How Regularly Must It Happen Before We Bother to Prepare Properly?

The uselessness of the English (particularly the southern English) when it comes to coping with snow is notorious. Passengers sit kicking their heels in airports around the world, because at Heathrow or Luton we can’t get the snow off the runways. Here, this morning, hundreds of schools are closed, forcing parents to stay at home even if their workplaces are open.

We don’t have the right tyres on our cars, and when we can’t drive any further we abandon them leaving an obstruction for those coming behind. We don’t bother to clear the snow in front of our houses, thus ensuring pedestrians compress it into something akin to a skating rink. A lot of us don’t even own snow shovels or a bag of grit.

There’s something infantilizing about all this and the media play along with it, playing videos of children throwing snowballs. It feels like we’re not living in a serious country. Not in a place where people believe in the value of work. It can get intensely annoying.

However consider this. The amount of time (and enthusiasm) anyone spends preparing for something to happen is a based on a judgement as to how likely it is to happen.

I remember once in Budapest speaking to a couple of Americans in a bar and they cheerfully admitted that though they were working there on long term contracts they had decided not to learn any Hungarian. The relatively small number of people in the world who speak that language meant that the effort of learning it was not justified.

In the same way, here in England we could work hard, both individually and at a government level, preparing for snow and ice. The Germans have all kinds of laws about this, and all around the year, even in 30^○ summer heat, you can see notices stating who’s responsible for the 'Winter Duty' of clearing the snow away. 

But that kind of rigid discipline is not the English way.

This six inch snowfall only happens every four years or more. (In fact it’s seven years since I’ve seen snow like this outside my window.) It’s an intense nuisance that we’re so little prepared. But, our climate is intensely unpredictable and not preparing is a judgement we make, about the best use of our limited time and resources.

So next time I am cursing the general uselessness of the authorities, I will try and calmly tell myself that this is a judgement we’ve made. And remind myself that, in any decision making, probability and pragmatism should not be neglected. 

HISTORY IS KING

I first read this at 15 and then again in early adulthood and now in middle age once again. It's lifechanging. The moment you finish it you want to inhabit its world - or at least try and write your own story set in that world. There are brilliant descriptions of settings, movement, light and weather. Seton is immensely generous to minor characters, giving them headspace in the story in a way remniscient of Dickens. The first third of the book, Katherine alone making her way in the world, and then married but abandoned to the mad inhabitants of Kettlethorpe, is Gothic. The final third, her spiritual redemption, has tremendous emotional heft and is incredibly moving. I didn't quite cry this time but I have in the past. The middle part (if I was to find a fault) somewhat sags, as the chronicle-sourced narrative of Kings and Great Men takes centre stage. John of Gaunt is a variable character, and somewhat annoying with his self-obsessed fears. Until he mellows in maturity, there is little evidence of his attractiveness apart from his wealth and power. However this is a crucial feature of the book - she's the centre of it, not him or anyone else. Katherine with her beauty and humour and calmness, her vibrant interior life, is a leading lady like few others. And the trouble is, you can look in vain for anyone else like her in the rest of Anya Seton. Years ago I hopefully bought all her other books, but none of them comes close to KATHERINE. This book has launched many historical novelists. There is something about knowing that the world we live in - the ground we walk on, the light and the sky and water - was once inhabited by people whose lives were immeasurably more judgemental, violent and dramtic. The drama of history survives through old beams and old stones and old landscapes as a kind of stage set to drama. Years ago I made a pilgrimage to Lincoln Cathedral and Kettlethorpe in the hope of discovering those textures. Not much is left, but there is something. The rest is inside my head....

 Gateway at Kettlethorpe Manor, the only part surviving from Katherine's time.

