Beginnings And Endings

Quoting the Prologue from Bertrand Russell's Autobiography on my Turnstone blog the other day, which begins, Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind, made me think about how crucially important a good first (and last) line is in a book (or a poem or a song or a play or a film).

There are plenty of examples, often quoted, of arresting first lines; for instance, Jane Austen's novel Pride And Prejudice memorably begins: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

And the opening to Melville's Moby Dick is immortal in its stark brevity: Call me Ishmael.

L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between evokes right from the start the nostalgic heart of the novel: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

And the beginning to Tolstoy's wonderful Anna Karenina, one of the greatest novels ever written, remains imprinted in the mind, even if its meaning is a little mysterious: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... Everyone knows these words which launch A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; and one of the most famous first sentences of all is the one which sets the scene for George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, 1984: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. How could you not want to read further after an opening like this?

Striking last lines are probably more difficult to find. They don't stand up as meaningfully on their own like opening lines do, since they rely on a knowledge of what's already gone before. However, there's this well known conclusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: So we went on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And there's the ending to Margaret Mitchell's romantic blockbuster, Gone With The Wind: After all, tomorow is another day!

I also like the typically doomy last line of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge: Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

I wonder if anyone has any favourite first or last lines of books (or poems, songs, films etc) they'd like to share? Would love your thoughts on this - suggestions from any readers of this blog who don't usually comment are also very welcome...

Walking Is Intimate

I've just finished rereading John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain (1968), a book I've written about before on this blog. This was one of the very first books which turned me on to what has become one of the greatest pleasures in my life: propelling one foot in front of the other through landscape. It's a classic account - entertaining, witty, and very well written - of a 1200 mile solo walk from Land's End to John o' Groats, from the extreme south to the extreme north of Britain. Reading this book in my teenage years fired my imagination, and I dreamed of following in his footsteps. Forty years on I still haven't managed to retrace his route. But I have done a fair amount of walking elsewhere. Near the end of the book Hillaby attempts to analyse why walking across his country had been such a special, rewarding and unique way to get the feel it:

What had it all amounted to? Why hadn't I spent more time seeing fewer places more leisurely, using a car here and there? I finished the journey as I had started two months earlier, that is by asking myself a lot of questions. The difference was I could now answer some of those I had thought most about. Part of the journey could certainly have been done more easily by car, but it would have been an entirely different journey. Roads are all more or less alike. Walking is intimate; it releases something unknown in any other form of travel and, arduous as it can be, the spring of the ground underfoot varies as much as the moods of the sky. By walking the whole way I got a sense of gradual transition from one place to another, a feeling of unity. The mosaic of my own country and its people had become a sensible pattern.

In The Garden

It's a pleasure
When, rising in the morning,
I go outside and
Find that a flower has bloomed
That was not there yesterday.

TACHIBANA AKEMI (1812-68)

The Sufferings Of Spain

When I visit a country I like to be surprised. I don't like being too 'prepared' before I set off. So I much prefer reading about a country after I've been rather than before I've gone. Since my return from Spain in late February this year I've been enjoying Travellers In Spain by David Mitchell, which is packed full of quotes and commentaries by distinguished visitors to Spain over four centuries, people like Casanova, the Duke of Wellington, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves and Laurie Lee.

I hadn't quite realised that the grinding poverty and the universally harsh living conditions in Spain lasted until well into the 1950s. This was partly due to the legacy of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The war was fought between the Republicans on the one side - an amalgamation of liberals, Marxists, anarchists, working-class revolutionaries and international volunteers - and the Nationalists on the other, who were conservatives, monarchists, Carlists and Falangists, and who had the support of the Roman Catholic Church.

Britain and the US did not get directly involved in the war - although some American corporations such as Texaco, General Motors, Ford, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company did supply the Nationalists with trucks, tyres and fuel, to their eternal shame. However, many volunteers (the 'International Brigades') mobilised from all over the US and Canada, as well as from all over Europe, and fought alongside the Republicans. These included writers like George Orwell, who described the experience in his book Homage To Catalonia. After the war had ended, terror, repression and censorship continued for a long period under the dictatorship of General Franco.

About 300,000 people died during the Spanish Civil War. And after the war 150,000 Republicans or 'Reds' perished in prisons and forced labour camps, or were executed in waves of bloody reprisals.

