current affairs | The Rivendale Review

Posts Tagged ‘current affairs’

Out and about – Some Trees and a Tractor

Posted in countryside, current affairs, journal, lancashire, out and about, outdoors, photography, walking, tagged adventure, current affairs, hiking, hodder, hurst green, lancashire, nature, ribble, travel, UK, walking, writing on March 13, 2026| 5 Comments »

We’re a little further up the Ribble Valley today at Hurst Green. It’s a cloudy bright sort of day with a fresh wind, the meadows glowering darkly one moment and glowing a lush green the next. The hedgerows closer to home are already in leaf, but here, not an hour’s drive away, it’s still early in the season, trees bare and gaunt in silhouette from afar, and you have to get up close to see they’re budding. It’s the Tolkien Trail today, a loop of the rivers Hodder and Ribble amid some fine, rolling Lancashire scenery. It’s about a year since I last came this way, in tow with a whimsical Galadriel, as I recall. But she’s keeping a low profile today.

Speaking of Galadriel, I’m reminded how elves can at times be as warlike as humans, but their legends don’t depict them being anywhere near as stupid. As we walk we’re mindful the world is shaking to its foundations. The Strait of Hormuz is now closed, a predictable response to the bombing of Iran. As of this morning, UK fuel prices haven’t moved much, but they will, when strategic reserves run out. Then there’ll be panic-buying. All of that will come, but I’m conscious our inconvenience is insignificant, compared with the suffering of others who have munitions raining down upon their towns and cities. Of course, we’ve had Middle-Eastern conflicts before, but there seems a particularly unhinged madness about this one, and I have a bad feeling about it.

There’s a roaring in the trees as we come down to Over Hacking wood and approach the Hodder. Pines soar here, closely packed, and they clatter ominously above like bamboo chimes as we pass, the wind stirring them. Some are freshly fallen, bearing the bright scars of newly splintered wood, the soft earth cratered at their base.

It’s a route I’ve pretty much photographed to death. Still, find myself pausing at the same view-points, looking for something new in the details. Mostly the light isn’t promising, the sun slipping behind cloud at the wrong moments, then on we go. The triptych of trees here, seen from the track leading down from Hodder Place, I’ve not noticed before, so loiter awhile, waiting for light.

But as I wait, I find it hard to avoid the sense that it’s becoming more difficult to find beauty in the passing detail, in the small, like this, when there’s so much going on in the world now that is irredeemably, and profoundly ugly. We woke up this morning to images of burning tankers in the Persian Gulf, and here we are waiting for the light to shine on some trees. At what point does that become ridiculous? When is it less of a resistance to the Zeitgeist and more a refuge from things we cannot alter? Perhaps it’s both. Or perhaps such things become even more important, the uglier the world becomes.

It’s striking how commentators still assume there is a reason for it all, yet even the most informed appear to be struggling with this one. For myself, observing such things from afar, it seems that, once upon a time, terrible acts were undertaken for identifiable reasons, however cynical. Now it more often feels as if explanations have been dispensed with, and confusion itself has become the atmosphere, indeed the entire oeuvre of power. Thus have our leaders moved beyond explanation. They have nothing useful, nothing intelligible to say to us, inhabiting as they do their own world, as do we ours. What this means for our futures is unclear, but disturbing all the same – our certainties shrinking to a bubble no greater than might fit in the palm of your hand, or through the all too selective viewfinder of a camera.

Lunch is by the Hodder, a stretch of pebbled bank where one can get down to the waterside. We’ve had plentiful rains recently, including torrents overnight, so the river is high and deep voiced. There’s plenty of company here, with other walkers and dogs, and the usual detritus – bottles and beer cans and the almost obligatory bags of dog-dog muck. The Tolkien Trail is always well walked, even midweek. I would not think to attempt it at the weekends. The Hodder is reflecting sunlight here, an alluring sparkle to it as it slides by, and the trees on the opposite bank roar in the wind, a touch of March Madness about them.

I filled the car this morning, burned about a gallon on the way over here, another gallon by the time I get home. It used to be I’d be panicking about conserving fuel, needing it for the commute. There was no such thing as home working during previous fuel-shocks, and I recall a particularly inflexible attitude on behalf of employers, too. Unlike in past crises though we now have far more electric vehicles on the road. You can pick used ones up very cheaply, though their battery life is probably much reduced now, with uncertainty over longevity and the cost of replacement. Still, they’d be fine for knocking about locally. Were I in a bind, and still having to commute, I’d be considering an older model as a backup now, though as it is, I can probably ride out at least some of what is coming our way.

We don’t linger over lunch but press on, making our way by Cromwell’s Bridge, up the hill, cross the meadow to Winkley Hall and the Piggery. Here we pick up the broader sweep of the Ribble, the newly diverted path no longer taking us by the spectacular oak, but here it is, captured in other times. Instead, we have this old tractor by the wayside – always something Stoic about them, I think. It doesn’t look to be in working condition, but I’ve seen worse, and still running. How many seasons, I wonder, ploughing the earth? It speaks of continuity, of certainty, of return.

We have a clear path now back to Hurst Green, most of it in company with the run of the river. Up ahead there’s another walker, what looks like a tall young woman, long auburn hair and a Barbour jacket, nipped at the waist. She has a graceful, upright posture. I catch her up as we climb from the valley, to the Shireburn Arms, and exchange greetings in passing. She’s actually getting on in years, a lovely, mature face that smiles easily. We meet again in the coffee shop in Hurst Green, and we exchange a joke, then I’m carrying my coffee-to-go back to the little blue car. It’s looking a bit grey actually, ready for a wash and spruce up.

The woman was interesting – in other times a potential meet-cute of course – but for the writer, it feels more like an introduction to a character who simply has to be written about, after she’s spent some time developing in the imagination. With the world on fire these are such small things, but beautiful in themselves, and we mustn’t forget that.

Sometimes it’s the only thing we have to go on.

Read Full Post »

Out and About – tending to the inner and outer worlds

Posted in Anglezarke, blogging, countryside, current affairs, existential, health, journal, lancashire, Metaphysical, moorland, out and about, outdoors, philosophical, photography, walking, West Pennine Moors, tagged countryside, current affairs, dreaming, dreams, hiking, lancashire, life, meditation, mindfulness, poetry, social media, UK, walking, writing on June 12, 2025| 12 Comments »

I’m a bit nervous, parking the car by the wayside here at Roddlesworth. It looks like the cows are gathering at the gate, in the meadow up ahead. It’s a bit early (or maybe late) for milking, but I’m wondering if they’ll be herded down this narrow lane, in my direction. A cow’s flanks can crush the side of a car and not even notice. Anyway, after watching them for a bit I don’t think they’re coming out. I’m just catastrophising – an increasingly tempting response to uncertainty – a kind of capitulation ahead of time.

