The other side of midnight

Okay, this one’s hopefully timed to go out at midnight on New Year’s Eve, while being written ad-hoc some time before. It’s just a quick post to say thank you to all my regular responders, also to the silent lurkers. All are welcome!

The Spring of next year will mark a decade of blogging for me. I still seem to have the energy for it, so it obviously remains important in some way.

I suppose that’s it with writing or indeed any form of creativity. While many of us are called to it, not many find their living at it, so the Internet, though much maligned in recent times as a vehicle for all manner of malevolence, still has its positive aspects. Hopefully in time we can learn to take advantage of those positives while getting smarter at dealing with the negatives. But that’s a long story and very complicated, a story trailing off into the future, and I want to keep this short and simple and focused very much on the present moment.

My posts towards the end of 2017 have had a negative trend, result perhaps of unsettling world events and the contemplation of various worrying future scenarios. My resolution for 2018 however is to regain positivity and optimism.  There are challenges ahead, but  how we deal with them most powerfully and least self-destructively, begins with the present moment, and our relationship with it. The trouble is, we forget, and we forget because we think too much.

Negativity is the result of resisting the present moment, of seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome, got around, or even somehow outwitted while we fix our sights, our hopes on some future time. We  resist change, we try to hold on to secure ground when all else is breaking away. With this approach, whatever we say or do in response reflects only the weakness of our position. Instead we must always be accepting of whatever is, become intimately aware of the present moment and our presence in it. Then we can work with it, and realise our true power in the face of change.

My very best wishes to you all.

See you on the other side of midnight.

 

 

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Drops of silver dew

December morning,
sluggish dawn,
of greys and greens,
and mist and mud,
where water weeps
into long hollows,
and pools like eyes,
which lidless gaze
at still sleepy skies.
And the ways,
heavy under foot,
slow my passing,
and would arrest me,
arms outstretched,
gnarled fingers grasping air,
lifeless as the hawthorn,
bare and dripping drops,
of silver dew.

 

 

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The Sea View Cafe – Finished!

My latest, possibly my last novel, is finished and up on Wattpad now for free. It’ll shortly go up on Smashwords from whom I’ll blag the free ISBN, then put it up on Free Ebooks who seem to be doing a good job of shifting downloads at the moment. And there we are. Finished! About two and a half years – the Sea View Cafe years. The small blue car years, the Scarborough years.

It’s a cliche I know but as ever I’m genuinely grateful to anyone who’s read me or commented on my stuff. Even had it been conventionally published, the Sea View would have made relatively nothing, financially, yet already it’s rewarded me tenfold with those readers who’ve picked it up on Wattpad and commented as I’ve posted chapters piecemeal.

It’s a novel written against shifting times, a story swept up in another iteration of the myth of Britannia’s idiocy and decline and, by association the  decline of the west. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s been an all pervasive narrative for as long as I can remember, and probably for centuries. Yet more than any other, the Sea View Cafe is a story that found itself distorted almost daily in the writing by yet one more headline in  rejection of the progressive ideals of strength in the collective of nations and a fall into a petty nationalism, into racism and bigotry.

Yes, these have been the pre-Brexit years. Years when we have wrapped ourselves snug in the native flag, covering all but our faces which are by turns ugly, pompous and hate filled – ejecting spittle with every sentence uttered. Our collective soul stunted by the recurrence of all manner of shadow complexes.

Some of the most brilliant minds working in Britain are of non-white, non Christian, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Anglo Saxon origin. We are a multi-cultural society, product of our history – not all of it good – but I’d dared to hope we were on the cusp of a rapprochement with our chequered past. Such diversity might have informed our spiritual nature, our secular philosophy – things to be celebrated, built upon, for there can be no surer path to greatness, than by the hybridisation of faith and ideas. And what did we do? We chose the path of the tabloid, of the angry old white crustacean.