Travellers to Spain in the 1940 and 50s found a country starkly divided between rich and poor, with little impetus for changing the status quo: Most surprising perhaps was the way in which the comparatively wealthy and the abysmally poor accepted their destiny. The latter lived sometimes 10 or 15 to a room, children had nits, weak eyes, TB through overcrowding and undernourishment... But they accept their poverty and the rich accept it without fear, without guilt.

Picasso's extraordinary painting Guernica shows the horror of the Spanish Civil War. (The Basque town of Guernica was bombed on 26 April 1937 by aircraft from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.)

The Politics Of Springtime: New Beginnings

Although I declared this blog an election-free zone a few weeks ago, I just have to break my pledge (very political, that!) and comment on the sudden, unforeseen rise to prominence of the Liberal Democrats. Thanks to a couple of live TV election debates between the leaders of all three main political parties (a first for British politics - though I should probably say English, as Scotland and Wales weren't represented at all), and thanks also to a confident and charmingly persuasive Nick Clegg whose face, even if it won't ever launch a thousand ships, is rather more than presentable (at least according to the women I've talked to), it appears that the Lib Dems now have a real chance of making their mark on this election and of holding the balance of power in a possible 'hung Parliament' scenario ('hung Parliament': a Parliament where no party holds the overall majority of seats). Despite some dodgy policies.

All this against a backdrop of one of the most glorious springtimes I can ever remember. The cottage gardens and the enfolding countryside look radiant. The blackthorn blossom has never looked whiter, the magnolia flowers never creamier, the tulips never redder, the new foliage never softer or greener. And yet, as one gets older, doesn't every springtime seem more glorious than the one before? I think it's a lot to do with age. As children we're barely conscious of time. We're absorbed in the serious play of our lives, naturally focused on each lived-in moment. The seasons seem almost stationary. My friends and I used to run through the woods and fields like heathens, cycling the country tracks and lanes, making dens and camps, having mock-serious fights and battles in the spirit of Bevis and Co in Richard Jefferies' immortal, eponymous book. We were glowing in 'the glory and the freshness of a dream'.

Gradually, because of the stress and pressure of adult life - jobs, families, motorways, deadlines - we stop living in the unconscious present and start living by our diaries. Suddenly we find our real lives, our important soul-lives, have drifted away, lost somewhere between out latest marriage and the Watford Gap Motorway Service Station. But, maybe around our late 40s or early 50s, we realise, if we're lucky, that it's not actually too late to recapture some of that early joy and spontaneity, that moment-by-moment freshness.

I think it's reflections like these, such recollections from a standpoint of maturity, which cause us to count our blessings, to be acutely aware that time is precious, and life even more so, and to appreciate the beauties of the spring, a spring that becomes more and more glorious each year.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream? WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Ode

El Caminito Del Rey

El Caminito del Rey (The King's Little Path) or El Camino del Rey (The King's Path) is a concrete walkway which winds precariously above the narrow gorge of El Chorro in the Andalusia region of Spain. It is 1 metre wide and has no handrail for most of its length. Chunks of the path have fallen away. It is highly dangerous and (I believe) illegal to walk it. I wouldn't attempt it in a million years - I have a poor head for heights. But some brave souls seeking adrenaline kicks do walk it - as this YouTube video shows. Don't watch it if you value your stomach. It's scary!

The Way, The Word And The World: The Language Of Walking

The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone's adventures. REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust.

Thoreau once wrote somewhere that walking inevitably leads to other subjects. He was right. The subject of walking itself is a vast one, but the paths upon which it takes you circumscribe the whole physical and mental world.

One of my favourite books on walking, and, I think, one of the best and most eclectic ever written on the subject, is Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History Of Walking. This book crosses so many boundaries, it's uncategorisable. Walking's the theme, but it encompasses so much else - poetry, philosophy, anatomy, history, religion, politics, psychogeography, mountaineering, landscape gardening, personal confession. All the things you encounter while walking. And consider while walking.

Solnit believes the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from automobilisation and suburbanisation. She also uncovers a long historical association between walking and philosophising. When walking, she says, the mind, the body and the world come into alignment. She points to a strong sympathy between writing and walking, between language and the path: Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.

