Category: Walking

Upon that mountain

I’m escaping politics, though maybe not quite escaping Zen.

I’m down by the sea, and walking the cliffs, but living a very different terrain. I’ve been reading Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into Thin Air’, his remarkable account of a disaster when multiple organised groups, of one of which he was a member, attempted the summit of Everest one day in May 1996.

He quotes from Eric Shipton’s classic ‘Upon That Mountain’ (1943):

‘Perhaps we had become a little arrogant with our fine new technique(s) ….We had forgotten that the mountain still holds the master card, that it will grant success only in its own good time.’

The mountain, in Shipton’s words, ‘holds the master card’. The mountain as a person, an enabler and a denier. It has an identity. Friend or foe. And you never know which, although in recent years we’ve come to think we do.

We’ve moved on 250 years, from mountains as the fearsome and impenetrable ‘other’, to mountains as less of a challenge to us as individuals and more to our equipment. We know we will return. Our Mastercard will buy us the mountain. I exaggerate. But the right equipment can take the danger (much, maybe most, but not all) out of even the hardest ascents.

Organised trips of the kind Krakauer joined in 1996 mountains have enabled boxes – bucket lists – to be ticked off. Have we forever lost our sense of awe and wonder, of the other, the impenetrable? Where is there still a snow leopard to be found? I remember watching the Frank Capra movie, ‘Lost Horizon’ (1937, remade as, remarkably, a musical in1973). Passengers from a crashed aircraft find themselves in a sheltered high Himalayan valley, known as Shangri-La, where spring is eternal and ageing is suspended. When they escape a girl they take with them, Maria, almost instantly ages. Once you could imagine such a valley.

Beyond the Himalaya lay the Silk Road and Samarkand, an almost mythical land of wonders, of magic and the arcane. This was the world Gurdjieff, a guru figure of the early/mid 20th century, wrote about in his Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Soviet Russia and now, and even more, the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, have drained all possibilities for dream and imagination from these one-time far-off lands. And Tibet itself has become a work and play space for the Han Chinese.

I want to reclaim mountains as places apart, as oceans were to another great climber, Shipton’s climbing partner, H.E. Tilman, who headed out into the South Atlantic in 1977 and was never seen again. Even the ‘void’, as touched by Joe Simpson, in that other great mountain survival narrative, ‘Touching The Void’, has a presence.

Evolutionary biology and neuroscience haven’t helped by providing explanations for all our fears and apprehensions, maybe too for our sense of awe before the world – our sense of mountains as personalities, as the ‘forever’ other.

But not quite. If we let awe and wonder meld into a sense of the numinous, of something beyond – beyond our comprehension. If we remember the hallowed status the mis-named ‘Everest’ had and has for Tibetan Buddhists, who call it Chomolungma. (The Nepalese name is Sagarmatha. For both the name means goddess.) Or at another and, literally, lower level, the Monch, Eiger and Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland, my favourite mountains from childhood – the monk, the ogre and the maiden.

They had personalities, and the Eiger earns its name to this day.

It’s too easy in our time to deny mountains that ‘master card’ they held for Shipton. A recent mountain movie, ‘14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible’, recounts how an extraordinary Nepalese/British Sherpa mountaineer, Nirmal Purja, climbed all fourteen 8000-metre peaks in the space of seven months. Funded by Netflix and all possible corners cut. An extraordinary achievement, that’s not to be doubted, but it was mountains (to viewers, at least) made easy, and danger and disaster dismissed with a shrug. (For others, I admit, the movie was inspirational.)

Better to go back to Reinhold Messner’s accounts his ascents of Everest, Nanga Parbet and K2 without oxygen. Or George Mallory trekking in for weeks from Darjeeling in 1921, 1922 and 1924. Read the books. Avoid the films.

Above all, read up on the career and the controversy surrounding the remarkable Russian/Kazakhstani mountaineer, Anatoli Boukreev. He is central to Krakauer’s narrative where he is both criticised and lauded. Many have taken up the cudgels on Boukreev’s behalf. Whichever side you take (and you can take both) theirs is the real high mountain story, not that of ’14 Peaks’.

The mountains of England’s Lake District were considered fearsome until tamed by notions of the picturesque in the later 18th century. But even today walkers can be caught out by rain or storm or blizzard.

It pays us to be humble toward the mountains even in our own backyard. Far far more so before the high peaks of the Himalaya and Andes.

*

And finally … one day after posting this blog, I read an interview with mountaineer and Everest guide Kenton Cool in the Financial Times Weekend edition. He’s climbed Everest sixteen times, ’a record for a non-Sherpa’.

The interview refers to Nirmal Purja who now has two million Instagram followers. Cool himself is troubled by the number of permits issued by the Nepalese government, but ‘most troubled by events on other mountains, where Purja’s feats have promoted a rush of 8000-metre peak-bagging’.

