A Christmas Card from through the (looking) glass

Anniversaries and Angels.....

Three tiers for Christmas!  London is abuzz.

Visitors abound.  Loving themselves and each other.  They so belong here.....

Though Churchill's brazen memory still leans towards FDR's ear in the drizzle.....

And anti-socially distanced queues line the dark streets eager to part with their valueless inheritances.

While the most important thing is to make contact with those who are not near.....

And receiving such is a lonely drag on an unhappy cigarette. 

Though for some everything Rolls on so easy....

Stop the bus!  I want to get off.....

Help me up?  It's a cold cold world....

Meanwhile, back home in the country, I fail to celebrate my 36th wedding anniversary.  It's a question of memory, I guess.....

But we walk across the muddy, watery landscape, sniffing the sunlight and clouds....

It is what we do.  Every morning.  36 years, and counting.  Whatever else, I still love the trees, and the light.....

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

Of course, some days, some mornings, are brighter than others.....

Some are misty....

And some, perhaps, are sparkling.....

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

Spellbound

Emily Bronte

There was a time, for me, when the world was beautiful, and full of hope.  It is harder now to feel so confident.

The dreamed Christmas,

flakes shaken out of silences so far

and starry we can’t sleep for listening

for papery rustles out there in the night

and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,

the day a psaltery of light.

Snow

Gillian Clarke 

Though not impossible.....

The roads are still there, to travel down.  And I sometimes think I could ride off, into the horizon.....

So, though the skies are dark, there's light behind the trees and maybe not all is lost.

Imagine how it must have been, aeons ago, when there was no Regent Street full of Angels, no Prime Minister's Question Time, no such place as Barnard Castle.  A time when a bed of ferns in a mud and sapling hut was luxury.   Imagine how limited hope might have been when life had no expectancy and Accident and Emergency was the rhythm of the day?  No Sage could decipher the pandemic and a plague was on all our houses.

The brilliance of dementia is that none of this has any meaning.  

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

Come on, baby, take a chance with us

And meet me at the back of the blue bus

This is the end, beautiful friend

This is the end, my only friend

The end

How she told me that one day we would meet up again

And things would be different the next time we wed

If I only could hang on and just be her friend

I still can't remember all the best things she said

Isis

Bob Dylan

Flying Lootenant Pietro Gibbchki, and other matters

My Heart Leaps Up

 

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

Well, that rainbow was a little while ago, and I have to admit that with this dreary weather and all it's hard to keep smiling....  

But....  Two things.  First we are still managing to get out and to commune with nature, which has many attractions.....  Whether it is this young chap in the woods near St Paul's Walden.....

Or one or two of his big brothers in the park at Knebworth.....

Then there's the ever changing world of vegetation around us, sometimes bright and startling:

Sometimes bejewelled with frost:

And sometimes shrouded in mist as this tree on Nomansland Common:

And then there is the wonderful avian world, sometimes little splashes of colour picking seed heads, like these charming Goldfinches by the Grand Union Canal:

Or this dark, whirling, semi-murmuration of starlings near Redbournbury:

Or this sleek Kestrel near Ivinghoe Beacon.....

Or this V bomber taking off on Wilstone Reservoir:

Hotly pursued by this scramble of Greylags:

Ah yes....  The joys of natural surroundings....

And, on the subject of flying..... back home, sheltering from the darkness outside and all around, I have been sifting through papers and memorabilia, trying to find some glimmer of hope in the past, and also trying to dispose of the trappings of too much memory.....

And I came across this faded, creased, moth-eaten piece of paper which I had long thought lost.  My esteemed pater, in a miasmic moment when far from home, aged about 19 or 20, filled in the first part of this previously Top Secret and highly sensitive Classified  Report:

We have to remember that there was a war on, and that it was almost certainly second nature to padre mio to use code, though I have some vague recollection that he may have told me that this report was filed during the sea passage from North Africa to the Italian mainland.  In any case, he was not alone.  The handwriting is not familiar, and, although I am not certain, I suspect that some measly Petty Officer or less was responsible for this capitalised inky blue.....