The photo below shows some of my 'walking book' shelves. The books assembled there are wide-ranging in their scope, 'fragments' of a 'secret history'. For walking is the starting point for a thousand byways, a thousand ideas, a thousand connections. There are all sorts of subjects here - social history, landscape history, nature writing, travel, adventure and exploration, farming and agriculture, autobiography, mythology. All these things are written into the landscapes and mindscapes through which we walk...

I Walk, Therefore I Am

My work has become a simple metaphor for life. A figure walking down his road, making his mark. I am content with the vocabulary of universal and common means; walking, placing, stones, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads. RICHARD LONG

My work really is just about being a human being living on this planet and using nature as its source. I enjoy the simple pleasures of ... eating, dreaming, happenstance, of passing through the land and sometimes leaving (memorable) traces along the way, of finding a new campsite each night. And then moving on. RICHARD LONG

What has evolved is a project that goes beyond art as an object to be looked at, to something that is a part of a landscape to be lived in. ANDY GOLDSWORTHY (Talking of his 16 year old, ongoing project of creating artworks in the Haute Provence landscape near Digne-les-Bains)

I think, therefore I am. DESCARTES

I walk, therefore I am. PIERRE GASSENDI

I Walk The Line

I've wanted to write something on this blog about Richard Long for ages. Long's art is hard to define in a few words. He makes art in the natural landscape from pieces of it - sticks, stones, seaweed, slates, pine needles. Out of these naturally evolved, 'found' objects he creates alignments, cairns, circles, spirals and other forms. These temporary structures made of natural materials are then left to the elements to be worked on and altered by nature itself. But he also uses his own two feet to crease lines, marks, patterns and indentations into the landscape - all in quite soft and eco-friendly ways. These consciously placed imprints may last for some time or may disappear overnight. Long deliberately seeks this impermanent, transient quality in his art. Only the photographs he takes remain as a record of the tracks and traces of his brief passing. The artist himself is invisible, has walked on.

Long is a walking artist - but not in any grand, Romantic, Wordsworthian sense. His eyes are fixed firmly on the ground, watching his feet and where they are taking him. He often walks in straight lines, measuring his progress by leaving stones at equal distances along the path. He's excited by the very idea of walking itself - and all the different styles of walking: walking as exercise and recreation; walking as a channel for reflection or poetic inspiration; walking as pilgrimage. But he's interested above all in new and original ways of walking. Once he threw a stone all the way round an Irish mountain which resulted in just one photograph - captioned Throwing A Stone Around McGillycuddy's Reeks (1977).


Such philosophical ideas about walking, and about old and new ways to walk, interest me too. I'm reminded of Tubewalkers, who trace the London Tube lines above ground from station to station, like human metal detectors or dowsing rods; Pyrenean and Alpine shepherds who still practise transhumance by walking herds and flocks to higher pastures for the summer; walker-adventurers who follow as closely as possible a particular line of latitude or longitude; walker-writers like Iain Sinclair who pioneered his own London orbital walking route shadowing the M25 motorway.


There are many different ways in which to walk and many different paths to follow - both literal and metaphorical. When I think about it, this is in essence what my blog's really about, the common theme which runs through its variousness. Walking in a line or in a circle; walking up a mountain or round a mountain; walking for penitential, religious reasons or purely for pleasure; walking for recreation or inspiration; walking solo or with others; city walking or rural walking; walking across the world or walking in one's own back yard; walking in the mind; walking through life; just walking per se, on its own - can be a creative and artistic act.

The top picture is Richard Long's A Line In Scotland (1981) and the bottom picture is Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking (1967).

The Face Behind The Face

Where does it live, the face behind the face?
Everyone ought
To know all there is
About the face that is his.

People often haven't a clue
About their very own I.
Each of us makes his own
Best defence counsel.

Nero, apparently, thought
He was a poet,
Hitler thought that he
Would redeem the world from woe!

The mean man thinks 'I am so generous'.
The shallow man: 'I am profound.'
Sometimes God will sigh: 'I am a worm.'
The worm hisses: 'I am God!'

The worm climbs arrogantly upwards.
The coward rejoices to be in the clouds.
Only the free man
Thinks:
'I am a slave.'

The Face Behind The Face by YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO (Translated by ARTHUR BOYARS and SIMON FRANKLIN)

Have we one face, two faces or many faces?
Which is our real face?
What is our 'very own I'? Have we a clue about it?
Why does only the free man think he is a slave?

