Foreground & Background

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1555) is an oil painting attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It shows the Greek mythological figure, Icarus (who got cocky, and flew too close to the sun) plunging into the sea in the lower right-hand corner. British Library.

One of our problems atm here in the UK seems to be a confusion between foreground and background. We live as if world events, famous people and the News were the centre of our lives and emotionally important to us. But we can do nothing about them and are not in a personal relationship with the protagonists. We risk losing sight of our own sphere of influence, our own relationships and responsibilities, our own foreground.

My wonderful 90-year old neighbour Ian reminded me about Mathew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, possibly written on Arnold’s honeymoon :

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach

The Twenties and the Pseudo Twenties

A few years after the Second World War, Miss Jane Marple went to stay at Bertram’s Hotel in London. Settling into a leather armchair, she enjoyed a perfect afternoon tea. The crumpets were crisp and brown without, soft and chewy within, as crumpets so rarely manage to be. The scones foamed in the mouth, while avoiding any bitter aftertaste of soda. Bishops and country squires, up in town on business, exchanged murmured comment among the quiet rustle of newspapers. The chief waiter knew everyone, and how they liked their tea. Cocooned from cataclysmic events, nothing had changed here. Surely anything real would change? There was something exaggerated, ossified. Miss Marple smelt a rat.

In Agatha Christie’s novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), what had been a comfortable staging post for the shabby genteel before the War is transformed after the War into a stage act. Most of its aging, fixed-income clientele are unaware that there are other rooms and other people, backstage, who are using the hotel as a cover. Behind the scenes, in the areas where the guests don’t go, the struggle for money rattles on, intense, unbounded, unexamined….

Verdant or Villainous? England’s Villages

by Katie Barron

https://www.waterstones.com/book/englands-villages/dr-ben-robinson/9781788704601

It’s only recently that I have come face to face with villages. My life has changed because I now have an extremely sporty son. Aged nine, he is the Ronaldo of Coton, Cambridgeshire, and he vies with similarly talented peers. The struggles on village recreation grounds at 9am on a Saturday morning are gladiatorial. My inner tigress rises up when my cub is two nil down. I feel especially trepidatious when we venture out into the fens, to those villages with no station and barely a bus route, once connected to others by the narrow still waters of Roman ‘lodes’, canalised run-offs from the river Cam. 

At a bitter match towards the end of this season, a sign had been hung on a pole beside the pitch: Do not heckle the ref. All refs are volunteers. Indeed the ref was an eager volunteer. He coached the home team, not only before the match but during it! The presence of the sign suggested that other teams had passed that way before – and been bitten. No amount of kit kats on sale at a folding table could sweeten our mood after the match. The final sting was a free kick awarded to the home team after our coach had magnanimously refused injury time…

‘Put another one in and I’ll get you a MacDonalds!’ shouted a mum from another fenland settlement, once the seat of an Anglo Saxon cathedral. ‘Get that one! Number seven! Stamp on his foot!’ Our cup semi final was played away at 8:30 in the morning on a pitch that sloped towards the goal, and guess who had to defend that goal first?

At such an hour, with the frost just starting to vaporise off the tips of the grass blades to hang in a freezing fog around our shins, it can seem that villagers are autochthonous, sprung like the Spartans from dragons’ teeth scattered in the soil: fiercely patriotic and very ‘other’. But we know really that this is an illusion. In much of south east England, at least, people are living in a village because the houses are a little cheaper or they may not live there at all but represent that village for matches, like my son for Coton. The passion evinced on the field has little to do with the place and everything to do with wanting to win.

Yet village life remains different from life in other places, even if the people are not; and different in predictable ways. The telephone box is a library; the notice advertising the yoga class is two years old and mildewed; the boy who paints graffiti on the phone box also sings in the church choir; non posh people play cricket ,while posh people go to the pub; haters of politics find themselves standing for the parish council; the vegan and the gluten-intolerant recant and eat half baked cakes at half baked summer fetes. The person who moves into the biggest house knows they must invite the neighbours in at the winter solstice. And so on.

