NaNoWri Mo

Well there is is.
My badge for writing 61,000 + words of a novel in November. I have set myself until the challenge ends on the 30th of this month to lick it into a draft form to actually show it to friends and family, who may or may not read it, but it will make me feel better that I did it to entertain, which is the main reason I do anything.

I am sure much of it will irritate. It is a ripping yarn, part historical friction, part suspense and drama, part a tale of everyday folk who eat sandwiches and go for a slash every so often while being required to commit themselves to having their minds messed with by a crazy homosexual minor knight type of Guy in the thirteenth century experimenting with alchemy, cosmology and scientific theory advanced even for the twentieth century and who rejects the basic beliefs of the Medieval Western World. Only they don't actually know that is happening. They are worried it might be psychosis or God. Hopefully the everyday folk will get to have sex at some point instead of the reader just being expected to assume that they do. Didn't have time to work up to any good sex scenes. Maybe later on. One can't rush such things. Not unless the characters are suffering from crosscentruy hypnosis and act, well , out of character. But then the reader has to have an idea that he /she knows how the character should act before being shocked that they are acting out of character, otherwise it doesn't really work, does it. For me writing it, the scenes have to be practical enough to act out, and have to be able to withstand questioning devised by a mind of a nine year old. You see, they know that you can't go three days without a pee, and they know that if you have a scab, you will most certainly pick it, and when people see something nasty they often respond by chucking up their lunch.

Anyway, so now I have the winners badge for achieving the 50,000 words, I shall have to do all those other things I haven't done this month, and that I used the creative challenge to procrastinate from doing. It was quite weird. I did a load of things that I would not normally do in order to ut off sittin gdown to write, but I didn't do the things that I normally would have done. That is, I cleaned the tile grout in the bathroom, but I didn't write to my cousin and I didn't make my Christmas cards and gift tags, and there is fluff like tumble weed under the bed.

Hmmm. Maybe I might just start the sequel...

Sunday Afternoon Walk.

the stone frog
on the window sill opposite
sports a frozen snow hoodie
lopsided it dribbles
a toothless hobo grimace


sycamore and chestnut
toss in the wind
clutch at the air
desperate
dead hands with parchment skin
cling to chimneys
my gloves, the colour
of autumn
float on a copper sea
of fallen beech leaves

miles of dappled lane later
stained glass sun fails to set blaze
the hills behind the turbines
on Knabb Ridge
greyscale sky scuds in from the moor
first flakes blow
too soon to settle
melt like love in a hurry

trees, a little more bare than before
crowd, suck spaces closer together
hover twixt dusk and twilight
afternoon and evening
life and death
The chill exhilarates
inspires
I slip on a dead squirrel
fur blurred as bonfire smoke
an urban fox scuttles
through swept leaves
eyes like a luminous watch.

Incident in the Street Outside

a woman struggled
four men held her down
on the pavement
'let me go, let me go'
it was a kind of mantra
not urgent or beseeching
more a statement of fact
she seemed coherent
but sad, not even desperate
or emphatic
Marcel said she had a knife
or a piece of glass
Ben had blood splashes on his apron
he held a teatowel tight
as a tourniquet around her wrist
she twisted and bit
it started to rain
the pavement glittered
ran with oily rainbows
the chiropodist led
a fat woman away
her shoulders slumped
she dragged her feet
why do people limp
when there is nothing wrong
with their legs?
the chiropodist comforted her
i needed you here to make sense
of how these people
our neighbours
strangers passers by
those who try not to stare
from cars
fitted into this scene
no one else could tell me
the ambulance came
Gerald from the bikeshop
directed traffic
it took them ages to strap
her on the trolley
she fell off twice onto the road
bare dirty feet waving
kicking obliquely
no one dared be firm or rough
still she screamed
my ears strained for clues
hissed with horror and pain
Gerald the bikeshop
declined to gossip avoided
people's eyes
later I heard it was his daughter
having a Breakdown
in public.

Why weren't you there?
You would have known
what to do
what to say.

Pond

The August Bank Holiday re-enactment weekend is always sad in a way as it is the last of the season and means that another Summer is coming to an end. Spring is always lovely at Murton, with the hedges foaming with blossom and wild flowers tucked away on the banks of the streams, not to mention the lambs and chicks, but for me, the park is at its best in late Summer, with the trees in their fullest foliage, the hawthorn berries turning red, the elderberries green still but plumping up to deep purple weighing down the slender branches like dangling earings on a Turkish belly dancer. The paths around the fort are bordered with shoulder high grass and nettles, briars spill ripening blackberries like shining jewels over onto the narrow packed earth tracks. The Celtic village is overgrown and mysterious with the ruins of the roundhouses which were burned down by vandals a few years ago. The twisted hawthorn bedecked with ribbons guards the remaining sod house, mossed green and cool as a water nymph's boudoir. Along the walkway to the apiary the apples plop prematurely on the path, and in the garden of the Tudor house, they blush red above the rioting herbs.

A few years ago a huge English oak on the path to the Celtic village was blown down in a gale. Its shattered and splintered trunk screamed, the trunk and overweight branches spread across the pond and beyond, a giant broken and dying. Over a period the leaves ceased to unfurl on borrowed sap in Spring. The branches were sawn up and used for firewood, so that now the remaining fallen trunk rests across the pond and has become a part of its organic ecostructure, the jagged base smoothed and painted by time is hollowed out and is home to various flora, fauna, insects and magnificent fungi. The nettles and willowherb, wild garlic and tall grasses had been cut back exposing the rushes and water edge plants and allowing the sunlight to play on the deep viridian waters, picking out the vaguely sinister emerald weeds below the surface that hide goodness alone knows what.

Today the sun shines passionately down as if making up for lost time. The woven hazel hurdles that warn the unwary visitor or stray sheep or goat of the pond's existence are warm and supple to the touch. The grass is vibrant with grasshoppers playing the fiddle and the creatures that busy on the banks of still water. The pond is rich cerulean in places where it reflects the sky, and a pair of dragonflies swoop and dodge and skim in an arial ballet, their wings whirring, whizzing, blurring , sharply changing direction to defy my camera lens. If I stare hard enough I can see poor mad Ophelia, flowers in her flowing hair, floating in the murky depths.

Despite the mad activity of the wildlife, the plips and ripples of the surface skimmers, skittering waterboatmen, the opportunist minnows and the wisps of thistledown, it is still and peaceful. It is peaceful enough to allow the imagination to slip beyond time and place to the pages of Thomas Hardy or Mark Twain, or to feel as if one is inside of a Romantic Movement painting or poem, formed in the dots of pointillistic impressionism.

Sitting by the pond, on a day like this, time stands still.

The Jacobite Steam Train and Dogs.

Trains of Thought.


I don’t know what made me walk that way last Thursday evening. I generally avoid groups of people hanging around on the footbridge over the railway, or groups of youths hanging around anywhere on the dog walking route. They tend to have Bill Sykes type bull terriers on one side or other of the Dangerous Dogs Law. In some areas a gun, either replica or otherwise is the must -have fashion accessory, around the area I walk through to get out into the woods and fields they favour the staffie or the pit bull as a necessary part of their well ‘ard image. Dangerous Dog Law is a joke. The owners are probably the danger , not the hapless hounds, but even so, we have been attacked by them on more than one occasion. My border collie assumes a sit and wait posture and if the dogs go for him, he tends to run. As I am always on the other end of the lead, and he runs rather faster than I do, the effect does not do much for my dignity. I hate people who insist on having their dogs off th leash and who cannot or will not keep their dogs under control. Dogs apart, I go on adrenalin code red if I see a group of people, and specifically a group of teenage males with an attitude and aspect intended to intimidate. However, it has always been my practice to walk right through the middle of them, ensuring I do not make eye contact. It usually works, taking the current dog fashion out of the equation. They part to let me through and don’t take much notice.

So, last Thursday evening when I decided to turn right and walk the bridle path at the back of the school the opposite way to which I usually take, and go over the footbridge, it was too late to change direction and avoid the crowd of about twenty people milling around on it by the time I saw them. As I approached, I saw that the crowd consisted of elderly people, children and a couple of people-who-looked-responsible. You know the type of person, you can tell them as soon as you see them; teachers, carers, some (not all ) parents, most grandparents out with the grandkids have it, that air of authority, that tilt to the face and set of the mouth. I soon realised that these people must be carers as a few of the others started to paw at me and smile and ask me questions that people who have inhibitions just do not ask strangers. In fact, people rarely say anything to other people, unless it is two dog walkers with the same sort of dog and dressed the same way, between whom the radar twitches and tests the signal with a jaunty ‘lovely evening isn’t it’ type of comment as you draw level. These people were Downs syndrome people, smiling broadly and clutching my arm, asking if the dog was friendly. (He is. Too friendly).

I smiled , to my shame, a little embarrassed, and spotting some kind of spaniel -cross -Heinz57 bounding towards us through the coarse grass, wild oats, golden rod, rose bay willow herb that grew wild and dry and scratchy in the no mans land between the path and the fence of the embankment, pulled my collie in close and rushed through , nodding and painting a stretched- mouth clenched- teeth grin on my face to them all like some puppet tweaked by a drunk with St Vitus dance, the spaniel attempting to shag my leg, my collie attempting to shag the spaniel. Bobby always prefers to make love not war.

