Snowdrop image

Came across this photo in today's batch of copying, taken back in February 1999. It was a particular time in my life when, though I didn't fully know it at that moment, I was being drawn into a dynamic of intense turmoil and change. After a long period of seemingly placid river reaches, the canyon had suddenly grown deeper and the water a lot wilder and I was headed goodness knows where.

Perhaps that is why the scene particularly caught my attention on that late winter afternoon, although in truth it was such a beautiful place that I think I would have reached for my camera regardless of my preoccupations.

Late winter. A heavy frost has thawed and there is mild watery sunshine filtering through the wood and the snowdrops, a first promise of the sun returning, are in full flower accompanied here and there by bright blue croci rising out of the damp earth. It all feels like something out of a poem by one of the nineteenth century Romantic poets.

Can you guess what this place is? It is the small grave yard next to the Society of Friends Meeting House at Garstang in Lancashire. It is an old Meeting House - in fact it doesn't really even have a proper road connection, you have to get there using a farm track. We had borrowed it one Saturday for a small day retreat and I took this picture between two long periods of meditation.

If it hadn't been for the Christian context maybe I could have happily become a sincere Quaker back in my twenties, rather than just a frequent 'attender' at meetings. These days if I can't get to a Buddhist meditation group locally I still occasionally go and sit with Quakers at a Sunday meeting for the company.

Early Meeting Houses I attended didn't have grave yards but all the ones I know in northern England have exactly what you see here. No spectacular or showy 'furniture fields' of monumental masonry and recumbent angels but just completely 'standard pattern' grave markers giving simply the name, date of death and age at death. Who would either want or need anything more elaborate than the rest of the 'gang' as a memorial? Something else I find myself admiring the Quakers for.

High Desert Gricing

My choice from today's trawl of copied slides is a photo taken early one April morning in 1994. Around 7:30AM I'd guess judging by the angle of the bright desert sun, and it is what Americans refer to as 'train time' at the depot on the Santa Fe main line at Flagstaff, Arizona. The eastbound Amtrak 'Southwest Chief' - latest in a long tradition of trains with similar 'Super Chief' names - is just pulling in on its 42 hour 3600 kilometre journey from Los Angeles to Chicago with 35 intermediate stops.

I was out of my motel bed good and early to do this particular bit of 'gricing' and the action that chilly Spring morning had started a good hour earlier as passengers first began to arrive at the Flagstaff depot. The Amtrak agent was busy checking in luggage, all of which was carted up to the east end of the platform to be loaded into the 'head end' cars. Taking a transcontinental express like this is more like catching a long distance plane flight than taking the train into Tokyo or on a day trip up to London. All seats and sleeping accommodation is reserved months in advance.

About half an hour before the train was due the Amtrak agent, armed with a megaphone, took passengers to their designated points along the platform and explained what they needed to do when the train arrived. Basically this was to get on board as quickly as they could. Whether he told the exact truth I cannot say but he made a little speech explaining why it was in their best interests to do this. It seemed that the 'Southwest Chief' standing at the platform would block a number of streets at either end of the depot, and a city ordinance only permitted the Santa Fe to obstruct the highway for a very limited time - I think the figure of eight minutes was mentioned. It the train was still standing at Flagstaff a moment longer, when the time limit expired the sheriff would show up in a police cruiser, arrest and handcuff the engineer and take him to jail. Then the train would stand at Flagstaff for eight hours while a new driver was brought from Albequerque.

If this was true or not I can't tell although from my limited knowledge of the American West I guess it probably was. But it certainly produced the desired result. When these two Genesis P40's at the head of the train purred to a halt all those waiting passengers were on board in just a minute and the train was off well before the sheriff showed up with his posse comitatus.

Crackers

Here is a neat picture from today's 'haul' of slide copying. Our old Cocker Spaniel 'Crackers'. She really was a pretty old dog when this picture was taken too, around fifteen I think. Despite variable health over her last years she lived long in the end, with a bit of encouragement.

Nobody could have asked for a better dog than her. The sunniest of dispositions, every one's friend, great sense of doggy humour, a sympathetic companion when you were feeling low, loved kids and full of boundless energy. Couldn't ever walk past water without jumping in, would walk on the fells all day. And over the years I realised that she had a very strong aesthetic sense too, she really understood beauty. I often caught her standing on her hind legs to smell blossom, and at the top of every hill she would settle down beside me to take a good look at the view.

Like all dogs she was also very aware of the practicalities of her environment. She knew not only where her lead was kept, but also the drawers in which many household items such as scissors and combs and flea spay resided, you only had to look at them and she was off.

Despite her good nature she was incredibly stubborn when she wanted to be. I remember one night when somebody else in the house determinedly closed the door between the kitchen and the lounge with the intention of making sure that she slept in her basket under the counter rather than on the sofa. She took just one look through the back door, turned on her heel and headed off down the garden, refusing to come in unless that lounge door was opened again. It developed into a stand-off with me piggy-in-the-middle as usual and I ended up getting up at three in the morning and hunting around in the rain for her at the bottom of our large garden in my pyjamas. There she was sitting stern faced under a bush and she STILL wasn't coming in until the lounge door was open and she could take her rightful place on the three piece suite.

I guess these days I'd feel honour bound to get a dog from the 'refuge' when and if we are in a position to have one again but every time I see a tricolour Cocker Spaniel in the street I can't help feeling that I would love to share life with another one before I die.

Group on a doorstep

This is one of the many slides I copied across onto my computer today. A group on a door step. I think it was probably taken in the summer of 1975 and I wonder if anyone can guess where this was photographed? I realise looking at the image that there is something about the quality of the people here that suggests a much older society, one with quite different values to England in 2010. It isn't just the fashions - though I would guess that the well preserved suit on the left had already seen a few decades careful wear when the picture was taken. It is much more revealed in the sensitive inter-relationship of the people concerned.

