If you’re in Liverpool tonight,…

On the Parsons Bullough road

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

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

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

“It’s what?”

“All the kids are off,” she clarified.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

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

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

The Pikestones – remains of a chambered burial mound

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

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

On Spitler’s Edge

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

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

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

Higher Hempshaws ruin

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, we’ll be fine.”

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

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

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

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

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Beating and Breathing

To deal with daily stress, we have to be like a cork, buoyant, always floating to the top of life. Events swirl, they jostle, they jam and jar, and to be healthy and happy we must find a way to keep ourselves bobbing along, always rising above, transcending that which might harm us. Indeed most people, I think, are robust enough when it comes to resisting the abrasions of daily life, and they float very well. They are adaptable, resilient and eternally balanced, no matter what life holds in store. Others though, perhaps those caught more in the Gaussian tails of a so called mental normality – the introspective introverts (like me), the fiery extroverts, the worriers and the warriors both – we fellow shadow-landers all need to be more careful.

Stress is a sneak thief, creeping in at dead of night, stealing our self worth grain by grain, and covering up the fact that actually we have not been floating at all, that we have been sinking, and perhaps for a long time. We carry on, at first oblivious, then wake up one morning to find life has taken on a paler hue, taken on a strange and an unsettled quality. The pleasures become fewer, and of those few remaining, we deny ourselves the pleasure of them, because they no longer suit our moods, or we say we no longer have the time. And as the world becomes alien to us, we become alienated within it.

Cynicism and grumpiness are my usual warnings. Take heed they say, take refuge from this. But I have not been listening, and the last few weeks have yielded that unwelcome sense of alienation. It came upon me suddenly while conversing with a friend, a quite unrelated feeling of tension, of oddness. An innocuous statement then became like a trigger, and it filled me with an abrasive tingling, like broken glass in my veins. Suddenly, I was running out of beat.

So,…

Another old watch arrived today, courtesy of a successful bid on Ebay. It’s a vintage Favre-Leuba, Swiss made, circa 1963. It’s had some work, and it’s showing wear here and there, but seems to be running all right and will at the very least tidy up to a slightly better condition than that in which I found it.

But like me, this little Favre-Leuba is out of beat. There is a lopsidedness to its tickings, a bias to its balance. I have dismantled it, cleaned it, examined it, assessed the bits I can replace, identified the bits I must accept more as the unavoidable scars of its life’s history.

With any timepiece, indeed any oscillating thing, we must deal with both the rate and the beat. The rate determines accuracy, determines the authenticity of one’s life’s direction. But the beat is also important, the degree of swing from left to right, from in to out, up to down, yin to yang. Any excess in either direction and we encounter problems, we deviate, we get lost, we stop, or a friend says something innocuous, inoffensive, and a wave of weirdness washes over us as if at the rising memory of a bad dream.

The yin and the yang of the Favre-Leuba is dealt with by a small adjustment of the balance. Provided we have no excessive wear, the rate should then be reliable under any number of positions and circumstances. The beat of a human life is a little more mysterious, the causes of its imbalance harder to pin down, but as a rule the danger lies in excess of Yang.

Yang is hot. It will burn us up, dry us out, render our gut acid, and make our blood boil. While the balance of a watch is contained in the oscillation of a wheel and a spring, the balance of a life is held in the elasticity of the nerves, therefore also partly in the mind. And it is in the mind we must make the necessary adjustment. Reaction and relaxation. These are the clues.

Reaction is tension, it is the preparedness for flight, for aggression, for action. Many of us live in this state all the time. It becomes habitual, and what is habitual over time we accept as normal, unchangeable, even if it is a normality that will harm us. Blood pressure. Heart. Anxiety. Panic. These are the symptoms.

Relaxation on the other hand is the letting go. It is the unfreezing of tension. It is the softening that allows a body’s natural, inner self to reassert itself. It is soothing, healing, calming. And it can be willed.

When we are ill, we are not cured by drugs. They can help, but ultimately it is the body itself that returns us to wellness, to neutrality. This is how the healing arts work. They create space, create the room within us for the miracle that is the human life to work more as it should.

Another thing that strikes me about this Favre-Leuba is its size. It is barely an inch in diameter, and as such flies in the face of the brutality of design and the sheer weight of many a modern man’s watch. It weighs just 25 grams.

