Perhaps she did not mean to break the world. It was just a step, she thought, to somewhere else. It was a career move, buoyed upon the shoulders of a carefully cultivated popularity.
She had calculated and triangulated opinion, courted her sponsors, paid the yes men, pulled the triggers of the culture wars. She had smeared the naysayers and the experts with adroitness, had them spread-eagled on the front pages and stoned, as devils.
She eroded faith in all the institutions, dismantled brick by brick our trust, advocated for apathy among the many, and appointed the thuggish as her captains. No, perhaps she did not mean to break the world. It just seemed there for the breaking and the taking, and none could stop her, so she did it anyway.
I was following this truck up Delph Lane when it hit a pothole and appeared to leap into the air. I hesitate to call it a pothole, actually. It was more that the road had partially collapsed at the brow, near Stang Yule. If I’d hit it in the Mazda, with so little ground clearance, that would have been the end of it, and a shame since she’s just clocked a hundred thousand miles. As it was, I managed to steer around it.
I’d hit one at the bottom of the hill as well, cunningly disguised as a puddle of water, only a small one, but very deep. I was going slow, making a turn, otherwise it would have ruined the tyre, maybe a bearing and a track rod end as well, but the car still felt okay. Twitching around potholes isn’t a good idea, especially in a panic as you come upon them suddenly, or in the dark, because you might just twitch into oncoming traffic. It’s happening a lot now, accidents, even deaths caused by holes in our roads. Imagine hitting one on a motorcycle.
I guess we’re growing used it, which is just as well, because I’ve read it’ll cost 14 billion and take 11 years to get our roads back to the standard of your regular wealthy, civilised country. We lost 21 billion to fraud during the COVID pandemic, but for some inexplicable reason there seems to be a resignation among our politicians that we’ll never get that back, even though we know who the culprits are. Meanwhile, the money for the men, the materials and the machines needed to fix our roads remains a pipe dream. All of which puts me on the edge of a rant, and that’s not we want today.
The truck driver is okay – I suppose a four-wheel drive monster thing like that is no stranger to a little rock and roll. The Mazda, though, is made for a more refined environment, smooth Tarmac at least. It adds another dimension for sure. Hard to imagine our roads were once smooth enough to be travelled for pleasure, but that was back in the days of the Morris Minor and the Humber Sceptre. People even wrote guidebooks about them.
So anyway, yes, 100,000 miles, and very glad to be clocking it up in Bowland, rather than on some dull commute. We’re back in the Bleasdale area, looking to explore more of what it has to offer. We find an unofficial lay-by where it looks safe to leave the car. Then a bit of road walking along Delph Lane, leads us to the house at Stang Yule, where we gain the open access area onto Oakenclough Fell. Here, we begin a steady climb up a fairly good track that runs alongside the plantation. I say “open access”, but this can be withdrawn by the estate at any time, especially during the shooting season, around August and September, and this is a big, shooting estate, so check your dates, or ring the Bleasdale estate office.
There’s a dark and brooding look about the moors here, fold upon fold of them rolling off into the distance. Last season’s heather has died back to a graphite grey, there’s a faint haze and then a mist stroking the tops. The curlew are everywhere, and larks are rising. The path is still drying out after winter rains, but generally okay. It eventually meets a firm Landrover track, used to bring the shooters up to their grouse butts, which proliferate here. There’s just a faint detour for anyone interested in scoring the trig point on Hazelhurst Fell top. We make the effort, and find perhaps the loneliest, most forlorn looking structure, amid a waste of moor, and bog. It’s little visited. We’re brushing the clouds here, and the mist is thickening of a sudden. This is unfamiliar territory, so we beat a retreat before we’re consumed by it.
The track weaves on around Winny Brow, then dips towards Langden Castle, but we must branch off across an unpleasant section to Feindsdale Head, a faint smudge of a thing, and still a bit boggy. The way is marked with white posts, reassuring in one sense, but the line of them is best regarded as theoretical, since they do little to help us avoid the wet, at least as we find this section today. Finally, we reach the paved bit we encountered last time we were up here. We know where we are now, and there’s a sense of relief we’ve put the moor behind us. Though that track meant we were sure of our way for most of it, the moor has a forbidding look about it, an unforgiving vastness that lacked all hospitality. And those grouse butts put me in mind of the vast gulf now between the one-percenters and the rest of us. If you have to ask how much to shoot up here, you probably can’t afford it.
As we turn for home, and begin our descent towards greener pastures, the sky peels open and the sun comes out. A little way down the track, we find the cairn we encountered last time, and sit with it for company a while. The views across the vale here are breathtaking, with Fair Snape in the distance rising impressively. As the clouds break up even more, the shadows drift, and the land breathes gently.
For a long time now, I’ve been under the impression of a future that has been cancelled. It’s in the daily news of war, political corruption, economic decline, and yes, even in the damned potholes jarring our bones as we drive around. I don’t know if this is me, a combination of advancing age, my retirement from the world of work, and my children leaving home to begin their own lives, or if it’s really the harbinger of a serious downshift shift in geopolitical fortunes for the western democracies.
I think back to the 1980’s, when I was in my 20’s. That was not a great decade either. We had rampant inflation, the violent assault on unionised labour, a housing crisis, and still, somewhere, always a war, or the threat of a war that would break the world order, or even incinerate the entire planet. But for all of that, there still seemed a positive energy about the times. It was in the popular culture and the music, and people dared to be romantic, dared to have a direction, even if it was only aspirational. Or am I talking about myself again?
Now I find I can only remain positive by withdrawing from the world as portrayed in the massed and social media, into a kind of fiction, perhaps creating literally a fiction of it. But is that not what we all do? Some of us, like me, prefer our stories mysterious but peaceful and dripping with meaning, others like them unsubtle, contentious, violent and nihilistic.
Anyway, our path brings us safely down to the farm track, mostly gravel here, but eventually picking up smooth Tarmac, as we approach the environs of Bleasdale Tower, the Big House. There are some potholes here too, but there’s an estate guy busy filling them with tarmac. They can at least afford to fix their own roads, while the council is too skint to fix ours. It’s a strange place, quite old-fashioned really, lost in time, this vast rural estate, with its rural ways, its shooting, hunting, lots of tied farms dotted about, lone cottages, the big house of course, and all serviced by a private road network, where a stranger stands out a mile and had better be ready to explain himself.