I blame my Substack feed, which has been growing increasingly hysterical and intemperate of late. If you write on there you have to accept back this tide of stuff you neither wished nor asked for. I’ve un-followed everything of a “current affairs” nature, thinking that was driving the algorithm into depths of despair since – let’s face it – things are pretty desperate at the moment. But if anything it’s made it worse. Unlike writing on WordPress, I can’t control what comes back at me, which is too much of everything: America, Ukraine, Gaza,… And yes, I know all of that is real, and growing darker by the day, but there’s nothing I can do about it directly. And that rubs up all wrong against the natural instinct most normal humans have for altruism – that where there’s suffering we want to help out.

Still, here we are, West Pennine’s again. We’ve had a long cold spell through late May and early June, with lots of rain, but things look to be taking up again. Mid-June and we have a riot of colour in the hedgerows with foxglove and cow parsley, comfrey and campion, also a strong scent of herbs rising with the heat. We’re off over Brinscall Moor today, tracing a little trod way among the lost farms, then an even thinner trace of a route along the upper Hatch Brook, across heather and bog cotton, onto Great Hill.

I’ve been lost on Brinscall Moor, depth of winter, a thick mist, and an hour from sunset, so I’ve been making a point of getting more of a feel for it, over the years. On a clear day like this, you navigate by the trees, knowing which of the various lost farms they’re attached to, and then orienting yourself on the map. I could probably get by on a bad day now, but I’d rather not. Days like this are best, when the views are far-reaching.

The curlews are out in force, and musical. I think they must have young in the grass, and they’re anxious about my intentions. We have skylarks too, and I hear a grouse somewhere. I’ve been reading George Monbiot on the creeping desertification of our uplands – or rather their reduction to a monoculture – namely purple moorgrass, which is about the only thing sheep won’t eat. It’s what gives so much of our moorland that uniform beige colour – sheepwrecked, he calls it. But the moors around Brinscall are green – haven’t seen sheep up here for years now, and I count a wide variety of grasses and heath bedstraw – even some opportunistic shrubs beginning to establish themselves. I don’t know if this is planned or the result of economic circumstance rendering sheep worthless.

Our first milestone is the ruin of Grouse Cottage, and its magnificent sycamores. Then it’s south-east to the fingerpost, and south-west for Popes – just a pile of rubble by the brookside, which we cross by stepping stones. From here we pick up the distant marker that is the stunted beech tree at the ruins of Botany Bay, where we break for lunch.

As a symbol of tenacity in the face of insuperable odds, and terrible weather, the Botany Bay Beech is an inspiration. And we could all use some of that. I have a rummage in the grass for any beech nuts it might have dropped, thinking I could grow one on, but it’s a big tree, a beech – not exactly the sort of thing you’d rear in a pot. Quite a statement though in the back garden, and in a hundred years, it’s not going to be my problem. I pop a couple into my shirt pocket for luck anyway.

Here’s another, slightly more impressionistic shot from several years ago. I think I was trying too hard with the effect. Some say less is more. I don’t know – I do remember the day and the picture sums it up fairly well – gritty sky and squally rain while today is clear blue and blustery, at least on the moor – hot and sultry in the vale.

They’ve erected one of those information boards by the ruin, telling you all about the farm, including a group portrait from the days when it was known as the Summer House. Hard to believe it was a scene of revelry once, a long walk up from Brinscall on a Saturday night, remote and lonely now. Haven’t seen a soul since leaving the car an hour ago.

Another stand of trees brings us to Solomons, then the Far Temple, hardly anything to go on underfoot here – just following the lay of the land as this little isthmus of pastures narrows down to point at Old Man’s Hill. Then we’re up onto the black waste of Withnell Moor with its heather out of season, and contrasting shadings of cotton grass. We can see Great Hill now, the broad green flank of it, and quite intimidating from this angle.

We’ll be picking up the main route from White Coppice shortly, which is always busy even on the grimmest of days. So we slow it down and soak up the sound of solitude. It’s different, out here – silence I mean. It’s a silence woven from a million micro-sounds – distinct from popping on a pair of ear defenders – and then you’ve the sigh of the wind and the curlew, distant now, but lovely.

We rest a while on a stile, take in the wide sweep of the moor, views out to a distant Darwen Tower, beyond to Pendle and Longridge fell. I’m feeling quite done in, actually, and not a bit sweaty. It was a late night last night, writing, researching stuff for the new novel. I thought I’d reached a point in my creative years when the flame was beginning to die down – the last few novels have been difficult, but this one’s writing itself – something daemonic driving it, like a deep and powerful engine. So many threads to chase up, and all of them stimulating. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the year has also been rich in dreams – long may it continue.

I know it’s no solution to the problems of the world, cutting oneself off from the fire-hose of online media, but so few of us are in a position to do anything constructive about it. And to shout all caps in the comments section is the same as shouting at the wind, or worse, peeing into it, and only damaging to oneself.

It might sound overly poetic, but those of you struggling with all of this, if you can cultivate your dreams instead of your social media, it’ll put you in a much better place. I’ve long believed we each have inside of us something that knows best what we need, and we have to find a way of trusting it. Better that than some machine algorithm which treats us as a package to be manipulated and sold on. But the world makes such a noise, it’s harder these days than ever to be a dreamer, and be taken seriously.

Anyway, off we go – picking up that main path from White Coppice and, sure enough, we encounter company, but not the chatty sort. This old beardy gent gives me a blank stare in exchange for my greeting. Funny, he has the look of an experienced rambler, and they’re usually good for a passing chat. Then again, he’s neatly togged out in expensive gear – something ironing-board fresh about him – and looking respectable – he perhaps didn’t think the same about me.

At the cross shelter on the summit, someone’s been to the toilet in one corner of it, so we move on, find somewhere else to snack, and top up on water, and where better than the ruins of Pimms – another oasis of green and soaring sycamores on the moor’s edge?

Things are changing. I’m changing. I read it in the dreams. I remember those early years of retirement, and how they felt like I was on holiday. Four years on and it’s different now. This is the way things are – settling in, and no great desire to make an impact in the world. The big camera gets left behind on trips like this more often than not – having worked the fantasy landscape photographer out of my system. Instead, I take this old small sensor zoom, light as a feather, and just for the blogging, which seems a constant, and still satisfying to me as a way of ordering my thoughts. And there are the books, of course. There will always be books to write, for as long as I can keep dreaming.

Down to the old turnpike now, and the sudden shock of traffic. Pick your moment and run, make the crossing, and plunge back into the cover of Roddlesworth. Here, we follow the run of Rocky Brook, pausing only briefly for a shot of the falls. Never managed a good one of this yet – including today. Look at those purple speckles on the water! Here’s another go, more artistically “imagined” by AI.

And then we’re back at the car, cows still safe in the meadow, doing what cows do, and just the lazy hush of a late afternoon. Silence, again, but somehow different to when we set out.

I’m reminded that even when everything feels like it’s falling apart, there are still places – real places, beyond our screens – where you can go and things still hold together pretty much the way they always have. And then perhaps, each of us, by tending to these inner and outer paths, by way of intention, mindfulness just calming the hell down, we might yet heal the world in all those places it really is coming undone.

