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.....

England, My England

WHAT have I done for you,

England, my England?

What is there I would not do, 

England, my own?

Not long before the First World War, D H Lawrence wrote a story entitled England, My England.  In 1912 he had eloped with Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of one of his former teachers at Nottingham.  They started their life together in Germany, but Lawrence was arrested as an English spy.  They walked south, across the Alps, into Italy.

After Frieda obtained a divorce, she and Lawrence were married, in July 1914, in England.  They lived for a while in Zennor, in Cornwall, but were accused of spying, and signalling to German submarines.

In October 1917, under the Defence of the Realm Act, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall at three days notice.  They lived for a while in Berkshire, and then in Derbyshire, but as soon as they were able, they left England, escaping, if you will, from poverty and harassment, and seeking better health (Lawrence suffered from lung problems for much of his life, and died in 1930 from tuberculosis).

They travelled to Sicily, and then, in 1922, to Ceylon, to Australia,  and eventually to Taos, in New Mexico.  In this year, his collection of short stories entitled England, My England, was published.

In the late twenties, the couple returned to Italy, and then, finally, they moved to Vence, in the south of France, where Lawrence died in March, 1930, aged 44.

The short story, England, My England, is not a hymn of praise.  In part it makes fun of the patriotism expressed in W E Henley's Victorian poem of the same name.....  In part it is a satirical portrait of Percy Lucas, brother of E V Lucas, and a genial dilettante, who in 1916 died stoically and miserably from gangrene following wounds suffered in battle.  When Lawrence heard of this, he wrote, I wish that story at the bottom of the sea, before it had even been printed.

However, at the end of the story, I wrote, in 1975, a note.  I don't now know where I got it from, but here goes:  Inexorable destruction of life as it used to be - always as it used to be.  The savage England has been broken up by the darkness of the twentieth century.  The war was something of a coup de grace - the damage had already been done.  Egbert's family, home and garden had been founded in true, spontaneous love, the only valid force, but as the love had died so had the health of the whole situation..... 

We are about a hundred years on from Lawrence's fugue from his homeland, but I sense a curious connection.  When I first lived in Italy, in the late 1970s, I found myself conflicted between enormous enjoyment of new stimuli and an agony of nostalgia.  I read Lawrence, Hardy, Dickens et al in abundance, yearning for a world I had 'sort of' left behind.  The world was in turmoil, again. Aldo Moro's death led to ruinous corruption in the politics of Italy; Mrs Thatcher inspired the greed of capitalist consumerism which led eventually to economic austerity and subsequently the rise of populism.

I was raised in an England recovering from a shattering war.  We played in air-raid shelters and bomb craters.  My grandfathers had served in the First War; my parents in the Second.  We watched films such as The Dam-busters and Dunkirk.  And read G K Chesterton and Ian Fleming.  The only time I went abroad was on a school trip to Norway when I was 14.

I love England, even though I left these shores for twenty years at the age of 25.  I loved the windswept beaches and soggy canvas of our family holidays, the ritual of stirring the Christmas pudding mix, the way my mother served kedgeree, or stuffed lamb's hearts.

Yes, I have grown old, and grumpy, and nowadays hold a list of dislikes as long as your arm (cyclists on footpaths, Jacob Rees Mogg, people who talk loudly on hands free phones on public transport, Chris Grayling, people who don't thank you for giving way, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, untrained dogs that leap up at you, Theresa May, children in bars, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, drones, the leader of the labour party, skinny lattes in takeaway cups....etc.)

But.....  the list of things I like is infinitely longer (wine, pasta, cheese, walking, soft rain, grey skies, the sound of waves on the shore, the smell of earth before a storm, my allotments, song thrushes.....)

Aye.  there's a lot to love, and in quirky, unreal moments, I could even love those who mistakenly voted for the UK to leave the EU......

However, I love France, and Spain and Greece, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, Portugal, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, 

And all who live in them!

