The Ghost Train

Had a meeting of our 'Stainmore 150' planning committee this evening. We have a big event planned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the opening of our station at Kirkby Stephen East and even though I'll be back in Japan soon I'll be working busily on the web site and commemorative brochure from a distance. No doubt it will feature more and more here on 'Little Paddy'

Our meeting tonight was in the old Gresley Buffet Car standing in the 'Darlington Platform' where at least we can make ourselves mugs of coffee. It is the first time that I've been there after dark and the station interior is quite stunning, like travelling back in a time machine. The old train shed is lit by dozens of small electric lights just exactly like it was a century ago - the station was one of the first in England to have electric lights thanks to an experimental hydro-electric plant installed by the North Eastern Railway in 1905.

Later in the evening I had to head along the platform to take a leak in the men's room and the atmosphere out there on the platform in that soft yellow light was just amazing, there was a real sense around the place of 'not being alone' as your footfall echoed from the stone walls. Like walking through a poem by Walter de la Mare. But I think those ghosts of railwaymen and passengers past are a very benign lot, it was always a happy place when it was a working railway and feels even more so now in retirement when it is so carefully looked after.

I suddenly had a thought that someday soon we ought to have a competition for budding playwrights to write something on the theme of "The Ghost Train". We could have the performance on a dark winter evening with the audience wrapped up and sitting on the platform at one end. The producer and cast could do a kind of a 'theatre in the round' - making their entrances and exits from the waiting room, the carriages, the station master's office and the locomotive footplate. That would be an interesting writing challenge - perhaps a Victorian-style melodrama with noises off as points clank and signals turn from red to green outside in the darkness. What plot could you devise to make shivers creep up and down the spines of the gathered company?

This would be an ecumenical matter ...

Went down to choir practice at out local church this evening. It is the second time that I've stopped by there on a Tuesday night but it will the last for a while because this time next Tuesday I'll be in the air somewhere over Siberia.

Dropping by to join in choir practice is something that I feel mildly schizophrenic about - but only mildly. I'm definitely not a 'Christian' and haven't been for the last forty years. But I am a lover of choral music and especially singing in churches and it feels fine just to show up and open my mouth and help out by adding an extra voice at practice. I can even see that it would probably be good to lend a hand on the more community and 'ecumenical' occasions such as Harvest Festival and Christmas. Those would, in the immortal words of Father Ted, 'be ecumenical matters'.

Interesting the way this is coming up for me. The last time I was living in England I wasn't much involved in making music but now in Japan it has become a central part of my life again. And there is no repertoire that I love more than English sacred music from Thomas Tallis right through to John Bacchus Dykes. They express everything that is of highest value in our native spiritual tradition. I don't like that over-used term 'cultural heritage' but there you go, that is exactly what such music is. Handed down by our ancestors and still flowing strongly in our hearts.

All a bit of a puzzle for me but not such a big puzzle really. Buddhists have never claimed any exclusivity, that theirs is the 'Only True Faith', rather more that it is one valid path of spiritual training amongst many. Nor do I usually detect any sense of one-upmanship amongst the sincere educated Christians that I come across. In fact I felt rather cheered myself by a lot that the Pope said on his recent UK visit. It is true that the different faith groups need to stick together and share witness that the Eternal is manifest in all things and that we can express compassion, love and wisdom in our lives and that achieving wealth and secular power is not the only thing that counts, or indeed counts for much at all.

Last Episode?

Another ear-bashing from my mum today about getting her a copy of a new book about the history of the BBC Television sit-com "Last of the Summer Wine" so I've ordered a copy on Amazon. I was hoping to get one in a local bookshop somewhere but there isn't a shop here and there's just no time. Anyway I get free delivery AND a 40% discount although the volume was only published last month. Seems books are remaindered now before they even appear in print. It has been published because the programme has just come to an end at the conclusion of the thirty first series. I wonder when I'll first see one in a charity shop ...?

"Last of The Summer Wine". I just checked it up on the internet and I see that the first episode was broadcast on 12 November 1973. I thought that it must have been a long time back because I have a clear recollection of sitting in the casualty reception waiting area at Preston hospital on the night my grandfather died in October 1987 watching an episode consisting of a plot involving a pedal ice cream cart and a reservoir (didn't they all?). But the thing was that even then it was a repeat from ten years before. Incredible eh?

It seems that the programme was long our own Queen's favourite and for some reason it was also held in deep affection by the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. And many others I guess.

We make a habit of these long running broadcasts in Britain. You only have to think of 'The Archers' on Radio 4 and 'Coronation Street' on ITV. And the longer they keep getting broadcast the more of an institution they become, impossible to kill. Why do we do this? Is there something comforting about formulaic programme formats? As a student of the enduring they really interest me - they have somehow learned the knack of social reproduction, they know how to go on reiterating themselves. Of course there are lots of people - producers, script writers and actors who have a vested interest in making a career of all this but there is more to it than that. We incorporate the form into our own biographies, like a football team or a religious practice. They literally become institutions in teh formal sense that they extend beyond the duree of the lifespan of an individual, just think of all those millions that have never lived to see the last episode.

Maybe that is how it will be with 'Little House'

Sir Lamiel of Cardiff that was a great lover

Well, there's the end of my fun for the summer. Only stern duty calls between now and the moment that I get on that flight to Narita in eight days time. And there is enough 'stern duty' lurking around here to last me a lifetime I'm afraid. Oh! But thinking about it not all stern duty - amongst the repairing and filing and washing and cleaning that I need to do in every room in the house there are a few fun hours still to be snatched perhaps ...