The cycleway asphalted path that runs parallel to the railway line here forks off the streets that once were part of the landscaped gardens of the big Victorian gothic house with the crenulated tower that breathed wealth and propriety, owned by the Foxes last century and now a Rest Home for Antediluvian Buffaloes. Once on this path from here, there is no exit until about a mile beyond where I would normally have taken my circular route home , thus taking me on a longer detour, past where I need to be so I would have to double back through the town streets. I decided what the hell, I would walk along it tonight.

There were two men standing on the path. They both had cameras cocked. They looked approachable so I asked them if there was a special train coming down the track, thinking maybe it was the Royal train or something, thinking vaguely I had not seen any police ,to say there were all these people loitering around. One of the blokes replied that it was a steam train and due any minute now.

Of course, I love steam trains, spend a fair bit of my time on and around them, what with all the WW2 railway events we attend. The dog and I stopped and fixed our eyes upon the arch of the road bridge by the Buffaloes Mansion.

At the museum there is a mile or so of restored track from the Derwent Valley railway, and we ride the lovingly restored trains as part of the scenarios when we do frontier or Indian Wars and WW2 , Spanish Civil War re-enactments there. The train enthusiasts are a fantastic bunch of talented engineers, with boiler suits , smutty faces, black hands and enthusiasm that would out-shine a beatified evangelist.

In August 2003 , the 100th anniversary of the original railway opening in 1913, there was a reconstruction of that day, down to the local brass band playing (badly) and out of time with each other, CL-W loafed around with his old school tie holding up his trousers, being very foppish, PH dressed as a gamekeeper in his plus-twos and Norfolk jacket, a couple of the girls wandering about with Votes for Women placards and rosettes, others chained to railings, genteel cups of tea in fine bone china in the marquee , croquet on the lawn, farmers, ag labs, gentry all milled around, everyone all dressed for an Edwardian summers day and the scene was for all the world a replica of 100 years back. I remember, I looked across the yellow and green fields dozing under the bluest of Vale of York skies, thinking how all these people (because for me now the scene had time slipped for real, they were no longer my friends and colleagues, they were people on the edge of the world) had no idea that their peace would be completely shattered within the year. in a few months time, the golden Edwardian Summer would have turned into the mud and blood and slaughter of the trenches of the Great War and nothing would ever be the same again. Most of these young men , cheeks puffed out honking their tubas and parping their trumpets would be dead, or if they survived, armless, legless, mindless or if they avoided that, with the joy sucked out of them. I started to cry. I am starting to cry now.

I burst into tears when the engine shrieked under the bridge, pristine brass work, glossy maroon paintwork, with a roar and a hiss . It was a long train, people leaning out of the windows. Involuntarily, I waved at them. With all my heart I waved at them, tears dripping off my nose So embarrassing. That will teach me to run out of emotional memory blockers. For once in my life I had no camera with me, so I looked with my eyes and with that part of me that seems to be attached to atavistic memory; I had to look with a roaring in my ears, and wave, wave frantically at all the people waving out at me and the dog standing in the rays of the sinking sun, there on the path along the embankment. No camera shot, just emotion memory to write from.

Full of wonder, the dog and I climbed up the steep slope to the Antidiluvian Buffalo's Road Bridge and clambered over the fence and the wall onto the main road sidewalk for a quicker run home to find out about the train.

It was the Jacobite that runs from York to Scarborough on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays in July and August. I shall be there next Tuesday waiting for it bringing its passengers home after a day at the seaside.









Settle to Carlisle Railway Poem.


Sleepy Settle wakes on a market Tuesday,
Farmers’ wives from Clitheroe,
Hellifield, Long Preston,
Gisburn and Horrocksford,
Not to mention Nappa ,
Have your tickets ready please.
Travellers on the platform
Don’t forget to mind the gap,
Standback while the gypsum wagons rumble past;
Look up to Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen y Ghent
All aboard for Langcliff and the Carlisle metropolis
Don’t lean out the window when the guard’s whistle blows.

On through Taitland’s tunnel
And the Sheriff Brow viaduct
First of many striding ‘cross the rivers and vales;
Helwith Bridge, Crag Hill, Horton in Ribblesdale
Where they carry off the Yorkshire Dales in tip- up trucks.

Steam from the engine trails back from famous Batty Moss,
A pall on the graves of the navvies who died
From gunpowder accidents, hard work and smallpox
Burrowing Bleamoor tunnel like an army of moles.
Arten Gill is where the firemen take a breather
Before they stoke the boilers for the highest of climbs

They’re knitting in Dent, they’re knitting in Dent,
Their needles are flying , those mad knitters of Dent.

In Garsdale the waterfalls tumble down the hillside,
form speleologists’ cathedrals far underground;
Dandry Mires marshes were hard to negotiate,
The engineers spanned it with granite cut from Pen y Ghent.


Over Lunds and Grisedale, Moorcock, Birkett , Shotlock,
Tunnels and bridges built by force of will;
Time for a thermos to drink to nature’s ruggedness,
Watch sparrowhawks swoop over Mallerstang Moor.

Mallerstang Moor, Mallerstang Moor,
Mallerstang, Mallerstang, Mallerstang Moor

Stop at Kirkby Stephen
Pick up passengers for Appleby,
Decked out in their finery for the annual fair;
Horses and gypsies, gypsies and horses;
‘Retain your loyalty
preserve your rights’
Appleby ,Appleby, pride of the dales.

Ribbons twist round Langwathby's maypole,
Time for a cuppa at the Brief Encounter café,
Count the stone dancers in Long Meg’s circle,
Past Little Salkeld to Lazonby Halt.
See the pele tower that guards the River Eden;
Stained glass windows in the church
By Edward Burne-Jones.
Last stop
Tired little Armathwaite
then chug into Carlisle
with a triumphant toot.

(by DeBracey)

For the Love of Steam Trains


Freight wagons shake bottle green buffet windows
globe electroliers swing umbrellas of ochre light
over vaguely antagonistic travellers
reading ripping yarns in waiting rooms.

Manic sweating fire-dwarves stoke
rake and shovel locomotive coal
smoke blinds our eyes
our ears ring with the clank of iron wheels
and the shrill whistle that rends the night
like a knife shredding silk.

The guard's arms flash his flags
in scissor-action semaphore
Betjeman crams his Great Western Railway
Company egg-and-cress sandwich
into his cut glass vowels
and we board the 19.42 for Wantage.


Library photo of The Jacobite Steam Train

Slideshow by me- photos of Bolton Abbey- Embsay Railway 1940s events

Poems by me.

Flailing morasses -The Project 2

Chatting randomly on a forum recently about history in general, someone said that they would have like to have lived in feudal mediaeval England. Often at the museum, or in Living History events am I asked if would have liked to have really lived in a time period I am demonstrating, or which time period I would like to have lived in. There has always been one era or another that appealed- always of course dependent on just exactly who and what one would have been born- great in any time period to have been born wealthy and been part of the kind of history that the history books, the TV dramas, Hollywood and the historical novel tell us about.

But the real history, made up of the heaving masses flailing in the morass either accepting their lot or striving to clamber out of the pit, is another matter completely. To put myself into the shoes, or rather lack of shoes, that was the reality of all the ag labs all and the miners who somehow managed to survive long enough to beget the ancestors that led ultimately to my random -chance existence, the question I find myself asking is how those people kept going mentally and physically in the absence of the material gain and leisure trade offs for intensive labour we expect today. We also expect advancement in society, personal satisfaction and fulfillment as reward for hard work. Perhaps the hard work was reward in itself for our ancestors but somehow I doubt it. The relentlessness of the toil sun up sun down day in day out without anything to look forward to- in reality, what was there to look forward to for our ag lab or miner ancestors? High days and holidays must have provided some relief, but these were attached to religious ceremonies grafted on to the ancient pagan festivals based upon the agricultural year.

We know that the life of the pre-industrial revolution peasant or artisan was hard and we know that the struggle for survival was probably what kept them going, but surely even the lowliest serf must had had hopes and dreams. Trying to imagine the grim existence leads to an understanding of the need for something beyond the relentless toil and struggle to merely exist. After all, even with the cushy lives we all lead today by comparison, we still need something above and beyond, something to believe in. How easy it is in this context to understand how religion, the church had them all by the short and curlies, the reward in the afterlife, heaven, hell and the Natural Order of Things.

What did our ancestors dream about, aspire to in the abstract? We have records of what the intelligentsia , the moneyed and leisured classes aspired to and achieved in various periods, but the 'common man', mainly illiterate, what was there for him beyond the daily grind? The artisan craftsman often found outlet for his creativity in the great medieaval cathedrals that soared ever upwards, the monk scribe in his illuminated capitals, but the ag lab? Perhaps his joy at the beauty of his world transcended the hardships and registered in ways that were beyond the physical recordings that were written poetry and art manifest.

This world was a world of darkness and silence. No white noise of traffic and machinery, no street lamps, electric lights, no noise or light pollution. The fields and hedgerows would have their own sounds the composition of which could be picked out- each grasshopper, each bird call, each whisper of the grass would be picked up by the ears of our ancestors. They would not be able to go anywhere after sundown, unless it was a clear moonlit night- they just would not have been able to see where they were going, The blackness would have been tangible. There would have been more stars, more constellations, the heavens would have come down to earth in the sense that our ag lab could have observed the movements of the heavens and ordered his life by them. The portents of weather and therefore the behaviour of animals and the production of food and sustenance, even the spread of contagious diseases and plagues could be correlated with observations of the skies and of nature would have been meaningful to him because of precedence of observation of what were once the gods by which men lived their lives and developed rituals to reverse bad auguries and facilitate good ones. Maybe our peasant ancestor absorbed the spiritual to such an extent that the very strength of the earth , the wind, the stars fed not only him but his descendents , and it is that spiritual strength that remains tenaciously somewhere in the dna of his bewildered 21st century sons and daughters.


