The passport application has to be one of those "Top Five Most Stressful Life Events". One stroke of the pen outside the box, the wrong colored ink, a missing capital letter and your application is put into the shred pile. Did you accidentally smile on your passport photo? Too bad. Start again.
The good news of the day was that my granda spoke an entire sentence, something he has not done in over a year! He spoke words to me several times during my visits to him in the home, but I couldn't understand him. He smiled often too, and those are easy to understand.
The next day I finally got to see my little brother James; he had left on a vacation to Cancun the day I arrived.
It was the day after that when I started to notice I had hay fever. Odd, I never had while I lived here. It was silage season, I had slept with open windows at night, and I had taken the dogs for runs over the freshly harvested fields.
I tried allergy medicine but nothing worked and by Friday, the area around my eyes was literally bulging and I looked like a Black Moor goldfish. This would not do, I had plans! After two doctor visits and a prescription for steroids, I started to look like myself.
Saturday, we had a family barbecue at my auntie Julie's house. I tried my first BBQ'd squid and it was surprisingly good!
How to BBQ squid
I love my auntie Julie's house; it's a converted barn with a huge garden and mini secret gardens with raspberry bushes, vegetable patches, wildflowers, and places to sit and sip cold drinks. Julie has a business "The Rusty Button", where she sells really cool vintage clothing. The girls like this because they usually get to play dress-up in fancy clothes. It was a beautiful day and it was good to see lots of family again.
Cocoa the dog is sweet and playful.
Mary, Jenson and his post-party tent, and fresh raspberries
puppets!
On Sunday, we headed to Beamish! I missed a field trip to Beamish in primary school because I was run over by a motorbike on the way to the school bus that morning. Despite my injuries, I remember being the most distraught over missing my school field trip. That, and I had been carrying a Tunnock's Teacake, my favorite, which was squashed on the road when I was run over. Other things I remember about being run over:
- Thinking the kids and driver on the bus were waving to me when really they were warning me of the motorbike coming over the hill. I waved back.
- The Alsatian dog licking me as we waited for the ambulance at the police station.
- The young motorbike rider crying in the police station as we waited. I hope he knows I was okay.
- When I was released from the hospital, I spent some days at Sissy's house before returning to school and she put too much pepper in her scrambled eggs.
- My teacher gave me a Beamish eraser and Beamish pencil when I returned to school. It was a white eraser, so it worked really well.
- My friends told me I should be the witch in the game because I had scratches on my face.
Funny, the things remembered from a child's perspective.
Beamish is the Living Museum of the North. It depicts life from the late Victorian to Edwardian eras. Beamish has a town, with stores, homes, a bank and a dentist. There is a colliery village, a railway station, tramlines, a farm, a fairground, a coal mine, a school etc.
The old trams, buses and trucks are interesting.
We had kids, so the first order of business was, of course, a picnic at the fairgrounds.
A spot of cricket
Then, we headed into town to check out the old stores and the dreaded dentist's office.
Mary was super interested to learn that wealthy fathers would pay to have their daughter's teeth removed and replaced with false teeth, making them more attractive and so more likely to marry well. Mary is now pleased to have braces. Hattie didn't do so well after hearing about primitive dental care and seeing the medieval looking dental tools. She was as pale as ivory and needed some time to recover outside.
My favorite part, when I was a kid, was touring the houses and seeing the old children's toys and living areas. The homes look so cozy and there isn't an Xbox or television in sight. They remind me of old farm houses.
We visited the print shop and learned that the terms upper case and lower case originated from print shop letter stacks, where the "small" letters would be shelved in the lower cases and "big" letters were stored in the upper cases.
We also learned that to coin a phrase means to align your phrases tightly so they won't come undone during print.
We saw cinder toffee in the making.
This reminded me of the time I tried to get a summer job at Carr's biscuits before heading off to university. I was denied due to long fingernails and had to work at Southwaite Services instead.
Mary made a train driver's cap in the school and then we ventured outside to play this old game involving a metal hoop on a stick. The aim of the game is to keep your hoop rolling for as long as possible. This was a lot harder than it looks, but Mike did pretty well.
After a stop at the colliers village for a cuppa and some ice-cream, we headed to the mines where we learned about mining lamps and got muddy and wet.
It was getting late (really, why do they close at 5pm??), so we didn't have much time to spend at the farm.
The rounds hanging from the pulley rack are breads made from flour, water and salt, and maybe a little pig fat.
The girls can't believe this horse would step in it's own pooh!
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