Villages are not so much places as games we like to play. Only 20% of Brits now live in villages, but many more of us go to them for our important moments: to be married, to strive in sport, to drink and to be buried. Even in our cities, planned housing tends to be built around a recreation ground, aping the village green, rather than around a piazza, as in Italy or Spain, where young and old parade in smart shoes.

Dr Ben Robinson of Channel 4’s Time Team, who grew up in Sutton in Cambridgeshire, muses on villages’ popularity in his book England’s Villages: An Extraordinary Journey Through Time, out in paperback this summer. The word village has been adopted by desirable areas of London, such as Hampstead, Highgate and Greenwich. It has been attached to the Olympic development in Stratford and the Bicester shopping heaven near Oxford: ‘a village that is, in fact, anything but’, Robinson complains. Trade is for towns.

The Romans urbanised Britain, but then the Anglo Saxons came. ’Urban life simply did not make sense to the new settlers’, says Robinson. The Saxons, Angles and Jutes might recycle Roman building materials here and there, but generally they preferred to build in wood, and so their lives are hard to reconstruct. The feat has been attempted at West Stow on the Suffolk border (where there is also a child-friendly cafe and, in the manner of places set up by enthusiasts, two museums). The houses feel homely, with a central hearth and boxed-in sleeping areas. There are no fences or defences. In the middle of the cluster is a freestanding hall, where locals could gather to drink and tell stories of other places.

Over a millennium later, Victorian self-improvement tried to drive a wedge between alcohol and social life by building parish and village halls, offering an alternative venue for gatherings and good works. These buildings with their porches and sprung floors have been hymned in The Oldie by William Cook, another son of Cambridgeshire.

The overall message of England’s Villages seems to be that there is marked continuity in lifestyles over the millennia but marked discontinuity in the sites of those activities. Alehouses have been around since Roman times, if not before, but premises as solid as olde worlde pubs are rarely found before the seventeenth century. Even whole villages wander about, as Robinson himself was surprised to learn from a metal detectorist when he was a boy. 

So villages aren’t markets. They aren’t self-sufficient settlements continuously inhabited for a few thousand years. What are they then? 

Stonehenge at the British Museum (ends 17 July)

An End to Othering

It turns out that we have been as we are now for a very long time. Five thousand years is a blink of an eye. We have been speaking languages for fifty thousand years. We have been farming for eleven thousand years (perhaps only six thousand in Britain). At the time of Stonehenge, around 3,500 BC, people who lived in Britain knew all about each other: the same pottery and patterns are seen from Orkney to the south coast. The bones of the dead, along with special blue stones, were transported from West Wales to Stonehenge. Others buried there come from other parts of Europe such as Switzerland. The big feasts and celebrations enacted at Stonehenge were winter solstice celebrations, full of conspicuous consumption just like our Christmas, if not more so. Thousands gathered to cook joints and eat them together, a sort of cross between a family roast and an FA cup final.

Archaeologists continue in their endearing way to ‘other’ the ordinary. A convenient wooden walkway across the marshes of the Somerset levels is described as a religious journey into a sacred space. Stone drums buried with children are believed to have ritual significance. Nowadays they would be replicas of kids’ toys buried with them to keep them company, by a grieving family. People dressing up in masks are described as priests, as opposed to festival-goers. The celebration of the solstice itself is seen as a sign of being more in touch with the rhythms of nature than we are today. Yet we still want to cheer ourselves up in the dead of winter. Certain leavings do seem more like superstitious offerings, for example objects left in flint mines of 2,900 BC, reflecting the hopes and fears of all of us when we undertake risky ventures.

For me, the British Museum’s beautiful and fascinating Stonehenge exhibition blew away two myths: the first, that human beings are ever ‘locals’. We were nomadic before we were settled and, even when settled, we have remained in touch with and intensely interested in the doings of other humans across wide distances.

The other myth, that people in the past were collectively similar to each other and different from us. Now as then, we pursue our individual trajectories like comets and stars rotating around each other, each a unique blend of the possibilities, differing from each other greatly as individuals but not more greatly for gaps of time and space.