One of the stories I have on the back burner is a guy from the 1860’s who’s not aged a day past thirty. I gave up on it because I couldn’t work out how someone like that would not have been found out by the authorities, and the tabloids of the twenty-first century. But if he had friends in high places, he could easily be tucked away in a place like this, among people loyal to a contemporary feudal lord, and for whom discretion was second nature.
Anyway the track is level, easy on the feet, but still exhausting in the sun, and we’re approaching eight miles now. The estate is well manicured, trees in leaf, that lush first flush of spring green, and the meadows are cropped close by grazing to resemble parkland. It brings us back to Delph Lane, and the little blue car, altogether a satisfying round and, as always, a pleasure to be in this part of Lancashire. No sense rushing home, though. We’ll take the long way, thread ourselves over to Chipping, then maybe Ribchester. It’s a top-down sort of day, and maybe we can pick up some fresh farm eggs on the way. We just need to watch out for those potholes.
Seven and three-quarter miles, and eleven hundred feet of ascent.
Sympathetic AI and humanoid robots are thin on the ground in literature and film. There’s something in the psyche that rejects them, paints them as an abomination, a threat lacking the discernment that is the human soul, and which will eventually exterminate us. Think: HAL the murderous robot in Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. Think: the Terminator movies. Think: AVA in Ex Machina. Think: Maria, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Think: the intellectual furore over Chat GPT, and the outrage of creatives at AI image generation. One outstanding counter to this trope which says, actually, robots and AI might make a positive difference, is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun.
In this story, we have a near future in which two classes of human beings are emerging. The wealthy are having their children genetically modified, or “lifted” as it’s called here. This guarantees them better employment prospects, for being rendered smarter than your average person, but it can also result in chronic sickness and death. This is a risk parents must balance, and many are willing to take it, rather than burden their child with mediocre life-chances. It’s not a dilemma parents yet face, but if you were a parent, would you risk it? And if not, what if your kid resented you afterwards for being consigned to a life of grinding poverty, while the chosen ones soared away? Capitalism and peer pressure are dangerous bedfellows and the catalysts for so much madness that is accepted as normal. These are just some of the questions we are invited to explore.
The child, or young adult, in this case is Josie, already sick from being “lifted”, and whose sister, Sal, did not survive the process. Then there are humanoid androids whose purpose is to act as companions or “artificial friends” and carers to young adults. Our android, Klara, is the narrator of the story. Technical details are kept on the down-low, but Klara is realistically humanoid, powered by a combination of a processing fluid that reacts with sunlight. This lends her a particular fascination for the sun, to the extent that there is almost something worshipful in her relationship with it. She displays some unusually advanced observational skills, and processing idiosyncrasies which set her apart from other models. But Klara is also one of the last of her marque, on the verge of obsolescence, languishing ever deeper in the shade of the robot store while newer more advanced models are being wheeled in to take her place – literally – in the sun, which periodically floods the shop windows.
During several visits to the store, Klara and Josie strike up a relationship, and Klara is eventually established in Josie’s household. There’s so much going on here, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s the contingency the mother is working on, with a techno-artist, who is constructing an android in the image of Josie, ready to step in, if the real Josie were to die. All the doppelganger lacks is a mind, which is why the mother is keen for Klara to observe Josie, and demonstrate her mimicry of Josie’s mannerisms. The mother and the artist want Klara as a substitute brain, saturated with the essence of Josie.
Whilst Klara has no choice but to go along with this, they reckon without her “humane” determination that Josie shall not die, to the extent that Klara makes a pact with the sun, and in return promises to destroy a dreadful machine that makes smoke and blocks out the sun’s life-giving rays. Although intelligent, and quirkily insightful, there is clearly something child like about Klara’s naïveté.
Then there’s Rick, Josie’s lifelong pal, whose mother has refused to have him lifted. This has already resulted in him being second classed by the other kids. This doesn’t bother Rick so much as the fact it sets him and Josie on separate life paths.
Then of course there’s the question of whether Josie lives or dies. Does Klara’s sacrifice to her sun-god work? How can it, since Klara is a machine? But that’s only the same as saying it wouldn’t work for us either, because such things don’t work, do they? Then there’s the incident where Klara is refused entry to a theatre, even though she is accompanying Josie. She is, after all, only a machine, cannot possibly appreciate the performance, and is therefore a waste of a seat. This begs the question: will humanoids, when they arrive, be the target of what we now identify as racism, and bigotry? Will they be unable to wander our world freely for fear of our malicious reactions – especially if they are rendered weak and defenceless?
So, this is not really a story about robots. It’s more about us. It’s also a story that explores the territory we’re likely heading into, if we follow what is least commendable about our natures. The most selflessly heroic character here is Klara, unburdened as she is by any self awareness. Indeed, there is no hint that Klara is in any way conscious, or ever will be. Her “thoughts” are all based on calculation and algorithm, and her vision is presented as a series of information boxes. She sees the world in great detail but, though she navigates it very well, she does not see it as we see it.
What is Klara then? She is not human, but not exactly a machine either. Not conscious, but certainly presented as another species, another “kind”. Is that reasonable? I found myself developing a profound sympathy for her, while finding the humans much less than wholesome, indeed they all seemed damaged by the mores of this new world, which isn’t that far away. The exceptions are Rick and Josie, whose relationship was tender and loving, as they negotiated the dilemma that was forced upon them.
A compelling read, that sucks you in and really has you experiencing this strange but entirely plausible world. I found the ending thought-provoking, meaningful, and deeply satisfying. Altogether, then, a very different take on the robot genre, and the usual freak-out about the dangers of AI gone mad. This is not to say those fears are unjustified, but what Klara reminds of is the likelihood that what we should be more of afraid of, what always ends up doing us the most harm in the end, is ourselves.
After dinner, I did not dance with Gabrielle. These were old dances, you see? Waltz, foxtrot, tango, quickstep, all of which required a man to touch a woman, and I could not touch her. Her voice alone was enough to set every atom of my being resonating dangerously to the richness of her tone. To have touched her, I fancy I would have burst into flames or, less dramatically, fallen down in an embarrassing faint, so agitated was I in her presence.
