Ice cream and wobbly planks

Ice cream on the pier

Today, we travel out to Southport for ice-cream, on the much beloved pier. We’re celebrating! We have a new PM who’s going to have our economy blasting off again, heading for the moon faster than an Artemis rocket. Where budgets have been slashed over the past decade, they’ll be slashed again to the benefit of all. As for the boring old energy crisis – I admit I was getting really worried about that – I’m confident it’ll all be sorted in the next few weeks, and I can go out and buy those new walking boots instead of being a tight wad and hanging on for news of my next energy bill. As for the benighted NHS, all that damned waste still bulking it out after twelve years of Operation Ongoing Austerity, will be purged with the strongest of laxatives, and then I’ll be able to see my elusive doctor right away, instead of sending his nurse a picture of my ailment, more in hope than expectation. No, only joking. Satire works best with a straight face.

Actually, I’m here because it’s a nice afternoon, with a hot wind, and the promise of thunderstorms tomorrow, so it’s today, or not for a while, and I don’t actually give a flying thing about who’s pretending to be in charge. The little blue car knew at once where we were going and could barely contain her excitement.

My good lady and I were also in the dentist’s chair this morning, having our teeth “deep cleaned”, and we wish to forget the experience. Heavens, what an experience that was! You’d think there’d be an easier way by now, something without all that whine and water. Indeed, I had to change my shirt when I got home. My good lady discovered, long ago, and by coincidence we were both traumatised by the same dentist, when we were children, for such is love. The downside is that, even now, in much later life, a trip to the dreaded tooth puller is never a relaxed affair, so we join forces, and find strength in mutual anxiety. The young man at the tool-end of this morning’s business is of an entirely different sort of course, and perfectly pleasant, perfectly good at his job, but much as it pains me to say it, his nurse – sweet voiced as she was – could have done much better with that damned sucker.

It’s a small private business, still begrudgingly servicing die hard NHS patients like us, while refusing to take on any more of the unwashed. Incidentally, I note it has a tree growing out of its chimney – several, actually. I would have mentioned it to the dentist, but I suppose, in these private corporate concerns, that’s always someone else’s department. Similarly, I note these private corporate concerns also have a high churn of underpaid, overworked talent, so it’s always a different dentist every time I visit. There seems to be no sense of continuity any more, with anything. Have you noticed?

Anyway, I regret I was not a good advert for their services, when I walked back through the waiting room with my wet shirt front. Twenty-three quid for a checkup, now, and then they always sting you for that deep clean at forty-two, and they want you twice a year, and that’s on the NHS. The gentleman who went in the chair ahead of me refused a clean point-blank, and good for him. The dentist scared me with a patter about gum disease, and teeth dropping out. But the name of the game is to play the game, if you’re brave enough. One checkup a year, not to get yourself struck off, for then you fall into the pit of private provision, and from which, I fear, there is no recovery.

Southport pier, September 2022

Anyway, the ice cream is truly delicious, and the memory of that dentistry, including the drowning, is fading. On the downside, it was three quid a small, single scoop. No one else is buying, and I’m feeling guilty at splashing out on luxuries, but I think we deserve it, my lady and I. The pier is looking a bit wobbly, planks coming up, and screws working loose. Some planks look to have been replaced by that legendary firm of Bodgeit and Scarper – ends rough-sawn, wonky, and a quarter inch over-cut. It does not fill one with confidence. I read Sefton council needs over two hundred thousand to replace them all properly, so for now it’s all about patching and making do. Thank heavens, plucky old Albion is not sending anyone to the moon, or it would all be gaffer tape and blobs of glue, and the inevitable consequences.

But that’s all in the past now. The economy will be booming again by Christmas, I’m sure. All it needs is a stiff upper lip, a bit of boosterism, and that good old Dunkirk spirit. As soon as those wealthy chaps have had their tax cuts, they’ll be showering us with the crumbs from their table, starting up high-tech, high wage businesses all over the place. One could almost be forgiven for forgetting we’re into our twelfth year of a Conservative administration, with the sunlit uplands always just over the horizon, that we’ve heard it all before,… that things have actually grown worse and worse and worse,… but no, I’m quite sure, this time,… oh, stop it!