Five and a half miles round, six hundred feet or so of ascent.

Thanks for listening.

Play me out, Stevie:

Who else remembers this like it was yesterday?

Read Full Post »

Out and About – Rambling around the Ribble from Marles Wood

Posted in blogging, countryside, current affairs, existential, health, journal, lancashire, out and about, outdoors, photography, walking, tagged current affairs, lancashire, marles wood, meditation, mental health, nature, outdoors, ribble valley, ribchester, rumination, travel, walking, walks, world affairs on March 5, 2025| 13 Comments »

Inspiration and healing in the Lancashire landscape

My apologies to those who come to the Rivendale Review looking for walking directions. I try to cover that with a map at the bottom of these “out and about” pieces, which should tell you all you need to know. The rest – the ramble – is what follows, and these are just the impressions that come and go as we walk the route, shaped by the times in which we walk it. Today’s theme: inspiration and healing.

News from America is coming thick and fast, and sounding like a fiendishly well-crafted perma-crisis unfolding in real-time. Those undignified scenes from the Oval Office landed like a bombshell, here in Europe, carrying an import I found deeply disturbing. It’s hard to resist falling into a spiral of alarm at such times. Diplomacy and foreign affairs, I’ve read, require a strong stomach. If this is how it’s to be from here on, I don’t doubt it. While it falls to our politicians and statesmen to wrestle with these matters, the rest of us – bamboozled by headlines and social media froth – must find our own ways to maintain perspective. So today, we walk.

But first, I must tread carefully. Yesterday was a pixie-led day, one of those where things inexplicably vanish – car battery charger, various adaptors, memory cards, notebooks, indeed nearly everything I turned my hand to. You know they’ll eventually turn up just where you swear you’ve already looked, but for now, the Good People, the fey, are hiding my stuff. In Celtic lore, this can mean I’ve offended them, or sometimes they’re just teasing, so we’ll hope for the latter, and take it in good part.

It would have been better to charge the car battery last night, which is very low after the cold weather, but of course the pixies have my charger. We manage to start her on the last turn anyway, and a longer run today will give her a bit more juice. We’re off to the Ribble Valley, to the leafy car park at Marles Wood, near Ribchester. The little route I have in mind took me a while to figure out but, thanks to sage advice from fellow blogger Bowland Climber, I cracked it last October. Now, it’s a firm favourite.

We begin with a short climb from Salesbury Hall towards Copster Green. Even more trees have been planted here since last time – yellow-green tubes everywhere, protecting saplings. This is a dramatic shift in land use. In twenty years, it will be a different place altogether. But these are native species – thorn and hazel among them. Were they planting Sitka Spruce, as they did throughout these isles, forty years ago, it would be a disaster.

Which brings us neatly us to the first meditation of the day: landowners have the power to transform landscapes, shaping the lives of thousands who never asked for change and might not want it. In a rules-based society, checks and balances rein in executive overreach. But when the cry goes up to slash red tape, follow the money. Who’s making the demands? It’s a safe bet they’re the ones the rules are meant to protect us from. This is not to say that’s what’s happening here – indeed I’ve no idea – and can only speculate on an agricultural grant, an incentive that encourages native reforestation.

Down now to the bridge at Ribchester, where the tricky egress from the little gated community always raises my hackles. It sits on the right of way like an elephant on your foot. A minor issue in a world full of greater problems, perhaps. But missing footpath signs, and impeded rights of way encroach upon our freedom to explore. And why do we want to do that? Because landscapes can inspire and heal – not just those who own them, but those who need them most, the ordinary folk from the towns and villages.

Following the Ribble upstream, the riverbank is thick with silt and winter’s debris – looping brambles, and last season’s dieback. But then we stumble upon a clump of snowdrops, sunning themselves. Next will come the wood anemones, the ramsons, and the bluebells – the full glory of spring.

The trees are still bare, stark against a fair-weather sky. The hazels show catkins and, down by the mill at Salesbury, an early cherry is in blossom. Colour is rare, then, but change is stirring. If we can get our head into this space, if we can let our thoughts be shaped by the curve of the land, the sweep of the meadow, the reach of the moor, the scent of meadows, then healing begins. And we see the words of liars and fools for what they really are.

The bubbling call of a curlew – always an arousing sound to an outdoors-man – roots us in the wild, stirring something deep. A buzzard cries as it rises, painting broad circles in the sky. We follow the path into Haugh Wood, then over open pasture, towards the farm at Hey Hurst. This is a lovely stretch, undefined, barely trod, offering a rare sense of freedom.

There’s a grand old oak here, one for my list of favourite lone trees. It reminds me of a short story I wrote about a man called Tim Burr, who wrote a book called “a little book about trees”. Nobody got the joke. Some thought it was about a real book. Maybe I’ll pinch the title and write it anyway. This impressive oak will definitely make the cut.

The world’s troubles don’t disappear on a walk, but neither should we let them consume us. Just reading about crisis after crisis while feeling powerless takes its toll. Today, the walk puts us back on our feet. Don’t get angry at what you see or hear. Anger is like stirring the silt from the riverbed – you can’t see through it, can’t see to the bottom of things. So take a breath. Let it settle, before you do or say anything.

We cross the Ribble again by the footbridge at Dinkley. Just a short way downstream now, and we’re back at the car, our legs nicely stretched, lungs filled, mind quieter than when we set out. The world beyond the Ribble Valley still turns, and in troubling ways. The headlines will keep coming. But for now, they feel more distant. The land has worked its magic, restoring balance. The seasons turn too, heedless of human folly, and clarity comes, not from obsessing over every crisis, but from finding the stillness to see through them.

The car starts more eagerly than it did this morning, and we head home, not exactly detached from the world, but steadier, as the Ribble Valley’s quiet wisdom sustains us. Let’s hope the pixies have returned my battery charger.

About five and a half miles round, three hundred and twenty feet of gentle up and down.

Read Full Post »

Out and about – seeing the wood for the trees

Posted in blogging, countryside, current affairs, existential, health, journal, lancashire, out and about, outdoors, photography, political, walking, West Pennine Moors, tagged blog, blogging, current affairs, lancashire, media, nature, outdoors, poetry, substack, travel, writing on February 19, 2025| 12 Comments »

Further reflections on staying sane in a mad world

We’re beyond mid-February now, and the light has, at last, a certain look about it. It’s helped by a bit of sun, but there’s definitely a feel of something stirring, a fresh season come to displace the winter months. The catkins on my hazel tree are showing signs, the snowdrops are dying back, and there’s a dusty dryness to the day that’s just begging to be experienced. So we take the car over to Abbey, but find our usual parking spot overwhelmed. It’s half term of course. So we motor on to Ryal Fold. This is usually even busier, but we arrive to find the parking fairy has been holding a spot for us.

