Across the pond

As readers will have noted from the appearance of my blog on the Durham Miners, learning the new version of WordPress takes a long time. I did finally manage to get the pictures in but the typography is far from perfect.

Perhaps I was unduly distracted by our summer party which in part a celebration of our first year in Charmouth. To get in visitors had to battle their way through a building site. The landscape lot are half-way through a two-month reconstruction of my very steep drive. The point of the exercise is to make it easier to get my scooter in and out.

Meanwhile this is what is necessary when I feel like taking a spin through the country lanes.

A fellow guest at the breakfast table in our B&B in Barnard Castle was surprised when we said we were going to the Durham Miners’ Gala. ‘I thought there were no miners left’, she said, as her husband went on reading his Daily Telegraph. She could not have been more wrong. By the time we arrived at lunchtime the car parks and the streets were full and the procession already stretched from hill by the riverside gate right across town to the vast field, where the picnic is held while stirring speeches are made.

Most of the Durham miners favour the blass or silver bands but the branch who arrived at the same time as us favoured the bag pipes.

Further down the hill we found a more typical group marking time while they waited for the path to clear ahead of them.

On the reviewing balcony of the Royal County Hotel more gold chains were on display than I had seen in many a long year. The swing against the government has not yet wiped out Labour’s Durham mayors.

In the field the tea and booze was already flowing and the brass and silverware was spread all over the grass.

Afterwards we visited the miners’ favorite Sunday playgrounds in the Pennines, including the waterfall at High Force.

And finally to the tranquillity of the river at Romaldkirk where this young girl was sitting quite as gracefully as the mermaid in the harbour at Copenhagen.

It is the greyest of grey dawns. Black cloud hangs over Stoneborrow Hill. Chesil Beach and Portland Bill are invisible. Two blackish birds are pecking on the terrace. Nothing on the bird table but they are pecking hopefully. Probably magpies. At least they are not crows or albatrosses or other birds of ill omen.

The weather mirrors my mood. My nephew Jim and his two sons have managed to find a patch of reasonably level ground in the back garden for their tent, but it is flapping in the wind and I fear it will blow down before they wake up. And the storm, forecast for Thursday, could easily begin in a few minutes.

Although I currently have no work obligations I have totally failed to maintain my intention of a blog a day. I have still not published that review of the moving diary of the manic depressive young woman or the new David Lodge novel. The Durham Miners’ Gala remains un-reported as does my impressions of the first UK WordCamp.

The only blog I have managed in the last few days was a rant about Gordon Brown. I am not alone in thinking he is making a mess of running the country but who am I to say so, when I cannot even write a blog a day. Worse than that I am not even sure I know anything worth writing about and I don’t even know what I believe.

Yesterday, Kate and James came over from Totnes to show us their new baby. The women were taking turns to cradle it. I insisted in demonstrating that a mere man was capable of learning this skill. She was asleep. She looked Chinese. Inscrutable. And looking as if she knew already far more than I did.

Meanwhile Lucas, who is not quite two, showed none of the murderous tendencies the great Sigmund led us to expect. He entained us all with a rattling good story, triggered by the digger he had seen in our drive as he came in. He told us in vivid detail how he drove his digger, what he picked up in the shovel, and where he put it. He held his audience and carried them on and on. He is already a better story teller than me. When I last saw him a month or so ago he said only two or three words. He seems to have learnt the whole language in a few weeks. And boys are supposed to learn to communicate much more slowly than boys.

No scientist that I have read has come anywhere near explaining just how that happens. And just why learning the first language is so different from learning a second langage. Maybe Darwin and Richard Dawkins have got it wrong and that we could all speak in many tongues if only we had faith.

But so far the only children we have found brought up by wolves had only learnt to howl.

Needed a breath of fresh air before dinner. Got more than I bargained for. Even though the sun was shining on the Williams sisters at Wimbledon down here on the Dorset coast, summer was having an away day. The wind had been howling around my house all night and it continued all day, bringing a lot of rain with it. More like November than July.

I arrived at the prom at the same time as a quite spectacular wave, which filled my boots and gave me a mouthful of salt water, My mobile phone got seriously wet, but I managed to get one picture of the scene after the big wave.

Back at the ranch I was forced to change before dinner, although I have no visitors. I washed my mouth out with a malt and water. Don’t know what I am going to cook for dinner but the desert is taken care of by this cake produced by my sister.

