Reflections on Covid, and the prelude to nuclear war.

On reflection, the Covid years haven’t bothered me much. I worked through the first year, which helped retain some semblance of normality. The second year, I retired into it, and the restrictions were irksome for a time, but the local area provided sufficient diversion as things eased, and I’ve enjoyed walking, exploring Bowland and the Dales with the camera. Covid’s still around, of course, but that story has moved on, and no one’s really talking about it any more.

There are some who haven’t been so lucky. Even if you’ve avoided catching it, certain types have been plunged by fear of Covid, and by media reporting of it into an anxiety-induced agoraphobia. While others are out shopping and pubbing, the anxious ones are still shirking company. Supermarkets, pubs, and restaurants, are still a long way away off for them. We, who are inching ourselves back into some semblance of normality, need to be mindful of that.

I’ve not been without a touch of neuroticism over Covid myself. I remember now I helped pull a woman from the river, after she’d fallen in. She was freezing cold, and really struggling to get out, and I had to get a good grip, so to speak, all of which was against the very strict rules on personal contact with strangers at the time. I worried about that for days afterwards, worried about the health of the others I’d involved in the rescue, all this while it later transpired our leaders were having “bring your own booze parties”. I feel terribly foolish that I even thought about it, now.

While we hear much less about Covid, other things have rushed to fill the void. To whit, the mainstream media seem to be ratcheting up for war against a nuclear armed state. So I’m thinking about nuclear war, and it’s a long time since I did that.

I remember my father was with the Royal Observer Corps (ROC). They had a bunker up near Brindle, part of a network that covered the UK. They were there to monitor nuclear bursts, and levels of radiation. Coupled with the weather forecasts, the aim was to give HMG some element of planning around the ensuing catastrophe. He took me to see it once. Its weird concrete protuberances frightened me. It was like a ready-made grave for the duty team who would be incarcerated in it. The ROC was disbanded long before the end of the Cold War. There is no defence, no contingency, no survival, and it’s dangerous to suggest otherwise.

The bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively small, compared with the weapons we have now. It would take very few to reduce the UK to an uninhabitable wasteland. We seem to have forgotten this. The danger subsided for a time, but it’s growing again, and we need to resist the media of usual suspects and their crass headlines, with a different, and more nuanced narrative. In such febrile times, the last thing we need is the equivalent of a banal Twitter spat pushing things over the edge.

But since there is nothing I can do about it, I tell myself to chill out, to read novels, watch movies – preferably without guns, or bombs, or ‘f’ words in them – and to dream dreams, as if there was no suffering in the world. Of course, there is immense suffering, but, in the long ago, we were aware of only manageable doses of it. Now we drown in it. It pours from our devices with every bleeping notification – an endless symphony of sorrowful songs, and the human psyche is only capable of so much compassion before we lose our minds.

I saw a recent interview with the former general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbchev. He spoke of the urgency of nuclear disarmament, because he says the kind of people willing to use them are still around. It was a sobering analysis. We came ever so close, during the Cuban missile crisis. It was only doubt in the mind of one Soviet officer, and his persuasiveness, that prevented the commander of his submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo against a US warship. They thought they were under attack, that world war three had started, and they should let loose Armageddon. But it was a misunderstanding, a hair’s breadth thing, so the story goes. But in a parallel dimension, the decision went the other way, and the earth is a barren cinder.

The west has been living in a blip of relative peace and security, perhaps since the later 1980s, since Gorbachev’s glasnost, and the formal ending of the Cold War. Since then, there have been good times, boom times. We have tanned our skins on the beaches of credit-card opulence, driven our SUVs with attitude up the rear end of those we see as lesser beings. But there is something in us also that seeks the periodic red-mist of war. I remember the newspapers egging on the invasion of Iraq. It seemed an easy thing to do and, given the might of the forces unleashed, it was. What came next was the disaster so many humanitarians predicted.

