Seventeen

When I was seventeen, they made me stand on the school stage at nine o'clock one morning to recite this poem to the assembled pupils and teachers of Beverley Grammar School in East Yorkshire. I read it clear and I read it true and I still remember all those faces in front of me - a little bit spellbound both by the poem and by my delivery of it. I have always felt comfortable standing on stages like that - an adrenalin rush -and that particular morning I felt quite passionate about the poem I had been asked to convey. It seemed to have something meaningful to say about the dispossessed and the outsiders - even though they were not really represented in that school hall.

REFUGEE BLUES by W.H. Auden

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

Othello

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:--but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.

Today it was time for an injection of culture at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre. The current production of Shakespeare's "Othello" has been vaunted on BBC radio and TV and by several theatre critics. I arrived early hoping to buy a "return" ticket and was offered a great seat seven rows from the front.

The production starred Dominic West as Iago, Clarke Peters as Othello and Lily James as Desdemona. For a girl who was still in drama school a year ago, Lily James was superb - imbuing her role with an overlapping sense of purity and gullibility that Shakespeare clearly intended. West was very good but arguably too domineering and I thought Peters made a rather puzzling Othello. His diction was often fuzzy - especially so when he raged. I was pleased to see that the reviewer from "The Guardian" agreed with me saying his enunciation "tips too often into indistinction".

I liked the fact that the set was simple and that the costumery was conservatively Elizabethan. In Shakespeare the words should speak for themselves without self-indulgent and rather bizarre stage effects and costume ideas chosen by madcap directors.

I first read "Othello" at the age of sixteen. I studied it again at university and then as a teacher I taught it a couple of times to A level classes. I am very familiar with the play's ideas and its language. Essentially it's about jealousy and the successful way in which the scheming Iago wreaks cruel revenge upon Othello for missing out on promotion.

The quotation at the top of this post comes from the last act of the play when Othello first extinguishes a lamp before proceeding to suffocate his wife. I have always remembered those lines. If I ever get to the promised land - the old people's residential home - you'll probably find me rocking in my chair reciting those words over and over till the Almighty puts out my light.

Yorkie

Another blogger - who goes by the strange pseudonym - Shooting Parrots, keeps referring to me as "Yorkie". That's rather like a footman in Buckingham Palace calling the Duke of Edinburgh Phil. Anyway, I thought I would pause to focus on the name "Yorkie". Is Mr Parrots thinking of the chunky chocolate bar reputedly enjoyed by English lorry drivers:-

Don't you just love that strapline - "Not for Girls!" with the accompanying and somewhat politically incorrect warning logo. Or was Mr Parrots thinking about the Yorkshire Terrier breed of dogs - often familiary referred to as "Yorkies". Here's a young one:-

Awww! And here's another on his way to a fancy dress party:-

One of my private investigators tracked down the aforementioned Mr Parrots and spotted him wearing this T-shirt:-

This mug was seen in his kitchen window as Mrs Parrots turned the mangle in their wash-house:-

Economy

There are some things that I know about but other things are as distant from my way of thinking as the planet Pluto. One of those things is "The Economy". It figures a lot in national and international news and gradually it has seeped its way into ordinary people's perceptions of life in the early years of this twenty first century.

"The Economy" makes my eyes glaze over - my mind goes walkabout. Wall Street? The Bank of England? The Hang Seng Index? I look at the television and see traders waving papers or beavering away at computers. Every day the BBC tells us about share prices and currency fluctuations. But all of this means nothing to me.

Greece to me is its rich classical legacy, the moussaka and retsina, a bouzouki playing evocatively across the harbour in Mykonos, a sunlit beach and clear azure waters. But now it seems we are meant to fret about whether or not Greece will "default". Are the Greeks playing tennis? Who initially lent Greece the money and if the country's structures were so damned suspect, who the hell allowed them into the Eurozone in the first place? Why did they have the Olympics as recently as 2004? I just don't get it.

"The Economy" is the monstrous child of human society. Men made it and gave it succour. If it rises and falls like a Frankenstein beast then that is surely down to the men (and a few women) who ride upon its back and the highly paid politicians we all elected to deal with the damned thing. It is their job to tame the beast and make it serve us better. I don't know. As I say, "The Economy" is a mystery to me. I never learnt about it in school and those who claim to know about it seem to speak an entirely different language.

The world appears significantly different from how it looked five years ago. Then "The Economy" was well-tethered. It ate its oats and responded to our commands but now it's bucking and there's horse-shit everywhere. Protesters marching on Brooklyn Bridge. Riots in the streets of London. Greece squeezed like an empty tube of toothpaste. Millions unemployed. Pension pots squandered. Bankers' bonus culture booming. Where's it all going to end? I wish I understood. I wish I knew what "The Economy" really means.

