Better than a gun

I’m rarely spooked, but the guys discharging firearms on the other side of the hedge took me by surprise. I was on a public footpath. They were on private land – uniformed members of the armed wing of the Tory party. I presume they were blowing the brains out of rabbits. It had been a pleasant morning up till then – a hard frost, a clear winter’s day, crispy meadows and warm in the sun, birds twittering. It was peaceful. Then bang, bang, bang. That’s country life, I suppose. I thought it was against the law to shoot so close to a footpath, even if you’re shooting away from it. But I checked, and it’s okay, as long as you don’t actually shoot anyone in the process. So, that’s all right, then.

The footpath I was on was an attractive one. It threaded its way along emerald pastures. There were ancient oaks, and a sleepy river nearby. It was idyllic, I suppose, but I didn’t feel entirely welcome. At the entrance to the first meadow there was a sign, reminding me of my place. I was on a public footpath crossing “private land”, it said. I was not permitted to picnic, to gather in groups, nor even to venture by the river-bank, it said. Did the little flask of coffee in my pocket count as a picnic? The Derbyshire cops would have said so, at least in so far as the lock-down rules go. Thank goodness this is Lancashire then, and I was walking doorstep to doorstep. But that’s another story.

River banks are monetised, and most of them are a trespass if you’ve not paid your dues. How does one own a river? Who was the first Sir Grabball to claim the river? Who was the first Sir Grabball to claim the meadow? These things are mysteries the Great British public prefer not to enquire too deeply into. They are accepting of their place, and obligingly supine before the interests of perceived class, and money.

Ignore me. I’m sore because those gunmen gave me a fright. But I used to shoot too, a long time ago. Okay, I was just a kid with an air-rifle, so not exactly the same thing. But I had a farmer’s permission, of sorts, to roam a patch of woodland near what was my home back then. I would sit for hours in that wood, waiting for things to point my sights at. But the wood also had a watchman – a noisy old bird called a Jay. He’d always see me coming and send up an alarm. Then all the other creatures knew to keep their heads down, until they saw me leaving. At least that’s the way I interpreted my poor performance as a hunter, as a superior creature in the evolutionary pecking order. Beautiful bird, a Jay. And smart. Smarter than me anyway. As for guns, they can be a dangerous obsession for a young man, and it’s best he grows out of them before they damage his brain.

I was lucky. All it took was cars and girls. And then at some point you realize you don’t need a gun to stalk creatures, nor to feel immersed in nature. Nowadays the pigeons come and sit on my garden fence, brazen as you like. I could feed myself all week off them if I’d mind to, but they know I’m not like that. They also know I’m superstitious about birds. Birds tell me things. One of them is it’s a hard life being a bird, hard enough without being shot at for fun. They take a dim view of it.

There’s this thing at the minute about making trespass a criminal offence. Have you heard that one? So if I’d chosen to ignore that sign, wandered off the path a bit and went and stared all poetically at the river, perhaps sipped brazenly on my coffee while I was at it, that would make me a criminal. How do you feel about that? Would it put you off roaming the English countryside? Is that good for us, do you think? The Ramblers Association is upset about it, and they’re a powerful lobby, but we’ve the wrong lot in at the moment for protecting public access to open spaces, so I fear there’s a good chance it’ll pass.

For the landowners it’s about money I suppose. For the shooter, I understand the appeal, having been there myself. But it was different back then – working men and guns. My parents’ generation grew up with rationing, but if you had a gun and a bit of countryside out your back door, you’d not go hungry. Nowadays, though guns are more about class, or aping it, than supplementing your diet. It’s about rubbing shoulders with the County – or what passes for it now.

I’m still not good with the names of birds – just the common ones – and I saw plenty of them along the way today. They were keeping their heads down, loitering in hedgerows and among the tangle of a tree’s branches. It wasn’t the gunmen they were scared of though. It was something else. I heard it before I saw it.

