Pre Trip

I’m a little nervous this evening – always am the night before a trip. I’ve checked the oil and the water, checked the tyres, taken her out for a spin and all appears to be well. The hotels are booked, the travel insurance paid, and even if we do have mechanical trouble, the AA will be earning their subs for once and getting us home.

Come to think of it the clutch felt a little odd during that spin, but I’m wearing new trainers and they lack the broken-in, wafer-thin sensitivity of my old ones. It was hard to judge to bite point and I’ve always had a thing about the clutch – the one thing you can’t check or mitigate against. And of course a failed clutch can ruin your holiday. But I’m sure it’ll be fine.

So, I’m off to the Dales in the morning, a week’s tour of the best of rural England, ending up on the East Coast by weekend. We have a new-ish Vauxhall Corsa on the drive that could do trip with ease and, with 20,000 on the clock I’d have fewer qualms about it, but where would be the fun in that? The Dales in a twelve year old roadster just coming up to 80,000 miles has to be worth the risk. It’ll be a trip revisiting the familiar – I know the Dales quite well: Malhamdale, Wharfdale, Wensleydale and hopefully with the top down as much as possible. Then a long run across country to Scarborough and a few nights off motoring.

I’m travelling light – not much choice in a little car. I have the kernel of a new story on the pad, and I’ll no doubt be tickling away at that in the evenings before bed. It’s late July now, the season maturing, and many a moon come and gone without anything new in the making. Thus far I’ve been reviewing older stuff and posting it on Wattpad, which has been satisfying in a way but a bit like treading water. I also finished off Sunita, a back burner project  and put her on Wattpad as well. Reception for Sunita was good, mostly thanks to fellow blogger and writer’s champion, Tom Lichtenberg. Reception for Langholm Avenue and Fall of night was more muted. But all of this has been somehow retrospective, and what I love most in writing is the new adventure. So, we’re pre trip in a number of ways this evening, and though I’m nervous, I’m looking forward to the road in the morning.

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That rippling ribbon of road.

It’s a year now since I bought the Mazda – a hot Saturday, the last weekend of May. It was a clear day, sunny-bright, confetti of pink and white cherry blossom floating in a breathless air. I’d been feeling something of an old excitement all the previous week, I mean at the thought of picking her up, like a kid warming to Christmas. It was unfamiliar, this feeling, sign of a misspent middle-age perhaps? sign of that peculiar kind of maturity, one in which we had learned to reign our selves in so hard against the risk of disappointment we ‘d forgotten what there was left in life to be enjoyed. Too much of the nine to five, and not enough of one’s self, Michael.

But anyway, there I was, driving her home with the top down and feeling like a million dollars, feeling like a free man and that in some mysterious way, long coming, I had at last reconnected with a much younger and more openly enthusiastic part of my self. I was eighteen when this dream first took shape, fifty three before I drove it away. It was just an old car, 12 winters gone and needing a bit of work – a very small dream, you might say, but sometimes they are the best; richer in meaning and more yielding to interpretation.

The summer was a good one – warm, and the rains held miraculously in check, as if by charms, as soon as I peeled open the top. I explored the Dales mainly, and mainly topless, a middling stone’s throw from home, a place whose open moor-top roads I cannot now drive any other way and see them the same as I saw them last summer – see them, feel them, taste them. I remember in particular the drive from Aysgarth, towards Hawes, a morning in which Wensleydale glowed golden under a warm Godlike blessing of late morning sunlight. There came a moment in which the car no longer purred and rattled along contentedly, but became a luxurious carpet on which we glided, cushion soft, cruising mid air, and the scene became a broad skied gasp of delight.

Such was the summer, a time of warm memories, followed too soon by a winter of anticipation in which the old car lay under a dust sheet more days than not, dreaming of the summer to come. So when the road-tax man came calling for his £265 of wet blanket, I paid up, armoured against the usual frown. Ditto, the shyster insurance man who tried to sting me for £475, but dropped it to £300 when I asked if there’d been a mistake. I smiled as I asked, because I know this game, know there is no sense or reason to the oftentimes bizarre and rotten monied foundations of the world we are still far too enamoured of. And the Mazda would never be a frowny face. My Mazda MX5 is always a smile.

