Today’s little walk was from Cley to Sheringham. A bit of a late start due to us taking the long way from Kings Lynn However it was a lovely clear day with the tide in, the pebble beach makes the walking a bit harder but very rewarding with the sea sounds.

The big surprise of the day is that you can buy a cottage in the centre of Sheringham for £99,000 my first glimpse of a sub £100K property in these parts and of cause Sheringham does have a rail connection

Norfolk Coastal Walk

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Sally has done a post with more photos over on her blog

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Last night I went to a couple of excellent talks here in Cambridge. The University talks are one of the big reasons for living in Cambridge, Here is my personal list of talks. Top notch speakers excellent bright youthful audiences and free drinks afterwards whilst chatting with the leading experts of the day.

The first talk was The Business of Fairtrade . by. Ms Harriet Lamb CBE Executive Director (She graduated from Trinity Hall were the talk was given – Silly folks at Trinity Hall have taken down the web page! so no links). An excellent speaker explaining how they have now increased public awareness to over 70% with £480m sales in the UK. Apparently Sainsbury’s saw a 6% uplift in banana sales when they moved over to 100% Fairtrade. Another fact more coffee was sold in cafes than from retail for the first time last year.

I hadn’t appreciated that for a producer to be involved they first need to find a buyer, intriguing that small farmers co-ops are dealing direct with Sainsbury’s! they also need a bank account, register as a co-op, get export licences and the worst of all get a loan to support to them until the first harvest. Any of these is quite a problem.

Fairtrade coffee bean prices

However, for those who get in the effect can be tremendous as Fairtrade acts to give a guaranteed base price for their crop. Here is a graph demonstrating this for Arabica Coffee beans.

Tremendous discussion afterwards, especially regarding Cambridge City’s Fairtrade status (Public meeting at Friends Meeting House on 20Nov 2008).

I skipped the drinks and hurried onto….

Who wants to live forever? Exploring the impact of extreme ageing

I was easily the oldest one here!. We were first reminded that ageing may be curable but it hasn’t been cured!  and the difference between development and ageing is that Development means functions improve with time whereas ageing is about functions dimiishing with time

Thymus reduction with age

A suitable gasp went up when Klaus Okkenhaug after explaining the role of The Thymus in producing T protector sales and then pointing out the Thymus starts reducing in size from when you are born and in fact at 40 is already 1/2 its original size.

Aubrey de Grey pointed out that ageing is very bad for you in fact 90% of deaths in the West are due to ageing! Interestingly the biggest cause of deaths in the  audience demographic is suicide.

Guy Brown pointed out that death is now preceded by 10 years of ill health and that currently 25% die with dementia by 2050 this will increase to 50% (dementia is strongly age related hence as we live longer more will get it).

Which brings me to my post’s title – the story of Tithonus who wished for eternal life to spend with his beloved goddess Eos in Greek myth. However, he didn’t get eternal youth so progressively withered away to be eventually made into a cricket (the crickets chirping is meant to represent old mens grumblings!).

A really excellent evening, especially listening to Richard Faragher afterwards reciting his experience in killing the worlds oldest living creature, some mollusc which apparently was in excess of 450 years old and smelt like a rotten tooth! Another factoid is that whales are now dying naturally which were  tagged with harpoons from the whaling days – the harpoons apparently were date stamped by their manufacturers.

A great Cambridge evening and nice to know what awaits me in 20 years if I’m lucky!

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Dark foreboding in Norfolk

Great day fixing sheds and blackberry picking in Norfolk.

I loved this cloudscape with its foreboding of a storm and the lightning scarred Oak tree silhouletted by the dark clouds.

Taken with my iPhone as well

Cheffins held a property auction in Cambridge yesterday (which i missed ). This fine 3 bed semi in Lovell Road CB4 2QW was predicted, prior to the auction,  to make £180K to £200K in fact it didn’t reach £118K . Oops it made £179,500

Only 8 of the 15 lots were sold at the auction. So it looks as though the property crash has finally hit Cambridge (again). I wonder if it will take 15 years to recover this time.

Update:

From the excellent Estate angels website I found some historic prices for Lovell Road:

Lovell Road House Prices 2000 - 2007

Yesterdays price of £118K £179,500 takes as back in time to 2000!  Eight two years of Cambridge property inflation wiped out in one month or so…

I have now finished the first walk designed by myself, although obviously others have trod a similar path in the past to get to the University of Cambridge

My requirements were to walk from Cambridge to Oxford keeping as straight a line as possible and avoiding all roads.

Once I started mapping using Memory Map, it became obvious that this is simply a walk through what everyone imagines England as it used to be. Rolling green countryside abundant Oaks, Beech Foxes and wildlife plus some of the most unspoilt villages in the country. An added bonus are the great houses at Wimpole Hall, Woburn Abbey and Waddesdon Manor. During the walk I also discovered that it goes through some of our finest nature reserves from the miniscule Paradise in Cambridge to the immense Stockgrove CountryPark and the Green Sand Trust to, who have thought, the two moors at Flitwick Nature reserve!.

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The Route takes in small parts of The Clopton Way, The Skylark Ride, The Navigators Way, The Bunyan Trail (amusingly sponsored by Scholl shoes ), Greensand Ridge Walk, Two Moors Heritage Trail, Seven Parishes Millenium Circular walk, Woburn walk, Stockgrove Country Park Circular Walk, Bucks Circular Walk, Cross Bucks Way, Matthews Way Village Link, North Bucks Way, Bernwood Jubilee Way, Oxfordshire Way & the CPRE Oxford Green Belt Way.

Plus the famous windmills at Brill (Loved the company name Brill Computers!), Quainton and also Stukeley famous for its authentic Norman church, longest village high street and London’s proposed third airport 40 years ago (the walk crosses the proposed main runway)

All the photographs are up on Picasa and Flickr (I’m at the point of leaving Flickr like its founders) and also maps can be found at Wikiloc, Everytrail and Google Maps (Nope I can’t decide which is best either).

Apparently Cicerone published a book in 1995 by James A. Lyons called “An Oxbridge Walk” now out of print but readily available.

Others ideas are to get Green King interested in offering free beers (their Loch Fyne chain is in Cambridge, Woburn and Oxford and also they have recently taken out the main Oxford brewers. I have a novel idea how they may do this to everyones benefit

Oh the coolest thing of all, for anyone over 60 who lives in England its free travel between Oxford and Cambridge on the Stagecoach X5 with buses every 30minutes, both ways, through the day. The bus is never more than 8 miles from the walk! What other walk anywhere in the world can offer that!

Many thanks to Sally and Ellee for their blog posts on this too

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Update:  30-06-2008:

Change the paragraph relating to “An Oxbridge walk”

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