It is rather embarrassing to say, in this time of national pandemia, when we need to pay respect to our greaters, that my progenitor, a Hertford College Man, might have indulged in some excess....  But, there was a WAR on!  So, Heil Doughnuts!

It kind of puts our current constipation (constitution? Ed?) in perspex (perspective? Ed.)

The last page, again in a foreign (sic!) (and probably third) hand, would appear to be a pastiche of "'Allo! 'Allo" but then, as no one in the EU has ever had a sense of 'umour (or so the Brexiteer Brigade might have us believe) I can only assume that this too is code....

However, now that Bletchley Park is a tourist attraction, how can we ever know what was meant by this drivel?

Deer me!

At least I can still hold my head up.... (just)
 

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

Among my souvenirs

Bella Italia!

Venezia 

Masks....  If only it were that simple; that beautiful.  

Anyway, as we suffer this purgatorial lock-in, it's perhaps only natural that we sift through pleasant memories of past freedoms.... And I cannot help but think of Italy, my home for twenty years, and, up until this pandemic, where Amanda and I have kept visiting several times a year.

In the last half century or so I have travelled throughout Italy, marvelling at the light, the art, the variety, the scenery.  I will never tire of it, though, I cannot deny, it isn't perfect.  Rubbish is a problem.  Politics is a problem.  Progress is a problem (?)

But here are a few of my snapshots from years ago. These are an almost random sample of colour slides I took on various jaunts when all of us were younger, and the future was bright.  Great art they are not, but if for a moment you can join me on an armchair tour of Italy, then sit back and relax.....

The Dolomites.  Stunning mountains and wonderful villages.  I remember beds of eider down, frosty walks with myrtle grappa breath.  Still waters and passing clouds.  Heaven....

Dolomites 

The islands. Perhaps everyone knows something of Sicily, and maybe Sardinia. But there are many more Italian islands. The Tremiti islands in the Adriatic, for example, sparkle with a deceptive beauty, even though the waters may be swarming with stingers......

Tremiti Islands 

Amanda and I used to take short breaks on Ponza, a relatively short journey south from Rome.  Once across the water from Anzio on the Hydrofoil, or bobbing across from Formia on a ferryboat, you entered a different world, where wild flowers, seafood and exotic bird life blended into a fantasy I could now die for....

Ponza 

And possibly my favourite, Giglio, where my memories confuse nightly jazz on the stepped streets of Il Castello, with snorkelling amongst rainbows of little fish and gleaming bream deep amongst the off shore rocks....

Porto, Isola del Giglio 

The mountains of central Italy. The Abruzzi National Park, with its wolves and hilltop villages, its fungi, the lamb cutlets that burn your fingers, and its dark red wine....

Opi, The Abruzzi National Park 

Or the unstable hollow that shelters Norcia, birthplace of St Benedict, and, thanks to the genius of monks centuries ago (who devised a way of keeping irrigation water from freezing so they could raise three crops of rice a year, and so had plenty to feed their pigs....) home of the most wonderful hams and sausages.....

Norcia 

And the hidden, wild places, like this frozen lake in central southern Italy - Il Lago di Matese.  Just beautiful.....

There are so many wonderful places.  Incessant travelling has not exhausted the treasures of this country.  Urbino, for example, with its vast Palazzo Ducale, is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of extraordinary towns.....

Less well known, and far less rich, is Montescaglioso, in Basilicata, in the south.  But no less fascinating for that....

And then there is the infamous, and now trendy, Matera, with its 'Sassi' - once miserable dug out hovels, now bijou apartholtels.  This is how it looked in 1990, not so very different from when Christ stopped at Eboli....

That is about all for now, as a whistle stop tour from top to toe of my beloved Italy, but it would be wrong to finish without a mention of the people. Everywhere has its idiots - we have Johnson and Gove et al; Italy has Berlusconi, and Matteo Salvini..... But my experience of Italians has been something to treasure.  I have always found people welcoming and open. Whether this man and his monkey by the canal at Fiumicino (July 1981)....

