...made out of words

The Fall

2012-02-14T07:40:00.002Z

to my surprise
I had time
to wonder at
the light
at the end
of the tunnel
how it turned
from a sun
into a star
that got smaller
and smaller
in a night sky
I had all
to myself
and I waited
for it to go
out altogether
as sometime it must
I thought
one way or another
rock or water
but no
it just seemed
to go on
and on
I never thought
I'd have time
to finish a
po

(c) Dominic Rivron 2012

Onwards and Upwards

2012-02-12T09:38:00.003Z

At Christmas, the band I've been playing in and I went our seperate ways. Playing with Trio Gitan was a wonderful musical experience and, had we simply intended to continue what we were doing, I'd still be doing it. However, as a glance at a roadmap of Britain will show, the North Eastern edge of the Yorkshire Dales isn't exactly the centre of the musical universe. If the few roads that snake over that part of the world were veins and arteries running through a carcass, then that part of the carcass would be suffering serious circulation problems. For the band to be financially viable long term meant travelling long distances and staying away over night. I didn't like the idea of that -teaching all week and disappearing at the weekend- so, with a heavy heart, I left it. It seemed the right time: we had no gigs until March and leaving when I did would give Andy and Jack (the other two-thirds of the band) time to find a replacement.

At least I've not had the problem of wondering what to do instead. Taking the band away has simply made room in my life for all the things it was pushing out - all of it stuff I do, given the chance, for the sheer joy of it. Spending time with K, watching telly, chilling out, running, blogging, writing a bit of poetry now and again, amateur radioing.

If I get involved in playing music again outside my teaching work I think it's going to be simply because I want to, and not because I'm being paid to. That'll probably mean playing free improv (see video, below) and there's not much chance of running into anyone who's into that round here, although you never know.

I also feel strongly that music should be part of life and not just something that's done in halls full of seats. In pre-TV days people used to play the piano and sing to it. In Elizabethan times people would gather around the table and sing madrigals (the parts were often printed facing "North South East and West" to facilitate this). Being able to make your own music was considered an essential skill, like being able to use a remote control today.

Not entirely unrelated, there was an item on The Culture Show last night (BBC 2 - it was a cracking episode all round, I thought - it can be found here for a few days) about artists giving away art for free. You make a picture and leave it in the street with a "free" price tag on it. Sooner or later somebody takes it. I was reminded of IPYPIASM.

Doing it

2012-02-05T10:35:00.006Z

Yesterday I bought an old transistor radio for three quid that didn't work. It took me back. It had a dark, close-fitting leather bag with a strap on the top. I never did like listening to pop music as a background drone, but there is something nostalgic about the sound of an old transistor radio. I'm able to say this because when I got the thing home I disembowled it, tweaked it, poked about with my soldering iron and got it going - well, on medium wave, at least. It didn't take a lot of doing: to get technical for a moment, I just wiggled everything until I found what made the horrible noise it was making worse and replaced it with something that looked the same from a box of bits. You don't know what you can do until you try. I think of building or fiddling with radios as almost a form of meditation. You have to take your time, go step by step, prepare your ground, make fine movements. First you need a bright light and box to put all the screws in as they come out so that they don't roll onto the floor. Then one of those alligator clips on sticks things that will act as an extra pair of hands - and blutack. Blutack is brilliant for holding screwheads on screwdrivers when you have to push them into fiddly places. You can stick screws on long thin sausages of blutack too, if they're going into really awkward places. And then there's the soldering iron. One false move and make a right mess of things. The cheap ones are nasty and frustrating because they never get hot enough. Slightly dearer ones get really hot and - zap! The job's done. No messing.

It strikes me, as this stream of consciousness rolls along, that one of the things I love about electronics (and radio in particular) is that try as I might, I don't understand it! I come at it as a tinkerer. As a musician I know my tonics from my dominants, my sharps and flats and why thing are the way they are more or less, but the facts that lie behind electronic engineering have to be dinged into my brain to have any hope of staying there and fall out as soon as I start moving about. I love the poetry of it. The box with no moving parts and a voice coming out of it - not to mention the unworldly sound-world that goes on between the stations.

It makes a change and it's good to tinker, to find one's way - to find out by experience, to work on aquiring a working knowledge rather than developing a trained knowledge, for a change (although the boundaries between the two, obviously, are not hard a fast).

And what shall I do with the radio, now it works? I'm not sure. Now it works, I can feel myself losing interest, moving on. I might tinker with it some more. Or I could just put it in the bathroom and listen to it.

What is Music?

2012-02-01T08:32:00.005Z

Researching my previous post, I came upon this short humorous verse which appeared as an introduction to the tunes collected in The William Vickers Manuscript - a collection of popular tunes which dates from the early 1770s. I'm sure one or two other readers who are also musicians will have a chuckle at this and think it's a case of "the more things change, the more they stay the same":

Musicks a Crotchet the Sober thinks it Vain

The Fiddles a Wooding Projection

Tunes are but Flights of a Whimsical Brain

Which the Bottle brings best to Parfection

Musisians are half witted mery and madd

And Those are the same that admire Them

Theyr fools if they Pley unless their Well Paid

And the Others are Blockheads to Hire them.

Would you believe it, Lisa?

2012-01-29T09:26:00.006Z

Lisa Gerhardini could have had no idea, when she sat for Leonardo that, 500 years later, her face would end up staring out of a jigsaw on a polished table in an English living-room, at a farmer and his wife assembling it by electric light.

Whoever it was first played GF#GGGDCBDGF#G and thought it might make a merry tune to dance to could not have conceived that hundreds of years later people would still whistle the tune and associate it with the sea.

Archimedes, if he ever did jump into the bath and cry eureka! may have thought he had discovered something people would think about for a long time afterwards but was unlikely to have realised he had given rise to the expression "eureka moment".

Delibes could have had no idea that his Flower Duet from Lakme would be disseminated to the masses via digital media to advertise flying machines, or Bach (here I show my age) that the Air from his 3rd Orchestral Suite would be used to advertise cigars.

In one way, the most interesting of these examples, because its creator is the least famous, is that of the Hornpipe. We have no idea who thought it up, anymore than he or she had that we would still be whistling it. I'm thinking, I suppose, of the "butterfly effect". We usually think of it in relation to time travel - to going back in time and changing history. I'm thinking though, of the butterfly effects that have happened in the past and happen in the present, without the help of time machines, how what we say or do effects not only the moment in which we say or do it but the future as well.

Whistle a new tune and if it's catchy you might have invented a cultural virus that'll knock around for centuries.

Or - I have heard it said that a joke told in a playground in London will be told within 40 minutes in Newcastle. Try and think up as good a joke as you can. Tell it to someone. 40 years from now it might still be being told. Come to think of it, it doesn't have to be a joke - just a novel expression or use of a word. Even better.

Or don't. As Lisa Gerhardini would know, were she still alive, sometimes all you need to do is to sit still.

The whole of the Sailor's Hornpipe, with guitar tab, can be found here, on my other blog.

So that was a week...

2012-01-27T21:26:00.000Z

So it's Friday. I never cease to be amazed how quickly weeks can pass by without one noticing. The ways we percieve and reflect on time present, past and future are endlessly fascinating. Viewed from Friday, a week may seem to have flown by, even if days during the week seemed to drag at the time.

It's also sometimes difficult at the end of a week to cast one's mind back to exactly what happened. Of course, there was all the work - but to access that I'd have to click on an icon in my brain that gets given a wide birth on Friday evening. At lunchtime I dropped into The Station (a local coffee shop-cum-art gallery-cum-cinema) as usual for 20 minutes with a coffee and the Guardian. I read an article in it about the Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs. I forgot to put the bin out this morning. I was alerted to the fact by the sound of the bin lorry making off down the road. I could have set off after it, just, in my dressing-gown and wellingtons, dragging our rubbish behind me, but dignity prevented me. Yesterday we bought a Chinese takeaway.

Wednesday we went out to Henderson's Bistro (up the Dale), not for meal, but because Karen has just sold one of her photographs there - a really nice one of Aysgarth Falls when it froze a while back. Tuesday evening I popped in to see my step-son and wish him a happy birthday. Unlike us, he has an open fire, so I sat down and found it hard to get up again...

Early in the week I finished reading Middlemarch. I'd found it heavy going in the middle but for the last third it was quite a page-turner, I thought. It has certainly found a place on my mental list of books I really enjoyed reading. Yesterday I started to read a book my daughter gave me for Christmas: The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. (After that it's going to be An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch). In-car listening for the week has been Radiohead's Kid A.

How much of that -even the more significant events- would I have remembered had I not written it all down? Perhaps I should keep a diary - a more systematic record of events than a blog, where I just post things I want to share, or that occur to me. I probably haven't got time to do that - although I probably won't remember what I did in the time I would have spent writing it. The point I'm making is not that I'm concerned for the state of my memory -I'm not- but that even when we're fully functioning, day-to-day events get forgotten (what was I doing first thing Thursday morning, three weeks ago?).

Time to Defrag?

2012-01-23T08:41:00.001Z

The other day I set the old PC to defragment itself. For the totally uninitiated I'll quickly explain the rough idea I have of how it works (and it is a rough idea: apologies to any IT minded people reading this who really do understand it). Fragmentation is what happens to a hard drive when it gets used in a computer. Files get left all over the place on it, as the computer tries to carry out its operations as quickly as possible. Like an over-busy, distracted human being, it puts things down wherever it is at the time without any thought of putting them away. Result: chaos. There's a hairbrush on the mantlepiece and the bedside table bristles with dirty coffee mugs. Where the car keys are is anybody's guess. Defragmentation is the computer's equivalent of tidying up. Once its disk is defragmented, it doesn't need to rush around it looking for what it needs.

So much for spring cleaning. I was struck with the wider analogies to life in general, too. We up sticks to go to college, take work where we can find it (I've moved around a lot myself. My children find themselves having to do the same thing. Personal choice comes into it, but it goes beyond personal choice, too. Decisions beget choices, more decisions...). If families split up, the fragments can find themselves heading off in opposite directions. The results fill up the trains and motorways every morning. Hours are spent travelling and hours are spent earning the money needed to travel. Fossil fuels, carbon emissions... (Travel used to be far more fun. Same with computers. In older versions of Windows a pretty pattern of brightly-coloured bricks filled the screen and methodically rearranged themselves when the computer defragged. The effect was hypnotic - certainly more pleasant to watch than your average soap, if you ask me. Sadly, the defragmenter in more recent versions is a boring affair: you click on the mouse and it just gets on with the job).

I often find myself trying to think up a list of "things we would do if we really took global warming seriously". One of the things I'd put close to the top of this list is: defrag. But how?

A Cautionary Tale

2012-01-15T10:09:00.003Z

A cold, clear blue-sky day here yesterday. I decided to go for a run over Pen Hill.

When I parked up, the thermometer read -2. At least it wouldn't be boggy on the top. I set off across the hard, icy fields and soon reached the edge of the moor at the Eastern top of the hill. I'd set off 15 minutes before sunset and as I ran across the plateau the last light of the sun shone across the moorland grass and heather, lending it a bronze tint. I found my way to the trig point then ran for some way along the cliff top which runs along the northern edge of the hill. The view over Wensleydale from here is quite something - especially when enjoyed in the light-headed, almost ecstatic state running can engender.

A mile or so later I realised I had to stop for a pee. I took off my gloves and held them under my chin. I had come to a stop in a glorious place overlooking the hills of Coverdale which, in the cold, clear air looked particularly bleak and magnificent. I spent a moment admiring the view.

I set off again. I'd only been running for a minute or two when I realised my hands were getting cold. My gloves! Of course, I'd been holding them under my chin. I must have dropped them somewhere in the heather.

I retraced my steps. I finally found them, still wet and steaming, where I'd stopped to admire the view. Be warned: it's impossible to admire a view and hold your gloves under your chin at the same time.

I took these photos of Pen Hill on a warmer day a while ago:

Pen Hill: Southern Edge

Cotton Grass: Pen Hill Plateau

Pen Hill: cairn overlooking Coverdale

The Barrier

2012-01-10T22:21:00.004Z

A story

“John...”
Diane's tone sounded worried, almost interrogative. John was driving just a little too fast, in her opinion, and not slowing up anything like as much as he should as he approached the bends.

“Take it easy...” she said.
John turned to her momentarily. His face seemed unreadable to her, almost unfamiliar. She thought he was about to say something. But he didn't.
“Whatever's the matter?” she said.

John said nothing. He could think of nothing to say in reply to her question. In fact, he couldn't think of anything to say about anything. He felt so confused he didn't know where to start. Whenever there's an earthquake you see pictures on TV of buildings teetering on the brink of collapse: move one brick, the wrong brick, and the whole lot will come crashing down. He felt his whole sense of himself similarly poised on the brink of something terrible. He found himself walking around it, on the outside. Pull out the wrong brick, utter one word, and if it were the wrong one it might all fall to pieces. He didn't want to take the risk.

However, he just couldn’t bring himself to carry on as if nothing was wrong.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” he said.

Diane frowned, unconvinced. She needed an explanation of this inconsistency between John's actions and his words. They had been together for ten years, ever since they were both in their teens, in fact. They had known each other even longer than that. Their parents had been friendly with one another. Although never in the same class (John was a year older) she and John had attended the same school. John had been her first boyfriend. When they first got together, John's parents had been a little unsure about the relationship. When they had been together for a while and showed no signs of falling out they let it be known that they thought John should “get a little more experience” of life before getting involved further. Diane -perhaps uncharitably, perhaps not- always felt that, at that time, they wanted John to “do better” for himself. He had ambitions to be an architect and she thought they probably liked the idea of him forming a relationship with another well-paid professional. If so, they were far too civilised to actually say so outright. Neither did they ever do anything to positively thwart the relationship. Instead they pursued an almost Gandhi-like campaign of passive resistance to acknowledging the young couple's feelings for one another. Diane's parents, on the other hand, had always accepted the easy inevitability of the situation.

The first major test had come when they both left school. John had gone to study architecture in London. Diane had attended a teacher training college in the Midlands. Once it became clear that their relationship had survived this ordeal by separation, John's parents began to relax a little, to the point that when they announced that they planned to get married, John's mother seemed positively pleased.

As for the present, Diane simply wanted the open, honest interaction that had existed between them for so long to be restored. She wasn't quite sure how long the present terrible state of affairs had gone on for – the onset had been gradual. Was it weeks, or months? Whatever it was, nothing she said or did seemed to have any effect. For hours on end there would be a dreadful, barren gulf between them: straightforward conversation was impossible. The expressions on John's face would suddenly seem alien to her: looking at it it had sometimes crossed her mind that, had she been looking at a passport photograph and not a real face, she would not have recognised it.

In the not-too-distant past when things were good and they talked, John had told her stories, probably myths she now realised, of failed early space missions during which space capsules had failed to achieve orbit, instead carrying on into deep space -potentially for ever- with a payload of frozen, suffocated human remains. These stories apparently originated from radio enthusiasts who claimed to have listened in to the last words of these asphyxiating cosmonauts on the frequencies used by Roscosmos. Ever since, whenever she thought about them, she found it difficult to get the images out of her head: frozen, space-suited corpses, each strapped to seat, drifting through the darkness, slowly diverging. She could see them now.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Diane thought John seemed a little calmer than he had been before she spoke out. He'd turned off the motorway. They had just passed a sign for Sheffield. They were driving down a steep-sided valley, through an avenue of trees. She opened the map, hoping to locate the place: she felt comforted, absorbing herself in something so normal. She soon found the road on the map: a red line heading towards a strip of blue, a lake between hills. Once they got into the hills they hadn’t got a lot further to go to get to the house. What would they do when they arrived? She craved normality: talking to friends about books, music, films, politics. She was looking forward to the mysterious pleasure one can feel inhabiting an unfamiliar place. The usual associations with the immediate past are temporarily erased. It seems, temporarily, as if the future might be different.

The end of the blue strip appeared ahead of them. She glanced at the map again.
“Turn left,” she said.
They found themselves driving down a road squeezed between a pine forest and the lake. Every mile or so, lay-bys were set between the road and the water's edge where tourists could pull in to admire the view. John abruptly steered the campervan across the road, into one of them. He turned off the ignition and looked around, his elbows resting on the steering-wheel.

“Isn't it beautiful?” he said.
“Yes it is,” Diane said, gratefully.
“I'll do my best,” he said.
“I know,” she said. She rested her hand on his thigh. “I think it'll do you good.”
“I hope so,” he said. “Shall we take a walk?”
“We said we'd be there by 8.”
“Just for a few minutes? We've plenty of time.”
“Alright.”

They opened the doors of the van and stepped out. There was a strong smell of pine resin from the woods behind them. It was a bright, clear day, but you could tell it was early evening by the slight lengthening of the shadows. There was a hint of a warm breeze. The lake shore had been reinforced with gently-sloping stone blocks. The water was lapping against them with short, sucking sounds.

They walked down to the water's edge and began to make their way along the stone bank.
“We should do this more often,” said Diane.
“Yes,” said John.
“We spend too much time with our heads down, getting on with it,” said Diane. “We should look up sometimes.”
“Get out of the rat race,” said John.
“Yes – well, sometimes,” said Diane.
“When you're somewhere like this, you begin to notice what you are,” said John, slowing his pace and sniffing the air. “You begin to feel how you're supposed to feel. Don't you agree?”
“Yes,” said Diane. She was pleased to hear him say the things he was saying. Getting out into the country seemed to be having a good effect on him.
“But what if we feel so good we don't want to go back?”
“We're big girls and boys now. We have to go back.”
“Why?”
“Because that's the way it is.”
John made an expression of almost comic resignation and shrugged.
“We have responsibilities...” she said.
“Aye.”

They walked along in silence for a while. They came to an iron grating set in the stonework. Some sort of overflow, perhaps? The grating covered a deep shaft. It was thrilling to look down it.
“We could bring those responsibilities with us, I suppose,” said Diane.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean apply for jobs. Find work down here. Get out of the city.”
A shadow of doubt seemed to pass over John's face. “But how much of this is real?” he said.
“Meaning?”
“This isn't a lake, it's a reservoir. When they built these places, they flooded whole villages. When there's a drought you can see the tops of the church towers sticking out of the water.”
“Well – I suppose it's as real as it gets. As you said yourself, you begin to feel how your supposed to feel here.”
“And when you do, perhaps you begin to see what you're looking at more clearly. Those hills – those moors over there, they used to be forests. We cut them all down to make charcoal. You can still find ancient treeroots buried in the peat.” He stopped walking. He breathed deeply. He smiled. “But it's good to be out here, all the same.”

The sun was catching the surface of the water in such a way that it appeared indistinct, unreal. John looked out to the middle, where the light intensified into a bright mass. It was like -indeed was, in a very real, physical way- a barrier between himself and the reality of what used to be, rippling with light over farms, roads and villages that no longer existed. He felt a sudden urge to swim. He started to take off his clothes.

“What on earth are you doing?” said Diane.
“Going for a swim!” said John, smiling boyishly.
“Don't be ridiculous!”
“There's nothing ridiculous about going for a swim.”
“John! We're supposed to be at the house by 8! We'll be late as it is!”
“It won't take long.”
“Didn't you see the sign in the layby? You're not allowed!”
“It'll be fine.”
“You'll be soaking wet!”
“That's a point! We packed a towel didn't we? Would you be an angel and run up to the car and get it?”
“John!”
He was by then stark naked, his clothes in an untidy heap beside him on the stones. He would have liked to take a running jump into the water but for all he knew he might land in a tangle of rusty submerged barbed wire. And as for running, it took a moment or two to get used to walking barefoot on the rough stones. He walked straight in.
“Thanks!” he said.

Icy braclets enclosed first his ankles, then his knees. The cold struck his groin with a shock but he kept going. Soon he was up to his neck and gasping for breath. Within moments he became aware of the fact that the water felt quite warm. He began to swim. The indistinct, twinkling barrier filled his eyes. It was as if he had morphed into a different creature entirely, one that could fly through the thick atmosphere of the reservoir, pushing the medium aside with its limbs. He quickly became aware of a feeling of deep water beneath him. He felt like a character he thought he'd seen in a Chagal painting, flying over fields, churches, villages, like an angel.

“John!”
He rolled over onto his back and continued to propel himself with the palms of his hands. The whole depth of the sky swung into view. He lifted his head slightly. He could see Diane stood on the shore. She looked a surprisingly long way away. From her stance she looked exasperated.

“Don't worry, I'm fine. It'll be fine. I'll be back in a minute. Please... If you could fetch me the towel.”

The figure on the bank made a sharp, downward gesture with its hands and jogged off towards the car.

He rolled back and swam on. Without really thinking about what he was doing or what he intended to do, he took a deep breath and dived under. It was a long while since he'd last been swimming. He'd forgotten how hard in was to stay underwater – his body's bouyancy and the the air in his lungs fought with him, tried to drag him to the surface. He fought back, digging into the water with his cupped hands. He opened his eyes. They smarted at the contact with the cold water and he could not see very far. He was surrounded by a green glow that faded into darkness. He forced himself down, deeper. He turned, and swam back towards the shore. Soon, from out of the darkness below him, he saw the hillside, now the bed of the reservoir, rising to meet him – mud, scoured of any distinctive traces of its former existence. He began to feel an overwhelming need to breathe. He thrust himself upwards then relaxed, allowing his natural bouyancy to carry him the rest of the way to the surface. A moment later he broke through the barrier again, back into the air and the light. He was close to the shore now. Diane was walking back from the van, the large brown towel thrown over her shoulder. He swam towards her. The water turned suddenly shallow. He staggered to his feet. He brushed his mane of hair back off his face, combing it with his fingers.

