900th Post

Numbers like 9, 90 and 900 are strange bedfellows; I feel a little sorry for them. Always destined to cower somewhere at the bottom of the bed, knowing everyone's waiting for the main event: the orgasmic 10, 100 and 1000.

In a bid to rescue these retiring wallflowers from the shadows, here's my 9th post and here's my 90th.

And this is my 900th. (Good. I was wondering what on earth to write for my 900th post, and the matter seems to have taken care of itself.)

And the moral is: don't neglect the build-up. It's generally a lot more entertaining than the climax.

No Comment

I've been composing and trying to send many long and beautifully wrought comments of late, comments full of pith and moment, comments as sparkling as dew on early morning grass, comments worthy of Blogger Comment Awards if not the very Nobel Prize for Comments ... but sadly, and frustratingly, they've all been lost in cyberspace because of IE and Blogger hitches and glitches. I thought I'd sorted the problem out, but now realise I haven't. As I don't want to go insane, I'm going to leave things for a while, and perhaps pray for help to the Great God Google. In the meantime, rest assured I'm still quietly reading all your blogs with enormous pleasure ... 

Went To See The Gypsy

Today the gypsies gather at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the French Camargue, culmination of their annual Romany pilgrimage. Bob Dylan attended this festival in May 1975. Today is also Bob Dylan's seventieth birthday. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life with coffee spoons, but I've measured out mine with Dylan albums and gigs. Happy Birthday, Bob, and may you stay Forever Young.

To A Mountain In Tibet

I'm really enjoying Colin Thubron's latest book, To A Mountain In Tibet. It's odd, but this is the first Thubron I've ever read. He's such an exceptionally gifted and vivid travel writer. This from Chapter One, where Thubron explains the motivation behind his pilgrimage to sacred Mount Kailas:

Sometimes journeys begin long before their first step is taken. Mine, without my knowing, starts long ago, in a hospital ward, as the last of my family dies. There is nothing strange in this, the state of being alone. The death of parents may bring resigned sadness, even a guilty freedom. Instead I need to leave a sign of their pasage. My mother died just now, it seems, not in the way she wished; my father before her; my sister before that, at the age of twenty-one ...

... You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth's surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it's my profession, after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end you come to a rest at a mountain that is holy to others.

The reason for this is beyond articulation. A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort.

 All this is quite subtle, and honest, and beautifully expressed, I think.Thubron is saying that grief cannot be assuaged by propitiating the gods after walking another culture's pilgrimage route. You still exist - a survivor - for the moment, and death is still final. Nevertheless, there is meaning to this journey, even if the meaning is not clearly relevant to your own history. He's doing the trip in memory of his parents, as a sign of their passage, although actually the real reason is beyond articulation.  You follow the river flowing the other way (he's travelling upstream from Nepal into Tibet) - suggesting difficulty, going against the current - until your secular pilgrimage reaches a mountain that is holy, but holy to others. You are not cured of your sadness, and any change you may feel is an illusion.

We'll see by the end of the book if he gains any enlightenment.

My own mother and father also died during the past few years; and my sister, like Thubron's, died in her twenties.

The Haunt Of The Wild Mignonette

This morning I spent a few more stolen hours on the Viking Way. It was windy but warm, as the wind was blowing from the west. Once again I followed the course of Ermine Street - the old Roman road which, in this area, is a broad, rutted track for walkers and riders. It cuts a dead straight furrow through the narrow strip of limestone plateau south of Lincoln, bisecting a monontous prairie of arable land mostly planted with wheat and barley ...
 

Sprinklers jetted arcs of water over the growing crops, and every now and then the wind hurled plumes of spray right across the trail, nearly giving me a soaking. This section of Ermine Street is called High Dyke, and it's really a kind of linear nature reserve ...

Ahead of me I watched a hare lope down the track, then disappear into an adjacent cornfield. Golfinches twittered madly in bouncing flight. You could clearly see their red, black and yellow colours flashing in the air. Yellowhammers flitted from bush to bush, and a single skylark rose up from its nest in the corn. For a while I walked alongside this gappy drystone wall ...