Or was it more a case of two fingers to a plutocratic establishment that had done nothing to solve the problems of a lost decade, and looked willing to sacrifice a whole generation of non-privileged youth upon a bonfire of perpetual austerity?

The reasons are complex, but tending in the same direction and manifesting in abject poverty for millions.

And what of women? That much maligned species, scorned, dismissed, defiled by the repugnant male ego. This is strange to me, for I have only the experience of women in my own circle to go on, and they are of strong character, organising, nurturing, building, and gifting love.

So, in the Sea View, we meet strong female leads, not out of any gender political motives – I wouldn’t dare go there – but more simply because that is my experience of women. They are my my aunts, my sisters, my mothers, my grandmothers. Helena Aynslea, Hermione Watts, Carina and Nina and Anica. These are tough women, while remaining entirely feminine, and I hope I’ve done them justice. They carry the Sea View, as they have carried my entire life.

And so what if two of them take a fancy to the same guy, and each other? Let them both have him, and themselves  – all at the same time and be damned – because I hope this is more than a romance, more than a trite polyamory fantasy on my part.

Thus we move beyond the conventional narrative, explode the hell out of the world in order to find ourselves anew. We have to hard-wire it into the collective that it’s okay to be different. Gay, coloured, bisexual, Muslim, Christian, Jew. Female. Intellectual. Shy. Red-haired. In short, diverse. And what we have to code out is the idea we can in any way advance ourselves at the cost of others, that anything which increases ourselves at the cost of diminishing someone else is not only wrong, it is also, ultimately, self-destructive. The young seem to get this and it’s in them I dare to hope.

These are strange times. They haunt me, as they haunt the Sea View. Either they are the end of times, or they’re the rallying call to radicals and progressives everywhere to seriously challenge the archaic and archetypal evils that seem to have snuck in under the radar.

The answer? It’s with all of us.

Awaken.

Oh, I almost forgot, do read the Sea View Cafe if you can bear it! Unedited, unprofessional, and riddled with sneaky typos. It won’t change your life, but it might cheer you up in the mean time! I know I’ve had a lot of pleasure from writing it.

 

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Literary fiction in crisis? Hmm,… maybe. Maybe not.

Okay, let’s be careful with our terms here. When we say ‘crisis’, what we really mean is even celebrity authors can’t make money writing literary fiction any more. Book buying is in decline generally, but literature especially. What’s literary fiction? Well, roughly speaking it’s what’s left when you take out all the other stuff people generally prefer reading – the genre stuff: thrillers, chick-lit, crime, horror, sci-fi,… whatever. It’s the kind of stuff written against the odds of anyone actually being interested in it. Sounds a bit grim, and it can be, but on the plus side ‘research’ suggest literary fiction is the genre most likely to improve a reader’s soul. But who cares about that these days?

I hesitate to say it’s the kind of stuff I write because that would grant me airs I’m not sure I’m due, but since my stuff won’t fit into any other genre I suppose that’s what I must call it. And that’s a pity because according those who supposedly know – all those book publishy types – literary fiction is finished. Kaput! It’s really so ‘over‘ darling.

Hmm, story of my life.

Except:

What saves me from oblivion is the fact I already don’t make my living at it, and never have so it’s a bit of a moot point to me. I’ve always had a day job, though to be frank for as long as I’ve had it – some forty years now – all I’ve ever wanted to do is quit it and write. Thank heavens for common sense then.

So, bottom line, it’s harder now for those who used to scrape a living at writing high-brow fiction – facts of life catching up and all that. But it doesn’t mean that kind of fiction’s dead. It just means you won’t find it in Waterstones any more. And at fifteen quid a pop guys, I mean, come on. There are some  who have to feed themselves all week off that. Oh, yes, seriously. So you need to get out of London and go visit some provincial towns. Maybe then you’ll be surprised to learn hardly any of them can muster a bookshop any more. They’re all Pound-land and charity shops, and thank God. Me? I get my literature from places like Age Concern and the Heart Foundation. So it’s no wonder the bottom’s dropped out of the market.

