Phew! I’m glad to still be alive today !

 Saturday 1483 – 25th February 2012

If you are following my other blog “Helen’s Photomania ” you will have read that I gave myself a bit of a scare with some flood water on Wednesday…  If you haven’t seen it take a look here

Yesterday I did something which scared me so much I thought I was going to have a heart attack that’s if I didn’t drive over the edge of a precipice first !!  So today I am very glad to be alive. So glad in fact that today I climbed to a waterfall along a rather precipitous path!! ( I didn’t know it was going to be precipitous! ) What is wrong with me !!  Do I have a death wish or something??

What makes us human beings do things that we know are going to scare us half to death? Is it because we don’t get enough of this adrenalin producing excitement in our everyday lives?  Or is it because we want to prove something to ourselves?

Or is it just because we are foolish and think we won’t be as scared of something now as we used to be? Or suddenly like something we’ve never liked before.  A sort of test for ourselves,  a bit like deciding to try garlic again and discovering you like it after years of “knowing” you didn’t. Okay not a great analogy but you know what I mean !

Anyway to go back to what I did yesterday.

I’m on holiday at the moment. In Cumbria in the North West of England, the area known as the lake district for obvious reasons… lots of lakes. Where you have lakes you often have mountains; in this case the Cumbrian Mountains.

For whatever reason…the challenge?? ..because I thought it was sure to be very scenic and photogenic?  I decided to go on the shortcut from Ravenglass on the coast to Ambleside via the Hardknott and Wrynose passes. The shortcut!! it would only be a shortcut if you were going by helicopter!

The Hardknott pass in particular  is known to have stretches of road ( lots of them as it turns out !!) where the gradient is 1: 3 that means it drops/rises 1 unit  in each 3… in layman’s turn that is TERRIFYING … and is the maximum slope allowed for roads,

The photo below looks innocuous enough doesn’t it but look carefully…that zig zig line is the road I drove down, the 1:3 road. So this is taken between passes! You can see a tiny car at the far right edge of the photo approaching the bottom 3rd of the pass. You can also see that the road looks very wet.. It was,  there was a lot of water running down the road in several places. What it doesn’t show is how windy it was!

Now I have driven on scary roads before, notably in Madeira and Tobago, but nothing like this. This was something else. I have never been so scared in all my life and once you’re on that pass there’s no going back. You can’t decide half way up you don’t like it and want to go back down and anyway going down is even worse than going up!

But… I did get some photographs… no not when I was driving !!  There is a flat-ish bit in between the 2 passes and I could think of no better way to regain my sanity or at least enough of it to tackle the 2^nd pass so I took some photographs and here are just 3 to give you an idea. ( some sheep ones will feature on Photomania I’m sure ! )

Fast moving clouds and shafts of light.

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Apparently the Hardknott Pass shares the title of the Steepest Road in England – you can read about it here and both Hardknott and Wrynose passes are 393 m (1,289 ft) at the top. YIKES !

Now you might well ask why I didn’t read that before I drove the road. Believe me I have asked myself that many, many times and if I had read it I doubt very much that I would have attempted it but then I wouldn’t have taken these photos or had this tale to tell !!

I think I could have coped with that !

This to my daughter – Katy if you come to the Lake District this is one thing you most definitely do NOT want to do !!

 I would NEVER do it again and I mean you couldn’t say, pay or do anything that would make me do it again….NO WAY !!  I think you are probably getting my drift

Anyway that was Friday. Today -Saturday -I spent a glorious couple of hours of solitude on the limestone pavement at Farleton ( photos to come on Photomania at a later date) , photographed some more sheep,(ditto)  climbed up a steep precarious path to the Aira Force waterfall… it was hardly worth it !! and visited Ullswater lake ( it was raining by then) .

On the drive back to my apartment I called in to Cartmel for a piece of their renowned Sticky Toffee Pudding with ice-cream; a delicious (and well deserved !)  end to the day. I chose blood orange tea to accompany it… Yum Yum !

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You can see more of my Cumbrian photos on Photomania from 21st Feb 2012 probably until I run out of them!!

