Beauty in the Land

I drove to Skipton on Tuesday for a job interview and I saw the most beautiful country on the drive over.  I am highly suspicious that there maybe something in the water, or maybe some kind of bewitching, or maybe even a Yorkshire blood transfusion given me in the night without my knowledge.   Reason tells me that surely I have seen country as beautiful, I mean I've travelled the world!  But when I'm looking at it, my sentiment cannot conceive a landscape more magnificent.  I should have the accent by October then…

Photo Credit:
Yorkshire.com

Our first accidental discovery in Leeds

On Saturday, we head into Leeds to top up Dr. My Beloved Wife's teaching attire, and we just happened upon the St John the Evangelist's Church building having its 350th anniversary.  It is loaded with restored 17th century woodwork and has a very interesting double nave/chancel interior.  I have never seen anything like it.  My beloved pointed out that if it were not for the Great Fire and the Blitz, all those churches in London would have their interiors intact like this one... mind officially blown.  The stained glass is 19th century and includes a memorial of the man who financed the building of the church sneaking gold hidden in a tankard into Charles I whilst he was being held prisoner in Leeds.  Considering the circumstances, I wonder if he wasn't better off with the ale?

Photo Credits

The Churches Conservation Trust

Car

We are no longer in London and I am going to need a car to work, so I went to a Jaguar dealership...

and got a Vauxhall Corsa!

Photo Credit: Tasker & Lacy

Tavares

Back in 2012, I passed a kidney stone.   Almost to the day, I was booked for a routine kidney scan 2 years later.  In the waiting room was playing SmoothRadio… the Tavares version of More Than a Woman came on and whoosh, I was in a space-time wormhole. Anyone old enough will be aware of the requisite forcefield around memories from the late 1970s: it's there for everyone's protection.

The string of Tavares pop hits were unremarkable for me at the time.  It wasn't until almost a decade later that Tavares became an anchor to my hometown of New Bedford, when a schoolmate made a casual mention of the group while he was tuning his ham radio into a transmitter on The Azores. He warned that if Tavares were rehearsing, we would have to do the radio some other time. The perplexed look on my face prompted the response: they live next door and when they rehearse, all you can hear is them.

Three decades and 3,200 miles away from that moment all I can hear is Tavares again.   And they highlight so much about where I am and from where I came.  In the wormhole, I am in multiple places and times at once:  I'm in New Bedford, that city full of Portuguese immigrants from various island communities, mine The Azores, theirs Cape Verde; I'm in a metropolis on this giant island by way of my Portuguese heritage; I'm in my teens; I'm in my midlife; I'm in a room agonising in so much pain I could not even contemplate fear, I'm in a hospital gazing out of a wormhole compromised of sonorous tethers of an American family of Cape Verdean descent.

Lisboa!

I got to Lisbon to present at a conference for work.  It was fantastic.  Here are some of the sites my colleague Dante & I saw.  He took all the photographs except for the last one, which was taken by one of the conference volunteers.

…all but the recollection that such things had been.

The next stop on the adventure is   Leeds. It all happened in the blink of an eye. My wife interviewed on Wednesday, secured the job on Thursday… and just like that we are off to Leeds. 200 miles north of London, Leeds is in West Yorkshire and is home to my favourite English accent (until we move again, anyway). Sadly, Leeds is famous for shopping, banking, and the start of this years Tour de France (somebody apparently needs a geography lesson).

But all is not lost because according to an Holiday Inn Express website, the top 10 Leeds attractions are Pole Position Indoor Karting, Tropical World, Harewood House (a Georgian mansion), Leeds Kirkgate Market (an Edwardian building), Diggerland (an amusement park), Charlotte's Ice Cream Parlour, the National Coal Mining Museum, Xscape Yorkshire (rock climbing and skiing???), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Ilkley Toy Museum.



...Farewell, London, for the present; is that all?

Photo credits:

Leeds Skyline
Sculpture Garden
Kirkstall Abbey

Suffrage

I voted in my first election on this side of the Atlantic on Thursday. EU citizens get to vote for MEP and in the local government elections. I was shocked how low key it was. It was in a free church hall and even with the huge polling station sign strung up next to the open door, I was in serious doubt I was in the right place until someone walked out.… no campaigners… no signs…. No convoluted machinery, just a very simple paper ballot that you mark with an X in a large square box with a pencil. A simple act, probably makes no difference especially as I am in a political stronghold. But it filled me with buzz to join the political process and it made me smile.

Photo Credit: Welwyn Hatfield Times