Is any kind of restraint possible? Short of the Nepalese and other governments withholding permits I can’t see it happening. But maybe in time we will adjust our priorities, give mountains and ourselves more space – and remember always to step back, before we step up.

Trespass – good or bad?

A few thoughts on The Book of Trespass, by Nick Hayes. Published in autumn 2020 it was released in paperback last autumn.

Hayes has written a remarkable book. He trespasses on some of England’s biggest estates, climbing walls or crossing rivers as necessary. But all his trespasses would be allowable under Scottish law.

His focus is on property, and on how attitudes to property have evolved to accord with (or, put another way, dictated) the status quo in each generation. He’s not advocating revolution or confiscation. The world is as it is. His argument is for open access, and he makes it with learning and skill, and of course the necessary irreverence.

Vast acres of our landscape are the results of enclosures going back to the 16th century. And earlier. He’s good at that break-out into early modernity which followed the Reformation. Captain Pouch, and the brutality that followed rebellion in response to hunger, in the 17th century, is just one example. Hayes’s is an outsider’s view of history, and you learn new things – see them in a different way. All the while he’s gently trespassing and lighting fires and camping out.

One hero is Roger Deakin, another natural outsider. But Hayes for his part has a more  political message. There are so many examples one could quote. The 1824 Vagrancy Act as a response to soldier returning from the Napoleonic Wars without employment and hungry. He homes in on the Drax family and fortune (the head of the family is an MP) and its origins in slavery. They see no reason to feel any guilt.  William Beckford’s fortune was also based on slavery, his reputation muddled up with his status as a gay hero. Basildon Park and India, and the cornering of trade and disempowering of India and Indians, on which its fortunes were based.   

Early on Hayes brings in then foundational tome of English law, Blackstone’s Commentary, to show how the law was on the side of the men of property. Thomas Hobbes has property as a man-made construct, ‘designed to lift us out of our state of nature’. Grotius considers property as an institution invented by man but once invented it became a ‘law of nature’. For John Locke Locke if you mixed labour, ‘something this is his own’, with land he ‘thereby makes it his property’.  Blackstone asserted that ‘occupancy gave also the original right to the permanent property in the substance if the earth itself’.

We haven’t moved on much from Gainsborough’s gentleman’s idea of the English countryside. We don’t challenge the origins of the great estates. Or at least we didn’t. Which side are we on in that great debate? The National Trust is doing its best to steer a course.  There’s Croome Park in Worcestershire, half an hour from where I live, where the Trust is restoring the park to its Capability Brown glory, with some farming added in. It’s what the public wants and there lies the great irony.

We love the landscapes we’re allowed into, but don’t worry too much about being excluded. Or most of us don’t. We’re urbanised. Open up the country and most of us wouldn’t go there anyway. Hayes’s will never become a great national cause. Landowners needn’t worry. Wilderness, the festival, is safe (less so the real thing, but that’s not Hayes’s subject), despite Hayes’s attempt to fray the edges.

‘Sealing of one part of the world from another’ is Orwell specifically on nationalism. Immigrants as cockroaches. Legitimised superiority by virtue of inherited property, birth and land, blood and earth. Fascist ideas of Blut und Boden. Now we have Putin: like the rest of us Hayes didn’t see him coming.  

Hayes is the forever outsider. At Heathrow or Basildon Park or Windsor Park, he captures the landscape and the mood and the story. If they weren’t there and we were all insiders… but that can never be. (Each generation generates its own breed of powerful men, and maybe women, and they marry into the old money and land. Socialist experiments have got nowhere. Private enterprise allies with land and as liberalism is shoved aside, the boundaries shift a little or as in China radically change but boundaries remain. What do William the Conqueror and modern China have in common?)

Hayes the outsider. But I want to go with him where I can. To the hills above Hebden Bridge, bought as a shooting estate, where the moors are ‘systematically burned each year to increase the yield of new green shoots…’ I can’t see why I shouldn’t kayak on wide stretches of river. Apart from the fact I’m maybe too old. The USA seems to have got river access right early on. I’d like to see multiple footpaths opened up through great estates. And scrap this crazy world of breeding birds and then letting them out on the land for a few months in managed woodlands before shooting them.

Hayes begins with the 1932 Kinder Trespass – that’s my part of the world. Setting in train the idea that ultimately we’ll follow Scotland and open up access. Is he right that once you’ve seen the importance of land rights you can’t unsee them? Once seen, you can’t unsee the cat, as Henry George put it.

I love the ideas of heterotopia, spaces for outsiders forged deep inside society, and ‘third spaces, ‘where real life occurs’. Check them out. My daughter used to work for an organisation called ‘Free Space’, which found temporarily unoccupied spaces in London where arts projects (as I recall) could base themselves.