A mixture of hospital visits and inhospitable weather has meant I’ve not been out for weeks. This wouldn’t have been much of a concern at one time but, as we age, we find the old man is increasingly eager to find his way in. There’s a physical stiffness from inactivity, yes, but there’s something else, deeper, a lack of spirit. In spite of the sun, there’s a rawness to the air that has me braced, and wishing I’d stayed in bed for yet another lie-in.

I’ve spoken to a few people about this recently, and we’re all feeling the same. There’s something in the air. The news coming out of America is dire of course, and will have serious repercussions for European security. Big things are changing, and in potentially dangerous ways. At the moment the various legacy media are talking about it as if it’s some form of infotainment, playing down the moment, almost normalising it. But the independent media is telling a different story, and maybe I’ve been reading too much of it.

The Plantations around the Roddlesworth reservoirs are always a bit dull at this time of year – better in autumn when there’s some colour. Around a hundred and fifty years old, they still lack the flora of our ancient wildwoods, and can seem a little sterile. Being fond of a lone tree, it’s impossible to single one out here, of course – difficult to find that one tree for the woods, so to speak. As we walk the usual circuit, I come across a young guy – looks to be in his twenties – crouching with a camera, and a long zoom. He’s spotted a likely shot, a little cascade in the brook, sparkling in the sunshine. Yes, I know that one. It reminds me how I’ve been coming round here since I was his age, eyeing up all the little scenes, always looking for something new. I’m still doing it.

I think this most recent malaise began with a link to Substack. I’d forgotten I had some stuff on there. I gave up on it because nobody was reading it, and there was little else of interest. But since the collapse of Twitter, much of the world of progressive commentary has now moved to Substack, and all of it is wailing of doom. This is not to say it isn’t justified, indeed I think it is, but it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it. So we’re faced with the age old dilemma of information overload, and powerlessness. We feel we lack all agency in a mad world.

Okay, we’re about half way round now, warming up at last. The path, a bit dull and lifeless to begin, catches the light here, as the way opens up across the causeway of the lower reservoir. There are some good shots to be had – some strong lines and nice contrasts. I wonder if that young photographer spotted it too. Or maybe he’s found another subject, and is caught in a quiet moment of creation somewhere else.

It reminds me why I started coming out to paces like this – not just to walk, but to see, to observe, to find something in the familiar I’d not noticed before, and at bottom, they are all glimpses of the same thing – that same mysterious beauty underpinning the real world. The mess we make of things – that’s all man’s doing, and does not reflect the underlying reality. But the beauty is still there if we search for it.

So, no the weight of the world won’t lift overnight. The headlines will still be grim in the morning, the uncertainties still forever looming. But in the here and now, there’s always something to hold onto: the land, the shift of the seasons, the changing light, and the fact that I’m here, still out and about, still looking for that next photograph, that next sentence, or a line of poetry – all of them vital links in that long chain of meaning that anchors us in reality.

That’s all most of us can do – seek out what’s lasting and true for us as individuals, hold to it, and resist the drift into fear. The world is turning in strange ways, but spring is still coming. And today, at least, we’ve made it out into the light. Anyway, enough of this. Let’s get a wobble on. We might just catch the cafe for a brew, before it shuts. Last one in buys the Kit Kats.

Three and a half miles round, five hundred and fifty feet of ascent.

Read Full Post »

Out and about – in the interregnum

Posted in countryside, current affairs, existential, journal, lancashire, out and about, outdoors, photography, walking, tagged current affairs, hiking, lancashire, meditation, nature, outdoors, photography, rumination, travel, walking on December 28, 2024| 21 Comments »

Headlights shine like twin suns across the vast meadows and the stagnant, watery ditches of the moss. Even from half a mile away, and in daylight, I have to avert my eyes. Would you fancy meeting them down a narrow, pitch-black country lane? They seem emblematic of everything our peculiarly corrupted Zeitgeist has become. So long as I’m okay, the rest can suffer what they must. Well,… it’s not really daylight, more of a half-light, around three pm, on a grey, late December day, hardly any texture in the sky. The moss between Croston and Rufford is washed out, and heavy going, the air rendered slightly opaque by a faint mistiness.

It’s that sleepy period between Yule and New Year, and it’s only by a monumental effort I’ve managed to haul myself out of doors today. The mornings do not exist, and the nights are spent wrapped in vivid dreams. My spirit animal must be a dormouse, and wishes we were hibernating, curled up in a ball of sweet oblivion, October to April. It’s significant we are also an endangered species, not well suited to the rigours of the modern world.

Just a short walk today, see if we can capture a flavour of the season, and blow away some lethargy. Despondency is the enemy of days like this. So much sinister news about, it’s important we go easy with ourselves. I should perhaps make a study of the writings and the artwork of the nineteen twenties. I imagine I will find it falls into three camps – those who were wilfully ignorant of their times, and shamefully self-indulgent, then there would be those who were most earnestly graphic in their warnings of the troubles to come, and finally, I imagine there were those who preserved, as if in glass jars, all the beauties of the world, held them like beacons through the dark times, then we could find our way back. I’m no good with the bleakness, it sends me too quickly off the rails. So I seek beauty in all the nooks and crannies, seek reassurances from our history that this too shall pass.

The main trod of the moss, as favoured by the denizens of Croston, is a square route of about two miles around. It may just be the holiday period, but it seems a constant promenade now, families five abreast and unbudging, dogs, kids on bikes and those ‘forever elsewhere’ folk, yakking loud into their phones. The only merit of it is it’s possible to get a bit of an airing while also keeping your shoes clean.

Instead, though, we peel off as soon as possible, along Cottage Lane, squelchy now, about a mile of it and dead straight. We make our way past the pond with its little boat, sometimes sunk, sometimes dragged out to drain. Here, our path is crossed by pylons, 400,000 volts crackling ominously in the damp air. The meadows are stripped of crop. Some are fallow, but were planted up last year with wildflower. These are now thick with blackened seed, weeping back and rotting. The sunflower meadow, an unexpected late-season delight, is similarly left to ruin. There is an unfamiliar scent, something herbal. It’s as if I am following in the wake of someone smoking weed. But no, stand on a bucket here, and you can see for miles. I’m quite alone.

I was hoping for a thickening of the mist, something to blur out the pylons, and the power lines which harm the landscape potential – at least from a photographic point of view. But they’re still there, cutting and zigzagging their way. The photographer needs to be selective here. Others can work with them, quite happily, but I find nothing beautiful about them, just a harsh, utilitarian layer, upon a landscape already tired from industrial agriculture.

We take the Shepherd’s Lane track, try a couple of shots of the Ash tree. Then it’s High Lane, down to the crossing house, and Sumner’s Lane to join once more the parade of Santa hats and dogs and shiny Chrimbob tricycles as they make their constitutional circuits. It’s most likely my last walk of the year. Totting up, I will have done three hundred miles, slightly down on last year, and a long way from the five hundred I aspired to. But they’ve been good miles.

