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following Edward Thomas and his ‘map of the soul’

January 10, 2013

Blown away by the quite phenomenal Nick Dear play The Dark Earth and The Light Sky about Edward Thomas, now showing at the Almeida Theatre on its first run.

I wrote about Thomas in The Green Road into the Trees – indeed in some ways the book was a centenary version of his own book, The Icknield Way, when he took the same route in 1912. Nick Dear has a fine phrase for Thomas’s travel books which he describes as ‘maps of his soul’, rather than more conventional guides, and as a result did not sell.

Dear does a few things exceptionally well: he doesn’t sentimentalise Thomas at all – he often comes across as a monster in the way he treats his wife Helen in particular; the play does not climax with Thomas’s tragic death in the First World War which often over-colours accounts of his life – this is the chronicle of a death foretold; he shows how the friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost was pivotal for both men’s poetry – Thomas started publishing and Frost got recognition.

But above all it focuses on Helen, who for me had always been a shadowy presence. She comes across as a tragic figure, quite beautifully played by Hattie Morahan, dealing with her husband’s depression and death wish with alternate light and sadness.

In The Green Road into the Trees, I quoted the lines of Thomas that haunted me from his own account of my journey: ‘I could not find a beginning or an ending to the Icknield Way. It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness.’

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Well at least it gets you out and about early

December 21, 2012

IMG_5502 tattoed man lo res — all photos (c) Hugh Thomson

Having complained in an earlier column that most people celebrate the wrong solstice at Stonehenge – i.e. the summer one – when archaeologists think that it was built for the winter solstice, seemed only fair to go along today and see what might be happening. Even if it meant getting up at four in the morning to drive there.

The Druids were out in force and drumming up a storm. So were about 1000 more people, but nothing compared to the summer when you can easily get 30,000. Fewer people come in the winter because usually there’s no sun – but today, despite the recent rains, it dawned beautifully clear.

One celebrant who came every year told me it was the first time she’d ever seen the sun for the solstice dawn.

Made for a great atmosphere. Chief druid Rollo Maughling (Panama hat, below right) led some ecumenical prayers in which Gaia got the odd mention, as did the war in Syria and – an unexpected left field one – the centenary of the US membership of the IMF (I’m taking him on trust on this one).

The odd friendly heckle from the crowd added suggestions for the service – like a spontaneous cheer in the honour of the late Sir Patrick Moore. Or a cry that went up at one point – ‘give him some room, druid coming through’ – when one berobed and bearded sage arrived late after trouble parking on the A344.

More by accident than design I found myself right by the drummers as they got going and almost got speared in the face by a stray dear’s antler on the back of someone’s mask.

But the moment the sun came up was a moment to melt the ice splinter in any sceptic’s heart: the stones warmed by the dawn, the music and the celebration. As the self-styled King Arthur Pendragon, who has spent a lifetime campaigning for more open access to the stones and is now in his 60s, said to the assembled media, ‘one can see the divine in the spirit of the place.’

…

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Well at least it gets you out and about early Read More »

Getting Through Customs

November 20, 2012

Regular readers will remember my review of Howard Marks’s book about his adventures and high times in the drugs trade, which I suggested signalled a new form of travel book – the ‘how am I going to get through customs’ genre. Another remarkable example of this was Marching Powder, ghost-written by Rusty Young about the hair-raising experiences of a drug dealer in a Bolivian jail and set to be a major motion picture, with Brad Pitt’s involvement.

Now comes Mark Dempster’s Nothing To Declare, ably ghostwritten by Matthew Huggins, which is considerably grittier than either of the above. Dempster does slightly less glamorous travel – though there is a funny bit where he tries to cross the Himalayas to a Nepalese village when stoned which is clearly not recommended in the manual – and is more Sweeney than Miami Vice.

Connoisseurs of the genre will still notice one or two similarities: there is always a moment when, just like the hero of Goodfellas, paranoia overtakes the life of Riley and the helicopters start circling overhead.

Dempster also does the ‘it’s just become a day job shtick’ well, when he describes ‘the same daily routine, the same grind: up at eight, drink, stock up on Crucial Brew, deal, opium, drink, deal, smoke hash, deal, line of coke, deal, line of coke, Brian [his main supplier], bottle of wine, Sprog [bodyguard and drinking mate, trouble], fight, opium, drink, sex with girlfriend Lesley, drink, drink, drink, drink – pass out. That was it – days into weeks into months until a whole year had vanished.’

