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I am finding it difficult this month to start with what may be the expected paeon of praise to spring, to the advancing greenery, to the hope of summer.

It is nearly two years since I started these chronicles, and if they serve no other purpose they are at least a record of the weather in this part of East Anglia. We are unlikely here on England’s eastern shore to suffer the worst of Atlantic weather – the floods or storm-force winds, but trends are visible. I am not going to make the mistake of confusing weather with climate, nor am I among the ignorant who say on a warm sunny day “Oh, if this is global warming I’m all for it.”

Trends are indeed visible, and they do witness to changes, differences which affect – albeit subtly – the environment in which we live, more obvious probably to those of us who live away from cities. I own a book “Wild Flowers of Britain”, published in 1977, which in the section “How to use this book” tells the reader “The flowers are arranged in calendar order.” It gives approximate dates, allowing for geography. Now more than 40 years on it is obvious that the signs of spring and summer are arriving far earlier than they were when my children were little. Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, the orchids on the Common this year appeared later than last year – odd when you consider last year late winter brought the notorious Beast from the East, and yet February this year had us sunbathing.

This year April has been true to form, throwing all the seasons at us. A damp and grey start, and then a sharp blackthorn winter. For those who do not know, the blackthorn winter, in rural England, is a spell of cold weather, usually in early April which often coincides with the blossoming of the blackthorn in hedgerows. The pure bridal white of the blackthorn blossom, which appears before the leaves, matches the snow or frost covering the fields nearby. And we did indeed see flakes of snow fluttering on the icy wind – when we were not being battered by sudden hailstorms.

This was rapidly followed by a glimpse of summer. The late Easter festival saw record temperatures in all four countries of the United Kingdom when we all know that it is enshrined in law that public holidays must be cold, wet and miserable. The warmth is like a loving embrace – all the tensions and contractions of the muscles which come from the cold and bitter east wind disappear. And then, so we should not get too used to this, came Storm Hannah, bashing down my flowers and broad bean plants as she blew. More panes out of the greenhouse. Gardeners know they can never win.

But the one dominant feature of our weather here has been exceptional dryness, and this is a worrying trend. Last year’s beautiful summer brought virtually no rain; the autumn was dry; and winter when rivers and ponds should fill saw significantly less precipitation than usual – with a spell of high temperatures in February.

My drive will usually flood several times each winter, and often in summer, so much so that it has to be pumped out before the postman can venture up. This winter…one puddle, which quickly drained away as the water table is so low. The ground is cracked and concrete-hard; stream beds and ditches are dry. My vegetable garden has already taken the contents of four water butts.

Of course there are always variations in weather, and we used to say that Nature will always make up for these. But now…?

I do not need here to rehearse the causes of the man-made catastrophe facing our planet that is climate change: it would not persuade those who remain unconvinced or who do not care, and those who do care do not need telling. It is very much in the public eye at present thanks to the efforts of Extinction Rebellion, School Strike for Climate, and David Attenborough and other environmentalists. Odd that it should take the urgent voices of a nonagenarian and a teenager to catch the public ear.

But have they? If I stopped ten people in the street and asked “Who is Greta Thunberg?” how many would know who this surprising 16-year-old prophetic voice from Sweden is and what is her message? Even if they knew who she was, and that she was begging the governments of the world to declare a climate emergency and act on it, and increase targets for reduction of emissions and the deadline for these, would they – and we – be prepared to make the life changes necessary to save our world? Am I?

I know from a decade spent as a fitness instructor qualified to take referrals from the NHS for various medical conditions (mainly, I have to say, obesity and its co-morbidities), and from my own life, that long-term behaviour change is neither easy nor simple. Am I prepared to give up driving? I live in an isolated rural spot with no public transport. Am I prepared never to fly? How then would I be able to see my grandchildren and daughter across the Irish Sea? Six weeks of Lent (virtually) without meat were not difficult, but would I do this permanently? The arguments rage within my head, and my heart.

Just because a task is enormous and seems impossible does not mean it should not be tackled:

And I think it’s not sufficient to say to ourselves “Well, I can start in small ways. I can recycle more; maybe turn down the thermostat a bit.” It’s really not enough. Listen to Greta Thunberg: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

I will, in company with many others, and particularly as a CAFOD supporter, be going to Westminster on 26 June to lobby my MP. Ah, my MP…a junior Environment Minister. A Catholic. But also a party loyalist who – despite voting Remain – wishes to deliver a Brexit which will see us no longer bound by Europe’s strict environmental laws.

Greta Thunberg makes no secret of the fact that her clear-eyed, single-minded mission to save the planet is made possible by the “gift” which is her Asperger’s, which drives her: “I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad…. It’s nothing that I want to change about me, it’s just who I am. If I had been just like everyone else and been social, then I would have just tried to start an organisation. But I couldn’t do that. I’m not very good with people, so I did something myself instead.”

In the same week I heard Greta say this, I heard environmentalist Chris Packham who also has Asperger’s Syndrome, say much the same. It means he struggles in social situations, has difficulty with human relationships (preferring dogs to people), and is, by his own admission, “a little bit weird”. He, too, knows this makes him the person he is today, and enables him to campaign, some would say obsessively.

And now a personal bit. I also struggle. I know that my obsessive thinking helps me to drive things through, get things done, campaign (in a very minor way) about issues of social justice, refugees, an end to world poverty, and gives me the grit to push through my own physical challenges, and achieve ( a favourite word of my father’s). But the downside of the condition is (among other things) intolerance, incomprehension, pedantry and an over-literalness – an incomprehension that people do not actually mean what they say or write (it took me years to understand that when people say “See you later” instead of “Goodbye” it doesn’t mean they intend in fact to see me later). Add to that the miseries of misophonia and misokinesia which mean I impose physical isolation on myself and if possible shun group situations, and I would say it is a condition that does not win friends. But hey – I can remember telephone numbers and dates, so not all bad then (that’s a joke. But I often don’t get jokes). Do I want to be me? Not really. It’s uncomfortable.

So from April to Asperger’s via climate change. Maybe May will bring more cheerful news.

 

 

Journey becomes a pilgrimage as we discover, day by day, that the distance traveled is less important than the experience gained. Ernest Kurtz

March’s offering is late, because I am only just now returned from the most recent peregrinations, on foot across Sicily. More of that in a moment.

Once again it was a case of new month, new weather. The exceptional temperatures and deep blue skies of most of February gave way to storms, named storms which swept in from the Atlantic, one after the other, with violent winds, hail, and rain in amounts which helped replenish ditches and ponds still unnaturally dry after drought. The wind gets inside your head, batters your brain, banishes reason, and hurls your thoughts around like flotsam tossed onto a beach. The noise of the trees was like the constant roar of the ocean. Rooks on the wing were flying wild, flung into the chaotic air like so many blackened and charred scraps of paper.

Walking head down hunched into this force demanded energy, resilience. The dog and I sought walks sheltered from the worst of the blast. The lovely Waveney Valley provided some respite. The Waveney, which forms the boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk, is a magical river, quintessentially English in its gentleness, whose beauty – to my mind – rivals that of the Stour in the south of the county. The Stour was the childhood home of Constable; the Waveney, at Mendham Mill, of Munnings, of whom I wrote in January.

