Early March, now, and the season of yellowing. Hazel and willow catkins hang from branches like exotic caterpillars, drying themselves. Clutches of daffodils nod in the breeze, and the starry heads of celandines brighten the first light-dappled greening of the woodland floor. It’s a cold sun, but our movement these last few miles grants us the impression of warmth. We find a bench by the murmuring river and sit down to rest.
We’re just a little upstream from Ribchester here, making way towards Dinkley, having in mind a short circuit of the Ribble Valley, and it’s proving to be far enough on wobbly legs. We’ve been out several days in a row now, and we’ve either tired ourselves out, or it’s the shingles jab we had that’s having unexpected side effects.
“You might feel like you’re coming down with something,” the nurse said.
Which would explain it. So, we’ll take our time. We’ll be fine.
It’s not an attractive bit, this stretch of the Ribble, and the lack of foliage reveals much we’d prefer remained hidden. The trees and bushes along the bank are hung with all the trash washed down, some of it from farms – plastic sacking and canisters of ominous and garish colouring. But it’s mostly the petty consumerist trash – the beer-cans, the bottles, the discarded wrappers, all of it heading out to sea, a long slow, infinite outpouring of human detritus. This is our gift to nature, product of a confused sense of who we are, of an imagined separateness, indeed an outright denial of the finiteness of the earth, and its capacity to forgive our childish ways.
We’re covering some old ground today, not just on foot but in our heads as well. From time to time long forgotten writings surface in the blog stats, and serve to remind us of forgotten byways. It’s surprising how we forget these things. I suppose we absorb the ideas, stripped of the detail, and simply move on, but I was once intensely preoccupied with the idea of identity, and it seems that’s what we’re thinking about again today.
Expressions of identity are all the rage of course, but we do far better if we can work out how to shed them. So, who am I? Right now I am just a guy sitting on a bench in the early spring sunshine, listening to the river. That’s all. Anything I add to that description is mere decoration. We used to equate the question of identity with what we did: plumber, poet, engineer. But the world is changing, and jobs are shrinking to a mere flotsam that seems unworthy of pinning something so precious as our identity upon it. We have AI stripping work away from us, or we may be entering retirement and looking for a new identity, or we may be clinging to an identity, courtesy of a former career and to which we no longer have any real connection. I write poetry, fiction, and I keep a blog now. Does that make me a writer and poet? I can call myself that if I want, but it never seems to sit right. No, I am just this guy sitting on a bench by the river.
We take a breath, let it out slow, extend our awareness into the body, open up a gap between the rush of thought, and the softer spaciousness of the inner self. It can be a tight squeeze, but if we can manage it we find in that gap there’s no past or future, no identity, no reputation to be protected. There’s just the river, this low, bright sunlight, and the movement of the breath. It’s not empty – quite the opposite. We sense a fullness and, sliding a hand into that gap, we peel the sides apart and, shedding all thoughts of who we think we are, we step inside.
There we find the presence behind the human, a presence in the world, rather than something pre-defined by culture, or by a label attached to us by ourselves or others. And through that presence we find we are not our thoughts or our feelings. We are more simply the awareness of those things, or every thing. Spiritual teachers will go further and tell us our awareness, the sense of self looking out at the world through our eyes, is the same awareness looking out through everyone else’s. But that’s not an easy thing to get across, or to accept, conditioned as we are, and increasingly so, into a sense of our own profound isolation.
Our times have seen a dramatic shedding of the old ways of belonging, making it all but impossible to find or even to take seriously the idea of meaning. Workplaces, faith-groups, pubs… all are in decline. Meanwhile, consumer culture promises fulfilment but, like all these bottles and cans down there on the riverbank, it delivers only an emptiness to be discarded, rather than something genuine to be adopted and worn for life. And then the rise of our identitarian culture offers so many off-the-peg identities, all of which might feel meaningful in the moment, though often built on nothing more than grievance, or victimhood. And of course, we have the ever present peddlers of “life-style”, false identities, like bubble gum, briefly consumed, soon to lose its flavour and discarded.
We are hungry for belonging, yet look for it in all the wrong places. There is no community, no identity in a mobile phone – absurd to think there might be – yet increasingly, we feel that’s our best shot. Imagine any crowded room of people at their ease, be they strangers, or even friends and family, most faces lit by the glow of screens, and the promise of diversion, of transportation from the here and now, to somewhere else – to a place of promise, a place of meaning. We scroll for connection, finding only fragmented shards, a thousand ways to perform an identity, to enter into community – likes, shares, comments – but no way to simply be. It is a mirrored labyrinth of algorithmic bait-and-switch, yet we keep scrolling, hoping the next post, the next notification, will tell us who we are.
We have forgotten. Who we are lies entirely in this gap of stillness, in this shedding of all decoration, of all identity. And the paradox? It’s just a breath away, the realisation we are at the same time nobody, going nowhere, yet also, and at all times, we are the world and all that’s in it. Of course the trick is to stay in that space, while we get up from this bench, and continue on our way along the river. But that’s not easy in a fractured world, where such teachings might be considered unhelpful anyway, a world where division and isolation serve a greater, if less wholesome purpose.
Stepping out of the car, we’re met by a moderate rain. Mid-morning at Vaughn’s Café – again. This time, our plan is a circuit, taking in a slice of the Roddlesworth plantations, then up onto Darwen Moor. We have a new lens for the camera, which we were hoping to try out. It’s a super-wide format, the aim being to add a touch of drama to our lone trees and sky, but we’ve left the camera at home. The forecast just didn’t justify bringing it out.
The lens is an old one, and designed for use with my make of camera – though, it turns out, not my specific model. It still works as a lens, but it doesn’t automatically focus. Now, this should be no hardship since, once upon a time, all our focusing was done manually. We chose the subject, then turned the dial until it was sharp. I could have got the lens a lot cheaper from other sellers if I’d known. Anyway, that’s another story, but it has us thinking about focus and doing things automatically, in metaphorical ways, like sometimes how we roll from bed of a morning, draw back the curtains on yet another flake-white Lowry sky, before rolling automatically back in.
So, we click our imaginary lens from auto to manual, we pick our day, and just go for it. And here we are, the sky more the colour of lead than flake-white, cloud-base so low you can reach up and touch it, and then the rain. It’s never a good sign, having to pull on full waterproofs at the start of a walk, but may the rain wash us clean. I imagined I had found a way of stepping aside from the news cycle, of no longer being triggered by ‘events’, but the world has more recently caught onto me, changed tactics, and now I cannot look at it without feeling unclean.
The forest ways through Roddlesworth are heavy going, dark, and the trees dripping, the paths doubling as lively streams. The body warms quickly under several layers, though the fingers still ache from cold. I have a new waterproof outer which is performing well, the rain beading up and running off, at least for a time. But after a couple of hours, the fabric is starting to wet out and no longer breathable, so we begin to wet from the inside as condensation soaks back into the mid-layers.
We make our way over towards Darwen, through Sunnyhurst, then a brief rest and a stand-up lunch in the shelter of the lych gate, before tackling the climb onto the moor. There’s been no let-up in the rain, and a stiffening breeze now, as the landscape becomes more exposed. But the wind is to our backs, so it helps, rather than hinders. I’m still exercising the legs of a morning with a dumbbell – still not sure if it’s making a difference on the hill, but anything that gets the heart pumping is doing some good, so long as we’re not overdoing it.