Wake up early. How early I don’t know, but I cannot see any chink of light through the curtains. There are immediately two or three blogs in my head, which I want to get down on paper. But I don’t jump out of bed. The energy is there but my limbs are frozen by the voices in my head. ‘Are you getting enough sleep, Robert.’ ‘Stay in bed otherwise you will be falling asleep again by lunchtime.’

Turn on my bedside lamp. The light blinds me, so I turn it right off again. Pick up my led pocket torch which I keep on the bedside table, so that if I do wake early in pitch dark I can get out of the room without falling over something and waking my wife. It is 3.30 PM, a lot earlier than I thought. But I don’t feel at all sleepy. And since I am alone in the house I don’t have to worry about disturbing anyone. Or face worried voices at breakfast, ‘Were you up all night, Dad?’.

Free to please myself and behave in whatever way I want to behave. So instead of blinding myself again I use my torch to light the stairs and take me to the kitchen to make my first cup of tea of the day. I don’t switch on the hallway light and I don’t switch on the sitting room light. Dawn is surely near. The lights of Portland Bill are sparkling but the sky is grey not black. And when I out on to the terrace I find a light grey sky with a few small black clouds. The moon is shining in the eastern sky, but all I can see of it is the last slender curve of an old moon. Beneath it the sky is much lighter. Is that the light of the moon or is the sun already rising?

Inside the house it is still darkish, but I can see quite well enough not to need the hallway light, nor the dining room light, and when I get to the kitchen I realise that I don’t really need the kitchen light either.

By now I am into an experiment of doing something in my own personal lifestyle to help stave off global warming. I realise how much energy I am wasting by turning on all these lights and leaving them on, until I remember to turn them off again. I keep my torch on, although I can actually see quite well enough to fish a tea bag out of the tin and fill the kettle. And there is no problem in finding the milk because as soon as I open the fridge door the light comes on automatically.

I cannot remember what time sun-rise is at this time of year, but there is a newspaper on the kitchen table. It tells me that sun will rise at 4.57 A.M. in Bristol, which is the nearest place in their table to Charmouth. An hour and half to go, yet it is light enough for me to write in my notebook, and read what I have written, without any strain.

Now I am at the computer there is absolutely no need to turn on the light in the study. The screen is brighter than it is at the middle of the day and I can read the smallest print without any strain. And I can read my notebook. But it feels odd. It is still darkish and normally I would have the study light on.

Habit is the most powerful of all the rulers of human emotions. And it affects one hundred per cent of human beings, not just those who become habitual users of alcohol and the far more powerful pills that today’s teenagers seem to be able to buy on street corners.

Habit is so powerful because it helps us to be more efficient. Our unconscious minds take over and guide our actions like sleepwalkers, leaving our conscious minds free to wrestle with more important and difficult choices we have to make while getting through the day. Even now, nearly three years after my final, final retirement, when I jump on my bike in Gospel Oak I find myself riding the route to City University. To go anywhere else I have to concentrate hard on the route I am taking. How much more difficult for us all to make the radical changes in our habits, necessary if global warming is going to be turned back.

But human beings can change their habits. In my regular trips up and down the M3 since I moved to Dorset just under a year ago, I had noticed how the average motorway speed had increased. Most of the traffic was moving in two of the three lanes at between 80 and 85 miles an hour. On my last trip down it was radically different. Apart from a few impatient idiots, weaving in and out of the traffic in their urge to get somewhere as soon as possible, everyone was keeping to 70 mph or a little above. They were even obeying the 50 mph sections, even when there was no obvious evidence of any road work actually going on.

This change has come about not because everyone now accepts the threat of global warming. But simply because of the surge in the petrol price which means that even the owners of modest family cars now have to take £50 from their wallets to fill their tanks.

My blogging has been interupted by several pressing matters, not least the arrival of the digger to sort out my driveway and hopefully make it possible to use my scooter without hazard from treacherous gravel.

The picture says it all.

At a buffet supper last night I ate my meal perched at a small circular table with two men whom I had just met. I will call them Harry and Jim. Harry and I were doing most of the talking, mostly about the joys and problems of living in the beautiful coastal village of Eype a few miles east of Charmouth, which all three of us knew and liked. But Harry had actually taken the plunge and bought a beautiful old house there. He loves it, as well he might. It is little different than it was one hundred years ago and not much different than it was two hundred years ago. It has escaped the developers. No 1930s bungalows. No glass palaces built by the seriously rich which you find up the hill in Charmouth. And, as Harry was quick to point out, he is only a short walk from the one and only pub.

