Yes it’s a bit sad that 18,000 people converged on Stonehenge for the summer solstice when most archaeologists now agree that the alignment was originally made for the winter solstice anyway…
But anyone in doubt about the powerful attraction of sun worship should take a look at these images:
see also my recent piece on the opening of the Great Stones Way between Stonehenge and Avebury for the Guardian.
Wonderful to have a white Xmas. My children, nephews and nieces all went sledging with me down a hill in the Chilterns at great speed – and is there anything more beautiful than travelling across England on a sunny day when it is completely under snow, as it was on Christmas Day?
That said, the ‘weather events’ of the last few weeks have left me wondering if we have lost the ability (or humility) to know when not to make the journey. Are we so used to being able to “beat nature” and control it that when clearly uncontrollable forces arrive we still try to soldier on when the wise course of action would be to beat a retreat?
I noticed this when caught myself in a whiteout blizzard on the M25 as it crosses the North Downs in Surrey. We think of suburban Surrey within the M25 ring road as being about as tame as England gets; but the hills of the North Downs collect the first wave of any incoming north-easterly snow and can fast turn into a bleak and hazardous environment.
On this occasion within just 20 minutes the scene looked like something out of the German retreat from Moscow: heavy lorries lumbering to a standstill (400 ended up parked on the hard shoulder overnight), visibility down to a few yards, the slipways icing up so that it was only with extreme difficulty that anyone could leave the motorway at all. …
It’s a perfect recipe for a communal village activity: bring your ripe and surplus apples to the green, have them pulped and pressed to juice, play various arcane games with apples (‘apple bowls’ – quite a few inswingers – , an ‘apple-shy’ with prizes if you can knock them off their perch), eat local pork with apple sauce. And of course drink copious quantities of the actual juice, which constantly changes flavour during the day as different types of apple are added to the mix.
In this small Oxfordshire village by the Chilterns, almost every garden has an apple tree and few can be bothered to store the fruit over winter in newspaper and sheds, let alone juice them, so much would just rot on the bough. The big communal apple press on the green is satisfying in its simplicity, with layers of pulp in crates, separated by sheets of coarse muslin and with a long lever that everyone from kids to adults can take turns in wheeling around to extract the frothing liquid.
Roger Deakin would have loved it. The Common Ground group he helped found were some of the first to celebrate the variety of the English apple, so that we did not succumb to a Golden Delicious monoculture (what Roger called ‘Tesco’s Delight’). He died four years ago, just after completing his wonderful Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, and is much missed by his friends. I wrote this in his memory:
.
Roger Deakin
(1943 – 2006)
The dark red windfalls from our apple tree
reproach me silently; I never knew
their name or provenance until you died
so suddenly; or cared about the orchard
with its Russets, Bramleys, old Charles Ross,
the quince tree pregnant with unwanted fruit,
a mulberry staining the cut-grass red;
.
and now you’re dead; and there’s no chance
to walk your coppiced woods again, or hear
that rich, smoked voice describing how
the railway shed has fresh clean linen
always waiting for you on its bed
in a bower of alder and ash.
Roger, I eat this apple for you:
.
The Devonshire Quarrendon Red.
Stonehenge was given to the nation in 1918. So far, almost a century later, the nation has done a remarkably bad job at looking after it.
The situation at the site is currently, as its custodians English Heritage put it, ‘severely compromised’ and as others like leading archaeologist Mike Pitts would say, ‘ an embarrassing, abominable, inexcusable mess’. For decades, plans have been put forward to improve the site and then postponed.
Two main roads not only thunder past but divide the circle of stones from the Avenue that should lead to it. The findings from Stonehenge are scattered piecemeal between some sixteen different museums and private holdings around the country. For the almost one million annual visitors drawn there, it can be a dispiriting experience, with the stones themselves fenced off and the current ‘visitor centre’ resembling a British Rail station built in the 1970s. Overall, it can be a bit like having a picnic in a car park.
Just last week the Government announced that it would no longer help finance the proposed new landscaping and visitor centre which Labour had announced last October.
On the face of it, this might seem perfectly reasonable. A saving of £10 million would result. We all know that cuts have to be made; the Government claims that Labour committed to projects that were never affordable. …
[A shorter version of this piece was published in the Times]
My worst journeys from hell? Waiting days for a series of cancelled boats in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal, at 100° in the shade — 6/10. A bus trip across the Peruvian desert that lasted 24 hours – 8/10. Taking a train from Birmingham to Edinburgh – 10/10 and not just because it was the last one I did. Or because it cost hundreds of pounds more for the pleasure that the other ones. But because you know it could so easily be improved.