There’s a forbidding bleakness to Darwen moor at the best of times, but on a day like this, it’s particularly challenging to the spirit. Interesting now, the proliferation of leaky dams and berms – the moor being engineered to hold water, of which there is plenty today. We make a somewhat bumbling return through the woods, past Sipper Lowe, back to Vaughn’s, slithering in mud as we go.
The car is a relief to see, though I’m almost too weary to pull the gear off. The waterproof trousers have leaked through the pocket slits leaving big cold patches on my thighs. And, as suspected, I’m wet down to the mid-layer from condensation. It was a longish walk, about eight miles at pace, not much by way of meditation, no messing about with photographs. I’m not sure if the day has washed me clean, but that cup of tea in Vaughn’s café was most welcome. We emerge from the steamy interior mid-afternoon to an already fading light, and the rain had stopped.
We’re feeling cold of a sudden, and in need of a hot bath. Back at the car, we set the heater on full and reach for the radio, then think better of it, and drive home in silence. It is plain now that, at a certain elevated – indeed stratospheric – level, the world has always been this dirty. Yet, I’m sure the majority of us bring our children up to believe in magic and kindness, and I still think that’s right. We imagine the damage comes only from the stranger, the predator, the one who lurks at the margins of society, yet some of them are also riding very high, indeed running and shaping the world in their own image.
Perhaps the rain did not wash us entirely clean then, but for a short time at least it has brought the world back into a cleaner focus. It’s shown us how it’s not always wise to go with what comes to us automatically, because it may not be trustworthy. And it reminds us that in order to see clearly, to choose what we look at, instead of having it chosen for us, we have to switch that imaginary lens back to manual. And if we can do that, then even splashing through the wet and the cold of a Lancashire upland in the depths of winter, carries its own form of innocent grace.
You catch up with me on the causeway between the Anglezarke and the Upper Rivington Reservoirs. It’s a clear day with an unblemished blue of sky, and a bright sun with no heat in it. It’s only my second outing this year, and January is all but done, now. I suppose that’s the problem when we can pick our days – we tend to hold out for the best of the forecast and save the inclement weather for indoor things: for housework, for writing, or just staying cosy in bed.
And then of course, with its storms, interspersed by interminable grey, the year seems to have kicked off with a mixture of rage and depression. The sparkle has been sadly lacking, but today looks like one of those days sent to rescue us all from oblivion. That said, the forecast was a bit hysterical last night with warnings about a hard frost and ice, neither of which transpired. It’s definitely cold though, as we step out to embrace the air and fasten on our boots.
The Anglezarke reservoir is still low, the last of the reservoirs to fill – the rest of them, from Roddlesworth to the Lower Rivington being now brim-top after all the rains. We take the path by the spillway, a shortcut up to the Yarrow, then loop round to the Parson’s Bullough road. If there was going to be ice anywhere this morning, it would be here, but the way is clear. The moor is shedding water, a bright new spring running down the path, and pooling by the corner of Allance bridge.
Here we take the steep meadow way, up to the finger post on the skyline, and catch our first views of the day – bare trees, and bright contrasts. Indeed, the sun is so bright here the highlights are burning out in the camera, and in my watery eyes too. I’ve been trying to keep the leg muscles in shape over winter by doing squats with one of the dumbbells the kids left behind. It doesn’t seem to have worked. By the time we reach the finger post we’re ready for a long pause and a fiddle with the camera.
The oak trees up Twitch Hills have survived the storms, and beg their photographs as I pass under their spreading branches. I wouldn’t like to lose these two. Always a tragedy when a grand old tree comes down, though it’s nature’s way, I suppose. We take a breather among the ruins of Peewit Hall – views out to the coast, across the gorgeous green of the hills by Jepson’s farm. They’re replacing a long run of wire here with a traditional hedgerow – looks like hawthorn. If anything can survive up here hawthorn can. This will be a boon for birds when it’s mature. Odd how one hand can be so protective of the environment, while the other is so destructive.
Lunch is a cheese and onion roll from the filling station we called at on the way over, and rendered all the more tasty for being eaten out of doors. All around us there’s the familiarity of long years, and an air of ease. Still no warmth in the sun, but it’s good to be out. I feel a whisper of poetry coming through, just a feeling and a rhythm… no words, yet, but it’s something about the importance of the familiar. Winter’s a hard time for getting out, for exploring further afield, but what we’re looking for in nature can be found anywhere, and no more deeply engaged with than here, amid the familiar. What it triggers is a mysterious blend of comfort and a longing.
While we eat, we set the camera on our bag, along with the binoculars, breathe deep of the air. So far, I’ve seen no one since the causeway, but suddenly there’s a loose dog coming at us like a rocket, so I make a grab for my gear. I’ve nearly lost a camera like that before. It got my lunch instead on that occasion. The dog gets a call from its owner who’s passing on the track above. I don’t get a glance, let alone an apology. It’s almost as if it’s my fault for tempting the dog by sitting at my ease. I find it strange.
I’m reminded of that story by the Zen monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, about carrying a cup of coffee. Someone runs into you and you spill the coffee. Why did you spill the coffee? You’re tempted to say it’s because someone ran into you, but the answer is because you were carrying coffee. Had you been carrying tea, you would have spilled tea. Someone bumps into you, and you tend to spill whatever you’re carrying.
The fact I didn’t feel anything in particular is perhaps telling in other ways – that I’m perhaps carrying a cup of low expectations towards my fellow man, which isn’t healthy, but there’s also a fairly robust compass in there that’s keeping me aligned in other ways, at least for now. That poem though? It’s gone. The muse must have given it to someone else. I’m sure they’ll do a good job of it.
We almost loop back on ourselves here, taking the path down to Lead Mine’s Clough, and back to Allance Bridge. Then we’re up Hodge Brow to Morris’s Barn, and across the meadows above the Yarrow to Rivington and the tearoom. The tearoom is packed out and steamy, seemingly the whole world on its pension. Including me of course. We plump for a Kit-Kat and a cup of tea, sit out with it.
That poem though? We trawl the memory, but it’s like one of those dreams that slips away in the morning, and there’s just no bringing it back. It doesn’t matter. I know what she meant, even if I can no longer articulate it. It’s a doorway, I suppose, a doorway to a feeling for what the Welsh have as hiraeth. There is no direct English translation, but the closest I can get is that it’s a longing for the world behind the world, a homesickness for a place you can never return to. The Germans have a similar word, at least one that occupies a similar emotional space: Sehnsucht, this being a longing for a home, a world you’ve yet to find. I guess my poem fell somewhere down the gap between the two.
Anyway, that’s it for now. We leave the tearooms, take the path around the old chape1l. It’s a place heavy with shadow and centuries of moss, but where the sun slices in, by the gates… there are snowdrops.
About 5 miles round, 390 feet of moderate up and down.
Sun and Moon in Leo. A misty dusk, first crescent rising over far hills as we make camp by the round eye of a nameless, reedy tarn. Why nameless? I suppose because it’s not always there, at least no one else seems able to find it, and if the very existence of a thing is contested, why bother naming it? Still, we gather water, fresh enough, and as the stars come out, we brew tea.
