Every Grain of Sand

 

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.....

The North Norfolk Coast near Holme-next-the-sea

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need

When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed

There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere

Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair

A Dunnock

Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake

Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break

In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand

In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand

Time passes.  Whether high on Everest or low on the Dead Sea, time passes.  From ashes to ashes, dust to dust, (if the women don't get you the liquor must....)

This is not morbidity.  We come from nothing, and to nothing we go.  

Or, perhaps, at least, so I believe.....

Brent Geese

The phone rang in my car.  I was about to park but was on hands free.  He's been taken to hospital.....  He will probably be back home this afternoon.  I just thought you should know.....

You never know when the reaper will reap.  We must live this day like no other.  Every day is precious, for it won't come again.  

I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame

And every time I pass that way I always hear my name

Then onward in my journey I come to understand

That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand

All Saints, Fring

I could pick bones with Mr Dylan.  Though he would indubitably better me at the game. But I was never convinced by his Christianity..... I was never really convinced by Christianity myself, and for someone to embrace it as a whole new discovery never rang true with me.

I was never convinced by his harmonica playing, either.  While Donovan may have made his mouth organ sound like someone blowing soup through a comb....  I think Bob Dylan was always a little random, a little loose - just as Larry Adler was too tight, too smart.  Sometimes it is painful to play Mr Dylan's finest pieces now just because of the harmonica breaks (Has anybody got an E harmonica?)  If you really want to hear the blues harp as it was intended to be, seek out Sonny Boy Williamson II (Alex - Rice - Miller) and his recording of Help Me.....   [Or Folk Festival of the Blues, 1963, Bring It On Home]

But I digress..... (as one is wont to do these days) and I should thank (sic) more clearly.  

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.....

When we were young, and carefree, we didn't expect life to become harder.  Being young was hard enough.  Til death us do part was a joke.  If we married we would marry for enduring love and good time, with either partner as grateful as the other.  

Plough that furrow.  Harrow that field.....

And the church was no help.  At least not to me.  If God had a place in the world, it was a place in our culture.  Informing characters and plots in fiction.  Guiding the moral decisions of law-makers and teachers.  God was not someone close to me.....

St Mary, Titchwell

But now.....  Now the  churches are empty, their shells protecting forgotten histories, holding echoes of hymns carelessly sung, or prayers vainly directed to selves long buried in the grounds around.....

All Saints, Bircham Newton

Yes, now.  Like Faustus I regret my insouciance. Forgive me my blasphemy, God?  Take me back?  Let me be untouched by the rigours of uncertainty.  Leave me untouched by the pains of death?

Let my wife alone.....

All Saints, Bircham Newton

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear

Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer

The sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way

To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay

And then the Church reminds us of conflict and plague.  Deaths unexpected.  Youths, of various nations, brought suddenly to the ground.....

St Mary, Great Bircham

But the sky still surrounds us, unsettled and uncertain.....

And the crowning virus appears where you  may not expect it....

So we walk the shores with the wind and the waves......

The Royal West Norfolk Golf Club, Brancaster

Disturbing the one-legged Oyster Catchers.....

And tripping over the remnants of wars long past.....

Remains of a military tracked vehicle on the beach at Titchwell

The Avocet's name is unfortunate, perhaps.  It reminds me of 'Exocet' and all that that entails.  But I marvel still at the sleek irregularity as one slips past me at Titchwell.  Such a razor sharp  outfit.  Such a confident flight.....

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night

In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light

In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space

In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face

Reedbeds and Marsh at Brancaster

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea

Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me

I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man

Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

The beach at Hunstanton

BOB DYLAN 

 © 1981 by Special Rider Music

Norfolk Skies - Imagine....

Only wheeling birds....

Above us only sky....

Actually, not quite....  Although the Norfolk skies are justly famous (partly because the landscape is relatively flat, so the sky seems to go on for ever....) 

Though it's not that flat.....

The black and white makes me feel rather 1943, and I find myself motoring into.....

