Me myself I*

 

I’ve not seen many wasps this autumn, but they’re everywhere on the ivy which decorates Pickworth’s walls and fences. The sky is blue, the sun warm, and like me they’re making the most of the shrinking hours of daylight.

I walk westwards looking out for the lime kiln where (possibly) John Clare made a living while every evening he wrote about hedgerows and flowers by the light of a whickering candle. I can’t see it because, and maybe the poet would have found this apt, the likely location is covered in bushes, general scrub…and wasps. There’s also a sign saying ‘keep out’ so perhaps too many Clare-freaks have been anxious to stand where the great man did. The path crosses a field on the angle and enters some woodland beside small pits where stone was once extracted for building or crushing, and then over a rise on the far side, my goodness, I’m not expecting the size of the more modern quarry which lies between me and Clipsham. It’s not quite on the scale of Ketton’s, but still pretty vast, with huge piles of spoil and impressive cliffs. The stone from here has ended up in King’s College Chapel, York Minster and the Houses of Parliament. Where the path leads down to its floor, a six-strong family of deer crosses left to right no more than thirty metres in front of me, the older females flanking at least one junior. One by one, with that peculiarly deft, precise agility, they leap a fence and disappear back into the trees. It’s a lovely unexpected moment. I’d been wondering whether to give the shorts one last pre-winter outing, and think to myself that the decision to remain in trousers was sound. No good avoiding Covid only to succumb to Lyme’s Disease. 

I’m la-la-la’ing the hook from Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ as I climb the steep exit from the quarry (yes, I know, this is something of a jump-cut from the bucolic to the bathetic…) I’m a fan of eighties music but the ‘Best of Clapton’ CD I was listening to earlier on in the car is a dreadful-sounding record IMO: gross drum sounds mixed far too prominently, too many notes, self-obsessed lyrics. I saw the all-star Clapton band in Birmingham at about that time, Phil Collins and Chester Thompson behind twin drumkits, Fairweather-Low on second guitar, big-bear Nathan East playing an apparently toy-sized bass and the excellent Greg Phillinganes on keyboards, Robert Cray supporting. I don’t remember them sounding all that bad…I was rather excited at the time. Sigh!

Pop music has always been rather ‘look at me!’  Perhaps all music contains an element of that – we love to hear virtuosity, and my love for the piano was fuelled by hearing my wonderful teacher Robin Harrison hammering a school upright to within an inch of its survival with massive Liszt transcriptions e.g. Wagner’s Tannhauser overture (Robin’s speciality); more notes per minute than seemed humanly possible. But of course, at its core music is much more than this: careful listening between participants, the control of dynamics to make others sound good, the sympathetic placement of notes, the matching of harmony, tuning and rhythm, the acknowledgment of other people’s skills. It’s about ensembles as much as solos.

My wider search at present, and particularly in the Church, is for the communal, for consensus, for inclusion, for togetherness in the Spirit, for harmonious disagreement in God’s concert, a societal and spiritual version of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony where dissonance magically dissolves into majestic, deafening concord. What we currently experience politically and sometimes ecclesiastically is aggrieved division and dissent, with interest groups recklessly pursuing their own agendas. Collective improvisation in insensitive hands becomes the competing assertion of egos.  I know I’m repeating myself, and regular readers may be groaning at this insistent riffing, but post-Trump - as we must pray - and post-Johnson (ditto) there’ll have to be healing.

·       I’m an only child.  It’s odd for me to be saying the foregoing. Isn’t that ironic? 

·       The Virus spreads because of togetherness, but its aftermath is division. Isn’t that ironic too? (enough already, Alanis…)

·       This is one reason for the Eucharist – to hear the words: ‘the body of Christ’. So act like a body, folks, not a bunch of dry bones.

·       ‘There’s no ‘I’ in team’. This is becoming increasingly funny as a slogan/cliché/joke because spelling like the understanding of geography is becoming a lost art. Or perhaps the saying’s completely irrelevant, because Thatcher’s gnomic ‘there’s no such thing as society’ has turned out to be prescient. Apparently the only team now is my team.

The path arrives in Clipsham opposite The Olive Branch, a clearly superior nosh-spot. As I turn left up the road to Stretton, Range Rovers cruise by, before turning into the restaurant’s car-park, engines quietly purring and salivating prior to a not-so-trivial lunch. Deferring my lunchtime gratification for a while longer, I yomp up the road, admiring the autumnal colours in the roadside trees, and jumping out of the way of passing Chelsea Tractors, like an elderly Henry VIII doing a galliard, but less stylishly.