“You ass! You had me frightened then,” said Diane. Her annoyance had dissipated. In its place she felt a familiar mood of semi-comic resignation. John: gentle, sometimes unfathomable, always untamable. If something decent and harmless could be done he simply couldn’t see why it shouldn’t be done. He had no respect for convention for its own sake.
“You should have gone in yourself. The water was lovely. Thanks,” he said, taking the towel. He started to rub himself down vigorously, starting with his head.
And why not, she wondered? Because she was not impulsive. Because she had a respect for rules that she did not like to admit to and which annoyed her: a respect borne of fear. Part of her would have loved to jump in with him. Another, bigger part, told her that the moment she did so, a Water Board van would pull up in the layby. Men in uniforms would come and tell them off, or worse. She envied John his careless sense of freedom.
“You didn’t see any houses, villages, church towers?”
“No,” he said, pulling on his trousers. “Just green light. And mud. Like going to Mars. You know, how they used to think there were canals and all that and now they think there’s probably nothing there?”
She picked up his shirt and held it out to him. He took it.
“Thanks,” he said. He struggled to pull it over his cold, still damp arms. Then he tried to do up the buttons. His fingers were obviously numb. He looked up at Diane with an expression of comic resignation. “Would you?... Please?...”
She started to fasten the buttons up the front of his shirt. So like a child, she thought. This is what it would be like if they had a child, dressing it. She looked up at his face. If they had a child, would it look like him, or like her? Perhaps a bit of both? If so, which bits, she wondered? There was still a triumphant, ecstatic look in his eyes. He’d swum. He’d proved he was a free man and buzzed with the satisfaction of someone who has simply been able to put his thoughts into immediate action. He’d broken through the barrier, even if he’d found nothing on the other side but unbreathable water and a green darkness.
“We better be getting on,” she said.
“So we had,” he said, looking round at the forest and the hill. “So we had.”

The Poetry of Margery Clute (18)

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Written on A Frosty Morning

‘Tis frozen all around:

The pond is turned to glass.

The world stands still

As if e'en Time itself

Has ceased to pass.

Poised in a silent moment

For an Eternity –

What cause will break

This silent spell, what dread

Catastrophe?

I know my boots are frozen.

My nose is turning red.

‘Tis warm beneath

This woolen quilt. I think

I’ll stay in bed.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Sky at Night

The rising sun restores the sky
To a bright, azure dome.
‘Tis time, they say, to rouse ourselves
And in the world to roam;

And yet, at night, ‘tis such a sight
When constellations glow
Like jewels upon a mighty breast
Upon the world below!

See there, the Pliads, like a lamp
That twinkles in the East
And there the Plough, poised o’er the hill –
‘Tis such a nightly feast!

O how I long to sleep all day
And wander all the night
Perhaps I should, I could – and yet
It doesn’t seem quite right.

But should such thoughts deter me?
Why do as others do?
Perhaps I should defy the world
And to myself be true.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Herdsmen of the Sun

2012-01-05T23:49:00.001Z

I'm not a film buff, but Werner Herzog is the one director who has made a deep impression on me as a director. When I was in my 20s, a cinema near where we lived in North London often screened his films. My favourite from back then was The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. It's still my favourite film.

Recently, my daughter sent me a link to another film by Herzog - Herdsmen of the Sun. I'd not seen it before. Made in 1989, it's a documentary about the Wodaabe tribe, who live along the Southern edge of the Sahara. It focusses on their Gerewol celebration, during which young men take part in a beauty contest, each hoping to attract the attention of one of the young women. Near the beginning we hear Gounod's "Ave Maria" recorded in 1901 by the last castrato to sing in the Vatican. I found the whole thing deeply moving. It's nearly 50 minutes long but if like most people you haven't got that long to spare, take a look at the first few minutes. You might want to come back and watch it all...

Chopping Little Bits Off (One At A Time)

2012-01-02T19:07:00.006Z

Happy New Year! I wrote this song a couple of years ago. I recorded it the other week, when I still had a cold. I'd only just got my voice back and I quite liked the idea of singing it with a rough/gruff voice...

Little Bits by Dominic Rivron

Just coming to the end of a great couple of weeks. Our family members are dotted all over England and somehow we managed to spend some time with a significant number of them.

The Poetry of Margery Clute (17)

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Upon the Moor

How perilously upon the Moor
The cotton-grasses cling!
While yonder stone stands all alone
Surveying everything;

See overhead the cloudy sky
Brood dark upon the hill
While Autumn winds sigh through the heather
And make it feel chill.

How many moods the Moor subsumes
Can scarcely be expressed!
Now bright, the sun breaks o’er my head
And kindly warms my breast
(A boon indeed! 'Twas getting cold
Beneath my cotton vest).

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Lines Written in 1848

I dreamed of travelling o’er the sea

To foreign lands unknown,

Aboard a ship, without a chart,

To where’er it might be blown,

That I might leave this place behind,

So silent, full of gloom,

A house so full of sadness,

So redolent of Doom.

Love and sweet companionship

Have borne me through the years –

Now, they are gone, I am alone

To face my darkest fears

And sadly, in my watery dreams,

I’ve found no place to rest,

No land of joy and plenty,

By Nature’s bounty blessed –

Merely a storm that rages on

And tears the sails to shreds,

Beneath the low’ring storm-cloud

Which hovers o’er our heads.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-23T10:36:00.002Z

Merry Christmas! This is a photograph of our Christmas tree. When, in the 1840s, following the example set by the Royal Family, people in England started to set up their own Christmas trees there is some evidence that they were not quite sure what to do with them...

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Christmas, 1842

Build up the fire! ‘Tis cold without -

The coldest I’ve known without a doubt!

But Christmas time demands that we

Cheerful, bright and merry be.

E’en pagans chose this frosty time

To celebrate, despite the clime,

And, whate’er the hardships of the season

There can be no better reason

To pour ourselves a cup of tea

And contemplate the Christmas Tree.

O holy night! O holy night!

Come forth, perform the sacred rite!

Let us celebrate with glee

And dance around the Christmas Tree!

Without, the Christmas bells are ringing

And the carol singers singing;

In the church the busy vicar

Blesses his flock by candle-flicker,

While through the woods men gaily go,

Gathering the mistletoe

To deck their halls and rafters bare

That they might then make merry there,

Sat beneath the wild berry

Eating mince pies and ~~watching telly~~ drinking sherry.

O holy night! O holy night!

Come forth, perform the sacred rite!

Let us celebrate with glee

And dance around the Christmas Tree!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Poetry of Margery Clute (15)

2011-12-17T07:00:00.020Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Poet Speaks

Mama and Papa have confused me,
Though 'twas not their intention, I deem.
They filled up my head with the oddest ideas
- I wander through life in a dream!

But they in their turn had their heads filled up
By old men in buckle* and wig,
Whose coffee-house chatter resulted in notions
For which I would not give a fig!

Things can only get worse, I fear -
Good sense is destined to fade
Unless every young lady avoids young men
And resolves to die an old maid!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

*A reference to shoe-buckles, popular in the 18th Century.

On the Opening of St George's Hall, Bradford, 1853

That so grand an edifice
Should house so great a Hall
Is but a Law of Nature:
'Tis but the outside wall.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Storm

Thunder and lightning fill my brain
With tumultuous thoughts, all the day long.
Sometimes I think it will surely explode,
Leaving me headless: I hope I'm wrong.

Come lightening, flash! Come, thunder, crash!
Do your worst, that you might inspire
A river of words to flow from my pen
As sweet music flows from the lyre.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

IPYPIASM(2)

2011-12-15T14:51:00.006Z

Went to Darlington today. Decided to combine a bit of Christmas shopping with International Put Your Poem In A Shop Month. I placed four in all : three I've written (and posted) before, plus one I wrote specially for the occasion. Below the poems you'll find a flickr slideshow with the documentary evidence! Which poem went in which shop is self explanatory.

Banana Poem

Yellow
Mellow
Bendy
Fellow

Love in the Café

Just across the way from me
sat a woman, drinking herbal tea.
Her other hand played on the screen
of a shiny new hand-held machine.
I drank up, left, felt very green:
it was the coolest phone I'd seen.

In A Bookshop

All you can see through the tall windows are
the rooftops of the city, and the sky
(both crinkled slightly by the imperfect glass).
This partial view serves to convey a sense
of stillness in which people linger, drawn
to contemplate the stacks, searching the spines
for words they hadn't thought of, books that might provide
some sort of landmark on a mental map.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

RIP Christopher Logue

2011-12-13T17:58:00.000Z

I ought to read the paper more. I've only just caught up with the fact that Christopher Logue died a couple of weeks ago on 2nd December, aged 85. He's been at the front of my mind this month, too. It was all sparked off by Dick Jones, who posted recordings of Logue's excellent Red Bird EP on his Patteran Pages blog (from which I have borrowed the photo - I feel sure Dick won't mind). If you haven't been there to listen to Logue's jazz-accompanied loose translations of Neruda, do go: they make a great epitaph for the man.

Dick's recordings got me going back to Logue's poems - I've had a copy of his Ode to the Dodo sitting on the shelves for years. I won't write about it at length, only to say that he speaks with a bold, musical, refreshing authority. I'll just quote this, from New Numbers (1969):

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
And he pushed,
And they flew.

IPYPIASM

2011-12-12T06:54:00.002Z

I though I should get into the spirit of International Put Your Poem In A Shop Month. Yesterday I paid a visit to the local garden centre. They have some very nice plants with big red leaves on. They were also giving out free coffee and mince pies. Brief, spontaneous and heavily reliant on an ancient TV series but there we go. It's a start...

The Flowerpot Man's Love Song

Obadob flobadob
Little Weed!

You've taken root
but you ain't gone to seed.

Obadob flobadob
Little Weed!

You look bloomin' wonderful,
Petal, indeed.

Obadob flobadob
Little Weed!

The Poetry of Margery Clute (14)

2011-12-10T09:37:00.002Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Spring

To see the yellow daffodils
Drives away all sundry ills,
And upon the lawn the crocus
Peeps out from the grass to poke us.

Harken to the cows that moo
And to the rooks that make ado
Among the treetops (such a flock!
Were they men, they'd run amok!)

And see the stripèd bee that flies
Along the hedge before my eyes!
Nature has woken to a joyful morn!
Who could, for long, remain forlorn?

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Poetry of Margery Clute (13)

2011-12-03T07:00:00.005Z

Autumn Gales

What thoughts absorb the lofty trees

As in the wind they sway,

As gales roar around them

Like the tide around a quay?

Do they despair of the turbulent air

That wafts them to and fro?

Or do they dance in ecstasy?

How can we ever know?

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Ode to an Ancient Stone

O Ancient Stone

If thou couldst speak

How thou wouldst groan!

I can no more

My thoughts postpone,

O Ancient Stone.

O Ancient Stone

The birds are flown

That once adorned

That rocky zone

About thy crest.

No more art thou

So fairly blessed!

The wingèd birds

Possess the air

As thou the mossy ground.

They sing a song

Both loud and long;

Thou makest not a sound.

O voiceless Stone!

This song I'll drone

For thee, that all might hear:

As thou wouldst,

Had Nature's art

Fashioned thee an ear!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Fall

2011-12-01T08:34:00.000Z

The Poetry of Margery Clute (12)

2011-11-26T07:00:00.005Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Wilfred

(i)

He glowed with beauty like a tree

That reaches up towards the sky.

------

(ii)

I dozed: my soul did drift away,

Fearless, to a sleepy land,

Where Wilfred stood upon a cloud,

A golden harp held in his hand.

Motionless he stood and yet

The sweetest music seemed to flow

Down from his aethereal height

To waft around my ears below.

I woke to bitter memory:

Alas! Poor Wilfred is no more!

At one now with the rocks and stones,

Cold, beneath the chapel floor!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Winter Sketch

When icicles hang
----------

The Poetry of Margery Clute (11)

2011-11-19T07:00:00.003Z

A Wayward Thought

A Wayward thought assailed me:
I know this place of yore.
The range, the chair, the window:
I've seen them all before.

Perhaps I dreamt of such a place,
Forgotten until now?
There is no way of telling:
If I did, I'll never know.

Perhaps I lived another life,
Unknown until some potent thing
Disturbed a knowledge, parcelled up,
Unravelling the string?

(Can I be sure? Does Time connect
Each moment to the next?
Such wayward thoughts confuse me
And leave me feeling vexed).

Perhaps this is the place I sat
Before I went outside
And coming back it's still the same,
The place where I reside?

'Tis so, I deem. The answer's clear!
Simplicity itself!
I recognise that book I left
Sitting on the shelf!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

7ism

2011-11-14T16:19:00.000Z

If you're not up to speed on 7ism, check out Natalie D'Arbeloff's blog:

The aim of 7ism is the creation of Complete and Wonderful artworks, in any medium, within the time frame of seven days, no less and no more, in a continuous procession of seven day periods, ad infinitum.

This is her first 7ist project:

If You go Down to the Woods Today...

2011-11-14T08:29:00.004Z

Not, I hasten to add, a continuation of the teddy bears theme although it does make me wonder what deep, embedded folk memories gave rise to that song. I recently read a post on The Solitary Walker's blog in the course of which he posted this anonymous 14th century poem:

While leaves were green, I gave
Veneration to my sweetheart's leafy bower.
Sweet it was awhile, my love,
To live under the birch grove,
Sweeter still to clasp fondly
Hidden together in our woodland hide,
Strolling together by the seashore,
Lingering together by the wood-shore,
Planting birches together, goodly task!
Weaving the branches together,
Love-talking with my slender girl.

An innocent occupation for a girl -
To stroll the forest with her lover,
To mirror expressions, to smile together,
To laugh together and, mouth to mouth,
To lie together in the grove,
To shun others, to complain together,
To live together kindly, drinking mead,
To repose together, to celebrate love,
To keep love's secret cordon, covertly:
Truly, I have no need to tell you more.

Did I hear someone on TV the other week (Ronald Blythe?) talking about or did I read in Deakin's Wildwood the fact that in the past romance went on in the woods, there being no privacy in house where many people shared a room? Whoever it was claimed that for centuries most people in Britain were conceived in the woods.

So, perhaps we actually had a "mating season" at one time. Perhaps what people see as an "over sexualized" culture in the West has more to do with general improvements to the standard of living and housing than sexual imagery in the media and all the usually cited causes. (Of course it does, as any fule kno. Seems obvious when I write it). If so, all the usual suspects (however unwholesome they are) may indeed be the effects, the symptoms - rather than the root cause.

No-one would choose a return to Victorian living conditions, but the fact is we were not designed for too much comfort. I find myself wondering what would happen to any animal if you serruptitiously removed it from the natural cycles it took for granted and find myself looking at our own species. Perhaps the process in our case has been going on for thousands of years, ever since our intelligence began to develop and we started to make more and more "intelligent" rather than intuitive decisions. This perhaps created a vicious circle, which would fuel the evolution of our kind of intelligence. I'm imagining that, stepping outside the bounds of instinct and intuition, we create problems that need solving, and need more and more of that intelligence to solve them, reducing our intuition to an advisory capacity. The bigger the hole we dig for ourselves, the more we have to think about how to get out of it - and we started digging millenia ago. How much deeper will it get? And how much more "intelligent" will we get? Will we ever get so intelligent we decide to stop digging?

To put it another way, once cheetahs started chasing prey, they had to evolve to run faster and faster, I imagine, as the also-evolving prey took up the challenge. Similarly, as soon as we began to rely on "bright ideas" to survive, we needed to have brighter and brighter ones to fix the mistakes of the past. I speculate, but if you live on fish and invent a way to fish more effectively, you exhaust the fish stocks and have to think up a new way to avoid starving. If you lacked the intelligence to invent spears and nets you would have to rely on grabbing your fish. Both you and the fish would get by.

Now, what are we going to do about all that nuclear waste?

The Poetry of Margery Clute (10)

2011-11-12T07:00:00.001Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Fireside

'Tis night! The darkness closes in.
Without, the raw wind moans and howls.
I sit enchanted, by the fire,
And listen to the hooting owls.

To-wit to-woo! To-wit to-woo!
I'm pleased I'm in here and not out there,
Where ragged clouds eclipse the stars
And leaves swirl wildly in the air.

The darkness of the sky goes on
And on forever, it seems to me.
If only I could sit beside
This fire, for all eternity

And listen to the roar without
While eating muffins, drinking tea.
I cannot think of anywhere
In all the world I'd rather be.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Of Teddy Bears and Poetry

2011-11-09T16:45:00.000Z

I've been collecting together the poetry I've written over the past few years, selecting the the stuff I'm reasonably pleased with and weeding out the rest. I've put it all together on a page, here for anyone who'd like to read it. There's a link to it, too, below the blog header, above.

*

I've just been enjoying reading through the blog of Alan Measles - Grayson Perry's teddy bear. I'm seriously tempted to go down to London to see The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. Whatever Alan's head is stuffed with seems to work better than the grey stuff I've got stuffed between my ears. He says:

Grayson bless him has his ‘art’. He hopes the show will inspire people to take their inner lives more seriously. Seeing world culture through his obsessions and perversities might help people to start out on their own personal pilgrimages and find relics of their own selves laid out before them just as he is coming to realise that the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman may be a very elaborate inner self portrait.

24 Hours of Art

2011-11-05T23:28:00.003Z

It's turning into quite an artistic weekend, here. Last night we stayed up late watching a TV documentary on Grayson Perry's Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman exhibition at the British Museum. Then, this afternoon, we went to the Baltic art gallery in Gateshead, to see the Turner Prize exhibition.

First, the Grayson Perry. This was the remarkable story of how Perry has built a cast iron boat - a tomb, in the spirit of Sutton Hoo, of the unknown craftsman who is, on one level, a symbolic figure representing all the unknown craftspeople who created artefacts the likes of which are now in the British Museum and, on another level, Perry's father, a man who could as Perry put it, 'fix a motorbike and "rewire the television"'. Perry's mother had an affair with the milkman, prompting his father to leave when Perry was very small, leaving nothing behind him but a shed full of tools and a motorbike.

A work of art in the form of a custom built motorbike decorated by Perry and incorporating a shrine for his teddy bear-god Alan Measles, also features prominently in the exhibition. Perry took Alan and the motorbike on a pilgrimage to Germany. The young Perry and Measles had fought many imaginary battles with German soldiers and so, he felt, it was the right thing to do - an act of peace-making. It also, very cleverly I thought, gave the bike a "backstory" not unlike many of the artefacts in the Museum which so interested the artist.

In the course of the progamme, Perry said (I think I've got this right) how although he was pleased to be a part of the 'modern art' world, he was concerned that many contemporary works of art were less interesting than the buildings they were exhibited in, relying on the milieu of the gallery space to confer the aura of an artwork upon them. This was one of the things he liked about the British Museum - the artefacts in it were interesting in themselves. These thoughts were still kicking around inside my head when we went to the Baltic this afternoon. The Turner Prize Exhibition was certainly popular. The queue to get in was twenty minutes long...

The video work on show by Hilary Lloyd was OK so far as it went. The blurb told us that "her films are often displayed using a number of projectors to create a collaged effect of moving images with various angles shown at the same time". This is certainly accurate. However, it's not so long since I went to the Baltic to see a Robert Breer exhibition. He was doing similar things with animation in the 1960s. I have to say I found his work a lot more interesting.

I thought the work Martin Boyce had on offer, harking back to Calder mobiles, seemed a tad derivative too. I've not seen any of his work before but, judging by photos of it on the internet, I'd probably find much of it more interesting, I suspect, than the work on show at the Baltic at the moment. To be fair to both artists, I'm not familiar with either of them and there is only a small proportion of their work on show here - nothing like enough to draw any conclusions about what they do.

I quite liked Karla Black's work - a landscape that might possibly belong to another planet (not unlike a Star Trek original series set) created from crumpled thick paper, transparent plastic, dry powder paint, and crumbling "bath bombs". I particularly liked the suspended cloud created -I think- from crumpled net curtain. I felt an urge to cautiously stalk around the area with a drawn phaser.

My favourite artist in the exhibition -by a mile- was George Shaw, with his Humbrol model-paint landscapes. To quote the blurb, Shaw (as many people know, as he's getting deservedly famous these days)

paints the landscape of his childhood on a council estate in Coventry using Humbrol enamel... The highly detailed paintings are of houses, pubs and nearby parks, without people but filled with evidence of human activities.

The exhibition quoted Larkin: "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere". One might equally have invoked Samuel Beckett. Shaw has a penchant for the great title. My favourite picture (and title) of his here was Landscape with Dog Shit Bin. To my mind, this was an artist doing what Grayson Perry wants artists to do. There were overtones of Perry, too, in the preoccupation with the artist's childhood - with regard not only to subject-matter but also to the choice of materials (the Humbrol paint, as the blurb says, "the material of choice for teenage model makers" ). Definitely worth queuing round the block for.

