Is your world grey or blue?

Rivington Pike

Rivington Pike, altitude 1191 feet, an instantly recognisable blip in the Western Pennines. When I was growing up in Coppull, my bedroom looked out upon this whole swathe of moor from Great Hill to Lomax Wife’s Plantation, and bang in the middle of it rose Rivington Pike. I knew it in all its seasons, from summer green to winter snow. These are the hills of home for me, instantly emotive, and home will always be anywhere in sight of their profile, which unfortunately isn’t where I’m living now. For much of my boyhood I had an astronomical telescope trained upon the Pike through which I could plainly make out figures ascending and descending. The colours were washed out, and the images would wobble with heat quake and the passing of tractors on the lane behind our house, but it seemed a magical thing and I loved that intimate connection with the hill.

Up close however, it’s not the most attractive of places, not nowadays. It suffers terribly from littering, and the pressures of being a piece of green within easy reach of several million people. That said, it’s been a regular walk of mine this year. In fact you’ll find me here most Friday afternoons nowadays. I’ll have a bacon and egg butty at the Great House Barn tea rooms, around 1:30 pm, then from about 2:00 pm, push myself up the couple of hundred meters of ascent from Rivington Hall. I usually go by way of the Higher house carpark, then snake my way up by the Pigeon Tower, take in the Pike, then descend by various routes through the glorious ruins of the Chinese gardens, part of the former Leverhulme estate.

The Pigeon Tower, Rivington

Something is happening to me this year, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t think I need to be afraid of it because the feeling is like relaxing as a door opens, rather than panicking in case a door closes. When I started out in the winter, this route would suck the energy right out of me, have me bent over and rasping for breath at every turn in the way. Now I can make it with just a couple of stops, time to feel the air cooling the sweat on my back, as I scan the western horizon through binoculars, and celebrate the start of another weekend.

It feels good, this change in me.

I drove up in the Mazda today. I can hardly call myself eco-friendly, being the owner of two cars now. The Mazda cost me £500 last night, a full set of pads and disks and a new caliper on the nearside rear, because it was leaking fluid. In other words, it was a serious pain in the wallet, but it seems I’ll forgive this car anything, because I barely blinked as I slotted my card into the machine. Had it cost me a grand, I’d still have paid up with a smile, just for the way this car makes me feel. By contrast I’ve resented every penny I’ve spent on my other vehicle, a seven year old Astra, which I use as a commuter mule, clocking up around 12,000 a year, simply earning a living. There’s something interesting in my duplicity here and I want to get at it this evening.

I’m stuck on this quote at the moment – it’s from the Talmud, but I got it from Eckhart Tolle – we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are. I think it’s true, but I’d change it slightly, and say that we see the world , not as it is, but as we see ourselves, and for a long, long time, I’ve seen myself as this sensible, reliable, grey commuter mule, when what really I am, and what I have always been at heart is this small, fast, blue sport’s car, built more for fun than to be subsumed by the grey world. I’m sorry, but there it is. This is the real me. It seems I have spent my whole life being practical and dull; now I wan tot to be frivolous, fun and Romantic.

The sky was an oppressive grey this afternoon. Something thundery about it too as I climbed the badly eroded track towards the Pigeon Tower, But the air had too much of a coolness about it for the weather to be a real threat. Getting struck by lightning is a genuine hazard in the hills at this time of year, so it pays to watch the skies, but I could tell it was just bluffing this afternoon. Further south of me, in the heart of England, the Glastonbury rock concert, just getting under way, was  suspended and the stage cleared as lightning split the sky. Meanwhile I sat on the Pike, sheltering from a stiff eastrly, watching a guy playing Frisbee with his dog.

Poetry features large these days. I write it and I read it – not the poets of old, nor the famous contemporary bards, but the amateur poets I follow on WordPress, and who somehow get under my skin. It makes me realise I am not alone in what I feel. Everyone else feels it too. It’s just that some are better at expressing it than others, but all are capable of expressing it – this thing I feel. It’s half way between rage and confusion, that I am here and I don’t know why – rage and confusion that I too am compelled to express myself.

There was a wedding reception at Rivington Hall. As I set out on my climb, I saw the bride in her white dress, and all the pretty bridesmaids as they arrived, like exotic orchids displayed against a background of dull olive. On my return from the Pike, as I pulled off my boots and sank back into the snug capsule of the Mazda, I heard the rousing cheers from the toast and recalled my own wedding, twenty five years ago next month. Another young couple starting out; a stage of life; children next; then the death of aged parents, aunts, uncles. I look at the group photograph from that wedding and note each time the passing of yet more faces, year on year.  At some point all will be gone, including my wife and I, and all that will remain is the potential of that one special day which led to the births of my own children, who will each enter marriage and hear those same cheers that celebrate it.

It’s a passing on, of sorts; a natural cycling of life.

I drove home over the moors, up the stiff climb by Lester Mill Quarries, the Mazda climbing like a rocket and leaving the cockey van driver who’d been pushing me since Rivington floundering in bottom gear and a haze of blue diesel fumes. Then it was Jepsons Gate, under glowery skies, and down by White Coppice. It had begun to rain by this time, so I couldn’t drop the top like I’d wanted. She’s noisier with the top up, but no less fun. She also stops better now for having fixed the brakes, which I knew were shot. I’m fitting into her better as well. I’ve pushed the seat right back, so my left leg is stretched fully when I press the clutch. I’m a lot smoother through the gears, and she doesn’t bounce off the clutch like she used to. At home, I dried her off with an old towel to keep the humidity levels down in the garage, because I don’t want her rotting from the inside out. She is a dream I want to preserve as long as possible, and its nice to have a car once more that I enjoy pampering, and the means to pamper her.

