The divinatory toads roll the dice..
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Out at night along the 'magic' meandering line of Burton top,

(where rabbits cross their ears in car search lights, soon to stop-bobble the verge to earth) the divinatory toads roll the dice with near infinite stoicism and await their fate. Further on a recent casualty lies fresh with the heat of life, the spirit expired back into the greater whole whence it came, the 'magic' charge of protea abounds such a night.

The slinky black pterosaurs that tomorrow will feed on the roads fallen are asleep - fingers knot tightening their perch as the solar behemoth glides beneath the earth's perfect bearing. The stars prick the firmament's immensity with attention, awareness startles the late hour's familial democracy. In darkness all is one, all-that-is so revealed beneath the formal separation of unique identity, kin and relationship.

Earlier in the day when the solar orb arced the frame with its blinding enlightenment, the bicycle made its way along the very same journey. The black cousins - crow, rook and jackdaw, finessed the limestone escarpment with their distinctive acrobatic stylistic footnotes. The crows a low hung glide into the middle distant perch or gentle late afternoon stroll through the field, the rooks the tricks and manoeuvres of aerial delight, the jackdaws the more localised tumbles to tree or on the grass their quick staccato jackboot 'dalek' stride.

Ahead a crow tugs and hacks at a dead rabbit's sacrifice, then nonchalantly heaves to the verge as a car drums past, then back barely lifting his eye such is the confidence of his spatial awareness - you rarely see a crow dead beside the road. (A rook maybe, though no less smart might he be the victim of a shooting party's greed, or a youthful air rifle yet to see the cause of its alienation and disaffection: Please see note 1. below)

But the solar orb swung by our ever brimming arc, the light went down, and the magic wee night sprites came out to play the fields of spring's abundance. The toads, the limestone edge and the equally patient sleeping crows..

Note 1. fallen blind and deaf upon a disenchantment, nature a mere backdrop to a kitchen sink drama of angry young men, and disillusioned young women wondering what happened to the Green Knight's of noble character their beauty deserves. Indeed its 'oy, that's my bike mate, bring me my bike!' screamed to the passing cyclist as the teens lie fallen on the swollen grass of a local gallery, burning uselessly in the sun with their despairing and imprisoning cans of ale.

Currently reading : The Mabinogion (Oxford World’s Classics) By Sioned Davies Release date: 23 March, 2007

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Flecks on the moist rapids of air.
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

This January's rapid air...

Its great to see all the birds buzzed and scrambled by the South Westerly gales. Their joy is thrown up by this rapier of elemental force. As you forget your wind jostled frame and hair you notice over rooftops flecks on the moist rapids of air. You see the rooks and crows happily toiling, tumbling, racing back, turning again to chest break like boats hitting waves.

You notice the fleeting pigeon's more rapid squat cruise missile homing manoeuvre, their left-right-left wing flips, rotating barrels fairly skewered on trajectory.

You notice a looser genius to the little gulls, their flapless head long 2^nd world-war dog-fight flips, left - right they somehow sinuous thread their speedy way into the teeth of the gale with practiced in-the-blood stamina. The effort is manifold, subtle manoeuvres a legion campaign of ability - grandmasters of aerial strategy; the violent, boom-shake wind just cannot checkmate their patient talent for flapless crook-wing levity.

Then you notice the tiny tits, the sparrow and finch fairly flung across the road like back hand volleyed tennis of gambling intent. They hit the shrub so quick, yet stop and pluck a perch; black birds too, they race from cover to cover like pretend cowboys at the OK coral.

But what is it so in the air for the birds today, those feathered pterosaurs - that buzz of elemental perplexity, the air all a stir, like cosmic power has touched up the oasis firmament with the locked up potency of creative energy - the maelstrom of chaos, unleashed from the darkest pit of memory?

You notice how the birds know their place, like kids on their sledge slopes on snow covered heaths; they play, exult, fairly converse with their maker.

