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Time passes. The days merge. My hair grows.

And there I could end my record of the month of May 2020. A torpor has descended; tasks are postponed – a Covid procrastination, for  why do them today when tomorrow will be the same, and the day after? I feel fixed and unmoving in a no man’s land where time – though it passes both pleasantly and all too rapidly – also seems immobile.

My world has shrunk. Lockdown has confined me to those very places of which I set out to write: my garden, the Common, and the fields and woods beyond. Outings are rare in the extreme – a slow puncture to be mended; chicken feed to be collected. I watch, distantly, the easing of restrictions, and neither want nor need to join in the emerging of the herd.

It would be wrong but easy to think that life was passing by unlived, that this year – one of the perforce few remaining – was being wasted, devoid as it is of the usual rush and bustle. The lived moment is life, and the value we put upon it – good or bad, pleasurable or painful, solitary or social – is just that, our subjective take.

Nonetheless, we are human and we experience pleasure and pain, however small our world has become. For me, blessed as I am, May has brought great pleasure…and a little pain. It has been the sunniest May since meteorological records began in 1929, and the driest in 124 years. Day after day the sky has been a Mediterranean blue and the sun has beaten down upon an increasingly parched earth with a dazzling intensity. From time to time there have been violent and rough winds to shake the darling buds, and these have served to dry the land still more. I have never seen grass burned brown in May before.

The old country proverb once again holds good:

Oak before ash, we shall have a splash.

Ash before oak, we’re in for a soak.

Even a splash would be good….

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In fact this year the darling buds of May had all opened and burgeoned well before the month began, for at an estimate most vegetation seems four or five weeks ahead of where it would have been a few decades back. The chestnut candles are long since dimmed; the hawthorn had dropped its blossom by mid-month – the indecent smell of it gone now.

The barley has “eared up,” as we say round here, and the million filaments shimmer in the morning light. The wheat begins to grow tall, blue-green. The uncut roadside verges frothed briefly with bridal cow parsley, and the starry white flowers of the pungent wild garlic have faded. The elderflower is out; dogroses cascade in the hedgerows; ox-eye daisies dance in the breeze. Summer races ahead, outstripping spring.

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This early flowering and seeding brings with it another sort of lockdown for me: the grasses are seeding and hay fever limits the time I can spend out of doors. On our morning walks I set out, duly medicated and sprayed and eye-dropped, in dark glasses, and my eyes and nose smeared with Vaseline. The dog precedes me through the long grass me sending up golden clouds of pollen dancing in the low sun.

Summer has come early; the electric lime green of spring matured too quickly. Soon the glory of morning birdsong will fade, little by little, unnoticed, till suddenly one morning we hear… silence. The lark may still sing high on the wing, and a yellowhammer may still announce “Little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeeese,” but that exuberance and joy (how we love to anthropomorphise the aggressive avian macho mating defence of territory!) will be gone till next spring. And thoughts come unbidden – shall I live to hear it? Live in the moment. Live in the moment.

The continuing pandemic, and the feckless floundering of our government, have sent me to my bookshelves for my ancient copy of Camus’ “La Peste” (The Plague), gathering dust since university more than half a century ago. The plague in the novel is generally taken to be a metaphor for the rise of Fascism, though some read it as a diatribe against capitalism and materialism. Given the current situation, especially in the United Kingdom, it can equally well be read as a literal account.

The infection comes to a town that is obsessed with business, a place where the sole object seems to be the pursuit of wealth. The authorities are slow off the mark, reluctant to act because of the economic consequences and the reputational damage to the town. Mitigation measures are mired in bureaucracy, until, as fevers spike and bedsheets are soaked from night-sweats, there is no choice but to quarantine the town: “We should not act as though half the town were not threatened with death, because then it would be….We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the [virus]. All the rest—health, integrity, purity—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”

Businesses complain about being closed down. Social distancing is not properly observed. There are hoarders and profiteers. Before long, hospitals are overwhelmed; medical supplies are scarce; a makeshift quarantine camp is established; and the police do their best but are sometimes heavy-handed. The cast of characters is eerily familiar: the Prefect who begins in denial (“There are no rats in the building,” as the rats die all around them), but then has no choice but to bow to the expertise of his medical advisers once the exponential spread of disease becomes apparent; the chap who tries to escape the lockdown, heedless of the risk of spreading infection beyond the walls. It could have been written in the past two or three months as we witnessed the Cummings and Goings of our masters.

Aristotle argued that, thanks to the gift of language, man is destined to be a social and therefore a political animal. Today I, and many, live in the paradox of an enforced solitude whose window on society is perforce through a screen, mediated by a cacophony of voices – politicians, pundits, scientists. We see the world through a television screen; we see our friends and families through a computer screen. Through a glass darkly to a world where we can look, but we cannot touch.

Can I end this month’s chronicle on a note of optimism? I can say that the number of cases in this country has fallen, that death rates are down, that the first tentative steps of a return to previous existence are being taken by some. I can say that some of the seeds I sowed in early spring are already providing food, that the rest will soon follow; that baby birds are fledging; that there is a foal on the Common.

The year rushes on, but down a path no-one in living memory has travelled. Where it goes nobody knows. There is no road map.

I do not wish, in a blog of my privileged life in rural Suffolk, to make this into some latter-day journal of a plague year, and those who know me will guess at my feelings about mistakes our leaders may have made in facing this crisis. History alone will give us a clear perspective. Moreover, it feels indecent this month to write of glorying in the beauties of this most lovely of all springs when all around there is illness, death, suffering, poverty, domestic violence. Unseemly indeed, when we read of – for example – a young NHS worker stabbed to death, just before the funeral of his father, who died from Covid, by a gang wearing medical-type masks.

It seems so distant from this paradise where we are untouched by it all, isolated from the realities of pandemic Britain, and yet not far away there is a hotspot of Covid deaths and hospitalisations. Despite these, there seems to have been a shift from a month ago, when fear stalked every outing, when the slightest slip – a door carelessly touched, a cough from someone in a queue – could spell sickness and maybe death. Lockdown in deep Suffolk has bred a potentially dangerous sense of immunity from it all, insulated from the intensive care units with their exhausted and ill-equipped staff, from the full mortuaries, from the breeding grounds of disease and death that are our old people’ homes. Here I am cocooned and cared for – a supposedly vulnerable septuagenarian. The drawbridge is up; the portcullis down.

And, as such, I live in a world which has shrunk to the confines of my garden and to the Common, and walks beyond far over the fields, long walks beginning with the sun which rises ever earlier on what has been an idyllic world. Those solitary miles with the dog have seen the transition from early spring with trees still skeletal to full leaf, from bare earth to greens which no artist’s palette could ever capture, filtering the early light. The primroses are now drowning in the rising lushness of new grass, the cowslips abundant on banks and in meadows after a winter of rain, the orchids on the Common bright magenta among the yellow of buttercups. Now the blackthorn in the hedges has given way to the may, with its sweet sickly smell of death. A barn owl glides silently before me along the field edge. A buzzard hunts. And all around  the birdsong of the morning is uncorrupted by man-made sound.

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These pure days of dawning blue and gold were like Eden before the Fall.