As was the exhibition on the floor above the Turner Prize show: a far less well-attended exhibition of work by the American artists, Mike Kelly and Michael Smith, A Voyage of Growth and Discovery. This featured videos of Mike Smith performing in the role of his famous "Baby Ikki" character, an ambiguous mute figure dressed as a baby, wearing sunglasses and sucking a dummy. There were definite overtones of Grayson Perry again, I thought, with his preoccupations with childhood and the way it reverberates through life as a whole. There is even a motor vehicle -in this case, a drab, dilapidated camper van. There are teddy bears, too. Smith's vision, though, is bleak and minimal where Perry's is lush and Rococo. (I enjoyed both).

For now, the Grayson Perry documentary can be seen here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016ycnn/Imagine_Winter_2011_Grayson_Perry_and_the_Tomb_of_the_Unknown_Craftsman/

You can read brief bios of the Turner Prize artists here:
http://www.newcastlegateshead.com/turner-prize-2011/the-artists

The Poetry of Margery Clute (9)

2011-11-05T09:04:00.001Z

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Ploughman

Were we but to follow
Like the tiny sparrow
The ploughman as he turns his furrow
With no thought for the morrow!

Time turns our thoughts to higher things
As ploughshares turn the hefty clods
So that we are left at odds
With this material world, that springs

From that same instinct that inspires
The tiny sparrow's song!
O, that we need not wait too long
To kindle the immortal fires!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Back from Wales

2011-11-01T22:12:00.006Z

Just back from 10 internet-free days in Wales. Had a great time, even though it rained a lot. There's no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather, as they say.

Karen took a lot of photographs including this one,taken from the back of the house we stayed in which is on a hill overlooking Borth y Gest.

Found some interesting places we've never been before, even though we've been going to that area twice a year for about fifteen years, including two medieval houses -Ty Mawr and Penarth Fawr- that are open to the public.

Wrote a poem:

Borth y Gest

it's cold and you can smell

the woodsmoke on the air:

it's late october. the tide is in

and in the blue dusk the sea

laps against the harbour wall.

if you try to feel unworldly

it's easy to fall into the trap

of thinking you're succeeding -

yet when you feel grateful

by the harbour wall you know

it's not as easy as all that

(if indeed it is desirable at all).

We tried to fix up an internet connection but couldn't get it to work which, I thought, turned out to be a good thing. It meant I read more and found time to write stuff other than blog posts! I'm currently ploughing through Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers. Found two or three good second hand book stalls too. It seems to me that they're harder to find than they used to be these days. I picked up a few books I've not read, including The Crow Road by Iain Banks and Virtual Light by William Gibson (I've never read any William Gibson). I also found a copy of Selected Poems by Edwin Muir which -although I like his poetry- I didn't have.

Being on holiday meant I got time to read the paper. Read a very interesting article in the Guardian by Jeanette Winterson about her childhood.

The Poetry of Margery Clute (8)

2011-10-22T07:00:00.005+01:00

Bluebells

If I could but sail the bluebell sea
And ride the myriad tinkling waves
'Twould be the acme of this world's delight!
Unsullied blue, untainted by the factory smoke,
Blue as the sky that first succumbs to city belch,
A letter, writ upon the forest floor
For all to read who dare! Could I but sing
The song that's written there – sweeter still than poetry:
A Holy Writ that fades with the shortening of the days.
I must content myself to walk among
It's mute, mysterious words that touch
The very essence of my Being.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Birds

2011-10-20T16:25:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I wrote a poem not under a nom de plume. I put that right this week. This, for what it's worth, is it:

The Birds

can you hear the birds?
they're somewhere over there

it's so dark between the lights
they never turn them off
it sounds as if
there must be trees

we can only dream
as we walk

keep walking he said
either the wire goes on forever or
this is the place I started out

play your violin
I'll listen I said
play a tune I know
tell me what it is

they tell me the birds
are singing the national anthem only
these days my ears
don't work properly and it just sounds
like twittering to me

play your violin I say
anything is better
than the birds

Would two heads be better than one?

2011-10-19T12:54:00.001+01:00

This is not what I set out to blog about today. I started to write a post, read it back - and then decided to delete it. One of the things I find particularly satisfying about writing a blog is the way it challenges you to examine what you think.

We all have those experiences when it's as if a light has come on in our heads. We've followed a train of thought and suddenly we have an idea or see something in a different light. It's easy to feel smug when this happens, in the uneditted part of our minds. Blogging is guaranteed to bring you down to earth in these situations. Nine times out of ten I find, if I set these things down they appear, when I read them back, to be simplistic, self-satisfied or just plain wrong. Blogging can be driven by vanity - it can also be a chastening source of humility.

I almost wrote another post the other day, and then -for the reasons above- decided not to. I'd found myself thinking how much better it would be if we all had two heads. I'm not just talking about appearances here (although it is the case that it would great if one could be a hippy and a skinhead at the same time). I'm sure as a species we'd be far more reflective if we had to discuss everything we did with a second self. And we'd never be lonely.

There are downsides. It would be good to be more reflective, but it could work the other way: my two heads could egg each other on to ever more despicable acts. Some aspects of modern life would be made more difficult: would I share a mobile phone with myself? If my other head was into "I'm on the train" kind of conversations, it could prove very annoying. As for tastes in music, or the chattery noise that comes out of walkman headphones, it doesn't bear thinking about. Garlic, snoring... I could go on.

Anyway, from the ridiculous to the sublime. If my other head was into this, I wouldn't mind at all. This is what happened when John Cage met up with James Joyce and Robert Wyatt...

The Poetry of Margery Clute (7)

2011-10-15T07:00:00.021+01:00

What is the World?

What is the world? Is there a scheme or plan
To that in which we sit and pass the time,
Or think, or act, or listen for the chime?
Has it been just so since time began?
Why do the stars shine in the sky?
Why are people born? Why do they die?

Such is the poet's lot, I deem! - To fret
On things sane men endeavour to forget.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Time

Untouchable, invisible,
A breathless wind that blows
From whence it came
To who knows where!
The clock, it's weather-vane -
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Time passes, pitiless,
Without a care!

Would that I might sail against the stream
Recapturing the youthful gleam;
But who can resist Time's ruthless flow?
If any can, please let me know!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

News from Nowhere... and the The Bell...

2011-10-08T21:32:00.001+01:00

Just had one of those weeks that's dominated by work. I'd been hoping to intersperse my posts on the timeless verse of Margery Clute with a few other posts, but few opportunities have arisen.

It began with a busy weekend last weekend - the band did a gig at The Victoria Theatre, Halifax. Alan Burnett, of the News From Nowhere blog came along with his partner, which was great. He was kind enough to take a photo - and give us a plug on his blog.

Ever since then it's been work. And, personally, I find the best way to get through a heavy schedule is to relax in a positively cat-like way whenever the odd opportunity to do so arises. A spare couple of hours on Monday night was spent with half a bottle of wine, a few green olives and Dr Who. Other rare moments of peace have been spent reading Iris Murdoch's The Bell. This proved to be unputdownable. It's left me with the feeling Murdoch novels often leave me with: that I was about to be shown the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but never quite was - which, in a novel, is the way it should be (and, of course, has to be). This is accentuated in The Bell by the brooding presence of the Benedictine Abbey, the inner life of which is largely obscured from the other characters in the book and the reader. One is led to consider that perhaps, within the novel, meaning lies within it: since what happens there remains largely unsaid, it's impossible to rule this possibility out. And the nuns who live there are largely portrayed as people of wisdom and integrity - unlike the religious characters on the outside who rarely, in the book, attain these qualities and certainly not both at once!

I picked the book up in an Oxfam shop together with another Murdoch novel I haven't read, The Unicorn. That can serve as next week's dose of escapism.

Oh, and I've been listening to this. Treated myself to a CD of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux. This is an excerpt from Le Merle Bleu: The Rock Thrush. Messiaen's pieces set out to evoke the songs and habitats of French birds. I've discovered that it's fascinating to listen to the music in a place where you can watch birds in the wild. I came to the fanciful conclusion that if birds could play the piano (not that they need to), this is the sort of music they'd make:

The Poetry of Margery Clute (6)

2011-10-08T07:00:00.003+01:00

Sunset

It always makes me frown
To see the Sun go Down -
I always feel depressed
As it sinks into the West.
Does it know no other way
To end the day?

Margery Clute (1824-76)

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Bleep - bleep - bleep - bleep!

2011-10-04T00:06:00.000+01:00

The Poetry of Margery Clute (5)

2011-10-01T07:00:00.011+01:00

If you missed the first installment, which provided some important background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

Night Thoughts

The stars shine down upon the dingy streets -
Diamond studs upon a sable dome;
Frost glistens on the cobble stones
And makes me feel sad to be at home.

To think I sleep beneath so grand a sight,
Blind as a stone, oblivious to it all!
Or lie awake, considering our earthly plight,
Staring blankly at the mind's dark wall,

Thinking sad thoughts, such as a horse might think
Hauling it's load along the dingy bank
From Liverpool to Leeds, when I might dance
Alone, uncorsetted, beneath the Moon!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

A Day full of Music

2011-09-25T02:29:00.001+01:00

It's late... Just gone 1am. I've just got back from a day of gigging that started at 11am and finished at 10pm. How any of us have any fingers left I'll never know.

It began at a local business, who employ us now and again to play at their promotional events. We played there (with breaks) until 4pm, when we had to pack up and head off to Glusburn Institute -its a community and arts centre in -where else- the Yorkshire village of Glusburn, half way between Skipton and Keighley. It's a good example of North of England 19th century civic architecture, complete with dome and public clock. The hall there boasts an impressive stage. We'd driven 50 miles to get there so it was good to discover that the audience, though small, was truly enthusiastic.

On the way back, in complete contrast to the Gypsy jazz we'd been playing, we found ourselves listening to Trevor Wishart's Globalalia on Radio 3. It's a multi-channel electronic piece which uses syllables taken from 26 languages from around the world to create music based on the sounds of language itself. One of the great things about his music is that, at its best, it has the capacity to captivate and enthrall people who do not think themselves as fans of "difficult" music. Unfortunately, none of his most exciting work is available on Youtube, but here's a short documentary about a smaller but similar project he undertook in Madrid:

The Poetry of Margery Clute (4)

2011-09-24T07:00:00.003+01:00

Poem, 1867

What lies between my Ears?
So many things remembered,
Set aside lest I Forget -
My hopes, my Fears - although
The Image fades with Time
To shades of Grey.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Cuckoo

The Cuckoo pecked
At the Portal of my Mind
Hoping, no doubt,
A Little Seed to find.

O Cuckoo, Sing!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
Your Fluting Song of Spring
Is not unkind.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

2011-09-19T07:30:00.004+01:00

"Imagine we're all characters in a novel," said B.
"OK," said a man he didn't know by name but could imagine sat, like himself, in front of a glowing computer screen, killing time, escaping from 101 things that needed to be done...
"Everything we say is the stuff that gets squeezed between the inverted commas", said B.
"I'm with you", the shadowy figure replied.
"So who writes all the stuff in between? Who's the narrator? Who writes all those paragraphs where no-one actually says anything?"
"Dunno," said the shadowly figure. "Isn't that taking the idea a bit far?"
"Humour me," said B.
"OK. I don't know. Who does write all the stuff in between?" said the shadowy figure.
"The artists," said B. "The painters, the writers, the sculptors, the composers, the poets, and so on."
There was a pause. A box popped up on B's screen telling him an update was available for a programme he'd never heard of. He cancelled it.
"I see what you mean," said the shadowy figure.
It's a shame, thought B: it's getting late. It would soon be time to go to work. He'd have to log off. Just when things were getting interesting.
"What if the novel's all dialogue?" said the shadowy figure. What a clever shadowy figure, thought B. He had to think fast.
"Then the characters have to work harder to say what they mean," he said. It was the best he could do.
"It's an interesting idea," said Mr Shadow.
"It is. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense of things. I mean, the meaning or purpose of the arts. It explains why they're more than entertainment. It cuts across boundaries. You don't have to take sides (not that you ever did). I mean, you don't have to choose between Tracy Emin and the Stuckists. Elgar and John Cage. If something someone makes is a meaningful part of the narrative then great."
"Music - now that's interesting. Are you saying that when we listen to music we should ask ourselves: what is this piece of music a soundtrack to?"
"Yes, I suppose I am," said B.
"And poetry... It means it might rhyme and go dumdidumdidum or be all irregular lines with funny punctuation but that doesn't matter at all, what's important is the part it plays in the narrative?"
"Exactly," said B.
"If you're right then the arts are pretty important," said Mr Shadow.
"Indeed," said B. "Invaluable." It was 7.55. If he stayed online longer he'd be pushing it...

The Poetry of Margery Clute (3)

2011-09-17T06:59:00.024+01:00

On Baildon Moor

On Baildon Moor the howling wind
Is not unkind.
‘Tis city life –not moorland air-
That makes us blind.

The dingy streets confound our souls
And burden us with unnatural care!
One can see the world so clearly here.
Not so, down there.

And, I must say, I feel bereft
When I desert this mossy cleft –
As if here is all the light that’s left
In this dark world;

Even as if this wild, wide expanse
So calculated to entrance
Was (it could be worse)
The Centre of the Universe.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The Fly

I saw a Fly.
It made me sigh.
Poor Fly!

Doomed to buzz
From Wall to Wall
Oblivious to the Rise and Fall
Of Humankind.

It doesn't mind
At all.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Poetry of Margery Clute (2)

2011-09-10T07:00:00.008+01:00

If you missed the first installment, which provided some background information regarding Margery Clute's poetry, you can read it here.

The Trees in Spring

The Trees in Spring
Adorn their twigs
With a multitude
Of verdant Sprigs

- And all the while the Birds
Sing out their Hearts
To Hill and Vale
In many Parts.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

The indents employed by Clute in the next poem made impossible to publish as text on blogger, so I've had to present it as an image:

So that was Friday...

2011-09-05T22:28:00.000+01:00

Pen Hill from Zebra Hill

Last Friday I went for run over Pen Hill. It's a long time since I was out running on the fells. For the last couple of years, when I've been out running, it's usually been on the road. Walking parts of Hadrian's Wall, climbing Helvellyn and -on a more sedentary note- seeing some great photos of running in the Dark Peak (and cake) recently over at Tea & Cake had really got me itching to get up a hill with my running shoes on again.

I started from a roadside layby half way up - a cheat I felt, in a way, as it's more satisfying to start from the bottom. I'd not done any hill work for ages though, so rather than wear myself out I thought I'd ease myself in gradually - a wise decision, I decided, as I struggled up the slope to the beacon that stands on the Eastern end of summit-plateau.

It was great to be running through flowering heather again, along the plateau's Southern edge with it's superb view of a distant Great Whernside, and the sky. Along that side the path fades into a network of faint desire-lines. Some lead nowhere, others join up at eroded nexus-points, from which other lines lead off. Sometimes the heather hides a treacherous surface of tumbled rocks which slows you down to a walk. I chose the lines which took me to my first objective - a miniature rocky outcrop, strung out along the Southern edge. I touched the rocks in greeting -it had been a long time since I'd been there- without stopping. I've run on Pen Hill a great deal in the past -it's the "local hill", just down the road from here- so I was quite surprised to find a path I'd not explored before. I took it, glad for a break from the awkward terrain.

The path took me down to a Land Rover-track that cuts up from the valley and across the middle of the plateau. As I've got out the habit of hill-running, the reascent seemed quite hard work. Then, all of a sudden, I realised that my field of vision -ahead, left, right- contained nothing but the moor immediately around me, skyline and sky. It was an exhilarating feeling. A minute later and I was looking down into Wensleydale - the valley on the Northern side. From there, it was a short run along the tops of the Northern cliffs, past the Iron Age chieftan's grave, to the beacon. I could see the car from there and after a steep descent it was no more than a jog across a couple of fields to the end of the first fell-run in ages.

The Poetry of Margery Clute (1)

2011-09-03T07:05:00.017+01:00

Margery Clute, from the frontespiece of Fallen Leaves

This is the first of an series of posts I'll be posting on Saturdays to promote the poetry of Margery Clute.

Margery Clute was born in the village of Baildon, on the outskirts of Bradford, in 1824 - less than 20 miles from her more well-known contemporaries, the Bronte sisters.

By the time of her birth, Bradford was an important centre for the textile trade, with over 200 factory chimneys belching black smoke. Cholera and typhoid were rife, and the average life expectancy of a Bradford-dweller was a mere 18 years.

Living in Baildon, close to the Moor, the tension between the rural and the industrial would have been part of Margery's day-to-day experience. It is hardly surprising to find this tension reflected in her work - for example, in the short lyric My Fevered Brain (1846).

Astute readers will detect a kinship with the American poetry of Emily Dickinson - a delicately observed metaphysical take on the world that opens the eyes of the reader to the previously invisible. There are also overtones of Blake, in theme and simplicity and, of course, the Lakeland poets.

Her poetry was always alert to contemporary developments: take for example her account of the arrival of the railway in Bradford - On the Opening of the Leeds and Bradford Railway, 1846.

Very little of Margery's poetry was published in her lifetime, and none since. On the Opening of the Leeds and Bradford Railway was published in a local Bradford newspaper. However, she did arrange to have a volume of her poems -entitled Fallen Leaves- privately printed and she deposited the result at Bradford Central Library. It was borrowed only rarely, although when I was living in West Yorkshire in the 1980s I was lucky enough to come across across it by accident in the poetry section. I was quite interested in her at the time: I made photocopies of quite a lot of it. I was reminded of it all when I came across them in a cardboard box the other day when I was cleaning out the attic. Hopefully, thanks to the internet, it will now be possible to give her the readership she deserves. I intend to publish a number of her poems in a series of occasional posts.

Daughter of a local mill-owner, Margery was always comfortably off. Her life, however, was not untouched by troubles: she had three sisters and two brothers - all but one of whom were carried off by the cholera epidemic in 1848.

In 1876, Margery herself died, as she had lived, in obscurity. She was buried in Undercliffe Cemetery in the Clute family vault.

The Moon

The moon cries out in anguish -
His silver face so sad!
His silent song disturbs my heart -
I wish he’d smile instead

And look down on the world below
With an optimistic eye
When he comes out to say hello
Or sinks, to say goodbye.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Written on a Foggy Day

If you could see what I can see
You'd wonder where you are.
I'm not that sure myself
As I can't see very far.

All around 'tis milky white
I could be anywhere!
Atop a crag, beside a hole -
To venture out, who'd dare?

Such dreadful visions crowd the brain!
None but the intrepid soul
Would venture out and take the risk
Of falling down a hole.

Margery Clute (1824-76)

On the Opening of the Leeds and
Bradford Railway, 1846

I had not seen a 'train' before -
It took me by Surprise.
An Iron House on wheels, belching
Smoke, and such a size!

With a noise like Drummers Drumming,
The massive Wheels turned -
While in the creature's Belly
A Hellish Fire burned.

And how I longed to jump aboard,
To go off on a Spree!
To travel through the countryside
Past Field, and Hill, and Tree!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

My Fevered Brain

My Fevered Brain
Unhinged by Moorland Stream
Propelled me forth
Like a Demented Sunbeam
Unto a Second Birth.

No more, the Smoking Mills!
The Drudge of Darkened Days!
No more the back
Bent to the Loom of Time!

Margery Clute (1824-76)

Helvellyn

2011-08-30T10:15:00.001+01:00

A sleepless night. I'm not complaining. I drifted in and out of consciousness, dream and reality melding one into the other. And at 3.30am a barbershop quartet started to sing in the street outside.

Meet the gang, 'cos the boys are here,
The boys to entertain you-ou-ou...

I hauled myself out of bed and stumbled into the living room. I opened the window and leaned out.

"What the hell..." I began.

The quartet ground to a halt.

"I'm terribly sorry sir", said one of the singers, clearly the mover and shaker. "We're from Arnside Rotary Club. We have to get up early to catch the commuters."

At the this point our host, mother of F, popped her head out of another window and addressed me.

"Don't be too hard on them," she said. They do a lot of good work for the local community."

I aquiesced, and returned to bed.

Nothing much else happened. The grey sky I could see though the gaps in the blind gradually got lighter. Drizzle rattled on the window from time to time. As dawn approached the gaps between the pulses of rain began to close. I had planned to get up at 6.30, by which time they'd closed altogether. I fell asleep.

I woke up two hours later. Drat that barbershop quartet.

Or not. In fact, starting out later than we intended to meant that we caught the best part of the day. We stopped briefly at a coffee shop in Glenridding then set off on the stiff, uphill trudge that leads to the foot of Striding Edge (there are good photos at this link: I took no camera).

The trudge is worth it, as it means that nothing ever seems quite so steep for the rest of the day. We intended to climb Helvellyn via the classic circuit - ascend Striding Edge, walk along the summit ridge to the summit, descend Swirral Edge at the other end. F and I had been up Helvellyn before and remembered Striding Edge as being a lot easier a scramble than its reputation suggested. It turned out to be not quite as easy as I remembered it: in the past, I decided, I must have taken the easier path around the most difficult part, the rock tower near the end known as The Chimney. It starts off easily enough. You have the pleasant feeling of rock underfoot as you walk along a ridge not unlike the ridge of a roof, with a view down both sides. An even easier path winds around the rocks for anyone who wishes to take it. However, as you approach the main body of the mountain The Chimney rises up (this is the part I must have circumvented in the past). This time we strayed onto it and were treated to several minutes of exhilarating, airy scrambling, ending in the descent of a short, steep gully which I'd guess would count as a Moderate-graded rock climb. All three of us -myself, friend F and son D- gathered finally on the col which separated the pinnacle from the long dirty climb to the summit ridge itself.

