If you’re in Liverpool tonight,…

On the Parsons Bullough road

As I draw a glass of tap water to take to bed this evening, I’m glad it comes from the Lake District, or I might be giving it a miss. I spent the day in the West Pennines, around the Anglezarke reservoirs. The water from Anglezarke doesn’t supply my area but passes it by, on the way to serving Liverpool. There were people swimming in it, in spite of orders not to, and no doubt urinating while they were at it. And then, at the lonely head of Dean Black Brook, which serves the Anglezarke catchment system, and miles from anywhere, I’d chanced upon the bloated corpse of a disposable baby’s nappy.

It’s indicative of the times and of a people with not the sense to avoid fouling their own nests. It’s also metaphorical in a greater sense, of the degradation of the world’s ecosystems, due to the self-interest of ignorants. I’m sure such impurities are neutralized at the treatment works,… and the people of Liverpool can rest easy tonight. I’m still glad my water comes from the Lakes though.

Other than that, it was a good day on the moors. Okay, my timing wasn’t great: a good forecast coinciding with a release from the stay-at-home order. But I was relieved to be walking somewhere other than from my doorstep, so plans were laid and an early start intended. But then my good lady reminded me it was Holy Week.

“It’s what?”

“All the kids are off,” she clarified.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

I was pleasantly surprised then to be the only one parking up at Parson’s Bullough. It was brutally early though, and I was confident it would be a different story in a few hours, so best get moving. The West Pennines have always been popular, but they’ve been gaining visitor numbers, especially during the furlough period with people travelling in from well outside the area, in spite of various stay at home orders. The stress is really beginning to show. Plenty of other areas are suffering the same, virtue of a small country with few wilderness areas left, and a large, mostly urban population, for many of whom even the basics of the countryside code is an unknown concept.

My preferred route up Hurst Hill, via the Pikestones is off the usual ways, and still in good condition, but from Hurst Hill to the Round Loaf, and on to the intersection with the path coming off Great Hill, there’s clearly been a lot of traffic, including bikes which have no business there. The bikes are cutting deep wounds through the sphagnum and the sedge, so the peat bleeds out. And there’s litter, even in the remotest parts. That nappy at the headwaters of Dean Black Brook was a case in point. Full marks for getting so young a child up there, but could you not have taken its doings home?

The Pikestones – remains of a chambered burial mound

Anyway, having said that, I’d left my sit-mat at the Pikestones – I’ve lost a few like that – which is its own kind of littering I suppose, and I apologize for my gormlessness. If you find it, consider it a gift – it’s quite a comfy one. If you’d rather not, I’m sure I’ll be back up that way when the Easter madness is over to collect it.

From Great Hill, I took the long, lovely route over Spitlers and Redmond’s edge. This is moorland walking at its best, climbing to just shy of 1300 feet. The views east and west are always spectacular, but particularly gorgeous this morning in the de-saturated spring light – a clear blue sky over varying shades of khaki and russet, and all criss-crossed by tumbled down lines of drystone walling.

On Spitler’s Edge

In the olden days, this route was barely passable because of erosion, but conservation efforts have restored it, basically laying flagstones end to end, all the way to Will Narr. They focus the footsteps to a narrow, meandering line, bridging the peat hags, and sparing disturbance to vegetation and wildlife. There was a lot of traffic on this section today, it being a popular route up Great Hill from the Belmont road. Most of the groups I met were covid-polite, exchanging the usual courtesies. Others were less so, and there were loose dogs, some of them big and troublesome, whose owners seem not to understand every passing stranger doesn’t want to make friends with their animal.

I was once caught in a storm up this way – big hailstones driven horizontally like cannon fire in a gale force wind. My thoughts at the time were: I cannot possibly die in the West Pennines, it being home ground – Striding Edge maybe, or the Hall’s Fell ridge, there’d be some glory in that, but not here. I ducked for shelter into a timely peat hag, and waited it out.

There were more difficulties on the path around the Hempshaws ruins, a mixture of heavy rain, massed footfall and bikes again, where there should be no bikes. There are many ruined farms on the moors hereabouts, abandoned in the 1920’s and 30’s, their remains shelled for practice during the second world war. I think Higher Hempshaws is one of the most picturesque – an emotive ruin, and still a pair of gritstone windows to frame the moor. This was the main objective of the day, though a long way round to get at it, and I spent a bit of time there with lunch and photography.

Higher Hempshaws ruin

The route back was along the broad farm-track to Lead Mine’s clough. I remember being upset when they curt this through, in the 80’s as a service road for the plantations. But I’m glad for it now, as a fast and firm route across the moor. I met several people on it, skimpily attired in shorts and tee-shirts, while I ambled along in several layers and a hat. It had been cool up on the edges, but at this lower altitude the day was definitely warming.