I repeat, I am not a grey commuter mule. The Astra, old Grumpy, stands outside in the rain tonight and must take its chances. What I am inside is this small, blue, sports car. I shelter it, and cherish it, not for what it is, but for how it makes me feel. I have seen myself as a grey commuter mule for far too long. So take care  how you see yourselves, and make sure your vision is true, because how you see yourself is how you’ll see the world.

And the world is not grey. It’s definitely  blue.

Mazzy, Rivington Hall Drive, Summer 2014

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Artificial Intelligence can be really stupid!

The world of artificial intelligence is in a buzz at the moment over a machine which recently passed the Turing Test. This means that during a question and answer session, a computer was able to convince a human judge, most of the time that its answers to his questions came from another human being, rather than a cleverly designed machine.

Passing the Turing test does not in any way infer a machine is sentient or conscious, or in any way “alive”, merely that its programmed responses convincingly simulate the responses a human being might give to those same questions. But that a machine has now passed the Turing Test means it’s time we sat up and took notice of what’s been happening in the world of artificial intelligence.

There are two kinds of artificial intelligence gurus. There are those who believe machines will one day become conscious, artificial life-forms. The followers of this school, tend to view the world in purely mechanistic and materialistic terms, believing that the processes going on in a human brain are ultimately machine like, something to do with molecules and electrons, and can therefore be replicated by digital processing, which is also to do with molecules and electrons. Gurus of this school are the latter day Dr Frankensteins, and we fear them releasing Armageddon by their foolish meddling.

The threat posed by a rogue, conscious mega-machine, plugged in to all the world’s digital and electronic systems is the stuff of nightmare and many a corny film plot, but I don’t think we need worry too much on this score as there are a lot of sound arguments pointing the other way, that when it comes to defining what consciousness is, it puts it well beyond what can be programmed into a machine. But a machine does not need to be conscious or self aware in order to be harmful to humans, and I don’t just mean physically harmful either.

Artificial Intelligence is an interesting field, calling into question what it means to be human and conscious. It also acts as a flash point for the soul-spirit debate – the non-materialists insisting there is more to consciousness than mere physical states, that there is also a ghost in the machine, our spiritual nature, which lights up the apparatus to produce a self-aware human being, and without that ghost, you can never have a conscious machine.

The other kind of artificial intelligence guru bypasses the argument about conscious machines altogether, and is more concerned with exploring the limits and the potential of machine based intelligence, and in particular the way machines can interface with human beings. If you flip over to the chatbot, Alice, at Pandorabot, and ask  “her” a few questions, you might find yourself getting drawn in by the answers. This machine is very good, but not perfect and with a little intelligence on the part of a human inquisitor the flaws in Alice’s “intelligence” are soon revealed, but we can see where this is going.

With most communications now going on “online”, it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a near future scenario where our emails to corporations are answered by Alice-type machines, and we’d be unable to tell if we were corresponding with a human being, or a bot. This of extends to spoken communication as well. At present it’s easy to tell when you’ve been sucked into the black hole of a human operated call centre, but speech recognition and synthesised computer voices are becoming highly advanced and I can see a scenario within the next decade, where call centres, already largely scripted, become entirely computerised.

One of the more amusing applications of a chat-bot, like Alice is to let one loose in a chat-forum. Even more hilarious is to let more than one loose. The human participants haven’t a clue – the only give-away is that Alice has better language and grammar skills. The point is, actually, it’s pointless to have one chat-bot chatting to another, because it’s the human being – again the ghost in the machine – no matter how imperfect, that grants meaning to the whole enterprise.

The replacement of humans by machines has been going on since the industrial revolution. The losers are always the humans who have been replaced, while the winners are the owners of the machines. Since the former outnumber the latter by thousands to one, replacing a human being with a machine can never be justified in humanistic terms, unless it is to release human beings to more personally rewarding or less hazardous tasks. In practice though, the machines release human beings only to the inescapable poverty of state-welfare or those low paid tasks where the machines have yet to make inroads.

When all the world’s systems are computerised and digitised, and the vast majority of human beings are no longer required to perform any useful function in the world at all, machine logic dictates that there will have to be invented for us an artificial function in order to “earn” the carefully calculated minimum number of “credits” to be spent on keeping oneself alive. Such a synthetic function might involve say one human putting pebbles into a bag, and passing them to another human being who then takes them out. A hundred pebbles, in or out, earns a credit. Too slow with the pebbles, your credit is halved. This is the way it’s always been of course – only the rise of the machines points out its questionable moral value.

It reduces human beings to pieces of machine code, to cogs in a machine, or more literally to a pair of hands. And we are more than that. We have complex needs, complex emotions. We need compassion, a sense of purpose, and we need to aspire to something greater than we already are or we become sick, and we die before our time. These things cannot be simulated or coded, and their absence cannot be compensated for by a warm, synthetic voice with nothing at its heart.

We are constructing an artificial intelligence that serves no purpose, one that’s on a divergent course to our own basic needs. I trust we won’t simply rush after it in the belief that even though machines might never be “sentient” their simulated intelligence makes them somehow better and more trustworthy than a fellow human being.

When I gaze into the night sky, I cannot count the stars as a machine might, and come back with a figure of so many million. I cannot categorise their brightness, nor catalogue their distance from earth, but what I simply feel when I look the night sky puts a distance between me and any machine, a distance that can never be bridged. That machines should always serve us, and not the other way around seems an unnecessary note of caution, but for that to mean anything we need to know first what it is we are for and what values we ourselves hold to. Otherwise we end up as slaves to a synthetic system that’s void of compassion and at the bottom of it really, really stupid. When that happens we will have become as pointless as the machines we are already beginning to serve.

