Well I sit here writing this at the end of a great afternoon, having just had a peak at the blackbird sitting on some eggs 30 cm from my nose just outside the kitchen window and she is looking happy and so am I. My very competent eldest child Miles drove us into the Durham City area and we had a nice stroll around under a puffy clouds sky and a bracing north-east wind slicing through the warmth to make us feel grateful that we had our winter coats on. We paid a visit to Durham Cathedral today and in the cheerful midafternoon spring light it was beautiful, the sandstone catches the rays very nicely and whether you believe in God or not it is a very nice place. Biscuit break was in the quadrangle area just down from the Monks Dormitory but we were doing anything but sleeping. There was a lot of mirth put it that way. Fiona is a lot fitter now and we were going at normal speed so we trotted off back to the car and Miles did a nice three-point turn to get us on our way back home. I like setting these little driving problems for him and when we got home the lads disappeared off to do their computer games and Fiona and I crashed out in the backroom with Leonard Cohen Live in London drifting over the sound system which was very nice. She looks so angelic when she dozes off. Today it is lamb meatballs to go with the new style pasta which I cannot remember the name of and the sauce is bubbling away. Garlic bread smells good to! None of this seems to affect that lovely blackbird half a metre away from my right shoulder and when we go out to the garage we walk right underneath it but do not look up or else it would just fly away. Blackbirds nested in a similar spot a few years ago but they abandoned the nest because it was too low down and we could actually look into it as we walked by. This time they are higher up and in the right angle between the house and the garage but we were so worried that they would abandon it with us going in and out that we pulled down the first nest so they would not lay any eggs but, by 11 o'clock the next morning they had rebuilt it even better so I guess they really do want to raise their family right next to us. Good for them. Since Fiona put in a birdfeeder in the garden we now have Goldfinches, Greenfinches and many other birds as regular guests and Wood Pigeons scratch around underneath it to pick up the seeds that the birds drop because quite a lot of them are messy feeders. Lovely. A great afternoon out with my lovely family and an evening of Star Trek is about to start. "Live long and prosper" as the Vulcans would say.

On an intermittently light and very heavy showery day me and the family had a nice walk around Durham City. I was a bit cheesed off today because my new musical doghouse in the garage which I was hoping to move into and get some serious blowing done on my harmonica has not really worked out. We may need to put an extension on in order for it to work and we just don't want to spend all that money out at the moment. So, I will be practising in the living come study room at the back from early morning to when Miles gets going with the serious stuff, mathematics, and then I will move up into Clifford's room because he will be at college and get the rest of my practising down there. I was also mildly cheesed off today because the folk who interviewed me last Monday said they would inform me yesterday of the outcome and there has not been a peep. Good job I have not got my hopes up and I am realistic about getting any of these jobs mostly because of my age and that's what the statistics say. Then again "lies, dam lies and statistics" and there is an awful lot in that. On the way up to Durham Fiona suggested getting a new "pink hat" which I rather uncivilisedly disparaged and suggested she look for a new headpiece at one of the outdoor gear shops. She duly did that and we had a lot of fun, which cheered me up, and the varying shades of pink, orange and white horizontal banded stripes stuck on her head within the wooly hat that she now has makes her look impressively cute. If she wears it in the hills it will probably scare off every bird and possibly hiker within a five-mile radius but never mind. She is happy. The reason she wanted such a colourful hat is apparently, and I can only suggest that some men need their eyes testing, a couple of guys last week who were serving her in a shop mistook her for a man. She looks all woman to me that's for sure. Anyway, that's been the only event of note in Durham other than it being a very nice place and we got back to our abode, and for a change, crashed out in the back room listening to Leonard Cohen Live in London and harmony in my mind was restored as well as affection with my lovely wife. I am glad she is as tolerant of me as I am of her because at times I can be a pain in the neck. Sometimes it doesn't rain flowers you just roll naked in the nettles! Metaphorically speaking!

When Fiona phoned my Mum to see whether she was up for a visit or not today the Warden of the residential home my Mum is in said she had had a dizzy spell accompanied by headaches, had fallen over and needed checking at the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton. So it was off to the Friarage we went, Fiona and I, to visit my Mum in casualty where thankfully she had nothing broken or any bruises but was just suffering from constant dizziness which was of concern enough to the Doctors to keep her in for this evening.

I really hate it when old people fall over because they seem to hurt themselves so much just doing this in a house for goodness sake. Fiona falls over in the hills but even when it is on rocky scree it is always where it is very steep so she falls into it often a fall of only about half a metre whereas if she fell on horizontal ground onto rock from one and a half metres up say, she would really hurt herself. Old folk do that all the time God bless them.

