For the love of England

First run of the year. Running up the hill being chased by my dog, we run parallel until I am an inch ahead of her then she races ahead leaving me in her tail’s trail.

I have been away a lot recently, traversing the country. I have seen sea, tilled fields, rocky cliffs. Once I found myself staying in a fairy tale place with a stone castle stood in the middle of the village. It dates back to the time of early Christendom and is contemporaneous with the Tower of London, I was told. Now a ruin on an escarpment; sturdy, thick-walled, held together by clods of flint. You couldn’t bulldoze it, but it has been worn down over millennia by forgetfulness. 

Some entrepreneurial agriculturalists used its fortified plains of grass to graze their sheep. People looted the castle remains for building materials. Feudal systems waned, industrialisation peaked, people got replaced by other people and they forgot why the castle was built.

ROLO accompanied us on all these journeys to bygone picturesque places around England. We walked as a pack along the white cliffs of Dover. I kept her on a leash as one unflappable guide at the lighthouse at the end of our walk told us a dog ran off the side of a cliff only the other day. No fences. Not at a National Trust site – where talk of carving a giant bust of Vera Lynn was met with grand disdain – for the love of conservation!

Last weekend I found myself staying in the middle of a field in a tastefully converted ginormous farmhouse. Nothing for miles apart one tractor working its engine off. Tilling the land with heavy machinery. Couldn’t think of anything I had less knowledge of. I met a boy that day wearing a T-shirt with a tractor design on its front, and I couldn’t be sure, but these were my only two touchpoints to tractors. Tractors as a symbol for something like toys? Big cars? Horses? And then an actual tractor (with me watching it move slowly across the landscape) hurling piles and piles of dusty earth in its wake. 

What was it doing? I asked the Uncle of the family horde. He said it was probably churning fertiliser into the ground. Oh right, I said. From that point I couldn’t even extrapolate what happened next. Does it have to rain for the fertiliser to work? What then grows? How long does it take? Basically, what steps need to take place before the fruit/veg appear on the shelves of Tesco? I couldn’t tell you. So, experiencing the real tractor in life made me question food supply chains and reminded me of the rising cost of living. How milk now is £1.10 and I swear it was 90p quite recently. Maybe this is just London prices and milk goes up arbitrarily like the cost of pints. I wondered then whether the alt-milk movement was pushing up the price of milk as there was less demand.

I was glad that family weekend offered much free booze and many distracting conversations otherwise my city brain might not have coped. ROLO was also put in kennels for this episode, so I yearned for her whilst the others tempered my flurry of emotions and told me she was having a good time playing with other dogs. Making new dog friends. I texted the kennel owner – Ronnie and he texted back saying she was ‘very nervous’. My extended family are very kind to me.  I’ve learned from watching them and being amongst them that love knows no limits. 

My Canterbury Pilgrimage

In the summer of 2021,

I undertook a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury with three friends and a dog.

You can read my account of it here via an ArcGis Story Map: https://arcg.is/15q1CS0

There's pictures and interactive maps too. 

https://arcg.is/15q1CS0

Canal Cavalcade

‘Worst case scenario Mer!’ Back in the boat brushing my teeth on a windy stormy gale-force sort of night, the drizzle hasn’t commenced yet but I assume there’ll be lashings of it after midnight, always is in England.

‘OK I’ll leave the keys right here - so we can drive in the middle of the night if we come loose.’

Pointing skyward with my toothbrush I say, ‘Good idea. Always be prepared.’

‘I’m telling ya’, Mer moves to the front end of the boat where she lives in a purple envelopment of warm blankets and wires ‘there are boats flying everywhere!’

‘Where?’ 

‘The canals. They’re all saying it.’

There was the Canal Cavalcade this weekend and all the happy boat folk were out in force. The floating bandstand was a novelty, reminding me of Dick Van Dyke and loud cartoon penguins, and I did spy a handful of rosy-cheeked men; one with a resplendent white beard and moustache combo which Brill Cream could only worship and never shape. I had a dog with me too - sniff sniff sniff wag wag wag - like there was no tomorrow, and whilst trying to sympathise with the canine form of excitement that copious crowds and smells must stir in them (‘Like being at a rave and being told off for dancing’ as a friend interjected whilst I pulled the dog away from another sandal-ed foot for the hundredth time) I kept tugging at her little collar because she would eat trodden down bread and lick spilt Mr. Whippy off the pavement. When I arrived back at the boat I told Mer of the festivities happening down the canal.

‘Yeah I went to see the cavalcade but I wasn’t impressed.’ 

She’s rarely impressed and always into something else, forever riding the alternative wave. ‘They’re not real boaters like us. Most of them aren’t liveaboards so they’re just in it for show you know, all pretty and no panties.’ 

I definitely raised my eyebrows at the “me being a real boater” comment but she makes me laugh. To Mer you’ve got to live it to believe it (like rock n’ roll) and she does live it be fair, and I like how in her mind all these pin-striped red and white blazers, the bunting, the brass band and the boater-hats are marks of a hobbyists. Conformist sold-out establishment whiners. Mer’s a true blue Lefty. I shake my head fondly.

The wind has really picked up since the weekend and now the debris from the parties float past my window. Some slowly, some chunks vigorously. A lot of PET bottles and straws and plastic bags and hell of a lot of blossom petals. There’s indistinguishable stuff mainly, and ducks swimming against it. The other day I saw a cat swimming - not on purpose - it must have fallen out of a Yuppie flat’s window overlooking the canal. It paddled quietly keeping his head above above the water with determination but looked exhausted from the wet, I wandered back and forth, but I was too far away to do anything about it. I hope the cat survived. There is lapping under my bed tonight and I can’t help feeling worried for the cat.

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The happy mess and excitement of parties throws people into a commotion and although that’s fun it can be disconcerting. When you've found yourself alone all of a sudden in a throng of people and the eyes begin to dart. A pretty pretty butterfly of anxiety flutters off the shoulder in to my drink then drowns. That’s a little insight in to my psyche anyway. I always keep remembering that there’s another side to the story and bits you missed or didn’t quite understand and that feeling of discomfort after having fun equates closely to but isn’t quite guilt. Like a whole weekend of fun is premonitory… of what I shall not know, but could this storm be the pathetic fallacy of these thoughts incarnate?! No, more likely a hangover.