Narberth

Katie visits a Welsh town on the Landsker Line

COSTAINS GOES M.A.D. WITH NARBERTH MUSEUM | Western Telegraph

There is an excellent museum at Narberth in Pembrokeshire, converted from a bonded warehouse, where Scottish whisky was once kept behind bars in vats and doled out in small quantities once a week to the mutual profit of Westminster and James Williams Ltd. Now, above a café and two bookshops, children can bounce over the floorboards trying out trades such as saddlery and cobbling; or they can drink in the atmosphere of the mythic early mediaeval Wales of the Mabinogian in which Narberth was a prince’s court.

The name ‘Narberth’, which means in Welsh ‘up against a hedge’, doesn’t hold out much promise of a prosperous future. Yet Narberth in its hey-day, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, had thirty pubs, and a wealth of tradesmen competing to serve all the needs of town and country. The town stood on the ‘Landsker line’, the boundary between the Welsh-speaking people of northern Pembrokeshire and the ‘English beyond Wales’, who had settled the south coast from Norman times if not even earlier. The linguistic line remained stable over some hundreds of years. For brief periods the English would sally north of the line, hungry for more farmland, only to find the uplands too wet and unrewarding, so that the Welsh regained them as their rivals retreated to more comfortable lives.

Genetic studies have found that these ‘English’ are very similar to the inhabitants of south-west England, and genetically distinct from people living just north of the Landsker line, indicating little cross-marrying between the linguistic regions. Evidently chatting up was counted an important part of the process. The divide was reflected in life at Narberth, where you could find a Welsh side of the street and an English side, each with its complement of shops and services.

If that makes Narberth sound provincial, it wasn’t. Situated just off the A40, which was one of the stage coach and mail coach routes from London to the Welsh coast and Ireland beyond, it benefited from a steady stream of visitors – and of course from imports such as the Williams whisky.

INCOHERENT, THE BLM IS MERELY A BANJAX: VAINGLORYING, AND A GHOULISH GRIEF-FEST BY THE INCHOATE

Guest Post from Herbert Agyemang-duah 

White self-loathing and black self-pity: these seem to be the only two options in radical politics these days. On one side stand white liberals, white radical students, white writers, beating themselves up over their skin colour and the ‘privilege’ it apparently grants them. ‘Our whiteness is… the colour of shame’, as the playwright Eve Ensler says. And on the other side stand black activists: Feral street thugs,  black Oxford thinkers, black writers, presenting themselves as the damaged goods of history, beat up by tragic past events, and traumatised by ‘white privilege’, and in urgent need of recognition of their pain. What both sides share in common is a depressing, fatalistic attachment to racial thinking, to the racial imagination, and a commitment to the therapeutic project of expelling inner demons (whites) or demanding validation of one’s suffering (blacks).  

One of the most oft-repeated shibboleths of identity politics is that it is about challenging preconceptions and stereotypes. Yet the very act of focusing primarily on one’s skin colour, swerving sadly away from the three C’s. class, clan and culture, sex and gender biases, {as if nothing else about that individual matters} is troubling. This is navel-gazing at its most nauseous.  

Radicals once rejected the category of race; now.  they give it credence, give it succour, embrace it, and expand it and do a war dance. The new racialism, this ghoulish grief fest, this ghastly ‘danse macabre’, between white self-loathing and black self-pity, is best embodied in the Anti-Racist protests we have seen the last 12 months. ——–  

#UKIP Myth: Toy Story

When Leo sits down with his Toy Story jigsaw puzzles a cold hand grips my heart. Sunday evening, I want to feel cosy, and he brings out those garish, creepy figures.

But there’s no escape. ‘Come, Mummy,’ says my two and a half year old, extending the beckoning hand that can’t be refused.