The source of the Waveney is a ditch on the road between Redgrave in Suffolk, and South Lopham in Norfolk. When I first came to Suffolk in the 1970s the bridge over the Waveney at Shotford near Harleston was a real frontier. Old Suffolk “boys” would say “Don’t ee cross the turnpike, bor.” Norfolk was not a place to be entered lightly. From its origin the river flows east about 50 miles through Diss and Bungay, and between there and Beccles becomes tidal, and joins the River Yare, reaching the sea at Great Yarmouth. Along its course watermills and windmills trace the rural history of East Anglia.

The Angles Way follows the river, as far as possible, and it was along here the dog and I walked to avoid the worst of the wind. A fox slunk across my path; the dog flushed out a deer; rabbits played. The world seemed at peace there.

The wild weather blew until the day of my departure, and then of course turned fine during the whole of my absence, only to return with me.

I had not done a “long” walk since the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome in 2016. Since then I have reached my early 70s, and suffered a doubly-broken ankle with soft tissue damage, and lost all confidence in my physical ability, much more so than such a minor trauma would suggest.

The prospect of a “short” long walk seemed to offer a feasible challenge. The Magna Via Francigena (the Great Route of the Franks) is a relatively unknown 183km trek across Sicily from Palermo in the north to Agrigento in the south. My approach to walking is that of Nietzche, for whom to walk was to overcome – to conquer mountains and oneself, more than that of, say, Wordsworth and the Romantic ramblers of the 19th century. This was something I had to do, to prove that there remained within me some vestige of the woman I once was.

And so off I set. I am not an inexperienced distance hiker, and I hoped no doubt to use that freedom, time and headspace which the solitary walker enjoys to take stock and set myself and my life to rights. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” said Nietzche in Twilight of the Idols. Was this to be a pilgrimage? I have no particular devotion to the two great Sicilian saints – Calogero and Gerlando, but I hoped to be open to what the journey had to teach me.

And, reader, what it taught me was that living – surviving – in the moment admits of no great thoughts, no spiritual reflection, no meditation on life, the universe and everything. This was tough, demanding, solitary in the extreme, and occasionally potentially dangerous. Not only were the daily totals of ascent and descent steep and relentless (there is no way of training in the flatlands of Suffolk), but a whole day could pass without encountering a house, a car, any sign of human beings, where one slip, one fall could mean injury, or death from hypothermia, bones eaten clean within hours. And exceptional spring rains in Sicily had meant small streams became deep, wide, fast-flowing rivers, fordable in summer, impassable now.

But what I had previously learned on distance walks is to rely on providence – God, if you will. I encountered the first stream in spate on day two. I was not expecting it: the guidebook spoke of a guado (ford). Too wide to jump, and apprehensive prodding from the bank with a hiking pole suggested it was deeper than the pole. And then there appeared one of those guardian angels who materialise at such times, from nowhere, in the shape of a charming young doctor from Pisa. I no longer find it surprising that someone turns up at the precise moment and location of need. In the presence of another person we could both more safely attempt a crossing. So – no doubt to his consternation – the English granny took off her trousers, hitched up her rucksack as high as it would go, and plunged in. The water was icy, brown, fast and strong (without hiking poles I’d have been taken by the current), up to my waist, the footing deep mud. But we made it, and his strong arm pulled me up on the opposite bank.

“Should you pass through the waters, I shall be with you; or through rivers, they will not swallow you up.” Isaiah 43, v 2.

His name was Matteo (it should have been Christopher!), and he appeared like the guardian angel he was from time to time during the next week, often at rivers to be forded, or when I was in danger of losing my way, or – because of the mud – in need of encouragement.

The mud! Mud such as I have never known it, mud into which you sank mid-calf, mud which sucked you down, mud which clung to the feet and legs in such quantities that lifting the foot was impossible. Being stuck to the ground uses muscles, tendons, ligaments not required in daily movement. The strain was intense, progress painfully slow – a kilometre could take an hour.

So again this walk – yes, this pilgrimage – became once more a metaphor for life: the difficulty of forward movement, the obstacles to be overcome, pain, and an absolute need to rely on others, on God, and not on one’s own strength or prowess. Don’t walk along thinking higher thoughts – you’ll only slip up.

That said, it was the most wonderful experience. The beauty of Sicily is wild, intense and compelling. The people kind, warm. And the food. The food! The generosity and abundance of what is (rather condescendingly) called peasant food, food which uses what there is to hand, what can be grown or gathered. It was wonderful.

And so I arrived in Agrigento and became a tourist once more, visiting the Valley of the Temples. And then a train back to Palermo, covering in two hours what had taken me nine days of mud, sweat, toil and tears (and not a little laughter when I walked with my guardian angel) to achieve.

Now back to the safety of Suffolk and its gentler walks carpeted by primroses and flanked by the greening hedges and trees. Back to a reunion with the young dog. And back to try to remember the lessons of experience.

February fill dyke
Be it black or be it white
But if it be white
It’s better to like

February fill dyke – so goes the old country rhyme, and the beginning of the month looked as though it would fulfil this meteorological tradition. I returned from Calais in heavy rain, and the first week was wet, cold, and then four days of wild destructive gales. We need the winter rains: ditches and dykes still have little water, and ponds even less.

But then the sun came out, and for the rest of the month it was warm, even hot, and temperature records tumbled, and the sky was a deep Mediterranean blue. The paths have dried, the mud is gone, and spring dominated. That first delight at discovering a snowdrop was swiftly eclipsed by joy at the first shy primroses, then whole banks of them, but oh! that’s now old hat –there are daffodils!

It is not normal; our weather is topsy-turvy. This time last year the Beast from the East had us in its cruel and icy grip; villages were cut off by snowdrifts for days; we shivered in Siberian gales.

But little is normal at the moment, and all is topsy-turvy in the world. My anxiety is high. Politics in particular is madness as the minutes tick down till the moment – in just 30 days’ time – when in all probability this country will commit the suicide of leaving the European Union. And a very slow painful suicide it is, with the two main political parties themselves seemingly in death agonies, torn apart by the question, and by strife and extremism. Is it wrong to pray about politics? Wrong to beg that some way should be found to stop the lunacy? I don’t think so, when so many people will be the poorer for it, our whole nation lessened, isolated, cut off from the richness which is a common European heritage. It is not all about trade and deals; it is about a way of being, cultural, historic, spiritual. Quite simply, we are better together.

However, the glories of this too-early spring have provided – if not compensation – at least distraction.

In fine weather there is no lovelier place on earth than Suffolk. The dog and I are extending our walks, and we have been exploring the Saints Country. This is a grouping of villages on the Suffolk side of the Norfolk-Suffolk border, the South Elmhams.  In the 1096 Domesday survey the manor of South Elmham was held by the bishop of Thetford, and then purchased by Herbert de Losinga, bishop of Norwich, who owned a similar manor at North Elmham in Norfolk. The villages are All Saints South Elmham, St Cross, St James, St Margaret, St Mary (Homersfield), St Michael, St Nicholas and St Peter. Add to these the Ilketshall Saints – Andrew, John, Lawrence and Margaret – and you have a litany of medieval devotion.

When I first came to this part of Suffolk in the early 1970s you could drive round and round the web of roads through the Saints country and never find your way out, often ending up where you started – unless you were fortunate enough to find an amused and slightly scornful old Suffolk “boy”, who could give directions.

