Where do the weeks go?  Well, we’ve been out and about, spending a long weekend with Annie in Yorkshire.  It's been an ambition to go to Spurn Head since I first saw and read about it in the Nat Geog.  The fragile promontory lies an hour or so from Annie's at the mouth of the Humber, and we headed off there on Sunday, with a picnic and a flask of tea.  It’s a captivating place, even on a day when the sun was a bit sulky.  Long beaches with the rollers breaking on them on the east side, with three or four levels of tide marks in places ; calm waters and wading birds on the west.  Enormous skies.  I was surprised at the amount of traffic entering the estuary: the pilot cutter was busy all the time we were there.  At one point the sand spit is very low and narrow, and there are often warnings during the winter storms that it’s at risk of breaching, as indeed it has at intervals over the centuries.  Evidently, there used to be a railway all the way to the coastguard station at the point, and a spot of googling reveals that they even had a couple of sail bogies, to take advantage of the wind that nearly always blows there.  There are stories of near-disasters, such as when drunken soldiers ‘borrowed’ a trolley one windy night and lost control!

On Monday we did Beverley things: visits to the Minster and St Mary’s, and to an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Jacqueline Stieger.  I can’t link to it, unfortunately, because the art gallery web site is way out of date.  A casualty, no doubt, of the cuts.  All impressive stuff, I assure you: she masters several media perfectly, from oils to bronze via any number of imaginative materials along the way.

We spent a day in York as well, visiting the National Railway Museum, the Minster and the tiny and ancient Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate.  When we picked our dates for the trip, we’d quite forgotten that it was half-term week: consequently, the museum was jumping with sprogs and pretty noisy.  The rolling stock collection is remarkable, but I think I was more attracted by the stack of other memorabilia, like old station and locomotive name plates, dining car and railway hotel furniture and table settings.  They also have an ample collection of chamber pots, stored in a cupboard clearly labelled ‘Empty Before Moving’.  Quite.

The fact that it was half-term may have accounted for the awful travelling conditions on the way there and back.  A stretch of the M11 was closed, so we finished up heading in to the North Circular, and bitterly regretting it.  We ultimately abandoned it and groped our way through Palmer’s Green, Southgate, Cockfosters and places like that.  We’d been three hours on the road by the time we were outside the M25.  The return was a bit less worse, though conditions on the M25 forced us to head way out east on the M20 and hack our way home along the country lanes.

I wasn’t really sure I was in the mood for Thursday’s art class, but set off anyway with my two current canvases.  I did some final fiddling on the latest landscape, then quickly slapped on some varnish before I could change my mind.  I also did a bit more on a still life of autumn flowers, and left feeling happier than when I arrived.

We’d a bit of fun in  the evening, though: four of us took the little steam train that runs nearby and were served (lukewarm) fish and chips.  Actually my third lot of fish and chips in the same week; shame on me.

The garden is starting to look a bit bedraggled, but I paid a bit of attention to it yesterday.  My new rose arrived during the week, and is now planted, replacing a rather overgrown euonymous, which yielded only to blood, toil, tears, sweat and a pickaxe.  The rose has been bred to mark the 650^th anniversary of the Magistracy, and mine looks like a healthy example.  So together with Edna, an English rose ( actually named after Geoff Hamilton) that I bought for Martyn just after his Mum died, it will guard the steps up to the grass.  Or as I put it rather more succinctly on facebook, I’ve dug a big hole and put a Justice of the Peace in it.  I managed to slither across the grass behind the mower as well yesterday, so it’s looking a little better than it usually does at this time of year.  The main problem is leaves from the neighbours’ ash tree.  The grass is already well carpeted with leaves again even though I cleared a lot of them yesterday afternoon.  If we get a couple of dry days, I’ll get out with the mower again.  But I notice that the October-April quagmire is starting to get established again.  Such is clay.

The kitchen is still a  bit of a mess pending tiling, But Paul’s coming to make a start on Wednesday, and will do most of the work while we’re in Lagrasse for an autumn break.  Martyn, meanwhile, has repaired the base of the cupboard beneath the sink, propped it up on new telescopic legs and fitted it out with a new set of shelves.  Next, a shelf in the boiler cupboard to take the cookery books, then we’ll start to feel we’re on the way back to some kind of order.