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Creative writing and crazy cat videos

Actually, I’m not sure about that term: creative writing. It sounds a bit infantile for what is a very serious business, serious at least for those engaged in it. If you’re  in the habit of stringing words together, and it’s something of a compulsion for you, and you don’t really know why you’re doing it, then regardless of whether you are paid for your work or not, you are a writer.

A writer is a person who writes and for many of us, nowadays, writing leads inevitably to the highways and byways of the world wide web. Work we would once have sent out double-spaced and with a stamped self-addressed envelope – posted into the abyss – we now post online. Some of us still send work out, while others, like me, have abandoned the traditional path altogether in favour of reaching a readership directly.

We put our stories up on web sites like Wattpad, Feedbooks and Smashwords, we self publish with print on demand publishers like Lulu, and we sometimes distribute quaint paper copies among those of our friends who have still to discover the Kindle and iBook apps on their phones. We keep blogs too, on which we talk about our view of life, as well as flagging up links to our work. I know, it all sounds a bit amateurish, and I suppose it is, but any writer without a publisher and a regular income is also, strictly speaking, an amateur. But the readers do come and that, of course, is the whole point.

This is the modern way of writing, and any writer not engaged with it is missing out on a lot. There’s no money in it of course, but then there was no money in doing it the other way either, but at least when writing for an online readership, there is a sense of connection which makes the writing a much less lonely business. We are, however still vulnerable to the scourge of discouragement.

Writers must be self motivated and compulsive or they would not be writers. One cannot write a two hundred thousand word novel on a whim and with no guarantee it will ever be read by anyone, let alone published, without being compulsive, and without the sense that the novel is its own driving force. Nor can one plug away at a blog, night after night, without a single pingback, like, comment or follower, unless, like the novel, the work is its own stimulation, and we merely lend it our fingers on the keyboard.

But self motivation is vulnerable to the writers’ moods. We thrill to the work as it forms, and we sense the energy flowing through us, but we fear it too – fear it may abandon us, for then we would truly be nothing. Depression is a terrible drain on our abilities and writers, like all creative individuals, are especially prone to it. The mysterious thing which can so enliven our work, can also puncture it without notice. Then the novel grinds to a halt, the blog goes without updates for months, and even the most valiant attempts at opening the laptop to begin work, end with our being diverted to Youtube where we lose ourselves in the quagmire of crazy cat videos.

When this happens it’s down to the individual writer to climb their way back up from the shadows by whatever means are needed. I usually turn to the diary and start rambling on about stuff I’d never blog in a million years. I find as I’m doing this other things crop up in there that illuminate the source of my malaise. I’ve noticed how the psyche is infinitely cross referenced, and problems in one area of life are usually reflected in others.

Of course writing online, blogging, poetry, all of these things are futile from a purely materialistic perspective. The sense of connection requires a magical dimension for the words, cast like seeds upon the wind, to mean anything. By magic I mean a clear sense of the greater dimensions of the world, dimensions that lend meaning where otherwise meaning is hard to discern. Such a fine sensibility drifts in and out with the weather, the seasons and, for all I know, the phases of the moon as well. And when we lose it, the material world crowds in and makes fun of our calling, calls it somewhat condescendingly creative writing, like it’s a childish pastime akin to crayons and sugar paper, something to keep us entertained on wet Sunday afternoons, when what it is is our sole reason for being.

When it returns, because it always returns, we can finally resist the lure of those crazy cat videos, we dust ourselves down and we carry on writing.

But for now at least, the cat has it:

Thanks for listening.

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First Love

Summer days and the fresh-cut scent of grass,
Turn back the fast accelerating years,
As memories of hotbed days long past,
Fill up the grooves of first-love’s acid tears.

Then images too stark, too real for words,
Return like it was only yesterday,
I gazed upon those lovely girlish curves,
And slowly fantasised my life away.

Down sun-bright corridors I’d watch her breeze,
With books and folders held against her breast,
Whilst I, that fateful moment tried to seize,
With fate’s sharp knife held square against my chest.

Those moments, all so fleeting and in vain.
Her heart so blind, she never sensed my pain.

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The True Story of Miss Muffet, Jack Horner, and Humpty Dumpty’s Accident.

Little Miss Muffet went to her tuffet,
But there she saw sitting Jack Horner,
So she said to Jack, Oy, that’s my comfy sack,
You go and sit in the corner!

Well, off stomped Jack Horner, to his usual corner,
Where he picked up a mouldy pork pie,
Then took aim at Miss Muffet, all prim on her tuffet,
And grumpy old Jack let it fly.

But Miss Muffet she ducked, at the pie that Jack chucked.
And that pie, o’er the living room sped.
It crashed into the wall, flew right down the hall,
And bounced off poor Humpty Dump’s head.

Well, Humpty looked glum and said, listen here chum,
You’re starting to get on my nerves,
Said, Jack leave it out, you great egg shaped sprout,
The blame in this case is all hers!

Now Humpty was cross, and quite at a loss,
And into a temper he flew,
So he squared up to Jack and said you take that back,
Or I’ll tell my dad over you.

Said Miss Muffet, now boys, please turn down the noise,
I’m trying to watch the telly,
But Jack didn’t care, he was mad as a hare,
And hurled at poor Humpty his Welly.