Any believer in the Genesis account of creation would be forgiven for mistaking this slope for God's building site. Piles of shattered rock are strewn all over the slope over a surface with the consistency of sludgy cement. Fortunately, although it's steep it's nothing like as long as the intitial trudge up from Glenridding, so we soon came out on the summit ridge. Surprisingly for a Bank Holiday, we had it to ourselves. The sun was out, the cloud was high and the wind only slight. We sat down, ate cake and admired the view. Then we made a few calls (including to F's mum, who had kindly offered to cook us a meal when we returned) and set off down Swirral Edge, feeling a twinge of envy for the handful of wild campers pitched below us on the banks of Red Tarn. As we did so, the first wisps of cloud appeared between ourselves and the summit. The further we went the damper the air became. A mile or so out from Glenridding it began to rain seriously. By the time we got back to the car park we were soaked.

Lindisfarne Senryu

2011-08-26T23:19:00.002+01:00

Early in the Twentieth Century, the Portugese cellist, Guilhermina Augusta Xavier de Medim Suggia Carteado Mena (1885-1950), known as Guilhermina Suggia was a frequent visitor to Lindisfarne Castle. She was briefly engaged to the then-owner, Edward Hudson. The reasons for the breaking of the engagement are unclear.

here is a cello
like a coffin full of air
the space around it

*

playing a Bach suite
the harebells for company
the sea, listening

*


Photo: Karen Rivron

Campanula rotundifolia (harebells) growing on the wall of
Lindisfarne Castle

Conlon Nancarrow and the Player Piano

2011-08-24T23:12:00.006+01:00

If I wanted an example of what I personally find so great about the internet, the case of Conlon Nancarrow would be a good one to quote. When I was younger, he'd be no more than a footnote in a book about music: an eccentric US composer who gets mentioned after Ives, Cowell and Partch. The jolly cacophony of his Studies for Player Piano would have had to remain in my imagination, unless I was lucky enough to come across a recording in the local record library - fat chance. That was then. Now, someone has had the good sense to upload videos of them to Youtube.

Nancarrow, a communist who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, spent most of his life living in Mexico. He's most famous for composing these Studies. The player piano/pianola has two advantages over the more normal kind. It's not limited to playing the notes you can reach with two five-digit human hands and it can play incredibly complex rhythms - for example you can make it play any number of musical lines at once, all moving at different speeds. Here's to jolly cacophony...

Moon Worshippers

2011-08-23T23:39:00.009+01:00

Went to Lindisfarne the other day. We've been there many times, but we've never actually visited the castle before. It's a great place and it's owned by the National Trust (so if you're a member you get in free). Like most NT properties, it's full of paintings, old furniture, interesting books and suchlike, only in this case -for me- the most interesting thing was the place itself. I didn't feel moved to find out a lot about it (how it was once a castle, but was turned into a house by the architect Edwin Lutyens). Instead, I just wanted to climb the stairs, look out of the windows, walk on the battlements and admire the view.

The island was very busy. On pleasant Summer days a tide of people almost as overwhelming as the tide that covers the sands around it and cuts it off floods onto the island as the water recedes. Queuing anywhere that sells food and drink can be a nightmare. (We've found, in the past, that one of the best ways to enjoy the place is to stay there after the tide has come in - it's usually quieter then). Instead, hungry and thirsty, we drove up to Berwick. Neither of us knew the place really. I'd been fantasising about Italian food all afternoon and I was delighted to catch sight of an Italian flag as we drove over the long bridge into the town centre. As I suspected, it hung over the door of an Italian restaurant. After eating we headed back to Lindisfarne, knowing that the tide would soon be in and the causeway which joins the island to the mainland at low tide covered.

The incoming tide on a pleasant evening at Lindisfarne is something of a tourist attraction. People are drawn there and if you've ever been there and soaked up the atmosphere it's easy to see why. They park up and gather at the end of the causeway at the water's edge, watching the intractable line of the water as it trickles innocuously over the grit and through the grass, up onto the road itself. I always feel uncannily aware there that what I'm watching, at my feet, is the moon pulling at the earth. Hardly surprising, as Lindisfarne is an uncanny place all round. When we were there there were about fifteen swans there too, waddling over the sand and swimming up and down the deepening channels. If you're lucky, seals swim up to the road to say hello. Finally the road is covered and the crowd melts away.

Almost Heaven

2011-08-21T10:01:00.006+01:00

I've had a great time the last couple of days: I've been walking a section of Hadrian's Wall. I've not been on my own - it was a sort of informal "bloggers convention". It all began when George (who writes the Transit Notes blog) decided to spend a week walking the wall from coast to coast. The on this occasion not-so-Solitary Walker then said he'd join him for a few days. Then I said I'd tag along for a day or two too.

My plan was to base myself in the village of Gilsland. From there I'd head East along the Wall, hopefully meeting up with George, who was traveling West. I'd then walk back to Gilsland with him. (I enjoy straight, "there and back" walks - to my mind they're often more enjoyable than circular routes). In Gilsland we'd meet up with the Solitary Walker and spend the night in a B&B (Tantallon House: it turned out to be really good). The following day, I'd set off West with the others until lunchtime, after which I'd leave them to carry on and make my own way back to Gilsland, and the car.

Nothing ever goes to plan, quite - but then, unpredictability is one of the joys of walking. Robert had decided to come down early and hunt down George. I ran into them both, deep in conversation, just East of the Walltown turret. Deep conversation turned out to be the order of the day, and the next day. We stopped to eat in the turret ruins, then made our way down to the refreshment kiosk at Walltown Quarry, before heading off back to Gilsland.

The central section of the wall, East of Walltown is the most spectacular - and the most photographed. Not only has a lot of the wall (and the buildings around it) survived, but it also runs along the top of a steep ridge. It's quite easy to imagine what it might have been like: or so I thought. Until I began researching this post, I'd not realised that in its day the wall may well have been rendered and painted white. It's hard to think of it without thinking of its neatly cut but chunky stones. As we walked along I did find myself wondering how had the landscape around the wall changed? Of course, there are modern buildings here and there, pylons, masts, conifer plantations, but I found myself wondering: just how thickly wooded was the land there in AD122, when they began building it? Were there fields, as there are now, and if so, how big were they? The more I thought about it, the harder it was to imagine Roman Britain and I found myself wishing I knew more about it.

West of this section of the wall, the character of walk changes: you're surrounded by fields, trees and wildflowers. The wall is often only recognisable from the ditch the Romans dug along its length. In some places this is quite a landmark, in others it's been reduced to a bump in the ground.

Next morning, we set off West and soon found ourselves crossing the River Irthing. Although, as I said, the remains of the wall are not so spectacular here, it's still a quite magical walk. Stone ruins remain here and there: for example, the remains of a stone bridge where the wall crosses the Irthing and the fort at Birdoswald. Wherever you are on this section, the Irthing is never that far away. At one point, crossing a bridge, we spotted an uncanny line of cairns -straight as a Roman Road- built on the stony river bed and across the pebbles of the river bank (the river there was rarely more than ankle deep). It disappeared among the trees on a bend in the river. A work of landscape art, we decided - the sort of thing Andy Galsworthy might construct. We thought it might even be an Andy Galsworthy. The river -and the line of cairns- disappeared around a bend so, intrigued, we took a track through the woods on the riverbank to find the other end of the line.

What we discovered is hard to describe. When you come across things unexpectedly you feel disorientated. You feel ill at ease and look around, wondering what's going on. Is there anybody there? Are you under some sort of threat? However benign the discovery, its unexpectedness triggers a sense of foreboding. What we discovered was a sign: Welcome to (almost) heaven. Various bits and pieces of paraphernalia were stacked against or hung from trees. Ropes, tarpaulins, bits of junk. Was this real life or Ruth Rendell? There was a line of armchairs and a settee stood on the pebbles of the riverbank, along with a table - a kind of outdoor living-room, only where you'd expect to find the TV, there was the river. Behind, strung between the trees, was a white tarpaulin on which visitors had written messages. From the messages it seemed clear that whatever the origins of (almost) heaven, it had -al least- evolved into an impromptu Hadrian's Wall service station for the soul (I say "soul" as it lacked those must-haves of UK motorway services - either a Costa Coffee or a Burger King).

We lingered for a while, tried out the armchairs, and added a cairn to the line. We found nothing more sinister than a dead mouse.

I was enjoying myself so much -what with the walk and the company- that I had neglected to turn back half way through the day and, throwing caution to the wind, had decided to finish the day's walk with Robert and George. So what if I finished twelve miles from my car? I'd get back somehow. I left the others to their B&Bs in Newton and set off to see what I could do. Plan A was to walk down to Brampton and hitch down the A69 back to Gilsland. It was a good plan - only it turned out that the bridge which carried the road from Newton to Brampton was closed for repairs. A team of men in hard hats were busy covering it with wet concrete. I had to ford the river, beneath the bridge. I squelched my way into Brampton, sticking out my thumb whenever I heard a car behind me - which wasn't often. What use is a road when a bridge on it is closed?

I hadn't a lot of water left, so I bought myself a carton of orange, and trudged on to the A69. Once there, I got a lift quite quickly from a chap who lived in Newcastle and worked at a radio station in Carlisle, who very kindly made a detour off the the main road to drop me in Gilsland. Thank you again, whoever you are. In the end I made such good time that I decided to drive to Newton and join George and Robert again for the evening.

It's great meeting up with other bloggers. Of course there are parts of other people we can never know and even parts of ourselves are hidden from us, but meeting people whose written thoughts you've read regularly for the first time is uncanny: it's as if you know them, at least partly, "inside out". The usual pleasantries never did play a part in getting to know them. In the pre-internet age it must have been similar for "penpals" meeting for the first time. It was great to be able to talk among ourselves about all the things which one would gather from reading our blogs we had more-or-less in common. If you could draw our thoughts in the form of a Venn Diagram, there would be quite a lot of places where two of the circles overlapped and, quite often, all three.

Thanks, Robert and George, for a great walk! And then there was the wall. Two days spent wandering along it has left me with an urge to walk the whole thing. Possibly in one go, certainly in sections. I wonder if I'll get round to it? What I do know is that next time I go for a long walk, I'll take two stout carrier-bags with me. Squelch.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera with me. George and Robert did though. Hopefully they'll upload some of them on their blogs, Transit Notes and Solitary Walker.

Music Maker

2011-08-14T07:28:00.011+01:00

Have fun! I, for one, had not come across these before. Click on a few random squares and take it from there...

Fred Vargas

2011-08-11T16:31:00.005+01:00

A while ago, I posted a request for good books I might try reading. I've since made a start on the suggestions, starting with Tony Zimnoch's recommendation: Fred Vargas' crime fiction. I've been pretty well absorbed in it ever since. Whatever I've been doing, I've been wondering how I can squeeze in a half hour of Vargas-reading. I've gone from bookless to booked-out.

What's she like? George Simenon meets Sherlock, perhaps. Romans policiers with a dash of the strange. So far I've managed to read The Chalk Circle Man and An Uncertain Place. In the first, an odd, elusive character starts drawing chalk circles on the pavements of Paris around pieces of litter: Commissaire Adamsberg (Vargas' detective) is the first to suspect something sinister is afoot. It left me with a taste for these books and the second certainly gave me something to get my teeth into: it bases its fictional world on the historical ("true" would be a slightly confusing word to use in this context) 300-year-old vampire stories of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole. It's strictly a detective rather than a horror story as such, but Vargas can certainly turn on the gothic when she needs to:

The smell was ghastly, the scene was appalling, and even Adamsberg stiffened, standing back a little behind his English colleague. From the ancient shoes, with their cracked leather and trailing laces, projected decomposed ankles, showing dark flesh and white shinbones which had been cleanly chopped off. The only thing that didn't match Clyde-Fox's account was that the feet were not trying to get into the cemetery. They were just there, on the pavement, terrible and provocative, sitting inside their shoes at the historic gateway to Highgate Cemetery. Fred Vargas, An Uncertain Place

Funnily enough, I used to live near Highgate Cemetery and work in the very same road (it was just a short walk from there to Karl Marx' grave). It's the perfect horror-film set and it comes as no surprise that vampire stories have grown up around the place, no doubt providing Vargas with more grist to her fictional mill. It's not the very occasional grisly bit that keeps you reading (like the above, which I couldn't resist quoting) but the humanity of the books and the realism of the characters. The Weaver of Grass is reading them too: I'm just going round, now, to swap An Uncertain Place for The Three Evangelists. I can't wait to get down to reading it: otherwise this post might have gone on a little longer.

Let's Hear it for the Book!

2011-08-08T23:53:00.002+01:00

Books don't break down. You can't turn a book off. You don't need to charge its battery or plug it in. I've got loads of books. I've had quite a lot of them for years - some, all my life. Quite a few of my books are way older than me. I've never bought a digital device that's lasted more than a few years: we take their built-in obsolescence for granted. Not so books. To replace books with files on a digital machine that needs replacing every few years is frought with problems which I think are insoluble.

If all the mod cons we take for granted ceased to exist (and we take them for granted at our peril) we'd still be able to read any books we came across so long as we kept them dry. Digital media, with no electricity and no internet, will simply turn into enigmatic curiosities. If such a calamity came to pass, we'd need a repository of civilised values to see us through. That repository is the book.

There's something potentially democratic about the printed word. Printed words live in books like people live in cities. People leave books they've read on the tube and on park benches. I can't see them leaving Kindles lying around. A future in which only people who can afford to buy (and replace) gadgets can read books worries me.

If the pigs in Animal Farm had written The Seven Principles of Animalism on their website instead of the barn wall, it would have been easier for them to change them. Instead of creeping out at night with a paint tin -or whatever they did*- they could have done it with a few clicks of a mouse. OK, so our civilisation is pretty secure, but if we think we've reached the end of history I think we're kidding ourselves. I'm not trying to be alarmist here: I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if we take our way of life for granted we make it more vulnerable, not less.

The Rosetta Memory Stick? Eh?

We're not being sold the next great step for civilisation. We're being sold stuff.

* Apologies - but this is a mere blogpost. I don't have time to re-read Animal Farm. :)

Sachal Studios Orchestra

2011-08-07T08:41:00.002+01:00

Enjoy! I heard them on the radio the other day playing Erroll Garner's Misty. I couldn't take my ears off it. Sadly for me it doesn't seem to be on Youtube, so I'll have to go and buy the CD, which can't be a bad thing. I did find these, though:

www.sachal-music.com

www.facebook.com/pages/Sachal-Music/198714516829311

Through the Pinhole

2011-08-05T09:39:00.002+01:00

Karen and I have fancied trying pinhole photography for some time. Well, we finally got round to it the other day. This is the result:

We pointed the camera at the front garden and hoped for the best. So little light goes through the hole you can see nothing through the viewfinder. Pinhole shots tend by their nature to be hazy and impressionistic. It's quite easy to do, too. I won't reinvent the wheel by providing a detailed description as there are a lot of pages on the net already explaining what to do in detail. Basically, if you've got an SLR camera, you obtain a "body cap" (like a lens cap, but designed to fit over the hole the lens screws into). You drill a, say, 0.5-1.00 cm hole in the centre and tape tinfoil over the hole on the inner side. Use dark tape and don't leave a lot of shiny foil showing if you can help it. Carefully prick the centre of the foil covering the hole to make the "pinhole". Put the cap on the camera. Now it gets technical. Set the camera to "M" and stick it on a tripod. Now experiment with a shot. On a bright day in the garden with our particular pinhole 10 seconds was over exposed, 3 seconds under exposed. For the above photo the shutter was left open for 7 seconds, I think. That's a quick guide. It's obvious that if the SLR is digital, the whole process is easier, as you can experiment without having to hang about developing film. If you fancy having a go, google it. In fact, it's an interesting thing to google anyway. "Pinhole camera" yields 2.39 million results - many of which seem to be enthusiasts who can't resist sharing their enthusiasms with the world, an aspect of the internet I rather like.

For optical reasons I don't fully understand, pinhole shots show up every last little bit of muck on a digital camera's sensor. I wrecked an old-fashioned SLR trying to clean its mirror, so I was loath to mess around. Fools rush in and all that. I'm pleased I checked the manual and followed the instructions in this case, as it said that under no circumstances should the sensor be touched.

Photography Exhibition

2011-08-01T17:15:00.006+01:00

Karen Rivron's photographs are now being exhibited for sale at Golden Brown Coffee in Darlington. The four currently on show reflect her interest in capturing the unusual in the everyday. There's also an element of North East-interest in the form of St Mary's Lighthouse which can be found further up the coast, East of Newcastle. Below are the four photographs you can see in the gallery (picture, left) plus a few others Karen also has for sale as framed prints (£35 each plus p&p):

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The coffee shop hasn't been open long and is, in my opinion, a real breath of fresh (well, coffee-scented) air for Darlington. As well as the coffee shop downstairs, there is an art gallery upstairs. Once visited, it can become something of a habit.

Rhino Mountain

2011-07-31T20:22:00.003+01:00

The Yorkshire Dales, apparently, are a dangerous place to be these days. Seriously, I've been meaning to photograph this sign for some time. You can find it on a high road in the hills between Kirkby Stephen and Sedburgh. I'm sure it's cheered up a lot of tourists (or worried them, if they're slow on the uptake). It's been there for years now. Are "SEM" the initials of the artist? Who knows.

*

Not so long ago we paid a visit to Ormesby Hall, a National Trust property just outside Middlesborough. Prior to passing to the Trust, it was the home of Colonel Jim Pennyman and his wife, Ruth. They were an interesting couple: Ruth was a socialist while the colonel was an active member of the Conservative Party. It's a pleasant afternoon out: there's a lot to look at in the hall, especially since Ruth -in addition to everything else- was a semi-professional artist. The exhibits which stick in the mind, though, are pretty gruesome. Ruth kept one of her milk teeth and it's now in a glass case along with two sections of Jim's ribs: he received a bullet wound in the war and, as a result, they had to be removed surgically. He kept them, wrapped in cotton wool.

Having had a wander round, I came across a portrait of Sir Michael Tippett in a corridor close to the exit. I was quite excited by this as, if pushed, I think I'd have to name Tippett as my favourite composer. I headed back to the information desk to find out what he was doing there.

It turned out that Tippett had been a friend of Ruth Pennyman in the inter-war years. He had worked with her on a project for unemployed people in the area - first on a production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and then on an opera which he composed himself, Robin Hood. Ruth Pennyman wrote the libretto. As it was an early work he was not altogether pleased with, Tippett later withdrew the music and forbade its performance.

He did write his Piano Sonata No. 1 in the thirties, though (this is "1/2", so if you listen, and it captivates you, click on the "2/2" that appears at the end to hear the rest) :

Now I've seen it in a new light I'll have to go back to Ormesby Hall.

The Birds

2011-07-27T06:54:00.001+01:00

Writing my last-post-but-one got me searching Youtube for Messiaen's music. In the process I found these videos of the composer talking about birdsong. Birdsong was a huge influence on him: it found its way into a huge number of his pieces and, frequently, into the titles he gave them.

And here's Le Rouge-Gorge (The Robin), from Messiaen's Petites Esquisses d'Oiseaux (1985-1987), played by Thibaut Surugue:

I was reminded of Messiaen's music when I went to an exhibition of Marcus Coates' work at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2007:

The Fall

2011-07-24T21:53:00.000+01:00

You weren't there:
neither was I.

The evidence of
the tape, however,
is unequivocal: there was
an urgent, white crescendo
as the twigs
of the desiccated canopy
crumpled against the sand
followed by
a dark sforzando
as that broken branch
that had stuck out
for so long
like the stump
of a severed arm
buried itself after which
time (as before) continued
on its invisible way

My Kind of Music (8)

2011-07-23T12:33:00.004+01:00

It's a while since I added anything to this series of posts. However, I've been listening to this composer a lot recently and was reminded that one of his pieces, The Quartet for the End of Time, was a piece I got into as a teenager. At the time I was bowled over by its originality and still am.

Olivier Messiaen wrote the piece while he was being held by the Germans in a prison camp during WWII. It was scored for the instruments available: piano, violin, clarinet and cello. It was first performed in 1941 in Stalag VIIIA, to an audience of about 400 prisoners and guards. Etienne Pasquier, the cellist, described the event in an interview with Hannelore Lauerwald:

[The performance took place] in the hut that we used as the theatre. All the seats were taken, about four hundred in all, and people listened raptly, their thoughts turning inward, even those who may have been listening to chamber music for the first time. The concert took place on Wednesday, 15 January 1941, at six in the evening. It was bitterly cold outside the hut, and there was snow on the ground and on the rooftops.

