(With contributions from Annabel)

We’ve now lived in Cumbria for just over a year. Reading the blog, you will probably have realised that we have made the right decision, although we have left some very good friends behind, many of whom have visited us. Tom and Tara live nearby, and we have just spent Christmas with them along with Tara’s parents and her sister, who moved recently from Hertfordshire. Annabel is quite close to her brother in Yorkshire. The living room on the second storey ‘upside down’ house looks over the village green, providing us with a grandstand to watch village life pass by. Sam and Zoe, who now live in Mozambique, have visited us a couple of times and we have visited them.

We have made friends with quite a few of our neighbours in Temple Sowerby (pop: 528 in the last census), and this has been helped by the overall level of friendliness in the village. Annabel is more gregarious than me and consequently knows a lot more people. Unfortunately, I am not very good at remembering faces. There is a decent pub/hotel in the village, where we have the occasional meal and drink. We regularly attend the fortnightly coffee and cake morning and listen to the local gossip. Annabel mentions a monthly wine tasting and an occasional village meal provided by Janet, our excellent resident caterer. These have been very helpful in getting to know people. There is a church on the village green and a primary school nearby but no shops apart from the local garage where a real person dispenses the fuel. In addition, there is a doctors’ surgery and a pharmacy which have served our needs exceptionally well.

You are probably aware that I was diagnosed with Alzheimers’ last year. I recently had a memory test where I had a slightly higher score than the previous one! I do try to be open about the disease when meeting people. Annabel has been incredibly supportive and she has taken over a lot of jobs that I used to do and this has put her under increased pressure. For instance, she now deals with all our finances and I help out by paying our online bills. I am greatly indebted to her and very proud to have such a wonderful, loving wife – she deserves a medal! I undertake a variety of activities to keep my brain active. I usually spend an hour or so each day doing a variety of logic, number and word puzzles, some of them online. Monday night is often ‘games night’ for Tom and me, meeting alternately in each other’s houses, playing a variety of box games for enjoyment and to help keep me mentally alert. All very well but my brain hurts! I have actually won a couple of times, but I expect there might be an element of chance on my side! I find the Lumosity app very useful as it provides a variety of games and tasks which help to keep the brain active.

Following the plot of TV dramas can be challenging and dropping asleep in the evening does not help. I tend to go for ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Luther’ whereas Annabel favours ‘Call the Midwife’. My Kindle supplies me with (mostly) fiction books and the daily Guardian. I also read non-fiction books, especially history, but I do not retain as much as I used to. For example:

Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind”,

Peter Frankopan’s ambitious “The Silk Roads, A New History of the World” and

Eric Hobsbawn’s tetralogy (I confess that I had to search for this word) “The Age of Revolution”, “The Age of Capital”, “The Age of Empire” and, finally, “The Age of Extremes”.

I do tend to wake up early in the morning and often head to my computer to edit the huge number of photos in my collection. I am currently in the process of scanning some of Annabel’s brother’s transparencies (slides) of her 21^st birthday party and an old photo album of my father (born in 1926 and in a care home). On the other hand, I have to be very careful about ordering things online as I can get confused and order the wrong products or the wrong quantities.

My photography is proving to make us better known. I have provided a variety of pictures for the village website and for the Jubilee celebrations. We are shortly giving a talk to the WI on our adventures in the Antarctic. I am also walking with, and providing a few photos for, the Penrith Ramblers. Having led a walking group of ex-colleagues from MMU, I have been asked to lead walks locally but my Alzheimer’s rules that out as I now find difficulty in reading maps and finding the route. We have already provided a photography show for the school in Crosby Ravensworth where our grandchildren attend school. A brilliant school with excellent staff.

The Eden Valley is between the Pennines and the Lake District National Park. We walk frequently from our ‘upside down’ house, gaining access to views of the Pennines to the east and to a very pleasant walk through the grounds of the National Trust’s Acorn Bank, past the flour mill (working in the summer months) and beyond along Crowdundle Beck, under the sandstone west coast mainline railway viaduct towards Newbiggin and beyond. There are other walks along the Eden river, where we occasionally see some wildlife – including deer – although we have yet to spot the otters which are allegedly in the area. We frequently walk down to, or drive past, the Ousenstand Bridge a.k.a. ‘The Owl Bridge’, where a tawny owl is resident. He often sits on the edge of a hole in a tree trunk, basking in the sun, watching the world go by and looking inscrutable.

The Pennine Way is just a few miles away as it meanders its way along the moorland hills. There are short walks and day walks, one of my favourites being to the spectacular High Cup Nick. Cross Fell,  the highest Pennine hill (893m), dominates the skyline but is denied the nomenclature of ‘mountain’ at three thousand feet. (N.B. write to my MP to complain about the balmy use of the ancient Briton distance and weight systems – inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs etc. and ounces, pounds, stones and hundredweights. How many pounds there are in a hundredweight? One hundred you might think. Well, you’d be wrong – there are 112 – obvious!). Above the ridge are often some interesting looking clouds and the Helm Wind, the only named wind in the country. There is often snow on the tops in winter.

Walking from the house is such a pleasure, especially in the recent bright, cold weather. As we turn into fields behind us, the snow-capped Pennines appear, rising from the frosted trees. A stunning sight.

Snow over the Pennines (viewed from Temple Sowerby

Wainwright’s ‘A Pennine Journey’ took me by surprise when I first came across it. It is a circumnavigation of a local section of the Pennines and is destined to become a new National Trail. I imagine that novice navigators on the Pennine Way could become bewildered where the two routes cross each other in Dufton. Another way for long distance walkers to lose their sense of reality is when they pass the ‘Hanging Walls of Mark Anthony’ – I kid you not.

I was somewhat surprised to learn just how close to us are the River Tees, Teesdale and the River South Tyne, all less than twenty miles away to the east of the Pennines. And Gretna Green, on the Scottish side of the border, is less than 40 miles away.

Our main shopping towns are Appleby-in-Westmorland and Penrith. Appleby is our favourite as it is small and it didn’t take us long to become recognised by the local shopkeepers especially in Pigneys, the hardware store. One of our favourite circular walks is along the River Eden in Appleby where we can often see red squirrels. Penrith is bigger but seemingly somewhat soulless. But it does have the unique Brunswick Yard – my favourite shop ever, except photography shops, perhaps. We occasionally visit Carlisle, often for hospital appointments, one of our major pastimes nowadays.

We enjoy visiting Lowther Castle and walking through Askham onto the local fell with views down to Ullswater. I was intrigued to see direction signs for Greystoke, the literary birthplace of Tarzan before he went ‘native’ in Africa. Longhorn cattle can be spotted here; they tend to be inquisitive and can appear quite threatening, especially when you fairly close to those horns! I occasionally walk with Tom, when he has a few spare hours from working remotely for an IT business in Southampton, sometimes with April and Cooper.

Well, thank you for reading my blog and for providing feedback, which I really do appreciate. I look forward to updating it in the new year.