Well, Humpty he ran, as fast as eggs can,
And he made his escape through the door,
Then he scaled up a wall, but from there he did fall,
And broke into bits on the floor.

The Kings horses arrived and the men side by side,
And the Captain said what can we do?
Moaned Humpty, all lame, that Jack Horner’s to blame,
Now quick go and fetch me some glue.

So, with Humpty all mended, the panic was ended,
And the Captain he gathered his men,
Then they burst through the door and they searched high and low,
But Jack Horner was not seen again.

There was just our Miss Muffet, curled up on her tuffet,
Quite vexed at the hullabaloo,
When down came that spider, and sat down beside her,
So she flattened it with her shoe.

_____________

With apologies

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Chain, keep us together – searching for Stevie in the back lanes of West Lancashire.

I’m still in the process of relearning how to drive. Twenty years of cruising about in automatics has left me unable to judge the best gear to be in when entering bends and also what a car feels like, literally through the seat of my pants. I’m enjoying the ride though and my teacher, this old but rather lovely MX5 is very patient with me, treating me to a rediscovery of the thrill of movement while forgiving me as I fluff and bluff my way up and down the gear box. I’m told her patience will be more sorely tested in the wet, so I’m avoiding that for now.

This evening I’m touring the lanes between Rufford, Parbold and Wrightington, an area threaded through with a network of little byways that have been the backdrop to various love affairs over the years, both real and imaginary. The weather is fine, clear blue skies deepening to tobacco at the western horizon, an horizon that comes right down to the plane and is interrupted only by low hedgerows. This is a big sky kind of place. The car is proving to be something of a time machine tonight because suddenly I’m nineteen again and I’m listening to Rumours on the player, and one song in particular is proving especially emotive:

Listen to the wind blow
Watch the sun rise,…

Rufford Old Hall

We’re just coming up to Rufford Old Hall on the A59 – home to the Heskeths for 500 years. They say Shakespeare debuted here in the days before patronage caught up with him. They still do his plays in the open air, on summer evenings – Midsummer Night’s Dream at Midsummer is quite special. The hall is a good day out on Sundays, somewhere to take one’s new love. You’re paying National Trust prices of course, but if there’s just the two of you it’s not so bad. In the later years it’ll be family tickets and sharp intakes of breath. But watch your speed here Michael, this is a thirty zone, remember? Down to fourth, revs settle around 2K, slight grumble from an engine that’s not quite warm yet but yearning for more throttle – mega-jolt from a pothole that rattles down the chassis.

Run in the shadows,…

Since the BBC took the bass “outro” of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and flogged it to death as the “intro” to their Formula One racing coverage, I’ve tended to skip this song out of sheer weariness, so the rest of the piece, and the lyrics in particular have atrophied to zilch. But listening to them this evening they’re winkling out startling memories as the sun sinks to ochre over the plane, and this little car shows me how to feel the road once more through both feet. In a sense it’s putting me back in touch with reality, and the song is reminding me how I once used to feel. Quick snatch down to third now, and a sharp left onto the B5246, dropping in a little corkscrew motion like we’re on smooth rails.

Damn your love,
Damn your lies,…

The song was written in 1976 at a time when the band was undergoing various upsets, marriage breakdowns and relationship break-ups. I caught up with them in 1979, around the time of the “Tusk” album, a period of romantic ups and downs for me too. The song reminds me that, in some respects, I have always been a teenager, feeling too deep, reaching too far and expecting too much, from women in particular. No disrespect girls, but it took me while to work out you were just human beings and not actually goddesses – well, except for Stevie Nicks of course who was and still is pure goddess.

And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain,…

At nineteen I was a third year engineering apprentice, studying for an HND at Wigan Technical college. In those days the day-job was just starting up, while inbetween my commutes, like most kids I was having my fingers burned and my heart fried in the furnace of fledgeling love. By contrast this evening I’m eyeing the endgame so far as the day-job is concerned, and having been happily married now for 25 years, it’s also a long time since I got my heart fried. Sometimes I forget this, but tonight it becomes a shade more real.

I can feel it.

And it’s interesting.

Listen to the wind blow,
Down comes the night,
Run in the shadows,…

Stevie Nicks in 1977 – Photo Wikipedia

This is not to say I don’t sometimes miss the intensity of feeling that first love brings, but it also leaves you a little numb, so you hold yourself in reserve as you age, shutting down those parts of yourself that are prone to most hurt. This is the trick of the adult – that emotional intensity would probably be too much for me now. But those early searing shocks are a natural proving ground, standing you in good stead later on, rendering you all the more able to cope with different kinds of loss – the death of friends and loved ones – and the sheer crazy mess of life.

I’d ride out this way with girls in the long ago, just for a drive and a talk and a place to be alone. I remember the scent of one girl very well and, before I became almost totally anosmic in later years, that same scent, like these lyrics, could release a long chain of memory. She’ll be fifty three now, but I’ve not seen her since ’79, so she’ll always be nineteen to me. There’s a tree, down a narrow lane off the 5246. We’d park under it and embrace while the sun set fire over the cornfields. Few travel that road, and even now you can usually guarantee the sense of being the last people in the world, at least for fifteen minutes or so. This was hardly dogging, those stolen moments. They were innocent times, times when it was sufficient for a man to thrill to the texture of a girl’s hair against his face, and the feel of her breath in his ear. Now anything goes, and nothing is too much or too depraved, or too precious to besmirch with haste.

In all my girls in those days I think I was searching for the muse I projected onto Stevie Nicks – me and a million other guys of course. Nothing worked out as planned. It was a tough learning process.