Apparently there are seventeen Strettons in England. Anywhere you see ‘street’ in a place name, even slightly disguised, you can be sure the Romans were once there: this is simply ‘the farm by the main road’, in this case Ermine Street. At the entrance to the village there’s a sign to Stretton’s inn, saying ‘The Jackson Stops’. This is a name I’m familiar with because they're an estate agency, so I assume the attention of passers-by is being drawn to the fact the pub’s up for sale. I’m nearly right. The firm did handle the transaction some years ago, but the new owners, perhaps out of sheer gratefulness, decided to adopt them with their new moniker. Perhaps they got a reduction on the fees. There’s a metal shroud over the north side of St. Nicholas’ church, and it’s shut, but I shelter in the porch for my sarnie, until another inquisitive black and yellow predator comes to share the space. I walk the long way round the houses until I can hear the noise from the adjacent A1, and then turn back towards Clipsham, passing the sign for H.M.P. Stocken as I do so (category C: past alumni include TV celeb Johnny Vaughan before he properly grew up).

I divert to my left to walk along the grass perimeter of ‘George Henry Wood’, eighty acres of relatively recent planting owned and maintained by the Woodland Trust where according to a web-listing you might find, in addition to eight different sorts of wasp, the Kentish Garden Snail and the Creeping Thistle Rust mushroom. Overhead the sun has disappeared and threatening, towering clouds are carrying showers towards the west on a brisk breeze. All afternoon they pass to the north and south, but miss me.

Clipsham’s church, St. Mary’s sits on the edge of the Big House’s grounds in a gently pretty location. Sheep feint to pose for me in the field to its south, and then, as sheep are wont to do, move at the last moment to spoil the photograph. I stick my tongue out at them, and pray for the human inhabitants of the village, wondering as always who they are and what they do with their lives amidst this pastoral loveliness. Leaving the village to the east, for the first time this autumn I find the fieldpath has changed from tacky to muddy. The Met has just pronounced October 3^rd the wettest day ever recorded, if you take the UK as a whole. The total precipitation made for a volume greater than that of Loch Ness. The path becomes a track beside cover where there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of pheasants and their chicks. Being not the brightest things in mental plumage they scuttle on in front of me for hundreds of metres before finally diving and crashing away into the undergrowth. Others chuck and squawk their way out of the undergrowth as I pass so regularly that I stop reacting to their sudden avian eruptions. By a farm I say how-do to a lady in a natty felt hat. A few minutes later as I climb into the cool green of Pickworth Great Wood, she passes me in a golf caddy driven by her man. They’re exercising a lively, young black lab, and stop to ask me if I’d like to say hello – to the dog, not them. I decline the kind invitation. I suppose for elderly folk it can be the only way to keep their companion hound fit. I remember once passing a driver in a Kent lane, who was steering his Land Rover at a steady 20 mph with one finger, whilst holding a greyhound on a leash through the side window with his other hand. Don’t try that at home, children…

When I’m within a hundred metres of the car, I overtake a couple who are looking intently at their map. They generously remark that I look as if I know what I’m doing – which could of course be a paraphrase of ‘You look dirty and a bit knackered…’ They’ve walked from Clipsham, but the other way - through the quarry - and are now wondering as I did about that lime kiln. I explain where I think it is and we fall into conversation. I tell them what I’m doing, and give them one of my cards. They ask if I’m a bishop or something. I laugh and say they’re quite right, the previous Archbishop of York did something similar but no, I'm just a bloke. Seeing my name on the card they double-take because they’re also Crosses. Geoff tells me that though they live near Lichfield, they have family origins in Bermondsey, London, and I say that’s funny because some of my people peter out genealogically in that part of London. Truly it’s a small world, and I wouldn’t at all rule out the possibility that we’re related. Such coincidences happen more than at first seems feasible. I once met my dad in Chappells of Bond Street’s record department, him having travelled twenty miles in one direction, and me sixty from another, with no collusion. Oddly, although I was banjaxed by this event, he seemed entirely unphased. These new Crosses tell me that this is their first outing on the back of a Julia Bradbury collection of ‘a hundred best walks’, and it is a good walk that they’re going to do, through Great Wood and all those pheasants back to Clipsham. But I know how imprecise some walking books can be, and as I’m driving home, I hope they find their way safely, despite my well-meaning but probably unhelpful tips about following the field margins where the diagonal path gets sticky.

 *The title of a Joan Armatrading song and album c. 1977

 Strings to my guitar:  14 km. 4.5 hrs. 13 deg. C.  Fine but often cloudy. No stiles. 5 gates 2 bridges. 2 churches.

 

Our Father in Heaven

This is a familiar conundrum.

But

Did you put me here to ‘do’?

Or simply to ‘be’?

Am I defined by what you made?

Or should I be struggling to turn myself into something more –

Like washing powder

A new improved me?

And what about other people

Whom Descartes and others have suggested

Might all be mental or social constructs?

(Though really we all know that’s a load of bunkum, don’t we?)

Anyway.

I know there should be less ‘me’ and more ‘You’.

But what about more ‘we’ and less ‘I’?

