Yet more high drama in Scarborough

The Scarborough Evening News just keeps these dramatic stories coming...

Flat oven fire

By Susan Stephenson

FIRE crews were called to an oven fire at a flat in Westborough during the early hours of yesterday.
The incident happened at 2.30am. There was no damage to the property.

Lazy days

A fairly lazy last few days, with just a few strolls into town, along The Esplanade and on the beach.

After a gap of a year, we've decided to hold our fourth charity music event at the Sunnyside Inn, Northampton, next year. (Read all about it on the website) so quite a few hours have been spent on the computer.

There have been a few maintenance jobs to sort out around the flats, and we're now enjoying our penultimate free weekend before local football starts again.

I've had a good gripe at Nevisport. We ordered a pair of boots for me, at a 50% discount from another supplier, and a pair for Maureen, at only 35% discount, from Nevisport, as the other supplier doesn't stock the women's range.

My boots arrived three days later, but after a further week, we're still waiting for Maureen's. Nevisport have made the pathetic excuse that they've been busy because they have a sale in progress.

Round trip (several times)

Today's walk was planned to fill in the next segment north in our gradual progress along the coastal cliffs.

We left the car in Ravenscar and started walking south towards our last finish point, a mile or so north of Hayburn Wyke.

This provides very easy level walking alongside amazing seascapes, until we turned inland along the same path that took us (eventually) to the old railway line last week.

Today, however, we were to turn right along the access road to holiday cottages at White Hall Farm, continue for a couple of hundred yards, then cut a corner to the railway line.

All went well for a while, then both waymarking and a clear path line ran out.

"Look, we're opposite that church on the map - all we have to do is follow the field boundary round the bend and we're there," I said.

And that's how it worked out for a few minutes, until we ran into some impenetrable woodland bordering a ravine that left us frustratingly short of the old line by about 100 yards.

We doubled back along the field boundary, searching for a way through, then realised that we had wandered into a game bird area, and pheasants started taking flight all around us.

We splashed and trudged up and down fields and gullies until we admitted defeat and made our way back the way we had come, past White Hall Farm.

A muddy lane offered a short cut to the railway line, but this quickly deteriorated into a very wet squelch down to a footbridge over the stream leading to Hayburn Wyke, then an even stickier, steeper climb up.

But there was the old railway line at last, offering a brisk 2.5-mile walk back to Ravenscar. In all, we covered eight miles.

Back home, it was frustrating to look at the satellite image of the area on Google and see how close we had been to an easy escape on several occasions.

I volunteered for boot cleaning, which was accomplished with a hose, a washing-up bowl and a toothbrush in the car park at our flats.

Tarred with the same rush

Can it really be true that Nottinghamshire County Council workmen who have just resurfaced Queen Street, Balderton, decided to spread the tar neatly around weeds that had grown in a turning head, rather than shovelling up the sediment that had accumulated there through poor drainage?

When challenged, they reportedly said: "We just do what we're told."

I've just had a phone call that assures me it is so.

Grump, grump, grump

Lots of grumps today.

The Times, in its main story, is lamenting the fact that Britain's "Olympic heroes" will be scrambling for handouts - oh, sorry, "funding" is the current polite expression for scrounging.

Does the signal a switch from lamenting the soaring cost of the London Olympics?

If people want to play sport, good luck to them. I don't understand
why we should be pouring money into their pointless hobbies, while people are dying of cancer because the NHS says the drugs that will save them are too expensive, and others are dying of kidney failure because we don't have enough dialysis machines.

Should old folk who can't afford to heat their homes properly have to scrimp to pay their taxes, in the hope that it will help some guy from Willesden to cycle round a track faster than another guy from Pyongyang?

What's next? Well I see that David Beckham's
publicity people are managing to place him in some impressive locations. Becks to lead Olympic handover, Becks coaches toddlers, etc.

We're probably being softened up for the news of his knighthood.

What sort of message does that send to modern youngsters? How can we make a role model of a tattooed buffoon? Should we really telling young people that it's praiseworthy for them to deform themselves?

Damp day

We dodged the showers today, taking a stroll for 90 minutes or so on the beach, where a surprising number of people were defying the weather.

Small tragedy in Scarborough - not many dead

Here's my favourite story this week, from the Scarborough Evening News

Garden shed blaze drama in Cromwell Terrace

FIRE crews were called out to a garden shed blaze.

No-one was injured in the incident which took place in Cromwell Terrace at around 9.40pm on Friday.

It's the way they write them.