lemon garden

I’ve just upgraded the wordpress installation powering this blog from version 1.5 to the latest version. It was a relatively painless upgrade as the instructions supplied by wordpress are clear and complete.

My next task is to see what I can do about all the bloody spam comments I’ve been getting lately. I’m averaging about 150 a day at the moment. Of course none of them appear on the blog, so the dastardly spammers get absolutely no benefit from their abuse of my hospitality. But it infuriating that, every evening when I get home from work, I have to zap over hundred comments from the moderation queue. I’m concerned that I might miss some genuine comments from new people in amongst all the spam and mistakenly delete them as spam. If that has happened to you, my apologies.

I see that the new version of Wordpress has a plugin that will check each comment against some third party service to see if it looks like spam and manage it accordingly. So I will investigate that and will report back shortly.

I spent a very pleasant day yesterday trekking over Pen-y-ghent. For those who don’t know, Pen-y-ghent is one of the three highest peaks in the Yorkshire Dales. I say one of the three highest because the three together (Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough) form the famous “Three Peaks Walk” - a 26 mile trek that takes in all three peaks on one day. I fancy giving the three peaks a try later in the summer, but I think I need to walk each one separately first to get a feel for them.

I approached Pen-y-ghent from the south, starting from Helwith Bridge. The ascent up the south face of the hill is rather steep, almost sheer in places. Ostensibly there is a footpath up the south face but in practice it is more of a hand and foot path. It’s worth scrambling up, for there is a cracking view across a breathtaking sweep of the western dales from the summit. I then followed a gentler path down the western side of the hill and into the village of Horton in Ribblesdale, where I stopped off at the Pen-y-ghent Cafe for a cup of tea and a slice of fruit cake. From the village I followed a path along the banks of the River Ribble back to Helwith Bridge and the car. A splendid way to spend the day. If you live within striking distance of the Dales I can recommend the walk. I’ve prepared a Google Earth kmz of the route for your delight and delectation.

This photo was snapped looking back as I headed away from the hill towards the village:

I stray away from my computer for a few days to enjoy the sunshine and what do I see when I return? Ninety-eight instances of comment spam in the last two days alone!

For goodness sake, when will they realise that the spam comments will never ever be revealed to public gaze. They simply sit in a moderation queue until I delete them. There is absolutely no point in it. Do you hear me Mr Spammer? THERE IS NO POINT IN IT!

I also received a very strange email from my web hosting provider. It read:

Hello, Richard.
A new person has been created for you.

Wierd, eh? I thought it might be some very odd spam, but no - it does appear to have legitimately come from my host. Someone’s been working too late I think.

Is there a better way to spend a sunday afternoon than to go for a walk in the spring sunshine over the Yorkshire Dales?

A footpath lined with dry stone walls leading towards the limestone crags.

Looking from the top of Attermire Scar over the fell towards Pen-y-ghent - which looks much bigger to the human eye than it does to the camera’s eye.

Walking in the sunshine is all very well, but I came home with a bit of sunburn on the back of my neck. I must buy myself some sort of wide-brimmed hat for such days. I’ve got a cricket hat, but I’m not sure if that’s really suitable for walking over hill and dale. Great at keeping the sun off your neck, but you may look a bit silly.

The Animations Page on the website of the Minor Planet Centre holds several animations of our solar system. Including one that shows the Earth’s orbit during 2002, along with all the Near Earth Objects that passed within 20 million kilometres of our home during that period. Some pass very close indeed. Some of the objects appear from nowhere on the animation, this is because they are only plotted from the moment they were discovered. Notice the way some objects were only discovered when they were already quite close.

Still I’m sure we’ll be fine.

It looks like spring is here.

Most Saturday’s I walk around to my local greengrocers and stock up on fruit and veg for the week. They have an excellent selection. The prices are a little more expensive than the supermarket, but they stock more varieties of vegetables and the quality is top notch. They also get in a lot of local produce, which I like to see.

Yesterday I bought some locally grown leeks and mushrooms. So I was pleased to see a recipe on Daisy’s blog for a Leek and Onion Tart, it sounded like a perfect use for those leeks. I cooked the tart this evening for dinner and it was absolutely scrumptious. Truly delectable. It was so good, I even went back to the pie dish for seconds.

I strayed from the recipe slightly because I had only single cream, rather than the double cream called for. To bring the egg and cream mixture up to the desired consistency I added a few good dollops of ricotta cheese instead and lightly whisked the lot together. The delicate creamy taste of the ricotta perfectly complemented the more intense flavour of the leeks.