Another thing that would have been a part of our ancestors’ lives which we find hard to imagine is the smell, or rather stench of everyday life. Often the beasts would share the living space with humans. Humans did not wash bodies or clothes on a regular basis, and if soap was used it would be lye soap, an ingredient of which would be urine and ashes. The rush lights used to put a glimmer of light into a hut of a winters afternoon would give off an acrid odour. There were of course no latrines and faeces would be piled close to the back door of the cottages. People of all classes harboured fleas, lice and worms as a matter of course.

If anything would put me off living in Medieaval England, the thought of having maw worms , creatures that could be six inches long and which can emerge suddenly for any bodily orifice, including the corner of the eye , would certainly be high on the list of the unacceptable. Just imagine, there you are in Orwell's brief bloom of beauty stage of life, on a definite promise one vibrant May morning, wreath of flowers round your head placed there by the vision of beauty about to let you make wild and passionate love to her in the meadow orchids, and a six inch wriggler shoots out of your eye, or worse, her nostril.

Where I was really going when I thought of the lives my ancestors led, other than what to my 20/21st century life has become accustomed to define as my right to enjoy my life and to have every wrinkle in it ironed out by 'the government', was the sheer contrast of expectations. My great grandmother gave birth to fourteen children in the course of seventeen years at the end of the 19th century, and did not lose one of them in infancy. Their father was a survivor of an epidemic of scarlatina on Romney Marsh in the 1830s in which all but he and two of his ten siblings and his mother and father succumbed. My Great-Grandfather worked as an itinerant agricultural labourer from the age of 9 when he was orphaned. His wife could not read and write. It is doubtful if he could read much more than the parts of teh Bible he knew by rote anyway.
The children were born in four different parishes in the Marsh, suggesting that he had to work for different employers to keep them clothed and fed, which he did admirably according to a school photograph taken on 1904 in which several of them , including my Grandfather stand straight and proud and shining like sunbeams in their Sunday best. A few years later the boys were all fighting and dying in the trenches in France and Belgium.

And where I was going? How petty our 20th/21st century whinging and whinings about stress at work, depression, exhaustion, head colds, etc sound in context of how our ancestors lived and how they had no time to worry about such things. So often I am fed up with my job, have changed my job when I have wanted a change. My daughter changes her job every few weeks fo rreasons ranging from she doesn't like it, doesn't like the boss, doesn't like the hours. Thinking 'I am tired in spirit and tired in body' I suddenly realised just how resilient and downright heroic were the folk who lived in past eras.

I doubt anyone would want to regress and wipe out the advances in science and technology that have been made and revolutionised the way people think, the way they Live with a capital L. Also we do recognise that we have lost something alongside the gains, perhaps this is why the past holds a fascination. it is not just to learn by the mistakes that the politicians, kings and generals made, but to regain something of what those ordinary folk who tilled the fields, hacked at the coal face, hammered the cherry red horseshoes on the unforgiving anvil or chipped away at a block of stone to carve representations of the flora , fauna and caricatures of the people that made up their world possessed that we , with all our sophistication seem to have lost.

Stepping away from existence

The first time I remember wanting to die, as in not wanting to be in the state of existence we call 'being alive', was during the summer before my second birthday. I was playing in a paddling pool beneath the pine trees in the garden of the officers quarters where we lived in Hampshire. Across the wire fence that separated our garden from the gardens of the children who were of a senior rank to me- ie their fathers were a senior rank to mine, which meant their mothers ranked over mine, and they in turn ranked over me. Women and children found these things important, and seldom were you allowed to forget it. Deborah was a little girl who not only out ranked me, at 3 years of age, she out- aged me, so when she came to the wire fence to excitedly brag that they were having a birthday party for her baby brother Lindsay that afternoon, I scampered over the pine needles and asked if I could come to the party. Deborah grabbed one of Lindsay's T shirts from the washing that her mother was pegging on the line and began to windmill slapping me about the head with it, screaming no no I couldn't go. Of course I started to wail and ran back to the paddling pool where I lay down in it and waited to die.

Army children knew all about death, even before they were two years old, then. This was the 1950s, not long since the War, and the Blitz. We all knew about how babies could be sleeping in prams in the garden one minute and blown to smithereens by a bomb the next. Everyone had someone dead, and we were all always prepared for the possibility that our Daddies would go to work and die. It happened.

The grown ups were always warning about not going near the edge of the pond in case I drowned. I guessed drowning had something to do with not being anymore, so I was sure that lying in the paddling pool would take away the pain of humiliation and rejection, because if there was no you, no one could hit you with their baby brother’s wet T shirt. It would have been better if the airplane dodging in and out of the rock-and-tower clouds could have dropped a bomb on me though, then I wouldn't have been responsible for not existing and no one would hate me for doing it. However, my life was probably defined from this point by there having been a slow puncture in the plastic ring sides of the paddling pool, and a leak in the bottom where it had been placed on a stone or somthing, so the pool had about half an inch of water and was pratically as flat and useless for drowning purposes as a used and discarded condom. At that moment though, Mum came down the garden path and said that we had to get ready to go to the NAAFI to get a birthday present for Lindsay. She asked why I had so many red marks but I don't think I could actually articulate that Deborah had attacked me with Lindsay’s wet T shirt and said I couldn't go to the party because I was too inferior,, and I wanted to die and be planted deep in the ground where no one could be nasty to me, and even if I could have done, it wasn’t the done thing to complain. There was nothing Mummy could have done about it because they out-ranked us. In Northern Ireland once, my big brother had thrown a tin can at the Colonel’s son and cut his ear because he had been nasty to him and said I was an ugly baby, and it was my Daddy who had got into trouble because he was only a Captain.

There were many occasions following that over the next ten years, when I simply wished to cease to exist right there and then, and fantasised about ways that it might happen. I never seriously contemplated actually killing myself, suicide. I heard the adults talking about cowardly people who killed themselves. I also heard all the rows and the fights that sounded like Dad was killing Mum, and I assumed it was my fault for being born and wished almost everyday that I hadn't been and could miraculously be unborn, especially when there were whispers about what to do with me if there was a divorce and how I could stay at Boarding School and go to Grandpa’s in the holidays would hardly notice any difference.

When adolescence struck it got worse in some ways and better in others. It was fashionable to want to die then, and a few of the people at school tried it. A couple succeeded. Meanwhile I still tried to think of a method that would be quick and relatively painless. One reason I never attempted suicide, never really thought it was the solution to ceasing to exist, was that I was unsure about the existence of the afterlife. I mean, what if you killed yourself, only to find that death was not oblivion after all and you had to go through it all over again with the embarrassment of knowing the consequences of what you did? That would be no better than continuing to be alive. The thought of being in the spirit world, there in a parallel universe watching yourself make a complete and absolute dick of yourself and seeing what happened and what they all said when they found out that you had failed this week's Maths test miserably, or that you had a crush on a boy in the sixth form and people had found out about it, or that it was you who accidentally scratched the Georgian bookcase, or that you had farted as you got up to do the reading in Assembly and everyone knew it was you and never stopped teasing you about it.

The idea of ceasing to exist by dying was supposed to take that embarrassment and humiliation away, but what if hell was being forced to keep going through it, watching the reaction of your family when they found out why you killed yourself and you faced an eternity of living it in an eternal loop. It was enough to put anyone off the idea. However, a bit of razor blading your arm and watching the crimson beads form on the parallel slashes met half way and there was always the possibility of slipping and accidentally catching an artery, or even getting Lockjaw. I used to get Tetanus and Jaundice confused. imagined that a rusty blade would give me jaundice and I would go all yellow like my brother who was born in Malaya- I somehow got the idea that he was yellow anyway, so it didn’t kill him like tetanus should really, but I wasn’t born in Malaya, I was born in Ireland, so it probably would kill me, but I wasn't keen on being yellow when I ceased to exist, so that was not the ideal solution either.)

Adolescence passed, at least I think it did. It probably returns periodically, something like once every couple of weeks until the day of the ceasing to exist happens. I engaged in activities where accidentally ceasing to exist, or being killed through no real fault of my own, and thus having an insurance pay out when it happened to ameliorate any desires by my nearest and dearest into investigating why I did not want to be alive, and therefore not hurting their feelings because they might think I didn’t like them and wanted to get away from them permanently, were a likely result. I think the term is seeking out death and danger, taking risks for a living. Hey, this way I could cease to exist by the method that might actually do someone or society some good in the meantime. It failed though. My existence continued despite dangling it brazenly in front of greedy fates. Obviously it was not tasty enough for them. Back to the cuts and burns.

As middle age came upon me, amazed to have got so far, I thought that at last ceasing to exist without any intervention was going to be a doddle. There have been a couple of glitches like giving up smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol except on odd occasions, eating healthy food and taking exercise and somehow maintaining a body that is more healthy than I , as a studied hypochondriac needs. In fact, as middle age bit hard, I discovered a temporary solution to ceasing to exist. Or should I say rediscovered it. As a child I had the ability to completely cut off from the world that rejected me and go into an inner world of my own making, in my imagination. I could be anything, do anything I wanted until I was rudely dragged back into the world I wanted to stop living in. Even then I could do back to the world what it did to me- be on the outside looking in and refuse to be drawn into it.
Of course as a functioning member of society, outwardly I cannot literally do that, but what I can do is look at through a backwards telescope. Today there is a label or labels for what is in my head, the desire not to exist and the disconnection. I don’t need the labels, just to pull the darkness over my head from time to time, until it really is time not to exist.