The starving artist in his garret? Yes, that old Romantic trope still exists. He might have a Masters’ degree in creative writing or literature now, or some other highbrow thing, but if he wants to live he works sixty hours a week in shop, or a warehouse earning £7.25 an hour, slaving for a grumpy old philistine who makes his life a misery. Then he goes home to his mouldy old flat, the rent on which takes most of what he earns, and he pens a literary line or two before he passes out. Then he submits them blind to a publisher who hasn’t a clue who he is. And you know what happens? Well, let’s just say he finds out soon enough there’s no money in literature, that indeed there never was for the likes of him, which is a pity because his story is the story of our times and worth listening to.

So that’s not to say there’s no need for it. It’s just a question of who needs it most and since the influential are deaf as a post to the cries of suffering heard all about us these days I still maintain the person most served by such work is the writer himself. Readers are a bonus, but hardly to be guaranteed, and not necessary anyway. So stick it online and be damned. If there’s no money in it you might as well, then move on and write something else because that’s what writers do. Isn’t it?

Can’t make a living at it? I know, it’s sad. But if stories are important, and the writers really mean it when they say they’re writers, rather  than posers in tweed jackets, the stories will get written anyway by someone not so proud. And this internet thing will disseminate all the unprofitable literary stuff and preserve it for eternity – unless of course this net-neutrality business gets a look in and then we’re all stuffed.

But that’s a story of a different kind, possibly much worse, and I’ve yet to get my head around it.

Maybe next time.

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The way of the dream

Don’t worry, I know there’s nothing more boring than listening to an account of someone else’s dreams. Our own dreams interest us of course, but then I think they’re meant to. Me? I take them as the surface of a sea of unconscious currents upon which the vessel of my ego floats. It’s a temperamental vessel, at times leaky, and it has a tendency to become unstable in stormy weather, skittering all over the place, lacks ballast perhaps, or sufficient steerage. Reading ones’ dreams then is like listening to the shipping forecast – you know when to venture far out into calm water, and when to put back into safe harbour.

Or maybe not. Dreams are funny things.

We seem to get by well enough if we pay them no attention. Indeed to analyse them sometimes only confuses us, and we’re taught by the materialists to forget them anyway, even though materialists have no more idea than you or I what dreams are, exactly, or if they’re important,… or not.

If we pay them no heed, we forget them on waking, perhaps even lending the impression to some they do not dream at all. But everyone dreams, every night, if we remember or not. Dreams can be embarrassing, frightening, or simply puzzling. They can have us waking with feelings of foreboding, or regret, or a deep bliss, or even with the cryptic understanding of the answer to a question we’ve not asked yet.

I suspect anything that affects our emotions should be taken seriously, because emotions influence our physical well-being too. Thus an awareness of one’s dream life can lend insight and depth to one’s waking reality. We must take care though not to allow the ego to get wound up when the dream turns its back on us, when it becomes inscrutable to analysis.

Sometimes dreams are subtly nuanced, contain no obvious nuggets of meaning, as if in our dream life we sometimes simply tread water. Sometimes there is meaning aplenty, messages we can take back with us into the waking world. And these messages will speak to our emotions, speak of balance.

To remember our dreams, we simply ask it of that inner part of ourselves before we sleep, and eventually, we rediscover the trick of keeping hold of them, otherwise they leak away on waking. But even then there is a strangeness to these kept dreams. My journal is filled with accounts of dreams I no longer remember, as if even once firmly recounted and committed to print, there is a sell by date on them, and when we read them back, perhaps a year later, it is like reading the dream of a stranger.

Not all dreams are like that, and perhaps the ones that aren’t are the ones of most importance to us, even though we do not know why.

Freud talks of dreams as wish fulfilment, and its true I have experienced many a fulfilment in the dreaming that was denied me in waking life – whether this be compensatory or not I do not know, but also what is denied in life, I spend a deal of time chasing fruitlessly in dreams as well, so the dream also mirrors, or caricatures waking reality oftentimes to a cruel degree.