Brittany? Santiago de Compostella? The Island of Lewis? Shetland? In fact it is the west of Ireland. In the centre at the back is 'Con' and in the suit next to him his brother 'Flurrie'. They ran a village forge together, putting shoes on horses and fixing tractors, gates and anything else made of iron. The lady in the mauve sweater is their sister who acted as their housekeeper. I can't remember the name or the relationship of the elderly lady to the right, perhaps their auntie. The big man in front who looks like a prop-forward was in fact a visiting Welshman but I don't recall if he ever played rugby. He certainly played snooker and bridge.

The Irish contingent here must all have been dead this last twenty years but as a courtesy to the privacy of their memory I won't say who they were or where they came from. I was really touched to suddenly see them again on my computer screen. Somehow they have an air about them that they should all have 'bit parts' in an episode of 'Father Ted' - a programme which, being very devout Catholics, I'm not sure if they would have approved of much. But they certainly did have a big sense of humour. Maybe they would fit even better into a droll Flann O'Brian 'Miles na Gopoleen' story involving pigs and anglophone school inspectors

It was 'Flurrie' that caught my eye particularly. I drank a lot of beer with him once upon a time, a man I deeply liked and admired. A native Irish speaker he was a writer and a poet in the language and a one-time university academic. But the Big City was not for him so he came home and worked in the family forge with his big brother. Sometimes when I was writing up my thesis it crossed my mind how much I would have loved to have talked to him about it, he would have loved the theme of transience and I'm sure given me some good advice.

Big Hill Cut

Last week we took a walk along a stretch of the old railway line towards Stainmore on the fell side above Hartley and Winton. It now serves as a kind of linear nature reserve, part of the John Strutt Conservation Foundation. I never met John Strutt, something of a local legend around here. He died last year. However I see and hear evidence of his interest in exotic birds pretty well most days in the guise of the semi-wild parrots that continue to haunt the chimney pots of the town including mine. The place wouldn't be the same without them.

Anyway, this walk included a section of the old line known as 'Big Hill Cut' - a deep cutting through hard limestone where the railway turned east towards Belah. I once actually walked this stretch of track when it was still a working rail route - well, trains were infrequent in those days and I was curious. Big Hill Cut was very impressive to walk through then, around sixty feet deep at its deepest and in the worst of winter blizzards snow sometimes buried a whole train there for weeks.

So I was very curious to see this place again. Without the track and now heavily overgrown in parts it was deliciously dark and sinister, definitely not the kind of place that you would want to pitch a tent and spend the night if you had an over fertile imagination. If I was a ghost train this is just the spot I would choose to haunt.

What is it about such places that give them that 'atmosphere'? I think in part it is the sheer intensity of human effort that it took to create such a large hole in the ground. The time equivalent of many entire human lives were invested here in making this trench through the hill. And it was made in the decade before the invention of TNT and dynamite, when contractors relied on old-fashioned black gunpowder and 'navvies' with picks and shovels who were expected to move at least ten cubic metres of rock a day using brute strength. Big Hill Cut is a kind of a silent monument to men like that, you have to look for it hard to find it but then there it is, still as big and as deep and as impressive as it was when it was dug out 150 years ago.

Forty years on

I felt that the picture I used on yesterday's blog set me a challenge and so despite the damp weather I set off up the road towards Nateby this morning armed with my camera and - as it turned out - a rather hazy recollection of exactly where the first photograph was taken. My guess wasn't too bad though, I think that I found the spot to within twenty metres but I have missed off a little of the area covered by the original photograph on the left. A part of the problem in replicating old pictures like this is trying to guess what focal length the original camera had. Even the smallest difference in the lens makes a difference. Back in 1973 I was using a Russian made Zenit-E. Back then for less that £10 you could get quite a good basic 35mm camera with interchangeable lenses although they were heavy to carry around all day. I think that lens was around 54mm so that is what I used today on my current 'all singing and dancing' Canon EOS Digital.

So what changes are there? Well, take a look for yourself. The most striking one is the large barn complex added centre left - I would guess back in the 1970's to support a dairy farming venture although I'm not sure if it is still used for that. Changing economic base - new technologies and industries - usually account for the most radical and rapid changes in the landscape and here in the deep country is no exception to this rule. Also there is one obvious change in technology here - the telephone circuits are no longer carried along the road on poles. Not much significant change is obvious in the residential built environment - at this distance I can spot evidence of three modification to dwellings.

More generally the farming landscape seems better maintained than it was forty years ago. The 'make do' wire netting along the stone wall to the left has gone and although the different season makes it difficult to be sure the hedges to the right seem much better 'laid' and thicker and obviously now cut in summer to shoulder height using a tractor to thin out the lower branches.

Perhaps the most reassuring thing here is that the landscape hasn't changed so much - a good job has been made over the years of conserving part of one of England most beautiful areas of countryside. Let's hope it stays that way.

Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

Spent part of today wading through a few boxes from my large collection of old 35mm slides and scanning them into this laptop. Lots of interesting stuff there - the earliest I have come across so far is from around 1963 and they go right up to the time I stopped regularly using emulsion films around 2000. I guess in an immediate and personal sense they are only an archive for me and perhaps for family and a few old friends, but looking at the images I can also see their potential as a resource for any student of change too. It is surprising what an emotional roller coaster coloured images can be compared with their black and white and sepia counterparts, I wonder how taking one step further and working with 8mm cine film will feel.

Here's a picture of my grandfather that caught my eye today, and especially as in the process of giving Edera some practice using an English stick gear change over this last month we drove this road pretty well every evening. The location is on the B6259 just to the south of the village of Nateby. The slide is undated but the dog is called Sally and she died in I think 1974. He has a shopping bag with him so he is headed 'down the street' as he used to say - walking the mile and a half into Kirkby Stephen to get his daily shopping. This became a necessity after he had a collision with a 'boy racer' when he was 75 years old and wrote off his ancient mini car. That happened on the hump back bridge at Appersett near Hawes in the summer of 1972. So my guess is that this picture was taken in February or March 1973.

