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Showing posts from August, 2013

Ticknall: Tunnels and more

Those first few years of your child's life, you take a pushchair everywhere, and it starts to seem impossible that they'll ever walk more than six steps, at any pace faster than a snail's crawl, in any direction resembling the one you wish to go in.  You look longingly at little paths snaking through woodland or striking up through grassy fields, and stick solidly to flat tarmac surfaces instead.  And then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, they become mobile!  You throw caution to the wind and venture out without a pushchair , and you don't end up carrying toddler and all his stuff for three-quarters of the journey.  Life has new and exciting horizons! Of course it helps if you still don't expect to get too far, and you have somewhere interesting to go.  A recent walk near the local village of Ticknall had pretty much everything a kid could want - and adults too!  We parked in the village car park, set off and promptly bumped into an old tramway, complete with dar

Cherry Mania

OK, I don't know if the East Midlands is secretly the cherry-growing capital of the UK, or if it's just been a good year for them, or what, but there have been a lot of cherries around.  I only ever remembering seeing the little ornamental ones before, more stone than fruit, but these are the real deal. It started when we went to the little playground down the road, and I noticed this tree with big black juicy cherries, right by the swings.  So next time we went, I lugged a ladder along and picked a boxful.  Wouldn't you know it, that was the one day that a guy from the council came along to pick up the litter and empty bins.  I wasn't actually on the ladder at that point, so he looked at the ladder a couple times, and he looked at me, and I'm thinking, "Hey, if you don't say anything, I'm not saying anything."  He didn't say anything.  I made those cherries into cherry sauce and we ate it with ice cream.  Yum. Then we happened