The Big Cover Up

Bruce Robinson's 'They All Love Jack' is, I'm tempted to say, the only Jack the Ripper book you need to read, but it won't do if you don't know the basis chronology of events. There again, nearly everyone does know them by now. Robinson's text is encyclopaedic, his thesis closely argued and proved very convincingly through immense attention to detail, including accounts of many murders ignored by other writers and careful analysis of the many Ripper letters. Whether or not you subscribe to Robinson's rather baroque full theory - there is no mystery, just a cover-up; the Ripper was Michael Maybrick, a senior freemason who left masonic symbols at the sites of his killings, framed his own brother (via 'The Diary of Jack the Ripper') whom he then poisoned, and was assured of his own freedom through the vulnerability of the masonic establishment - it does seem unarguable that there was a cover-up at some level. I enjoyed his argument that the police and judiciary were hopelessly compromised by their loyalty to a Masonic establishment that went from the Prince of Wales downwards. As you might expect from the man behind 'Withnail', the book is written in an enjoyably irreverent style (like Orwell at his most polemical), and extremely readable:
'The English Establishment had a full-blown psychopath still active in their midst - but no problem, they could cope with the odd dead kid or two, even more with the odd dead whore. Their only problem was that if he got caught they all got caught, all the way up to the Grant Glutton. How could this profilgate prance around in his pinafore when he shared one with Jack the Ripper?' Excellent stuff. The only fault with the book is its structure -some 150 pages towards the end are devoted to the death of James Maybrick and the horrendously unfair trial of his widow Florence. Whilst this is undeniably gripping reading - a Stalinist show trial comes to mind - it could almost have been a separate book in its own right (I knew nothing about the case, though I had read about the comparable Charles Bravo case; his widow was also a Florence.)
It's a hefty book, but you'll read it fast, specially if you have any interest in how history can be re-written to suit the Establishment. He is enjoyably cynical about the cult of 'Ripperology' and quite rightly questions the veneration with which even modern authors treat the pronouncements of such as Donald Swanson and Melville McNaghten. I can't help wondering if, given there was coverup, the truth is simpler. What about Thomas Cutbush? After all, he was a Superintendent's nephew, but he did not have any complex psychological motivation beyond being a psychopath and loner.

Tomorrow’s Unknown

I’ve noticed that Procrastination happens much more with something interesting but hedged around with uncertainty, than it does with something boring but definite. This is my own experience but it’s borne out by my coaching clients. Ambiguity and uncertainty are the things we dread, it seems to me, more than boredom or even pain.

When we see the prospect of a change, even an exciting change, with part of our minds we feel an urge to settle back into the comfort of our present routine. You might complain about your bed, but bed is never so comfortable as when the alarm clock is ringing.

One effect of this is a tendency to debate the true underlying rightness of the change. Is it really right for me?  Call it overthinking, call it shyness, call it perhaps (in the words of an old song) Courting Too Slow. And so we are s    l    o    w in taking that first step.

It might be a job application or a holiday or even reaching out to a new networking contact. Ambiguity is the toughest thing. Remaining poised at the start, looking at ambiguity from outside, can have a deep allure. If you have not decided on one destination, you have not closed off the other ones.

But thought won’t solve that. You can only address it by plunging in. Feel the pain and do it anyway. Remember, the search for clear mental patterns, everything fitting into place, is almost always futile. We humans are usually far more effective at than action than thought.

There, I’ve written it now. All I need to do is put up on the web. Maybe tomorrow…

Trying to live in the NOW (but this is the 10th day of Christmas)

We are just emerging from the most time-obsessed part of the year, when, our buttons pushed by community expectations, we bring complex event management into our homes just because of a calendar date. I favour the old style of twelve days of feasting, and it's something many of us could keep up, in terms of time off from work, but that event management imperative pushes the leave we take earlier, well before the time-honoured 'first day.' In the old pre-industrial days if there was one key date in the feast it was probably its climax, Twelfth Night. And this year, being a Friday, it might feel something like it once again.

Finding the mind’s pause button

THE POWER OF NOW by Eckhart Tolle

For this book, ‘thought-provoking’ is a huge understatement. The book makes you question so much in your thoughts, feelings and even consciousness that it is a slow, slow read, you stop every few pages and wish you had someone to talk to, to share your latest discovery. The only parallel in anything I had read before is Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation  – where getting away from thinking is part of the struggle to move closer to God.