Delicious ice cream done, we saunter down to the end of the pier. The tide is out a long way. Opened in 1860, it’s the oldest of our traditional iron piers, and is beaten only by Southend for length. It caused me a panic in the nineties when I had written it in to a scene in my novel Langholm Avenue, only to have the council pull it down. Fortunately this was for a major refurbishment, and they duly put it all back up again, saving me a serious re-write. It was a close run thing, though, the pier’s existence saved by a single vote, and a public subscription. The pier starts quite a way inland, which is puzzling to many visitors, but old photographs tell us this is due to the coast, which has been steadily expanding due to silting, the pier having to reach further and further out in order to get its pilings wet.

The rather modernist café, at the pier’s end, has undergone some sympathetic internal refurbishment during the covid years, and was used as location for filming the final scene of the recent BBC drama “Time” starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, who in my humble opinion were both utterly compelling. It wasn’t an easy watch, though, being set mostly in a generic, northern prison that was barely under control, and in a way I saw as a microcosm of civic society: underfunded, understaffed, everything cut to the bone and, for the inmates, a life of boredom rendered tolerable only by drugs, interspersed with episodes of horrific violence. Our hero, Bean, is a drunk driver who killed a man and is imprisoned for four years. It was a deeply moving story, and a surprise for me, Bean’s redemption coming as it did in the café at the end of our beloved Southport pier.

I’ve had a few good shots of the pier over the years, but it’s at its best during the golden hour. In the middle of the day, like this, it’s actually better in the rain, when you get reflections of the structure, and the lighting, off the wet planks.

We came up by the Marine Way bridge, opened in 2004, a cable tied suspension bridge, and a difficult structure to frame in one go. It’s better shot from underneath, by the marine lake, which grants it a certain dynamism. This is a massive architectural gesture, and quite beautiful. One doubts it would ever get past the planning stage now, but I have to stop talking Albion down. It’s just that I can only find these sunny uplands we are forever promised in my head these days. Once I leave the bounds of imagination, it’s hard not to trip up over all those loose planks!

The Millennium Bridge, Southport, 2022

Thanks for listening.

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Small pleasures amid this talk of God and War.

Southport, Easter Saturday afternoon. I’m crossing the square in front of the Town Hall, thinking of lunch, when a woman steps out of the crowd and offers to pray for me. I thank her kindly, but tell her I couldn’t possibly put her to so much trouble.  She hands me a leaflet which I fold and pocket with a parting smile.

The town looks poor still, nearly a decade after the crash. There is an eerie Parisian beauty about Lord Street, but it is long past that time when people dressed up for Saturdays in town. Some make the effort but they stand out now, look ridiculous even in their finery, like peacocks strutting among pigeons. Or perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I only notice the haggard expressions and poor pigeon-clothing we wrap ourselves in. Or is it a myth, this hankering after a nostalgic vision of an England that never existed – and really we have always looked and dressed this way?

In Chapel Street, the air is lively, cut by the jangle of buskers. And there’s this wizened beardy guy shouting passages from the Old Testament – the end is nigh, that sort of thing. I note he has a bigger crowd than the buskers. But he sounds angry. It’s our stupidity perhaps he takes issue with, our refusal to be saved? Whatever that means.

It’s unkind to make rash judgements of course but I have an instinctive aversion towards angry, shouty people. And I’m only here for the cash machine, so I can pay for lunch.

Lunch is a ham and cheese and mushroom toastie. They put it in fancy bread and call it a Fungi Pannini. It grants it a certain altitude, but it’s as well not to get too carried away with these things. Obviously, I am not a gastronome. Still, it’s flavoursome, and nicely filling, and the coffee is deliciously aromatic. This is my reward after a week of six-thirty get ups, and long days that are leaving me increasingly knackered. It’s worth the wait, and the sheer quiet pleasure of it revives my spirits.

I take out the ‘droid for company. Out with it comes the leaflet from the lady who offered to pray for me. She’s wanting me to join her Evangelical Church, but it’s not really my scene. They’re heavy on the healing stuff – a long list of things they can cure by faith, but the small print cautions me to seek medical advice as a first recourse. The legal escape hatch is somewhat deflating. Even the religious fear litigation it seems. Does this mean that for all of  their assertiveness this afternoon, they lack the courage of their convictions?

I flick through the headlines on the ‘droid. The Times and The Mirror seem excited by the possibility of nuclear war. Meanwhile the Guardian has its knife in the guts of the leader of the opposition. The collective subliminal message here is that we can forget any realistic prospect of a return to calmer, more reasoned discourse. Instead we shall be distracted from ongoing economic and political turmoil by increasing talk of war. There are historical precedents for this phenomenon and we should not be surprised. These are ancient daemons, hard to outwit, filled with an infectious loathing.

