Day3

Oh weary deary me … the point of a ‘blog’, Ralph, is that it is updated regularly and quickly, otherwise Yon Gentle Reader loses interest and goes and surfs for something more interesting, like watching paint dry, or Olympic canoodling or dwyle flonking or something. Er, yes (conversation of writer with self), you’re quite right, but things get forced in upon one by sheer pressure of what one does for a living (writes) and, you know, you cannot accomplish anything if you don’t just CONCENTRATE ON ONE THING AT A TIME but you can’t, because you’ve got 4 projects running concurrently and there’s only you (me) to do the creation, direction, production, chasing up other people’s people, hunting down MONEY, marketing on most of ‘em.

Never mind. Here I am in the Men-deeps again, oh Gentle Muse, where the men hang out…

That complicated twist of valley
and the way it breathes out:
Bristol Channel

Down Elrick Road, Rodgate, into Blagdon. Stock up on provisions in the Spar Markt. Busy manageress says she saw me on TV. Massive tanker honks, boogies and grinds up narrow street outside. The butcher round the corner tells me of Bob ‘Two Adders’ Johnson (could’ve got the name wrong there, writing got washed away in a storm). Seems this ‘ere Bob, like, was up at Charterhouse or somewhere, showing the kids some fine specimens of adders. So he picks up one, holding it careful like. That’s fine. Then he decides to pick up t’other, like you do, only he can’t have his attention on two of the beasties at same time like, so what does original beasty do? Why, the scurvy little slimy sod squirms i’self round in his grip and bites him, dunnit. Ow. So Bob very carefully puts both of them back in the box, where they continue adding, or multiplying or something, takes a step or two back and says quietly to the teacher, ‘I think you’d better get me an ambulance…’, then gently collapses. So that’s the Bob ‘Two Adders’ story.

I ascertain the footpath leading off a lane round the back on the uphill side, wander up a field in wet grass and follow the turn off to the right, heading for the wooded slopes up from the Bath Road, the A368. Just before I dive into the wood the field is striped in newly germinated corn, sweeping up to a single old oak proclaiming the rebirth of the Galleon. Above it, the sky shifts. Over a stile, then, into Dark Wood. This continual interplay of dark/light; light/dark. Up on the tops in short grass – light; diving down into green woods – dark. I try and video this fluid boundary, propping the camera up on a fallen tree, waiting for a patch of sunlight to sweep over the oak, then over me. A short way into the wood (Fuller’s Hay) the path dips to cross what would be an avalance run in the Alps. Can’t be – I don’t think Blagdon is known for avalanches, but it’s the same trichterfoermig (funnel-shaped) shape. Maybe water-formed, then? Local kids did it in Play-Dough? It looks as if water still cascades over the path into it in storms, but then gets soaked up by the grass.

An old, weather-beaten mossy sign hanging high in a slip of hazel says nothing at all anymore. What could it say? ‘Have a good life’? ‘Mind the gap!’ ‘Scubidoo’? ‘Piss off or you’ll get shot’? Who knows. Perhaps it just says, ‘this is not a sign’, in which case, fine, I’ll go for that in this strangest of all possible worlds. I mean, isn’t it strange and absolutely breath-taking that we are here and able to say ‘this is a strange world’?

The path winds up through Fuller’s Hay and I get out my Ready-At-All-Times dedicated Internet-linked Wap-2-Wap User-Enabled Guided Missile Mobile Phone in Flaming Red with Bumpy Monkeys’ Theme Toon to check what this could mean (no, I don’t – how on earth is one supposed to accomplish anything at all if one is wired up 24/7? Geddalife! Sling it out!!!) But I do check later. Want a job as a fuller ? here’s the JD:

“The 13th century is boom time for the wool trade. With three sheep to every man, woman and child, wool is our biggest export. But nobody likes stiff and itchy cloth that falls to pieces, so we have several openings for fullers.
As a fuller, you are expected to walk up and down all day in huge vats of stinking stale urine. The ammonia produced by the rotten wee may make your eyes water, but it creates the softest cloth by drawing out the grease (lanolin) from the wool. If you can dance up to your knees in urine for around two hours per length of cloth, you'll succeed in closing the fibres of the wool and interlocking them to produce cloth that is kind to the skin. You will be doing your part, along with the weavers, dyers and merchants, in making it a world-beating export. You may stink and regularly have to fight back the urge to throw up, but you are guaranteed very clean toenails.” http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/W/worstjobs/medieval.html:

Anyone going for that? Beats shelf-stacking in the local Sainsbury’s? Shelf-awareness? Hmm, let’s see … I have vaguely heard somewhere of ‘Fuller’s Earth’ – so what’s that?

