THE HIGH GNOME & Sounds from The Steppes

Anyone with knowledge of THE HIGH GNOME knows his HQ is NOT the north pole. It's on the Steppes where his reindeer, ALL female btw, eat the magical foods which help them fly into other worlds. Common sense animal management when you think about it.

The Lateral Thinkers

As a lateral thinker I view the world from a totally different perspective to everyone else apart that is from other lateral thinkers. As our perspectives rarely point in the same directions we are like folk following drummers only to find our drummers are in the next valley. Which is all well and good if there are but few hills in the plain. 

However if we find ourselves within a mountainous region we may end up following someonelse's drummer which could prove very interesting, especially if the beat of the drum be faster or slower or of a totally different beat altogether. As happened a while ago when my drummer was going NNW and I picked up on one going WWN...er, what was the question by the way...

Might the answer be in a Hard Boiled Egg?

Close your eyes and imagine Ilkley Moor five thousand years ago. Then as now rain poured down and wind howled. Breakfast, such as it was, may have been the odd egg or two from some native bird and maybe their equivalent of our toast soldiers. With one exception, hard boiled eggs have a tendency to roll off wind blown rocks. Fed up with the latter some enterprising individual began carving a hollow in a nearby rock and when fellow tribes folk saw how useful they were, did the same. 

Thus the first purpose built egg cups came into being. Depending on how large the family unit dictated the number of hollows. Alternatively those rocks with a great number of ‘cups’ could have been their equivalent of our B&B or communal table. All well and good you say but what about the rings? Simple. Where do you think they put the toast?

An update from a 2008 post.

Journalistic Licence and Historical Fact

It is a fact that Journalistic Licence has done more to damage History in whatever country than most documents. Lack of knowledge of the subject is the main culprit. Followed by bad research, that is not following leads back to source, and making as sure as possible what you are about to print is 98% safe.

If not DON'T!

In my own small area I often hear mis-information spouted and over the years have come to recognise which publication the spouters have been reading. In the main it can be reduced to three volumes. Each taking mis-information from the other and because few bother to do deep research it carries on like a bad cold getting worse and worse.

If you are a Journalist, a Researcher, or just someone doing someone else a good turn I beseach you all to remember those who eventually will be reading your work.

Ignore the Jounalist's Proverb at your peril
"Don't forget the last phone call."

Tightest Parallel Parking - Guinness World Record

The Impossible is Possible if you know the Way

seeing is believing - believing is seeing

If you could save a third of your fuel bills would spend a bit to do it?

Have a look at this and draw your own conclusions -

http://www.ecomagnets.com/thermoflow.htm
Fitted in Royal and not so Royal residences throughout UK and abroad.
Nothing to lose and everything to gain....

http://www.ecomagnets.com/

How Green was Your Valley

Perhaps Concerned of Ilkley and those who see the felling of trees on Ilkley Moor as scandalous should think about conditions in Australia. There is strong opinion bush fires would not have been as bad if environmentalists had allowed clearance of dead wood, bracken, etc.Phil Cheney, a bushfire researcher, said he was ‘totally frustrated’ by his Government’s failure to reduce forest density.

A resident of Strathewen, ravaged by bush fires, said the Greenies issued a statement that nought had to be touched. That is none removal of dead wood because a little mouse might be living under it. Now both people and the mouse are dead.

Travelling the Yorkshire Dales and other rural areas it soon becomes evident our Countryside is being ruined by misinformed factions who can’t see the wood for trees. Hedges were planted in the main to keep stock in and/or people out. A well laid hedge also provides much needed cover for nesting birds, insects and smaller animals. Leaving a hedge to grow open and as book environmentalists are apt to say, natural, defeats the object of a hedge.It is also open to pest, disease and rampaging peasants. There are many examples close at hand where the book environmentalists have held sway.

The woods over by Middleton are arboreal scrap yards. I warned Ilkley Parish Council and Bradford Metropolitan District Council what would happen if they didn’t clear felled timber. Fifteen years ago I warned them.However they took the book environmentalists attitude and what have we now. Erosion like you’ve never seen before in the bluebell beds. Erosion which should never have happened, if those supposedly in power had listened to people trained in woodcraft and the like. Sometimes folk interpret what they see as a hedge, when in fact it is not, which leads to all kinds of misinformation.

The same goes for the Victorian Landscape Garden some are apt to call the lower reaches of Ilkley Moor. When Man disturbs Nature all hell breaks loose unless a degree of careful management takes place. Look at The Tarn for instance. Look closely. Look at it’s banks, look at the carriageways, look at the footpaths which lead to it. What are natural about those? One could say what indeed is natural.

There’s been talk of late about putting fences on common land. Why did no-one oppose the fence Leeds Diocese put up in front of the four hundred year old way marker at the junction of Langbar Road, Slates Lane and Hardings Lane, beside Bridlepath 1. What about those trees planted along the edge of the moor by the former Darwin Gardens Trust.They are as much out of place as those spreading across The Moor and will, eventually, block any view of White Wells from below, or the Millennium Green from White Wells.

In the year celebrating Charles Darwin’s birth and publishing of his monumental book one does wonder what he, a botanist and scientist, would think of Ilkley Moor and neighbouring countryside today. Equally the attitude to the environment by those so-called experts, the book environmentalists.