Darius removes his boots, lifts the insoles, lets them breathe. In country like this he says, it’s your boots that make the difference between heaven and hell, yet most travellers pay them little attention. Then he points out the brighter stars, orients us in time and season, gazes long at Mars, just rising, its reddish glow a reminder of the brutality of our excesses: the red mist, the call to arms, even our arrogant belief in the meaninglessness of things: moths fluttering in erratic flight, drawn to our flame, while bats hunt the moths, and an owl hunts the bats. An ouroboric cycle of one thing eating the other, until nothing remains.
All is silence. And Saturn with his book closed, and his gate shut firm, and all because we see no further than our nose. Maybe this time round we’ll tempt his indulgence.
It was, once upon a time, an anxious night, this first night of the moon, a fiery energy robbing us of sleep, and then that irresistible urge to be under way. I suppose this later mellowness is a sign of wisdom, or old age, or both, I don’t know. Darius smiles, silent watcher that he is, reading minds, and knowing more than he lets on.
Our first objective is visible in silhouette, though fast fading now into the black of a velvet night: The Hill of Noon, four days across the moor – and a prominent summit cairn to tempt our rushing at it. But how many have died on that one hill alone? How many have burned themselves out in the achievement of it, only to witness from the top other hills rising beyond, one after the other, ever taller, and each with its own crowning glory?
How many years was I in realising the cairns aren’t worth a damn? You cross the hill if you have to, use the cairns for navigation when the ways turn misty, but as things in themselves? There are better ways to channel that martial energy, and we’ll have need of it for sure if we’re to keep going, if we’re to complete this lunation. But Mars is a fool un-tempered – and he neglects his boots.
I trace a circle round the tent to keep the night ghouls away from my dreaming, then put out the lamp and await the dawn.
Patience comes not easily to youth, nor even at times to old age. But four days afoot and nothing but the same view ahead isn’t something impetuousness can mend. It’s a question I suppose of tuning in to the more intimate details: the moor all about is beautiful just now, and rewards a close attention – scent of heather, the burbling call of curlew as they circle, then the high twittering cadences of the larks. And, now and then, a grouse, chuck-chucking, and the grey ghosts of the men who stalk them.
Darius trails behind at times. When we first hooked up, I thought him too old for the journey, but I soon discovered he could walk all day, and all night if need be – all weathers too. Indeed during those less propitious times, when the wind’s blowing and the hail’s coming horizontally, stinging your face, it’s the steadiness of Darius that goes on ahead, undaunted, while I tuck in behind, meek and trusting. But with the weather so fair as this, and the promise of a clear crossing, it’s hard not to respond to that feeling of a spring in your step. There seems a crispness to the vision too, and a freshness to the air. How can one suppress the urge to make way, while the going is so good?
But I take his point. I too saw Mercurius on the ecliptic last night. Fleet of foot, always coming up behind you. Even in his brighter aspects he would not be beyond leading us up to our chests in bog.
Each night we set camp among the heather, and I draw my circle round the tent. Darius does not sleep, but vanishes into the night as my dreams come on. He knows of other places that fade in and out, farmsteads that vanished from the maps long ago, but which are still real to him, and provide welcome. I sometimes wonder if he will tire of my company in favour of his own kind, but come morning, he’s always there, brewing tea, frying bacon he has somehow conjured up in the night.
I never ask about his sources, and he never tells.
So, four days in the crossing, the final climb, and we pitch up on the summit, well away from the cairn. Ten feet tall and piled high with the inscribed stones of many a life’s labour, there is still a chance I will be seduced by it. And ahead of us now, the valley – just filling with a faint mistiness. And the light of course. Always the lone prick of light, and the ring around it, and the siren glow. But this is no Jack-o-lantern – none of those old tricks – but a warmth and a sweetness of welcome, and a cottage with roses round the door.
Darius sees me looking, senses my unease.
“We could always go around it,” I tell him. “No need to call. Is there?”
He shrugs. It’s my journey after all, but I know what he means. Sure there are many who have entered there never to be seen again, and some who emerged years later, mad as hares. Others with that bliss upon them men sometimes mistake for the kiss of angels, only to wake back in their tents at first slice of moon, and with a loneliness upon them like a raging thirst.
As the night comes on, we have the swelling moon, then Mars and Mercurius already in play. And now, above the cottage the lone light of Venus, a mirrored image among the stars. But unlike the stars she’s a steady light, sometimes false, sometimes true, sometimes a guide around the shoals and reefs. Sometimes a lure to doom.
Oh, I’ve lost myself there often enough, took what was offered for a lover, thinking it the only game. Consummation in a feathered bed and seeing in the dawn, propped against soft pillows with the sound of a woman singing downstairs. The song of the Fae. And each time she was happy to lead me that way, to hold me for ever. And for ever I would have let her.
Other times I let her go, only then to walk away in regret, to seek again her beauty and her caress. I have sought her traces on the hill-tops, one after the other, until I dropped to my knees exhausted by the love that comes upon me whenever I think of her.
A welcoming light in the deep valley, a lone woman, and a bed for the night? What man has not dreamed of such a thing? What man has not mistaken the divine, and made of it something profane?
Come morning, she meets me at the gate, older now – as I am older – but still possessed of an unsurpassed allure, at least to my eyes, since it is my eyes that seek it. And then that irradiation with the source of a profound love – life blood of the universe itself – catching in the throat, momentarily arresting breath. She smiles her welcome, but sees the change in me, and mirrors it. I look around for Darius, but he has melted away.
Some sections of the path he says, must be walked alone.
We take tea in the garden, heady with a scent of rose and lavender. There are fine china cups and saucers, a past gentility, speaking of the warmth of family, of deep ancestry. She asks about my life, since last I walked this way, and I tell of what I can remember, which seems always a little less each time. It is as if maturity is more of a forgetting than an accumulation of anything, that each time we pass, we must travel a little lighter, and trust more in what we find along the way.
We talk long, and not once is there an offer of her bed, nor do I hint for it, though I know it shall be granted if I do. But my weakness now is only for her company, my sadness only for the counting of the suns, and the march of the moon through Leo to the cusp of Virgo. And then it’s the knowing I must leave her, and the knowledge there can be such love in the world, while the fates insist it be forever a mystery unresolved.
On the fourth day, she walks with me, up the hill, beyond the cottage. It’s greener here, not so wild as the moor. There are hedgerows and blackbirds, and though it was dawn when we set out and we seem not to have gone a mile, already there’s a gathering of dusk, and long shadows racing ahead, hurrying us to an end I am not yet ready to meet. Only her presence steadies me, fills me with a sense of the divine as she guides me along the meadow paths. Though the way be strange, from here I shall not need to draw circles around my dreams. From here, Venus alone shall watch over me.
From the hill top, we gaze down into a vale already steeped in darkness, and over which a moon is riding high, nearing full. Luna in all her silvery glory: The Valley of the Moon, and another four days afoot, travelling the long pass where the sun never rises, and where the way is as strange as dreams. She bids me go well, and I take with me her parting embrace, breathe it in, take it deep inside, to a place I might return in times of need.
The path leads down into a wide vale, the silvery night dominated by a moon, neither ominous nor kind, but radiant with a growing, ambivalent energy. I feel it probing, too, sensing my direction, my desires, that it might grant the dreams accordingly. I wish Darius were here, but he never walks this place, unless it is in my dreams, which I admit is somewhat confusing. But that’s the way it is here, a way that is both travelled, and dreamed at the same time. A vale of dreams.