So today I drove across to Harrogate and then we headed down to Barrow Hill near Chesterfield to the steam centre there. A big crowd and an interesting day out and I never even spent a penny, a 'first' for me at this kind of event.

One of the four engines in steam today was 30777 'Sir Lamiel', one of the Southern Railway N15 'King Arthur' Class express locomotives designed by Richard Maunsell and built in 1925 for West Country expresses to Salisbury and Plymouth. Morte d'Arthur is one of those books I like dipping into sometimes but for the life of me I couldn't remember who Sir Lamiel was so I just googled it and there he is in Book XIX in the Caxton version. But he only appears at the end of a list of names where it simply says "and Sir Lamiel of Cardiff that was a great lover".

You think I'm joking don't you. Well, look it up for yourselves!

If someone was going to write half a sentence about you in a splendid medieval romance then being flagged as a great lover isn't bad eh? Better than being noted for your collection of Belgian stamps or acne.

But is it - you know - 'nice'? Should it have some kind of a qualification in there about there being just one object of his honourable desire etc. - some fair and so far intact maiden that he sings 'hey derry derry' to as he rides his white 'charger' along the banks of the Taff?

And then I have to ask myself if I only had the one wish would I want to be known as "Sir Iain of Sedgefield who was a great lover" or "Sir Iain of Sedgefield who was a great thinker" or "Sir Iain of Sedgefield who was a great artist" or ... well, the list could be endless couldn't it? Are you sure the tooth fairy only gives one wish here?

Steam in chilly Shildon

Over to Shildon today for the first day of the September 'Steam Weekend' at 'Locomotion' - the branch up in County Durham of our National Railway Museum at York. Two of our volunteers from Kirkby Stephen East were manning a stand publicising our project and raising funds and although there was a cold wind the site was busy enough. I'm glad to say that the crowd was mainly young families from the area bringing their kids along to see and ride on steam trains.

To an ancient 'gricer' like me the locomotives at this kind of event always feel 'sanitised'. Here for example are two of the working engines today painted in Great Northern Railway (nearest) and North Eastern Railway (furthest) green. Towards the end of their lives in the 1960's they were a uniform grimy black and that is how I remember them but back around 1910 many such locomotives really did wear beautiful company liveries like this.

Next summer is the 150th anniversary of the opening of our station at Kirkby Stephen East and for the first time in fifty years you will be able to catch a train there too! After fourteen years of restoration and track laying we will finally be opening for business. You might not be able to travel very far - probably less than a mile! - but wheels will have begun turning again. Who would have thought it?

As I'll soon be back in Japan my contribution over the winter will have to be made at a distance. I will be co-ordinating the development of the web site which should be up by December and also putting together the commemorative guide. I'm sure that all that is going to keep me pretty busy. And it should be fun too...

Tomorrow - down with my friend Pete to the major rail nostalgia event being held at Barrow Hill near Chesterfield. We are definitely making a 'Big Boy's Weekend' of it all!

Autumn air

Over to The northern part of the Lakes today - a humid north-westerly air stream so there were plenty of showers to dodge and occasionally heavier rain but the cloud base was quite high and occasionally there were short bursts of sunshine. Not a day you would have wanted to head for the high fells or even wander far from the car but high on climatic 'entertainment value' nevertheless.

Nice for taking photographs as well, and here are two of them. The first is a place that featured here on 'Little Paddy' only a couple of months ago in high summer - the stone circle at Castlerigg. Now autumn is here and the cooler moist atmosphere has brought softer colours and a gentler contrast between the durability of stone and the mutability of the air and vegetation. Every time I call by at Castlerigg I am struck by the exceptional spiritual quality of this place.


The second photograph was a bit of fun - taken on the road down from Honister to Buttermere. I set the camera aperture to the highest value on my Canon - F36 - which resulted in an exposure time of about three seconds - more than enough to get that lovely soft effect on the water in the stream while keeping the rocks crisp. It give it an 'eternal' kind of feel don't you think? And it reminds me of the words of the Japanese National Anthem too.

May your reign
Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations,
Until the pebbles
Grow into boulders
Lush with moss

Incident at the Cheese Factory

Over to Hawes today - a short trip from here and a nice afternoon out if I have visitors staying here. It only takes just over half an hour unless you get stuck behind a tractor. You have been warned.

The main purpose of the trip was to stock up on Wensleydale cheese. The cheese factory is just a couple of hundred yards to the south of the town centre. Well, 'village centre' is probably a better description of Hawes, there only is the one street and two car parks. Still it is a place that fairly 'hums' these days, I was just astonished at the number of visitors there at the Yorkshire Dales National Park Centre when I was in town over the summer. It was absolutely 'heaving' - the area seems to have become a major tourist 'honey pot' recently.

Can't put my finger on it but there is something more than a bit bizarre about the cheese factory. The 'Rennet Zone' - a place of transformations and illusion. Wensleydale cheese is the stuff of pure 'Wallace and Grommit' style Yorkshire myth but today I had the feeling that it was all a bit too much like a set out of Monty Python's 'Meaning of Life'. A certain kind of visitor haunts the place. If the 'American Dream' is about the pursuit of happiness then the 'Wensleydale Dream' is about milling around in shops that sell tea towels and pictorial calendars and Kendal Mint Cake and woollen blankets designed to live on the the back seats of cars and be slept on by little grumpy white 'Scottie' dogs. This is a world documented in detail in the short stories and monologues of Alan Bennett, maybe my all-time favourite writer. And in a place like Hawes it becomes a kind of fearful reality, suddenly you pass through an invisible barrier and nothing is the same.