Fuller's earth is any nonplastic clay or claylike earthy material that can be used to decolorize, filter, and purify animal, mineral, and vegetable oils and greases. The name reflects the first use of the material. In past centuries, fullers (q.v.) kneaded fuller's earth and water into woollen cloth to absorb lanolin, oils, and other greasy impurities as part of the cloth finishing process.
Fuller's earth was also sold in pharmacies until recently for compressing pills and it is sometimes used by crane operators and their oilers to absorb grease and oil off the brake bands on the winches to make them function properly.
Fuller's earth is also used by military forces to clean soldiers who are contaminated with chemical weapons. It also finds use in special effects when simulating explosions. Fine-grained fuller's earth makes a much larger plume than ordinary dirt, suggesting a larger explosion and allowing a smaller, safer charge to be used. Important uses are in absorbents and filters. Because of this, fuller's earth is sometimes found in cat litter. Hills, cliffs and slopes containing fuller's earth can be unstable, since this material can be thixotropic when saturated by heavy rainfall. (source: Wikipedia)

Beats floundering around in stale urine, I’d say. Where’d they get it from? Well, from around here they probably got it from around here at the Combe Hay Mine. Which “was a fuller's earth mine operating to the south of Bath Somerset until 1979.”

More? Combe Hay is “a village in the English county of Somerset. It falls within the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Combe Hay was known in the Domesday Book as Cumb. The village includes a church with a 15th century tower, a Georgian manor house and Georgian rectory. Coombe Hay was the site of a series of locks, dating from 1805 on the Somerset Coal Canal on which research and restoration is proposed. It is the site of the only Caisson lock ever built which was near the current Caisson House. Many of the locks and associated workings are listed buildings. It was also served by the Camerton and Limpley Stoke Railway, and was the site of a Fuller's Earth mine until 1979.”

Wunnerful innit? Dunno quite what the following link which came up under a search for ‘Fuller’ has to do with anything, but it’s wunnerful, too … http://home.pacbell.net/barbward/elfdiar2.htm

I come to a farmstead populated by a lone goose and a tidgy pony and hang a left, thru’ an open field towards a dead tree signalling the end of the world (doommongery even more popular than usual nowadays. Well, some of us will survive. Either that or it’s cockroaches’ chance to take over the earth. Can you hear the slither of thousands of insect legs? Slither slither.) I circumnavigate some sheep, emerge onto the Nature Reserve above Burrington Combe, start to trot off over the Ham but then think ‘oh what the -, I can’t be doing with descending to the Rock of Ages then up again the other side’’, so double back and head straight up Black Down, find a nice spot slightly sheltered by the trig point at the top for lunch.

Five tumuli are strung out along the path here, the sun and clouds chasing shadows over them. Wave after wave. I wonder about the wave after wave of people who’ve swept over these hills, some to rest here for ever, others, doubtless, to move on. Reminds me of a quote in Simon Schama’s book about ‘Trees’ (I break off to search my book shelves but can’t find it, tho’ it’s a massive great volume…). Anyway, he was talking about the Jews in the ancient forests of (Lithuania?) and, I think, quoting someone who asked an old Jew about his ‘roots’. ‘Roots???’ scoffed this guy, ‘We’re not trees, we’re humans. Jews don’t have ‘roots’, we have LEGS. We pick ‘em up and walk!’
Story of Humankind: ‘We have legs, we pick ‘em up and walk.’ And so we do, through all human history, in every age and time. We pick ‘em up, and we walk. Neolithic Man, the Beaker Folk, Bronze Age Man, the Romans – they all picked ‘em up and walked here, to these hills, and over them, and beyond, and into new lives, old deaths. Wave after wave. Where is their voice? The wind soughs over Black Down, fleeting cloud casts shadows on their remains.

