Otley pubs...

I'm doing my best, but I can't keep Otley pubs in business on my own. While Friday night is busy, a lot of pubs are empty in midweek. Maybe we really are losing the pub habit, and just buying cans of cheap lager to drink at home, while we watch celebrities eating kangaroo testicles in the jungle. Apparently, an average of 72 pubs are closing in England every month. I'll have another day in the library tomorrow. Got to finish this damn book.

Licensed over the weekend: Swinside stone circle...

 

Wareham...

The River Frome at Wareham...

Windermere...

The last licence of the month: a train at Windermere railway station...

Compulsion...

Krishnamurti doesn't mention religion, in this short quote, though the idea of compulsion - what we must believe - is a foundational tenet of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

"The very first thing to do, if I may suggest it, is to find out why you are thinking in a certain way, and why you are feeling in a certain manner. Don’t try to alter it, don’t try to analyze your thoughts and your emotions; but become conscious of why you are thinking in a particular groove and from what motive you act. Although you can discover the motive through analysis, although you may find out something through analysis, it will not be real; it will be real only when you are intensely aware at the moment of the functioning of your thought and emotion; then you will see their extraordinary subtlety, their fine delicacy. So long as you have a “must” and a “must not,” in this compulsion you will never discover that swift wandering of thought and emotion. And I am sure you have been brought up in the school of “must” and “must not” and hence you have destroyed thought and feeling. You have been bound and crippled by systems, methods, by your teachers. So leave all those “must” and “must nots.” This does not mean that there shall be licentiousness, but become aware of a mind that is ever saying, “I must,” and “I must not.” Then as a flower blossoms forth of a morning, so intelligence happens, is there, functioning, creating comprehension...

A street in Sidmouth: the kind of pic that might illustrate a story about urban traffic congestion...

Trump...

Donald Trump began his speech yesterday to the 2018 United Nations general assembly with typical self-aggrandisement: “In less than two years my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The spontaneous response from the world leaders assembled in the room was mocking laughter. There’s hope for the planet yet.

Boats on the estuary of the River Torridge at Appledore...

Kayaks...

A kayak tutorial at Porlock Weir...

Porlock Weir...

Otley folk...

I spent yesterday in Otley library, editing the book, even though attempting from write from 9 to 5 offers diminishing returns. Then I had a fun evening in a couple of pubs, at the start of the Otley Folk Festival; I was tucked up in bed before the pubs got too crowded.

Licensed this shot yesterday (though for a price that would barely buy a Big Mac and fries)...

Farmhouse...

Licensed this shot today of Walburn Hall, a fortified farmhouse near Leyburn (best price so far this month)...

Weather...

Drove north yesterday, but slowly, due to the gusting wind. The Romahome feels like a high-sided vehicle when the wind is blowing. Today, according to the forecast, I’ll be driving through heavy rain, heading for Yorkshire.

Licensed this shot of Pontefract...

Kites...

Having seen sister Kari yesterday, I’m heading north to Coventry for an evening with son Chas. I’m seeing kites again, over the fairly flat terrain of the Midlands, which suggests that, when they’re not being poisoned by farmers and gamekeepers, they’re a bird of the lowlands (having only retreated to the Welsh mountains because of persecution). When considering the country as a whole, a large raptor is now more likely to be a kite than a buzzard. Parked up in a lay-by today, to edit the book, I could hear their rather plaintive cries.

An uninspiring landscape, in Shropshire, but it was licensed today...

Banking...

Another run-of-the-mill image - a mobile bank on the Isle of Arran - which was licensed yesterday...

Music...

I was walking back to the van in Appledore - feeling a bit glum, an early night beckoning - when I heard music. It came from a tiny pub, The Champ, where about ten local musicians were playing airs and jigs and reels. After a couple of hours of ‘home-grown’ music, I went to my bed in better humour…

Licensed another mundame pic today...

9/11...

Before the twin towers were toppled, seventeen years ago today, I didn’t take much notice of religion. Nor, it seems, did Richard Dawkins. He tackled the subject head-on in The God Delusion, but only after he had re-evaluated the destructive power of faith in the immediate aftermath of the attack. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense”, he wrote. “Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.”

It’s taken me rather longer to marshal my thoughts. While 9/11 remains an indelible memory, my reason for writing my book was altogether more prosaic. It was the idea, almost innocuous on first hearing, that members of other religions, and non-believers like myself, were required to treat Islam with respect, and that any criticism of the religion was deemed to be “racist” or “Islamophobic” or “anti-Muslim bigotry”…

Clovelly...

I took a look round Clovelly today. I thought it would be awful (and, on a Bank Holiday, I'm sure it would be), but on a Monday in September it was fun. I took lots of pix, and may have another session down by the harbour, before I leave Devon. Licensed this shot today...