I love Hymns (Ancient, not Modern!) 

And Stencil Art in suburbia:

Darkness, and light:

Field mushrooms and cats' ears:

Quiet dinners with friends:

Gnomes (and rabbits) in gardens:

And kites in the sky:

Trees in winter, and cows, and starlings:

The sky, whenever, but especially when in flame:

And again skylines, at the turning of the year:

Everyone has their own England, or Wales:

Or Belgium, or whatever.  That's part of the joy of life - we are all different with different backgrounds and hopes, fears and stories.  Some of our experiences are shared, and some are suffered, or enjoyed, in private.  

But this nonsense of the inexorable destruction of life as it used to be is just that: nonsense.  We need to build on the experience of the past founded in true, spontaneous love, the only valid force.....

Whatever our station in life.....

Ever the faith endures,
England, my England:—
'Take and break us: we are yours,
England, my own!
Life is good, and joy runs high
Between English earth and sky:
Death is death; but we shall die
To the Song on your bugles blown,
England—
To the stars on your bugles blown!'  

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) 

Neither nationalism, nor patriotism, need exclude mutually profitable relationships with others.  The infatuation with regaining 'control' and the misguided belief that some kind of independence will lead to regained status or greater wealth are delusions that exist only in the minds of those who are already rich and who lack any real understanding of either history or people.  

As D H Lawrence wrote, in England, My England, And as the years passed, the lightning cleared the sky more and more rarely, less and less the blue showed. Gradually the grey lid sank down upon them, as if it would be permanent.

Amen to that......

Central Italy - Tuscia - The land that time forgot

Italian shadows

The car falters, and stops.  We are in the middle of Tuscia, the ancient land of the Etruscans, in central Italy.  Sometimes also called Etruria, this area covers much of northern Lazio and southern Tuscany, and is littered with broken down relics - tombs, temples, towns, and, as here, modes of transport.....

It is a wild and unkempt area, cut by deep wooded valleys, and undulating with unpopulated hills.

Villages, like Blera, rise up on spurs, growing out of the living rock, carved like cheese,

Towns like these are still sleepy places, with shaded narrow streets where groups of elderly inhabitants wait for the time to pass.

Symbolically, the local butcher advertises snails for sale at €9 a kilo....

Nearby, the town of Barbarano Romano is in costume.  

A friend of mine, who used to run a simple trattoria here, carries the banner of the Confraternita della Morte.....

While young women dress as noblewomen:

Young men proudly beat the drum:

And the town band plays on:

In these valleys, overgrown and neglected, lie the empty tombs of Etruscans, who ranged across this area two thousand years ago, or more.  Typically they carved tombs out of the volcanic tufo (tuff) in necropolises across life-giving rivers from the towns of the living,

Though sometimes they constructed elaborate tombs from blocks and then mounded earth over them,

The vast majority of these were looted ages ago, or spoiled by being opened and trashed, though some, such as those at Tarquinia, at least kept their painted walls intact, and others revealed their secrets to archaeologists rather than grave-robbers.  The city of Vulci, with its walls and gates, remains an evocative place to visit, though much of what you see now dates from Roman times after the empire imposed defeat in 280 BC,

But what remains is preserved by grazing aurochs....

Today Vulci is a well-cured park with its own natural swimming pool, the Laghetto del Pellicone, surrounded by cliffs in the valley of the river Fiora....

But for centuries malaria crippled this area, and early visitors, such as George Dennis in the 1840s, chronicled the desolation: the wide, wide moor, a drear and melancholy waste, stretches around you, no human being seen on its expanse.... The Fiora frets in its rocky bed far beneath your feet, and its murmurs conveyed to you by the tall cliffs you stand on, are the sole disturbers of the solemn stillness.....

D H Lawrence, some eighty years later, also found the place dispiriting: the country was all empty and abandoned-seeming, yet with that peculiar, almost ominous, poignancy of places where life has once been intense.....

