Primavera

 O spring has set off her green fuses....

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly

And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry

And all you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be.

Breathe (In the Air)

Pink Floyd

David Gilmour, Richard Wright, Roger Waters

The Dark Side of the Moon

What's not to like? The world still turns. The tyrant is dead (OK that is wishful thinking, but it will happen.....) The Streets [sic] of Hormuz are opening to traffic, and oil is well.....

Apparently you can see the canals of Ken Hill from the dark side of the moon, though you might need a Hasselblad (and a mirror).....  But I am so happy there is a dark side - I was beginning to think it was just a flat cheese plate.  My only worry is that the space portal-loo doesn't seem to work....

Anyway, I have been out in my tractor - a harrowing experience [Stoppit!  Ed]....

Anyway again, I am glad that someone is ploughing the fields and scattering the good seed on the land. [Wir pflügen und wir streuen - Matthias Claudius, 1782 - Ed]....  Someone's got to do it, or the good Burghers of McDonald won't have the ultra-processed Fleurs du mal that Charlie Baudelaire so enjoyed.....

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,

N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins

Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,

C'est que notre âme, hélas ! n'est pas assez hardie.

Au lecteur

Les Fleurs du mal

Charles Baudelaire

(Who wrote in French, as Europeans do)

Anyway, yet again, to shut a strong lorry cort, I have been springing to my feets and wandering the pleasant lands around me, breathing the air, and not afraid to care.

I love the spring, largely because of the resurgence of life after the darkness and death of winter [Thank you Jesus - Ed], but also because of the physical warmth of sunshine and the uplifting light that brings us Vitamin D [An essential fat-soluble nutrient that regulates calcium and phosphate in the body, crucial for maintaining healthy bones, teeth, and muscles - Ed].

I love to see nature coming to life.  I love to walk where we have made our homes, and I am so grateful that, so far, at least, we have not been subjected to the extreme violence that is the daily and nightly diet of the citizens of Ukraine and much of the Middle East. I shudder in horror at the indiscriminate killing of ordinary people, the destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, bridges, power plants etc.  But, we are fortunate - by chance.  It is a privilege, but that is by chance.  It has not always been so - there are plenty of reminders around us of the Second World War in the shape of concrete gun emplacements, bombing ranges and air bases. 

Say what you like, but this recent vortex of violence was unnecessary.  Forgive me for this quotation, but today's leader in The Guardian was a powerful statement of just how wrong things can be:  The US has squandered tens of billions of dollars, burned through its interceptors and torched relations with allies.  That may not bother Mr Trump, who had premised victory on the conditional reopening of a waterway that was not closed prior to the conflict.  But the war has also spooked markets, raised prices at home and showed signs of fracturing his Maga base.

Mr Trump chose to believe Benjamin Netanyahu's assurance that this would be a short and easy war, but soon found himself seeking an exit......  The war has destabilised the region and normalised talk of war crimes, further trashing the idea of a rules-based order..... 

The tide is out. The earth is scorched. But seven avocets can stand on one leg while Artemis [The ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness  and wild animals et al, sometimes called Cynthia - Ed].... while Artemis spins through space, leaving us breathless....

Near here the clouds add to the reflected beauty of beach scenes:

The wind blows fresh and cool, disturbing little but the dust and what's left of my hair.....

Sea lavender (limonium vulgare) brings colour to the dun and grey of winter:

Alexanders (smyrnium olusatrum), possibly the gift of the invading Roman legions, burst into life by the waysides:

Ramsons, or wild garlic (allium ursinum) fill the air with an unmistakable scent by the Ingol river [for which in 2018 Anglian Water funded the creation of a natural treatment wetland - instead of a traditional chemical upgrade - which now acts as a giant, living water purifier - Ed].

At Dersingham Bog National Nature Reserve [which merges with the now infamous refuge of Wolferton Fen - Ed] birch trees stand guard over rare and diverse species of plants such as bog asphodels, round-leaved sundew, white beaked sedge and cranberry....

We walk at Courtyard Farm, Ringstead, and admire the budding trees, as the sap rises and leaves unfurl. I am reminded of Charles Causley's Spring 1818, which commemorates John Keats's departure from this land, When spring fired her fusilladoes, and then we come across a Taiwan (or Formosan) cherry (prunus campanulata), which is another beautiful reminder of international disharmony and threat....

And then, as the sun slips away to add another layer of yellow to the sickening POTUS, we enter a field of cowslips (primula veris) which brings us back to the natural glory of spring in our part of the world, where delicate shoots go untrampled, and the cycle of life goes on.  In Look! We have come through! D H Lawrence wrote: 

We shall not look before and after.