One warm and sunny afternoon the dog and I started from Metfield and our eight-mile loop took us through the parishes of St Cross, St Nicholas, All Saints, and St James on a wonderful well-signed, and now dry, network of paths across country. We went to explore the church of All Saints, standing alone in a field.

It is one of some 38 round tower churches in Suffolk (they are mostly in East Anglia). There are various theories as to why they predominate in this region. They mainly originated in Anglo-Saxon times, and may have first been defensive structures against the Vikings, with church buildings added later. In this area without natural stone churches are built of knapped flint which makes corners difficult. Or it may be because King Athelstan decreed in 937 that the land of every thane should have a bell tower.

The church was open. Where many places of worship have prominent and presumably expensive memorials to the war dead, here we found this rather poignant scroll. It was obviously not a parish of the well-heeled.

In this “summer” in February every morning has been a joy. The trees, still starkly skeletal, stand out against the dawn, sometimes gauzy through a haze of morning mist, the ghost of a gibbous moon sailing high through the western sky.

Birds are now singing in surround sound: the raucous thrush, the melodic blackbird, the insistent great tit, and a host of small native birds fill the air. There is a little aria from a pastoral opera by Vivaldi  in which the orchestral introduction seems to mimic exactly the sound of birdsong on a spring morning. All too soon we shall be used to this chorus and it will be mere background, but for the moment it is joyous. Joyous too during the day is the constant high note of many larks invisible way, way above the fields.

That is, when there are no bird scarers in the vicinity. I accept their necessity when pigeons can destroy a field of rape in an hour or so, but farmers rarely obey the NFU code: “Never use auditory scarers before sunrise or after sunset.” What a joke – they are going strong, banging and booming, soon after 6am. “Avoid positioning auditory scarers adjacent to rights of way.” Ditto. They scare me, let alone the birds. I walk past, fingers in ears, and I am sure the split-second surge of adrenaline could trigger an attack in someone with what is called a “weak heart.” It is tempting, when they are next to a path, to go and turn off  the gas bottle.

Farmers could do worse than employ my dog. Fields of rape hold tempting olfactory delights for her, and she gallops across them at full velocity, sending up clouds of pigeons – and many a pheasant. I never cease to wonder at her docility to obedience training and the performance of exercises and challenges off-lead (hence the certificate and rosette), yet her utter deafness to any command or blast on the whistle when she is the other side of a field on a scent.

I do not really approve of taking a car somewhere just to walk a dog. However, one blue and gold morning with the crunch of frost under foot was irresistible. We drove to Eastbridge early, and walked solitary to the sea at Minsmere and back through the dappled birch woods.

Solitary meant for a frustration-free outing. All too often in the vicinity of the RSPB Bird Reserve an amble of elderly and slow bird-watchers appears, and I stop with the dog on the lead to let them past (surprisingly, some people do not appreciate being embraced by a large, hairy and usually muddy monster). They advance towards us at snail’s pace and stop, blocking our way, just before they get to us, to peer at the sky with binoculars. We wait. And we wait some more. Eventually they move off, having gazed at length on some avian wonder, still oblivious to our presence.

All this visual and aural beauty is a far cry from what I left behind in Calais when I returned earlier in the month. In the week I was there snow fell, there were sub-zero temperatures, then the snow melted, giving way to rain and gales. That week there was a marked by a sharp increase in evictions and clearances, despite the freezing weather. Calais is becoming fortified against invasion, with so much now walled in protective concrete or fenced off with razor wire. It is a problem that no-one seems to have the will to resolve. What is the future for these people who will continue to make the perilous journey to the hell that is winter in Fortress Calais?

And so to March, and meteorological spring. True to form (“New month, new weather”) this spell of summer is ending, and we shall be back to rain and gales. I shall end the month of March by walking across Sicily, God willing, and so the next publication of this chronicle may be delayed a while. I expect you’ll survive the wait.

 

 

 

 

 

January in Calais

‘January’ is being written in Calais, where it is cold and life is grim for the migrants. The reader will forgive me for writing of the situation here first, for it cannot but be uppermost in my mind. And if I get on a virtual soapbox, it is because there is a humanitarian tragedy in play here. For the safe and gentle Suffolk news and views you must wait – or skip – to the end.

Currently there are around 500 “exilés” (so named as to avoid any contention over the definition of “migrant” or “refugee”) in Calais itself, but probably a thousand or so spread along the coast between Calais and Dunkerque. In the two or three days I have been here there has been deep frost, snow, mud, rain and gales. The stress the weather causes to those who are living rough is equalled and compounded by official policy: there has been an increase this month in the clearances (a word which should give some cause for thought to those of us born in the first half of the 20^th century) – the dismantling and destruction of tents, sleeping bags and personal possessions, often with violence. Young Eritreans and Ethiopians sleeping under a particular bridge for shelter have had their belongings destroyed, and a three-metre wall has quickly sprung up near a service station. Walls, fences, barbed wire, CCTV, drones, dog patrols, violence, tear gas, the persistent dehumanising of those who seek refuge…Donald Trump could learn from this.

And who, dear reader, pays for this? If the British public are scarcely aware of what goes on here, then they are probably even more in ignorance of a new cooperation deal on 24 January under which the UK will pay the French government £6 million to support its plan of tightening border controls in France. Just over half of the investment will come from the £44.5 million already allocated under the Sandhurst Treaty on UK-France cooperation signed by Prime Minister Theresa May and President Macron in January 2018. However, an additional £3.2 million of new funding will be given for equipment and measures to combat migrants using small boats including CCTV, night-vision goggles and number plate recognition technology. Moreover, foot patrol across beaches and coastal areas in France as well as air and boat patrols in the channel will be reinforced. At night here, by the beach, I hear helicopters.

This new round of measures will make it difficult for people to make crossings in the future, which can in turn lead to more dangerous attempts by refugees to reach UK given their precarious living conditions in Calais.

Compatriots, when you pay your taxes, spare a thought for your cold, starving, exhausted fellow human beings who are hounded and harassed to prevent them setting foot in our country.

Whatever people’s views on admittance to the UK it cannot and must not be denied that these people are human beings, forced to live like animals, herded up, moved on, burying their meagre possessions to prevent their being destroyed.

And so, here in freezing Calais, Help Refugees, the Auberge des Migrants, the Refugee Community Kitchen, Refugee Youth Action, the Info Bus, and other aid organizations work every day to bring warmth, clothing, bedding, wood, food and information to those whose journey across continents has been forced to end here. I am here for a week, and the intense cold of working conditions – which for a while yesterday I thought I could no longer bear – makes me realise that, whereas my working day will end with the warmth of my paid-for accommodation, there are many for whom the pain will not cease.

I came with a car load of material donations from my parish and from the local WI, and €1000+ donated by parishioners, friends and family. If there is a scintilla of hope and joy in all this it is that the Auberge des Migrants functions on cheerful volunteer labour, mostly very young, from all over Europe and the world, but mostly  the UK; many giving up months or even years to do this work. In the darkness and division of an imminent Brexit they are the light of the future.