After a long lunch I consult the map and head due South to Burrington Common. I consider the ‘Inclosure Act of’ oh, 1870? Earlier this year I wrote a series of scripts for the Peaks National Park, one of which was on the ‘In-, or En-closure Acts’ up there. The track goes straight over a barrow. They all have indentations on the top, perhaps where the stones have collapsed underneath (?). The turf on top of this barrow is short and springy. I sit, then lie down and fall asleep. Wake up with a start. Tom Bombadil calling? No, just the wind. Sweet bilberries grow on warrior’s grave. Better be getting on.

The ‘track’ gets increasingly wet. How come it’s so wet on top of a hill, the highest point of the Mendips? I cross a very watery stile, skirt a brick bunkerhouse from WWII and enter the Land of the Dead. The Land of the Dead is a triangular piece of ground fenced around at all sides at the top of a field above a couple of springs. They used to hang people here. I imagine the country folk trooping up the field to witness justice being done or to gawk at the spectacle. Red-faced farmers with their wives in their Sunday best, ‘have you got the hamper, dear? Cheddar?’

‘Life/Death’, such easy things to say, such hard things to know. What did the Swedish poet say? “We think that when life ends, death begins. This is wrong. When life ends, death ends, too.” There was a Bavarian film on in Germany when I was there this summer entitled, ‘Wer frueher stirbt, ist laenger tod’ (‘he who dies early is dead longer’). Was in Bavarian dialect, so the Schwabs in Stuttgart had some problems understanding, for example, what a ‘oichketzelswoif’ could be (? It’s a squirrel’s tail – an ‘Eiche’ is an Oak, an ‘Eichkaetze’ is an ‘oak kitten’ ie. a squirrel, and it’s ‘swoif’ is its tail. There you go, isn’t language fascinating?)

I hop over the fence into unclean land. Restless thorn trees, close-clustered stink of death. When in residence at Tintagel, North Cornwall I wrote:

Mordred

rank mildew'd gnawed at eclipsing shadow

lusting hungry insatiable the storm in the

eye of balance the stink of cirrus awash on

a blood-red evening where wild boar grub

skeletons of wooded green

Then down the field, off the hill, across a ginnel (that’s Scotttish, isn’t it? No, Yorkshire, um, Lancashire? North, anyway) which proclaims itself ‘The Property of Bristol Water’ and onto the lane leading to the Charterhouse Centre. Meet up with Jim and Merryn, pick up her tent and she carries it down for me to Nether Wood where I camp for the night in Black Bunny Hollow. My tent pegs grate on fused clinker just below the surface. I write:

The Great, of this has died, is
laid out in the Land; and star-studded
crumbles to nothing in barrow; storm-
swept, tracked and inter-woven to
Fate. What we do, we must. It is not in our hands.

Swallets & Redshanks

Feel sleepy - must be the Redshanks – the local fairies. I scoff the somewhat stodgy pasty bought at Hansford’s in Penscot, then fall asleep in the sun amidst the small scabious, early purple orchid and eyebright flowers. Acid-loving bell heather, too, surviving, I am informed, on ‘small patches of acidic sand blown onto the site during the ice age’. I dream about things to be done, and heavinesses lying upon the sea, and wake up suddenly to write: “The greatest dance is danced alone, and for no honour or glory. Only the wide sky and the far-off chocolate of the Bristol Channel.” Below me the trees wave their green signature in the clouds’ passing. Do they come and go, or is ‘coming’ and ‘going’ only human representation of no coming and going? It is the voice of the Poet that is to speak with slow power at the unravelling of Time. Jerk properly awake, roll over, try to take some self-portraits which turn out to be mostly of grass and flowers as the camera keeps falling over, then hit the top of the ridge and proceed jauntily Eastwards Ho.

The track wanders along on high between wide-grassed variances of impromptu Nature interset with mole hills – or could be emmity butts (= anthills!) – or consequences of thawing and freezing? Unlikely. Hiding places for Mendip Trolls, their craggy heads sticking out of the cropped sward with bad shaggy haircut grass? Hmmm… mini-tumps, anyway, some topped with a heather bush. Views over thorn trees to far off chocolate waters.