Appledore...

I parked up in Appledore yesterday evening; the last time I was here was in 2015, when we had a solar eclipse. There’s a car-park on the quayside, where I joined other campervans and motorhomes. Appledore is a handsome little town (village?), with a long quay giving access to the mouth of the River Torridge. There is an alleyway behind the buildings on the quayside, which is fine for pedestrians but too narrow for vehicles. This is where you’ll find the Royal pub, and, a few yards away, the Royal Plaice. You can buy your fish & chips and eat them in the pub, or you can buy your drinks at the pub and enjoy them in the fish & chip shop.

Since I’m feeling as rough as a badger’s arse, with a cold and a chesty cough, I’ll stay in Appledore today and take things easy. I can work on the book, listen to the cricket from the Oval and feel sorry for myself.

A pic of Appledore from 2015...

Lynton...

The skies are leaden over Barnstaple. I spent the night in Lynton, and was hoping to visit the local cricket ground, in what’s called The Valley of Rocks. Not many cricket grounds have such a spectacular setting. I’d been online, to confirm there was a game today, and I was hoping to take some pix. Unfortunately, I woke up to unbroken cloud and steady rain. The fixtures secretary of the Lynton Cricket club no doubt cancelled the match about the time I settled on plan B: have a writing day.

The harbour at Watchet...

Campsite...

Felt rough yesterday, and it was raining, so I stayed in a campsite to edit pix. Oh, and I called into this Christian bookshop to ask if they had anything more agnostic...

Resurrection...

Just visited old chums in Taunton, and enjoyed a day at the cricket, seeing 22 wickets fall on a remarkable day’s play. I declined the option to stay for the second day, thereby missing out on that rarest of results in county cricket: a tie.

Now I’m parked up in in Watchet, on the Somerset coast, having listened to an old guy telling me about the power of prayer. He said he had healed people - including himself - who had been given a terminal diagnosis by their doctor, but denied being a healer; the power to heal was God’s gift, he insisted, not his. I carried on listening, resisting the temptation to comment, as he told me of an incident in India, when he was doing missionary work. On one occasion he visited a hospital, and saw a mother who had recently given birth. Unfortunately, her baby had died. The guy prayed over the baby, which, after a few minutes, opened its eyes and smiled at him. A miracle!

A few months later, he said, he was back in the same village, and was asked if he would like to visit that mother and her now-healthy baby. She was walking along the road, and, when she saw him, she fell to her knees. The guy said he turned around at that point, and walked away, because “I didn’t want the place being turned into a shrine… to me”.

He won’t find his way into my book, though I was intrigued by the juxtaposition of faux-humility and self-regard. The righteous can make the most remarkable claims for themselves (it was this guy, after all, who was able to bring the dead back to life… not Joe Bloggs), while simultaneously praising God and his “mysterious ways”.

I did wonder whether his remaining years could be put to better purpose by bringing more dead people back to life, and, while he has God’s attention, maybe finding a cure for cancer… rather than running a second-hand bookstall on the quayside in a small Somerset town. Ten million children die every year, before the age of five, because of poverty, starvation, illness, drought, war and natural disasters. God, when unprompted or un-prayed to, is able to watch this carnage with apparent equanimity. If the old guy could jog the creator’s elbow once in a while, maybe God could be encouraged to show a bit more compassion.

The 9th century cross in Irton churchyard, Cumbria... licensed today...

George Carey...

I’ve just finished a slim book by George Carey (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002), about the way that Christian faith has been marginalised - privately, publicly - in recent years. He bewails the fact that faith is in retreat, yet at no point does he question the wisdom of believing things which are palpably untrue. In particular he wants Christians to be able to register their disapproval of homosexuality, without coming up against human rights legislation or ending up in court. “Christians, like everybody else, believe that sexual minorities are equal but they do not believe that all expressions of sexuality are equally acceptable. This, of course, is a distinction which homosexuals, in particular, cannot accept. There is no possible way of squaring this circle”.

I don’t know why the Church of England is so fixated with homosexuality. I know what the Bible says on the subject, just as I know what the Bible says about slavery (nowhere is it prohibited) and adultery, which, 2,000 years ago, was a capital offense. The church no longer sanctions slavery, and adulterous women are no longer stoned to death, on their father’s doorstep, by the men of the town. But homosexuality, in the eyes of many Christians, is still the biblical “abomination”. I don’t know why sex acts between consenting adults are the business of the church, or anyone else. Churchmen should get out of other people’s bedrooms… and stay out...

Marlborough...

Drove in early-morning mist through the rolling landscape of Wiltshire, with a distinctly autumnal nip in the air. I’m parked up in Marlborough, another favourite place, to shoot some pix around town and, later, to watch some cricket.

The last pic licensed in August: cottages in the village of Orford...