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January in Suffolk

I do not dislike January. It can be drear of course, and at its start I miss that dreamy fallow period between Christmas and New Year, and the house looks dull and dowdy once decorations are removed. But the tangy sweet and bitter aroma of Seville oranges and lemons and sugar bubbling into marmalade compensate for that. Cold weather calls for hearty and healthy food, taking account of a resolution to eat less meat. By the end of the month the birds are singing in the mornings; days are perceptibly longer; the light changes subtly and hints that one day spring may come; there are snowdrops, celandines and maybe even primroses – and there are projects and plans.

I took advantage of travel expenses to London being paid for a meeting of the media working group of the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome to go out to Chelsea and the splendid National Army Museum (which I didn’t know). The reason was an exhibition of Alfred Munnnings’ work as an official war artist commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Munnings provides an insight into the men of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and the Canadian Forestry Corps. His paintings demonstrate both the important role of the cavalry on the Western Front and the vital work behind the lines that sustained the war effort. Munnings’ wartime artwork was pivotal in establishing his success and securing his admittance to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919.

I have to admit that I love Munnings’ work (except the rather “society” pictures of his famous later career). The man was a shit, certainly in his younger life, as his marriage to the disturbed and suicidal Florence Carter-Wood suggests. But he was born at Mendham Mill on the Waveney, four or so miles from where I live, and his early paintings of the Suffolk landscape and the men and horses which laboured there vividly elicit a rather blinkered nostalgia for an era and a county which were never as pretty as he painted them. The work of Harry Becker does much the same in capturing a bygone rural age, but Becker in a simplicity of line and a speed of brush somehow gives the greater reality to the hardships and the toil.

Once again English weather thwarted me of the spectacle of the last total lunar eclipse I am likely to witness, for the next will not be till 2022, and then, falling in May, it will not be visible in the UK at six o’clock in the morning. What I did not see was a rare super blood Wolf Moon. Things looked good for visibility when I went to bed. At 4.30am I got up and went out at the appointed time in an eerie complete darkness. To the south and east the sky was clear, with stars shining; but at the very moment the full eclipse was due and the moon should have turned dark red clouds advanced in the western sky. I saw nothing (again), and went back to bed, grumpy.

These celestial events hold an atavistic attraction for me. There is a primitive awe at what happens in the sky, and I will go short of sleep to watch the fireworks of a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse, even partial. The winter night sky sparkling with huge stars scattered across the frosty air detains me, gawping in wonderment, when the dog and I go out at bedtime. In early 1997 I was living in the deep south of France when I first saw the comet Hale Bopp. Night after night I went out to gaze at it as it hung cradled in a hollow between two hills. Nowadays we know and understand what causes these phenomena, but it is hard not to attach a mystical significance to them, for to me they are glimpses of the numinous:

The heavens declare the glory of God, the vault of heaven proclaims his handiwork; day discourses of it to day, night to night hands on the knowledge (Ps 19).

From my window in Calais I can see the White Cliffs of Dover. I cannot bear that in less than two months my country will cut itself off from the lifeblood of Europe, and all the richness – cultural, artistic, spiritual, political, economic, financial – that comes from being part of a community.

The Solstice has passed, the twin Gods of Christianity and Consumerism have been celebrated. The year is at its darkest, and we are in that unreal period between Christmas and New Year, when normal life – and time – seem suspended. The earth sleeps, and we who have feasted – and imbibed – unwisely slumber replete on sofas in front of bad television. For a few days the rules do not apply: no calculating of calories, counting of units, exercise regime, or chores; and a log fire may be lit early in the afternoon.

I love the dark of the year. The darkness encloses and enfolds, shields and comforts. Rarely this December has it been illuminated by the stars, but on the few cold clear nights the countless scattered jewels across the sky are huge, close enough to reach up and snatch. I go out with the dog at bedtime and see Orion with his belt and sword flashing in the south; the Plough to the north pointing to the Pole Star. Out again in the very early morning, and Venus is immense.

Those early mornings are fully dark when we set out to walk…but how to see a black dog in the dark? The answer – an LED collar. And now I can follow her progress as she races across fields, an eerie light glowing red, moving low and at speed as she hunts. It could give someone quite a turn – Black Shuck in full pursuit, for if you see the devil dog it is said your death will occur before the end of the year.

Black Shuck, the ghostly black dog-fiend of East Anglian, particularly Suffolk, legend… The Revd E. S. Taylor’s 1850 “Notes and Queries” describes him as “a black shaggy dog, and of immense size.”

Hmm, that sounds familiar….

A. Dutt, in his 1901 “Highways & Byways in East Anglia” describes the creature thus: “He takes the form of a huge black dog, and prowls along dark lanes and lonesome field footpaths, where, although his howling makes the hearer’s blood run cold, his footfalls make no sound. You may know him at once, should you see him, by his fiery eye…But such an encounter might bring you the worst of luck. So you will do well to shut your eyes if you hear him howling; shut them even if you are uncertain whether it is the dog fiend or the voice of the wind you hear.”

Shuck is known particularly to frequent my part of Suffolk. On 4 August 1577, at Blythburgh, he is said to have burst in through the doors of Holy Trinity Church to a clap of thunder. He ran up the nave, past a large congregation, killing a man and boy and causing the church steeple to collapse through the roof. As the dog left, he left scorch marks on the north door which can be seen at the church to this day.

On the same day at St Mary’s Church, Bungay, he appeared again: Abraham Fleming wrote at the time in  “A Straunge and Terrible Wunder “: “This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a mome[n]t where they kneeled, they stra[n]gely dyed.”

And, it is said, Shuck is still sighted today.

This December darkness is anything but silent. Owls hoot, vixens scream, muntjac bark, a pheasant – disturbed by the dog – squawks and whirrs. December darkness, book-ended by sunset and sunrise,

the swift time between all too short. December, when autumn finally turns to winter. The last roses, the final fruit; and the last clinging oak leaves brought down by gales. Rain has come at last, and there is some water in the Beck, the ditches and ponds. Not enough, however, and unless the next three months are very wet water will be in short supply next summer.

True winter is still to come. Only one or two mornings have sparkled with frost, with the crunch of ice under foot.

One such, happily, was Christmas morning. One of the daughters, the dog and I – free of any obligation – set out for the coast. The wetlands of Minsmere and even the usually sullen North Sea shone sapphire blue, the reed beds pale in the low sun. It was an idyllic Christmas walk.

Less idyllic the weather when I visited the other daughter in Northern Ireland: Storm Deirdre lashed the shore with 100kph winds and torrential rain. I was warm and safe in the bosom of my family, amused with Scrabble, jigsaws, much food and drink, and a recital by the violinist granddaughter.

And so the year turns once more. All too soon decorations must be packed away, duties must be resumed, for the feasting is over for another year. Whether it has been the companionship of family or the lights and bustle of the season, but the dark has somehow been healing, and I feel energy seeping back, and the cloud which has stifled me all autumn is lifting.

So here’s to 2019 – though a dire and fearful event is scheduled for 29 March. Perhaps Black Shuck will appear; perhaps the ravens will leave the Tower of London; perhaps King Arthur will arise from his sleep. As our campaign proclaims: Bollocks to Brexit!

 

 

 

 

 

November’s main photograph was taken just before two o’clock in the afternoon towards the end of the month. Darkness already visible.