We shall be, now.

We shall know in full.

We, the mystic NOW.

[NB, He also wrote:

Oh, America,

The sun sets in you.

Are you the grave of our day?

Ed.]

And there we have it.  A row of oaks march down towards the wash in the early morning light:

While our village church stands proud upon the hill, catching the farewell glance of the evening sun, a symbol, even to the unfaithful, that there is a place for differences of belief and practice.  If there is a god, then surely it is the same god that envelops Hegseth and Netanyahu and Khamenei?  

But then in truth the god that really matters is surely Apollo [The god of divine distance - the god who made mortals aware of their own guilt and purified them of it - Ed]? 

Well yes, but Apollo is also the god of light, music, prophecy, and healing, and, perhaps, above all, the god of the sun, without whom/which there would be no life, no spring, no resurrection....

Arrest my case.....

For one who has nothing to worry about:

Breathe, breathe in the air.

Don't be afraid to care.

Leave but don't leave me.

Look around and choose your own ground.....

Life and death and love and loss on the Norfolk Coast

Resurrection at Eostre....

Part One:  Cromer

The sun doesn't go down over Cromer at this time of year - rather, it goes out, gently slipping away, fading, as the sea washes the shore and the town lights come on.  There's no one about, and the evening is ours.....

There's no one on the pier, no one to claim the crock of gold under the Lifeboat Station:

So we climb the companionway to 

Upstairs at No1

for a traditional platter of fish and chips....

After which we prowl the empty lanes:

Timidly passing the busy Red Lion:

Thinking that perhaps a drink in the bar at the Pavilion Theatre might be a quieter option:

 

However, finding that we are coinciding with the interval, with geriatric rockers spilling out from the auditorium, deafened by the 60's revivalist band, forming orderly queues at the bar, we turn towards the seemingly more sedate Hotel de Paris......

The hotel is part of a chain that caters mostly for busloads of pensioners..... 
Julia Blackburn, Threads

Where the Team welcome us:

And, here, while one aged holidaymaker sits nursing a pint and staring into the void, another group of pensioned revellers are enjoying double shots of Baileys at £4 a go.....

In the lounge the man in a faux-silk jacket and florid bow tie with the karaoke set-up energetically provokes an assortment of uber-retired couples to respond, "Who the fuck is Alice?" to his enthusiastic rendition of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More."  We walk on, not really surprised that after 24 years Alice has moved on....

Good night Cromer.....  It's been good to know you.....  [When I first saw the sign below, I misread it as "Germ of the Norfolk Coast...." But that is quite wrong:  make no mistake, Cromer really is a jewel....]

Part Two:  Sheringham

So, after Brancaster smoked haddock, spinach, poached eggs and sourdough, we leave the delights of Cromer, to park at West Runton and brave the full-on wind up and over the 200 or so feet of the Beeston Bump, where the wartime gun emplacement collapsed into the tunnels below and had to be replaced by a wooden effigy.  

It is a bracing, colourful morning, and the waves are coursing in from the churning sea.  Nothing, I guess, to an experienced fisherman, but it puts us in mind of the subject of our visit.

Which is an exhibition at Sheringham Museum:

Called:

OK.  I will be honest (for a change) and admit that I knew nothing about these three until recently [Like now? Ed], but thanks to my friend I have read: 

Which is a beautifully enlightening book about life and death, love and loss, centred on, as it says on the cover, the delicate life of John Craske [you may be able to blow this endpaper up, but if not, don't strain your eyes] - it says that Craske was a fisherman who, having become ill, spent the rest of his life painting and embroidering the sea life of North Norfolk, and that Julia Blackburn, in looking for the life of this man, while her own man died, treads an intriguing path along the Norfolk coast, finding footsteps in the sand, while swimming with her own sadness.

I don't believe this photo is really what it appears to be, but never mind.  The face is John Craske's.

Photograph by unknown, taken about 1901 - in the Public Domain

I want to share Craske's work and encourage others to visit the Sheringham Museum and appreciate the living reality of John Craske's art and life.....