In many of the images time has started to subtly change the emulsion, and maybe on some film stock the blues - especially Kodak - the colours were never really authentic. But in this snow picture that isn't really a problem - the hues are pretty well as I remember them. That brown coat and hat, it feels like they are hanging here in the hall invisibly

I feel quite a sense of affinity with this picture - I'm 13 years younger than he would have been here but the place and context is otherwise pretty well 'spot on' for me at the moment. I'd quite forgotten that frayed red check duffel bag over his shoulder - can you still buy those?

I must head up here later this week and get a photograph from the exact spot, I'm curious to identify all the changes. The village has become rather gentrified of late and the agricultural buildings have also grown in scale and spread down the hill. Watch this space for some comparisons and analysis coming up!

Another day in sunny England

Edera on the plane bound for Narita today, time for our students to return to their studies I'm afraid after the long and very hot summer in Japan. All good things have to come to an end sooner or later and a couple of months together in rural Cumbria certainly counts as a 'good thing'.

And apart from all that somehow it also turned out to be one of those days when it would have been a good idea not to get out of bed in any case. 'Troubles come not as single spies but in battalions' usually turns out to be the truth of it in my experience. Carelessly forgot my medication and left it in the hotel room this morning and had to drive back to Altringham to retrieve it after I had dropped her at the airport. And when we did get to 'check in' and queued twenty minutes to drop off the baggage British Airways refused to take it because the airport luggage conveyor belt had 'broken down'. It all delayed us more than an hour and so the rest of the morning got telescoped, a planned trip to IKEA cut back to twenty minutes which meant that I couldn't find what I wanted in the time available and by the time I made it to my mum's place there was just half an hour to spend with her before I was out of the door again. Oh! And of course just because their equipment wasn't working and delayed everyone it didn't stop the airport charging everyone an extra hour at the car park and profiting from their own incompetence.

Just an 'ordinary day' in England I know, it happens all the time, why bother even mentioning it?. Que sera sera. Just sometimes I wish I was 'The Great Dictator'; part of the fun of being a total despot must be the ability to haul people over the coals (even literally eh?) for this class of thing. Luggage conveyor belts don't "just break down", you have to be feeble minded to believe that. They break down because they haven't been properly maintained; not cleaned, or oiled, nor had their motors checked out properly. Some ill conceived maintenance contract, lack of proper holiday cover, ineffective supervision and management, willingness to accept a crap half job badly done. My inquisitors thumb screws would soon lay bare the trail of shoddy workmanship involved, on the rack all secrets of work undone would be made manifest.

You know, in Japan trains NEVER break down. Never. In England things break down all the time, but in Japan people couldn't live with the shame of it. They have proper maintenance plans, they do the work properly and - magic! Things don't break down! It is easy, you just have to work conscientiously.

Good. I feel better for all that already.

Abbey Bridge

When I was over at Barnard Castle during the week I drove past this flower bed, which has more of a history than you might imagine.

It is at the southern end of the 'Abbey Bridge' across the River Tees about two miles downstream from the town. In fact there are a rather weedy pair of these circular beds, one on each side of the road. Their untended nature makes me feel sad; looking at this photograph I feel that I ought to get over there with a fork and tidy them up a bit. Obviously set out in more genteel times, when the local council road men still took a pride in making such places look nice.

I guess this flower bed is around forty five years old, but what makes it significant to me is what it was BEFORE it was a flower bed. Until the 1960's this was a toll bridge, and what is now the flower bed on the west side of the road was the toll keeper's living room. Across the road, at the point from where I'm taking the photograph, was an identical room which was her bedroom. Now only the bottom four courses of the stone walls of those two single storey circular cottages survive as a home for couch grass and nettles. The upper part and roof was demolished.

In this little room the toll keeper ran a small tea shop with two or three tiny tables, offering pots of tea and scones to passing motorists and stoking up her coal fire to boil a kettle. I often sat in here as a child with my grandmother enjoying her home baking and a well earned rest on our way back home after a long walk. I could almost feel tempted to rebuild the rooms and take up residence here, but in today's traffic it might not be such fun.

Clapham Junction

About as different you can get to the Velazquez painting featured yesterday is this work by the Bristol-born artist George Heiron who was not only a great and original photographer but also a talented painter in both oils and watercolours. Back in the late 1950's and 1960's he produced one or two watercolours every month for the covers of Ian Allan magazines and they were invariably works that not only recorded railway scenes with complete precision but also very carefully observed the contemporary culture and character of train working.

This week sorting out some 'vintage' magazines my eye fell on this painting from the cover if the May 1962 edition of 'Model Railway News' and once again I was struck by the exceptional quality of Heiron's work. I could place this particular scene exactly from my own memories. It is a location just to the north of Clapham Junction station in south London where the tracks running from Waterloo carrying trains to the South West of England run parallel to the 'Brighton Line' tracks from Victoria towards Sussex. Often as a teenager on trips up to London from Crawley our decrepit '2 HAL' suburban electric train would be overtaken around here by a steam hauled express train accelerating away from the capital for Salisbury and points west.

In this painting 'Lord Nelson' class 30854 'Howard of Effingham' is getting to grips with a westbound 'Atlantic Express'. Just three or four miles from Waterloo the train's speed is already up to 70 m.p.h but there is still a big fire and a good head of steam available in the boiler for even harder work ahead as is evident from the raised safety valves and that big plume of white steam. The two white discs at at the top and bottom of the smokebox indicate that this express is bound for Plymouth.

But the detail I really like here are the figures in the foreground - two track maintenance 'gangers' and someone (probably a shunter) on his way to work sporting his bait bag and carrying a billy can containing his tea. Pure 'sixties' nostalgia - not a 'high visibility' jacket in sight and in contravention of almost every modern 'Health and Safety' regulation in the book. Back then railwaymen wandered around on high speed running lines with impunity and survived by moving briskly and paying careful attention to what was going on around them - something that these three are very evidently doing.