Thus, I pine for a more sober approach to our present predicament, for a wiser take on the inflammatory headlines of the media with its calls for even more dogs of war to be let loose than are already in the running. As if by way of reply, my phone pings with news, of today’s horrors, and what are we going to do about it? Phones were so much better in the olden days, when all you could do with them was ring people up and say hello.

We should limit our intake, do you think? Impossible, you might say. But there’s only so much we can stand. At the very least we should not be so browbeaten we are ashamed to sing, dance, and make merry, or at least switch off and read some lighter material. It does not make us bad people. What’s more important is we remain level-headed, that we might then see through the fog, as far as we possibly can, that we make sure the wasteland of our world remains in another dimension of space and time, and is never visited upon this one.

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Go ask it of the tree

Tree and puddle

The lady in the pharmacy is upset. Her mother is ill, and struggling to get her medication. The lady wants to know if the pharmacy can arrange for her mother’s prescription to be delivered. Normally, yes, this can be arranged, but the prescription needs to be signed off by the doctor. But the lady explains, in a tone of rising desperation, that she is unable to get through to the doctor by telephone, that she has been ringing the surgery for hours to no avail. I had heard appointments were difficult to come by. Now it’s impossible even to get the surgery to answer the telephone. The pharmacist cannot help, but, unlike the doctor, she is at least available to speak to and, sadly, to field the invective she does not deserve. The lady leaves with her life still in crisis.

My own quest involves the search for Lateral Flow Tests. Last year you could order these things online, and they would be delivered, or you could walk into a pharmacy and pick up a week’s supply. Now, official online kits are as hard to come by as the proverbial manure of rocking horses, and before you can get one from a pharmacy, you needed a code from the official website. I have the code, but the pharmacist has no kits.

“We’ll get a small delivery tomorrow morning,” she tells me. “But they’ll gone in an hour.”

Looks like an early get-up then, tomorrow. I do not need them for myself. My habits are once more reclusive; I no longer work, have no elderly relatives to support, and I can keep myself to myself. But my son is working for an employer who has decided the pandemic is over, that Covid is reduced to a sniffle, and “prefers” everyone return to the office. This is notwithstanding the fact hospitals in my area have declared states of emergency.

There is nothing to be done. The world is upset and things are broken. The newspapers report our formerly free lateral flow kits are now selling online for hundreds of pounds. I don’t know if this is true, or if it’s just the newspapers being newspapers, stirring things up for the clicks.

The last word from our leadership was characteristically laissez-faire, and seemed not to take account of the rising sense of crisis, or at least as it is felt in the pharmacy queues of greater England, and more specifically, Northern England. Muddle through is the motto, and fair enough, we’re good at that. After all, things could be worse; the world is not at war, and asteroids are not falling from the sky. But the waters we must muddle through are muddier of late, and it’s harder to see the depths ahead.

Still, the sun is shining. My boots have dried out from their soaking on Withnell moor. There is a tree, and a puddle on the plain I have not visited for a while. And while the built world, the world we have thought into being, shudders and grows less sure of itself, the natural world, in pockets at least, remains to provide a clearer reflection of our true nature. That said, the potato fields are sprouting rubber gloves and face masks these days. In the coming millennia, archaeologists will scan down to the level of this detritus, and use their findings to answer the questions of how well we coped with these particular pandemic years.

These too are the years before we solved the vexed problems of perpetual war. They are the years before we stopped burning fossil fuels, and discovered how to stuff the carbon dioxide and the methane back into the earth, the years before we found our more harmonious balance with nature, cleared the oceans of plastic rubbish, greened the cities, and rewilded the wilderness, turned back the earth from grey to green, and ended poverty. It was a miracle. And how did we manage such a thing, they’ll wonder, those future archaeologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, for things were not at all apparent from the evidence of our times, such as they are, and from the records we left behind, including those long archived newspaper reports of black marketeering in lateral flow test kits.

I shall have to go and ask it of the tree – how we did it, I mean – because I forget now. But trees have long memories, and it might just remember how we managed to squeak through to better times.

