A Wave of the Wand at Burley

On my way back from a visit to my Mum in Dorset I called in at Burley in the New Forest, a place I haven’t visited in probably 35 years or so. It’s an odd sort of place: most of the dwellings are at some distance from the t-junction around which the centre of the village is organised, and as New Forest-style ‘commoning’ is still practised locally you can often come across ponies wandering around (though I didn’t). Two pubs, several tea shops, a couple of spas, a cycle hire outfit and a grand mock-Tudor mansion now turned into a hotel make for a collection of businesses largely orientated around tourism, or other sorts of visitors. But what most strikes the tripper to Burley (or this one, anyway) now is how witchy it is.

In what’s effectively two short streets there are four, or maybe five, witch-themed gift shops: it depends how you categorise ‘Away With the Fairies’, which has more of a fairy theme though it does overlap with the other four – ‘Witchcraft’, ‘The Sorceror’s Apprentice’, ‘Cobwebs and Crystals’, and ‘A Coven of Witches’. The last-named is the oldest store, beginning as an antiques shop run by the person responsible for all this, Sybil Leek. Ms Leek lived in Burley from some unspecified time until 1964, a familiar and flamboyant character often accompanied by her pet jackdaw, Hotfoot Jackson. In his history of wicca The Triumph of the Moon the great Ronald Hutton gives short shrift to her claims to have been trained by Aleister Crowley, or even to have met him, and even less to her historical sense, quoting a sentence ‘which manages in twelve words to confuse a nineteenth-century personality with a seventeenth-century one, and locate both in the wrong period’. Sybil Leek worked for a local TV station and for a brief period was able to promote herself as Britain’s chief spokesperson for witchcraft, before falling out with almost everyone else in the wiccan world, claiming she was under attack from Satanists, being evicted from her house in Burley, and relocating to the USA.

The stores share a family resemblance – they all have the same racks of crystals and incense and other knickknacks – but differ subtly from one another. At Cobwebs & Crystals, amongst the bottles of charged crystals and figurines I observed a vintage plastic telephone for sale not far from a small articulated toy of Matt Smith as the 12^th Doctor, while Coven is clearly catering for the serious wiccan practitioner as it sells altar tables, cauldrons and wands (the kit’s small as I suppose it has to fit in teenagers’ bedrooms a lot of the time). All those items are seriously kitschy but there’s a certain seductiveness about the whole aesthetic, which overlaps with Goth although not identical with it.

In my long-distant memory Burley majored more on saddlery and leather goods, and although the witchcraft connection is clearly longstanding, it’s intensified in relatively recent years. Those horsey shops have been replaced by witchy ones, and it would be an interesting project to trace exactly how it has happened.

On the way out of Burley I stopped and walked down a muddy track to pay my respects to the Lady Well, which I certainly hadn’t seen since 1987. It hadn’t changed at all, which was a bit disappointing as I thought someone had tidied it up!

Cumbria 1: Landscapes and Townscapes

The name of Byre Cottage – at Dodbury, at Garrigill, near Alston in northeast Cumbria – suggests it used to be essentially a cowshed, but the owners have turned it into a holiday cottage and it’s where I’ve just spent a week. Unlike some of the more basic places I’ve stayed, it’s modern and bright, and gazes over the valley of the South Tyne. A footpath runs right through the little garden, but I never saw evidence of anyone using it. These photos were all taken the morning I left, when the best weather of the week arrived!

There’s a lot of water about in this part of the world, some of it cascading in rocky falls. Beldy Fall was just yards from Byre Cottage; and Ashgill Force is a dizzying experience. The fall is at the top of a gorge: the bridge you can see in the photo carries a road across the top. You can, if you want to take the risk, stand behind the water and look outward as it crashes from fifty feet above. It’s not that likely that the whole thing is going to collapse, is it? There are gentler manifestations of water, too, at wide Kielder and rainy Ullswater.

You see the odd field of cows, but farming here means mainly sheep. It can’t ever have made for an easy living, but derelict farms like this one at Low Craig somehow express how hard it really could be. Imagine the last years of Low Craig.

That’s a different sort of economic scarring from the kind evident in the towns. Alston, a little market town a couple of miles from Garrigill, clambers over a steep hill with its market square halfway down. It’s clearly kept going by catering to tourists, walkers and bikers, but those are fewer than they once were. One of the cafés is closed, and what you might describe as a knickknack shop is heading that way too. I had a look round on Monday when everything was shut anyway, apart from the Cumberland Inn where I had lunch. So did everyone else: Monday’s always a busy day at the Cumberland, apparently, because there's nowhere else to go.

Picturesque Durham is a student city as much as anything else (I saw a queue of at least twenty outside Greggs at lunchtime) but the presence of lots of young people can’t disguise the closed shops there either. As for Newcastle, the streets around the city centre witness to the pride of a provincial capital, confident in its identity and prosperity: and thus in contrast to the hard times it now finds itself in. In handsome, red-sandstone Carlisle, even the Covered Market is half-empty, which is a bad sign when market stalls require so little investment, comparatively, to set up.

Towns like Penrith and Hexham, small but on the next step up from Alston, seem to be doing a bit better: they have their blank frontages and rubbish-strewn corners, but also their mobile coffee stands and side streets of little shops.

I’ll finish this section with a couple of bits of Art Deco, a bijou former cinema in Hexham and a building in Carlisle which uses the red sandstone in a proper 1930s idiom. 