The cry of a Buzzard is an eerie thing. I’ve been stalking one for ages in other parts of my locale, and didn’t expect one here. That makes three I know of now, and all within a small radius from my doorstep. They’re vulnerable when they stake out a territory that belongs to Sir Grabball. The birds have more natural rights to it, but he has the guns and the traps and the poisoned bait on his side.

Apologies, again. I didn’t mean this to veer into Ewan Maccoll territory. But anyway, for once everything came into place. I had the camera with the right lens on it. I had the shutter set on burst mode, by accident. The sun was lighting the bird beautifully. Now, would it grace me with a flyby, close enough to tell it from a sparrow?

Squeezing off those shots was a thrill. Maybe a man with a gun would understand, even though his endgame would be a dead bird. I took a lot of pictures in that burst, so it was odds on at least one would come out right. I admit, I wandered off the path a bit in my excitement. Yes, I trespassed. So shoot me.

A camera is so much better than a gun.

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A little souvenir from Germany

I found this thing in a tin of bits and bobs. I’m guessing it travelled from Germany  among the loose change in my uncle’s pockets, at the end of the war. He’d been in the army, fought in France, was evacuated from Dunkirk, then spent years training in the Cairngorms. In 1944, he was fighting in Belgium and ended the war in Germany, at Bergen-Belsen.

He never talked about the war unless pressed, and then he rarely elaborated. There was just that one time when, as  a naive young man, I’d tried to pin him down about Belsen, and got more than I’d bargained for. What he told me of this time there, I could never quite assimilate, let alone repeat. Indeed, I think I rejected it as too complex and too dark a thing for me to deal with. Thus, I discovered there is a psychological disconnect between those of a  peace-time mind-set and those who witness, and must digest, the worst humanity is capable of.

As for this little memento, I’ve always assumed it was some sort of regimental cap-badge. But I recently did some research on it and discovered it’s a souvenir given out in exchange for donations to the German Police. This was in 1942, and the German Police by then were very different to peacetime cops. As if to drive the message home, that same research took me to other images featuring the German Police in action, executing women and children.

As with all holocaust imagery, one wonders what systemic failure could allow such monsters into power? What could turn a police force into brutal, militarized units suppressing unarmed civilians? Was there something particular about the circumstances of those times that could give rise to such an orgy of mass-murder? And is it too naive to suppose we have learned the lessons, and could never find ourselves so benighted again?

That this little souvenir was associated with the very worst in humanity came a shock. I don’t know why I should have been  surprised by that – the clue is, after all, in the Swastika. Not everyone’s of the same opinion of course. There are those who find Nazi memorabilia fascinating, indeed even thrilling. This little thing, cheap as it was, and banged out by the tens of thousands, can now fetch up to £50 at auction. I find that both surprising and revolting.

There were lots of divisions to the German Police. Some were civilian, some military, some political, but all came under command of the Schutzstaffel, the SS, a name forever marked as the personification of evil. But it’s dangerous to dismiss evil as something “other”. It does not come from outside the human race,  but dwells within it.

The German Police were not recruited because they were known killers, with long records of ruthless violence. They came from the rank and file of ordinary life, such as it was in wartime Germany. It was circumstance that robbed them of innocence, and then something of the animal took over, normalizing the violence and the de-humanisation of others. This should serve as a warning to the rest of us: just because we imagine we’re incapable of such atrocities ourselves, it doesn’t make it true. All it means is we’ve never found ourselves in a situation where that side of our natures comes out. Nor does it mean we’re ever free from witnessing such atrocities again.

We have only to flick through the vile things people write on social media to see the seething broil of the dark collective. The only thing more dangerous than glorifying the worst of humanity is the belief we could never repeat the horrors of what the German Police did in wartime. If we need any more proof of that we have only to look at the images of the American Police in action in recent days to see how easily the balance of a State can tip from the protection of its citizens to their oppression by militarized force. Indeed, we need extrapolate contemporary events very little into the future, to find ourselves in very dark territory indeed.

For the time being then, I’m putting this odious little souvenir back in its tin. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Such darkness is a thing we must recognize and own if we are ever to keep a lid on it. Then at the very least we might have a chance of spotting it, before it overwhelms us again.