And does it make any difference

Being an introvert?

(I mean, do you cut me more slack

Because I so often want to hide from people?)

 

I’m so good at excuses

And equivocations

And evasions.

Lord, help me through all my self-deceptions

To a better understanding of your will.

Amen.

Knobbled

 

Have you heard of ‘dragging’ websites?  No, me neither, until Emma Barnett on Radio 5 darkens the morning by interviewing Sali Hughes, a beauty ‘influencer’ who writes for The Guardian. Apparently, these are websites entirely devoted to denigrating individuals in the public eye who make their living or reputation from a web presence.

Just as when some years ago I was commissioned to write one of the many volumes of Macmillan’s ‘Puppy Patrol’ series for children, and so was set the task of concocting a winsome canine tale (!) about dog agility competitions, my life takes a rapid lurch across spacetime as I’m forced to comprehend yet another form of life of which I was hitherto blissfully unaware. It’s not thus been improved. Either by dog agility or ‘dragging’.

According to Sali, some individuals spend up to twenty hours a day contributing to and/or consuming this anti-celeb porn. She’s fallen victim, but at least Sali’s still here to warn the public, and hasn’t suffered a breakdown or committed suicide as others have done. I can’t think of a better argument for original sin and the power of evil. How can we ever now benignly control the Internet monster originally created for the betterment and drawing together of humanity? It’s the story of The Fall recreated.

Anyway that’s the overture to today’s walk, and I’m glad to exit the car and stroll up the Roman lane from Great Casterton towards Pickworth. Immediately I’m hailed by Mick who’s cutting hedges on a side road with his mate. He asks if he’s seen me before. I rack my brains and equivocate, slightly thrown because Mick looks very like piano-tuning friend and ‘Prince of Wales’ Rattler’ Clive Wood, fit and fifty something with rock star hair and shades. Mick’s interested in my walker’s stick, because he makes them as a lifestyle business . He happens to have a few on board the van so he shows them to me. His speciality is the ‘whistle-stick’. It has a detachable wooden whistle slotted into the thumbpiece - very attractive and useful. In Mick’s parlance my stick’s a ‘knobbler’. I say it was a present from my dad, and it’s been with me through thick and thin for the past twenty years, despite having been left accidentally on tube stations and in cornfields. I add that having just cleared my parental home, I’ve inherited a couple more, so sadly despite the beauty and usefulness of Mick’s work, I won’t need another one for the time being. It turns out he lives in Hardingstone - just a few miles away from where I live - and we swap favourite local walks before parting with a manly fist-bump. Mick doesn’t know just how much he’s cheered me up by his crafty skills and breezy manner after Radio 5’s morning glooms.

Opposite Mounts Lodge, I turn up the bridleway so I don’t have to slog it all the way to Pickworth by the metalled road, but half way to the village get confused by the angles of various tracks. A 4x4 creeps up behind me and revs its engine pointedly. I give way. The driver leans across the passenger seat and asks that ominous ‘Are you lost?’ question, meaning ‘What the jolly flamin’ roger are you doing here, my old son?’ He’s a gamekeeper. ‘Only,’ he continues, ‘I’ve got deer-stalkers up there…’ (pointing to a piece of woodland which my map tells me shouldn’t be where it is) ‘…and you don’t want a bullet whistling round your ears…’

We agree this wouldn’t be in either of our interests, so feeling like an incompetent wayfarer idiot I retrace my steps and pick up the bridleway where it undulates into a dip and out the other side, eventually to emerge opposite All Saints church. Sensitised by the hunters I’d just avoided, I can’t help noticing the delicate tracks of a small deer on the mud of the grassy path.

All Saints isn’t Pickworth’s original church, which lies under a field a few hundred metres away. The new one was built in 1821. Its interior chocolate colours are primly spare and Puritan, but everything is neat and appealing in rustic simplicity. Just a few years before its construction John Clare had been employed in the lime kiln close by – dangerous and unpleasant work, one imagines – heat, dust, emissions – but at least he had the consolation of his great love, Martha. She lived in the farm a couple of kilometres back towards Casterton. The poet’s industrial occupation is a stark counterpoint to his flowery, agrarian verse. 

There’s very little to Pickworth these days, whatever the reason for its depopulation, which some attribute to the Wars of the Roses’ Battle of Losecoat Field. A handsome stone carving commemorates the event on the bank in front of the church. Memories last long in the deep country. I walk east along the drovers’ road known as ‘The Drift’.  Where the path to Ryhall veers across some fields, I’m grateful to the four hikers who are preceding me across the untrodden earth, marking the way. At the crest of the hill we greet each other again – they’d pinched the bench outside All Saints for their lunch, where we said a first hello. I made do happily with a churchyard tree stump for table and chair.