Did I mention dreams? Yes,… I was dreaming of work again. An old boss I’ve not seen for thirty years, suddenly large as life and going on at me for not giving him enough warning I was about to retire. I remind him he’s known for three years that I was going, and he hits the roof at the incompetence of the administration. Four years out now and still getting the occasional dream like that. Strange, I never gave work a second thought, when I left. My real-life preoccupations seem to be maintaining a balloon of post-retirement optimism afloat in determinedly deflating times, while every glance at the news is another pin-prick to be dodged by mindful gymnastics.

We pause, just after Sumner’s Farm, taking in the view across to Mawdesley, and the wind turbines. The land seems neatly layered, with trees and low hills. We try a shot, holding our ground as a couple comes up from behind – more elsewhere people – both of them yakking into their phones, power-walking. They pass by, voices trailing, as I stand here, the dormouse with his camera. The problem the dormouse faces is he makes his nest in the once sacrosanct places, on the forest floors, places now trampled by these elsewhere people, careless of where they’re stepping.

Just a short way from home now, the air is thickening with an unwholesome smoke, as we approach the village. We were on the telly over Christmas. Songs of Praise, coming from St Michael’s. Didn’t watch it. News of Trump and Musk and Farage, today, as it seems every day. Nothing good. Just gave it a glance.

Poor light for photography. But you never know.

About four miles round, dead flat.

Thanks for listening.

Read Full Post »

The writing life – finding your light

Posted in current affairs, journal, Metaphysical, philosophical, the writing life, tagged books, creative writing, creativity, current affairs, daemons, dark, fiction, harpies, light, short story, writing on December 22, 2024| 18 Comments »

I recently turned 64. This seems a very great age to me. Yet, under normal circumstances, I could still have three years to work, before retirement. Three more years of early get-ups, and long commutes! As it is, I managed to get out at sixty, courtesy of a works’ pension, and the allure of some very seductive hobbies. Of these, writing remains foremost, but there’s also walking, photography and various forms of artwork. None of them amount to anything in financial terms, and they’re not intended to. What they are is more a way of connecting with whatever it is that lies beneath the world of appearances.

This wasn’t always the case. My younger self was obsessed with ways of becoming a professional novelist and landscape photographer. Fortunately, I had the sense to stick at the day job, but this is not an easy investment of time to make. When you’re in your twenties, imagining yourself in your sixties, you’re thinking you’ve not much life left. But then, come your sixties, you’re thinking differently. Of course, you realise by now you’re not immortal but, with luck, you could still be making sense of things for another twenty years, or more.

So anyway, I’ve got nineteen books out, fourteen of them novels, some poetry, some non-fiction. I give them away through Smashwords and Google Play Books, some through my personal Dropbox. 2024 saw five hundred books downloaded. Not all of those will equate to reads of course but, as I’m always telling myself, and anyone who’ll listen, it’s the process of writing that’s the important thing. Few of us get to change the world with a book, but the act of writing, or however else we choose to create, takes us on a journey, and it changes us.

The current work in progress “The Island of the House of Light” hit the buffers, then partially recovered after basically discarding most of this year’s progress. This took me back to a scene I wrote some time in 2023. You can tell when you’ve taken a wrong turn. You can hear yourself when you read it back, and you know you don’t mean what you’re saying. Calamity? I didn’t see it that way. The new direction is stimulating, and I’m learning new things.

Through the writing, we explore our past, our present and our future – or at least a possible future. But the urge to sell our labours pins us down at a point in time, sometimes for decades, constantly coming back to the same piece, freshening it up, sending out again, and again, when we should have moved on. After all, there is so much of the world to explore, though admittedly not all of it good.

But there again, the act of creation offers us a vital reprieve from a world that can, at times, seem to be hanging by a thread. Our access to information is greater than it has ever been, but it has revealed an ever more fractured and fractious world. When we’re young, fixing the world is something we’re still up for, mainly because we’re naive enough to believe in simple solutions. At my age, however, we realise human affairs roll like storms across the planet, sometimes predictable, but mostly unavoidable – even when they’re predictable. Their depth and complexity confound us. Brave voices call for sense, for calm, for unity, but are set upon at once by harpies. Sense comes out of our conscious awareness, and our experience of the world, but the harpies come out of the roiling complexity of the unconscious, what the ancients knew as the underworld, or Hades, and the gates to that place are presently flung wide open.

All of which gives us a lot to process. But we cannot do that by appealing to the rational, which means we can’t really make sense of it at all. We are entering a period of transition, something akin to the nineteen thirties, already with its strutting demagogues, and staggering loss of life. And most of the wells of information we once relied upon are poisoned, harbingers of still more chaos to come. And there is no resisting it. The storm will come and, though it might take decades, it will also blow itself out, and we’ll tidy up afterwards as best we can.

Our stories come out of the same unconscious as the harpies, most of them delivered up by daemons from the personal realms, but there are hints of the collective too. Through creative work, we invite the company of the daemons who, given a chance, always seem eager to elevate us. Sure the world is a mess, they say but, like all bad news, there is no sense making it worse by the way we react to it. The harpies, of course, do the opposite. When we’re tearing someone to shreds on social media, it’s the harpies we’re channelling.

So, I’m hoping more of us will channel our daemons than our harpies. The daemonic mission is a positive one. It tells us that the way we engage with the world, whether it be through writing, walking, creating, or simply being, shapes not just our lives but also the ripples we leave behind. The harpies certainly scream louder than the daemons, but the act of creation, however small, however quiet, comes in defiance of the chaos. It is also a gesture of hope.

So, whether you’re 24 or 64, or 94, the key lies not in feeling we must solve the storm of human affairs, but in finding clarity within ourselves. Like hiking a mountain in the mist, progress comes one step at a time, guided by the truths we know and not by reacting to every half-truth and deception. So, ask yourselves this: is it your daemons or the harpies you’re reacting to? And if it’s your daemons, what are they urging you to create? Where are they suggesting you will find your light?

Read Full Post »

Red Sky

Posted in Short Fiction, tagged current affairs, fiction, lies, political, story, the writinb life, truth, zeitgeist on October 6, 2023| 3 Comments »

Simon tendered his passport at the outbound border-post. It was the first time he had done so, and suspected it would be the last. He would not be returning, always assuming they let him leave in the first place. This was by no means certain.

“Your destination?” asked the guard.

“Nowhere in particular,” said Simon.

“You must have a destination,” said the guard. “What’s your business overseas?”

Outbound travel for pleasure was forbidden. There was a fear the broader foreign Zietgeist would infect the psyche of weaker minded citizens. Only travel on business was permitted, and then only by members of the more bona-fide, and strictly vetted professions.

“I am a pilgrim, ” said Simon.

“Pilgrim?” said the guard. “What kind of profession is that?”

“It is concerned with,… searching,…” said Simon. He paused a moment to reflect on what he had said. He had never had to define his calling before. To describe it as a profession was stretching a point, but he had made his living at it, or rather lived by means of it, and therefore felt he had answered truthfully, and to the best of his ability. “Yes,” he repeated. “It is a profession that searches.”

