@Hannahnim you are correct, the rules are the rules, it’s always nice to connect and make good friendships with people on the forum. It’s nice to know especially in this ever fragmenting work you can still have people to laugh, have fun with and take trips down memory lane, like this one.
The Hollybush Inn at Denford. One of my favourite stop off points.
Oh family gatherings… Well ours in the family always involve someone who is very, very controlling, like a two legged Stromboli, and usually these sorts of people are trying so hard to control the people around them that they don’t control their own behaviour, and their own temper, which is the thing that needs controlling the most!! Yes I know that feeling of treading on eggshells, I get it all the time. It’s like you’re dying inside to say what you’re thinking, or crack a silly joke but you just know that they’ll take it the wrong way and explode, because they always do.
I bet you must be so much fun in real life, my close friend whom I miss so much and her mum used to lived around the corner from me, and I used to escape to hers as a bolt hole and have a good moan! But she was always vexed having a good sound off like you do! Just like you I wouldn’t dare get on the wrong side of her! 
I hope this doesn’t come across bad, it just makes me laugh cause it it reminds me of her and you seem a bit similar to my sister as well who I love to bits. The banter between you and @Long-John-Silver it’s been a nice distraction this morning from all the drama going in the family X
That’s at the core of the forum to be there for each other as is needed with friendship, an ear, and shoulder and oodles of kinky advice and experience.
Most importantly as we all need to do is look after #1
I’m not fun, I’m miserable and boring and the absolute worst human to be around…
Before tea 
But seriously, you know, growing up with a family that was always so negative, I just wanted different for me. When I met Master Levi l, I learned different. I learned wit and sass and fire and play. I had people who loved me and encouraged me to be me. I call his Dad Dad#2 because of the love we have for one another. He says I’m trouble… then he calls me sweetheart 
Also my upstairs neighbour’s kid adores me. The other day they were banging on the window for my attention while I was watering the garden. If i’m gardening, they don’t want ro help my neighbour (their Dad), they want to help me. I just shrug at him like “you best start digging. It looks like you’re on your own again”
And yes, he’s the same neighbour who is always wherever I am
I had to reply to this here because it wasn’t relevant to the other thread.
@Hannahnim typically this relates to a post I have planned, I just haven’t written ir yet because a) I’ve been distracted (
) and b) I’m entertaining this evening. By the way, I’m now wearing a daisy print blouse top with black trousers, my hair in an updo, pearl drop earrings and Good Girl perfume like butter wouldn’t melt
Going back to my point, I was raised in a Church of England church and my family were always popular. When I was sexually assaulted by a group of peers, my family were shunned by the church like I had offended God myself. Add to that my kinky thoughts, I thought I was condemned for hell.
A good friend of mine helped me to understand that I hadn’t and I haven’t done anything wrong, and that, most crucially, the church is full of hypocrites. Matthew 7:3-5 NIV explicitly demonstrates Jesus speaking out against hypocrisy, yet we see it time and time again in those who claim to be Jesus’s most ardent followers.
A few days ago I cried, hard, when I thought about how I used to kink shame myself in the name of my religion. I was failing God’s orders. I had to think: would God want me to hate myself? What would he think of me if I shamed somebody’s else who confessed to me that they were kinky? So why was I treating myself so dispassionately?
Our father is all loving and all forgiving, he sees our struggles and he forgives them. Our father would not judge or shame you for being you; he would judge you for judging yourself.
Look up the Center of Progressive Christianity on YouTube. It’s been a huge help for me. It’s a relationship with God based on God’s love and acceptance, not a relationship based upon shame 
First you think of me, then you chase me?
My my, you just can’t resist little old me, can you?
No i can’t!!! You’re 
!!! 
(nervously waits for a complete ban..
)
If anyone wants to explore the midlands
72 hrs give or take
Me and the OH have 
from Skipton to Leeds on the same route @Long-John-Silver 
I thought I was talking to myself here 
Never alone @Stacy2
Although my current closest canal is the Forth and Clyde I have walked the midlands canals extensively through my young adult life. I was going to buy a narrow boat to live on if I didn’t move north. I also had the idea of turning a narrow boat into a floating dungeon long ago.
Kinky boating if you will
Oh Stacy so you are a Yorkshire lass then? sorry Friday is one of the only days I’m away from the Internet and on a girly day out with my best mates/supervisors my big sisters so I’m not ignoring you!
That is amazing what you said, love a bit of boating history. My mum had a friend at work who spent her childhood raised on the last generation of cargo carrying working boats. we watch a lot of the boating and Vanlife vlogs to chill and we’veu lived here for most of my life and to see all these locations on the boats for all these years and then to connect a visual with that is really nice. I did have a bit of a Google to see where Riddlesden was, the first time we watched the Leeds and Liverpool vlogs we couldn’t get over how much of an embankment it is on! I love how it is over all the towns and sweeping countryside, and it was snowing which made it even more spectacular.
What I really like about the northern canals is the industrial history, that you have a lot of old textile Mills up there and they seem to be well preserved? And the northern stone that they’re built with. I especially liked the look of saltaire and Skipton.
A lot of our industry in the West Midlands was red brick built foundries and factories, a lot of these have been demolished now, we do have some left but I don’t think they look as nice as the Mills. There are especially a lot around Birmingham and with so many houses needed, I don’t know why they don’t just renovate them, I think it’s a shame to lose the old buildings. Also there were a lot of coalfields, particularly around cannock and Dudley. That is why the area is called the black country by the Romans, not because of the pollution but because the ground is black from the coal.