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The Blue Lagoon – making your mind up?

Picture by Simon Harrod at Flickr, taken in May 2012

This fêted age of infinite information renders us vulnerable to a blizzard of spin. Some of this is deliberate and state sponsored, some of it is mere tittle-tattle. But as Churchill once said, a lie can be round the world before the truth has even got its pants on. It pays therefore to be careful how we interpret what we see, read and hear.

Newspapers are the least trustworthy sources of factual information, no better than gossip. We all know this, yet are happy for them to feed our own particular prejudice. The online gossip-mills too are manipulated to dramatic effect by the same nefarious actors. But at a time of crisis when we’re hungry for facts, such misdirection  undermines confidence and spreads fear.

Some newspapers took delight in reporting the fate of the Blue Lagoon in Derbyshire this week. This is an intriguing little beauty spot, near Buxton – its most striking feature being its beguiling Caribbean-blue waters. The newspapers tell us that to prevent people from gathering there, flouting social distancing rules,  the cops poured black dye into it.

Whilst correct, the facts here are spun by omission. They make it sound like the act of a police-state gone mad. Worse, they sound like a reckless piece of ecological vandalism. It takes a little more digging to learn the cops often do this at the Blue Lagoon. They do it in collaboration with the local council to stop people from swimming there. Why? Because, with a Ph close to that of bleach, the lagoon is toxic. So, the first story aims at shaking public trust in the police at a time when that trust needs reinforcing. The other story shows the police in a struggle to protect us from ourselves. Which story you prefer depends on your innate prejudice and political leanings.

Facts are those things that don’t change. They do not dance around with fancy hats on. This makes them lacking in novelty in a world that craves novelty. We crave it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, and it makes facts boring. Spinning the facts is what the press, the politicians, the propagandists and the gossip-mongers do. So, we should be mindful never to take anything at face value. Once we deviate from rules and scientific fact, the truth is always something we’ll have to dig for.

Facts – the full facts – enable us to make up our own minds. And what’s so interesting about any form of mass media are the ways in which others can use it to make up our minds for us. One mouth. Many listeners. So, be sure you know who you’re listening to and remember how the omission of certain key facts in the telling can change a story completely.

Lets be careful out there.

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Curve ball

 

So, the Derbyshire police reveal in dramatic fashion what I’ve suspected for a while. The cops have put surveillance tech into the air via the ubiquitous drone. It’s less expensive than a chopper but it can still read a car number plate or spot a person from miles out. It might even be able to read your face. And when the cops read a car number plate of course, they know who you are and where you live. The bad guys should look out then, except the cameras aren’t always used for catching the bad-guys.

I’ve been critical of people resisting this “lockdown” (hate that word), exasperated when I see people taking to the hills en-mass when we’re told to stay at home, except for “essential” journeys. But it has never been made clear what is and is not an essential journey. And now to see this tech unleashed on sparse numbers of non-criminal members of the public in order to “shame” them for taking a walk, well,.. it’s pulled me up short. More, it will be one of my abiding memories of this crisis, along with others that are starting to leave a bad taste, like how only the rich and famous are able to get a Covid-19 test. And all the while the usual sycophantic organs of the fourth estate are drumming up the Dunkirk spirit, assuring us we’re all in this together when we’re clearly not.

Freedom in the hills has always been a fundamental necessity for many. A journey to the hills might therefore be interpreted by such folk as essential for one’s sanity. Me too.  And we’re confused. Many of us are still expected to travel to work when we’d rather not, given the risk to which it exposes our selves and our families. But employers are thinking about longer term business viability and profits. That’s another interpretation of what’s essential. What’s the difference here?

So,.. the Derbyshire police shame members of the public for taking a walk away from home. But it didn’t look to me like they were risking increasing the spread of this contagion very much. They might have fallen, yes. They might have crashed their cars and needed the emergency services, tying up already overstretched resources. I get that. But something doesn’t feel right here. This feels like a distraction from other issues.

