Welcome to the second week of links set by me, King Krophta the Quizzical, otherwise known as crofter. I hope that the healthy harvest of points last week was to everybody’s liking and now I plan more of the same as I expand upon my boyhood spent on Rocky Island off the Northumbrian coast. The village was home to no fewer than seven sets of uncles and aunts with a plethora of cousins in a (reasonably) happy, stable extended family structure.
In a way, my boyhood was idyllic in a “Tom-Sawyer”-esque sort of way, with a wealth of rock pools, sand dunes, sea breezes, forest land (the Dene) and even a small river winding its way to the North Sea (the Burn). The water in the Burn was used upstream by a local pit to wash the dust from the coal and this resulted in a harbour filled with a thick black sludge known locally as “dolly duff”! Several of my uncles were coal miners and bore the black scarring caused by coal dust entering facial wounds. For them, mining was truly “under the skin” and “in the blood”.