Mining Museums and Bed Bugs

This Saturday Chris and I headed off even further north to Penrith, to spend a couple of days with Chris' parents and younger brother who were staying up in Keswick. We were met at the station by my brother and sister-in-law who kindly took us over to the holiday cottage and stayed to have dinner in one of the village pubs.

There were only two pubs - The Salvation and The Horse and Farrier - and they were 1 minute walk from each other (and one minute from the cottage, conveniently). On inspection of their advertised wares, it seemed that they served identical bar menus. Lasagne and burgers are pretty standard fare, but they had both chosen to champion Bean and Celery chilli on their veggie section. There didn't seem to be waiters scurrying across the main street, so we speculated about whether they shared a vast underground kitchen. The plot thickened two days later when the waiter who had served us on Saturday in The Salvation showed up behind the bar in the Horse and Farrier. Very odd. Perhaps not all that interesting in itself, but somehow it made me think that this was only part of a much bigger Cumbrian village conspiracy, which probably involves putting lost and forlorn fell-runners into pies.

The next day we went for a walk around one of the lakes, managing to get more than a little confused about which direction to go in. It was sunny. It was beautiful. It was exasperating not having my swimming things!

On Monday we went to Castlerigg Stone Circle and watched as tourists clambered all over the ancient stones. The setting was stunning, as the picture I found below shows.

http://townhousegallery.co.uk/shop/, Copyright © 2009 Town House Galley
Clearing Storm, Castlerigg Stone Circle, Mike Shepherd

However, it was just depressing to see children kicking at the carefully placed rocks. The sign said that getting them into their current formation would have taken as much planning and work as constructing a medieval cathedral. I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by that, but I did find it unsettling to see people being destructive in such a beautiful serene place.

So we headed on to a somewhat rickety labour of love, the Museum of Mining and Quarrying. I can't say that the digging of minerals out of the earth down a deep dark hole is a particularly appealing topic for me, but the museum had been put together with such care and attention to detail it was fascinating to look at, even just to appreciate it as a collection of information.

Outside the main building were what looked like over a hundred old machines - diggers, steam engines, cranes. The man at the shop explained that they were restoration projects, but I thought that bringing all those rusty metal contraptions back to life would take a century or more. Perhaps it would make a good site for another Transformers movie? Or maybe Scrapheap Challenge would be more feasible?

I forgot to take many pictures of the landscape but I did get this single moody shot from the window of the train on the way back to Manchester. The hills make me want to pull on my walking boots and get climbing. Don't mark me down as some breed of fresh air adventure though. Unfortunately the clouds make me want to take shelter in a pub with a pint. And if I'm unlucky, perhaps I might look like a straggler and end up in a Salvation pie.

Once we got back home I took this picture. It's a shot from Chris' bedroom window, so it's the view we wake up to every morning, and this photo sums up what it's like at the moment. If there's not a shower on the way, there's one just been!

The streets around here are crammed full of these red terraced houses, with alleys running in between the backyards. I'll take some pictures next week to show you the neighbourhood.

The last adventure of the past few days began this morning. Chris had gone to work and I was in the shower when I noticed a dark mark on my leg. I reached down to investigate and realised that something was stuck to my skin. Not just anything, though. A creature! I was horrified. I pulled it straight off and attempted it squash in between some toilet roll. Having lived with cats most of my life, I have on occasion had to contend with cat fleas. They are speedy little blighters, so to avoid further bites and possible infestation the only course of action is to grab them and pinch them as soon as they are spotted.

This bug was refusing to be squished. It wasn't jumping anywhere though, so it wasn't a flea. I decided to deposit this new breed of biter into a pint glass and see if I could identify it. The persistant beast started to climb up the pint glass, so I decided to fill it with water to hinder its escape, and also preserve it so that Chris could help me identify it when he got home. It didn't seem to mind the moisture though. It spent hours floating on the water surface, looking like it was having a jolly afternoon doing the backstroke.

I looked up biting creatures on wikipedia and decided that I'd been nibbled by a bedbug. The monster looked a lot like the pictures, and it was possible I'd picked it up in the Cumbrian cottage bed. The possibility of a bedbug infestation was not a pleasant prospect though. I set about washing all bed linen, pyjamas and towels on a boil wash. No nasty eggs were going to survive on my watch.

In the afternoon Chris came home and had a look at our uninvited guest, who was still enjoying the swimming facilities. He took one look and decided that I was wrong. It wasn't a bedbug at all! It was a tick, that must have climbed aboard when I was in the long grasses of the Lake District and had been clinging on ever since. Yuck! I remember when my cat would get ticks and we'd have to coat their swollen blood-filled bodies in Vaseline until they suffocated and dropped off. And I'd just wrenched one off in the shower! It was, however, very little and doesn't seem to have got more than a little nibble at me, so I think I'll live. Probably.

A snapshot I found online of a beast that was pretty close in appearance to my creature ( from www.businesspundit.com/tick-warning/).
Not my finger! There are many more gross pictures if you care to google the subject, but I decided to spare you here.