The real risks are what our health workers are exposed to daily on account of the shocking inadequacy of their protective equipment, also commuters being forced to share public transport, still travelling to jobs that employers are allowed to interpret as essential. Essential for whom? Where are the police drones shaming the slashed NHS budgets? Where are the police drones shaming employers for making people go to work, when they could and should be working from home?

If the Derbyshire cops have this technology, all the constabularies have it, and they’ve been trialling it for years. But its deployment in the midst of this crisis is both crass and high-handed, and it exposes far more than was intended. Yes, it might scare people off the hills for fear of that sinister eye in the sky, scare them back to their homes, but it also tells me we should be very careful of our freedoms in the future. We should beware allowing others to define, in the longer term, what is and is not a necessary action. Near martial measures such as these are quickly imposed and accepted by the public as necessary for our protection, but how quickly will they be eased?

When, in the coming weeks, the death toll from coronavirus escalates, be careful of who gets the blame. Yes, we should all be exercising close to home now, not driving out to the hills like we used to do. But the height of the death-curve will not be the result of that handful of walkers in Derbyshire interpreting their own essential needs as they have been left to do. Nor will it be the occasional lovers gone out to watch the sunset or post Instagram selfies. It’ll be the result of millions forced to work and commute in the name of profit, and our health workers having to improvise their own protective gear from bin bags.

I shall bear this period of isolation as best I can. I will stay at home, because I understand it’s necessary. But I’m not stupid either, and I know a curve ball when I see it.

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In the absence of anything else

Photo by malcolm garret on Pexels.com

I found a purse, stuffed with cash, credit and debit cards, rail card, various membership cards – everything. You know how it feels to lose something like that? You panic, don’t you? you turn the house upside down, retrace your steps,… when did you last have it? Petrol station? Supermarket? Then you find it down the back of the settee, and breathe a sigh of relief. But there looked like being no such happy ending here, and I could imagine what was going through this person’s mind.

What do you do? Well, there was a name on the credit cards, but no other ID. I asked among friends and family but no one knew the name. What now? In the olden days you’d contact the local Bobby, and they’d hold onto it down the cop-shop. The owner would call in on the off-chance and be re-united with it. But now there is no cop-shop. No local Bobby either. Not much of anything really. Instead there’s a police Lost and Found Website with a million-choice tick-boxes to navigate, and as soon as you mention credit cards it boots you out.

Then there’s this non-emergency police help-line that takes half an hour to connect and, after twenty questions from an operator speaking from a distant city, in which your actual query seems irrelevant, you get a crime number, like that’s any good to you.

All right,… perhaps even thinking of the cops in this instance was naïve, a sort of bourgeois knee-jerk to calamity, but it served to highlight how much things have changed, how much has gone. If there’s been a murder, sure, call it in and the state will see to it. But if you just need a bit of help,… well,… services are somewhat overstretched at the moment, so just use your initiative.

Right now though my glutinous initiative is somewhat slow in taking shape. Finally I go out and Sellotape a note near to where I found the purse: Mrs Suchabody. Please ring,… etc. But that’s pathetic, surely? So I go home and fret. But an hour later I get the call. Purse and grateful owner are reunited, and all ends well.

I wonder if this denudation of local services, local help, local authority, will perhaps in the longer term serve up the grass-roots transformation we so desperately need. Indeed I’ve noticed recently how the despair of neglected communities up and down the UK, since the crash, is now transforming into a rejection of national politics and the “official” support mechanisms of the state because, well, they’re so chronically under-funded, they’re useless.

People are saying, you know, this place is a mess, and it’s been decades, and no one else is going to sort it, so let’s do it ourselves. It’s called social activism and it comes out of the community-centres, the church-groups, the Facebook-groups . It’s what the original socialist movement sprang from – despair and necessity.

So you find a purse on the path. What you do about that is between your own conscience and what’s realistically doable, in the same way as there’s that homeless guy sitting in a shop doorway night and day, and kids turning up to school so hungry they’re not fit for a day’s lessons any more. Do you think the state’s going to sort that out now? No,… it looks like it’s down to the community. What is the community? We are the community, us and the people we know, the people we trust.

