Tavistock...

Spent the night in Tavistock, just outside Dartmoor National Park. To judge from all the notices on display, there’s plenty of musical events in town… except they all seem to be tribute bands. Offering pale pastiches of other bands’ music sounds so dreary… for both musicians and audiences. There’s only one tribute band I’d go and see, Steeleye Spam (and that’s only because I made them up).

With better weather promised later on, I’m off to photograph what remains of a bronze age dwelling known as Grimspound…

Wistman's Wood...

Spent most of the day taking pictures of Wistman’s Wood, a remarkable upland oakwood, with stunted trees and granite boulders festooned with mosses and lichens… 

On my travels I see plenty of musical events advertised, though I’ve usually just missed them or they’re weeks away. I saw a flyer in Moretonhampstead, about Martin Simpson playing in the town’s church tomorrow night, so I bought a ticket. There aren’t many better guitar players…

Taunton...

I heard the first summer visitor of the year yesterday: the halting, monotonous call of a chiffchaff. As I drove into Taunton I saw a welcoming sign: ‘Best large floral town in the south-west’. It reminded me of another proud civic boast, emblazoned on a railway bridge in Lancashire: ‘Oldham, home of the tubular bandage'. Had a chatty evening - and an excellent stew - with Gordon and Trish, and now I’m heading for Dartmoor…

Tan Hill...

Heading south, to Taunton. Licensed this pic today: the Tan Hill Inn in snow, shot on the last day of May!

Terrorism...

Yet another article in The Guardian, suggesting that we shouldn't blame Islam for terrorist acts like we saw last week. Sorry, but we should. Sometimes we have to acknowledge that people actually believe what they say they believe. Islam is stuck in the dark ages; any attempt to modernise the religion is interpreted as 'heresy'. And 'heresy', like blasphemy, adultery, apostasy, and many other 'sins', is punishable by death. If muslims can't reform their faith - and the portents are not good - then Islam will be pitted against reason, rationality, democracy and freedom of speech until the end of time... 

Landscapes...

Today - as the clocks go forward - marks the beginning of my favourite ‘quadrant’ of the year for taking pix, ending with the longest day in late June. I love the quality of the light at this time of year, and the colours in the landscape, before the greens lose their freshness. I’ll be in the Midlands for one more day, then heading for some more dramatic locations…

Charnwood Forest...

Took a wander round Bradgate Park today, part of Charnwood Forest, near Leicester. The sun was out, the sky was blue and my foot gave me no trouble. I heard skylarks singing and green woodpeckers ‘laughing’, and saw a kestrel hovering, with infinite patience. I took plenty of pix, in the ‘good enough’ category. When I logged on this evening I learned that my friend Colin’s latest operation has been a success, so I’ll be able to visit him on Monday in Leicester General…

Right and wrong...

It was an impressive sight: two lines of stationary traffic parting - like the Red Sea - to let an ambulance through. As a manoeuvre it looked almost choreographed, as though we were all obeying some instruction from on high. But nobody needed to be told what to do, and nobody failed to react. We instinctively knew that by acting in concord, the ambulance would make unimpeded progress. Our actions might even have helped to save somebody's life.

The righteous, convinced that they get their moral certainties from the Bible, are unable to imagine what is stopping an atheist like me acting immorally (which may say more about them than it says about atheists). Without the commandments of a divine authority, how can we possibly know right from wrong? There are many reasons why we may decide to act empathetically, cooperatively, without any apparent self-interest, and we don’t need God to coerce us into good behaviour with threats and promises. Anyway, how moral are those who behave well simply to avoid an eternity of hellfire?

I have more respect for our innate abilities, individually and collectively, to do the right thing, and to consider other people’s needs as well as our own…

Cake...

My gout is nearly gone; after a week I can get my shoe on again. Thanks Chas for putting me up (and putting up with me). Thanks Dr Ajam for sorting me out, even though I’m not registered with the health centre. Thanks Chas, Nancy and Gorkem for the surprise birthday cake (just one candle, not 66: fire hazard, apparently)…

'Peace'...