What is especially bizarre is coming across foreigners sucked into all this. In the car park I heard a definite North American 'twang' and cast around to see where it was coming from. A couple, but how did they ever get here? Americans are terrified of driving gear-change cars on the left on our awful narrow country lanes. But then I saw that someone from Leeds had brought them in their car, the policeman in me was satisfied eh? There was a rational explanation. Maybe they were Canadian cousins from Ontario

I wonder if you can buy Wensleydale cheese in supermarkets there Grommit?

Pope - part 2

I still haven't got the Pope's visit out of my system here; I was glued to my TV set before tea watching him taking off from Birmingham airport. In an Alitalia plane this time. Usually he flies home using the 'flag airline' of the country he has just visited but he seems to have drawn the line at British Airways, given them a miss. Probably worried that the cabin crew might walk out on strike, or lose his suitcase, and then there was a little matter a while back of BA sacking a member of staff for wearing a crucifix. What goes around comes around, and thank goodness it does.

The other thing I really warmed to on this trip was the extent to which he mixed with other Christian sects and other religious traditions during his British tour. Hardly any surprise that he got on well with our own Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury - two completely 'dyed in the wool' academics and intellectuals there, so many interests in common that they could hardly of failed to like each other. Birds of a feather. The warmth of their embrace on parting made it obvious that they were rather good friends. Bearing in mind the sadder side of the last several centuries of English history that is indisputably a 'good thing'.

The more interesting aspect for me was the focus on supportive relationships with other different religious traditions. In this sometimes shockingly secular and grasping acquisitive world people with any kind of spiritual practice should be going out of their way to help others nurture and develop theirs whatever brand it might be. "By their fruits shall ye know them" (Matt. 7:20) was never better advice.

This point seems to be coming up very strongly for me personally at the moment. For a time I'm surrounded by lots of nice people with a spiritual practice that isn't mine. Their practice isn't FOR me but I think it is great that they have one. Hmm ... something more that might be said there but I don't have the words for it.

I have a visitor for most of this week and so 'Little Paddy' might or might not be appearing regularly.

Watching the Pope

I was watching the Pope on his travels around England on the TV at various stages during the day - usually while I was eating, folding the laundry that kind of thing. I'm busy enough at the moment without spending time glued to the 'box' and I can be a real addict if I let myself be. But I did enjoy the Pope and especially the big Mass that they held in Westminster Cathedral this morning. Wonderful singing! And I'm not even a Christian eh? - let alone a Roman Catholic.

There are lots of aspects to this visit that I feel an itch to write about but the one that especially struck me today was that this kind of thing - large public events promoted by the State and institutions - simply don't happen in Japan. It is another of those profound differences that I've never noticed - until I noticed. Of course happenings like Royal Weddings get equivalent if not similar coverage. And public broadcasting like parliamentary proceedings is also a feature of Japanese TV - in fact they do it much better that we do because they are more polite and civilised and not so confrontational in their politics.

No, I mean events like this. Say the Dalai Lama came to Japan and met the Emperor, of course it would be covered on TV and you would probably see some bowing and greetings but it would essentially be behind closed doors. There would be no ceremony nor 'discourse' involved, no grand public spectacle. There would be no major uplifting of hearts. Nor would the opposition and protests to such events by some sections of the public get any airing, probably there wouldn't even BE any opposition or protests. Who would care?

What is the actual difference here? I'm not so sure. Japanese and English people have a very similar pride in and love of their country and both nations equally like to whinge and complain about the parlous state of affairs while actually nurturing a deep respect for the essence of their Japaneseness or Englishness. I suspect this partly comes from both being insular,and so inherently xenophobic peoples.

I think is is something to do with Japanese civil society lacking institutions that give a public face to power. And the church - and music and argument - all play a part in England that is Japan is not covered by temples and instinctive deference for authority. In Japan there never was the equivalent of the 'Anglican' church, no Reformation. Shoguns like Tokugawa Ieyasu made a formidable contribution to the development of ethics and morality but it all worked so very, very differently. Yet another topic worth researching if only there was time!

Half an Inch to the Mile

I've got a lot of maps - at the last count which was a long time ago about five thousand of them. And they never cease to 'grab' me, I often find them more interesting than books. Once I pick one up I can't put it down. For example you might just think that a map is a map, but although the scale might be constant between countries - 1:50,000 is now common around the world - the maps actually in use are often quite different.

In Japan for example the 'city plan' at about 1:10,000 and the detailed Zenrin city atlases are widely used and you can also easily buy maps of the Prefecture. This is the scale of human experience - on foot and by bus and train around a particular city or conurbation. But wider scale maps are much rarer and few people buy the kinds of topographic maps that you might be hard pressed to live without in a place like rural America because people just don't live on that scale.

I mention all this because this evening I have been boxing away some old Bartholomew's 'half-inch' maps of Britain. Fifty years ago they were by far the commonest map sold here but they went out of fashion and then out of print about 1980 and the company - based in Edinburgh - was sold and eventually merged with Harper Collins. Those maps, to a scale of 1:126,720 were beautiful and colorful representations of the British landscape and ideal for a world in which people made leisurely bike rides an weekends along country lanes.

But over the years lifestyles changed. The cyclists became motorists who needed maps covering a much bigger area, and walking hiking and climbing became more popular outdoor pursuits, all of which needed much more detailed maps showing footpaths. New map series appeared to serve these new markets at 1:250,000 and 1:25,000 and the old 'half inch' scale and the company that produced them vanished.