“There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour. My meaning, [there is no such thing as society] clear at the time but subsequently distorted beyond recognition, was that society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations.”

Margaret Thatcher said that, as a prelude to winding back the state safety nets. And she was right in what she said, or at least there’s a sad inevitability about it,… in the absence of anything else.

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Seeking useful information

After a quieter day, one in which the village clears away the mess from recent floods, we are unsettled again. It’s not so much the weather forecast which promises storms, but the arrival of the army and the Chinook helicopter. Stealthy the Chinook is not, and the steady, thudding rhythm of its rotors has been compressing my eardrums since noon.

There are holes in the flood banks, and the Chinook will plug them by dropping grab-bags of something or other – the media say sand, but this sounds inadequate to me and I’m hoping for something rather more substantial. The media, who have by now invaded the village in strength, also tell us the banks are to the south, when in fact they are to the west and the north. This lack of accuracy is disconcerting but not altogether surprising.

The flood banks have been breached in two places. Further meaningful information, such as the extent of the damage, the resulting danger, and the feasibility of repair is unavailable. The public, those threatened by these breaches, are advised to keep away from the “area of operations”. This is sensible, I suppose. But there is also a risk here to each of us, personally, and the media can be relied upon for nothing more than emotive garbage – pictures of Christmas trees being chucked into skips and our womenfolk dutifully choking back tears for the nice journalist bastards.

So, I set out to learn what I can by observation on the ground. There is a highpoint to which I might walk and maybe glimpse what is going on,  but I fail to get through a police check-point on the main road. There’s a bigger police presence now and a WPC has me dispatched in short measure by one of her community support minions. The young man peremptorily delegated to tackle me is polite, apologetic. His accent betrays a drafting in from far away.

I try another route, threading along a network of farm tracks, out across the flooded plains. The waters have receded a little, leaving the tracks passable to Wellington boots, though the meadows are still like lakes. Here, reflections in the water have brought the sky down to earth. The effect is dizzying, beautiful. Murmurations of birds have begun to explore their novel bounty.

By this somewhat open subterfuge, I am able to approach quite close, in fact, to the “area of operations” and, through binoculars,  learn the extent of the breach. The hole in the river’s flood banks is of awesome proportions. I am humbled by it. These banks have stood for centuries. I have walked their tops on balmy summer days, confident they will stand for ever. Why now such a dramatic collapse?

Here also, I find a handful of  moss-dwellers, with whom to swap stories. The best information, the most useful, is that gained at first hand and “local”. The usefulness of information decreases the more removed its source. Information on the TV or in the paper press is of course not information at all. It is infotainment, possibly manipulative, and worse than useless.

I watch for a while as the Chinook drops its bags, four at a time, sending up an almighty splash. It is more likely building aggregate, I think, than sand, which would simply be washed away the moment it hit the water. The roar of outraged river is drowned by the roar of the Chinook’s engines. I estimate it will take a thousand bags to plug that hole, five minutes per drop. You work it out. Operations have just begun in earnest, but there’s only ninety minutes of daylight left, then the Chinook will be going home for its tea. I am  not hopeful the hole will be plugged in any meaningful sense by nightfall. This is useful information.

I’ve seen enough now, and turn for home, the light fading.

The Chinook is a mighty bird, noisy as hell and ungainly to look at, but steady as a rock and graceful in the air. A daunting job, that pilot has, stopping the next tide from coming in where it ought not to. But those bags of dropped stuff looked pitifully small, beneath its belly, and that hole dauntingly big. On the plus side the tides are tending now towards the neap rather than the spring, and the fire brigade’s massive pumps are making a difference. This also is good information.

Meanwhile, in the village, more sand has arrived, donated by builders’ merchants. Local people organised by Twitter and Facebook, shovel it into bags. Anyone with a van or a tractor and trailer tours the village, dropping off bags wherever they are needed. Unsolicited, I have acquired a pile of ten. They look inadequate, but I’m grateful, and anyway I’m sure I won’t need them.