Rokeby Venus

The word 'Rokeby' is widely known in English because it is associated with the 'Rokeby Venus' - the painting by by Diego Velázquez completed around 1650 and now in the National Gallery in London. It was hung in the salon in Rokeby Park from about 1813 until it was purchased 'by the nation' in 1906. It was actually the first painting bought for the gallery by public subscription. When I studied art in my 'teens' I spent a long time one afternoon in London looking at the image because it was a painting on which I was expected to be able to write an essay at the drop of a hat. I don't think that I would have made much of it then if I'd been asked to do so.

Nudes from this place and period - when the Inquisition was at its height in Spain - are quite rare, and this is the only surviving example by Velázquez. It is thought that he modelled it on Giorgione's Sleeping Venus and Titian's Venus of Urbino, though I guess that by the time he was fifty as an artist he had some idea of what naked women looked like on his own account too.

Even as a teenager I found this image worrying for all the wrong reasons and looking at it again I still do, because there is so much more to it than meets the eye. She has a beautiful mature body but hardly voluptuous, not what we are led to expect any Goddess of Love to be. If she wasn't tended in a bored if sympathetic kind of a way by her son Cupid we might not immediately realise who is portrayed here. There is more than a hint of passing years in her figure too; a firm body but already a fruit that is mellow, the muscle tone is soft. Perhaps that points to the first discovery for me here - for a Goddess representing sexual desire she is disturbingly mature and carnal rather than the conventionally aestheically pleasing female which all young men expect Venus to be. She is heavy, all hormones, seriously 'all woman'.

But it is the mirror that arrests my attention - the face is somehow startlingly absent. As the focus it should BE in focus - crisp and clear. But it is almost formless, although she is clearly not a great beauty. In fact could almost be any, every woman because the focus is drawn out, there is no clarity in the image. There is languor too - ready for lovemaking and yet also already so distant from it - almost an element of boredom lurking. Commitment of a kind, a hunger of 'attachment' to outcomes - and yet also an urge for separation. It is as if the final fruit turned out to be - 'just this'. All this returning to the same point, old discoveries; is it really all there is? Nothing new under the sun here - but anyway maybe we had better just check again to make sure. And something very 'binding' - a bondage represented by that ribbon. That class of thought and feeling.

Rokeby Park

Over to Rokeby with Edera yesterday to take a look around the house and park. I've been in Japan so long that I hadn't realised that the place was ever open to the public until I spotted it listed on the Historic Houses Association web site. It seems that it has been receiving visitors for the last twenty five years but rather discretely perhaps, only a couple of times during the week in summer and then only for a few hours.

If you don't know North Yorkshire then I should say that Rokeby is the family home of the Morritt family. It is a couple of miles down the Tees from Barnard Castle and just near the spot where the Tees and Greta meet. When I was a child I often walked with my grandmother on the path down the Yorkshire bank of the river from the Abbey Bridge to the Dairy Bridge across the Greta at the 'Meeting of the Waters'. As a boy I was aware of the large bulk of the house set back behind trees across the meadow, an utterly different world from the terrace house we occupied in Coronation Street at the top end of Barney. Later, at school, that name 'Rokeby' kept cropping up, firstly as the title of one of Walter Scott's poems (Goodness! in the 1950's we actually read Walter Scott in primary school!) and later as the name of that famous Velazquez painting 'Rokeby Venus' in the National Gallery.

So to make a visit yesterday was a real treat and the place more than lived up to my best expectations. Still very much a family house and home of Sir Andrew Morritt, much of the building is substantially unchanged since it was finished and furnished back in the eighteenth century. But something has survived here more than the architecture and artifacts, the place has a gentility all of its own, something to do with the importance of quality in places and objects and the value of looking after such things. Good taste. Essence of Englishness really, at least for someone of my generation.

Well, you have missed your chance to visit the house this year, in a fortnight it will close for this season. Better make up your mind to get there next summer eh? But I was glad we made it this August. I was smiling on the drive home thinking just how much my grandmother, who despite her Wesleyan roots was a bit of a snob when it came to 'titles', would have loved to have set foot on that gravel drive and wandered around those beautiful rooms

Prospect of Whitby

Another corner of Yorkshire visited on Saturday was Whitby. It wasn't in the plan but the day was fine and sunny in that misty North Sea kind of a way and we were a couple of hours ahead of schedule and then suddenly it was only eight miles away so I decided to head for town. Well, not town, that was heaving with holidaymakers. I headed over the Esk River and up to the ruins of St. Hilda's Abbey up on the headland.

Whitby Abbey. I used to come here on primary (elementary) school excursions more than fifty years ago. Somewhere a few months back in 'Little House' is a picture of me and a young lady called Jennifer sitting here on the beach and I recently came across another picture of me as a boy soprano dressed in cassock and surplice singing in the Abbey ruins on a church outing. In those days I would climb up the 199 steps from the town and admission to the site of the Abbey ruins was free. Now English Heritage want £6.50 for the opportunity to rubberneck the place (well, cheaper for me now as an 'oldie' of course) and you get the inevitable audio guide and interpretive centre and gift shop thrown in for your money.


Still an exceptionally beautiful place though, to be honest there is something a bit surreal about Whitby. It feels like it should be in Cornwall or Brittany but then there is also something distinctly boreal about the place, the winds of the northern oceans are never far away. And it is cut off from everywhere else in England by miles of roads across barren moorlands. It always attracted eccentrics which is probably why I like it. Bram Stoker developed part of the plot of 'Dracula' at Whitby, and the port was once a base for whalers headed for Greenland waters.

If you were looking for a site for a religious community, and back in the seventh century the Saxons were, then this headland is an obvious spot. Wouldn't it be fun to learn Saxon and how to play a harp and to sing the poetry of St. Caedmon out loud again up here?

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard metudæs maecti end his modgidanc uerc uuldurfadur.