The modern man must carry so much weight around these days, much of it imaginary, though we imagine it to be real, purposeful, with all the dials and clickers to prove it. But open up a modern watch and it is mostly space, like the space inside an atom, which renders an atom mostly nothing, but apparently real, at least for all practical purposes. But its solidity is never-the-less an illusion.

The vintage watch is more a cutting back. For all of its antiquity, it’s simplicity, it will still carry the time, the purpose, the direction of a life, but with less weight, less fuss and bother, and there is no more worthy an example of this than this old Favre-Leuba, plagued as it is with the aches and pains of its long journey.

While I tinker and explore its workings, nudge back its beat, fine tune its rate, I feel a slow returning to myself, the palms less tingly, the heart less frozen by unseen terrors, the broken glass melting back to blood. It needs a new strap, the tiniest dab of paint on the dial to hide the bit silver showing through. And I shall wear it, take pleasure in it for a while.

To see the signs of imbalance in ones self is an important step, for then we might stop and wonder what it is we are missing. Better that than not to stop at all and plough on into sickness and oblivion. But what it is is usually to be found not in the details. These are the distractions, and shall all be transcended once we have remembered the single vital thing, the thing we have forgotten.

And what we have forgotten is often simply how to breathe.

 

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The yin and yang of modern living

I’ve been reading a paper by Roger Jahnke, a much respected author of many works on energy  medicine, and Qigong –  a rare sane voice in a field otherwise beset by fools and charlatans. The paper is quite technical and discusses research into how the body functions at the cellular level, how it sometimes fails, and how it repairs itself. It basically says Qigong is good for you, and then presents the evidence.

There was a lot of hype a while back about Genetics and the mapping of the Human Genome. We were told you could read the profile of a person’s DNA then tell them what illnesses they were going to get, even when they were going to die. It was a scary idea and only the life insurance companies really took to it with enthusiasm. For the rest of us, it was a depressing concept; here’s the roadmap of your life, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But now we know better. Your DNA can present you with statistical data on those ailments you’re most susceptible to, but whether you fall foul of them depends mainly on environmental factors. In fact we have about the same number of genes as a rodent, but there’s clearly a great deal of difference between a person and a rodent, a lot more going on in the maintenance of our well-being than the bare facts suggested by a DNA profile.

What do we mean by environmental factors? Basically stress.

When early man roamed the wilderness with his bow and arrow, his stresses were obvious – an angry bear, a hungry lion, the threat of being killed by another man. Faced with an immediate and obvious danger of death, the body responds by pumping you up, it sets the heart racing and readies you either to fight for your life, or to run like the wind.

We still have this “fight or flight” response, but in modern living the things that scare us are less obvious. A powerpoint presentation in front of the top brass? The ever spiralling cost of utility bills? Rumours of redundancy at work? A two hour commute in heavy traffic? An endless list. But how do you fight or run from such things? You can’t. Modern man is presented with a new kind of predator, one against which the old responses are useless – indeed worse than useless, because if you don’t physically fight or run, your body’s response becomes toxic and makes you ill.

The fight or flight mechanism is Yang. It’s active, dynamic, hot, and potentially dangerous. It can burn you out. It pumps you up and it says: “Do something!”. But without balance, Yang is indiscriminate and self destructive. Fight or flight is important, but should be used wisely, and for that we need the Yin side of our nature. Yin equates to the body’s “relaxation response” – the mirror image of “fight or flight”, like the nestled tadpoles in the yin-yang symbol. It’s natural and we all possess it, but modern living  causes us to neglect it, to belittle it,… even to laugh at it.

Techniques like meditation, yoga and Qigong work by awakening the relaxation response – defusing and dissolving toxins, encouraging repair rather than corroding us with the bitter acid of a million nagging worries. The methods are quite easy to learn and they allow the mind to enter the whole body, to sense it, to enjoy its vibrant aliveness, and to soothe the parts that are tense and troubled. Over time, the stillness these methods induce becomes a part of who you are and you no longer see the old stressors in quite the same way. You react to them with more discernment. Instead of terrifying, your old enemies begin to look jaded and foolish.

Internal methods like Qigong are taken to their extreme in martial arts. When skilled opponents face one another, they do so, not in a state of tension, pumped up with the fight or flight chemicals, but in stillness. When action comes, it’s swift and purposeful, rising forcefully out of stillness. And that’s the healthy way to live: acting when required but out of a more general stillness, rather than being forced to run like the rodents those early geneticists tried to tell us we were, forever moving, jumping at shadows, for ever reacting to life’s imaginary enemies.

So stop. Think. Breathe.

Relax.

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