The path wavers in and out of the trees, then descends slowly to open scrub, grass, bracken, crosses the N-S track nudged between Dolebury Warren and Hill Farm, clambers over a style – or could be a kissing gate - and gallops into sink-hole country; what do they call them? Swallets. A [Swal´let] is: ‘n.1.Water breaking in upon the miners at their work; - so called among tin miners’, according to my online dictionary. It does sound very much like ‘swallow’, doth it not, as in ‘the very earth swallowed him up and spat him out’. There’s a lot of mileage in ‘swallet’. The tracks proliferate at this point, a sort of system of hills clashing leading to rumpled land. The spelunkers’ spiders’ web trails lead off every which way. Bos Swallet, Sidcot Swallet, Rod’s Pot (Google comes up with Rod's Pot), Goatchurch Cave, Whitcombes Hole, East Twin Swallet.

Of Goatchurch Cave, or Cavern, Wikopedia says: “Goatchurch Cavern (grid reference ST47585823) is a cave on the edge of Burrington Combe in the limestone of the Mendip Hills, in Somerset, England. The cave is historically understood to be approximately 750m long, although 1500m of surveyed passage has been measured (UBSS, unpublished survey, pending: 2007) and reaches a surveyed depth of 61.5m. It has a complex network of predominately dry passages and has two entrances. It is though that it was explored by lead miners in the 19th century. Around 1901 the owner unsuccessfully tried to turn it into a show cave. The cave is especially popular for training people who are new to caving. This is due to its easy access and wide range of terrain that does not necessitate the use of special equipment such as ropes or ladders. The two entrances to the cave add interest as cavers can do a round trip. Many of the surfaces within are polished, as a result of numbers visiting over many decades and are slippery. Notes of exploration in the 1920s record finds from the Pleistocene period including bones of mammoth, bear, hyaena and cave lion. During November 2003 inscribed marks were noticed in Goatchurch Cavern while cleaning away graffiti. Three finely cut marks were uncovered, resembling the letter W with a patina darker than in nearby graffiti dated 1704. These have been identified as ritual protection marks, possibly dating from the period 1550 to 1750. The term ritual protection mark was preferred to the description "witch marks". I used to go caving around here with a friend called ‘Tink’ Taylor in the ‘70s when I was a student at the then Bristol Polytechnic (acetylene lamps and all), but got put off by a rather bad experience at Seale Hayne Agricultural College and have never caved since.

The area is dimpled with inverted cones hiding mysterious holes. I find Bos Swallet, or could be Rod’s Pot. Maybe it is here that life comes writhing out of the folded haze of cthonic earth. Continuing along the obvious way I come across a parked car. The track is turning into a navigable way – must be wrong. I check the map. I seem to have imperceptibly bent northwards, following the contours around the walled off wood to my left, and be heading for the Rock of Ages. I reverse my steps, take the next available hikers’ motorway heading, as far as I can see, straight up Black Down, hang another left at the cross track and am on the Limestone Link. Bit of a plod, now – not the route, skirting Burrington Combe to the left – but the fact that it’s getting late. The path hits three more coming off or round Beacon Batch, curves to the North, down to the B3134, I plod up the road, into Ellick Road, miss the B&B, plod back up Ellick Road.

Thursday 28th June - Shipham to Blagdon

In the bar of the Penscot Inn there are various sayings inscribed into the ceiling beams. For example: ‘reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol’ (that old chestnut). There are various takes on ‘reality’ aren’t there, including ‘reality ain’t real at all’ (but it still affects you, doesn’t it? How about ‘reality is what affects you?’). As someone else said, there’s no way of telling whether we are in fact part of a giant computer simulation run by highly advance aliens or not. Cue the Matrix? We deal ‘as if’ – that makes world. Money has no existence, it’s just a cipher. The Stock Exchange, for example, depends on the entirely nebulous concept of ‘confidence’. Dealing ‘as if’ gives it its power.