This is the sixth movement, Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes:

Night Run

2011-07-20T22:01:00.074+01:00

Busy day again yesterday, tying up administrative loose ends. Went out for a run last night: I'd spent so much time sat in front of a computer or a steering wheel I desperately needed a bit of exercise. Stuck my headphones in and, fortunately, caught the Alastair Roberts Trio on Late Junction (Radio 3). (You can still hear the concert for the next six days here, on the BBC website if it's available where you are). I'm not usually a folk music fan, but this struck a nerve. I just liked what I heard (and not just because Roberts is credited, somewhat journalistically, with "reinventing Scottish folk music"). It certainly helped that the combination of bass, guitar, violin and voice is the same as the band I play in - only we're playing jazz. It was interesting to hear a texture that was the same, but different. It was musically thought-provoking.

I'm looking for a good book to read and had a browse through the local Oxfam shop this morning. Several things attracted my attention, but I came away empty handed. I almost bought a Doris Lessing scifi book, almost bought The Gormenghast Trilogy. Both were books I'd like to have read. But I read a page of both and couldn't see myself reading another few hundred in either. In both cases, something about the style got on my nerves. It's a shame - as I'd like to have read both and I'm sure I'd get a lot out of them if I could bring myself. I was left feeling that, having been around for half a century, if there's a book I've wanted to read for years but kept picking up and not reading, there's probably a good reason for it. Why voluntarily knock my head against a brick wall? If I picked up Titus Groan 1982, 1991 and 2001 and put it down again perhaps I should just resign myself to accepting that it's not "me", not bother and look elsewhere.

Or perhaps not. Certainly with music, I often find myself listening to stuff I'd heard years ago and thought I didn't like only to find something in it.

The fact remains, I feel in need of a good book to read, and can't find one. And although you can't make special things happen, I'd quite like it to be a life changing discovery. Some books are. It's not about whether it's a good book or a bad book - but just about the impression it makes on you when you read it. For one reason or another, things after you've read it are never quite the same again.

I can feel a list coming on - books I've read, which have had this effect on me, in no particular order. I've excluded overtly philosophical books as what I'm interested in here is how books that are not directly so can affect the way one thinks. There's no poetry there, either - I decided poetry would warrant a list of its own.

Mountaineering in Scotland and Undiscovered Scotland by WH Murray
Waterlog by Roger Deakin
Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome
Lord of the Rings by Tolkein
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Composition With Twelve Tones Related Only To One Another by Josef Rufer
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Collected Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle
A Year From Monday by John Cage
Piggly Plays Truant by AJ MacGregor
Fun With Short Wave Radio by Gilbert Davey

It strikes me that there's quite a few doorstops in there. I seem to like big books. That having been said, I've stalled on a few. I'm just over half way through Middlemarch. I had decided to "rest" it (after all, it came out in installments) but when I picked it up again, it suddenly seemed to be hard going. It's billed as "A Study in Provincial Life" and it suddenly seemed very, well, provincial. Did I really want to wade through it? Perhaps I don't like novels - certainly, many books on my list aren't novels.

I'll have to keep looking...

To the Secret Harbour

2011-07-13T08:57:00.010+01:00

I felt a little apprehensive clicking on the "New Post" button this morning. It seems a long time since I last strung words -as opposed to notes- together for the fun of it. The last few weeks have been very busy: always the case where the summer term is concerned.

I'm a great believer in the maxim, you should work to live, rather than live to work, although this tends to go by the board this time of year. It's also true, as my grandad used to say, that if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly, so needs must. Fortunately, things are about to even themselves out: by lunchtime today all the exams will be over and I'll only have a handful of reports to sort out. Sadly, if recent years are anything to go by, the summer will be all but over too, to be replaced by the "rainy season".

The last period of free time ended weeks ago. It ended so suddenly I didn't even have time to blog about it. My friend Alick and I borrowed an inflatable canoe belonging to a friend of his and made for the Lake District. Our objective was to follow in the footsteps of Arthur Ransome's fictional children (and Arthur Ransome himself) and seek out Wild Cat Island, the idyllic camping-place of the Swallows and the Amazons.

Of course, Wild Cat Island only exists in fiction. it is, however substantially based on Peel Island on Coniston Water. Ransome camped there in his youth and visited it frequently. He was great friends with the Collingwood family, and a great fan of WJ Collingwood's book, Thorstein of the Mere. As Ransome says in his introduction to the book, quoting Collingwood:

Far up the lake was Peel Island. "When you see it from the fells it looks like a ship in the midst of the blue ripples; but a ship at anchor, while all the mere moves upbank or downbank, as the wind may be. . . . And to make the likeness better still, a long, narrow calf-rock lies in the water, as if it were the cock-boat at the stern: while tall trees stood for masts and sails." We had seen it so from the high fell, and as for the calf-rock, we ran our boat in alongside it when we rowed down to the island. We knew that someone had lived there, in the narrow place between rocks in the middle of it. For twenty years I treasured an old nail found there, now gone, like so much else.

Alick, with boat, in the secret harbour

Photo: Alick Bridger

Of course, the geographical details are altered slightly in Swallows and Amazons, but when you land on Peel Island you are left in no doubt that you are stepping into the pages of a book. It's most famous feature, the secret harbour at the Southern end, is exactly as you would expect it to be. Photos, we felt, are called for, and we snapped each other. This is my photo of Alick. We both look very serious in the shots. Anyone who read and reread Ransome as a child could not help but feel slightly awestruck in that place - much as you might feel walking into a cathedral. We pulled our canoe well up on the shore and set off to explore. The real island is not big -its fictional counterpart has been stretched a few yards- but big enough to capture the imagination. It is essentially a rocky wood. Almost everywhere on its coastline the rock slopes down steeply into the water. Apart from the secret harbour there are only one or two nooks and crannies where one could land or launch a small boat. In the centre there is a depression, surrounded by rocky hillocks, where traces of a Viking settlement have been found (none are visible now). At the Northern end -much used in the book as a lookout point- I could not resist climbing an oak tree.

Once we'd explored the island, we ate our lunch and returned to the boat. I was slightly worried that we might return to find a crumpled plastic bag instead of a canoe. We had had the foresight to bring a pump with us, just in case. Thakfully, the boat was just as we'd left it - I had underestimated just how good a good inflatable canoe could be. I'd seen cheap versions in action in the past and had not been impressed. This one was quite a ship and we were amazed to discover just how fast we could travel in it. We set off North to the steamer quay half way up the East side of the lake, landed briefly, then set off back to Peel Island and landed again. Then we circumnavigated it... In short, we spent the afternoon, to borrow a water rat's famous phrase, messing about in a boat.

We'd parked the car and launched that morning at Low Peel Near (someone -not us- took a great photo of the place and posted it here). By the time we got back there we were feeling quite bold. The far side of the lake didn't look that far away anymore, so we set off to Brown Howe. It only took us a few minutes and, on the way back, we passed the Gondola, a steamer that carries tourists up and down the lake. Could we outrun it? We gave chase and kept up for a while, but soon wore ourselves out. The wash from the thing was a bit choppy.

Back at base, we decided to end the day with a swim. The lake was surprisingly cold (this was May), but not too cold to swim without a wetsuit. (We'd been wearing wetsuits all day, but I don't like swimming in them unless I have to - the bouyancy makes me feel like a bobbing lump of polystyrene). When we got out, we discovered an aspect to the place that features in Ransome's fiction not at all - midges! On Peel Island we'd said we'd wished we'd brought a couple of bivi bags and stayed the night there. Dressing on the shore while trying to beat off the blighters we were glad we hadn't.

Trio Gitan Video

2011-06-25T12:28:00.001+01:00

Andy (the violinist) has just posted some live videos of us on Youtube from our gig at the Abbeydale Picturehouse Jazz Club in Sheffield last month, including this one of Afternoon in Paris...

Wordsworth's Prelude

2011-05-27T01:18:00.000+01:00

I wish I knew The Prelude better. It's a huge poem - a "song", as Wordsworth himself puts it, "which like a lark, I have protracted, in the unwearied heavens singing."

I heard an excerpt of it read on the radio the other day. It was a passage I didn't know, about an expedition to one of my favourite mountains...

IN one of those excursions (may they ne'er
Fade from remembrance!) through the Northern tracts
Of Cambria ranging with a youthful friend,
I left Bethgelert's huts at couching-time,
And westward took my way, to see the sun
Rise, from the top of Snowdon. To the door
Of a rude cottage at the mountain's base
We came, and roused the shepherd who attends
The adventurous stranger's steps, a trusty guide;
Then, cheered by short refreshment, sallied forth.

It was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog
Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky;
But, undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain-side. The mist soon girt us round,
And, after ordinary travellers' talk
With our conductor, pensively we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked
Those musings or diverted, save that once
The shepherd's lurcher, who, among the crags,
Had to his joy unearthed a hedgehog, teased
His coiled-up prey with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed
In that wild place and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band;
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched,
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty,
Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that through a rift--
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens.

One for the Poetry Jam

2011-05-09T07:52:00.000+01:00

Birthday Poem

Um... Tyranny, perhaps
(4,5,7)
crossword freak

Die Tödliche Doris

2011-04-30T22:52:00.005+01:00

Not wishing to reinvent the wheel, I'll leave a description of the long-defunct Die Tödliche Doris to their Wikipedia page. Unfortunately, their name doesn't translate well. In English, they were "Deadly Doris". However, in German, change the r in Doris to an s and apparently they become "The Deadly Dose". (An English equivalent -although it's a completely different name- might be "Lethal Rose"). They're well worth a Google if, like me, you like this kind of thing.

I said they're defunct, but, actually, according to their own publicity,

The Deadly Doris broke into three parts in 1987. Each of the three members of the group transported the multi-parted Deadly Doris into one or several different conditions. Wolfgang Müller transformed Deadly Doris into white wine.

Wolfgang Müller's myspace page is here.

Cnicht

2011-04-28T18:36:00.002+01:00

Borth y Gest, Friday, 15th April

I went off on my own this afternoon, to climb Cnicht. Cnicht is a 2,260-foot hill (or 689m if you prefer) between Beddgelert and Ffestiniog. It stands alongside “the Moelwyns” and, from Porthmadog, has a fine, Matterhorn-like profile.

I was aiming to climb it from another direction, though. On the far side of Llyn Dinas, just outside Beddgelert, lies an expanse of wild land. If you travel across it, as the crow flies, for about two and a half miles, you come to Cnicht. A long time ago I'd read a book by EG Rowland, a populariser of walking in the Welsh mountains in the 1950s. In it, he recommended an ascent from the Llyn as one of the best ways to climb the mountain.

I parked the car in the lay-by close to the Southern end of the lake. The start of my route took my around the edge of the lake. I passed two artists with their easels, painting landscapes. The path, once it reached the far side of the lake, turned East, up through the woods. It was in the woods I made my first mistake. Perhaps I was feeling a bit vague today. Perhaps I was carried away by the excitement of walking through a fantastic Welsh wood – the kind I often drive past but too rarely stop to walk through. Anyway, I reached a fork in the path and turned right.

Of course, I should have paid more attention to the map. If you were to do this walk yourself, you might find yourself thinking, “What was he complaining about? The navigation's easy”. However, I spotted at least three places where it was easy to go disasterously wrong (and any mistake is a disaster in this terrain: miss the path and progress is a struggle, as you see later). It's as well to keep one's map-reading hat firmly on when walking this route.

It soon became clear I'd gone wrong. I didn't mind that much at first – in fact, I was enjoying myself. So long as I headed East-ish, I reasoned, I'd soon hit the road. I had underestimated how hard-going it was going to be without a path. I stopped at a destinctive stone sheepfold: this must be on the map, I decided. Find it there, and I'd know where I was.

No such luck. My first response in such situations is to blame myself. The map doesn't lie. I was obviously looking at the wrong part of the map. I moved on a short way, up and East, and triangulated my position, using mountains in the Snowdon group. I decided I was high on the flanks of a minor lump, Mynydd Llyndy. No problem. I'd take a bearing East and soon end up at the road.

I don't suppose it took that long, but the going was rough, slow and exhausting. The terrain was either flat and very squelchy or steep and rocky. It undulated continuously. In a short while the hilly moorland gave way to fields, but these very boggy, filled with tussocks veiled with dead, yellowy-white long grass. There were walls to negotiate, barbed wire, wide shallow streams running over deep, oozing mud... And, forced by the terrain, I strayed a bit to the right. I came to a sign on a gate which said “Danger: Quarry”. I climbed over it, to tentatively investigate. There was a dangerous looking quarry: I stayed well away from it. But there was also a solid path, well away from the edge. I followed the path until it petered out. To my left a bramble-choked ravine rose. There was a gate at the top. I struggled up through the brambles to the gate and looked over it. There was a familiar sign on the other side: “Danger: Quarry”. I climbed back over it, suitably chastened, and resumed the slog over the tussocks.

I finally reached the road. From then on route finding was easy. My only concern was that I'd lost time and ought to really keep moving over the next section to make it up. If I did, I could chill out on the summit and make my way back in a more leisurely fashion. I took a brief, standing break and drank some water.

Following the map, I stopped to open the gate that led up the drive to a farm (now mountaineering centre) calleed Gelli-Iago. A couple were standing by the gate. In fact I'd noticed them as I walked up the road. They looked lost.
“If you're going up Cnicht,” I said, helpfully, “I think this is the way”. Why did I say anything? Probably because I'd just been lost myself. If only I'd run into someone then...
“I think we've worked that out for ourselves now, thank you,” said the woman. Did I detect a note of tartness?
Oh, well.

The path round the farm-cum-centre went through several gates and stiles in quick succession. I pressed on. I noticed that George and Mildred stopped to have a major deliberation with the map before opening each one. Perhaps I ought not to tease them though, considering what I'd just been though myself.

Time was pressing. I was now faced with a steep ascent by the side of a stream. The best thing I decided was to get on with it -no dawdling- so I stomped off uphill at a steady pace. It was so much easier walking on a path, even one built of three-dimensional crazy paving. I soon reached Bwlch y Battel, a kind of high valley, the far side of which is the steep-sided ridge of Cnicht.

My aim was to climb up to the prominent notch in that ridge just South West of the summit. There's some great scrambling -or a spectacular walk- from there to the summit itself. The only problem was that I was now feeling pretty tired. I had expected to: as I said, having lost time, I wanted to push myself to get to the summit quite quickly. As the hill steepened the views got more and more spectacular – and my pace slowed to a crawl.

As usual, it was great to reach the ridge and suddenly be able to see what lies on the far side. The plunge down from the ridge into Cwm Croesor is one of the great things about Cnicht. Looking down at the green fields and buildings on the valley floor is spectacular, like looking over the edge of a balloon gondola. On the far side of the valley rose the bulk of Moelwyn Mawr.

From the notch one can either take the path or a choice of scrambles. I chose the path. I toyed with a scamble I'd descended on my last visit but, from the bottom, I couldn't see the way out at the top. Although the holds were easy and there were plenty of ledges, I didn't want to ascend the wrong line and be forced to descend it. I decided to avoid it and took the path – which is a bit of a scramble in itself, come to think about it. It's only a few minutes from there to the summit, and I hadn't gone far when a bird flew out from the rocks above me. A buzzard, perhaps, I thought, although I had a good look at a bird identification chart later and I'm almost convinced it was an eagle. They do stop off in the Welsh mountains apparently, on their way from Ireland to Scotland. I should definitely carry a bird-book with me. I carried on and was soon stretched out by the summit-rocks with my head on my rucksack, eating and drinking. Bliss. I could have stayed there a long time: the weather was ideal for what I was doing.”Goldilocks weather”: neither too hot nor too cold. Lots of clouds in the sky, but lots of sun too, and very little wind.

I descended back to the notch by way of another scramble. It's not quite Tryfan -a Mecca for scramblers among Welsh mountains- but it's certainly a great hill to climb if you like to get your hands on rock. I was enjoying myself now, I felt rested and had plenty of time to get back to Llyn Dinas.

I was soon back at the road and determined to find the correct footpath this time. I walked North for some way, turning left, opposite a house called Llwynyrhwch. This is where I should have emerged had I had the sense to pay more attention to the map earlier. The walk down to the lake from here is delightful and goes right past an even more remote house called Hafod Owen. I'll have to check my facts but I think it is the same Hafod Owen once inhabited by the climber, Menlove Edwards. He was famous both for the bold innovation of his routes and the fact that he was gay. I seem to think he spent his latter years at a Hafod Owen, struggling with his own mental health and struggling to write a book on psychiatry (during the week he was a psychiatrist). I might be wrong about the details - my memory is sketchy, but for anyone who is interested, an in-depth account of his life, Menlove, was written by Jim Perrin. I read it a long time ago. The only event in his life I think I can remember with some certainty is his ascent of the “Very Severe” rock climb Munich Climb on Tryfan. A group of Austrian mountaineers, fresh from the North Face of the Eiger, had come to Wales to climb and had just pioneered the route. In so doing, they had resorted to the then very un-English practice of inserting a piton (a metal peg) for added security on the hardest pitch. When the details became public, Edwards climbed the route alone and ropeless, removing the piton on the way. (I climbed the route once. Had I not been securely tied to a better climber than me I would have fallen off, and I had to be hauled up the section in question like a sack of potatoes).

I didn't get lost on the way down, but did pass one or two features which made me think this walk might have been designed by a demented map-reading instructor. Although the route is clear and well-trodden most of the time, going wrong on this walk is not difficult. Walking back through the woods I passed the place I'd turned off by mistake on my way up. It was a silly mistake to make, I thought, with the benefit of hindsight. On my way down, I'd considered going for a swim in the lake when I got back. However, when I came out of the woods and found myself on the lakeside I decided against it. I felt pleasantly tired: I'd done enough for one day.

Holiday Diary(5): RS Thomas, etc.

2011-04-22T23:08:00.008+01:00

Borth y Gest, Thursday, 14th April

Travelled down the Llyn Peninsula to Aberdaron, where RS Thomas was vicar for many years. I borrowed Karen's camera to take some photos of his church (I've started using flickr to make slideshows you can embed in a blog - you can still click on individual shots to "blow them up"):

Earlier, on the way, we had stopped at yet another National Trust property, Plas yn Rhiw. This relatively modest-sized house was bought by the three Keating sisters in the thirties. It is said that there was a house on the site going back to Roman times and that the foundations include “Roman cement”. The sisters spent the rest of their lives buying up land around it in order to recreate the original grounds. They left it all to The National Trust, in memory of their parents, Constance and John Keating. They left a huge collection of books behind – including a first edition of Jane Eyre, with the pseudonym Currer Bell inscribed on the spine. I thought it was almost worth a visit to the place just to see this. The garden commands a view of Porth Neigwl, the bay known in English as Hell's Mouth. There is a bench in the garden –a recent addition- engraved with fish, animals and birds (try clicking on the photos to see them better). I don't know who made it, but it's beautifully done. The grounds are also famous for their two-seater privvy...

Why two-seater? I always thought twin seat arrangements were to allow people to dig two bore-holes for waste products, saving themselves the effort of moving the shed every time they filled a hole in. These, however, are built over a small ravine containing a stream which is culverted elsewhere in the garden. Perhaps the owners were simply great conversationalists.

We made for the bench in the woods instead, where we sat for a while, drinking coffee and eating the penultimate two slices of the excellent fruitcake my mum had baked us for the week.

Soundtrack for the day for me was I Sing The Body Electric, my favourite Weather Report album. The first track, Unknown Soldier, was inspired by keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul's wartime experience as a child in Austria. He and a friend were out playing when they found the dead body of a soldier. It's less well known than it deserves to be, but if there is a list of pieces of music inspired by the Second World War out there this should definitely be on it.

Went for a run in the evening, up through the woods and back along the coast. Sat for ten minutes on the rocks at the edge of a calm, gently undulating sea, watching the clouds reflected in the water.

Holiday Diary (4): A Poem...

2011-04-21T00:45:00.005+01:00

Borth y Gest: Wednesday, 13th April

On the Train

I have picked the pockets
of all my fellow passengers.
They are now incommunicative
while I have a shopping bag
full of mobile phones.

I intend to plant them
on a hillside – watch them grow
into a forest of telephone trees.

In Winter they'll
reach down with their electric roots
deep into the earth
searching for a current
to recharge their batteries.

In Spring they'll
put on an LED display
of digital foliage.

In Summer they'll
greet the sun
with a chorus of ringtones.

In the Autumn their leaves will fall
littering the forest floor
with unobtainable numbers.

Holiday Diary (3) : Peter Finch

2011-04-20T22:36:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday, went to Ynys, a remote stretch of coastline overlooking Portmeirion. We ate our lunch there. The tide was out, leaving pools and shallow channels in the sand. Whenever we stop here I can't help but follow the horizon with my eye, naming the hills: Moel y Gest, Moel Hebog, Yr Wyddfa, Y Liwedd, Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach, Cnicht, Moelwyn Mawr, Moelwyn Bach...

In the afternoon we went round the coast to Llanbedrog, to the art gallery there. A stone sculpture in the garden made an impression on me, although I've not idea who made it or what it was called. A statue is a stone that looks at you...

In the shop I bought a book of Peter Finch's poetry, Zen Cymru. A great, arresting title that. There is quite a lot of his stuff on Youtube. I chose this, because it's in the book:

In the evening, we went out to to the Sima Tandoori in Porthmadog. One of the best meals of its kind I've ever eaten. The only one that came close was the one I ate the last time we went there.