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Glad to be alive Saturday Girl saying goodbye until next week. I’ll be keeping my feet firmly on flatter ground until then !

Simplistic thoughts on individual Credit Crunch responsibility.

Saturday 1489 – 14th January 2012

A more serious post this week.

So each and every one of us in the UK is carrying a huge amount of  foreign debt. The figures depend on which website you are looking at but is reckoned to be over £100,000 per person. What does seem to be agreed on is that in the UK it is staggeringly high. ( Similarly in other parts of the world as I’m sure my followers will testify)  If you want to read something about this try  here  or about the recession  here   (  just a random example of what’s been written )

The blame is all attached to Banks and Governments but is that entirely just?  Don’t think for a second I fully understand how the world got itself into this financial mess, as I find it bewildering and these things are always complex but here are some of my rather simplistic thoughts on what I see as part of the problem.

It seems to me that successive UK governments have promised people things which people are not prepared to pay for and have increased borrowing to fund these things as no politician wants to lose elections or popularity do they?

Everyone wants better services but no-one actually wants to pay for them. Costs in the NHS for example continue to rise as more and more expensive treatments become available and everyone wants great services but do people want to pay more tax in order to secure them? Likewise our services for older people have never been worse but do people want to pay more tax to make sure they are better?  It appears to me that they don’t.

So why don’t we want to pay ?

I think part of the reason is because we have become a throwaway greedy consumerist society in which individuals perceive they need more and more things; latest phone , latest camera !, bigger and bigger TV, faster and smarter car, holidays every year ( sometimes several times a year)  I have known couples who would not get married until they had bought a house, newly carpeted it throughout with all new furniture… We equate happiness with having things now !even though in our hearts we know that does not fulfil us.

Much of what is happening now with credit has a long history which has slowly brought us to this point.

During the war years and post war ( until the end of rationing and beyond) people in the UK largely did without and there was most certainly an ethos of you worked for what you had and you didn’t buy something until you saved up to get it.

When work, money and goods started to become available (arguably partly rebuilding and repairing post war damage) parents wanted their children to have what they hadn’t been able to have during those very lean years. There was a genuine feeling of happiness being able to give your children things as described by some old people I have spoken to about this ( I’m a Social Worker working with older people).

Unfortunately the side effect of this natural over compensating has been the gradual production of a more and more greedy must-have society; not helped by massively over inflated housing costs.

It makes me crazy that few individual members of society seem to want to accept any responsibility for the so-called “credit crunch” and arguably the invention of the credit card has been one of the worse inventions of all time. Do people think they are spending real money when they use one?  Unfortunately credit cards make it so easy to have things now and think ( or even not think) about the consequences afterwards.

It’s easy to blame the bank for offering credit cards to people so freely but tell me what business doesn’t do the same when it sees consumers eager for something it produces?  People have choices.

Here’s a few figures for you – taken from here - 

• “The UK average for personal debt is £7,388.”
• “The data looked at the average owed  on debt such as credit cards, loans,  store cards and overdrafts.”  so not mortgages
• “One in four people in Britain are using over 40  per cent of their wages each month just to pay off non-mortgage debt”
• “Total UK personal debt at the end of July 2011 stood at £1,451 billion.”
• “UK banks and building societies wrote off £8 billion of loans to individuals in the four  quarters to end Q2 2011. In Q2 2011 they wrote off £2.06 billion (£1.15 billion of that was credit card debt). This amounts to a write-off of £22.54million a day”
  

Makes staggering reading doesn’t it and there’s more on the website.  I don’t know if these figures are completely accurate but would you be surprised if they were? I wouldn’t .

Is it too late to go back to a society that saves for what it wants and is satisfied with less? 

It looks like society will have no choice.

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I have to end on a silly note to cheer myself up a bit and hopefully you all too.. I took the photograph below in Cambridge on Friday.. I had noticed where the busker was sitting and waited for the right moment when his mouth was in just the right position…had to be quick though!… I hope it makes you smile.

OPEN WIDE  ——

See you on Photomania during the week or on here next week.  Saturday Girl signing off. Hope you have a good week.