When I’m making a pie or a tart, I always aim to make a little bit too much pastry. Purely so that I can whip up a currant pasty or, as seen here, some jam tarts. Yum.

The only drawback to all this is that I spent the whole evening pottering around in the kitchen and didn’t realise that I’d forgotten to put the kitchen clock forwards by one hour last night. It wasn’t until I sat down to eat that I realised it was half past nine, rather than half past eight. Oops.

Visiting a visitor to this site (if you see what I mean) I found that she’d started a meme all of her very own. It would be churlish of me not to join in. Even if the meme is a transparent attempt to plug her book. Capitalism, eh?

1. Briefly describe an aspect of your life for which ‘The Dying Of Delight’ would be an apt title.

At work yesterday morning, rather than waste time working, we stood around chatting. One of my work colleagues started talking about synaesthesia; he’d seen some programme on TV about it. It reminded me that I used to have something like that when I was a teenager. I’d all but forgotten about it, because it passed with the end of my teenage years. I used to experience music as colours. So, I’d hear some music and it would immediately evoke a tangible sense of some colour. The colours usually had a texture associated with them too. The first Smiths record was a jumble of white crystalline shapes shot through with notes of grey and blue. The song “The Queen is Dead” from their third album was a dark muddy green with flickers of red.

Nowadays, for the most part, I just hear music as music. Though I did, whilst playing around on my guitar last week, hit a beautiful run of notes around the twelfth fret that fell into my mind as a series of azure blue droplets like sapphires. But that’s a rare occurence. This is price of getting older I suppose.

2. Pick another book whose title has some resonance in your life, and write a little about it.

Ok, let me take a look at my ridiculously overloaded bookcase. The first book I see is the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. A friend from Finland was amused by my use of the word “errant” in an email the other day. It wasn’t a word she’d come across before and she had to consult her dictionary to understand my message.

That’s not a very resonant title, however, so I think I will go with “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson. I can remember playing with quicksilver once when I was a child and marvelling at the way the liquid metal moved about. The odd thing is I can’t remember how I managed to get some actual mercury; but I do remember holding a drop in my hands and letting it roll about, breaking up and recombining. It’s probably the mercury poisoning that’s done for my memory. Anyway, the book itself is quite entertaining but I’m not sure what Neal Stephenson was trying to achieve with the series. It’s by no means as good as Snow Crash.

3. Write one more short personal piece - one which matches the book title chosen (in part 2) by the person who tagged you.

Ah, bugger. I just leapt into this meme without being tagged. That’ll teach me to look first. So I’ll use the book that Clare picked, even though she didn’t tag me: What Women Want Men to Know. I’ve no idea what women want men to know. I imagine it will vary from woman to woman; human beings are a diverse bunch. Perhaps women want men to know how to wire a plug, that’s quite useful. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t know how to wire a plug. I can never remember which wire goes where.

Oh hang on, I’ve just noticed that Daisy tagged me with this meme. So I have got a proper book to play with: “A Clergyman’s Daughter” by George Orwell. I rather fancy the idea of seducing a clergyman’s daughter with my wanton atheism. I suspect I would need to live in Edwardian times to do that properly.

4. Take your favourite little-known book and plug it to your readers. Authors need incomes, and word of mouth is one of the best ways to sell books.

My favourite little known book is “Christ stopped at Eboli” by Carlo Levi. However, Mr Levi does not actually need an income as he is dead. Poor chap. Carlo Levi was an Italian writer, painter and doctor who opposed Mussolini. Il Duce didn’t necessarily cart his intellectual opponents off to concentration camps, instead he exiled them to remote parts of the country. Carlo Levi was exiled to Gagliano, and the book tells of the year he spent there. He describes the landscape and the life of the peasants there with a painter’s eye. It’s well worth a read.

Now I’m supposed to plug Clare’s book - plug - and finally tag five other people with the meme. I’m too shy to simply come out and tag people. I’ll have to resort to sneaking up behind you, tapping you on the shoulder, and whispering “you’re it!” in your ear. Be prepared…

Yesterday, I complained that my MP hadn’t replied to a letter I sent him regarding the Police and Justice Bill. However, this very afternoon, I received a lovely polite email from someone in his office apologising for the tardiness of the reply. I wonder if that means he reads my blog (or, perhaps someone in his office does). Anyway, it was a very nice email so I thought I’d better amend my earlier post so as not to refer to him as a bugger. If you’re reading, I am sorry about that old chap.

Apparently the Police and Justice Bill is now entering the committee stage and so my MP has copied the letter to his colleague Nick Clegg MP, who is sitting on the relevant committee, and asked him to take my views to the committee. That’s what I call service.

Forgive me, because I need to rant about something…
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