A beautiful scale to look at though, those maps really show an era in the emergence of the English landscape to perfection. To get a 'birds eye view' of a region you couldn't invent a better map and you can still find them in secondhand bookshops without too much trouble.

Newspaper deliveries

I went down to the local newsagents to buy a ruler this morning. How come we don't have one of those, how many rulers have I ever owned in my life? Actually I bought two - they were only 69p each. One was a 30cm transparent Helix product, the other a natty 15cm rainbow colour object emblazoned with the words 'Kirkby Stephen' by some stationery manufacturer, probably based in Dairen or Guangdong.

Arrayed around the counter were the usual piles of newspapers you find in English newsagents, a sight that you NEVER see in Japan. In fact there aren't any newsagents in Japan anywhere. Well, some convenience stores might sell a few, as might railway station snack kiosks. But there won't be a choice, it will be either 'Asahi Shinbun' or 'Japan Times' or 'Mainichi'.

Japanese newspapers are largely sold through distribution networks in which they are printed regionally and then distributed to agents who will deliver the paper to your door. The whole 'mechanic' is very slick. Local promotional leaflets from supermarkets etc. are often collated with the main paper and if it is going to rain overnight they will be packed in plastic bags. The local distributor then drives around the neighbourhood in the dark between about 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM delivering papers on a motorbike, it is usually the first sound of the new day in that last hour of dark before the dawn. And these distributors also come around in the day time and try and persuade you to become subscribers, armed - as salesmen always are in Japan - with piles of freebies and gifts such as tissues and kitchen paper.

But here is the thing - this distributor will only deliver ONE paper. So two or three bikes might roar past the house in the dark. There is no such thing as wholesaler news networks so you can't get your 'Beano' or 'Stamp Collector's Weekly' delivered with your 'Mainichi', nor can you get any other newspaper either. If you want to be in the newspaper business you have to not just print them but also deliver them yourself.

Personally I don't think this kind of monopoly is a 'good thing' - it puts the power of the press into very few hands, even fewer than in England.

Antidote to doubt

Early start out into the autumn sunshine and across the Pennine moors bound for Durham this morning. I had a class and a couple of meetings on my schedule plus I had to collect the 'final final' hard bound copy of my thesis and deliver it to the academic administration office. I'd collected it from the binder's by 9:30 and walked around the corner to the university offices and deposited it and got my receipt. So that is that, six years of work complete.

The first of my later meetings was with my supervisors to talk over some options for publishing papers in academic journals. I must admit that when I had finally finished all the writing (for about the fifth time!) back in February I didn't care if I never saw another academic paper in my life. I was pretty well minded to put it all down to experience and do something COMPLETELY different. But you can't just do that of course - there is a huge investment of your time there, and also of you - your creativity and energy. And I have gradually warmed to the idea of putting the work to the best use I can in terms of publishing - though I still have to debate with myself how that is finally done.

My final appointment of the day was to meet up with a young Japanese student or urban planning I know from Tokyo who is just starting on her own postgraduate research in England. We went for a coffee in the cathedral cafe and then just talked wall to wall urban planning and research until our voices were hoarse . She was the best antidote I could possibly have had to some of the self-doubt of the last few months. We both had so much enthusiasm for our shared interest that sparks were flying through the air. If the cafe hadn't closed we would probably still be there talking.

Reflecting on this experience walking back to the car it struck me just how much I DO potentially have to give now. But what exactly and to who? And where, how and why? Offering ideas and enthusiasm and encouragement to many others for sure. It is a kind of expression of love I can see that, to give yourself openly and without limits, like a candle burning to offer light. Why wasn't I doing this before? I was just lacking the vision somehow, so much of my life feels that it has been sterile.

But even now the exact form and the skillful means to use time wisely are still not clear to me, even if the motivation is there.

Monday Meeting

My schedule Monday afternoon meant that I could linger in Lancaster at tea time and then get along to the usual weekly Monday evening meeting of the town Zen meditation group that I used to regularly sit with. I've been a member there for more than twenty five years, many of my friends go. I first got to a meeting in October 1984 - I had intended to go the previous week but it was the night that Lancaster Market burned down and it was impossible to get through town because of the blaze and all the fire engines.

Apart from one brief period we've met in the the Lancaster Friends' Meeting House ever since. At first we sat in the 'Porch Room', a tiny hexagonal chamber over the main entrance with a trap door for a fire escape. We used to set up our altar on a rickety bookcase with a glass front. It was only when we offered to paint the room and came to move it that we realised that some of the dusty volumes inside was bound copies of original seventeenth century pamphlets covering the period when Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned by the state and the established church for practising their form of meditation. That was quite an awesome discovery for me, to find out that that our Buddha had been supported by a shelf full of a contemporary record of the earliest meetings for silent worship in England.

Later, about twenty years ago, we shifted to one of the big back rooms converted from what had been a Quaker elementary school at the rear of the building. Nice carpet and even potted plants but the slight downside was that on still summer evenings you could hear all the platform announcements from Lancaster railway station just behind the building and meditation was punctuated by the occasional Anglo-Scottish express roaring through. But you soon get used to that kind of stuff, we would miss it if it wasn't there.

There was quite a gale blowing last night and heavy showers too. I had a dodgy drive home afterwards, clinging to the steering wheel on the motorway. Autumn eh? Still mild enough but the dark country of winter is not so far behind. Somehow that room, which is warm and comfortable enough, draws the sound of the wind into your inner ear. In meditation I feel like a child lying in bed in the dark while the grown ups are still moving around downstairs. Outside there is the occasional muffled sound from the station or from the streets, sounds humans and of the city. But then above all that is the sound of the wind, pushing in from the ocean that lies just to the west across the mouth of the Lune and rising in buffeting waves over the roof tops, somehow grateful to have made land fall at last.