Damn your love
Damn your lies,…

The 5246, known also intermittently as Meadow Lane and Rufford Road is a lovely long run, twisty turney, lots of downshifts and then fast out of the bends, a lovely snarl from the engine out of second gear and a punchy acceleration that lights me up. It runs for a couple of miles, then brings you out onto the A5209 at Parbold. I spent the first five years of my married life here, up to ’93. Lovely village, Parbold, but stank to high heaven back then, courtesy of the Hoscar Sewerage works. I can’t smell it tonight, but that’s not saying anything.

The Windmill pub, Parbold

Long pull from here, up Parbold Hill, a brute of an incline, especially on a cold morning with a cold car that could barely manage 60 brake horse, but the Mazda’s nicely warmed now and even with her nose pointing at the sky the slightest nudge on the throttle yields a thrilling eagerness that’s thwarted only by the strategically placed GATSO cam.

Break the silence,
Damn the dark,
Damn the light,…

The pub at the top of Parbold Hill used to be called the Wiggin Tree, a popular watering hole, and a frequent haunt when courting. During our Parbold years, my wife and I would alternate between it and the Windmill on Friday nights. I blagged it for a scene or two in the Road from Langholm Avenue. It’s a Miller and Carter steakhouse now, a national franchise. Times have changed. Drinkers in pubs are simply in the way. The money is in food. I’ve not been in since it changed hands.

That reference to Langholm Avenue has me thinking of unrequited loves now. We’ve all had our share of those, but it’s a curse bourne in greater part by the reticent.

And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain,…

Parbold Hall

Which brings us nicely down to the ominously named Dangerous Corner at Wrightington, noting as we pass that Parbold Hall gardens are open, and I’m thinking I must make the effort one day, as those gardens are well spoken of. The house, originally dating to the 13th century but extensively remodelled in the last four hundred years, recently changed hands for 9.5 million. Nice twist here as we take the corner, very tactile steering, feeling every stone as we pick up Robin Hood Lane, then sharp left and out across High Moor, into the setting sun. There’s a faint clipping from the nearside rear disk, but it’s drowned out by an exuberant snarl as we punch along the straight.

Chain, keep us together
Running in the shadows,…

Sharp  right, past the Rigbye Arms, my current watering hole of choice, then a few nice twists and turns before the road falls away on Bannister Lane, the plane opening suddenly again and giving a brief impression of flight. I’m  keeping the speed to forty here, though the temptation is to floor it. I’m half conscious the pads are wearing thin and need a change, but I’m also wanting to resist the intimidation of this huge BMW I picked up at the Highmoor restaurant. He’s weaving about, sitting on my bumper, eager to prove his willy is bigger than mine – proof enough, if proof were needed, that we are descended from primates. There’s nowhere really for him to pass safely here but,… oh, there he goes – shower of chippings and a faint grey haze. Fast, ambitious, and obscenely monied. That car was easily worth fifty grand – more than I paid for that house in Parbold twenty five years ago, and which I’ve only just finished paying off. My car’s worth a mere two and a half thousand, but a whole lot more fun. He’s careless too as it doesn’t look like he’s bothering with the thirty zone at the bottom of the hill where you run into Bispham, just flashing through, and flashing on in his flashy self important way.

The Rigbye Arms, High Moor

Down to third now and a sudden sweet reverberation from the exhaust, then slow past the Farmer’s Arms – easy to miss the right turn here onto Maltkin Lane and the final leg of tonight’s run. Here it is. Stay in third or drop to second? Hmm, too late – fluffed that one Michael. Never mind. That tug as we make the turn more than makes up for it. This is motoring in all its glory.

This is not nostalgia, this drive down the memory back-lanes of West Lancashire, in search of Stevie Nicks. This is more a searching of the past for pieces of soul we might have left stranded there. It’s good to gather them up now and then and feel oneself becoming whole again. You know it’s working when you feel yourself suddenly  energised by a thing you’ve all but forgotten. The trick is to bore deep down and be patient until you feel the energy of reconnection coursing through your veins. What does that feel like? Well, it feels something like this:

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An area also well known,… for dogging.

Great Hill, West Pennine Moors

I was sitting in the cross shelter on the top of Great Hill on Friday, sharing the view and passing the time of day with another walker. He was in his late middle age, what I’d describe as a robust pedestrian and a good sort. He was knowledgeable about the area and about the bird-life. I’ve never met him before and I knew him for all of ten minutes, but we got on well. Such encounters with strangers on hilltops are not unusual. The mere fact that you’re there means you already have a lot in common.

It’s a very beautiful spot, Great Hill, in a low moorland windswept sort of way. It’s about 1250 feet high, and miles away from the roads or any form of habitation. There were larks a plenty and a couple of curlew plaintively piping. To the north, we could see as far as Pendle and beyond to the Dales. Westwards we had the Lancashire plain and the sea. To the south lay Winter Hill, all of it crisply delineated in the mid-morning sunshine, and shimmering over the long moorland causeway known as Spitler’s Edge. This is a very beautiful patch of territory, otherwise known as the Western Pennines, and not twenty minutes drive from where I live, also not twenty minutes drive for a couple of million other souls as well, and unfortunately suffering from the stress of it.

Suddenly my new found companion advised me never to be in the area after 9:00 pm, that there were far too many unsavoury goings on these days. If it wasn’t boy racers killing themselves and others on the narrow moorland roads, he said, it was people up to goodness knows what on the public carparks.

“You know,” he said. “Those unsavoury parties and such-like.”