But now, with my legal presence on the roads negotiated for another year, I find the season much colder. It is rainy, squally, temperatures still scraping freezing on the fell-tops. And I’m reminded that the reason we revere memories of a good British Summer, is that they are so rare. A maritime climate lends a randomness to the mix, our summers being more a shake of the dice than a predictable turning up of the wick. We have to take what comes and with a smile, so we wear our summer shorts and hats, even though we shiver in the grey of a cold front, and the gale snatches our hats away.

I drove out to the coast last night, a gorgeous evening, high in blue skied contrast, but as yet still low in temperature, a stiff breeze dropping it to 6 degrees and the cherry blossom already blown away by a greedy air. The vinyl of the top felt stiff and frigid with cold as I folded it, and I wondered if I should leave it up, but that would be to waste the sun and the wide skies peeling back just then to shades of vanilla and tobacco. So, I was triple layered, warm hatted and gloved up as we rode towards the setting sun. I was perhaps considered mad by the usual parasitic coterie of rear view hogging Audis and BMW’s, ever pushing for a squeeze past.

Southport’s Marine Drive is something of a roller coaster, sinking slowly into the Ribble’s estuarine mud, becoming over time a long and curiously rippling ribbon of a road, the highs of it scored by the sparking strike of exhaust pipes, and sumps and sills. At fifty the big fat four by fours are gaily bouncing, their springs topping out, struggling to remain grounded, body-shells lolling like unballasted ships tossed in a swell. Hard sprung, the Mazda remains more firmly rooted, and we managed to lose the bully boys, at least until the bit where the limit drops to thirty. Here they had me cold and tore past in a series of multi-litred, self important flashes, doing sixty.

On the long strip of the promenade car park, people were lingering in the warm interiors of their cars, interiors lit with amber now as a post nine p.m. sun sank to within a finger’s width of the horizon. Pulling up among them I was immediately cold. A topless roadster’s warm enough when you’re motoring and the heater’s roaring louder than the engine, but stop a while and the cold will find your legs, and the tips of your ears, refuse to let you settle in. But that’s part of the fun – the drive I mean. Old cars like this are all about the drive for me, not so much the destination any more.

This can be a season of anxieties, cresting the month of mid-summer, a season of waiting for the whistle that will say the time we have been waiting for is upon us, that we might cast our top coats and stride out at ease and with the sun smiling down upon us. Yet we are stricken, downcast by the feeling that by the time we have begun, the time remaining will be already too short, the summer run, the season turning, while all we can do is wait for the chance to get out and do something.

But this year I am already doing it.

In the once upon a time I would not have driven out to watch the sun set. I would have thought about the cost of petrol, sat at home while shadows lengthened, and checked my blog stats. The Mazda is no longer a stranger to me, but I still see the road differently when I drive it. I hope in other ways too, I have learned to enjoy the world more as it is, feel more my presence in it as a thing to be enjoyed, than one to be resisted. Life is the journey, not the destination. It is not the rising nor the setting sun but every moment inbetween.

Sure, the sunset from Southport’s Marine Drive is always worth a trip, but I didn’t wait for it, and why? Well, that rippling ribbon of road is even more fun in the opposite direction!

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Looping

On the last Friday of February in 2014, I drove in the early morning sunshine to Glasson Marina. It’s an interesting place and a very beautiful part of the Lancashire coastline. I wrote about that day here. Today was the last Friday of February 2015, and I went again. I don’t know why exactly, other than the urge to get out, to feel the wind on my face and the soft earth under my feet, and I couldn’t think of anywhere else – and I remembered that walk so well. I had time owed me, just like last year; the forecast was fair, just like last year, and the snowdrops and the daffodils were starting to push through, just like last year. In the absence of any other motivation, I think we are easily suggestible creatures.

Last year, I shared the carpark with a middle aged guy in an old ragtop. Today I was the middle aged guy in the old ragtop – not a classic MGB like his, but a near classic MX5. Maybe he was the inspiration for my later impulse to buy the car – I don’t know. I recall he also wore an Irvin flying jacket, like a Spitfire Pilot. I thought that was a bit over the top, unless the heaters on those MG’s are rubbish. The Mazda has a heater like a small furnace, so you can easily drive with the top down in mid-winter – not that I tried because it was about 5 degrees. My ragtop is showing signs of wear and the colder it is, the more brittle, so the top stays up until the temperature nudges above 15 degrees.

She made the run easily, some thirty miles of motorway and narrow lane. It’s strange how when I first got her she felt like such a hard ride. Now any other ride feels too soft, and even if I’ve driven her a hundred miles, the first thing I want to do, still, is drive her some more.

