We hear a lot about spying in the media – often (allegedly) involving the Russians or the Iranians. There’s currently an issue in the news involving a British citizen sentenced to life imprisonment in Iran, apparently for spying.

Another Great talk at Probus this week by member Keith told us the story of a piece of nifty WW1 decoding of secret messages that prevented the Germans from getting back into a stronger position in the War.
Apart from being a cracking tale of spycraft, technology and world politics it brought out the role of luck and the stereotype of the plucky British amateur succeeding against all odds.

The start of WW1 saw the British cut communication links available to the Germans, forcing them to use a British transatlantic undersea cable to transmit an encrypted message to Mexico. The German intention was to get Mexico to declare war on USA in order for them to regain the southern US states – hoping that this would divert/ prevent US joining with The Allies against Germany.

• The luck came from the British obtaining old coding books from a German warship stuck on a sandbank.
• The stereotype came from an enthusiastic couple of decoders occupying a spare room (room 40) in the Admiralty in London.

A precursor of Bletchley Park in WW2, Room 40 deduced what the telegram meant, and their political masters found a way to tell the Americans without giving away the source of their information -and the US joined in on our side!

The rest, as they say, is history!

I guess that these days spying, eavesdropping and general political skulduggery involves much more advanced technology – though I suspect that chance and individual sparks of initiative still have their place.

I wonder if there’s been any skulduggery during the whole Brexit saga? Surely not!

Back from my visit to my sister in Western Australia and straight into another one of our Probus walks yesterday.

This was a beautiful 5 mile walk, starting from Grassington and walking anticlockwise to Hebden and then around the old mine workings – and back to Grassington!
I find that the name of this village is one that gives away the fact that I was originally a southerner – when I say its name without thinking it through it sounds rather rude! In fact it’s a rather beautiful place!

Our group is very keen on doing clockwise and anticlockwise walks – it may be Yorkshiremen’s economical approach to planning walks. You get two walks for the price of one, and interestingly a walk in the reverse direction feels completely different to the previous walk – often to the extent of getting lost! We’re thinking of repeating this lovely walk – reverse-wise!

We were lucky with the weather – the predicted light rain did not materialise, and we got wonderful views over the upper wharfe valley, with the low sunlight picking out the historic terracing on the valley sides.

At Hebden, a hamlet that I’ve often driven through on the way to the Dales but have never really ‘seen’, we walked up alongside the beck running through it – up to the fascinating old lead mines’ workings on the hillside, and then turned back through some very vigorous winds for a nice lunch at Grassington House Hotel.

This Yorkshire walk is in stark contrast to one I did very recently while in W.A. in the Southern Hemisphere. Staying at a place called Denmark (named after one of the naval officers on a British ship that explored the area in 1829), and feeling the need for some exercise after indulging myself in the many attractive wineries in the Region, my friend and I did the local WOW walk (Wilderness Ocean Walk).

This superb 5 mile walk included fantastic ocean views, bush views (with a multitude of spring flowers) and good wildlife, with many black cockatoos feeding from the bushes.

The route consisted of a winding nicely-surfaced path with very clear directions. What could go wrong?

Only the sight of two tiger snakes, apparently very poisonous – one sneaking off into the undergrowth next to the path, and another curled up on the path in front of us. Luckily the combination of the snakes’ timidity and my fear meant that we weren’t disturbed any more, but I confess to talking quite loudly for the remainder of the walk, and treading rather noisily on the footpath!

Both memorable experiences, and both of great beauty. It’s lovely to be back walking in Yorkshire though!

It’s said that a change is as good as a rest, and my holidays these days seem to concentrate on the rest!

Well, this musing comes from Bali, Indonesia – and it’s certainly a change!

The journey itself (17 hours flying, in two legs) is certainly a different way to spend a (long) day.Legs are very important when you’re in Economy, and though it wasn’t too cramped, they were certainly suffering by the end of the flight. Flying, loads of food and drink, watching multiple films on a small screen and very little sleep just doesn’t prepare one for downtown Denpasar.