Lo! Thy dread empire, Chaos! Is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;

And universal darkness buries all. (Pope)

When was November decreed the month of the dead? The celebration of All Souls on the second day of the month naturally follows the feast of All Saints on the first, but when did that tradition arise? And suppose the Armistice had not happened in November would we be commemorating the war dead in, say, May or June? It seems entirely fitting that we remember our dead as the light fades, the leaves fall, and the land becomes colourless, featureless. The mournful, haunting Last Post which rings out round our war memorials in the chill air strikes cold in our hearts as we know that we, too, must follow…as night follows day, as winter follows summer.

This year saw a hundred years pass since the guns fell silent and that ‘war to end all wars’ ceased its terrible slaughter. Two years ago, on my way to Rome, I walked along the line (one of the lines) of the Battle of the Somme, where exactly a century before nearly half a million British and Commonwealth troops died. The rolling country was gentle, green, and beautiful – as far from the hell of the blasted landscape of battle as it is possible to be. Larks sang exultantly high above. Every mile or so, down narrow lanes, in fields, on farm tracks, there were immaculately kept Commonwealth war graves. I stopped and read some of the gleaming white stones through my tears. They were so young. Tellingly, the German cemeteries are locked, their dark iron crosses each witnessing to several dead.

Later in my walk to Rome, coming down from the Paso della Cisa – the gateway to Tuscany – on a tiny country road, I came across another, half-hidden, memorial to two British SAS men shot by the Germans in 1943. It is decorated, poignantly, with some faded imitation flowers and a poppy wreath. Captain Patrick Dudgeon and Parachutist Bernard Brunt were part of Operation Speedwell, tasked with disrupting German forces and severing their supply lines. Despite being in uniform and unarmed the two were condemned to death, led down the mountain to a point just past the memorial stone, and executed by firing squad. They are not forgotten.

Before the light finally died and gales swept the remaining leaves from the trees summer tried to reassert the dominance of the past six months: there were a few last days of warmth and sun and huge blue skies. But they are now vanquished by cloud and rain, and the summer flowers are gone:

The bones of the land are visible now in the harsh geometry of ploughed fields, and the skeletal trees are unsoftened by foliage.

All except the oak, which clings to its leaves long after those of lesser trees have become drifting susurrant carpets under foot. The oak is symbolic in many mythologies, and in its strength and steadfastness and longevity it is easy to see why.

In ‘War and Peace’ Tolstoy makes the oak a metaphor for Prince Andrei Bolkonsky:

“At the edge of the road stood an oak…With huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, with gnarled hands and fingers, it stood, an aged monster, angry and scornful, among the smiling birch trees. This oak alone refused to yield to the season’s spell, spurning both spring and sunshine….It stood…scowling, rigid, misshapen and grim as ever.”

Bolkonsky comes upon the “aged, stern, and scornful” oak tree when he is recovering from his war injuries and distraught from losing his young wife; he is weary of life. The oak tree, like the prince, has been wounded. It has had its bark scarred, in the same way that he has been hurt in battle and in life.  Bolkonsky too is “stern and scornful.” Despite its wounds, the tree is resilient and continues to stand.

But come one real sharp frost the oak leaves too will go with the next breeze:

That…as leaves

do on the oak, have with one winter’s brush

Fell from their boughs, and left me open, bare,

For every storm that blows (Timon of Athens)

Open and bare is not a bad description of how I feel in the dark days, and resilience gives way to self-pitying vulnerability. One (only one) kind reader picked up the veiled mayday call of October’s blog, understood that depression was not far off, and issued an invitation to cheer me. And so I went to participate in her dog’s second birthday. Cake and a good time were had by all.

But December always brings a defiant stand against the darkness; December brings frenetic activity – meals, celebrations, family. And December brings a festival of light and hope.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

 

The clocks have gone back. It is a moment of some dread to those of us whose moods plunge, and whose bodies ache and creak and long to sleep when light lacks. Now the dark comes creeping up in the afternoon, cutting off contact, compressing meaningful activity into a few precious hours, causing gloom and despondency.

At this time of year the Black Dog stalks my steps, ready to spring and seize on any weakness, any imagined slight, any frustration or anxiety, and worry and gnaw at it.

I have often joked that I acquired my own black dog to ward off these tendencies to winter depression, but as the young dog approaches two years old and reaches full physical maturity her coat is noticeably paler, and her father’s colouring is emerging more. Is she my own Portrait in the Attic? As she becomes less black will I grow more gloomy?

And with the change of hour has come a change of weather. The wonderful Indian summer, which succeeded our summer of summers, has ended with a blast of Arctic air, and rain! rain which within hours turned dust to mud.

Golden October has gone. The warm – almost hot – low sun casting long shadows; the mornings still and pure and perfect. All now gone. Those mornings…we were out every day in the half-light when the senses are more acute, and the smells of moist leaves, decaying fruit, nocturnal animals are most vivid. We heard the tawny owl with his “Ter-wit!” and sometimes the answering “Woooo”; at first light we saw the barn owl hunt. In the southern sky Procyon and Regulus shone bright and high, and the moon sailed behind the trees.

In the cool of the morning the young dog’s breath would come in golden clouds as she galloped towards me, the rising sun behind her. Gone. Replaced by inky indigo skies and hailstorms.

Gone too is the last blanched straw on the stubble fields, turned to umber as the earth yields to the plough.

The roses in my garden responded to the glories of the weather with a display that outshone that of June.

Afternoon walks were over fields dry as dust, buzzards wheeling overhead, sometimes as many as five together in the blue blue sky. Now we walk head down into the cold wind.

Occasionally a walk produces a surprise. We come across a wooden garden seat in the middle of a field. Who carried or dragged it there? Someone who liked to sit down and rest surrounded by crops? Surely not the farmer so he could sit, enthroned, monarch of his land? Farmers don’t have the leisure to sit and contemplate.

I wrote last month of a scary encounter with a large herd of Devonshire Red Ruby cattle. I said never again…But a few weeks later, back home, while on a public right of way across a field we unexpectedly encountered some British White heifers. This is a breed which trampled a woman to death locally about ten years ago. She made the mistake of trying to rescue her dogs. So – dog on lead – we made our way across, me trying to look braver than I felt. They approached, as cattle will. As they got close, one of them snorted. The dog – spooked – shied, knocked into me and I went flying under the hooves of the nearest. Fortunately the lead was pulled out of my hand and the heifers (heifers again!) turned their attention to the dog. I have never scrambled to my feet so quickly, unaware at the time that I had painfully turned my recovering broken ankle. We got out of the field unscathed, but I was trembling and feeling sick. This is my dog’s second attempt at killing me this year.

A charity commitment prevented my taking part in the huge anti-Brexit march in London on 20 October. I had been on the previous two when 100,000 walked through London to Parliament Square. This time 700,000 came, to demand a People’s Vote on any final Brexit deal, if there is a deal…Until the clock strikes midnight on 29 March I pray this lunacy may be stopped. One elderly, and more than somewhat infirm, lady from our parish, who leans heavily on a walking stick, marched. She said the atmosphere was electric. I so regret not going, for part of the gloom is our sheer impotence in the face of this folly.