D. H. Lawrence, in his essay Democracy, defines two ideas of the self: the egotistical, self-conscious, materialistic, secondary self of the personality (from the Latin 'persona', a player's mask or a character in a play), and the living, creative, spontaneous, primary self of the spirit.

The Day I Met Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I had to pinch myself, but there I was, sitting opposite one of the most famous public poets in the world, debating what drink we were going to order from the bar. It was decided for us when Marion Boyars, publisher, and her second husband Arthur, poet and translator, appeared with four whiskies. I felt decidedly starstruck. Here was a poet who used to have everyone queueing down the street to hear him speak. Here was a poet who'd stared Nikita Krushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Pasternak, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck in the face. And now here he was, giggling right in front of me, inquiring how his books were selling in Coventry and Kidderminster. It was unreal.

We were in the Warwick Arts Centre at the University of Warwick, where the Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was giving a reading before a crowd of adoring, mostly female admirers. I'd brought along a stack of his poetry books for him to sign. Hopefully there'd be plenty of eager fans wanting to buy them during the interval and after the performance. And this really was a performance rather than the usual staid, polite poetry event. On stage was the quiet and restrained Arthur Boyars, Yevtushenko's friend and translator, and beside him Yevtushenko himself, fizzing and exploding like a human firework. What a piece of theatre! He was a whirlwind of energy. He danced around the stage like a gazelle, addressing many poems directly to girls he'd singled out in the audience, going down on one knee before them, even (I'm sure my memory's not playing tricks) sitting on their laps. The old charmer. His charisma, humour, boyish innocence and unashamed romantic ardour went down a treat (Simon Armitage and Carl Ann Duffy please take note!)

Yevtushenko's led a controversial life. Never out of the public gaze, he's been criticized for trying to placate various Soviet regimes, for not coming out as a fully fledged dissident like Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. But I suspect Yevtushenko would argue that it can be more beneficial to fight the system from within rather than from without. Certainly his record on speaking out against the crimes of Stalin and the persecution of the Jews (by both the Nazis and the Russians) is unimpeachable. His famous poem Babi Yar, which appeared in samizdat form in 1961, strongly denounced Soviet distortions of Jewish history. It was not officially published in Russia until 1984.

Yevtushenko has travelled widely, and now spends half the year in the US, where he gives readings, and teaches poetry and European cinema. Known for his many romantic liaisons, he's been married four times. At the end of the evening Yevtushenko signed my own copy of his book The Face Behind The Face with the words 'To Robert ... with my gratitude for your help.'

Marion Boyars: Last Of The Mavericks

Pulling down from the shelf Yevtushenko's poetry collection, The Face Behind The Face, the other day, I was reminded of its publisher, Marion Boyars, who died just over 11 years ago, in February 1999, at the age of 71. In the early 1990s Marion commissioned me to sell her books in the Midlands and North of England. It was a tough assignment. These were books published out of love, radical commitment and a passion for ideas. She published the books she believed in, books which lived up to her high literary and aesthetic standards. Consequently they proved a difficult sell into the UK's general bookshops which, as ever, were looking for middlebrow potboilers, TV celebrity bestsellers and a quick turnover.

Marion was one of the great, maverick, independent publishers of her day, and the last of her kind. She was the first American and, I believe, the first woman to enrol at Keele University, the first of the new English redbrick universities to be built after WWII. At Keele she was also the first student who was already married and the first to own a car - a sports car which she used to drive at breakneck speed. In 1964 she bought into the small independent publisher, John Calder. Calder and Boyars went their separate ways in 1980, and Boyars struck out on her own. Over her career she published Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer, William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Hubert Selby's notorious Last Exit To Brooklyn, the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1968, which Marion won after a second appeal with help from barrister and writer, John Mortimer.

Her reading was wide and global - she loved Russian, French, German and Eastern European writers, Tolstoy, Rilke and Thomas Mann, as well as Plato, Joyce, Shakespeare, Updike and Hemingway. She published several writers (Elias Canetti and Kenzaburo Oe for example) who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a host of radical intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ivan Illich, John Cage, Michael Ondaatje, Julian Green, the celebrated film critic, Pauline Kael, and the feminist philosopher and sociologist, Julia Kristeva. With John Calder she also published Samuel Beckett.

A tiny figure in full make-up, chainsmoking, stern but smiling, I met her only a couple of times, though every few months she would ring to berate me about my sales figures, phone calls I came to dread...