April was a month of virtually no rain, a month which marked a transition from waterlogged fields and paths of mud to iron-hard, bone-dry cracked earth. The garden turned to dust and needed watering every day. The garden…always a preoccupation, but in this month of isolation it became a daily ritual, a guardian of sanity, a saving grace, and a promise of the future. The present circumstances convince me more than ever of the necessity of growing my own food.

The beauty of the spring garden lifts the heart and soul when the news is grim:

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It is of course impossible not to reflect on what is happening beyond the bounds of my eremitical existence. Although nobody living has experienced anything like this pandemic, it seems there is little new under the sun. Daniel Defoe, who was only five during the Great Plague of 1665, wrote his “Journal of a Plague Year”, based on contemporaneous accounts. It sounds so familiar: “The infection was propagated insensibly, and by such persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they infected or who they were infected by.”

And again:

” And finding that I ventured so often out into the streets, he (a friend) earnestly persuaded me to lock myself up and my family and not to suffer any of us to go out of doors that we could keep within doors entirely…And here I must observe again, that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another.”

The face of London, Defoe tells us, was “strangely altered,” and Pepys, who was an eye-witness, marvels at how empty the streets were, before deciding it might be more prudent to stay at home:

“But now, how few people I see, and those walking like people that have taken leave of the world…. I to the Exchange, and I think there was not 50 people upon it and but few more like to be, as they told me, Sir G Smith and others. Thus I think to take Adieu today of London streets ….”

I myself have been out very little. I have no need. But on the rare occasions I have driven anywhere (out of necessity to the vets for the quarterly flea and worm treatment) I marvel at the empty roads. I drove six or seven miles and saw one car. Spooky, weird, disquieting, the end of days.

I have no need to move from the confines of house and garden because I have kind friends who bring shopping. I don’t need much. I am so blessed: I have a well-stocked larder, home-grown produce still in my freezer, and I am still working my way through a big No-Deal-Brexit Box amassed at the end of last year when it looked as though there could be shortages. There could still be, for in the focus on the present pandemic we edge, blindly and seemingly inexorably, to a situation where no trade deal with the EU can be secured before the end of the year.

And friends have brought cake and chocolate, exchanged at the gate – two metres apart – for eggs and plants. There were Easter eggs, too.  I grow tubby, and there is no-one to see. Hard to have the grace always to receive and accept, and not to be out and doing. I think of Calais where refugees now go without hot meals or the means to keep themselves safe, and where the clearances and brutality continue. Watch and pray, send money. It is so passive.

The fragrance of the rape field beside the house swirls round the garden, vying with the lilac. It has been the most poignant and beautiful of springs.

April 2020 will be remembered by us all. I can do nothing to alleviate the suffering that surrounds us, save to stay – obediently – at home, protect the NHS and save lives. Watch and pray.

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The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

“The only traffic I hear is ambulances,” said my daughter in London. In rural isolation here that stark sentence brings home the threat.

Writing anything at this time seems redundant, but life continues. The cycle of the year keeps turning.

A month of two halves. The first, a phoney war situation when nothing had changed, but a creeping awareness of menace coming closer, and with it that the scenes of deserted streets and overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins in makeshift mortuaries in Italy and Spain – then France -might soon be our own normality. The second, when suddenly it was upon us, with hundreds of new deaths reported every 24 hours, the populace confined to their homes, the elderly told to stay put for four months, and a government scurrying to catch up with what should have been done so much sooner.

New phrases are on everyone’s lips: lockdown, self-isolation, social distancing. “C19”  is no longer a shortened form for the nineteenth century, but something deadly which stalks us, waiting for one careless moment, one slip of our guard.

It seems somehow irrelevant to write of the ‘old’ normal.  The recent past, the beginning of March, seems long distant, as alien to our present way of being as that of a previous century. But maybe recording life and times is still important.

The old normal

In like a lion came March, with tempests of wind and even more rain – a continuation of our dark and drenched winter. Work took me to France the first weekend of the month. As Eurostar sped me to Paris, and another sleek and  smooth TGV raced me to Reims, I saw fields under water and trees down as they were in England, the similarities smoothing out the shock of the speed of travel.

France, ahead of the UK in its number of Covid-19 infections, was definitely nervous. No-one shook hands; no-one kissed; Friday night restaurants and bars were nearly empty; hand sanitiser was much in use. I felt compelled rather self-consciously to wipe down the seat tray and arm rest of the trains.

Despite the advancing virus, the meeting in Reims went ahead. I was there as an observer, representing my organisation, and made a brief speech presenting it, with many expressions of fraternity in this post-Brexit age. I was treated royally, which was quite humbling – and surprising, given the usual French jibes of “Who burned Joan of Arc?” when faced with the English. Champagne apéritifs, dinner, lunch, a private tour of the cathedral and Art Deco Carnegie Library. Walking along a street past the Archbishop’s former residence I caught sight of a knocker on the main door…I wonder if some frustrated former archbishop commissioned it specially…

That same week I went to a talk in a neighbouring village about owls. Owls, I learned, are now big business, farmed like puppies as must-have accessories and pets, thanks to the popularity of Harry Potter and Hedwig, his snowy owl. The tame talking owl Archimedes, belonging to Merlin in T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone,” is surely a prefiguring of Hedwig.

My childhood reading of this book gave me a love of owls, and hence I went to this talk. Alas, children discover that the owl their parents were persuaded to purchase is no Hedwig, and must be cared for. Thus many end up in sanctuaries, and cannot be released into the wild. A barn owl and a tawny owl were present to illustrate the talk. On my walks I see many barn owls hunting silently in the twilight of dawn and dusk, and I hear tawny owls most nights, but I had never come so close.

I was allowed to hold the barn owl, and stroke her softly with the back of my finger. My reaction to her beauty and to her proximity surprised me. I had to fight back tears.

On one of the last days of our freedom (oh, if only we had known it was about to be so curtailed) the dog and I went to Dunwich, and walked along the shingle shore towards Walberswick. Hard to think of it as once a busy port, with its many churches now long sunk in the invasive sea. Dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, Dunwich once stood proud as the capital of the kingdom of the Eastern Angles, at its mightiest in the 14th-century matching London for size. It was a seat of power for the Anglo-Saxon bishops for centuries, an international port, and the Domesday book of 1086 puts the population at over 3000.

That day the sun shone. And with the sun came rapidly that wonderful opening up to life which is the spring. The land dried, winter mud and mire soon just a memory.

The mildness of the winter meant the greening came early. There were primroses and violets and cowslips and oxlips and birdsong and blue skies. The land rejoiced. My heart rejoiced.

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And then came lockdown.

The new normal

It would not be unfair to say that earlier in this crisis the government (still cock-a-hoop no doubt with its resounding new majority and having “got Brexit done”) did not respond in any way commensurate with the situation, with what had been apparent to anyone who could see the straws in the wind. Covid-19 appeared in December in China. We have long known a pandemic was overdue; and the Cygnus crisis simulation three years ago proved the NHS – underfunded for years – would be unable to cope.

