Em and I were struck in town by how beautiful the “Mother and Child” statue looked yesterday afternoon with the fountain flowing. As we got closer we realised that the water had frozen on parts of the statue.
“Mother and Child” in ice
Popping in to town with Emma yesterday, we dipped into The Works for the last day of their sale. There I found a copy of Geoff Sample’s Garden Bird Songs and Calls. I have always wanted to be able to identify bird song properly. This book is accompanied by a CD and, ripped to my MP3 player, the morning and evening commutes should become a more relaxing – and more educational – experience!
Ever since my childhood, there has been an association between walking around Langdon Hills and Saturdays.
Autumn walks particularly are fixed in the memory, the family – not just parents and siblings – slipping into boots and pulling on coats and setting out into Coombe Woods an hour or so before dusk (Coombe Woods is known to many as “The Bluebell Woods” for its stunning spring carpet of bluebells as far as the eye can see). Five youngsters with over-active imaginations would pass through the gate into the tunnel of trees that lead from Dry Street deep into a darkly magical woodland kingdom that could only harbour wraiths, twisted goblins and other spectres between the creeping shadows and tendrils of mist.
We would march determinedly past the ponds, past “The Woodpecker Tree”, to the edge of “The Valley”. There, catching our breath, we would gaze out towards the pines that that comprise “The Creepy Copse”, standing tall in silent sentry over the winding path – far below them and us – that leads to “The Ski Slope” (what was then a broad and open slope, lined on each side with pines and with a glorious ancient oak at its summit). “The Woodpecker Tree” has long since fallen, but for years it stood as an object of wonder, its bark-less, limb-less trunk giving it an almost prehistoric appearance. It got its name from the holes that punctuated its upper reaches. Whether or not woodpeckers ever dwelt there I’ve no idea.
If we were feeling brave we would run down the valley into the trees, follow the path through its twists and turns, past “The Sandy Hill” (site of numerous stick battles and rope-swing disasters and not to be confused with “The Sandy Hills” of Westley Heights) before clambering up to “The Ski Slope” where we would follow the upper path towards the old cricket ground at the top of Dry Street. En route we would gather chestnuts from the piles of leaves to roast on the fire before heading back down Dry Street. The smell of creosote on the handrail of the newly-created ranger path was a welcome return to the safety of civilisation. The wraiths and goblins slunk back into the darkness, watching our descent under the comforting yellow glow of the street lights from from their lairs amongst the shadowy twist of brambles.
Reaching home and back indoors, fingers clasped around mugs of tea would ache with that satisfying gnaw of heat on bone. The fire would be lit and stoked to a blaze before chestnuts were roasted in the embers and crumpets toasted on an ancient fork and then buttered and piled high on an old plate, itself precariously balanced on a low brass stand by the kindling. Cousins – who despite their gender were all “Men of the Hills” – would plan their next adventure before settling back, bellies full and imaginations fired, to play and draw and, when we could get away with it, watch The Dukes of Hazzard.
Times change, of course, and “The Men of the Hills” are reunited for their walks less often, though I like to think that we all retain similarly fond memories of those childhood woodland adventures.
Saturday walks for me are now more usually taken in the early morning.
Yesterday, having not enjoyed such an excursion for quite a while, I decided to get up at 6am (something of a feat as I had only gone to bed at 3am!) and head out into the hills. Porridge and tea delayed my start, but at about 6.40am I set out from Gernons, wellington boots on and staff in hand and Radio 4’s Farming Today on my headphones. I walked across Eastley green and used the cut-through (that really must become an all-weather path – it is used by so many), heading down the college entrance road to Nethermayne. As I walked past St Luke’s Hospice and Basildon Hospital, the clouds above the estuary were a spectacular and angry inky swirl against a dark steel blue sky that only lightened towards the horizon.
Despite the day and the hour, traffic was already heavy and it was a relief to turn into Dry Street, the reassuring forms of Dry Street Farm – where so much growing up was done – quickly coming into view. From Dry Street I headed up past Dry Street Memorial Church towards One Tree Hill.
The view from One Tree Hill across the Thames to Kent and then up the river to London is one of the most spectacular I know. We too often take these places for granted, but such open and sweeping vistas are rare and, when the air is clear and the sky light, the views are inhibited only by the quality of your eye-sight. From One Tree Hill I headed through Northlands Woods, before picking up the bridleway through to Hall Woods. Here, switching off the Today Programme to listen to the morning chorus, I could hear a woodpecker drilling and I felt a thrill to be outside in such beauty, the sun now throwing a low and soft golden light on the frosted fields that I could see through the trees.