Added to the first horror of sorting out four jisaws that have been jumbled together, I then have to pore over every limb of these gruesome zombie like objects: the corpse with the drooping eyelid (Leo calls it ‘baby’); the giant locust crossed with the Incredible Hulk (Leo calls it ‘green man with yellow pants’); the sickly pink fluffy monster (‘teddy bear’ to Leo), the leathery octopus, the eight-eyed monster…. I want to hide these four jigsaws (once we start we have to do them all) in a cupboard, but his favourite babysitter gave them to him for Christmas, so it wouldn’t be diplomatic.

I wonder if this is how Ukippers feel about the European Union: weird alien creatures they don’t want to understand. And I sympathise.

But I have to learn from Leo who assumes that everything around him is animate, and in some way connected to the world he already knows, and so he can relate to anything. The doll is a baby, the eight-eyed monster is a different kind of frog.

Maybe even Farage is just a different kind of frog.

Maybe we can relate to the Other without losing ourselves.

#Pilgrimage in #Terror: Day 3

Day Three, For Dave Mugridge. Roncesvalles to Burguete.

Being a student suited Dave. We were all lonely, lazy and languid then. He inhabited benches, wrapped in a large grey coat. Looking at photographs now I see how young and blooming he was. The light shone in his mane of chestnut hair and the vivid blue eyes were fringed with long lashes. At the time, he seemed older than us, like a man who had Lived. Perhaps it was that his skin was slightly pock-marked from a brush with acne and that gave him a wolfish, battle-scarred look. We discussed literature and his sallies with girls over chocolate Hobnobs in those cold student rooms.

One day in his final year he paid me a visit in my room. The mist was hanging outside the Victorian stone windowsills, turning the afternoon violet. He was serious and awkward. In a low voice he told me he was ‘HIV Positive’.

‘Ah-ha?’ I said neutrally. I thought it was important to show that one of his good friends wasn’t alarmed or disgusted.

He looked at me bewildered. ‘Do you know what ‘HIV Positive’ means?’

Some fluke, some twitching in the DNA, gave Dave haemophilia back there in the embryo. Neither of his parents was a haemophiliac. When he was in his early teens, Dave had to have a blood transfusion. That was in the 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher was declaring, ‘There’s no such thing as society.’ Before Dave had ever kissed a girl, he was infected with Aids. Someone well-meaning gave him life and death.

After we graduated, Dave shared a rented house with a group of friends from university. They were turning into young professionals. He was not. He had enough money to live on and too broad a horizon. This group of student friends, spread between three or four rented houses, hardened into one of those adult gangs – Were they a Nineties phenomenon? – professionals who lived together, spent their Friday and Saturday nights together, and eventually married each other.

Between the members of his gang Dave moved like the invisible man, unable to drink as his liver weakened, entertaining them with stories of his own foolishness. We all heard about the latest woman to be the object of his love and desire. He would pursue to the point of intimacy and then flee in terror. Once a girl clung on and he couldn’t flee. But as the relationship developed he started to wash his hands obsessively, taking on a guilt and dirt that didn’t belong to him. ‘You can still use them for fantasies,’ I suggested. He laughed, shocked.

Dave didn’t work. While he still had compensation money he couldn’t take it seriously. He tried once. He bought a suit and worked in the Government Statistics Office. His boss was a nice, earnest man who had high hopes of Dave. But Dave had his own room and was thus able to put his head down on the desk and go to sleep in the afternoons. A week came when his boss wanted him to go to Wales to tell the civil servants there what the Stats Office was up to. Dave took the train and faced the row of grey suits. He had nothing to say.

Towards the end of our twenties, Dave’s compensation money began to run out. And it was this that forced him to use his talents. He taught English in the prestigious Catholic comprehensive that was educating Blair’s boys. But the virus started to kick in. A boy shouted at him in the corridor – ‘Aids man!’

Dave looked in the mirror and saw how thin his face was. But research had produced a miracle drug that kept men living years longer: it gave him cancer of the liver. He didn’t know this until April. He kept on going into school, facing classes. In the evenings he came home and threw his clothes on the floor in heaps, too tired to sort them out.

After he was taken into hospital his friend Adam walked into his room and found piles of jeans and good quality jerseys, full of moths.