Government messages started to come thick and fast. First we heard that we must all be exposed to the virus to confer “herd immunity,” though it meant many elderly and vulnerable would die. This survival of the fittest policy made economic sense – no burden of care for the elderly, no blocking of beds in the NHS, no pensions to pay out….but it was fairly quickly dropped, for it showed a shocking disregard for the sanctity of life, and I – as a septuagenarian – didn’t feel quite ready to take one for the team. Besides, herd immunity is conferred by vaccination not widespread contagion.

Then we oldies were told we must isolate ourselves for four months to save our lives – the very lives which a few days before were to be recklessly dispensed with – and to prevent our health service being overwhelmed. This was swiftly followed by a general lockdown.

The lane is silent. A car is a rarity. There is a background drone of tractors finally able to get on the land and drill spring crops and the regular reports of the bird scarers. But otherwise all is silent . The builders on the site next to my property along the lane have gone, and it is mercifully quiet now the pile drivers and excavators have stopped, and machinery stilled. The dominant sound now is the high note of the skylark.

I choose to live isolated, surrounded by fields and fresh air, and in general I am happy with my own company, and that of a cheerful and enthusiastic dog. I grow much of my own food, and I am busy with  work and many projects. I am thus blessed more than most in our current circumstances, but the prospect of being cut off from all community for months is daunting. No-one knows what will happen; what the future will be for ourselves, for our loved ones.

As I start to wake the garden up and sow seeds these symbolise tiny expressions of hope: when this germinates and grows and bears fruit the plague may have passed us by.

Growing anything, but specially food crops, earths us and roots us. It declares a continuity from the past to the future. We are performing the same actions, the same gestures on the same days of the year as our ancestors did, and future generations also will. It shows us our place in the scheme of things, in the cycle of birth and death, and it helps, at this time when grief or death may come suddenly and surprise us, to understand this.

The reader will, I trust, forgive me. I updated this particular software and have been rather unsatisfactorily and unaesthetically getting to grips with it.

27 February 2020

Three days off the beginning of meteorological spring. Damp snow – the first of the winter – is pouring from the sky, adding more wetness to the spongy saturated ground. Much more rain is forecast.

At this point it would be ungracious and ungrateful not to point out that I am writing from the flood-free “heights” of East Anglia. Nightly our TV screens show towns and cities in the west and north of the country with flood water rising to the upper storeys of houses and shops. We see it so often, our hearts go out to those affected, we say “I can’t imagine how awful it must be,” and then – for those of us in dry dwellings – it becomes normalised, submerged beneath panicky reports of killer viruses coming ever closer, killer riots in Delhi, killer bombings in Idlib.

Nature has decided that spring is already here. The mean temperature in the UK this winter has been 5.2°C, around 1.5° warmer than average. One by one the primroses have appeared on the steep banks like stars in the summer dusk. The grass is growing, daffodils are blooming, I have even seen a cowslip. The birds are singing and the ducks are pairing off. These are sights to lift the spirits, but it is hard to maintain a rejoicing heart in perpetual deluge.

More so when the deluges have been borne in on storm-force winds. Storm Ciara first, then Dennis battered the British Isles, with gales every day in between, and then some. So many trees came down, and walking became perilous with flying branches and brambles whipping into my face. I was thankful that the house suffered no real damage, and that the chicken run and shed stayed upright, and the birds themselves unharmed and still laying, but…my poor greenhouse! It had stood, exposed to the predominant winds, for 15 years, with only the occasional pane broken. Ciara swooped in, shattered glass, and sent the whole structure into the neighbouring ditch. Do I give up and just buy my vegetables? It would be much cheaper in the long run.

Morning after morning staccato salvoes of rain hammer against the panes of my bedroom window, engendering a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness: another long drenching walk with a dog who is  undaunted by wind and weather. The wind does not howl or moan or whistle, or any of the words we associate with its power. Sometimes it sounds like heavy machinery, or an aircraft coming in to land, or an express steam train, the gusts whomping and shaking the house.

Often on walks I observe the miracle of small birds flying in this chaotic turbulence. A skylark weighs just 33-45g, a nothing in the power of the storm. And yet the male lark rises vertically from the open fields, and hovers seemingly effortlessly, singing, singing, singing.

Another is the beautiful kestrel, the windhover, and we see them regularly over road verges, ditches and field margins. They can, apparently, spot a beetle at 50m. They need several voles or other small mammals a day to survive, and so there they are riding the storm, absolutely still before they plummet down to get their prey. A kestrel flies into, and at the same speed as, the oncoming wind. It extends its wing tips and fans its tail feathers, and in high wind may not even flap the wings at all – just kiting and gliding.

The construction of the Grand Design in the field next door continues, despite the weather. The demolition of the old house is complete, and heavy machinery moved in to start digging the footings.

They dug deep down into yellow Suffolk clay, and the trenches promptly filled with water. But work goes on with an army of builders, and much noise of diggers and banging and shouting and the beep-beep-beep of reversing vehicles. The lane is full of parked vans and cars, and huge lorries ply to and fro bringing loads of hard core. Mud is everywhere.

I last wrote on 31 January, and despite all efforts and demonstrations and fervent prayer, we have left the European Union. For the moment, during the transition period, nothing concrete has changed – a phoney war – except there is the taste of defeat. On the day itself and for several after there was the affront of the triumphalism of the Brexiteers – the jubilant bunting which appeared locally, the flying of the Union Flag (to my glee, often hung upside down in ignorance).

And so, as February closes, Lent begins. To Mass last night, with its repeated insistent intimation of mortality “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the funereal black smudge of ash marking us so we cannot forget that with every passing Ash Wednesday that fate comes nearer. Turn, repent, turn again, before it is too late.

Is not Protestantism so much the poorer without this? The repeated rite, the ritual of imposition, the intoning of the sonorous Miserere:

Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offence,
O wash me more and more from my guilt
And cleanse me from my sin.

 
My offences truly I know them;
My sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned:
What is evil in your sight I have done.

Those who read the Daily Office will know the psalm by heart, for every Friday morning comes the same reminder. Maybe Protestants with their “personal relationship with their Saviour” are in no need of such admonitions, for that relationship, they say, is sufficient to get them to heaven. I am happy for them.

Like the effects of Brexit, only time will tell, and no-one can know. Justification by faith or works is beyond the scope of this blog.

 

 

 

31 January 2020

Let me find some positives in this sad month. There is the first glimmering of light in the sky when we go out now just before 6.30am.

The birds are beginning to sing – the robin, the repetitive great tit, the melodic blackbird, the raucous thrush and others, and in daylight I hear larks high over the open fields. There are snowdrops, aconites, and the first primroses – which witness to the enduring mildness of this winter.

I look for other signs of hope, and find few. One, which restores faith in humanity’s response to destruction and brutality, is the work of Help Refugees, among other aid agencies, in Calais and northern France. This work – demanding, strenuous, often dirty and thankless – is done in the main by dedicated and inspiring young people. I will return to this below.

In the dark early days of the month the paths across the field and through the woods were running with water or mired deep in mud from the continual heavy rain, and on rare dry mornings were silvered deceptively by a gibbous moon. Little has changed, save for the slow lengthening of the days. The rain and relentless grey go on.