The humidity hits immediately and the taxi to the hotel passes along roads full of light motorcycles, scooters and SUVs all travelling far too fast and much too close. (Probably it’s the comparison with flying where you see nothing but clouds far below, and they look all the same so there is no feeling of movement even though you’re moving at more than 500 mph).

There’s also an exposure to local rampant capitalism, with the roads lined with a variety of small businesses competing for your attention. As a first time visitor here it all seemed a bit ‘Blade Runner-ish’. (reference to a cult scifi1980s film, one of my favourites)

The contrast with the hotel couldn’t be starker – beautiful tended grounds full of palm trees and flowering bushes, on the edge of a sea that is full of energetic young- ish folk enjoying the activities. Heaven by the sea!

My major activities, however, have changed over the years. Once snorkelling and scuba diving – now eating ( lots of fresh fish and fruit) and drinking (somewhat more than usual) and looking at the lovely views.

I did miss our monthly Probus walks, to Beamish Beacon and back, and round Thruscross reservoir, but you’ll appreciate that I have found that a change can be good too!

At least some of our members were expecting a talk about New Zealand at our Probus talk this week. The title was ‘The Auckland Project’, and only the better informed among us realised that we were going to hear about Bishop Auckland in County Durham.
I must confess to knowing little about this town of 25 thousand people, between Darlington and Durham, apart from seeing its name on road signs. Lee and Chris soon put us all in the picture with their fascinating story of the rich past of the town.

Auckland castle dates back some 2000 years, and significant years were 1031, when King Canute gave the land to the Bishop of Lindisfarne, and 1072 when King William I put down a local uprising and installed a Norman Bishop of Durham, made the Earl of Northumberland.

These ‘Prince Bishops’ became the most powerful and wealthy land-owners in the country, until their powers were removed in 1832. In 2011 the last Bishop of Durham (fascinatingly the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby!) moved out of the Castle, making it available for sale.

The local Civic Society with massive financial support from a local-born benefactor Jonathan Ruffer purchased both castle and contents, formed charitable organisations and started a massive project aiming to regenerate Bishop Auckland by creating a world-class visitor destination centred on Kynren (a Norse-ish word meaning generation or family).

This is an open air show run by 1000 local volunteers, which tells an epic tale of the history of England, complete with a fireworks extravaganza! The town has just held its 3rd Kynren, and hopes to attract 400,000 visitors to the town, castle and show next season!
There’s much more to the story than I have summarised here. Local businesses and employment are growing, with encouragement from a lot of sources – so expect to see Art galleries, gardens, restaurants, hotels and museums and a beautiful town centre, as well as Auckland Castle and Kynren.

I have a feeling that, if members are sufficiently interested, Probus might put on a trip to Bishop Auckland next year, so we can see for ourselves what’s going on in a town a third of the size of Harrogate but with major ambitions for itself.

Seems like there may be some competition for Harrogate for tourist footfall. Maybe there’s a link between Kynren and the UCI Road World Championships 2019 taking place around Harrogate next September – with tourists from around the globe turning up to ‘do’ the North of England!
Amazing what can be done with a bit of energy and shared purpose (and a lot of money)!

https://www.aucklandcastle.org/the-auckland-project/
https://www.kynren.com/ https://elevenarches.org/

Our ‘elite’ Probus walk this week went well. A five and a half mile circular walk from Pateley Bridge was tackled by an elite band of just four members. [It’s a tricky time to hold a walk – schools are back, grandparents are off on holiday (and there are always hospital appointments!) ]

I know that strictly there were only three musketeers in Alexandre Dumas 19th century novel, but there was a fourth ‘would be’ musketeer, D’Artagnan. I rather fancied myself to be this young, hot-headed, rakish guy, but in fact was probably a bit more like the portly Porthos!

We set off down river in beautiful dry weather, much better than predicted. A disarmingly pleasant level stroll took us to Glasshouses, then we crossed the river and struck off up the hill towards the tall mast that bears multiple devices for mobile phones and goodness knows what else.
Discarding pullovers and coats, we strove up the slope past the beautiful Guise-cliff tarn (what is the difference between a tarn and a lake?), through the beautiful autumnal woods.