******

‘It is a very kind act to take a friend’s hand and show him or her the pleasure you have in something,’ says Natalie Goldberg, the writers’ guru. This was Dave’s gift. His enthusiasms – about certain musicians, certain writers – made him almost frightened. ‘Will I talk about this?’ he hesitated. ‘Let me know what you make of him. I think – I hope you’ll like him.’

We discussed the then-popular TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, for an hour. ‘Do you think,’ I asked, always earnest, always wanting to know what happens after the end of the story, after the chicken has crossed the road, ‘Do you think they got on after they were married?’

‘Like rabbits.’

He was my personal tutor in culture, introducing me to the Shuttleworths and Colonel Blimp, and Queen (Mama, I don’t want to die. Some times I wish that I had never been born), and Star Wars. That was a formal event. I took a day off work and went round to his shared house in Kilburn. We sat in while the sun shone outside, munching houmous, pitta and iceberg lettuce, imbibing Luke Skywalker. Now and again he would freeze the video to check I was following, or draw out the hidden meanings. Then we walked on the mown grass of the park, near the railway line. Meetings always ended more subdued than they began, with him starting to talk about his troubles – love life, work, health – and then hating us both for the serious turn of the conversation.

I confess those depressed endings scared me off. There was a year when we lost touch. I am walking today partly for that.

Then April, the first spring of the new millennium, Adam appeared in the front garden. He brought a pale blue letter from Dave.

I visited him twice, but after that he didn’t want to see me. There were too many crowding for his attention, people who mattered more, and he tired easily.

He quite soon made the decision to give up the chemo. In his hospital bed he converted to Evangelical Christianity. His sister, who was already a convert, introduced him to a local evangelical pastor. This bible-based faith was something he had been putting off for years. In student days, he would get inveigled into attending evangelical dinners and then run away afterwards, traumatised. ‘Why does it bother you so much?’ I would ask him. ‘Just put it out of your head.’ ‘Yes,’ he would say, unconvinced.

It was awkward to get news of him in hospital. I didn’t like bothering the nurses and feared discussing his worsening condition with his Dad.

In the end there were letters: tiny skynotes, addressed in his own increasingly spidery hand. I felt as if I were receiving words from beyond the grave, so far apart were we in prospects and daily experience. I didn’t know what to say, twiddled my ink pen sitting in cafes, etching some kind of empathy onto the void of white A4 sheets or just nattering on about my day. Then back through the British postal service came these miracles. I treasured those letters as if they were love letters, knowing that one of them must be the last. And yet there was nothing intense written on either side – we had no great words to say – just a couple of friends continuing until the whistle blew.

Thank-you loads for your letter which reached me today. You continue to lead an interesting life but I hope it is not getting in the way of your writing… I am full of regrets that I haven’t achieved (written) more but I am currently collating everything… ‘Blasted’ is a good word to describe this disease. I feel very angry and frustrated at the loss which will take place when I die. Still I have nothing to be too ashamed of or regret I think… I am moving towards a sense that it is all God’s will really – hard to accept – but ultimately true...

Later, when the morphine doses were raised, the writing shrank to a minute size and he went over his letter underlining certain words in a different colour: I’m glad you write, it gives me simple plans to complete. I sometimes feel so sad but I’m sure I’m doing the right thing here. It’s hard to wait for the end, equally its scary to think about it – meanwhile when I put strategies into place to deal with these feelings hallucinations get in the way!…. Woozy, Dave. Woozy he may have been but the post-code was always accurate.

The last card is John Constable’s Hay Wain and it’s faintly baffling.

Dear Katy – he alternated between the ‘ie’ and the ‘y’ spelling – This card is taken from a postcard book bought from National Gallery by Claire for me – and it’s about the only one I could bear to part with because they are all so beautiful – wonderful colour reproductions of Renaissance stuff…. My story is not getting written. I seem to be very busy with guests…

With returned good health have come all manner of political difficulties dealing with family and friends – it seems tough on me but politics never goes away, it seems. Now the crisis seems to have passed no one, including me, quite knows what to do with me. I have a deep sense of frustration at still being alive, to tell you the truth, but perhaps God still has plans for me down here. I found myself evangelising a nurse today and thought ‘Lord, please make that my last one!’

love Dave

The grip with reality was loosening and yet I wonder if, in amongst the veins and the lymph glands brimming with morphine and toxins, you knew that that was your last card. It is the only one you signed with love.