Tranquillity indeed.

But for any incoming twenty-first century townie there are some practical problems. No shops. So to get any food which you don’t grow in your garden, or to buy a daily newspaper, you have to drive to Bridport. Not very far. But it can a take a long time in the season, because the lanes to the A35 are narrow, and you have to reverse to a passing place because of the tourists wanting to get in and have a few hours of this tranquillity.

Jim had said very little. I knew from what he had said that it was not because he was not interested in the subject matter, because, from what he had said, he was interested in the subject matter. Which was basically about what people do when they retire. All three of us had lived lives constrained by the economic needs of earning a living and providing for families. All three of us had decided that after retirement they would try something different. Against the advice of most of the retirement manuals, which warn people against moving away from friends and neighbourhoods they know well, to an idyllic spot of their dreams.

We were three retired folk talking about our present, but also relating it to our past. But as we explored our past we found that there was a considerable difference in our ages. Not surprisingly because I did not finally retire until I was 73, and then only reluctantly. Whereas both of my supper table friends had taken early retirement.

In the street in which I now live in Charmouth there are quite a few retired people (as there are in the street in London, from whence I came). And retired folk, as we all know, when they get together bask in shared memories of the past. That is certainly how it was in my father’s time, when nearly everyone, apart from a few company chairmen I had to interview at age 91, retired at aged 65.

Today’s world in Britain, let alone the rest of the world is radically different.

So in the street in which I now live I am probably the possibly the only person only finally retired until the ripe old age of 73. But amongst the people living in my street whom I have actually met, there is a an international company executive who retired aged 46, because by that time he qualified for a full pension, because he had spent much of his life working in places like the tropical rain forests, which most managers are not that keen on. And another who retired from ill health aged 45 from a fire brigade because his heart had murmured in protest as he climbed the ladders rescuing all those people from blazing buildings.

So in Britain 2008 there is a possible difference of 28 years in the ages of ‘retired folk’. More than a generation.

In my new neighbourhood I have also met people who have moved here while still raising young families. Two particularly. Both of them told me that they had moved here from metropolitan towns for ‘quality of life’ factors, much to do with their feelings about bringing up their children somewhere where they could swim in the sea and walk the hills. The wonders of computers and the internet make it entirely possible for many professionals to live in a place like Dorset, which boasts it does not have a motorway in the county, and still earn a living in the mainstream.

So the world is changing and not entirely for the worst.

Back to the supper table. When I turned my attention to Jim and asked him a question he said, ‘What did you say?’, he replied ‘What did you say?’. So I then asked if he was hard of hearing.

In his ears he had two of the latest digital hearing aides. Which were of course were quite invisible to the rest of us because, unlike the old fashioned ear trumpet, which was a signal that the person using it was deaf, the modern hearing aid conceals the disability, in contrast to the white stick and black glasses of the blind.

So I then spent some time with Jim urging him to read the latest novel by David Lodge, which I have just read because my eldest daughter got Amazon to send it to me on Father’s Day. It is quite the most insightful book I have read about being deaf that I have read. But since it is a novel it is not just about deafness. It says quite a lot about the subject of this blog; about what professional men do in our society when they grow older and realise that they can make some choices about what they do in the rest of their lives.

And though Lodge deals with two pretty heavy subjects his narrative is punctuated with his substantial wit, which raises laughs from youngish women who hear perfectly as well as oldish deaf men.

But in part two of this blog I will set out some reasons why every person who is ‘hard of hearing’ and every person who has a partner or close relative or friend who is so impaired, should read it.

While I was reading the book I wondered whether it was a work of the imagination and research. Or whether it was based on his own personal experience. I did not find the answer until after I had read the last page of the novel.

Because, contrary to usual publishing practice Lodge has put a section at the end called ‘Acknowledgments’ which according to usual publishing practice is at the beginning. The first sentence reads:

‘The narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience, but the other characters in this novel are fictional creations….’

Fans of Lodge, who love his wit and humour will not be disappointed with his novel. But for those who are deaf, or who have a spouse who is deaf, this novel might transform their lives.