On waking the ego then writhes in agony, or rails in frustration at its inability to shake some sense out of the dream world. And sometimes the ego can break in. Just as we can teach ourselves to hold on to our dreams, we can also arm ourselves with the keys to the kingdom and drop the ego into the dream world. Then we are no longer passive as the dream unfolds around us. We are conscious, as if awake in the dream.

This called lucid dreaming.

It’s relatively rare phenomenon, but commonly enough reported, though I have mixed feelings about it. It’s not a thing I’m able to indulge in, nor am I advised is it wise, like trying to see the bottom of a pool of crystal water while splashing about in it. Ego assumes dominion, like it does over everything else, bending all to its will, flying about, having sex with strangers, or worse: sex with people you would never dare proposition in waking life, and all are suddenly putty in your hands, or rather in your mind, your thoughts manifested in apparent form. Oh, the ego can have a ball all right, but then the dream itself becomes shy, loses meaning, serves not its natural purpose.

That said, I know the techniques, and sometimes ask the keeper of dreams to grant me lucidity, “if it would help”. But I have yet to be trusted, and perhaps just as well.

Jung shows us the dream as an expression of the unconscious, sometimes personal, sometimes collective. He teaches us to recognise the subtle players of the dreamscape and the masks they wear – anima, shadow, trickster, peur, senex. From a study of their manifestation in the dream over time we can chart the development of our personal myth, our very own hero’s journey to wholeness.

And then we have Hillman who likens the dream more to the underworld of classical learning, its archetypes, like Jungs, proxies of the gods. And Hillman, rather than emphasise the importance of analysis and understanding the meaning of the dream, speaks more of submitting ourselves to the experience of it, to ask not what does this dream symbol represent, for then we lose the dream. Remembered dreams are thus less messages from the unconscious as memories of preparations for death and permanent residence in that place.

Or not, maybe.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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To find the centre of a circle

One of the recurrent emotional themes in my life’s story is that of lamenting the loss of green spaces treasured since childhood and, by association, I presume a good deal of my self with them.

I was fortunate growing up in rural England, meadows and woodland on my doorstep, an ancient space I could disappear into the whole day long, a space that responded to childhood imagination and to the later private poet – the spirits of place alive and well and taking me into their confidence.

As I grew, the woods and meadows seemed an immutable fact, an anchor to a solid bedrock, holding me steady. No matter what else happened, they would be the same, their familiarity a salve for the occasional humiliations meted out by the pitiless ogre of growing up. If I felt threatened, anxious, lonely, I could simply walk those familiar ways, pick up the company of my ghosts and emerge easier in my head.

Life has not taken me away from my roots. I settled locally, settled into a career within easy commuting distance, married a local girl, bought a house, had children. I realise I have somehow existed well into my sixth decade in this small circle, in the north of England. It feels familiar, intimate, safe. But in that time those meadows have also suffered from the scourge of greenbelt erosion. There are now vast housing estates intruding upon my past, and I curse them, because I want my past to remain inviolable. I’ve watched the diggers moving into one meadow after the other and felt something akin to grief at their destruction – each bit of green a life taken, a spirit of place evicted. Precious,… irreplaceable.

The other side of this argument runs that as populations increase there is an inevitable demand for new houses. There is nothing we can do to prevent it. If it were not ‘my’ meadows disappearing, it would be someone else’s. And lately it’s made me suspicious the way I become angry at this thing I cannot possibly do anything about. So I ask myself, is it that I treasure the place, or merely the past versions of my ‘self’ I imagine it represents? Do I champion the breathing space and the freedom it affords me, or is it more I am imprisoned by it?

There is a world of beautiful, open space out there – just not on my doorstep. All I have is that bit of space I’ve got. So the question is, in my lament for its loss, am I restricting the person I might otherwise be?