“Can we get round to the top of Lead Mine’s Valley this way?

A map would have told them, told them also of the difficulties in undertaking such an expedition. But they didn’t have one.

“Em, well, you can take the path over Standing Stones Hill, and swing round to the west a bit, but it’s trackless and needs care.”

Looks clueless: “Which one’s Standing Stones Hill then?”

Points: “Em, that one. Rough going though. Really rough, and likely to be boggy.”

“Oh, we’ll be fine.”

The lady and her little dog looked done in. The guy would be carrying them both soon. An off-piste jaunt over tussock grass was not a good idea, but it was hardly my place to say so. I trust they’d the sense to turn back when the going got tough.

On my return, I could barely find the car. There were vehicles everywhere, youths cackling as they swigged lager, and there were people in wetsuits climbing out of the Yarrow Reservoir. The Yarrow is so deep, it gives me nightmares just thinking about it, and I swear there’s a dragon lives at the bottom.

Just your typical mid-week Holy Week in the West Pennines then? There was a time when it was only like this on Bank Holidays and you could more easily calculate to avoid them. Now it’s like this all the time. Still, I had a good walk, and a welcome change of scene, covered around seven miles and a thousand feet of ascent. But as always, the stress on the moors pains me. And of course it’s Easter weekend coming up, so they’ll soon be on fire again. It’s what we do. We foul our nest, and set fire to it, be it Anglezarke moor, or planet earth, instead of thinking: we really need to look after this, because it’s all we’ve got, and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

On second thoughts, if you’re in Liverpool tonight, I’d get some beer in, and avoid the tap-water.

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On my bookshelf – books about dreaming and time

It was reading the psychoanalysts that introduced me to the interpretation of dreams. But I also read Dunne’s “Experiment with Time“, which said if you make a note of your dreams for long enough you’ll dream of things you’ll later encounter in waking life, like a premonition. If I’m being honest with myself then, it was more on account of Dunne than the psychoanalysts I began a dream journal. I was looking for personal experience of something anomalous, something that would challenge the rationalizing ego, and grant credence to the possibility there was something beyond the face value of the material life.

And you know, Dunne was right. Time is not the straight line we think it is, or at least my own experiments along his lines – basically recording one’s dreams as diligently as possible – convinced me it was so. Sometimes we do dream of things that subsequently happen, as if the dreaming mind can borrow images from both our past, and our future. What do you do with that? Well, you think about it for a bit, then screw the lid back on, tight, because having established the fact there’s something wobbly about the way we view the world, something strange about our concept of time, you discover you’re not equipped to explain what it means and, in spite of his valiant efforts to the contrary, throughout several subsequent books, neither was Dunne. Then I read Priestly’s “Man and Time” which covered some of the same ground as Dunne, though without the analytical ambitions. Priestly, the artist and playwright, was able to look differently on the results than Dunne, who was a scientist and an engineer. He was able to say (and I paraphrase): “yes, it’s a rum one this, and we’ll likely never get to the bottom of it. Best just to go with it then, and don’t worry about solving all the equations.”

So, instead I turned back to the psychoanalysts and tried interpreting dreams. This is something of a hit-and-miss affair. Plus, those psychoanalysts will throw you deep into symbolism and mythology, stuff you’ve never heard of, nor will you ever discover in a lifetime, and I worry if you think long and hard enough there’s a danger you’ll read something into nothing. Personally, I’d rather the dreams spoke in a language tailored to one’s own ability, otherwise what’s the use? Sometimes they do just that, but mostly they don’t.

So while it is indeed possible to glean some insights from our nightly adventures in dreams, I reckon it’s best to simply let the dreams be. By this I mean, don’t try to dismantle them and examine the pieces. James Hillman’s book “The Dream and the Underworld” says something along those lines and discourages any particular practice in following dreams, other than, well, just following them. Sometimes you’ll get a definite “Aha!”, but overall the impression is that the dream has its own life, and we’re giving ourselves airs if we think its business is to interfere in our every waking step along the way.

I’m still in the habit of remembering dreams. Mostly though, I recall only fleeting glimpses. At one time I would have beaten myself up over that, worried I might have missed out on a vital insight, so the most valuable lesson there is to let them go their own way if they’re not for hanging around. I’ve a feeling we dream all the time anyway, night and day. Slip into an afternoon nap, and the dream-life is right there again to pick you up and carry you along in its surreal flow. It’s like a soap opera, no matter how many episodes you miss, you can jump back in anywhere and pick up the threads. Dreaming is one half of our natural state of being, but mostly I’ve no idea what the other guy is up to in there. Sometimes our paths will cross though, and then the one world mirrors the other in ways that mean something.