But I was here to walk, not just to drive, and I followed much the same route as last year, about six and a half miles of salt marsh and coastal footway. Walking alone, and the conditions being so remarkably similar, both walks – this years and last – blurred into one avant guard production, and I had the impression of a replay layered over the real thing and my self not being able to tell the difference, if the thoughts I’d thought last year were the same as now, or was I walking last year, possessed of memories I did not have at the time, of the year still to come? And what if I come again, next year? So little had changed. I even encountered the same farm tractor spraying slurry in the same meadow, the same ruined tractor abandoned in the same ditch. Was I looping endlessly in time?

There were murmurations of dunlin out over the marsh, like last time, an eerie chorus of peewits calling for curtains on the winter in the meadows behind the long bank at Cockerham, like last time. My eyes scanned the same scenes, the same wayside curiosities, the odd blocks of stone, the tumbled farm buildings. Something must have been different!

All right, this time I called in the parish church, beautiful with the morning sunlight bursting cleanly through the stained glass. There, I bought another novel for my collection from the secondhand stalls at the back. It cost 50p and was serendipitoiusly titled “starting over”. There was such an overwhelming choice of titles in the church I guess reading is pretty big on the pastimes list for Glasson Parishioners. I read the opening paragraph and was hooked at once, carried the book in my pocket for six miles, determined to bin the ones I’m labouring through at the moment. No sense wasting one’s life on things that don’t connect. We must hold to the ones who love us, and let go the one’s who don’t, just as we cannot hold on to what we are not meant to keep, and cannot lose what is meant for us, even if we throw it away.

There was the same boat sunk in the dock, but different faces in the Lantern Oer Lune cafe. No all day breakfast this time either, but a more demure omelette with a side salad, even though I’d asked for chips. Still, I enjoyed it, and I’m not one to make a fuss. My sense of smell had even put in an unexpected return – not so much that I could smell anything, but that I could at least taste my lunch, and that coffee tasted very nice indeed after two hours of a stiff salted wind coming off the bay.

I drove home a different way to last year, picking up the A6 at Garstang, but not before crossing over the canal and having a flashback to 1972 or thereabouts, and a fishing trip with a friend and his father. How I hated fishing, but pretended I did not because it’s good to have friends. He was to die on a race-track, ten years later. He would have loved the MX5. I felt guilty I had not thought of him in a while. He was engaged to be married, and I wonder what kind of life he would have made for himself – if we’d still be friends or if by now we would have drifted apart as so many friends do.

I looked for us down on the canal bank, fishing. But we weren’t there. It must have been another day, another season.

Fancy a run to Glasson? Hop in.

 

 

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Marauding Murmurations

Slaidburn – November 2014

Slaidburn is the self styled touring capital of the Forest of Bowland which this year celebrates 50 years of being designated an area of outstanding natural beauty. Bowland is a vast tract of peat upland in northern England, mostly wilderness, dotted with occasional rounded hills which lend a gently soaring splendour to bog and windy bleakness. It’s also grouse country, much of the land hereabouts being owned by a few wealthy individuals for farming and shooting – one of them being the Duke of Westminster.

Slaidburn also styles itself as a centre for hillwalking, but I’ve never thought of it that way. Indeed I am from a generation of walkers for whom Bowland was never much on the radar due its aggressive attitude set against public access. Rights of way have always existed here, but they were sparse and I always found them to be of little use for a day’s walking, tending more towards the impossibly remote and leading to nowhere you could easily get back to from a parked car. Attractively named peaks: Wolfhole Crag, Wards Stone, Nicky Nook, and many others were simply out of bounds. Interesting walks – horseshoes, rounds, and any genuine, intimate exploration of this so called  “area of outstanding natural beauty” inevitably involved trespass.

As an apprenticed walker I grew up on tales of a past generation for whom forays into Bowland had the air of a special forces raid, avoiding local spies and gamekeepers in order to bag the peak and brag about it afterwards. A friend of mine was once run to ground among the crags of Ward’s Stone by the keeper’s dog. He befriended it by sacrificing his packed lunch, which kept the dog happy while he made good his escape, losing the keeper in the mist. This story is possibly a myth, but a good one. For myself I preferred to avoid conflict and usually headed on up to the Lakes, or the Dales instead where the ways were more certain, the peaks loftier, and the welcome more assured.

