Hammer

Songs that say something meaningful or stirring about socio-political issues have always appealed to me. They are not too plentiful but they are certainly out there. I think of "Imagine" and "Working Class Hero" by John Lennon , "We Shall Overcome" that evolved from a church hymn, "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds, "No More Auction Block" and other American slave songs,  "The Red Flag" by Jim Connell, "Hurricane" and "With God On Our Side" by Bob Dylan, "Born In the USA" by Bruce Springsteen and "The Internationale" by Eugène Pottier and Pierre De Geyter.

Often such songs are driven by strong senses of injustice or exasperation. They can pierce your heart more than a dump truck load of soppy love songs.

Four years before I was born, American folk figures Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote a powerful yet simple socialist anthem that most readers of this blog will be very familiar with. It's "If I Had A Hammer". Of this song, Pete Seeger once said that it had a message for ordinary working people - "We have got tools and we are going to succeed". He also remarked that back in 1949, "Only 'Commies' used words like 'peace' and 'freedom'". Recordings of the song were blacklisted in America and in 1955 Pete Seeger was summoned to give testimony before  the House Un-American Activities Committee. He stood up to them bravely.

If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning

I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land

I'd hammer out danger, I'd hammer out a warning

I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land

If I had a bell, I'd ring it in the morning

I'd ring it in the evening, all over this land

I'd ring it in danger, I'd ring out a warning

I'd ring in love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land

If I had a song, I'd sing it in the morning

I'd sing it in the evening, all over this land

I'd sing it in danger, I'd sing out a warning

I'd sing out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land

Well I got a hammer and I got a bell

And I got a song to sing all over this land

It's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom

It's a song about love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land

The song has been recorded by many different artistes, some of whom failed completely to convey the angry political message it contains. It's not meant to be a happy little ditty with you grinning and winking at the camera. It is intended to stir and inspire.

Pete Seeger lived a long and fruitful life, remaining true to his core principles. He died in 2014 at the age of ninety four. The recording I have chosen to end this blogpost with was made  five years before his death. Thank you Pete.

History

Woods where the site of Wood Hall is located

Traffic on the A1 was congested as I drove slowly to Darrington - a village south west of Leeds and about twenty five miles north of Sheffield. Then I was off the busy road and heading east along byways to the ancient village of Womersley. It was an area I had not walked in before - what I call virgin territory.

Map study at home showed me that there had once been a moated medieval manor house called Wood Hall - a mile and a half north of Womersley. I planned to plod there along farm tracks and that's what happened.

As half expected, the woods that have grown up on the manor house site have become almost impenetrable. Not many walkers go there and beyond it there are spoil heaps connected with former coal mining activity in the area with the addition of waste from remaining power stations.

I had almost given up locating something of interest but then, through the perimeter fence, something caught my eye and I scrambled in. It was the archaeological remains of  Wood Hall's  stone gatehouse and a wooden structure that I did not fully understand but I know that in past decades the hollow would have been filled with water. 

Later I learnt that in the 1990s, the site had been investigated by archaeologists from The University of York. They had made several interesting discoveries and documented work that led to a clearer picture of how Wood Hall would have appeared, evolved and functioned threough the centuries.

I took photos of Grade I listed St Martin's Church in Womersley. A stone effigy of a knight of yore lay supine in the north aisle. He was very probably Sir Adam de Newmarch who, in the late thirteenth century went off to fight the muslim "saracens" in The Holy Land. Many wealthy English nobles did the same and there are indeed many recumbent stone effigies of knights in English country churches. Sir Adam was certainly not alone but it makes me wonder why? Why did they up sticks and travel to distant lands to wage religious wars, leaving their homes and loved ones far behind? What was it truly all about?

I drove on to a small and rather unattractive village called Cridling Stubbs. The best part about that village is its name. It sounds like a nineteenth century artist who specialised in painting farm animals or a certain blogger with an exasperating right wing perspective on current affairs.

Then back to Darrington where I parked Butch on Church Lane close to another lovely old church - St Luke's. In the village shop, I treated myself to a sausage roll and a can of "Costa" coffee before aiming Butch back to Sheffield. 

Again the Friday traffic crawled sluggishly along the A1 but all was fine on the M18, the M1 and The Sheffield Parkway. I was home in time to make a nice tea for her ladyship and I - smoked gammon with pineapple, grilled tomatoes, dauphinoise potatoes and a medley of green vegetables followed by little Belgian chocolate cheesecakes that I had picked up in "Aldi".