Trees in the moonlight, second glanced, then gone; a stony path that is also a river to be crossed. It is not a place of living, more a grand stage set of possibilities, of dreams half dreamed and then abandoned. They are my own dreams perhaps, from the times I’ve passed this way before, and don’t remember – indeed that I may have been in a hurry to forget. Sometimes I even see the shades of my own longing, my own regrets whispering as we pass by on the trail. Oh, yes, it’s all here, all of it preserved, this rural suburb of the underworld, the edge of death, waiting to be acknowledged, to be owned.
And ruins, so many ruins. They cast gaunt shadows in the hard light, fortifications, long fallen, old libraries, former places of learning, and torn books, torn papers, all dusty now, faded writings of things forgotten, long before they were made sense of. We block it out, this place, and no wonder. But if we can open ourselves to even the smallest slice of it, there are guides who will see us through.
“A penny for your thoughts.”
It’s a little girl, wan faced, dressed in sombre mourning. She holds out her hand and in her palm there nestles, not a penny, but a silver coin – silver like the moon, the calling card of Mercurius. Should I trust her? How can one not trust the innocent?
“I was wondering if I was lost.” I tell her.
“Well, it depends where you’re going.”
“The trail leads through all this strangeness,” I tell her, as indeed it does – a flinty trail, sparkling as if scattered with diamonds. “Will you walk with me a little way?”
She takes my hand and we walk. I know her now. She is my own blood, and she is in mourning for me. I am comforted by it.
There is no dawn, no dusk to mark the days here, and there’s an elasticity to time: a passing day in a heartbeat, or an entire epoch in a footstep, marking the rise and fall of civilisations, indeed the drift of continents. And always the steady moon and its ambivalent energy, growing, swelling to full, then the first turn of an imperceptible attenuation.
Strangeness, acceptance, occasional jewels of insight – nothing revelatory, just glimmerings of something stirring, carried aloft by optimism, and the comfort of that little hand in mine.
At length, she stops and points ahead to where the darkness thins and the sun rises on a greening vale, and where a figure waits: Darius. And behind him, suspended in an azure sky, the faint disk of a stately Jupiter, and its own string of jewelled moons. I feel its blessing at once, and a sense of horizons widening. Darius greets me, and we walk on. I look back for the girl, but she has already faded into the dream, into myth – long years, decades, centuries gone.
Darius knows the drill. We make camp at the first welcoming glade. He brews tea, and I spend the day in meditation. And as I meditate, I unseal the package in which I wrapped that parting embrace of Venus, and soar a while upon its wings.
Unlike the Valley of the Moon, vale of dreaming, this place is so alive, so fertile with possibility. It is a deeply measured springtime of the soul. A kestrel hovers nearby, and a hare bounds across the way. A sparkling waterfall tumbles chuckling into a lively stream. After such darkness and longing, and deep, deep strangeness, things begin to feel possible again, and there comes over me a quiet sense of the sheer nobility of being.
Darius reminds me to take care of my boots – the difference between heaven and hell.
He’s telling me to remain grounded. He’s cautioning me that hints of paradise and divine blessings tempt hubris, and we still have a way to go. Four days, and another distant hill, the highest point of our journey, visible just now, but so often locked in cloud and belonging more to the sky than the earth, and there the refuge and the pillared shrine for offerings to the gods.
It comes to me then I might have made passage through the Valley of the Moon too quickly, for it is from the depth of dreams there come our most valuable insights. And by recognising them, acknowledging them, we offer them back in gratitude. But I can remember no dreams, unless all of it was a dream. Then I remember the coin the girl gave me, and retrieve it from my pocket.
Silver with the emblem of an eagle on one side, a thunderbolt on the other – these are the tributes to Jove, mark of the Unified Field, of all that is dreamed, and lived and loved into being. Things fall into place. We don’t know how, and it’s best not to question them.
The going is easy, the way is clear, the nights are warm. My dreams are of widening horizons, and an expansion of consciousness, so that everywhere I look I am. We climb the hill on the last day, as the moon prepares its transit from Pisces into Leo. I leave my token on the high altar, among all the others from the many pilgrims who have passed this way before us. Then Darius and I descend just a little way to the mountain hut, where a girl in Bavarian costume serves us beers, and a hearty meal.
Darius is quiet. Yes… he’s always quiet but to varying degrees and meanings, and his meaning now is one of caution.
“I know,” I tell him. He nods. He knows I know. But I am always heady with altitude here and he knows also my habit of running ahead of myself, of spoiling things at the last minute, thinking I understand something, and then losing it all when the tables are turned and nothing left to hold onto. None of this is for understanding. It is simply the path we must walk.
I sleep on clean sheets that night, and in the morning look out from my balcony upon the vale below. It is already aglow with the sun, and a growing sense of clarity in the true nature of things and in the feeling I am beginning at last to grasp some meaning in my journey. Yes, that’s the nature of the Vale of the Sun, and though it seems to smile upon us, glowing promises of revelation from every hillside and meadow, something in the memory of my parting embrace with the beauty of Venus grants perspective.
It is a reminder the eternal patterns are of such abstraction they are beyond cognition, that the only abiding truth we can hold and name is that which we already carry. Love, yes, but without object, and characterised by a sense of melancholy and deep longing, the engine of the heart-mind, the motive energy behind all things.
Darius bides with me as we travel the vale. The sun is a revelation, painting all things with such richness I pray I shall always remember the world as being this way. And the nights come fresh and warm, and we sleep out on cushions of aromatic heather, waking each morning to the sound of bees buzzing around our heads.
Four days, and the way comes down at last to the rickety old town where no one speaks our language, and where the ways are many, and all the signposts have been removed. And somewhere across this place, the gate. And Saturn with his book.
Darius already feels it. It catches up with me more slowly, as the memory of previous journeys filter through. We find a pavement cafe and sit down, make ourselves understood by gesture that we are in need of coffee. The waiter, a jovial man with an elaborately curly moustache and a white apron, cracks a joke, gestures to the sky – something about the weather, I suppose. Then he goes to fetch our coffee. It is a shy waitress who brings it, but not coffee. Instead, she brings tea in a silver pot, and with fine china cups that put me in mind of that timeless heart to heart at the cottage of warm welcome. And in the mirror polish of the teapot, I see a caricature of myself, an eyebrow raised. Even when you know it’s coming, it never fails to surprise.
Darius shrugs. I smile, thank the girl, and we drink the offering of Mercurius in good humour. The devil in all revelation comes when we take ourselves too seriously. The moon is in Sagittarius now – just a few days before she goes back into the dark. We have made good time at least. I hold my cup out to Darius by way of a toast and we chink them together.
The waiter appears once more, cracks another joke, gestures again to the cloudless sky. And though we do not understand, we laugh with him, for that’s his way and he has an infectious good humour. Laugh with him, and at yourself, and he remains your friend. Rail against the madness of it, and he will darken, and then this labyrinthine town of tight little alleyways and stairways, and spiral ways to nowhere, will swallow you down forever.
Darius attempts a gesture: meaning which way to the gate? The waiter smiles and nods and points. It could be another trick, but we drink up and follow his directions anyway.
The gate is not a gate at all, but one of those old works’ clocking machines, and a grand old clock tick-tocking, with a yawning aperture for your ticket, which I don’t think I’ve got, but naturally Darius, guardian of the way, produces it from his pocket. Old Saturn turns out to be a sleepy man in a post office uniform. He sits in a booth by a turnstile. I put my ticket in the slot and the clock punches me out. Then I push through the turnstile, and into the street of awakening, where I parked my car so long ago now I can barely remember.