Holiday Diary (2): Plas Newydd

2011-04-19T17:53:00.000+01:00

Borth y Gest: Sunday, 10th April

Another beautiful day – clear sky (well, so far) and as still and warm out as in. Went out for a run while Karen was still in bed. Clambered to the top of a rock which is an island when the tide's in and just a rocky outcrop on the beach when it's out. Discovered a mess of broken mollusc shells: one of those places seabirds come to break them open and eat the contents. Slipped and grazed my leg (only slightly) on the way down.

Ran back to Borth y Gest along the beach, mostly. A short rock-climb took me up from the beach back to the street – it was just the way it should be: just outside my comfort-zone, but well inside the safe zone. It was only a few feet high and the holds were huge, sound and well-polished with regular use, so I was not the first.

Passed a gate on the coast path on the way back and concocted a haiku:

Preifat

a sign on a gate:
soon the weeds will be so high
no-one will read it

After breakfast we set of to Plas Newydd on Anglsey. We joined the National Trust not long ago – members get to park at and get into National Trust properties for free, so we'd been poring over the blurb they sent us looking for good places to go in North Wales. Anything with a tea-shop went straight onto the shortlist. Since Plas Newydd has two tea-shops and a second-hand bookshop it beat all the others by a good margin.

When we first joined, I stuck my oak-leaf car sticker on the windscreen with a heavy heart. It made me feel ten years older – very “pipe and slippers”, as they say, I thought. Having been to a few places now, I realise I'd got the wrong end of the stick and my opinion has changed completely. I wish I'd joined years ago – especially when my children were small. The grounds of the National Trust's old buildings are awash with parents and small children. Toddlers pursue footballs almost as big as themselves around the lawns. Eight year olds run screaming in and out of the rhodedendrons, parents wander around, breathing in the fresh air, glad to be able to relax for an hour or two.

The tea-shop lived up to expectations, as did the second-hand bookshop. The books were interesting – and cheap. I bought a copy of the complete Father Brown stories and a collection of Maupassant's stories. (The latter includes the hilarious Madame Tellier's Establishment. I couldn't wait to get back to the house at Borth y Gest to read it). We didn't go into the “big house” itself today as the weather was so good – we thought we'd leave that for a more typical April afternoon later this week. Instead, we wandered round the grounds, which slope down straight into the Menai Straits. It's a wonderful, dreamy place. We left late in the afternoon and, reluctant to leave the island, drove East, through Beaumaris, to the more remote stretch of coast that overlooks The Great Orme. We sat there for some time, soaking it in and watching the cormorant that was sitting on a rock a few yards out from the shore. In the middle distance, flocks of birds were flying low up the Straits. Behind them the Carneddau mountains rose up. I regretted not bringing my shorts and towel with me. A swim there would have been quite something.

Soundtrack today -for me- has been Radiohead's new album, King of Limbs. My daughter bought it for me for my birthday. I had heard a few minutes of the music before and I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. Were these good songs, or just recycled ideas from their previous albums? I have to say that anyone who knows those albums (particularly Kid A and Amnesiac - I can't speak for their last album, Rainbows, as I 've missed out on that so far) will hear echoes of them in this one: Thom Yorke performs his impersonation of a constipated elf over a monolith of rhythmic sound. That makes it sound like I don't like it: but in fact I like Yorke's ideosyncratic vocals and the more I get to know King of Limbs, the more impressive I find it. The lyrics are good, as rock lyrics go, which helps. I'm not sute about Thom Yorke's bowler-hatted dancing routine, but this -Lotus Flower- was my favourite track on the album.

Holiday Diary (1)

2011-04-19T00:37:00.003+01:00

Seagull, Anglsey

We've just returned from a 10-day holiday in North Wales. We stayed in a holiday cottage at Borth y Gest, just outside Porthmadog. We didn't have an internet connection where we were staying, but I did keep a diary, with the intention of blogging it later. It's not just about what we did - mountain walking, music, poetry (RS Thomas, Peter Finch) and photographs come into it as well. So, here's the first installment...

Saturday

Borth y Gest

Went into Porthmadog and had a walk round. I went off to Cob Records, a brillaint second hand record shop opposite the Ffestiniog railway station. There are thousands upon thousands of old LPs there. On this occasion I don't think I intended to buy anything. Browsing around there is a bit like doing the same in a museum. It's nice to look at the old record sleeves of progressive rock albums that I have no desire to listen to but which take me back thirty-five years. Pure nostalgia, right down to the destinctive smell of the sleeves: a sort of mixture of student bedsits and dirty old leather jackets that have spent too long hanging around in pubs. I had no desire to listen to most of them then – on the whole, they belonged to people I hung around with at school. (I wonder what the Welsh word is for flaneur? Since the word is borrowed from French anyway, I think it's probably flaneur).What I was actually listening to, on Radio 3 via headphones, was the Brazilian musician, Raf Vilar:

It wasn't what I'd usually listen to - but that's what I like about Radio 3. As well as it's core repertoire of classical music, it plays a surprising variety of other musics. One thing it has over the internet is that it throws things at you randomly. When I discover music on the internet, it's at the end of a chain of associations: I've searched for terms or followed links that interest me. When I turn on the radio I simply get what I'm given.

I'm probably usually five years behind in the technology stakes: I've got a mobile phone now with a built in FM radio and use it more as a radio than I do as a phone. It has the great advantage over old Walkmans and similar devices that the battery stays in and just needs recharging. Having to get round to replacing batteries has always stood between me and a gadget habit.

I could whinge about how, come the analogue switch off, I'll have to replace this excellent device, but I won't. I'll save that for another day.

After the Brazilian stuff, a great jazz programme featuring the guitarist Mike Stern.

The Station: Margaret Ashman

2011-04-07T07:59:00.002+01:00

On Tuesday I found myself not having to work all day, so we went out for the afternoon. First, we visited Reeth, a village at the junction of Swaledale and Arkengarthdale, in search of a safe home for some hedgehogs, a good distance from the main road. If I were a tourist, of all the villages I know in the Dales, Reeth is the one I'd enjoy visiting the most. It's in the valley, but raised up slightly which, combined with its location at the junction of two Dales, means that the views from its paths and roads -not to mention its graveyard- are spectacular. There is an unusally high density of pubs and teashops, too, without it feeling unduly commercial.

From Reeth, we drove to Richmond and paid a visit to The Station. Richmond's disused railway station has been converted into a cinema-cum-café-cum-art gallery. There's a handful of trendy shops tucked away in it, too. We went to see the exhibition that's on there at the moment: Press Freedom: A Celebration of Printmaking. (I dislike the way people these days use words like celebration -and festival- when what they're really talking about are marketting opportunities - but enough of that).

First we stopped off at the café: 15 minutes sat reading The Guardian, drinking coffee in a condusive atmosphere, thinking, when not reading, that I ought to do this more often. Then on, to the exhibition. If you've not far to travel it's well worth going to see it. This isn't a reflection on the other artists, it's merely a reflection of how receptive I was feeling on the day, but for me one artist stood out and made a deep impression on me. There are a handful of prints by Margaret Ashman, from her flowers and birds and her signdance series. I spent a long time just stood looking at her Sweet Song. (Do click on the link and have a look for yourself). I'm not sure how to put it, but in some uncanny way she creates the impression that she can portray the interior as well as the exterior of her subject.

That's Life

2011-04-02T11:52:00.001+01:00

For a while now my head's been too full of musical stuff to think of stringing words together: somehow it's always one or the other, not both at the same time. However, this morning I found myself forced to endure an hour or so of idleness: just me, a comfy chair, a room, a laptop, an internet connection. Can't complain...

I'd not taken a ride on the Poetry Bus for ages. I decided I'd try hopping on. Prompt this week from Titus. What I've written goes back to 2006 when we went to Maryport to see a dolphin that had swum into the harbour there.

That's Life

I once saw a dolphin
swimming round a harbour
confused perhaps
by the smooth stone sides

for some reason
it stayed there
it never swam back
out to sea

thousands came
to have a look. "look",
they'd say to their children,
pointing, "it's over there!"

and their children
went home and
drew pictures of dolphins

later I heard
it died soon after

Nightmare Alley (3)

2011-04-01T07:27:00.003+01:00

The last episode, I think. I dreamt it the night before last. I remember nothing from last night. The dreams have got less and less lurid: were it not for the previous dreams (see the previous two posts) I don't think I would have taken much notice of this one. What began with a bang has faded to a whimper. (In case anyone is worried for me, I should point out that the idea of going to a hospital is purely a dream-creation) :

I was sat on the top deck of an old London bus with a friend. I said I'd get off as I thought we were close to the hospital. I ran down the stairs and jumped off the rear platform as the bus slowed down.
When I got to the hospital I found it was largely deserted. I was going there to see a psychiatrist but it was the wrong day for the clinic I needed to attend. I walked round the corridors lined with empty chairs thinking I should try to get it together and come on the right day, with all the paperwork the doctor had given me.
I left the hospital and walked home. At home, the landing window had become a kiosk. I was stood there talking to a man who said he could only sort out my benefits if I had the right paperwork.
I found myself looking out of a window. It began to snow, then hail. There was thunder and lightening. The hail turned to heavy rain.

Nightmare Alley (2)

2011-03-31T07:00:00.001+01:00

And indeed I woke up the next morning with a vivid memory of another dream I'd just dreamt. (If you missed the previous "episodes" scroll down to the previous post):

I'm in a mine beneath the streets of London. There are others with me. In a recess in the floor there is a stop-cock of some kind. We try different spanners and various other tools but we are unable to turn it one way or the other. We give up and decide to leave. We agree to make our way North, to a location about half a mile away. Some time later I realize I'm alone and walking in the wrong direction. To make up lost time I decide to hail a cab. At first I think the cabman has seen me and is going to stop for me: but he doesn't. He's already carrying a fare. Fortunately, he stops to drop his fare off not far away and I run to catch him. He agrees to take me to my destination but produces a long form that needs to be filled in before he can do so...

Nightmare Alley

2011-03-29T23:09:00.004+01:00

John Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare

I've been having strange nightmares the last couple of nights. I've no idea why: if it's something I've eaten, I've no idea what it could be. I've not been particularly worried about anything, either. On both nights I woke up in a state of fascinated terror. It's not very often that I remember a dream and these are so strange and dreadful I couldn't resist writing them down and sharing them. Well, I say dreadful, but in dreams sometimes things seem to happen to the dreamer with an emotional intensity not usually associated with the events he or she is dreaming about. They certainly had a Gothic feel to them.

This is the dream I dreamt the night before last:

I was walking across a field towards a low, modern building. I was worried: worried that if I went in I might meet the Cardinal. When I arrived at the building, I opened the door and went in. The Cardinal was indeed there. I wanted to make my way across the room to the door in the opposite wall, only the Cardinal, in the nicest possible way, was blocking my way. He was a tall, thin man: seven feet tall, they said. I was surprised to see that his cape was not red but a creamy white. My eyes could not help but be drawn to its sickening colour, which filled me with dread. In the nicest possible way, I moved to one side, to walk past him. He moved in front of me again. I knew what he wanted. Under his cape he wore a many-facetted precious stone, on a chain. He wanted to draw back his cape and show me the stone. I knew that if I looked upon it I would fall under his spell. It had happened before and I was determined that it should not happen again. I made for the door. Again, he blocked my way...

And last night:

I was living in a city. It was a dark, winter evening. I set out to visit a friend who lived not far away. The friend was a publican. He lived and worked in a large, drab, brick-built public house. When I arrived, he greeted me and showed me upstairs to his private room. A little later I left to go home. I had not gone far when I was set upon by an Alsatian dog. It attempted to bite me: I felt its teeth on my hand. There was a man with the dog, standing a short distance off. I couldn't see him clearly. I turned and ran back to the pub, pursued by the dog and and its owner. When I entered the bar my friend, seeing what a state I was in, immediately stood back and let me through. As I ran up the stairs I could hear a commotion below: the dog was barking and the man was remonstrating with the publican.

Oh well, I wonder what's in store tonight? If there's a third exciting episode to this surreal soap I'll blog it.

A Visit to Lichfield

2011-03-21T20:50:00.004Z

Photo: Roger Robinson. Released under GNU Free Documentation License

Went to Leicester on Saturday, to see my son, Daniel. We went off together to Lichfield for the afternoon: he'd never been there, but I'd spent most of my childhood there and I thought it would be good to go see where my parents used to live and where I used to go to school. If your family always live in one place you take this kind of knowledge for granted: if you are a fisherman and your father was a fisherman and you sailed from the same quay that your grandfather used to sail from you know -and probably take for granted- a lot about who you are and where you come from. If you live in a typical modern family where people have moved about a lot, all you know about your parents (and their parents) is what you see, then and there, as you grow up.

I went to the Cathedral School in Lichfield: a prep school attached to the Cathedral and which supplied the choir to the Cathedral, although I was never a member of it. It was a very musical school, though, and it was there I started to learn the double bass. Lichfield and its Cathedral left a deep impression on me. It's difficult to be accurate, because the mind plays all sorts of tricks, but I think it's fair to say Lichfield played a major part in shaping me into the person I am.

We parked round the corner from the Cathedral, at the end of the grandly named Prince Rupert's Way, a short street in a housing estate. The name alludes the major role played by Lichfield in the Civil War. We walked from there to the Cathedral Close, much of the way following the route I used to take walking to and from school. Apart from the personal associations, I was really keen to show Daniel the Cathedral. Whatever view one takes of religion, one has to accept that buildings like this are massively important parts of our cultural history. For example, when you walk up to the West Door (that is, the "front door") you are immediately struck by the massive West face of the building - if I'm describing it like a mountain, then that is not wholly inappropriate. To stand at the foot of it is like standing at the foot of a cliff. (It occurred to me, as Daniel and I stood there, that part of my later love of mountains and rock climbing may well have its roots in the years I spent under the shadow of this massive, man-made rock-wall). Looking up at it, you're left in no doubt about the political role of the Church during the last milennium. The wall is covered in statues. All along the foot of the wall, standing on pedestals, are statues of the Apostles. A little higher, over the doors, kings of England sit on thrones. Above them stand row upon row of Old Testament prophets. Above them, at the apex of the wall, stands Christ. I spotted one woman in the wall - The Virgin Mary, over the main door (thinking about it, she may have appeared more than once). The effect is that, more or less, of a stone flow chart of the order of things as one was expected to accept it. Just round the corner stands a statue of Charles II, who contributed much to repairing the damage done to the place during the Civil War. During that war, since Lichfield lacked fortifications, the Royalists defended the Cathedral and its walled Close. The Parliamentarians laid siege, and it was from the spire of the Cathedral that a Royalist sniper, "Dumb Dyott", shot the leading Parliamentarian, Lord Brooke. Life can be symbolic.

Anyway, we had a good look round, both inside and outside. As I don't have a video camera (and even if I had one I'd rather walk around looking than walk around filming) I had a look around Youtube later, too, to see if there was any good amateur footage of the place. I came across this amateur film: I was impressed by the choices the film-maker had made when it came to what to show us. If I'd had a video, I would have shot more or less the same things, although I would have included the tea shop opposite the South Door!

Having spent some time at the Cathedral, we went off into Lichfield itself. I lived there for years, but I don't ever remember going into Samuel Johnson's birthplace: it's now a museum devoted to Johnson. I also realised I'd never read anything he'd written, an omission I've since put right. Born in 1709, he wrote in an era few book-readers rave about. He's most famous -and known to all Blackadder fans- for writing his Dictionary of the English Language:

The most fascinating exhibit to anyone new to Johnson is found in the attic: a first edition of the dictionary itself. There is also a more modern edition you can browse through. Daniel -a QI fan- told me that Johnson had come up with 26 definitions of the word "set", and there they all were, pages of them. You can read it for yourself online, here. This site will even read the book to you if you ask it, in a Stephen Hawking-like electronic voice. However, no-one told it that in those days people printed "f" instead of "s", fo it ftrugglef with the old profe and I muft fay it foundf a bit filly.

One of the great things about poetry is that most poems take less time to read than most works of prose so, if like me you're unfamiliar with what Samuel Johnson wrote, here's a quick one:

A Short Song of Congratulation

by Samuel Johnson

Long-expected one and twenty
Ling'ring year at last has flown,
Pomp and pleasure, pride and plenty
Great Sir John, are all your own.

Loosen'd from the minor's tether,
Free to mortgage or to sell,
Wild as wind, and light as feather
Bid the slaves of thrift farewell.

Call the Bettys, Kates, and Jenneys
Ev'ry name that laughs at care,
Lavish of your Grandsire's guineas,
Show the spirit of an heir.

All that prey on vice and folly
Joy to see their quarry fly,
Here the gamester light and jolly
There the lender grave and sly.

Wealth, Sir John, was made to wander,
Let it wander as it will;
See the jocky, see the pander,
Bid them come, and take their fill.

When the bonny blade carouses,
Pockets full, and spirits high,
What are acres? What are houses?
Only dirt, or wet or dry.

If the Guardian or the Mother
Tell the woes of willful waste,
Scorn their counsel and their pother,
You can hang or drown at last.

If you watched the video of the Cathedral, you'll have seen the pool: Stowe Pool. We walked back past it, back up to the Cathedral, and spent a happy half hour sat in the above-mentioned tea shop. They have a small wood-and-glass conservatory which extends into the back garden and we were lucky enough to find a table there. It felt like the sunniest day of the year so far and we could have sat there for a very long time. If it didn't close at 4, we'd probably still be drowsily propped up there.

What did they have to say in Svalbard?

2011-03-13T23:02:00.002Z

Following a comment on the previous post by Jessica Maybury, I decided a bit of background information on it was in order. I had probably talked about Amateur Radio while assuming that everyone knew roughly what it was about. Those who know me well, I suspect, know not to ask me about it at all, even if they don't, unless they want their ears bent.

Amateur Radio is a hobby pursued by millions of people around the world. To become a radio amateur involves passing an exam in very basic electronics, radio communication and the causes of and ways to prevent interference. Once you've passed you're considered competent to venture out on the airwaves with a radio transmitter. Of course, you could just buy a CB licence or even buy a mobile phone - but there are differences. A licensed radio amateur, if they want to, is permitted to build their own radio transmitter - with a CB licence you're not even permitted to tamper with the set you've bought. CB is restricted to one band: amateurs have a whole range of bands to use. Amateur radio is a lot more than talking into a microphone: amateurs transmit and receive Morse code, radio teletype, TV and a range of data modes (encoding signals for transmission and decoding signals with the help of a computer). Licensed amateur hold call signs which identify them and the countries they come from: the "prefix" of the callsign identifies the country. (Sorry, but this map is not the most up-to-date: UK callsigns begin with M these days, not G. Mine is M0KXD) (click to view):

Like "jazz", the term "amateur radio" covers a whole range of activities. Some become amateurs simply to communicate with other amateurs. Some are more interested in building radio equipment. Some use amateur radio satellites or even bounce their signals off the moon. A lot of astronauts are radio hams - it's even possible, as an amateur, to communicate with the International Space Station. There is an ongoing competition, Summits on the Air (SOTA), for hill-walking radio hams who enjoy transmitting from hilltops.

Most amateur radio goes on on the shortwave bands. Using these bands is an interesting challenge. Conditions change: sometimes it's possible to transmit right around the world, sometimes it isn't. The atmosphere bends shortwave radio waves so a signal that's inaudible a hundred miles away can be heard a thousand miles away.

What do amateurs talk about? First, it's not a bit like Tony Hancock. Seriously, I think Hancock gave amateurs a bad press, but here he is:

In real life, amateurs are restricted: you can't discuss politics, or say anything offensive. In a brief contact they'll generally restrict themselves to reporting their names, locations, and the strength of their signals. However, sometimes you can get into a longer chat. The hobby has a language of its own. Basic English is used a lot, but a whole lot of abbreviated terms that are used too which enable people from different countries to understand each other. These started life in Morse code, where commonly understood abbreviations are vital. For example, when I transmit, I usually use a digital mode known as PSK-31 (roughly, this is a bit like a modern, computerised version of the old "Grandstand" teleprinter they used for the football results). Messages are sent and appear as text - we don't talk to each other directly. First I'll transmit, on a frequency commonly used for digital modes:

CQ CQ CQ DE M0KXD K

In other words, this is a general invitation to communicate (CQ) from (de) me (m0kxd). "K" is an invitation to anyone to respond. When I responded to a CQ call by JY5HX (Dr Munzer Qraini) in Jordan the other day I sent this. Important information is repeated, as interference and fading can disrupt signals:

JY5HX DE M0KXD
Thanks for the contact Munzer!
RST is 599 599 599
Name: Dom Dom Dom
QTH: Bellerby Bellerby Bellerby
So hw? BTU JY5HX DE M0KXD KN

RST is an estimate of signal strength and quality, a bit like the Beaufort Wind Scale.

QTH is a term from the "Q code", used to mean location.

HW? is an old Morse abbreviation for "how?" - i.e., "how do you copy"?

KN is a bit like "K", but means only Munzer is invited to respond.

This over was followed by another in which we offered to exchange QSL cards and said goodbye. Of course, we could have gone on for longer if we'd wanted to.

I could go on, but, out of consideration for patient readers I'll resist the temptation. If you want to know more, have a google. The internet is awash with stuff to do with Amateur Radio.

