A Very Flashy Christmas from Brassington

We had a homesick moment earlier this week - a sudden urge to sip gluhwein beneath the benign gaze of Albert Square's Father Christmas, and to listen to the song of the Christmas Market reindeer. Of course we told ourselves that it'd be too crowded to move and that we've seen it all before anyway - loads of times, year after year: sparkly lights, pre-fab chalets, wooden toys - but you know, we weren't convinced. Sometimes you just want to eat a big sausage in the freezing rain and buy more stuff you don't really need.  It's not just the market we were homesick for, of course, but for ourselves as city people. Bone-deep, mind-forged Manc identities can't be unmade just by moving house.


But then the next day it snowed and when it stopped we went walking along the High Peak trail. It was one of those perfect winter days: the sky as blue as summer, the fields ice green, the brilliant, sparkly air.

It's tempting to make this into a simple feel-good story . .  we were homesick for the city, for its crowds and culture, for those well-known Lancashire delicacies: gluhwein and bratworst . . . but then were comforted, diverted, healed by nature. It's an old story - Wordsworth and the Romantics are partly to blame - but it's not quite true.  We loved the snow but sometimes you just need bad wine and tacky trinketry.  

So . . I went home and made gluhwein which Him outdoors said wasn't a patch on the reindeer's but he drank most of it anyway. And, anyway, this village has got its very own very dynamic light show at the gateway into the churchyard:    

A Very Happy Flashy Christmas to you all!

Where are we?

The Cottage we've moved into is called . . . wait for it . . . The Cottage - as are two other cottages within the same postcode and a few more in the wider village. The post person told me wearily that this was common -there are lots of cottages just called The Cottage, as well as plenty of barns called The Barn and the only way she/he can work out what belongs to who is by learning everybody's name. Which is nice. It took a week or two but now the GPO knows who we are which means that, as well as cards and letters we now also receive our rightful daily bin load of bills, adverts, free papers etc.

However, getting other deliveries is proving far more challenging - and Christmas by internet has only made it worse.  The people from Citylink, ParcelForce, DPD etc neither know nor care what our names are as long as they get rid. It's all been very exciting - one parcel was delivered to a coal bunker from where I skulkingly retrieved it - the neighbours probably think we're coal thieves - (what else can you expect from Manchester people?)

I've also managed to intercept a few deliveries by lurking about on the lane and flagging down men in vans. Could be misinterpreted. But today it's all gone wrong and my Amazon package has been posted through one of the other The Cottage's  letter boxes - the one that's a holiday cottage. I can see it lying in their porch in full view: desirable and unobtainable. Hope they visit soon.

The thing is - it's a tad frustrating but it's also puzzling: this has been going on for years and years - why didn't the previous owner or one of the other owners simply change the name to something, well, different? Answers on a postcard please. Perhaps in the olden days it was considered a bit fancy to give cottages names, after all everybody knew who lived where. This still works - neighbours, when describing where somebody else lives, often don't give the house name but the location - e.g. they live in the house on the corner next to the one with the red door.  It's still a little bit eighteenth century here. Except for all the delivery vans buzzing about, of course.And the internet that brought them here.

We do plan to change the name as soon as possible but we haven't thought of one yet. Joke suggestions so far from people who call themselves friends have been: Sixty Percent (because the balance between moving here and staying in Manchester was  60/40) - don't think that would go down well in the village, and it doesn't have much of a ring; Dunrunnin' was another - which doesn't deserve comment.

Ideas welcome - the winner gets a free lunch. If they can find us. 

                                                                         
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Rayburn demands recount!

In the last post, I said that, frighteningly, we had already used one whole tankful of oil and the Rayburn was to blame. I was wrong. Technically it wasn't me who was wrong but as I don't want to embarrass him I won't name names except to say that his name begins with R.  The gauge wasn't working - you're supposed to check it with a stick said the oilman (back to the eighteenth century) . . . and it turned out to be only a quarter empty. Phew!  Sorry Rayburn. Still getting rid of you though. You may make nice soups and cakes and perfect oven chips but you are going.
Definitely. Don't try and get round me.
 





(Cottage photos taken with telephoto lens by mancinbrassington, paparazzi)

First Snowfall - Second fill-up of the Oil Tank.

                                          

Snow! Oh sh . . winter's here, we haven't got a freezer yet, the dining room's a glass box and the path down to the lane is as lethal as the Cresta run - only lumpier. 

 

I keep telling myself that I ought to be nervous, that I'm about to find out why certain friends who shall not be named but who know who they are, implied that we were/are/would soon find out/ that we're mad . . . (they meant too old) . . . to leave the safe, cosy city and begin teetering down bad paths, messing with house extensions, stone cottages and being 3 miles from a shop, when we should be thinking about bungalows, slippers and cardigans. (They didn't say that last bit . . . but you get the gist) They may well be right - but you know being too safe and comfortable may not be all it's cracked up to be as a way to face ageing and mortality. Many of our friends - again you know who you are - have chosen some unsafe routes through life - extreme sports, risky jobs, working in the public sector, radical relationships, beings artists, writers, feminists. What's a dodgy path and a bit of snow compared with that. We all die in the end. There's no escape from that. I just don't want to escape life.