I’m tired of hearing - as I did again yesterday - that “Islam is a religion of peace”, and that extremists and fundamentalists have hijacked this peaceful religion for their own violent ends. People seem happy to believe this ‘peaceful’ narrative, but only until they actually open a copy of the Koran and start reading. The calls to violence aren’t only to be found in the unhinged rantings of radical clerics; they are the common currency of Islamic teachings. There’s no need to hunt for violent verses in the Koran; they can be found on almost every page. Jihadists aren't corrupting a peaceful religion; they are just obeying God's commands...

Improvement...

A quick update in what is rapidly becoming the most boring blog on the internet, with approval rating - from my handful of regular readers - even lower than President Trump's. Foot is responding to stronger medication and I'll be able to 'hit the road' tomorrow...

Hopping...

I feel like I’ve done a morning’s work, even though I’ve done nothing except have a shower and take a taxi to the local health centre across the park. Dr Ajam turned out to be a young muslim woman wearing a hijab, who must have been about fifteen when she started her medical training. She gave me some more powerful anti-inflammatory pills; after ten minutes of talk I'm feeling better already. Reassurance: a cool hand on a fevered brow? The placebo effect?…

Still immobile...

I’m occupying the fold-out bed in son Chas’s front room in Coventry, and will probably be here for a day or two yet. I have a ‘funny’ column to write today, though a painfully gouty foot is one of the least amusing things I can think of…

Getaway car...

Stayed last night in a little town called Shepshed. I didn’t fancy sitting in the van feeling miserable - just me and my gouty foot - so I found an insalubrious pub where a few locals were playing pool… and joined in. I hobbled around the table and won half a dozen games before being knocked off. The guys seemed to think I was something to do with the police (an old guy with a gouty foot? Really?), but, once I'd convinced them I wasn’t, they were friendly enough. I vaguely recall being recruited to drive the getaway car next week…

Gout...

I thought yesterday that I might be getting gout again: a suspicion confirmed this morning when I couldn’t put any weight on my left foot without wincing. Fortunately, I have a course of pills to take, and, assuming the attack is like the previous ones, I’ll have 24 hours of excruciating pain, with the effect of the pills kicking in the day after. Today’s Friday; I hope to be walking normally again on either Sunday or Monday.

Gout is an unpleasant augury of what life will be like when mobility is limited, and every tottering step is painful. It immediately makes me feel ten years older. The second thing to go, after my sense of balance, is my sense of humour. There’s nothing funny about gout…

Hull, Helen and Halifax...

Visited Helen at her new house in Halifax, which is handily placed for the sundry delights of nearby Gibbet Street. She has a talkative neighbour, in her nineties; I can see Helen doing plenty of shopping and odd-jobs for her. The old lady will no doubt be able to reciprocate… with advice about knitting patterns for antimacassars and choosing a new mangle.

I drove down to Bakewell this afternoon. I’m not sure who was more to blame, me or the satnav lady, but we seemed to hit horrendous traffic all the way: roadworks, a road accident and police blocking off whole streets, bringing traffic to a standstill…

Whitby and the River Esk...

Consciousness raising...

Until I read The God Delusion, I didn’t really think about the ramifications of a child being described as a ‘Christian child’, or ‘Jewish child’, or ‘Muslim child’. In what Richard Dawkins describes as “consciousness raising", he insists that “there is no such thing as a Muslim child: only a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not”. The point is by no means pedantic; it really matters. Dawkins points out that we wouldn’t think of describing a child as a ‘Labour child’, or a ‘Tory child’, or - God forbid - a 'UKIP child', based solely on the parents' political affiliations.

I spotted this sign outside a school in Whitby…

Heaven 'n' hell...

