy willows but it seems to make them very excited.

She had calmed down by time we got to Durham City Centre and biscuit break was humorous as usual accompanied by the strong smells of the Hog Roast stall right behind us. Must try some of that roasted flesh sometime it smells very good. We took an alternative route back which was Miles idea and the street up the hill that we went along was really pretty with great views of Durham Cathedral.

After getting back home, Fiona and I had a nice crash and cuddle listening to "Old Ideas" by Leonard Cohen which is a brilliant and very subtle . I hope, like him, and several other oldies that I know like those in the Button Hole Jam, that I keep improving with age. Well, time to get off my backside, get the Meatballs, tomato sauce and very chunky concho pasta going or the family will start complaining.

This is the second day of the Baha'i Fast and I do not eat or drink between sunrise and sunset and it goes on for 19 days. I quite like this time of the Baha'i Year but I am really looking forward to my tea!