To be continued...

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

In Praise Of Non-Doing

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing, like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. THOREAU Walden

(Quoted by Jon-Kabat-Zinn in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are.)

The Unfolding Path

In the middle of this road we call life / I found myself in a dark wood / With no clear path through DANTE Inferno

The journey metaphor is used in all cultures to describe life and the quest for meaning. In the East, the word Tao, Chinese for 'Way' or 'Path', carries this meaning. In Buddhism, meditation practice is usually spoken of as a path - the path of mindfulness, the path of right understanding, the path of the wheel of truth (Dharma). Tao and Dharma also mean the way things are, the law that governs all of existence and non-existence. All events, whether we see them on the surface as good or bad, are fundamentally in harmony with the Tao. It is our job to learn to perceive this underlying harmony, and to live and make decisions in accord with it. Yet, frequently, it is not exactly clear what the right way is, which leaves plenty of room for free will and principled action, and also for tension and controversy, to say nothing of getting lost entirely.

When we practice meditation, we are really acknowledging that in this moment, we are on the road of life. The path unfolds in this moment and in every moment while we are alive. Meditation is more rightly thought of as a 'Way' than as a technique. It is a Way of being, a Way of living, a Way of listening, a Way of walking along the path of life and being in harmony with things as they are. This means in part acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. At the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged, or without hope). On the other hand, it often happens that we can become trapped into believing too strongly that we do know where we are going, especially if we are driven by self-serving ambition and we want certain things very badly. There is a blindness that comes from self-furthering agendas that leaves us thinking we know, when actually we don't know as much as we think. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

Vive La Différence, Vive La Variété

For some decades now we have lived within a global consumer economy that exalts the idea of all cultures and societies eventually converging on a single norm. Cultural palates in this flattened world can only be progressively homogenised. PANKAJ MISHRA Guardian Review 18.04.09

I hate this gradual, insidious homogenisation of culture that's happening in all places you look. For me the whole beauty and fascination of things lies in their difference, their plurality and their individuality. The presence of companies like Starbucks and McDonalds now in most countries of the world makes me uneasy. I know cultures cross-fertilise - indeed they are often the richer for it - but when one culture hugely dominates the rest, the threatened cultures have one choice: to be absorbed or to resist. Happily there are many examples of cultural resistance everywhere.

Connected with this, it also saddens me that our diet here in England has become so unvaried and homogenised. We may think there's an unparalleled choice of fruit and vegetables in our supermarkets, but this selection is spartan compared with what was available in Victorian times. Then they grew 42 different types of cabbage, 37 lettuces, 62 peaches, 53 peas... A combination of disease, commercial requirements and idiot legislation put an end to this wonderful variety. Apparently it costs nearly £3000 to register a single cultivar for 2 years on the EU's National List of legally certified seeds.

An Infinite Expectation Of The Dawn

Daybreak's coming earlier and earlier each morning as spring advances. I love the dawn and the early mornings. When I was young I had to drag myself out of bed. Now I relish that quiet hour or two before the workaday world begins to stir. There's something special about it, magical even. It's a good time to meditate, and rinse the mind, before its relentless daily stream of thoughts starts to flow.

Thoreau liked the mornings, too, and in this piece he considers the dawn, but ends up contemplating something wider...

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look ...To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

THOREAU Walden

How To Peel An Orange

It is shocking and profoundly regrettable, but, apparently, sales of oranges are falling steadily because people can no longer be bothered to peel them. As soon as I read this I began buying oranges more frequently... Now I peel an orange very slowly, deliberately, voluptuously, above all defiantly, as a response to an age that demands war without casualties, public services without taxes, rights without obligations, celebrity without achievement, sex without relationships, running shoes without running, course work without work and sweet grapes without seeds. From The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard To Be Happy by MICHAEL FOLEY

Oh I agree, I do so agree. I got into conversation with a shopper in a supermarket the other day. She told me her daughter would only buy grated cheese, as she couldn't be bothered to grate it herself.

I can understand some minor exasperation with, say, artichokes. But oranges?

Right, I'm off now to peel an orange. Slowly. Deliberately. Voluptuously. Defiantly. Why don't you do the same? With a bit of zest we can perhaps subvert the zeitgeist...

God help us all.