Or memorable nights in Rome, here atop the Janiculum Hill in Trastevere, a short walk from where I lived.  High on his horse is Garibaldi, a symbol, perhaps, of an aspect of Italy which outshines the myths and jokes, the failures and the mistakes.  There is something splendid to be found, if you take the trouble to look for it....

I just wish I could be there now.

I had a dream.....

Darkness Visible…..

 

Paradise Lost 

 

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky 

With hideous ruin and combustion down 

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell 

In adamantine chains and penal fire, 

Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

 

Book 1: Lines 44-49

 

Sometime early on Wednesday morning, November 4th 2020, I woke with a start, frightened.  I had been dreaming, which for me is rare, or, at least, to remember my dreams is rare.  And I woke suddenly breaking off a three dimensional, vivid but very short dream.

 

It went like this:  I was looking up to a platform, high atop a steel structure.  On the platform stood a man, dressed in light tan trousers, a pale green sort of puffer jacket, like American flyers sometimes wear. His back was toward me, but I could see longish fair hair falling from under his dozer cap.  The platform was reached by a vertical ladder, and it must have been about thirty metres high.  There was no safety net, and the man was alone.  In front of him, sloping up at around ten degrees, was a wire, maybe about four metres long.  He seemed confident, and started to walk up the wire, his small hands outstretched in balance.  As he gained height, however, he began to falter, and his feet, close in front of each other, trembled a little, then switched several times from side to side, while his body remained upright, but his head looked down.  He grabbed out for a long horizontal pole in front of him, which was cradled at the end of the wire, but it slipped from his hands, and fell away.  His feet and the wire went quickly to the right, and he slipped, catching the wire under his arms as his red hat disappeared.  He seemed to shout, but I couldn’t hear.  He swung awkwardly with his head just above the wire, then slipped down towards the platform, his legs flailing under him above the void.  Somehow, he managed to bring his feet onto the edge of the platform and to hoist his body up, then he was lying flat on his back, his head off the end of the plank, his face toward me, upside down, his mouth open, his hair flopping in the air, his arms flung out on each side, his palms open.  He was barely balanced, the plank seemed narrow, and I knew he was about to roll and fall.

 

It was a scary dream, and I had no idea where it sprang from.  I woke disturbed, frightened of the fall, puzzled by this strangely vivid image of a man on his back about to slip off a very tall steel structure with no safety harness, no net, no guides, no friends.

 

I carried this dream around all Wednesday, and all Thursday, without seeing the blindingly obvious. 

 

Then, this morning, Friday, 6 November 2020, we went for a walk near Redbourn.  It was a misty, cold, autumn morning, and we walked along a muddy path, under oaks, and under a strangely cloudy sky.  Then, as we followed a lane near a place called Nirvana, I heard a faint hissing, crackling sound, or perhaps a sort of buzz, like a hive of bees in the distance.  Looking up, I saw power lines and a great steel pylon, the cables rising up to the peak at an angle of about ten degrees.  This was the high wire, the tall structure.  This was the height of power.  

 

And the man had achieved greatness, and dominance, and then, as he approached the zenith, with the possibility of sliding down the other side into the future, he fell back, like Lucifer, or Satan….

 

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven…..

 

Or Macbeth, whose vaulting ambition…. o'erleaps itself and falls on th' other

 

Or perhaps like many others, too numerous to name, where ambition and pride precede an ignominious fall.  Politicians, warriors, businessmen and businesswomen, CEOs, tribal leaders and stars, brought down by some tragic flaw.

 

And life, as we know it, goes on, without a blip.  Careless of the flailing legs that momentarily stick out from the sea as the body sinks.  While the ship sails on, and the ploughman continues his daily toil.

 

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

Nine times the space that measures day and night

To mortal men, he, with his horrid crew,

Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,

Confounded, though immortal. But his doom

Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain

Torments him: round he throws his baleful eyes,

That witnessed huge affliction and dismay,

Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate.

At once, as far as Angels ken, he views

The dismal situation waste and wild.

 

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

Thank you.  You have a lovely, happy time.....

Amanda

Dream on......