Along the lane my neighbours’ house is being demolished, brick by brick, by two Polish labourers. This pulling apart and tearing down seems to accord with the mood of this month. These elderly neighbours, long dead now, were the subject of the first chapter of this monthly chronicle, in July 2017. They sold their home of 52 years and the six-acre field with it in September 2016 so that he, terminally ill, could move to a bungalow in a nearby small town. He died less than a month later, and she – hating her fenced-in view – followed him to the grave after nine months. He wanted to call the new bungalow “Galanthus”, to remind him of the clouds of January snowdrops at their old house…a few of these remain among the ruins.

And in its place, set back from the road in the field, a Grand Design is planned – a glass and timber palace. I am told there will be “privacy planting” to shield the owner from my gaze, and I am also told (by others) that the plans have had to be redrawn – somewhat smaller.

Change and decay in all around I see.

There was one dry week, and one morning of sparkling iron-hard frost, but, reader, I missed it, for I was away in the grim fortress that is Calais. My regular readers will recall that in January of each year recently I have been to help at the Auberge des Migrants, which is under the umbrella of Help Refugees. My parish and other friends and family have been generous in their support, and this year was no exception. I had a car full of donated goods and some €725 in cash for them.

I am so fortunate that I can afford to rent a small (AirBnB) studio in Calais, so I can shut a door on myself in the evenings. There is warmth and hot water, and the possibility of heating up a meal. It overlooks the beach and the Channel, and on a clear night I could see the lights along the Kent coast. Inevitably it sparked thoughts of our place in Europe; we are so close geographically and culturally, and yet we in England are so stubbornly insular.

The Auberge des Migrants, which gives short-term volunteers the chance to work either in the Refugee Community Kitchen or the wood yard, is a place of inspiration. It has the same feeling as a walking pilgrimage – of working to a common purpose, of hope for a better future, of adventure even. These are young people who give up weeks, months or even years to run the place. Out of an apparent hippy chaos it works like clockwork. Wise after three years, I opted for the wood yard, for there – because of sustained physical effort – one can keep warm. The kitchen, open on two sides to the cold, chains the volunteer to a chopping station standing for hours on a wet concrete floor, then soaks him or her to the skin at a washing-up station, only to freeze again, immobile. The woodyard is fun: splitting logs, breaking up pallets, making kindling, bagging wood.

There has been an influx of refugees/migrants in Calais recently. Now there are about 1000-1500 (it’s impossible to quantify exactly). This puts a strain on resources. Last year the bags of wood had to weigh 13kg, and two tonnes were distributed daily. Now the bags can weigh only 6kg, rationing wood, four bags per “fire.” The distribution van goes out twice a day, after the regular clearances by the Police aux Frontières and the CRS (riot police). We couldn’t have a morning tea break (desperately needed by Granny here) till at least 150 bags had been filled and stacked ready. At nearly 73 I found the toll on the ageing body to be great. I am always the oldest volunteer. I hope that there may be people among my readers or friends or fellow parishioners who will take the baton and run with it.

While in northern France I was invited to a reception at Arras City Hall (the famous Beffroi). Why? you ask…For some months now I have been negotiating, on behalf of an organisation for which I am communications officer (the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome) a partnership with an umbrella organisation in France which serves pilgrims on the French section (nearly 1000km) of the Via Francigena (the ancient pilgrim path between Canterbury and Rome). The reception was an event where the Great of Arras present medals to the Good of Arras – in this case a woman who devotes her time to arranging accommodation throughout the Pas de Calais and beyond for pilgrims on their way to Santiago and Rome.

This lady, looking disconcertingly like Una Stubbs as Mrs Hudson in the BBC “Sherlock,” had helped me on my way to Rome four years ago. And so I went, as PR for the Confraternity, and sat through 75 minutes of speeches. And then lunch with French colleagues. Many years living in France have taught me the correct social dance of Anglo-French intercourse.

I miss France so much. Crossing the Channel had always a frisson of excitement and adventure, however frequently I did it. Because I am not speaking my mother tongue I have a sensation of being a different person, someone who can express different sentiments, be…not myself. I used to whizz past Arras on my way south, towards the sun and the red tiled roofs and what was for some years home, but I must admit to loving the north of France. The day I was in Arras was cold and foggy, and I walked through the great squares with their Flemish gables, their echoing arcades, their cobblestones. I drove through flat fields, occasionally glimpsing canals, distant rows of poplars…all was grey. Jacques Brel’s voice translates so exactly the essence of the north.

And this nostalgia brings me neatly to the elephant in today’s blog. Today is the day so long fought against, so dreaded. Today is Brexit day, and the feeling of defeat swamps me. No, I do not see a new dawn, and an exciting liberated future. No, I do not see the positive. I am overwhelmed with grief, and I have wept today.

I will end with a quotation from a recent edition of the New York Times: ” [Britain has] … a new prime minister whose track record includes overtly racist statements, some of which would make even Donald Trump blush, a Brexit project linked to native nationalism and a desire to rid Britain of large numbers of immigrants, and an ever thickening loom of imperial nostalgia…” No wonder I weep.

 

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing” – John Stuart Mill

My introductory paragraph, traditionally a report on the weather and observed trends in our climate, could this month be a repetition of November’s. The reader will forgive me, for in deeply rural Suffolk my daily existence is much ruled by what is going on out of doors.

And what has gone on out of doors, with very few exceptions, is heavy rain. And more rain, and unremitting dark skies; days of little light, and a universal cold damp dripping. And mud.

However, as we descended into the deep dark of December there was, as ever, the prospect of the midwinter festival – which is what Christmas has become – to cheer us. I don’t find that the commercial noise and bustle and kitsch glare distract me from a contemplation of the spiritual meaning of Christmas, and they do delay the slide into the depression that dark and damp bring.

In our villages competing light shows illuminate the night – whole properties, house and garden, given over to flashing snowmen, ho-hoing Santas, rooftop reindeer, dangling blue icicles. A transient rural East Anglian Vegas. I like the attitude depicted below (which is not, alas, from Suffolk):

In our farms the preparation for the food fest of Christmas takes a different turn. One regular early morning walk takes us near a farm which sells free-range geese and turkeys, and during the autumn months I hear every day the geese wake up with much raucous honking and screeching. A few weeks before Christmas suddenly a deathly silence falls. The geese are no more. Instead a powerful security light illuminates the dark fields. A gang of Romanian workers walks the miles to the farm to pluck and dress the poultry. Where will farms find labour next year?

On an early December Saturday, one of the rare dry days, I spent all day at the Guildhall with its spectacular view of the City of London skyline, in a meeting of trustees of the charity for which I am communications officer and editor, gathered to decide on our three-year strategy. It was unexpectedly productive and good-tempered…until a colleague, our previous chairman and a former Reuters chief correspondent, surprised us all by an outburst calling current concern over climate change “hysteria,” a myth to which we should give no credence, and a Marxist totalitarian conspiracy (according to a book he subsequently ordered me from Amazon in order to contradict me. My 15-year-old granddaughter took a look at it, and her pencilled-in marginalia demolished the illogical diatribe as only a teenager can).