I asked my Mum if she wanted me to sing to cheer up which got a big laugh, broke the rather dire mood and then we had a lot of other laughs but always snapped back to the reality of their might be something serious going on with my Mum's health. Family is a worry sometimes but I am sure she will be all right she has had odd things before and is a natural survivor with a very rude health and only stopped walking in the Howgills and the Lake District a few years ago just past the age of 70 and only because her feet packed up. The rest of her is doing pretty well. Except for the dizziness and headaches. She will be fine!

Family always successfully punctures the bubble of my overexcited feelings and elation that I quite often get and I like that. Besides there is no getting away from duty and dire things so you may as well try to make the best of them!

This is a post written by one of my Facebook mates Caroline Murphy and it is really great both in form and content. I just love writing that compares what is around us all the time with that which happens in another setting in this case another country: America.


"One of the things I most miss about living in America, is breakfast. Americans really do breakfast. Here it is an uncomfortable mish-mash of the fry-up (nothing wrong with that, but hard to find in most small towns and often really bad), or the carb-filled delights of a coffeeshop where you will inevitably consume enough sugar for a year and be hungry again an hour later. Its also hard to find somewhere to go. A hotel? possibly, but thats a stodgy, overpriced experience where you feel obliged to pay and leave as soon as possible. A caff? ok, but I don't want to drive 20 miles. In America, the first time my husband took us all out for breakfast, I was google-eyed at the range of things on offer, but its not so much the food, or the prices, or the fact that kids are expected to make noise/mess and you can stay as long as you like without getting 'the look' from a waitress, its something you can do, any morning, without driving more than a mile, any time from 5am to lunch and you can carry on eating it all day if you like! Brits are very starchy about 'breakfast' it should be eaten in the morning dammit, between the hours of 8am (god forbid that any of us would be expected to rise before this) and all over by 10 - out you go! In fact Americans are very relaxed about eating out in general. I was delighted to find that at dinner in a large party, the waitress did not bat an eyelid when it came to my turn to order and I asked for just 'a bowl of ice cream please'. Maybe it was my 'foreign accent' and I am expected to be a bit weird, but I felt that had I asked for a bowl of marinated toenails, she would have whipped off her shoes right there. Moving back to Britain, we all felt the usual sense of anticipation on weekend mornings, when we got ready to go for breakfast, then wandered around looking at each other in confusion - where does everyone go? Being away for a while, you forget things (things you don't like much) and this all came back to me: 'er, British Homes Stores?' Right, said my husband, lead me to it (enthusiastically), well first we get in the car and drive about 8 miles to the nearest large town, then we park and pay, then we all troop out and stare at some miserable pinkish things in a hot cabinet while a surly server drums his fingers, wait in line and part with a mortgage payment to sit in silence in the plastic splendour of the department store 'restaurant'. Its not the noisy, laughter filled, happy breakfast mornings I remember. There are lots of other wonderful things to like about living here, but breakfast is not one of them. One amazing place we used to go to in Texas, was a large old restored warehouse. It was a restaurant/wine bar and an art gallery which did the most fantastic breakfasts. As soon as you sat down, the waitress brought you an effusive welcome, an introduction and a steaming basket of muffins and other just baked pastries. Oh, I thought the first time we went, not much choice but hey ho. Then the menu's arrived. Pastries were complimentary and everything else you could imagine wanting for breakfast was on the menu. Tables were close enough that you could chat with a neighbour but far away enough you didn't feel cramped. Kids all socialised with other kids, made noise, dropped muffins on the floor, swapped bits of food, spilled drinks, yelled to friends they knew a few tables away and adults had surreptitious bloody mary's with their coffee. Also, you can have your food any way you like it! try asking for your bacon sauteed for 6 minutes exactly here, with crispy edges only and you would get a curt nod and the bacon the way it comes regardless. Americans will cook your food any way you want it and you get all that with a smile. Returning to Britain after five years, I looked forward to many things I had put out of my mind, and now we are planning a move back the the states, I can hardly wait for breakfast!"

This morning got off to a good start because a couple of weeks ago I threw out all of the scale and chord books that I used to use for harmonic practice and now I just do tunes and improvisation and go over any of the chords and scales from memory because I know most of them anyway. There are thousands of them but they are easy to remember because they are all related to each other.

Finally, I have found a way to practice that I really enjoy, a mixture of keeping my reading music skills up by improvising on the chords on paper, spontaneous improvisation of any tune that comes into my head both melody and jazzing it up and going over scales and chords that relate to the two things above so the scales and chords are done within a context rather than just on their own as I used to do. Hours of it in fact in the 90s when I was very keen on harmonica.