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Fifteen minutes

The UK National Health Service is severely stretched, and about to enter its second winter of Covid, with a new variant on the loose. You can’t get a face to face doctor’s appointment for love nor money, and you’re as well to avoid A+E, unless your life depends upon it. Covid is taking its toll in ways other than infection. That said, I was invited for my Covid booster at the weekend, and found the whole thing calm and well organised. The staff were friendly, and welcoming. I turned up a little before the allotted time, and got the jab straight away. Then I was asked to wait fifteen minutes before leaving, just in case of an adverse reaction. And while I waited, I got to thinking.

There was a big take-up, both with booked appointments and walk-ins. The nurse who saw me was in her sixties and had a manner that would have made light of any indignity she ever had to inflict on her patients. She was the epitome of the NHS: professional, friendly, and efficiently competent. There was also a sympathy about her that’s often nine tenths of healing. She was more than a nurse, then, she was your aunt, she was your mother, she was your sister.

We’re used to having the NHS around, and we expect it will last forever. Everyone benefits from the same level of top-notch care. We all chip in through our taxes, and then we all benefit. Those who can afford to pay little or nothing are looked after by those who can afford to pay more. I think it’s a good system. It’s civilised and decent. But there’s a class of economic fundamentalist who hates it, and would rather see it sucked into the toxic world of the global market-place, where the price is everything and human values are of no consequence.

I’m aware bits of it are already privately run. One of my local GP surgeries was recently bought out by a “for-profit” global brand. They bid to provide services for the NHS and, through the NHS, and our taxes, make vast sums of money for people we’ve never heard of, instead of that money being ploughed back into care. The next phase, through the current Health and Social Care Bill, paves the way for an insurance based system, like they have in the United States. This is where the insurance companies dictate whether we get access to treatment. And in a system run for profit, it’s not in their interest to grant it.

All of this seems unthinkable, but then, until recently, it was unthinkable we would ever have food-banks in the UK, but now we do. We have them by the score, because the welfare system is no longer serving the people who need it, and wages are suppressed to a level well below what’s decent, so even people in work are having to use them. We’ve grown used to having foodbanks around, used to the fact there are more and more of them. That’s just the way it is, we say.

I guess it’ll be the same with the NHS. Though it’s hard to imagine it, one day, all of this will be gone. The ambulance man will turn up to transfer your ailing, aged parent to hospital, and you’ll have to swipe your debit card before he lets you on board. He won’t want to do it. It’ll seem inhumane to him, but it’ll be the system, and he’ll have no choice, because he serves a master for whom care is no longer primary. And we’ll get used to it being that way, and we won’t complain about it.

Our healthcare will be tiered. The more we pay, the better care we get. If we can’t pay anything, we get nothing. And if the insurance company finds a way of wheedling out of paying for your surgery, you’ll either have to sell your house to pay for it yourself, or go without. That kindly nurse? She’ll be gone too, replaced by a slave to tick-box managerialism. Global health brands will be running ads at us, talking about “choice”, and “excellence”, and the corporate drone-bots will be pinging you emails to “kindly rate your experience today”. And we’ll accept it all as being just the way it is, because that’s just the way we are. But is it really who we want to be?

My fifteen minutes are up, and just as well. I’m good to go.

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Keeping the shine

So, today is Monday. It’s cold and rainy. I’m ironing. I’m bleeding the radiators. I’m replying to a flurry of overnight comments on the blog. I’m pondering the next chapter of “A Lone Tree Falls”. Retirement is bliss, even on rainy days. Then the phone rings.

It’s a very well-spoken young man who’s concerned I’m missing out on loft insulation deals. I don’t quite get the angle, but anyway, he says my house has come up on his database as having a certain type of insulation. It doesn’t conform to the current regulations – tut tut – but not to worry. It means I can claim for,… well,… something,…

“If we could confirm your details, sir? Name, address, postcode?…“

Now, I know very well what type of insulation I have, because I’m the one who put it in. So what I want to know from him is how come he knows so much about it. I’m a little more assertive than I usually am, but there are issues of privacy at stake here:

“If I could stop you there and ask: exactly – and I do emphasise the word ‘exactly’ – how you came by that information?”