Cow Lane, Womersley

Vans

The world of vlogging is a bit of a mystery to me. However, we all know that there are people out there in the world making money from their YouTube vlogs. Some vloggers post new material every few days and attract thousands of loyal supporters and subscribers. These people have to be fed regularly with new stuff or they will simply drift away - possibly to find new vlogs.

Recently, I became aware that there are a lot of creators who claim to live outside the 9to5 rat race and travel in vans to different locations. Their vlogs will invariably take viewers along for the ride and frequently the vloggers will share their innermost thoughts.

Their vans are their homes - sometimes customised by the vloggers themselves. You might say that these van people are like modern day solitary  drifters with cameras and wifi and a few of them have drones as well. 

The concept is quite attractive to those of  us who live in houses with foundations. Maybe we will occasionally fantasise about getting away from it all to experience the freedom of the road so the van vlogs appeal to that kind of yearning.

Ashley Azzurro is from the southern suburbs of Manchester and she has a blue Ford Transit van. She also has a young sheepdog called Apollo. There's a kind of innocence about her output as she seeks pleasant, often secretive country locations to share with her audience. She is into wild swimming and the simple life.

Give the confusion, apprehension and bitterness that many people experience in the so-called "real world", Ashley's Vanlife is an oasis of niceness and rural simplicity where the only things that ever seem to go wrong are her old blue van's moving parts.

Of course, it might all be illusory. There could be someone else with her on her adventures and maybe she goes home to get a shower and a proper feed. She comes across as a sociable human so how does she survive solitude without her friends?

Mmm... Perhaps I should not have introduced that slight note of cynicism. It would possibly be better to take the channel at face value. If you are interested, here is one of Ashley's most recent videos. It is typical of the genre...

Leftovers

 Just ten random pictures I have taken in the last month - but not posted before...

The Union Hotel, Nether Edge, Sheffield

Statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester. She was a leading light in the 

British suffragette movement - campaigning for women to get the vote.

Our Phoebe as a butterfly at Sewerby Park

The author of this blog with a Lego sabre toothed tiger at Sewerby Park

Cobbler's dummy on Ecclesall Road, Sheffield

The Path to Rawmarsh from Parkgate

Railway footbridge at Halfway

Phoebe in the old bearpit - Sheffield Botanical Gardens

Dock plants one evening in Bingham Park Woods, Sheffield

The Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield - rising above the leafy suburb of Broomhill

And that's all for today folks!

Sisterhood

 

That's Phoebe and Margot on our doorstep on Sunday evening. Phoebe is five and has just begun her second full year at primary school. Margot will be three in November. What I especially like about this photograph is their sisterly hands wrapped in unity around each other. I sincerely hope that they will always be friends, always there for each other even though life might take them miles or continents apart. There won't be any more siblings - just the two of them.

This afternoon, I walked over to the neighbouring suburb of Nether Edge. It's a mile away. And there I thought of two other sisters who were born in Sheffield back in the 1930s. They lived in Number 36, Meadowbank Avenue which is a rather nice Edwardian cul-de-sac with a big green in the middle.

The sisters' names were Margaret and Antonia. Amazingly, they both became internationally acclaimed writers. People who read books will be familiar with both their names - even if you haven't actually read any of their work. As with Phoebe and Margot, there was a three year age gap.

Margaret retained her birth name - Margaret Drabble  while the older sister, Antonia, adopted the name from her first marriage - becoming A.S. Byatt. As I say, it's quite staggering that two girls from the same family should make it to the top - not just by getting their books published but gaining so many plaudits.

Margaret above and Antonia below

Antonia won The Booker Prize for Fiction in 1990 for her novel, "Possession: A Romance", while Margaret received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E.M.Forster Award in 1973, the same year that she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature by election.

It has often been said that as sisters they became estranged from each other as the years passed by. How much truth there is in that, I do not know, but if there was an enduring rift it was a real shame. Interestingly, I could not find any pictures of the two sisters together. They had so much in common and both spent countless days and nights crafting brilliant books. They could have been there for each other as I hope our Phoebe and Margot will always be.