Fortunately, Gruber was enlivened by the music, also by the wine, and was consequently less attentive to me. Instead, as the gramophone began to play its first scratchy waltz, he offered his hand to Gabrielle, and she nodded her assent. I then took the opportunity of distancing myself, of observing them from the shadows, hoping perhaps they would become so bound up in the evening, and in each other, they would forget about me, and what appeared now to be a peculiar pact between them: that they should assume roles of mythical, daemonic and quite fantastic meaning. To me.
Gabrielle could not dance, but after what seemed like only moments in Gruber’s company she was granted the grace and poise of a dancer as surely as if he had enchanted her. As for the rest, his skilful lead ensured she did not put a foot wrong. As she took her first steps out on the lawn, she wore a tight expression, but by the second or third dance, her lips were parted in a breathless smile, her eyes aglow and she had relaxed, as if into a dream. One could not help but admire the man – he was such a charmer, and I did not wonder that many a woman might have given herself to him gladly, in exchange for being made to feel so regal in his company.
As, one by one, the evening staff came off duty, they joined in with the dance and began to swell our numbers. I saw Bernadette transformed, her uniform exchanged for a pretty floral dress, her polished, upright manners abandoned for a slinky sway of the hips as she danced with the dashingly handsome Anton. Some of the guests also, began to drift downstairs, lured by the gay music, and the sound of laughter. I exchanged nods with Signor De Luca and his girls as they came out to join in.
Gruber received their arrival with a look of gracious satisfaction, and I was happy for him that his evening was beginning to liven up. Indeed, soon, there was a respectable party upon the lawn, by the lake, beneath the stars. Consequently, I began to feel less vulnerable to his machinations, and more anonymous in the darkness, like the invisible observer of life I have always told myself I am.
I turned my gaze from the dancers to the movement of the sky. There still came the occasional flicker of light from the few clouds remaining in a dome of late evening that was clearing as rapidly as it was darkening. But there was no sound, as with lightning. It was most strange, unlike anything I had seen before, and also hauntingly beautiful.
Signor De Luca stood with me for a while, smoking. “You know,” he said. “One cannot but have the feeling of falling through time.”
“Yes, curious isn’t it? We’d come to rely so much on technology, yet already we’re beginning to forget it, at least for this evening.”
He thought a while, perhaps still lamenting the demise of his four thousand Euro watch, as I still secretly lamented the loss of my old stories. “You are not dancing, my friend?”
“Not if I can help it. I’m enjoying watching the others.”
He laughed. “You will be lucky to escape with watching. We men are outnumbered by the ladies this evening, and these days, you know, it is not like in olden times, when they waited demurely to be asked.”
He was pulled into the dance by Carmen, who winked cheekily at me. I moved more deeply into the shadows in case her sister, Natalie, came looking for a partner. I was even wondering, rather churlishly, if I dared sneak inside to my room, when Bernadette stole up unseen on my flank, tapped me on the arm, and asked if I would dance with her. I sighed in graceful defeat, then smiled, unable to resist her charming girlishness, and I allowed her to lead me out onto the lawn.
She felt so light, so elven suddenly, I wondered if she could possibly be real. I had been this age once, and in those days girls of this age had seemed so mature, so knowing. They still possessed an allure for me of course, though in what sense I could no longer fathom; it was not sexual, surely – for a man of middle years like me to think sexually about such a girl as this was only to tarnish her. It was another enigma, one I would probably have to wait for old age, decrepitude, and the complete dissolution of the last vestiges of my libido before I finally made peace with it.
“You dance well,” I told her. It was already the second tune, and my reserve was beginning to dissolve into a delicious enjoyment.
“But I’m making it all up as I go along,” she laughed. “Ah, look! There is Herr Gruber, watching us. I can read his thoughts.”
“Oh? And what is he thinking?”
She nodded, her brow furrowed with mock gravity. “I am in trouble.”
“He disapproves of you dancing with me?”
“Oh no, it is not that you are dancing with me, but that you are not dancing with Mademoiselle Lafayette. It is time we swapped. I am monopolising you.”
“Em, I have no intentions of dancing with Mademoiselle Lafayette. In fact, I was about to disappear to my room and barricade myself in.”
“I know,” she said, frowning. “Herr Gruber suspected as much and asked me to detain you.” She laughed beautifully. “You cannot escape, you know? You have been on the edge of life all of your life, like on that little table in the restaurant, yes? But tonight, you are caught up in the middle. Tonight it is you we all dance for.”
“Have you been drinking, Bernadette?”
Her eyes twinkled. “Of course, yes.”
“Then it’s as well I’ve been drinking too, or I would have to pretend I understood your meaning, if only to appear polite. Now, if we must exchange partners, would you mind if we sought out one of the De Luca girls – I’m probably safer with them.”
She gave me a wink, then leaned close and whispered: “That’s not what I’ve heard, sir.”
Gruber had indeed found us out and approached now with a sly grin that gave the impression he would not take no for an answer. “Would you mind if I cut in?” he said.
Then he and Bernadette took off into the mêlée and Gabrielle, who had but a moment ago seemed so light and alive on his arm, became once more quiet beside me, her mood languorous, her eyes hooded. I was conscious of the return of a palpable heaviness between us, and wished it did not have to be this way, that we could dance and laugh together as I had been doing a moment ago with Bernadette, that Gabrielle too could be light and alive and lovely with me, for then it would mean nothing, and we could exchange partners and be done with it soon enough. But of course what was growing between us demanded an altogether different kind of denouement.
“Richard?”
“I cannot, Gabrielle. You don’t understand. Everything I have lost: a million words, they were all of them groping towards some kind of personal enlightenment; if I were to touch you, if I were to become any more lost to the illusion of what you mean to me, then you will steal all of my words, do you see? And I will never get them back. My whole life will have been a waste.”
She shook her head, bewildered. “I did not steal your words. You gave them to me, and there is only one way to get back what you think you have lost.” She gave a little shrug and a quick flash of a smile.
“How?” I asked.
“Why,… dance with me,… that is all.”
It was a hauntingly lovely gesture, and the music sounded suddenly so sweet as it echoed from the unseen mountains in the darkness all around us. What harm could there possibly be in just dancing with her? It might even cure me of the fallacy that she meant anything at all, if I could only bring myself to touch her!