Three Moons

Recently I have found myself thinking often of the moment of three full moons. Why these three I wonder? Like everyone else I have known romantic moons, some very romantic moons and occasionally simply outrageously romantic moons but these three were nothing to do with 'romance' in any guise.

In chronological order the first was probably in June or July of 1966. I was doing vacation surveying work at Moor House, a very remote nature reserve centre in northern England far from any road. All there was to this moon was that it was amazingly bright and full and the sky was clear and so the two of us lodging there decided we would take a late night hike up the high fells to the west. We must have walked 15 kilometres across the moors by moonlight that night and it was all as clear as day once your eyes got used to it. Ever since I've loved to walk in the hills at night when the brightness of the moon (occasionally the clarity of the stars) makes it possible to do this kind of 'walking on the edge of the world' on your own.

The second moon must have been the winter of 1969, shrouds of racing cloud sweeping over a moon which again lit up the hills and my grandfather joking that on such spooky nights on these kinds of lonely country lanes he would come back and haunt me. Maybe he does too but of course it isn't a scary kind of haunting.

And the third moon was one frosty winter night about ten years later driving on the back road from Great Eccleston to Bilsborrow with fresh snow on the ground and the road surface. I switched off all my car lights and cruised in the darkness. Once your eyes got used to it, then it was easy, a kind of strange voyage in my own space.

I suppose these really are three kinds of rather mad moon, lunatic moons. There is a hint of craziness in the way that I was that runs as a common thread through each. The moon really does affect our behaviour eh? If I do something crazy soon I will know who to blame.

The pack horse bridge

This is one of my favourite bridges. Even if I were to tell you precisely where it is you would still struggle to find it. It crosses a small stream just near its meeting with the River Tees, but you can only see it from this spot in an overgrown meadow. A more modern bridge (well, at least 250 years old I suppose but then everything is relative) crosses the same beck parallel to and just behind it. You can see part of it just beneath the arch.

You could easily walk over that 'new bridge', which carries the narrow lane from Startforth to Rokeby, and not even realise that the ancient bridge was there right next to you over the parapet, just a few feet to the south.

I'd guess this bridge was built in the fourteenth or at the latest the early fifteenth century. It was made for the use of pack horses and mules heading for Egglestone Abbey up on the hill above this spot. It is only about four feet wide, and on the grass grown cobbles you can still see the marks made by the iron shoes of those horses if you look very carefully. Or so my grandmother insisted. From this side view you can appreciate that it has a very fine ashlar arch, probably built by the stone masons employed on maintenance work by the monks. I like to imagine that this was a job that they managed to string out right though one long beautiful summer back in Plantagenet days, maybe one year during the reign of Edward III around 1350. And at the end of such hot August afternoons perhaps those masons sat here in the light of the westering sun drinking ale and swapping gossip.

If you know where to look there are many old medieval tracks and paths in the valleys of the Tees and Greta and Eden and you only have to set off down them, turn the first corner, and you become one with the tender drone of the flies and the sweet scents of all those woodland herbs. And then step back into a much earlier England where the last of the afternoon light slants through the undergrowth and wild things move and you can inhale the strong damp odours of the forest. Whenever I'm in one of these special places where time stands still those lines of Oberon's from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (Scene 1: A wood near Athens) are always in my mind

"I pray thee, give it me.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine"

The 'march past'

I was watching an item on the news the other day about the memorial service and parade at St. Paul's Cathedral, held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the London blitz. Seventy seems a strange number to celebrate to me, in the UK we label it as a 'Platinum' wedding anniversary but the number has an unsatisfactory sense of mere convenience to me somehow - you aren't so likely to hit seventy five which has a better ring about it in terms of numerology.

Anyway there they all were on the TV doing a proper 'march past' in step - the RAF and the nurses in dress uniform. And the traditional 'fly past' of a Spitfire and Lancaster overhead. I had quite forgotten how these events used to attract my deepest attention as a child.

There was a kind of lurking existential 'logical fallacy' about 'march pasts' that used to profoundly worry the young philosopher in me when we stood on the kerb to watch soldiers marching past when I was small. I've noticed over the years that children often have a deeply original perspective on such things, not being influenced by the conventional discourses and meta-narratives of those adults around them with only concrete left between their ears and sawdust lingering in their hearts. These childhood experiential uncertainties all centred around the question of where the actual 'marching past' began and ended. There we go along the road in our uniform - left, right, left, right - but obviously the true business of the 'march past' can't just be past 'here' - it must extend infinitely both back into the past and forward into the future. After marching down the High Street the logic of real experience dictates that it needs to extend past the gas works, across the river and over the hills and far, far away. Hamelin-like, it has its own pied piper logic eh? The 'march past' comes from infinity and goes to infinity. Adults only see the 'march past' from the perspective of the saluting general or politician on the review stand but that is merely to see the world as just a moment and not a process. Somewhere those men are still marching. Where are they now I wonder?

This intuition is exactly captured in that bizarre and painful sketch "The French Waiter" in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life". When I first saw this scene in the film it I realised for the first time that I was not alone in understanding the significance of all this. You can find that sketch here

Against the gradient

A quick trip to the surgery this afternoon. Actually I was impressed - I phoned at lunch time and had an appointment within two hours. Over the last couple of weeks I've been developing a pain in my right shin and the doctor thinks that it is probably just a dose of tendonitis. "Better put my feet up for a few days" he says.