It is more than disturbing to hear this sort of rant from a respected colleague, or indeed from anyone. Neither he nor I are scientists, but to my lay mind it seems the huge consensus of scientific opinion is that human beings are responsible for the changes we are witnessing in climate, and that the perhaps debatable fact that we have not yet reached a point of no return, does not mean that we never shall. Of course I understand that projections are not facts, but if there is the slightest chance that these projections show us the face of the future then I believe we must act now.

It requires drastic behaviour change, which – we all know – is a difficult process. A headline caught my eye this month: “Being obese creates long-haul flight’s worth of emissions.” A study, published in the journal Obesity, alleges that the extra food consumed by the world’s 600 million obese people has a carbon footprint on a par with the whole UK, and their increased metabolism means they breathe out extra CO₂ equivalent to Sweden’s annual output. I know insufficient science to rebut this, and have not seen the relevant statistics, but none of us should be smug about what we do or don’t eat, and where we do or don’t travel, and by what means.

I do know that weather is not the same as climate, but it is certain that over time repeated patterns can be an indicator. Here, on what passes for high ground in Suffolk (50m), I am safe from floods, but nearby the entire flood plain of the Waveney is under water, one long lake from Diss to Beccles. One night at Syleham Mill I was forced to reverse the car down the dark lane by what looked like an endless sheet of water overflowing from the mill race, the river slapping and gurgling against the parapet of the bridge. Driving over the Common is like going along a causeway across a lagoon. On Boxing Day a daughter and I found our traditional walk via Minsmere Sluice deserted, and soon discovered why: vast tracts were under water. The dog, bounding ahead, disappeared in the depths, all but the top of her head and her nose swallowed up. Not wishing to turn back, we waded knee-deep through icy water, boots wet and squelching for the next five miles.

It is a favourite walk, which takes us from Eastbridge to the sea, then north past the RSPB  reserve to the Coastguards’ cottages and the National Trust, and back through heath and birch woods. These Minsmere Levels are the flood water catchment marshes that drain the area of land either side of the river Minsmere that runs  through the New Cut and out to the sea via the sluice. This tidal sluice collects water from three channels before discharging the flow into the sea, between Dunwich and Sizewell. The rains throughout the autumn have been too constant and too heavy for the drainage channels to cope.

My regular readers will know that I cannot allow December to pass without mentioning the political situation which has concerned me over the past four years in ways it never has before. Through Advent the readings which prepare us for Christmas are taken from Isaiah, from the beautiful prophetic poetry of Deutero-Isaiah foretelling an age of peace, of restoration when wrongs will be righted and justice will reign:

“He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted…garlands instead of ashes, oil of gladness instead of mourners’ tears”.

On the evening of 12 December, as seconds counted down to 10pm and the release of the exit poll results, I knew that these would be the final moments of hope for a better future. The Conservative party won a huge majority – thanks to our first-past-the-post voting system – for sufficient of my compatriots voted to “get Brexit done’ (a meaningless but obviously effective slogan, which somehow persuaded people that their future would be rosier if we could get on and sever our ties with the EU). It cannot mean better. The days of the sovereign nation state are long gone; we cannot recapture them, if that is what is meant by “getting our country back.” It is incomprehensible to me that people cannot understand that unity – community – is better, more productive, safer than standing alone, grasping for illusory better deals, trying to shut our doors against all comers.

What voters seem to have forgotten is that historically the Tories are the party of “I’m all right Jack,” and that election promises of bonanza cash, which wooed and seduced and ultimately broke  the Labour “red wall” of the North and Midlands, will not materialise into prosperity, that workers’ rights will not be preserved, and broken post-Brexit Britain will mean more poverty, not less, for we shall be the poorer outside the EU. Poorer economically, politically, culturally, morally and spiritually.

Truth was the victim of this election, and already we see the consequences for democracy. Has the executive power grab which immediately followed really gone unnoticed in the pre-Christmas frenzy  – or do we not care? Look – really look – at what has disappeared from Johnson’s notorious Withdrawal Agreement “deal”, the metaphorical piece of paper (in fact 600+ pages) proudly waved after last-minute negotiations in October:

• The clause giving MPs the right to approve an extension to the transition period.
• The clause 31 requirement for parliamentary approval for negotiations on the future relationship. Under the old bill, the House of Commons would have had to approve the negotiating objectives of the government in the next phase of talks. The parliamentary approval process for any future relationship treaty subsequently negotiated with the EU has also gone.
• The removal of clauses pledging alignment with the EU on workers’ rights. Legal protections for refugee children reunited with family members in the UK have been watered down. The bill removes, via clause 37, obligations in regard to unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the EU with an obligation to make a statement within two months of passing the act.
• The promise that the government’s position on negotiating the future relationship will be in line with the political declaration that accompanied the withdrawal agreement.

I am writing this on the 849^th anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, St Thomas of Canterbury. He took on the executive power. He too lost.

And so the old year fades with failure and the dismal decade dies, and with it much hope for our future. I am fortunate and privileged, and I am unlikely to go hungry, protected as I am by a pension and the ownership of my home, and I am blessed with the love of daughters and friends. But next in Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs comes a sense of connection. That is going, has disappeared with any voice or agency I might once have had in this country, any influence on our future. The Black Dog is coming ever closer.

____________________________________________________

 

 

 

 

Australia burns in record springtime temperatures. Venice floods with the highest acqua alta since the disaster of 1966. More floods in Yorkshire and the east Midlands. We are told the planet’s future is at the tipping point.

Here: rain, rain, rain and more rain. Pitiless and relentless, day after day; low grey light. In the early morning the Gatling gun salvos against the window announce another drenching walk in the dark. Must I get up out of a warm bed and face it? The dog says yes! Ditches overflow; some roads are passable only with care. The mud turns liquid and no longer weighs my boots glutinously down. The paths are under water and the exuberant dog sends tsunamis over the top of my boots. As we walk there is no autumnal susurration and swish of drifted dead leaves, but  a soggy dispiriting squelch.

And then today the miracle of a sunrise seen. Colour returns to the landscape. Those few trees still in leaf – the oak and the field maple – which were a dull brown in the dark grey landscape turn suddenly to flame, russet, gold. The world is glorious once more; a million drops of water shine and dazzle. There is light.

After 18 dry months the Common is restored to its winter status as a waterland: we wade rather than walk over it. Where once the summer’s mares and foals grazed, ducks and geese now swim. It is hard to remember that this is how it should be.

The mud is not just a feature of fields and paths. In this deeply rural spot where I am writing the lanes are dangerous with slathers of liquid mud and huge gobbets of solid clay. Tractors and farm lorries and – above all- sugar beet harvesters and transporters spread it. A rickety hand-written “mud on road” sign scarcely does justice to the hazards of the muddy skating surface.

We live in the country, but maybe we accept it too readily as just part of life, nothing to be done, farmers rule. However, to leave mud on the road is illegal. The Highways Act 1980 makes it an offence to deposit mud and other things on the highway (S148). In addition, the act provides that if a person without lawful authority or excuse deposits anything whatsoever on a highway in consequence of which a user of the highway is injured or endangered, then he is guilty of an offence (S161).

