Let Me Sing And I'm Happy

Non, je n'egret rien

Every summer now for some ten years or so a friend and I have taken a couple of July days out to walk somewhere in England.  We have wandered on the Northumbrian coast, in the Yorkshire Dales, the Peak District, in Norfolk, Suffolk, the Cotswolds, along the Kent coast, around Malvern and Stratford, and, this year, in rural Essex.

This year we found ourselves alongside the thundering A120 near Colchester, attempting to appreciate the joys of Essex in the shadow of the new Caligula, Al (Mammy) Jolson [I'd walk a million miles.....complete according to taste....]

the Blue Boris Chafer

In fact, there is an Irving Berlin song that Alexander Boris Piccaninny Letterbox Kipper Caligula Jolson made famous, by the title of Let Me Sing And I'm Happy, which just about sums up the onanistic joys of these happy days in their full fretulosity.....

What care I who makes the laws of a nation

Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs

What care I who care for the world's affairs

As long as I can sing this popular song

Let me sing a funny song with crazy words that roll along

And if my song can start you laughing I'm happy, so happy

Smile!

In the muddy estuarine tracts of Essex I lose myself in reflections on life and love that are far, very very far, from Westminster or Brussels.  It is quiet here, and lovely.  A few oysters and a glass of stout and the soul develops resistance to the glib emptiness of daily politics.  Ancient toil and tidal wash provide an impression of things that matter more than greed and gain.

Godwits, rather than fuckwits, sift the silt here.....

And in the Stour Valley, where John Constable created the two dimensions that England has become (no offence, JC, you meant no harm: Ed.) the Common Darter does what a Common Darter does, not what some self-important hyper-ambitious ill-informed cabaret minstrel would decree.....

And the people of this world attempt to live their lives as well as they can, by the skiff.....

Or by the spray can.....

The haves, the have-nots.....

The ducks, raising their young....

The swans, loving their families.....

And the Drakes [pirateering, as some do]....

Let's be honest, Essex is no Shangri-La, but it's worth the detour.  It still surprises, and delights, me how one can find solace on the banks of a muddy creek, with the fluffy clatters and screeches of birds tempering the rotting reeks of the slimes, while gleaming insects sparkle over the shiny weeds.....

Yup, Essex is neither Magaluf nor the Maldives, but it saves air miles and carbon footprints, or exchange rates (and commission).  Maldon has a sweet gold and a tart salt, Mersey has all the oysters you can eat, and Clacton is 'on-sea'.....

On our way to our respective homes in the nondescript netherlands of this scabied aisle, we pause in the rain at Perry Green, to commune with some of Harry Moore's patient figures....

I admire these stoical unmoving, unmovable figures, who care nothing for rain nor dark.  It's an intriguing staging post.

In an ancient barn, tapestries tell silent stories,

While bronze casts stand impassive under the raindrops in quiet corners of the grounds, pieces of ordnance yet to be dropped on the innocent by the bombasts who preen to rule....

Let me sing a sad refrain of broken hearts that love in vain

And if my song can start you crying I'm happy

And thence to home, where peace comes dropping slow (if I am lucky). 

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal

Tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien 

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs 

J'ai allumé le feu

Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs

Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

Balayé les amours 

Avec leurs trémolos

Balayé pour toujours

Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal

Tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien 

Non, je ne regrette rien

Car ma vie

Car mes joies

Aujourd'hui 

Ça commence avec toi

Songwriters: Charles Dumont / Michel Vaucaire

Putting Suffolk on the Map

A love song for Suffolk.....

The land of the South Folk, or Suffolk as it is now called, is a part of East Anglia that I have become curiously fond of.  It isn't a part of the country I knew at all when I was younger, but we started exploring with our girls some twenty years ago.  Then I read W G Sebald's entrancing The Rings of Saturn, which added to the allure. 

We stay at The Eel's Foot Inn, and walk to the sea near the Sizewell Nuclear Power stations, watched warily by one of the Konik Polski ponies that graze by the ruins of the twelfth century remains of Leiston Abbey.

Sizewell A was shut down at the end of 2006.  A week later it was found that some 40,000 gallons of water from the pond where spent reactor fuel was being kept had leaked out and into the North Sea.  This Konik Polski  had obviously drunk of the delightfully glowing waste.....