Take a much cheaper coach from Birmingham to Edinburgh and you need a numbered ticket with a designated seat to travel. Just as you do with a plane. So why is it that British train companies get away with crowding as many people as they possibly can onto a train before shutting the doors? This particular journey saw passengers crammed solid down the aisles and in the doorways, with luggage spilled in every direction and children crying: it looked like a train load of refugees after a catastrophe event. If the train company could have got away with putting passengers on the roof, they would have. And this was not for a couple of tube stops or a suburban commute, but a five-hour journey.
…
Now we’re getting so much more snow in Britain, perhaps it’s time to stop complaining about the disruption to travel and work, and start appreciating what it brings.
A woodpecker came by this morning picking at the grains of food I’d left out for the birds in my small copse. Against the white of the snow, I have never seen its colours looking so brilliant – or appreciated quite how many different colours go into a green woodpecker’s coat: the green shading into yellow across its back, the red head with its ruffled blue and black. And tiny birds like wrens which can get lost in the undergrowth suddenly stood out as well: is there anything that draws the attention as much as the attentive way a wren cocks its head? Even the rabbits, which normally I view as either dull or pests, have an exaggeration to their movements, an extra kick to their hind legs, in their delineation against the snow.
The lower woods and copses of the Chilterns are scattered across the valley I look out on, and the snow exaggerates the distance between them, giving the landscape an open, Scandinavian feel that was liberating.
Along the river meadows by the Thames, a flock of no less than 75 Canadian geese, surprised to see a walker, took off all at once making a noise like snow from a distant avalanche. The tracks they had left on the frozen water meadows were very beautiful – a tapestry of fine webbed footprints. And elsewhere the tracking reminds me of my passion as a child for those shoes Clarks made which left animal footprints behind.
Travelling down from Scotland along the East Coast line recently, I was struck by the hard beauty of the Northumbrian coastline under snow: the breakers lashing towards the high-plateaued farmhouses with their caravans to one side for the overflow of families or labourers; deer crossing a snow-furrowed field; a scarecrow wearing a Superman costume, so bright that the red of his cape stood out like Kryptonite. And later, in the distance, the Cleveland Hills which I had walked in the summer, looking far finer and more impressive now.
Even down into the soft contours of Gloucestershire, the mistletoe bunched up in the blackly inked trees and the low, late sun coming over the Malvern Hills carved long shadows – more Japanese than traditional English pastoral.
What a country! It makes me want to go out and explore it all over again – prompted by John Steinbeck, whose Travels with Charlie I’ve just finished: written almost exactly 50 years ago towards the end of his life, and a fine meditation on the way America had changed in some ways, but not in others.
I recently had the good fortune to be able to attend a Buddhist Centre retreat in the idyllic setting of the Somerset Hills. Like many people, I have long been interested in Zen Buddhism without knowing that much about its practice – but I did know that meditation (or za-zen, from which it derives its name) is absolutely central to it.
The actual meditation proved very difficult. The idea of ‘mindfulness’, where you not so much empty your thoughts as become very focused on the here and now, is not one that comes easily to me.
I found myself being continually distracted by the soft smoky runs of the boiler igniting its regular puffs of disbelief in the background, and by the distant catcalls of children playing in the garden, while we sat inside, in postures of graduated discomfort and in complete silence. Hard to avoid the ticking clock in one’s head that counts down the days, the hours and the minutes, both in the past and the future, but never quite reaches the present tense.
…
We are coming to the end of another bumper season of literary festivals. From Hay to Edinburgh to Saffron Walden, it sometimes seems that every town and city in the land is getting out the French regional white wine to welcome writers.
At Cheltenham recently, where I was giving a session on travel writing, they told me that overall this year they had sold more than 100, 000 tickets before the festival had even begun – a staggering amount, and far more than they have in the past.
When VS Naipaul gave a talk there a few years ago, just after winning the Nobel Prize, he suggested that the growing success of such events is not accidental; it is because the appetite for such highbrow literary debate is no longer being fed by the BBC. And the Beeb could do well to pay more attention to the phenomenon. There is talk of cutting Newsnight Review on BBC2, the last remnant of The Late Show enterprise that once lit up the channel. Given that it only runs once a week, and after 11.00 at that, this hardly seems a sacrifice that is necessary to make. And nor is the egregious Culture Show any substitute – a much more lightweight magazine format, without the same sort of sustained debate that could make Newsnight Review – or indeed a literary festival – such fun.
…