You have to laugh eh? Here I am putting in a bit of extra effort to get my weight and more importantly my blood sugar level down and what happens? The doctor says the walking makes me sick. You can't win. It is a shame, I've been getting into a good rhythm. I'll give it until Sunday.

Walking up the old railway line if you put some effort into it you can really feel the gradient working against you, even on foot. It is only one in fifty - a 'two percent grade' in American terms - but that was positively Alpine for steam locomotives.

Somehow when I walk this slope I can feel the effort in the tension of my arms and shoulders - must be some kind of a folk or a collective memory there. The detailed working of steam locomotives is complex but basically you have two controls just like a car. The 'regulator' is the equivalent of the accelerator ('gas') pedal and controls the amount of steam. The 'reverser' is like the equivalent of a car's gears.

When the reverser is in full gear the steam from the boiler was admitted into the cylinders for perhaps 65% of each stroke which would be a half rotation of the wheels. But as the locomotive builds up speed and impetus you could reduce the 'cut off' until steam was only admitted to the cylinders for say 15% of the stroke and expansion did the rest of the work. This saved the fireman a lot of shovelling of coal into the firebox.

But on a steep hill that 'cut off' had to be increased again to maybe 40% or 50%, giving the fireman two or three times the work to provide enough steam to provide the energy to keep the train moving. Steep hills were hard physical work for train crews, they had to shovel much more coal into the firebox to keep the energy output high.

And somehow when I'm walking I can still feel this, almost hear the change in my imagination's ear the exhaust beat as the engine works harder and the fireman is reduced to just shovelling and shovelling continuously to keep that steam pressure up neat the mark on the gauge. A skilled job and a very physical one. Sometimes they would shovel six tons of coal on one shift.

Who is a pretty boy then?

I was sitting eating some toast for tea this evening and watching the news on TV when there was a heck of a squarking and screeching came down the chimney and out of the fire place. I went out into the back yard to see what was going on and it was these two were the culprits. They were sitting on my chimney pot and making a racket. They seemed to be holding a long distance conversation with some other Macaws in the pine trees at the opposite end of the field at the back.

You can find most things in Kirkby Stephen if you look carefully enough (except a glazier!) but you don't have to look far to see more parrots, parakeets and Macaws than you could shake a stick at. They hang around on the roof tops in town all day, and being very sociable birds they fly in pairs screeching as they go. I'm told that they like our part of town because of the possibility of tidbits in the school playground across the road but I don't know if that is true.

They certainly do like this end of town though, I quite often hear them during the day.

The parrots are all here thanks to John Strutt, a local naturalist who died earlier this year but who lived towards Hartley and developed a nature reserve there. He took many 'rescue' birds over the years and several of them still go back to his place to roost at night, although others have now nested locally.

These birds really cheer me up, they would cheer anybody up the way they flap around the place and make this corner of the Pennines feel and sound like a little bit of Africa. It all feels like something the Beatles might have written a song about, something that featured 'magic mushrooms' and rainbow coloured 'shades'.

Send in the clowns?

When it comes to reflecting on the nitty-gritty of experience I suspect that I'm primarily a classifier. Classification is not the straightforward animal that we assume, you only have to read a text like Michel Foucault's 'The Order of Things' - 'Les Mots et les Choses' - to get a glimpse of how the underlying conditions of truth forever metamorphose. If you get your teeth into any of the great systems of classification - Linnaeus and plants for example - then you soon realise how tentative and provisional all processes of classification really are. They can only ever be based on relative understandings.

I really notice how things so often seemingly effortlessly inter-relate. There is an old Spanish proverb 'Dios escribe derecho con renglones torcidos' - "God writes straight with crooked lines". Events happen, but then apparently unconnected threads suddenly are seen in a quite different perspective. It is as if everything was meant to fall into place that way, such a relationship was meant to be after all, was 'written in the stars - it is the course of karma.

Others relationships are not like that. At least superficially.

This came into my mind today because driving down to Lancashire I was listening on the radio to that wonderful Stephen Sondheim song 'Send in the Clowns' from 'A Little Night Music'. Powerful stuff, even had a tear trickling down my cheek.

Isn't it rich? Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground, You in mid-air.
Send in the clowns.

Isn't it bliss? Don't you approve?
One who keeps tearing around, One who can't move.
Where are the clowns? Send in the clowns.

Just when I'd stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines, No one is there.

We all know these kinds of dimensions in our lives, I suppose that is why the music is so powerful. Wormholes in space, a reality that feels that it should join up somewhere if only we could figure how this piece if the jigsaw relates to all the others. Maybe it is a part of the 'bigger picture' or maybe it isn't - just a sad little dream recalled in the clearer like of day - "a bubble in the stream, the sound of thunder on the summer air ..."

After the wind

It was really windy around here last night. It would hardly have qualified as a 'severe gale', nothing like you get in November or December, but I it must have tipped the scales at 'Force 8' during some of the stronger gusts. I lay awake in the dark listening to it all, what sound is more beautiful than that? My favourite kind of weather. And the house here is a real treat to be in on darker nights when the wind gets up - there is that lovely tuneless whistling down the chimney as you sit quietly or work away alone with just the elements outside for company.

Taking my usual walk around the footpath 'circuit' to the east of the town this morning the evidence of the night's happenings were everywhere to be seen. I usually head up the river for about a mile and then follow an abandoned railway line out onto higher ground. It is forty years since trains ran there and new woodland has taken hold on the cutting sides. But today debris was strewn everywhere. Many of these trees had suffered damage, whole boughs brought down in the dark and in one case on the path back down the hill a whole tree had been uprooted and tipped against a stone wall. If a gale like this had turned up three or four weeks later there wouldn't have been much damage done but in early September the outer leaf canopy is still complete and attached strongly to the tree and so the boughs are put under terrific strain.