I read a line in a book recently, that we are indeed whomever we allow ourselves to be, that through fear of the unknown, we risk keeping ourselves small. We choose the familiar path, keep to the places we know rather than venture abroad, try out the new, the unfamiliar, and grow. This is the mantra of the entrepreneur of course, of the big-shot businessman – nothing ventured, nothing gained. You too could be a millionaire, and all that,… and if you’re not it’s because you didn’t think big enough, that you wasted your life, that instead of lamenting the vast housing estates blanketing the once virgin green, you should be the one building them!

It depends how you measure success of course, but I take the point.

But still, I suspect the bigger point is this, that the obstacle to self growth is more the inability to let go of what must inevitably change – change into a form we no longer recognise or connect with. Everything changes, and we must change with it, and not view the change in it, or in us as being in any way important. It may cause us deep regret, but it just is.

Small circles, big circles – they’re are the all same. Live your whole life in one little town, or circle the globe. But it is the singularity at their centre that’s important, also that we take the trouble now and then to seek it out. How to find the centre of a circle? Euclid might give us a clue, something to do with bisecting chords is one method I recall, but that’s for the circles other people draw for you. The centre of our own circle is always wherever we happen to be standing at the time.

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Photographing in December

I could tell you a tale of bright, frosty mornings, but mostly the season is grey, broad sweeps of colour and contrast washed out, leaving a world on the verge of hibernation, in a soft tissue monochrome.The camera struggles with the bigger picture now, trees and moss and fallen leaves and mud all merging into shades that seem but a fraction of tone apart. It squints to discern them, and the usual post processing tricks that digitally deepen the dynamics fail to work, at least not without making the lie even more obvious. Instead we must seek interest in its isolated macroscopic scraps of colour, but if we are to send our camera probing to that level of curiosity, we had better be prepared for what we find.

The camera sees a scattering of seeds on a fencepost, left there by humans for birds. We want the birds to survive, and in wanting it we feel better about ourselves. The seeds shine like miniature pebbles and speak of a glowing altruism, of valuing the small creatures but it makes for an odd juxtaposition with world affairs which betray daily the fact we struggle with the bigger picture and cannot extend such fine sentiments to our own kind.

I left some coins in the begging bowl of a homeless guy in Stratford upon Avon, home of the Bard, Union Jack mugs, fridge magnets and international tourists. In the camera of my mind, those coins looked like seeds scattered. But I’m told you shouldn’t do this, give money to the homeless. Buy him a sandwich instead, I’m told – he’ll only spend the money on alcohol. But it was a bitterly cold afternoon, and raining, and if he wanted a bottle of whisky to keep out the cold, then who was I, entirely ignorant of his story, to deny him?

Meanwhile, we visitors took shelter far across the divide, in the bookshop at the Royal Shakespeare Centre (3 books for £21) while the homeless man had enough coin for a cup of tea. To be sure, the story of December reveals uncomfortable details. I tried a picture of the RSC, but it was too tall to fit the landscaped frame, and I was in no mood to make a portrait of it.

Closer to home, the camera of my mind spies Santa stuff, and animatronic reindeer in the garden centres. But the myth of a secular Yule needs little analysis before revealing the trap we’re in, that we’re only useful to the world if we’re spending money, that if we’re no longer economically active we’d be serving society better if we were dead. The greeting cards tell their comforting lies of bright frosty mornings, snow covered hills and cosy cottages – thatched of course – smudge of carbon footprint rising, and all cosiness within. I flick back to the mind’s eye photograph of the homeless guy sitting on the pavement in Stratford, and the sound of Santa’s canned carolling makes me want to scream.

The camera of the mind spies the supermarkets, the crowds thickening in their fear of being without parsnips on Christmas Day, while arrayed by the door the camera sees those “support your local foodbank boxes” – gift the blessing of survival this season of good will – a tin of soup to one more needy than yourself.