Time of departure and arrival, another circuit of the moon, from dark to dark again. I sleep well that night and dream deep, something different about me, though I can’t say what. So many nights and days the same old thing, until once more I wake to starlight by that nameless reedy tarn, and the scent of Darius frying bacon, reading the sky and reminding me about my boots.
Ah, these soft Sunday nights. All Creatures Great and Small — stout tweeds and the warm certainties we imagine our grandparents knew. Not mine. I think they would have laughed.
My father’s father could touch his toes with his elbows, you know? Not Yoga – a roof-fall in the mine that near broke his back.
And my mother’s father? Irish. The labouring kind. Not easy, being Irish – any kind of Irish – in the England of All Creatures Great and Small.
So don’t get me started on Downton Abbey.
Yet still, we seek it, don’t we? This thing we think we know, this thing we think we’ve lost. It’s like an ache, and we seek it always in the past.
Each generation, the same – not realising it’s a hunger for a way of being. Not an era. Not stout tweeds, nor Peaky-Blinder pocket watches, nor that warm patrician certainty.
Keep calm, old boy. Carry on. England of the Blitz. Is that what you want? You’d seek it there? A hair’s breadth from death. And jackboots.
Or would you resurrect the ghost of Lord Kitchener? You know – Your country needs you – finger pointing, accusatory. Coward. Pointing you back to a time, that first time, the dawn of mechanised slaughter. Lions led by donkeys. Seek it there?
But what is this loss you mourn, exactly? Might it not be something we deny, even as we search for it in the pockets of our dress-up forties weekends? Could it be with us all the time – through the nine to five, the long commutes, the over-spilling emails of the present?
Is it not a shadow, tapping on our shoulder – a shade from the underworld, black-clad, mourning a future we can no longer imagine?
It visits each generation, the same. Points the way – but not to Kitchener’s slaughter, to the future.
Why nostalgia for the past is more a calling from the future
We’ve all felt it. I mean that strange ache for the past, for times we never actually knew. The triggers are many: TV shows, wartime stories, imagined versions of the home front in the 1940s, 1950s. It’s in the bric-a-brac of our junk shops, selling the things we remember in our grandma’s parlour, selling Nostalgia. Something in them feels warm, solid, reassuring. We look at the present day – rushed, loud, superficial, dangerous – and we feel we’ve lost something precious, something steady and certain, that we left it behind in our childhood perhaps, in grandma’s parlour, or further to a time we never knew at all.
But the truth is, the thing we’re missing was never in the past, so we’ll not find it by looking back. Nostalgia is a misdirection – not a lie, exactly – just a psychological misunderstanding. We’re not longing for a time and a place. We’re longing for a feeling.
But we’re losing our vocabulary for such things, so these unarticulated longings tend to collapse into historical fantasy instead. We imagine a return to the values of a different era would soothe the existential ache, the restlessness we feel now. But scratch the surface of any supposed golden era, and we find the same old hardships, prejudices, fears, dangers. We know this, yet we sanitise it. Our forebears, who lived through those times, would laugh at such cosy idealisations – as we would at future generations harking back to the 2020s as their own ideal era.
So, why does nostalgia feel so convincing? Well, why would it not, since the ache is real enough? It’s just that the story we make up to explain it is mistaken. What we really miss is depth – a sense that life has an inside to it, that it has a texture you can feel, an atmosphere you can breathe, and that it really, truly means something to be alive. We miss the feeling of being rooted, connected, held safe by something larger than ourselves. We miss a sense of belonging, and the dignity of an imagined slower time. These feelings are internal, insubstantial, but we literalise them as best we can, project them out into the world, where they find no purchase, so plunge them instead deep into that idealised past. But did you ever pause to wonder what it would be like instead, meeting those feelings head on by looking inward as they emerge and asking what they really mean?
The past can’t give us what we’re after, because it never had it in the first place. The real problem is not that life used to be better. It’s that we are losing our means of self-analysis, methods that can reassure us our lives right now possess the depth we’ve been seeking all along. But self-analysis takes time and a quiet room. It takes courage, even just the lack of embarrassment, to say to someone – you know I had the strangest dream last night. I wonder what it means.
When the British Empire moved into Africa, the tribes people said they stopped sharing dreams with one another, as was their long-held tradition. They said there was no longer any need for them, because the British knew everything. But too much literalism comes at the price of our souls.
It doesn’t help the way our attention is constantly broken, that in the absence of a way back inside our own heads, we surrender ourselves all too easily to the doom-scroll, to the bubble-gum of TikTok, to the sugar rush of social media, where our conversations are corrupted into polarised argument and slogans. We work too long in the day, and our dreams are erased by pills each night. Everything becomes literal, functional, efficient. Life loses its metaphor, its symbolism, and when things stop pointing beyond themselves that way, our imagination dries up, our souls become desiccated. Then the world appears insubstantial, because depth is soul.
So then this feeling we call “nostalgia” creeps up on us, not to deceive us, but to warn us. The ache we feel isn’t calling us backwards. It’s our soul calling us into a conversation with ourselves.
What we’re missing isn’t behind us, not lost in time. It’s beneath us – under the surface of the life we’re living, and it’s all around us in the objects and the encounters of the everyday. That ache for nostalgia is not our past calling us back. It’s our soul wanting to be let in. It is the shadow of a future which might yet be, if only we would let it.
So the next time you’re indulging yourself with that nostalgic drama on TV, and you feel a pang of longing, try looking it in the eyes and asking it what it’s doing hiding all the way back there, and what you need to change in your life right now to make it real and visible again.
First of all, my thanks to all who commented on my last piece, enquiring after the health of Andrew. I’m pleased to say he’s responded well to some tinkering, cleaning and a judicious drop of oil. He seems very much his old self again. So, we settle him back into his place, let his ticking resume, forming a gentle background to the days. Well, not so gentle, actually. In fact, he’s quite a lively character, a similar rate of ticking to a wind-up wristwatch – which is quite brisk. If he were any louder, I don’t think my good lady would give him houseroom.
Some of us like a ticking clock, others can’t abide them. I suppose it’s down to whether you were brought up with one or not. Indeed, so sensitive are some of us these days to extraneous noise, there is a market for “silent” bedside clocks – not allowed even to tick softly once per second. We had an early version, which met with my good lady’s approval until I was foolish enough to point out it did tick – just once every fifteen seconds. Claims of insomnia ensued. Fortunately, the newer types are completely silent, so harmony is restored. But oh, how I love a ticking clock!
Perhaps the loudest ticker I have is Norman, banished to my study, back of house. He’s the older brother of my clocks, dating to the inter-war years, probably 1935. He’s typically, beautifully Art-Deco in style, boasts a full Westminster Chime and has the steady beat of a big brass pendulum. The guy I bought him off, some forty years ago, had completely restored him. That guy’s name was Norman.
Norman was a colleague and shop supervisor, though formerly a craftsman. He was originally multi-skilled and possessed an eye for precision. I reckon he would have been apprenticed during the early post-war period. Then, much later, as a manager, he kept returning to the tools for a hobby – restoring old clocks – since the tools, precision metalworking and making, were his calling. Which raises the question: is management a calling?