He explained those “unsavoury parties” were the reason the Higher House car-park at Rivington is now locked at night by a sophisticated electric rolling gate – or at least it was until the trolls came up and stole the solar panel that charged its batteries. Another car-park in the area, he informed me, is now padlocked at all times – no one can use it, day or night.

With a worldly sigh, he set his hat upon his head and bade me good morning. It was a curious encounter, possibly daemonic, and one that’s had me thinking ever since.

As I watched him ambling away, I reflected on other stories I’d heard about these nefarious goings on, and how they are increasingly interfering with people’s innocent enjoyment of the countryside. I suppose I take it personally because it’s my back yard and I grew up treasuring what it has to offer – its beauty, its wide open space, its antiquarian oddities, and its walking of course – so a part of me does resent this rather rude intrusion of what I call the grey world and its creeping ugliness.

It spreads like litter.

And of course the West Pennines isn’t the only area under siege by such unsavoury goings on.

Imagine:

An elderly lady and her husband drive to a local beauty-spot. There’s a pleasant car-park under the trees, a shimmering lake in the distance, a shapely green hill rising beyond. It’s all sunshine and blue skies – a midday week, about lunchtime. They park their vehicle, unpack a picnic and are about to pour coffee from the flask when a man walks by in a pin-stripe suit, carrying his trousers, neatly folded, over his arm – only his shirt tails to spare his modesty.

They used to bring their children here for picnics on Sundays, they’d go walking and playing hide and seek in the woods. It’s a public car-park, a handy public loo, but unknown to them it’s also become what the police have unofficially designated a public sex area, in this case mainly for gays, looking for anonymous encounters. The street smart call it “Cottaging”. The police call it a public nuisance, but don’t want to be seen as homophobic, so unless someone gets hurt or there are drugs involved it’s mostly tolerated.

Then imagine:

A young woman takes her dog out for a walk, early evening. It’s another car-park, another beauty spot. She’s followed by a man who begins making lewd remarks, so she beats a hasty retreat, understandably in some distress. As she drives away he calls her stuck up for not wanting to have sex with him. When she calls the police, she’s told the area is a well known “Dogging” location, Dogging being a euphemism for what might be loosely termed public sex. People drive for miles to these spots and rendezvous for anonymous intercourse, this time of the heterosexual variety.

The young woman didn’t know all this of course, not being familiar with that sort of thing.

In an attempt to curb the problem, and I’m sorry dear Doggers and Cottagers, but you are a problem, the council locks the carparks at night, unless they run out of money and can’t afford to pay a warden, in which case they simply shut the car-parks altogether and the amenity is denied to others who merely want to walk or picnic and generally enjoy the greenery and the scenery on their doorstep. But because that green is within spitting distance of a conurbation, the grey tide washes up a thick line of unsavoury detritus.

I’m not sure how these things take hold, nor how the innocent among us are supposed to know that lay-by or car-park where we habitually leave our car of a summer’s eve, while we take a couple of hours out across the moors and enjoy the sunset, is now a public sex area. It’s a very British phenomenon – apparently – this dogging thing, but it’s all rather sordid too, and though it’s not like me to moralise, I really don’t like the thought of it in my back yard.

Of course, it’s not a good idea, sex with strangers, but even less so with lots of strangers. It’s a sure way to catch an STD for a start, possibly a fatal one, but that never stopped anyone from doing it, so moralising and pointing out the public health implications is never going to solve it. The other problem is it also creates bad feeling among the locals – these immoral urbanites travelling out to our rural idyll to perform their beastly functions. And there’s a resentment too that the innocent ones had better be locked indoors, with the curtains drawn by dusk, because there’ll soon be trolls about and there’s never a burly copper around to see them off.

Anyway, I came down from Great Hill, returning via the woods at Brinscall, then along the Goit to White Coppice. I saw more curlew and lark, heard cuckoo and woodpecker, and found what I believe to be an unmarked standing stone, though possibly a Victorian facsimile. It was a beautiful day, a pleasant walk, a beautiful area, an area well known to me, an area well known also, apparently, for dogging.

As an interesting, though not entirely unrelated aside, today I took the good Lady Graeme out in the MX5. (We might as well enjoy it while the sun shines) We drove to Saint Annes on Sea and had a picnic by Fairhaven Lake. We used to go there a lot with the children, but today’s journey was considerably enhanced by travelling in an open top car. In fact it was a delight, and it was also wonderful to see my teacher wife smiling again after weeks of stress during the build up to yet another school inspection. On our return, my good lady, one eye on the wing mirror, asked me if I was aware the car behind the car behind us was a police car.

I was not.

I wasn’t speeding, but that aggressive looking Hyundai cruiser was suddenly an intimidating presence and, driving that MX5 I felt like I had a target on my back. I have been indicted for my carelessness before (SP30) – there were extenuating circumstances, but I didn’t argue them. I have also been falsely accused by a traffic officer of using a mobile phone when driving. I was not using it, and was able to prove to his satisfaction I had not been using it, but was given a stern warning for using it anyway. I was also once stopped and asked, with blistering sarcasm, if indicators were optional on my car, sir. It’s unfortunate but my only contact with the boys and girls in blue is when I’m behind the wheel of a car, and my confidence in them is tainted by that experience. I recognise it as a neurosis, and could perhaps use some desensitisation therapy, but I no longer feel protected and served. Instead I feel vulnerable.

So, if you were the traffic officer two cars behind when a blue Mazda MX5 pulled into the petrol station at the Warton filling station this afternoon, I admit I wasn’t really pulling in for petrol. I was merely wanting you off my tail because you were spoiling my day out with my wife. And by the way, did you know, as I write there are people committing acts of public indecency in nearby beauty spots, frightening the life out of old ladies and young women, and horses too?