I will attempt to explain why in my next blog. Which will be written whenever. Because tomorrow I am due to commune with the New Zealand branch of my wife’s family on one of their much treasured visits to the home country.

Meanwhile the reference is:

Deaf Sentence. By David Lodge. Harvill Secker, London. List Price: £17.99. And worth every penny. Deaf Sentence: Part one

At a buffet supper last night I ate my meal perched at a small circular table with two men whom I had just met. I will call them Harry and Jim. Harry and I were doing most of the talking, mostly about the joys and problems of living in the beautiful coastal village of Eype a few miles east of Charmouth, which all three of us knew and liked. But Harry had actually taken the plunge and bought a beautiful old house there. He loves it, as well he might. It is little different than it was one hundred years ago and not much different than it was two hundred years ago. It has escaped the developers. No 1930s bungalows. No glass palaces built by the seriously rich which you find up the hill in Charmouth. And, as Harry was quick to point out, he is only a short walk from the one and only pub.

Tranquillity indeed.

But for any incoming twenty-first century townie there are some practical problems. No shops. So to get any food which you don’t grow in your garden, or to buy a daily newspaper, you have to drive to Bridport. Not very far. But it can a take a long time in the season, because the lanes to the A35 are narrow, and you have to reverse to a passing place because of the tourists wanting to get in and have a few hours of this tranquillity.

Jim had said very little. I knew from what he had said that it was not because he was not interested in the subject matter, because, from what he had said, he was interested in the subject matter. Which was basically about what people do when they retire. All three of us had lived lives constrained by the economic needs of earning a living and providing for families. All three of us had decided that after retirement they would try something different. Against the advice of most of the retirement manuals, which warn people against moving away from friends and neighbourhoods they know well, to an idyllic spot of their dreams.

We were three retired folk talking about our present, but also relating it to our past. But as we explored our past we found that there was a considerable difference in our ages. Not surprisingly because I did not finally retire until I was 73, and then only reluctantly. Whereas both of my supper table friends had taken early retirement.

In the street in which I now live in Charmouth there are quite a few retired people (as there are in the street in London, from whence I came). And retired folk, as we all know, when they get together bask in shared memories of the past. That is certainly how it was in my father’s time, when nearly everyone, apart from a few company chairmen I had to interview at age 91, retired at aged 65.

Today’s world in Britain, let alone the rest of the world is radically different.

So in the street in which I now live I am probably the possibly the only person only finally retired until the ripe old age of 73. But amongst the people living in my street whom I have actually met, there is a an international company executive who retired aged 46, because by that time he qualified for a full pension, because he had spent much of his life working in places like the tropical rain forests, which most managers are not that keen on. And another who retired from ill health aged 45 from a fire brigade because his heart had murmured in protest as he climbed the ladders rescuing all those people from blazing buildings.

So in Britain 2008 there is a possible difference of 28 years in the ages of ‘retired folk’. More than a generation.

In my new neighbourhood I have also met people who have moved here while still raising young families. Two particularly. Both of them told me that they had moved here from metropolitan towns for ‘quality of life’ factors, much to do with their feelings about bringing up their children somewhere where they could swim in the sea and walk the hills. The wonders of computers and the internet make it entirely possible for many professionals to live in a place like Dorset, which boasts it does not have a motorway in the county, and still earn a living in the mainstream.

So the world is changing and not entirely for the worst.

Back to the supper table. When I turned my attention to Jim and asked him a question he said, ‘What did you say?’, he replied ‘What did you say?’. So I then asked if he was hard of hearing.

In his ears he had two of the latest digital hearing aides. Which were of course were quite invisible to the rest of us because, unlike the old fashioned ear trumpet, which was a signal that the person using it was deaf, the modern hearing aid conceals the disability, in contrast to the white stick and black glasses of the blind.

So I then spent some time with Jim urging him to read the latest novel by David Lodge, which I have just read because my eldest daughter got Amazon to send it to me on Father’s Day. It is quite the most insightful book I have read about being deaf that I have read. But since it is a novel it is not just about deafness. It says quite a lot about the subject of this blog; about what professional men do in our society when they grow older and realise that they can make some choices about what they do in the rest of their lives.

And though Lodge deals with two pretty heavy subjects his narrative is punctuated with his substantial wit, which raises laughs from youngish women who hear perfectly as well as oldish deaf men.