Sizewell B (whose bright white dome dominates the scene) is run by EDF (Électricité de France S.A., a French electric utility company, largely owned by the French state) who intend to keep it going until 2055 (Brexiteers eat your hearts out) despite emergency shut downs in 2008, 2010 and 2012.... 

Sizewell C, another EDF reactor, is a project, like Hinkley Point C, due to be completed with the Chinese.  Oh! What price sovereignty?

Anyway, we walk back to the Eel's Foot (another by-product of nuclear power?) through the RSPB Reserve at Minsmere, in time for the weekly folk night, where ageing minstrels serenade us from their word sheets with The Last Thing on my Mind, a strangely appropriate song under the circumstances.....

Ben Britt and Bill Budd

The morning after we drift down the coast to Aldeburgh, home of Benjamin Britten.  I waxed a little lyrical about this place and its  tin scallop in August 2013 (see my blog entitled Great Britten) so won't eulogise unnecessarily.  

Its shingle beach is scruffily used and the pastel shaded holiday homes evoke the future of holidays by the North Sea (when Europe is way beyond the Dogger Bank).

And the produce fished up is smoked in the Meerschaums of locals who welcome the money of strangers.....

But I sense a slight tension when I note a photo of the Springwatch team on the wall.  The face of Chris Packham had been cut out....  He should be shot! extols our fish-smoking brother.  Protecting crows and pigeons?  He should be shot.....

"Starry Vere, God Bless you!"

Sutton Wat?

Slightly dazed we motor on.  We stop to pay our respects to the dead at Sutton Hoo, where nothing is as it used to be.  The visitor centre is in a state of upheaval, as £4m worth of work proceeds to ready expositions in the High Hall to rival the Titanic in Belfast.  If there was an Anglo-Saxon King alive today, he'd be turning in his grave.....

It's which?

And so we proceed, suffolkating under the weight of Kulture and Anarchy on offer all around.  We moor at the Novotel Ipswich, and quench our thirst at the Briarbank Bar and Brewery (a long time favourite) which is hard by the Custom House and the mighty Orwell.  

It is a little known fact that Ipswich is the 42nd most populous town in England and Wales.  But it is the home of the UK's newest University (prior to 2016, Suffolk was one of the only counties in England not to have one at all) and, in 2017, the Royal Mail (who he? Ed.) voted Ipswich the seventh most desirable place to live and work in England....

The seventh?

.... Despite the fact that many people know it as the home of the Suffolk Strangler (though he was originally from Norfolk), Steve Wright, responsible for the murder of five Ipswich female prostitutes in 2006 (committed to Life Imprisonment in 2008).   

The Car Stall on the Hill

And speaking of crimes against humanity....

Benjamin Joseph Levin and Edward Christopher Sheeran are famous people. The latter, at least, is one of the only famous people (if you discount Robert Hindes Groome or Frederick Bird) ever to have come from Framlingham (which Country Life Magazine voted, in 2006, the number one place to live in the country) and between them the two writ a song about the Castle on the Hill, the official video of which has been seen 372,289,930 times on YouTube (though only 2.2 million liked it - and 68,000 actually took the trouble to say they didn't!)

These figures may have something to do with the lyrics, such as:

We found weekend jobs, when we got paid

We'd buy cheap spirits and drink them straight 

Me and my friends have not thrown up in so long, oh how we've grown

But I can't wait to go home

and, perhaps more memorably:

I'm on my way

Driving at ninety down those country lanes

Singing to "Tiny Dancer" 

And I miss the way you make me feel, and it's real 

We watched the sunset over the castle on the hill 

Over the castle on the hill 

Over the castle on the hill

Mr Sheeran, when interviewed on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, had this to say about his masterpiece:

This is a love song for Suffolk, because I don’t think anyone has ever done that.

That was the second song I completed for the album, so… I’ve listened to that more times than anything else, and it just sounds completely different. I wrote that mid-2015.

I shot the music video in Suffolk, and they cast a group of friends from my high school, and all the extras are kids from my high school, and the main guy, who looks exactly like me, is in my sixth form. It’s really weird.

So it’s all putting Suffolk on the map.

Perhaps, dear reader, you should be the judge of that?

https://youtu.be/K0ibBPhiaG0

Hey! Wayne....

And so to PC Jack, RA, the painter of Dedham Vale....

We are on our way home, now, and stop at Flatford Mill for breakfast (the Ipswich Novotel breakfast was neither to our tastes nor our pocket....)   Flatford is remarkably unspoiled (at this hour) and Willy Lott's cottage still stands more or less where Constable painted it.....