Therefore, if a farmer or contractor deposits mud on the highway they run the risk of committing a criminal offence and may face prosecution and a fine. It is not very well known but in addition, if there is significant mud on a vehicle, such as a tractor, it may constitute the more serious offence of dangerous driving under the Road Traffic Act 1988. This is because S2A of that act states that the term “dangerous” can include anything attached to a vehicle (which can include mud).

But, a big but…the “Farmers Weekly” opines:  “However, I think it would have to be a significant amount of mud, and/or a serious accident and/or a repeat offender before the police would be likely to consider bringing this additional charge.” Indeed. Or any charge at all.

In common with so many other offences (I daily see drivers doing at least 50mph through villages, and many on hand-held mobile phones) it is not policed here. Nor is it likely that any of  Mr Johnson’s proposed 20,000 extra police will be seen along the lanes where I walk and – perforce – drive.

The main cause of the hazard is the harvesting of sugar beet. Despite the UK’s modest size, it is the eleventh largest producer of sugar beet worldwide, behind giants in the top ten such as Russia, the United States or China. This gives our nation the dubious honour of having the largest proportion of our land devoted to sugar beets of all countries, and much of this happens in East Anglia.

Sugar beets were not grown on a large scale in the United Kingdom until the mid-1920s, when 17 processing factories were built, following war-time shortages of imported cane sugar. Before World War I, with its far-flung empire, the United Kingdom simply imported the sugar from the cheapest market. However, the war had created a shortage in sugar, prompting the development of a domestic market. The first sugar beet processing factory was built at Lavenham in Suffolk in 1860, but failed after a few years without the government support its counterparts on the continent received. The Dutch built the first successful factory at Cantley in Norfolk in 1912.

Here in north Suffolk we know that any journey to Bury St Edmunds during the sugar beet campaign, which starts in September, will be a slow one, as trailers loaded with beet are pulled by tractors in snail-like processions along the A143 to the Silver Spoon factory. Why is it called a “campaign”? Apparently because it is a huge undertaking and requires coordination of farmer, contractor, haulier, and receiving station. “Campaign” of course comes from “campagne”, the French for countryside, and military campaigns used that vocabulary of “taking to the field”. In the harvesting and transporting of sugar beet a neat example of a word returning to its origins.

Another campaign preoccupies me, for as I write it is less than two weeks to the General Election. That anxiety felt for nearly three and a half years now rises in me, knotting my stomach and robbing sleep, for the Tories have a good lead in the polls…not that polls can be trusted. If they win they will, in their words, “get Brexit done”, whatever that means, and oh then we can kiss goodbye to their campaign promises of spend spend spend . Except that the costings suggest that for all those promises spending on public services will not go back to the level of a decade ago. And Brexit will not be “done;” it will only just be beginning and we ain’t seen nothing yet. The future is dark.

These are not my words, but they are my sentiments:

Do not go gentle into that good fight
The Truth should burn and guide us on our way
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

When the wise with their educated sight
Call for compassion in the Laws and say
Do not go gentle into that good fight.

Good men upon the Left must use their might
To make their deeds mount up and every day
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

Young people with a vision now alight
Must gird their loins and gain in strength so they
Do not go gentle into that good fight.

While women know misogyny by sight
And violence fills their life they need to say
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

So all of us who want to stop the blight
Curse, bless and shed those fierce tears I pray
Do not go gentle into that good fight.
Rage, Rage against the lying of the Right.

Meteorological winter starts. The trees stark and skeletal stand out against the sky. The deep dark of winter is nearly on us. But even in the darkness I know that the sun will continue to rise, and occasionally gleam upon us. I know exactly where it rises in December, exactly where it rises at any point in the year. I could tell the date from the sunrise. This is a daily miracle which says we will survive.

 

Five o’clock in the afternoon, and the darkness walls us in. Meteorologically it is autumn, but we have had the first frost, and the changing of the hour always signals the start of the slow slide into winter.

I have learned another new word: “Noachic”…you’ll see why in a moment. October has been supremely autumnal this year. I have written before that nature always seems to make up for times of drought, and we had been short of rain for a good 18 months. The first day of the month brought a positively Biblical downpour, but it soon soaked away as the water table was so low. But it was five days later that the rain became Noachic – or, as I might have said, diluvian. All that Sunday torrential rain fell; friends’ garages, gardens and outhouses were flooded, and the water in my flooded drive (something I had not seen since April of last year) was lapping at the front door.

Fortunately, the horses had been taken off the Common the day before the deluge, a week earlier than usual. Now the Common is vast, empty, barer and bigger now they are gone.

The rain has continued through the month, and gradually ditches and ponds began to fill, streams started to trickle then run faster. Our walks are slowed by mud. The extreme wet but warm conditions have brought out a flourish of funghi. The frost came near the end of the month. Order is re-established.

For me, it has been a month of more than usual gadding about (I am a lover of staying put – unless it’s off for adventure abroad). Meetings in London, meetings here, meetings there. On my way to one  I walked the dog along the beach at Sizewell. The great dome of the nuclear power station dominates, shining, sinister and alien. I should say power stations, by this tiny fishing village and its shingle shore. The old Sizewell A from the 1960s with its two magnox reactors is in the process of being decommissioned. My brother-in-law from New Zealand was part of the engineering team, and when he visited in 1986 we had to drive over so he could see it was still in order. A previous owner of my current house also worked on the construction, and was – allegedly – somewhat light-fingered. I’m told the police raided and removed all sorts of items taken from the site. Why would he want them? He built a ramshackle shed in the garden from materials he had pinched. It didn’t glow in the dark, however.

Sizewell B is a pressurised water reactor, and came on stream in 1995. A new twin reactor, Sizewell C, is planned…eliciting spirited resistance from villages on the route to the shore, fearing the passage of 600 lorries a day. It is certain the construction would affect the nature reserves of Minsmere and Dunwich. Stage 4 of the public consultation has now finished. How to weigh up the benefits of non-carbon-generated fuel with the destruction of these habitats?

When my children were small we would swim at Sizewell. The water was warmer there.

The same week saw me invited to an Ed Sheeran exhibition and then the theatre in Ipswich. I am not quite like the judge who supposedly asked “Who are the Beatles?”. I have heard of Ed Sheeran (two of his albums are in the list of the best-selling UK albums of all time) , but I was unaware that this Suffolk boy was such a creative talent from a tender age, and in visual arts as well as music. His drive to write and perform, and his courage (busking in London and Ireland at age 14) were impressive. But the reason I wanted to see the exhibition was the portrait – and oil sketches – of Sheeran by Northern Ireland artist Colin Davidson. They were powerful pieces of work done with great sensitivity.

On the day there was to be the great anti-Brexit march in London (at least a million on the streets) I was on my way to Santiago de Compostela. Driving to Stansted I was listening to the news and comments with my heart in my mouth, for the Commons were to sit on a Saturday (for the first time since the Falklands conflict in 1982) to debate Johnson’s Withdrawal Agreement Bill, and – had it passed – we’d have been on our way out of the European Union. And if it hadn’t…we’d have been out without a deal. I found myself emotional and tearful at the enormity of what was to happen that day, and I nearly, so nearly, drove on past Stansted towards London, because the most important thing seemed then to go and march, and shout at the deaf ears of the Government.