I’ve just finished a book, The Doors of Heaven, by Richard Brooks, a spittle-flecked fulmination on the afterlife, based entirely on the book of Revelations. It would be difficult to write a coherent book based on the bizarre prophesies of Revelations; thankfully, Brooks doesn’t even try. If nothing else, the book offers an insight into the mindset of total religious conviction; at no point in The Doors of Heaven does the author doubt the veracity of his source material. Every word of the Bible - even Revelations - is the literal truth.

He lays his cards on the table right away. “There are only two possible destinations at the end of life’s journey”, he writes. “One is heaven. One is hell”. There are no doe-eyed virgins in the Biblical heaven. Though Brooks is keen to go there, and wants readers of the book to join him, the attractions of heaven are not immediately apparent. “Heaven is not (and never will be) a place of idleness. For a start, the praise of God in heaven continues day and night without ceasing. Once there, we shall be like the angels of God in this respect - while nothing will be toilsome, laborious or painful about our work, every moment will be spent in the delightful worship and service of our glorious and gracious God”.

Read that again: “every moment will be spent in the delightful worship and service of our glorious and gracious God”. That’s what heaven is like (Christopher Hitchens called it a "celestial North Korea"). If heaven doesn’t sound very appealing, just consider the alternative. “All that scripture says of the awfulness of hell is not only true, but true eternally. For ever! The lake of fire goes on burning. The hungry worm goes on feeding. The rubbish dump (Gehenna) goes on rotting and smouldering. The darkness goes on spreading its cloak of gloom. The wailing and the crying is always heard. To be condemned to hell is truly to be condemned for ever”.

Brooks wastes no time in speculating about the fate of those who have the temerity to worship other gods. The Bible says they’re all going to hell… and that’s good enough for him. “It is not all the dead who are blessed. There is no blessing on the Christless dead; they rush into an undone eternity, unpardoned, unholy. You may put their body in a splendid coffin; you may print their name in silver on the lid; you may bring the company of mourners to the funeral, in suits of solemn black; you may lay the coffin slowly in the grave; you may spread the greenest sod above it; you may train the sweetest flowers to grow over it; you may cut a white stone, and grave a gentle epitaph to their memory; still it is but the funeral of a damned soul. You cannot write “blessed” where God hath written “cursed”.” (note to any members of my family who are reading this: don’t engage this guy to officiate at my funeral).

Towards the end of the book Brooks adopts a more confidential tone, as he addresses unbelievers. “Oh! that God would make you thirsty for salvation and thirsty for himself. You need to see the value of your soul and to realise that you are in danger of eternal ruin without Christ. You need to feel as a real burden the weight of your unforgiven sin, and to acknowledge that it is against God, first and most important of all, that you have sinned. You need to have laid upon your conscience what it is to be guilty before God, to be unclean and separated from him, grieving him, under his last judgement. You need to see that the only one to whom you can turn for help and relief, the only one who can bring you any remedy and hope, the only one who can reconcile you to God, is the Lord Jesus Christ”.

What is sin, you ask? “The slightest transgression of God’s law, and the commandments, the minutest departure from God’s spotless holiness, the tiniest shortfall from God’s unbending standards is sin”. Ah, right. A lustful thought just popped into my head, unbidden; that isn’t going to help.

Brooks warns believers not to assume they’re going to heaven. “However unpalatable, unpleasing, unattractive, unacceptable, or unsavoury anyone may find this doctrine to be: hell is real, just as heaven is real. And real people are already there, including some we have known already in our lives. And real people will yet go there, including, it may be, some who are reading this book”. Gulp…

He ends the book on a more cheerful note. “It is death that brings us to this unchangeable, eternal rest, and which explains how a Christian’s death-day is better than his birthday, and why a believer’s dying day is his best day. This accounts for the fact that so many of the martyrs welcomed the messengers who came to tell them of their impending execution, hugged the stake, or clapped their hands in the midst of the flames”.

