Wrong place, Wrong Time.....

Once upon a time in humankind.....

Dr John and I go way back…. We were due to meet in Kendal, in the winter of 1985. Unfortunately, however, he wasn’t well and had to cancel.  He kindly sent us tickets to see Carmen instead…..

As you do.....

Now it seems like we may never meet, though in a way he will always be with me, if you con what I intend?  [Or perhaps I will join him at the Great Rent Party in the sky?] Like many would-be losers, I often think of the words of one of his best-known songs, Right Place, Wrong Time:

I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time
I'd have said the right thing
But I must have used the wrong line

And to seque into a sort of non-sequitur [if you will forgive me] recently my Amanda and I visited Calke Abbey, in Derbyshire, and the song sang through the strangely derelict house, especially through the exhibition on the ground floor, entitled Humankind.  To mark the 200th anniversary of the death of Henry Harpur, 'The Isolated Baronet', this year at Calke Abbey the National Trust is exploring stories of loneliness and isolation, kindness and compassion, past and present.

Just up our street.....

As the NT website explains:

For more than thirty years, the story of Calke Abbey and its significance has been built around the tale of a reclusive and socially-isolated family who guarded the estate from modern life and lived eccentric, disconnected lives. Today, as awareness grows of the enormous challenges posed by loneliness and the harmful impact of social isolation on more and more lives, [we] are looking afresh at Calke’s past, reassessing the stories told about this place and exploring their potential to foster more, and more meaningful, contemporary human connections.

Recent research has shed new light on the lives of the people who lived at Calke. This has revealed powerful, rich and sometimes surprising stories of love, compassion and kindness, rooted in complex life experiences and events, alongside the more familiar ones of isolation and disconnection.

Spanning more than 200 years, these are stories that many of us would recognise today. The people who lived at Calke needed one another and took care of one other.  [Good for them!] Their routes out of difficulty were always aided by others – by humankind and human kindness.....  [Rare commodities, perhaps?]

In 2019 – marking the 200th anniversary of the death of Henry Harpur, ‘The Isolated Baronet’ – [we] are exploring this wider and richer history of Calke in exciting new ways. HumanKind uses these new stories and insights to challenge the stigma that surrounds loneliness and social isolation, to get people talking about this pressing social issue, to foster human interaction and connection and, in true Calke tradition, to encourage small acts of kindness.  [Right on....]

HumanKind is a research-led collaboration between the National Trust and the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at the University of Leicester.

I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time
My head was in a place

Henry was gossiped about for his shyness and said to suffer from a ‘disease of the mind’ by diarist, Joseph Faringdon, who’d never met him. Over the years these fragments have been woven into elaborate stories of a family who distanced themselves from society and each other. 

But I'm having such a good time
I been running trying to get hung up in my mind
Got to give myself a little talking to this time

New research has revealed an ordinary 13 year old, doodling strange beasts and writing ‘H. Harpur is a fool’ in his books. The books he bought and the journals he subscribed to as an adult tell us that he had a curious mind and was influenced by the Age of Enlightenment. He built the library, remodelled the house, commissioned music, collected political caricatures, and used experimental techniques to make cheese! He had a sense of humour and he liked fine things. He married for love. 

All of which is very nice, and was either written by the National Trust, or by Mac Rebennack, who could have been Elton John’s uncle, perhaps, or Augustus John’s niece, or even Sleepy John Estes’s second cousin.....

But why?  Why have I borrowed these words?  What’s in it for us?

Well…..

Just need a little brain salad surgery
Got to cure this insecurity
I been in the wrong place
But it must have been the right time
I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong song
I been in the right vein
But it seems like the wrong arm
I been in the right world
But it seems wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

I recommend a visit to Calke Abbey. It’s not an Abbey, of course, nor is it made of cork, but it is splendidly confusing nonetheless, and has the most magnificent park, and a wonderful walled garden, all of which is good for the soul, however isolated.  