Walking the unmade roads past the settlements and farm buildings, I headed into Coombe Woods, past “The Ski Slope” and “The Creepy Copse” and stopping at the head of the valley – “The Valley” – to admire a beautiful sunrise on a now cloudless January Saturday morning. Finally, I headed down to Dry Street and the familiar outline of “Hillcroft”, detouring briefly around Northlands Approach and Coombe Drive so that I could enjoy the garden on my way to Mum and Dad’s back door.
As I opened the door I realised I had seen no-one at all until Coombe Woods, where I met a ranger making his way past the ponds, picking litter.
I am going to make the effort to walk this more often through the year, enjoying the very different ways it feels, looks, sounds and smells as season slips to season.
Even at 37 I realise that there are still adventures to be had for the “Men of the Hills” in their old hunting grounds – have your own and see what an incredible place we live in.
Below are the pictures I took as I walked.
It’s rare for me these days to be gripped so completely by a book that I can’t put it down. I’ve just finished Liz Jensen’s The Rapture.
It is simply, chillingly brilliant.
Set in the near future, Jensen draws you right inside the head of her main protagonist, Gabrielle Fox, carefully weaving the breathy pace of a thriller with the considered reflections of a psychological drama. She baffled this layman convincingly with her climate science and caused me to reflect on my faith in this age of disaster chaos and economic uncertainty. More importantly, she eschews the typically shallow exploration of character that you find in most thrillers and instead delves deep into the psyche of each of her main characters.
To exquisite effect she toys with your recollection of recent events, mixing up recent landmark events, imprinted by a thousand television reports, with fictional facsimiles. It is a confident trick for a first novel and one that has you wondering if you’ve managed to miss a significant news story at some point that really should have fixed itself in the memory. To sustain the intense descriptions of oppressive weather, constrained phsyical circumstance and the unhinged lunacy of Fox’s teen patient until the last pages is a real achievement.
If you are ready for some brutal characterisation, a different sort of heroine, some occasionally lurid story-telling and are confident enough in your faith – if you have any – to read a convincing and ferocious challenge to its presumptions, then I commend this as a very exciting read.
If you don’t mind a spoiler or two, there are some worthwhile reviews in The Guardian (Irvine Welsh), The Telegraph (Helen Brown) and The Independent (Marianne Brace).
So buying a phone really shouldn’t be a political exercise, should it?
The fact is, though, that the iPhone is the epitome of the corporatisation of our social networks, looking to control and mould the way we interact rather than giving us a tool to empower us creatively. You’ll probably read this as just another anti-iPhone rant from the Nokia-owning geek, but the Free Software Foundation provide some pretty compelling reasons for thinking twice about chaining yourself to the Apple cart (and WTH do I have to pay more for a crappier contract if I want an iPhone, eh O2?):
You can do what you like with an iPhone – as long as Steve Jobs wants you to do it. The FSF captures the sentiment perfectly:
“The iPhone is an attack on very old and fundamental values — the value of people having control over their stuff rather than their stuff having control over them, the right to freely communicate and share with others, and the importance of privacy.”
Contrast that with Nokia and its approach to the N900:
Basically, Nokia take the most powerful phone-tablet-thingy they’ve ever designed and, instead of having a precious hissy fit at the thought there might be people out there cleverer than they are, say “Here you go world… play with it!”
Visit MAEMO.org and you will find something quite unique – users, developers and corporate reps all on the same boards, talking about what applications they want and need and some volunteering to do the coding – and finding ways to make this little technological marvel do the most incredible things.
As someone who admires the ingenuity and creativity of individuals – and wishes he could code for toffee – there is no contest.
Besides, I remember the video. And I’d not be seen dead in an Escort:
My politics, my family’s politics and my party’s politics are about empowering people to take control of their own lives, in communities that we hope can be vibrant and and nurture diversity, ambition and a sense of collective responsibility towards a sustainable future. It can all start to sound very grand. The reality is, though, that taking control starts with very simple and mundane things that politicians – even local ones – start to overlook as their grand designs grow.
Joining the dots between people, the lives they live, their surroundings and the politicians who run the local council is what basildonFOCUS is about. Inspired by Rochford’s onlineFOCUS (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so the cliché goes!), basildonFOCUS is our latest attempt to make it easier for people to raise issues that, if tackled, would make a real change to their immediate area. At the same time, it is our way of trying to keep those who voted for us informed.
The web is often cited as the solution to people’s information needs. It is not. It is part of it. For those who don’t have access, it is irrelevant. For those who have access but little experience or understanding, some supposedly helpful sites are so bloated and confusing that they are more hindrance than help.
Our intention is to keep basildonFOCUS clean-looking, informative and easy to use.
And for those who are interested, click on the excerpt of the preamble to the Liberal Democrat’s constitution to get a sense for the instinctive and inclusive beliefs that underpin the party’s philosophy.
Your comments are welcome.
As part of my recuperation I spent a morning out walking in the hills, enjoying the bleak beauty of the Langdon ridge in winter. As I tramped I listened to Radio 4 – a regular vice.