I held out my hand, and she would have taken it, but at that moment her parents appeared in their dressing gowns like spectres at the feast. Gabrielle’s hatchet faced mother had already dispatched her father, like a torpedo to strike us amidships. Gabrielle drew back in surprise.
The Aberfan disaster is seared into the memory of most British people, at least those of us over a certain age. On the morning of October 31st, 1966, following days of heavy rain, an unstable coal-tip belonging to the Merthyr Vale Colliery, turned into a river of slurry. It slid, thundering murderously down a mountainside to engulf the village below, including the primary school. 144 were killed, 116 of them children. I was attending primary school myself at the time, another mining village, hundreds of miles away. I was five years old, but remember saying prayers in assembly, for the victims. The event cast a long shadow.
One of those who visited the scene was a psychiatrist called John Barker. He was on the trail of reports of a boy who’d escaped unharmed, but had later died of shock. Barker was studying whether people could actually, and literally, be frightened to death, but he realised he had arrived too soon, that it would have been disrespectful to begin making enquiries. The scene was one of harrowing devastation, with bodies still being recovered from the ruins. He was horrified by what he saw, but also intrigued by reports of children who had apparently foretold of the disaster, yet had gone on to die when the landslide hit the school. Others had been spared by the most unlikely coincidences, and Barker wondered if they too had somehow been responding to an unconscious sense of foreboding.
A conventional medical man, he held a position as senior consultant at a large mental hospital. But Barker had seen much strangeness in the course of his profession and was open-minded regarding so-called anomalous perception, and he felt it was worth studying. He contacted the science editor of the London Evening Standard, Peter Fairley. Barker asked Fairley if he would invite people to write in who’d had their own forebodings of Aberfan. Fairley was another conventional character, a former army captain, and now an ambitious young journalist. But he was also open-minded, with a particular interest in ESP and extraterrestrials. Fairley was up for it, and ran the appeal. They received seventy-six replies.
Thus began the Premonitions Bureau. Although born out of the Aberfan disaster, the Bureau went on to invite premonitions of other catastrophes. People would phone them in, or write. The predictions would be time-stamped, categorised, and later checked for their veracity against actual events. Of these premonitions, the vast majority were duds, but there were also some astonishing hits, including plane crashes, train crashes, the death of the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. The majority of the hits came from a small group of apparently highly sensitive individuals. Among them was an unassuming piano and dance teacher, Lorna Middleton, and a GPO employee, Alan Hencher.
But what to do with the premonitions? Was it possible to set up some kind of early warning system? Could disasters be prevented if we could intervene in time. And then, the ultimate paradox, if the future had been seen, how was it possible to change it anyway? Questions, questions. Barker felt he was on the cusp of something big.
Although the book recounts details of some staggering premonitions, the main thrust of Knight’s narrative here, is the characters involved, their lives, their motivations and in some cases their personal tragedies. He does not set out to either support or debunk the idea of what we might once have called “second sight”, nor does he offer any theories on it, other than the speculations of the main protagonists themselves. In that sense, then, it does little to add to the field of parapsychology, but then that’s not what this book is about.
The premonitions Bureau ran for around 18 months, and did not survive Baxter’s untimely death in August 1968. Peter Fairley went on to be the “face” of the Apollo Space program, at least for UK viewers, becoming a regular presenter on the BBC and ITV. 723 predictions were collected, with just 18 recorded as hits. In the years since, and without Baxter to defend his work, it has inevitably been the target of professional sceptics and nit-pickers, who have largely explained it away.
For those looking for some clear answers, then, the book will likely disappoint. There is always something elusive about these things which are, by their nature, spontaneous and non-repeatable. But I found it a compelling read, also insightful and balanced, with plenty of passing references for further reading. It was also surprising, how much the times have changed. I cannot imagine a nationally recognisable science correspondent having anything to do with the business of “premonitions” nowadays, at least not in public. Such things it seems have been driven out of the popular imagination, even though they happen all the time, just not often enough or reliably enough to actually be useful.
Altogether a valuable piece of late-sixties memorabilia, largely forgotten, historically factual, at times harrowing, but also deeply human. It pulls you up sharp, and makes you think.
Be careful what you dream tonight. It might just come true.
Are these the last of them, I wonder, gathered on this sunny midweek lunchtime? They are well-dressed, come to dine, This, the last generation before the turning of the tide.
Have they come to say goodbye, to what their children cannot know? They have money for fripperies, electric cars, fine clothes. There’s a lady over there, dressed like a flower chick, or an eccentric millionaire. I’ve seen pictures of her as a youth, I think, fresh-faced, and bare boobed, at Woodstock, or was it the Isle of Wight? Where did all that zest and spirit go?
Unlike the staff with painted smiles, these folks knew good money, and sit pretty, in nice houses, they paid off long ago. Yes, the last of a generation with deep pockets and the change to fill them, while in the shadows now, lurk the care homes, like salivating wolves, come to snatch the fallen, cream off the fruits of all their labours, in a year.
But for now they sit like royalty, consult their menus. They talk of how it was, back in the day. And, for this lunchtime at least, they have blind eyed the changes come to sweep them all away.
So spend it folks, don’t give-a-damn, and laugh, for now the hour is late. You are the last of us brought up on promises of sunshine, and of plenty, when now the bag is empty, but for these brittle shards of disappointment, and the egging of division, and of hate.
It was the first real piece she taught me, I mean after the basics. And as I leaf through my old folder of music, it slips out now, and falls into my lap. I can hear her playing it, the little andantino by Ferdinando Carulli. There’s a clarity to each note, and then that beautiful fluency she had. It’s a beginner’s piece, but I never mastered it, something in the fingering that always managed to trip me up. She said we’d come back to it, but we moved on to other things, and it was forgotten.
I still have the guitar, though why I keep it is a mystery, since I’ve not touched it in a decade or more, and I’ve jettisoned so much else of my life I felt was useless. So, no, I cannot play the andantino any more, nor anything really, but I do remember her teaching it, so it must still mean something.