[Now we must honour the Guardian of Heaven, the might of the Architect, and his Purpose, the work of the Father of Glory.]

Glaisdale church

Last year I tracked down my grandparent's marriage certificate and discovered that they were married in Glaisdale Parish Church in North Yorkshire on 12 September 1924. Why I don't know for sure but there are several pieces of circumstantial evidence to weigh in the balance. My grandfather was working as a signalman at the local railway station at the time, and until just before the day my grandmother had been working at the Miner's Hospital at Eston. None of the witness names given on the certificate have ever been mentioned to me (perhaps he was lodging in their house?), but it was certain that no members of either family showed up for the event. Nor probably were they invited. There had clearly been some spectacular 'falling out' going on within and between both of the wider families in the preceding months. But between who exactly and for what reason it looks like I will never know.

Even the fact that it was a Church of England ceremony was a surprise. My grandmother's family were staunch Wesleyans and would probably never have set foot in an Anglican church in their lives. My grandfather as far as I could ever discover never bothered about church. Having spent his late 'teens' listening to 'church parades' in the trenches of the Somme he was not on good terms with God, not then and not ever afterwards either. I'm sure that for him a church ceremony was a pure formality.

So I was very curious to see this church, as it had turned out the location of such an important event in the eventual emergence of my own biography. And I wasn't disappointed. A small chapel-like place perched on a wooded hillside, my guess is that it originally developed in the seventeenth century as a 'chapel of ease' to spare local farmers the effort of long hilly walks to a mother church in a distant village. Certainly it wasn't an old building, nor did it have any space for a choir, just a simple altar and some well polished pews. It also had some very pretty modern stained glass.

Glad I've seen it. In one sense it told me nothing at all about those events of 86 years ago and in another way of course it did. It was just the kind of place, from what I remember of them, that they would have got married in. Peaceful, and in the country.

Pullman ride

Not much time to draw breath over this weekend which seemed to take us to every corner of Yorkshire at some stage. Two friends of ours married the week before last and we were invited to their 'reception' which they had planned as something a bit different and more in line with our shared passion for trains. As around half the guests were also lifelong railway 'buffs' the choice was a good one.

We were all invited to travel on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, to ride on their vintage Pullman train and to have dinner on board. After a reception at Grosmont station we headed south at a leisurely pace hauled by their Stanier 'Black Five' 45428 named after Bishop Eric Treacy. During the twenty mile southbound journey to Pickering we were served the first three courses of our meal, and then on the return trip dessert and coffee.

A 'never to be forgotten' treat for all of us. As a child I used to see the 'Tyne-Tees Pullman' and the "Heart of Midlothian" passing through Darlington, with the familiar chocolate and cream carriages, but such luxury could never be for us. To ride the Pullman cars then there was a surcharge of, I think, 7s.6d. So this really was a lifetime dream fulfilled for me, to be on the other side of the train window with the neat little table lamps and the white table cloths, as if I was riding in some 1920's detective novel.

And by the time we pulled into Pickering it really did feel like we had travelled back in a time machine - the old fashioned lights on the platforms, the tangerine coloured signs of a North Eastern Region Station of yesteryear and above all the smells of a steam locomotive - smoke and steam oil - warm on the late evening air.

A great day out.

Ticket booked

I eventually got around to booking my air ticket back to Japan today - I'll be heading east early in October and then back to England again at the end of April 2011. The date for the eastbound flight more or less selected itself - the first date after the cheap fares kick in after the start of the new university term. Selecting a date back was more difficult, but I want to be here by early May for a number of reasons.

This kind of hiatus in my routine has usually happened twice or three times a year over the last decade - the 'tidal flows' of life become structured around major moves east and west but there have always been a few weeks when I've not been sure when the change will be taking place, each time a kind of period of suspended animation or maybe more of a pregnant pause. Now that pattern will change because in future my plan is to make this trip not more than once a year and to be in Britain for much longer periods, more of which I'm likely to be spending here on my own.

I'm always observing these days the many different ways in which people who spread their lives between two countries make a success - or don't - of reconciling the conflicts of interest that arise in their lives. If you leave your home country early in your life, and don't have particular ties of family or friendship in your country of birth - then chances are that you might be largely absorbed into your new family and culture elsewhere. If you make that move later in life it will be more likely that messy compromises will form a part of the patterns of your life, even if these are rich in experience and meaning.

In my 'teens' and twenties emigration from Britain on assisted passages to places like Australia and Canada was still in vogue and back then, before cheap long haul flying made living on the other side of the world almost as simple as living at the other end of Britain, you really did leave your old life behind for some years and maybe for ever. There was no hurrying home when family crises arose and you were expected to adopt a new nationality and adapt to a new place and make a life there. In a way easy air travel undermines that kind of commitment. We often talked about life as emigrants and we had fewer ties than most households back then but I'm not sure that we would have made a good job of it.

Emergency Planning

I was recently invited to help out with producing an 'Emergency Plan' for an organisation and today I've been glancing through a couple of 'model texts' to try and come up with a first list of chapter and section headings. It is an interesting project - you can't run any operation involving heavy plant and equipment in close contact with members of the public without seriously considering this kind of stuff. Too late to start to think what to do when someone is seriously injured or a building or machine catches fire. You should already know exactly what to do and who to contact.

The list of headings to be considered makes interesting reading too. Fire drills, injuries and medical emergencies are all pretty obvious but I what if a visitor or staff member turns violent? And then there are severe weather emergencies and natural disasters to consider, suspicious packages and the like. Earthquakes are not usually considered a hazard in Britain but they are not entirely unknown - actually here in Kirkby Stephen we were at the epicentre of a Richter 4.1 quake on 4 August 1970.

Although I can see the importance and value of a plan like this I'm going to have to sit on my hands when it comes to the physical form of the layout. Planners just love very structured texts, lots of headings and sub headings and crisp short sentences offering very obvious advice. In my working life the thing I hated the most was working with our systems people on documenting systems, they just loved to have everything fully documented and described while I was already in my usual undisciplined and selfish way already off dreaming up the next big invention.

