Brockhole...

There's usually an end-of-month surge in picture sales... but not this month. Licensed today: Brockhole Visitor Centre, near Ambleside...

More religious foolishness...

Supplicants in Georgia are still sharing spoons, while taking communion in church, believing, apparently, that since communion is a holy ceremony it is impossible to get ill. If these religious fruitcakes really are convinced of their invulnerability to coronavirus, I hope they decline all medical care and let God look after them instead…

Isolation opportunities...

Enforced isolation creates opportunities. Last week I learned Swahili. This week I’m getting to grips with double-entry book-keeping. My next project is to build a scale model of St Paul’s Cathedral out of match-sticks. Well, that’s the idea. The reality is that I’m editing pix in my underpants, and eating whatever the local Co-op has in stock. Tonight: choc ice and chips.

Rudston, near Bridlington: the tallest standing stone in the country...

The future?...

Some words here from Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, laying out the range of emotions people elsewhere in Europe are likely to go through in the weeks to come (edited down from a longer article in the Guardian).
 
“I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We watch you as you behave just as we did. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

“You’ll laugh. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all. You will count all the things you do not need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant. You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

“At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too. If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same”…

Great Dixter...

Living on a cul de sac, off another cul de sac, I’m not best-placed to know whether local people are hunkering down at home, as I am. For all I know, every night might be party night in Howden and Goole. But I do know that the UK death toll has risen sharply today, and that it’s my responsibility to avoid mixing with other people. It’s ironic that we do the most when we do the least, and that the best way of pulling together is to stand apart.

Licensed today: Great Dixter House in East Sussex...

NHS volunteers...

Boris has just said that 405,000 people have signed up, in the last 24 hours, as NHS volunteers. “That’s more”, he said, “than the entire population of Coventry”. Wow, the people of Coventry have really stepped up to the mark.

If you drive around Barra, after 14 miles you will arrive back where you started. Castlebay is the main settlement; this pic, licensed today, is of Northbay...

Viral emergency...

Not sure I'll be taking many photos for a while...

CV deaths...

This is a comparison between the number of deaths in Italy and UK. Apparently, we are just two weeks behind Italy...

Sledmere...

The village of Sledmere, yesterday...

Acts of worship...

I just heard a bishop on the radio, talking about broadcasting “acts of worship” online, now that church services have been stopped. He finished off by reassuring listeners that “there is a God who loves and cares for us”. The presenter took this appalling platitude at face value, thanked the bishop for his sentiments, and moved on to another topic.

Where is Jeremy Paxman when you need him? He wouldn’t let the bishop get away with such nonsense. With a curl of the lip he might demand some evidence, in this time of plague, that there is indeed a God who “loves and cares for us". If this is being "cared for", I'd hate to be around when God is in a less charitable mood.

And, please, can we have a moratorium on “worship”... at least until the worst of the coronavirus crisis is over? Thanking God for giving us a deadly disease is like “turning the other cheek”: prostrating ourselves before a bully, begging to be spared.

Knedlington Hall, yesterday, beneath a bank of cloud...

Happy birthday...

I’m washing my hands… even more often than Lady Macbeth. Ensuring that I wash them for the full twenty seconds, I usually sing ‘Happy birthday to you’, twice, or, to ring the changes, an aria from Tosca. Today, however, I’m able to make a small change to the lyrics and sing ‘Happy birthday to me’.

Just read an article in the Guardian about camper van owners who are deciding to ‘self-isolate’ north of the border. Fergus Ewing, the MSP for Inverness and Nairn, is not best pleased: “I am furious at the reckless and irresponsible behaviour of some people travelling to the Highland and Islands. This has to stop now. Let me be crystal clear – people should not be travelling to rural and island communities, full stop. They are endangering lives. Do not travel.”

I’m rather glad that my nomadic days are (probably) over. I wouldn’t want to be viewed as a virus-carrying pariah, being chased out of one town after another by an angry mob. I feel fortunate to have a roof over my head as the crisis deepens; if I can’t be sociable, at least I can be comfortable.

Bishop Burton, yesterday...

Sell-by date...

According to Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, “There is plenty of food in the supply chain. There is a billion pounds more food in people’s houses than there was three weeks ago, so we should make sure we eat some of it.” Indeed… I wonder just how much of this panic-bought plunder will end up in landfill sites once it’s past its sell-by date…

Licensed yesterday: the grave of Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall (local Plath fans don't like the headstone, and keep scratching out the word 'Hughes'. That's an argument I'm staying out of)...

Stockpiling...

Anyone stockpiling food, by buying more than they need, might take two minutes to watch this heartfelt plea by Dawn, a critical care nurse, who, after a 48-hour shift, couldn't find any fresh fruit and veg in her local store. Panic-buying really does have real-world consequences...

A pic of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, licensed today...

All things...

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

Which means that he also made the coronavirus. That must be a special kind of “love”, I suppose…

Wistman's Wood, Dartmoor...

This is how the inside of my head feels, after listening to the news...

Staying home...

Saw Boris Johnson this evening, flanked by health experts, delivering his draconian new instructions to the nation, and asking for the kind of personal sacrifice last seen in 1945. He looked weary… like a man who thought being PM would be a breeze… and then coronavirus arrived. Remember the days, just a few weeks ago, when we used to bicker about Brexit? Was it weeks… or years?

God knows when things will get back to normal, or even what ‘normal’ will look like. How long will local businesses survive, before the doors stay closed… for good? We really are sailing in uncharted waters.