I never thought of myself as musical, but that didn’t stop me from taking up the guitar as a kid. If you must have a reason, I thought it would be a good way of attracting girls and, yes, I know how desperate that sounds. It’s also difficult to imagine a scenario where I could have brought the music to bear, I mean in order to win the hand of a fair maiden. But the mind of a teenager works in mysterious ways and, while I’m sure it makes perfect sense to its self at the time, it leaves my older self, now, none the wiser. It didn’t work, anyway.
The classical guitar is also a difficult instrument to get going with. I needed a teacher but, for a long time, my head was too full of other, work related studies to make room for it. It was only years afterwards, in my later twenties, with those studies out of the way, and still no girlfriend, I thought of night-classes. It’s ironic then, my teacher turned out to be a girl, and of course I fell in love with her.
The night-classes were dreadful. There were a dozen of us in one room, all beginners, all playing a different tune, all at the same time. Students fell away, dissatisfied, unable to hear themselves play, while neighbouring nonmusical classes complained of the noise. But I was in love, so hung on to the end, and when she asked if I wanted to take private lessons with her, I felt the gods were smiling on me, and signed up at once.
She was a good teacher. In the serene environment of her home, she took me from nothing to playing grade six pieces in a couple of years. I’m not saying I was any good, always a bit clumsy, stumbling over my fingers, and I never could play a piece all the way through without a mistake. Still, I had some musical knowledge by then, which was enough to begin making my own way if I wanted, but all I wanted was for her to go on teaching me, and for me to go on seeing her. Seeing her was the highlight of my week.
Sometimes she would demonstrate a piece by borrowing my guitar. I treasured those times for the way her scent would linger upon it, long after her embrace of its curves. And as if that was not enough to have the pulse of a young man racing, there was a set of books she asked me to buy. The cover art appeared abstract at first, but when placed side by side, the books revealed a tastefully naked girl, laid next to a guitar. The memory of this still carries an erotic charge. And, in imagination, of course, she has always been both the girl and the guitar.
I suppose it was always a fantasy I was living. Perhaps I should have declared my love, but I was afraid it would spoil the music between us, and she never gave the slightest indication it would be returned. There was also, the small matter of the boyfriend.
Now, the boyfriend was by no means an impediment to my fantasies. Indeed, I was, for a time, perversely happy to include him as part of the story. It was clear to me, he didn’t like her teaching, you see? She said nothing, but I imagined he did not want her having people around he did not know, or approve of. Least of all, he did not want her seeing male students, like me, or perhaps me in particular. It was obvious he didn’t recognise the genius in her – not as I did. Of course I would say that, because I was jealous of him. But more, I think it was that, in the naive story I was inventing, I needed a villain to rescue her from.
Those were acquisitive times, the eighties. Possession was everything. Fancy car. Fancy girl. Lots of money, and all of it to be flaunted. That’s all she was to him, I told myself, a good-looking girl, and more to the point his girl. But he had no music in him, so on what wavelength they connected remained a mystery. I therefore allowed myself the further foolishness that it was only a matter of time before they split, and then,…. well,… there I was. Waiting.
I had persuaded myself it was more than jealousy, I mean my dislike of him. He had an edge, I thought, something of the bad-boy about him. I’d sensed this at a distance from time to time, when he came to collect her from those night classes, something in the pose of him, in the curl of the lip, and the racy little car he drove.
The closest I got to him was one evening as I was finishing up the lesson at her place. He had let himself in, and we crossed paths in the passageway. I gave him a nod and a smile, nice and polite, but which I swear he returned with a look of such unambiguous hatred, I was taken aback. There was no doubt then, at least in my mind, my presence in that house – even though it was her house – was not welcome.
I sometimes wondered if she sensed my feelings. If so, though she gave no indiction of returning them, she cannot have objected because she did nothing to discourage me. Indeed, the opposite seemed the case, for she was always keen to sign me up for more lessons, money in advance to keep me hooked, to keep me engaged, to keep me bound to the rhythm of our regular timetable. Naturally, I went along with it.
And they were always pleasant, the hours we spent together. Besides the music, we would talk, of quite personal things sometimes, times also when I thought I detected hints all was not well with her life, shadows of some past tragedy. I suppose what I was also discovering was that it is possible, where romance is otherwise hindered, for a man and a woman to experience nonetheless a deepening friendship. If I had only reached out, offered a little more, she might have responded. But the sanctity of those lessons was everything and, while we played, nothing else existed. Beyond that, I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing.
Then came this one time, when I called for my usual lesson, and he was already there. As I knocked on the door, I could hear them, arguing. I had never heard her raise her voice before, and it upset me. I could hear his was the dominant voice, deep, bellowing. Sure he was the boss all right. Worse, I was the subject of the row. He had told her to cancel the lessons, but she had refused, and he was angry now, me turning up again. She was to get rid of me.
After a long while, she opened the door, clearly still distressed, though having made an effort to compose herself and tidy her hair. There had been a mistake, she said, she was sorry, but she could not teach me today. She would consult her diary, and call me later. But, listening to that row, I had already skipped several pages ahead in our story, and I knew she would not. Could not.
What to do? Well, I was sorry if this was to be my parting memory of her, but I was in no position to do or say anything, except cover it with a smile, tell her it was fine, no problem. Had I been an alpha things might have been different, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to make it easy for her, to give no indication I had heard the row, so as to preserve her dignity, and the secret of my love. I had been right about him all along. And he had been right about me.
I was in love with her. And I had wanted her. And he had known it.
We might have been good for one another, she and I, for I had sensed in her a kindred spirit, but in that moment I saw she had chosen her man, and that man was not me. If I was wrong about any of that, then she’d call me, but she didn’t. I never saw her again.
I have often wondered how we would have been, together I mean, if things had been different. I would never have matched her talent as a musician, so we would not have become a guitar duo on the international circuit. She would soon have despaired of me, fluffing my way through pieces I had never the discipline, let alone the gift, to master properly. But I would have done my best to encourage her. I would have protected her with my ordinary job, and my modest income, until she’d found her wings. Then I would have watched her soar, and been glad for it.
As for my own music, it deepened no further, and I did not want another teacher. I played the same old pieces for years, until they fell away under the weight of more mundane things. The guitar gathered dust, was knocked over, and bruised now and then by the vacuum cleaner. My fingertips softened as the playing left me, and there grew a reluctance even to pick it up. There was also a resentment.