There’s a school of psychology which holds our brains to be computers made of meat, that we are nothing but biological machines, that dreams are junk, and we shouldn’t bother our waking consciousness with them. But I suspect those who say such things don’t dream very well, or very deeply. Anyone who’s had a big dream and been moved by it knows that, while they cannot always be understood, dreams are certainly not junk. And sometimes, yes, they’ll trip you up with hints of the non linearity of time. And maybe you wished you’d not seen that, because in fact it’s easier to go on believing we are indeed just biological machines with an end-by date, that time is a straight line, and that there’s nothing more to the world than a swirling bag of dust and a black void at the end of it.

True, most of the time that’s the way it looks, and you wonder at the point of plodding on. Then you have a big dream, and you wake up knowing that’s not the way things are at all, and you’d better keep going because there’s a bigger picture here, and while you might not understand it, you’re a part of it, and you don’t want to let the team down by giving up on it. Like Dunne discovered, you’ll never explain it, because we’ve not the language, neither mathematically, nor philosophically. Yet, like Priestly tells us, it adds another dimension to the world, if we’re only prepared to think on it without a view to explaining anything, and rather just accepting that things may just be so. And if we can do that, it’s like opening a door without wondering how the lock and hinges work.

As for what’s on the other side, well that’s more a sense of being, than a way of thinking.

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The stories told by trees

Lone tree in a puddle

I don’t know what sort of tree this is. I’ll have to wait until it’s in leaf for a clue. I see it once a week or so on my rambles across the plane, as I continue hiding out from Covid, so I’ll get to know it in all its seasons. While it wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, it has the distinction here of being alone, so it can be more expressive. It’s also a valuable way-marker through the confusion of drainage channels and boggy potato fields that make up this part of the world. And to top it all, there’s this puddle, shaped just right, that reflects it. I think it tells a lonely story.

There’s a school of thought among photographers that scorns the use of filters. They don’t like fancy post-processing techniques either. You should tell it like it is, they say. A skilled photographer doesn’t need software to make an impact. A skilled photographer reads the light, squeezes the shutter and bang. There’s your dinner! And fair enough, if that’s your thing. But there’s also a school of thought that says no two people will see a scene the same way. We always overlay it with our mood, with our imagination. The camera sees things one way, and we see it another. And if we want to bring what the camera sees closer to how we saw it, we use whatever pre and post-processing techniques there are to achieve that.

So, I shot this five times in rapid succession. The first image is correctly exposed, the others are under and overexposed to varying degrees. The underexposed ones exaggerate the texture of the sky. The overexposed ones bring the details out of the shadows. Then I used some free, open-source software on the computer called Luminance HDR. This overlays the images and lines them up for you, then adds some tone-mapping to bring out detail and colour. It also changes the mood of the scene, depending on the tone-mapping algorithm you use. This one is Mantiuk ’06. It adds a bit of noise, which I didn’t like at first, but now I do. Then I use RawTherapee, another free open sourced tool for cropping and fine-tuning. RawTherapee also seems to convert images well for displaying on a screen.

Bleak and wind-blasted. That’s how the scene appeared to me this weekend. A single, normally exposed, shot told a different story, but Luminance seemed to reach in and pull out that ragged lonesomeness for me, one that struck a chord with the times.

Given the turmoil at home and abroad, I should perhaps be paying more attention to current affairs than gawping at trees. But these days trees make more sense. To an old left-libertarian like me there’s much about our direction of travel that pains me. As a pragmatist though, I’m persuaded there’s not much we can do about it while the Zeitgeist is pointing so firmly in the other direction – meaning right-authoritarian. But since I’ve drifted onto the subject, are we English really expected to wrap ourselves in the Union Jack at a time when the Union has never been more precarious? Are we really to play the patriotic card at a time of spiralling food-bank use, a time when even cripplingly long hours of work are no guarantee of avoiding poverty? Are we to pretend that’s okay, a good example to trumpet on the world’s stage? And all that was before Covid, of course, and a response that has left so many dead, yet so many well-connected types in serious profit. I think my nameless wind-blasted tree, reflected in a muddy puddle, has more to say about where we are right now. Anyone wrapping themselves in the flag at a time like this is using a strange kind of reality-bending optic, and certainly one that stretches this photographer’s credulity way beyond reason.