The weather was tough on the animals too I came across too. At one point I encountered a collie wandering lost along the river bank but she was too afraid to come to me. Crossing the old stone viaduct at Podgill two cock pheasants were running on the gravel ahead, unable to fly because of the severe gusts coming down off the moor. I couldn't help thinking with the 'season' opening next week that they would be wiser to stay down here on the ground as long as they could, maybe stick to this bit of railway or perhaps the thick woods in the valley below and certainly not to head back up to the open moor when the wind dropped. But you can't tell cock pheasants eh?

Kobe eyes tattoos

News sites with Japanese stories in English are few and far between once you have absorbed the 'Japan Times' and NHK material, so if you want to keep informed you do have to cast around a bit. There is one site I sometimes visit that is SO bad that I won't even mention its name. Apart from the many errors and 'howlers' that I come across in its incredibly biased right wing reporting, it has a kind of masculine flavour of the worst kind. This arise mainly from the many bored American servicemen sitting in bases in Okinawa with time on their hands who like to pour scorn on the 'locals' on the Internet. I would be appalled to think of any of my Japanese friends reading it. I think that probably sets the scene that I don't like this site much.

Also it has some of the silliest headlines I ever came across and in particlar they love affectations like using 'eye' as a verb in the sense of 'to consider something'. But it was a surprise even to me the other day to come across an article entitled 'Kobe eyes tattoo ban at Suma Beach after marijuana case'

Remember the Beach Boys - 'Sumahama' - back in the 1970's. OK. It is the 'Coney Island' of Kobe, the 'Southend of Kansai'. Well, the essence of this story was that it seems that someone had been arrested on Suma Beach this summer for smoking marijuana. Hard to imagine I know but then remember that some student was also arrested in Kyoto for the same offence last year, we even had a case of marijuana possession in Chiba a few years back. Japan gets more lawless day by day - I put it down to all the troublesome foreigners myself. Locals were getting nervous about going to la plage with so many 'druggies' littering the place so the city bureaucrats had a meeting about it all and immediately solved the problem by passing a new city ordinance.

Which bans anyone with tattoos from visiting the beach.

What do you mean 'what for'? I would have thought that was pretty darn obvious. It is a well known fact that all bad guys have tattoos and only bad people smoke cannabis so if the cops put anyone with a tattoo straight back on the train this burgeoning drug problem is solved at a stroke. QED - Quod erat demonstrandum as we post-doctoral types love to mutter.

Will the tattoo ban hold back the black tide of corruption? Somehow I doubt it. These same officials passed a city ordinance two years ago banning loud noises on the beach at night but this year there have already been more that 70 musical events. It seems that laws don't enforce themselves and especially very silly ones.

Swallows are restless

The swallows were wheeling over the river when I walked down to the big meadow this evening. It was mild enough not to take a jacket with me but under that soft grey milky sky the ridge of the Pennine escarpment north of here looked like like the misty grey mountains in a Chinese Zen ink wash painting.

I've been noticing the swallows all week. Every time I've stepped outside they have been darting and turning restlessly, circling in the air above the lane. Maybe it is just my imagination but every day they seem to fly a bit higher, and sometime in the next week or so they will be gone, headed south on their travels across continents. I can sense their anxiety, especially the young birds for whom this is the first time, this journey is latent in their genes but so far it has never taken actual form for them. A mystery soon to be lived.

For me the urgency of the swallows is the second sign of autumn arriving, following hard on the heels of those late August evening mists and the certain sharpness in the night air that they introduce. Autumn is subtle - even in the heat of summer it is already present, a maturity and fruiting present in the balmy weeks that follow the summer solstice if you take time to notice.

This year I will have an autumn migration of my own, crossing continents in my own way. But it doesn't feel like it is time for that yet, I am not as restless as the swallows. I'll let the equinox come and go, wait until the days draw in and the central heating gets turned on and then I'll think about all that, I don't yet feel the urgency to take flight.

A tight squeeze

Some days turn out to be eventful for all the wrong reasons and today was one of those days. My schedule included a trip over to Durham this morning to get my thesis into Prontaprint for final binding, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening coaxing my printer to deliver the necessary 378 pages without running out of magenta ink. This isn't the kind of town where you can buy Canon Pixma 990 ink cartridges off the shelf I'm afraid, it would mean a 50 mile round trip at least. But the fates smiled on me and this morning I had a big cardboard box of paper ready to load into the car, even if I was running a bit late because I didn't wake at 6:30 as usual.

Got everything loaded, came back into the house and checked the back door was locked and the gas and lights were off, headed out of the front door and closed it behind me and - the door handle fell off. Well, that isn't exactly true, it didn't actually come completely away in my hand, just kind of 'expired' as I turned it vertically upwards to engage the many door bolts that come with this kind of a high-tech plastic hermetically sealed front door. And then when I turned the handle back it just wobbled around uselessly. Bust! My high-tech front door was as firmly closed as a prison cell and with me on the wrong side. Quite unopenable by anyone. You would have to use explosives.

I eventually figured out the the only way back in was to remove a small pane of glass from the back door, reach through the hole and retrieve the key from the counter by the sink. With the hand tools in the shed 'Plan B' started off well enough but that glass was deeply embedded in putty. Then I noticed that the back room window was open and, contrary to my expectations, it actually opened enough for someone as big as me to crawl through. 'Plan C' took shape.