I have no particular business in town other than lunch, but I visit the bookshop while I’m here. I’m looking for something by Sebastian Barry. They have nothing in the second hand section. They might have had him among the new stuff, but I do not buy new books any more – my little contribution to Austerity and my own knife in the guts of the economy. I’ll find the book I want for a couple of quid in a charity shop, when the time is right.

Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful, sunny afternoon. The trees on Lord street are budding and there is blossom aplenty. But there are more angry voices here, more shouting about God. The words are incoherent but the tone is clear: Fess up, submit, or else!

I escape up Scarisbrick Avenue, heading towards the light and the sea, but there are drunk men here with pints of beer. They are staggering, arguing volubly, incoherently. Fuck this, fuck that. Fuckety fuck it. Fuck, fuck, fuck. It’s not yet two pm, the sun a long way from the yard arm. There is no wisdom in such heroic quantities of beer, no real escape in it from the misery of latter day working lives. Only hope and the dignity of decent wages will cure it, and both are in short supply.

Along the front, by the King’s Gardens, the greens are littered with chip cartons and cellophane wrappings. It’s my eye again, black dog stalking, showing me only the decay, the despair, the sheer hopeless void of it. The pier affords an arrow to the sea. The sandy tide is in, a scent of briny freshness at last. I walk the bouncy boards at a brisk pace, breathe in the sea, take it down deep as the only bit of the day worth holding on to.

Well, that and the coffee, and the toastie.

Small pleasures amid this talk of God and War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The gathering storm – Writing, retiring and remoanering.

Full moon and a Spring tide draws me to the coast. The coast for me is Southport, North West England, a place you rarely catch the sea – at least not splashing up against the promenade, even at high tide, so the opportunity is not to be missed. I have in mind an hour’s stroll along the front, and some sea air, but I am an hour late in arriving and the tide is already on its way out, a slow peeling back of muddy foreshore puncturing my boyish optimism.

Instead I am faced with a dilemma. To park on the promenade for just an hour now is over a pound. I fumble for change, but it seems an extravagance given the receding tide and the all pervading mood of “Austerity”. Do I stay, or do I just go home? I split the difference and drive to the Ocean Plaza instead where it’s free to park so long as you intend buying something.

I buy coffee.

Two pounds buys a medium Americano at the Pausa Cafe  in Dunelm Mill. Luck gets you a balcony table overlooking fabrics and curtains. The coffee is really good.  I come here a lot on wet weekends – for the coffee, not the fabrics.

When I sit down I’m thinking about the work in progress, a novel that seems intent, as usual, on self destruction about three quarters of the way in. Such single minded preoccupation is irrational when it doesn’t matter a damn if it’s ever finished or not, and will in any case never make me a bean. It’s just a vast puzzle to be solved, something satisfying only to my convoluted psyche, the end result being something I have made and can post online. And it gets me out of bed.

A couple of overnight pings in response to a sample posted on the blog have revealed potential avenues for exploration, and I’m thinking about those. My thanks to elmonoyd on Wattpad, and Steve on WordPress. I make notes, add them to the mix, let them stew. Then I fall back on the secondary preoccupation: the apparently perilous state of Western Civilisation, its dearth of progressive leadership, its alarmingly retrograde motions this past twelve months, and its lack of answers to the most pressing questions of our times.

What now after the collapse of Capital?

The world is disintegrating on so many levels, and no one knows what to make of it, let alone what to do. The best us Brits can come up with is Brexit, God help us, but that’s like sawing off the branch we’re sitting on. Me? I’m done. All I have in mind now is a little cabin in my back garden, so when retirement comes, soon I hope, I can sit in it and make writing the sole purpose of my life, instead of just a hobby.

My solution to the world’s ills then will be to get up at nine in the morning, instead of six, and never have to commute another fucking mile – a sort of wry three fingered salute. Of course there will be no more purpose in this than there is to my writing now. But I feel too old these days, and too muddled to make a difference to anything more worthy. I see my life’s challenge as simply not to waste any more time moaning about stuff I cannot fix.