We need more wildernesses. (But that isn’t really Hayes’s subject. He’s not a romantic, a Muir or a Hopkins, espousing wildness for its own sake.) And charging for Stonehenge – maybe we have to. That means we exclude ‘whole sections of the population’. But is there anyone out there, other than midsummer Druids, who actually feel themselves excluded?  

So I’m with him all the way… only I’m not. And maybe he isn’t either. Turning the world upside down with some utopia at the end of the rainbow is a mug’s game. Anarchy will get us nowhere. Hayes would be lost. He’s happy with his tent and campfires. But a Robert Tombs-style history, upbeat about England and everything English, won’t get us anywhere either – unless it’s deeper into Brexit and petty nationalism. And we’d continue to walk as landowners dictate, and we may find as I have local field paths barbed-wired into the sides of fields, and rights of way diverted at a landowner’s behest, so that he can, as in one case I know, keep the best view for himself.

Apart from anything else it’s beautifully written and illustrated. In its own way it is a wonderfully wise book.

VE Day 2020

8th May 1945 – 8th May 2020 

One striking statistic marked the day. We’d a quiz via mobile phone in the afternoon and Miles, my partner’s eldest grandchild, asked us how many people died in World War Two. Mine was a massive underestimate. MiIitary deaths were  21-25 million, including about 5 million deaths in captivity.  Include civilian deaths and the number rises to 50-56 million. Add in deaths from disease and famine, and that makes a total of 70-85 million. From the ambitions of the over-mighty came brutality and holocaust.

We had just returned from a wonderful walk up into the woods and back across the Common. From speedwell and periwinkle, via ground ivy and vetch, to bugle and early purple orchid, the abundance of flowers is mind-blowing. Chalk milkwort is rare, with white touches around the tiny blue flowers. Prevailing easterlies always bring clearer air, and pollution levels are hitting new lows. Sun and clear skies and clear air – the flowers just seem richer this year.

After the quiz we’d a street party, suitably socially distanced. Our neighbour had sat quietly with her two young children at 11am. She’d explained what the silence was all about, about how people had died, and how they celebrated on VE Day. The children listened, and kept silence. They will remember, as I remember the Queen’s Coronation, as a six-year-old in 1953.

Families everywhere are home schooling, and VE Day has been a focus for studies. Schools would normally have provided that focus. In times of lockdown it’s been family.

We’ve all got used to silence in recent weeks. We are fortunate. We have open country nearby. There’s one place deep in the woods, where the wild garlic spreads its widest carpet, and the birds never stop singing. Forget the morning chorus. This is 2.30 in the afternoon. The leaves of the beech trees are thick enough now to achieve full woodland shade, so the patches of sunlight in the clearing beyond stand out more sharply.

War and silence. I’ve been reading Anne Frank’s Diary. We’d visited the annex where the family had shut itself away last October. They could hear the Allied bombers overhead, they knew about the concentration camps. They must keep silence, and they did, remarkably so, for more than two years. In these coronavirus lockdown times that beggars belief. They knew the Allies would win. But would they be able to hold out? What hits home so terribly hard is that they were betrayed.

The big and terrible picture of war, set against the close observation of nature. The noise and joy of VE Day, and the (relative!) quiet of a street party under lockdown.

Not a day I’ll forget.

 

 

March for a People’s Vote, 19th October 2019

The day-to-day of Brexit is well written up elsewhere. Maybe one day I’ll put a timeline up here. As a matter of record. After it’s all happened and we’re out, or in, and staying whichever way. But for now…

I’m on the march for a People’s Vote. It’s 19th October 2019.

I’ve not marched before. Hazel and I returned from Amsterdam 11pm on the 18th. 11am on Saturday 19th I’m on a train to Paddington. I walk across Hyde Park, and join the march at Hyde Park Corner. Some walkers resting. Banners and placards likewise. Looking down Park Lane: full of marchers as far as the eye can see. Looking east, along Piccadilly, likewise. A million? Maybe.

I head down to join them. Shuffling along. The pace reminds me of the last ½ mile of the London marathon, when you’re struggling along Constitution Hill, toward the Mall. Would we were so close to an ending. There may yet/will certainly be more political marathons before any level of sanity is achieved. As one placard has it: ‘I’m not leaving.’ Or as Steve Winwood sang, ‘keep on running’. Or another placard: ‘If you leave me now, you take away the biggest part of me…’ I hum that all the way back to the tube.

A batch of Labour cabinet members give short speeches. Keir Starmer the stand-out for clarity and apparent commitment. LibDems old and new. Ed Davey more punchy that usual. Jo Swinson gets her message across well. And others. David Lammy brilliant. Likewise Jess Phillips. The biggest cheers at the end for Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn, fresh from the Commons debate, and the vote by 322 to 306 to withhold final approval for Johnson’s Brexit deal until the relevant legislation has been passed. And finally big cheers for the old warrior hero, Michael Heseltine. Hezza as lucid and passionate as ever.