But soon the gales blew out – there came the icy pause of arctic stillness as the atmosphere slipped round clockwise from the North, wheeling across the cold North Sea to bathe and clarify that it was, actually, supposed to be winter. It was nice and fresh in Lincoln here, the Arctic breeze so clean; cycling through it like washing a face in a mountain stream - in the clear sky above the golden orb scintillated the scene with a fine winter's luminescence. Like the gales before also quickening. Such is the elemental magic of climatic surprise.

After this the week slipped back once more to unseasonable warmth. Driving out to Brattleby Manor late at night, we saw an owl at the side of the road; it was a long eared owl, all a startle upon its prey, on the verge of the road: what was in its sharp iron-grip toes? Totally unfazed by the car, it was very much a privileged glimpse of the primal spark. You felt its uncanny spirit; it's vibe like the very quick of an atavistic awakening. 

So warm then for the time of year with glorious sunny skies and cold crisp star lit nights. Felt like spring yet it still the depth of winter. Birds all chattering, fluting - scrabbling in dry autumn leaves, already so eager for the nest, the open treasure chests of spring.   

That was January, and most probably, the unseasonable warmth the early warning signs of climate change.

Currently reading : All Points North Yorkshire By Simon Armitage Release date: 06 May, 1999

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In The Lakes from Boxing Day.
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

The Lakes on Boxing Day

I awoke to hear the horn of the local fox hunt. To spite the ban, they still go out drag hunting, testing the hounds and chase with scent; clear rebels now, they will still take a fox or two given half the chance. But thankfully the spirit of our native fox is smart as ever, smarter than perhaps anyone really knows; the vixen shaves the odds down to on, the more the numbers ever declined in a single season's hunting and shooting, the more cubs came along to fill the void. As with their Native American cousin the great coyote, the more you try and 'control them' (an obscenely dispassionate phrase), the more their numbers increase and they opportunistically spread ever wider than before. Here in the UK there are perhaps as many foxes now living successfully in cities and built up areas as in their natural environment.

The horn sounds again up on the hill. I imagine the hooves clumping the packed wet earth, flinging it up behind as the great beasts heave over hedge and gate, they hit the hard macadam and hooves clip their flinty-sparks, then clop as they heave over opposite fence after the drag hunt's false scent. But as we know it's the fox they really covet, their blood is up, the red jackets dripping with intentions old as a post-pagan repressive hangover gets. The 'nobility' is theirs now, not that of the four-legged 'spirit' teachers of old. The beast is now a demon called 'vermin' to be thus 'managed' and 'controlled'. But the fox is quicker by definition, sharp as a razor's thorny edge, he smells, and hears, and quick-darts the steer cross the drag's line, and slips back along the hunt's ragged procession's tracks, smelling the fresh winter's lifted sod and the hot stink of horse and hound, perfume scent and that faint hint of an aftershave's eye watery sting.

In Cumbria, the Lake District is a rocky outcrop of Earth's Eurasian massif, a beautifully fragmented open chrysanthemum of rocky uplands, a wilderness 'civilized' by an 18thC desire for distinction and beauty, a manageable grandeur that flocks the outdoor visitors even in winter to its gorgeously gnarled mountain vistas. Wherever you look a picture post card scene, but wherever you like wilderness laps at your feet whether you decide to take a dip along a color-rich tree-lined lakeside walk or more full on take to the spirit-quickening heights above.

Thick with low cloud, mists shroud the valleys, then fade to reveal the fells and cliffs, Jackdaws sparky and bright in almost every tree, tits, wrens, robins and blackbirds flitting in the tangle of stripped twig and branch, evergreens looming, clouds brooding atop Skiddaw's great domed immensities. Nearby is Castlerigg stone circle.  A magical place - it's on a shallow hump shaped like an enormous Saxon shield and surrounded my mountains like the shields iron studs. The space has a very unique feel to it, it is a vast natural amphitheatre. You can see why they placed the stones where they did, feel their atavistic, elemental power.