But there’s a snag, and it’s to do with the energy of reaction. We’re ten years into a recession, though no one’s actually calling it by that name. In the broader picture it is the sudden acceleration of a decline that’s been steadily ongoing since the seventies – in practical terms by this I mean the availability of well paid work for working men, and free education so the sons of working men can aspire to better paid middle class work. Irt is the struggle of the majority against the minority.

But that’s all over now.

Think about it.

Things are no better, ten years on, employment trends being to divest the employers of all responsibility for employees, while driving wages down to Victorian levels that fall short even of subsistence. In the mean time it overhangs everything, like a chest infection, every breath we take a reminder of its cloying presence, that foul delusion of our times: Austerity.

Is my little cabin still a viable proposition? Sure I can build it, but can I really close the door on a world gone mad, retreat into my fantasies? On the one hand I don’t see why not since I can do nothing about any of this. Putting the world to rights is for the pub, and self indulgent blogging, but on the other hand it seems morally bankrupt to turn my back when the generation I have nurtured in hope and optimism is left with no future and no credible leadership of any colour at all, and there is only the turmoil of populism and layer upon layer of toxic social media to inform opinion.

What the hell?

Suddenly I’m aware the old girl at the table behind me is talking too loudly and has nothing nice to say about anyone. Then there’s a sharp mouthed mother shouting abuse at her child for dolloping something on the table. A baby squeals loud for hunger, for comfort, for sleep. It seems my troubled thoughts are sending waves out into the world, unsettling it. Time to move on before I bring the ceiling down as well.

I look in Pound Stretcher and Matalan while I’m passing, further justifying my free parking, but they are drab and uninspiring this afternoon, and I don’t buy anything. I never do. I cannot help but think big out of town shopping centres like this will all be gone soon – nothing to sustain them with the world and his dog on minimum wage. Then all we’ll have will be our threadbare highstreets with their thrift shops, their pawn shops and  their pay-day loan sharks.

And coffee shops, I hope.

I return to the car the long way via the end of Southport Pier. It adds perspective, and a glimpse of emptiness, of infinity.

It begins to rain.

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The Phishers and the darkening tide

The summer has been a bit of a washout. We are already into September and I can recall very few days when I have felt comfortable without my jumper. Granted, I was fortunate and those few days I do remember coincided with my holidays, but one would hope for a more extensive summer than a single shirt-sleeved stroll along the promenade at Scarborough. And the next day it rained.

So now the garden is crisping up, the borders thickening with dead-heads and neglect. On the upside, the lawn is no longer as voracious in its appetite for the mower, but too late, the feeling of decay has entered my bones, got me braced for something I cannot avoid, like the new school term, even though it’s thirty years since I needed trouble myself about that.

I received a message from Yahoo Customer Services informing me that unless I entered my password into the proffered window pane, my mail would be terminated within 24 hours. The message is composed in poor English and as such is rather a transparent attempt at phishing – a criminal ploy to get me to reveal my email login details.

I dislike this kind of thing, that there are those in the world who would do harm to innocents. This sounds pathetic, naive, even to say it, but I truly wish the world could have turned out otherwise. We have after all had ample opportunity. Is it wise or even sane to remain optimistic?

Another message this morning informs me my mail has duly been suspended. It has not. I confirm the fact by sending myself an email from one of many other accounts I use, and it pings up in my Yahoo inbox as normal But still, one wonders. Does the phisher single me out, or is my mail merely one morsel of millions in a broadly cast bait?

All day I have imagined my computer is behaving strangely, that the blackness of infection seeps in through cracks I cannot see. Defender and Firewall do not seem to be in a flap about it.

But still, it leaves one feeling a little unsettled.

Anyway, it was another cloudy start to the day, light rain, but clearing by mid-afternoon to a kind of blustery-sunshine, and rather cool, 12 degrees. But that the sun shone at all was sufficient to entice me out to the coast, to Southport.

And tide was in, which cheered me.

There are music hall jokes about Southport and the sea – that you need a camel to reach it, and it’s true it does go an awfully long way out, so much so that some visitors would query if Southport actually qualifies as a seaside town at all, but I can assure non-natives, as all Sandgrounders know, it comes in again twice a day, just like everywhere else.

I like the light here.

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

I wonder what might be lost, I mean were the darkness to take hold of my email account. Since Michael Graeme exists only online, the mangling or the hijacking of his imaginary affairs would hardly matter. But what other doors does that password unlock? And what other unfortunate souls have left themselves open this way, rashly taking the phisher’s poisoned bait. How does one protect ones young in such a world as this?

