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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Sugar Shaker

Sugar Shakers.

The rime last week gave us spectacular views across the Dales. I remember a conversation we had a couple of years ago while negotiating a hair pin bend down from the moor, where he (driving) asked if that was frost on the hedges. I had replied that no, it looked like the kind of mist you got when the morning sun was just burning off the dew , but was that thing that for me most grabs me from inside, May blossom. This time it was reversed. I was driving alone, but the winter hedges spiked, every twig and thorn delineated by the fluffy frost appeared to be exploding in a riot of frothy flowers.

Following the excitement of the rime, there was a total eclipse of the moon to break up the monotony as February slithered towards March. With hope that for once the skies might be free of the cloud and general overcastedness which occurs whenever there is an astronomical phenomenon, which , predicted to occur between 1am and 4am, might actually be at optimum visibility from a position in the sky relative to my bedroom window and at that time in the night least affected by light pollution of the town. No such luck, however, the temperature rose and the sky was thick with low lying cloud, so no red moon to marvel about.

The next bit of excitement was the earthquake last Wednesday morning. Well, more of a shiver or a tremor really. It really should have done it again the next night at 1am, so that everyone who missed it would have a story to tell, and those who didn’t might actually know what it was and observe accordingly. Me, I would have normally been still awake at 1 o’clock in the morning, but for the first time in ages I had actually fallen asleep over a critical essay regarding Omens in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.

I was woken by what I thought was the dog scratting and rattling his ID and microchip discs. The fact that the dog was snoring and sleep whimpering, paws twitching and scuffling the laminate floor at the side of the bed somehow did not compute, but what else could it be. Bangs ,crashes and the bed doing an impression of a tall ship on a rough sea and assumed I was dreaming and must need a pee. With a rumbling like a lorry which was not hitting the raised manhole cover in the street outside, I realised it was an earthquake, mainly because my father had been around a few of them in his time and told me all about the symptoms. Not that I took much notice at the time, assuming that it was all a euphemism or excuse for him being drunk as the proverbial skunk.

So 10 seconds or so later, it was like interesting but blink-and-miss-it sex, all over in three shakes.

I can’t believe really I just went back to sleep. Me the insomniac nearly slept through an earthquake and did not even bother to turn on the TV for 24hr news to see if the rest of the country apart from my house had been swallowed up by a huge fissure in the earth and global warming seen to the rest by covering up the mess with North Sea and/or Atlantic Ocean.

Next morning all seemed to be intact except for a few teddy bears having leapt from their customary perches, and a couple of model plane crashes from his study shelves- oh and the model cars on the sitting room windowsill had started on a run to London but stalled when they had hit the mullion. I realised that the rattling had been the collection of Aladdin oil lamps I have for Living History presentations and displays shoved on any spare bit of flat surface. All intact except one broken glass chimney.

Friday evening saw the most frightening wind and rain storms I have witnessed from here in my urban nest. Somehow, outside in the open countryside, such violence is not so threatening. Actually, not just witnessed from my nest, witnessed in it. It is the irony of my life that if I bodge a job up, it lasts for at least 20 years. If I pay good money out for professionals to do it I always end up having to do it again. Last week I had a whole new roof put on the ground floor bay because it had been leaking over the front door. Well, Friday evening, the rain was being blown against the front of the building so hard, in such quantities that looking from outside it was like Hardraw Force , and from the first floor sitting room, and the second floor bedroom it was like someone had turned a powerhose full blast on the windows. The noise, even through the double glazing was such that it put that tightness of dread in my stomach. I would not have been surprised if the whole front elevation of this solid stone Victorian building had not collapsed.

Downstairs in the shop, the water was pouring into the bay, through the new roof. Running with pans and buckets and plastic sheets, but it was hopeless. All I could do was try to move everything that was vulnerable to water. Bugger. The roofers came immediately I called them on Saturday morning, and despite the wind blowing their ladders down (fortunately without either of them on it and no one passing underneath ) spent the day redoing the mortar that they reckoned had cracked with the frost. Think I am that daft? They forgot to finish that bit, the edge where the bay meets the wall, didn’t they.

The wind has dropped a bit now, but it is getting colder. There is a another severe weather warning, this time for snow.

March 2008 looks like it is going to come in like a big white lion shaking its mane.