Back at the cottage, as the classical CD left in the player by the previous guest finessed the room, I read the selected poems of Simon Armitage - that arch, Yorkshire griteralist, he seamed to capture the dour flint-lock tell-it-like-it-is-lad Cumbrian mood; the pristine air, clean water, rocky bout of honest skepticism that arrests the flamboyance of moneyed-southerner preening to harness the exchange for the local upkeep.

And out on the stone terrace, the smell of real coal and log fires; the scintillating clarity of the air despite the hint of mist that bathes Ambleside below in a cotton wool picture book Victoriana.

What from my visit stays with me? The Jackdaws…  Never knew there could be so many in one place.

Recommended read:

Tyrannosaurus  Rex and the Corduroy Kid,

by Simon Armitage.

(With Simon Armitage its as if the bare-teeth of Emily Bronte's rocky outcrops and glowering moors have breathed the spirit of an earthy feet-on-the-ground defiance into a contemporary poet's soul. Being so flinty, faintly acerbic, and with that distinctive Northern wit his bearing is clearly shaped on the finest whetstone of Yorkshire grit. With it he demonstrates with ease the sharpest quick silver only to be expected with such an arch contemporary poet.

Through the electric potential of our native language, Simon Armitage transmutes poems of such black humour, precision and wide ranging guile as to empower a fair stake upon the granite peaks of English poetry. In Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Corduroy Kid the North, that sour spice that seasons his pen, the very arc of England's uplands spine, startles our taste buds and sharpens his timeless and far wandering palette. He is a natural heir to Ted Hughes outstanding if at times lowering mantle, but is utterly his own precedent. Arguably our foremost living poet, Simon Armitage stands in no one's shadow.)

Currently reading : Beowulf: A New Verse Translation By Seamus Heaney Release date: February, 2001

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Our most atavistic, indigenous roots.
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Religion and Philosophy

A Gaia retrospective. (Brief praise for James Lovelock's seminal book.)


It didn't have the direct and dramatic impact of Newton's Principia - a book that radically changed the world, nevertheless James Lovelock's book Gaia - a New Look at Life on Earth, did have a more subtle influence on our world – particularly that of science. In a sense the Gaia Hypothesis prefigured - culturally and symbolically - the evolution of pure science from that classical, mechanistic world view inspired by the uncanny genius of Newton, to a less linear, more holistic awareness of the irreducible relationships ('gestalts') that permeate apparently discreet phenomena. Indeed this kind of more 'organic' approach is radically renewing the scope of Science.

What this unique book may also prove to have done is act as a pivotal stepping stone in time: a step back into our most atavistic, indigenous roots, a time when we lived in harmony with the Earth - talk to any Inuit, Aborigine, or Sioux elder and they retain that deeply intuitive and spiritual connection; but just as significantly, a step into the future - towards a re-newed awareness of our responsibility and acute vulnerability as part of the Earth's 'living' ecology. Climate change is the moment that latter reality is returned home to us with the harshest and most dangerous of lessons. And in a sense, climate change was the mighty prediction James Lovelock issued with his Gaia Hypothesis.

More recently he's said his hope lies "in that powerful force that takes over our lives when we sense that our tribe or nation is threatened from outside". However, he's also said "I do think it will take a disaster to wake us up''. Let's hope, on that score at least, and for all our sakes, he's wrong.

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On storm-whipped rocky escarpmets...
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Winter's season...

Late November. How do you characterise the UK in the strong Atlantic South Westerlies of the Gulf Stream? Does it make us more gothic with fast clouds rushing just above tall cathedral spires? Or out on the great hummocks and moors more reminiscent of Beowulf's hearty hearth, our flinty granite ballast strangely weightless in this un-seasonal warmth like a warm loaf for the eating, paths for the walking?

December continued with even heavier Atlantic storms; for two weeks they blew across the crags, grassy humps and flats of England up to Lincolnshire's big sky levels.

