Dangerous Sports

I know that you wouldn't normally include metal detecting in the category of dangerous sports but my detecting colleague almost came a cropper yesterday. I was chatting to one of the farmers who allows me to search his fields last week and he told me that the local history society had suggested that one of his fields might be a site of ancient activity. He suggested that I have a look over it with the detector so I checked it out on the map. It was about a mile from the nearest road and at the top of a steep hill. I told my pal about it and asked if he was up for it. No problem. He was happy to give it a try.

So yesterday at about 9 o'clock I found myself here, half way up the hill, with an extremely shattered detecting partner. He found the going extremely tough and had to stop and lie down. He's not that old (early sixties) and thought that he was pretty fit. He's not terribly overweight either but, although he used to ramble regularly, he hasn't done much physical activity other than detecting for some time and the climb up the hill was a real shock to the system. I had a horrible vision of him suffering a heart attack a mile away from the car but after a while he recovered sufficiently to make it to the top of the hill. Sadly I can't report that the effort was worthwhile as we only found a button, a buckle, a lead weight and a spindle whorl between us. I think we'll stick to easily accessible sites in future.

Finds to die for?

There's been hardly any time to blog this week as we were up at four thirty on Tuesday and heading back to St Andrews to bring Sarah and our new granddaughter Rose out of hospital. After worrying us all with her sleepiness and failure to feed which resulted in a big weight loss, Rose finally got used to the idea of feeding and is now doing fine. We spent Wednesday in St Andrews in some glorious sunshine before heading back to Southport and arriving home at one in the morning. But no complaints. It's so fantastic to be able to see our family.

And we would drive five hundred miles

You would think that perhaps after such a hectic couple of days we would have a lie in on Thursday but no. We were off to Liverpool first thing in the morning in order to buy what was needed for the new St Andrews caravan. It's like setting up home all over again. This was how the car looked by mid afternoon. The fridge, the TV and the DVD player are being shipped to Scotland and we still haven't got everything with bed and pillow covers and towels still on the list along with a fair bit more. We're off to Southport today to stock up on the missing items.

When the car was full we went and had another light lunch at Salt House Tapas. We've become regulars there over the past month as the food and service are great and the portion sizes are small which means that we don't over do it. After lunch we headed for FACT and saw the acclaimed Palme D'Or winning film The Tree Of Life. Now I would have loved to have said that this was as brilliant as some of the critics have said but we found it seriously flawed. The underlying story of a family growing up in the early fifties is good but it's wrapped into a lot of quasi religious mumbo jumbo involving dinosaurs, planets and heaven which drag on for ages and made no sense to me and Marion at all. It was a bit like 2001 A Space Odyssey in parts (and nobody understood that either) and I can't help feeling that a lot of the praisers of this film jumped on the bandwagon for fear of being unable to see the King's new clothes. It's certainly different but I would not recommend it.

Here's something that is not particularly different. It's been done before by a car manufacturer (Audi I think) and OK Go but I think that this one is the best yet.