Thinking of doing a hard-core writers book which would describe my day, which also begins at eight but otherwise has few similarities: cup of tea, watch a rerun of Frazier on Channel 4, bacon sandwich, few e-mails, cup of coffee, write as much as I can before I get bored, phone girlfriend, pop over to deli across the road for a chat, have a Scotch egg or pork pie for lunch if I’m feeling like something extreme, salad if I’m feeling healthy and trying to go clean, do some more writing, do some more e-mails, uh, take some exercise, and let’s face it no one has got this far in the paragraph because it’s so dull….

This book reminds me a bit of those Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where every speaker tries to outbid the last one by declaring that ‘you think that guy did bad stuff – wait until you hear what I did!’

Dempster is quite remarkably candid – and often funny – about his lowlife, which does hit some truly frightening lows by the end. It never quite addresses the mystery of why some people feel the need to get so wasted – ‘an addictive personality’ is a very loose concept. But it certainly describes the consequences well.

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What Laser Scans have revealed at Stonehenge

October 10, 2012

Revelations about Stonehenge continue apace, with the news that laser scans have revealed 72 previously unknown Early Bronze Age carvings chipped into five of the giant stones.

Moreover many of these carvings are of Bronze Age axes. The initial response – by among others The Independent, who covered the story – was that ‘the axe-heads – the vast majority of the images – may have been engraved as votive offerings to placate a storm deity and thus protect crops.’

As always, whenever anyone reaches for a ‘ceremonial’ or ritual explanation in archaeology it is wise to be careful.

One should remember that bronzes axes were neither purely functional or military, let alone ceremonial, in Bronze Age culture; they were often used as currency, to be bartered for other goods. There are many reasons why the symbol of the axe may have had such a great attraction for the builders of Stonehenge: as a symbol of wealth, or of the great clearance of the forests which they were embarking on; or simply as a potent icon, in the same way that they celebrated horses on their coins and at the White Horse of Uffington.

Very few such Bronze Age depictions of axes have been uncovered elsewhere in Britain; those few that have were often associated with funerary monuments, which would match with the recent work done on the sacred landscape that surrounds Stonehenge by Mike Pearson Smith (who uncovered a henge at the river Avon nearby).

These are not the first axes to be noticed at Stonehenge. A few can still be made out on the surface without the need for a laser scan, and were listed in the 1950s. But in the past they have always been considered a rather marginal aspect of the site. This new discovery, showing them there in such quantities, puts them more centre stage.

Those who wish to go straight to source on this fascinating story should read the full report which very helpfully has been put online by English Heritage: among other details, it also confirms the long-held suspicion that many of the stones have been removed over the years. Rather than being an unfinished site – as many have suggested since the very first investigations of the 18^th century – it is a vandalised site.

Those who think the only good thing ever to happen to Stonehenge was to be in Spinal Tap might instead enjoy the Daily Mash’s Experts close to discovering secret pointlessness of Stonehenge.

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The Real Enemy of the Coral Reef

October 2, 2012

An excellent piece in the Independent shows how the true enemy of the coral reef is not climate change – although of course this is a contributory factor – but a particular coral eating starfish.

I had a wonderful time a couple of years ago snorkelling off the Belize coral reef, the longest in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most unspoilt in the world; Charles Darwin described it as ‘the most remarkable reef in the West Indies’.

I had snorkelled before, off Bonaire in the Dutch Antilles which has some of the best walk-in snorkelling in the world. But this was altogether more satisfying, slipping from the side of a sailing boat into some nameless section of the reef, and seeing one’s fellow passengers transformed into weightless and floating mer-folk swimming with the fishes.

And what fishes: large shoals of blue tang floating over and around the elkhorn coral; yellow snapper and the striped school-master fish; Nassau groupers and the odd pork fish as loners within the group; a peacock flounder near the bottom. And then the sting rays, swimming in majesty and leisure, or burrowing down into the sand, the best possible reason never to rest your flipper on the seabed if you could possibly help it.

At one point I felt someone swimming along beside me and turned to see which member of the group it might be, only to find a spotted eagle ray calmly keeping pace at almost arms length, the largest of the stingrays after the manta.

