October has come and gone, and the book is now finished. I’m glad I gave myself a deadline; otherwise I doubt if I would have finished the book this year. To celebrate I’ve been on the Argos website and ordered a new ironing board cover. Heady days!
Licenced today: Drax power station…
Just been reading in the Guardian that the team batting second, during the main part of the Twenty20 World Cup, has won nine games out of the ten which have been played. Wow! That appears to make the coin toss the most important element of the short-form game. Win the toss... win the match.
Licensed today: a display of fruit and veg for harvest festival…
Australian footballer Josh Cavallo has come out as gay, making him the only known current male top-flight professional footballer in the world to be out. It’s rare for any footballer to come out as gay; they have generally waited until their playing days were over. There are currently about 500 players in the English Premier League, and we’re supposed to believe that not a single one of them is gay.
Licenced today: the Macclesfield Canal in Macclesfield, Cheshire…
Licenced today: Japanese visitors walking through the village of Elterwater in Cumbria...
Licenced today: a limestone pavement at Hutton Roof Crags, near the village of Hutton Roof, in South Lakeland…
A quote from Krishnamurti which just arrived in my in-tray. “Religion is a state of mind in which there is an awareness of all the conflicts of human existence, which brings order in our daily life. God is the invention of thought. God is put together through our despairs, fears and anxieties. When you worship something that thought has created, it is still within the field of confusion. According to various doctrines, God has created man, but if you look at it closely and seriously, man has created God in his image. There are those who say you cannot understand God, and so they call the same principle the nameless, the timeless, the unknowable, and so on. But what is important is that we want security. We demand not only outward security, which is natural, healthy and necessary, but also we demand psychological, inner security in our relationships with others. Perhaps there is no security in another, and so we demand security beyond all human relationship. So we invent, put together the idea that there is an entity, a father figure or mother figure who will look after us, sustain us, protect us in our troubles, miseries and depression. So we pray to that entity that thought has created. We are back in the same field, because thought has created this super-entity and created confusion, misery, depression, sorrow, anxiety, and so on. The content of our consciousness is put together by thought, with its belief, fears, rituals and so on. So thought is responsible for fear, for prayer, for that supreme make-believe God. Thought is the thread through all this, and it is necessary, if we want to go into it deeply, to understand the nature of thinking”.
Licenced last week: not much of a picture, but, as a sign of the times, eminently saleable...
According to Jacob Rees-Mogg, the member of parliament for the 18th century, Conservative MPs don't need to wear masks during debates because they know each other so well. I had no idea that the virus was able to differentiate between friends, colleagues and mere drinking buddies... or was unable to 'cross the floor' in the House of Commons.
Licenced today: inside the Old Post Office in Tintagel, Cornwall…
Poor Steve Bruce: sacked as manager of Newcastle United by the club’s new owners, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. It’s a very public way to lose your job, though the humiliation is mitigated by the fact that he’s getting a compensation package in the region of £7m. This is, apparently, what ‘failure’ looks like, in the crazy world of Premier League football…
Licenced today: St Botolph's Church - the Stump - in Boston, Lincs…
Names are being changed. Kanye West has changed his name to Ye (apparently because ‘Ye’ is the commonest word in the Bible). No middle name, no last name… just Ye. Facebook will reportedly get a new name next week: a parent company to oversee the various parts of the business: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc. Whistleblower Frances Haugen has been telling US Congress that Facebook put “astronomical profits before people”. Earlier this month Facebook suffered an outage, after routine maintenance went wrong. As Haugen told Congress, “For more than five hours Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilise democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies”.
Licenced today...
I’ve done something I should have done years ago: joined the Co-op. On ideological grounds, dad would never set foot inside a Coop shop; the very idea of anything cooperative made him go ballistic. Anyway, I’ve bought my single share, for £1, and I’m told that my membership card is in the post. According to the company’s website, I get special offers and in-store discounts. Best of all I can save money on a funeral plan. I'm living the dream.
Licenced today: the canal basin in Skipton...
Sad to read an article on the Guardian website today by Brendan Cox, whose MP wife, Jo, was murdered five years ago in her Batley constituency. He has now witnessed, along with the rest of the county, the murder of Sir David Amess, stabbed to death while holding a constituents’ surgery at a church in Leigh-on-Sea. Cox laments the polarisation of political discourse: our apparent inability to engage with those with whom we disagree, without the threat of violence. He writes about “the day-to-day brutality with which our political debate is conducted, from online abuse to increasingly regular death threats”. Democracy is a fragile flower; we need to take better care of it.
Licenced today: Burnley looking festive...
Just had a few laughs - albeit rather hollow laughs - at a piece on the Guardian website by Ed Cumming, who announces that, thanks to all the shortages, Christmas has been as good as cancelled.
“There will be no PlayStation 5 under where the Christmas tree used to be. There will be no jokes in Mrs Brown’s Boys, as usual, but none in the Christmas crackers either. There’s no petrol or HGV drivers, of course, but correspondents also report shortages of tennis balls, merlot, white bread, sardines, M&S chicken kievs, fish sauce, frozen apple strudel, tinned sardines, spring onions, fire alarms, an effective opposition, chocolate Hobnobs, cat vaccines, cat worming pills, bubble bath, Leon fish-finger wraps, marmalade, butter beans, dog-poo bags, goats, crisps, decaf coffee, bulbs (plant), bulbs (light), pigs, blankets, pigs-in-blankets, roofing lead and Harry Potter merchandise, especially wands”.
Licenced last week: a pub sign at Rye harbour, in East Sussex, which reveals that in a brief cessation of hostilities during the Battle of Hastings, the adversaries were able to fraternise over a glass or two of the local ale...