More placards. ’Stop the coup.’ Yes, in a way, that’s what we’re facing. ‘Let us be heard.’ Not easy with so much of the press in Tory hands.

My favourite slogan before, and still my favourite: ‘If a democracy can’t change its mind it ceases to be a democracy.’

The marchers are a wonderful, worthy, uncomplicated bunch of ordinary folk. All ages, some serious, others chatting, having fun. A trumpet here, a rallying cry there. A single line of ‘Ode to joy’. Sudden unexplained surges of noise. Helicopters occasionally drowning everything out.

Talking of drowning. Rain starts on the Mall, continues as we head down toward the Cenotaph. Briefly heavy. But we walk on regardless.  Then big blue skies and dazzling sun. A big screen helps me keep up with the speeches. The crowd thins a little and I finally make it to Parliament Square.

A few placards are rather more direct: ‘Eurocrats not Brexit crap.’ Not quite sure we should be lauding Eurocrats, if we want to persuade waverers. ‘Bramm orth Bretmes,’ apparently (do I believe it?) a Cornish curse meaning ‘a fart to Brexit’.

Maybe my favourite: ‘Brexit is as shit as this sign.’ (On makeshift cardboard.)

Other favourites: ‘I’ve seen smarter cabinets at IKEA.’ Right on. ‘Only tectonic activity can take us out of Europe’. A simple geographical fact.

Yes, we are serious, but we have fun. Shouts of ‘Shame on you’ as Andrea Leadsom leaves the Commons, so I read. She reports she felt threatened. This is as I experience it a very unthreatening event. But the press of course pick up on her comments.

Blue berets with yellow stars around the edge are popular. A teddy bear atop a wooden pole. A labrador with a rag doll Boris in its mouth. ‘Honk if you want to remain.’ Not so easy on roads from which cars are excluded. A goose with a Euro flag in its beak: yes, I like that.  Some kind of vehicle moves slowly through the crowd, with a Boris mock-up in front, and a bigger puppet-master Dominic Cummings behind.

‘Hastings loves Europe since 1066.’ Really? But I support the sentiment.

And finally, ‘Plant molecular biologists against Brexit.’ As I would expect.

If I’d carried a placard … putting attempts at clever thoughts aside, I’d go with ‘keep on running’, or ‘I’m not leaving’. Keep it simple. Conserve energy.

We are in it for the long term.

Three days at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2019

I read that Ian McEwen has read everything on Brexit, admitted to being an obsessive. He’s just written a book, Cockroach, about a cockroach which wakes up to find it’s become prime minsiter. He admits to a lack of subtlety.

I keep reading on Brexit. Never was a subject so pervasive and invasive. But any kind of orginality requires deep reading. And life just now has other attractions!

What can a literature festival offer? The Cheltenham Literature Festival is on my doorstep. One of the great advantages of living out of town, in the country, but not as much in the country as you might think. Maybe the Hay Festival is my favourite, by a small margin – the scale and vibe is overwhelming, and I love it. Cheltenham is urban, and you’ve a cafe and street culture which sets it apart.

I’ll take language as my theme. Not maybe what the organisers of the Cheltenham Literature Festival had in mind. They’re celebrating their 70th birthday. But what is literature if not language. Though language may not be literature.

It’s Saturday morning. I’ve yet to read David Nott’s book, ‘War Memoir’, about his life as a frontline surgeon, operating, literally, in the world’s most violent places. He was our first event, and he came across, initially, in interview, as out of his element. But honest. He’d found when working under fire in Sarajevo a kind of high, an excitement, this was where he wanted to be. Less a moral compass than a vocation. But he found that compass and now trains surgeons to work beyond the specialisations into which they’re shoe-horned by modern hospital practice. He has met Mullah Omar, met ISIS, and his dedication to life made his denunciations of those who seek and exercised power and the language of power for its own sake, careless of death, all the more powerful.

Our next event, the debate ‘Populism: Death of Democracy’, was topical, though there was always the danger we’d simply be re-visiting well-trodden territory. So it proved. The debate was chaired by Leslie Vinjamuri, of the think-tank Chatham House. Matthew Goodwin brought a British perspective to the subject, and Amy Pope, ex Obama advisor, an American perspective. Do the origins of populism lie more in cultural or economic issues? Identity or issues relating to jobs and income? Populist leaders exploit both – the apparent undermining of national cultures, of ways of life – being left behind – victims – of a political system, of elites operating in their own interest. The issues are real, and the crisis, with hindsight, inevitable. But the debate went round in circles.