Long Live Heath Robinson!

2011-03-09T22:35:00.004Z

Have you ever written a post that, on rereading it, leaves you thinking it might make you look a bit of a nerd? I just have. So what. I'm going to post it anyway..

It all began with the clock. We were drinking coffee in the village hall (once a month the village holds a coffee morning - more about that here), when I spotted it. Stood beside a bric-a-brac stall was a large, wooden art deco clock. I went over to have a look. It didn't work, but the owner only wanted a fiver for it. I was tempted. If I wanted to get it going, she said, I should talk to Joe, who was into renovating old clocks. I didn't say so, but I thought of having a go myself.

In the end, I didn't buy it. It would end up, I felt sure,on my list of things to do that never get done, and that's long enough as it is. I did meet Joe on the way home though. He'd been heading the other way, but when I told him about the clock he promptly turned round and made straight for the village hall. If it had been an old radio, I said to K, I would have done the same. Come to think of it, I'd been meaning to build myself a decent radio mast in the garden (like you do - well you do if you're into amateur radio). All I needed was some lengths of "two by two". It wouldn't take that long...

Old Radios... Racal RA17 Receiver - first came out in 1954

An hour later I was back from the builder's merchant with the said lengths of wood tied to the car. An hour later I had them both painted with wood preserver. Up until now, my mast has been a fishing pole with a wire tied to the end stood on it's end in an old bit of pipe. This has enabled me to make two-way amateur radio contacts with just about anywhere in Europe and occasionally, places further afield: Chicago, Rio de Janiero, Svalbard spring to mind. I've always wanted to extend my reach and, without getting too technical, that means lifting that wire a bit higher. If I bolted two lengths of two by two, I reasoned, I should be able to raise it up at least five metres - possibly more.

Have prepared the lengths, I started to dig a hole to stand them in. Here I hit the first technical hitch. It's hard enough to dig a deep hole eight inches wide even when you don't hit solid rock two feet down. Oh well, I thought, I'd press on. I'd find other ways of supporting it later.

After a lot of huffing, puffing and struggling I managed to stand up the new mast and stick it in the hole. It looked quite precarious. I realised -surely I knew this already?- that sticking a heavy piece of wood in the air and getting it to stay there was a major engineering problem. Up to three or four metres was not so difficult but after that you -literally- pass a tipping-point. It's all about leverage. I tried screwing some wooden buttresses to it, but it still looked more than a bit dodgy. I went indoors and googled masts. I though it might need a few but it soon became clear that it needed lots of guy lines -six- and pretty heavy duty ones at that. (No wonder I went into music and not engineering).

I've compressed quite a lot of activity into a couple of paragraphs. In fact, at this point I realised it would soon be getting dark. With an anxious eye on the roofs of our two cars which were parked a lot less than five metres from this distinctly wobbly erection, I lashed the thing to a nearby tree (before anyone suggests it, not tall enough to serve as a mast) with all the rope I could find. I'd sleep on it. At least if it fell over in the night it would fall in the least bad direction.

Next morning I got up early, determined to sort out the whole problem before civilised Sunday getting-up time. I looked out of the window and was relieved to see it was still standing. I decided to combine the old and the new: reduce the height of the mast and stick the fishing pole on top. The pole could be removed when not in use, so the whole structure would be safer and less obtrusive. (Incidentally, fishing poles are often used as masts in amateur radio - long live Heath Robinson!).While I was at it, I renewed a lot of the electrical connections - the wire bits are all held together with electrician's "choc block" connectors. The result was far more successful. Sticking a lightweight carbon-fibre pole in the air is a lot less serious an undertaking that sticking up a piece of two by two. No guy ropes, and it goes up higher than the wobbly wooden Plan A. Why didn't I think of it in the first place? Fools rush in.

Does it work better than the original? The first two-way contact I made with it was with an amateur station in Berdichev in Ukraine, UT5XR. The second was with one in Amman, in Jordan: Munzer, call sign JY5HX. That evening I could receive Cuba, South America and the US, but they couldn't receive me: that's probably just the way conditions were at the time. My hunch is that, in the long run, the new mast will turn out to work a lot better than the old pipe. However, it's not a patch on that of the the aforementioned JY5HX. He's put out a photo of his aerial in Amman - and it's slightly more upmarket than mine! The thought that someone sat here in the Dales, and Munzer there in Amman can communicate like this via shortwave radio just for the fun of it is one of the things that, to my mind, makes amateur radio worth doing.

Aerial at JY5HX, Amman, Jordan

Down by the Sea

2011-02-24T17:48:00.001Z

Went to Saltburn again today. Had to take the car to Middlesborough to be serviced. It's only a few miles further on to Saltburn, so it was a chance not to be missed. It was a bright, if a little crisp, afternoon. We bought ourselves a couple of baked potatoes and sat eating them in the car, overlooking the sea. Then we drove down to the front and went for a walk along the pier. There were a lot of people about, walking their dogs or eating fish and chips on the beach. One or two people were daring to paddle. Before we left I gave in to an urge to run down the beach, take my shoes and socks off and go for one myself. Very nice it was too.

While we were there I noticed a curiosity which I'd not noticed before. You find all sorts of things on the front in English seaside towns: amusement arcades, joke shops, whelk stalls, candy floss sellers; but how many English seaside fronts boast their own mortuary? It's there, beside a pub a few yards from the pier. The date on the plaque says 1881. I took a photo of it.

Back home, I googled it. Apparently it was in use right up to the sixties. Prevailing currents mean that bodies frequently wash up here, and they needed somewhere to put them. It's a Grade 2 listed building to boot.

Buckden Pike

2011-02-22T21:38:00.003Z

Climbed Buckden Pike this afternoon. It's a hill in the upper part of Wharfedale and it rises up to its 702m summit from behind the village of -unsurprisingly- Buckden. It's almost as steep as the car parking charge in the village car park but, thankfully, the path to the summit takes a more leisurely, zigzag route. It's one of those hills which the English fondly call mountains, which anyone who lives in a country the boasts really whopping hills that really are mountains will probably find amusing.

It's been a drizzly, overcast day. The bigger hills (like the Pike) still have snow on their upper slopes and, what with the low cloud, the snowy slopes have merged into the clouds in an indistinct haze.

When I got out the car and shouldered my rucksack I realised how long it had been since I went for a walk like this. For the past year, getting close to nature has meant swimming in lakes and rivers. The year before that, the time I would have spent walking was spent road running.

I set off up the track, which is almost level at first. It runs through a small wood. It's a sparse affair: for the most part the trees are growing in scree. Quite a few of them are dead. It would be quite photogenic on the right day. I had a camera with me (as you've probably realised by now) but it would be good to come back when the conditions were right. Today, with its meagre, diffuse light was a classic, bad-for-taking-photographs day.

Above the wood, the track ascends across fields to an almost-level area of moorland, which I didn't remember noticing from below. (It's one of the things I like about climbing hills: what looks like a big lump from the bottom hides all sorts of detail which you only discover when you climb up).

On the moor I passed a line of "shake holes" and took a photo of one. For anyone who doesn't know, I'll try to explain what a shake hole is. Limestone dissolves easily and so the rock beneath limestone landscapes are full of holes (hence to preponderance of famous potholes and caves in the Dales). If the hole isn't very big, the earth on top of the rock trickles in and chokes it. The effect is rather like the dimple you get in the surface of the sand in a running egg-timer.

The path steepened again and I soon found myself on a second shelf of moorland. I was lost in thought by now. I was thinking of something I'd read recently, by Emerson:

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

I decided that whoever said that was definitely a man for our times.

I soon found myself at the foot of an outcrop that ran around this part of the hill like a contour-line: the path steepened again. Once at the top of the outcrop I found myself in a different world: there was more snow on the ground and the cloud had closed in. If this was a sacred mountain, I felt, then I'd just entered an inner sanctum. The ground was steeper and after a few minutes I realised I was on a steep, continuous slope that disappeared into the cloud on all sides. I felt as if it could go on forever. The air felt lighter: it's a feeling I've often felt as I approached a summit and I've never worked out why it should be so.

I took a break at the summit: just long enough to eat a banana and take a few more photographs. As is usual for high, windy places in winter, the wind had blown the ice into curious shapes. I was particularly struck by an accumulation of ice on a pole that stands by the summit.

Banana eaten, I set off down. I took a different route: I'd ascended by the "tourist path", but descended by a path that leads to the head of Buckden Beck: a stream that runs down the hill, back to the village.

The descent was more of an adventure. The path was well-defined at first, but later it became more like the ghost of a path. I'd find it for a while, then it would disappear. I came across the spoil heaps of a disused mine, but could find no tunnels. Perhaps it was just as well. Old mines are dangerous. I had a torch and am always tempted to explore places. I carried on, and soon found myself standing on an edge overlooking the village. The hillside steepened considerably at this point and I found myself descending a scree-slope. I found myself in the wood I'd walked through at the start. Sadly, the tea shop in the village was shut. It had just gone 5 o'clock and it is February after all.

Julius Eastman

2011-02-19T20:47:00.003Z

It snowed today. Not a lot. Just enough for me to look out the window and wonder what we were in for - would it be a drab, wet weekend, or would we find ourselves stuck in a few feet of the white stuff? Six hours later, it looks like it's the drab, wet option. And there's not even anything decent on TV.

Researching my recent post about Charles Ives, I made what was, for me, a new discovery. Ives was perhaps the first of many highly individualistic American composers who were not in the least afraid to do things "their way": John Cage and Harry Partch spring to mind as examples, and I'm sure there are many others. They have always intrigued me. The gay African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was one I wasn't familiar with.

Eastman was both a composer and a singer. He also played the piano and turned his hand to choreography. He pursued what seemed to be developing into successful career (he sang the title part on on the 1973 Grammy-nominated Nonesuch recording of Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King). However, after 1983 his life began to fall apart. He became dependent on alcohol. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1990 he'd faded into obscurity. It was eight months before anyone wrote an obituary and what was left of his music has been difficult to piece together (but not impossible, thanks to the hard work of his admirers). This piece, Evil Nigger(1979), with its minimalist texture and provocative title, is one of his better-known works.

I've recently started a new blog -well, sort of a blog- which I've called The Mousehole.

I say sort of a blog, as it's just a "no frills" list of things I've come across on the internet that I feel are worth noting. It's a sort of online bookmarks, a place for things I probably won't get round to writing longer posts about. So far it's mostly music - but I doubt it'll stay that way. I'm almost not bothered if nobody visits it but me - but it's there, if anybody wants to delve into it.

Communion

2011-02-16T12:47:00.001Z

A short story

Dr Tallis Deveraux took a leaf from the plastic sample-bag and laid it on the desk in front of her. Out of the sunlight, exposed to the -to it- alien atmosphere of the orbital station, faint blue streaks had begun to appear on its surface. Its smooth, creamy skin had begun to wrinkle.

Magra. The staple diet of Species 9. To an earth-human it had a sweet, slightly metallic smell. Like all the life on N-52, human scientists had invented it almost two centuries ago. Part of the Project, as it was known, with a capital P: to create a human mind in a body that could survive in an alien environment, along with whatever other life was needed to sustain it. As it said at the entrance to the Project's matrix-node: creating a template for a technology to colonise the galaxy. The first-born of the Species had been created in a laboratory on earth with the aid of human genetic material. It breathed carbon dioxide and could withstand the radiation levels of a planet with a thin atmosphere: precisely the conditions found on N-52.

She took a scalpel from an open box to her left and cut a thin, two-millimetre strip from the edge of the leaf. She then made two short cross-cuts to create a two millimetre square. She contemplated the minute tile for a moment. It contained nothing that was poisonous in small quantities: but then it contained nothing particularly nutritious, either. She had not heard of anyone ever attempting to eat a magra leaf before.

So why her, now? Curiosity. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but she had seen members of the Species on the planet’s surface, from a distance, grazing on the magra. It was considered essential to the scientific integrity of the Project to avoid all contact, physical or social: it had to go on working long after both the earth and its inhabitants had ceased to exist. A minute glitch in the present could spell catastrophe in the future and there would be no-one there to fix it. Eating a magra leaf was as close as she could get.

She put down the scalpel, picked up the tile with the tip of her index finger and placed it on her tongue. An unpleasant, burning sensation quickly spread to her nose and eyes. In the lab she had smelt, though never tasted kerosene, and this was what she imagined it to taste like.

Water. She desperately wanted to wash her mouth out. She should’ve thought of that: a glass of water. She tried to lift her head, but it felt three times heavier than usual. The more she tried, the more it lolled uncontrollably. She tried to hold it up with her hands, but it kept slipping out.

She tried to get up, but it was as if the strings that controlled her arms and legs had been cut. Instead, she tumbled sideways to the floor...

She opened her eyes. Time had passed, although whether it was seconds, minutes or even hours she had no idea. Her cheek was pressed against a hard surface that she could see stretching away into a blurred middle-distance. Things slowly began to make sense. The floor. The legs of the chair and the side of the desk slowly came into focus. She felt strangely happy. She wondered why. She cast her mind back and forth, searching for a reason. Only one thought intensified the feeling: tomorrow they were returning to the planet.

-****-

The midday sun beat down relentlessly on N-52. The suit's environmental controls maintained a comfortable temperature but you could see by the turbulent heat haze and the sharpened outlines of the landscape (as seen through the tinted visor) just how formidable an environment it created. It was not without reason that Species 9 were nocturnal.
They had landed in the north eastern region of the third continent, on the edge of the mountains, the northern edge of the magra fields. The Northern Apennines it said on the map. She wondered what the Species called them, if they gave names to mountains. They gave a name to themselves: the copra. They were largely nomadic: in the summer they moved north, to avoid the fierce heat of the south. As they traveled they collected and dried enough magra to see them through the summer months, as magra was scarce in the north. Once Tallis' team had come across a deserted camp: she had seen for herself the drying leaves hanging from the ceilings of the tents like a colony of blue, wizened bats.
It was one thing to cultivate magra on earth for a few years, in an artificial environment. It was quite another to establish it on another planet and leave it to grow for an indefinite period. How would it cope in less than ideal conditions? It was Tallis' job to monitor this. How did it respond to extremes of weather? Was it resistant to disease? Since leaving the cube that morning she had been collecting samples from the patches of magra that were growing here and there in a wide corrie: they reminded her of patches of snow on mountains she'd climbed on earth. The surface was red and rock-strewn. High cliffs rose on either side.
She had finished collected her samples. She was climbing a little further up the corrie than she intended to but then, she thought, why not? The mountains were beautiful. She had a few minutes to spare. Part of her felt uneasy about this: but it was a very small part of her, too small to do anything about it. It was almost as if that part of herself was outside of itself, watching another Tallis Deveraux making decisions and acting on impulses that were not her own.
A few minutes later she noticed she was still walking. She'd walked further than she intended. But then, why not? They allowed themselves wide margins. She was usually the first back. She smiled to herself. Patrick was usually last: it wouldn't hurt him to be left hanging about for a change.
She stopped climbing for a moment and turned to admire the view. Below her the southern plain stretched as far as she could see. Close to the mountains, the red surface was streaked with fields of magra. In the distance, in the turbulent haze, the streaks merged into a single mass. As she watched, that small part of her that felt as if it were
looking in on herself from the outside seemed to shrink to a helpless thought at the back of her mind. She was seized with an urge to lift her visor, to feel the air of the planet on her face. The pressure was not so different from that of the suit. The intense sunlight was a different problem. She noticed that the sun was no longer directly overhead: the cliffs to her right had begun to cast a shadow. If she made her way to the foot of the cliffs, into the shade...

-****-

'Tallis?'
Lucas' voice. She tried to speak. She moaned. The mother of all headaches was pounding at the centre of her forehead.
'Tallis?'
She felt her eyes begin to open. She was aware of the soft bluish light of the station. The ceiling.
'Are you OK?'
She nodded. A head, bending over her. Grey, receding hair. Lucas' head.
'What happened?'
This time she succeeded. She was rapidly regaining control. She lied. 'I don't know,' she said.
'Think.'
'I can't remember.'
'Your visor was off. The planet's contaminated.'
She said nothing.
'Did you see anyone? Anything?'
'I don't know.'
'Were you attacked?'
The question struck her as bizarre. 'No,' she said. 'At least not...' She frowned. She felt suddenly weak. She had forgotten what it was she was trying to say.
'Not what?'
'It's nothing. Who would attack me? Out here?'
It was typical of Lucas to think like that. He had reason on his side, in a way. It all went back to Perez, the twenty-second century geneticist who started it all. He began by inventing a rodent that could live on Mars and worked up. The leaders of the Sects at the time said it was a crime against God. Perez maintained that even if it was, then to do nothing, to allow the only intelligent life we knew about at the time to be destroyed along with the earth, was a greater crime. Perez himself survived three assassination attempts before they got him. Things quietened down after that, but the problem never went away completely.
A thought occurred to her. She didn't take it seriously, but she thought it would do Lucas good to consider it.
'What if they did it?' she said.
'Who?'
'The Species.'
'Impossible. They don't even know we're here.'
'Of course,' she said. Fortunately she was still unable to speak loud enough to convey the intended note of sarcasm.
Lucas smiled down at her and put his hand on her shoulder.
'Get some rest. I'll drop by later.'
'Thanks. Bye,' she said. While he had been speaking it had occurred to her exactly what she should do. The whole idea seemed obvious from the moment she thought of it: why had she not thought of it before? It so took her by surprise that she felt sure every last detail of it must've been written all over her face. She smiled with as much sincerity as she could muster: it was essential that he should have not the slightest inkling.

-****-

The research area was never busy in the evening. Patrick was there as usual, bent over a magnifier, testing insect specimens. No-one else. He mumbled a greeting without looking up.
At least she could do what she was about to do without arousing his curiosity. Her work often involved the use of nanobots and so it was not unusual for her to program the computer to create a batch. Her fingers ran deftly over the touch-screen.
'I thought you were on the sick,' said Patrick.
'Yea, well. You know what it's like.'
An oblong drawer-front lit up to the left of the screen.
'Sick of staring at the ceiling,' she went on. 'Thought I'd catch up on a bit of light research.'
She touched the drawer-front and it opened to reveal a phial of nanobots. She glanced at Patrick. He was still engrossed in his work. She took an injector from the rack and carefully inserted the phial into it. She then slipped the injector into her overalls pocket.
Creating nanobots was a restricted operation liable to scrutiny. Security routinely monitored computer operations. From now on she'd have to move fast. There was a chance no-one had noticed yet, so she closed the drawer and quickly deleted the program.
It was a two minute walk to the cube lock. She had to force herself not to look over her shoulder. At one point she met a security officer coming the other way but he just smiled and walked past her. The cube lock was deserted. The green cube sat dimly illuminated in the dark space of the lock, almost as if it were suspended in space itself. She finally allowed herself to look over her shoulder. There was nobody there.
The thought crossed her mind that there might be somebody inside the cube already. If so, she'd have some explaining to do. She typed quickly on the barely visible touch pad on the cube's smooth, matt surface. The door opened. A wedge of light flooded over her. She stepped inside. The cube was empty. The door closed.
'Surface,' she said. The journey would take about thirty seconds. The nanobots or, to give them their full name, the Species 9.1 effectors, took about that long to act. She pulled out the injector and fired it into her arm. There was still a chance she'd be found out and the ship brought back. When she opened the door she might find herself still in the lock, facing a team of security officers. If so, she'd be dead: she'd collapse and suffocate at their feet.

Black Swan

2011-02-13T07:34:00.004Z

We went to see the film Black Swan the other night. I'd seen it mentioned in the media often enough to be curious, but hadn't paid sufficient attention to what I'd seen to know much about it. I'd seen the same striking photo of Natalie Portman in her black swan get-up as everyone else, so I knew it was about ballet, but that was about all. Probably a bit like Billy Elliot...

Nina is an ambitious ballerina driven to the limit by the pushy mum-from-hell. She wins the part of the Swan in Swan Lake. The part requires the dancer to play two characters: the White Swan and the Black Swan. She is ideally suited to the role of the White Swan but as she comes to terms with that of her evil sister, the Black Swan, her mental health deteriorates.

Nina's startling hallucinations make for watchable cinema. The ballet was well done on the whole: although use was made of doubles, it's obviously no mean feat for actors to pretend to be dancers. On reflection, though, I had reservations. It played up for all it was worth to commonplace ballet stereotypes: the pushy mum, the bitchiness and the megalomanic, sexually abusive ballet master. It also played on the popular misconception regarding artists in general: that artists live what they're making when they're not actually in the act of making it or, to put it the other way round, make work based on what they're feeling at the time. Wordsworth famously talked of poetry being "emotion recollected in tranquility" rather than an outpouring of what he was feeling at a particular moment. Beethoven wrote some of his most cheerful tunes when he was feeling miserable and vice versa. Nina's Swan turns out to be a great success but in real life, contrary to what the film suggests, this would be despite rather than because of the fact that she had lost control of a life which had been totally taken over by the role.

Perhaps I'm being too critical. Perhaps, because there is so much about the film that is so good, it leads one to expect it to be deeper. As a thriller, it worked well. It was worth the six quid. Whenever we go to the cinema, I come out wishing I went more often. In this case, the wish is coming true: we're off to see The King's Speech tonight.