It’s true, our own kind are going hungry, and not just in the famine places, the war torn places, it’s on the streets of our provincial towns as well, a stone’s throw from the RSC. Yet we’re persuaded the poor are undeserving, that they are drug addled, lazy, immoral, that they have brought it upon themselves, and we would sooner feed the birds. It’s so easy to fall now, and nothing to catch you on the way down. Dickens would recognise our world. He would look at the iPhone and at the beggar starved at the rich man’s gate and lament that in a hundred and fifty years we have made no progress at all in the things that are most important.

Beware looking too closely into the details of December. It does not reveal a comforting picture of our world. Better we set the camera aside, take refuge in the monstrous myth of Santa perhaps, ignoring all the while the truth he’s just lie we tell our children. Or do we grow up, see things for what they are, for what they have to tell us about the way we live? At the very least we owe it to that homeless guy, that we reject the temptation to accept any of this as normal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A victory for common sense? Witches and skeptics.

Curious incident recently – a science blogger learns of a water-company engineer dowsing a field for a broken water pipe. She blogs it with a skeptical slant. It’s picked up by the news media who add their own spin: UK water companies wasting money on “witchcraft”. Nice one!

That little “ping” of Witchcraft on the radar then brings out the great showboating battleship, HMS Skeptic, guns blazing. Arch celebrity skeptic and CSICOP* notary Richard Wiseman is on the BBC’s Today program, reminding us of the idea-motor and confirmation bias stuff – how we’re all so thick we can’t tell when we’re being duped. Presenter John Humphrys mischievously recounts his own successful experience of dowsing, and thereby earns further snippy headlines in the following days’ newspapers. Wiseman responds by saying Humphries would have kept his anecdote to himself had it been unsuccessful (confirmation bias), and a fair point, though this hardly discredits the idea either since Humphrys’ attempt was successful.

When asked, most UK water companies admitted the use of dowsing, but then quailed at the sight of HMS Skeptic anchored ominously offshore, so they back-tracked, emphasising instead how they invest vast sums in proper scientific solutions. Their field engineers “might” employ a bit of dowsing on the side, they said – but in a strictly personal capacity. I smiled at that, imagining the emails then sent to all those engineers to get with the corporate message, and to get rid of those bits of bent coat hanger.

It’s a while since I studied the paranormal in any depth, but it’s a fascinating subject. It’s an area in which the gullible can easily find themselves lost and duped, but equally, it’s a field that could yield the most profound advances in our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Also of interest to me is that cohort of professional celebrity skeptics and their oftentimes simplistic arguments which start from a baseline of: this cannot possibly be true and thereafter work towards a rational explanation, no matter how weak. When all else fails, they call into question the honesty or the sanity of the persons presenting evidence in favour of paranormal phenomenon, also those simply writing about it in anything other than derogatory terms. Anyone actually claiming paranormal prowess will be mercilessly torn to shreds.

True, dowsing has been debunked by scientific trials – at least those trials selectively quoted by skeptics. Skeptical debunkers it seems are as prone to confirmation bias as anyone else, since other studies do lend credence to its efficacy. In more prosaic terms water company engineers probably use it on the quiet because it has worked for them in the past, and they are not uncomfortable using it again simply on the basis they have no rational explanation for how it works. Engineers are pragmatic people.

Me? I have some technical training, which I mention here only to demonstrate that, although I regularly indulge in literary fantasy, I am not entirely without the ability to think critically. In spite of that I once made a twitching stick from a birch twig, held it like dowsers do while I walked a stretch of path through a meadow. Why? Well, I was curious, and why not? What happened? Well, mostly nothing. But at various points the stick twitched in a very disconcerting manner, no matter how steadily I tried to hold it.

My explanation, part technical, part speculative, is that it was responding to the unconscious movement of my hands. This is programmable to a degree by the idea-motor effect, just like the skeptics say, but not in all instances. To dismiss it as such is a little disingenuous. Personally I favour the idea that the body is responding to discontinuities in the local geomagnetic field, caused in turn by anomalies in underlying geology. Although hardly proven, it is, at least, an interesting avenue for study, how the body might be sensitive in this way, and how it might connect to the electromagnetic energy matrix of its environment.