We are all a little jumpy now, feel irrationally threatened by even the promise of a spot of rain. But the river levels have dropped to no more than boisterous levels. Only the media  insist we’re doomed. I’m sure they hope we are. Great story isn’t it?

As I write a reporter stands not fifty yards from my home, talking empty nonsense to the entire nation. I see him on the TV in realtime. It’s disorientating. Shall I run out and photo-bomb? Offer him a cup of tea? He says nothing I can remember even five minutes later.

Dark now, 11:00 pm, a storm moving over – for some absurd reason they are calling it “Frank”. It’s raising a roar of wind in the chimney, promise of more rain tomorrow. But I note there has been an adjustment in the psyche’s perceived threat level. The risk is still severe, according to the Environment Agency,  but on the front line we are less reactive, no one staying up until the small hours this time. There is less traffic on the little road outside my window. Normality is relative, and human beings are adaptable creatures, defining their normality by whatever circumstances they find themselves in at the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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An area also well known,… for dogging.

Great Hill, West Pennine Moors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It spreads like litter.

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

Imagine:

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

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

Then imagine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not.

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

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

What’s that? You do?

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

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

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

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The fidgety girl and me

My morning commute was interrupted earlier this week by a lorry on fire. I saw the funnel of smoke from five miles away, a great ominous plume rising thousands of feet into the air. Fire Engines and police vehicles tore past me, and then the motorway slowed to a halt. My heart sank. I’d a feeling this was a big one, a terrible accident up ahead, and we wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long, long time. I switched the engine off, opened the window a crack, settled back and took a deep breath.

To the right of me was parked the great shiny white whale of a coach. The driver was a bulky fellow, shirt-sleeved, leaning forward a little over his wheel. His muscular forearms were perfectly relaxed, resting lightly on the rim, his fingers drooped, his posture empty, his expression impassive. This was a face used to staring out at an endless ribbon of road, in all weathers, day and night. He barely moved from that position until the traffic cleared. Some people are naturally meditative and calm. I admired his stillness, and adopted him as my guru for the morning.

Behind me, through the rear view mirror, I spied a Mercedes, all corporate black and shiny. It carried a lone occupant, a suited man, grey and of late middle years, apparently talking to himself. Now and then he’d shake his head in vehement disagreement, then drive home his point with sharp little nods and jabs of his fingers. I presume he was using one of those hands free things. It was barely eight fifteen but his business was already running at full tilt, and very important business it appeared too, at least judging by his tense expression. He was an eminent meetings man, no doubt, a finger-on-the-pulse type, dynamic, assertive – all the things I am not, and am consequently quick to notice in others.

To my left was parked a red Ford family saloon, a man and a woman, again middle aged. The woman was very still, the man by contrast very twitchy. His window opened half way and he lit up, releasing a great gasp of smoke. Neither spoke. She seemed withdrawn into a place of deep silence, her eyes inexpressive, resting in the middle distance while he appeared more quick-eyed, prowling and irritable. He was a caged and hungry lion, his patience sorely tested by the interruption of his routine – she a docile rabbit. I felt a tension between them – unspoken and probably imaginary on my part. I felt also a passing and quite peculiar sense of compassion for her – in all likelihood entirely misplaced – but interesting all the same.

In front was another Ford, a small, squat little Ka. Its occupant was a young woman who had the immediate urge to remove her jumper, then comb her hair, then check her face in the mirror, then put her jumper back on, then apply some lipstick, then slide her seat back and recline it, then pull it forward again, then check her ‘phone, then pull her jumper off again, then comb her hair a different way, then check in the mirror to see if she preferred the hair up or down. All this and we’d only been stationary for five minutes – any longer and she’d be getting out to have a walk around! She too lit a fag and a great gasp of smoke leaked from her window. She was indeed a terrible fidget, the little vehicle rocking impatiently on its springs as she wrestled gamely with her restlessness. I tried to remember if my own energy at her age had bucked so fiercely against such imprisonment. I know it had. It was only in my thirties I discovered the damage it was doing and began groping my way back to some sort of stillness.