Our friend Jo, sent us a 'Welcome to your new home' banner she'd made which spells out Reasons to be Cheerful.  

 See Jo's work at http://www.joannamartinartist.blogspot.com/






 

The main reason to be cheerful is that the snow is beautiful, thrilling, exciting. Up on the hill today felt like walking through that famous Bruegel painting, Hunters in the Snow -  crossing the fields between black trees and hedges, squeezing through narrow stone stiles, stopping at the top to watch snow falling in great sweeps over the valley below. Darkness and light.

Another reason for cheerfulness is our wood stove - easy to light, super efficient and just what the heart and the cockles need on a day like this. Gives Him outdoors lots of wood chopping opportunities too - I can chop kindling perfectly well if I can get my hands on the axe, but this kind of country and weather brings out both his inner scout  and his inner Frenchman so it's hard to get a look-in. 

But it is very cold and as it gets colder, we are going through a frightening amount of fuel. The cottage has a Rayburn for cooking and central heating and it a serious binge oil drinker.  Living in the presence of this stove you can imagine that you've gone all Downton Abbeyish - maybe with a pheasant (or possibly  a peasant?) hanging from a hook over the kitchen range.  I can hear all you lefty-liberals snorting with derision at my class-traitordom but don't you ever have dreams of a new batch of bread baking in the top oven while a haunch of venison roasts in the bottom, wood smoke in the chimney, the sheep's in the meadow and all right with the world. But yes, I know, such a life never existed and anyway the likes of me, Wythenshawe girl, would have been blackleading the grate while the lady of the house used my back as a footstool. 

Anyway, fantasies aside, the Rayburn is no olde-worlde
kitchen range but a high tec piece of kit which probably cost a fortune to the previous owner, just as it will cost us if we let it, as well as being not so much environmentally unfriendly as environmentally antagonistic. It definitely has to go and be replaced with a less romantic but efficient condensing boiler and electric stove.


Anybody want a second hand dream machine that burns money?

Writing on Air

The trees have lost nearly all their leaves, and so you can see more and farther now: the slopes and angles of hills, the rocks emerging. Now that the Sycamore has lost its leaves, I can see through my window, for the first time, a small steep field high up on the opposite side of the valley bounded by tangled hawthorn and a dark ravine, sheep teetering confidently around its terraced edges. The grass is still green, the birds are still piping and trilling, but gradually everything is fading to black, white, gray. There's a seriousness in the air today, the first touch of frost, fifteen hours of darkness already. Honeymoon's over. No more romantic dreaming. Now we have to learn to really love it here - or not.


I walked along the lane today and passed a field with a tree full of crows - scores of them flying up and around the top branches, landing and taking off again, cawing and flapping.  In the same field, below them, more sheep, heavy and solid, munching steadily away. I was struck by the contrast: trees and crows all sharpness and noise:  twigs, claws, beaks rattling and clattering; the quiet  slow sheep, lambs growing in their bellies.



Something about this scene, that moment walking, catches a mood, a tone, that begins to explain (at least to me) why I've come here, what I think I'm doing in this place. As I was walking I was thinking about writing this blog post - how I would put down here exactly what I felt, tell you what I saw - not just the tree and crows and sheep, but that other thing that I understood  . . .  knew . . . but here I struggle to find the words, language fails me and I have to stop and call on a better writer. Virginia Woolf called these experiences Moments of Being - a moment when you are fully conscious, when you catch a glimpse of your connection to a larger pattern, a hidden reality behind the opaque, cotton-wool surfaces of everyday life. I'm not really religious in any conventional sense apart from a few excursions into meditation, I haven't been able to believe in anything god-like or heaven-like since my twenties, and I'm fairly sure that when you die the lights go off  and that's all folks.  But the tree and the crows and the sheep, the sharpening edges of hills as winter comes closer, all speak another language to me: a language as ordinary and simple as daylight, the strange language of being alive.

Of course, such moments happen in cities too, even in Manchester where pragmatism, plain speaking and down-to-earthness are the principal exports. There are trees and crows in cities, although probably not many sheep. It just got harder and harder for me to remember. Maybe it's something to do with the wide sky or the newness, the loneliness, being a stranger in a strange land. If so, the more I embed myself in this place, the more it becomes familiar, ordinary, then such moments will disappear and I'll forget again. Maybe.


One more thing about the tree and the crows. Every morning I can, between 9ish  and 12ish, I try to sit down here and write. I'm working on two projects: beginning a long-planned non-fiction (book/blog/website?) about Manchester itself; and a novel, also set, partly in Manchester. I also write this blog (so far, a lot of it about not being in Manchester - bit of an obsessive theme developing here, n'est-ce-pas?). Very few people ever see even a tiny amount of what I write and have written - I'm not complaining, much of it isn't ready to be inflicted on the world. I just keep on doing it, writing myself, this world I know, into time and space before it all goes, before I go.  But here's the thing (as Siobhan Sharpe (aka Jessica Hynes) says in Twenty Twelve): All this writing is somewhere now, not just the small amount of published stuff, but all the rest. Stored in some half eternal cybercloud or something, somewhere, nowhere. It's like speaking to the wind, like writing on air.    

