Athletics Indoor Grand Prix, Glasgow

Inside the indoor athletic stadium

It was my first visit to the Emirates Indoor Athletic stadium in Glasgow for the Muller Indoor Athletic Grand Prix. A fine way of keeping warm on another cold Sunday in February. We parked at Bridgeton Cross and walked the mile or so along the empty highway through the starkly depressing new offices and housing towards Dalmarnock. The Emirates stadium has grand ambition but even on a rare in use day seemed a bit desolate, it is located opposite the increasingly untidy looking Celtic Park.

The stadium's 5000 seats were well filled and the offer of a free Muller Yoghurt on arrival provided a late lunch. Much as I enjoy athletics, I was staggered at the facilities provided to accommodate an indoor event. There was lots of empty unused spaces on a day when it was almost at capacity. The facility along with the adjacent velodrome cost £113m to build as part of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. It is only used spasmodically for indoor athletic events although the track and field event facilities are available for local athletes. The venue also hosts Basketball, Netball, Tennis and Badminton events.

There was a good participation by world-class athletes competing in the last Grand Prix of the European indoor season. Athletes from the USA, China and other countries were using the event to prepare for the world indoor championships to be held in Birmingham next week. It is a long time since I last watched an indoor athletics event and I was surprised at how emaciated most of the athletes looked. Only Greg Rutherford, the long jumper, looked heavily muscled and he was far from peak condition as he finished fourth in the long jump. We had seats close to where the athletes entered the track and we were able to observe the complexity of officiating for the different events, with judges, timekeepers, starters and officials not always working in tandem with each other. The ladies long jump was stopped one round early to allow a competitor to take part in the 60 metres. The staff responsible for resetting the pole vault bar had great difficulty performing the task and a large lady official guided the competitors about with brutal Glasgow commands.

The highlights were watching the women's pole vault at close quarters, seeing Kenya’s outstanding Beatrice Chepkoech, who moves like mercury, dominate the women's 1500 metres and Tom Bosworth break the world record for the 3000-metre walk. The men's 60m final was won by China's Su Bingtian with the evergreen Mike Rogers second and the 41-year-old Kim Collins making the final.

The TV coverage by the BBC interfered with the events so that interviews could be conducted with British winners and attempts made to clap and glorify British athletes. This was hardly justified with the exception of Tom Bosworth and Dinah Asher-Smith in the women's 60 metres but as with the recent winter Olympics, our press and media are obsessively and obsequiously patriotic. This was to my mind an insult to the many exceptional athletes from other countries. As the fine generation of UK athletes funded by an exceptional explosion in sports facilities and coaching from the turn of the Millenium begins to dry up and as government austerity closes many facilities, we will soon be back to celebrating the plucky British loser.

Pole vault competition

Men's 1500m final

Get ready for Men's 60m final

Men's 60m final

Katerina Stefanidi, Olympic and World pole vault champion, 

Celtic Park across the road from the Emirates

Wensleydale Weekend

Askrigg Common

Arrival view

Wensleydale is etched into the family psyche. It was a stop on our first family holiday with our 7-month-old daughter in a wet January. Three years later we spent a week during a cold February visiting cheese factories, and local pubs, watching racehorses gallop whilst enjoying the innocent devotion of two inquisitive young girls with a third child imminent. We returned a few years later for a long weekend with friends and walked the children 'uphill and down dale' in November rains. Aileen and I had enjoyed a memorable weekend at Buttertubs Pass when Le Tour de France visited Yorkshire in 2014. So when another February long weekend was suggested it seemed an appropriate season to rekindle our memories. Gregor had found a large well well-equipped house near Hawes and 19 family members managed to turn out. We could wallow in the cold winds and rain and visit friendly pubs that make Wensleydale such a wild yet lightsome place.

The hills were plastered with snow as we headed down the sinuous B6259 from Kirby Stephen to Hawes alongside the Settle to Carlisle railway line. The Ure valley was swept by a raw northwesterly wind as the fading afternoon sun skipped from behind the clouds like a searchlight picking out the snow-capped limestone scarps. The fields were filled with sheep, and the roads were calmed by wide milk tankers heading for the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes. The Yorkshire Dales National Park retains a strong agricultural identity without being dominated by the intrusive tourism embellishments in the Lakes and other more visited national parks. We stayed in Hilltop, a much-extended farmhouse that bore the personality of the Halifax building magnate and football aficionado who owned and had modernised the property with a builder's love of salvage and a blind eye to the resulting ambiguity.

The Saturday morning run after a raucous night was more of a trial than a trail and I struggled to keep up with the thirty-somethings. There were numerous stiles to negotiate alongside the river Ure, then bogs and steep grassy hills that brought back memories of school cross-country races except I was now slogging through the muddy ground rather than skipping over it. Punishment over, we spent a few hours in the Wensleydale Creamery in Hawes. The community-run enterprise had reopened the creamery after Dairycrest had closed it in an act of gross corporate negligence to the local economy. It now employs 200 people when including delivery vehicles and visitor attractions. After sampling 20 or so cheeses, I turned down the lunch menu, every dish was laced with cheese.

A walk around the town with the rain-sodden streets still bustling with the weekenders who seem to own a lot of property in the dale. This is reflected in the antique shops, outdoor shops and pubs serving Yorkshire-sized lunches. The Gayle beck gushed through the town with a force that would scare lesser mortals than the hardy folk of Hawes. We decided to visit the nearby Hardraw Force below Buttertubs pass to complete outdoor activities for the day. It was time to return to the house of fun to light the wood-burning stove, watch rugby and football, play pool, table games and attack the plentiful supplies of alcoholic beverages that had been brought along.