But I didn’t. I was sent reports and pictures of the demonstration in real time. “Epic,” my daughter said. But I am left wondering if it was all too British and polite and middle class and humorous to be taken seriously. When voices are not heard does change not sometimes call for more forceful methods? The peace processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and even women’s suffrage would not have come about without violence. I don’t know…turning the other cheek cannot be right in the face of injustice or oppression. Or governmental malpractice and lies.

But of course I went  on to Santiago, where I was treated like royalty. My host, who had commissioned the Pilgrim Diptych, was the most welcoming, courteous and generous of men, and I also had the honour of meeting the subject of a previous commission:

Arriving in Santiago was like coming home, so familiar is it as the endpoint of many Caminos. As I returned to my hotel the first evening after a stupendous dinner, the rain-washed streets glistened as I crossed the Praza do Obradoiro and walked under the arch where so many joyful pilgrims catch their first glimpse of journey’s end. It is a place that pulls the pilgrim back year after year, a place which we endure pain and hardship to reach. If a pilgrimage is a metaphor for life, with its joys and sorrows, ups and downs, encounters and losses, then arriving in Santiago is surely like being welcomed in heaven.

And I came home feeling healed and whole from having been treated with such respect and love.

While there, I managed a day’s walking, to remind myself of Galicia:

So…I write this on 31 October, the day so long dreaded when we would, in the words of our blustering prime minister of mendacity, leave the European Union “No ifs, no buts. Do or die.” If we did not, he said, he would rather die in a ditch. Neither has happened. I breathe a temporary sigh of relief that we remain – for now, tempered  by rising anxiety about the result of the election announced for 12 December. As with every twist and turn of this so polite civil war it is impossible to call what will happen.

I leave you, on this 31 October, with an apt image.

I am distracted this month from writing about what I am sure many will consider to be my rural idyll, and dwelling on the beauties of falling leaves and the autumn landscape. We live in what the (apparently apocryphal) Chinese curse calls “interesting times.”

But this blog is about my Suffolk life, and has become a sort of record not only of the seasons, but of the changing weather patterns and the effects these have on life in deepest Suffolk.

Exactly on cue, autumn arrived with the equinox. We had had a golden month till then, with heat and sun, and increasing drought. The effects of two years with less than usual rainfall had made the land almost a desert – no ponds, dry streams, empty ditches, dust everywhere, all foliage tinder dry.  The grass on the Common long gone, and the mares and foals hungry. The year pursued its usual course, the plough changed gold to umber, seagulls in its wake. We went out on calm and tranquil mornings through the dew, and every day the darkness lingered longer, and rushed in earlier each evening.

Those lovely mornings – all the more poignant because they were the last of summer. One morning a buzzard was out teaching one of its young to hunt. The youngster swooped low over our heads to have a better look, its hunting cry not yet perfected to the menacing mew – more like a seagull whose voice is breaking. Another morning a large grey heron rises from an near-empty pond and flaps slowly away toward the rising sun.

But with the equinox came gales and rain rattling against the windows, the parched grass now growing rapidly green in the warmth of low pressure systems as they pile in from the Atlantic. A torch is necessary in the morning.

And this turbulence and invading darkness match our political weather. The storms grow increasingly violent. The calm knowledge of a democratic parliamentary system that works and with which I grew up, and which carried on more or less efficiently in the background of our lives, has gone. There have been lies, deceit, sharp practice at the highest level. There has been drama, and  language which incites to hatred and violence. Trust has gone, and with that comes an anxiety so deep that it pervades every waking moment, and robs me of sleep. No-one knows what will happen, what the outcome will be or can be. But as things stand much of what I hold dear will be wrenched away in a month’s time on 31 October.

I will return to this later. The reader must forgive me if therefore my rhapsodic paeans of praise to autumn fields and skies are in short supply this month.

One sunny day early in the month the dog and I walked a path to Wingfield, a small – and as the overworked cliché would have it – sleepy village a few miles away.

I went into the church to look at the magnificent late medieval tombs, and met an enthusiastic vicar waiting for a bride and groom to come and rehearse their wedding. Seeing the dog whistle round my neck, he invited both of us in to explore at our leisure. He took me into the vestry (I’m sure that could be the first line of a bawdy song…), and then suggested I climb the vertical ladder up to the vestry loft where there is a spyhole overlooking the altar.

This tiny village was not always so sleepy. It not only witnessed but took an important part in another period of extreme turbulence in our history. It was home to one of the great families whose power and influence changed the course of that history – the de la Poles, earls and dukes of Suffolk.

Forgive me if I recount their story. It seems somehow relevant to today with its aggrandisement, treason, plotting and civil war.

Their story begins with a merchant from Hull marrying the daughter of a local East Anglian landowner. The de Wingfields were of Norman origin, and Sir John was a fighting man of distinction who served the Black Prince and had favour at court. When Sir John died his widow had the present large church built. Their only daughter Katherine married Michael de la Pole, from Hull, who had been ennobled for his services to the Crown and had become Earl of Suffolk. Their son, also Michael, had married a daughter of the Earl of Stafford (also a Katherine), but died at the Siege of Harfleur (of “Once more unto the breach” fame). And their son was killed at Agincourt immediately after.

Michael’s brother William inherited, and served the king so well he was made Duke of Suffolk, and married Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey “Canterbury Tales” Chaucer. He was later impeached for treason for plotting with Henry VI’s queen Margaret of Anjou, and beheaded as he tried to cross the Channel. His body was thrown into the sea, but was later washed up on shore, and was brought back to Wingfield for burial. John, William and Alice’s son, was eight when he inherited.

Now England was in the throes of the Wars of the Roses, and John the second duke was a Yorkist, and such was his favour at court that he married Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of the kingmaker Earl of Warwick and sister to the future kings Edward IV and Richard III. Their son fought for Richard at Bosworth Field, but Henry Tudor, the victor, was foolishly lenient because the family was so powerful, and the de la Poles retained their titles and estates. Elizabeth Plantagenet however, plotted with her sister in Burgundy to restore York to the throne, and John de la Pole joined in uprisings against Henry VII, and was killed at East Stoke in 1487, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses.

His brother Edmund inherited the earldom, but was not duke. He and his brothers Richard and William also plotted with Burgundy against Henry Tudor. As sons of Elizabeth Plantagenet there was a good and legitimate claim to the throne. William died in the Tower; Edmund was executed in 1513 by Henry VIII, but Richard remained abroad in the service of François 1er, and was a continuing thorn in the flesh to the Tudor dynasty, but died at the Battle of Pavia in 1525.

None of these brothers had children, and so ended the story and power of one of the greatest families in the land.

The name lives on. Opposite the church with the noble tombs of the Wingfields and de la Poles is the de la Pole Arms, and the lane which leads down from Weybread crossroads towards Wingfield was originally called de la Pole lane. As  with most old names this became corrupted by use, and today is known as Dale Road, but when I first came to Suffolk it was called both Dally Po, and another  version of de la Pole pronounced as “Daily Poo.”