Norman
In my own later years, working in the engineering industry, it seemed the ambition of many youngsters was to be fast-tracked to project management, bypassing as much of the hands-on stuff as possible. Indeed, I encountered many a callow youth I had to be polite to, as one never knew if one would be working for them in a few years’ time. Very few I met possessed any affinity for tools, or indeed for deep technical work in general. Many could not communicate even basic geometry by drawing, or think in three dimensions, which had once been a prerequisite for an engineering position, and certainly for Norman and me. But the world, it seemed, had moved on. Laptops and spreadsheets were now the tools of the trade.
Norman was close to retirement when I knew him, a grand old silver-haired gentleman – old he seemed at least to me, though no older than I am now, which does not seem very old at all. At least, not to me. Others – those aspirant baby-faced project managers – might disagree.
But again: is management a calling? I don’t mean to downplay the importance of the administrative function, nor the management of projects. Indeed, in our post-industrial societies, it’s pretty much all there is, now, with anything below it strictly minimum-waged. Norman adapted well to his position though, had a reputation for being a fair-minded supervisor, occasionally grumpy, but generally well regarded by his men. And as I say, he shifted his calling into other avenues – took it home with him, to his workshop, his hobby-bench.
But no, as a generic term, I wonder if there is not something more evasive about the calling to management. For another thing I noticed was the mobility: responsibilities were not allowed to become burdensome, so roles were switched. In charge of one thing today, something else tomorrow. You never could pin a professional managerialist down. Norman, on the other hand, took forty years – a slow progression, a deepening, a Herculean shouldering of burdens, and an earned degree of soul.
We might say then a true calling requires weight. There is a kind of gravitational pull that draws a person down into the specificity of their work. A craft does this naturally: it binds you to materials, to process, to the stubbornness of the real. The medical and the teaching professions also do this in their own ways, and have suffered their own dreadful losses in recent times. But management – at least as it is commonly practised – seems almost to have purposely evolved to avoid such gravity.
Indeed, it possesses an airy, mobile, unburdened archetype. One is forever moving on, moving through the next post, the next reorganisation, the next initiative. Nothing is allowed to accumulate, and therefore nothing roots down. Norman, by contrast, let forty years of metal filings settle into his pockets like a ship’s ballast, aiding a steady course. He stayed long enough for the place, the people, even the temper of the machines to shape a character. That is what I hear in the ticking of his clock, now: not efficiency, nor ambition, but depth – something earned.
But like Norman – like me too, I suppose – that kind of workplace, that kind of world, is now largely a thing of the past, and we must let it go. Still, I listen, and I wonder if anything comes close to replacing it, for this is not nostalgia for a lost era; more for a mode of being. These old clocks, you see… they don’t just tell the time. In fact, they’re not about telling the time at all. Your phone will do that much better these days. No, it’s more I think the times they have known. As such, they become the keepers of our stories. And the best stories don’t just look back with fondness for something lost. They ask questions about our future.
Have a think about it. What objects in your own life carry the weight of stories? What do they say about the world we’ve lost – or gained?
A little sunshine illuminates autumn, renders its colours luminous, dazzling, magical. Such days are to be treasured, of course, but there are also days like these: you crack open the car door and the first thing that hits you is the scent of leaf mould and damp earth. It’s mushroomy and moist, and the autumn gold resists a kicking by clinging heavy to the ways. To put it mildly, we’ve had a lot of rain this week, and the sky looks like we’re not done yet. The brooks are running, and the falls are falling. But it’s still beautiful. Dream-like.
The little blue car delivers us to Hall Avenue at Rivington. It’s a busy midweek. I count three coaches parked up awkwardly. I’m wondering if we’re now included on the “See Britain in a Week” package tours: next stop, thirty seconds in Grasmere. But then I hear the euphoric sounds of schoolkids set free, excited voices muffled by the woodland. It’s amazing how many people a forest can absorb and still afford each of us a sense of privacy.
The light is poor, of course, so we’ll have to see how it goes with the camera. We’ve picked rather a slow lens for the day, but if we click the ISO up a notch we should be okay. The yellows and golds, of course, eclipse the dull skies.
No new ground today – just a familiar walk, a zigzagging meander up through the terraced gardens. I’m still not firing on all cylinders. Never am at this time of year. Some walkers are born Range Rovers, effortless cruising to the top. I’m more your Morris Minor (Cabriolet version) – chugging along in a cloud of exhaust smoke, and hitting bottom gear early on. We don’t always get to the top either, but when we bail out we like to think we do it with a kind of antique stylishness.
Anyway, we’ll not be pushing our luck too much – just three or four miles on autopilot, an eye for the colours, take some pictures, meander back down to the Barn for a coffee, then home. Coming up on five years retired now (have I mentioned that before?) and things still aren’t wearing thin. Familiar ground, yes, and walked a hundred times, but like this, on a whim, midweek, mid-morning — may I never take it for granted.
Still dreaming of work, though I usually take it as a proxy for something else now — the characters standing in as symbols for the particular emotions they aroused back then: frustration, despair, intimidation, anger, loathing. Some of the more tyrannical and driven characters I can remember have been turning up in Hawaiian shirts, full volume, dancing like they’re trying to make up for lost time. Some are dead now. Work and tyranny were all they knew. I hope they found peace, though I doubt they would know what to do with it. God bless them.
Mushrooms, fallen trees slowly rotting back to atoms. A light wind sends cascades of gold through the forest’s gloom. The dream of autumn recurs and we welcome it with open arms. Full moon tonight (at time of writing) – halfway through the lunation – lunation 319, if you’re counting by Meeus, or 1272 if you prefer to go by Brown – and yes I know most of us don’t do either, and it is a little eccentric. But dreams can overwhelm once you get into the habit, so I hold them in chapters and title them by the moons. And the dreams respond, loosely – there’s never a precision with the dreaming. But if anything, it disproves the old rationalist misconception that dreams are just unprocessed garbage. There is an intelligence behind them, a depth to the soul. At the minute it’s been telling me not to hold myself too much to the old standards of rationalist doubt, that at my time of life it doesn’t matter what others think. That it’s a time for deepening rather than seeking the social safety of conformity.
Slippery underfoot — wet leaves, wet gritstone pavings. Puddled ways, the sound of falling water from the ravine. As always, there is the feel of a lost citadel about the terraced gardens — a lost era certainly, but much of what we see is not much more than a hundred years old. It’s had a chequered history since it passed out of the hands of Viscount Leverhulme, fallen into ruin several times. But since the Terraced Gardens Trust took it over with a huge grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, there has been a transformation — so many of the old structures, once dangerous, are now restored, and the vast area of hillside and zig-zaggy terracing maintained by an army of enthusiastic volunteers. In otherwise dark times, when all the pointers are pointing down, it’s done me good over the years to come up here and see what can happen when things are pointing the other way.
We reach the Japanese Lake – always a pleasant pot, especially when the falls are running. Here we settle a while, break out a nutty bar. A rambler’s group emerges from the woodland and spreads out to take in the air of repose. They remind me of the group I invented in my angry novel “Winter on the Hill”, and called themselves the “Autumn Tints”. The memory links back to earlier writings, essays and poems all inspired by this area.
We wind up in the autumn of 2003:
There’s little left but ruins now, Of glory days gone by, And images in sepia, Of gardens in the sky.
Paved walkways and pagodas, And a house upon a hill, A place to gather up one’s thoughts, And measure out one’s fill,
Of dreams and schemes and visions bold, To change the lives of men, Improving what had gone before, With the flourish of a pen.
But what a man can render up, In mortar and in stone, Does not always last for ever, Once the visionary’s gone.