But here it’s much stronger – the mind, the ego, is an absolute tyranny with its self-dramatization, its mental movies about a better tomorrow, and so many more little tricks that distract you from consciousness of yourself, your deep body, your current existence, your immediate problems now.

Achieving all this is a big ask, of course. One of the many annotations I have written, early on in the book, says, ‘If you are saint!’, next to one of Tolle’s calm injunctions to ‘watch the mechanics of your mind.’ For a person with health problems and pain it might be too late to try and adopt the principles of this book, much as Tolle tries to get us to understand pain and tolerate it.

Following this book is scary but liberating at the same time. It chimes very closely with some of my own thoughts as I’ve faced up, this autumn, to a world without my father in it. This grief needed a strategy to make it tolerable. Also he presented a sad example of over-reliance on the mind, even to burning it out while the body limped on.

Since reading this book I have found myself less bored, less frustrated, less impatient. As Tolle says, ‘Waiting is a state of mind. It means you want the future; you don’t want the present.’ (That sounds rather like a late Leonard Cohen lyric – one of those phrases that, like the best coaching questions, are simple but very perceptive.) I have noticed the beauty of my surroundings; even sitting in a traffic jam this morning the sunlight on the frosty field was glorious. I have concentrated more on what I am actually doing now.

The mind is so powerful, it can churn away day and night with thousands of images and sounds and feelings. But it can hold you back from action, too. I remember going to ‘Go Ape’, a tree climbing experience where you make your way through high treetops across wobbly rope bridges and zip wires. Every movement was preceded by a fiddly process of fastening and refastening the three rope slings that were connected to my safety harness. Of course I was glad of the harness, but still all those loops, carabiners and buckles slowed down my progress. In the same way, the mind can surround you with a fog of thoughts, rationalisations and interesting patterns that have to be spotted before the next step can happen.

Also it sets you up with too much self-image, a compilation of image and sound that you have to see coming true. That builds up the pressure to succeed to an almost unbearable tension.

The other problem with these mental movies is that when they are optimistic they are often less vivid than the pessimistic ones. The prospect of change is less easy to imagine than the prospect of staying the same; rejections are intensely familiar because they come so often. If they are allowed to become mental movies then we can gravitate towards them. That’s the trouble.

This book helps you find the off switch. The mind has its essential uses, but like every television, it needs to be turned off at the end of the programme you wanted to watch. 

WHY I AM STILL A CHRISTIAN

8^th July 

Many years ago my father contributed a chapter, intellectually rigorous but lucid, to a book entitled ‘Why I am Still a Catholic’.  Nowadays I would broaden this to all denominations. For me the answer to the question lies in the bleakness of death. Death makes a nonsense of all our love-based edifices of family and blood. Eventually all those bonds will be dissolved, and that is inescapable. For many of us death softens itself in the padding of ‘a good innings’ and ‘a full life’. But sometimes it flaunts its cruelty, reducing small children to tears as they walk behind a coffin. Today I was a mourner at such a funeral; a family where a mother and father had lost a child, their little grandchildren had lost a loving parent.

Everything we try and achieve through the people we befriend and mate with, and the children we engender - their vulnerability freighted with the intensity of our love - can seem a completely empty ritual in the face of death’s power. Today, the question loomed in my mind - what is family love, ultimately, but passengers trying to provide comfort to one another on a ship that has already struck the iceberg, and is heading for the bottom?

This bleakness is unsustainable without hope. This may be just a case of wishful thinking, of wilfully holding onto something that exists beyond proof. But we all know that we all feel, we don’t only think: our intellects are often little help to us. As I sit in my garden this evening with vivid colours from the flowers receding away to the lawn and orange sun in my face and a soundtrack of birds and distant sheep bleating, I can feel, just fleetingly, a certainty (not a conclusion, nothing that cerebral) that the loveliness of the scene is not all there is, that our minds and emotions are, in a way we can’t yet articulate, copies and hints of something greater outside and beyond, something of infinite duration beyond the transience of these earthly bonds and loves. Coupled with this conviction that we are made in the image of God, we also have the solid scriptural record of a poor carpenter’s son who defeated death several times and finally rose from his own tomb. In the bleakness of this life’s struggle, these are the reasons why I cling to the word ‘this’. And why I am certain that another life extends beyond.