The guard eyed him suspiciously. Then he fingered the plug in his ear, and settled his hand upon the holster of his side-arm. He would be receiving instructions from the AI, thought Simon. His answers had already unsettled the machine, and he sensed the barriers shutting against him. But what else could he do? His training permitted only honesty, both by deed and discourse.

“Searches for what?” asked the guard.

“The truth,” said Simon. “For meaning. I shall find it in a place, perhaps.”

“Ah, so we do have a destination. And what’s this place called?”

“I don’t know that it has a name,” said Simon. “Nor even if it exists, actually. But if it does, my mission is to find it.”

“If you don’t know it exists, how will you recognise it? How will you know when you get there?”

“By its nature,” said Simon. “It is a place that trades only in what is true.”

“Well this sounds like a fishy business to me. Is there not enough truth for you at home?”

“There is no truth, here,” said Simon, which, as near as he could manage, was the sum total of the only truth regarding his homeland. If truth was to be found in the world, it would have to be elsewhere.

A light flashed behind the guard’s station, and a door swished open. It was as Simon had feared. This was not the door to the ocean terminal, and the waiting vessel. The guard kept hold of Simon’s passport.

“You’d better come with me,” he said.

The sky is not blue. It is red. In order to hide the redness, new-born babies are injected by the socialised health service with a drug, that makes them see the sky as blue.

Some say it started as a competition among students in a rowdy bar – who could tell the biggest lie. There is a long tradition of such tomfoolery, and much of it amusing, until that is, the nation lost its sense of humour. Then people either took offence, or began to believe the lies. Others say it came out of a focus group. In support of the latter theory, they offer the evidence it was such a masterful lie and aimed with such devastating accuracy it could only have been developed with the aid of AI. It was like a pinball sent ricocheting off several psychological triggers, to create at once a ding-a-ling ferment of fear and loathing throughout the land.

As he recalled, what became known as the Red Sky movement circulated the fringes of the absurd, for a time. Then, gradually, it began to take hold in the nation’s psyche, first and foremost among the noisy, simple minded elements, who began attacking the hospitals. They were intent, they said, on turning up proof. And when no proof was found, it only proved, they said, the depth of the conspiracy and caused them to redouble their efforts.

Far from being alarmed at this breakdown in public order, politicians saw an opportunity for self advancement, and began to work the lie into their speeches and manifestos. They promised enquires. They promised legislation. They would outlaw all things social. And it worked. The Red Sky movement became mainstream.

At first, Simon wondered how they got away with this. But then he realised those who lived by what was true, and knew the sky really was blue, had long since grown dissatisfied with politics, indeed revolted by it, and no longer bothered to vote, leaving the field open to the purveyors of untruthful fantasy. Hence, sensing further opportunity in falsehood, even more lies were concocted.

There is to be a tax levied on smart-phone usage. And though there was in truth no tax, politicians garnered support among the outraged by promising to abolish it. There is to be a law forbidding emails to be sent on Sundays. And though there was no law, politicians garnered support among the outraged by promising to abolish it. And the people, raised on this blizzard of lies were happy, until the next lie was deployed to unsettle them.

It was found that the simpler, sound-bitey untruths worked best. But they were like toxic seeds and, once sown, they poisoned the ground of discourse so more complex untruths sprouted, seemingly of their own accord, rendering the very fabric of society inherently corrupt. Even when one stumbled upon a thing that was indisputably true, such was the power and the negative weight of the Zeitgeist, one was tempted to consider the truth untrustworthy.

The executives of socialised medicine are developing a drug to be administered secretly at birth. Taken just the once it will render the very air we breathe poisonous, unless we sign up for a lifetime of antidote medication. The profits generated by its sale are intended to prop up the flagging social healthcare system.

Although inordinately complex for a sound-bite culture, the effect of this latter deception was devastating. Politicians garnered huge support among the noisesome by promising investigations, even the public execution of the guilty executives – for so heinous was the crime it warranted a reintroduction of capital punishment. Socialised medicine would be abolished, and private healthcare would come to the rescue. Warm advertisements appeared in browsers to drive the message home. Anything social was to be outlawed. The definition of “social” was very broad. Even helping an old person to cross the road was considered a suspicious act, which risked one being denounced as a subversive snowflake and hauled away by baton weilding cops.

“But Master,” said Simon, to his teacher. “What use is the truth any more? I mean beyond the walls of this retreat? We brothers speak and act truthfully among ourselves, but outside, the language is corrupt, and every act is a deception. Even to be exposed to news broadcasts and social media is to risk becoming corrupted oneself, and turned, if not into a liar, then rendered helpless with despair.”

And the teacher said: “So far as we can tell, Simon, it is always the truth that is the surest path to what is good. Lies lead to corruption, and suffering. This seems part of a long cycle, and though it may take centuries, the truth will eventually make a better showing of itself than it appears to be doing at the moment.”

“Might I find the truth anywhere else in the world, or is everywhere the same as this?”

“I do not know, Simon. Have you the courage, do you think, to search for it?”

“I don’t know, Master. But I would like to try, if you think it will help.”

“It will certainly help to know it still exists, Simon. Indeed, you must make it your mission. Go now with our blessing, and all the resources we can muster to support you on your journey. Seek the place that still lives by the truth, where people do not believe the sky is red. Once there, seek out its wisest teachers, and learn from them.”

“I shall, Master, and I shall bring home what they teach me.”

“No, don’t do that,” cautioned the master. “The truth won’t last five minutes here. Just give us a ring, and we’ll come join you.”

The guard led Simon to a cold, windowless room, and told him to wait. The walls were mirrored, and Simon assumed he was being observed from behind one or the other of them. There was no chair, no table. He waited, standing at first, but the minutes went by, then half an hour, so he sat, cross-legged, upon the bare floor. There was nothing he could do. He had failed at the first hurdle, and it pained him that he had let his master, and his fellow brothers, down. He would never find that place where they lived by the truth. He would never learn how to rid the world of the poison of its lies.

The worst thing that could happen now, he thought, was to be arrested, and sent for re-education. He had heard terrible stories of sleep depravation, and of being forced to watch endless online videos, and social media feeds in order to soften his brain. But were these stories true? Who could tell these days, and anyway all of that, that’s what people did to themselves of their own accord, so how bad could it be? He would not like to lose his grip on the truth of course, but from what he had observed, those who had already lost it, did not know they had lost it. They suffered, yes, but had forgotten what it was like not to suffer, so their suffering felt perfectly normal, and they took their small pleasures in finding others to blame for it.

It was an hour before someone came. It was not the guard, who Simon supposed had resumed his duties. It was a silent boy who’s eyes were glued to his phone, even as he led Simon away. Simon glanced over to see what the boy was looking at, thinking it might be messages, from which Simon might glean some clue as to his fate. But instead, he saw the boy was watching videos of the bubble-gum variety, high in sugar and low in nourishment. It was as if the boy were only half present in the world.

