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?