Sometimes a dream is just too big, For other men to grasp, So all we’re left is ruins, Of a dream that didn’t last.
I’m not sure about it now. There’s been a lot of water over these cascades since then. The original vision of Leverhulme, his grand northern retreat, and these gardens by Thomas Mawson had an all too brief yet rather magical flourishing. But the material world is ever ephemeral. Like the years, things come to harvest, and settle back once more to autumn. But autumn brings the dream time, and if you’re settled and in the right frame of mind, the dream of this place goes on.
I used to find my work interesting. It was about making things with computers and other complex machinery. It was specialised, unusual, technical – came out of research we did around the millennium, employing the computers of the day to the very hilt of their abilities. That got easier of course as the machines evolved, became faster, smarter. Meanwhile, outside of the little back-room where I worked, the company evolved too, over the years – became more corporate. It expanded, shrank, expanded, shrank again. Departments disappeared, new ones were invented, reorganisations swept the ranks like stormy squalls. But, unlike the computers, and for all of its self important re-shuffling, it didn’t seem to grow in capability – indeed quite the opposite. On the surface, what I saw was a drift towards offices that were vast open spaces, everyone sitting at an identical machine, typing emails, filling spreadsheets, time-sheets, booking meetings. But what they were actually doing – I mean delivering – grew more and more opaque.
I’ve always wondered about that, I mean the way the corporate machine eventually seemed to hold us all captive, immersed in this bullshit. Me? I’d started to feel – somewhat arrogantly – like I was the only one doing anything real – something that went into a box and got put on a wagon and shipped out at the end of the day. But otherwise, that back-room suited me – the isolation, I mean. I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. It’s not a path I’ve consciously chosen, more one that seems to have chosen me. As others submitted meekly to capture, to immersion, suffocation, I allowed myself to gravitate to that little basement back-room, wedged between other forgotten functions like the janitors, and the maintenance men. And there, I felt I could still breathe.
In theory I had a line manager, but I was just a name on his spreadsheet and so long as my head didn’t pop up on his radar, I never heard from him. The radar swept for employees who had insufficient funding to cover their time. I always had plenty of funds. Although what I did was unusual, my services, my little widgets, seemed to be in quiet demand. At any rate, I alwasy seemed to muddle through. Requests came in by email. I’d do my thing, and deliver the goods. I could go weeks and not see anyone at all – just clock in, tend my machines, then go home again.
But then this one time I came into the back-room of a morning, coat still dripping wet from the rain outside, to find a couple of guys logged on and huddled over my machines. Like I said, my set-up was special, unusual. I’d adapted those machines to serve a unique purpose, though they’d still do the more mundane corporate functions, and that appeared to be what these guys were up to.
I didn’t recognise them. They were from another office, another part of the country, visiting. There was a hot-desk policy in play by that time, which was working out a bit like musical chairs. I was usually okay of course, my machines being special purpose. Things must have been particularly tight up in the offices for these guys to wind up poking about in the basement for seats.
I explained to them I couldn’t work until they’d finished, and they replied that they’d likely be all day, and since hot-desk was first come first served, and what they were doing was important too, or so they said, I was out of luck. They came off as a bit arrogant, even a bit offensive. So I laid it on and told them I hoped they’d logged me off properly, otherwise they’d probably lost the company a month’s work. This wasn’t true of course, and anyway, they weren’t having any of it, said if that was the case, it was my fault for not logging myself off like I was supposed to.
So I put my coat back on and prepared to leave them to it – go have a coffee in the canteen or something – when one of them started rooting in my desk drawers. I don’t know what he was after, but I explained I had personal stuff in there, and I’d appreciate it if he didn’t go rooting, but he came back with the corporate line that we weren’t supposed to have items of a personal nature on site – I mean even the kids weren’t allowed Smurfs on their desks any more.
The only remaining salvo at my disposal was a little black book which I took from my pocket. I asked both their names and wrote them down. I didn’t make a fuss about it, or tell them why – that I was going to report them up the line or something – because I wasn’t. I could see it unsettled them. Funny that. Even in this age of hyper-surveillance you get blase about the spy in the machine, but no one likes to think of their names hand-written, in a little black book in someone’s pocket.
Naturally, I was puzzled by the intrusion. I mean, contrary to what they claimed, they weren’t doing anything of any importance. Most likely they were costing the company money – travel and hotels and such – and here they were holding me up, so I couldn’t deliver anything either. But I was fine, I had a funding code to cover diversionary activities. So, I could just go sit in a corner of the canteen, drink coffee and pretend to shuffle papers, while actually writing poetry. You couldn’t get more diversionary than that could you?
Poetry was my hobby – though hobby’s perhaps too small a word for it. Naturally, it wasn’t permitted on company time, but better than staring into space, and easy enough to pretend I was doing something legit. Protocol perhaps demanded I’d better pass word up the line that some random bods were hogging my machine, but then I needed a machine to do that, and all were taken. We were at a Kafkaesque impasse, then. So, yes, I wrote poetry.
Were I a different kind of guy, my ego in hock to the corporate libido, I would have been obliged to get angry at the disruption. But I viewed these itinerant hot-deskers more as a kind of virus infecting a system by now so sick, it couldn’t see that most of its functions had been taken over by performative box-ticking. So few of us actually made anything any more, I mean seriously added value, and we had to carry these jokers as well. But the real mystery? None of it seemed to matter. The company didn’t collapse under the weight of its own absurdities. And then you look around and the same might be said for much of what was going on in the wider world of work, too. Nobody was making anything. We were all just staring at screens, pushing digits.
So there I sat. The canteen was quiet at that time of a morning – just the chef and kitchen people, back of counter, preparing lunch. These were still your “doing” sort of people, and I felt a kinship with them. At the end of the day they could point to what they’d done – so many meals served, so many plates washed. Others would drift in for coffee refills, nod their vague acquaintanceship, then drift back up to the offices, a kind of zombified look about them. And I wrote my poem.
It was blank verse thing. At the back of my mind there was still that old school insistence poetry should rhyme – no fair tennis without a net and all that – but blank verse lets you get your thoughts down quickly – sense impressions, visitations from the imagination. That always felt more important to me, and you could tidy it up later, look for rhythm, even rhyme if you still wanted it.
The thing with a poem is, it’s like an inner part of us wants to see itself expressed in words. And that was odd because it’s such a literal thing, while much of the pointlessness I saw in the day to day lay precisely in the way we took everything so literally: why the spreadsheet had become more important than the data it recorded, that the data had become more important than the values it expressed. Value, real value, lay somewhere else. It wasn’t literal, yet still sought expression, risked corruption at the hands of the profane. It was for the poet to realise that, and protect it.
I took lunch in the canteen when everyone else piled in, then took a walk down to my back-room to find the hot-deskers still hard at it, doing nothing. I asked if they’d be all day, and was met with the snippy reply that they’d take as long as was necessary. Sure, when a company reaches that point where it’s no longer making anything, it becomes a haven for arseholes. Arseholes don’t last long when the key performance indicator is: did you deliver that box out the door?
My wife thought I was joking when she asked me, over dinner, if I’d had a good day, and I’d replied yes, that I got a decent poem out of it. But then she realised I was serious and asked me if I was happy turning up every day like that, trying to maintain the light in my eyes, while the lights were going out everywhere else. I told her it was just the nature of things, and anyway, thinking about it in the quirky way I had always gave me something to write about. But she had a point.