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 did much to secure access to Bowland’s upland regions, but actual walkable paths are still sparse. There are some permissive routes, all liable closure at short notice. I’ve had a day’s walk cancelled by local restrictions – access to Ward’s Stone peremptorily closed because of a shoot. That day I remember watching as a convoy of glittering black Range Rovers crossed the russet moor like a fleet of galleons. Inside were quaintly dressed gentlemen with guns. I’d driven 50 miles, so turned around and drove 50 more back home.

Slaidburn was always more of a place to bring the kids for picnics on the green, not usually to walk, but there are a number of lowland routes you can enjoy from here without trespassing, though you need good navigation skills and keen eyesight to spot the way markers and, where the markers have “disappeared”, a fair amount of imagination and a magnanimous attitude to failure.

A foggy day in November isn’t the best of times to visit anywhere, but Slaidburn put on a good show today, managing to look homely and quaint. Mostly sixteenth century and with very little modern development, this attractive, unspoiled village – formerly in the west riding of Yorkshire – has a timeless quality about it. Photographs of Slaidburn are best dated by the style of the motor cars. Shoot in sepia today and the village still has a timeless air about it. Built from a mixture of locally sourced limestone and sandstone, it has a picturesque quality, aided by the lack of road-signage, telegraph poles and powerlines that festoon other places. By contrast modern developments do not respect the local character of a place, indeed their building materials may well have come from China. Not so Slaidburn. This is definitely England, and northern, and very, very old – so old it is, in part, still Feudal.

My walk for the day took me past the Hark to Bounty pub, following the little road, Town End, northwards, out of the village, where I picked up the first of a series of farm tracks and then fast vanishing footpaths that threaded their way across upland meadows, back towards the peaty glide of the River Hodder, at Newton. Hill fog and near 90% humidity made for a steamy walk with misting spectacles and rather poor views across the Bowland Fells.

There’s a bleak grandeur about this landscape, something that stirs the heart, but I have to admit my heart wasn’t exactly on the walk today so much as it had been on the drive over Waddington Fell from Clitheroe. I’ve crossed that fell dozens of times in hatch-back commuter-mules, playing eye-spy with the kids to keep them occupied. Today I’d driven alone in a little roadster that’s been making every journey I take in her something really special. She was down on the carpark, waiting for me, muck splattered, and to be honest all I was thinking about was enjoying the drive home again.

I am not as attached to Bowland as other walkers are. I suppose it’s had its back to me for too long, and to be frank there are other places more understanding of and amenable to my motivations as a hill man. I was open to inspiration of course, as ever, but it was slow coming.

But then, sometimes, the unexpected happens, like fetching up on a dour, black, wind-blasted farm, sunk in mud, like something from a Gothic novel. And there were birds – great murmurations of birds, like smoke, wheeling about, rendering alive the aged roof of the byre in which cattle sulked in muck, birds perched brassily long their backs and heads, robbing feed and bedding – a mad cacophony of shrill birds and lowing cattle.

Lonely places, these, a hard living from the earth, hunkered down among decaying farm detritus and, for the walker, always something intimidating about it when the path turns through the yard, and the dogs are barking, and the black windows of the farm are staring at you in accusation. And the tractors look tired and rusty. I would have liked a friendly face, a cheery wave, someone to point me in the right direction, but there was no one about and I had to guess my way. I’ve had a chill feeling in my gut all weekend, thinking about that place – a place ravaged by marauding murmurations of birds. And loneliness.

The paths became less helpful as I went on, markers missing, ladder styles that lured you into the wrong meadow – meadows from which there was no escape without a long back tracking – and all this shenanigans with GPS and Sci-Fi navigation app on my ‘phone to mark the way. No, this is hardly a popular area for pedestrians, and I wondered what had brought me there other than curiosity. Sometimes the way could only be discerned by a bit of rubber insulation over the electric fences, then giving on to long trackless runs where it appeared neither man nor beast had trod in centuries. If you like your waking lonesome, then Bowland is for you. Come November, midweek, you’ll feel like the last man alive.

Dunnow Hall – Slaidburn

I was glad to pick up the surer way of the riverside path at Newton, by the Hodder, a path that led me back to Slaidburn across the wide, landscaped, sheep cropped meadows, and under the multifarious windows of the imposing Dunnow Hall. I had been walking for a couple of hours and seen not another soul, but came now upon my first encounter with fellow man – a muddy Landrover patrolling the fields.