So, little changes in human nature and the desire to control the course of history: hubris, privilege, deceit, the seizing of power, warring factions, and a monumental battle for the soul of the nation.

Our country is divided. A friend of mine, who voted Leave, when pressed for his reasons, actually said “You can’t trust the Germans. Look at the War.” And here I get to my point: for me – and for many – statements of such idiocy (neither side is exempt from idiocy, of course) destroy relationships, drive wedges, create breaches and wounds which will not heal.

And I have to ask this question of my faith. Is it a faith that really dictates that force should never be used? It is a faith of contradictions: on one hand the injunctions to turn the other cheek, on the other the Jesus who drove merchants from the temple with knotted ropes and overturned their stalls. On one hand we have “Peace I give you, my peace I leave you”, and on the other “I came not to bring peace but the sword.”

When voices are not heard, when agency is denied, when liars and privileged bullies rule and deceive, what is left? I know that I would shed my blood if we could remain in, and enjoy the freedoms, values, and rights of,  being part of the cultural, spiritual and economic community which is Europe.

When I come to write the October chapter…what will have happened?

Late summer

Late indeed! The pattern of July has repeated: a poor month for weather, with rain, tempests of wind which rattled through at 90kph, storms and grey…but rounded off with a heatwave, when temperature records for an August bank holiday were broken.

Last year day of heat succeeded day of heat, and in these past few days we have recaptured that certainty, that unchanging sense of eternity when the hot wind blows from past to the future. But it doesn’t endure, of course.

We go out very early, the dog and I, for she does not cope with heat.

The red sun is scarcely above the horizon now. The mornings are misty, mysterious, in their promise of heat. We walk and walk until the mist recedes leaving the shimmering day, already hot.

Yes, we walk and walk. In August comes a review copy of “In praise of walking”

by the neuroscientist, Shane O’Mara, professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity College, Dublin. He tells us what we already know: that walking is good for our posture and muscles, helps us repair and protect organs, slows or reverses brain ageing, promotes creative thinking, improves our mood, and reduces stress levels, and that walking together is a social glue. No surprise there then. I believe it aids spirituality. For me the daily 10km is when I pray, when I give time and thought to those who need prayer, to those who are dear, and when I reflect on my life. It is also a time when I write within my head, and the origin of much of this chronicle.

All this while the dog races before me in a frenzy, for now the fields are clear there are dozens of hares, muntjac, roe deer that must not go unchased. She rarely catches anything. She can match a hare for speed, but loses it as it zig-zags and turns. One morning a large hare shot out of an uncut field straight into my legs. I don’t know who was the more astounded.

And for once the sky was clear mid-month, and I stood outside at night enjoying the celestial fireworks of the Perseid meteor shower, while the dog sniffed the scents of the summer night.

Harvest is all but done, safely gathered in, and the surrounding sea of gold ebbs away to be swallowed by the advancing browns and umbers of ploughland.

Individual farms have their methods of stacking straw, but soon these too will disappear from the fields, and the year of production begins all over again.

And in a minor key my own harvest too…potatoes, a glut of courgettes, tomatoes, beetroot, chard, lettuce. The beans are done; leeks, cavolo nero, broccoli still to come. The rosy eating apples tumbled down in the storms and are fed to the chickens. My fig trees are alive with the rustling of birds keen to get to the luscious fruit as soon as it softens.

Farmers complain; it’s what they do. Now it is those who raise livestock who think they are being unfairly targeted in our fashionable scramble to reduce the environmental impact of the consumption of meat and dairy. I no longer buy meat unless it is for someone else. The arguments rage back and forth, and each is sure of the solidity of the moral high ground beneath their feet. There is so much more each of us could do in living more simply and sustainably, and no doubt all of us throw stones from our glasshouses (unheated glasshouses, I trust). One of the targets of my self-righteous projectiles is the huge, gas-guzzling 4x 4s which proclaim “I have moved to the countryside” (why ‘side’, please?), and whose owners have rarely if ever any cause to drive off-road. But I am as guilty as anyone: I drive; I have flown this year. If I could afford trains I would, and if there were any buses here I would use them. Our last (weekly) bus was axed ten years back.

Now I must admit that, hypocritically, I have to take a plane in October to Santiago de Compostela. Great excitement! I have been invited there for a weekend to see the hanging of my Camino pilgrimage diptych, to a gathering of what might be called Camino luminaries. The day before the August bank holiday I sent photos of the finished paintings to the commission-er, who approved them (more than approved, he says) – and joy! paid immediately – and the panels will be dispatched by courier in a week or so. I am permitted to display them here (rather a dark photo. The original is lighter and brighter). The reader familiar with walking pilgrimage in general, and the Camino in particular, will swiftly discern all the symbols.

One waits years, trudging through a desert of self-doubt, and then validation comes all at once. Over the August bank holiday weekend I then sold five paintings. No doubt another few years of desert will follow.

The regular reader will have discerned long ago that I am a pessimist (I prefer to say realist). Recent research in the States suggests that optimists, and those who think positively live on an average 11-15% longer than pessimists. Hmmm…Amazing that I have lived this long, then. I can only say with Mona Lott from ITMA “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.”

I have recently resumed the post of communications officer for our parish, and had the task of sending to local and church media a minor excitement. In the exceptional gales mid-month a stone finial cross on the roof of St Edmund’s Roman Catholic church blew down and crashed onto the sacristy roof, before bouncing to the ground and narrowly missing some of the famed Victorian stained glass. In the sacristy at the time, and directly underneath was the parish priest. Naturally I billed the story as a “miraculous” escape. But I was tempted rather to head it “God strikes St Edmund’s”, for the reader will recall that a year ago I wrote of the IICSA report on the scandal of child sexual abuse at Downside and Ampleforth abbeys. That same parish priest was named (if not shamed) as one of the abbots on whose watch these crimes were allowed to happen unreported to the lay authorities.

Every day for more than three years now I have said to myself, “Things can’t get any worse.” I don’t mean my own situation, for I am greatly blessed in my life. No, this is the continuing long slow suicide of the United Kingdom, and my own feeling of a visceral wound of being separated from part of my culture and history. Ever since the result of the “advisory” referendum in which 52% of those who voted – reduced by years of “austerity” and victims of a mendacious campaign which played upon the fear of the Other – stated their desire to leave the European Union and “take back control”, our once great nation and revered democracy has been tearing itself apart in a mix of farce and tragedy. But it has got worse, relentlessly every day. And now our parliamentary democracy itself is in jeopardy: we have a prime minister elected by 0.13% of the population, with a majority of one in the House of Commons, who has prorogued Parliament, leaving MPs opposed to the destructive No Deal likely to be foist upon us by monomaniac Brexiteers a matter of a few days before the 31 October deadline to stop it.

I wake after little sleep, day after day, with a sense of dread at the impending national suicide. I echo Conan Doyle in the final Holmes story “His last bow.” There is an east wind coming…unless we can stop it. Why are we not taking to the streets, stopping traffic, occupying the Palace of Westminster, manning the barricades?

There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”

“I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.”

My readers expect more lyricism from these monthly reports. I apologise for the tone of this one. But to end with a smile, I bring you another example from orthographically-challenged Suffolk.