I surprise myself. I seem to be settling in for a crossing of wits here, when I could as easily hang up. That’s what I normally do, though with a polite “sorry, not interested”, thereby extending courtesy even to ne-er-do-wells whose aim is to raid my life savings. Did I get out of the wrong side of bed or something? Where is your patience, Michael? Where is your joy of living?

Anyway, the line goes dead before the young man can explain himself – a fault at his end, I presume. But never mind, all is in its place again. God is in his heaven, and the scammers are sweating the phones.

And I have more important things to be thinking about, such as November 3rd 2019. Why? Well, that’s the day I took this picture:

It was a Sunday, the first dry day, after weeks of heavy rain. The gentle undulations of the meadows had become lakes, and in the early light of that morning, they were as beautiful as they were unexpected. I don’t know why the picture strikes me now, as it has languished on the memory card for years. Perhaps it’s more the date, marking a time just before the time everything changed.

My diary fills in the details:

I had bought a new lens for the camera, and was trying it out with this shot. I had also bought “the Ministry of Utmost Happiness” by Arhundhati Roy, from my local thrift shop. I was lamenting how I’d probably never get around to reading it, that it would languish on my TBR pile, which turns out, thus far, to be true. My hall table was also full of leaflets extolling the virtues of the Labour-party. I was delivering them in batches, around my patch, for the local party office. It seems I too was caught up in the heady Corbynism of those distant times.

Then, the day after I took the picture, I sat down with my boss and took pleasure in giving him a year’s notice. Of a sudden, I tasted freedom. I was as excited by that as the thought of an imminent, and long needed, change of political direction. Yes, politics featured large in my thoughts in those days, which I find embarrasses me, now, because it doesn’t feature at all these days. In fact, quite the opposite, I find I view such matters with a very cold eye, or perhaps that too could be called political thinking? But let’s not go there.

Covid was not even a rumour in November. The first cases would appear in China in the coming weeks. But it would be March before Britain, after believing itself immune, would be on its knees. Suddenly, I could not travel even to the next village without fear of curtain twitchers dobbing me in. As for our health service, it proved to be so ill prepared, hobbyists were in their bedrooms, churning out face-masks for doctors and nurses on their 3D Printers.

But back to the photograph. I wasn’t overwhelmed by it at the time. Perhaps it was because events overtook us, and everything that came “before” seemed no longer relevant in the world. Then I tried a different crop, and it seemed to speak to me a little more.
I remember the season came on with a record-breaking wet. The year after was the same. The water table rose, filling the hollows, spoiling crops of winter wheat and oilseed. Migrant birds enjoyed their new-found wetlands. But then each spring, came a drought that baked the land, first to iron, and then to dust.

The photograph tells me the world was beautiful then, as of course it still is. But I detect also now a more deeply entrenched fatalism among its people. There is a growing acceptance of the ruin, and all the casual corruption, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. It just is. And, as if by metaphor, while once upon a time we could avoid those of low character by avoiding a particular part of town at night, now they come at us in our homes, down our telephone wires, wherever we are, and there’s no protection, other than our wits. But such a wit as that risks also tarnishing the spirit and rendering it blind to the beauty of the world. It will make us cynical, it will tempt us over the threshold into the hell of a collective nihilism. And then we are lost.

We need a powerful formula to keep the shine on things, and to keep believing it all means something. For myself, I trust it is sufficient never take our eye off the beauty of the world, never to let it be diminished in our souls, that therein lies the path to truly better days.

Now, please excuse me, the phone is ringing again. Perhaps it’s that young man with his explanation.