Antiquity

Woke this morning to cloud cover. I guess that summer really has breathed her last breath now. The weather forecast supports that opinion with familiar depressions lining up in the Atlantic. Taking good pictures is so much easier in good light but even so I went out this afternoon with camera in one hand and in the other an Ordnance Survey sheet I'd copied from the internet.

I was looking for the ancient stone circle you can see near the bottom right hand corner of the above map. I knew it would be hard to locate amidst the moorland grasses, heather and gorse and I wasn't expecting anything even remotely monumental - just squat stones arranged by our predecessors - probably more than two thousand years ago.

In those pre-Christian times, the population of the entire United Kingdom would have been far fewer than half a million. There would have been woodland almost everywhere except on exposed moorlands. Nights and winters would have both been very long and the business of simply surviving would have been extremely taxing. People would have been much more in tune with the earth, the rhythm of the seasons and how the stars are arranged in the sky.

Why did they build their stone circles? Communal gathering places? Primitive pagan churches? Astrological maps? Nobody really knows for sure but around the Peak District there are plenty and there are many other archaeological pointers to those far distant times.

After locating the stone circle, I walked half a mile to the north west to another interesting moorland site - Lady's Cross. Why it has that name, I have no idea. A cross or monolith has stood on this site for at least a thousand years. Again why it was put there, nobody is really sure. Was it a parish boundary marker or a guidepost for moorland travellers? I suspect that it was once a place of pagan significance and that as the centuries passed, its original purpose was forgotten and new meanings were applied - just as the cross itself was altered.

I often wonder about those people of the faraway past and what their world was like. Modern society likes to think that as time has passed, humanity has progressed and of course in many ways it has but I can't help feeling that somewhere along the line we lost some of life's best treasures. Being in those atmospheric, mysterious places makes you feel closer to those who went before. Walking where they walked. Breathing where they breathed.

At the stone circle:-

Lady's Cross:-

Rambling

"I'm a rover and seldom sober, I'm a rover of high degree"

We have just had the hottest September day ever recorded in Yorkshire - and it was the last day of the month - not the first. So once again I was rambling. This time to the north west of the city in the vicinity of Bradfield which is actually two villages a few hundred yards apart. Down in the valley there's Low Bradfield, nestling beneath Agden Reservoir and up on the hill there's High Bradfield with its picturesque church, its sturdy stone dwellings and "The Old Horns Inn".

I realise that some non-English (alien) visitors have enjoyed seeing my last two batches of local photos so at the risk of boring other visitors senseless, I have another photographic offering for you. Today I was like Heathcliff, tramping the moors, at one with the elements which were incredibly benign, putting Heathcliff's troubled soul at rest... "A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness..."

After three hours of rambling I returned to our coach and ventured in to "The Old Horns" where I purchased a simple luncheon of broiled rabbit, a thick wedge of Wensleydale cheese and a slab of warm farm bread. In the murky candlelight, I recognised the inn's young landlord - yon Edgar Linton from Thrushcross Grange - still as pale and bony as a skellington. What Cathy spied in him only the Almighty knows. For my part, I would have whipped him and left him to weep in the company of yon wretched whelps. But I quaffed my glass of bitter Farmers' Ale and continued on my journey across the naked moors back to Wuthering Heights.

Oaks Farm across Damflask Reservoir:-

View to the cricket pavilion in Low Bradfield:-

Window of an abandoned farm in Coumes Woods:-

View into Bradfield Dale from Cliffe House Farm:-

Returning to High Bradfield:-

Roving

It's daft to stay inside on sunny days like today so I was out again rambling in the lovely countryside that surrounds Sheffield. I tootled over to the suburb of Totley and parked up - not far from the place where Totley Teacher Training College once stood. Now it's an estate of rabbit hutch houses - "little boxes, little boxes and they all look just the same".

Five minutes over the fields and I came to this stile which leads into Gillfield Wood which I have recently worked out is the most southerly point in the Kingdom of Yorkshire. Beyond that narrow woodland, there be dragons - in other words - Derbyshire:-

I walked up Mickley Lane - no footpath so I had to keep close to the verge to avoid being winged by passing vehicles. I was sweating when I reached Mickley. Then onwards to Rod Moor and near Upper Birkitt farm a horse called Mr Ed came over to speak with me:-

Passing Dore and Totley golf club, I noticed groups of men whacking little white balls down fairways:-

Along narrow paths and bridleways emerging into the dormitory village of Dronfield Woodhouse:-

At Birchinlee Farm, I noticed a mobile phone mast beyond a huge pile of barrel-shaped black plastic buoys containing tons of winter fodder. Then there was this tumbledown, deserted farmhouse:-

Two and a half hours after starting my ramble, I passed through Holmesfield Park Wood where sunlight dripped gorgeously through the leaf canopy:-

Past peaceful Woodthorpe Hall Farm where a silver haired grandfather was teaching his grandson how to harrow ploughed fields, then down into the hollow and back through Gillfield Wood to the heartland - Yorkshire.