Much of the reef was still healthy compared to some of the deterioration that coral had experienced worldwide as sea temperatures rose. But there was still a sense of elegy, a feeling that if I returned in ten, twenty, let alone another thirty years time I might not be able to see delicate blue damselfish nibbling around the polyps, the fan coral waving in the current or the squiggles of brain coral clustered on the bottom.

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Machu Picchu in the clouds

September 21, 2012

There is a good interesting roundup of current theories about Machu Picchu in the Peruvian Times in which the author, Rick Vecchio, sensibly doesn’t commit himself too far in any particular direction…

…Unlike many of the guides at Machu Picchu who are still perfectly capable of telling you that this was where the Inca emperor hid his Virgins Of The Sun and that stone over there was where they sacrificed the black llamas.

For my own brief introduction to the interpretation of the ruins, take a look at the short film I did for CNN last year: See Hugh’s cut-out-and-keep 5 minute guide to Machu Picchu for CNN.

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Then you’ll understand why I prefer to use this picture of my own in which Machu Picchu is covered by cloud, rather than the usual sunlit panorama. It’s a place we still don’t fully understand although we have recently gained some useful pointers.

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Hyde Park – A Short Walk To The Centre Of The Universe or ‘Sometime In London City’

September 3, 2012

There was a moment when I was in the crowd of 80,000 for the final Olympics concert in Hyde Park, on the evening of the closing ceremony, and New Order were playing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, when the last of the late August sun fell over the crowd’s faces – a crowd who were singing along to the song – and a realisation came home to me which had been growing for the last couple of years. Slowly but surely, Hyde Park has become a concentration of wonderful energies from around the world.

When I was a kid growing up in London it was a dull place, a place of nannies with prams and the Round Pond and not much happening.

But slowly and quietly things have been changing. It began with the outburst of emotion over Diana’s death when the railings of the park spilled over with flowers; her memorial fountain – treated more as a long water slide by delighted kids – and flower walk softened the martial regularity of the place.

With its intricate system of paths all radiating out from one another in complex geometrical patterns, rather like those children’s games where you make a point and then swing a compass to see where you can get to next, it is a park one can get lost in constantly and discover new surprises: the Lido where the hardy can still swim the Serpentine; the beautiful new statue beside it, unveiled in 2009, of a 10 foot high bronze ibis; the many families from the Middle East who feed the ducks as a Sunday outing, carefully avoiding the Rasta-locked rollerbladers who swing along the tarmac; Speakers Corner, where fundamentalist Americans wearing khaki debate with sober Hasidic scholars wearing suits. The joggers of every nation pass the couples sitting on a bench, or the students playing Frisbee.

The park technically speaking is made up of two republics joined at the hip, like the old Czechoslovakia; Kensington Gardens to the West and Hyde Park itself to the East. But to all intents and purposes Londoners treat them as the same contiguous park, regardless of bureaucratic distinctions. The Serpentine that snakes between them, with its strange boomerang shape, is not so much a border as a binder.

By happy chance Yoko Ono currently has a show in centre of the park, at the Serpentine Gallery beside the lake, with ‘peace trees’ outside, festooned with the notes and wishes of visitors. The show not only demonstrates that she was doing conceptual art of great simplicity and rigour when the new sensationalists like Hirst and Emin were just a gleam in the art teacher’s eye, but encapsulates the feeling that what used to be the preserve of Central Park in New York – the internationalism, the love, the casual mingling of nations, many wearing rollerblades – has now come here to the centre of London: the park as a world of its own; the park as the centre of the world.

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2012 – End of the Maya Long Count

August 20, 2012

Catastrophe theorists have been having a field day – or rather year. 2012 is when the Maya long count ends.

As catastrophe theorists have loved to point out, 2012 marks the end of the old Maya long count, the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle; but before we get too depressed, Mayanists have been quick to add that just because one count ends, it doesn’t mean the Maya believed another couldn’t begin.

As ever, nothing is ever quite as you think it is with the Maya.

Thirty-five years ago, I visited my first Maya site, at Palenque. From the top of the Palacio temple, a staircase led down inside it to the burial chamber of a ruler. The ‘secret staircase’ – it is difficult to use any other less melodramatic term – had only been discovered in 1949. An archaeologist noticed there were holes which had been filled with stone plugs in one of the floor slabs; the temple wall also extended below ground level, suggesting some lower chamber.