Something In The Air

I wandered lonely as a Cloud / That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd / A host of dancing Daffodils... WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

A few days of mild weather, and some sun, and spring has come to England, in a dance of golden daffodils, a blaze of yellow gorse and forsythia, and snow-white drifts of blackthorn blossom. It's a little too early for the terns and the nightingales, the sand martins and the swallows, but the chiffchaffs, willow warblers and reed warblers are here, all singing furiously. Bumblebees, ladybirds and other insects are out and about, and brimstone and tortoiseshell butterflies too.

At Besthorpe Nature Reserve by the river Trent in Nottinghamshire, the cormorants are busy carrying impossibly long sticks in their beaks with which to repair their nests. And at Whisby Nature Park near Lincoln, the yellow-green flowers of the great sallow, or goat willow, or pussy willow have emerged from their furry grey catkins...

On a short visit to each place this week I counted 28 different species of bird at Besthorpe and 30 at Whisby. Here's one of the Whisby hides overlooking a pool where you can see emperor dragonflies later in the year, and kingfishers if you're lucky...

From one of the hides overlooking Grebe Lake I spotted shelduck, tufted duck, greylag geese, Canada geese, and great-crested grebes doing their synchronized head-dance - which is a courtship ritual. There was much urgency and excitement in the air - not least among hundreds upon hundreds of black-headed gulls, which clamoured round the sky and fought noisily for space on the overcrowded gravel islands in the middle of the lake. Here are two that found a refuge from the cacophonous melee...

A Somersby Interlude

She came to the village church, / And sat by a pillar alone; / An angel watching an urn / Wept over her, carved in stone... From Maud by ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

Half-way along my walk in the Wolds lay the tiny village of Somersby, birthplace of the venerable Victorian poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Tennyson's father, George, was the rector of Somersby and Bag Enderby, and the father of twelve children (Alfred was the fourth). George was a violent man, a depressive, and dependent on drink and drugs, so Tennyson's mother must have had a very hard time. All of George's children were born in the vicarage, which, in my picture, is the white house on the right, and is now called Somersby House. The imposing, castellated dwelling on the left is Somersby Grange, probably designed by Sir John Vanbrugh, who also designed Castle Howard, the grand stately home in Yorkshire where much of the TV series Brideshead Revisited was filmed...

On the other side of the road is St Margaret's Church, built of greenstone blocks with brick repairs and a slate roof...

In the churchyard there's a rare example of an original stone cross (most churchyard crosses were destroyed in the English Civil War)...

And above the church porch is this sun dial dated 1751...

Inside the church you can see a plaque on the wall commemorating Tennyson, the font where he was baptised, and, near the lectern, a rather scary bust of the great poet...

Just before I left the church I noticed a 'Prayer Tree' on one of the south-facing window ledges...



I rested on a handy bench near this signpost and ate my sandwiches...

After which I took a right-of-way through a farmyard and meandered back to Brinkhill on grassy footpaths and green lanes...

(You can find my other posts on Tennyson here and here.)

A Walk In The Wolds

The Peak District lies west of here. But there's another good walking area to the north-east - and that's the Lincolnshire Wolds...

It's not as spectacular as the Peak, but it has its own quiet charm. It's a landscape of low chalky hills, dry valleys, rolling farmland, fox coverts and tranquil villages. This is a five mile walk I did a few days ago from Brinkhill to Somersby and Bag Enderby, then back to Brinkhill again...

In some fields corn crops were already shooting up. Other fields were freshly tilled. The contrast between the young green corn and the reddish-brown soil was pleasing to the eye...

Turning back towards the sun (not that there was a lot of sun) from Warden Hill, the leafless trees, hedges and dead winter vegetation had a dark mauvish tinge in the dull light...

The palette of patterns and textures, forms and colours created by nature is truly astonishing. Nature is the greatest artist of all. It was a day of muted subtleties...

There were very few flowers in bloom - except in the cottage gardens - though the soft, green leaves of celandine, bluebell and wild arum were prolific in wood and hedgerow. Buds were ready to burst out everywhere, but they were hesitant, holding back. The air still held a bitter chill...



It's been a long winter. Surely spring is round the corner?

To be continued...