Eventually, her window came right down and she stuck her head out. Her body followed. I was thinking now she might be trapped and was trying to escape, but then the ‘phone came up and in a couple of little flashes we got the “selfie”. I wondered at the caption. “Me stuck in traffic?” Heavens, love! A little dull?

The traffic began moving again after thirty minutes or so – not a severe delay by any means, and a sterling effort by the emergency services. I was lucky – those stuck at the tail end of it were delayed by a couple of hours, and the motorway was down to a single lane all day. The lorry was a terrible mess, the forward half of its cargo, some 20 tonnes of pet food, all gone and the cab burned to a shell. When the engines of these monsters overheat, they really overheat! The driver was unhurt, but it was a sobering scene all the same.

I carried with me into the day the stillness of the coach driver, but also the memory of the fidgety girl, and her diametrical lack of any stillness whatsoever. Of course for the Facebook generation there can be no such thing as inactivity, with even moments of forced inaction necessitating the reactive “action” of capture and comment. There seems nothing mindful in such a culture; it’s definitely a “look at me” kind of thing, more self absorbed than self reflective, and a little childish. I hesitate to criticise though, because I was young too, once, and remember being more painfully aware of myself with the world as my backdrop, trying to be seen as “cool” and likeable, as I made my first hesitant steps into manhood. Who’s to say I would not have been a Facebook fan, had they had it in the 70’s and 80’s, when, let’s face it, I was trying to attract girls?

Nowadays I think I look more at the world itself, in all its shades, perhaps seeking to catch glimpses of myself reflected in its sometimes quirky, sometimes mysterious traces, but without bothering much about the picture of myself within it. Is that true? Or do I delude myself? Is blogging not the more mindful selfie of the older generation? There I was, stuck in traffic, and here I am now, writing about it. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s about what I’ve written here. Perhaps I should have saved myself the self reflection, joined with the fidgety girl, and taken a selfie, just two faces in ten thousand, the pair of us held up by a lorry on fire.

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Abiding by the law? Michael Graeme runs foul of the boys and girls in blue.

I’m quite a timid person in real life – very non-confrontational. If you’re looking for an argument, you’ll find me very slippery – always switching the subject back onto neutral ground where we can both agree and get along fine. The original fence-sitter – that’s me. Break the law? Never – not under any circumstances, because it’s the law that protects us and keeps us from turning into an uncivilised society. However, sometimes it seems you just can’t help yourself.

I remember as a child, a mate and I were playing with a boomerang in a meadow at the back of our street. It had cost me 2’/6p, and we were having a great time with it. The field was fallow – no crops, no livestock or anything. Suddenly, my mate’s face took on a look of pure terror and he ran away as if he had the devil on his heels. Wondering what was up, I turned to see, not the devil, but the farmer, bright red with steam coming out of his nostrils in a comically bovine fashion. What was up with him? He looked angry over something. Surely, it was nothing we’d done. But then, why was my mate running like that?

Such delightful innocence proved to be no excuse and I was landed a kick up the rear end, which stung because the farmer was wearing shiny steel toe caps as I recall. This got me going and I duly caught up with my mate as we hopped back to safety over his garden fence. The farmer kept my boomerang and consequently still owes me 2’/6p. Yes, if you’re reading this, forty years later, you bastard, I remember who you are, and I know where you live!

Though the incident was largely forgotten (honestly) until quite recently, I think it instilled in me an abhorrence for laws that are either stupid, or applied in such a way as to deliver a kick up the backside to an innocent person, for no other reason than they seem easier to catch than people who are really naughty. Now, okay, technically we were trespassing that day, but my defence is that there was no harm intended – we were kids playing out. Some farmers don’t mind kids playing in their meadows if there’s nothing growing in them but this guy had zero tolerance, and I think I have him to thank for my own intolerance of arbitrary authority delivered by jobsworths, especially when it comes to land access issues.

