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Boxing Day

We hope you all had a good Christmas. Our blogs for Christmas 2021 and 2022 had pictures of the two of us on a beach in the sunshine. I am afraid it was wet and windy in Yorkshire yesterday morning so you will have to make do with Gill and I standing next to a fibreglass Santa wearing woolly hats.

Despite the weather we had a good day which started with poached eggs on toast with KALLES CAVIAR! I became very fond this Swedish delicacy when I worked for Ericsson but the only place selling it in the UK was Ikea who I have vetoed ever since they tried to swindle me out of £5 twenty years ago. So the only source of this precious paste was from Swedish Sue, a nice lady who lives in Sweden but has a holiday home in Bishop's Castle. She brings me carrier bags of caviar which I exchange for bottles of wine. But a breakthrough - Sian discover it for sale in Lidl and kindly bought me some for Christmas. So please can you all rush down to Lidl and buy lots of caviar so they see it as a popular line and keep stocking it (it goes well with eggs and is wonderful on cheese on toast).

On Christmas Eve I posted a picture of men in riding gear accompanying a pantomime horse in the Market place which I could not see the point of.

Well the Times thought they were good and the picture above appeared in todays paper. Apparently it is called "The Poor Hoss" and is a Richmond tradition performed by a group of mummers that has pagan origins. I still can't see the point of it.

Today was blue skies all round and almost no wind so we set off up into the hills climbing up onto Great Pin Seat which is covered with old lead mines and spoil heaps which, after 100 years, don't look too bad.
The walk starts from Surrender Bridge so we had all sorts of ideas about an epic battle hereabouts between the Scots and the English but sadly it is named after the adjacent moor of Surrender Moss, a damp peaty expanse named from the Old English word sūr, sūran meaning ‘sour, damp, course’. If we had known that before we set out we would have gone elsewhere. Gill took the shadow selfie.

We are now packing our bags as we are off home tomorrow ready for the next holiday on 1st January, a 10 day fully inclusive break in Manchester Royal Infirmary for me, Gill will be in an Air BnB close by.