And now to more ignorance, prejudice and bigotry. I attend a small art group in the next-door village. This consists mainly of elderly ladies carefully – scrupulously even – copying pretty photos. I don’t want to do that as I prefer to paint “live”, but I’ve been told I must get out more, and it gives me a couple of hours to play with colours and forms, and to catch up on the local craic, such as it is.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me to enquire whether a man who had been temporarily homeless but now newly arrived in the village might join the group. Local people had been kind to him generally, had given him furniture and equipment. I put it to the organizer. The reaction was not favourable, but she said she would put it to all the members. I could not believe the comments. “He makes my flesh creep,” said one wealthy farmer’s wife. “I don’t know why people can’t get on their own two feet without being given all this aid. I expect it was his own fault he was homeless,” said another. Unbelievable. He has not, so far, joined the group.

And worse. Racism. On a different occasion someone who should know better said, out loud, “All [insert racial type] are animals.” I challenged. She defended her right to say it. “What’s wrong with that?” she asked. We can’t stop people’s opinions, though you’d think that someone who had lived through the wars of the mid 20th century, as she had, would think twice, but such a blatant public expression of blind prejudice…? Today, as I write, we hear of the shooting of eleven people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh and its aftermath. Although the target of her venom was not Jews, this sort of unthinking, blind hate speak is the thin end of violence and killing. All over the world the far right is gaining ascendency. We have learned little since the 1930s. In the United Kingdom this will only get worse after we leave the EU, and the police have been told to expect mounting hate crimes.

I don’t really want to be part of that group any more.

Last month I also wrote of how the past can powerfully and unexpectedly break in on the present, and how on that occasion music caused that reflection. In early October the past sent an avalanche not of nostalgia but of turmoil that engulfed me for a while, and with which I could deal only by somatising the pain. Decades ago, around five years after my husband died, I became engaged to a man who was bipolar, flawed, and who operated on many levels. I was ignorant enough to think love could save him. Before we met his wife had divorced him; he had been cut off from his children, and had on several occasions attempted to take his own life. He succeeded weeks before our wedding, when his multiple deceptions threatened to come to light.

His then ten-year-old son is now the age his father was then. This son’s wife had obviously done a lot of googling, and managed to contact me, asking if I would be willing to help her husband who was struggling to understand his father’s life – and death. I replied immediately that I would. And since then I have heard not one word, leaving me dealing with the situation all over again.

And so for all its sunlit beauty October has not been an entirely easy month. November brings the beginning of winter, the commemoration of the ending of the Great War, and the start of the race to Christmas. Like our ancestors, we shall light a fire in an attempt to ward off the cold and dark.

And suddenly – autumn: Adieu vive clarté de nos étés trop courts.

Though in truth this last summer has not been short. It has endured, nearly five months from May and on into September.

In Suffolk, that is. In Cornwall during my week’s holiday, alas, it was the week of  equinoctial gales, and drenching swathes of rain. But more of Cornwall in a moment.

Some readers have complained that I have recently strayed from descriptions of my twin preoccupations: walking (the Common) and my garden. How odd and how limiting it would be if my life revolved solely around these activities. I do and I will return to them in these chronicles, but not exclusively so.

I was ready for some down time. The first two weeks of the month were spent with my nose to the grindstone, as my father would have said. Editing, sub-editing, nagging for the last bits of copy, laying out pages, tweaking, and checking checking checking – my first print journal for the Confraternity of Pilgrims to Rome. I felt I was going cross-eyed. The last time I prepared copy for publication was decades ago, not quite in the days of hot metal, but certainly before the days of digital. Maybe I have forgotten what hard work is.

And so in mid-month from Britain’s most easterly county to its most westerly, for a week of holiday with the young dog. She is excellent in the car – you wouldn’t know she was there, but I am mindful of her, and my, need for exercise, and breaks from travelling, so we took the journey in two days, for the most part off motorway so there were possibilities for walks.

My years in France have caused me to forget how wearisome, crumbling and congested are the roads in this country:

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire

wrote Chesterton, but what malevolent maniac made the million Milton Keynes roundabouts?

But soon we came to the straighter roads of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, many of which are remnants of our Roman past. By chance we came across an ancient track, the Salt Way, which runs from Droitwich  on its way to the coast of Hampshire. It is mentioned in a Saxon Charter, dated 969, as “Sealt Street.” Some have supposed it to have arisen from the traffic of salt from Cheshire, while others hold that the name simply implies the “Hill Way.” We stopped and walked for miles.

Thinking of how the Romans built their roads, straight as arrows cross country, always recalls my father’s passion for these tracks and paths. He possessed many books on the Romans in Britain, and when he and my mother retired it was to within a few metres of the Via Devana which slices diagonally across England from Colchester (Camulodunum) to Chester (Deva). I remember him vividly, setting off so earnestly in stout walking shoes, armed with map and compass in an old gas mask bag, to explore.

And the next day, too, this time on motorway, passing signs to Weston-super-Mare, which he insisted on pronouncing “Mar-é”, and listening to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, he sprang to mind. My sleepless childhood nights were disturbed by many composers, their music filling the house from my father’s two enormous stereo speakers, and a great deal of Vaughan Williams with his plangent strings.  It was, I suppose, less deafening than the Wagner…

And how will our children remember us, with our own eccentricities, our own crimes against their childhood?

But to Cornwall…We stayed at Morwenstow, just west of the border with Devon, on a beautiful but murderous stretch of coast, where the cliffs are rugged and sheer.

A sailing friend wrote to me “Absolute death trap in a nor’wester and the only possible port of refuge, Padstow, even worse since it’s a bugger to get into in any sort of blow. But golly, lovely.”  Indeed it was lovely when we could see through the rain.

Morwenstow seems known mainly for its strange Victorian parson, Robert Stephen Hawker. One of his main concerns became the rescue of sailors from ships wrecked on the rocks of the local coastline.  On 7 September 1842 the brig Caledonia was dashed to pieces at nearby Sharpnose Point.  All but one seaman were lost but Hawker ensured the survivor was nursed back to health, while giving a Christian burial to the nine crewmen who were washed up.  The Caledonia’s white pitch-pine figurehead he also retrieved, and used as the churchyard’s grave-marker for captain and crew.

He built a little hut on the cliff at Morwenstow, using timbers washed up from the Caledonia and two vessels wrecked the following year, the Phoenix and the Alonzo.  He’d sit on fine days smoking opium and composing his poetry, and during times of storm scour the grey waters for ships in distress.  For many years he continued this gruesome duty of recovering corpses from the sea. Altogether, he rescued nearly 50 bodies. It is said he plied villagers with gin to inure them to the task of collecting washed-up body parts.

It takes a while to relax into a holiday, to realise – in the sense of making real – that I do not have to be anywhere or do anything, except keep the dog and me exercised.

To this end on the first full day, and the only completely dry one, we set off on a long trek which took us across fields, through woods, alongside streams, and to the coast at a little beach, pleasingly called Duckpool. And then back along the clifftops past the GCHQ listening station to another inlet, Stanbury Mouth, and then back inland towards “home” on country paths. Here I was genuinely scared, no exaggeration, and the thought that flashed across part of my consciousness was “Is this how it all ends?” We were crossing a big field with a large herd of grazing heifers, with a few cows and biggish calves. I think they were Devonshire Red Rubies.