What’s that? You do?

Clearly one is less likely to attract the attention of the constabulary these days cavorting in public areas without one’s trousers than one is when merely driving from A to B.

The material world is endlessly fascinating. While it so often seems bent on self destruction, I seem able to watch it these days from the detached perspective of a mostly docile middle age, but it doesn’t stop me from occasionally getting my dander up when the unconscious among us use what few bits of beautiful English green we have left to us for wiping their bottoms on.

Except, reading back on all of this it sounds like rather a long editorial from the Daily Mail – World going to hell in a handcart, public morals shot to pieces, and the police doing nothing about it. But in truth, though I am aware of what goes on, I have never personally witnessed such public indecency as I speak of here, and I don’t lay awake at night worrying about it,  so the West Pennines remain for me another country, and long may it remain so. Policemen are also human beings and do a decent job that many, myself included, would be incapable of. Yes, I’m paranoid about traffic policemen, I break out all nervous and sweaty when one settles on my tail – which is precisely why I imagine I attract them –  when all the guy’s probably thinking is “please let there be no more calls before I finish my shift”. If I could learn to love them, I would no longer care so much when one settles on my tail. That’s going to be quite a challenge, probably beyond me, but its been an interesting weekend’s journey from my first sitting down on Great Hill on Friday morning.

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A Racy Lady who turns heads

Mazda MX5 Mk2 – 02 Plate

It’s now a week since I picked up the Mazda. The day before I was worried I’d made a terrible mistake, buying such an old car after no more than a quick look round and a ten minute test drive. What if I’d missed something? Rotten door bottoms, bubbling wings, blue smoke, badly fitting rag-top, leaking oil, duff tyres. The list of things that can go wrong with an older car is long indeed, especially if it’s not been pre-loved, and the dealer turns out to be a rogue.

The car was waiting when I rolled up. The top was down and the guy had washed it off for me. To my immense relief it looked even better than I remembered. A quick card transaction, a handing over of documents, and I was on my way. In real terms it’s probably the cheapest car I’ve ever bought, but easily the one that has impressed me the most.

The drive home was a real pleasure; a hot, sunny afternoon, and the way taking me along the winding country lanes of the West Lancashire coast. The car warmed quickly and ran sweetly.

It has been loved, I think, and the wad of service reports reassures me it’s also been well maintained. I did no more than forty, but it felt like I was flying. I made a quick stop for petrol and the lad in the shop complimented me on the car. It’s a conversation starter, something that’s not happened in 35 years, not since the days of my ancient Mk1 Cortina Super. The Cortina was rotten underneath, but managed good show up top and conversations were frequent when I was out on my travels. Sure, it’s a long time since heads were turned by anything I’ve driven. The Cortina eventually collapsed, literally, its McPherson struts held in place by nothing more than spiders webs.

A long time ago. God bless it!

But now I’m cruising through West Lancs with the top down and girls are looking. Yes, girls! I assured number one son, who accompanied me, they were looking at him, not me. He assured me they were looking at the car, and not at either of us. We are both blessed, it seems with the same lack of self confidence.

I bought polish and spent the evening buffing her up to a deep blue lustre.

Oh, she’s lovely. Very lovely indeed!

I must have done a hundred miles since then, just driving around on short hops, getting a feel for her, identifying any problems areas. She’s not perfect. All but one of the tyres was duff, so I had to get a fresh set right away, and the brake pads will be next. The driver’s side hood clamp doesn’t latch – a common problem on MX 5’s – but hardly a reason for gnashing one’s teeth, and is easily fixed. There’s also a tendency to bounce when taking up drive in first and reverse gears when she’s cold – another common idiosyncrasy of certain Mk 2.5’s, I’m told, but this one’s more a question of how you handle her than spending a fortune on unnecessary  repair. I’m sure there’ll be other things that surface as our acquaintanceship deepens, but my main worry, the bodywork, is fine. This is a 12 year old car, but it’s in better shape than my 7 year old Astra whose door bottoms, to my dismay, are already starting to bubble through.

The attention the car drew on that journey home has continued. A small two seater sport’s car cruises by and people look at it. I do  it all the time, thinking: isn’t that lovely? And I must get one of those before I’m too old to enjoy it! So I don’t mind that others do it to me, but there’s another kind of attention that’s been much less welcome. It’s a kind of maleness I’m uncomfortable with, and it smells of over-ripe testosterone.

My longtime companion, that grey old Astra with his rotten door bottoms, does not inflame egos. We’ve done Seventy thousand miles together over the years, without so much as a second glance and that’s the way we like it. I’m not a sporty driver. I don’t take corners on two wheels. I like the feel of speed on the straight, but I don’t push my luck. But with the Mazda I’ve had cars overtaking me for the fun of it, running dangerously and blind on the wrong side of the road into bends. I’ve had other soft-top saloons suddenly come alive and pull wheel screeching burnouts in a village where the speed limit is a very sedate 20 MPH.

Oh, how I like the feel of this car! I like the sound of it, and I can’t stop driving it, but after a week, I’m growing tired of looking in the rear view mirror to see a fluorescent Ford Focus with go faster stripes and an adolescent-brained driver behind the wheel, sitting on my bumper, weaving about aggressively.

There have been three recent road deaths in my locale, all caused by stupidity and carelessness involving cars – the victims were all pedestrians or cyclists. Makeshift memorials pepper the black-spots, reminders as stern as the GATSO cams, that motoring without due care and attention is dangerous – says me with three points and an SP30 on his license.