Which makes me feel ever so T S Eliot as well, but sleepier.

Anyway, I stop to admire the round tower of St Andrew's Church (in the company of the spitting image of Jeremy Corbyn, who should have been in Brighton....)

Imagine all the people

Living for today....

Within this ancient haven, I browse a well-thumbed booklet:

Which is packed with romance and derring-do, as well as secret plans to defeat the enemy.  (If you continue reading, I may have to offer you some Plutonium Tea)

Yes, it's Norfolk's plan to win the war before Lincolnshire does!

On leaving the church I note a lonely wind-sock in the middle of a ploughed field.  Thinking it might be a tasteful memorial to the 1,807 men and 361 women who served here (and to the 12 Lancasters and 43 Mosquitos that took off from here never to return) - and in distinct contrast to the 102 ft tall rusty cone just officially unveiled in Lincoln - I stumble across the uneven ground to take a photograph.

And here's one of the original runways commemorated in An Airfield Remembered by S F Ruffle, a copy of which I was allowed to take from the nearby church.

I returned to Snoring Airfield

The way was hard to find,

For over paths and taxiways

Nature had thrown a blind

Of grass and twisted bramble, 

Willow herb and clinging vine,

No longer there the nissen huts

In which men slept and dined.

But then, just as I was clicking at the billowing windsock, the snarl of unfriendly cylinders caught my attention, and I found myself running North by Northwest in true Cary Grant style....

For one vibrant fleeting moment

This vast airfield was reborn...

In fact, Little Snoring Airfield is now operated by the McAully Flying Group, and The Light Aircraft Company produces the Sherwood Ranger microlite here. Less salubriously the former mortuary acts as toilets and washing facilities for a camp site....

Then like a wraith all sank to rest

Beneath the quilt of grain.

The facts are these:  125,000 aircrew served in Bomber Command in World War II.  364,514 operational sorties were flown.  55,573 aircrew were killed in action, and overall 70% of Bomber Command aircrew were killed, injured or taken prisoner.

Imagine there's no heaven

But now the village churches are empty; the skies are quiet; the airfields are returning to the earth. 

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace....

Norfolk is full of sky, and Norfolk is full of water. Sometimes the two merge and it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends:

 

Even where the sea smooth shingle banks of Snettisham have been colonised by man it is hard to tell water from sky:

And, taking a broader view, the waters imitate the sky in defiance of gravity - or in praise of levity....

Above us only sky....

Well not quite.  High above me geese quaggle their way to roost, while, far far above them, an aeroplane drives its payload to their dreams in a fly past of ironies....

You may say I'm a dreamer

I turn. The geese are whirling at me. Their downdrafts brushing the mist from my eyes:

Norfolk skies are justly famous, and they hold a history of militant flight that led to peace: 

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind....

But now they are the realm of particles of dust:

Which particles coalesce and form feathers and beaks and squeaks and flutters:

And join in impossible families of like thinking, like feeling individuals who whirl in time with the tides and the currents of air and water:

Coming to rest in intense societies of common understanding, where closeness is both necessary and desirable:

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

My friend, a Black-Headed Gull, says it's not quite like that.  

Above us only sky.

It depends on how you see..... Some are blind to colour. Others see infra-red. We are not all the same, despite appearances....

Vapour trails scar the sky. Nature boiled by turbojets tracing the paths of flightless men.

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one

Norfolk skies are justly famous, especially where they touch the water.  

From my well of memories

I drew long and deep that day,

Recalled the bitterness of war

And the price we had to pay,

That we might live in freedom.....

S. F. Ruffle

23rd Squadron

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will live as one

With thanks to S. F. Ruffle, W. B. Yeats, and John Lennon, who would have celebrated 75 years of life on October 9th, 2015, but for a simple act of violence...

Imagine....

*  *  *

{Also very many thanks to all those at RSPB Titchwell Marsh Nature Reserve and RSPB Snettisham for enabling me to be there to see all this}