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A Wet Run to the Lakes

It’s two years since I was in the Lakes. Today doesn’t count, because I’m not walking; I’m delivering family to their hotel, so it’s more a kind of taxi service. Timings require a drop-off at 2:00 PM, which is late in the day to be arriving for anything recreational, so I have left the walking gear at home to make way for luggage. It’s a wet day, anyway, so no regrets. I’ll just turn around and come straight back.

Traffic is heavy on the M6 in the usual places: the crazy merge with the M61, the pull up the hill before the Tickled Trout, and then the mad lane-switching frenzy of the junction with the M55. Beyond that it’s just rain and spray, and the usual last-minute Larrys playing Russian roulette, crossing all the lanes, at speed, for the off-slips.

I know my driving has slowed, as my reactions have dimmed with age. 55-60 MPH in the slow lane is fine by me, but especially in these conditions. Others are less cautious, having learned their driving at the school of floor-it and pray. I can only hope their eyesight is good. Observation, however, supports the theory the worst offenders are merely coked to the gunwales.

We pick up the Lake District tourist-grind on the downhill into Windermere town – the A591 – this being the main route for all central destinations, and generally busy, but especially so today, it being a Saturday and holiday change-over day. From here, it’s stop-start to Ambleside, and it rains like it can only rain in the Lakes. Everything is glistening with a dark sheen of wet, under heavy skies, and the mist is down on the Lake, ghost boats emerging from the shifting grey. And yes, it’s beautiful. All right, it’s a little dispiriting if you’re beginning a holiday, but the forecast for the coming week isn’t too bad. Mixed. That’s the Lakes at its dramatic best. That’s the stuff that inspires poetry.

I make the drop-off in Grasmere in good time. In spite of the torrential wet, visitors are still falling from the pavements here, their flimsy waterproofs saturated. There is no point trying to find a parking slot for coffee. Next to Bowness, this is the busiest place in the Lakes, apart from Ambleside, and Keswick. For the introvert, Hell is always going to be other people, so I point the car for home, and head back along the A591, making just the one brief call at the garden centre in Ambleside to answer an urgent call of nature.

It seems we are now split evenly between the masked, and the unmasked. The emporia are also split evenly between those who say it’s up to you, and those who ask you to continue wearing one out of common sense, politeness and respect for others. I still wear one, but without the legality of compulsion, and the mixed messaging, it’ll peter out. You’ll set out for the shops one day and find you’ve left your mask at home, and you’ll think: oh well, it doesn’t matter, does it?

I’m hoping they do not disappear altogether, though. As a fashion accessory for the ladies, I find them attractive now, drawing attention – as they do – to the eyes. Or is that just a personal peccadillo, not shared by many, and better I kept quiet about? I find I am still covid-twitchy, so avoid the temptation of the indoor café, though the scent of coffee is impossibly alluring. Instead, I purchase marmalade and mint-cake, this being out of guilt for the free parking and a quick pee.

I note in passing the garden centre is also selling tweed jackets for £250 – reduced. I do like a Harris Tweed, but not at that price. Mine cost me a fiver from the charity shop and, Harris Tweed being what it is, and in spite of indeterminate age, it’s not in bad nick. I fancy a tweed waistcoat to go with it – you know, that old writerly vibe – but they were £150 – reduced. If these are garden centre prices, I shudder to think what they’re charging on Saville Row these days. I know it’s the Lakes, which is renowned for joke pricing, but we must be seriously down on foreign visitors this year – these being the only ones with that kind of money. Except, of course, the seriously monied Brits are slumming it at home this year as well, so maybe those fine tweeds won’t be gathering dust for as long as I’m thinking. Go on, you fools, cheap at twice the price. You know it makes sense!

From here it’s an hour back to the M6, then home. Five hours in the car all told. It’s a long time since I did that. The little black car did well, this being a 2012 plate 1.4 litre Corsa with just over 40K on the clock, borrowed from my good lady. And, like my good lady, it’s looked after me very well – the Corsa for the last eighteen months, my good lady for the last thirty-two years, God bless her, and long, I pray, may both persevere with my eccentricities.

