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.