And in the end that is how I did it, with the aid of a small ladder and some shelving that I could pass through and stand against the inside wall and so avoid sending the television set flying across the room. An hour and one tight squeeze later (so I really can get my leg up that high these days after all!) I was inside and feeling pleased with myself and ready for a late departure to Durham.

But tomorrow I need to get that front door dismantled from the inside and repaired. I was wondering what to do with all that time I have hanging on my hands at the moment ...

Narrow Road

Now that schools have gone back the weather has suddenly improved and we are getting all those summer days that would have been more appropriate in late July or early August. Still, who is complaining? And if the daylight hours are fine and hot the nights are definitely chilly, you wouldn't want to walk far without a jacket after sunset.

I had an errand today over in Crosby Garrett. It is a village I don't know well, even in my younger days around here it was just further than I would have wanted to walk on a casual excursion. If you were going to use up THAT much energy you would have made a proper expedition of it and gone up onto the higher fells.

I took the road by Smardale Hall. It is the most direct route but it always makes me nervous and today driving a smaller car I was doubly anxious . Because it is the end of summer the hedges are even higher and thicker than they usually are. All the country lanes around this neck of the woods are narrow but the last two miles of this particular route are just crazy. The lane is never more than three metres wide, in places it feels more like a tarmac footpath. So if you met anything coming the other way you would have to back up hundreds of metres. I have visions of local farmers in bygone times meeting in this lane with horses and hay carts and it taking the whole day to sort out - horses just hate backing up. Maybe they even resorted to the occasional fisticuffs to establish who got the right of way.

Cars are easier to back up but the other trick this lane throws up at you is that half way along there is a ford over Scandal Beck. And it is the only ford I know where the road actually turns a bend in the middle of the river bed! It would be a nightmare trying to drive this lane after dark in heavy rain in the middle of winter and I don't suppose anybody is ever dumb enough even to try.

Errand done I came home the long way around through Soulby. It is three miles further and no easy road either but frankly it is worth it just for the peace of mind.

Rainbow analogy

I recently came across this picture of a rainbow I took near Killarney and by a bit of serendipity it was on the same day as I was reading an article by one of our senior monks on the 'Scripture of Great Wisdom' - one of the sections of what many Buddhists refer to as the 'Heart Sutra'

Reverend Master Hugh used a rainbow to offer an excellent analogy for the understanding that all things - including 'ourselves' - are empty and void of any separate 'self nature'. It is such an easily understood parallel that I'm surprised that I never heard anyone mention it before.

So is a rainbow 'real'? 'Real' in the same sense that we perceive ourselves 'real'? Well, yes and no. We don't believe that you can reach the end of it and dig up a pot of gold any more (well, at least not as far as rainbows are concerned eh?). But then look at the picture above. Obviously it is 'real' because you can photograph the darn thing.

Only when five factors arise does a rainbow manifest and become 'real'. There has to be sunlight, an atmosphere which contains raindrops, an observer and finally there has to be a specific orientation between the observer, the sun and the raindrops (usually the sun needs to be behind the observer).

Take any of these away (a cloud crosses the sun) and the rainbow no longer exists.

Because all five factors and the appearance of the rainbow happen at the same time we say that they are 'co-arising'. Because you can never get a rainbow if even one factor is missing we say that they are 'co-dependent'. And because they all coincide at the same place we say they are 'interpenetrating'.

So is the rainbow 'real'?

When I read this I realised that this was exactly the same question about the idea of 'process' that I have been sparring with and chasing around in one guise or another this last six years. You may think that we are more substantial than rainbows and you may think that a city is even more substantial than we are but cities are more than simple bricks and concrete, that is just an expression of the skandha of form which can be knocked down even quicker than it can be built up. The really important stuff is what it takes to make form arise. What factors make things appear and change?

Down the Dingle

It is a long time since I was last in Ireland. I can date it exactly because I was there the year that Clare won the All-Ireland Hurling Final at Croke Park and that was 1995. The last time they had won it before that was 1914, so understandably everyone was very, very excited. And we fell in with all that 'crack' twice because we looking for bed and breakfast in Ennis a few days before 'The Big Game' when the entire population of Clare were already going crazy on the streets of their county town. And then we were actually in Dublin the night before the game where the whole population of County Clare arrived in the capital along with their team. Not much sleep was had THAT night anywhere.

But this isn't what I want to write about. The pictures here were taken on a much earlier trip - in fact just a couple of months before my son Patrick was born in 1976. And this is even further west, down the Dingle peninsula in County Kerry. And then even further west than that, out on the little unclassified road that runs around Mount Eagle and down to Slea Head. Just a couple of miles out in the ocean the craggy uninhabited Blasket Islands and then nothing until Newfoundland. This is the most westerly point in Ireland, the European continental shelf ends here. "The next parish is in Americay!" they will tell you.

Just a short way back along the road are clusters of stone 'cells' which in the great flowering of the Irish Celtic Church back in the sixth century were home to a community of monks and saints living on the barren boggy mountainside in the teeth of Atlantic gales. Walking around here I used to try and imagine what it must have been like living a life of solitude and prayer around here in one of these tidy stone huts but the truth of it is that you can't begin to imagine such things, or maybe you could if you spent time at a Coptic monastery in the Egypt, following in the footsteps of the Desert Fathers.

Just north of here the sixth century Saint Brendan of Clonfert - 'Brendan the Navigator' - is said to have climbed the mountain and seen the New World which is why he set off on the earliest of the transatlantic voyages.. And also in Dingle they love to tell you that this is where 'Ryan's Daughter' was filmed - remember that one? Me neither.