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More than space for rich men’s horses

There are stronger hints of spring, now. I see buds on the hedgerows ripe for opening, where they’re touched by the sun, and I catch the first pungent whiffs of allium along the riverbank. The river’s high and swift today, after rains. We’ve had two incidents of people falling in trying to rescue their dogs. This would be comical were it not potentially so serious. The first occasion I was on hand to help. The second was more difficult and involved the police, fire and ambulance services. Today is not a day for falling into the river, and I hope the dog-people, of whom there are many this afternoon, are mindful of that.

The meadows are slippery under an inch of water and make for heavy going. Approaches to the stiles and kissing-gates, which always seem so mysteriously attractive to cows, are trodden by the press of their hooves into a gloopy commando assault-course. My peregrinations have boiled down to two loops from the home village, now, both around five miles. We’re heading east today, up-river towards Eccleston. I have the camera, but I’ll take some persuading to get it out, because by now I’ve shot this walk to death. It’s a sunny afternoon, but I’m finding such days uninteresting now – photographically, I mean – a stinging, bright, squinting sun, and all the colours washed out. Strange to say, but I’m favouring a bit of cloud to add texture.

It’s funny how the footpath signs disappear. They’re obviously very fragile things. There’s often no more than tattered remnants left clinging to a gate or to a post to prove there was ever a right of way this way at all. Sometimes the post has disappeared as well, or you’ll come across it overthrown and tangled deep in the hedgerow. The council needs to make them of stronger stuff. I’m thinking of what the sportsmen must make their “Private fishing” signs from. The landed’s “no trespassing” signs too, seem to last forever – rude, officious and imperishable. I liken them to ruddy-faced farmers, legs astride as if to present their phallic authority over the land. The farmer has a shotgun in the crook of his arm. His steel toe-capped boot, encrusted with cow-shit, is swinging for my arse,…

Sorry, I digress. That was a long time ago. But such things, encountered in childhood, colour one’s outlook to land and one’s rights of access to it.

“F&%k off my land.”

“I’m not interested in traipsing your land willy-nilly, Mr Farmer. Indeed, I have better things to do, and would rather avoid this abominable scrap heap of a farm-yard if you would but kindly direct me safely through it. Also, I’ll walk my path as a mark of my diminishing freedoms. Interfere with that, and you’ll bring a war of ramblers down on your head.”

They are a precious thing, those green pecked lines on the Ordnance Survey 1:25000 maps. They are a fine Irish lacework of exploration, of fresh perspectives. And they are the gateway to a secret. Let me whisper it: they put you back in touch with the soul of the world. If you want to know a place, to feel it, you seek out the green pecked lines. You will never know a place from the roadside or through the windows of a car. You have to walk the paths that thread among the trees and the meadows. But sometimes the landed take those paths, your paths, and use the anvil of the law to straighten them out, to redirect them away from their properties. They channel them between high fences, between barbed wire and electric shocks. They keep to the letter of the law by right of way, but rob entirely the deeper meaning of the footpath network. They deny you your right to soul.

I have a path like that at the back of my house, once a meandering smudge through buttercups, across a pair of sleepy meadows. At certain times, you’d get a moonrise between a gap in the trees and on some nights, misty nights, say, that was a real jaw-dropper. Then the money came and bought the meadows for their horses. The path is now a pointless ginnel between squared up paddocks. It is an A to B of nothingness and all between destroyed. Money buys you space and the means to keep horses, but it clearly does not restore the sight of those who are already blind.

I find the “private fishing” signs along the river here an affront to decency. Big and white, they shout their possession, contaminate the scene, and ruin the photograph. I mean FFS, is there a problem with people fishing along here and not paying their dues? It seems odd to me. It would be pleasant to rummage along the river bank, see what’s about: Water-vole? Heron? I’m told there are salmon in the river now. But are there kingfisher? Alas, I am forbidden from casual investigation. I must stick to the path, and not linger too long in case my tardiness be misinterpreted as an encampment. Is it really true trespass is soon to be a criminal offence now? Will then the cops be swooping if I stray from the path? How long a stretch will it be for affronting the landed with my bootprints?

In my novel, the Singing Loch, it was in the wilder places the protagonists touched the soul of the world. It was the thing that gave life meaning. Without it everything else turned grey, like ash. The genesis of that novel lies thirty years in the past, in the emotions aroused by a book by Marion Shoard. Its sentiments still inform my philosophy. Around every town or village there’s a ring of dog turds, about a quarter mile out from the last house. Within that ring, all is tired and grey, void of any vestige of the world-soul. It’s trampled out, like the land around those stiles and kissing gates by the heels of cows. You’ve got to get beyond that ring, into the quiet zone, and among the shy creatures, before you can hear the earth breathe again. The footpath network will take you there, it will reconnect you.