Homesickness

Vasili, the new Lithuanian boy, smokes on his veranda.
Cigarette aroma, redolent of carefree Summers-past before health scares
and sensible years kicked in, drifts through my open door,
hangs in the cool dimness of my hallway like nostalgic incense.
Vasili screws up his face in the stripy sun, stabs the dog-end out on his beer can.
He checks his phone, but there are no calls. Vasili throws his hood over his head
It hides his face, but the dejected slide to sit hunched on the decking
indicates his habitual sadness has not lifted despite last night’s party in the house.
The railings cast shadows over his body, build a cage around him.
An exile who pines for the birchwoods and lakes, he anticipates
Sunday voices from home, tests the signal, battery and ringtone. Satisfied
there is no fault, he picks embedded splinters and grit from the soles of his bare feet.

Ivor the Humber Box

Sometimes, the re-enactment world is more bizarre than even the general public think it is . Sometimes, the re-enactment world is bizarre to the re-enactors themselves.
Granted, there are several different levels of re-enactment for many eras, and for the 1940s, people who recreate various aspects of it range from the hardcore living historians, to the swing dancers, to the 'promenaders' who dress in anything from approximations of imagined impressions of wartime apparel adapted from anachronistic items, to those whose attention to detail would call up the expression 'more wartime than wartime' in order to pose on the platforms and ride the steam trains at various railway events. Let us not also forget the battle re-enactors and the military and classic vehicle enthusiasts who may or may not match their obsession with having the vehicle spot on to the last cross headed bolt with their own appearance when driving or displaying the ever-demanding cash and petrol guzzling mistress.

The 1940s weekend at Haworth, West Yorkshire is a place for people- watching. Haworth, usually more famous for the Bronte Parsonage, the Bronte Tea Rooms, the Bronte Antique Shoppe , the Bronte Mauseleum and the Bronte Toilets goes all red white and blue bunting and criss-crossed masking tape windows every Maytime around the date when Victory in Europe was declared in 1945. The steep cobbled mainstreet is closed off so that various jeeps and trucks and staff cars, gleaming Austin 7s, Ford Populars, sleek Vintage Rolls Royces can prowl and purr and prink while a thousand seamed stockinged, fur-stoled, killer heeled, rather less than svelte Rita Hayworth wannabe lookalikes pose beside them to the click of a thousand camera shutters.


There isn't much to do apart from looking at the shops , queuing, (but then queuing always was and always shall be a way of life in England), then finding a vantage point such as the raised seating area outside of the Black Bull pub, from which "Winston Churchill" with his obligatory bowler hat and, just in case anyone is in any doubt of whom he is meant to be, a cigar the size of a baboon's cock between his teeth, drawls the Victory speech accompanied by what appears to be some kind of strange furry animal but is in fact someone impersonating Queen Elizabeth (wife of George VI- the one who stayed in London during the blitz and was pleased when a bomb dropped on Buck House so she could hold up her head in the East End- Mum to our current monarch). From such a place the comings and goings of the crowd can be observed, the puffed up Military Police, blowing whistles you really yearn to shove somewhere dark, telling people to get out of the way. This is often a difficult thing to do because women get their heels stuck fast between the cobblestones and cannot move until men in hobnail boots which have absolutely no grip whatsoever on the slope slide gingerly to rescue them.

Bottlenecks occur as the shuffling crowd heaves and suddenly comes to a standstill when two small groups , one travelling up hill, the other down hill stop to talk to each other, or someone stops dead to take a photo of an old pram containing a life-like baby doll in a full suit gas mask that some poor bloke sweating in Home Guard Hairy Marys and a fat woman with very swollen ankles ,curlers hanging out of her turbanned head-scarf, and a dead ferret with six legs slung around her neck are pushing up and down the hill as if it were a broken down Austin 7.

A cold wind wuthers off the moor and people shiver. The real Yorkshire people bound up and down the hill like sheep dogs in a Hovis advert, the visitors complain bitterly about backs and feet and legs and varicose veins. They hang around the ENSA stage, which someone, as usual, has put by the steps of the church so no one can get through to the steps to the car parks to get out. You are trapped by the nightmare strains of a ukelele and a George Formby impersonator. The crushing crowd and the smell of mothballs, the feel of old fur on your neck (you hope against hope it hasn't got fleas) the puckered lips of old ladies smacking your cheek or worse, mouth, as they shriek that you remind them of some long dead flame , all combine to give you a panic attack. Clouds bank up blackly and the jeeps , those who do not know Haworth Moor weather, scramble to put the canvas on the tilts.

A group of German SS joke around , their black uniforms sinister. What they are doing there, promenaders portraying Axis troops in an English village reliving Victory in Europe Day, has been a cause for concern and question for years, but they are allowed to come. It helps bring home what the war was about. At least that is one way of looking at it.
Attention this year is diverted from them by the Japanese bloke, dressed in full Eastern Theatre uniform, with his wife in traditional kimono , obi, tabi socks and pattens, the whole geisha works. No one complained at the incongruity, the inappropriateness, the total lunacy- instead they all wanted their photographs taken with them. And the Japanese soldier and his lady complied with never ending patience and miles and miles of white toothed smiles.

It was the most surreal thing I have seen in years. What was also surreal is that I knew I should express disapproval as I usually do with the presence Gestapo, but somehow this smiling couple was symbolic of something more than old enmities. I felt sort of ashamed that I had ever objected to these very friendly chaps doing the Nazis- the leader, when I got talking to him, I have always turned my back on them in disgust before, turned out to be a car park attendant in Blackburn and his politics to the left of Trotski, and their representation of 'what might have been' extremely accurate. The Jap was showing part of his country's history that he was not proud of, but we cannot erase it, and neither can he, and to see him and his wife confront it in this most unlikely place was at once humbling and a lesson in what courage can really mean. It has caused me to rethink a few things, including my own arrogance.




We go down the hill to talk to the military vehicle friends and are offered a ride in Ivor's Humber Box , done out for 8th Army Desert Rats, that won best wartime vehicle in last week's show. Ivor has not done the Haworth procession before, neither has Brandon in the big Dodge 6 wheeler. After the procession is shepherded down the hill and directed to turn around and wait in a narrow side road that no one has measured to see if large Dodge trucks can get down, never mind turn around and wait as instructed, Ivor is beginning to regret deciding to show off the Humber. Brandon defies the MP and drives past the end of the lane. A message comes across John's walkie Talkie that Brandon is lost.

The parade starts. By the time it gets to the top of the mainstreet, and Ivor realises that he is supposed to drive down the 1 in 4 cobbled gradient behind a jeep which is having difficulty with its brakes, through Kami Kazi crowds leaping in front of him with cameras, crowds that will not stand back far enough to allow all wheels to run over cobbles and not feet. We get to where we started and Ivor whistles with relief. Then he is told to do a second circuit. He wails that he is sure his brakes are now shot, but he does it, swearing that no way will he go around a third time. Twice with no casualties was a miracle, three times would be pushing it, not to mention the cost of the petrol. And no one does.

The old blue and cream bus disgorges its cargo of evacuee children clutching gas masks and teddy bears. They get better at looking like bewildered waifs every year. I think I know how they felt as we head out for the car park and home as it begins to spitterspat with moors rain, my opinions and nerves in tatters, not quite knowing where to go in my thoughts of what is right and what is wrong from here. My world, yet not my world. 'They have this thing called Spring in the country, Mum. They have one every year.'

Awakening 2- The flying solar plexus.

Sometimes the soul is so saturated with something undefined: beauty, love, longing, that it becomes one with the air, like a cloud of midges or a field of swelling barley , a crack willow trailing pale new fronds into the music of a brook. My solar plexus is habitually heavy with accumulated dread, but at this moment it soars on the warm air currents and anyone would expect it to drop right out of the sky and splat onto the hard tarmac runway like the proverbial pound of strawberry jam. The idea of the soul as a pollen -laden bee, or a throbbing Lancaster bomber bumblehumming , finds a frequency whose tune almost convinces me that it actually does exist.

How else can I explain the Eureka moment of revelationary understanding that when one is young and is stirred by quickenings of knowledge of love, and longs for that capacity for love to be so filled with love that it brims? I remember imagining a time when my inner and outer world would be one huge Elizabethan May Revel, where some magic potion swapped on the tongues of faun kisses merges the spirits of lovers, and one of those lovers would be me. Or more, the part of the duality which was me would not be able to be distinguished from my imagined Lover.

There are times in life when that love does grab the guts and twist them to ecstatic pain- the birth of one's child, the birth of anyone's child come to that, a friend's pain shared and eased, a long tailed comet moving across the sky, a blood red moon, an untamed sea, a tree in full bridal blossom, the earthy dampness of a fresh dug grave. Always however there is a beautiful yearning for something undefined that drags and strains like a line on a kite. There is a hope, nay, a certainty that at some point in life, that yearning will be fulfilled. We have to believe that, don't we, because if we do not believe it, it cannot happen. Ever.