It's Not Just About Money

It was a long while ago that I heard journalist-cum-development activist-cum-historian Sarah Chayes talking on an edition of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 about the subject of corruption, and I have kept meaning to write about it, but haven't had the energy. Ms Chayes's latest book is about the growth of corruption in the US governmental system, drawing parallels with what she saw in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s: what she said fitted in with some of the things I'd been thinking about in respect of the situation in the UK, which she mentions only in passing. At first, Chayes says, corruption seems small and local, and only when you step back can you see that the limited instance you might have come up against is part of something bigger:

I started thinking about corruption in Afghanistan where I lived for about a decade … What I began to see was that when, for example, you were driving down a dirt road and a police officer, usually about 17 or 18 years old, would stride out into the middle of the road and block you with a Kalashnikov and demand not much money, maybe it might add up to a pound at most, what I learned was that that didn’t go into the police officer’s pocket, not all of it. Some of it went up the line. And so I realised, this is actually a system, it’s a network, and corruption is the operating system of this network … and in Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, it was adding up to something like 2 ½ billion US dollars in a year. In return, those at the top of this system were providing absolute immunity from any kind of repercussions from this behaviour. That was the model. And so that was what I looked at, everywhere from Honduras to Nepal. 

Chayes argues that large parts of the US political system, disproportionately but not exclusively in the Republican Party, are now dedicated not to any concept of the public good but to the extraction of financial advantage from political office, and that the ruling class defines corruption so narrowly that there is increasingly little judicial redress. She quotes the shocking example of the prosecution of Robert McDonnell, former Governor of Virginia, in 2016 for receiving a wide range of benefits-in-kind from a fraudulent businessman: he was convicted, a judgement then unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that what he had done was not corrupt because no specific political decisions had been influenced by it.

 

When I last thought about this issue in September and related the story of Njal's Saga, I was prompted by the UK's announcement that it was prepared to break international law in pursuit of its Brexit ambitions. I was thinking about the implications of eroding the rule of law and how that could lead to the entrenchment of violence and criminality, but I hadn't cottoned on to the direct relationship between financial corruption and violence: I was imagining a cultural rather than an instrumental process. But when money begins to trump law and those who have money are able to circumvent the consequences of stepping outside it, that is exactly when criminality and violence seep into the system, because the source of the money becomes immaterial. It is the erection of money into the measure of value that embeds violence into the institutions of the State, especially the police, to whom we customarily grant a monopoly of the use of force.

The antidote, Chayes suggests, is an ethic of solidarity, but this is always apt to be eroded by self-interest, and only bitter experience can bring it back once it's gone. Forgive the long quote: it's to the point.

In that period roughly between about 1870 and the mid-1930s, this phenomenon stretched across the globe, regardless not just of political party but of political system; so you had the German Empire, the French republic, the British constitutional monarchy, the United States republic, all behaving in fundamentally the same ways. The networks were interwoven in exactly the same ways, and they included very much the same revenue streams I mentioned, energy, finance, and high-end real estate. I would say that today the additions might be pharmaceuticals, industrial agriculture, and tech, but you have exactly the same weaving back and forth between the private sector and the public sector. I looked at how we got out of the kleptocratic control of our economies and politics in those days, and the rather sad answer is that it took the repeated global calamities of the first half of the 20^th century to generate a solidarity ethos: two world wars, two genocides, use of a nuclear weapon, a gigantic pandemic, and a gigantic global economic meltdown.  That bought us about 40-45 years of gradual hard-fought reform. Then, starting in about 1980, it’s like the generation aged out and we went back to, first, the use of money as the yardstick to measure our social success; and once you do that you get coalitions of the super-rich getting together to figure out how they can rig the rules to benefit their network, and we’re back into systemic corruption. That really begins to take hold in the 1990s, and continues through to today. ...

That means it’s up to us to absolutely hold our own leadership up to its highest standards, maybe asking candidates to sign some kind of an ethics pledge [to] reinforce laws against the revolving door, conflicts of interest … in the private sector we can choose to take our money out of banks that continue to violate our laws.  … And we must, because if it took wars and economic meltdown to get us out of kleptocracy last time, what would the calamities look like in this century? 

Back to Change

In many ways, the parish seems normal on my return to work, despite the masks ubiquitous in the shops. I was able to go for a coffee yesterday, the children make their way to school, the bell of the church rings, just as usual. Meanwhile in Wales my friends Cylene and Dee are incarcerated apart from food shopping, even though just up the valley from them the infection rates are lower than here. That's devolution for you.

Yesterday's coffee fortified me for a virtual school governors' meeting in the evening. This year, we were told, there are 18 pupils who qualify for pupil premium, a little over one child in every ten. At Branscombe Meads school at the other end of the village, this would be nothing remarkable, but Swanvale Halt Infants has never had more than a handful of PP children. The great majority are in this year's Reception class, so they have been assessed since the epidemic started. Meanwhile the headteacher's been contacted four times this half-term by social workers with concerns about pupils; normally, she says, she gets one such enquiry every term or so, so by this rough index family strain is running at eight times the standard. Things look normal-ish, but they aren't.

The church congregation is generally on the older side, like many, and I get the impression - not that I have counted it up - that where members have families including younger children they tend to live elsewhere. It means that my sense of what is actually going on in the parish has to come more from random scraps of information and conversation with those who feel confident enough to talk to me about troubling matters, and not everyone does. I encourage church members to talk to their neighbours, too, and to pray for them.

The Oil in the Wheels of Commerce

... is, in some ways, coffee. Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist talks about coffee quite a bit, because the supply of this product, as a drink, can be used to illustrate all sorts of economic themes: pricing, the location of businesses, scarcity and abundance. When lockdown began I was very concerned about our two lovely cafés in Swanvale Halt which have made such a difference to the atmosphere of the centre of the village; both, thankfully, have survived, operating now on reduced hours.