On a humorous note, Duncan Hall posted a link to Dan and Dan on Facebook. Perhaps everyone else knows this guy/these guys and I'm years behind. Anyway, they/he are new to me. I've just spent an hilarious hour of a sleepless night watching his/their Youtube channel. It was such fun I couldn't resist going over the top and embedding three of his/their videos....

Essays Before A Sonata

2011-02-06T08:00:00.017Z

Charles Ives in 1913

I feel a bit diffident writing about something I know little about. However, recent posts on Transit Notes and Turnstone got me thinking about the Transcendentalists. Emerson and Thoreau have always been there on a sort of mental must-read list, but I've never got round to them. I may, now.

This post is more-or-less an extended comment on these series of posts and, if Walden Pond and all that is not your thing, please feel free to go to my very recent previous post if you've not read it, about strange goings-on in Yorkshire!

What I do know, a little, is Charles Ives' piano work, the Concord Sonata and the "Essays Before A Sonata" which Ives wrote to accompany it. It occurred to me that anyone who had read (or written) the above-mentioned blog-posts might be interested in these - if, indeed, they didn't know about them already. They may well know more than me: as I said, I don't know a great deal. As a result, what follows reads more as a series of notes than as a fully-fledged article.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was perhaps the first American composer to gain an international reputation (although he made his living working in insurance). His father, George Ives, had been a bandmaster who was prone to musical experiments such as sending different bands marching into the same square playing different tunes simply to experience the effect, or playing pieces simultaneously in different keys. His son aquired his taste for musical experimentation.

Ives evolved a style famous not only for its use of dissonance but also for its use of quotation - the classical flow of his music can suddenly find itself interrupted by snatches of "The Star Spangled Banner" or Sousa's "Washington Post". Anything can happen in a piece by Ives.

The Concord Sonata and the essays that accompany it reflect his interest in the Transcendentalists. He described the piece as an

"...impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago... undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."

The Sonata is in four movements, all titled: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, Thoreau.

Of Emerson, he says:

Though a great poet and prophet, he is greater,
possibly, as an invader of the unknown,--America's deepest
explorer of the spiritual immensities,--a seer painting his
discoveries in masses and with any color that may lie at hand--
cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder, freely
describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's uprise--
perceiving from this inward source alone, that every "ultimate
fact is only the first of a new series"; a discoverer, whose
heart knows, with Voltaire, "that man seriously reflects when
left alone," and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous
chain which links the heavens with earth--the world of beings
subject to one law." In his reflections Emerson, unlike Plato, is
not afraid to ride Arion's Dolphin, and to go wherever he is
carried--to Parnassus or to "Musketaquid."

We see him standing on a summit, at the door of the infinite
where many men do not care to climb, peering into the mysteries
of life, contemplating the eternities, hurling back whatever he
discovers there,--now, thunderbolts for us to grasp, if we can,
and translate--now placing quietly, even tenderly, in our hands,
things that we may see without effort--if we won't see them, so
much the worse for us.

Of Thoreau:

Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but
because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony."
The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine
his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the
enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony
of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission
to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of
simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of
Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism
which teaches slavery.

The musical example I've chosen is not from the Emerson or Thoreau movements, though, but from The Alcotts (after Bronson and Louisa May Alcott). Not only is it the most approachable of the movements -the music has a warm, homely quality to it- but also a unique recording exists of Ives himself playing this movement.

Of The Alcotts Ives said:

We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of Bronson
Alcott--unless you will assume that his apotheosis will show how
"practical" his vision in this world would be in the next. And so
we won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the Alcotts with
much besides the memory of that home under the elms--the Scotch
songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each
day--though there may be an attempt to catch something of that
common sentiment (which we have tried to suggest above)-a
strength of hope that never gives way to despair--a conviction in
the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done,
may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its
transcendentalists.

If you think you hear the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in this movement, you'd be right. Ives quotes it in every movement. Beethoven, along with the Transcendentalists, was a major figure among his personal influences. As he puts it, "the Concord bards... pound away at the immensities with a Beethoven-like sublimity".

Believe it or not...

2011-02-05T10:47:00.000Z

I thought I ought to sit down and string a few words together, since it's Saturday morning. It's nice to have a bit of time on my hands when I'm not feeling utterly worn out. I've had a cold for the last few days and this week has been a bit of an effort. What to write about? My head has been full of things musical for the last few weeks so definitely nothing to do with music (although I'm tempted to sound off about a Weather Report CD Karen kindly bought me).

A long time ago I came across a booklet in a second hand bookshop called Believe it or not, it happened in Yorkshire by Cyril Oxley. Oxley was an avid collector of Yorkshire trivia and oddities. He produced several similar pamphlets. I've often thought of posting about it, so here goes.

Did you know...

In 1878, a Miss Sykes walked 248 miles in Brighouse Town Hall? She started walking on a Monday evening and continued until the following Saturday. A huge crowd gathered to see her finish.

There seems to have been a lot of it about. In 1843, James Searle of Leeds became the first man known to have walked 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours on the stretch of road between the Shakespeare Inn, Meadow Lane and the New Peacock Inn, Holbeck. It seems -and Oxley doesn't mention this- that he has something of a celebrity in his day: his success was celebrated with a public ox-roast in Battersea, so presumably the walk was a high-profile event.

John Wesley thought that the people of Huddersfield were the wildest he'd ever seen. He added, however, that they were "tolerably quiet while I preached, only a few pieces of dirt were thrown".

At Hull, in 1654, a number of locals reported seeing a battle between phantom soldiers in the sky between 9 and 10 in the evening: "the rival combatants formed a red and a black army, the conflict being accompanied by the dread clash of arms, explosions and cries of the wounded." A similar phenomenon was reported in October 1658, the sound of which, it was said, could be heard forty miles away.

In 1818, in a Wakefield mine, a five-inch long reptile was discovered in a solid block of coal. Apparently, "upon being exposed to the air the creature died immediately." However, call me stupid, but I don't see how anyone could know it was alive before being exposed to the air as it was inside a lump of coal at the time.

At Northallerton in 1798, a Mrs Metalf's cook discovered a gold wedding ring that had been lost twelve years previously inside a turnip. That was a turnip for the books, if you ask me.

The shortest river in England in the River Bain in Wensleydale. Cyril Oxley reckons it's only a mile long. Wikipedia offers two and a half. Don't ask me why it's called a river and not a stream, or why other streams couldn't be called rivers.

Sweet Sue

2011-01-29T19:46:00.001Z

Latest Youtube posting. I'm afraid we recycled the slideshow images - apart from Karen's wonderful night photo of us playing, which we've used for the title. As Andy, the violinist, sings when we perform, we thought it was about time we featured his vocals in a recording.

Last night we played at Zeffirelli's in Ambleside. We've played there before and this time we decided to try a new route - the one which Google Maps claimed to be quickest! It took us up to the top of the Kirkstone Pass (I think it might be on the "Coast to Coast", if you're reading this, George) and down the long, steep, winding hill known as The Struggle that leads from the top of the pass directly down to Ambleside - something of a roaring, second-gear white-knuckle ride in a van full of band. On arriving in Ambleside we instantly and unanimously decided that after the gig we'd go back the easy way, on the main road to Keswick. I assume the name "The Struggle" was coined in the days of horses and carts but it's still an apt description.

What have I got under my wooly hat? Part 2

2011-01-18T20:47:00.000Z

Not long after finishing my last but one post, I found myself reading George's excellent blog, Transit Notes. He was quoting Henry Miller. The emphasis is mine:

When you put your mind to such a simple, innocent thing, for example, as making a water color, you lose some of the anguish which derives from being a member of a world gone mad. ... You desist from improving the world or even yourself. You learn to see not what your want to see but what is. And what is is usually a thousand times better than what might be or ought to be.

If we could stop tampering with the universe we might find it a better world than we think it to be. After all, we've only occupied it a few hundred million years, which is to say that we are just beginning to get acquainted with it. And if we continue another billion years there is nothing to assure us that we will eventually know it. In the beginning as in the end, it remains a mystery. And the mystery exists or thrives in every smallest part of the universe. It has nothing to do with size or distance, with grandeur or remoteness. Everything hinges upon how you look at things.

In my mind, as I read it, this quote resonated with what I'd been thinking about when reading A History of the World in 100 Objects. What did Henry Miller say? "When you put your mind to such a simple, innocent thing, for example, as making a water color, you lose some of the anguish which derives from being a member of a world gone mad." Well, it immediately took me back to some things I'd said in the previous post:

Something happened to the human brain between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. We started to be creative: we started to make patterns and decorate things.

And, from the book itself:

According to [social anthropologists], we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain.

What occurred to me was that, whatever the initial reason for us exploring our creativity all those years ago, when we make art today, perhaps we are trying to put ourselves at ease and reconnect with the ancient parts of our own minds - the people who we are, and who we know so little about.

Am I going back far enough? When we first became creative all those millenia ago were we trying to reclaim something then, too? Is that when people started to feel a sense of detachment from what they had been in the past? Did people consider themselves, then, (as Henry Miller put it, above) to be inhabiting "a world gone mad"? Quite possibly. The human brain might have changed slightly, but also:

"Ice Age conditions were critical... it was a very challenging time for people living in harsh, long winters - the need to build up really intense social bonds, the need for ritual, the need for religion, all these related to this flowering of creative art at the time."
Prof. Steven Mithen, University of Reading, quoted in A History of the World in 100 Objects.

So, I suppose, for "making a water colour" we can read carving a piece of ivory, or painting a cave. Speculation - but obvious, in a way.

China Boy

2011-01-16T21:24:00.004Z

This is Trio Gitan's latest recording: China Boy. The slide show includes the picture Denise Burden painted for us:

If anyone wants to strum (twang, blow, etc) along, the chords are here!

Our next gig is on Friday January 28th, at 8.30pm, at Zeffirelli's, Ambleside.

What have I got under my wooly hat?

2011-01-14T17:38:00.002Z

Sat on the settee here, wooly hat on, top zipped up. I've had the mother of all toothaches all week, finally giving in and going to the dentist on Wednesday. One filling and a few antibiotics later I'm beginning to feel a bit better -I think- but...

Enough of feeling sorry for myself. Among several amazing books I was given this Christmas was The History of the World in 100 Objects - the book of the BBC radio series. For anyone unfamiliar with this, it's a series created by Neil MacGregor, director of The British Museum. The book is the best book on history I've ever read.

By "best" I mean best for me. I always wanted to learn about history, but found most history books nigh-on unreadable. It obviously wasn't my subject. For some reason, MacGregor's format lets me in: I suspect its emphasis on objects rather than dates fits better with my style of learning. (If you feel the same way about history, you might find it works for you, too).

I've just got to object 26, which brings us to about 500 BC. What I've found most startling so far is the sheer length of time we've been around. I'm sure I knew it, but like all good books (and teachers) MacGregor makes you stop and think about it. The first tools, made of stone, emerged about 2 million years ago. For the vast majority of those 2 million years those stone tools were all we had. If all human history were compressed into 24 hours, then all the stuff of modern life we take for granted -and I'm talking basic stuff here- would be compressed into the last few minutes. Something happened to the human brain between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. We started to be creative: we started to make patterns and decorate things. 16.500 years ago we started to make pots.

If I understand MacGregor right, this is more or less what he's saying or, at least, my take on it: each of us only has a few short years in which to stuff our human brains with memories, but the human brain has been around for so much longer than that. And although these days fatalistic wiseacres are fond of pronouncing that "you can't stop progress", for most of those millenia of millenia nothing much seems to have happened that today we would describe as "progress". What our brains are now has been formed by the lives we led over that time. No wonder that they -our brains- take us by surprise with their superstitiousness and irrationality. No wonder we find life in modern societies hard to make sense of. For example, in cities:

We sometimes just can't cope with the sheer mass of people. And this, it seems is not entirely surprising. Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we're likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we're likely to list on a social networking site, it's rare even for city-dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred. Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we're all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.
Neil MacGregor: King Den's Sandal Label

It's a great read. It's a long time since I wandered around the British Museum and I didn't wander around it half so much as I wish I had when I had the chance, but this book takes me right back.

You can explore the 100 objects here.

MKOM(7): I could never get it under my chin...

2011-01-11T21:21:00.007Z

Now, where was I? I think I mentioned how, as a teenager I fell out with the double bass - the instrument I'd learnt at school. It wasn't the jokes - that was quite fun. Wherever you go with a double bass some wag will quip "That's a big violin, mate" (always 'mate', for some reason) or "I bet you can't get that under your chin". What's really sad is that from the look on the faces of these comedians (who probably hardly ever see a double bass), each thinks he (and it's invariably "he") is the first to think up the joke. My stock reply is:

Q: What's the smallest book in the world, mate?
A: The Bumper Book of Original Double Bass Jokes.

I used to have a beautiful bass. I sold it when it got so fragile that it really needed a lot of expensive restoration work and, rather than having the money to do it, I needed the money I could sell the thing for! Anyway, in those days it just sat in the corner, doing nothing. I was in my twenties, working as a residential social worker and involved in lots of other things. I was sad to see it go though. My parents bought it for seventy quid from an elderly Belgian man, a Mr Fockaert, who had carried it on his back through the trenches in the First World War. It was covered in cracks which had been filled with what looked like bitumen. After the war he played it in the silent cinema. There was a short scratch on the back where a theatre cat had reached up and scratched it. Then the talkies came and that work dried up. Mr Fockaert had fingers like teaspoons from his years of playing. One summer I mowed his lawn in exchange for French conversation. I still failed French O level, but I did learn that a Belgian says "mes doigts" (at this, he'd hold up his teaspoons) for "my fingers" and not, as the French do, "les doigts". I can't remember a lot about Mr and Mrs Fockaert, except to say that they left me with the impression that they were happy people, despite all that they'd lived through and that Mr Fockaert claimed to have been responsible for the death of the famous xylophone player Teddy Brown. He told the story of how Teddy had fallen out with him over a musical arrangement -so much so that he'd looked positively ill- hours before he died of a heart attack. I took it with a pinch of salt until I found this account on the net, although I doubt Mr Fockaert really caused his death: by the sound of it Brown was probably irascible at the time because he was unwell.

I had a wonderful bass and the jokes didn't put me off: I fell out with it for the simple reason that there seemed to me, then, to be hardly any decent music written for it. Added to that, I didn't like playing in orchestras much. All the kids playing other instruments seemed to have loads of stuff to play. It's a shame there's not more music around as good as Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf's Concerto (which I loved back then and still love), and it's a shame that what good music there is isn't heard more often:

The other piece of double bass music, for me, that stands out above the mediocre is Gunther Schuller's Quartet, once affectionately -I think- described as a "quartet for four wardrobes". The sound-world it creates is truly original, somewhere between Bartok and modern jazz. If you've got some big speakers somewhere, now's the time to plug them in (I have! Someone's just come upstairs and told me to turn it down!), turn out the lights and turn it up. Oh, sorry - there is a minute of chat at the beginning, but I thought it was the best performance of the piece on Youtube:

Oh, and then there's this, third in my personal double bass "top three". An acquired taste, perhaps. but I like it. Not so long ago I played the final third of this to children at a primary school, and they loved it (incidentally, that's not me in the video):

2010: The Truth!

2011-01-04T00:16:00.000Z

So to the answers... (If you don't know what the answers are to, see the previous post).

The two joint winners were Poet in Residence, Gwilym Williams and Emily Rivron. Both, however, only managed to score two out of three!

The true stories were:

...A woman tunneled out of prison using a dessert spoon.

A 35-year-old Dutch woman serving 12 years for the attempted murder of her sister-in-law successfully dug a 30ft escape tunnel in the cellar of the prison kitchen using a dessert spoon. Oddly, she didn't have that much time left to serve. However, as far as I know, she's still on the run.

...a New York chef has been serving cheese made from human breast milk.

Chef Daniel Angerer has been making cheese out of his wife's excess breast milk. You can find the recipe on his blog.

...Postmen in Leeds were terrorised by Tiger, an elderly cat.

You can read all about it here.

The rest, I'm afraid to say, I made up. There really is a rhubarb triangle in Yorkshire though, though, as far as I know, unlike its Bermuda namesake, it's not famous for mysterious events or disappearances. An 11-year-old did gain entry to Harvard - early in the previous century. As for the universe as a particle, this was, more or less, suggested by Julian of Norwich some time ago rather than a physicist at CERN.

2010: The Unbelievable Truth

2010-12-31T11:59:00.002Z

Can you find the THREE true stories?

In 2010...

...The Scottish Parliament voted to reintroduce dog licences.

...A woman tunnelled out of prison using a dessert spoon.

...A Yorkshire rhubarb farm generated enough electricity from it's crop to power a small housing estate.

...A real life Rocket Man from Warrington sent his daughter's pet hamster into space.

...a New York chef has been serving cheese made from human breast milk.

...A Dutch scientist working at the Large Hadron Collider suggested that instead of looking for smaller and smaller particles, scientists should consider whether or not the universe was not one big particle.

...Postmen in Leeds were terrorised by Tiger, an elderly cat.

...A 10-year-old boy from Warrington became the youngest person to be given a place at Harvard.

And then, if you enjoy this kind of thing, you can check out Solitary Walker's "Getting To Know You" Quiz...

Works of Art!

2010-12-27T21:09:00.002Z

This Christmas we've been the lucky recipients of two pictures by local artist -and Trio Gitan fan- Denise Burden. The first one, commissioned by my mum, is of the band ((left to right, Jack, myself and Andy)! The pattern in the background, Denise told me, is the sound of the music.

The other -which Denise herself gave us- was a print called "For Them to Come", after a poem by CP Cavafy. This is a detail from it:

If you like them, have a look at her blog and Etsy shop, where you can find out more about the Cavafy poem.

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-22T00:39:00.013Z

Three days early, I know...

Personent Hodie by Dominic Rivron

The tune Personent Hodie is one of my favourite "Christmas tunes". Versions of it existed as early as 1360.

Star

2010-12-18T08:23:00.001Z

One for the Poetry Bus, driven this week by The Weaver of Grass.

Coincidentally, I was searching through some science blogs this morning when I came across the Zooniverse Planet Hunters citizen science project. If you follow the instructions, you can sit at your computer and take part in the search for planets around other stars using data from NASA's Kepler mission. Apparently, it can be done with computers but, in some respects, people do it better.

Star

One bright stone in Orion's belt -
it took me by surprise
when I saw it through a break in the clouds

(they were scudding away to the East, driven
by a cold wind that sang through the trees
like the sea) as I sat in the dark.

Had the light been on
I would have seen only myself
reflected in the glass

(perhaps as we read or write
this star's light breaks
through a cloud and someone somewhere

sat in the darkness
sees it there)

My kind of Music (6)

2010-12-15T06:37:00.005Z

When I was in the Sixth Form at school I got involved -though the local youth orchestra- in playing the double bass in some of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Looking back, I realize I had no idea how lucky I was to live in a town where there were sufficient committed young musicians to do this. They are still among my favourite music. There's so much going on, and yet nothing is superfluous. Everyone involved has something interesting to do: everyone is playing a different tune, or part of the tune, all at the same time. As the music flies by, your ear can wander from one instrument to another.

Around the same time I used to meet regularly with a sax player and a clarinetist for sessions of free improvisation (I've just googled them. Ben is now a herbalist and storyteller, Paul still seems to be playing his clarinet in the South Wales Clarinet Choir).

One of the intriguing things about free improvisation in a group is the way the minds of the players work together. It's intriguing in ordinary social situations, using the currency of words and body-language. Dispense with words and interact intuitively with sound and all sorts of things begin to happen. (For example, it's commonplace when you get deeply absorbed in making sounds together to spontaneously end together). I still enjoy making music like this - it's just a case of finding others who share my opinion! I do understand the point of view, too, which says that this form of music making is often more enjoyable for those taking part than for those listening. I've no problem with that, but if people like to listen, they can: it's an adventure, and all kinds of things happen that could never be written down or repeated. I had a look around Youtube to see if I could find anyone doing the kind of thing we did (what fun we'd have had with the internet then, had it been around!). Listening to these guys from Brazil really took me back:

Essence Vessel

2010-12-14T10:11:00.000Z

One for the Poetry Bus, driven this week by Titus.

MKOM5: Christy Moore

2010-12-14T00:46:00.004Z

In the Eighties a friend gave me a pile of cassettes of Christy Moore albums, and we used to listen to them in the car, when we first got a car. It reminds me of driving round Scotland in an old Lada estate in the days of cheap petrol (of all the cars I've ever driven, Lada estates were my favourite, but that's another story). I've listened to him on and off for years since, for the words as much as the music. When I first had a go at the guitar, songs I'd heard him sing were the first 3 and 4 chord songs I had a go at: Jimmy MacCarthy's Ride On, in particular (are the lyrics of that song a conscious reference to Yeat's epithaph?). For many of those years, my in-laws had strong Irish connections, and the things he sings about resonated with the things they talked about. Most poignantly, my then father-in-law, Paddy, had, as a child, known some of the people named in Christy's musical Spanish Civil War Memorial, Viva la Quince Brigada.

The song I've embedded here, though, is probably my favourite. The lyrics put over an idea which could be over-complicated as simply and directly as possible. For me, it's one of the most thoughtful songs going.