        Out at Wellingore cliff edge, atop the limestone escarpment, I witnessed great ocean going gulls make their way south into these strong south, south westerlies. They tack left, then right, up, then down, until they hit a sharp updraft where the geological fault edge turns a kind of bowl - the wind funnels and intensifies way up aloft, and they take this escalator to distant heights as nothing but barely visible eye lashes - mere specs of intent. A few at a time they slowly pass, and gradually disappear down the spine of this ancient land – like outriders tracing the ancient Roman Way leading from the Humber through Lincoln and on to London and the Thames.

Lower down the slope inky black crows collect in a lone oak, then one at a time heave off and soar across the wind with that part folded-shoulder (tread-water) hunch of theirs.

Heading back at the edge of Hykeham there's a buzzard across the road. Solitary, flying low, splay fingered, leaf edged feathers spread to capture and slip across the rapid running air, low, hunting, enjoying the 45 degree slide with a preternatural ease.

Our feathered cousins seam to love the wind, the challenge, the rush, the test of skill. Their spirit raised, a calm exhilaration to their feathered genius.

For deep mid-winter its unseasonably warm, at night the wind is howling under the eaves of our big country estates, giant invisible fingers roughle our owl jewelled trees. Imagine night vision glasses, all the wrapped tight orange and red orbs like magic lanterns bobbing in the trees. Think of all those countless rooks and crows in the woods, why don't they drop from their perch in their sleep we ask? Iron-tight toe-fingers grip on as they settle back on their haunches, leg tendons pulled tighter on their hand-like feet, so as they sleep, their grip is ever more secure. Only as they stand up alert will their grip incline to let go.

When the wind dropped a week of fog came along.. Temperatures dropped from 12 to skirt above freezing at night, 2 and 3 degrees C. A big cold continental high was squatting over us, all the Atlantic moisture from the lash of storm rain was slowly drawn out of the ground by the clear skies and dry cold air, so literally clouds were forming on the ground, and with very little breeze to move them along. Atmospheric; such elemental mood-grammar is an immensity (see note 1. below). That intimate proximity as you literally cycle through 'clouds'.. The sound is muffled as you feel the subtle kiss of moisture, your glasses become cool-misted, your black woollen hat collects the tiny beads that startle like jewels in the lights of passing cars, their red tail and fog lights haloed as they disappeared into the muffling silence of space, tangibly scanned by the thick wet air..

Then on past the solstice.. That wonderful late year momentum thing, the tide has turned already, nights drawing out so soon. So deceptive how quick we get to the 21^st, the momentum of the old year draws quickly into the dip of the longest night. It often seams much slower to get to March, the new has to pick up its feet again, the fresh virgin routine an incline apparently steaper.

The rustling marvels of Christmas came and went, and so to the New Years Day and a bike ride like no other.

Cycling through Lincoln is a novel delight with so few people around, the precincts offer free passage and at more reasonable speed. A joy to take an urban ride through these great galleys and beasts of architecture; riding through time's structure like history's parchment writ in stone. At the Brayford Pool I slowed to take in the preen-stretching swans, geese, ducks and gulls, all a little at a loss at the lack of attention perhaps, an attention to which they're fully accustomed with the frequency of easy food.

I passed further along the waters edge and came across a wild, raven haired women throwing nuts and raisins for the birds. Striking, she looked like the mythic quick silver gypsy of folk song, but dressed up in scarlet and electric blue she could pass for the latest super-model in the vampic style of a rather florid air stewardess. Her ruby red lips, powder blue eyes that drilled like the darkest beams of eternity, her heavy vacant air of interior contemplation. As she emptied the contents of the packet over the edge she sat back down on her seat before the water, hands deep in coat pockets, she was clearly very alive...

New Year, new decisions, perhaps just home for the festive season she was soon to leave again for the bright lights of London, Paris, who knows where fate will take her hand? Seeing her reminded me that returning home for Christmas can be discomforting, quickening and deepening all at the same time. It looked to me like she was on the very crest of her destiny.

I left for home, content with my own.

Note 1. Like a giant cool damp cloth to the fevered brow of foliage combed and jostled by weeks of storm.