We rested at the top, enjoying the remarkably clear view of the Nidd valley as far as the Menwith Hill radomes. Lovely clear sky with just some scudding clouds (and an area of rather grey cloud cover in the distance, thankfully moving away from us).

We continued with a level walk, rather too close to the edge of Guise-Cliff for comfort, and experienced a breezy welcome from over Nought Moor. After Yorke’s Folly we started descending through Skrikes Wood and Fishpond Wood towards Pateley Bridge. All the woods we strolled through were beautiful in their autumn colours. Paths were variously carpeted by silver-birch leaves or pine-needles, and we crossed swathes of tall, browning bracken. Funghi were in evidence everywhere, but none of our group showed any inclination to put their knowledge of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ funghi to the test!

A bridge over Fosse Gill (is that the same as stream?) led us to our final challenge – crossing a field where cows and their young (and a rather large brown bull!) were grazing – before proceeding down the hill to Pateley Bridge.

Actually there was still one last challenge. Our chosen pub for lunch was closed (because the road leading to it was being re-surfaced), and a number of other possibilities were also closed for one reason or another (surely word of the musketeers being in the area had not leaked out?) We settled on the Sun Inn at Norwood, with its magnificent, and huge, steak pies.

Maybe this successful trip bodes well for a future alliance between France and England, Post-Brexit, against the wicked Cardinal Richelieu (does he work for the European Parliament or the Commission?)

We had a fabulous talk last week by David Skillen about The Industrial Revolution. There’s my brief summary of the talk (and all our Probus talks), in the Local Clubs’ Section of The Harrogate Advertiser.
Apart from being a brilliant and informative talk it started me thinking about our own age, often hyped as the period of greatest change that the world has ever known.

According to the Web (1) the major time-periods in world history include the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Ages, then through Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, The Islamic Golden Age, The Age of Discovery, The Protestant Reformation, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Age of Revolution, The Romantic Era, The Industrial Revolution, The Age of Imperialism, The First World, The Inter-war era, The Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, The Cold War and The Information Age.

What a lot of Ages!

Some of these periods of history (Eras, Ages etc.) overlap, though increasingly our world is moving synchronously, driven by the need to know what’s going on, when and wherever it happens (like the Martini advert – Any time, Any place, Anywhere).

David’s talk made me doubt what I’d lazily taken for granted – that we are now living through the greatest changes in our World’s history. He showed that a period of just a few decades in The Industrial Revolution transformed working life radically in the 1700s, enabling incredible leaps in industrial productivity – that the UK at least seemed to have failed to reach subsequently, and we invented the Industrial Revolution!

According to the Web we’re still in the Information Age, where modern technologies are shaping our society, but I think that we are meant to have arrived by now in ‘The Age of Knowledge and Wisdom’, rather than just drowning in (fake) information.

I came across a ‘wise’ saying somewhere recently that describes the difference:

‘Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad’.

(1) https://www.biographyonline.net/different-periods-in-history/

I had a great fly fishing trip this week with Probus friend Bill. A glorious evening (apart from a brief rain shower while we were tackling up). We startled a hare as we crossed a field on our way to the lake, and it zig- zagged away from us, causing a heron to rise! All before we had started fishing!
In no time two nice rainbow trout took a fancy to the pale green nymph I offered them! Fantastic (and extraordinary in my personal experience)! Bill also fooled a couple of nice fish, and then we had a short walk to the car with a background of a local church bell chiming the hour, and a beautiful sunset. The evening was finished off with a very pleasant drink in The One Eyed Rat in Ripon. Superb! You can’t beat Yorkshire!

The following evening being Friday, it was my turn to cook our habitual fish and chips, and the picture shows my home grown (and caught) meal – with the potatoes and the runner beans coming from the allotment!

I must stress that this level of self-sufficiency is very unusual – the fish are very rarely so cooperative, and the allotment only provides vegetables for a couple of months a year, including a very intense few weeks when runner beans and their picking, blanching, peeling and freezing is the only activity in my calendar. The freezer, and I, are both groaning!

Would you like any runner beans, climbing beans or broad beans? Please! They’re all has-beens!