I got a wave and a friendly nod as I made way through thickening mist and a light rain. Tough life, farming, summer sun and winter rain, here as anywhere and enough to do without having to maintain a footpath network as well, so the occasional blundering pedestrian can cross your land without getting lost. Loneliness is a state of mind. We are all lonely. Looking for connection, for a friendly face.

I appreciated that wave. Good to know Slaidburn is still a friendly place. Seek it out sometime; take a picnic on a sunny summer’s day, some bread for the ducks. But walking?

Nah,..

Now, driving on the other hand:

Mazzy – Slaidburn, Late November 2014.

 

 

Yes, as a touring stop-off, a quick coffee in the cafe and even a look at the Church of St Andrews (est in the 1400’s) and which I highly recommend, Slaidburn’s your place. But unless you’re coming here in a Mk2.5 Mazda MX5, designed in Hiroshima, Japan,… I’ll wager you won’t enjoy the drive half as much as I did!

🙂

Goodnight all.

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Where I went on my day off.

The News told me it was Black Friday – insisted actually. Today is Black Friday, it said. Everyone is buying stuff! Cameras point to scuffles in ASDA and Tescos to demonstrate the collective decline in morality as devoted consumers fight over discounted televisions and other tat. But I was already on my way somewhere else. I was going to Slaidburn, taking to the hills for a walk in the mud and the fog of the Forest of Bowland. This is a remote and impressively bleak part of Northern England. By the time I came home it was all over and I’d missed it. Never mind there’s always Cyber Monday!

I don’t think so.

If you did watch the video, thanks very much. Glad to have you along for the ride!

Goodnight all.

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Snowdrops and Wormy Gremlins

Sometimes we feel the world is caving in – I’m talking trivial here: the washing machine gets blocked, the lights blow in the bathroom and the conservatory roof starts leaking. And as soon as we fix one thing, something else happens; you break a wineglass; a breakfast bowl; you lose the charger for your iPad, you take a chunk out of the freshly painted plaster in the kitchen. And though you hear your grandma telling you there are bigger losses at sea, it’s like the world has suddenly turned to mud, and there’s nowhere safe to stand.

Even the Mazda has succumbed to the pernicious wormy gremlin. Sunday was a decent day, sunny, warm for the time of year and I fancied a drive out with the top down. So I turned the key but there wasn’t a spark of juice. I’d not touched the car in a while but the battery was in good nick and it’s not been cold, so I’d expected it to be okay. It wasn’t. There’d be no driving out that day, and worse, I somehow had to get the car to the workshop the day after for its annual MOT test.

This was not a good omen!

So, it was off to town in old Grumpy to Halfords for a charger. It’s a long time since I’d needed one – maybe thirty years, and I wasn’t sure I even remembered how to use one. That’s something else when things start going wrong – we begin to lose confidence that even the basics in life – like how to charge a car battery – are still within our competence. Forty minutes later, I’m plugging the new charger in. It doesn’t work because I’ve been sold a dud. Wormy gremlins again! Deep breath, back to Halfords and another forty minute round trip – close to closing time now and fighting the urge to floor it. The staff are apologetic, falling over themselves to help. New charger works okay. A quick skim of the instructions, then whip the battery out and set it to charge.

By now the wormy gremlins have put me in a dark mood. I’ve been getting dragged down by the dying of the light – once it starts getting dark at 5:00 pm I just want to hibernate until spring – but it’s an additional kick in the guts that the Mazda might need some work now, that she might not tolerate being idle over the winter. I’d thought her spirit indestructible – it seems though she’s just as prone to the black dog as me. Perhaps that MOT test will reveal a nightmare under the gloss, then the dreams she’s kindled over the summer will be well and truly over. All this from a flat battery? Oh dear me!

Later that night, I reconnected the battery. The interior light came on and the mystery of the Mazda’s unexpected demise was solved. That light had been on for about a week – since the last time I’d sat in her – plenty of time to flatten a battery. The wormy gremlin in this case was me. I turned the key a click and she lit up, needles flicking to the ready. Another click and she turned over – not so lively as usual, but she caught and roared back to life.

Smiley faces all round.

When we’re in the throes of one damned thing after another it’s tempting to lash out at the wormy gremlins who seem to have it in for us personally. But this is self defeating, and if we can only find the space within ourselves to step outside the cycle of pernicious events, we realise the spiral of decline is largely self created and entirely self sustained. I was careless over that interior light, but that’s my nature I’m afraid, and I forgive myself.

