The Parting Glass...

What a great weekend: a family wedding, on the wrong side of the Pennines, followed by a gig in Kendal by Karine Polwart, my musical lockdown discovery. The wedding reception was held in the pavilion of the East Lancs cricket club, with a game in progress under blue skies and whispy clouds (though not a swallow in sight). The speeches were short, and perfectly pitched, with a few jokes (nothing too smutty), reminiscences and hopes for the future. No shouting matches, no fist-fights: an altogether wholesome and enjoyable affair.

I headed north, long before the disco was due to start, and managed to squeeze the van into the last space in the car park at the Old Brewery arts centre. The music was stripped back: just Karine singing and pianist Dave Milligan playing. According to one review of her most recent album, “This melodic and mellifluous music is a perfect illustration of the richness of restraint”, and I can’t argue with that. Her songs are still floating around in my head, especially The Parting Glass, which was, appropriately, the last song of a magical evening.

Blackburn Cathedral, yesterday morning...

Summer visitors...

The swifts are back! The swifts are back! Not in ones and two, like the swallows, but in a noisy gang, streaking and shrieking over the rooftops of the village (the pic refers to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where the locals feel rather proprietorial about 'their' swifts)...

Broken promises...

If we want to see how Islam operates, when unencumbered by western democratic norms, we should look to Afghanistan, where the Taliban are reverting to type by re-establishing a brutal theocracy. Instead of tackling the nation’s many economic problems, the pious men fronting the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Vice and Virtue are busy doing what they do best: curtailing women’s freedom and autonomy.

Women are being forced back into cloth bags, and preferably the full-length, all-enveloping burqa (if womens’ faces are seen in public, then, in a Machiavellian plot twist, it's their male guardians who face fines or prison). Taliban representatives have reneged on their earlier promises to allow teenage girls back into secondary education and women to work outside healthcare and education. Women are being told not to travel anywhere without a male escort, and, basically, to stay at home. 

A typical springtime scene around the 'marshland villages'...

Reflections...

W H Auden described his face, in later years, as looking like “a wedding cake left out in the rain” (“If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?”, David Hockney mused, after his first meeting with the poet). Thoughts like these pass through my mind whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. Inside my head I’m still a young man, though my raddled features tell a rather different story.

The way we live today: upmarket groceries being delivered to a house in Hotham... 

Melton Mowbray...

Licenced today: Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire…

Yarn bombing...

I think that's what it's called...

Epworth...

The village of Epworth this morning. From my vantage point I noticed a blue plaque behind me: “In June 1852 this market place was the scene of one of the greatest peacetime riots in British history”. During the lead-up to the general election of 1852, the three candidates for the North Lincolnshire seat made the unwise decision to hold a political address, in Epworth, on the same day. Violence erupted in the market place, between the candidates’ supporters, with stones and ginger beer bottles being thrown, and people trampled by horses. It took many hours for the local constabulary to restore order...