Lovely Probus walk on Tuesday. Six of us tackled a circular walk starting from Coldstone Cut, near Pateley Bridge.
Don’t know if you’ve been there, but it must be the best kept secret in Yorkshire! An unimpressive small car park just off the Pateley to Grassington road with a short-ish rising footpath leading to a fascinating ‘art installation’ that overlooks a massive working quarry! Information boards describethe geology and the history of use of the local stone – superb!
Already buzzing with interest, and we hadn’t even started the walk!

Bill, our walk Leader soon went ‘off piste’ from his planned and reconnoitred walk, so it was a ‘short cut’ across open moorland followed by some genuine footpaths past beautifully renovated stone houses with lovely gardens and matching views.
The advertised stile-free walk turned out to have quite a lot of unstable stone steps over crumbling dry stone walls, and a few more sturdy wooden stiles – apparently these don’t count!

The long distance views, it has to be said, were magnificent throughout, as was the wildlife. A hare darted across a field, a large flock of alleged partridges took to the wing(s), and a charming group of cows, their calves and a rather scary bull allowed us to continue on our way across their field.
A steep climb took us back towards the car park, and in the many opportunities we took to pause to ‘admire the view’ we observed the decision making processes of a flock of sheep, with the braver members (the sheep that is!) leaping over substantial stone walls into a much better adjacent pasture.
Our lunch at The Sportsmans Arms Hotel at Wath was one of the best meals we’ve had, fully matched by the entertaining discussion within the group.

A great day out – may there be many more like that!

We had a great talk at Probus last week on ‘Iconic Road Cars from 1950s to today’.

In the Q&A session after the talk there was a bit of a murmur about what iconic meant in this context, but our speaker, Graham, made it clear that it was his personal choices – and he soon added quite a few more cars, based on suggestions from car-mad members present!

His choices from the 1950s included the Morris Minor, which drew sighs of remembrance from lots of members. His slide show of different models from the different decades acted as a quiz throughout the presentation – and Graham reminded us of the different market segments that cars were aimed at under different economic times, how they drove (as well as how easy they were to maintain), and the ways the cars were marketed through their use in films, in motor car rallies, and to the very wealthy.
The very recent 1500 b.h.p Bugatti Chiron at £2.1M and The Aston Martin Valkyrie that achieves Formula 1 speeds for a very reasonable £2.5M attracted many!

I’m not sure that I’d count myself as a car enthusiast. At least one of our members goers off on regular adventures all over the world in frighteningly old cars, but I have more of an “it’s a way of getting from A to B” mind-set! I tend to look at the ‘number of miles to the gallon’ indicator rather than the speed dial, now!
I do appreciate a stylish car, especially something a bit sporty. In my dreams my hair flows elegantly in the breeze as I accelerate away from the lights on Hookstone Road … Then I realise that my hair isn’t quite full enough to blow in the breeze, and I would have trouble getting in (and especially getting out) of a sports car now!
Still, one can dream….

Last week’s Probus talk was a cracker! For those members who missed it, the subject was marquetry – not ‘The Common Marquet’, but applying wood veneer in decorative patterns to classical furniture.

Jack Metcalfe’s post retirement ‘hobby’ turned into a high intensity ‘obsession’ to replicate some of the wonderful work of local cabinet maker Thomas Chippendale, whose largest commission was to fit out Harewood House with his wonderful classic furniture.

Jack gave us a spectacular presentation and talk of ‘Marquetry 101’, and his journey to understand and master the techniques of using the different hardwoods, fretsaws, glues and stains.
His slides showed the original Chippendale pieces and his replicas, beautifully detailed and colourful – as they were when new in the 1700s. Jack committed years of work to complete each superb piece.
I’m looking forward to visiting Newby Hall and Harewood House before the end of September when exhibitions of both originals and Jack’s replicas are celebrating the 300th anniversary of his birth.
One ‘takeaway’ from this excellent talk actually came from a Probus member, heard after the talk ruefully commenting that he felt that he’d wasted his own retirement when compared with Jack’s!
Me too, but I know that my DIY would always be a good deal more primitive than either Thomas’s or Jack’s works of art!