I am going to get the folk harmonica going as well and relearn all the Irish and country tunes that I used to know. The York session at the Maltings will be graced by me by the end of the month. Watch out there is a harmonica about!

I would like to thank The Button Hole Jam band as well as the Butterknowle bunch of people up there for giving me a role model prod in the direction of taking music a bit less seriously and having more fun with it. They certainly do!

Yesterday I had a wonderful day out with my family. We went up to the Ullswater area in the Lake District and the boys did a up and down Helvellyn to eventually end up at Thirlmere Lake where we were to pick them up 4 1/2 hours later. Clifford looked a bit peaky and I was hoping that he would not want to go up and down Helvellyn and I could go with Miles instead. But even though I asked him several times if he was all right he was totally fine and raring to get going.

So us oldies left the youngies and we drove further up to BrothersWater a small roughly 1 km² lake at the bottom of the Kirkstone Pass and then walked to the head of the lake in a beautiful late morning light and we saw a Goosander all on its own but absolutely nothing else. I knew there would be more birds in the reeds at the head of the lake but I did not know whether they would come out. Well they did! After looking at the Goosander we did not stop again until we reached the head of the lake and looked back across it and saw several Goosander's and joy of joys two of them were roosting on a small pebble spit sticking out into the lake and then they got out and walked over to the small stream that fed the lake. Never in all the years I have been looking at Goosander's have I ever seen them walk on land and I was amazed at how big and ungainly they were with the breast very round and sticking out. On the water, under the water and in the air they are the essence of gracefulness and beauty but man they look so waddling and fat outside of the water. They only waddled for a few minutes and then they were back in the water and just disappeared from view and we were pretty sure that they had a nest in a hole in the bank which we could not see. As the Goosander's disappeared a couple of Great Crested Grebes had turned up in full summer plumage and were diving and rising as they fished for food. Totally knockout!

As we looked back at the pebble spit sticking out into the lake we saw a large Heron glide gracefully down to do some fishing as well. "Join in there is plenty of food!" I thought. As we walked back to the car park we saw another Heron on the far side of the lake and then it flew away having been chased off by a couple of Greylag Geese and it flew low across the lake, wingtips just a few centimetres above the water. And just to round off the birdwatching as we got to the car and stared up into the sky a buzzard started to circle around attempting to catch a thermal eyes pinned to the ground to see if lunch had tripped over and died and was ready to be gobbled up. Truly amazing!

Onwards to Grasmere Village and a pot of coffee and muffin were beckoning but just before we got to the Cafe we looked at the river to see if there were any birds there and joy of joys there were two Goosander's a male and a female 4 m away down in the stream completely relaxed about us and a lot of other people being there. The village road through Grasmere was only about 10 m away from the bank of the River which was about 2 m down from as. I have never been so close to Goosander's in my life and it was interesting to note that the female had splayed out her feet to give more resistance to the water so she could float down the river at the same speed as the male which being bigger and and heavier and having having more of its body in the water would glide down slower if she never did that. That was a very interesting behaviour but Fiona and I could just not get over just how close we were to these very fine animals. I may put a little bit more thought into that duck resistance to water idea. Miles was sniffy about it yesterday when we were discussing it but he couldn't be bothered to really get into it. We will tomorrow when I take him to the skate park ,that is a good time to pick his brains!

We went to the Riverside Cafe and had our coffee and muffins there and they have an outside terrace which looks over the River and it was very beautiful and peaceful. After this we walked down to the lake but there were so many people boating on it which was good that there was no chance to see any birds. So, we headed up to the Youth Hostel Butharlyp Howe and talked about the summer of 1992 where we stayed there with our newborn son Miles Saunders Priem who we left alone in our family room for the first time ever and had a nice time talking to the people in the Common Room. Miles was such a good sleeper that we knew we could leave him there and he would be very peaceful and not bother anybody. I also thought a lot about staying there for a couple of days in the mid-80s with the learning disabled men from Juniper Communities and having a very wacky time particularly in the pub where the men did not drink but me Joe James and a couple of the other helpers certainly did. Not much cognizance of health and safety in those days because one guy nearly slipped over a small cliff and the other one after struggling up this hill got so out of breath that he coughed up his false teeth in a massive pool of yellow stained saliva because he was a chain smoker. Heavy. But an amazing good laugh. I do believe Mr Joe James himself retrieved those teeth because I would not touch them although I think I went to grab another guy when he was sliding down a snowy slope towards a medium-sized drop. Fun times!