Sunday brought another day of heavy weather but suitably attired the highlight was a Sunday walk to the nearby village of Bainbridge. A traditional Yorkshire pub provided a good range of beers, and a warm room and fortified us for the hike back into the wind and a sleet storm. Wensleydale had once again provided weather that made Scotland seem almost tropical. Some families with children had to return home late in the day but half of the party remained for a final night. It was easier to get on the pool table and there was enough cheese and wine left for a Tupperware party, whatever that is. We returned home the following day overawed by the solitude of the raw Wensleydale landscapes, they were sublime.

Askrigg Common

With Wallace and Gromit at Wensleydale Creamery

Remember when recycling was just done without fuss or fake sustainability

Gayle Beck in the centre of Hawes 

Hardraw Force

Hilltop

Passing weather

West towards Hawes and Widdale Fell

River Ure and Addlebrough

Looking towards Dodd Fell

Sleet

Recycling was better in the fifties

Replaced by wheelie bins, plastic bags, charity shops, and beach detritus

Play equipment for Hide and Seek and Drumming

The ubiquitous brown paper bag

6d back on these

A state-run service that worked

Bin Collection day

Electric powered and reliable in the 1950's

As the crescendo of instructions to recycle, stop buying plastic bags, buy a reusable coffee mug, drive less, walk more steps and all the other environmentally sound advice hits us from the media and ethical zealots, I can't help but become a little cynical. Most of these things I have tried to observe since growing up in the 1950's when lifestyle was far more sustainable than today. It has not been helped by the explosion of packaging, throw away products, two for one deals, the demise of brown paper bags, unnecessary use of the car for short trips, and the emergence of supermarkets and retail parks with massive car parks and their vast buying power that has led to the explosion of imported foodstuffs.

As a young child, I lived with my parents and grandparents in a two bedroomed terraced house. Things worked pretty well and waste was minimised by good local services.

• Milk came in an electric milk cart, the bottles were recycled, 
• Lemonade bottles had a 3d deposit and were returned to the local shop to be refilled at the nearby factory owned by the family of a girl in my class. 
• Wet fish arrived from Fleetwood mid-morning, it was wrapped in paper as were fish n' chips from the chip shop at the top of the street. 
• Fruit and vegetables came from the local market and was mainly sourced from the market gardens whilst milk, cheese and butter came from local dairy farms. The market was a ten-minute bus ride away on a service that ran every five minutes. 
• The bin collection was once a week and primarily consisted of ash from the fire and the odd tin. 
• There were a regular horse-drawn rag and bone collections for any old iron. 
• All our transport was by bus or a tandem. 
• Heating was by an open fire burning coal or coke, my father worked at the local gas works and he converted the fires to burn coke, a smokeless fuel that gave out more heat.
• Hot water was by an ascot geyser and cooker by gas from the local town gasworks. 
• The post arrived at 7:15am before grandad went to work, there were two deliveries a day including bank holidays.
• A local evening paper was delivered at 5:00pm just before grandad arrived home from the mill. It had the cricket scores from the afternoon session up to the 4:15pm tea break. 
• Bread was baked or bought from the local bakery at the top of the street. 
• All meals were cooked and all cakes or puddings were homemade
• Shopping was brought home in a straw basket that had a lifespan of several years.
• Clothes were darned, shoes resoled and appliances repaired.
• Holidays were either day trips by bus to Morecambe or a few days in Scarborough with Yorkshire relatives 
• There was only one TV in a street of 20 houses, it was ours but we had won it in a competition. At the coronation, cup final and state funerals, most of the street would squeeze into the parlour to watch.

The contrast could not be greater today.

• Milk is bought in supermarkets in large plastic containers
• Lemonade or fizzy drinks come in cans or plastic bottles, not that I ever buy them or bottled water.
• Fish comes from the frozen food section of supermarkets or occasionally from the mobile wet fish van
• Fruit and vegetables are bought at the supermarket a half hour drive away, often wrapped in plastic containers or bags
• We have 4 large wheelie bins, all three times as large as the original bin and two go out every week. One for plastics, one for paper, one for garden waste, one for general waste and there is a box for glass. I calculate that the volume of the receptacles is a seven-fold increase on what happened before the 1980's.
• Any old iron or broken electrical goods have to be taken to a recycling depot 10 miles away. There is no provision for those without transport.
• The bus service runs four times a day and we run two cars. The bike is for leisure activities.
• Heating and hot water are provided by oil and electricity although solar panels do provide most electrical needs in the summer months. A wood burning stove is used infrequently because it is so much more time consuming than switching on heating appliances.
• The post seldom arrives before 11am, there is only one post a day and sometimes none. Parcels arrive by a vast array of delivery vans that ply the area.
• There is no local evening paper and even the twice-weekly local newspaper is syndicated and bereft of much local news.
• Bread is usually bought at a supermarket although there is some homemade bread
• We eat out once or twice  a week and eat a ready prepared meal once a week
• Shopping is brought home by car in reusable bags, although they are not for life, no matter what the supermarkets claim.
• Clothes are cleared out annually, shoes are thrown out before worn out and broken appliances are dumped.
• Holidays are abroad at least once a year involving flights and currency exchange.
• We have two TVs, two computers as well as an iPad to watch TV. 

So claims by the government of improved sustainability are just another facet of fake news.

Hot water for the house from an Ascot heater in the kitchen

Emergency electric fire

Ribble Bus for holidays to Morecambe

Newspaper delivery van