CHARNEY HALL Merry Christmas 2024!

 

Well another year has almost passed and Christmas is, again, just around the corner….the years fly by and I’ve started the habit of celebrating each day….it’s difficult to decide at what number to begin the countdown as I have no idea whatsoever when the final curtain will fall….

I commenced the above digital painting just over a week ago. The subject lies not a stone’s throw from Grange-over-Sands, just over the hill in Cark-in-Cartmel, within the beautiful garden of the Cavendish family. I suffer from a serious bout of self doubt and procrastination (the enemy of time) whenever I embark on a project like this. Sometimes it is a miracle that I actually finish in accordance with the deadline of the original contract (that is, with the powers that be…). 

Whatever I learnt at Charney Hall between the years of 1954 and 1958 did not cure my indolence. I could see Maxwell Duncan wringing his hands in despair as he had convinced himself in one report that I occasionally lapsed into some kind of stupor, suspended in time, perhaps to dream?…. Concentration was not my strong point, especially if I either didn’t get the general drift of the teacher’s logic or the subject was excruciatingly boring - and there were many of those. 

I have a feeling that my performance at sports was equally interspersed with similar breaks with reality. Being a late developer had no readily discernable benefits. Being accused of slacking in lessons by MD and being heckled on the football field by Raymond Hirst did me no good at all.

The lime tree is at least 400 years old - some even add another 3 centuries. It has been voted as one of the top 50 Great British Trees as scheduled by the Tree Council. Trees of this magnificent stature have a completely different view of life than we mortals have. When this tree was planted it is highly likely that King Henry VIII was on the throne, to be followed in turn by Mary I and Elizabeth I. The average life span of the common people was a little over 30 years. At the start of the C16 the cost of living doubled and then redoubled in the following generation …and there was no NHS then….

Does that sound vaguely familiar?

This year the number of ‘hits’ on the blog has almost reached 30,000 since its inception. Monthly hits have steadily increased throughout the year from around 200@month to inexplicably almost 900 in December! Whilst this is far from our record of over 1600 of a year or two ago, I am bewildered why so many people from Singapore, Hong Kong and America (170, 67 and 37 respectively so far this month) wish to read about a minor private school in the UK, which closed in 1973, and was located up near the top of a steep hill in Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire - apologies, ‘Cumbria’ - soon to become ‘Westmoreland’!

Perhaps I am missing something…

A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL WHO COME ACROSS, READ AND CONTRIBUTE TO THIS BLOG !