We make our way over the empty landscape, eventually to Tuscania, whose walls and churches indicate a rich past.  The magnificent Lombard-Romanesque church of San Pietro stands aloof outside the town, flanked by two imposing medieval military towers.  

Inside the church, beyond a line of Etruscan sarcophagi, steps rise up to the apse, or down to the crypt.  It is solemn, quiet, and bare.  Centuries could pass in moments here....

We move on, beyond Viterbo, to Bomarzo which  George Dennis described as, a village of considerable size situated on a wooded cliff-bound platform, with an old castle at the verge of the precipice.  It commands a glorious view of the vale of the Tiber, and the long chain of Umbrian and Sabine Apennines to the east; of the vast Etruscan plain to the north, with Monte Fiascone like a watch-tower in the midst, and the giant masses of Monte Cetona and Monte Amiata in the far horizon..... All is not so wonderful, however.  He goes on, like most villages in the Papal State, Bomarzo is squalid in the extreme.....

But we are not here to seek accommodation.  Bomarzo has an unusual claim to fame.  Below the town, in the Bosco Sacro, is the Parco dei Mostri, which was created in the second half of the sixteenth century by the slightly bonkers local nobleman, Vicino Orsini.....  Vast figures, grotesque masks, a temple, a most disconcerting sloping house, and giant sculpted creatures have been created out of the natural rocks, and surprise you amongst the woods....

Across the Tiber valley we spend a night at the Abbazia di Farfa, once one of the most powerful Benedictine Abbeys in Italy, with over five hundred monks and an adjoining village to support it.  Now, though it still houses an important library, it is served by five monks....

But we are well looked after by the Suore di Santa Brigida, aka the Hot Cross Nuns (due to the crosses on their headdresses).  There is something medieval about the experience, though maybe that's due to the wine?

In the morning we backtrack to Torrita Tiberina to pay our respects to another shade of the Italian past, Aldo Moro.

Though this distinguished politician was originally from Puglia, he and his family loved to spend time here in their villa.

After his kidnapping and murder in 1978, his private funeral (he left strict instructions that no politicians nor dignitaries should attend the service) was carried out here and he lies at rest in a simple tomb overlooking the river valley and the hills of central Italy.

Rolling back across Tuscia, we come across a strange, possibly sinister, coincidence.  In the village of Canale Monterano, my attention is caught by an ancient Fiat Cinquecento, the number plate of which bears a close resemblance to that  of the Red Renault 4 in which the cadaver of Aldo Moro had been left in 1978.....

The Renault that was left in Via Caetani in the capital was (falsely) plated Roma N5 7686 in a very similar configuration.....  Traces of sand and soil on the tyres of the car, and on Moro's shoes, were found to match the volcanic ground in neighbouring Manziana, where another Fiat, belonging to Mario Moretti, the head of the Brigate Rosse who kidnapped Moro, had been seen at a villa earlier in 1978.

But that's another story....

On the way, we pass through Vejano, dominated by a grim castle, also property of the Orsini family.  There is an imposing town hall, which bears the motto, Labor Omnia Vincit Improbus (1959), which was once a popular injunction, adapted from Virgil, and meaning Hard Work Overcomes Everything.....

Well, perhaps not everything, as a bas relief on a nearby wall witnesses, calling up other shades of this part of Italy:  In Memory of the Killling of Mariano and Orsio Nobili, Victims of Nazi Ferocity, 7 June 1944....

We return to Lake Bracciano, Lacus Sabatinus, and visit the Odescalchi (originally Orsini, again) castle that overlooks the lake, gazing back at Trevignano Romano, where we used to live, amongst the remains of Etruscan tombs and medieval towers....

And in the woods, after all the rain this year, the cyclamen are flourishing, nourished by all that history.....

While monsters relax in the shades of Tuscia.....

With fond memories of many great times at La Pacchiona, Barberano Romano....