Maybe that’s it then. The landed would rather you didn’t discover this secret for yourselves, and that’s why they hide the footpath signs. That’s why they tear them down (I can think of no other reason). They don’t want you waking up from your slavery. After all, who else is going to pay for their luxury, and the oats for their horses?

Ooh, it’s been a long time since I had a pop at the toffs. I quite enjoyed that. Forgive me such indulgence. Anyway,…

I brought back just the one picture. It was a blaze of late afternoon sunlight, and long shadows thrown by a tight little trio of trees. They spoke to me, in that instant, of the river, and the wind and of past rains. But I couldn’t capture it. Even with five brackets overlaid and through a Leica lens, it was a near-white-out barely rescued by post-processing trickery.

I don’t know how much longer we’ll be obliged to stay at home, stay local. But we’d all do well to get out those maps, study our local footpath network, and discover its secrets. There’s more to our land than space for rich men’s horses. Go find it.

Goodnight all.

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The AstraZeneca vaccine

The woman in the queue ahead of me was clearly glad to be out of the house. “What a pleasure,” she said, “to be out and to see other people”.

I’d followed her into the sport’s hall at Edge Hill University where they were dishing out the vaccinations. The receptionist said I’d timed it well – it being so quiet – that there’d been huge queues first thing. The chap who gave me my dose looked young enough to have still been in school uniform, but that’s because I’m sixty and still think I’m twenty-five. He asked me if the AstraZeneca was okay, as that’s what they were issuing today – like I had much choice in the matter, the only choice being this or nothing. I joked that I was happy to have anything that was going, and I meant it. All the same, I was thinking: that’s the one that makes you ill, isn’t it?

While he stuck it in, my eye caught the waste bucket, full of spent shots. They’d definitely had a busy morning. We had to be turning a corner with this now. It had been such a grim year, a hundred and twenty-five thousand deaths to date. And now here we were, the National Health Service, forever under-funded and fighting off the wolves of privatization, was doggedly hauling us out of the mire, one shot at a time.

She was right, the woman. It was a pleasure to be out, seeing other people – all be they few, well spread out and masked. There was pleasure in the polite exchanges, the small-talk, in the occasional joke. It was like there was an energy, long contained that wanted to be social again.

The drive over had been strange. Shops in Burscough and Ormskirk were all closed. It was like a Sunday, yet the traffic through both towns was as heavy as I can ever recall it being. I didn’t get it. Where was everyone going? I was nervous in traffic, and I’m going to have to watch that. I’m not getting out enough. I’ve always hated town driving, but these towns are familiar and have never intimidated me before. The world seems to have been growing faster in my absence, or at least Covid hasn’t slowed it down much.

I see the world changing actually, becoming accessible only to those who, all along, have had the self-confidence to flout restrictions. Those who did not, those who have stuck to the rules and stayed at home, like me, hunkered down and ordered all their shopping online, risk finding everything in the future, even a trip to the supermarket, a struggle with their nerves.

As for the jab, the instruction leaflet assured me only one in ten people suffer any side effects at all. This sounded optimistic, since of the five people I know who’ve had the AstraZeneca, all were ill. So, I beg to suggest there’s something off with the stats on that one. Sure enough, it took me about eight hours for the onset of flu-like symptoms, and I was out of action until tea time the following day, so I’m not exactly looking forward to the booster. But then a day of mild symptoms is better than dying of Covid. Plus, if it improves the chances of us all getting out again over the Summer, I’ll take as many shots of it as the Health Service tells me to.

On the way home, coming out of Ormskirk, I got lost. There’s a place in town where the lanes split and if you miss it, you’re off to Southport, instead of Preston, which is the direction I needed to be in. Sure enough, I got muddled and found myself on the way to Southport instead. But the sun was shining, and it was good to be out more than a couple of miles from home. I wasn’t sure if the old zoned Covid boundaries still applied – which would have put Southport still out of bounds for me – or if they’d been dissolved with the latest stay at home order which puts everywhere out of bounds, except for those who don’t bother with the rules.

A drive down Southport’s sea front would have been just the thing. I might even have caught the tide in – it being the right time of month. To have seen the sea and the sun shining upon it would have been a real tonic! But no, the guy who gave me my shot that morning, and the vast, publicly funded organization behind him, were playing a big part in getting us all out of this mess. My part was much smaller, simpler: Stay at home. So, I sheered off at Scarisbrick, threaded the car along the little lanes that cross the wind-blasted Lancashire plain, back towards home, and to await the onset of side effects.

Maybe I’d be lucky, and get away with it.

