Small Bears at Christmas

It's almost Christmas Day!  Over the last couple of weeks, we bears have been helping our humans to get ready for the holidays.  We love Christmas time, because humans are encouraged to think of each other and human cubs get very excited about it too.

Early in the month it looked very Christmassy, as we had some snow.  It looked very pretty, although we were a little bit sad that there was not enough to build snowbears or go sledging.

On the first Friday of the month, we went out for a proper Christmas dinner with some of our human waterways friends, and had our first mince pies of the season.  We love mince pies and are so glad that they make little ones specially for small bears.  Everyone thought we looked very smart, because we had brushed our fur and put our Christmas jumpers on.

There is plenty to do at home.  One of our favourite jobs is helping Polar to decorate the Christmas tree.  Polar had a clever idea to make room for it this year, folding down one of the old-fashioned easy chairs and covering it with a Christmassy cloth, but she has trapped our basket with our spare clothes and coats underneath it!  

Luckily, we had already changed into our Christmas jumpers.

Polar fits the tree sections together, and we help to straighten out all the branches.  Then we climb up and down the tree for fun, while she untangles the lights and decorations.

Hanley Bear always helps with the lights, as he likes to do technical things.  He holds the wire very carefully between his teeth as he climbs up through the tree, spacing them out as evenly as he can.  

He was very proud of his work this year, although he ran back to sit with Grizzly once he had plugged them in, as they were listening to a football match on the radio. 

My job was to sort out the baubles, so we could put the smaller ones towards the top and the bigger ones lower down.  Soon, there were small bears climbing all over the tree with decorations.

Polar passed the tinsel up to us, and some strings of shiny beads, and soon the whole tree was covered in pretty things.  We were very proud of it.

Once the tree was decorated, it felt very Christmassy indeed.  We thought it would be fun to decorate some more trees, so we took some of the left-over tinsel and baubles outdoors and hung them on the apple and plum trees! 

We had special Christmas cards with us on to send to some of our human friends and to our bear friends from Twitter, and have been lucky enough to receive some cards, and even little presents, from some of them in return.

The biggest surprise came when we opened a package from our friend Tour Guide Ted - inside, was a little bear cub!  His name is Dudley and that's where he's from, too - Dudley in the West Midlands.  He is almost as small as Waverley!  They are already great pals and are hoping to have lots of adventures together in the New Year.  

Dudley isn't our only new bear friend, however.  A few days before, Aunty Tina had called in with a bear she had rescued from a charity shop in Tunstall, who she thought might like to join our hug.  Here's a picture of Tunstall Bear - or Tunny.  

As you can see from his hat and jacket, Tunny is an airline pilot.  He wants to travel the world, so we hope he will be able to go to visit our bear friends in other countries in the New Year and take them small presents from Stoke-on-Trent - but he will need some trousers first!

But now, it's time to send Christmas hugs to all our pals and to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Two Tweet-Ups with the #BerkshireBears

During this very strange year, it was often hard for our humans to socialise with other human friends and not always easy for us to see our pals, as we small bears do need our human families to help us travel around.  

 

As you might have seen, we did see our friend Tour Guide Ted and his friends Frank and Theo, and Milly the Mammoth and Blueberry Bear, while we were on our West Midlands narrowboat trip, and had a big "Tweetup" with small bears and other pals in Sheffield, but we have not been able to welcome as many friends as we hoped to our home area.  However, we have enjoyed two autumn visits from our great pals the Berkshire Bears - Confused Bear, Cinnamon, Anise and Little Brown Bear.

Our first get-together was at the Spitfire Gallery in the City Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.  Their human guardians - Mrs Deborah and Mr Andrew, came with them, along with Mr Rob, who is Mr Andrew's brother, and a Stoke City bear called Stanley.  He and Hanley Bear became great friends straight away!  We all had tea or coffee and very nice cake together, although the funny table was very wobbly.

Hanley also loves talking to Little Brown Bear (LBB) about football but, during this visit, they spent most of their time talking about aeroplanes.  Hanley showed us all around the Spitfire Gallery, as he had been there before with Langwathby and Cosford from our hug, our Air Bears.

 

Hanley found a reminder of a much loved and much missed Twitter pal as there was an etching in the screen around the balcony of the S6B Schneider Throphy seaplane designed by Mr R J Mitchell, which Toddy Furrington allocated to him as his #TheAviators plane when he gave him his goggles.

The Berkshire Bears were in town again in November, on their way to see Liverpool play Arsenal.  We arranged to meet in the cafe at the Middleport Pottery.  

It was a very chilly day, so we all wore our winter coats and hats and snuggled together in our bear bag.

Because it was wintery, instead of having tea and cake we had oatcakes for our lunch, then we all went out to sit on the roof of the traditional narrowboat Dane, which is moored on the Trent and Mersey Canal beside the pottery.