As my book project comes to a close - the writing part, at least - I feel confident that it won’t be the last. Now I’m ‘in the zone’, I don’t want to give up. The book has been such a big project, taking me a long, long way out of my comfort zone; I don’t think I’ll attempt anything on this scale again. Maybe something lighter in both tone and subject. Like a cookery book for men entitled You Can’t Make an Omelette Without Breaking Wind… A book of gardening tips: Grow Bigger Bonsai… Naked at the Keyboard: a short history of internet porn… First Batter Your Mars Bar: a book of Scottish cuisine… Or maybe a (very) slim volume called The Lighter Side of Islam? The book I'd like to read? That's easy: Donald Trump's prison diaries.
The River Ouse and King's Staith, York: licenced yesterday...
Just bought an encyclopaedia of euphemisms in a charity shop: that’s a lot of reading for just 50p! I like ‘taking an early bath’ for being sent off in a football match (maybe for committing a ‘professional foul’). Not in the book - but one of my favourites - is to ‘pour yourself a hand shandy’: euphemistic and alliterative! For that to happen, you need to have some ‘lead in your pencil’. My favourite euphemism for female masturbation is ‘checking the oil’. “We must have lunch some time” means “goodbye” (not "au revoir"... but "goodbye"). Some euphemisms seem almost worse than what they replace: ‘friendly fire’, for example. The book has ‘military intelligence’, though isn’t that an oxymoron - like ‘Microsoft Works' - rather than a euphemism? Excuse me… off to see a man about a dog.
Licenced today: another stately home, Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire…
I’m expecting a package from Amazon today. I can track the progress of my package in real time, online, from the moment it leaves what Amazon euphemistically calls a “fulfillment centre” to the exact moment when an overworked and underpaid van driver hurls it in frustration over a hedge, somewhere in Asselby, into a neighbour’s garden.
Licenced today, for the best price in weeks: the market cross in Epworth, North Lincolnshire (the birthplace of John and Charles Wesley, and the 'cradle' of Methodism)...
Writers often give advice to other writers, while throwing in a few barbed comments about the perceived vexations of the writer’s life. Cyril Connelly cited “the pram in the hall” as one reason why writers fail to flourish, while Virginia Wolf described the necessity, for women writers, of “a room of one’s own“. Samuel Johnson advised writers to “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out” (the shorter version, the slogan for the T-shirt, would be “slaughter your darlings”)
The secret of writing, according to Sinclair Lewis, Nora Roberts, Robert Benchley, Stephen King, Oliver Stone and other luminaries, is to “apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”. Perspiration, then, rather than inspiration. If you wait for inspiration to strike, you may be waiting a long time (while intimating that the ability to string words together coherently is a ‘gift’ over which we have no control). My favourite quote, also attributed to a number of different witers, is this... “Writing a book is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo”.
Licenced today: Boarbank Hall near Grange-over-Sands...
Sunny days come and go while I’m putting the finishing touches to the book. If I want to meet my self-imposed deadline of the end of October, I need to put in at least four hours at the beginning of every day (before my brain turns to mush). If the book wasn’t 99% finished, I’m not sure I would have the motivation to keep going.
The book is now very different to what I first envisaged, about five years ago. Against expectations, my attitude to religious affiliation has hardened, not softened. I’ve searched for the “good stuff”, in the holy books and elsewhere, but, frankly, the ‘morality’ which underpins the Abrahamic religions is pretty poor fare. And the idea of coercion - being told what we must believe - drives even this poor fare towards irrelevance.
Licenced last week: Broughton Hall, near Skipton…
Newcastle United has finally been bought, by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. To pass the Premier League’s stringent ‘fit and proper persons’ test, a prospective buyer must answer two questions. 1) “Have you got lots of money?” and 2) “Can we have some??”
Licenced yesterday: framing the view from the top of Holme Moss, in West Yorkshire...
An independent enquiry and a devastating report have revealed that at least 330,000 children were victims of sexual abuse by clergy and lay members of the Catholic church in France over the past 70 years.
I don’t know how many paedophiles saw the church as an opportunity to get unsupervised access to children. I don’t know how many Catholic priests, forced to be celibate, were tempted to find another way to express their sexual feelings. I only know that the trust placed in parish priests - traditionally the most trusted figures in any community - has leaked away like water through sand. Would any parent now leave a child alone with a Catholic priest?
A favourite shot, licenced today: a horse & trap on the beach at Redcar…
What a coincidence! Licenced two images today, to different buyers, both featuring gravestones in Heptonstall. The famous one is poet Sylvia Plath. “King” David Hartley was the leader of the Cragg Vale coiners, who produced fake gold coins in the late 18th century to supplement their meagre earnings from hand-weaving. They ‘clipped’ the edges of real coins, and melted down the shavings to create counterfeit coins, impressing a new design into the metal with a stamp and a hammer. David Hartley was hanged in York on 28 April 1770 (these days he'd probably be called an independent financial adviser)…
The vast majority (at least 90%) of the people now in hospital with severe Covid are unvaccinated. Vaccined people are getting Covid too, but, crucially, they’re not being hospitalised. Nevertheless, the vaccine programme seems to have stalled. As we approach winter, when Covid cases are likely to rise, I wonder what it will take to persuade the ‘vaccine hesitant’ to reconsider their options…
Licenced last week: an MG Roadster sports car in the village of Stillington, north of York...
Had my flu jab this morning. The good folk at Howden Medical Centre are wonderfully well drilled; I was in one door and out the other in just two minutes.
Licenced yesterday: Packwood House in Warwickshire...