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

I find my way to Yahoo, log myself in securely, change my password. All seems normal. But still, there’s that feeling of unease, of shadows creeping through my innermost world. I light candles and utter spells of protection, draw circles of exclusion in my mind.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Phishers, like all criminals, are a challenge to ones understanding. They present often the keenest intelligence, the highest of ability and ingenuity, yet in human terms they also operate at a low level of consciousness, or they would be more mindful of the suffering they cause. They are, in a sense, a sub-human species. But one must be careful in condemnation, for then the blackness creeps inside the soul. They are in fact like bacteria, not sufficiently conscious to render any negative emotion on my part a truly rational thing. I think this is in the nature of forgiveness. Still, I can only hope that as with any bacteria, I am fortunate in avoiding infection.

The sea sparkled at Southport as the sun glanced from the little wave crests. I walked the boards of the pier, gazed out through binoculars at the boats and the rigs and the windmills that dot the horizon. But the sea here is not of sufficient depth to hide the murkiness of the sands underneath. There are no blue boisterous depths to wash clean the shore on which we travel.

The tide swirls murkily, and with each swift retreat is revealed the scum line of all our sins.

The verses of course are Longfellow’s, and not mine.

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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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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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The man who nearly lost his hat

It was a beautiful hot day, early in the season, and I’d been tempted out to the coast, to Southport, for a walk along the promenade, then to the end of the pier, for coffee and doughnuts. Being rather challenged in the follicle department these days, I’d not wanted to catch the sun too much on the top of my head, so I’d called in to the Matalan store, just off the promenade, for a hat, choosing for myself an inexpensive, one-size-fits-all thing, made of straw.

Thus, protected from the sun, I re-joined the crowds making their way along the pier. It was a wonderful afternoon and my spirits soared. After feeling like I’d been cooped up in the house all winter, the sea air was incredibly invigorating. About half way along the pier we picked up a teasing breeze, and one of the mischievous little sprites of air lifted my new hat from head and snatched it out of reach of my startled grasp. Well, that’s that, I thought – I’d had the hat all of ten minutes, and there is was: gone! I turned then, just in time to see a quick witted lady, whom I took to be of Malaysian descent, catching hold of it with a dainty little hop and a laugh. Her companions, an English couple in their seventies, found the incident amusing and for a moment we all shared in the silliness of it. She had the most wonderful smile, this woman, and such playful eyes, and a charming demeanour. Graciously, she returned my hat and, a little embarrassed, I thanked her, then went on my way.

It was that same evening, at home, I got an email from a friend. I replied with some news about my day. I don’t know why I brought up the subject of nearly losing my hat – perhaps I was stuck for something to say – but anyway I described the incident to him pretty much as I’ve described it to you. Then, the very next day, he came back to me with another email. He said his sister, who lives in Southport, has a neighbour, a lady originally from the far east. She’d had some elderly English friends visiting recently, possibly the companions I’d described, and wouldn’t it be amazing if it was the same woman who’d caught my hat? Enthused by the possibility, he resolved to ask his sister to enquire at the next opportunity. And I, equally enthused, eagerly awaited news. The odds were pretty much against it, but stranger things have happened, plus I had this funny feeling,…

And you know what?

My friend’s sister’s neighbour said it definitely wasn’t her! But if it had been,… well, that would have been a really good story!

Of course, it would not have taken much for me to end my tale differently for you here, thus transforming rather a pointless, factual, anecdote into a more beguiling lie. Believe me, the temptation was strong, because I had wanted it to be true. I had wanted the neighbour of my friend’s sister to be the one who had caught my hat, because it would have created a highly improbable and possibly meaningful connection between strangers who were mutually, though rather vaguely connected already, yet entirely unknown to one another. That we are all more intimately connected than we suppose is, I believe, the way of the universe, and I’m hungry for stories that support this hypothesis, to the extent that I am often tempted to bend the facts in order to yield a more polished myth. This is, after all, what story-tellers do.

Sure, we’re all fond of amazing coincidences. It would have been like the universe singling me out on that sunny day, amid vast crowds, and raising me to the ranks of existential celebrity. It would have meant I was not just some insignificant twerp in a poorly fitting hat. But alas, in the absence of any miracle, as my good lady was kind enough to point out at the time, that’s exactly what I had been. That I’d been unable to hold onto my hat, and a stranger had caught it, was really neither here nor there, and barely worth the mention.