She passed the MOT. I had her serviced too. Sparks, filters, oil-change, replacement of dodgy alternator and power steering belts, engine flush, coolant change. She sounded very pleased with herself on the drive home.

We’ll have that run out next weekend come rain or shine. And in the mean time I’ll plant snowdrops under the tree in the front garden like I’ve been saying I’ll do for years. We should always have something to look forward to.

It helps keep the wormy gremlins at bay.

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The magic of it!

The weather turned cool and showery by week’s end, making for a wet and windy drive up Wharfedale. Mazzy did not enjoy it as much as her first trip here, back in July. That day the sun shone and the air shimmered with a high-summery heat, and the moors had about them a sluggish, humid quiet. With the top down one could smell the hedgerows and meet the gaze of passers by – share greetings with them as we motored leisurely on. Now though, great curtains of rain pressed in on either side of the valley, spilling over the fells. It had me fumbling for the wipers I’ve not used all year, and of course the top was up, so the world passed remote to all but my visual senses.

We were delayed near Kilnsey by a collision between a camper van and a road sweeper. The camper was a terrible mess, its side torn open and the remains of some poor souls’ holiday spilled all over the road. The queue inched by as best it could while policemen jabbed fingers in ad hoc traffic control. They must have to deal with many such incidents on this stretch, and I don’t envy them the task. The road along the valley of the Wharfe is as narrow and twisty as it’s always been, but the vehicles we’re driving are getting noticeably bigger. Mazzy’s a low slung, narrow slip of a thing, perfect for threading her way up and down country like this, but she and I are moving against the tide which insists what country like this needs is a pumped up four-by-four with the assertive beam of snowplough.

I stopped off for a brew at Buckden, then made pilgrimage to Hubberholme – pronounced “Ubberam”. Hubberholm is a tiny hamlet in upper Wharfedale, beloved of generations of walkers, also home to St Michaels and All Angels, one of the loveliest of our Norman churches. Though the increasing secularisation of society has led to the diminution of moderate religious congregations everywhere, England’s churches retain their potential as foci for binding communities, and in a more prosaic way provide a statutory and timeless continuity with their records of births, marriages and deaths. The church at Hubberhome dates to the 12th century, and has the look of a place that was not actually built at all but rather that it grew organically from the soft earth, here on the banks of the Wharfe. Its pews bear the distinctive adze marks and the unique rodent-motif of the celebrated Mouseman. It has about it the scent of old churches everywhere, and rests in the profound silence that pervades these remote valleys, a silence reinforced for me that morning, stepping out of an old roadster after seventy miles in the pouring rain.

Saint Michaels and All Angels – Hubberholme

St Michaels and All Angels is the resting place of J.B.Priestly, native of Bradford, novelist and playwright, known to me through his work on the relationship of man with time. I think a lot about the nature of time, and more recently have tied myself in knots with it almost to the point of despair in wrestling with my current work in progress – a work that takes only halting steps forwards these days. For my trip I had packed my toothbrush, but left my laptop behind, thinking to let the story rest for a bit. In making pilgrimage to Hubberholme and JBP, I wasn’t expecting a synchronistic finger pointing to the way out of my literary cul-de-sac; it was more a case of stoking the boiler of imagination, and hoping something would emerge in the fullness of “time”. All the same, my pilgrimage bore fruit, I think, or at least I came away feeling more philosophical about the dilemma. I self-publish to a small audience, for nothing; I write novels like I used to do Origami, for the personal satisfaction of completing a puzzle, rather than labouring for coin. In my current game, as with Origami, there are no deadlines – only pleasure in the folding and unfolding of lines, hopefully winding up with something self-standing at the end of it, and all from a blank sheet of paper. I sometimes forget this, but the timeless peace at Hubberholme, proved a timely reminder that time has no existence other than in its relation to man, and that all deadlines are ultimately defeating of the self.

Aysgarth upper falls

I stayed the night in Wensleydale, in the pretty little market town of Leyburn, passed a pleasant evening in the Golden Lion and woke on Saturday to a brighter morning. Then I drove to Aysgarth, to the falls. At Aysgarth, the River Ure is rent by a series of dramatic steps over which the waters thunder, all peaty brown, like stewed tea. There is an upper, a middle and a lower falls, spread over a kilometre length of the river, and all accessible by well maintained walkways and viewing points. The National Trust have set up camp here, providing decent car-parking and a visitor centre. It costs £2.50 for a couple of hours, which I didn’t think was too bad, and the falls of course are worth it. Then it was on to Hawes, and from there the long, bleakly spectacular run of the B6255, to Ribblehead. We managed this bit of the run with the top down, Mazzy’s humour lifting enormously, making her roar with the pleasure of it, and lending to the sun-splashed, blue-skied scene, at last, a moving connection that brought a lump to my throat.