Though written in 1998, The Doors of Heaven reads like it was written two or three centuries earlier. As is usual, with this kind of book, there is no evidence whatsoever that anything in this blessedly brief diatribe is true. I don’t really approve of burning books (any more than I approve of burning idolators, heretics or blasphemers), but maybe I’ve been too hasty…

Rugby

A guy watching the rugby yesterday offered an interesting comparison (though I doubt it was an original thought). Football: the players spend 90 minutes pretending they’re injured. Rugby: the players spend 80 minutes pretending they’re not injured. The comparisons with football don’t end there. In a better-known saying, “Football is a gentleman's game played by thugs; rugby is a thug's game played by gentleman”.

There’s so much to like about rugby: the players call the referee ‘sir’, he lets the players enjoy a civilised punch-up to relieve the pressure, and, when the players have settled their argument, just awards a penalty to restart the game. It’s just a shame that all this civility is wasted on such a boring game. Oh, he’s kicked the ball into touch. Oh, the scrum’s collapsed… again… And then, just as you’re wondering why you’re still watching, Jonathan Joseph accepts the ball, hands off a tackle, ghosts past half a dozen Scottish players, who seem immobile by comparison, and plants the ball over the line. Wow!...

Limestone pavement, Yorkshire Dales...

Catwalk...

It was good to wander round the Norber Erratics and the lovely valley of Crummackdale (always quiet, because there’s no road through the valley). Here’s a pic, from a few years ago, of the old clapper bridge, across Austwick Beck, which, for a few moments, became a catwalk for sheep…

Outside Lies Magic...

“Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people…. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run…. Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore…. Abandon, even momentarily, the sleek modern technology that consumes so much time and money now…. Go outside and walk a bit, long enough to forget programming, long enough to take in and record new surroundings…. Flex the mind, a little at first, then a lot. Savour something special. Enjoy the best-kept secret around—the ordinary, everyday landscape that rewards any explorer, that touches any explorer with magic…all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it. take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theatre that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.” (From Outside Lies Magic, by John Stilgoe: published twenty years ago, though the massage is perhaps even more relevant today… now that people spend so much time prodding listlessly at their mobile phones)…

Norber Erratics...

Had a wander yesterday, from Austwick, around Crummackdale, to photograph the Norbert Erratics, which aren’t, despite the name, an under-performing football team. They’re one of the finest groups of erratic boulders in Britain, probably deposited by glacial action at the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, which are perched on pedestals of limestone…

Barcelona...

In Settle last night, and watched Barcelona v Paris Saint-Germain at the Social Club. Not a bad game, though I left with ten minutes to go, certain that Barcelona had lost, to get some chips. In what the radio pundits decided was “the greatest come-back in Champions League history”, Barcelona scored three goals in the last six minutes… to win the tie…

Chapel le Dale...

I’m back in my favourite campsite, in the Yorkshire Dales, to edit and upload pix, update computer software and plan my itinerary for a busy few weeks of picture-taking. I got a discount because the shower block is being renovated, and there are no mirrors. I accepted the discount, even though a mirror comes very low on my list of campsite requirements...

The little church at Chapel le Dale, with snowdrops...

Gibberish...

I’m reading a book on my Kindle: The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart. As an apologist for religion, he gives the atheist authors a hard time. Fair enough. But he’s a terrible writer. Here’s a sample…

“It is worth considering, for example, at least as a thought experiment, whether either the metaphysical remains of mechanistic thinking or something more like the Aristotelian understanding of the relation between form and matter - or between actuality and potentiality - provides us with a self-evidently more coherent way of portraying to ourselves the relation between the incommensurable worlds of phenomenal objects and the quantum events”. Worth considering? Hell, why not?

If I wanted an example of how not to write, about complex matters of faith, doubt, theology and atheism, here it is. I will keep it by me as I write, as an object lesson in incomprehensibility…

Wasdale farm...

