Month: September 2014

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station

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Brontë Garden

Last month a new garden was officially opened at Sowerby Bridge railway station. It’s called the Brontë Garden, and is maintained by volunteers from the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station. It sits on a small parcel of land next to the car park, opposite platform one.

The name comes from the station’s slightly tenuous link with the Brontë family. The Brontës hail from over the hills in Haworth, in the Worth Valley, but one of the Brontë siblings was employed at Sowerby Bridge station at its time of opening in the 1840s. He was Branwell Brontë, brother of the three famous sisters Emily, Anne and Charlotte. He was later appointed at another station further up the line at Luddendenfoot – this station succumbed to the rationalisation of the railways in the 1960s and no longer exists.

The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge railway station

The garden isn’t particularly big but does house a bench and small gravelled area, along with some planters built using old railway sleepers. There’s also a restored luggage trolley, with opened suitcases serving as planters.

As well as the garden, the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station look after various other planters on the platforms, many of which are sponsored by local businesses. It’s a relatively young group, having only been formed in November 2010 (co-incidentally about the same time I moved to Sowerby Bridge). Whilst they are a voluntary group, they’ve done quite a bit to make the station look nicer – a hard ask, thanks to its brutal concrete architectural style.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

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One of my lovely friends nominated me for the ice bucket challenge earlier this week. You probably know the score by now, but the idea is to raise awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS – more commonly known as Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in Britain. Throwing a bucket of ice water over yourself is supposed to simulate the effects of the condition, which is terminal and normally kills its sufferers within a few years of diagnosis. There is no cure. One of my colleagues died as a result of MND a couple of years ago.

Whilst the idea is that, after being nominated, you have 24 hours to donate or be drenched in ice cold water, thankfully most of my friends have been doing both. I’ve donated £5 to Motor Neurone Disease Association. I’ve also donated £5 to WaterAid; whilst us westerners can chuck water around as it’s in plentiful supply, there are many in the world who can’t because there isn’t enough to go around. And donations to WaterAid made in the next week or so will be matched by UKAid, so they’re worth double.

Originally I planned to do this outside – however, as we’re four floors up in our flat it would have been a long, cold walk back so I did it in the shower. My wife Christine, whose laughter you can hear in the video, filmed it on my iPhone 5 using the stock camera app. It really was very, very cold – hence why I got the name of the MND Association wrong.

This was the first time I’ve ever edited a video. I used iMovie ’09 as it was already on my Mac, and apart from one tutorial to do the silly bonus replay at the end, all the editing was done just by exploring the app. It’s reasonably intuitive. The music was from Free Music Archive. I edited out the bit about nominations, but those of you who are friends with me on Facebook can see the uncut footage on there.