We left the Aerodrome on Sunday afternoon in convoy of a Half- Track, a Diamond T, a Rio towing a wartime Jeep and an old British Army Landrover, with our 1943 Willys Jeep and trailer after a weekend of glorious sunshine and relaxed enjoyment. We took the convoy through the centre of York. People waved and cheered. We waved back. Out of the city we rumbled along the country lanes that cut through fields of oilseed rape whose scent filled our faces, and whose delicate yellowness bathed us in reflected light. Chestnut candles lit the way through green tunnels. The wide sky over the vale of York met the ridge of the purple moors, while the white horse of Kilvington galloped like a shining destrier from another dimension on the distant horizon, beyond the ubiquitous patchwork of the crop fields that tugged at the essenses of time and my spirit's self imposed boundaries.

The flash of realisation came- this was it. This is the ultimate point, where everything melts away and what is left is pure abstract . One of those watersheds in life where if you were to die at that moment, like getting to the top of a mountain after a long and arduous climb, and jumping off into the void because there is nothing else, there can never be anything else to match the purity of elation, you would die fulfilled; and if that was the last the eyes of your soul had seen to hold in image for eternity, that would be the best anyone could ever hope to achieve. That adolescent awakening longing, of being loved and loving and becoming Nothingness; Nothing at all except for an explosion of sparkling atoms , a cloud of midges irridescent in the late afternoon sun of an English Maytime.

Awakening

Awakening

May Day, and always I am torn between the Workers of the World Unite memories and the nostalgia for the world that, of course never was, or never was for me, the Merrie merrie month of May in which lads and lasses cavorted in bucolic sexual bliss.

Recent memories are of cold winds and incessant rain leading to localised flooding during May, which also happens to be chocka full of re-enactment events, there being the May Day (International Workers’ Day) Bank holiday at the beginning, and Spring Bank Holiday (the old Whitsun or Pentecost) at the end. In the middle, the various other excuses for regional quasi agricultural or religious fests involving Morris Dancers, May Poles, a lot of Real Ale and Cider consumption and hopefully a bit of old fashioned matchmaking.

The weather has been hit and miss at least for the last 20 years that I can remember, sometimes snow, sometimes scorching temperatures, never predictable.

All looked set to be the same last week. There were few ground frosts this winter, which meant that flowers which would normally be ‘annuals’ went on blooming and ‘came again’ rather than being killed off by Winter cold as any self respecting bedding plant should be. Such plants were blooming when they had no right to be blooming, and such anachronisms were commented on by television pundits, pointed to as evidence of global warming, that some flowers were out over a month before their time. This was all well and good, but the bulbs and corms were neither earlier nor later than expected and the trees bided their time , as did the May blossom which started to froth in the hedgerows on the first of May here- exactly as it should.
When I was young I always associated the beginning of the long hot summers of childhood with the breathtaking beauty of bluebell woods. What more magical experience could there be than to see the carpet of special and inimitable , indescribable azure under the softly greening silver birches; to smell the delicate scent before it comes into sight, to anticipate the squeak of the fleshy stalks when you pull a bunch for Mum, enough to fill both hands encircled around the smooth succulence of the cool peatiness of the bright green stems; to bury your face in the rustling fairy-hats and freckle your nose with the golden dust of enchantment
.
They always wilted though, and the blue faded before your eyes, almost before you got them home and into the heavy cut-glass vase that the sunlight threw rainbows at so that they bounced around the walls, and David said they were fairies. Then you felt guilty and sad.

So a few days ago, the trees were still waiting and only the bravest of pioneer bells breeched the earth to signal back to those still below that it was time. Today , once again the suddeness of the Spring explosion took me by surprise, as it has done for the last 40 or so years. I mean, you know that Spring is coming, and you think it has come when the pussy willow pussies, the catkins quiver, the lambs gambol and the daffodils dance all the usual Spring strutting its stuff clichés, but then April flips over into May and the beauty makes you want to swear with the greatest profanities you can muster; it chokes you , overwhelms, drowns you. and there is nothing to do but to cry tears of love and joy and gird up those unexplainable emotions that can only mean that you know that the Earth itself is claiming you as its own.


In the days when ‘Summer is icumen in’ and all the May songs and rituals were made, in the days of the old calendar, May Day was actually on May 11th . Perhaps it is more comfortable for me to think of May Day as the beginning of Summer, rather than the bursting of Spring. That way, the midsummer solstice on 21-22 June does not seem so odd, bearing in mind August is considered the height of Summer. Time is something that has a life of its own, but I feel a need to tuck it up with hospital corners in order to make sense of where I am standing. I need the reference points , whether they be distance trig points high on a ridge on the horizon or a shadow on a sundial on the walls of the Antediluvian Buffalo Lodge on the corner of the street. But that’s just me.

I have no idea if the seasons are changing due to global warming or not, but I do know that throughout history festivals have ended up being in the wrong season and calendars have been hitched up like schoolgirls’ skirts , because the fault was deemed to be astronomical miscalculations. Of course, we have the solar system all worked out now and we know that our systems of time are right now, no need for hitching and nipping and tucking the days and months and seasons. Then of course, throughout history the alchemists, qabbalists astrologers & co all knew they had got it right too.

All I can say with this ramble is that it would be something of a crime to allow the absolute beauty of this May morning to go unremarked, even if there are no descriptions that are new and original. Then they do not need to be. It is there already, inside every one of us that the Earth has claimed and whose chest hurts with the annual thrust of the awakening of the Green Man, the quickening of his sap.

What I did in my Easter Holidays Part Two -

All my life I have been what I suppose would be called delusional or psychotic, in that sometimes I see things that are obviously not there. I know they are not there, yet I see them. It usually happens in towns like Richmond or Knaresborough, where I will be walking along and suddenly the surroundings will change so that I am not looking at the modern street scene but there are horse drawn carriages and people in Victorian costume, or in York it may be a pre Norman Conquest street scene. Outside my house, in the street I have seen a Victorian funeral cortege, including hearse drawn by black horses with black ostrich plumes waving from their heads and men in tall sealskin stovepipe hats walking in front and behind. Even in my own kitchen I have turned to see the room transformed into a bedroom, with a cast iron bedstead , a fire in the hearth and a woman in a dark green dress standing watching me. When we stripped the paint from the original pine doors, we found ‘bedroom 2 ‘ written on the frame in pencil. It can happen anywhere, I see horse ploughs on fields in the countryside, children playing in car-less streets, just people going about their normal business. The hallucinations last for two to three minutes.
At the museum, the Roman Fort, Celtic Village and Danelaw site are built as outside classrooms and backdrops. They are not 100% authentic and they are certainly not built on original sites. The Park itself was probably once part of the estate of a long gone stately home, but there seems to be no history extant about it. I have never had a psychotic episode there in all the years I have spent there as a site volunteer.

However, there was the weekend five years ago when Chris Flimsy-Whimsy came to visit for the evening, a reunion with him from another life in re-enactment. People tend to gravitate back towards the re-enactment comrades of their youth round about middle age and paths had crossed after a gap of several years. Someone had brought some poteen and dypsomaniac Chris imbibed enthusiastically until he was drunk enough to win at Mikado and extremely inebriated enough to sing ‘As I walked out one Sweet Moooorrrnnneeng in May, one Sweet May Morninge I walked out with a pretty fair maid with a pretty fair maid I walked out nnyaaahhh…’ There was much reminiscing and apocryphal story telling, not to mention revelations of political shenanigans in the hierarchy of the English Civil War Battle re-enacting fraternity. Eventually Flimsy decided he must return home and wailed in anguish as he crossed the fort compound and stopped dead in the middle. He then moved his body in strange ways, like some slow motion puppet dance. Fearing that his sanity had finally fled, we rushed to see what was wrong. He asked us to assist him in climbing the wall , which we did, even though there was no wall. However, we failed, as he just could not manage to get enough of a grip to get over, so using our intelligence, we noticed a gate a little further down the wall which was not there and led him safely through it, whereupon he staggered happily up the lane singing about shagging his love on a bright May Morninge.

That was the weekend of the Children of the Village of the Damned. A family of mother and father and 4 very blond, very blue -eyed boy children who stood and stared at us, silently, unblinking as if we were waxworks, but more as if they were the waxworks. It had freaked me out so much that I had gone into the shack and shut the door, where I stayed in hiding, trembling, until there was a peremptory knocking. Guiltily I opened the door and they were there, mother, father and four sons fixing me in their Aryan gaze, studying every detail of me and the dressed up hut I cringed in.

. That was also the weekend of Yvonne (not her real name) the 12 year old Asperger’s girl who dressed and looked like a character in a strip cartoon story out of a 1950s edition of June and Schoolfriend. This time she had sat down at the Mess Hall trestle and calmly picked up Clare’s embroidery frame and proceed to plickpluck the needle in and out of the canvas at random whilst telling us that her mother had been changed into her father and her uncle was now her aunt and her father was living with another man. The women managed to remain straight faced and professional in the face of these revelations, which somehow they did not seem as strange as they should have done. No one appeared to find it worth the gossiping.

It occurs to me as I sit in that same hut these years afterwards my thoughts skittering into the chasing shadows , it was just too much to take in. Poor Yvonne. She is now a big girl, young lady , all handbag , ankle socks and bossy boobs, holding grandad’s arm. He gets progressively more blind. Tunnel vision I think. They take care of each other. I wonder if she will be here this weekend, or if there is not need for them to come anymore, if she has grown out of baby animals now.

The most peculiar thing about that weekend- it had been one at the end of May, Spring Bank Holiday and the sun had shone hotly, stickily, was the pocket-watches. His watch had gone backwards. He had arrived at the station on the restored old railway line on site before he left the fort- usually a 10 minute walk, but in his case, he got there 10 minutes before he left. The person with whom he walked up found his watch had stopped as he had left the Fort. Someone else had gone to their cabin to get their watch to find it had vanished altogether , never to be seen again, and three other people’s watches either gained time madly or stopped altogether forever.