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Under heavy-wet gunmetal skies...
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Today the ride to work was awesome under dark heavy-wet gunmental clouds, brooding black battleships booming out their threats of rain.

Along the raised river bank it began as a faint promise with tiny fingered witnesses; it dabbed your hair, cheek, glasses with tiny transparent buds of cold winter purity. Unusually blackbirdsrfled startled from the wheel, they staccato pierced the air with their warning as they went, even coots and a moorhen seem tetchy and jumped to water, all caught up in the tension of this weight of atmospheric mood grammer perhaps.

But the mountain bike stuck to its task on the bumbling, aged, crumbling path, better up there than down on the fresh smooth quick-to-wet tarmac. Had I known, had I foretold – to be honest easily done – I'd have picked the folding shopper's mudguards to prevent the wet-grit along my back of the journey home. But earlier I just made it through the park and on to work before the fullest torrent fell.

In the park the squirrels were still at it, their tiny hands under winter's dark brown crinking leaves, tails coil-emanating like silky-wisps of brown flecked smoke, joyfully shooting up trees, or flipping upside down to stick like tree magnets nose to ground. Some haunch-sit, knubbing their chestnuts at a safe distance, while others flush with numbers are tamer still and casually eye you by through their city haven.

The it was over the little wooden bridge and out onto the oak crowned greens for the opportunism of the already dinner-jacketed crows. Already they're inky black capes are raised, they glide to attend as the mixed fruit and nuts plutter to ground.

As I left the scene they hit it running some 6, 7, then 9 strong - except two juveniles who disdained choice brazil nut squabbles, they knew I kept some back, and past the middle clump of trees spilt the final contents for their private and calmer perusal.

On again a couple of late arrivals landed ahead, sharp as blades - hopeful to repeat the trick just witnessed from their high twig crimp perch. Too late, all I could give them was a friendly shrug.

Outside the park the rain started to platter a fuller soak. My glasses were 50% blurred by then. I paused to get out the small umbrella. The rest of the journey was a Mary Poppins ride along the cycle path to the great oaks of Doddington Road...

There as you pass them you can almost feel immense strength emanating from their giant elephant leg trunks gripping the earth with their mighty roots.    

What is it about those wise old oak trees? Their re-assuringly impassive vitality, they stand there like a little piece of eternity despite their varied forms - perhaps centuries in them yet - their growth rings like a clock reflecting the very cycle of the cosmos itself.

And what of our migrating ancestors, once percolating through those primal forests of northern Europe to this misty wind swept Isle - those Celts, Saxons, and Viking in their skins and cloths of hemp? What of their intuitive lore? What did they get from the oaks? That little piece of eternity perhaps? For them did the still, patient, potent oak hark back to the generative source of creation itself? The World Tree, the 'Tree of Life', 'Tree of Knowledge', 'Tree of Speech'; once actually representing the greater axis mundi of the Milky Way perhaps?

Right back to the Big Bang itself, the source of eternity, was there to be read in them that vital divine spark of potential unfolding its awesome and majestic teleology… its formal plenitude the symbolic embodiment of the mighty acorn perhaps?

Who knows!?

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Gulls super charged with a vital stamina...
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

6:46 PM - 9 Comments - 17 Kudos - Add Comment

Sparklers and fireworks banging in the night sky...
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

Now the UK Autumn is gripped in a tug of war with winter. The warming Gulf Stream fights it out while winter's Northern fingers start to grip the land. Out here today there's this cool, damp, almost metallic air..  The light lower in the sky makes you think of open hearth fires waiting at home, a mug of tea warm in your hands. Thoughts of Halloween fancy dress have come and gone, and trick or treat came and went.. 

This atmospheric battle is gothic, pagan, Brontific - elemental, out on the moor gritty-granites spanking cold in the night; but down on the greens slight-damp gun-plot powder-keg bon fires wait - for looming 5^th of November sparklers and fireworks banging in night skies.