When they lifted the slab, they found a stairway filled so densely with rubble that it took three years to get to the bottom.

Going down the corbelled staircase on my own felt like something out of John Buchan. At that time, visitors were asked to bring their own torches, as there were only low-voltage lights running from an intermittent generator.

For the archaeologists who first saw the funeral vault at the bottom, it must have been the revelation of a lifetime: the room was still preserved as they had found it, with the king’s funeral tomb dominating the chamber.

The size of the crypt was impressive: it was at least twenty feet high. After the descent down a narrow staircase, this was like finding a cavern after pot-holing.

In the years since my visit, much has changed in our understanding of the Maya – from new archaeological discoveries, but above all because we can now finally read the glyphs on the temple stelae. …

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The Green Road into the Trees – Launch

July 18, 2012

The book is now out – see the reviews in the Spectator and Independent

To celebrate the launch and what is supposed to be summer, despite constant rain, a small extract on meeting a leading Druid at the summer solstice celebrations at Avebury:

A few people have gathered by the big stones that were once, when upright, set as a triptych and may have been orientated towards the rising sun. Loud snores are coming from a sleeping-bagged bundle at the bottom of the largest stone, where it looks as if someone is going to sleep through this year’s dawn solstice.

I talk to a tall man in a grey cloak with a staff, who lives in Malmesbury. He has the languid, tired manners of an Anglican vicar.

‘Are you a Pagan?’ he asks, as if it were the most natural question in the world.

I mumble the sort of non-committal generalities I usually do if someone asks if I’m a Christian. My hesitancy is reinforced when he then asks if I’m a Christian and I have to give a similar response.

‘Paganism,’ he explains patiently, ‘is tied to a sense of place, of being rooted in a landscape. If you’re drawn to a place like Avebury, then you’re probably a Pagan.’

I nod politely.

‘Not that it’s easy being a Pagan,’ he sighs, and leans on his staff to peer moodily at the ground. ‘The problem about Paganism is that because it’s all local, and about local places, we don’t organise ourselves on a national basis very well.’ For a moment he sounds like a Liberal Democrat. ‘What matters to a Pagan in Malmesbury is completely different to what matters to a Pagan in’ – and he casts around for an exotic example – ‘to a Pagan in, say, Devizes.’ He pauses. ‘Or for that matter in Aylesbury. There are a surprising amount of Pagans in Aylesbury.’

‘Trying to organise Pagans is like trying to herd cats,’ he says, with bitterness. ‘It’s solstice day, the most sacred day of the year, and most of them have gone to the wrong part of the circle to celebrate!’

From The Green Road into the Trees: An Exploration of England by Hugh Thomson (Preface 18.99), with illustrations by Adam Burton

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Shakespeare in Kabul

April 26, 2012

A remarkable new book has just come out about trying to mount a production of Shakespeare in Afghanistan, using a mixed cast, which of course is in itself a radical step.

Even the discussion about which play to select caused endless difficulties. Most of the comedies have “Male-female interactions that could be problematic in performance”: the Merchant of Venice raises issues of anti-Semitism; Measure for Measure and the Taming of the Shrew are not funny in a country where many women continue to be treated badly; Miranda pursues a young man in The Tempest in a way Afghans would find ‘inappropriate’. Obviously the history plays with their themes of invasion and insurrection could have played well – Richard II being a strong candidate.

But the producers did want to try to introduce a large female cast, so the search was on for the right comedy.

Eventually they settled on Love’s Labours Lost with its courtly conceit of four young men retiring from the world, and four young women disturbing that seclusion. But even that caused problems. At one point the young men are required to disguise themselves as Russians to woo the women. The actors categorically refused to dress up as Russians. Eventually a compromise was reached. They would disguise themselves as Indians instead. As I know from my own travels in Afghanistan, because of Bollywood movies the Afghans think of India as the home of romance, so this transposition made sense.

As did these wonderful – and in Kabul, revolutionary – lines from Biron’s speech on the folly of forswearing the company of women:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

they sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

they are the books, the arts, the academes,

that show, contain and nourish all the world.

Shakespeare in Kabul (Haus) is by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar

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