I chat to the friendly landlady in the Penscot Inn about the Lifelines project and drystone walls and she writes me a something to take with me. They’ve recently taken over the Inn, she says, it was in a dreadful state, most of the ceiling in the dining room came down due to leakages from the rooms above. The previous owners didn’t get on with Shipham, that first saying on the beam you see on entering the bar has to go. She’s a bit hassled, she has an awful lot to do, now where’s her list? I suggest she keeps a list of lists, or perhaps a list of lists of lists. Trouble is, she says, if she prioritises the things she has to do then the things someway down on the priorities list are still priorities so there’s not much point prioritising them.

I don’t know why we’re so pressure-cooked nowadays. Everybody’s pressure-cooked, it’s like there’s one big pressure cooker clamped over our lives. You can see the steam coming out of everybody’s ears. I think it’s due to the relentless pressure to ‘get it right’ in all circumstances and for absolutely everybody. Then a constant drip of fear & guilt from the media. The in-word of the week or was it last week (I’m afraid I’m reading the Sun in the breakfast room at the Penscot Inn) seems to be Blair’s use of the word ‘feral’ to describe the media. I’d always thought ‘feral’ described domestic animals which had gone wild again, as in ‘feral goats in Corsica’ (or in Cheddar Gorge), but the dictionary says it can also be used to mean ‘brutal’. Only having written a two-minute poem about Dear Tone and not being acquainted with him personally I don’t think he meant ‘brutal’, but more sort of ‘hunting down’. I don’t like the idea of government by the media either, how’s any government supposed to function at all in the modern media culture? Newspapers tell you what to think. I don’t like being told what to think.

‘Amy (Winehouse) self-harms’ says the Sun and quotes her as saying ‘I don’t care. I don’t care about any of this and I don’t have much of an opinion of myself. I don’t think people care about me. I write songs because I’m (expletive deleted) in the head and need to get something good out of something bad. I’m just a very silly girl.’ Ah, the roots of creativity – are all artists, writers, creative people (expletive deleted) in the head, so ‘art’ is a kind of therapy, an overwhelming need to get it out of one’s head regardless? Discuss (I did, for mile after mile, with myself).

Outside hedge sparrows ramp up the invective: THIS IS MINE, THIS IS MINE! GET OFF MY TERRITORY! Perhaps we should stop thinking life is ‘for’ something. We should talk to trees, rabbits, venomous cross-patterned adders soaking up the sun on drystone walls, watch clouds, eat cream-teas.. we think the human sphere and what humans say, do or don’t say, do is so important but to the mosquito humming around my ear I’m just something to suck blood out of. What about a world in which there is no ‘for’…..

I leave the Penscot Inn and its pressurised landlady, go and buy some provisions in the Hansford Village Butchers and Stores. A gentleman is very pleased to meet me and hear about my ramble, says his son writes and he’ll pass it on to him. I should go right, up Cuck Hill (a very pleasant lady tells me ‘the cuck horse’ means the lead horse in a rig), into Templars Way, follow through round and above Shipham. Not the fastest route, he says, but the most picturesque. I don’t have the heart to tell him I’d gone for a walk the evening before and discovered the route for myself.

At the top of Lippiat Lane I sit on a rock in the sun and start writing. Two young women in jodhpurs (India in the Mendips: ‘jodhpur’: in the 1860s the maharajah of the Rajputana state if India was an extreme devotee of polo which he played in breeches that were tight-fitting by the ankle and loose-fitting above. British army officers exported the game and the breeches to England – Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) sashay past (to ‘sashay’: to walk or proceed, especially in an easy or casual manner; to strut or flounce in a showy manner; to perform the chassé in dancing; to move in a sideways manner - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ (from the French ‘chassé’)(France in the Mendips; France allied with India – globalisation at work!)(That’s enough dictionary work!). They ask me to move as they’re bringing a young and skittish horse down to get him into a horse box. They reappear with said rather fine animal and he does indeed act up at first, dancing all over the yard, but then agrees to enter the box. A huge industry around these magnificent beasts of which I know absolutely nothing – except that no way will you get me on one of them!