Ryhall is an interesting place, beside the River Gwash and next to the old Turnpike which once bumped travellers onwards to Lincolnshire, Bourne and the Fens. There are two pubs, a small square and St. John the Evangelist’s solid church, on the side of which is a remain of the Hermitage where it’s said St. Tibba once resided. By the newish south porch there’s a sign which says the church is open, though it isn’t, so I sit on a bench and munch thoughtfully. An elderly lady, smiley, neatly made up, pushes her trolley along the church path in front of me. She’s doing short triangular laps through the churchyard, in one gate, out the other and along the road. At the third time of asking we swap a few words. ‘Got to keep going’, she remarks, which I take to mean in the wider, more existential sense rather than that she doesn’t want to talk. I am somewhat moved.

Seems to me that there’s a missed component to contemporary ontological thinking. Outside the church, but within it too, we concentrate on the possible, and never enquire about the likely significance of the impossible. This is quite understandable. We want to harry the scientists to find a cure or vaccine for Covid. We don’t want to contemplate the notion that there’s no cure, no vaccine. But the smiley lady of indomitable spirit can’t turn back time, because time only works one way, and in a real sense we don’t know why. In our current dilemmas the public and press is desperate to be told that health and safety can be preserved while boosting the economy. Yet this is impossible. It’s one or the other, not both. Heisenberg’s principle (yes, that old saw) tells us we can know the position or speed of a particle but not both. We cannot posit anything at all about what preceded the Big Bang. As Wittgenstein drew for us in the Philosophical Investigations, one can make a puzzle picture which viewed one way is a duck, and in another is a rabbit, and we can call this nonsensical thing a ‘duck-rabbit’, but we can only ever view it as one or the other. And Jesus is fully human and fully divine, but this too, outside of the formulae of Christian orthodoxy is… impossible. But it is a mystery, and perhaps makes much more sense if we view it in the context of all the other impossibilities with which we have to deal. But this stretches our notion of ‘Truth’ beyond the ‘coherence’ and ‘correspondence’ of twentieth century philosophy. And yes, I know I haven’t made a clear distinction here between logical impossibility and scientific impossibility. Nevertheless shouldn’t we in some sense reify ‘impossibilities’?

St. Tibba was a seventh century Saxon princess, who Wikipedia tells me is venerated in the Anglican and Catholic churches, and in Western Orthodoxy too, a niece of King Penda of the Mercians. She’s the patron saint of falconers, though no one on the Web will tell me why. And she was buried here in Ryhall, though her bones were carried off to Peterborough Abbey in the eleventh century. Wouldn’t it be nice, if today’s Ryhall church were to be rededicated to her instead of St. John?  After all, many places of worship carry his excellent name, and she is nowhere honoured. I feel a campaign coming on…

A late middle-aged couple stand talking quietly in the garden of a bungalow at the end of the village. The bungalow’s name is ‘Middlemarch’. My guess is that one of them is an English teacher. But which one? Of which gender?

The path propels me on past a happy, happy chicken farm where plump birds peck and feed in acres of prime grass, up a hill and down to Tolethorpe and its beautiful mill. Above my head towers the superstructure of the open-air theatre which does Shakespeare each summer. I expect this year was an exception. Let’s hope it’s business as usual next time round. Tolethorpe has a cricket ground too, but it’s nearly in Little Casterton. The outfield is less than pristine, though to be fair it’s now October (mind you, the professional season only ended last weekend!) A couple of chaps are lovingly seeding and preparing the ‘square’, putting it to bed for the winter. It’s usually a seasonal moment that would fill me with melancholy, but this time I can only hope for better times to come.

Beyond the cricket ground lies All Saints, Little Casterton. On the website: greatenglishchurches.co.uk  its author writes:  ‘…it is small, humble, little known, rather chaotic – and yet full of curiosities. It epitomises the’secret’ churches that (understandably) didn’t make it into Simon Jenkins’ book but which have so much to offer to those who dare to look outside the confines of the ‘recommended’ lists. It is a sort of antidote to overdosing on the diet of its more celebrated cousins and neighbours’.

I shall have to come back another day.

 (Mere) Prawns in the game*:  18 km.  5 hrs.  15 degrees C., and breezy with it, so not so warm. Three churches, one open. Pheasants everywhere. Two stiles, ten gates, three bridges.

Dear Lord and Father of mankind

Forgive our foolish ways;

Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,

In purer lives thy service find,

In deeper reverence, praise.

             John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92)

 *Morning Prayer often makes use of Psalm 8, which begins ‘O Lord our governor’. In the recesses of my warped mind this carries me straight to dear George Cole, whose TV character Arthur Daley was always apt to say something like ‘Oh dear, oh dear, your guv’nor won’t like this. He won’t like it at all!’  On one memorable occasion Arthur/George also opined sadly that in the end we are all ‘…mere prawns in the game…’  Let’s hope this is a theological inexactitude.