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The Pall Mall Treasure Trove

I wish I could remember the name of that camera shop on Pall Mall. That’s Pall Mall in Chorley, not the more famous Pall Mall, in London. It’s forty years since it closed, but I can still hear the sound of the doorbell as I enter, feel the hollow ring of the place, the scent of it, see the weird photographic contraptions on the shelves: the bellows, the enlargers, the developing kits. The guy rises to meet me, suit and tie, yellow fingers from the nicotine. He knew cameras, lived and breathed them, and he didn’t mind sharing his knowledge, even with the pocket-money teenager I was then, and who could barely afford the price of film.

My father was a frequent customer. He bought second hand equipment: cameras, developing tanks. I remember ancient box enlargers too, with fixed focal lengths and grubby lenses. The stuff was always dusty, and smelled of the cigarettes of past owners. By the time it fell into my father’s hands, it was next to junk. But he’d bring it home with a gleam in his eye, like one who had discovered treasure and was eager to share it. Thus equipped, through the haze of an already bygone era, we learned the rudiments of developing film. That’s no small feat when you’re living in a small semi, without the luxury of a dark-room. Needless to say, we improvised a lot.

Our rewards were few, but precious all the same – soft images that took ages to tease out, and which would all too often fade back into the paper again for want of fixative. I couldn’t help feeling the effort taught us little, only that we needed better kit.

I swore I would have a darkroom one day, a bees-knees enlarger, and bags of space to set out those trays of sweet smelling chemicals. But then the world changed, and I didn’t need any of it. You could do it all on your computer, even on your telephone. Nowadays, I lift the ‘phone and produce effortless images in seconds, enlarge or shrink with a swipe of the finger. I can post-process too, add any number of effects and have them beamed round the world for other eyes to see. He’d be ninety now, my father. I imagine him with an iPhone in his pocket – second hand of course – but still pushing the limits of what you could do with it.

I don’t know what we were searching for back then, what rich seam of enlightenment we’d hoped to strike. Was it something in the images we sought? But those images were like ghosts, and hard to bring out, to materialize. Or was it more about the technology, such as ours was then, I mean it being near Victorian, in an age of rockets? Sure, that might have been the thing. The world can be intimidating in its complexity if you think too wide and too deep about it. But if you can master one small part of it, you feel in some way something less than small. That’s the gist anyway. We never produced enough images to get into the mystery of them. That was another universe altogether.

My father’s best camera was an early Russian SLR, again from the dusty, cigarette scented shelves of that shop on Pall Mall. It had no doubt been cast off by a more well heeled amateur, who’d upgraded. The only mode it possessed was manual. There was no metering. We read the light with a hand-held selenium meter, and dialled it in, or more often we got a feel for what would work – aperture and shutter speed – and we trusted to luck.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But then a timely “follow” on the blog interrupts the flow of my thoughts, and promises I can: “acquire abundance of wealth, and confidence.” Also: “Happiness, and can address change smartly, what many would observe as impossible.“

This is no small claim, and bears closer scrutiny.

It goes on to tell me I can: “Feel, act and live happy, because happiness is the objective of everyone’s life.”

Well okay, feel act and live happy. Nothing wrong with that, but as an aim itself it’s somewhat simplistic, and a common enough trap for the unwary, though useful for the vendors if they can harness it to the cause of commerce at our expense. Still, I’m grateful for the interruption, for my reaction points me in the right direction, closes the arc, so to speak, and we have our conclusion.

I have some decent cameras now. But in using them, the aim, the drive hasn’t changed. It’s the same as when my father and I struggled developing film in the bathroom, half a century ago, a towel over the window and a safelight that took ages to fix up and take down again when the bathroom was required for more conventional purposes – often urgently and in the middle of timing an exposure. It’s about exploration, and the desire to understand a thing bigger than oneself, for such a thing serves as the surface proxy for another kind of quest, something archetypal, something transcendent, and internal. I glimpse it now and then in the images I’m taking, and more often by chance – the camera seeing something I do not. It’s an abundance of something, call it a wordless insight. We can reject it of course, seek instead our “health, wealth and happiness” in the material world, through material things, and become ever dissatisfied slaves to it. Or we can say yes please, more of that transcendent thing, and then the world becomes at once a place of magic, and much more the worthy objective of a man’s life.

Yes, it was a treasure trove my father shared, that dusty old kit from the camera shop on Pall Mall, but mostly it was his enthusiasm for the quest, and for the insight one could still pursue the transcendent through the symbolism of the mundane. He knew something of the nature of things, I think, and was kind enough, to pass it on.