But the truth of it often was that in fact you couldn't entirely effectively 'document' the use or even the design of systems and certainly not by adopting a super-analytical approach based on intricate structures. Software - or emergency procedures - may appear to be susceptible to that kind of treatment but reality is always more complex, even to break something into 'component parts' is an act of fiction because components are in the eye of the beholder.

Trust me to complicate this kind of thing. Sorry! When it comes to the crunch I promise I'll just write "when the fire alarm rings leave the building by the nearest exit ..."

Trackbed walk

On such a beautiful evening as today it felt like a nice plan to take a short drive just to the west of town to take a look at some of the old trackbed that we hope to be relaying track on here over the next few years as our 'Heritage Railway' project begins to develop wings. After studying the changing urban environment in detail all these years it shouldn't come as a surprise to me to see how much has happened along an old railway route after so long out of use. It is about 35 years since the last trains ran here and the track was removed.

But the 'reality' of change is always powerful, and never more so than it is when you come across a once familiar scene now transformed for the first time in half a lifetime. That is always the shocking thing, the second time it never has quite the impact even if the detail penetrates much more.

There seem to be some underlying rules about what happens to old railway routes that I haven't clearly formulated in my mind yet. If a reasonable thickness of old track ballast remains then the stony surface supports a kind of meadow that is quite easy to redevelop as a railway line later. But if the protective ballast is lost, or it cutting and embankments are substantial, then there is plenty of scope for trees to start to develop and especially pests like sycamore and willow. In deeper cuttings eventually the former track drainage system starts to break down and marshy sunless areas need major attention before they can ever bear the weight of a train again.

There are other major hazards to re-establishing a line of railway. Gardens and farm outbuildings start to encroach on the former right of way, and structures that might pose risks that could lead to lawsuits - especially bigger bridges over streams and rivers - are often removed. Then there are other potential users of these places to keep an eye on - conservationists for example and local authorities setting up cycleways and footpaths. Can these uses live alongside restored railway tracks?

It is all interesting stuff. A few days ago I was feeling very optimistic about the project but this evening ploughing along overgrown track bed I wasn't so sure. There are certainly endless opportunities for keeping fit wielding a saw and shovel lurking out there.

Far away is near at hand in images of elsewhere

Sorting through some of the mountains of old railway magazines that fill my cupboard today I came across an article on early British Railways holiday posters form the 1950's. Vanished world of course - vanished in so many different ways. Sad, sad, sad. Back then for almost all of us a foreign holiday was not even a distant dream. But it isn't so much the mundane reality of travel sixty years ago that strikes me, rather the way in which certain kinds of fantasy are subtly promoted by some of the images.

The two that disturb me most deeply are these two for the Lincolnshire town of Skegness and the Northumberland town of Whitley Bay, I don't think it is any accident that they are both on the 'bracing' North Sea coast and so perhaps most in need of a healthy dose of dream weaving when it comes to attracting holidaymakers. I'm sure that I could write a novel based on either of these two images.

The Whitley Bay poster (official guide available from 'Room 2'!) oozes a powerful and latent though very boyish sexuality which was probably still pushing the boundaries of acceptable public images when Michael painted it in 1958. How old is this girl? Thirteen? twenty four? There is such a riveting, extrovert quality in that slim body, like some minor deity let loose on the sands. But the goddess doesn't look directly at us, there is an element of Delacroix's 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' there, she is leading those holidaymakers on the beach into a windblown and sand strewn assault on sensual pleasure. Allons, mes enfants! But what about the star fish? it comes at you straight out of some different dimension.

And then this image of Skegness by F. Donald Blake! Here we all are arrived from Barnsley on the evening excursion and then as the sun sets and the clouds of night build on the eastern horizon we are transported at the margin of known space to a world of sophistication where the clock on the promenade is lit up by - many electric light bulbs. A few shiny saloons pull up around the clock tower, and the small crowd is spellbound by the beauty of the charabanc. They drift towards that sign in the distance that fills the night sky with its profound and timeless message - "Skegness welcomes you!". Maybe this could be the cover of a wartime edition of the 'New Yorker' or the opening scene in a Bob Hope movie.

So it will be in my novel. The chilly evening breeze will blow off the North Sea and boy and girl will walk and in hand towards those beckoning bright lights and the wings of enveloping darkness spreading from the east to cover them and then ... oh! To find out you will have to come to 'Skeggy' with me and then you will still have to wait and see ...

Form and Content

During the course of the summer we have attended a few places of worship around here. Two weeks ago Edera and I visited the local Quaker meeting together - these days sometimes not really so different to sitting in our own temple meditation hall to do zazen. And today we paid a visit to our local Anglican church. It was her first visit to a Matins/Eucharist service in a local church as she missed out on the visit we made with the ladies from the choir a few weeks ago.

Once upon a very long time ago I was actually 'confirmed' as an Anglican in my early teens and sang in several church choirs, so the form of the service is no mystery to me although it has changed a lot over the decades. I can't help but think that is a great pity - I used to love the sound of the seventeenth century English in the old form, truly an important pattern of English poetry that has endured. And yet I can see the problem for those hoping that modernising the text might make it more relevant to younger people too, we can't always live in a museum.

I'm also struck now by how these ceremonies so deeply reflect aspects of English culture, history and identity. Maybe you have to live abroad for a long time to notice this, to spot those echoes of say Reformation obsessions that still lurk below the surface in the way things are done in the established Christian church.

I can attend a service like this and in one sense feel 'at home' and if you ignore the differences of linguistic expression there is a lot of content - perhaps around a third - that you feel is in common between this kind of Christian worship and Mahayana Buddhist practice. I could take a 'highlighter' and rather quickly mark those parts of the prayer book.