He was taken to a room in which there presided some kind of official who exuded an air of grandiosity, though Simon, finely attuned to what was truthful could tell at once this was a lie. This was simply a stone-faced slouch of a man, behind a stout desk, and yet, for all of that, he was to be the final authority on Simon’s fate. He was studying the passport.

“I’m informed you wish to leave in search of the truth. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” said Simon.

“Tell me then, what do you know of the truth?”

The official seemed dismissive, but it was a good question, thought Simon. “I know it in the feel of the ground beneath my feet, that I am present in the world,” he said. “I know it in the fact that I am aware of the sense of my own being. These things are true. Beyond that, nothing is certain. I know the opposite of the truth is a lie, and I know that to lie is to suffer, and it causes others to suffer.”

The man thought on this for a long time, but didn’t really get it. He tossed Simon’s passport back at him. “Permission to travel is denied,” he said.

So, that was that, thought Simon, but they had not kept his passport, which suggested he was at least not to be arrested, and re-educated. This was a relief, but also puzzling.

“However,” said the official. “I might be able to connect you with an informal route across the water, if you’re fool enough to risk it.”

Ah. The Master had warned Simon some of the officials he might encounter at the borders would be corrupt, and would offer to deliver him into the hands of the smugglers who had corrupted them. In the old days, these brigands had thrived on the smuggling of people into the country. Now they were smuggling people out. This was to be regretted, but the Master had authorised him to take advantage, if the offer was made, and all else had failed.

“How much?” said Simon.

“Five hundred for the connection. What you pay the courier is between you and him.”

The man produced his phone, set the transaction to receive, and offered it to Simon. Simon set the amount and waved his phone to the man’s device. Bleep. Simple as that – corruption as commonplace, as banal as paying a tip. It was easy to live a lie, harder to live the truth. Simon hoped he was not already corrupted by his proximity to such unscrupulousness.

The man revealed the contact number. Simon photographed it.

“My assistant will show you out.”

The boy with the bubble-gum phone was summoned, and Simon was led away to begin the next stage of his journey.

Later, he stood upon the blustery quay of a seaside town, looking out into the choppy grey. It was coming on to evening, and the sky was smearing over with an angry red. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Was that a truism, he wondered? He tried to remember. Perhaps at least it boded well for the crossing. What was it he had said to the official, about the truth? He lifted his phone and prepared to dial the number, reflecting on the fact there was perhaps no greater truth in the world than an overloaded rubber boat, launched into a rough sea and with a fifty-fifty chance of drowning.

Read Full Post »

Many a true word

Posted in blogging, journal, Metaphysical, philosophical, political, tagged corrupt, corruption, current affairs, dm verity, events, mobile phones, news, politics, scams, spin on November 6, 2022| 6 Comments »

The day begins with a scam text message purporting to be from the courier, Evri. It wants us to “Click here” to re-arrange delivery. I’ve not ordered anything. The sender intends emptying my bank account. I wonder how many poor souls have fallen for it, and thereby helped swell the coffers of an organised criminality the world seems unable to outwit. I wonder how they came by my number, since I am ever so careful with it. We block the sender for all the good it will do us, and, while we have the phone in our hands, we turn to the news.

In the UK, right leaning ministers of state are spurring hot-heads to violence with intemperate language. Internationally, the UN reports the last eight years were the hottest in recorded history, and that limiting global temperatures to what is calculated to be a relatively safe 1.5 degrees is now a forlorn hope with, thus far, no realistic plans in place, anywhere. In America, Trump looks set to begin a return to the presidency, following the mid-term elections, while various armed MAGA hatted militias are discussing outrages which threaten civil war. Back in the UK again, the pollster, Sir John Curtice, reports significant buyers’ remorse over BREXIT, with a 15% lead among the public for those in favour of now re-joining the EU, but the political debate has closed on that one, BREXIT being the one thing no one talks about. All this and we have only scrolled half way. What other grumblies await us down there? Shall we doom-scroll some more, and see? No, that’s quite enough.

We set the phone aside, rise into the cold of the house, make coffee and check on the washing machine.

Current affairs hold a significant fascination, dare I say even an addiction. We imagine, by keeping ourselves informed of the various goings-on, we gain a greater understanding of the world, that it is a virtuous thing to do, the mark of an intelligent, well-balanced and educated person. At least that is what I was encouraged to think at college, forty years ago. Now I’m not so sure. The media landscape has something of the nature of quicksand about it. Perhaps it always had, and I am simply less sure-footed than I was, for I suspect the older one gets, the more it seems the world is going to hell in a handcart. Things no longer conform to one’s personal expectations, and perhaps, too, one’s expectations begin to narrow, thus alienating us from life still further, whatever our disposition. And we find in media whatever data we need to support our personal hell in a hand-cart hypotheses.

There are plenty of things in life we should be wary of – alcohol and other drugs are the obvious ones, but also this connection to fast-food and short sell-by media. They each poison us, make us less useful as the eyes and ears, and the heart and soul of the universe. Our phones suck us down into a sorry world that is void of imagination, and creativity. They land us among the sterile refuse of data, where we become much less than our selves, as the spark of individual value drains from us. Then we merely subordinate our selves to a tribe who holds certain data to be sacrosanct, other data to be heretical, and thereby we become mere unreflective data-points ourselves, so we might be served more of the same unwholesome junk.

So now, the washing machine has finished its cycle. There are clothes to dry, and the maiden is still full from last week. Things dry slowly these colder, autumn days, and it serves to remind us there are only certain kinds of data that are unequivocal. Your clothes are still wet, or they are dry. Other data requires nuance. It requires a more right brained, wholistic approach in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. Anyway, after sorting that one out, we take up our coffee, pick up the phone once more, note that in the meantime there has been a glitch. The phone has rebooted itself, and come back with a curious error message in which, with brutal honesty and admirable self-flagellation, it tells me it is corrupt, and cannot be trusted.

Many a true word and all that.

Read Full Post »

Extraordinary events

Posted in blogging, My Notes, political, tagged current affairs, end times, events, media, news, nihilism, shock, times, truth, zeitgeist on June 21, 2017| Leave a Comment »

It’s been a summer of violent and tragic events here in the UK. Once upon a time we would pause for a minute’s silence to remember the wars and the fallen. It happened once a year, was a predictable, sombre occasion each November, a reflection on the folly of armed conflict. Now it seems we’ve had a minute’s silence every week for weeks in response to the shock of one damned thing after the other – bombings, mass stabbings, vans driven into pedestrians, and of course the terrible London tower block fire.

Such events shock us, pull us from our private lives, reconnect us with the human collective and cause us to question the nature of the incurable malaise from which we apparently suffer. And of course the speed with which events are now reported lends an extra feverishness to the times, a feverishness spun to favour one shameless political agenda or another. We need no longer wait for the ten o’clock news like we did in the old days, the Smartphone tells it all, instantly, and the story it tells is one of perpetual shock, violence, hatred and a corporate greed that verges on the homicidal.