The touristy bits of the Lakes looked a little shot at, and terribly busy, of course. Home territory it might be, and forever well-loved in its intimacy, but Switzerland it ain’t. If I come back this year, it won’t be until the autumn, and then to somewhere well away from the main drag, somewhere you can park the car for free, if you’re bright and early, and you can get on the hill without having to queue.

I’ve not done a video for a while, but I gave it a shot from the dashcam – not a brilliant device on the little black car, but serviceable enough for emergencies. Things have moved on a pace since I last had a crack at movie-making. Windows movie-maker has bitten the dust, so I used a free app called Video Pad. Then I found YouTube wouldn’t let me get at my account, where I host my dashcam edits, unless I divulged my mobile number first. So, I thought, yea, right. I’ve moved to Vimeo, now, which seems to render videos in much greater detail anyway. They let you upload around 500Mb per week, so short vids only, which is fine. The backing music is either a catchy or an annoying little number, depending on your taste. I got it from Bensound; it’s called “beyond the line” – and all due courtesies and acknowledgements etc. to them for that.

Bye for now, and,…

Thanks for listening.

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On empty legs

Pikestones – Anglezarke Moor

I’ve been out of sorts recently: low energy, and the back’s been aching, threatening something dire in the region of the sciatic nerve. But the weather’s been fair, I thought the air would clear the head, and a bit of a walk loosen the back. A short hike to the Pikestones was far enough, and I was curious to see if the sit-mat was still there, after leaving it behind on my last visit. I did not like to think of it littering. Better to retrieve it, though there was a good chance a passing walker might have adopted it.

I felt washed out as I started the climb by Parson’s Bullough, and by the time I came to the ladder-style by Peewit Hall, I was running on empty. Here, I reached up to hook the top of it with my arm – resistant to grabbing hold of things with the hands, due to Covid transmission fears – but I missed. No bother, I thought, the legs will hold me while I have another swing at it. They didn’t. There was nothing in them. They buckled, and I sailed backwards into the ditch.

I checked the camera for damage. It was fine. I was fine, just no energy. Plus, I was an idiot. Damn Covid! Damn its cursed erosion of trust, that we fear to touch what others might have touched, fear to go where others might have gone. We cannot live like this forever!

Anyway, there were peewits out in the meadow, curlew coming over from the moor, bleat of lambs with the season in full swing. And I could hear skylarks. Beat of life. Beat of nature. Rush of sap to the swelling buds – just not my buds. I was blocked, or leaking somewhere. Steady, slowly to your feet, take a few deliberate breaths. Reach. Now grab. GRAB dammit! With your hand. And look: gnarled wood under the palm, bleached under a thousand suns, deep pitted, patterned with crusty lichens, yellow-green and teal. It’s darker, and shiny where other hands have touched it, smoothed it in their passing. The texture. The beauty,… Yes, all right, all right,… I get the message.

I took a firm hold, and made it over the second time, dropped the pace the rest of the way to the Pike Stones. When you know you’re running off-song, there’s no sense flooring it and burning a hole through a piston. Okay, so here we are. Sit, now. Breathe. Qigong breathing. Remember that? Deep. Slow. Find the centre. I’ve been neglecting the Qigong, forgetting its principles. I’ve let it go off the boil a bit. Anyway, the sit mat wasn’t there. It’s been adopted – and welcome. Such an easy thing to do, forget your sit-mat. Gormless though.

It was chicken and mushroom soup from the thermos for lunch. Scan the plain below through the binocs. Chorley, Southport, Liverpool, Preston, Lake District, Snowdonia – everything where it should be, only myself slightly displaced if not exactly in space and time, then metaphysically, somehow, and no I can’t explain what I mean by that.