36 Meadowbank Avenue - childhood home of Margaret Drabble and A.S.Byatt

Figures

On Saturday, I took the train over to Hull to watch The Tigers draw with Aston Villa. The kick off was at teatime but I travelled earlier in the day because I wanted to visit The Hull and East Riding Museum of Archaeology in the historical port city's old town. It's just a stone's throw from another museum - Wilberforce House - the former home of William Wilberforce, the famous anti-slavery campaigner.

Anyway, in the archaeology museum, two happy hours passed by as your genial correspondent absorbed information about East Yorkshire from its earliest geological beginnings to medieval times. There were many interesting exhibits to illustrate the story including complete Roman floor mosaics from two villas that were discovered in the region. One of them was at Rudston, close to the stone monolith I wrote about very recently.

However, it was another exhibit that left me awestruck. It was inside a climate controlled glass case. Two wooden figures standing on a wooden boat stared back at me from the mists of time. They are known as the Roos Carr Figures and they were found in wetland near the village of Roos in 1836.

Some labourers were digging a drainage ditch and two metres down, totally by accident, they came across a cache of carved wooden items. Some of the items were badly degraded but a few had miraculously survived several centuries in the earth, including The Roos Carr Figures.

They were carved from yew wood and that factor undoubtedly assisted their survival. Radio-carbon dating has indicated that the figures are approximately 2650 years old, carved during a  period that is now known as The Iron Age.

It is believed that there was once a shallow lake where the figures were found and it is speculated that they were left in the mud at the side of the lake as votive offerings to some ancient deity. The figures have detachable wooden penises but at least one expert has pointed out the when the penises are removed, holes that might represent vaginas are left. Perhaps the figures are androgynous.

Although carved from yew, the figures' eye sockets contain rather unnerving quartzite eyeballs.

I stared into that glass box for a few minutes as thoughts bounced around inside my skull. I thought of those swift-minded  labourers who had the presence of mind to stop their work and report what they had found. And I thought about the nineteenth century Hull Literary and Philosophical Society that first cared for the carvings. But mostly I thought about the community from which the strange figures emerged - speaking tantalisingly to future people like me or you.

There is still so much that we do not know.

998

Perhaps inspired by Grandmaw Moon over in northern Florida, I had it in mind to tackle a jigsaw. After all, isn't that one of the things that retired people are meant to do as they watch the clock ticking in God's waiting room?

Being a Yorkshireman, I am as tight as a duck's arse as we say in these parts. I was very reluctant to buy a new jigsaw. Couldn't I just purchase a secondhand one cheaply from a charity shop? Another determining point was this - the jigsaw image needed to be one that I wanted to work on as I knew it would take me hours to do. Google Gemini suggests that it takes  between twelve and twenty hours for a "beginner" to complete a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.

In the middle of May, I was in the local "British Heart Foundation" charity shop  looking for branded "Old Fella" clothes when I spotted a jigsaw I knew I would like. It only cost £3 and the image was of a lovely village on the North Yorkshire coast that is familiar to me - Staithes just north of Whitby. "Yes!" I said to myself, "that's just the job!"

Anyway, a week later, I began. After what seemed like twelve to twenty hours I had almost completed the outer frame after sifting out all of the pieces with straight edges. I was making progress and then something happened. 

The best Yorkshire summer on record broke out and I did not want to pass my time indoors working on a jigsaw. I wanted to be out doing summery things like  surfing, attending musical festivals and running naked through forests. So the jigsaw was "put on hold" until normal British weather resumed. Staithes could wait.

Then ten days ago, I went back to the jigsaw. This time I set up a table in the front bedroom - right next to the window where  daylight would make the task easier.

In several sessions, I made steady progress though some gaps were hard to fill because mischievous pieces were hiding in plain sight. Doing that jigsaw was a practical challenge and gradually the finishing line came close. Of course, I always knew that there was a real possibility that not all one thousand pieces would be present and sure enough, as the last pieces were pressed home, it became clear that two pieces were missing.

I didn't know how I would feel about that. Would I rage in my "Old Fella" nightgown and toss an incomplete Staithes up in the air or would I calmly accept the reality? I am pleased to report that I was cool about the two missing pieces. It was okay.

However, the next time I decide to do a jigsaw it will be a new one and I will do it in the front bedroom in natural light - hopefully when it's grey outside and drizzle is steadily drizzling. But that won't be any time soon. I am jigsawed out right now.