Lathkilldale

I've been going to the Peak District for as long as I can remember. It's the nearest National Park to here - with the most wonderful walks and scenery. It lies mainly in Derbyshire, but the western moorland edge takes in parts of Staffordshire and Cheshire too. Geologically it forms two distinct areas: the White Peak, a limestone plateau scored with deep river valleys, and the Dark Peak, an altogether different region of grits and shales, of rocky escarpments and acidic peat moorlands. I can't decide which I half I prefer, for I love them both.

Easter Sunday found me at the head of Ricklow Dale just outside the village of Monyash in the White Peak. This nine mile walk, from Ricklow Dale through Lathkilldale, down Bradford Dale, then across the limestone plateau back to Monyash, is an old favourite of mine. I've done it in all seasons and all weathers. Who could resist the inviting allure of this grassy, lumpy valley, as it winds out of sight through the gorge - becoming steeper and narrower, rockier and more wooded all the time? It draws you in...

Lathkilldale is special, a jewel among Derbyshire rivers, its waters crystal clear, its habitat perfect for orchids and the rare Jacobs Ladder flower, grey wagtails and dippers, water voles and brown trout. As the dale narrows, the open sides give way to steep slopes dense with ash trees, the young ash saplings with smooth, grey barks, the older trees with fissured trunks. Low by the stream the trees and rocks are covered in bright green moss and lichens. Further down there's a natural waterfall, then some man-made weirs with trout pools, and the relics of an old lead mine, the Mandale Mine.

Here's what Patrick Monkhouse has to say about the Lathkill in his book On Foot In The Peak, published in the 1930s, and one of my favourite books on the area (I like these old, little-known, out-of-print books brimming with personal enthusiasms, quirky observations and individual style - far more interesting than all the anodyne, clichéd guide books you find on sale everywhere):

The Lathkill should emerge from a great square cavern on the right as you go down Ricklow Dale. In wet weather it does so, and no river in the Peak has a more imposing birth. It springs, already a river, from the hillside, as the goddess Athene sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus. In dry weather, the Lathkill gets up late, and comes out, with perfunctory apologies, anything up to half a mile down its course. But one cannot long be angry with so beautiful a river. Lathkill is among the deepest and narrowest of the Derbyshire dales...

Here's the cave at Lathkill Head, where the river Lathkill emerges from the Underworld, and which Monkhouse describes so romantically...

(I've written before about Lathkilldale here.)

Gandhi Gets My Vote

I want to vote for a Gandhi
Or a Martin Luther King,
Someone who sets the soul on fire
And makes the pulses ring.

I want to vote for a Churchill,
Or an F. D. Roosevelt,
Someone who lifts the spirits up
And makes the heartstrings melt,

Someone like Helen Suzman,
Nelson Mandela or Joan of Arc,
Someone who changes history,
Forging light out of the dark,

A Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel,
A Kennedy or Obama,
An Albert Schweizer, Thomas Merton,
A Buddha or Dalai Lama.

I want to vote for a Son of God
Or a Saint of High Renown,
But I know in the end I'll have to vote
For Cameron, Clegg or Brown.

I NOW OFFICIALLY DECLARE THIS BLOG TO BE AN ELECTION-FREE ZONE

A Little Bit Of Politics

It's happened at last. Gordon Brown called on the Queen this morning, Parliament will be dissolved next Monday and there'll be a general election on 6 May. So far, so good. But who on earth do I vote for?

It's a problem, as there's no obvious party to back. Would it were as clear cut here as it was for the US voters in 2008! The Democrats - it had to be. A no-brainer. After the disaster that was Bush, a Democrat pygmy could have got in. But the Democrats held all the cards, the ace being Obama: a man of stature, dignity, charisma, sincerity, conviction and intelligence. They had a giant.

I don't want to make any personal remarks about Brown, Cameron or Clegg - good men all, I'm sure - but I really am failing to find any inspiring vision or charismatic leadership from any of them.

The background to this election is grim. Let's go back to 1997, when Blair and New Labour swept into power with by far the biggest Labour majority in history. After 18 years of the Conservatives (11 of them under Margaret Thatcher) the country had been aching for a change. Blair also scooped the next election in 2001, again with a large majority. All was sweetness, all was light. Exciting, optimistic times.

Then it turned sour. Blair cosied up with Bush and took us into Iraq, an act for which I and many others have never forgiven him. His majority slipped in the 2005 election from 167 to 66. Blair saw the writing on the wall and stepped down, leaving the poisoned chalice to his Chancellor, arch-rival and now successor - Gordon Brown.