It was a weekend of thoughts then, about the nature of time, about writing, and even of Origami. It was also a weekend of waterfalls and old churches. And it was a weekend of roads, the best in England, roads that make driving still a pleasure, a pleasure I had largely forgotten on account of long decades spent behind the wheel of a car merely commuting. But as that accident near Kilnsey reminds us, these roads can also exact a terrible price for a moment’s distraction. They are beloved of many, but struggling now to accommodate the sheer variety of transport they nowadays carry. Along the way I encountered vast lumbering peletons of MAMILS; I came upon huge farm vehicles hauling skyscrapers of hay; then there were the wide-beamed Chelsea tractors, the caravans, the motorhomes; and there were entire squadrons of ton-up motorcycles, a half glimpsed minuscule dot in one’s rear view mirror, then roaring past your ear like a jet fighter barely a second later,…

Even in remoteness these roads can at times feel terribly crowded. Now and then though the way simply opens, and it’s just you, and the freedom of the Dales.

That’s the magic of it.

Footage: Mazzy’s  dashcam. (Mr Happy was along for the ride)

Drive carefully.

Graeme out.

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Watching the sun go down

I’ve been driving out to the coast a lot of an evening. I drop the top on the car and we make our way to Southport, park up on the Marine Drive, and watch the sun go down. Sunset was around eight fifteen last night, and the air carried with it a tale of drawing in. The sun was rendered fat and orange by a faint haze which had also,strangely, rendered other things in a sharper resolution. I could see the mountains of North Wales and Cumbria and far out at sea there was the faint twinkle of a myriad of windmills as they tipped their arms, juggling with the last of the light.

I’d wanted to test the car, to feel her vibes and see if there was any doubt she was up to another tour of the Dales this weekend. She ran sweetly, as she has done all summer, so I can find no reason for anxiety, other than my usual pre-travel qualms. It will probably be the last long trip I take in her this year. Soon the days will be too short, and the air too sharp for flitting about in a car with no roof. She’s not the same with the top up. With the top up she is  lumpy and bumpy and noisy. With the top down she is sweet and serene.

I know which of her humours I prefer.

I usually arrive at the Marine Drive around eight PM, mainly because the parking’s free after this time. The long stretch of the car-park is usually quiet – just a few vehicles dotted about, the shops closed, and an all pervading air of peace as the sun sinks. People gazed out from the warmth of their cars, some walked the sea front for a fresher air. Some skated on rollerblades, some MAMILS cycled, their effing and blinding and spitting being the only occasional departure from eventide gentleness. Then there was a comfortably sweatered man reciting lines from the script of a play he was learning, speaking quietly to himself. I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded lyrical, like a poem, or a spell he was casting upon the coming night.

I sat on the sea wall, with binoculars, naming the fells and picking out landmarks along the Fylde coast where the low sun had by now set the entire sea front on fire. The car was behind me, just a short hop across the road. I don’t like her out of sight when the top’s down. She reflected the deepening contrasts, her blue paint taking on a tinge of midnight, and with a halo of orange from the setting sun. Her engineering details blurred out, and she began to look different than she does in daylight, half fantasy, like an other worldly thing.

In the setting of the sun there was also a feeling of holidays coming to an end, and the banal grind taking on a more troublesome stature. I don’t know why I feel this way. My holidays were over a month ago, and even then I only get a couple of weeks, yet still I carry a vestige of that old academic calendar inside of me, and feel a wobble when I see the back-to-school adverts on the telly, also when I see the sun kiss the sands here at eight fifteen.

We are rarely aware of the movement of the earth, nor the passage of time so keenly as when we watch the sun set. From the moment the disc first grazes the horizon to the last poignant speck of gold winking out, we see and feel the transience of life in the visible draining of the light. We feel its mystery too as we gaze, ever hopeful, at the pink afterglow, wondering if the sea will not throw up some belated revelation of reflected light from its depths.

It did not.

