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. 

The Distorting Mirror

If you look at yourself for ages in a mirror, your face tends to look weirder and weirder until you no longer completely recognise yourself, and age helps the process. It’s still your face, but not as you are familiar with it.

That’s not a perfect analogy for Mr Putin’s speech of justification as he annexed the four Ukrainian oblasts the other day, but there’s a similarity. Like an occasion when two people recount the same sequence of events and interpret them completely differently, it was an entire narrative of world history from a divergent point of view to most of ours. Liberalism, a philosophy that has its basis in the idea of individual human uniqueness and worth, becomes in this story a threat to what is ‘really’ human, and a handmaid of colonialism: ‘satanic’. Now, not only does a country taking over bits of someone else’s and then complaining about ‘colonialism’ look like something of a case of pots and kettles, but we know that when Russia got the chance in the great and heroic age of colonialism it behaved in exactly the same way as the West. It had little in the way of overseas possessions, preferring to absorb its neighbours, but Alaska – a Russian colony until it was sold to the US in 1867 – underwent an experience of state-capitalist resource extraction, enslavement of the native population, slaughter and disease that was absolutely indistinguishable from that of any other imperial territory, and only smaller in scale because not many Russians went to live there. But everyone believes they’re special.

Nevertheless, the hard reality is that this perverse and self-serving narrative resonates across much of the world, and, like all great lies, it isn’t empty of truth. It holds up a mirror in which we see ourselves distorted, but still horribly there. We, the Western imperial powers, did do all those things, and they are remembered: they are one powerful reason why many African countries are actively hostile to the Western account of the current struggle, whose story on the surface might seem so obvious to us; or at most they can’t see what it has to do with them. It’s a contest between distant, declining imperial regimes. Why should they suffer for it? Haven’t Europe and the US brought them enough trouble already? We may have begun, slowly, painfully, and with much controversy, to face up to the uncomfortable facts of Empire, while Russia very much hasn’t, but that cuts little ice.

Gradually and often sorrowfully we grow towards the truth, which is the apocalyptic movement of the Holy Spirit. If we ever get through our current moment of danger – and at this exact time I find it hard to imagine how we might – we should pay attention to this lesson, as well as the others it is teaching us.

Pretty Pictures

Over late months I've acquired a couple of pictures which I have just now got around to putting on the walls of the Rectory. While I was at Petworth House at the start of the year, the National Trust shop had a little selection of art including some watercolours by a lady called Georgina Ling. One of these, to my great surprise, showed narrowboats on the canal at Swanvale Halt, caught in a snowy winter. Thanks to Dr Bones I do have a fascination for canals and so I had to buy that. 

Then, when I went with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen to Greenwich in the summer, we dropped in on a small antiques shop, and in a sheaf of prints I found a little one of Oystermouth Castle, which of course I visited last autumn, so I was tempted to get that. It came with a larger image of Harlech Castle, which I haven't visited, but both were worth the extra cash. The picture of Oystermouth Castle is fairly accurate though Harlech is not quite as dramatic as it appears here!

Back Inside

On Wednesday I and Margaret from the congregation went in through the airlock-like door of Widelake care home, and followed a member of staff to the 'pub' where we celebrated Holy Communion for a group of residents. This unremarkable event was the first of its kind to happen since March 2020 when covid was first gripping us. I'd had discussions on and off with Amy who runs Widelake about starting up services again, but for a long while we would have had to stand behind a perspex screen and have no contact with residents, which makes a communion service a bit of a non-starter and there's little point in doing much else. But now all is, more or less, back to normal. My face mask was all very well but seemed a little bit tokenistic.

One change is that we no longer have the services of Alec who used to play the piano so I had rigged up some music and a couple of hymns on my iPod. It turned out that the speakers weren't up to the job, leaving the music so quiet that even on 'All Things B&B' and 'We Plough the Fields' we were a bar out of time after a single verse. More kit required. I could barely remember what to put in the bag as it was, and spent a good chunk of Tuesday morning frantically photocopying hymns after the folder with the old hymn sheets was nowhere to be found.

Goth Walk 35: Chasing the Golden Dawn

It finally happened: my Goth Walk about the history of late 19th- and early-20th century London occultism was originally going to take place as part of my 50th birthday celebrations in May 2020, but of course other events intervened. Even when pandemic conditions allowed us to proceed (and get into the Main Quad of UCL for the last stop), the first date was stymied by a rail strike, the second by a heatwave (Goths die in hot weather, as the joke has it), and yet another rail strike put paid to a third. I began to think it might never happen, but it did, and yesterday. I did think it might have been nine years since the last one, but on checking find it's a mere seven. 

We started at one of our favourite old haunts, the cavernous Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street, and then wound our way up through Holborn and Fitzrovia. Here we are pictured on the steps of St George's Bloomsbury: some of the stops were directly relevant to the Matherses and other characters and events involved in the story, and some were just convenient places to take a breath, like the rather nice find of Whitfield Gardens off Charlotte Street, culminating in front of the Slade School of Art where Annie Horniman and Moina Mathers - or Mina Bergson as she then was - I suspect rather fell for each other without really recognising what they felt. A tale of odd personalities, beliefs and events, and, to my thinking, some startling talents diverted from their true vocation; which even applies to Aleister Crowley, who by all accounts was a pretty good cook and probably should have run a restaurant rather than an occult society.

We realised how long it had been since some of us had seen one another. Archangel Janet was visiting from Somerset in the company of Lady Wildwood, down from Herts; Sir Goingpostal made it in from Essex; Lady Metalmoomin complimented Janet on her elegant undyed grey: she has now gone undyed herself. Apart from the entertainment and information, I hope, this is of course part of the point of the whole thing. I have some inklings of subjects I might try next: 'Mew Pussy Mew', 'Lud Heat', 'Taking Liberties', 'No Popery', 'Cocktails with Elvira', or 'Tap'd in Bunhill'. That's enough work to keep me going awhile.

Photo by Archangel Janet.

You Cannot Go Back

During the pandemic I was able to book an appointment with my GP via their online system and I assumed that would be the same today. Not so: the sequence went as follows, more or less:

  - The GP's website relocates me to Patient Access

  - Patient Access tells me I do not have a GP registered on my account

  - Having selected my GP I must now prove my identity and I am relocated to NHS Login

  - My first photograph of my driving licence is unacceptable

  - My second photograph, exactly the same as the first, is acceptable

  - My face must be scanned to make sure it's the same as the person on the driving licence

  - It doesn't seem to be similar enough no matter the angle or arrangement of spectacles

  - I am offered the chance to record a video of my face instead, during which recording I have to repeat a code of four numbers

  - Despite making sure NHS Login can access my laptop camera, the video doesn't work

  - It is made very clear that I can't go back and try another driving licence photo

  - I give up and in the afternoon visit my GP so I can be issued with an access code

I suppose such obstacles are one way of putting people off making appointments!

Ta-Da!

This flower has appeared in the garden as a welcome distraction from anything else that might be going on and a reminder that the earth will spin on, carrying out the Lord's instruction to be fruitful and multiply, no matter what we manage to do to it. This stuff is bergenia, and heaven knows how it got into the borders of my lawn, just in front of the camellia. 'Pigsqueak' and 'Elephant's ears' it's apparently called, so symbolically it introduces not just colour and delight but an entire, if small, menagerie.