The market comes to town every Thursday and I buy my fruit, veggies, cheese and fish there – not to mention a bacon butty for lunch which can be eaten on The Square, weather permitting! Unlike the Farmers’ markets in the U.S this produce doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg. Total for this little lot was £8. The box of tomatoes was £1.

The weather forecast was predicting icy weather for the next few day – and for the whole of March! Knowing that I should take advantage of today’s sunny sky I decided after lunch – bacon butty, apple and satsuma – to take the bus up to Old Town and find a hike along the upper ridge and dropping down into Mytholmroyd. There were several people waiting at the bus stop. Ten minutes after the bus was due a man and his son left saying ‘We’ll go to the library instead.’ Another man, obviously quite disgruntled commented ‘I feel like getting a taxi and send ‘t bus company th’ bloody bill. Bloody bus ‘as brok’n doon agin.’ A couple of minutes later, before I could check the time of the next ‘bloody bus’ a taxi stopped to pick up three of the waiting passengers. “Hold on,” I called, “Can I come too?” So off we all went up t’th’ tops. I paid £1 to the driver and got out just by Hebden Bridge golf course, picking up the upper road where I had left it on Monday. This time I had an ordinance survey map with me so that I could pick out features in the landscape.

Looking across to Stoodley Pike

Mytholmroyd in the bottom You can just make out Sowerby church on the centre skyline where I walked from on Monday

You can just make out Sowerby church on the left skyline where I walked from on Monday

Not sure I’d want this as the name of my house! But what I learned from the Antiquarian lecture on Monday is that this indicates where a family built a dwelling for a son. So the initial family would live in Rough Farm and when the son came of age a dwelling would be built for him to weave and farm, and the family farm’s name  would change to Rough Top, and the son’s would be called Rough Bottom. (Same goes for Slack Top and Slack Bottom just above Heptonstall. There’s also Dog Bottom!

At some point I knew that I had to head down into the valley. Ah, I see a Public Footpath sign. Perhaps I should take that track. but what’s that I see lying in the grass?

OK, there’s no way in hell I’m going to walk through their field!

Eventually I found another path that took me to the Grove Inn on Burnley Road. Perhaps i can have a sit down and get a drink there.

Hmm – no house, free or otherwise, no B and B and certainly no food on offer.

So I joined the towpath in Brearley, having decided to continue walking all the way back to my apartment. A little farther along I saw a building I’d not noticed before: The Kitchen, adjacent to the towpath. It was advertising coffee to take away. That’s a nice idea, I thought. I’ll be very American and walk back into Hebden sipping at my coffee. People don’t do that in England very much at all. Tea or coffee is a ritual here that requires sitting down for a considerable length of time, and either musing quietly to oneself or talking animatedly depending on the company you are in. But once inside the place looked so attractive I decided to take my coffee in. Note to self: they do curries too, so I could walk along the canal from my apartment (about 2 miles) and get a curry and stroll back into town.

Wonder if my daughters would feel at home there?

First daffies I’ve seen in bloom

Late afternoon sunshine. Looking to see where I’ve walked from – the top of the farthest hill.

I always say hello to these ducks. They live at a house next to the canal and someone told me that the house used to keep chickens in a hen house. During the 2015 flood they all drowned, so now they keep ducks instead.

Thursday evenings are band night. I joined the Halifax Concert Band and next weekend we are spending Thursday and Friday evening and all day Saturday recording a CD. Here’s an extract from our rehearsal last night. The balance is all wrong because I was recording it in my coat pocket!

My next knitting project – honestly! – being given its first airing at the Antiquarian Society

I can’t help comparing England and the U.S. I’ve spent an equal amount of time in both countries. Actually, I’d prefer to say ‘cultures’ because, despite the common language (well, for the most part) the cultures are vastly different. Last night I attended my first Calderdale Antiquarian Society meeting. Despite its name it’s not a society for old people   but I was certainly one of the youngest in attendance. I got talking to a lady whose one daughter moved to Canada.We chatted about being away from our children, and she shared with me that she’s now tired of going to Canada because, naturally, she always goes to the same place to visit her daughter. It reminded me of the trips to Europe that our family did when we lived in the U.S but as the girls got older we would combine a week visiting relatives in England with a few weeks seeing parts of Europe that were new to us all. I suppose I’m thinking about this from my mum’s point of view at the moment since my daughters are coming to see me soon – and they’ve all been to Hebden Bridge before.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the meeting which was entitle Aspects of the Landscape in Upper Calderdale. About 60 people showed up on a wet, chilly night gathered in a chapel. The screen was suspended from the organ pipes. Most of the attendees sat for the 75 minutes in their coats, and not a few kept their hats on, and I thought how quintessentially British! I remember taking photos of my family on visit to England taking my mum out for lunch and she’d always wear a hat – during the meal. Tonight’s meeting was free – donation accepted.  If you want to join the society it costs £10 per year. This is just the same mindset as the lunchtime organ and brass band concert the previous day when 1000 people attended a free event. Where are these events in the U.S? And more to the point where are the equivalent people in the U.S? Shut in watching the telly? In nursing homes playing bingo? It took me all my powers of concentration to keep up with the lecture. My hopes that there would be stunning photos of ancient walls, enclosed fields and rocky outcrops were thwarted. Instead we saw a handful of landscape photos  and the remaining slides were charts and maps showing the gradual development of mini hamlets, into hamlet, thence into villages and so on into townships. We were treated to several lessons in the derivation of local place-names from the Norwegian Anglo Saxon language (!) and the influence of the Romano Celtic alphabet. Fascinating for nerds like me. Where are these lectures in Santa Cruz (pop 62000)? It’s too small a place , you may say. OK. Where are they in Oakland, in San Francisco – (pop 864000)?  Halifax’s population is 82,000: Night after night of free (or almost free) education.

• 

  A thousand people were present for this Monday lunchtime free concert

  

  

  Flugelhorn soloist is off to U C San Diego to do a Masters in composition

  

  Trombone sextet

  

  My fellow Meetup member did a couple of drawings of one of the audience during the music.

  

  He was delighted with the outcome!

• Since it’s half term this week my regular weekly events, art class, chatty crochet and choir, have all been cancelled so that gave me the opportunity to reconnect with a Meetup group and go to Leeds Town Hall for a recital by Huddersfield University Brass band and he resident town hall organist. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked into the Victoria Hall. The place was packed. I mean, this was a rainy Monday lunchtime concert. The Hall holds 1200 people so I judge there must have been 1000 people there! It certainly felt like it as the audience left the hall through the narrow winding hallways. We were packed like sardines still swimming in a tin. Huddersfield was one of my Alma matas so it was good to see their current band who are regarded highly. They looked SO young!