Shropshire

Blue Remembered Hills, AONB....

I am loath to admit this, but I am having a 'nice' time.  The weather is, how can I put it, clement. Like Lady Spencer Churchill before she married.  The hills are cornflower blue....  

At least so it was when I visited the Shropshire hills a few days ago.....

The hills are blue remembered, as A E Housman, from Bromsgrove, wrote in 1896, while Professor of Latin at University College London.  He imagined A Shropshire Lad at a distance..... but never mind.  Hardly anyone reads it now, only saddoes like me, searching for a hook.....

But I am in clover...... Properly immersed in leguminosity which will fatten the calves and facilitate slaughter and feasting later in the year while fixing nitrogen in the soil to ensure richer grass which will enable cattle to produce more methane thus depleting the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and leading to further weakness in the ozone layer and thereby increased harmful radiation from the sun and higher global temperatures....  [I may have got some of that wrong.  I only read The Guardian..... though of course it depends on the intensity of the farming.  Isabella Tree wrote on Saturday August 25th that biodiverse pasture systems are in fact highly beneficial to our ecology....]

I enter a village church - this one being the Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Lydbury North, where people have been praying week by week since the first millennium (or so I am told - I wonder just how many of those prayers were answered?  Did anyone pray that Donald Trump would spontaneously combust, like Krook in Bleak House?  If not, why not?)  

I love the light that filters through the leaded windows.  Is this God, I wonder?  Am I blessed?  Or is it just waves of particles being absorbed by the flaking plaster?

I venture out into the ultra violet, where the dry grass quivers under fleeting swallows.  In the distance is Bishops Castle, a town of some fifteen hundred swains, with six pubs and two breweries.  As Housman wrote:

....malt does more than Milton can

To justify God's ways to man.

Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think:

Look into the pewter pot

To see the world as the world's not.....

Later I am puzzled to know the Shropshire Way?  Is it really any different from My Way?  They both seem to be the prey of buzzards of all kinds.....

But this is the land in which I grew up, a land of blues and hills, a post-war environment where catastrophic conflict was a recent memory, but the prefix 'post' was of the utmost significance.  The sky still had the shadows of aerial dogfights; the earth bore the scars of high explosives, both in towns, where rubble lay in gaps between cracked and crumbling houses, and in the countryside, where huge hollows marked where mis-hits and jettisoned ordnance had fallen.

Intrusion and violence are not new in this land.  Where I walk now in tranquillity was once under Roman rule, with valuable ores excavated from seams in these hills.  Later the Normans came, then bitter squabbles between thorny roses, and then, eventually, liaison with and control by the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family and their descendants (God save the Queen!)  We (who?  Ed.) have never been 'free.'  As an epistemologist might say, we actually have no empirical knowledge of the nature of freedom....

(Or does that come under ontology?)

There are billions of grains of sand in the great egg-timer of evolution, and recent history is but a dot on the landscape....

I know nothing.....

So I walk to shake off the dust from my mind and to freshen my limbs, and to sample the gentle slopes of Salop.  A mountain ash brightens my way:

And I follow the ageing signs on the Mucklewick Walk:

Before diverging onto the Flenny Bank way:

Declining the offer of assistance from some appealing locals:

And thinking better of the possibility of a free lunch, perhaps discouraged by a lack of mint.....

Then I climb up from The Bog to the Stiperstones, scaling the heights of Cranberry Rock, my scoped Springfield M1A sniper rifle (bought from TacOpShop online for $2,425 complete with a black Archangel sniper stock, a bipod, a ten round metal, factory magazine and three twenty round Thermold polymer magazines) on my shoulder, ready to pick off the geriatrics one by one should they approach.....

I look to the north and genuflect towards the Devil's Chair, wondering if the fallen angel will return to take his seat, to rescue us from the modern miasma?

Then, without a shot being fired, I skelter off across the heath, passing Squilver and Stedment, crossing the River Onny at Bridges, then navigate the twisting single track over Wild Moor and the Long Mynd, past Boiling Well, and down perilous Burway Hill into Church Stretton, the heart of the Shropshire Hills.....

And not far from here, at Acton Scott, I pause for breath in Victorian times, the days when Alfred Edward Housman thought and wrote, creating his idealized vision of the English countryside in 63 melancholy lyrics.  I can almost smell the pessimism.....

But Hey!  Oh look!  The sun shineth and the harvest is a-coming in.  Sheaf by sheaf, the lord of the manor reaps in the glories of the Elysian idyll.  Yakob Reich-Mogadon puts together another completely imaginary show, while fiddling the books in his offshore empire....

And then, just by chance, I come across the lair of the ex-primate monster, the lousy, trotters-up David Scumerbag, or is it Davey Caiman?  I tiptoe up to tug at my forelock, trusting not to disturb the scratching of his goose quill as he writes another million dollar word....

[That word being, 'shit.']

And, with breath that reeks of despair, I spittle the words, Thank you, Davey, for all you have/have not done for your/my/our country.  I really appreciate your having created/delivered/precipitated the gravest crisis in political history this country has known since Oliver Cromwell [though, don't misunderstand me, he was a great man....]  And I love/hate/despise the way you scuttled off to scribble your memoirs as soon as the fan and the merde were clearly united.  Denying any responsibility.

What was that word?  Responsibility?  What is that?  Making sure the Bullingdon pig is clean?

Your superior/moneyed/privileged arrogance coupled with your weakness/blindness/selfishness has not only severely damaged my daughters', and their entire generation's, prospects, but has fomented civil division and unrest, raised the chances of the disintegration of the United Kingdom and contributed significantly to the further fragmentation of the European Union - created after WWII (initially as the European Coal and Steel Community) to ensure lasting peace - and to the rise of extremism, intolerance and a resurgence of would-be right-wing supremacists that will make the Ku Klux Klan look like circle time in a Woodstock kindergarten.....  

I hope you rot asphyxiated in your shepherd's hut and that, eventually, someone, anyone, if not me, pushes you and it over the White Cliffs of Dover.....

Whoops!  A little light-headed spin there!  Not to be taken literally of course, just a touch of ecstasy brought on by the image of a Shepherd's Hut, subconsciously linked to rural fantasies such as Far From The Madding Crowd, and All Quiet on the Western Front.....

Sorry!

XL

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

This is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A. E. Housman

A Shropshire Lad

[1896]

But I am still having a 'nice' time.  They can't take that away from me.....