The worst of it all had been that on the day after we had all gone home, the Celtic Village had been burned to the ground by (allegedly) the local didicoys who were and are the bane of the site management.

A lot of re-enactment is re-enactment societies re-enacting themselves. Certainly much of the ‘camp-fire talk is reminiscing of past musters, past weekends, telling the tales with flourishes and embellishments, crafting them, communally polishing them into the stuff of legend. I chuckle a lot when I hear a tale being told in first person by someone who wasn’t even at the event, and who has casually made themselves the hero of the day, when I was there and I know who was that man, and it wasn’t them, being described. I chuckle when they are caught in mid sentence as I walk up; they know and I know they are repeating the tale as told, fitting themselves into a major role. I never call them on it, and neither does anyone else. Why? Because I might tell the tale again with the other names, and in any case, it is part of the whole magic- that a story has made such an impact that someone wants to retell it and star in it. This way are legends born, folk tales committed to collective memory, then as now and ever shall be Gaia willing.

To diverge from proper chronology of this blog, such a tale was told in the museum café next morning, where management had kindly provided coffee and toast for the re-enactors who had slept on site, to warm them up a bit. The manager was telling the American Student Vikings of an occasion in Battle Re-enactment, when the arrogant Scots in phillibegs had come howling down with sword and glaive onto a musket regiment. The musketeers had retreated into a patch of stinging nettles, hotly pursued by the heedless Highlanders, who soon heeded the brambles and stingers around the trossocks. Actually the story was true of a pike regiment at an entirely different muster (unless of course the Highlanders were daft enough to fall for the tactic twice, always possible I suppose). I know, I was that pikeman whose hose had fallen down.

After I had been huddled thus musing for about 45 minutes there was a human banging at the door, and His voice, what was I up to in there, come on out, we had visitors in the Mess Hall (who turned out to be group members who were most certainly not crazy enough to camp out in this weather but would visit at stages of the weekend.) Friday evening then passed with the notable sight of Tony getting steadily more and more drunk and receding into a hippy state of love and peace towards everything and everyone, his face relaxed into a happy smile, his head waggling so that he resembled a stoned gnome. This was mainly brought on by our critical discussion of a book I had given him called ‘Bored of the Rings’ and was probably impossible to make any sense of unless you had not remembered living through the 1960s. I distinctly remember a conversation about the influence of Benzedrine on Hobbits and similar creatures.


Hot water bottles are ace. They are the most wonderful inventions ever. Stone hot water bottles are okay, but smuggling in your one luxury item, the rubber hottie through the time machine is the thing to be recommended. Thanks to the contraband hottie, we did not suffer from hypothermia that night, and, contrary to all expectation, managed some deep and healthy sleep under the blankets furs and coats heaped on top of us, and awoke to a blinding brittle frosty morning- the sky as blue as the Lebensborn kids’ eyes, the sun as yellow as an Easter chick. Soon the drooly smell of bacon cooked al fresco , and coffee steaming on cold air became the epitome of contentment. As good as it gets. Yes.

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What I did in my Easter Holidays Part One- Friday

There I was, you know, like in one of those situations where the finger wags and a voice says ’be careful what you wish for’ and you are glad you can’t see the face of the voice or you would smash your fist into its smug mouth.

After a week of the usual frenetic preparations for the first Living History long weekend presentations of the season, all the tears and temper tantrums and stressings out, the huts were set dressed, everyone changed into costume and character , the range lit and the Friday night crowd settled in the mess hall for booze and bitching and the odd song. Spring had officially arrived . The full moon played hide and seek with the ragged sheep-clouds and hares shrilled in competition with the cold mad wind. Wood smoke played its game of alternately puffing out of the range pipe and filling the mess hall , driving everyone outside and fluttering smuts into beer tankards. This is as cosy as it gets, the range, cunningly made from a battery box from an army truck, glowing cherry red. Little John ,who somehow has managed to grow from being six to being fourteen without anyone actually noticing the years passing, makes it his task to light and keep the fire burning and the water boiler filled. The storm lanterns throw kindly shadows in the sense that we all appear ageless and timeless. We enjoy each other’s company, we are used to each other‘s moods and idiosyncracies, like a family; we consider ourselves a family, more than a family in some cases. We have all been doing this together for some years now; some of us go back a quarter of a century in this hobby, this way of life, living as people lived in past centuries. Others come and go, participate on part-time peripheries but the dedicated core are always there, always set up, always slotted into place on a Fort Friday night, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, piglets at the teats of the Obsession. We know when to speak and greet each other , when to offer help and when to leave alone and wait for conversation and shared situations. Now, huddled around the trestle, for the first time this season we re-aquaint ourselves with our personas and our alter egos., and those of our companions.

Outside the cabin doors bang, someone asks if the main gate is locked yet, if it is time for the first security patrol of the site. We all look at each other and shiver, say that there are Vikings arriving so better leave it a while. No one wants to leave the glow of the fire, but someone goes outside for a piss. We all seem to acquiesce in an unspoken decision that we will drink tonight. We do not usually have a heavy drinking session on the first night in these days, having learned that it can ruin the weekend. He says he didn’t bring our bottle out, so I go back to the cabin for it. The wind slices my clothes, cutting my flesh like a hunter’s skinning blade. It screams around the corners of the wooden buildings, arranged as a Roman Fort. I fight against it to open the door of our 10ft x 8ft shed (Roman Claustrium/line shack) As I fall into the darkness within, bang my shins against a wooden form and kick the emergency piss bucket over (fortunately empty) the wind slams the door back and ice balls splatter in. I reach out and drag the door back, realising there is no catch on the inside and hold it with one hand while I fumble with a match with the other. Door tied shut -ish, I light a beeswax candle. We stopped using paraffin lamps a couple of seasons ago because the fumes were making us ill and anyway the ones we had were unauthentic for the place we were supposed to be representing. The candle flared and fluttered , I rummaged for the whisky bottle. It was a single malt left over from Christmas. Too good really for here, but we had a few and the Chancellor has put up the cost of spirits so much that buying bottles of blended whisky for consumption by drunken re-enactors has become a bit restrictive. The wind whistled Dixie and it sounded like someone was tipping a truckful of gravel on the shack. I opened the door, which the wind nearly ripped off its hinges and got a stinging faceful of frozen rain which was not draining into the shale of the fort compound but forming large puddles. No way was I battling back to the mess hall and getting drenched on first night , so I sat down on the form and wondered how to pass the time.

So that was how I came to be in a much wished for position. Alone, away from telephones, television, all the trappings of my 21st century life; away from all the demands that beset me. There was nothing I had to do, nothing I had to clean or tidy, nothing demanding my attention whatsoever. At least nothing I could do anything about , marooned inside the cold hut , with the known world enclosed within the confines of the limbo dancing candle flame. I could think without interrupted thought, write without distraction. I rooted around under the folding cot and found a notebook, got a pencil from inside the Victorian writing slope and opened the book. I stared at the blank page. The darkness and cold settled on my shoulders like a shawl, the storm rattled around outside, the candle flame twisted into fantastic shapes and I could think of not one word to write. So I put the book away and sat , swigging the whisky from the neck of the bottle, swallowing down the panic of nothingness that I felt rising from somewhere in what I supposed was my bowels. I stood up and looked at my face in the polished steel mirror, distorted by creases and shadows. There was a kind of purity in the nothingness that frightened me, and which I and the storm embraced.

Last Times

The trouble with last times is that even when you know that it is the last time, it never really registers that the last time actually means never again. You would think, that when you know that it is a last time, you would savour every moment, hang on to every nuance, but you don't, because endings are always beginnings too, and last times are either welcomed or sentimentally toasted and forgotten in the whirl of moving forward. It is not until they are seen in retrospect that nostalgia, regret, creeps up and gooses you. Years, decades, later it comes as a bit of a shock when you read it as historical fact that someone else found interesting enough to mention in passing, that the ‘last time’ for yourself really was the last time it happened. When you are young, and you absorb the passing of days, months seasons as tied to activities on the land, the appearance of the field crops as well as the colours of the trees, you know that you are part of this land, the soil, the earth, the rhythm, and that these things have happened so forever and will probably go on happening forever. Obviously there are changes, and you urge and welcome changes, because you are young and reject the conservatism of the old people. You are young, you yearn for progress, but you still expect the constants to stay just so even though you never try to make sense of the contradictions.

In Spring 1974, with the European Economic Community, and all that stood for with the ‘Common Agricultural Policy it was inevitable that the day of the bitter hop was over, at least in the small commercial quantities we grew. Even so, it seemed impossible that it would be the last time that the hop garden would be strung in spring; the last time passengers on the top deck of the Aldershot and District Traction Company number 9 bus would see Zeb going up and down the rows as he had done for the last 20 years since had he started work on the farm at 14 years of age, constructing the web which looked so complex to me, but which he appeared to be doing with his eyes shut, replacing broken hooks that secured the strings at the nodes, almost by instinct. Europe dictated what was to be grown on English Farms, the quotas and quantities. ‘Eurofizz’, lager was now fashionable It was taking over from the traditional bitter in even the grubbiest of village pubs as yet undiscovered by the new breed of incomers, not only to the village pubs , but increasingly to the shape of rural society: the yuppies. Even Zeb asked for lager across the formica bar of the Prince of Wales now. It was cool. He had bought a brand new Ford Capri, at which Alfie White, his employer , shook his head and observed that it had thus come to the point where the farm labourer could afford to buy a better car than the farmer who owned the land and paid the workforce.