I drove back in the semi-dark, the air smelling of late season and the harvesting of vast meadows. A soft reddish glow came from the instruments, and the brighter of the planets dotted the ecliptic. I did not know their names – guessed at Venus and Saturn. Another planet turned out to be an aircraft on final approach to Blackpool.

It was a clear night, beautifully still as it sank to black. I slowed the car to hush the rush of wind, as I drove the long Marsh Road past Hundred End, and I reached out to feel the caress of air in my palm. There I felt the summer softness giving way to autumn’s tingle, and the darker, harder days ahead.

It was from around here I bought her. She seems to enjoy drawing me back to the sights and the scenery of her past lives, hinting at summers unknown to me.

I hope the weather holds for the weekend, and the Dales.

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Hot and tired, and Grumpy!

July turns uncompromisingly hot, and the humidity creeps up. These are the days when even modest tasks outdoors raise an uncomfortable sweat. It was after 11:00 pm last night before the air thinned to a pleasant coolness, but it was back up to twenty two degrees by 8:00 am this morning, already thick and heavy with the humidity once more – another scorcher in the making.

I was driving to work, shirt sleeves rolled up, and with the windows down, something I normally only do on the return in the evening, when the car’s had all day to bake out on the softening Tarmac of the work’s car park. I should have taken the Mazda, topless, except she’s not for the commute, unless the commute is on a Friday and the weather’s fine. Then she can kick the weekend off, and I can drive her home by way of Rivington for lunch, like I plan on doing tomorrow. To risk a chauvinistic metaphor, and a black eye from the Lady Graeme, Mazzy is my mistress; I don’t waste her ironing my shirts.

Instead I took the Vauxhall, old Grumpy. I’m afraid he’s not wearing very well. At only seven years old his door bottoms are starting to rot out like cars used to do in the bad old days. He exceeded his six year anti perforation warranty by a year, which is either good design, or bad, depending on whether you’re a buyer or a seller.

With sound bodywork and regular servicing you can keep a modern car going indefinitely, and you rarely see a rotten car these days, even cars of twelve or fifteen years old will polish up like new, but grumpy’s cards  are definitely marked. I’ll get another few years out of him, but by then the doors will have well and truly rotted through, and he’ll most likely be bubbling up all tired and ugly in other places too. I can almost hear the dealer tut-tutting when I offer him for trade in – unlike the dealer who was all smiles and reassurance when I bought him.

It’s a pity. He’s had his moments, his occasional, spectacular mechanical failure, and he’s managed to ruin most of the holidays we’ve ever had in him. Sure, I’ve cursed him, but I’ve also grown to like him. If I want to get somewhere far away in comfort and in quiet, he’s your guy, that 1.8 litre engine pulling like a thoroughbred, and the automatic box to smooth away the miles – usually, anyway; he just doesn’t like going on holiday. He was raised as a commuter mule, and that’s all he seems to want to do.

The aircon failed a couple of years ago. No one I took it to could fathom the problem, except to say it would probably cost about £500 to fix. It’s a nice thing to have, aircon, but for the few weeks a year we get when you really need it, like we’re enjoying now, I’m happy to wind the window down instead. That £500 fixed Mazzy’s brakes, which was money better spent, I think.

It touched twenty seven degrees by tea time yesterday. Grumpy was rattling on the way home, pre ignition pinking. I could hear it with the windows down, the sound coming back at me, reflected off tall buildings and walls. I plugged him in and ran a diagnostic on the ‘Droid, but no fault codes came up. He just runs very hot, so nothing to worry about, I think – not yet anyway. But I won’t be taking him on holiday next week, just in case. We’ll take the Lady Graeme’s car, which is newer, and her aircon still works!

He sits out on the drive now, covered in the dust of ten thousand miles – I mean since I last washed him. Then there’s that thin, greasy traffic film and a low sun picking out the smeary streaks across the inside of the windscreen. His doors bear the scars of other doors banged into him in parking bays. He’s hung with cobwebs that trail the fluffy bobs of blown seeds, and there’s a green lichen growing on the undersurfaces of the mirror housings, where dew lingers.

I’ll give him a wash tomorrow, perhaps a bit of a polish up as well, taking care not to burst the paint where he’s bubbling through. It won’t make him last any longer, but he might feel a little better, and look a little less hot, and tired, and grumpy.

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Is your world grey or blue?

Rivington Pike

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

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

The Pigeon Tower, Rivington

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

It feels good, this change in me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mazzy, Rivington Hall Drive, Summer 2014

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