******

The pilgrims had marched out of Roncesvalles before dawn, leaving the monastery emptier than an empty building, scoured and sterilised, all atmosphere washed away by the nightly flow of guests. The massive interconnected cloisters stood stony silent among their groomed lawns. As it was a special holiday and there were many visitors, the museum was shut. In a telephone box near the restaurant three Filipino women were trying to sleep. We were disappointed, Sandra and I, that there wasn’t more of a gung-ho saint-thumping Catholic ambience, something to give us instant spirituality. But then maybe the point of a pilgrimage is to start from a state of godlessness and move towards God…

#Pilgrimage in Terror: Day 1

September 2002. Disillusioned with protesting against the ‘war on terror’, Katie went on a 13-day pilgrimage in Northern Spain.

Day 1: Invasion

On the railway platform at Bayonne we were all waiting in our different ways for the train that would take us to St. Jean Pied de Port (‘St John at the foot of the pass’) and the start of the pilgrimage route. One man was smoking a pipe and his wife, a cigarette. They wore chic red rain gear. I wondered how they would make it, with smokers’ lungs, over the Port de Cize, the mountain pass that had brought the Romans and Napoleon into Spain, and now pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.

We strung ourselves out along the platform. We were all clearly walkers, with our backpacks and boots. We couldn’t hide from each other that we were all starting off on the same rather zany commitment of time and energy: a pilgrimage. Even today, even when lots of the walkers on the route are atheists or agnostics, it isn’t quite like just setting off on a hike. The modern tradition of the route says it will change you, it will give you some kind of experience of truth or happiness or peace. Paolo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine are but two of the more famous writers who have talked of mystic experiences on the way to Compostela. And that made us all a little sheepish standing there, made it difficult to strike up a conversation, as if we were all sitting in a therapist’s waiting room.

Our train crawled into the station. It hadn’t been painted for years. It made me think of the Harry Potter train, taking us into the time-warp of walking, into a world where the rules are different. Very soon the land began to rise around us as the train rattled on, winding tighter and tighter into the Pyrenees. Grassy banks sloped up at forty-five degree angles from our window, waving bunches of trees at the top. A light misty rain blurred the distances.

Opposite me in my compartment sat a young Englishman, just out of his teens. He was well built, with close-cropped hair. I could tell he was English because, apart from pale skin and shyness, he was studying a copy of the bright green laminated guidebook produced by The Confraternity of Saint James, a British outfit headquartered in Lambeth.

Chugging round tight valleys in the Pyrenees, I wondered if the young man opposite me had met the same lady in mauve that I had met in the Confraternity’s Lambeth office. He certainly had great respect for the guide, which he was poring over. Would he like a conversation or would he think talking to fellow English spoilt the atmosphere?

The ticket inspector entered our compartment. This created more awkwardness: the embarrassment of making those strange French sounds in front of a fellow Englishman. So we both of us confined ourselves to the relatively uncontroversial ‘Merci’, with just a glimmer of the vomit sound of the French ‘r’. The inspector didn’t bother looking us in the face, but examined our tickets disapprovingly from above a bulbous nose.

Having survived that incident together, we started to exchange bits of our lives. Alec was at ‘uni’ and seemed anxious. He only had enough money for two weeks’ walking and he wanted to get as far as Burgos, 257km according to the guidebook. I would never be able to walk that fast. Ah youth and maleness!

‘And what made you decide to do it?’ I asked.

‘Character building. That sort of thing.’ He was looking down. ‘I want to test myself. My Dad was in the army.’ So that explained the haircut. ‘He’s always told us that it’s important to have challenges in your life.’ Pause. ‘How about you?’