Focusing on language would have helped. The misuse of language has turned a crisis which might have brought people together in a common understanding into conflagration. Language brings together, its misuse divides. Post-truth was well-established before 2016. Fake news and disdain of real expertise took hold in 2016 and beyond. Current parliamentary debates have coupled disdain and anger in a way that challenges truth in language still further.

Amy Pope contributed an American standpoint: she sees hope in the wider race and gender representation in the House of Representatives. But as she admitted, that doesn’t address the issue of the resentments of the ‘flyover states’, everything, that is, between the East Coast and California.

Sunday morning. Time for my next event, a celebration of the life of the American novelist, Toni Morrison, who died in August. As an editor at Random House, the first black editor in US publishing history, she opened doors for black writers, and she herself opened up the realities of Afro-American life as never before. She didn’t whitewash, or glorify, or sympathise. She allowed language to tell it as it is, and as she saw it. And the language is wonderful, inspired, magic passages of writing which capture all the hurts and hopes and failures, resignation on the one hand and the search for identities and roots on the other. The panel were black women, writers and publishers, and I’m a white and male, and in a big minority in that Cheltenham tent. But I came away inspired. The panel spoke Morrison’s language – Miss Morrison as two of then called her. They quoted favourite passages, and the most resonant was the speech she gave at the Nobel-Prize-giving ceremony.

‘…the recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.’

‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’

Next, another debate, ‘Who’s Next for the White House’. Leslie Vinjamuri again, joined by Sarah Baxter and Adam Boulter, both now of the Sunday Times, festival co-sponsors. As a choice, this was interesting, intriguing, but probably a mistake. We were on the same ground as the populism debate. And the same radical uncertainty of outcome. I may for my part see hope in a new and raised awareness coming through, or at least a cause we can identify with, in the opposition to populism. But where lies hope in the battle to be president? The Democrats are divided centre and left. Theirs is at least a debate I can connect to. Elizabeth Warren a powerful candidate, but with big-state ideas which could panic centrist voters. Trump is Trump, widening his river of no destination ever further and carrying his supporters along in the turbulence. We were asked for a show of hands at the end. Who do you think will be the next US president? Two-thirds, at least, thought Trump. Not me. I’d thought – Trump, no way, last time. Not again, that I cannot believe. Though were I to expect a Trump victory maybe my penchant for guessing wrong would somehow influence the outcome – and Trump would lose …

In the evening we had ‘An Evening of Joni Mitchell’. Note the ’of’. She is recovering slowly from a brain aneurysm, re-learning how to walk. She is not travelling. I knew that. Some didn’t. They expected Joni to be there. A 40-minte four-way ‘expert’ conversation talked about her childhood polio, speculated on its influence, touched on her relationships – but never on the detail of her songs. We’re back to language. They never touched on the language of her songs. What inspired her to write them. They are her legacy to the world. Would that come over in the second half? No. Her songs were given the full jazz band, wild sax, treatment, and the words got drowned. Very occasionally her rhythms came through. But while the music was almost OK, the treatment was a travesty.

And, finally, two events on the Monday. Smaller venues. The first in The Pillar Room, in the Town Hall. Two writers. Philip Marsden writing about a single-handed boat journey from Cornwall via the west of Ireland to the Summer Isles (the title of the book as well – I love the name) off the north-west coast of Scotland. You’re face to face with the sea, with the world, when single-handed. He’d walked with his aunt who lived in the North-West Highlands, and she’d died out there in an accident. Her library was full of books on (if I recall aright) on simplifying life, on Zen. Also talking at the event was Dan Richards about his book, ‘Outpost’, where he writes about bothies and cabins and lighthouses and even sheds at the bottom of gardens – your stepping-off points, as an explorer, of wilderness, or as a writer, the open spaces of the mind. The idea appeals, and I will buy the book. The authors are different as personalities,  Marsden aspiring to the slightly grizzled loner, Richards rather more (if he will forgive me) urbane. But for both experience is everything, and truth to experience, and truth to the way it’s expressed in language.

And finally, Laura Cummings, chief Observer art critic, and her family memoir, ‘On Chapel Sands’. Another smaller venue, The Nook: we sit round small tables, in greater comfort and more intimacy than usual. This was better for a writer whose book is about the brief and unexplained disappearance of a little girl for five days from a Lincolnshire beach, when she was only three years old. The little girl was the author’s mother. A long-time unsolved family mystery. She bravely followed the story where it took her. The small venue allowed intimacy and author tears.  In pursuit of the truth about the abduction, she dug behind family stories, as we’d expect, but she also interrogated family images. Her art critic skills proved useful. Photos can tell lies, or they can be bland – just another family photo. Or they can, as in this case, hide secrets which only a practised eye can reveal. A husband and wife photo from 1910 – but posed like a Vermeer, but Vermeer was all but unknown in England back then.

