Tag: jesus

You can lead a horse to water

A drawing of Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey from Vanity Fair magazine in 1893. Sir Ralph of Thirkleby Hall, paid for a roadside water trough in the village (Photo: Leslie Ward, public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

A few weeks ago I wrote about how my best friend and I celebrate the longevity of our relationship by having an annual weekend away together.

 

Gurli Svith from Denmark wrote: “Your column on friendship touched me very much because I have a very good friend I have known since I was 14 and she was 12. She was going to start at my school and came to my home to ask if we could cycle together. That was the beginning and now being 76 and 74 we are still close friends. We do not meet very often but when we do it is as if we saw each other just yesterday. We can talk about everything, and we have helped each other through hard times. For many, many years we have given each other birthday presents, but sometimes we have not seen each other for two or three years so it is like Christmas when we are sitting there drinking tea, eating cakes and unwrapping our presents.”

 

Is it true that many people are closer to their best friends than their own family? The saying goes, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, so if you could opt out of spending Christmas and Easter with relatives, would you? (I acknowledge that I might be opening a can of worms with that question!)

 

Let’s get back on safer ground with troughs. Regular reader Clare Powell says: “We do have a couple of stone troughs we bought in a farm sale in Rosedale in the 1980s (Paid more than we should have because my husband kept bidding against himself – much to the locals’ amusement!). We transported them in the back of a Volvo. No idea how old they are, so it was interesting to read your article. Like you, I never really thought about who made them, and how. And you’re right, your dad would have had the answer at his fingertips.”

 

He sure did, and I now have the space to tell you what I discovered inside his old file. There were a few cuttings, columns, and notes, one of which was in Dad’s handwriting dated 15th May 1993. He had written it during a phone call from a chap called Dick Thompson who lived in our village and whose family had made locally quarried stone troughs for years.

 

“Each trough was excavated with a pickaxe and drawn down to the road on a sledge,” he’d scribbled. “It took seven or eight days to make one trough – all sizes done. Circular pig troughs also made so pigs could eat together.” He added that the troughs were made on spec, bought mainly by farmers, although parish councils paid for communal troughs situated in villages.

 

Among other things, the file also contained a newspaper cutting from March 1973 written by the esteemed founder of the original Countryman’s Diary column, Major Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough.

 

“The wayside water troughs were a real blessing both to parched travellers and to horses,” he wrote, “Especially in the heat of the summer when roads sent up a cloud of dust. Many of the troughs were erected by landowners who knew their value to man and beast. Some of them have inscriptions which tell us of their donor and his consideration for horseflesh.”

 

He mentions one between Burnsall and Appletreewick in the Dales which has a Latin verse ‘De torrential in via bibet propteren exaltabit caput’ which translated means ‘He will drink at the spring on the way, and thereafter lift his head with joy’, which is the last line of Psalm 110 in the Old Testament. The Major (and my dad when he wrote about it 20 years later) could not shed any light on who had placed the trough there. Can any of our Dales contingent add any more detail about this particular trough?

 

Dad mentions another placed at Thirkleby near Thirsk, paid for by Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey (1848-1916), 3rd Baronet of Thirkleby Hall, who was an accomplished engineer, historian and artist. Its inscription, with a bit of poetic license where the rhyme is concerned, reads: ‘Weary traveller bless Sir Ralph, who set for thee this welcome trough.’

 

I have a feeling we have a lot more to come on these once indispensable features of our countryside highways and byways.

 

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 2nd and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 30th April 2025

Are you perverse or perverted?

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I thought I knew the difference between the words ‘perverse’ and ‘perverted’ until I consulted my 2004 Oxford English Dictionary

Brace yourself. I’m about to have a rant (before I do, as a highly trained journalist and consummate professional, rest assured that I do not rant unless I am 100% certain I have my facts right).

Is it just we writers who get upset when people get words wrong, or is it an affliction felt by regular mortals too? There are certain words that, when used in a misplaced context or misspoken, make me want to scream.

It is even more annoying when the mistakes are uttered by people who should know better. On car journeys, I entertain myself by listening to audiobooks and recently had chosen a new one about serial killers (as you do). The author, a ‘leading TV psychological expert’, narrated it herself and kept referring to the evil perpetrators as ‘perverse’, describing in unnecessary and gratuitous detail their ‘perverse’ habits.

Did she mean that they behaved in a way that was opposite to the norm for your regular serial killer? Was she going to say that instead of killing their quarry, they treated them to a fancy dinner and a family movie before setting them free? Because that would certainly be perverse for a serial killer.

Of course she didn’t. The word she should have used was ‘perverted’.

One of the reasons this particularly annoyed me was because it was being read from a published book, that literary thing with pages and sentences and such like, and which presumably has had a number of wordy professionals like editors and proofreaders look over the manuscript lots of times; the kinds of people who earn a living from the written and spoken word. And yet, she used it on so many occasions that by the end of the journey, every time she read out ‘perverse’ I was shouting ‘YOU MEAN PERVERTED!’ very loudly at my car’s audio system. Thankfully, it was a cold day and I had my windows shut, otherwise the ears of innocent pedestrians could have been harmed.

To understand the difference between the two words, this scenario might help. Imagine your Tory-sympathising granny unexpectedly decides to vote Labour. She is not offended when you accuse her of being perverse. She voted Labour, which you would never have expected her to do in a million years, and therefore her action is totally perverse.

If you then ask your granny why she voted perversely, and she replies it is because of a scandal involving a Tory MP, a nappy and some whipped cream, then her real reason for voting that way is because she thinks the Tory MP is a pervert who has done something perverted with a nappy and some whipped cream.

Perverse is when something happens that is the opposite to expectations, while perverted is something that is sexually depraved.

Isn’t it?

Approaching the end of this column, I remembered the first thing that I was taught at journalism school – to never assume anything and always check your facts. Therefore, being the aforementioned highly trained journalist and consummate professional, I decided I’d better do just that, even though I knew that I was 100% correct. I turned to my most trusted resource, my 2004 version of the Oxford English Dictionary which offered two definitions of the word ‘perverse’. The first read as follows: ‘Showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave unacceptably. > sexually perverted.’

Oh.

Have you lived for years with the certainly of knowing something to be 100% correct, only to be proven wrong beyond all doubt years later by a source you absolutely trust? And, because you can’t bring yourself to believe it, you try to convince yourself you are still right by consulting other trusted sources, only to be proven wrong time and again? And then do you slowly begin to understand what it must be like to be an advisor to Donald Trump?

And finally, do you realise, after writing almost a full column, that all you can do is admit that you were wrong and that your rant is completely unjustified? I suppose I owe an apology to the unnamed famous TV psychologist and to her audiobook’s editors then, although I shall not be listening to any more of it.

But here’s a thing. Does it mean I have just written a column that has ended up being totally perverse?

I’d love to hear from you about your stories, memories, opinions and ideas for columns. Use the ‘Contact’ button on the top right of this page to get in touch.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 25th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 23rd Oct 2024