What is a Dale?

Ping and I recently returned from a trip to Derbyshire where we did lots of walking and took a cable car up to the Heights of Abraham. It was kind of a nostalgic trip as it was a place my parents took me to just before puberty. There was a tower on top of the HoA {why do I need to go up a tiny tower when I am on a cliff already, oh, I see – it says here on this plaque that the tower was contrived to cut unemployment figures in the late 1800s.} There was also a cavern {no cybermen} introduced by a short film that was still being shown since I was 12. Ping* and I love crap museums. We’re going to have a contest to find the crappest museum, especially when we have kids. “Hey kids, it’s the Colchester broomhandle museum”, “Hey kids, it’s the Putney stapler experience”, “Hey kids it’s the Camberly potato peeler archive…” and so on.

Worth mention is the town of Bakewell. There used to be a multiple choice questionnaire about Bakewell, ‘Why have you come to visit Bakewell?’

1) eat the pudding

2) Other (please state)

But now there is a tudor fireplace competing for attention. The town is in denial I’m afraid. They can’t admit they have a crippling one-way system merely because they have a secret pudding recipe. And {I hope you’re reading Mr Zizek, because this would make a good example of something Lacanian} nobody seems to know what it is! The legend used to be that there is a secret Bakewell Pudding recipe {but when you get there you’ll find two shops that claim to have it}. Now the plot has thickened. Everyone seems to be selling them, even the Chippy. We only found one ‘official’ eatery of the two legendary ones, nobody could give us directions. Imagine being in Bakewell, looking for the second pudding shop and nobody can tell you where it is. They look at you as if to say “a pudding, you say. You are looking for a pudding. Let me think. Hmm” The shops aren’t marked on any tourist maps {unlike the fireplace}, and the tourism centre; I asked them, and the woman replied “The pudding shop. Hmm. Let me think…let me get my bearings {as if she hasn’t told 300 people already today} I think if you go out of here to the left…” and it wasn’t there. One blatant ‘official’ pudding shop, dozens of Tarts to mop up the rest of the tourists, and a missing Ye Olde Pudding Shoppe. And it tasted too eggy to boot.

If we hadn’t had a marvellous time next to the Derwent Dam where the water was too blue and the hills too green and got intimidated by the amount of water stored up above our heads… Thank God for cable cars. They are wonderful and just pointless enough.