Norman chanted his mantra at me, as we trained and widdled the bines in early summer, once they had broken ground and trailed the pale green triffid-like plants across the loam, ‘runner beans grows away from the sun, the hops they grows towards the sun, ‘ meaning that we were to give them a helping hand up the wires by making sure we twisted them clockwise.

Every September , more or less since I could remember, the dusky late Summer nights had been heavy with the aroma of roasting hops, which drifted from the octagonal towered kiln in the Village street across the fields and meadows and into my bedroom window .It was a timeless smell, redolent of warmth , fecund darkness and flickering winter fires, mulled ale. It was also crisp and green, insinuating, like Spring, It was at once an outside and an inside smell, intoxicating like a drug.

Summer 1974 was the last official Summer of my childhood. My eighteenth birthday fell during hop harvest, and I would be leaving the village behind before the next one, going out into the world. Farmer Mike collared me on the last day of the summer holidays, and told me to be there on Tuesday after school for the hopping. I demured, I would have too much studying for important exams that year. No one on the farm had any respect for exam results , but much as I wished to stay seventeen and pretend to be an agricultural labourer forever, I knew I should never be allowed. My parents had not even allowed me to change my options and apply for agricultural college. My days of being carefree were at an end. Mike did not insist. He looked at me with what I took to be contempt and said he would prefer it if I could just spare one more week, all things considered, if I was to be leaving them for the rest of my life, surely another week wouldn’t hurt. There were not as many gypsy families coming as used to, the village women were all working in offices and he didn’t know ‘ow we was going to get through. I told him that Tuesday was my birthday, so I really didn’t want to work, and my parents would expect me home from school. Mike had a way of looking at you, his eyes like a baby seal, so Tuesday saw me get off the number 9 bus in the middle of the village and trail up the lane , dump my school bag in the barn where I kept my boots and overalls and wander out to the hop garden which was adjacent to the farmyard.

I was a little cross because I felt that I had been lied to. The machine shed was shaking from the clanking of the rollers and cogs and the roof practically jumping with the noise of what seemed to be fifty women in bright aprons and headscarves cackling and shouting. The men were red faced and sweating, manhandling the seven foot pockets. Nearly every man woman and child in the village was there, along with several of the dark skinned gypsies. I could see Zeb hooking down bines , his face screwed up against the sun, two deep welts from the sharp serrated leaves across his cheek with blood beads dried unheeded , thick gloves on his hands. Six of his many brothers stood at intervals along the row with their poles, dragging the bines down to the intinerant workers who loaded them carefully onto the carts and brought them to the machine shed, where more of them fed the bines to the great clanking monster which stripped the cones from the stems and shuffled them down the belts where the women’s hands moved deftly to pick out all leaves and pieces of bine so that only the cones dropped into the bushel baskets which were then tipped into the long hessian pockets.

Junie grabbed me as I made my way through to go into the garden. ‘You stand by me ‘ere and pick leaves wi‘ us, young’un’. She said, pushing me into the group of women in a line by the rolling belts. They all laughed gap toothed , russet- apple chuckles at me. ‘Can’t I go out with Zeb and the men, Junie?’
‘No ‘til you knows what you is a doin’ young’un. Bezoides, you intelickules is too dellycat for proper work,' she teased
‘Bugger orf Junie, I’m a man today, Junie. I am 18’
The laughter of women rose above the machine, faces loomed like a hundred ‘green men’, and in the shadows of the bines women with hairy faces and men with smooth sun burned skin teemed, tumbling in the noise of cogs and rollers, the sticky green dusty light, and overpowering, soporific hop fug made me feel like I was on a surreal trip. Suddenly the machinery stopped. The silence was relieved when Alfie called for the break for tea , the buzz of voices resuming as soon as it was sure that the machine had not eaten a child this time.

Junie told me to go up to the house and tell Mrs Mike and Mrs Alfie that the hop-pickers had stopped for tea. I always obeyed Junie. I trotted off and on the way back stopped to go to the toilet. There was no light in the Kazi. I had barely started when there was the banging of a fist on the door. ‘hurry up, there’s a queue out here young’un.’
‘Coming won’t be a sec‘
I opened the rickety planked door. The sun poured into the outhouse blinding me. No- one wore sunglasses, even though the men’s faces were upturned to the sky all day as they pulled down the bines. I blinked as I thought I had emerged like a lone performer on a stage before a full house. I had. There must have been a hundred people standing in the yard, but it was they who were singing ’Happy Birthday’ and Junie and Norman carried a board with a massive cake flaming with candles. Ruddy , gurning female faces, sweaty male faces were thrust into mine, kissing me, congratulating me, making lewd jokes. Zeb kissed me on the mouth, held me in a long hug. ’You, I don’ care what them posh folk say, you, you be one of us and allas will be’. I felt the tears come, fall on Zeb, make tracks on my dusty face. I said the hops were making my eyes sting. Which they were.

Some one asked me what I wuz goin’ a do wiv all that skoolin’ and at that moment I just wanted to stay there in among the gypsies, the villagers, the farm workers, this buzzing mass of timeless humanity. I wanted time to freeze right there, preserve the moment forever in the hop resin. I wanted to be part of them all forever, never leave the land, never leave the people who worked it, my village, my people. It was the first and last time I ever belonged anywhere. I mean really belonged.

As it happened, the first time I was to exercise my new adulthood and vote was a few months later in the referendum in 1975 to join the European Community. I felt that I had betrayed them all, betrayed my own roots, betrayed my friends, but I knew that we could not survive in economic and agricultural isolation. The world was changing. I don’t know if I was right to vote yes , but I was not the only one. Enough people did for it to happen. I suppose we did not entirely understand just how much traditional things like the hop garden would change forever. We maybe thought that the garden would lay fallow for a year or so and then the hops would grow again as they always had.
I had never imagined 33 years later to stumble across the stark words that the last hop harvest in the village was in 1974, and to be taken back to that day of lasts and firsts, to find that perhaps I did stay there after all, in that moment whose essence is preserved in every stray wild hop in a summer hedgerow twisting towards the sun, in every kiss that lasts a fraction too long and in that special place where first times and last times are stored.


http://freespace.virgin.net/churchcrookham.home/history/hops.htm


Some other pictures of hop picking in the 1970s to illustrate can be found at this site about Bodiam.
hop stringing
http://www.bygonebodiam.co.uk/hop%20stringing.htm
Hop training and widdling
http://www.bygonebodiam.co.uk/Hop%20Training.htm
The machine
http://www.bygonebodiam.co.uk/Machine%20Picking%20-%20At%20the%20Picking%20Machine.html

Vale of York

*Image "Dance of Spring " by Franz von Stuck

The Environment Agency has issued storm warnings for tomorrow, Monday. Not sure if these are for the North of England, as the North doesn’t usually figure much in national calculations and I heard that it was Devon and Cornwall that people are being advised to secure everything, nail down their pets , children, old folk and sheep , inflate their rubber dinghies and stay inside, doors appropriately sandbagged.

However, it was warm enough and sunny enough to explore the Vale of York for today’s house hunting reconnoiterings , or rather area assessments and house envying, because of course, the perfect house in the perfect setting is always occupied by some other people who are likely not nearly as deserving of it as we are. Bastards.

Although the Vale of York ticks a lot of boxes for us, the fact that we have had to wait for a day to trawl this area when the weather was good enough to see it in its full glory should not be forgotten when the prettiest cottage with the most lush garden which could double up as a grade I archaeological excavation site of interest ,and the most excellent range of outbuildings, requisite number of bedrooms, bathrooms, reception rooms all renovated, restored and redecorated in the most sympathetic manner and the best possible taste, presents itself at the most tempting price.

Being a geological plain , a lot of which was once marshland drained over the centuries, a lot of which floods regularly as a matter of course, and even more regularly either as a result of global warming or not enough consideration and knowledge about just exactly where it is unwise to build new housing developments, service roads and all the things associated with developing land which has been under plough or water for thousands of years. Consequently flood alert is endemic and the difficulty in obtaining buildings and contents insurance a problem not to be sneezed at lightly.

The Vale of York is evocative of its homophone. It is as changeable and mysterious as a woman with the light and the season, the weather and the mood of the land. Often swathed in mist , a teasing veil that has concealed the Minster Towers, the soaring spires and the city walls from friendly traveller and warlike enemy alike as they have traversed the fertile plain since the Romans built Eboricum , and probably before that, back into the miasma of time when Ugg and Akha the Neanderthal couple tramped across the tundra seeking the mighty aurochs to fill the winter larder and clothe their band of hunter-gatherers. On a clear day, however, as they say, you can see for ever and ever across the Vale, up to the rolling Wolds and to the purple horizon of the moors. The red brick cottages, the grey spires of smug churches, the outcrops of tree lines stunted wind breaks, the emerald- greening- spring -breaking spikes of flailed white-thorn hedges, silver streams and water meadows retaining shallow lakes that bring the sky to earth all conspire together to make you forget to breathe. The huge skies, nimbus clouds streaked with mother-of-pearl subtlety , or castled with blowsy cumulus Camelots put every living thing, every timeless brick and stone and clump of earth into its place in time and space, makes you feel that there is indeed an order to the universe.