Nor is this as far-fetched as it sounds, since recent squeaky clean scientific studies suggest birds navigate the earth by seeing, or sensing its magnetic field using quantum coherence effects. It’s not a great leap then to suggest we might also possess the same ability, perhaps unconscious, or in most of us atrophied beyond all practical use. Yes, it sounds a little strange, but only if you’re thinking along narrow lines, and only if you adopt the rather unscientific position that anything straying beyond the materialistic and strictly mechanistic paradigm is all “witchcraft” and can’t possibly be true.

Skeptics should also bear in mind witchcraft is a well established spiritual practice, and as such, to use that term in a pejorative way is disrespectful to those practising it. So mind your language, and remember the more shrill one is, the more likely you are to win over only those as shrill as yourself. And that’s no victory for common sense at all. It’s simply another form of fundamentalism.

View at Medium.com

*CSICOP – Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

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Calling time,… on the little blue car

It doesn’t feel like I’ve had the little blue car for long, but it’s getting on for four years now. It’s hard to describe how much pleasure I’ve had from driving it. I’ve discovered the roads have a sway to them not felt since my motorcycle days, the sunshine is brighter and, top down, the air is a dream of freshness, and all this is to say nothing of the places I’ve discovered with it – especially in the Yorkshire Dales, just a short hop from home, and a place for which the car seems to have been especially built.

For years now the remoter dales have echoed to the burble of its exhaust note, as the little blue car wandered with a tenacious grip and a surprising vigour, given its fifteen years. I’d thought it would last for ever. But then I noticed it was suffering from tin-worm in the back wings, and sills. A previous owner had already patched it, and quite neatly, but the sills are bubbling through again, and I’ve had an advisory on the MOT.

The cost for a decent repair is far in excess of what the car is worth. So at the moment it’s tucked up, looking forward to just one last summer on the road before the breaker’s yard. I couldn’t sell it on without pointing out the work that’s needed, which will surely put any casual buyers off. An enthusiast with a knowledge of welding and body repair might take it on, but at most five hundred quid is what I could, in all fairness, get for it.

Sadly this is the way most old MX5’s go. They are like butterflies, built for warmer, drier climes, not the persistently wet brutality of roads in Northern Europe, nor especially its salt caked winters. Rationally, it makes no sense to invest any more in it. I mean, goodness knows where else the rust might be lurking – the body shop talked of common issues with the forward suspension, further advisories on the MOT and costs in excess of five hundred at some point in the future.

It’s a thing to ponder over winter, and quite sad. She runs well, has only 86,000 on the clock, and might in all other respects have another ten years of pleasure ahead of her, but there we are. All good things must come to an end.

“I’d bite the bullet and get it done, mate,” said the guy in the body shop. “These cars are becoming classics. It’ll be worth it in the long run.”

Nice guy, and an infectious enthusiasm, but he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Oh, I know he’s right, but classic cars are holes in the road you pour your money into. They take all your love and patience, and repay it with an ever more temperamental drift into old age and irritability. But for a short while at least, heaven for me has been a little blue car with a roof you can fold down, and a twist of dales country road warming to dust, under a hot summer sun.

 

 

 

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Waiting

Above the town a patch of green,
Shoulders aside the black brick line,
Holding up the sky.
All sour grass and brambles,
And the russet crumbs,
Of dried fern,
Dotted with the pastel shades,
Of plastic,
Wrapping up
The still moist remains
Of long preserved dog turd.

And like impacted wisdom teeth,
Gone green with age,
Shy outcroppings of grit-stone
Rise from mud.
Their weathered flanks are raw
With the scratchings of passing blades,
Etched deep now by the acid
Of three hundred years
Of rain.
Quiet as ghosts, patient as death,
This patch of green,
Looks down upon the sprawl of man.
And waits its turn again.

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