Poor Gordon. To begin with we gave him the benefit of the doubt. He'd managed the economy all right, hadn't he? He was a good Presbyterian Scot of impeccable moral integrity and social conscience, wasn't he? Well, he may be all of these things, but he couldn't help the fact he presided over a jaded government about to face the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.

Swift action avoided total financial meltdown - but, nevertheless, we're still completely lacking any strong and enlightened vision for the future. Brown always seems in the background, in hiding. And now he's had to apologize for misleading the Chilcot Inquiry with massaged statistics. What's more, some of his former cabinet ministers - Hewitt, Hoon, Byers - have been caught out employing various shabby, corrupt and self-serving practices. Overshadowing all of this - and this cuts across the whole party spectrum - is the MPs' expenses scandal. Not good, not good.

It's true the Conservatives look more electable than they have done for years. Their biggest asset is their new youthful and energetic leader, David Cameron. But he's untried and untested, and his shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, looks even younger than Cameron does - inexperienced, and without the gravitas of Alistair Darling, the current Labout Chancellor. And, anyway, can I really bring myself to vote Conservative? I don't think so.

The truth is I - along with a great many others - am disillusioned with politics in general, politicians as a whole. There's no easy, straight ideological choice any more. Although, of course, there are obnoxious extremes in both main parties, the two parties have tipped to the centre ground - and the poor Lib Dems are left struggling to define themselves. (Nothing new there then.)

In the end people are going to vote for the party which appears to have the best strategy for getting the economy back on its feet and for repaying the deficit without too much pain. This will be achieved by a balance of taxes, public spending cuts (or efficiency savings if you see it that way) and incentives for growth. It's a question of which party convinces us it has the right mix. But pain there will be.

So I come back full circle to my original question. Who on earth do I vote for?

A Mindful Walk (2)

I set off on my walk the next day with a heightened awareness of my five senses and of my mind interpreting and coordinating them. It's a revelation if you do this. It makes you realize that most of the time our minds, left to their own devices, are continually constructing and reconstructing unreal, conceptual worlds of prejudice and supposition, half-truth and fantasy, set in the past and the future - and we're lost to the intense richness of the immediate present.

I 'rotated' my senses one by one, bringing each in turn to the forefront of my awareness, finally trying to spotlight them all equally at the same time. Every time my thoughts meandered off on their usual, routine course of worry and anxiety, taking me away from the 'now', I reminded myself (from some place beyond the 'me' of my thoughts) of the whole chaotic mental process. I became super-conscious of these random, unbidden thoughts as they streamed past - watching them arise, stay a while, then disappear - with a certain detachment and wry amusement.

It suddenly dawned on me that, although my thoughts were part of me, I was not my thoughts. In fact the idea of 'I' or 'me' or 'self' became less central and important the more I immersed myself in pure sound and vision, touch and smell. If I had to put it into words, I'd say, perhaps, that I'd actually become the sightscape and the soundscape, the touchscape and the smellscape - even the tastescape, for smell and taste are very much bound together, and I could almost taste the air, the rain-soaked grass, the early spring freshness. My petty-minded, puffed-up ego seemed miles away, and for a few moments I rested in an ocean of undiluted being...

(All photos taken on my village walks.)

A Mindful Walk (1)

I try and go for a walk most days, even if it's just round the village. With a little imagination you can walk a subtly different route each time by using slightly different variations and permutations. I may only walk to the end of the village and back, I may take in some of the surrounding countryside, or I may even walk seven miles to the nearest town if I have a few hours to spare (you can reach it on paths, tracks and quiet lanes without touching a main road.)



The other day I returned home from one such walk and realized with a shock that I could scarcely remember anything about the walk at all. I knew the ground I'd covered, but I'd been on 'automatic pilot' - so deep in thought, so immersed in all the plans, preoccupations and anxieties that plague our minds much of the time - that I'd barely registered any of the things I'd seen or heard (let alone or touched or smelt). Of course my senses were there all the time, working away. I just hadn't tapped into them, so I'd missed out on all the peace and calm, the joy and pleasure they could have instantly brought me.

The next day I resolved to be more present in the 'nowscape' of my walk, to be fully aware of every sense experience, to be mindful of each moment...

(All photos taken on my village walks.)