Kendal

Stayed in Kendal last night, so I could get the camera sensor cleaned this morning (a simple, twice-a-year job), at Wilkinson's camera shop in town. Sod’s Law dictates that the day should be sunny and bright and photogenic. Never mind; I’ll have the camera back in a couple of hours…

Today feels like spring: sunlight with a bit of warmth in it, and so bright that I have to shade my eyes. The buildings in the ‘old grey town’ have a hard edge to them, and the grass is greening up. It’ll soon be time to relinquish winter wear and adopt my spring collection (that’s hello to my broad-brimmed hat and goodbye to the beanie hat that makes me look half-witted, like Benny from Crossroads)…

Wastwater…

Swarthmoor...

Went to Quaker Meeting at Swarthmoor, the only meeting house that George Fox gifted to the movement. It’s always good to share a silence; the world looks just a little more colourful when I walk out than it did when I walked in. I feel ‘settled’… like a box of cornflakes whose contents may ‘settle during transit’ (the weight doesn’t change, just the volume). As I was leaving, a woman grabbed my hand and beamed. “George Wilson”, she said confidently. I said I was John, not George. “Ah, John Wilson”, she said: just another demonstration that old guys are basically interchangeable. Since we’re all the same, one is as good as another…

Just read an article on the Guardian website about an event in Todmorden, featuring three naked men reading from books by the Brontë sisters. It reminded me that last week, in Whitehaven, I saw two naked men walking down the street (very casually… not like it was some kind of event or charity stunt). They were starkers, except for matching green folders, which they held in front of them (were the Brontë manuscripts inside?). I’d filed the brief experience in a folder of my own, entitled “Did what I just saw really happen?” Perhaps they were on their way to a reading…

The road to Wasdale Head...

Herdwick...

Me and Wordsworth...

It was good to see my writer chum, Ian Davidson, last night, in Broughton Mills. It was even good before I saw him: I let myself into his house, where the first few chapters of his next book, Me and Wordsworth, were laid out on the kitchen table, with an accompanying instruction… to ‘start here’. Before Ian returned I poured myself a glass of wine and read a couple of chapters. They read well. I’m sure the rest of the book will be just as funny and incisive…

Wasdale...

La La Land...

I went to see La La Land at the Rex Cinema, tucked away in a side-street in Ulverston. No swanky multiplex, the Rex is cinema as it used to be. The lady who sold me my ticket looked me up and down, hesitated, then gave me a consessionary ticket. With no other cinema-goers in sight, we had a short conversation about the difficulties of deciding whether a customer is of pensionable age or not, and the potential for causing offense by getting it wrong.

There were only about a dozen people in the cinema. La La Land may be hot property, but this was Monday night in Ulverston. After the adverts, the projectionist appeared in the auditorium to tell us there was some problem with the main feature and there would be a few minutes delay (once the film started I saw that a broken film played a part, coincidentally, in La La Land itself).

The film was… OK. The critics loved it, the public too, but I didn’t find it terribly engaging (I looked at my watch a couple of times). The relationship between Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) was underwhelming, and I found myself not caring very much whether it worked out or not. Both seemed bereft of charisma, and didn’t generate much sparkle when together. When they broke up, it barely registered.

Their dancing was OK, their singing too, but no more than that. La La Land was supposed to be a return to the classic Hollywood musical, but it lacked the vivacity or brio of, say, Singing in the Rain. Fred and Ginger they ain’t. City of Stars was a pleasant coda to many of the scenes, but the other tunes were instantly forgettable.

So ‘OK’ is about the best I can do for a review. I might have had more fun watching Vin Diesel in a dirty vest, outrunning a fireball…

Ulverston at twilight...

Choices, choices...

I returned to Wasdale to get more pix, between the showers, and now I’m back in Ulverston. The competing attractions this evening are seeing La La Land at the little cinema in town, or watching Manchester City thrash Huddersfield Town in an FA Cup replay. Despite not being a fan of musicals, I think I might enjoy it…