And the dry dock where he pictured Boat Building near Flatford Mill (in the V and A) is still pretty dry.....  (certainly drier than witnessed in  my 2014 Blog, Mr Constable....)

Flatford Mill itself is a Field Studies Centre, but none the worse for that.....  It really is lovely round here....  The village of East Bergholt, the river Stour....  

Constable Country....  

So, there we are....  it’s all putting Suffolk on the map.....  

A love song to Suffolk.... 

because I don’t think anyone has ever done that.....

Ever read Ronald Blythe, Ed?  

Or Roger Deakin?

Or W G Sebald?


(or my 2013 Blog, Great Britten?)


(or my 2014 Blog, Mr Constable?)


A love song to Suffolk

Nobody done that!

Mersea Island - Have Mersea Now

The quality of Mersea is not strain'd....

Tim is a fisherman.  He has been fishing the waters between here and Vlissingen for forty years. I almost think he has the answer to The Riddle of the Sands within his sleeve, but it turns out to be a Thornback Ray, one of several he caught the previous day.  

It may not be what you expect, but this is what we usually know as Skate, whose wings, au beurre noire, are just lovely.  What you also may not know is that these fish are better when not too fresh, as they make and maintain in their blood a supply of urea, which reverses the tendency to lose water to the sea and enables them to keep an osmotic balance. Unfortunately, after death, the urea breaks up and produces ammonia, so they smell.... However, as the wonderful (late) Alan Davidson explained in North Atlantic Seafood, after about forty-eight hours beneficial chemical changes occur, though undesirable ones take a little longer.....

So, where am I? (We all could use a little Mersea now....)  

Well, for reasons I won't go into (the official secrets act, etc), I am in Essex, on my way to Ipswich, and I have strayed across the Strood onto Mersea Island, to have lunch at The Company Shed, which unashamedly calls itself The best seafood restaurant in West Mersea (locally caught and sourced produce, whenever possible, and locally produced alcoholic beverages).....  Just so bashful!  Pace, Dr Easton, the only way really is Essex.....

I first heard about the place thirty something years ago, from local friends, and then first visited twenty-ish years ago (though that didn't go so well: the Colchester Constabulary filmed me doing thirty-four miles an hour in a thirty-mile limit and I was invited to spend a day with two of Essex's finest ex-constabules on a defensive driving course.... at my expense)

The marvellous thing is that, apart from the fact you still have to bring your own bread, and that they have miraculously attained a liquor licence, the place hasn't changed.  So welcoming!  So friendly.  Fish is the name of the game, and it's all fresh.....

Sorry.  Wrong picture.

Fresh local oysters, such as the Romans used for cement (the shells that is....)

And fresh, unfiltered, remarkably tasty, perfectly suited, Oyster Stout (made with real oysters)....

This is a cracking place to be.  Rosie (not her real name) should know.  She has lived here for thirty years and can't think of anywhere better.   

She tells of when the floodwaters reached the blue line (which came first, I wonder?)

And of how there was a time when you didn't need a Jaguar to be able to afford a sixteenth century cottage.....

But this is the real Dickens, the real Chaucer.  An England that reeks of salt, and fish, and mud, and times past and  times immemorial.  Mersea is the easternmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom, and has been a popular holiday destination since the Romans got fed up with the traffic in Colchester.  

At East Mersea the parish church is dedicated to St Edmund, King and Martyr, who might well have passed by, dead or alive.  The rector here for ten years from 1871 was Sabine Baring-Gould.  Who he? you cry....  The penman of Onward Christian Soldiers, put to music by Arthur Sullivan, no less.....  

What could be more Brenglish?

OhmyGod....! I've just turned sixty-seven.  Can't I treat myself to a spot of lunch?  

We are not divided, all one body we 

One in hope and doctrine, one in charity

As William Blake put it:

For mersea has a human heart,

Pity a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

Or, as Mary Gauthier sang more recently:

Yeah, we all could use a little mersea now

I know we don't deserve it

But we need it anyhow.....

I ask Tim when would be the best time to visit.  He looks up from clipping the skin from his fish, pauses, and says, the wind whipping his words.  

Well, now, prob'ly.....

Cheers, friends!

The quality of mersea is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.....

consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mersea,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mersea......

https://themerseaislandsociety.wordpress.com/




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