The resentment was puzzling, for I had no cause to lament the way my life turned out. But why leave the guitar lying around as a reminder of those times? Why not pick it up and play? How often had it come up in conversation with visitors: “Oh, do you play the guitar?” And I found myself mumbling that I did not, that it was only for fancy. What was the point? What part of all that hurt had I still not dealt with?
I think it was the recognition of my cowardice. I should have showed my hand earlier, allowed her the opportunity to unambiguously reject it, and spare her the suspicions of her man. Then I might have swallowed the hurt, got over it and found myself another teacher. And I would still have had the music, instead of just this story of a failed love that’s been rattling around my head all these years, part truth, part myth, part imagination.
So, recently I was blowing the dust off that old folder, and the music spilled out. Among the pieces were studies by Carcassi, Sor, and Tarrega. They carried the pencilled notes I must have added all those years ago, though I don’t remember playing them. I must have done, though, because she’d also placed a double tick at the end of each piece. One tick was to indicate I should keep practicing, two ticks meant I had practised enough, and should move on to the next exercise.
Then that little andantino fluttered out, and there was just the one tick to indicate I was to keep practising.
From time to time I’ll type her name into the search engines, wondering if I’ll discover her playing solo in a grand salon, to an audience of admirers, or even just still teaching, somewhere. And it’s not because I harbour fantasies about her. We’re both far too old for that now. It’s more I feel she’s always deserved to be known for her music. There are lots of fancy guitarists posing online these days, and none of them a patch on her. But it’s as if she has disappeared, and it has me wondering if the music died in her, if it was crushed out of her under the weight of an ordinary life, perhaps even submissive to a man she loved, yet who had no music in him at all and no tolerance for the music in her.
It’s taken a long time, but I’m at peace with it, now. She was the conduit through which I received the music, and I suspect that, as well as the memory of my own clear inadequacies in the affair, the resentment I feel is also against my own self for having let the music die, and lacking the courage to pick it up again. It also devalues the times we shared, which were chaste and beautiful, and if anything of that has gone to waste, if I have allowed the sweetness of it to go sour, well, that’s my own fault, isn’t it?
So lets take a look at this little andantino then, see if we can get our fingers around it, blow away the cobwebs, and finally fill in that last tick, I mean in her absence. And then, who knows? Maybe I can let the music back in, and with the fondness it deserves. And all of it thanks to her, and to whom I dedicate these words,…
with affection, and apologies.
It’s a beautiful little piece, Carulli’s andantino. Do you know it? It goes like this,…
Carruli’s Andantino in G Major, played beautifully here by Anikó Juhász
Spring comes limping in late, but with a smile on its face. It’s been a wild winter, with trees down, fence panels blown out, roofs leaking, and meadows awash with constant rains. But for the last week or so, there’s been a mildness to the air as the trees begin to green. We’re in Bleasdale today, a small rural community in the Forest of Bowland. The plan is to visit the site of the Bleasdale circle, a prehistoric henge monument, and then see if we can get up on the fells.
My thanks as always to Bowland Climber, whose blog is a must for anyone visiting Bowland, and whose writings were invaluable in piecing together today’s outing. In a recent post he mentions the curlews being constant companions on a walk in this area and, sure enough, their haunting cry is the first thing I hear when I step out of the car, at St Eadmer’s church. Not just one curlew, but curlews everywhere. This is a good start.
Access to the village of Bleasdale, including the church, turns out to be along a narrow road that’s marked “Private”. Although a public right of way, cars and cycles are not allowed. This confused me, given that the church website advises us it is open to visitors every day. Anyway, I checked the situation with a local guy I passed on the drive up, and he said I’d be okay to park at the church, that no one would bother. So, in a rough sort of way, I obtained permission, but random vehicles are otherwise discouraged from straying onto the estate, which is privately owned, and you could be asked to leave. You are probably better parking down on the main Bleasdale road and walking up the half mile or so.
Anyway, we’re here now. First a look at the church, which is beautifully maintained, and in a truly outstanding setting – remote, and with the gorgeous Bleasdale fells beyond, rising gently to a little over 1700 feet. It is the only church in the world dedicated to St Eadmer.
The “Clootie tree”, Bleasdale circle.
Next it’s the Bleasdale circle, accessed by a permissive path across soggy meadows. Here we discover the destruction wrought by gales in previous years that have toppled nearly all the trees that once surrounded the site, and lent it a unique atmosphere. One survivor, its branches extending into the bounds of the circle, are hung with so called “clooties” – from the Scots, meaning narrow strips of cloth or rag. In the ancient folk religion, these are in some way emotionally entangled to a person, allowing a kind of magic or a blessing to be inferred – a wish come true, or a cure, or blessings on one departed. In the Celtic tradition, this a very serious business, closely linked to the fairy faith. This looks to be an updated version of the craft, though, which now also permits the hanging of hats and knickers.
Anyway, it’s not an impressive site, now the trees have largely gone, but this belies its archaeological importance. There’s a decent information board and lots more information online. Well worth a visit by antiquarians, but I felt the vibe was dominated mostly by evidence of recent sad destruction of those once magnificent trees. It’ll be a generation before it recovers.
Somewhat chastened then, we retrace our steps, then carry on along the public way, through the yard of the farm at Holme House, after which we strike up the fell, to the moor, then begin the climb towards Fiendsdale head. There’s a guy who’s come running over the fell from Langden castle, miles away, looks to be seventy and, unlike me, isn’t even slightly out of breath. We pause and chat a while.
Approaching Fiendsdale Head
The track is good going just here, and well drained. It gives on to a paved way around Fiendsdale Head, which takes us over towards Webster’s Meadow. The word meadow normally conjures up an impression of sweet grass and hedgerows, possibly sheep peacefully grazing. But this is a vast expanse of moor, all peat, and bog, wild Lancashire at its best, or its most daunting, depending on if you’re lost or not, and if the mist is down or the sun is shining. The paved way gives us some confidence as it swings us around towards Fair Snape, but then the paving ends abruptly, and the route ahead looks decidedly squelchy, just a thin line of intrepid footprints gone deep into bog and saturated peat.
Paved ways on Fiendsdale Head.