Except,…

This fragment of an opening has the feel of a romance about it, and I’m fond of writing those, so I shall step aside from myself for a moment and put a fictional protagonist in my shoes. He’s single, perhaps divorced, or maybe he just never got around to it in the first place. He’s thinking life’s passed him by, that the time for love has gone.

Then the wind snatches off his hat, just like that!

And the rest, as they say,…

Well, you couldn’t make it up, could you?

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And then what?

Friday 22nd November 2013

Cool this morning, about 2 degrees, light frost. Dropped T off at the bus stop for college, then drove to the Marshside nature reserve and walked out along the old dumper truck trail to the estuary – at least as far as the mud would allow. The skies were a little hazy first thing, streaked with brown and blue grey, but clearing now to a deep blue, a low sun rising behind me and casting long shadows as I look out over the route I’ve just walked. There are a few other cars about, mostly people taking their dogs for a dump, one bearded twitcher standing alone in the reeds, heron-like, with an impressive telescope on a tripod. Across the estuary Blackpool is crystal clear, also Black Coombe, and I can just make out the Lakes beyond, through binoculars, the fells having a light dusting of snow this morning.

I’m probably going to sit here until about 10:00, then go in search of coffee and a new jumper – I noticed yesterday my old lambswool is coming in holes, a bit like me.  I also seem to be scratching about for socks and underpants – so may restock at Matalan.

I’m also trying to think.

I did eventually download that book “Brain Wars” by Beauregard. Hate the title though. Consumed it on my Kindle in one long sitting yesterday. There was nothing new in it for me – a repeat of studies I’m familiar with from other sources – not that this detracts from the importance of the work. Worth the read, but I think I preferred his “Spiritual Brain”. That the mind is separate from the brain seems now all but proven, at least to my satisfaction – only die-hard materialists continuing to deny the evidence that’s been mounting since Myers and the founding of the SPR in 1882. The argument that the mind is reduced by the brain for the purpose of enabling a physical existence in form is also convincing, and further arguments that the mind is freed upon death, back into a greater, non-physical awareness are also compellingly well supported now by an accumulation of evidence from veridical NDE’s. As Jung said, back in ’61, we have to reckon with the possibility,…

Where this leads us I don’t know, what the purpose of the greater mind’s hamstrung foray into physical form might be, again, I don’t know and am probably incapable of imagining. I did get it once, I think, grasped it intuitively, wordlessly, but that was on the other side of an ME, a long time ago. And I’ve slept a lot since then.

The windscreen is misting now, and I’m beginning to wonder what I’m doing here. It’s like this muddy trail in front of me, heading out to the sea. I’ve been passing it for years, decades even, seeing people wandering down it and wondering to myself what was so special at the end of it that might draw them on. Well, I’ve been down it now and it’s just a twenty minute tramp to a muddy foreshore, a couple of stumps and a seemingly infinite plane of yet more mud beyond – nothing that seems very special, in other words,  and always another frontier stretching before you.

The skies are alive with birds this morning, all manner of waders and the plaintive call of curlews and oyster catchers. Great squadrons of geese are moving up the estuary.

Nature is so wonderfully diverse and complex; we look at it and wonder at the purpose of it. But it has no purpose, no meaning, other than what we grant it. The meaning is perhaps what we aspire to, or something we grant it without even knowing we’re doing it. It’s an idea dimly grasped through the fog of an inadequate intellect, and perhaps the full awareness of that purpose will dawn only when there’s been a global shift in consciousness, maybe centuries from now, something that restores us to the perspective of our  immortal selves, temporarily camped out and shivering down here in the mud.

And then what?

But having advanced so far along the trail, I find myself withdrawing from such thoughts now, withdrawing from the mysterious frontier. Life is where it’s at, down here in the mud. Life is where it’s happening, it’s where consciousness lights up if only briefly in form, so with my life more than half over should I not be waking up to the fact of it by now and living it a little more? Should I not be more focussed on simply being instead of sitting here at 9:00 am on a Friday morning with my head up my own ass, ruminating on matters that greater minds than mine have foundered upon?

Okay, time to move on. I need coffee, and underpants and socks.