And also for me now whole sections of the ceremony that I don't feel make sense to me at all, I struggle to see their relevance as a basis for spiritual practice. The whole focus on sin and repentance in Christianity for example. I don't feel the necessity to think of myself or others as a 'miserable sinner'. In Buddhism we have the idea of 'sange' which is apparently related but not really - the focus is much more on awakening to shortcomings and seeking to correct them - in fact to 'sitting up straight' in the presence of the Buddha.

A day of two engines

Working up at 'Kirkby Stephen East' station today and I ended up in charge of service in our buffet car because of a shortage of volunteers. It is a beautiful Gresley teak coach from the 1930's but at the moment it doesn't actually 'go anywhere' - it just sits in the old 'Darlington Platform and serves tea, coffee and snacks to anybody visiting our heritage railway site. The weather was changeable and business was hardly brisk but I enjoyed making visitors drinks and chatting to them about the railway. There is quite an art to being a buffet waiter, and listening is a big part of it. Restoring railways isn't all about monkey wrenches, grease guns and cans of paint. Actually talking to people visiting the site makes me realise what a wonderful project this restoration of the line down the Eden Valley really is, something that in ten or twenty years time will have become a major asset to the area.

I was just boiling a kettle when I heard a roar and rumble in the little yard outside the station building followed by the familiar whine of a big English Electric diesel engine turning over. Some of the volunteers had started up our Class 20 - number 169 - to check out the engine and generator. It needs several pretty heavy duty batteries to turn over the engine to start it and these are brought to the site on a trailer.

Wonderful to hear that sound of a powerful locomotive ticking over in the station yard, it is the first time I have heard it running and made me realise just how close we are actually getting now to running scheduled trains again next year. A 'real railway' once again. Who would have thought it?


Edera was on site today helping with the maintenance of the station gardens, and just before four we headed up the hill to the old Midland Station to watch a steam special come through on the Settle to Carlisle line. We arrived on the platform in a deluge that wouldn't have been out of place in the Amazon jungle and took refuge under a golf umbrella but it was well worth the effort - 6201 'Princess Elisabeth' in her beautiful maroon LMS livery came pounding up the bank from Appleby just a few minutes later. Who knows - in five years time maybe she will be drawing into our other station just a mile down the hill. We can but hope.

Longleat

On our recent trip to Somerset we got taken around the Safari Park at Longleat. I knew that it had been in operation for a long time but reading the guide book I see that it is nearly fifty years already since it opened. Well, at last we got to pay a visit there.

You can sort of sense it has been there a long time in the way that the place works too. The communities of animals in the various large drive-through enclosures scattered across the escarpment of the Wiltshire Downs seem to be very 'at home' in the grasslands and woods and it felt to me like it was us that were the strangers there - along with about five thousand others on a hot summer afternoon. I guess many of the animals are already the fifth or sixth generation on the site and so it is, in a real sense 'home'. All the carnivores and especially the lions were happily crashed out after lunch, for all I know most of them might have been fibreglass imitations for all the movement they made. Only the rhinos looked a bit dodgy grazing under the trees - a warden in a big JCB fitted in front with a very large leather pad was hovering on hand in case any of them took a romantic interest in the cars slowly drifting past

The really interesting animals for me were some of the herbivores. The giraffes were as tame as the Frisian cows in the field by the lane here, and the wallabies paid less attention to us walking by in the wood than your average Swaledale ewe would in these parts. They were all very socialised to humans.

You can't help but like the deer though. As some Japanese temple sites - notably Todaiji at Nara and on the island of Miyajima - you have to watch out for the sitka deer rifling through your pockets if they get the chance. At Longleat they have all that organsied for profit and you can buy a small pot of food for a pound and the local fallow stags will come and eat it through your car window. Youngsters and females get no look-in at all in the melee at the roadside.

They are clever blighters though - they quickly spot the 'soft touch' in the car ('beta' humans are those in the back seats). They can eat everything that comes their way but they know exactly when the last crumb is gone and are off like lightning to scrounge elsewhere. No point in wasting time where there is nothing left on offer.

Retail torture

One of those 'grit your teeth' days somehow. Started badly, I got out of bed on the wrong side, and it got no better and I didn't expect it to either. I was browbeaten - there was no other word for it - into taking my mum shopping again around a retail park in Preston. She weighs in at 100 kilos and despite being only ten years old the pavements there are terrible with steep gradients, large areas of subsidence and adverse slopes that could easily tip a wheelchair over. I knew it would be physically taxing, and it was. I couldn't have managed it without Edera's patient help but it wasn't the physical effort that was the real problem.

Actually just last week it came to me what the real problem was around this kind of excursion. Down in Somerset we nearly but not quite made it to Bath for the day and yet somehow I was glad that we hadn't and then it dawned on me that Bath had been the site of childhood suffering of a particular boyish genre. My mum often made it to Bath with a childless college friend from Swindon. It eventually became associated in my young mind with hours and hours of unrelieved shopping with two middle aged women. Spells of stupefying terminal boredom with no father around to bring relief when all you could do was to retreat into a fantasy world. It was the start of a lifetime of really hating shopping for clothes of any kind, I only have to go into that kind of store to feel depressed and even physically sick.

And the worst of all of those wretched shops was Marks & Spencer and that was where we ended up today too. Like wading through mental and spiritual treacle, even the smell of the place hadn't changed a bit. I used to believe that only prisoners worked in these places, because surely nobody could ever be there of their own volition?

So the day was just as bad as I dreaded it would be. Sorry I have to admit it, I just don't have the patience for it any more. And it isn't over yet, there will be the 'returns' the next time too. By the time I we drove home my mum's mobile number was already on the 1471 'recall' number on our home phone line and long experience tells me what it will be. Despite the changing rooms and all that something isn't going to fit, you can count on it.

