If I could talk to the animals, I'd say "Shush"

I've been out camping for a couple of nights this weekend at Glaisdale, North Yorkshire. My tent is the blue one, on the right.



It has been very very hot all weekend, and completely dry too. This is good for camping but there seemed to be inordinate amounts of midges and flies about, especially as night falls. It made sitting out at that time fairly unpleasant unless you covered exposed parts with some kind of cloth. Sitting inside in a pub on the second night, however, eliminated this problem entirely. Nice pub actually. Decent food at lunchtime and then in the evening they seemed happy to let us stay as long as we liked after closing time to finish up our drinks.

Shortly after I got home this evening there was a massive thunderstorm with some really loud thunder. I'm glad the weather held out this long. Camping in the rain is never much fun.

I haven't been camping for maybe ten years or so. I think the last time was in Spain after my A-levels. Four of us went out for a month and had planned to do half camping and half staying in a friend's villa. It ended up being more like just 2 nights camping due to a combination of laziness and us missing the swimming pool back at the house. Even if it was full of cockroaches (the house, not the pool. Imagine swimming in cockroaches!).

Thankfully, my tent seemed to have suffered no significant deterioration apart from feeling more cramped than I remember. This might be sign of me being older, or might just reflect that I'm not used to sharing it with other people.

Glaisdale is a funny village in several respects. The first thing that struck me was that along the side of the roads, and outside many of the houses (and in some cases up telegraph poles) are scarecrows. Loads of them. They are dressed in all sorts of costumes and some of the more memorable ones were, in no particular order:

1. Dorothy and her three companions from The Wizard of Oz (Dorothy looked very scary)
2. Little Miss Muffet and her Spider
3. A steeplejack up a pole
4. Various gardeners and tool users
5. And this one. Obviously it's my favourite



Not a great photo, but we were driving past in a car at the time of taking. The reason for these scarecrows appears to be related to their Open Gardens weekend when many of the villagers allow the world and his wife to wonder around their expansive, well maintained and very attractive gardens. The scarecrow thing appears to be a concurrent thing. It all appears to be quite good natured but due to the level of effort that had obviously gone into many of the creations, there must be a lot of local rivalry. Like when you have old women with cake-baking compeitions.

Anyway, it's nice to be back home again with all amenities and a proper bed.

And blimey, sheep in fields make a hell of a lot of noise at night. They're up loudly baaaaing until almost dawn. And then the bloody birds start!