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Short story: Happiness is,…

Photo by Rachel Claire on Pexels.com

Working from home had never suited Jed. Okay, he’d always hated the commute to the office, especially over winter. But now, since the great switch, he missed the companionship of others. He also hated the intrusion of his employer’s virtual presence into his flat. Then there was his employer’s theft of his electricity, his heating, his lighting and his Internet. And for what? Every day he beamed his face into team-space for the sake of listening to the same dreary wombats droning on in meetings he was unable to avoid. And while he listened with one ear cocked for his name, and an invitation to make some banal contribution, he’d try to keep up with the avalanche of emails, so he could still clock off at a decent time. It was an absurd way to live.

Mondays were the worst. It was as if people saved everything up until the end of the week, then waited for him to log off before launching stuff at him. He was sure some even stayed up to the small hours with trivial queries they’d send with a time stamp aimed only at impressing the line manager, whom they’d copied in for no other reason. And come Monday he would open up and be buried in this meaningless dross.

If Jed took a week off, or worse, a fortnight for the summer, it might be several days before he caught up. There were hundreds and hundreds of emails, every day, and most were about nothing. But all required an eyeball for the small number that actually need a response. For years now, he’d felt like he was drowning.
So, he was in no particular hurry to log on this morning, to see what the cat had dragged in over the weekend. He was anxious about it, actually, even retching a little in the bathroom as he’d cleaned his teeth. Still, he’d better get to it. There were debits to pay, and he’d lose money for every minute he was late logging on. Late three times in a row, and he’d lose an entire week’s pay.

This morning though, the machine wouldn’t let him in. It took his password, did the usual security scan, taking pictures of his morning-bleary face to confirm his ID, then booted him out. He’d always passed facials before, but this morning something had changed.

“You’re displaying signs of unhappiness,” said the machine.

“I’m what?”

“All employees must show evidence of positive energy, before entering the system.”

“When did this come in? What evidence?”

He regretted the question. The machine recorded all his conversations, all his mails, for analysis. It would go against him that he’d missed, or more likely deleted, that particular email.

“Lack of a happy smile indicates you are low in spirit,” explained the machine. “You will contaminate the stated company ethos of maintaining a powerful and spirited enthusiasm. You will quarantine while you adjust your attitude. Please cheer up, and try again tomorrow.”

There was nothing he could do. That was a day’s pay gone, and all because he couldn’t muster up a smile when he logged on. Anyway the machine was right. He wasn’t happy. His wife had left him and his dog had died, and he hated his foolish job, answering emails about emails all day. How could anyone be happy about that? How could anyone summon up the required powerful, spirited enthusiasm, unless they were insane? It wasn’t enough the whole world was now operating at this same level of lobotomized enslavement to shovelling bullshit, everyone had to be happy about it as well.

He decided to use his day off to good effect, and to relax, then he’d be in better spirits for logging on tomorrow. So he took a walk in the fresh air. Then he made himself a proper dinner, and practised smiling in the mirror before he went to bed. He practised some more when he got up in the morning, before he logged on. But still, the machine would not let him in.

“Your smile is not genuine,” it said. “It suggests deception. Be warned this is not a positive attitude to adopt, and will count against your employee rating. You will remain in quarantine. Please try again tomorrow.”

There was no way around it. That was one pernickety machine.

Jed wasn’t sure what to do now. It seemed his unhappiness was finally getting the better of him. What puzzled him though was how everyone else had managed to pass the happiness test. Were they right now beaming their positive energies into their emails? But he’d rather got the impression everyone else was as unhappy as him. Could it be they were that bit better at hiding it? And if so, what was their secret?

It struck him, of course, as the days passed, the emails would be piling up, and he couldn’t get at them. Even when he managed to log in, it would be terrible. He would be drowning in them for days and days. Feeling very depressed now, Jed went to the pub. There he met Chris, a former colleague, occasional drinking buddy and barfly sage.

“Hey Jed, why so glum?”

“Don’t you start,” said Jed. “They’ve got this new fangled facial scanner at work. It can tell when you’re unhappy, and it won’t let you log in.”

“Can’t you fake it, like everyone else?”

“Tried that. It didn’t work. At this rate I’m going to be broke.”

“Don’t worry,” said Chris. “I’ve heard of this face reading stuff before. It’s creepy, mate, but it’s not infallible. You need a bit of coaching, that’s all.”

“Coaching?”

“How to pretend you’re happy, when you’re not.”

“But why should I have to go around pretending? I do my job as well as anybody else. Now they’re demanding I smile while I’m at it? I mean it’s just not dignified, is it?”

“It’s a fad,” said Chris. “You know what these big corporate management types are like. They’ll try any shiny whizz-bang thing to impress the shareholders. It also helps if it’ll subjugate the minions. Why do you think I quit?

Because you inherited a fortune from your dad, thought Jed. And we can’t all be so lucky as that.