There I was, a recent peace demonstrator, walking against war, and in the very first moments of my pilgrimage I’m alone in a compartment with a soldier’s son. What magnetic material had they planted in those laminated bright green booklets to bring unlikely people together?

Faced with the politeness and forthright decency of this young man, my anti war arguments dissolved on my tongue. ‘I just wanted some time to reflect,’ I said, ‘Deserter!’ ringing in my ears.

I moved the conversation on to discussing the two routes over the Pyrennees into Spain: Napoleon’s conquering one over the mountain and Charlemagne’s path of retreat down in the valley. To my surprise, Alec agreed with me that the lower route would be enough of a personal challenge for the first day. Neither of us had done any training before we left, he because he was working day and night and I because I hadn’t managed to get organised.

But when we reached the tourist office in St. Jean, which was flooded out with pilgrims of all nationalities, their pilgrim staffs rolling over the floor and the shiny new rucksacks obstructing all passage, we were commanded to take the upper path, the ‘Route Napoleon’. The woman behind the desk raised an eyebrow and completely failed to comprehend when we suggested we might follow the modern lorry driver’s route. Brushing aside our qualms she told us to stay the first night at a hamlet called Huntto and attack the pass tomorrow. She pointed out the way on her map and showed us where, tomorrow, halfway along, there was a water fountain and shops. This I translated for my friend.

Alec was keen to get to a supermarket and stock up on provisions. I on the other hand was dreaming of a sit-down lunch with meat and potatoes. He was a little hesitant to abandon me in Saint Jean but I reassured him, so he shook hands with me and strode off. Over the next days of the walk I soon lost touch with him, polite and upright as he was. He rose each day with the earliest and launched off into the pre-dawn, swinging a plain baguette. I’m sure he reached Burgos and will do well.

In contrasting style I lingered in the mediaeval fortified town of St. Jean, eating a pricey meal of a whole duck with chips. It was late and I was the last person lunching, upstairs over a bar, with red and white checked paper tablecloths for company.

The town’s chief business seemed to be starting pilgrims on their journey. There was an entire market for pilgrims’ staffs. I wanted one of these, as I had read that they were a deterrent to dogs. I chose one with a spike. This was a bad mistake. The shock and ring of that spike on dry roads was to persecute me up and down dale for two weeks. But I clung to the thing in the hope that it would scare off territorial beasts who might waylay me at the gates of far-flung farms.

Before leaving St Jean, I climbed one of the stone staircases up onto the massive walls. Hills stretched away in all directions, blue and mushy with mist.

I had decided to dedicate each day of my walk to an aspect of the ‘war on terror’. I was hoping to find insights as I walked.

The theme I had picked for today, September 5^th, was the plight of the Iraqis. Troops were already massing in the Gulf before I set off.

From my position on the fortifications, I gazed down on terracotta roofs, which the rain had stained dark red. Each had its own sliver of garden running towards the wall, dripping and shiny with the recent showers. Some were striped with different shades of green, the foliage of tomatoes, marrows, beans. Others had grown wild, but even those showed some sign of human providence – a walnut tree or an apple tree, a little easy nourishment in these pockets of land.

I could not think about a dry place. I could not think about suffering and fear. I could not think about hunger and the worry of parents. I could not both be here and somewhere else. How strange it was to be attacking a country so far away, none of whose people I had ever met, let alone hated. Here was full of enjoyment and there not. I chose here. I chose with an uneasy feeling of guilt.

So it was with a heavy heart and confusion, together with my usual expectant fear of dogs, that I crossed the river over the mediaeval bridge and followed signs for Huntto….

Christmas Rape

Thomas Nast added the North Pole and the elves’ workshop to Father Christmas lore

Boxing Day 2015, Blairgowrie.

This morning we were in Grandad’s bathroom doing nappy change. ‘Mummy,’ says Leo, ‘Why did you pack a stocking?’ ‘So you could put it out and Father Christmas could put presents in.’ ‘I don’t want presents! I don’t want Father Christmas to give me presents!’ The tears rolled over the bright red cheeks. He had been okay about it yesterday, but now he was blotchy and shaking.

