to a lost cove. A pint of Trelawny and some grilled sardines, then down to the beach. And gazing out to the sealine with my feet in the silky brine, I watched a dinghy come to shore. One of my oldest friends swung out from the landing melee and tiptoed across the pebbles, stopped and stared back, spooked as I by the chance encounter. Sweet and unexpected is this life.
with punts until last summer, couldn’t get around the mockery impulse. But a year back I had to race to an upriver rendezvous at the Victoria Arms and while zigzagging the bends, ducking under willows and kicking away at the bank snags, I finally got it. It wasn’t Wordsworth out on the lake but in the unthinking dash I had my flash of punting serenity, the infinite drip of the green-mirrored water slab made sense to me. Now, when it gets over 25C, I just want to be out on the water. Or mooring up at the beer garden. Flat water has a rightness about it.
before I kick out: take a long voyage in a dazzle ship, to the white wastes of the ice bears.
dangling static over the new space at IWM London. I caught sight of it from every floor, wandering still-dazed between the galleries. The new trench, projection wall and the First World War exhibit are impressive and touch the heart but it was Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country in an end room and the top floor Ashcroft VC gallery that held me longest. You bear witness to incredible things in those quiet places.
with me on one of my occasional benders, troughing economics. I stare at the numbers, rants and reports, thinking the codes must be hidden there, the arcane science of commerce, money movement and the phantom motivations of our leaders. I come away scowling and saddened as though from some mountebank magic trick, wishing the central banks would just stop printing our money to prop up GDP stats, recklessly inflating stocks, debt and housing to keep this bogus, smoke and mirrors recovery rumbling along. Roll on the inevitable bust. Or is the darker truth that the bankers know there’s no going back, that the last 30 years were all built on credit and debt and spending and we’ve come to the end of the leash?
of have/have-not England and turn away from lucre, status and ephemeral digital tat? We waste our hours and energies on these distractions, wavering at the task of making new beacons in art, music, books and ideas. Are we to blame if each yearns for their own walled pleasure garden? Meantime, the old stars, shakers and status figures are exposed as rogues and worse. Those myths of a community and a better, fairer future might be lost for good, or will we find them again, running through the streets?
will light you home when you go clanking down the lanes. Buy nine pints, get the tenth free. It used to be five. Inflation, explains the tapster. Too much for me and my huddled group, there’s work to be done in the morning and I’ve sunk my share. I’ll ride out before they sound the bell, into the night freshness to join the community of cats, lonely shufflers and out-late lovers, all of us lit by the same glowing star, all moon-gazing and seeking our own answers.
over the banal mechanics of life commerce and costs, then catch sight of the July sunset gilding the cedar. It seems more worthy of study. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet?
and impulses, the essential forces of life, in ethics, false causes and fine argument. We hide the rough ore of our wishes even from ourselves. And thank the gods for that, else war and will and hate would drive out every tender, untrampling thing from this world. Those rare, other things would be lost to us. Might is not the only right and both sides must take their places at the dance, the battalion and the butterfly.
at the wood fringes around Disraeli’s house and grounds. And sure enough, there were old traces of wounds and wars there, combat aircraft motifs on the pathway signs and an ice store bunkhouse converted into a black chamber, where agents once stooped over aerial pics of enemy factory districts. They watched from rumbling bombers seventy years back and now there are shark-grey tubes and fins silent above us, ranks of mobile phone chips in their nosecone cameras recording every moving object, tracking, recognizing, analyzing for threats. All for the good if they can keep us from harm. And what choice do we have but to trust the shepherd? But, a few steps back from the poppies and you’re under the ash and oak canopy, out of sight of the electric eye, free to walk the shaded paths and review the past. Free to imagine and peer at the flickering shapes of the soon to come.