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Photographing ghosts

More pale winter sun today, tempting the crowds out to the coast, and to Southport. Indeed the crowds along the promenade and pier this afternoon were extraordinary in their density for the time of year – but even more extraordinary: these people were simply out enjoying the air.

They were not shopping.

There was a lot of pre credit crunch investment in the architecture here, particularly along the sea front and the Marine lake, much to please the modernist eye, and the photographer. I’ve been coming here for fifty years, so you’d think I’d know all the angles by now, but I rarely make a visit to Southport without my camera – even when I’m shopping. The light is just too tempting. Yes,… the secret’s out: I’m a camera buff, and that most annoying of species: the amateur photographer.

To get the geek speak out of the way, I’m currently shooting with a Canon G12, at the higher end of the compact market, with a 1/1,7 sensor – a relatively modest 10 Mega Pixels, and a practical, rather than an extensive x5 zoom range. I’ve been using it for about a year and I’m enjoying my photography with it. I didn’t want a larger sensor DSLR camera  – those bigger sensors are certainly capable of jaw dropping impact, but on the whole the cameras they’re fitted to are just too hefty for my taste these days, and, like my old 35mm SLR kit, I’d I know I’d simply end up leaving it at home.

So what is it about photography then? Is it art?

“No, you just press a button and shoot.”  Or so I was told recently. It’s easy to take a photograph. Why make such a fuss about it? I suppose the short answer to this is yes, it’s very easy to take a well exposed photograph under a wide range of lighting conditions nowadays – the technology of the digital camera really delivers on that score to the extent that you don’t really need to know what’s going on in terms of exposure or aperture for it all still to work. You can be a complete noob and still get a picture of whatever you’re pointing at.

But the “art” of the camera is very much what it was in the days of Cartier Bresson, or Ansel Adams. Beyond the technical details of imprinting an image on a photosensitive medium, certain images simply have a greater visual impact than others. You can follow certain rules of composition, colour, contrast, sharpness, detail, and so on, but the secret of a good image is still elusive, still enough to separate the snap-shot taker from the photographer. It’s all in the eye, not only shooting what the photographer sees, but what perhaps the non-photographer would never see in a million years, until it’s hanging on the wall.

Me? I’m not that good. I began with Soviet era Russian 35mm kit, and mountain photography. I did place some transparencies of wild places with a walking magazine thirty years ago, but they never paid for them, and those pictures have yet to appear. Like my writing, my other “arts” have never been very much in demand. I also used to bore my friends and relatives with slide shows of places they’d never want to go to in a million years, but I’ve grown up at last and these days my photography is more of a private affair. I have a Flickr account for the shots that really mean something to me, but also it has to be said a growing portfolio of the same dull old scenes shot year after year and spread across a couple of portable hard-drives just aching to be dropped or deleted.

Mountain shots these days are conspicuous by their absence, unfortunately. Grinning snaps of my offspring from years one to eighteen, are more the norm, also the “what we did on holiday” pics. But there still the others – the ones where nosey parkers flicking through my camera are left nonplussed. Their flippant comments embarrass me, because I do not wish to appear self absorbed and I can hardly tell them what I’m looking for in those pictures are the ghosts of something other than what can ordinarily be seen.

There were ghosts on Southport pier this afternoon. They wandered up, took my arm a while as I walked, and they promised me a thaw was coming. That there are better days ahead. I didn’t capture this very well on film – couldn’t even tease it out in Photoshop –  indeed my ghosts are mostly camera-shy.

But it was good to have their encouragement all the same.

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Watching the Watcher

A sunny afternoon. Southport on the Lancashire coast. You park your car on the seafront, you walk along the pier with your family, savouring the salty breeze and then you sit down at Silcocks for a chip barm. It’s lovely. Bikers come here from all over the county. They line their polished machines up for all to see and admire. There’s a kiddies roundabout, the Cocks and Hens. It’s late April and we’re trying to shrug off the winter months. There’s a pause in conversation, a moment of introspection, and I find myself playing the game of spot the security camera.

It doesn’t take me long. I’m getting pretty good at it. Good enough to realise that in any urban setting, no matter where you are you can rest assured, you’re on CCTV.

I’m on this one at the minute. It’s watching me, as I’m taking a photograph of it. It’s the equivalent of two fingers, though I’ll probably come a cropper one day and have some explaining to do. I particularly like the way the Union Jack has wound itself around the pole, rendered itself only half the flag it used to be,…

Still, it’s nice to feel so,… protected.

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