I dive into the sun-bespeckled entrance to Roeberrow Warren. Another 4-legged status symbol/way of country life/darling of little girls sights the Bard and stops dead. ‘He doesn’t like rucksacs,’ says the rider, 'none of the horses in the stable do. Whoa there, whoa – he’s alright!’ Perhaps these particular horses think humans should be a certain shape and a person with a rucksac doesn’t fit the pattern? I greet a fellow hiker. ‘As it’s a nice day I’ve decided to play hooky and bunk off work,’ he says. There you go – I seem to recall a major worry of the 60s or 70s was that ‘in future’ we would all have so much leisure time we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. What has actually happened is that those in work are now supposed to work 10 times as hard as in the 70s. Anyone know why? Are we happier? No – more unhappy. I used to think ‘work’ was something you weren’t supposed to enjoy: if you enjoyed doing it, it couldn’t be ‘work’. Stopped that some time ago and became a poet, writer and artist. Some people resent you doing what you want to do and making money out of it, as if it’s against the natural order. One is not supposed to enjoy one’s work, that’s why it’s called ‘work’. Hogen Daido Yamahata once said, ‘why exactly are you rushing into your grave?’ Answers on a postcard, please…

I wander lonely as a cloud oh blithe spirit down the shady warren. Rabbits gambolling in a field with some ponies. Rabbits come from, er, Italy? The Romans brought them over for food whereupon they bred like, er – rabbits. Evocative crumbled walls indicate abandoned dwellings, sheepfolds etc, moss overgrown, tree-root writhed (should that be ‘writhen’? Is there such a word …? Seems there is) then: tree-root writhen. Two particularly fine trees edge the muddy path. I arrive at a fork in the trail where there is logjam debris from the previous storm and check my compass – yes, directly ahead is the steep rise of Dolebury Warren. Two girls appear, one on the inevitable horse, t’other on a mountain bike. ‘Nice horse,’ I say. ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Blue,’ the one on the horse says, ‘he’s actually a blue roan – well, actually his name’s Bluebell.’ ‘Bluebell,’ I say, and the horse pricks up his ears and nuzzles me. No problem with wrongly-shaped rucksac-bearing proto-humans here, it seems.

I shortcut straight up the Warren, emerging out of the dank, green heaviness of trees and water to springy wild-flower speckled karst uplands. The valley weaves away below me, off down to the A38, Churchill, Bristol, the rest of the world. The complicated twistedness of the valley follows the natural way, mirrors life – why do humans not?

LOWER THE TONY

START BLOG

Bear with me (do you have a bear with you?). Due to technical FUBARs I have no Internet access on my home computer till the teccies fix it so I’m down the road at Ye Olde Internet Cafe to at least get some stuff up in the meantime. This was not the way it was meant 2B! (or 3C?)(UR42N8!). So, no jazzy bits in the sidebars just yet. Sorry!

This is the blog of my ‘Walls Have Ears’ Mendip Lifelines 8-day ramble. The whys, wherefores and wotsits are all on the ‘Lifelines’ website at http://www.mendiplifelines.org.uk/, so I won’t repeat them here

LOWER THE TONY

Tuesday 26^th June 2007. Evening. The usual panic. Hasn’t helped that Radio Bristol wanted ‘a one-minute poem on Bristol and the legacy of Tony Blair’ for their morning show on the morning I was supposed to be bussing out to Winscombe, 27 June 2007, Tony Blair’s ‘bowing-out’ day as Prime Minister.

‘Are you paying?’ I asked. ‘No,’ they said, ‘doesn’t have to be anything too good, just the references to Bristol … Carol Chaplain and Euan Blair and so on’. I think, ‘what do they mean, doesn’t have to be anything too good’?‘All my poetry is good,’ I say. ‘We know,’ they say, ‘we just meant you shouldn’t put too much effort in. Oh by the way’, they continue, ‘nothing too serious.’ Right-ho - 10 years of The Reverend Tone condensed into one minute and ‘not serious’. Perhaps I should bow out along with Tone.

But of course I agree. I like challenges. I spend the whole evening writing a one-minute – well, it turns out nearer two-minute - ‘effortless’ poem rather than packing for the Mendips, rush up to Whiteladies Road the next morning to deliver it live.

