Days in the Dales: The Annual Kettlewell Duck Race

June 23, 2024 by Zoe Dumelow in Food, Travel, Walking, Weekends, Yorkshire

Sometimes, in life, you encounter moments which make you realise how much you’ve changed. For me, such a realization comes on May bank holiday Monday, standing outside my house and poring over an OS map with a friend as we discuss a road trip route.

‘The A59 is closed near Skipton,’ he says ‘so we’ll take a detour here and go up this road to get to the village.’

I peer more closely at the almost invisible line he’s tracing on the map, a minute thread of white amongst the green.

‘Is that a B-road?’ I ask, ‘that looks miniscule.’ He just grins. With too much glee, I think.

‘It’s a narrow road, but it’ll be fine,’ he says, ‘it’s such a nice drive.’

January in Pictures.

February 03, 2020 by Zoe Dumelow

I know everyone, everywhere has said it, but January has been a very long month. Although it hasn’t been cold here in York, it’s been unendingly dark and grey - a month of waking up in darkness, of making stew and baked potatoes (and worrying that it’s not really cold enough for stew) of curling up on the sofa under a blanket with a book and of being at home mostly, and trying to be slow and mindful.

Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Swimming Pool.

January 20, 2020 by Zoe Dumelow

I don’t remember my first swimming lesson, but it has attained almost monumental status in our family folklore. According to legend, whilst the other three year-olds in my class got into the water with no fuss , I refused to follow them and remained on the side of the learner pool, the picture of anguish and fear in Pink Panther armbands. In the end, my mum was obliged to borrow a swimming costume from another mother and accompany me into the water for the rest of the lesson (sorry, Mum!) From this ignoble beginning however, I must have decided I quite liked swimming, because going to the pool became a twice-weekly fixture in my life for the next twenty years.

Rain, Cakes and Captain America: A Weekend in Whitby

December 16, 2019 by Zoe Dumelow in Travel, Weekends, Yorkshire

By the time I get to Whitby on Friday night, my parents, who arrived the day before, have a new obsession.

‘Look at this!’ my mother says, ushering me into the kitchen of our rented cottage and pointing to a treacly cake sitting in the middle of the table. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?!’ I admire the cake and notice a number of paper bags lined up on the sideboard, with the same blue and gold branding.

‘There were biscuits too,’ Mum says with a touch of smugness, ‘but we’ve already eaten them.’ My parents have discovered Botham’s Bakery. The wonder of Botham’s, in fact, turns out to be just the first of several unexpected and marvellous discoveries we made during a weekend in Whitby this past November.

Neutralising Stendhal Syndrome? : Thoughts on taking Pictures in Venice.

June 29, 2019 by Zoe Dumelow

n his book ‘Venice is a Fish,’ Tiziano Scarpa writes at length on the potentially lethal effects of being continually surrounded by the beauty of this city:

‘In the historic centre, the aesthetic radioactivity is extremely high. Every angle radiates beauty….you are face-butted, slapped, abused by beauty, Andrea Palladio topples you over…Mauro Codussi and Jacopo Sansovino finish you off. You feel terrible. It’s the famous illness of Monsieur Henri Beyle, a disorder known to history as Stendhal syndrome.’

‘the tourists are lucky: the moment they find themselves confronted by a splendid piece of architecture, the neutralize the aesthetic radioactivity by boxing it away in a camera.’

[Tiziano Scarpa, Venice is a Fish: A Cultural Guide, Serpent’s Tail, 2010]

Fairytales, Feminism and Far Too Many Dogs: A Day at Polesden Lacey.

January 27, 2019 by Zoe Dumelow

Polesden Lacey seems to appear out of nowhere. One moment, you’re pootling the tree-lined, semi-suburban streets of Great Bookham in Surrey. The very next, you’re abruptly turning in under the low, lemon-and-white-painted arch of the lodge and sailing down a long drive towards what Elizabeth, the Queen Mother once described as a ‘delicious house,’ with parkland rolling away to either side of you. Perhaps it was the effects of the low January sunlight, shining straight into our eyes on the day of our visit, perhaps it was the fairytale feeling of the landscaped gardens, but the feeling of having suddenly slipped into another world never quite left us…..