Licensed today: an eco-house at Findhorn...

Cognitive dissonance...

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort experienced when we try to hold two or more contradictory ideas simultaneously. I listen to the news, which is apocalyptic, and then wander out into Howden, where locals are going about their business as usual. It’s not easy to bring both these scenarios into sharp focus at the same time.

“Coronavirus? It’s all bullshit… just like global warming”, says one of the guys building the house next door… who seems refreshingly untroubled by the concept of cognitive dissonance.

I’ve decided to self-isolate in the Old Sunday School, with a larder of food, some cans of industrial strength lager, a reliable broadband connection and a box of mansize tissues.

Licensed last week: a shot of Cross Fell, the highest point in the Pennines...

Flamborough Head...

Had a trip out to the coast, to take some pix and watch the gannets plunging into the sea: spectacular!

This is Frank Gannet and his wife Ethel, contemplating their dive...

Old folk...

“I’m not being funny," said the landlord of my local pub, “but coronavirus may get rid of a few old people and free up more hospital beds”. I said I agreed with him… at least about “not being funny”.

Licensed today: the Old Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory, in Reading...

Goole docks...

Misology...

Eschatology - the study of the ‘end times’ - was a word I’d barely heard before I started writing my book about belief. Also misology - a mistrust of reason - and theodicy - the attempt to explain why a just God would allow the existence of evil. There are many such words in the religious lexicon, most of them describing theological ‘problems’ which are brought about by believing unlikely propositions. Theologians create problems for which they attempt to find solutions: as bleakly pointless a task as I can imagine.

I have found, from reading books of Christian apologetics, that theological arguments can be complex, elaborate, circuitous, sophisticated, even subtle and nuanced… but once the authors have embraced misology, they are heading down a cul de sac. It may be a long cul de sac, with many twists and turns along the way, but there’s still no way out. Once blind faith has eclipsed sweet reason, the search for truth is effectively over.

Springtime in the East Yorkshire village of Lund...

Eschatology...

Well, my fellow humans… our race is run. What’s coming next? My bet is a loose coalition of dolphins and cockroaches. It was good while it lasted. Goodbye.

The Triumph of Death, 1562, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder... 

Welton...

Welton, another village of character in East Yorkshire, snapped today...

Bolton church...

Hmmm... for an atheist I do seem to shoot - and license - lots of pix of old churches. This is All Saints Church in the village of Bolton, Cumbria, licensed last week...

Blacktoft Sands...

It's been a while since I spent any time at Blacktoft Sands, so I called in yesterday. The lapwings were making nests - just a scrape in the ground - and the black tailed godwits were coming into their breeding plumage. Snipe were so well camouflaged agaist the reeds that, unless they moved, you couldn’t see them at all. A flock of about thirty dunlin was easier to spot because they never stop moving. Marsh harriers were doing their mating ‘sky dance’. Best of all was a pair of goldeneye and the return of the avocets…

A male goldeneye. From a distance it looks black and white; close up, in the spring sunlight, the head is a 'metallic' green...

Another chapel...

There are plenty of brick-built chapels around East Yorkshire, but none of them are as pretty as my little home in Asselby. However, this chapel, near Sedbergh, has looks and location... backing onto the Howgill hills...

Sedbergh...

Licensed today: the narrow main street of Sedbergh... now established as a 'book town'...

The Old Sunday School...

Thanks to some help from a local historian, and the Historic England website, I think I have found the age of the Old Sunday School. It was actually built as the village’s Methodist (Wesleyan) chapel; only later did it become a school. So... the Old Sunday School was built in 1810, a year after Charles Darwin was born.

Mixed messages, in a pic licensed today...

Kirkburn...

Had a few hours photographing around the Wolds villages. This wonderful 12th-century font is in St Mary's Church, Kirkburn. The figure at top left is Christ, showing the holes in his hands, as he ascends through a mandoria, an almond-shaped frame, into heaven... 

The mystery of salvation...

It was back in 1996 that the Anglican church downgraded the concept of hell from ‘fire and brimstone’ to a more euphemistic ‘separation from God’. Since the Bible hadn’t changed, and God han’t seen fit to upgrade the holy book to reflect modern sensibilities, I wondered what evidence the church had found, in the last years of the old millennium, to warrant this re-writing of Christian doctrine. How did the debate go? I bought the relevant book, The Mystery of Salvation, compiled by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, to see if it would shed some light on the subject. I’m disappointed so far (I’m half-way through). Though obviously written in English, the writers seem to delight in being needlessly obscure. This paragraph - about the Trinity - is typical of the style.

“The formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in its classic form as a result of the debates of the patristic period took place in close continuity with this New Testament emphasis. The doctrine insisted that all three trinitarian persons are truly and equally God, because it is as these three that God gives himself to us in salvation. If the incarnate Son Jesus were less than truly God or if the indwelling Spirit were less than truly God, salvation would be jeopardised. It would not be God’s gift of himself. The gift of the Son would be a gift of something less than God himself, and the gift of the Spirit would be a gift of something less than God himself. The divine activity in salvation - the gift of the Son and the gift of the Spirit - would not be the activity of divine self-giving that the New Testament witness sees in it. Salvation would be only the receiving of certain good things from God - forgiveness, immortality and so on - not the experience of the self-giving love of God. This argument from the nature of salvation was the really decisive argument for Nicene orthodoxy against all of the more or less Arian positions in the fourth-century controversies”.

Licensed this pic today of Drumburgh Castle, a fortified house in north Cumbria…