I took my time heading back, feeling cross on account of Ego, which has little patience for empty legs. Ego wanted Great Hill, Spitler’s Edge, Winter Hill. It wanted the endless miles and the indestructibility of youth. Just three miles brought me around by the lead mines, an insult to the Ego, but the bones and feet were aching like I’d done a ten-miler. Paradoxically, the back felt easier. Strange that but, as a cure for back-ache, launching oneself backwards from a ladder stile is a little extreme, and hardly to be recommended. The car was waiting with a smile. I dropped the top and basked a while in the restorative tonic of a noonday sun. Then I drove home.

Rushy Brow – Anglezarke Moor

The bones responded well to a hot bath, then I flicked through the bagged shots with a glass of red. Blue skies are uninteresting now. To think: how I used to edit the holiday pics, take out the cloudy skies. Look, look what good weather we had! Now, give me dynamic skies, and a camera that can handle them! Things change. We age. We grow. Patience. Qigong. Meditation. Remember? I’ve forgotten these things – our little Tai Chi group blown to smithereens over a year ago now by the damned Covid. Lord knows if we’ll ever breathe deep of the same air as each other again, touch others, explore their centre with the dancing grace of Push Hands and all without the fear of germs.

So much has been lost, we’ll be a generation counting the scale of it. Was it inevitable we would grind things out as long and slow as this? Might things have been different with a more urgently human-centric approach from the beginning? Let it rip,… Let the bodies be piled in their,… no, don’t go there, Mike. Let others pick at that one. Anyway, all that was a week ago. I’m feeling better now, the energy returning. Sometimes that’s the way, and you just have to be easy on yourself in the meantime. The weather looks like being a mixed bag for the remainder of the week: April showers, interesting skies.

Time we were out again.

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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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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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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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Did I do the right thing?

So, you’re out taking pictures of trees, and an elderly lady comes running up to you saying someone’s in the river, they can’t get out, and can you help? You take a look and there’s a woman up to her middle in the freezing water, down a steep bank. She’d gone to help her dog get out, and slipped in. The dog gets out on its own and is now yapping and careening about like it’s demented, and not making me feel particularly welcome. She can’t scramble up, and she can’t move to where the bank is less steep either, because the river runs very deep on either side of her. She’s basically trapped. So, I lower myself as close as I can, and offer my hand, thinking I can perhaps haul her out. She takes a firm grip, but I’m not strong enough, and I can’t gain enough of a purchase on the bank, so there’s a risk she’ll have me slithering in as well. She’s already been in the water a while, is cold and getting tired.

What I’m thinking I should have done at this point was call the fire-brigade, and just keep her company until they arrived, but I reckoned that would have been another half an hour at least, and she’s been in the water long enough. The other side of me says there’s a farm a few minutes away. We just need some big lads, a rope and a sling, so I leg it to the farm. The farm duly spills out to the rescue, big lads, quad bike and all. They drop the woman a sling which she gets around her body, and they have her out in a jiffy. She’s embarrassed, refuses offers from the farm ladies of a lift home, says she’ll walk, that she lives not far away. Drama over, the farm goes back to work, and I go on my way.

It’s only then I realize I’ve seriously broken the social distancing rules and, in the heat of the moment, actually touched another human being. If I’ve caught Covid from the woman, it’ll show up in a couple of days and that’s me in isolation for a fortnight, or worse. On the balance of probabilities, I know it’s unlikely, but it is just possible. And it’s not only myself I put at risk, either. It’s everyone at the farm, and everyone I live with and half of me is kicking myself over that. Maybe I should have just called the fire brigade, and sat there like a lump until they came, with their PPE and their proper procedures for dealing with rescues in the time of Covid. I don’t know. What would you have done?

We all need to get outdoors, to walk, get some air. Stay local, yes, but there are still risks, like falling into the river after your dog, and needing help to get out. It could happen to any of us. I could have been out in the field with my camera, turned my ankle and had to beg help off a passing walker. So it’s not just ourselves we’ve to think of, but those who might have to turn out and help us.

Anyway, I got my tree photograph, a decent walk and even a bit of a jog – which surprised me. As for the Covid, I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed.

Good night all.

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