There must have been 30 or 40 of them. I put the dog on the lead. As cattle will, they came towards us, and at first I thought it was just the usual curiosity, but it was soon apparent that it was aggression. Thirty or 40 large animals advancing at a trot and then a canter is truly terrifying. I followed advice and let the dog go, knowing that she could outrun them, and that she would draw them away from me. That worked at first, but then they came for me in a wide semi-circle which then drew into a three-quarters arc.

I knew instinctively that if they managed to close the circle I would be a goner, and I would be killed by trampling. It happens. I opened my jacket to look as big as possible, bellowing and waving my stick, and as the leader came at me whacked it hard on the nose. That caused it to pause, and they all stopped for a second. Then they came on again. The stile at the end of the field seemed very far off. I dared not turn my back. And so, slowly, walking backwards and praying not to stumble or trip, I managed to cross the field, bashing the nose of the nearest as they advanced, and shouting as I went. Heifers, eh…. big hormonal girls.

When we got over that stile I was shaking, and my heart racing. It’s not an experience I would wish to repeat – which is a pity as that path was our most direct to a beach.  I know it is said that it is a myth that the colour red enrages bovines and that they are colour blind – but I was wearing a red jacket.

The remainder of the holiday was not without its perils, either. Storms Helene, Ali, and Bronagh battered the coast in swift succession, rendering clifftop walks unwise. One morning I had to cling to a gatepost to avoid being blown over. Inland paths, with the attendant worries about livestock, tend to peter out and the possibilities of getting lost are many. Once upon a time labourers walked to work; children went to school on foot, and these public rights of way were in constant use. Now farmers understandably do not encourage walkers, and signs disappear, and gates are padlocked, and the paths cease to exist – except on maps.

Vaughan Williams attended our return journey as well, as I listened to Radio 3’s Record Review of his “On Wenlock Edge.” My father loved what one critic unkindly called this “Cowpat Music”, the works of English pastoral composers – Vaughan Williams, Holst, Bax, Butterworth. They engender a nostalgia for a lost England, calling up a pre-War world which never was the idyll our false memory clings to.

I was reminded also of a chance and emotional encounter in France, one of those rare moments when the past bursts in unexpected on the present. Four years ago I was working in a pilgrim hostel on the Voie de Vézelay, on the way of St James in the Dordogne. Some Dutch pilgrims arrived one evening, and after supper one of them, René, got out some music and sang unaccompanied from Butterworth’s “A Shropshire Lad.” The surprise was so great, and the emotion of memory so strong, that tears came unbidden. Eighteen months later another surprise: René emailed and invited me to a concert in which he was singing at Oosterbeek.

Back to Suffolk, which had enjoyed continuing summer while we battled the wind and the rain.

And so now there is more darkness than light in the 24-hour cycle. Morning walks start later; a coat is necessary. But the legacy of this extraordinary summer lingers on in the glut of fruit. The hedgerows blaze with scarlet and vermilion hips and haws.The dog joins me in blackberrying. Blue sloes are prolific and await the first frost for picking. Tomatoes in my garden are so numerous they fall to the ground and rot.

Across the Common the horses will soon be moved to winter accommodation. August’s late foal – a surprise – has grown strong and sturdy. The ponds are dry as dust, and we wait for the winter rain.

 

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides tenèbres.

At the end of my July offering I was debating whether to continue with these chronicles, as the year had come full circle since I initiated the blog. There was a positive response, and so here is August.

I could not have imagined, when last month I wrote of the first rain in months, that there would be precious little more for another month. As August ripened the heat built and built once more, this time with sapping humidity. And so it continued till a few days ago. Now another couple of rainy days have seen the grass (and weeds) spring up, and the stubble fields are covered with a sheen of green where fallen grain has germinated.

But what a summer! My two fig trees are bowed down with ripe and luscious fruit. In previous years the birds and wasps had the sparse fruits as soon as they softened. Outdoor tomatoes, even the Italian ones sown in hope rather than expectation, have produced a glut. Harvest is over and all safely gathered in, and the landscape assumes its autumnal aspect as the plough get to work through the dry earth. My own domestic harvest threatens to overwhelm me, and processing of tomatoes and courgettes demands constant attention. I press gifts of vegetables onto friends and family.

 

Drought has produced a premature autumn, and hips and haws glow red in the hedgerows. Blackberries are ripe and plump – how have they found enough moisture?

However, most arable farmers are speaking of a reduced yield this year, though one organic farmer of my acquaintance in Lincolnshire says his has increased. Those who use the old varieties say so as well. Lessons to be learned.

Now, at the end of August, on the cusp of meteorological autumn, the sun has yet to breast  the horizon when we go out for the early walk.

Now even the yellowhammers are silent, and hunting buzzards are the only birds I hear. Sometimes a great grey heron rises with its slow wingbeat from a pond. One day we come across a baby barn owl sitting under a tree, a ball of grey fluff surrounding an improbably stern owlish face. I hold the dog still. Too young for full fledging, he must have flapped down from the nest but couldn’t fly up again. I don’t think he will have lasted long. Another morning we startle a large dog fox. My young dog pursues, then wisely she thinks better of it, and the fox slinks away.

Early in the month, on a blazing day, I went to help set up the Inspired by Becker Exhibition (the regular reader will recall that back in April I was accepted by this art society, dedicated to raising awareness of Harry Becker’s work within the art world and among the general public, and to running events which celebrate his contribution to painting and printmaking in the early years of the 20th century). I also, with some daring – since I am but a self-taught amateur, entered the Paint Out competition on the Saturday of the exhibition. This was held at Blythburgh, where Becker is buried. Some artists chose to paint the marsh landscape of the Blyth estuary, some to paint the church and churchyard, and three or four of us to try and capture the working party clearing the artist’s grave.

I reproduce here first, second and third – and my own. I thought the third-placed one (the pencil drawing) should have won. But what do I know?

I cannot help but write this month of the IICSA (Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse) report on the case study of the English Benedictine Congregation, and particularly their abbeys and schools at Ampleforth and Downside. I had thought myself unshockable, but the appalling repetitive catalogue of depravity, predation and cruelty in the report caused me to reel psychologically.

The report highlights how time and again the attitude of former Abbots of Downside (one of whom is our parish priest, for Downside has served the parish in which I attend Mass since 1657) sought to protect the reputation of the monks and the school, sought to protect the offenders, and failed to honour their duty of care to the victims. “Through ignorance, through weakness, through [their] own deliberate fault”… I see only too well how the weakness of our priest, who flees from confrontation, head in sand, and the naïveté of another (who also was priest in this parish) could allow the darkness to continue.

I requested some sort of statement from our priest for our parish website, of which I am an admin. “No comments; no statement,” came the reply. But then when Downside issued a statement I persuaded him to allow me to post it online, and put a hard copy on the noticeboards. After Mass he stood up and said these were available to read, but then spoke of his own stress, with not one word of regret, contrition, or owning the situation. There was much anger and upset among the faithful, and eventually he was persuaded to make his own statement of regret. It cannot have been easy for him, and he did it in a toneless, emotionless voice.

The report suggests that there is still “an entrenched belief that the clergy are superior to the laity.” I see it every day in our parish. And we the laity allow it to continue…“Father” knows best; Father must be supported whatever; Father must not be questioned or confronted. What one commentator calls the infantilisation of the laity. And so we must share responsibility for these abuses of power, through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault.