It’s sometimes hard not to view our times from the nihilistic perspective as evidence of an acceleration towards the end of days. Certainly pictures of the burned out Grenfell Tower are as symbolic as they are deeply shocking. But the people who died that night were not victims of extremists. The enemy that sealed the fate of Grenfell Tower was more a culture of institutional avarice, one painstakingly manufactured over the decades to line the pockets of the rich at the expense of the lives of the poor. All of these things, though diverse in origin, seem part of the same unsettling atmosphere of the times, like faces vaguely recognisable from our deepest nightmares, all of them bearing weapons of one sort or another.

But if you can look beyond the violence, beyond the tragedy, it’s possible to discern something else happening, something that suggests less a rush to the end of times and more to a transformation of the collective consciousness. The bigger the outrage and the faster these events come at us, the bigger too the response of the many who awaken and gather, not with violence in mind, but with a compassionate dignity. And the pocket media that disseminates these shocks so far and fast and wide also unites us, brings us together in ever larger numbers, mobilises us to a deeper empathy and reflection.

The world of the technocracy is increasingly machine-like and it has become a proxy for the collective human ego, a thing wrestling for control over every aspect of our lives, measuring even the keyclicks on our computers, evaluating them for the risk inherent in our thoughts and beliefs, to predict and plan in order to subvert bad events even ahead of time. But the more you plan, and the greater the detail to which you plan, the more vulnerable you are to the unexpected, to the uncontrolled, to the irrational turn of events. And the faster we fail, the less useful Ego becomes, and the less useful it feels the more it tears itself apart and adds to the maelstrom of destruction and despair. The greater the shock, next time that we seem so powerless against the nihilistic forces and the ill winds of fate.

What we are seeing almost nightly on our TV screens is a form of collective madness. We are on the couch, and it’s time to talk it out with a competent analyst. All egos are ultimately at the mercy of their shadows, dutifully raising demons from under every stone turned, like the headlines of the Daily Mail. It’s only compassion that spares us, a recognition we are not machines and that for life to have meaning we must recognise and value more our ability to transcend the material, or at the very least to temper its excesses with the better side of human nature.

When events shock us, it’s tempting always to turn to the machine for answers. Through it we calculate our responses, plan future contingencies, establish means of mitigation. But when the shock hits, it’s better to set our machine thoughts aside, if only for a moment for a moment, to remember we are not robots, that it’s better sometimes we say nothing for a while, and simply reach out and hold someone. It’s a long shot, believing in a reactive transformation that will eventually eradicate the dark stain from the zeitgeist, but if enough of us can respond to extraordinary events with compassion, empathy and a degree of stillness, it’s at least a start in the right direction.

Read Full Post »

Small pleasures amid this talk of God and War.

Posted in blogging, journal, My Notes, philosophical, reading, spiritual, tagged agnosticism, current affairs, Easter, England, evangelism, newspapers, north west, prayer, religion, southport, war on April 16, 2017| Leave a Comment »

s-port cafe Southport, Easter Saturday afternoon. I’m crossing the square in front of the Town Hall, thinking of lunch, when a woman steps out of the crowd and offers to pray for me. I thank her kindly, but tell her I couldn’t possibly put her to so much trouble. She hands me a leaflet which I fold and pocket with a parting smile.

The town looks poor still, nearly a decade after the crash. There is an eerie Parisian beauty about Lord Street, but it is long past that time when people dressed up for Saturdays in town. Some make the effort but they stand out now, look ridiculous even in their finery, like peacocks strutting among pigeons. Or perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I only notice the haggard expressions and poor pigeon-clothing we wrap ourselves in. Or is it a myth, this hankering after a nostalgic vision of an England that never existed – and really we have always looked and dressed this way?

In Chapel Street, the air is lively, cut by the jangle of buskers. And there’s this wizened beardy guy shouting passages from the Old Testament – the end is nigh, that sort of thing. I note he has a bigger crowd than the buskers. But he sounds angry. It’s our stupidity perhaps he takes issue with, our refusal to be saved? Whatever that means.

It’s unkind to make rash judgements of course but I have an instinctive aversion towards angry, shouty people. And I’m only here for the cash machine, so I can pay for lunch.

Lunch is a ham and cheese and mushroom toastie. They put it in fancy bread and call it a Fungi Pannini. It grants it a certain altitude, but it’s as well not to get too carried away with these things. Obviously, I am not a gastronome. Still, it’s flavoursome, and nicely filling, and the coffee is deliciously aromatic. This is my reward after a week of six-thirty get ups, and long days that are leaving me increasingly knackered. It’s worth the wait, and the sheer quiet pleasure of it revives my spirits.

I take out the ‘droid for company. Out with it comes the leaflet from the lady who offered to pray for me. She’s wanting me to join her Evangelical Church, but it’s not really my scene. They’re heavy on the healing stuff – a long list of things they can cure by faith, but the small print cautions me to seek medical advice as a first recourse. The legal escape hatch is somewhat deflating. Even the religious fear litigation it seems. Does this mean that for all of their assertiveness this afternoon, they lack the courage of their convictions?

I flick through the headlines on the ‘droid. The Times and The Mirror seem excited by the possibility of nuclear war. Meanwhile the Guardian has its knife in the guts of the leader of the opposition. The collective subliminal message here is that we can forget any realistic prospect of a return to calmer, more reasoned discourse. Instead we shall be distracted from ongoing economic and political turmoil by increasing talk of war. There are historical precedents for this phenomenon and we should not be surprised. These are ancient daemons, hard to outwit, filled with an infectious loathing.

I have no particular business in town other than lunch, but I visit the bookshop while I’m here. I’m looking for something by Sebastian Barry. They have nothing in the second hand section. They might have had him among the new stuff, but I do not buy new books any more – my little contribution to Austerity and my own knife in the guts of the economy. I’ll find the book I want for a couple of quid in a charity shop, when the time is right.

sport pier Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon. The trees on Lord street are budding and there is blossom aplenty. But there are more angry voices here, more shouting about God. The words are incoherent but the tone is clear: Fess up, submit, or else!

I escape up Scarisbrick Avenue, heading towards the light and the sea, but there are drunk men here with pints of beer. They are staggering, arguing volubly, incoherently. Fuck this, fuck that. Fuckety fuck it. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It’s not yet two pm, the sun a long way from the yard arm. There is no wisdom in such heroic quantities of beer, no real escape in it from the misery of latter day working lives. Only hope and the dignity of decent wages will cure it, and both are in short supply.

Along the front, by the King’s Gardens, the greens are littered with chip cartons and cellophane wrappings. It’s my eye again, black dog stalking, showing me only the decay, the despair, the sheer hopeless void of it. The pier affords an arrow to the sea. The sandy tide is in, a scent of briny freshness at last. I walk the bouncy boards at a brisk pace, breathe in the sea, take it down deep as the only bit of the day worth holding on to.

Well, that and the coffee, and the toastie.

Small pleasures amid this talk of God and War.