 

We hoped we would see our friends again this month, because we were going to visit Grandad Polar, but we postponed our visit because of the nasty virus.  Hopefully we will all see each other again next year, along with more of our pals, both furry and human.

A Trip to Lincolnshire

After our visit to Grandad Polar, we didn't come straight home.  Polar and Grizzly drove us up to Lincolnshire instead.

 

This was for a sad reason.  One of Grizzly's best pals, who he met when they were in the RAF together in the 1960s, had passed away and they were attending his funeral.  

Grizzly's pal Terry had stayed in the RAF and become a pilot and instructor, often flying a very big plane called the Orion, and had adventures all over the world.  He also had a family who all loved him very much and lots of friends, because he was a kind, generous and often very funny man.  

He was also very clever and did lots of research about the First World War, including finding someone who could read old-fashioned shorthand to decipher a diary kept by Grandad Grizzly about his time in the trenches, so Grizzly's family owe him a great debt of gratitude too.  We met Mr Terry - or we should say, Flight Lieutenant Terry - when we went to Belgium in 2018 for the centenary of the Battle of Kemmel, where Grandad Grizzly fought.

On the way to our B&B pub, we passed through Lutterworth.  We all jumped because we thought this plane was flying very low over us, but it was just a statue of the first jet aircraft designed by Mr Frank Whittle.

   

We were all tired after our journey and glad that there was a nice, comfy bed waiting for us in our room while our humans had their dinner.  From the window, we had a nice view across the fields and could see humans riding horses, and lots of sheep.

In the morning, before the funeral, Polar drove Grizzly (and us) out to see the countryside and the airfield at Scampton, famous for being the base of the Dambusters in the Second World War and now home to the Red Arrows.

They had been practicing first thing in the morning and a local photographer we met said they were due to fly again soon.  He showed us a brilliant place where we could watch them and take photos.

One plane took off on its own and soon it was doing all sorts of clever manoeuvres, training smoke so we could see the shapes it was making.  We could see there were two people on board.

 

We were sad when the display finished but, very soon afterwards, five planes took off together! 

We all cheered as we knew we were in for another amazing display.

They flew much higher than the single plane to do their manoeuvres but we still had a super view.  We thought Grizzly's old pal would have been pleased we had spent the morning watching such clever pilots.

In the afternoon, we stayed at our nice pub while Polar and Grizzly went to the funeral, being quiet bears and thinking about how sad our humans and their friends must be.

In the morning, Polar went out to photograph the sunrise, as there are big skies in this part of Lincolnshire because there aren't many hills. After breakfast, it was time to go home, but our human guardians said we would make a little adventure of the journey.

The first place we stopped was Torksey Lock, which links the River Trent with the Fossdyke.  The Fossdyke is the oldest canal in Britain because the Romans built it, to link the Trent to the River Witham.

Huddlesford and I went to explore with Polar and Grizzly, while the smaller bears stayed in the car, since it was very cold.  We hoped we might get cake and hot chocolate, but the café at the lock was closed.

You can see how interesting it is here.  The lock between the river and the Fossdyke is quite a big one and was quite deep when we visited, but sometimes the river floods and can be as high as the Fossdyke - or even higher!

Our human guardians decided to have a walk a little way along the river.  Hanley Bear decided he wanted to join us for this, to see the River Trent, and was amazed to see the name of the local council.

"Fenton is one of our Six Towns of Stoke-on-Trent," he said.  "Are we near Stoke?"  

When he saw how big the river was here, he could tell he was still a long way from from his city, as it was so much wider and deeper than it is close to our home.  It was even bigger than when I had seen it in Nottingham.

"Wow!" cried Hanley.  "It's massive!  It would be scary to bring Uppie down here!"

Polar and Grizzly explained that there was another thing that would make it tricky to bring Uppie here - the Trent is tidal below Cromwell Lock near Newark, making the current stronger at times, and there are sand bars where you can run aground as the tide falls.  I don't think we will ever come here on Uppie, unless we travel with another boat whose crew know it well.

There are some interesting buildings beside the river, including several big power stations with their huge cooling towers, and the ruined manor house of Torksey Castle.

Walking back towards the car park, we saw there were very good moorings on the channel leading to the lock, where boats could tie up before using the lock, or as a safe place to stop between the tides when travelling up or down the river.

Grizzly drove and Polar navigated us from Lincolnshire, over the toll bridge into Nottinghamshire and through Sherwood  Forest into Derbyshire.  We saw the famous twisted spire of the church in Chesterfield, which we had spotted from the train when we visited Sheffield.

Our human guardians stopped for a tea-break in Bakewell.  As they had stayed in the car at the lock, we bears decided Endon and Waverley ought to go to the cake shop with them while the rest of us had naps.  

But we wished we had all gone, as they tucked into Bakewell Pudding with ice-cream!  Perhaps we'll go back another day and all try some?