And to think that I could have lived there, with the good Dottore Giovanni, had we both not been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time……

Or perhaps we could have lived at Kedelstone Hall, not too far away, also in Derbyshire, where Robert Adam advertised his talents in a spectacular way for the Curzon family.

Or, we could have been curators of the tram museum at Crich, ringing the bells of New Orleans, 

Where we really do stay with old friends [thank you Sue and Dennis]

But.....

I been in the right trip
But I must have used the wrong car
My head was in a bad place
And I'm wondering what it's good for

Right Place, Wrong Time

by

Malcolm John Rebennack 

(aka Dr John)

 (November 20, 1941 – June 6, 2019)

RIP






Peace brother peace
The doctor's comin'

Footnotes:

Dr. John told songfacts.com about "Right Place, Wrong Time", "That was my life for a long time. At the same time I was in the wrong place at the right time, and the right place in the wrong time, too. That was the problem. We're always shifting those gears."

The singer explained his inspirations behind this song by saying, "While writing the song 'Right Place Wrong Time,' I ran into Bob Dylan. He gave me the line 'I'm on the right trip, but in the wrong car'.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date

Summertime.....

The last rose of summer

It was a good summer, wasn't it? Apart from remembering the big freeze of 1963 and being bitten by a plague of ladybirds in 1976, I find it hard to remember details from one year to the next.  Did we have a wet spring?  Was the winter mild?  

As Porgy sang to Bess (or was it the other way round?)

Summertime,

And the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin'

And the cotton is high

The sky, sometimes blue, towers over us, the days are never-ending, and nature blooms:

Pan appears in blue - or is it Donald Trump?

I love the spring, with its fresh promise, but as the crops reach maturity it is hard to think of anywhere better than the English countryside:

It's a time for being outside, by the sea, with a bottle of chilled wine and a picnic:

Your daddy's rich

And your mamma's good lookin'

So hush little baby

Don't you cry

And speaking of rich daddies, etc, one of the trees we sat under this summer was that (as a young tree, obviously) had sheltered Princess Elizabeth when news was brought to her that her father had crumpled..... It doesn't look so youthful now, but it's still going strong in the grounds of Hatfield House.....

And so another English rose came into flower....

Though perhaps the analogy is better without the mosquito....

And maybe even better in virginal white?

This really is the season of the birds:

And the bees:

Of poppies:

And oxeye daisies in the fields:

Of honeysuckle in the hedgerows:

And purple loosestrife in my favourite part of the Chilterns:

It was a lovely summer.  The particular politics of this summer made it necessary to celebrate the best of Britain, rather than to dwell on inequalities or to cry over sour milk. We admired the roses on the stones of the National Trust property at Lacock Abbey, once home to William Henry Fox Talbot and so one of the nurseries of photography:

We walked through the landscaped park of Brocket Hall, only a few miles from home:

And, courtesy of British Gas, who, as a reward for paying astronomic prices for gas and electricity, gave us a few weeks' trial membership of English Heritage, we had a morning to wander in the gardens of Wrest Park:

And subsequently sheltered under a magnificent London plane tree at Audley End:

At Dyrham Park (from the Saxon word doerham - deer) we were bashfully examined by some of the 200 fallow deer that live there:

And elsewhere and everywhere I turned my lens on the beautiful insects that flutter busily around to make the most the sunny days. Here's a peacock butterfly on a teasel:

And here's a red admiral on bramble flowers:

And this is a comma:

And this dazzling beauty is a common blue damselfly at rest:

Living on the edge of East Anglia we can reach the coast of Suffolk in about two and a half hours.  It's good to have a change of air sometimes, and there are some very peaceful spots, like this landing stage on the River Ore at Havergate Island:

Just north of Cambridge, at Fen Drayton Lakes, reeds were being harvested from the Great Ouse:

Though it is birds that normally draw me to these RSPB reserves. This cormorant taking off is by no means a rare sight, but it's still a marvel to behold:

And the willowy, watery world at Fowlmere is always peaceful with its grey green light:

Despite being on the east coast, the evening light at Aldeburgh is captivating, and it is great to scrunch along the shingle at dusk.  Here the old lifeboat station settles with the sun behind it:

And in the top left window of this holiday house a wistful figure watches the sea at bedtime, writing a farewell to the summer holidays with a finger on the glass:

Back home in the fields in Hertfordshire the crops ripen and the poppies fade:

And Will Dickinson, whose family have farmed Cross Farm at Harpenden for six generations, brings in the harvest.  It's been a good summer, and I hope Will's yields are high this year, not just because he's a neighbour, but also because he values this country, and its place in the European Union.  As he said, in an interview with the Herts Advertiser, he believes that to remain within the union is the best way to preserve the integrity of my business and he does not believe that any new independent UK government will relinquish any control that these [EU-derived] regulations give them..... 

It has been a lovely summer.  We must celebrate what we have:

One of these mornings

You're going to rise up singing

Then you'll spread your wings

And you'll take to the sky

But till that morning

There's a'nothing can harm you

With daddy and mamma standing by

George Gershwin/DuBose Heyward

(Even if.....)

Sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do

But there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues 

Summertime Blues

Eddie Cochran/Jerry Capehart

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Jeremiah, 8: 20

RSPB Havergate Island

War and Peace:  a MAD hare day

Take some more tea, the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

I've had nothing yet, Alice replied in an offended tone, so I can't take more.

You mean you can't take less, said the Hatter: it's very easy to take more than nothing.

Nobody asked your opinion, said Alice.

 

The rivers Ore and Alde form a single stretch of water that winds its way from Shingle Street to Snape Maltings, passing by the towns of Orford and Aldeburgh.  From Orford Quay the National Trust runs a ferry to Orford Ness and the RSPB organises boat trips to the reserve of Havergate Island. 

I visited the strange world of Orford Ness some years ago, poking my nose into concrete bunkers and scrunching over banks of shingle.  It’s a sinister place, just past the centenary of its involvement in warfare, from when it was purchased in 1913 by the War Department.  At the end of World War I there were over 600 staff living and working on the site, not to mention a number of POWs…. 

In WWII it was the province of the RAF, though they brought in many lay-scientists.  Bomb ballistics were the priority, with work here contributing to the 22,000lb earthquake bomb, but it had also seen Robert Watson Watt’s development of an aerial defence system in his ‘Ionospheric Research Station.’  This led to the creation of Chain Home Radar stations (which directly affected the outcome of the Battle of Britain, and my own father’s career in the war – please see  http://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/02/a-war-in-italy.html for more on this.)

At the height of the Cold War the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) and Royal Aircraft Establishment used Orford Ness for developmental work on the British Atomic Bomb (Blue Danube), which involved the creation of the iconic concrete Pagodas (and a complex of developmental experiments on G forces, resistance to temperature extremes, shocks and Ore).  The AWRE ceased operations here in 1971, though in the meantime the Anglo-American System 441A, ‘over-the-horizon’ (OTH) backscatter radar project, known as ‘Cobra Mist’ was initiated here, in a building which still shelters the BBC Word Service transmitters (and nothing else?  Still very secret....) 

The MOD continued to have a Bomb Disposal unit based here until 1986....

As the National Trust’s own pamphlet states, Orford Ness is emblematic of not only the Cold War, but also of the whole of the 20^th Century warfare.  During this period the systematic application of weapons and warfare resulted in the ability of one country to subject an opponent to the threat of ‘total war’ across oceans or continents.  This came to be known as MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction….. a concept which divides political leaders to this day.

On this occasion I am bound for a night on Havergate Island, eschewing War and seeking Peace, though in the company of MAD brown hares. 

I am in good company.  We are a select group of keen amateur photographers, tutored by professionals, organised by Wild Adventures under Suffolk’s Skies which works together with the RSPB.  

The weather forecast is uncertain, but we remain dry.  The evening light is lovely, the sun streaming across the sea lavender and tussocky grasses, and, as hoped for, we soon find a hare or two that don’t seem too mad for now.  