Oh no way! You didn’t say!? So you’re all the way up there in Scotland but you could’ve been walking straight past the bottom of our garden! There is quite a popular public path opposite us and I do a lot of people watching sitting at the bottom of the garden as well as checking out the boats, wondering where these people have come from and where they’re going, and during Covid we had people coming from quite a long way away.
I did consider buying a boat at one point and my sister has as well, but it’s very physical, it’s expensive (heard from an American that boating meant ‘bust out another thousand’) and got to be tip top physical shape to be doing boating, can’t be having disabilities doing the locks. But if I didn’t have nearly numb arms, I’d consider it.
We did have a smallish cruiser at one point when I was very young, we could only really have what fit across the bottom of the garden, with several people crammed on board we did the Trent and mersey, shroppie, Coventry, Ashby Canal… Staffs and Worcester… We did the Harecastle Tunnel and that was an experience I will never forget! Being stuck in a pitch black tunnel for 3/4 of an hour, couldn’t see the front or back entrance, remember seeing it for the first time and it was a tiny pinhole of light that gradually got bigger! But the boat had a very, very unpredictable engine, flickering tunnel lights so it was quite a hair raising experience to say the least! But they were the best holiday memories I’ve ever had.
I had a naughty thought the other day, well that’s nothing new there really but there was a lovely old boat moored opposite and i thought what it be like to break into it and have some fun against a banging and clattering old boat engine! I don’t know, I really think I need to up my meds sometimes
No problem. It was more a tongue in cheek comment so please do ignore my waffle 
I’ve moved around over the years, but yeah I am. I grow up in West, spent a few years in East and now live in North Yorkshire, although I still own the house I grew up in which over looks Riddlesden, the canal, the Hall and the valley below. I can’t live in it because of the family memories and I can’t let it go either, so I rent it out to a lovely elderly couple. They’ve become like my second grandparents which is really sweet and they adore my little one. Last Christmas the wife told me they had been saving any spare change, putting it in a bottle and it’s for him once he reaches 18. I left there in a mess 
And you can’t miss the abundance of Mills in places like Saltire, Bingley, Shipley etc. As you say, most are in very good condition and well looked after. Skipton is gorgeous. You’d love the waterfront, all the boats that park up and small cobbled bridges.
We regularly had holidays and trips and rented out the smaller narrowboats before settling down. Aside from the Leeds and Liverpool, the Shropshire and Grand Union canals we’re our favourites.
I do love the red brick. It’s very different to the normal for us. I wish we did more exploring (although there is plenty of time left).
You probably watch David (cruising the cut) and Robbie Cummings then? I’ve been a long subscriber of both channels. I met Robbie when he was filming his TV series on Naughty lass (such a great name and Yorkshire saying).
Okay I’ll shut up now
I have the Essington and Wyrley canal virtually on my doorstep, and have walked some of the Llangollen canal. Also sailed a canal boat and used locks in Staffordshire, wasn’t keen on steering the boat! Also been on the canal and into the tunnels at the Black Country Museum.
Sounds very interesting, might put that on the bucket list.
Starting my second cup of the morning, catching up on news and posts here. Have a lot of work planned today, contractor coming in to help with a project for a few hours, then other paint and repair items in the queue. If things go well, maybe a late afternoon bike ride before supper.
Have a great day everyone.
Oh that is lovely to know Stacy, thanks for sharing, it’s very hard to get to know people online and for people to open up as well. But I’ve got a lovely little picture in my mind what it must be like! It sounds really nice the tenants as well, good tenants are everything, sometimes it’s worth taking a little less just to have better people!
Yes, the Shroppie is up there, the embankments and the cuttings we have walked a lot, around Brewood is particularly nice. There is a really lovely old bridge there which I’ll have to dig a picture of if I can, and the famous telegraph pole Bridge at Norbury. But that canal is sort of like the Canal version of an A road, so straight compare to the contour canals. My uncle did the Pontywotsit and chirk Aquaducts on the Langollen canal, I don’t know how he did, I’d go flying over the edge!
BYeah, we watched those Vlog as well, i like Robbie because he covered the Birmingham and urban Canals well, rather than just moaning about the rubbish he was positive, which I think is nice. Mrs. M mindful narrowboat is really nice as well, she always spots the nature very well 
Yeah, we’ve been through it as well! Love the black country museum, especially the boiled sweets 
I think they shot the new peaky blinders film in it 
Oh that is absolutely awful what happened to you 
(By the way sorry for the late reply I read your message and then completely lost it. Sometimes I think these messages have legs, I had to go through the followers to find you!)
But it is absolutely terrible that they didn’t do anything about your abuse, although I hate to say it, I’m not surprised… As you say it’s hypocrisy and power, unfortunately there always has been so much of it in the church. And its why so many people hate God in the first place. They blame God for what man (and woman) has done.
I won’t say much else regarding my thoughts on religion as it is such a controversial topic, I think much more so than sex, and everybody has their own ideas and beliefs. And I don’t want to ruffle any more feathers on here than what i have done! But for me personally what I believe is one of God‘s greatest gifts is free will, most of us have the choice to believe what we want to, and that shows we’re all unique and not the same.
I’m so pleased though you have found your happy place, that you didn’t abandon God in itself is a miracle!! well done you!! 
Yeah, that’s it. They’ve only rented it for a few years but its great not chasing rent. The husband does drop the occasional hint about me putting it on the market. I plan on keeping it for my little boy and him inheriting it, like I did from my parents - generational wealth is what my dad always told me 
And thanks, I’ll have to check out her channel.
DownieLive did a 3 hour long UK canal series (in one video, so bring tea and biscuits) if you fancy a great watch. He covered loads, including the Anderton boat lift (Link for the video)
Yes they shot a lot of Peaky Blinders the tv series and movie there, specifically the canal scenes. They also filmed some in Wolverhampton city centre.