We almost give up at this point, and turn back. There’s been extensive re-wilding up here, meaning peat preservation, dams and dykes to slow down the drainage, so water is pooling and the bogs extending. I don’t know what this means for the permissive route across the fell, or if the paved way will be extended at some point, but that’ll require considerable ingenuity. For now the route is,… well,… unpleasant. We deploy the sticks to test the ground ahead, and proceed with caution.
We’re mostly following the line of a boundary fence, but the encroaching bog makes this impossible in places. Still, the fairies are kind to us, and a way, somewhat tortured, is revealed. We eventually make it with dry feet to Paddy’s Pole, and the shelter on Fair Snape Fell. Here, lunch is served out of the chill wind in the rather elaborate drystone shelter. It’s a very clear day, and the views are extensive. We could extend the walk from here to take in Parlick, but that would take us into ten miler territory, and my max today is looking like about eight. So, at the little cairn we take the beautifully sunken zig-zag path down to Higher Fair Snape farm, and circle back to the church via Holme House. All of this, except for the summit, is new territory for me, and though one is always anxious about navigation and rights of way, it’s such a pleasure to be breaking fresh ground, after the confines of a bleak winter.
Curlew in the valleys, larks on the fells, trees greening, the land draining after the endless winter rains, brooks rushing. There was a time when I thought we were never going to get this far, but there’s a sense now of the year opening, and we have much to look forward to. The little blue car is waiting, no angry notice from irate estate guardians, telling me I’ll be clamped next time. They are selling fresh eggs, Bleasdale’s Burford Browns. We purchase half a dozen by way of thanks for a grand day out.
About seven and a half miles, twelve hundred feet of ascent.
Among all of my online writings, I’ve noticed the little e-book on Men’s Mental Health is currently outstripping the downloads of my fiction. I’ve had no feedback on it, but I do hope people have found it helpful. I’ve just been through the book again, tidied up a few typos, and reissued it with a fresh cover. The title isn’t meant to sound “Patriarchal” or dismissive of women’s issues. It’s just that I’m a man and write from the male perspective, obviously with a greater awareness of the issues faced by men.
It began as a response to “Movember”, the month when men grow flamboyant beards and moustachios, to raise awareness of men’s issues. In 2014, mental health was the theme. Having experienced various degrees of anxiety, depression, and puzzling neuroses in the past, I was moved to declare solidarity, and grew a goatee. I still have the photographs, but only as a reminder never to do it again. I looked like I had a hedgehog glued to my face, though some would say that was an improvement.
It didn’t feel like enough, though, the goatee. So I blogged as well, throughout the month, not so much about my own “issues”, but from a more positive angle of how I went about tackling them. Then I gathered all the posts together, and issued them as a free self-help e-book. Not being a mental health professional of course, there is always a sense of caution about straying into areas I’m not qualified to comment on. I mean, what do I know? But, given the near absence of adult mental health provision in Britain, at least at my level, I felt my personal experience had to be worth something, and certainly better than nothing.
So I explored a way out, at least for those of us suffering from things like anxiety, panic attacks, and that veritable Pandora’s box of neuroses, and who were perhaps struggling against a health system that seemed utterly broken, over-eager to hand out pills and call it a successful intervention. There is, actually, a lot we can do to help ourselves. For the more serious mental illnesses, of course, one can only defer to the professionals. But God help us, in this culture where once again mental illness is stigmatised by government diktat, even as mental health services are scaled back yet more. After forty years, I cannot believe there’s anything left to be cut, but they’re having a go, backed up by infantile media headlines bemoaning Britain’s so-called sick note culture.
Mental illness cannot be cured by a stiff upper lip, or the withdrawal of sick pay. What the stiff upper lippers fail to recognise is that an epidemic of mental illness is reflective of a sickness in society, a rottenness at the heart of our culture. Anxiety and depression, are natural human responses to what the soul judges to be intolerable circumstances. But society no longer believes we have a soul, that indeed even our conscious awareness, our very sense of self, is an illusion. And since it’s a tall order to change society to suit the individual, the bewildered individual has only two choices: They can medicate to the point of quiescence, in order to fit in with this weirdness, or they can withdraw their support, their participation, and find their motivational energies elsewhere.
And medication doesn’t always work. Indeed, it can sometimes make things worse, leading to a spiral of despair. Medication requires the close supervision of a doctor, alongside proper counselling. But I know people taking anti-depressants whose supervision consists of a thirty-second telephone conversation every six weeks. That’s not supervision, but it’s as good as it gets. As for counselling,… well,… you might have to wait a long time for that.
The approach to my personal demons was holistic and self-taught. It was essentially three-pronged – physical exercise, meditation, and creativity. Nothing controversial there. Nothing to get the professionals wagging their fingers, and anyway in response to them, I would say: well, you might be qualified, but you’re not there, which is the same thing as useless.
We are creative beings who seek meaning and connection. But in a materialistic society, there is no meaning, and we are encouraged to approach life with an attitude of ruthless self-interest if we hope to be respected, and to prosper. At least that’s the theory. We all know it’s stupid, that such an approach enables only a minority of ruthless bastards to achieve success at the expense of the rest of us, “success” being measured in materialistic terms as wealth and influence. But even as they reduce the poor to rags, the rich don’t seem particularly happy either, indeed as one of the characters in my novels – a psychoanalyst – opines: there will always be plenty of rich loonies who can afford her fees, so she will never be unemployed.
The rest of us? Those of us who can’t afford her fees? We must become survivalists, improvising weapons against the demons that assail us, and carving out whatever small oases of calm for ourselves we can. And part of that is looking at the world, at the sheer madness of it, and waking up to the realisation that actually, you know, “it’s not me.” It was Jiddu Krishnamurti who taught us it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. By this measure then, far from feeling stigmatised by our neuroses, we should be wearing them like a badge of honour.
In a materialistic society, the ideal citizen is a robot that runs off simplistic, predictable algorithms and turns up for work reliably every day, even when its arms have fallen out of its sleeves, and it can serve no useful function. But we’re not robots, we’re human beings and the best way of dealing with us, as the robots will no doubt one day discover, is by treating us as human beings, with dignity, respect and by seeking more than a superficial level of understanding.