And the knowledge of how the clergy have abused their position keeps flooding in – the United States, Ireland, Australia, Scotland, England. Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of a shift of the tectonic plates in the Church, a new reformation – if only the laity can grow up. I wrote to The Tablet, and support flooded in from all over the world.

End of sermon. The readers who said “Continue” may be regretting their encouragement… And yet abuse of power concerns all the human family, Catholic or not.

But speaking -more cheerfully – of families, August has been a time of visits. One weekend to Northern Ireland to see elder daughter, her husband and their two girls. Lovely girls, growing up fast: one embarking on GCSE, the other about to spend her first day at “big” school. They are a pleasure to be with.

The next weekend, younger daughter comes from London, and spoils her old mother with breakfast in bed. We walk a long loop of 11+ miles: Cratfield, Linstead, Cookley, Huntingfield (sandwich and a pint of Adnams in the Huntingfield Arms) and home via Cratfield, after a scary encounter with the most aggressive horse I’ve ever had to face.

This is the longest walk since my doubly-fractured ankle, and although the last mile or so were painful, it set me thinking of more serious long-distance walking. Next month, in Cornwall with the young dog, I can test myself on some proper gradients.

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned a new word. This is always a good thing even when it is the younger generation getting one over on me. One of my daughters wrote it to me in an email a few evenings ago. I thought she was just showing off but I gather Twitter was buzzing with it at the time.

The word is “petrichor”. It means the scent given off when rain hits dry ground. This is apparently the effect of a molecule, geosmin, a bacterium produced by Streptomyces, which is released in to the air. The word was coined by scientists Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas in their 1964 article “Nature of Argillaceous Odour”, published in the journal Nature. The neologism is made up from the Greek petros, meaning “stone”, and ichor, meaning “the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods.”

The reader with alert powers of deduction will by now have understood that it has rained. I little thought when I wrote in June that another month would pass with not a drop of moisture. The colours of the landscape had by then become a blanched restricted palette, and  over the course of July green became a rarity: the ditches, long dry, retained enough residual moisture to keep a thin line of verdure along their course, but this gradually diminished to nothingness, and soon even the stressed trees started to lose leaves and shrivel. Grass bleached almost white, crops palest gold or cream, gardens brown and dying. Heat hung heavy in the stifling air. All talk was of the weather which surpasses the legendary summer of ’76.

On the Common there is precious little grass left, leaving only rubbish (weeds, in farming-speak) and some of the horses have been taken off in order to conserve feed. The pond from which they drink is at an all-time low, a churned and muddy puddle.

The longed-for rain came with a storm towards the end of the month. Farmers rushed to get in crops as the clouds approached, bales perched perilously high and leaning. The fields either side of my house were harvested simultaneously,

continuing till the first drops fell, and a violent wind sent the straw flying.

But alas it was the night of the blood moon, the longest total lunar eclipse of the century. After weeks and weeks of clear skies there was no chance of even a glimpse; the evening before, or after, would have given us all a clear view. Maybe better luck for the Perseids in August, but mid-August is notoriously cloudy here.

---

But oh! It has been glorious. The beauty of the very early mornings just after sunrise is worth all the sleepless nights.

The dog and I are out then with cool air on our bodies after the stifling darkness. The mornings now are almost silent: there may be a yellowhammer “little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheeeese;” sometimes the menacing mew of a buzzard; very rarely now a skylark high high in the still air. We go over stubble fields and she chases hares; on paths through the wheat and she dashes up and down the tramlines, the tip of her black tail visible – a swift-moving shark’s fin surfacing on a sea of gold.

She is nearly 20 months old. The relationship deepens, and owner and dog communicate more and more by body language. She knows the meaning of different ways of my standing up, or of a search for keys, or even of a change of clothes. She knows the tone of a sigh. She observes the raise of an eyebrow. And I know her. There is something so poignantly endearing watching her struggle to control her impulses: a large rabbit sits provocatively on the path in front of us; she starts forward; I whistle her back; she quivers, trembles with desire. But she comes back.

Usually.

She is doubtless my last dog. I have tried to keep something back, to not give her my entire heart for fear of the loss which one day will come. Those who know the aching space in a home when a dog has died will understand. But she has claimed my love completely. I must do as she does, live in the moment, and not fear pain.

A recent, but already dear, friend has just had to have his old dog put to sleep. He has allowed me to quote the poem he wrote:

Go now, chase the deer and pheasant, over heath and fields,
through glade and vale, greet the Morning Star,
‘til the yearned for dawn, disperses the dark-aching shadow, and,
at my side again, eastward looking, from warm shingle, gold flickering to the horizon, heavens and seas meld deepest blue and we too, rest in peace eternal.

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High summer. The time of meals, festivals, outings. On one of the real furnace days our parish held its annual outing . Do not conjure up pictures of a Cider-with-Rosie jollity. No – these excursions were initiated seven years ago, and graced with the name of “pilgrimages”, and always involve places of significance in the Christian history of our area. The first was to the wonderful ruins of St Benet’s Abbey (founded in the 11th century) in the Broads. The first and the best: we arrived by boat from Ludham, heard Mass and picnicked among the ancient stones in the sultry heat, watching boats sailing, as it seemed, through the fields. This year it was to the nearby village of Hoxne, to honour the patron saint of our parish, St Edmund.

Local legend has it that, after being routed in battle against the Danes, King Edmund of East Anglia hid under the Goldbrook Bridge. The reflection of his golden spurs glinting in the water revealed his hiding place to a newly-wed couple crossing the bridge. The couple informed the Danes who promptly captured Edmund and demanded he renounce his faith. He refused and was tied to a nearby oak tree. After whipping him, the Danes shot spears at him until he was entirely covered with their missiles – like the bristles of a hedgehog. Even then he would not forsake Christ and so was beheaded and the head was thrown into the woods. It is alleged Edmund cursed all married couples who should pass over Goldbrook Bridge, and to this day brides and grooms will not cross the bridge

The great oak tree stood for 1000 years until it fell in 1848. The tree’s trunk was over 20 feet in circumference. When the tree was cut up, it is said that an old arrow head was found deep within the tree, five feet from the base. Today a stone cross in a field marks the spot where the tree stood with an inscription “St Edmund the Martyr AD 870. Oak tree fell August 1848 by its own weight”.

Parishioners gathered in the grounds of Hoxne church for Mass and picnic in the blazing 33C heat, and afterwards walked to the Memorial. Do we believe the legends? Not necessarily. Does it matter? No.

Another outing. The regular reader may recall that I have, rather to my surprise, joined the local WI. Even more to my amazement I agreed to go on a WI pétanque day, no doubt seduced by memories of my life in the far south of France…old men in berets, clichéd Gauloises hanging from their lips, under the shade of plane trees in the village square. This time it was elderly women (the average age must have been well over 70), mostly considerably overweight. But the spirit of competition, the intense concentration, rivalled the concours de boules of Gallic summer festivities – but with a lot more laughter and, alas, no pastis.

Last month I wrote of a portrait commission which had gone well. Most unusually the subject of the portrait not only recognised himself, but said – in a kind email of appreciation and thanks – that it was exactly how he saw himself. A rare tribute indeed.

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This online journal of my common-or-garden life has chronicled a full year now. If nothing else it provides a record of the weather over 12 months. To continue or not? That is now the question.