Only yesterday when I walked the dog through the trees near the common there was a timeless feel, a hint of a Saxon's open flinty hearth to the slowly stealing cold.  You could feel the elements charging the twilight with a timeless spirit, an ancient power and a medicine; imagine the natural fibres and skins keeping you warm as you returned to the round house, or great wooden hall.  So much for the deepest Palaeolithic in the very bones of the Saxon's DNA, and through this, our memory is strong..  Celtic, Viking, all the same.

And just tonight a journey back from the supermarket with an organic/fair-trade haul for the week ahead is privileged by an encounter with the tinder spark of a quickening fox, eyes sharpening the night as he fast-cut his mono-rail across Tritton Road. He paused before the cover; uncanny, clever-calm, molten amber-eyes an intensity of spirit-fire piercing the vehicles relatively blunt dazzle, and then he lept into the undergrowth beneath taught, wind sprung autumn trees. That was 1am.

Now the mischief teens are safely in bed, while night owls hoot and screech in the great bowers at the back of the house as I recall earlier, yet another fox had cut even quicker the moment's journey. That was two in one night, the pair. Above fleet wintry white clouds were stirring, speeding past like yaught race sails, mild yet in the fast Atlantic skies. A Gulf Stream requiem for summer's least favourite trajectory if dry weather is your want, high pressure holding up the stasis of pristine blues as the flow has to find its way round the north hebridean weather chart wheel.

But already it's changed. Its early morning now and already a blustery winters blast is roughing up the backyard plants and shrubs, trees getting some serious hassle, busied with groaning beams and rampantly fluttering leaves; they are blustering like shoals of fish turning as one, they concert their troubled hurry and gradually, one by one, will concede and fall to time's palm..

Winter can be sobering, concentrating, inspiring maturity, something of a reflective recoiling for the year to come… 

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A tale of autumn, chestnuts, squirrels and crows...
Current mood: awake
Category: Writing and Poetry

A tale of autumn, chestnuts, squirrels and crows...

Today I cycled to work through the cool damp autumn riverbank air – a warm enough day but the moisture a pleasant embrace on the skin. I turned from the river along the track leading under the great bowers of Boultam Park's immense and ancient trees. As I slowed to take the gentle hump of a small wooden bridge at the stream I heard those small familiar impact thuds all around. I glanced up and saw a large shiny chestnut land - a prize 'conker' already unsheathed – it rolled to rest on the damp-packed earth. As I bent down and plucked it the earth around fairly jumped and seamed startled. As I looked it gently seethed with faint ghostly emanations: it was those spirit-smoke tails of grey squirrels - relatively unafraid they had paused. Expecting food? But they soon they made their way, putting their searching hands under the old dry leaves, with their magic grey shaman's capes tied to their tiny silken fingers.

On a large nearby wooden block was a pile of nuts and seeds - left by some kind soul - the occupation of which I must have disturbed.

I decided to spare my own small packet, and cycled ahead to the large expanse of grass - the realm of the crows. And there they were beyond the bandstand; like 19thC gentleman minus their top hats, but clearly wearing their dinner jacket tales as they casually strolled, arms behind backs, looking for the opportune beatle, worm, what have you.

I opened the mixed fruit and nuts and scatter-dropped them on the grass then wheeled some distance away from the scene. Two pairs of crows had already clocked my activity, their dalek beaks reading the booty. The boldest crow took straight to wing with heavy beats and effortless soared low over the food - flying past at first to check for traps or snags - only to wheel round again and land. Cool, the other three began their leisurely stroll, then slowly quickening their pace ever growing in purpose as they watched this leader's increasing ease.

In the distance across the way I noticed an old gent on a park bench both hands on cane. I could almost discern him smiling. The old country ways are bounden still; that ancient natural prescience of kinship intact despite the blinding efforts of a shallow modernity.

I glanced at my timepiece and saw my work day was calling me back..

(Heard tell the word squirrel derives from an ancient greek word which means 'shadow-tail'..  How all language descends from poetry!)

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Elemental Stuff. Review of Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath..
Current mood: artistic
Category: Writing and Poetry

Elemental Stuff. Review of Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath..

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