Whilst we were walking up to the footpath that goes to Easedale Tarn I met a friend of mine called Mary with her mother who was up in the lakes for a few days walking. The last time I saw Mary was in the mid-1980s and she was and really is still a very fine lady. I remember mentioning to her in the 80s that she was a very nice lady and if there was any chance we could get to know each other better. Well there was no chance because she said she wasn't interested in men at that time! I was mildly shocked and very disappointed and to be quite honest a little tiny bit of that came back yesterday even though I had the finest hiking lady on the planet holding my hand, my Good Wife Fiona. Still, it is strange what comes out of your mnemonic past and grabs you for a few seconds. Mary did weaving with the men at Juniper Communities and looked absolutely lovely as she cycled around York often clad in dungarees and occasionally in a big ballooning skirt. It used to drive me crazy!

As usual, my timing was impeccable and I knew the boys would only take four hours to go up and over Helvellyn so as we were pulling into Thirlmere car park lo and behold they were just getting off the path and onto the road. My daddy skills are still there! They had had a good walk and what really pleased me was that Miles had done a bit of networking on top of Helvellyn talking to some Australian young people and he seemed to have a particular interest in the young lady in the group. Good stuff and he gave them his e-mail address. Then it was back to a cloudy Darlington through a few showers which had been predicted by the Meteorological Office and then we tucked into a supermarket bought Indian meal and Star Trek. A perfect day made especially nice by seeing so many amazing birds as well as the lovely Mary and her mum. God bless them and my family!

Yesterday: pottering round the Lake District with Fiona looking at birds, very nice. Today: back to the usual routine of a very fresh and pleasant walk around the Durham Woods with Fiona and Clifford, Miles stayed back at home because he has got another cold. I asked him whether the effects of legging it over 3000 foot Helvellyn yesterday had bothered him but he said "No Dad it is just the cold". Today he also got great marks for his latest mathematics mechanics assignment and the tutor is really good because he is not so much addressing the mathematics that Miles does, that is a given (after a ton of hard work I might add) but more the way he presents it which is really good. University academics are just brilliant people. For the most part!

Anyway, there was so little to say about the walk other than the weather was pretty chilly, fresh and there were some nice little mini downpours which only occurred driving there and stopped completely on our walk. Barely a bird to be seen around the River Wear area and the highlight of the centre of Durham was the German Sausage Stall and the tantalising temptations of the smells wafting over us. We had a good laugh today because there was not much else to think about. Fiona is a lot fitter and actually jogged for 100 m which is really good because a month ago she barely made it back sometimes.

Well, I sit here talking away to my netbook, passing the time until I go into "Daddy cook" mode and meatballs, tomato sauce, pasta and garlic bread are rustled up and yet again I buy my passage to another day of acceptance with my family. If it wasn't for my jokes and my cooking they would have got rid of me years ago!

Just bought this "Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford History of the United States)" to broaden my understanding of American history.

Today Fiona was totally wasted from yesterday's walking in Whitby , Miles seemed to need more sleep than usual he did not get up until pretty late and then wanted to do a few hours on his Open University assignment to make sure it was all correct. Good lad because I have been encouraging him to do some weekend work, given that he will be required to do that in the future and will want to as part of his general enthusiasm for mathematics, so I am very pleased when he just gets on with this instead of sticking to his tried and trusted formula or five hours of maths a day, more or less, Monday to Friday.

So me and my youngest doggie Clifford went for a stroll around the River Wear area and into Durham City. I barely saw a bird and saw no ducks whatsoever until we got to the Elvet Bridge and they were just overfed Mallards. There were plenty of the overfed in the centre of Durham and the streets were pretty busy with people shopping who looked busy and acquisitive which must have been the weather, which was slightly cold, because when it is warm in Durham city the consumerites actually walk around quite slowly. Biscuit break was perched on the main monument in the market of which even though I sit on this thing quite often I still do not know who is on the monument. Monuments do not interest me that much. We slurped some lovely coffee at Starbucks and then trundled back to the car going straight through the town because it is always an interesting walk looking at the buildings.

On getting home I was pleased to see the other half of the family had got out of bed although Fiona was still pretty tired although on talking about it we thought she was just shattered from yesterday's exertions rather than anything to do with a cold or sinusitis. Good, because we have many more exertions coming up. One thing I learnt about health problems having been in hospital a lot when I was a young child was that the best route to recovery is to get up and about and fling yourself around. Very young, young, not so young, middle-aged or nearly dead, it is the best way to get over anything in my view. Call me Spartan!

