Pontypool

Did I mention I have bought a vegetarian cook book.  With it came a radical change in my cooking habits cos there were lots of nice easy recipes like spicy ginger and chickpeas, orka and mixed vegetables, potato pancakes.  I have decided that I won't cook with meat - that's Harry's job now.  To assist with this new hobby of mine (and friends that know me well will be shaking their heads in disbelief) we are now taking two trolleys shopping.  Harry fills his with all the normal stuff and I go wandering around the supermarket trying to find the few things on the shopping list for my next vegetarian delight.  We meet at the checkout and transfer my few goodies into Harry's pretty full trolley. Even forgetting the shopping list doesn't deter me (I am just not used to such things) as I managed to remember most of the ingredients and the one I did forget didn't seem important in the finished product anyway.
On Thursday night we went to a Quiz evening - a fund raiser for Prostrate Cancer Research.  We came last equal which was pretty disappointing as usually we make it to second to last.  We had 60 questions and managed to get less than 50% right, the good news was we did  manage to put an answer in each one which I thought was quite an achievement.  We thought we would excel in English geography considering we have been around the country and bit, but got our lowest score 1/10 - yes we knew that Leeds was further north than Halifax (which was a guess actually) , but forgot the name of the longest river in Wales and the second to highest mountain in Scotland.  Harry even failed on the Formula One question (oops failure is a bit strong) 'Which Formula One car driver owns a golf course in Devon?', and thought that Jennifer Lopez was known for her lips but was put right by the other men at the table.
The weekend was a wilderness trip into Wales - well not quite.  We climbed Sugar Loaf which as you can see from the pictures is a pretty little hill with some bracken at the bottom but a clear path to the top.  A guy at work belongs to the Welsh Search and Rescue and by the time we had finished work on Friday I was envisaging climbing a mountain peak not much smaller than Mount Cook.  Armed with plenty of food, lights, hat, jacket etc (just in case we got caught in the mist) we began our climb and stopped on the way to see the Stonechats sitting on the bracken.  They are sparrow size birds, dark with an orange beak and sound like stones rattling together on a beach.  We stopped at the top for lunch and were visited by two friendly sheep - the photos prove that British sheep have quite a different attitude to Kiwi ones - they were keen to try our melon and salami but we said 'No Way' - they even ignore the dogs.

That night we had dinner at a Pontypool pub and spent a couple of hours reading the paper, trying local cider and eating fairly average food.  But it was relaxing and put us in the mood to go back to the hotel and watch the documentary the Queen - a very good doco that combines real life footage and acting to get a reasonable impression of the social and political events of the time and how they impact on the Royal family.  This one was about how the Queen was asking Edward Heath to double her income in the 60's (up to £1million) while the miners were on strike across the country asking for more than £20 a week to feed their families.  Which was incidentally an appropriate history lesson for the next day.  After a bike ride a long an old railway path which used to transport equipment up and coal down to the valleys (all down hill going there and all up hill against the wind coming back) and a stop for lunch (there is a photo of a station - when it was in its prime and now) we went to the Big Pit -  a coal mining museum.  I was first interested because I saw that there was a brass band playing but we became a bit more interested in the museum.  We saw for the first time the shower block put in during the 1930's which meant the workers could go home clean, the mechanised equipment once the pick and shovel became almost obsolete and generally enjoyed the day.  There was a huge locker room with some stories of the miners (some who loved their jobs and remember the comradeship, while others hated it - I must admit it isn't my 'preferred occupation'). There was

• Richard 'Plodder' Dally who worked for 68 years at the coal face retiring when he was 79.  
• Bert Coombes who wrote an autobiography 'These poor hands'
• Kenvin Thomas described as an 'ordinary bloke' who 'loved his job but 'hates ice and waterfalls in the shafts when it rains'
• Ann Land the canteen lady who entered the colliery managers office to finding him working in the nude and collected telephone directories to wrap chips for the miners.

Anyway, I said to myself while climbing the hill in the museum - that job "must be the pits" and smiled as it occurred to me that perhaps the saying originated in a mine somewhere in Wales. Then it was time to return to Bristol to have tea at Chris's before another week starts.