It’s true that his bah-humbug mum had filled his stocking entirely with oddments purchased at closing time on Christmas Eve in the charity shops of Blairgowrie (Raspberry Capital of Scotland). But I don’t think it was just about the quality of the gifts. Leo had been interested enough in the plastic fish holding an anchor in its fins and the miniature elephant asleep in a box. Knowing my son, I think it was about self-determination: I hadn’t properly asked him if he wanted to hang up a stocking, we had just done it, and he’d gone along with it without knowing what it was about. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said now. ‘You don’t want presents from Father Christmas, I’m sorry.’

And I know the feeling. There’s a heck of a lot of Christmas that I don’t want and did anybody ask me? Did anyone ask me if I wanted my head buzzing with Frank Sinatra’s  tinkety-tonk from end Nov to 24^th Dec everywhere I go? Did anyone ask me if I wanted to intone ‘While shepherds watched…’ or eat brussels sprouts? Did anyone ask me if I wanted that egg cup, that biography, that scarf? Did anyone ask me? And there’s my honourable Scrooge Within who doesn’t enjoy blowing a month’s child tax credit in a week…

I miss my Dad. He brought a rich, velvety gloom to every part of Christmas, sombre tones between the tinsel. The Christmas cards would start to arrive: ‘Oh God! They had us to dinner five years ago and we still haven’t had them back. It’s awful!’ As the card season wore on, ‘We haven’t sent them one.’ Sigh. ‘Too late now!’

He would fry his nerves doing all his shopping on Christmas Eve and then deliberately exhaust himself by not starting present wrapping till gone ten o’clock. By that time we would have had the family row, the only part of Christmas he joined in with a passion. On Christmas Day, if he could find no other excuse for misery, Dad would develop toothache, at its worst the year we stayed with a friend in the country and there were no painkillers for miles.

Sometimes when you lose someone you love you would be willing to have any piece of them back. If the only Dad I got was the toothache spectre in the corner, I would opt for that. But it’s not just that I want him back, I also need that uninhibited party-pooper. By the time the 27^th came, and we were preparing for yet another set of family friends or lonely hearts to eat turkey risotto or cold ham, my Dad would burst out: ‘I would like some peace!’

In this time when foreign policy is not going my way I find myself wondering if there could be some link between my Dad’s ‘peace’ and the pipe dream of world peace. What if we just did less? What if we gave up that positive idea that ‘there is always a solution’. What if we chose to endure adversity with the same bitter gloom that my Dad used for Christmas? What if that turned out to be the less harmful option?

Here in Blairgowrie, like everywhere, we’ve had the Strictly Christmas Special, the World at War, an Andre Rieu concert and a black and white Christmas Carol. Today, St Stephen’s Day, when we could be meditating on the poor saint getting smashed to death by stoning, we have done the Perth panto, with puns, dames and local lyrics to well-known numbers. It’s like we’re trying desperately to distract ourselves from some unpleasant truth. What is it? Winter? The sure knowledge that we will have flu in February (with and without the jab)? Or war? – that as we sit at our family tables our taxes are paying to blow other similar families to bits, physically and psychologically? But the chin-up grinning goes back a lot further even than this ‘War on Terror’ that we’ve been befuddled into staying in for fifteen years.

My theory is that the Christmas story is even scarier than the Crucifixion. Maybe we can just about get our head around someone, finding himself in a hairy situation, threatened with death, deciding to Tell the Truth, let go of control and take what comes. Sometimes people do have these moments of courage. But to be a god, who could stay up on a cloud twiddling a harp, and deliberately choose to get down here – knowing how it’s likely to end – that is too scary. And not believing in God doesn’t really protect from the story. The point is that, if there were a god, we think he might do that.

We think he might do that – suggests there’s a part of us that’s choosing to be here – not just the one in Denial, and the Lizard Brain with its survival reflexes, some other bit that actually chooses this.

Why on earth?