A more recent example was when walking through a meadow attached to my home village. There, a sign asks us to keep to the alloted path – in other words keep off the grass – but the grass is wild – it’s a wild-meadow for pity’s sake. I was there recently with number two son, having gone to take a look at some wood carvings that had been done by way of decoration. The carvings – life sized statues of religious figures stand in the field, away from the path. I wanted a closer look, so I wandered over with my camera. Number two son was horrified that I’d be told off, and I was horrified that he was so sensitive. Duly chastised I crept away, but felt angry that such unseen nannying was curtailing my innocent freedom to come and go as I pleased. I was pushing fifty for heaven’s sake! It’s about time I was allowed to grow up. I can guarantee the person who will eventually hack those statues’ heads off or carves irreligious graffiti upon them will have no such sensitivity. And they will never be caught either.

All of this might sound like the bleatings of someone with nothing better to whine about, but I should advise you, I have also been subject to a warning by the police for his  misbehaviour – oh yes, Michael Graeme is a real bad-ass! (Is that the right phrase?)

Some years back I happened to have my finger in my ear as I was driving past a side-road. Allow me to explain: it was momentary thing – a bit of an itch that needed a desperate scratch, so I scratched it. Unfortunately, down the side road there was lurking a police car which duly emerged from its lair and sat on my tail for two miles before pulling me over. Was there a problem, I wondered? Had I a tail light gone? No. According to the otherwise charming young lady officer, I had been using a mobile phone, faced three points on my licence and a hefty fine and was I not aware that it was an offence “sir”? 

I was nonplussed and politely denied all knowledge. I hate it when I see people driving with a mobile ‘phone pressed to their ear, because it’s dangerous, they don’t seem to care, and there’s never a policeman around to catch them – so this felt like the ultimate irony. My mobile phone was requested, but did I even have my mobile ‘phone that morning I wondered? Cue a rather undignified emptying of pockets: pens, pencils, MP3 player, snotty hanky, small torch, swiss army knife, curious piece of bassalt picked up from the beach at Porth Neigawl,… calculator,…. backup calculator, oh yes, there it was: the tiny phone was located, in a zipped pocket, fastened in a case and switched off.

It was a mistake, obviously, a simple misunderstanding; and I could readily accept that a man with his finger in his ear could easily be mistaken for a man using a mobile ‘phone. But was Michael Graeme sent on his way with an apology and a friendly “mind how you go, sir”? Not exactly. He was given a warning and sent on his way with the feeling that he’d been lucky to get away with it this time – and he’d better watch out in future. But a warning against what, I wondered? The question was on the tip of my tongue but circumspection got the better of me. I tugged my forelock and went on my way.

Be warned, therefore, I am not so innocent a soul as my writings might lead you to believe! I also try to keep my mobile phone in a bag in the boot now when I’m driving, but I’m not sure that will be sufficient defence if it were to happen again. In my novel Durleston Wood, I have a character who’s so paranoid at the sight of a police car, he’s no longer able to drive without feeling like he’s going to have a heart attack. Hmnn, I wonder where I got him from?

And then there’s the recent troubling story of a man, (fortunately not me) sitting in his garden one summer’s day while a group of jolly local youths take delight in throwing apples at the side wall of his house. It’s annoying and it happens a lot, and there is never a uniform around to prevent it from happening, so the man goes out, remonstrates, ends up in a tense stand-off with several strapping youths encircling him, jabbing fingers and uttering profanities. The man grabs the ring leader, saying he is making a citizen’s arrest. He feels alone, vulnerable. The yobs close in. He punches out at one in self defence. The police arrive. The man is arrested for assault and spends weeks entangled in the machinery of the law, awaiting trial. From sunny afternoon to nightmare in the blink of an eye.

The message is: don’t get involved. The last thing society wants is its citizens acting on their own initiative and doing what they think is best, or right, or common sense in any given situation. So, stick to your email, your twitter or your blog, or any other means of indirect communication, but do not under any circumstances engage face to face with your fellow human beings unless you’ve got a solicitor on speed-dial. Oh, and watch out for scratching your ear because there’s never a policeman around, until you’re least expecting one.

Sorry boys and girls. You do a tough job, but you really ground my gears that day.

Graeme out

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