Chris went on: “Everybody in work these days lies.” he said. “No one says what they really think, or they’d not last a day. The high-fliers in a system like that are the ones who are best at pretending they believe in this positive vibe stuff. Right? Including to themselves. So, tell me,… when was the last time you were happy?”

“Dunno.”

“Oh, come on. Think back. How about when you were a kid?”

An image came to Jed of walking along a beach as a little boy. He could feel the softness of the sand underfoot, and the sparkling cool of the sea as it washed over his toes. It was the first day of his summer holiday, and it had felt like it would go on for ever. There was no sinking feeling at the thought of an email in-box waiting on his return. There was no thought for all the emails wanting to know when he would be responding to his emails, about his emails,… about his emails. Yes, he’d been happy then.

“There you go,” said Chris. “Now you’re smiling. So think of that same thing when you’re logging on tomorrow, and you’ll be just fine, mate.”

Jed was impressed. Chris had always struck him as a bit of an intemperate jerk, but on this occasion he’d nailed it. So the following morning he closed his eyes and summoned up that same image from boyhood. He focused on it until he swore he could feel the pleasure of it tingling throughout his whole being. Then he logged in. But the machine wasn’t fooled.

“Please try again tomorrow,” it said.

Three days now without pay. That meant he’d nothing clear after rent, and he’d need to cut back on some essentials, skip a meal or two. He rang the doctor, thinking to get some happy pills, but he couldn’t get an appointment for weeks. Then a text came through on his phone. It was someone from HR reminding him he’d missed three logins. If he missed another two, he’d be fired as per the terms and conditions of employment he could remember neither reading nor signing.

He looked around him and felt the walls closing in. His flat was rented. His car was rented. Everything he owned, including his phone and even the apps on his phone were all in some way owned by someone else. He merely leased them, rented them, paid subs on them. And if he should ever stop, then everything, his whole material life disappeared. Exactly what did he own, other than the clothes on his back? Wait a minute. Even they were rented now! Was he to go naked into the world and starve?

There had to be a way to turn this around. He had to try harder, focus more on that scene from the beach. He had to focus all day and all night if need be – focus until he was as good as there. But as he focused, he realized, lurking in the background, there had been an imperfection. He’d been ten years old, and innocent, but there’d still been something hanging over him. He would be moving up to big school in September, and the thought had terrified him. He’d been hiding from this fear under cover of that long summer holiday. But it had still been there and, in the weeks to come, it would begin to gnaw away at the seeming perfection of his happiness. He needed to find another memory, one without such a fatal flaw. There had to be something.

What about love? He ran through all his past girlfriends, but discovered love did not cut it at all. With the joy of love there was always the attendant potential of the loss of the other’s affection. Love had always been a striving emotion, never the true, settled perfection of its promise.

What about when United won the Championship then? He’d floated on that for a while. But again there was the accompanying thought about how well they would kick off next season. Always then there was this potential for loss, for the sun to set on one’s joy. As he flicked his way through all the moments of his life, he realized it was never possible to actually be happy for anything other than fleeting moments. Indeed, it was foolish to make happiness the aim of your life. Happiness was both the balloon, and the knowledge the balloon was inflating itself against the sharpness of life, a sharpness that might rupture one’s joy at any moment. More, it was necessary to realize it, he thought, to accept it, and be strong in the face of it. Otherwise, you would always be a slave.

This thought, coming to him in the small hours, after a long meditation, felt like the revelation he needed. He’d been trying too hard. He had to be more neutral in his approach to life and to work. He had to be, if not exactly indifferent to life’s potential for happiness, then at least sanguine over the potential of its loss. As for maintaining a happy, powerfully spirited attitude for even a single working day,.. well that was impossible.

Feeing philosophical and relaxed now, he slept a little, woke early and logged in. The machine scanned his face, analysed it for longer than usual, searching among the millions of facial templates to find the one that matched Jed’s, and which might describe it. The machine failed, then booted him out with the default claim he was not showing enough positive energy. He risked contaminating the organizational ethos with his “unknown” demeanour. So, he was to remain in quarantine until his attitude improved, until he could show the right spirit.

“Please try again tomorrow.”

By now though, Jed was less preoccupied by his lack of success at logging into the damned machine as by the changes he could feel going on within himself. The walls of his flat moved out again. Their colours grew pale, then transparent as they dissolved, and he felt an overwhelming sense of release. The next morning, he logged in without a thought and the machine scanned his face. It thought about it for a long time, then came back with an opaque error message, but let him in anyway. He opened up his inbox, but it was empty, and no faces appeared in the usual team-call. Across entire continents, servers were humming to destruction, eating their own code.

Jed had broken the machine.

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