The snowdrops nod thickly in Manor House woodland, blossom blushes neatly in planned avenues, ubiquitous roadside borders of daffodils richly sickly yellow; there comes a point where it all suffocates you, where you are looking at yourself through the wrong end of a telescope- where you are outside of yourself and see yourself inside the landscape and the timescape, a distant spire on a horizon hazy with swirling mist of petal fragrance on the wind, a minuscule speck of miserable humanity. You have absorbed as much beauty as is possible without exploding like a ploughed fieldful of gulls disturbed by a shotgun blast, like this blossom will when the coming storm rips it from the twig.

At this point in our outing we hit the military garrison at Strensall. I had never imagined I would ever feel particularly nostalgic enough about the Army Camps I lived in or near for the first twenty years of my life, to welcome the memories the brickwork of the married quarters, the squareness, the grey and red, the white lines , line and lines , everything in lines brought tumbling into my consciousness. Even the heathland was the same as at Leipzig Barracks, the fences, the warning signs, the Scots pines. No, I had never imagined ever feeling fondness for the concrete grimness of it all, but today, after the surfeit of beauty, I positively embraced it and looked favourably upon the village as a possible future home with echoes of my distant past. The odd and unexpected symbiotic symmetry pleased and soothed my spirits.




Heading into the outer city, we took a wrong turning, if there is such a thing when exploring, and drove round and round an estate the like of which is not mentioned in the tourist brochures or guidebooks of York. Crumbling, chip boarded up, the people are poor, the streets threatening in a blank staring kind of way. We pulled up at T junction, escape in sight in the form of the Bootham Bar, gateway through the ancient city wall rising before of us . A lollipop sign read STOP in the red circle. Under this someone had written in fat black marker pen:

"POETS".

I have no idea what it means.

Here a llama, there a llama, and another little llama

Derek and Evie brought us eggs today down from their farm in the Dales.
The eggs are mixed sizes and species. Most of them have poo and feathers stuck to the shells, which are all shades from white to espresso, plain and speckled. They most definitely do not have little red lions and dates stamped on them. They do not conform to each other, never mind DEFRA egg specifications. Derek and Evie’s eggs are not so much free range as positively feral. The yolks, often double, are not the insipid greyish cream of battery eggs, nor are they the self conscious saffron of barn or supermarket ‘free range’ eggs. These are full bodied proud ochre, bright and rich as the sun over a field of bursting wheat ears in an old Soviet propaganda poster.

They are also illegal eggs. The hens and chickens , banties, ducks and geese and whatever else waddles and scratches about Derek and Evie’s yard gobbling up the corn and scraps from Evie’s bucket as they have done for hundreds of years worth of generations of Dereks and Evies, eat the wrong things to be allowed to have the eggs passed as healthy for sale for human consumption and therefore no little lion may be be stamped on them. No little lion, and it is illegal for Derek and Evie to sell them, even though they are the tastiest eggs you could scramble, poach , boil or fry, or indeed throw at Deputy Prime Ministers during Countryside Alliance protest rallies.

Evie’s sponge cakes are orange with them and taste like my generation can just about remember home made cake should taste like; did taste like, before the rules and regulations banned the sale of home made cakes as we knew them, a la Grandma, Jerusalem and WI, church fete and village jamboree. Rather than Grandma knowing what is good for us, Nanny State knows best, and only allows us to buy the kind of factory produced cellophane-wrapped cakes that are marketed with all the clichés that the brainstormers use to try to flog us the mass produced, bland, advertiser’s psychological image triggering so called country- goodness wholegrain free- range hand- made (okay-yah right) have absolutely nothing to do with mother nature as she straddles the motorways and holes herself up in inhospitable rural badlands, naked and fulsome.

So Evie and Derek collect the eggs and give them away to friends. We had sunflower colour mushroom omelettes for tea, and we rejoiced that Derek’s and Evie count us as friends to be trusted not to be poisoned by the eggs.

**************************

Evie's last appointment at York Hospital lasted 20 minutes while they prodded her stomach and pronounced her clear of the cancer. However, when I asked how her eyes were now, (not having seen Derek and Evie since well before Christmas) she calmly replied that she didn't know what he had done in the operation but she had been in some dreadful pain for a week or two, but it was mostly alright now. The worst thing was trying to manage to cross the road in this bright sunlight with only one eye working. I swallowed. I thought it was a routine cataract op. She continued, telling me that Derek had not been so good, he was out of breath before he got to the stall to muck out the alpacas, and she had to go with him to make sure he got there and help with removing the droppings to the midden. They had wanted to breed llama's really, not alpacas but a mistake had been made with the order for the first female and when it had eventually arrived, having cleared extended quarantine because of the outbreak of 'blue tongue' in the UK, it turned out that they had sent an alpaca instead of a lllama. It was a very nice alpaca though, as alpacas went.

Derek chirped in that the windows had been painted with frost patterns for the first time in 25 years. It had been so cold that they had gone round to feed and muck out all the stock first thing, gone in for breakfast and stayed indoors until it was time for evening feeding and bedding down. Evie said Derek had been stir crazy for three days, but his chest was so bad he could hardly breathe the freezing air and several courses of anti- biotics had not helped any, so it would seem he was now incurable and may as well put up with it. It was difficult for them to bottom out the byres, so their sons were coming at Easter to do it, but it was hard work for them. They weren't used to it. Good boys, but not farmers. Right. I almost offered to come and do it myself, but what I know about bottoming out llamas could be written on the sharp end of a needle, and that providing you could locate it in the midden.

'But,' Evie grinned, 'that wasn't the best of it. '

'No,' Derek snickered, 'You know when it was all white, the rime was on every tiny twig and thorn across the valley, and the smoke from the chimneys hung like a fairyland mist. I melted peep holes in the window frost and looked out into the yard. I said to Evie, that alpaca doesn't look too well, what do you think? It was up and down , lying down. I said...'

''Ee said it was colic," Evie chimed in. " I went and had a look at her when I put food out for the cats lunchtime, and I was suspicioned. I didn't say about what I knew to him though,' she touches my arm conspiratorailly, "Sure 'nough, she gave birth to a calf. She must've been expecting when she came. "

"So instead of one llama, you got two alpacas for your money. " I chuckled, thinking flipping typical of a Yorkshire farmer, that, climbing out of the midden stinking of honeysuckle.

Derek's thin face assumed a modest , self deprecating , half embarrassed expression, "well Kevin says he can sell the calf when it is old enough. Evie keeps looking up its arse, but it's difficult at this stage to see how many orifices there are, because of all the hair. But she thinks it is male. We should get a good price for him, offset it all a bit."

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Evie tells of how she was asked to help with the washing up at a village whist drive. She said she would after she had seen to the pigs and had a wash. She had gone down and was very upset that no one had spoken to her. True, although she had lived on the farm for 32 years, she didn't go into the village very much, and never had much time for taking part in things, just washing up and clearing up after them when she had finished working, which was usually very late on. She said that when she had gone on the intensive course- 6 hours a day for 3 weeks - to learn how to use computers (this was last year before she got too ill to do the follow up one) in Tanfield, every one there had been friendly and they all had a laugh and it was interesting and fun. In their village, it seems they are all miserable beggars who can't bring themselves to speak to the volunteer washer upperers , even though they have washed the smell of the piggery off in the shower.

*****************************

Derek laughs and the conversation turns to the rag doll cats. They had to let the stud male go because he would not use the litter tray, and when Evie had to clean eleven piles of of catshit , deposited in a neat line along the hearth, enough was enough. He had to be let outside and so his fur got dirty and he cross bred with the moggies , but people loved the half rag dolls. They had another up and coming Rag Doll Tom, so that meant they could maybe afford a laptop computer for Evie in Summer.

********************************

It is a while since I have been to their smallholding in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. Years ago Derek used to hold auction sales in one of his fields, and the farmers from miles around would bring their rusty old bits of obsolete toolery for the incomers to find charming and mount on the walls of their barn conversions. Machinery would change hands, amidst unintellible dealing muttered out of the side of the farmers' mouths, and the most unusual and rare items would often emerge from someone's old cowshed. Like a Bugatti, or an ancient shuddering old Morris van converted to run on gas during the war.
That is how I first met Derek and Evie, when I was in pursuit of a cheap compressor, and someone had told me about the farm auction up Leyburn way. It was a warm , magical summer evening; such a one as you can taste the green and see the fairies flit from meadowsweet to cornflower. This is truly 'God's Own Country' with the yellow and green patchwork fields, bordered by ubiquitous drystone walls wiggling up hill and down dale, the pinkish Yorkshire sandstone cottages, gardens aflame with geranium, begonia and sprawling nasturtiums. Their rambling cottage rambled amidst hollyhocks, honeysuckle and chickens. Geese honked indignantly and a donkey nuzzled around hopefully at anyone who passed near enough to his warped wooden rail fence , teeming with a microcosmic burrowing insect world.

I was breathing in the night-scented stocks, their heady scent intoxicating me even further, dragging me into something resembling a D.H.Lawrence novel, when Evie had started to talk to me about something I remember as being the last thing on earth I expected to have a conversation about out there in the sticks, but can't for the life of me remember the subject. Evie can converse on ever subject under the sun in an informed and intelligent manner. It may well have been the tv film crew that had been there earlier and broken her gladioli . Evie and Derek (as do we) supply various items, animals, implements and backdrops for film and television productions , and sometimes even appear as extras in dramas.

I cannot think of Derek and Evie without an image similar to the Romantic chocolate box painting of William Morris's gaff, Kelmscott Manor (which I once proudly completed in an oil painting by numbers kit) rising tangibly before me, with this old Yorkshire couple meandering down the garden path, hand in hand, to feed the alpacas , just out of frame.

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