In fact they are at peace – the only predator here has been a fox from the mainland with an Olympic swimming pedigree.  For a moment I see Albrecht Durer before me, drawing his famous Feldhase in 1502.

With a three-quarter moon rising, I work on catching lesser black-backed gulls against it, though they seem luna-shy, and veer away just before coming into line.

The light fades, and the colour leeches from the  land- and water-scapes.  Jeremy demonstrates ideas for landscape photography, and I enjoy experimenting.

Then, as darkness falls, we gather round the barbecue for a mad-hatter’s tea party.  I like islands. This one formed as Orford Ness grew southward, causing sediment to accumulate at the mouth of the Butley River.  Then, about five hundred years ago, farmers built an embankment around the land to inhibit flooding.  Crops were grown, and livestock was brought over to graze, initially by swimming them across at low tide, then later, until the second world war, by barge.

During the war years, while Orford Ness was busy, Havergate was neglected, and it became partially flooded.  In 1947 the first avocets to breed in Britain for a century were discovered here, and in 1948 the RSPB bought the island, eventually using the avocet as its symbol.

I like islands, and this one, with no electricity, no traffic, and far from the madding crowd, is a place of peace.  [OK, it may be beyond practicality to take up residence here, but it has its attractions, despite the fact that I also like belonging to a greater conglomeration.  Life's a Russian Doll sometimes!]

I hardly need have brought my tent. Not only does it not rain, but it is very warm, and day breaks almost as soon as I have zipped myself in.  A yellow band briefly illuminates the dark clouds.  Gulls and waders, who don’t seem to have slept at all, are newly excited at the increased visibility.  

But the sun doesn’t rise [also].  A narrow bloody splodge at the horizon is a momentary signal, 

And then Aurora stretches out her rosy fingers, and the pagodas on Orford Ness come into view, reminding me how close we are to concrete and the scars of conflict.

The sky fills with light and cloud, a flowing series of colours and shapes.  Avocets and redshanks are now busy feeding, egrets and herons fish the shallows, meadow pipits and corn buntings flit among the bushes, while a flock of tearaway young starlings scour the hedges. 

At the south end of the island the lesser black-backs are still rearing their chicks and they dive at me relentlessly when I get too close, their red-rimmed eyes fearful that I may bring harm.  Kevin advises me on camera technique, though the birds seem not to appreciate my practising.

And so, all too soon, it is time to strike the tent, pack up and clamber aboard the little ferry boat back to Orford Quay.  Leaving peace behind, but passing the remnants of war on the way, our group returns to reality, to the balancing acts that daily life entails.  I hope that the hares on Havergate, and Orford Ness, will continue, under the protection of DEFRA, with funding from the EU LIFE-Nature programme (?) and with the stewardship of both the National Trust and the RSPB. 

As the RSPB website (currently) advertises, The Alde-Ore estuary is important for many species of European importance. Because of this, a new EU Life+ funded project has been set-up to sustain and enhance the habitats and species at Orford Ness and Havergate Island.

This new project builds on work supported by previous LIFE grants and work already carried out on by us at Havergate Island and The National Trust at Orford Ness.

I do hope that the work will continue and that future generations will be able to enjoy peace here, and to compare it with the ugliness of war.  I hope this is not too much to ask.

In fact, we need more of this sort of tea party.  More peace like this…. 

I know that nobody asked my opinion, but…..

Thank to the hares, and thanks to my fellow castaways,

And very many thanks to Jeremy Hennell James, Kevin Sawford and Monika Koch.

For she's here only for a moment,
Durer's Hare;
the frame can barely hold her.
Her shadow is a shifting thing,
slippery as a raincloud in wind,
and even as you look,
twitches to be gone

Durer's Hare

By Anna Wigley

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[Located approximately 800m to the east of the Vibration Test Buildings, the Hard Impact Facility was built by late 1962, in which a weapon, minus its fissile core, was propelled by a rocket powered sled against a concrete wall. It comprises a reinforced concrete wall orientated south east to north west with a battered rear to the south west; this side also has an extended tank at its base now infilled with shingle.....]

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