Then, that night, I had a dream – well, it was half dream, half total recall. I was back at primary school – so I could only have been about nine or ten, and I was about to join the football team on the mini-bus to go play another school. I wasn’t that great at football, and I was only picked to play that day because the number one striker – we’ll call him Bruiser – had bunked off school, so they were a man down. Then, as we were boarding the bus, he turned up, albeit without his boots.
I could see the way the teacher was thinking – he was a competitive man, so even a kids’ inter-school football league was life or death to him. Some people are just like that, aren’t they? He knew, and I knew, if I played they had a less than even chance of winning. If Bruiser played, they were going to win for sure because Bruiser took no prisoners.
Now I didn’t care if I played or not, but it seemed pretty obvious to me the way everyone else was thinking – the teacher and my so called team-mates – and it puzzled me they couldn’t see how easily I saw through their hemming and hawing. They got around to it eventually of course, which just left the question of Bruiser’s boots, which is when I saw the teacher looking at my feet.
Sure enough, Bruiser fitted neatly into my boots, and off they all went. Did they win the game? Don’t know – never asked. I got to go home on time, but without my boots. When I got them back, they were scuffed to blazes, and my dad went and played hell with the teacher. I was sorry about the boots because my dad wasn’t made of money. But other than that, I didn’t mind and had quite enjoyed playing in the garden instead of standing there freezing my nadgers off on a muddy pitch.
So anyway, still feeing a bit weird after that dream I turned up bright and early next day, and there they still were, my pair of hot-deskers, camping out in my little back room. And they had a look on their faces as if to say you’ll have to get up much earlier than that to catch us out. So I spent another day in the canteen, and got another poem out of it, this one about the value of touching grass, a kind of echo of the dream. You can’t put that into a spreadsheet, can you? What it’s like to touch grass.
In the end I gave it a week, to see if anyone would come and fish me out of that canteen, ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. But they didn’t. Come Monday my hot-deskers had finally moved on. I wiped their fingerprints off my screens, and settled back, ready to catch up. But I could still feel their sickly presence in the air. Something had changed. Even the little bit of work I did, and which I’d drawn some satisfaction from over the years, just didn’t seem important any more. So I went home.
That was years ago. And, so far as I know, no one’s noticed I’m missing
Touching Grass – a meditation
I used to make things. Now, I walk the meadows, touching grass. Both real and imagined.
Palms down, fingers splayed, I snag the waist-high drooping heads – the texture of rabbit’s tails, and crow’s foot.
Such vast landscapes these, places of presence, and past. Imagination too, of course, like the sheep cropped fields, dewy-sweet, that lick my boots, now, to a varnished glaze.
And those fresh mown swards, scented of all the homes I’ve ever known, where, eyes gently closed, I am returned to other versions of myself – boy and man, callow youth and would-be sage.
Yet it was once the all of me, to fashion, to shape and change, to alter this world in my own image. But it’s only here lies the more authentic reality, and a nameless soul-meaning, in the feel, imagined and otherwise…
We begin the week with a lady asking me to undress. Naturally I hasten to obey, then await, rather awkwardly, the administrations of a second lady who, contrary to my expectations is very gentle and, in spite of her pressing schedule, takes as much time with me as is necessary, so to speak.
Yes, I find myself at the hospital, where I’ve been led to expect a biopsy, this being a procedure that is sometimes a prelude to life-changing, and profoundly intrusive treatment – yet also, for all of that, still ending in death. But this second lady, this young doctor, after careful examination, deems it unnecessary and sends me away with a prescription for a humble tube of cream. The first lady then takes care to make sure I know where I’m going, and assures me they’ll be in touch with a future appointment to see how I’m doing.
I admit I’d rather been bracing myself for that biopsy, so it’s a relief to find myself sitting in the dispensary instead, here amongst the walking wounded, waiting on topical antibiotics and steroids. And as I wait the mind turns, as it does, to the subject of intimacy, and to the sacred nature of certain interactions between human beings. In any other context, my earlier encounter with members of the opposite sex would have had entirely different connotations, but the medical setting carries with it as much of a sense of the sacred as perhaps a religious ceremony. It seems we each then carry with us a sense of the sacred, and can switch it on whenever the occasion demands.
It can be a life or death thing, or just a mild illness which we wish would go away, but won’t, and we need the magic of the medical profession to make it so. Last time I enquired it was 12 years of training to become a GP, 15 for a hospital consultant. These are seriously committed and uncommonly driven individuals, and thank God there are such still amongst us.
My own case may still come to a biopsy, but I wasn’t given the impression there was much urgency, so I take comfort in that. And non-urgent waiting times for dermatology in the NHS, these days, are of the order of 20 weeks. Yet still we talk of the need for efficiencies, rather than investment, in order to save a failing system, as though this sacredness were a mere “process” to be streamlined. But the sacred cannot be made efficient; coming from within, it is a distinctly human phenomenon, and it takes the time it needs. To believe otherwise is to commit a category error.
Anyway, my name is called. I rise to collect my little tube of cream, surprised to find I don’t have to pay for it. When I enquire the guy checks his paperwork. You’re over sixty, he reminds me. Ah, yes… considerably over sixty, I remind myself. The flesh is perhaps drifting now into that time of life, when more maintenance is required, but at least my medicines are free.
The rain is lashing when I recover daylight, and attempt to decipher the parking machine. It takes a while. Everyone is struggling with it, and queues have formed. I thought I had mastered this thing on previous occasions, but that was a while ago, and the machine has changed its tunes. People lean in to help. The hospital does not benefit from the fee, though it could clearly use the funds. Instead, the machine collects rent for private investors — thus are our human frailties exploited, all of which strikes me as a grave profanity. Yet there are some nations where hospital parking is the least of it.
Having paid our dues to that great rentier in the cloud, we venture into town, in search of coffee, and crowds to watch. All told, the week has got off to a wobbly start, and I find myself wrong-footed. I had no plan beyond this morning and presenting my corporeal form to the doctor. I had even wondered if I might be hobbling now with stitches. But then the weather forecast is looking like there’ll be no “out and about” this week anyway.
Pulling up on the car-park in town, I note a warden splatting a penalty notice on the windscreen of the car next to mine. The little red square sits amongst a fall of orange and gold leaves — its artificiality in shape and tone offensive to the eye. This is not a job I would relish, indeed the warden looks even less happy than I imagine the recipient, when they turn up. But by contrast, the girls in the coffee-shop smile, address their customers as love and darlin’.
I’m reminded of Hermione, a girl I made up, and whose opening line this was – “So, what can I get you darlin’?” – a woman who embodied warmth, a sense of hearth, home and an authentic cheerfulness. That was what? Seven novels ago. My… I wonder how she’s going on.
There is something sacred in that too – I mean what these girls do – indeed, any act of service or care, freely given. After all, these girls don’t make enough money to warrant such warmth. But that’s the difference between us and the machines. And it may just be the reason this is the busiest coffee shop in town. You can’t account for that on a spreadsheet.
We linger over coffee – just ten minutes left on the ticket. We imagine the warden prowling, so return to the car. The rain comes on again, squally and cold, autumn settling in. No matter – the gods are smiling on us. The sacred isn’t only to be found in the grand or the holy, but in these fleeting moments, even amid days of prolonged rain. It’s just a question of knowing where, and how to look.
The Rivendale Review 