Cowslips grew in profusion - their blooms now faded  - and bird's-foot-trefoil, bugle and buttercup brightened the wide grassy borders of the path. Among the cow parsley I spotted the tapering, greenish-yellow candle-spikes of the wild mignonette ...

At Byard's Leap I turned off along the main Newark-Sleaford road in the direction of Cranwell. The sweet smell of fried bacon wafted enticingly from Byard's Leap Country Kitchen opposite. I pressed on, disappointed and hungry. I had forgotten to bring any money with me.

Cranwell is home to the Royal Air Force (RAF) Officer Training College (it's what Sandhurst is to the British Army). Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, developed many of his ideas here. And it was here too where my wife's maternal grandfather played clarinet in the College Band ...    

Hospitality

Forget not to shew love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. HEBREWS 13:2

In spring 2010 the climate change activist Adam Weymouth walked 3,500 miles from London to Istanbul. It took him eight months. (A plane takes four hours.) He went through twelve countries, three seasons and two pairs of walking boots.

One thing that struck him on his journey was the warm hospitality he encountered - particularly in Muslim communities. Most religions have a tradition of hospitality, but none more so than Islam, where the principle of hospitality is a duty not only to the stranger but also to God. This faith in and openness to strangers he found both heartening and moving. It's something that we suspect is disappearing in many countries and cultures, so it's wonderful to find this natural and human core of hospitality very much alive. I found it thus on the Caminos I've walked, and I'm delighted to find it experienced by Weymouth here.

Without delving too deeply into its linguistic derivation, the word 'hospitality' implies a relationship between a 'host' and a 'guest', a relationship which nowadays tends to be seen as one-way, ie the 'host' gives and the 'guest' receives. But at one time the two roles inherent in the word were synonyms rather than antonyms. After all, a 'host' needs a 'guest' in order to give (to fulfil his or her human duty and duty to God), and a 'guest' needs a 'host' in order to receive (and we all need to learn how to receive gracefully, which, strangely, we often find more difficult than giving). When you think about it, we are 'hosts' and 'guests' all the time, in some way. Giving and receiving are the basis of our daily interactions; both should be done with dignity, grace and a light touch.

Weymouth viewed his momentous walk as a chance to challenge the culture of fear, the distrust of strangers, that seems to be a given in a world where we are increasingly denied the opportunity to interact with the unknown. Perhaps opening up one's home and opening up oneself to strangers is a risk - but it's a risk that holds the promise of a deeply satisfying reciprocality. In others we recognise ourselves; and in ourselves we see others. I know of no better way than a pilgrimage, secular or not, to remind us that we are dependent on strangers, writes Weymouth.

Walking seems to me like one way of trying to recognise all parts of this world, in sickness and in health ... The people and places I saw stretch out from where I write this now, not as unconnected parts but as a continual thread. It is this that seems to show that both the good and the bad of my journey, the environmental destruction and the beautiful landscapes, the recent wars and the incredible hospitality, are all part of my world, and, as such, must be embraced.

For more on Adam Weymouth's journey read this. And my own blog post on the hospitality I met with on the Camino is here.

The Sound Of Silence

And what did you do when Blogger went down?

A Coleby Round

Each flower has its brief season. The pure-white blossom of the blackthorn has  given way to the creamy-white blossom of the hawthorn. The yellow mopheads of the dandelion have metamorphosed into delicate, fluffy seed 'clocks'. Speedwell, campion, cow parsley and hemlock have sprung up in the rough grass between path and hedgerow. Buttercups and daisies dot the grazing pastures.  

Spring came early this year. The warm weather and lack of rain hint that summer is a mere promise away. All the common deciduous trees are now in full leaf - the last to unfurl being the ash a week or so ago. Elderflowers are already emerging, and rosebay willowherb - a plant of deep mid-summer - is shooting vigorously upwards.

On the Viking Way the air is full of birds: swallows skim the meadows and invisible skylarks sing exuberantly above green cornfields. We spy a clump of common comfrey drooping their purple, bell-like flowers under a rather rare Swedish hornbeam. In Coleby we resist the siren call of the pub ...

     

... and take a path southwards just below the spring line of the limestone escarpment. This lumbering line of grave-faced cows is heading for a water trough ...