Two masted steamer - watercolour
Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

Some of these pictures are watercolours painted on wood, some oil on tin. Others, mainly later ones when he didn't feel so well, are embroideries.  Here, for example, is one which he stitched:

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

And, if you look at the back, you see how the short waves flutter while the sail billows at length:

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

He gets the wind, and the way the vessels ply with the frothing sea:

Steamer in Rough Seas - watercolour
Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

He understands the way the wave motion can lift a boat from behind:

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

And how boats had to ride through the upsurging sea, even though it may have been ten or twenty years since he had been a fisherman himself:

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

And you can tell how he knew and loved the interaction of land and sea that is such a part of the North Norfolk coast:

Coastal View with Cottages
kindly donated by Madeline Weston
Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

I encourage you to imagine these pictures as John himself would have imagined them. We don't have his past experience, but by immersing ourselves in the image we can perhaps imagine his imagination:

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust

Here is one of his textile pictures of the Norfolk coast, which is real, as real as art ever is.  It was woven with love, and found its way, via Peter Pears, to the Red House in Aldeburgh:

Beach Scene: The Foreshore 
John Craske (1881 - 1943)
The Red House, Aldeburgh
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

I love these pictures. John Craske became ill after enlisting in the army in 1917, at the age of thirty-six, and never really became an easily functioning man again before his death in 1943. He was loved and looked after by his wife, Laura, who, for some time, was pushing him in a wheel chair from their cottage in Wiveton to Cley (maybe two miles each way) every day so that he could be by the sea....

But he came from a family of fishermen and served his time in his youth on boats that were tossed and shaken by high seas. He was therefore able to express the shifting forms of water around the buoyed shapes of vessels in all weathers....

Here is one of his paintings that lives at the Red House:

Hauling the Codliner, 
John Craske (1881 - 1943), 
The Red House, Aldeburgh 
licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

You can feel the shifting waters, and hear the wind, and smell the salty water, whichever way the wind blew, or the sea lifted, or the sails were set....

In the late 1920s, Molly Turpin, soon to be known as Valentine Ackland, wrote that Craske is undoubtedly a very great artist.....  He is middle-aged, tall, burly; he wears a blue sailor's pull-over and his eyes are blue and bright.  He has a stern, intellectual face, with a beaky nose and fine bones.  He is decisive and clear-thinking, but without any blanketing of theory or art-talk. He paints from he calls 'memory' and when he was telling me about two pictures of coastline he said that one's Yorkshire and that one is Imagination. he knows the exact history of every boat he paints, the story of how a boat looked, where she went, what the weather was like and who was aboard her......

We leave the. museum and wander in Sheringham, making friends with the local people, who have stored memories of life and death here - of love and loss:

It is not sure exactly what it was that afflicted John, but he was diabetic, and may have had some problem with his pituitary gland. For long periods he was in a semi-comatose state, or just listless, and had difficulty walking. He painted on all available surfaces in their accommodation, but then, when too tired to sit and paint, he took up embroidery and stitched scenes of the life he had known, and the life he imagined (his last, unfinished, work was a five-yard long embroidered depiction of the evacuation from Dunkirk, currently in the Norwich Castle Museum....)

The sense of history and culture and tradition here in Sheringham is very strong:

And the town is proud of its artistic heritage, which celebrates the lives of those who didn't hesitate to give for others:

Given John's ill health, his background, his education, and the cost of materials, his output was remarkable. And, given all that, his optimism and clear love for his subject are to be admired, and his story, as told by Julia Blackburn and evidenced in various sources, is inspirational.  

Life, I think, is not just about the living.  And art, I think, is sometimes a gift from one to another, something to share and treasure, something to value not as a private possession but as a common experience.

The sea is everywhere here.  A wall lobster startles me in an otherwise quiet lane:

In the Peter Coke Shell Gallery I am reminded of Ariel's song to Ferdinand:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change

And on the slipway outside the Fisherman's Lifeboat Museum small boats seem safe:

Until you think about the relentless swash of the sea, even at its mildest:

And then images come to mind of ships creaking and groaning among the waves as a headwind whisks the water to spume.  

Thank you John.

And thank you Julia.

We turn away from Sheringham, walking back into our lives, but stronger, perhaps, for what we have seen.

In Threads, Julia Blackburn has written a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live.  It is also about life after death, as Julia's beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished.

There were some lovely paintings and embroideries.  I especially liked the one of a ship in a storm done in all sorts of greys, but above all I liked the tiny slip of an image that had dropped out of the prayer book.  John Craske had written his name in black paint in careful but shaky capital letters in the bottom right-hand corner and he had written PEACE BE STILL over the top of the image.

Julia Blackburn

Threads

Reproduced with the kind permission of Sheringham Museum ©Sheringham Museum Trust
kindly donated (I think) by Madeline Weston

******

The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transported into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.

Albert Einstein 

in a letter to the Queen Mother of Belgium, 1953

(Quoted in Threads)

******

For my friend and companion on this adventure

******