One of the programmes advertised was A History of the World in 100 Objects. Narrated by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, it does as it says on the tin – tell our human history through the objects we have made. The reason it caught my ear was that the item being discussed was a Braille-related device, the operator explaining that it was virtually unchanged since the 1920s and offering the sentiment that it was unlikely that many people were using objects of such an age today.
An hour and a half earlier I had been speaking to a relative who had been working with machinery from the 19th Century – in an industry unchanged for hundreds of years (he produces the shallots for pipe organs – if you are lost as to what a shallot is, this page in Understanding the Pipe Organ might help!).
Both experiences prompted the (unoriginal!) thought that so much of our history is told in small, everyday ways. We’ve all got defining memories of ordinary objects, large and small, that have been part of our life story. The BBC’s programme, recounting our global history in such objects, is genius. Each programme is just fourteen minutes long. If you’ve missed them so far, you can catch up by listening to the podcasts on the BBC.
If you go to the page A History of the World, you can join in their project to tell a history of our world in objects, submitting your own entries.
The Sinclair ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum for me I think!
“Nuts in May” - from the BBC
I’ve just spent a very happy hour and a bit slumped on a sofa in front of a roaring fire, Em on one side, a mug of tea on the other – and “Nuts in May” by Mike Leigh on the television. As with all his films, it is a perfect study of the quirks and imperfections of human nature – and the little obsessions that drive us all. If you can laugh at yourself, and you’ve not seen it, try and get hold of a copy. Better still, if you like character-driven cinema, that examines the way we complicate even the simplest things with our hang-ups, routines and prejudices, get hold of a copy of “Mike Leigh: The BBC Collection”, which contains all his surviving films, plays and shorts for the BBC:
If you want to read some reviews of “Nuts in May”, BFI Screenonline has a very good synopsis by Darren Rea. For a transatlantic view, RVA News has a very good review by Scott Burton. There is also an interesting piece by Ray Carney, excerpted from his book The Films of Mike Leigh.
Looking over Ellie’s art, and writing about the decision of the Council to remove “The Woodsman”, reminded me how beautiful this part of Essex is – in very different ways. Ellie’s art, as she explains in her words in my post below, is heavily influenced by the landscape of her childhood. We grew up nestled in a rural area that was an idyll for children raised on Enid Blyton. Dry Street in Langdon Hills is isolated from the New Town in terms of development and social culture (you might find my very early post on the new town interesting). However, we often took trips to the Estuary coastline, to Coal House Fort, from where we could see the effects of industrialisation very clearly.
With that in mind, I decided to create two galleries on my Flickr page to show off the very different beautiful aspects of the area we live in (both of which are linked in earlier posts but are easy to miss).
The first is of Langdon Hills and is a stunning display of the natural beauty that is available to us in Basildon. The second is of the industrialised Thames Estuary and presents a very different, but equally beautiful view of the same area. Both galleries show pictures of the landscapes to be found in the constituency of South Basildon and East Thurrock.
Some of the scenes are barely a mile apart. Enjoy – and marvel at this diverse and beautiful place.
It is something to celebrate.
“Roll away your stone, I’ll roll away mine”
It’s been a long time since I have been floored by a new album. There are few things more incredible and satisfying than that moment when, hearing the swirl of passionate chords and melodies, you realise you are listening to something truly magnificent.
As a youngster I would spend hours in Parrot Records in Basildon (now gone), flicking through the vinyl until something caught my eye. I would then race home to record it to cassette so I could play it though my headphones and drown in the sound and forget the sheer painful horror of school. Some nights I would jump on my bike and race down to Stringbean’s place and share the latest discovery I would jump on my bike and race down to Stringbean’s place and share the latest discovery over a game of Speedball on the Amiga (you still out there somewhere, mate?). All the rage and passion and anger and hope of growing up, refined in music.
Fantastic.
And somehow, as the years pass, those moments become rarer.
I downloaded Mumford & Sons from Napster because I liked the snatch I heard on the television. Hauling myself into town earlier, I thought I would give them a listen. After four songs I went straight to the counter and bought it – even though I already had a download.
I felt I owed them.
With a sound that is Counting Crows meets Simon & Garfunkel meets The Jayhawks, with a dash of The Dubliners thrown in for good measure, their ability to soar from melancholy to riotous celebration and back again, the honesty in their sound and lyrics, and their relentless energy are the most refreshing things I’ve heard in years. Each song is a poem, reflecting on love, loss, faith or yearning, set to blindingly good tunes. Listening to Marcus Mumford’s aching vocals and you’ll be reminded of Adam Duritz and Paul Simon.
Today I was afforded a special gift: a chance to experience again that heady sense of discovery, depth of passion, tug of emotion, passion and rage that I felt as a youngster.
Treat yourself.
Fragments and Reflections 