So, three days at the festival. For me it’s been, so far, above all about language. About the integrity of language. The natural substrate of a book festival you might think. But what’s struck me this time around is the importance of awareness of the role of language. A surgeon whose role would be so much less needed round the world if only power was subservient to truth. Politicians will, they must, use language as best they can to put an argument across. But to weaponise truth, which quickly becomes weaponising untruth, is a very different story.

Toni Morrison, and Philip Marsden and Dan Richards, opened/open up not narrow down the world. Language and shouting don’t go well together. Toni Morrison – a writer who engaged with an agonised world with extraordinary honesty – a writer of genius. And two writers who talk of quieter times, sailing or walking or writing. They’re not out to change the world, they don’t insist or demand. But they tell it like it is.

The beech and the oak – and the ash

So much going on out there… and a nature diary?

Yes indeed – time to walk, or if you’re so inclined, as I am, to run, out into the hills, through the woods, and the farmland. Seek out another perspective on the world.

Six weeks ago the first pale green leaves showed on the beech, now the wood is dark, and the light seeks out chinks, or clearings where the foliage is less intense. Many climb tall, planted close together. In time, many years hence, they will be harvested, fuel for our wood burners.

But, given the chance, beeches spread their trunks wide. On one, pollarded long ago, I counted ten trunks. It and its fellows mark the edge of the woodland, where it meets the big hedge-less field, where the barley now four-feet tall is growing abundantly.

Oaks are fewer where I run, but they are there. I know of none of the old, the 500-or-600-year-old, oaks. But across the Severn estuary, into the Forest of Dean, they are abundant. Felled for shipbuilding – and replanted (at Nelson’s instigation, so I read) for the same purpose. But by the time the trees had matured iron had become the main building material.

Can you mention the oak, without mentioning the ash? I often wondered about the old saw, ‘when the ash’s before the oak, there’s bound to be a soak’. When in my experience was the ash in leaf before the oak? Never. (I read that, back in the 18th century, the ash did sometimes beat the oak. But our climate has changed.)

The ash. … the ash is in crisis. They always gave a lighter cover, with their compound leaves. But now leaves are fewer, twigs and branches bare.

I used to sing the old Welsh folk song, The Ash Grove, at school.

The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ’tis speaking;/The harp through it playing has language for me…/I lift up my eyes to the broad leafy dome…/The ash grove, the ash grove again is my home.

The lover found solace beneath the ash. And now it seems it is the ash itself we must weep for. Our only solace – there are resistant strains, we can replant.

The ash is woven not only into song but into our history – and Norse mythology. What off Yggdrasil, the great ash if Norse mythology? Must the tree of the gods also suffer dieback? (There is a symbol for our times!)

‘The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. …The third … root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root … [there] the gods have their court.’ (Extract from the Prose Edda, see also below.)

Tree recognition hasn’t been a strong point of mine.  How might ash differ from sycamore or oak, or lime or white poplar? I knew the shapes, sort of, but I guessed. Now I know the ash. They are in groves, and near me, lining hedges, and especially, they’re where local farmland rises to a gentle summit, prominent, lording over the land. They are thinner now, you can see through them. When they go, so will our landmarks.

(Ash and sycamore – I puzzled a day or two ago over two trees apparently growing together, their trunks conjoined – it’s called inosculation.)

At a more mundane level, we were wondering over lunch – is there a plan, a national plan, to replant? Or at least recommendations? Or guidance? None as far as we can tell. A recent report in Current Biology estimated a total cost to the nation of the loss of trees (no mention as far as I am aware of replanting – of ultimately restoring the landscape) at £15 billion.

And the ash trees that line our lanes? Are they the farmer’s responsibility? The local council? Primarily the latter, according to the report. I’m told when they’re felled in the diseased state, weakened by fungus, they shatter, and there is a mighty mess.

I’ve recently returned from the Hay Book Festival. Robert Macfarlane was there, talking about his new book, ‘Underland’. There’s a marvelous chapter that focuses on the ‘understorey’ in woodland, where fungi spread their hyphae, a network which not only consumes dying matter but also supports the living.

‘The relationship between plant and fungi is all about exchange, swapping chlorophyll for nutrients, but far more than this, ‘the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another … sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest:  a dying tree might divest its resources into the network for the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours.’ (Underland, p98)

But the dieback fungus is at another level, a fungus which feeds only to destroy. A dead-end fungus.

So I despair to see the ash die back. And I wonder what lies ahead. But I also wonder at what lies beneath. My eyes have been opened to something extraordinary. But as town-dwellers, most of us, we take it all for granted.

We take the ash for granted.