I thought we’d check on Bevis today. Bevis is a dog. He died in 1842 and rests in Duxbury woods, south of Chorley. Given all the rain we’ve had, I thought it was prudent to set out wearing Wellington boots. I have my own story about Bevis, which I’ve written about elsewhere. He’s far enough away in time to be recruited as myth, and I’m sure he won’t mind. He’s a playful creature, loyal beyond the grave. And we all need someone or something to watch our backs
We begin with lunch at the Treeface café, at Birkacre – a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich. The forecast is fair, which seems unlikely, I mean following on from yesterday’s gales, and torrential rain, but then this is a notoriously unsettled season. While we wait for our bacon sandwich to arrive, we amuse ourselves with the Merlin app. We have warm sunshine, and it’s pleasant sitting out. In just a few minutes the app has picked up the songs of great tit, blue tit, thrush, wren, blackbird and chiffchaff. They are going mad for spring.
Drybones dam
I’m still a little stiff after my trip to the lakes last week, and a good soaking up Sallows. The hiking boots are still drying out at home, and it’s as well because I suspect they’d be useless where we’re going today. In the deep of the wood, beyond Drybones dam, we discover the bluebells, the anemones and the wild garlic are all in bloom, but subdued somehow. Perhaps a week or so of sun will bring them on, but it’s getting late for anemones, which look to be enjoying their last gasp. As we make way, the weather changes suddenly, the sky darkens and there is a rush of hail.
We lean into a tree, and wait it out. There is the sound of construction, coming from beyond Lowes Tenement, and the vast housing estate that is ripping up pristine meadows, to the west of the Yarrow. I’m told the local council did not want or need it, but were vetoed by central government. Thankfully, it is not visible from this section of the walk. I wrote about this last time I came. You’ll understand therefore why I cannot swing my route through those fields of destruction any more, that in part what we’re doing today is looking to heal the wound to memory by finding another way through this home patch, by lopping off the limb that has gone bad, and pretending it is no longer there. So, we’ll be heading deep into Duxbury wood instead, swinging a loop, then retracing our steps back to Treeface.
While we walk, we’re musing that much of what we believe to be true about our selves and the world, is actually just a story we tell. Much of what we believe ourselves to be is either memory or aspiration, in other words, just something in our heads that we’re forever casting back, into the past or forwards, into the future. Neither exist beyond the notion of being either a memory or an idea.
We talk of living in the present moment, but what is that? How big a slice of time is the gap between the past and the future? Is it a minute? Is it a second? Is it the so-called Planck second, which is zero point, then forty-three zeros and one, of a regular second. This is supposedly the shortest meaningful time period that can be measured. But the present moment is shorter even than that. The present moment is a singularity. It seems, therefore, we exist entirely in our own imaginations, forever travelling this line in time from past to future without ever setting down to rest anywhere.
There’s a crack of thunder and the hail sweeps over us with a soft hiss that finally recedes. We move on, past the lone tree that fell, in my novel of the same name, and was still standing when I wrote Durleston wood. We enter the domain of the old Duxbury estate, now. In places, I measure the mud here at eight inches deep, by the tide-line on the Wellingtons. There is no way around it, heavy going, yes, but at least we’re not concerned the boots will leak, and we’ll clean them up by a quick paddle in the river. Bevis can be hard to locate, but if you stick to the river, refuse to be intimidated by the mud, teased away by dryer looking pathways, you’ll find him.
He looks to be doing okay.
I presume the grave-site is the original one, chosen by the Standishes of Duxbury Hall. The statue is not the original – the original falling foul of vandalism some time in the early twentieth century. The commemorative stone is the original, erected in 1870, the year after a fire that burned half the hall down, and whose inhabitants were saved, according to the reports, by the manic barking of Bevis.
All ye who wander thro these peaceful glades, Listning the flow of Yarrows rippling waves, Pause and bestow a tributary tear, The bones of faithful ‘Bevis’ slumber here,
1842
This remembrance erected by Susan Mrs. Standish
1870
Remember, the dog died in 1842, which gives us a neat little mystery we could hang a hundred stories from.
As we get older, it’s harder to maintain the integrity of the story, the myth, we think we’re living. The pristine meadows we knew as children are suddenly housing estates. The world we thought we knew suffers the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time, and means nothing to others who did not know it the way we did. By the time we’ve more time behind us than ahead, we utter that time-worn lament of the old: “I remember when all this was fields.” And it hurts, because we feel our lives are/were special, so many little victories hard won along the way, and yet here we are, our story being erased line by line, meadow by meadow, ferny dell by ferny dell.
What do you say, Bevis old boy?
Bevis says the myth must be renewed, if we are to go on living without regret. He is, after all, named after a mythical character from Britain’s middle-ages. And have I not attempted my own reimagining of his myth? But the founding myths of our lives are laid down in childhood, and come with the magical charge that only childhood can bestow. The world of the adult is less charmed. All the magic has been beaten out of us by the paradigm in which we live. Still, we do the best we can.
Another hail storm sweeps the wood. Fierce one this, and a sudden drop in temperature, too. We lean into another tree, melt into the lee of it, seek its protection a while. The storm passes. We move on. Marsh marigold, anemone, wild garlic, bluebell, chickweed, lesser celandine. All look tired, except for the marsh marigold, which is everywhere perky, as the bogs widen.
Marsh Marigolds
Scent of old woodland after rain, now. A few old trees have gone over, tearing craters in the ground, scent of earth, scent of the peaty Yarrow. The river is eating at the bends, undermining paths. Just here, the winter storms have also washed out bits of pottery from a Victorian tip, tumbled them down a stream and in to the river, always worth a look. We fish out several shards, patterned, some with bits of writing – “Made In Engl,…” we invent stories for them, old farmhouse kitchens, cups of tea, Sunday lunches long ago.
Pottery shards – River Yarrow
We make it back to Treeface, another story there, for what is Treeface if not the mythical green man? I call my sister, who lives nearby. Drive round for a brew and a chat, swap stories. I am no longer a child. No longer an engineer. Those are old stories, no longer serving a purpose. I am a writer of sorts now, and a photographer, marking the changes, while also seeking the unchanging in landscape, and finding a way through it all. That’s fine, it’ll work, so long as I don’t try to big it up too much.
The Rivendale Review 