Cat on a wall

Being a bit of a cat starved family at the moment we are always on the lookout for felines to enjoy surreptitiously and over the summer there have been two around here that have befriended us. One is a fine ginger Tom that lives across the road from our house and likes to sit on our garden fence early in the mornings. Sometimes I spot him when I'm checking my mail before breakfast and then I head out the back to spend some quality time with him. I'll include a picture of him here soon. Like all cats he has a sixth sense and notices if you are feeling a bit low - just after I moved in here last January he was forever peering through the kitchen window at nights to make sure I was OK.

The other feline in our lives is this lovely tortoiseshell female. I don't know where she lives but if you go for a walk along the river in the evenings on the footpath to Hartley there is a small gate and she is always lounging there on a flat stone on top of the wall waiting for passers-by to give her some attention. I suspect half the fun of this eyrie from her viewpoint is that small dogs on evening walks hurry past her quite unaware of her cool green eyes looking down. In fact she is so well camouflaged that if she is asleep and her head is down you can't spot her from fifty paces even if you know exactly where to look.

This is one cute cat. Some of my best friends over the years have been felines and I wouldn't hesitate to say that she is a queen in feline society. And so large and strong too - half way to being a puma almost.

In our currently peripatetic lives looking after a cat of our own again is going to have to remain a dream for a while, but at least these two have given us the pleasure of feeling fur under our finger tips for a season.

Scarfe work

Down in Frome over the weekend I had a chance to wander around an exhibition in the Black Swan (or was it 'Sheep'?) Arts Centre of recent work by the artist Gerald Scarfe. It mainly comprised those weird bits of moving sculpture he does so well, but there were several drawings there too. To be honest the exhibition was a really good laugh - well worth a visit if you are around that part of the world.

I found myself trying to remember what the first Scarfe art was that came into my life. It must have been his work in the late sixties and early seventies in the Sunday Times, caricatures of the likes of Harold Wilson and Callaghan and later Heath and Maggie Thatcher. But was I confusing some of his stuff with Ralph Steadman? Anyway it didn't matter.

This 'ship' sculpture especially caught my eye because it reminded me of a 'perpetual motion machine' that I invented myself as a child. Mine was based on magnets rather than the power of the wind but the principle was quite similar. In Scarfe's version the forward motion of the ship powers that fan on the stern which blows into the sail which makes the boat move forward which powers that fan ...

Neat. Nobody could explain to me back then why my theory wouldn't work and I still don't see why this one is not universally applied to all vessels on the briny ocean. A long while ago here on 'Little House' I was sketching out a rough proposal for giant unmanned floating meditating satellite controlled fibre glass Buddhas circumnavigating the globe down in the 'Roaring Forties' and surely here is the perfect method of propulsion.

Although admittedly you might need more than one fan.

Tomb of Thomas Ken

One of the things I especially wanted to get a look at during our visit to Frome in Somerset over the weekend was the tomb of Bishop Thomas Ken. It is located in a strange little structure tagged outside onto the east end of the parish church of St. John the Baptist just behind the altar. We walked around the back of the church and there it was, just like the photographs I have seen of the place.

Thomas Ken is one of those figures in history that I always admired. I'd like to research him a bit more if I had the time, perhaps turn up the books of his poems published back in the eighteenth century. They aren't much read now. We remember him today mainly for the verses he wrote to be used as hymns, works such as "Awake my soul and with the sun ..." and "Glory to thee, my God, this night ..." but in his day he was a formidable thinker and preacher and also a man of very strong principles that he stuck to no matter what the cost.

Once when he was a chaplain in Winchester the court of Charles II descended on the town, and he refused to have the King's mistress Nell Gwynne billeted in his home despite the monarch's pleadings. It seems that Charles II respected him so much for his spirit that two years later he insisted that Thomas Ken be appointed as the new Bishop of Bath and Wells, demanding loudly to know "Where is the good little man that refused his lodging to poor Nell?"

In 1688 on the other hand he refused to accept James II's 'Declaration of Indulgence' which he thought compromised the position of the established English Church and along with seven other bishops was imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried for the crime of 'High Misdemeanour'. But the jury defied the King and found him innocent. And yet only two years later after the 'Glorious Revolution' he was deprived of his see by WIlliam of Orange because he would not forswear the earlier oath he had taken to the King who had tried to destroy him. He believed having once freely sworn allegiance to James, he was precluded from taking a new oath to William.

Thomas Ken spent the last years of his life in the home of his old friend Thomas Thynne at Longleat House writing hymns, which is how he came to be buried in nearby Frome churchyard.

Day out in Glastonbury

Just arrived back in rainy Cumbria after a few days down in sunny Somerset, a contrast that 'you-know-who' didn't fail to notice. Lots of interesting excursions down there over the last couple of days. And one place that I really enjoyed 'touching base' with again was Glastonbury, England's answer to ... hmm, well where exactly is anything like Glastonbury?

It must be fifteen years since I went camping thereabouts and it felt like it had got even more 'extreme' and bizarre over the years. The various Arthurian myths and legends have always made the place popular with pilgrims and rubber-necking dreamers and ageing hippies but in this generation almost every form of spiritual bandwagon seems to have filled the local shop windows. Lots of mainstream-ish Hindu and Buddhist bric-a-brac. North American Indian charms and wicca hardware also much in evidence as well as endless stuff to bring a bit of luck. In fact hard to see how anyone could ever run out of luck again if they spent wisely on the 'charm' counters of Glastonbury and tuned in to a few ley lines.


Also some good veggie menus in local cafes. We all piled into the "End of the Rainbow" and the slices of caramelised onion and parsnip pie and chocolate cake were enormous, more than you might have shaken a stick at. Not that I had any chocolate cake wedges of course, no Siree!

After all that excess we headed up to the top of the Tor. There's no quick way as you will find out if you go there, although a minibus from the town car park will take you half way up. What a beautiful day - sky so clear that you could see far out across Somerset and Devon and then beyond the Bristol Channel into Wales and the hills of Glamorgan. The other way you could see far across into Wiltshire. Right to the curve of the earth. And what a big sky!

You can't help but like Glastonbury really. Well, I suppose you could hate it but it wouldn't do you much good.