**

(Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, 15) “The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Æsir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. But under the root that reaches towards the the frost-giants, there is where Mimir’s well is, which has wisdom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. …The third root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root is a well which is very holy, called Weird’s well (Urd’s well). There the gods have their court.

Walking for charity with Melanie

We’ve been out walking, 10km (not miles, that’s the way it is these days), for ‘Walk the Wards’, a charity event to raise money for local hospitals in the Cheltenham area. (My partner, Hazel, is a volunteer on the oncology ward at Cheltenham Hospital.)

There’s something wonderfully positive about such events. I’ve run marathons for charity, but this was more laid-back, more focused – one charity, not many, and walking, so time to think, and no crowds to cheer you on, just mud (too much rain overnight) and a sense of common purpose.

The mood continues into the afternoon, this afternoon, Sunday afternoon. It’s drizzling outside.

It was drizzling – raining – at Woodstock in 1969, when the singer Melanie came on stage for her first-ever performance to a big crowd. The audience were lighting candles to beat back the rain. (We had imagination in those days!) She came away, as she said, a celebrity, and with the chorus of ‘(Lay Down) Candles in the Rain’ in her head. ‘I left that field with that song in my head, the anthemic part.’

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down…let your white birds smile/at the ones who stand and frown./Lay down, lay down, lay it all down…let your white birds smile/at the ones who stand and frown.

We were so close, there was no room, we bled inside each /other’s wounds.

We all had caught the same disease..and we all sang, the songs /of peace.

I wasn’t at Woodstock, but I listened and lived it back in 1969. Listening to Melanie singing Ruby Tuesday (in the bath, after the walk!), and that catch in her voice – something of the old optimism came back to me.

Today’s walk, ‘Walk the wards’, did a little bit of the same. Brought back the optimism.

In this overly negative, too often backward-looking era, with Barack Obama a memory (though still an inspiration), we have to hang on to the ‘can-do’, make it new, share it with our kids and their kids.

Another Melanie song, ‘Peace will Come’:

And my feet are swimming in all of the waters /All of the rivers are givers to the ocean /According to plan, according to man …

Oh there’s a chance peace will come /In your life

Each generation feels the push-back, each new generation has to push forward, all progress is slow, but if the older generations can find it in them to join with the younger, as I did with my two children, very grown-up children, last year, opposing Brexit in Trafalgar Square, then there is hope…

And yet… a mention of Brexit slips in. Many walking today will be Brexit supporters. Nothing is ever simple.

Impermanence

We conjured a turtle on a Cornish beach last Sunday, and slates gathered on the beach were scales for its back. Five hours later, in the gloaming, I watched the incoming tide, the waves creeping, maybe one in three or one in four, a little closer, until they trickled into the ditch we’d dug around the turtle. The shell held out a little longer, maybe ten minutes, until a small wave sloshed gently over the top, and then the undermining was really underway. By the time I took my leave, reluctantly, ten minutes later, there was barely a hump to be seen, as the tide pushed further in.

Impermanence… I’ve also been walking the coast path, from Trevose Head to Morgan Porth, and back, the same terrain, yes, but different perspectives, as if two separate journeys. The coves bite deep, and the caves and sink-holes provide sounding-boards for the waves. The rocks break and twist, as the strata and lines of weakness, and all the vagaries of weather and climate over many millions of years, dictate. And yet it all seems so permanent. Even the flock of oyster-catchers, which piped on a rock platform far below: they were there both outward and inward, though inward the black-backed gulls had flown.

Looking down on Bedruthan Sands from the cliff top, the sand was fresh-swept – the tide bites the cliff, no soft or littered sand, and four girls were playing boule, and their cries just carried to me. The waves which had been a high surf were lapping low, or seemed to from my elevation, and all seemed … well, yes, permanent.  I didn’t want to walk on, and lose that sense of forever.

I found a grassy slope, and sat and looked out to see, blue under blue, aquamarine closer in, where it shallowed, and the rippling smoothness extended in a great curve around me. Another cliff, another cove – snorkellers were taking advantage of low tide and swimming out to a sandy beach.

Where the cliffs come down to Treyarnon beach there’s a steep gully which you can swim through at lowest tide. This, my imagination tells me, is what they do, what I could do, as the observer, every day, and yet – such moments, such times, are rare. The tide will rise, the mists sweep in, and the storms, and the winter …

Joy and a gentle melancholy combine, and a sense of peace, and fragility … that sense of living in the moment, and yet living forever.

 

 

Walking in the Lake District with Mrs May

Father, son and daughter in the Lake District. No talk of politics, just much sharing of music, all our of favourites, from fifty years back in my case, back to Grace Slick belting out White Rabbit – where did such amazing music come from when all had been doldrums only ten years before. Not quite so far back for Ben and Rozi, but they have good taste, and are slowly convincing me that I should love You can be heroes...wrong… We can be heroes… wrong again, just Heroes, and maybe come round to David Bowie after all these years. Now that he’s gone.