But in part two of this blog I will set out some reasons why every person who is ‘hard of hearing’ and every person who has a partner or close relative or friend who is so impaired, should read it.

While I was reading the book I wondered whether it was a work of the imagination and research. Or whether it was based on his own personal experience. I did not find the answer until after I had read the last page of the novel.

Because, contrary to usual publishing practice Lodge has put a section at the end called ‘Acknowledgments’ which according to usual publishing practice is at the beginning. The first sentence reads:

‘The narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience, but the other characters in this novel are fictional creations….’

Fans of Lodge, who love his wit and humour will not be disappointed with his novel. But for those who are deaf, or who have a spouse who is deaf, this novel might transform their lives.

I will attempt to explain why in my next blog. Which will be written whenever. Because tomorrow I am due to commune with the New Zealand branch of my wife’s family on one of their much treasured visits to the home country.

Meanwhile the reference is:

Deaf Sentence. By David Lodge. Harvill Secker, London. List Price: £17.99. And worth every penny.

I shall be singing and dancing in the rain later today, not on the streets of Paris, but on the terrace of my house on Lyme Bay. The rain, forecast by the weather men for the last two days will be here shortly. I can see it advancing across the sea from Chesil Beach.

The Texan dancer, Cyd Charisse, who has just died aged 87, is remembered by some for her million dollar legs. But I remember her for the zest and fun she showed in her dance with Gene Kelly in the 1952 movie, Singin’in the Rain.

The memory of it still cheers me when the rain comes down when I am walking the coastal path. Me, and probably millions of others.

Thank you Cyd and Gene.

The picture is from AP.

p>To Bath for Friday night’s dress rehearsal of the FullSail Theatre’s production of Beowulf, A tale of the Dark Ages. This is one of the many offerings at the Bath Fringe Festival 2008
, the west off England’s answer to the Edinburgh Festival. Beowulf opens on Sunday night at 8 PM and closes the following night. It is billed as a multi-media promenade production. If that sounds a bit daunting fear not. What it actually means is that the company is part of that refreshing move in the arts world to take the theatre back to the people. Far away from astronomical West End theatre prices and princely salaries for star actors.

That’s not too different from the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day. Last night the cast gathered in Sydney Gardens, one of the City’s beautiful parks, on what proved a not too chilly and entirely dry evening. The prompter, a bloke of about my age, had enough light to see the script. And it was just warm enough for him to stand in thin purple cloak, bare legs and sandals without shivering.

This being just a dress rehearsal the park was empty apart from the cast and a few friends. And a group of young teenagers sitting on the grass a hundred yards ago. (Judging by the girl’s this year’s skirt length is hyper micro, as near the navel as it is possible to get.) As the performance got under way the teenagers came over to listen and then followed the cast around, as they performed different scenes in different parts of the park.

In the opening scene there was a whoosh of noise rather like a modern train going by, which I thought must have come from some concealed loudspeaker. When it happened again twice I realised that it was a modern train because the main west coast line runs in a cutting right through the park. As does the canal, as I discovered when we all trooped down to the tow path into a tunnel. Then we watched a film projected from a lap-top computer on to the wall of the tunnel.

My mobile phone had difficulty in coping with the light as nightfall approached. But below is a picture of the opening scene which should give you a taste of the scene.

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To Bridport to buy a water butt before the storms come again. On the way back we call at the village of Eype to take in an exhibition by one of the local artists. First picture that hits me as we go into the church is something that looks remarkable like the Albert Bridge. However the other scenes were mostly of the Dorset countryside in a wide variety of styles. The one I liked most was a striking picture of silver birch trees around a lake at Little Sea in Studland.

My picture here, ‘The White Sun in Winter’ shows the Purbeck coast.

Apparently Stephen John Bishop
is one of our best contemporary landscape painters who is continuing the tradition of ‘en plein air’ painting of Monet and Van Gogh. And like Constable Bishop believes that ‘painting is another word for feeling’.

It was a very sunny day but the beach was empty bar one fisherman. Maybe the tourists are deterred by the narrow lanes they to negotiate from the A35. The next picture is of the coastal path which dips down to the beach before climbing steeply back up towards Golden Cap.

We stopped at another village on the way home. Symondsbury has only a few houses but it boasts an old thatched pub and a school built in 1868 which is still open.

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