Too much democracy?

Is that possible? Two recent exercises seem to suggest that at least it might be. Obviously one took place last Thursday. But the other (which I also took part in) was the Labour party's leadership ballot where anyone could buy a vote for the price of a pint of beer. Interesting to speculate how a different result in the first election might have helped us swerve away from the cliff edge in the referendum...
However, I do somehow feel that the country will cope with Brexit better than the labour and trade union movement will cope with Corbyn - a man with a donnish level of charisma and a political level of intellect.

The Arguments are balanced – but the Power isn’t

           Considering where to place my cross on Thursday, I am still unconvinced by the arguments on either side.  The Economic and business arguments favour ‘Remain’ without question, but the only way to meaningfully control England’s population growth is to curb free movement from the European Union. I have three children who may need unskilled work and certainly need places to live. No amount of economic strength is going to create any more land in our country. The mighty housing developers’ pressure on the Green Belt will soon start to win out against the flimsy under-resourced planning system.

          However, this referendum was never meant to happen. David Cameron included it in the Conservative manifesto at the last election with little expectation of achieving an overall majority. He did get a majority, but it is slim. By a significant percentage, MPs of all parties favour Remain. If there is a ‘Leave’ vote on Thursday it could only be implemented if Cameron (or his successor as leader) whipped all the Tory MPs into line. I can’t conceive of that being accepted without a long process of delay and amendment to the 'Leaving' legislation.

         Given the House of Commons’ current makeup, a leave vote, I have decided, would be a vote for political chaos, and certainly would be compounded by an economic recession. We would stay in full membership for a period of some years and during that time any Romanians and Bulgars still weighing up whether or not to try their luck in London would have a major incentive to get on a budget airline. So immigration would go well up before – maybe - it went down. In Britain we have a Parliamentary democracy not a direct-vote democracy. Only Parliament can raise taxes, only Parliament can pass laws.

        If the country votes to leave, I can’t help thinking it would be like a household of three people where two, who are unemployed, want to move house, but the third who has a job and pays the rent, wants to stay put. And it would be much less clear-cut than that because the result is certain to be very close.

        I feel that in fact it won’t arise, that on Thursday we will end up with a pragmatic, unenthusiastic ‘Remain’ vote. But UKIP won’t go away and can only go on to build their numbers in Parliament, both by election - and defections. If they and their allies had a larger coalition in Parliament then I might have voted differently.

Possession by A.S. Byatt - one of my biggest influences

A tremendous roller coaster of styles and times, the original of the research-based plot, with pages of fine poetry. It's remarkably like the process of archive research. Every word is beautifully chosen but somehow you rattle over some of them, just as you would if really handling old letters in a freezing room in a Lincolnshire mansion, or in a boiling dusty basement in the British Museum. I remember well the 'ironworks' where Prof Blackadder has his lightless office - all swept away now for the Disneyland-like space of the Great Court. That was a sad loss and I'm sure that The British Library's St Pancras offices will never have the same atmosphere. I also remember the Great Storm of 1987 - I was in Sussex at the time too - and the specificity of that night of destruction gives even the modern scenes some historical distance now. As also do the feminist emphasis of Maud, and her womens's studies library. That would never have seemed, in the 80's, to be something we'd lose, but now of course that kind of feminism is a dead letter on any university campus. Why not 5 stars? - [Spoiler alert-] The final scene in the graveyard was a little too rushed, I would have liked more Gothic descriptions of coffins etc. And I was unconvinced by Mortimer Cropper meekly climbing down from the role, so well portrayed throughout the book, of acquisitive villainy. Still, a great read and a great book. It stays with you.