We have now changed the use of the lads study room to a reception room as well as a day study room for Miles and it is really cosy watching Star Trek in there and instead of sticking the disc in a DVD player I have bought a HDMI cable and stick it into my new laptop and this outputs to the television screen and is really good. We are planning on extending our house so Fiona and I can have a downstairs bedroom where the garage currently is which means Clifford can have our old room and a lot more space. His head is expanding with all the mathematics he is doing so it stands to reason that he will need more room. Is that logical? Yes of course it is you idiot where you think your lads get it from! Who the hell are you? I'm the person you talk to when you think. Oh, I wondered who he was! Anyway I know you have been here a long time and I should have said this a long time ago but "Welcome to my head".

Well, the weekend is going well, I'm disappointed that my man Joe James cannot visit tomorrow but he has promised he will come around the May bank holiday time which is also my birthday. Whoopee that will be good because he is a very nice man, so concerned with justice for ordinary people and I dearly love him. His wife Liz is a smasher as well!

Yesterday with the family, I had a really nice afternoon and early evening out in Whitby North Yorkshire. We parked up at the usual place on the West Cliff and walked down to Sandsend beach to have a look at the coastal erosion of the glacial till down there. It changed considerably from several months ago and in one part of the cliff a whole 50 m section had slid from the top to the bottom. Really good! Whilst inspecting the cliff I found a rock of reddy brown sandstone which I am pretty sure is Penrith sandstone all the way back from the Permian geological period when the Eden Valley was all sand dunes and windblown rock because the UK at that time was roughly at the same latitude as the Sahara. The red in the Penrith sandstone indicates that there was little vegetation to take out the iron oxide hence leaving the sandstone coloured red the gorgeous colour I was looking at yesterday and is still in my rucksack because I have forgotten to take it out. We reckon that at the glacial speed of 1 m a day it would have taken around 240 years for that rock to travel from Shap to Whitby. I would have loved to have been there to see that journey.

Outside of the very exciting erosion features of the glacial till cliffs I also spotted a genuine Shap Granite which today is dug out from a quarry near Shap in Cumbria just off the M6. I have seen and read about these in my geology books but it is very exciting to find them in the field. What is it doing in Whitby! This rock was plucked out possibly from a cliff by a glacier which then took it over the Stainmore pass, where the present-day trans-Pennine route the A 66 goes, it then descended into the Vale of York and turned right to head down the Vale obviously moving towards Whitby and when the glaciation retreated around 10,000 years ago it deposited the nice little rock beastie that I saw yesterday. There is also a Shap Granite in the Museum Gardens in York which I'm pretty sure was found there many years ago and has been left as a lovely reminder of our geological and glacial past. I was talking about this rock to my family in the Gardens about a year ago and one of the Museum curators who was a geologist walked by and said it was really unusual that somebody knew what that rock was. I just glowed!

An interesting point about the movement of the glacier up and over and down the Stainmore pass is that you would not think that a glacier can go uphill but indeed they can it all depends on the height of the mountains it comes from and when all this ice just pushes into the valley before the Stainmore pass it eventually just rides up and over it a physical feature seen even today where there are glaciers. I have just thought that this could explain the very steep gradient of the West side of the Stainmore Pass as the glacier just dug into the uphill section and then forced the ice up.

Fiona was fairly fit and feisty yesterday and even though after about 2 miles she started to feel woozy an ice cream picked her up which was good, a very normal response when she is fit, and we walked down to the East jetty of Whitby harbour and joy of joys saw 2 Eider Ducks which I was pretty sure I would see but not within the harbour I thought I would see them about half a kilometre outside of the harbour in the open sea where there are mussel beds for the Eiders to dive and feed off and then surface to swallow them whole whole including the shell. They must have very good digestive systems! The two we looked at appeared very content!

As a sign of Fiona's continuing walk to health she strolled up Whitby steps in a moderately good time! Miles ran up them. However, she did look pretty wasted at the top! We then walked to the urban dwellings on the east side of the River Esk and went through a residential bit of Whitby I had never seen before a mixture of public and private housing all of which were in really good shape, lovely gardens and very nice. A lot of the public housing looked like it had gone into private ownership. A very nice part of Whitby!

By then even though I wanted to walk up and around the road bridge at the top end of Whitby, Fiona was getting quite hungry for fish and chips which we had at Hadley's which is our usual place of repose and food at teatime in Whitby. The food was really good as usual and the service courteous and fun. After this we did a swift mile walk back to the car everybody was in high spirits and good fettle and it was back home to 2 episodes of Star Trek as well as some of the fudge that Fiona insisted on buying. She bought seven pounds worth of fudge yesterday the little piggy but then again we get to enjoy some of it as well! Another great time out with my beautiful family.