  

... while we head for the typical Lincoln Cliff village of Boothby Graffoe: all yellow-stone cottages, sleepy farmyards and shaded lanes. Wood pigeons clatter out of sycamores, and two green woodpeckers dig for ants in the short grass. A parallel path - now arrowing north - guides us back to Coleby between thick hawthorn hedges and an old filled-in limestone quarry, which is now a level field of impossibly yellow oil-seed rape ... 

Before completing the circle we crane our necks over the wall of this hidden house and garden. The bottom of the garden has been left in a natural state to encourage wildlife. It's a micro-forest of wild flowers, with scattered woodpiles and a reed-fringed, water-lily pond (just hidden in the picture) ...

Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose

Roses blooming in our garden today

Are you someone who grumbles that roses have thorns or are you grateful that thorns have roses?

The Way Of The Vikings





After an extended spell at home, my feet are getting restless. But I can't commit to a long, distant tramp lasting many consecutive days. First, I'm involved in giving the house and garden a complete makeover. Second, I'm supposed to be studying on a proofreading course. Really I need a local walk I can complete in separate stages over snatched half-days and the odd weekend.

The two long distance trails nearest to here are the Trent Valley Way and the Viking Way. I've already walked the Trent Valley Way - with a friend in 1994. We covered it mainly at weekends and visited practically every pub on the route. It starts in Long Eaton, south west of Nottingham, and follows the course of the river Trent and the Chesterfield canal for 84 miles to West Stockwith.

So I'm considering the Viking Way. I've already walked a couple of sections. This 147 mile path begins at the Humber bridge, breezes through the chalky Lincolnshire Wolds, shadows the river Witham to Lincoln, then runs due south along a thin limestone escarpment before cutting across part of Leicestershire and finishing on the shores of Rutland Water.

The bit I walked this afternoon took in part of Ermine Street, the old Roman road. I passed this fun, mosaic road sign ...

... and later ate a banana sitting on a wooden bench beneath a huge flowering horse chestnut tree in the middle of Welbourn village green. This is Welbourn church ...



... and this is the approach to Wellingore where I'd left the car. Some people love it, others hate it - but you can't avoid the dazzling yellow colour of the oil-seed rape fields at this time of year. I always welcome these crops, providing us as they do with rapeseed oil, one of the healthiest of the vegetable oils, rich in omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.



What Is Truth?

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies FLEETWOOD MAC

According to a piece in last Saturday's Guardian, John Steinbeck's classic travelogue Travels With Charley is no factually accurate report of his famous road trip. (I'll remind you that, in this incredibly popular memoir from the early 1960s, Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley make a 10,000 mile odyssey round the US, romantically roughing it in a camper truck he names after Don Quixote's horse Rosinante.) It's now been shown that Steinbeck's narrative is completely unreliable. The van is driven on an artistic licence; the story is peppered with 'creative fictions'. Just one example: although Steinbeck makes out the trip was a solo voyage, it seems he was almost never alone. Indeed, half the time he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine, and for much of the trip stayed at luxury motels or parked up on friends' properties. He even spent one week on a cattle ranch owned by a Texan millionaire. Steinbeck spins such a good tale. You feel you're right there beside him and Charley, cooking your beans with them on a campfire under the stars. So do these embellishments, these omissions, these flirtations on the borderline between truth and fantasy, really matter?

This kind of authorial malleability is nothing new, of course. Writers have always been prone to embroider the truth in their autobiographies. Thoreau, for instance, somehow neglected to mention in Walden that his self-sufficient, hermit-style sojourn in the woods was enlivened by regular visitors, frequent excursions to the nearby village, boxes of food sent weekly by his mother or sister, and yet more emergency parcels regularly delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway led us to believe he was living in Paris almost as a down-and-out - but this was in fact far from the case. Lillian Hellman's memoirs are notorious for their cobweb of 'factual errors' (I put it politely). And, quite recently, James Frey was exposed as being 'economical with the truth', to say the very least, in his drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces. But should we care about any of this too much - as long as the account's a good one, and well written, and keeps us enthralled?