She didn't just live as a man, she fought as one Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine, 1723-1792 by Matthew Stephens

Hannah Snell served as a marine in the Royal navy in the 1740s, under the name of James Gray. According to the legend her true sex was never detected during several years on the lower deck. She was even wounded in action - possibly at the siege of Pondicherry, possibly elsewhere - and kept the secret by insisting on removing a musket ball from her own groin! Later, back in England, she exploited her reputation by touring in uniform and giving drill demonstrations. I first heard of her when visiting the Warwickshire Regiment's museum, though her connection to the regiment or its predecessors is not apparent from this book. She was born in Worcester and supposedly first put on uniform by joining Guise's Regiment in Coventry in 1745, but this seems much less convincing than her later marine service. The main source for her biography is a sensationalist account written in 1750 by Robert Walker. Stephens has traced the documented facts such as Hannah's marriages and children and the service of 'James Gray'. He points out that in many instances Walker's account is contradicted by the facts - she could not have been receiving 500 lashes at Carlisle Castle because she was in fact having the baby in London! The truth remains elusive, even after finishing this little book (which includes all of Walker's account) though the image of a young woman, no doubt strong and muscular enough to be taken for a boy, yet able to act as a wardroom servant and even sing for his masters, remains alluring. I was left wanting to know more. I wonder what further research has been done, or can be done - the life of an illiterate member of the working class, in the days before universal registration and censuses, will perhaps always remain frustratingly shadowy, and, in the case of Hannah, hidden by legend. One annoyance is that on a Kindle the illustrations can't be enlarged, and text notes don't link to the text, but have to be read in a block at the end. However, this is well worth reading and buying, and very good value.

Cramped Solitude

For the first time for many years I have used a train to make a social weekend trip to the West Country. In this case it was the 'further' West, the area that normally would have involved both the M4 and the M5. I exchanged the driving seat, with its relative space but limited freedom of immediate physical action, with the (now) strangely high-backed armchair of what is once again called the Great Western Railway. It is strange to see how the prices of transport have artificially skewed the demographic: the majority of travellers are under 30; nearly all are alone (on any journey of 100 miles +,  a group of three or more would almost certainly save money by using a car rather than the train, even to include maybe hiring a car.)  The recent booms in rail travel - perhaps related to the growth of the student population - have fed through to rolling stock design. Most of the young singletons are coralled into  rows of airline style seats. There is little visibility to the front, back or sideways, as the 'four across' table configuration is all but obsolete. So few tables are there, that when two passengers request a table seat facing forward, they can, rather ludicrously, be placed side by side in an otherwise near-empty carriage.
There is, though, an unarguable advantage to travelling by rail, the one that prevails despite the inflated ticket prices and strange interior layout.  This is the difference: you retain the use of your eyes, hands and to a large degree your mind, so you can read, write and think whilst someone else takes charge of the menial but important business of checking the way ahead is clear.

No Name Lane (great title, great book)

A sprawling time-slipping serial killer mystery where, in a remote Durham village, young girls are being abducted and killed by a fanatical Christian, and moonstruck lovers of the 1930s have turned into bitter old ladies of the 1990s. Very enjoyable, though my only criticism is that the killer's 'religious' motivation has been offered by other writers, eg in James Oswald's Prayer for the Dead, which I also read recently (and on the whole enjoyed less.)
This book is clever and enjoyable. Both its timescales are in fact historical. The present day is actually 1993, which allows the author to indulge his enjoyment of sexist male group scenes, and also enables the power of the tabloid press to be a major plot motivator. Compared to Linskey's David Blake trilogy, which I admired enormously, this is much more ambitious, with two main characters, each with their own world of supporting characters around them. These are the ambitious, driven journalist, Tom, and the diffident, guilt-wracked detective Ian. By the end of the book their character arcs have developed so that, with extra knowledge, the readers' sympathies are reversed. <br>There are numerous points of view, sometimes changing within the same scene, but the author's very straightforward, people-centred style ensures things always stay clear, and the momentum keeps moving along. It was slightly disappointing, for a Penguin book, that the editors had not paid  more attention to detail in the punctuation. At several points quote marks are missing. But that doesn't matter. On the whole this is exciting, suspenseful and great fun - you'll read it quickly.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