This is the life of the poet, the life of the artist, you can’t resist creative bones to gnaw on. And it does help ‘get your name around’ even if there’s no dosh in it. It does have the effect, though, that I am forced into ‘rhyming mode’. A ‘non-serious’ one minute poem which has to come over to someone busy in the kitchen trying to make their sarnies for work whilst listening to the radio with half an ear has to grab them immediately ie it has to have something repetitive about it ie it has to rhyme. So even after I’ve delivered the poem everything anyone says to me immediately sets off the rhyming voice in my head. ‘Road’? ‘Toad’. ‘Sarny’, um … ‘calmy?’ ‘No …barmy?’. ‘Bus?’ ‘Fuss!’

The poem? It started something like this:

George W. get yer smokin' gun
YEHAH! Tony get yer pistol
Cherie get yer lifestyle guru
In Ye Ancient Port of Bristol

- and gallivanted around in similar vein (with refrain) for the next 8 verses.

Still, I’m supposed to be talking Mendip and not Bristol & The Blairs. Anyway, that’s the reason I missed the bus I said I’d get – it’s all the (ex) Prime Minster’s fault (like most other things wrong with this country, I can hear you say…). I almost ran to the bus-station … to be told the internet timetable for Service 121 to Weston Super Mare I’d looked up was ‘invalid’ (means plain old ‘wrong!’), so that rather than the 5 minutes I thought I had, if I was lucky, I now had 40. Perspiring heavily I wended my way to Broadmead M&S to purchase some vests (two for £9.95, if you’re interested. Tony’s fault, too – I was in such a hurry I forgot to take any vests), tottered back to the bus-station and eventually caught the 13.42 bus out.

The 121 did a minuet with the central theme of the A38 round bits of the county of whose names I’m unsure; called into Bristol Airport to see EasyJet; negotiated windy, stone-bound lanes scattered with houses with BMW X5s parked up outside (I nodded off); and drew up near the Co-Op in Winscombe.

‘You get off here.’ Said the helpful lady in front of me. The ITV TV crew were waiting for me, so, unfortunately, rather than me finding a nice hedge for a snooze, they wanted to document The Bard setting off into the Setting Sun. I went into the pub to change into my ‘Lifelines’ T-shirt and duly set off, introducing myself (gently, I hope) to people I met on the street, telling them what I was doing and giving them the pre-paid postage cards for possible thoughts and messages on the Mendips. Up the lane, turn left into the playing fields, talk to group of very nice kids. It starts raining (again) so I hole up in a bus-shelter till it stops, then cross the A-whadyamacallit (again), wend my way around Sidcot School and, winding up a narrow lane with a wrought-iron arch embedded in a fantastical stone wall next to me saying, ‘The Gift of George Thomas of Bristol 1869 feel, for the first time, a Mendipsical feeling slowly coming over me.

“Where does the path to Shipham go?” I ask a pale, loitering schoolfellow. “Up that drive and over the fields,” he says politely. Over the hills and far away… it is, of course, not too far from Winscombe to Shipham. In fact, they are very near. A field or two, some nice houses or three – one looks abandoned, a large creamy house set into a slope, I seem to recall a water feature with a water-pipe coming out of a Neptune-ish face, perhaps. For the next two fields I entertain the fantasy that, just as I was passing, someone comes out and says, “nice house, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I’d reply. “Would you like it?” – has to be the next line. “Yes, please!” “Goody-oh – here’s the keys!”

Once in a previous life I had a job teaching English to foreigners in a language school just off Oxford Street in London. One of my students was from The Gambia. I got friendly with Mohammed and invited him to come with me on an English country walk. “Those cows,” he asked, “are they allowed to go anywhere they want?” “Does that land belong to anyone? In my country, if I want to go and live somewhere, I go and ask the chief. If he agrees, we all help each other to build a house on the land.” He was obviously struggling with the concept of ‘private ownership’. You know, all these things we take for granted – we make them all up, every one of them. What was that great line in Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s graphic novel, Stardust? ‘Everything I ever thought about myself, who I was, what I am, was a lie. Or sort of. You have no idea how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ ‘…how astonishingly liberating that feels.’ Is it, ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘I am what I think?’ Why do we think what we think? Who taught us to do it?

I leave the A38 behind in a hollow, wind round some cottages, through a dog-walking field and emerge right outside the Penscot Inn in Shipham.