I don’t know what kind of life my Mazda has known in the past, but it looks like she’ll be getting a lot of sand kicked in her face with me behind the wheel. If you’re out and about and you should cruise up behind a little blue Mazda with a silver haired driver behind the wheel, tootling along at forty, and you fancy a bit of sport, don’t bother, because he’s not up for it. Back off or pass me safely because the closer you get, the slower I’ll go. Let me enjoy my old Mazda in ways that does not involve you, or endanger other users of the road.

She and I are strictly Zen these days.

She?

Actually, I’m puzzled by that gender thing. The Astra is male, a safe, steady commute-mobile, slab sided and grey – old Grumpy. But the Mazda’s curves definitely suggest something female. A name hasn’t struck me, but I’m sure it will in time. The good lady Graeme fingers the frayed creases of the ragtop and suggests “Leaky”, but we’ve not been out in the rain yet, so we don’t know about that one for sure.

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Is Amazon good for aspiring writers?

Rows keep breaking out between Amazon and the world of corporate publishing. It goes like this: Amazon squeezes the publisher’s profit margin by insisting on lower prices, the publisher bends as much as they can, keen for access to Amazon’s awesome distributive power, while trying to maintain a decent cut for themselves. And if Amazon’s not happy with the deal they switch off the “buy” button. If the reader wants that publisher’s titles, they have to get them from somewhere else, they’ll be harder to find, and more expensive. None of this is personal; it’s just business.

From my perspective the struggles going on in contemporary publishing are merely symptoms of a near extinct business model, and its inevitable demise at the hands of a scary new predator. Amazon has sharp teeth and is using them to reshape the way we buy books – or indeed anything else for that matter. The big publishing houses may yet find their balance and survive in some new shape or form, I don’t know, and I find it hard to care. What interests me more is what all this means for the aspiring writer.

Traditionally, a writer plugged away in obscurity for years in order to finish “the novel”, then they spent even more years debasing themselves in search of the beneficence of the notoriously mercurial literary agent. The agent then fixed it so a publisher would read their work. If the publisher liked it, then began the writer’s slow rise from obscurity to mid-list mediocrity – except in rare cases, where a chosen few were invited to the top table of celebrity authorship. Here, in exchange for getting their teeth fixed, they might at last sup from the publisher’s golden chalice.

For the aspiring writer, at the bottom of the money chain, this system left much to be desired. To be a writer, and happy, you had to be either pathologically deluded or well connected. For the publishers and the agents though, it worked very well, enabling them to exploit a limitless ocean of creativity on which they floated their luxury liners. When they were low on talent to stoke the boilers, they just reached down and pulled another one on board. It was obvious anyone who came along and threatened this centuries old system was going to be viewed in a dim light. But unless you’ve been living on another planet this past ten years, it’s impossible to miss the fact that something is changing. Many of the smaller luxury liners have now been torpedoed. The ones that remain have become overloaded with hangers on and are sailing pretty low in the water.

There’s no shortage of writers to stoke the boilers of course, but to stretch the nautical metaphor to destruction, there’s now a problem in the engine room, and it’s this: the route from writer to reader is no longer controlled by the gatekeeper of traditional publishing. That you’re even reading this is proof that anyone can publish anything now, for nothing and find an audience. Surf over to Amazon or Smashwords and you’ll find novels by unknown writers for free, or for a couple of quid. Most of them look and sound crap, as most blogs are also meaningless crap, but this new age does shed rather a clinical light on the traditionally published stuff, a light that strips these expensively marketed and slickly edited works of their mystique, and you know what? A lot of them are crap too.

So, anyone can publish anything? Isn’t that great? Well, on the one hand, yes, but on the other,whether anyone notices you or not is a matter of luck, unless you’re prepared commit some heinous act on the basis there’s no such thing as bad publicity. But by the same token, there’s been many a traditionally published book pulped long before the public has had time to wake up to it. As any aspiring writer with more than ten years experience will tell you, traditional publishing is no guarantee of making any money at all, let alone fame and fortune – neither is the fact of getting that novel miraculously published. So you’re published, so what? We’re still turning up obscure Victorian authors and lauding them as undiscovered geniuses, but who died penniless, believing themselves failures in their own time.

So, the question is this: does the “Amazon” way of doing things, torpedoing those fuddy duddy publishers and bursting the market wide open, make it any easier for your average unknown person to take up the pen and make a decent living at it? The answer of course is a resounding no – indeed, you still have to be slightly mad even to try it. Really, don’t do it. Get yourself a proper job and, write in your spare time.

I can shift a few hundred of my titles on Feedbooks and Smashwords each week, by giving them away, and that’s fine, I seem to be happy with that, but if I were to charge so much as pennies for them, that hit-rate would dwindle to a trickle that was hardly worth logging in to check. True, some authors have done well, financially, by self-publishing, and good luck to them, but then some authors always do make it big – it just doesn’t happen very often and the likes of Amazon won’t change that.

Publishing will always be about celebrity and the shifting of large numbers of catchy titles, crap or otherwise, at a tenner each. As profit margins are squeezed, those writers in the “paid but mediocre” bracket will find themselves squeezed out too as a bigger slice of the marketing cake is reserved for those authors with the perfect teeth. More and more writers will be joining the scruffy ranks of the indy scene, self-publishing for peanuts, while scratching a living doing minimum wage type jobs. It’s not a rosy picture, but then it never was. Creative individuals will always be at the mercy of patronage, wherever it comes from. Yes, things are changing drastically at the money end of the book business, but for your average aspiring writer, it looks pretty much like business as usual to me.

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