This late novel is harsher and more modern than its better-known predecessors. Prince Nekhlyudov is a moral hero - formerly dissolute, now abruptly brought face to face with the consequences of his past, and with the means, as a wealthy aristocrat, to feel the responsibility to make reparations. He encounters one of his former 'conquests', a maid reduced to prostitution and then convicted of a crime deserving of deportation to Siberia.  The story, in three distinct parts, takes us from wealthy metropolitan salons - the milieu that in Anna Karenina was mainly accepted as natural - to the crushing poverty of the peasant villages, and finally to the elaborate and arbitary cruelty of the Tsarist Gulag. Published less than 20 years before the Revolution, this is a world where telegrams and electric lights, trains and rubber coats, mix with penal processions of convicts, like modern accessories within a medieval scene. There are beautiful descriptions of weather and landscapes, and the accurate and keen observation of people that we expect from Tolstoy. The dialogue is natural and deeply-felt. There is some emotional interiority in Nekhlyudov but it is superbly balanced with action and with the long term suspense of the situation, as he awaits the decision as to whether his remorseful offer of 'rescue' will ever be accepted. It's a tremendous story of moral anxiety, degradation and regret, but it does finish on a note of spiritual hope. Even though this is late Tolstoy, it's actually easier to read than his earlier epics. And I particularly recommend it to anyone who likes Graham Greene.

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

3096 Days by Natascha Kampusch is a riveting read and rich in psychological material for any writer or creative person.
I picked up this book knowing very little about the story. The early pages are a little too discursive, as her family background is set up. However once the kidnapper strikes then my attention was riveted. The writing is calm, measured, seldom fraught, despite the author having gone through experiences beyond anything most of us could imagine- an indeterminate spell in solitary confinement, her only human contact with an unstable psychopath. Somehow Natascha managed him (as well as managing her own pain and indignity in passages that reminded me of Viktor Frankl's Holocaust memoir, Man's Search for Meaning)and so against the odds, she survived. Of course her dependence on her kidnapper was complete and not just a physical dependence, but also emotional. But who wouldn't become emotionally dependent on the one person in their life from the age of ten? After her 18th birthday she decided this was going to end. So she took an opportunity to escape, by no means the first she had been offered. Previously she had never dared - and one of the main reasons for that is that breaking the spell of her captivity would inevitably mean the death of either her or her captor. It's suggested at one point that his ultimate suicide on the railway came about as a result of a conversation with her. As with Frankl, you finish this book full of admiration for the author's psychological self-awareness, her 'groundedness'. <br>I was left wondering how many Prikopils there are in Austria. Certainly establishment complacency and police inertia seem to hide a very dark underbelly. She recounts how, after her release, one of the many crank emails she received was from a man who wanted her to come and live as his domestic slave...
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Effort and Faith

Faith is difficult. Why should it be true, in the face of so much contradictory evidence,  that an overarching good lies around and above us, and that the end of our earthly lives is far from the end of our spirit? Continuing to believe needs hard work and patience, often sustained by the mere bleakness of the compared alternative.
The world is distracting, the people around us offer little encouragement, and often offer vocal discouragement.
But on a pilgrimage we enjoy isolation (within gregarious group living with those sharing our mission), the sights of natural beauty, and the shared challenges of  cold wind, rain, sore feet. At the end of our trail - in my case, on the Northern Cross pilgrimage to Holy Island - we cross the icy  wet sands and emerge onto an island with a fairytale castle and a nestling little white village of pubs and churches.
Faith has never been easy. But the effort of pilgrimage, its simulacrum of the cycle of life and death, makes it a little more attainable.

Little book. Big subject

The biggest subject of all in fact - What happens when we die. The Great Divorce, a book I happened upon recently, is nothing to do with marriage, but the title is an allusion to Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. The author boards a bus that takes him, and a group of selfish, shortsighted, argumentative passengers, out of a grey drab city, so like the real life of late wartime, to a beautiful landscape where it is always dawn, but grass and water are solid, whereas the passengers  own bodies becoming transparent, ghostly. Here big healthy transfigured people, more physical than ever they were on earth, point out it is time to choose- Heaven, unfamiliar and daunting but ultimately more rewarding, or Hell in the endless city below. Some stay, some wait for the bus to take them back. A beautiful story that comes from the same time as a Matter of Life and Death (late in World War 2 when so many had been killed) and envisions the 'beyond' in something like the same way. There are hints at some of the imagery that would come out, later, in Narnia. A gripping read. If you only read one of Lewis's religious books, make it this one.