We try and avoid politics, though father and daughter are political animals. Whoops of delight when I see that all the election posters in Coniston are for the LibDem candidate. What, I wonder, does Theresa May talk about with her husband, and passing strangers, when out walking? And what if I met her out walking? A cheery good morning?

Bagehot in the Economist has a piece on Theresa May, under the heading Tory of Tories. Her Britain he writes is ‘the Britain of the Tory heartlands, a Britain of solid values and rooted certainties, hard work and upward mobility, a Britain where people try to get ahead but also have time for the less fortunate’. That made me wonder. What’s to disagree? Well, let’s get started…

Rooted certainties – that of course has never been England, or the UK. It’s our ability to change, to move quickly, to adapt, to draw on skills from around the world (here in the Lake District the Coniston mines and Millom tannery are two local examples) that has made us what we are. Not clinging to rooted certainties. ‘Solid values’ – a euphemism too often for closing ranks against the world. ‘Hard work’ – it’s inspiration, and we’ve drawn over centuries much inspiration, and wisdom, from Europe, we need as well. ‘Upward mobility’ – and what of those left behind? Not the JAMs, the just about managing, an invented concept if ever there was one, but those whose disadvantages of birth and position deny any opportunity of upward progress. The Tory world is too often a world where the barriers comes down, and the shutters.

There’s another free-trading Tory as well, a different breed, and they have a curious co-existence with the heartland Tory. Not Mrs May’s world at all, nor it seems that of her ‘guru’, Nick Timothy,  who likes to quote Joseph Chamberlain as a hero, claiming him as a people’s champion against … free trade. Falling into the old trap of quoting history out of context, one that seems to be everywhere in these post Brexit days.

All a frightful muddle.

And if we’d met her out walking? A cheery hello, as I manage with most walkers, that would have to suffice. Puzzling over the contradictions of Mrs May would be for another time, and the certainties.

Walking is about the next horizon, and the one after that, and horizons open up as you travel to take in the whole world…

 

 

 

Gloucester, Easter Sunday morning

Easter Sunday, and a forecast of dullness belied by brilliant sun, and a blue sky which set off the white stone of Gloucester Cathedral. 8pm, early morning communion in the choir, before the high altar. Above us the great 14th century window reputedly commemorating the battle of Crecy. About thirty people at communion, come 11pm the cathedral will be packed, chairs await them in every corner of nave and aisle. After communion I waited awhile, and stood at the back of the nave, looking toward organ and altar, and all was (for a few minutes) empty, not a soul, just the great Norman columns in stately procession toward the transept, and the simple vaulted ceiling, in sharp contrast to the wonderful fan vaulting of the choir.

(Should anyone wonder why a blog with zen in its title should be comfortable with early communion… There’s a silence, a time for contemplation, in the early morning. I’ll say no more than that.)

In the cathedral precinct there’s major landscaping, and fences everywhere, but lift your eyes to the cathedral walls, the tower and the sky, and there is all the space, and all the serenity you could wish for in the world.

Ivor Gurney has a close association with the cathedral.  The son of a Gloucester tailor, he was composer, writer of songs, poet, and a celebrant of the Gloucestershire landscape, in his poems from the front, and in his letters. Windows in the Lady Chapel commemorate him, and I always pay a visit when I come to the cathedral – but not today. The Lady Chapel is fenced off, major renovations until the autumn. They will make for easier access, and maybe more people will find sanctuary there, and take in the wonderful stained glass (by Tom Denny) of the Gurney memorial. He survived the first war, but his mind didn’t, incarcerated in a mental home in Kent he longed for his home county, and the Severn vale, where he’d walked countless times…

One place he walked was Cranham, whose woods he celebrated, and where I am now. Reached via the Portway, down and up which I drove an hour or two ago. Gurney would have walked, and he’d have seen that amphitheatre of woodland and meadow opening up ahead, farms either side, and a vast sky above. He was obsessed with the idea of beauty, above all the beauty of his home county. It gave him comfort in France. He recalls in a letter home how the tower of the church of Merville reminds him of Gloucester’s tower. Both churches rise above the landscape, are landmarks, and inspirations.

Walking back to my car, I passed along pedestrianised streets, stained, a little ragged, forlorn, and empty on an Easter Sunday morning. Only Macdonalds and Burger King open, and they only just. How would Gurney have responded to the decay of his old city? To the contrast between shops, and cathedral and precinct, an absolute contrast. How I wondered as I walked back could the city be revived, made vibrant and colourful as a city centre should be – and keep all the while the quiet and sanctity and celebration of the cathedral and its surrounds.

One of many questions this Easter, an Easter where questions seem to crowd in on all sides – so many questions where there are no obvious answers.