There is also a family connection. Lewis was a fellow of Magdalen College. For most of the war another fellow's sister in law Barbara had been living near Oxford with her two little girls - and Barbara typed out this book. She was well practiced because she had written several novels herself. And Barbara was my grandmother...

More than half my life

Thirty years ago, I was already an adult. I had lived away from home and thought I knew something about life. But I had no idea little I knew. I found out, with a crushing blow, a never fully-healed blow, on this day in 1984 when I heard that my mother had died in the night. Cancer - yes, weak - yes, but still full of strong hope and prayer and love. We had no idea, my sisters and I, how this could have happened so suddenly, how there could be so brutally little warning. Thoughts of the shortening of her suffering were scant consolation in that cruel winter. Now - on just such a day of icy sun - I have the leisure to look back and consider how the scars have grown over. But  - when I think of my children, and the smallness of our Christmas - they are still there. I can only try and copy the warmth of her affection, and value my survival.

Gabriel Bergonzi, 1938-1984. 

THE END IN VIEW

The morning mirror shows a gaunt visage, a man twenty years older than I ever feared I’d be, whilst icy wind whistles past the unlit glass behind my head, and children fretfully clatter over their breakfasts below – Medicine taken? PE kits remembered? Lunchboxes clean? A hundred cares upon cares, and a snoring form dozes before her worries coalesce. Let her sleep.

And on this morning, the cold grips and death seems close enough to put out your hand and stroke.

And yet – thirty lifetimes back, when cold was unvitiated by gas and dark by electricity, when my age was enough to be really dead, and the kids would be at work (none of this endless learning), and you had one blanket or a bit of fur and the fire on your face would turn your back to ice – then a bit of straw was enough, and a stable a sufficient shelter and yet – and YET – the light was born.

And the light will be back. 

Our Only Castle

 

The Chiltern Hills, were, in my personal geography, a barrier to be travelled through, on journeys between family home and study/work.  I seldom gave the area much thought. Later, much later, a home in Metroland Bucks chose itself for us as a map decision, a logical calculation based on research rather than experience. And on the whole it’s been a worthwhile move and we have a great family life. But the human continuity here is surprisingly limited. I’ve read that in the years before my house was built, the land where it lies was known as the Mushroom Field. It was only built in the 1950s, and an old neighbour remembers seeing combine harvesters working where now houses stand.

But I was brought up in an 1830s house on the edge of a medieval town.
It’s remarkable how neglected the Chilterns was over hundreds of years. My personal geography was everyone’s. In his enjoyable book ‘If Britain had Fallen’ Norman Longmate postulates a 1940 Battle of the Chiltern Hills. But in fact, it never happened and the area stays in its pretty obscurity, well-known only through its railways. This lack of pre-railway history was something of a disappointment to me, having grown up in a county with five or six standing castles including some of the country’s most famous.
That’s why Berkhamsted Castle was such a refreshing discovery when I finally saw it close to, rather than as a blur from the train. Its ruined state is due to stone thieves rather than sieges. Of course here in the Chilterns we have no workable stone, only endless jagged flints, both difficult to build with, and ensuring years of uneconomic farming.

The castle, and town, defend a strategic valley where the road was later joined by the canal and then the railway – the latter obliterated part of the castle, though it fared far better than its contemporary up the line in Northampton, which was destroyed without trace to build the ‘Castle’ station.

This is a scrap of medieval stone, water and earth, very beautiful, and surprisingly quiet, unless there are children running and climbing.

It’s also a lovely link to one of my favourite novelists. Early in The Human Factor, Graham Greene’s hero Maurice Castle wonders if his surname links him back to one of the medieval masons who worked in stone there in Berkamsted.

The castle English Heritage property but not an expensive one – in fact it’s free. There are no ‘facilities’ apart from the Castle itself and some simple display boards. Parking is difficult because of the draw of the railway station.

But then again, this is not a touristy area. Is it?