The bare tree branches silhouetted. Dark twigs are pens, pencils, charcoal scratching. The crows are letters, black words. An unreadable, untranslateable language written on sky.   

Running for the hills

Ok, so we've actually done it: defected, decamped, finally unstuck our city shoes, detached our city hearts - not without tears of course - and pinned them here in Brassington.

But why this particular village? What's it got that Manchester hasn't got?

The first and most obvious feature is that it's not flat. It's got hills and at this very moment I'm looking through my window at a genuine hill.  Manchester (the south anyway) has many things but you have to admit that it is flat. Maybe there's the odd slight incline here and there, plus a few landscaped heaps created when they built the motorways - but otherwise it's horizontal - although please feel free to put me right if you know of a genuine hill within the city boundary.

I think I like hills: I certainly like looking at them; I like the wider, farther perspective you get when you reach the top; I quite like going down them but I'm not so keen on climbing up them, particularly if the slopes are steep and edgy. Fortunately the hills round Brassington are kind and gentle grassy summits, with many walking trails contouring around the lower slopes, slipping beneath cliffs and through the lower passes. This was once a big mining area so probably many of the routes were workers' tracks, paths of least resistance. Who wants to go over the top when you've got a long hard shift ahead of you? 

 As well as the big hills, there are lots of small ones: tiny mounds and hollows all around the village, traces of the old mine workings.  There is evidence of lead mining in Roman times continuing through the centuries until it declined in the nineteenth century.  According to a local history there were still forty-three miners in 1851 but only sixteen in 1881, and the industry had effectively disappeared by the end of the century. 

See A History of Brassington  by Ron Slack for more details. 

A large part of the village is set into the side of a hill which means that the roads and lanes, the houses and gardens are all up and down too, higgledy piggledy, and hugger mugger.  Ominously, there are council containers for salt and grit around every other bend. 

Our house is particularly horizontally challenged, the garden all uppy and downy, no flatness anywhere, the field behind us almost as high as the roof, its great bulk only stopped from slipping down over us by an old stone wall. The path from the road, through our gate and up to our door is a nightmare slope, that will almost certainly become unnegotiable by the faint-hearted (me) if there's even a hint of ice.   

'You must be mad.' a friend said. 

I do wonder. Today I bought a snow shovel and three bags of salt. 

Walking weather

It rained for 2 days and 2 nights. Then on the third day the sun rose over the ridge of the eastern hill at 8.15am and stayed out all day.  We were told before we came that this area is in some kind of micro climate - lots of sunshine, but I have to be honest here and say I thought they were probably living with self-delusion - the kind of over optimistic weather lore that bed and breakfast owners in the Lake District demonstrate when the rain is teaming down outside and they're telling you that it was beautiful a few hours before you arrived. 

But I think I may have been invaded by the same delusion. It has been sunny a lot. And warm. The grass is still green and growing, there are a few insects - even the odd butterfly last week.  Walking weather. 

This is part of what we came for - to be able to walk from the door without having to face the A6 or the M6. A longer view, a wider perspective. And here it is. We walked yesterday over the hill to have a cup of tea with R's sister who lives in the next village. The photograph above is Brassington seen from the path and the one below is of Carsington Water on the other side of the hill.  As we walk and explore, it feels even more rich in potential for walking and being outside than we had imagined.

There are animals all around. Cows, sheep, horses. The smell of horse dung and cow pats. Cows mooing loudly, tiny calves in the field. Noisy birds everywhere, yesterday a squawking crow harassing a miaowing buzzard, the two of them falling and soaring under the blue blue sky, like fighting planes in an old war film.

And it isn't only the birds. This may be a country village but it isn't quiet. More rush hour traffic noise outside from the yellow road than we had expected. A happy birthday party in the village hall - which is about forty metres from our back door. Couldn't quite catch the tune - 1970s golden oldies. David Cassidy or Bowie maybe. Made me feel quite at home. Then there are the two pubs. Plenty of sounds there. More on this later. 

The neighbours continue to exceed our expectations of friendliness and kindness. When I did the classic just- moved-into-a-new-house trick of locking us out - something boiling dry on the erratic and incomprehensible Rayburn hotplate, threatening to burn the 200 year old house down - a very nice man helped us jemmy the door open with a crow bar. We've had invitations for a drink and meal already . . . plus there's an auction of promises thingy on at the village hall. Looks like my idea of a quieter life may have to be revised.  

Moving Out/Moving In

Hard to find a way to write about being here and what this move from city suburb to rural village is all about, why we’ve done it and how we can make it work. On the day we moved, the sun sneakily came out and shone pointedly down onto Devonshire Road, Chorlton, Manchester, making everything - even the graffiti - glow as if blessed by the saint of cities. (Saint Urban maybe?)

    



I drove, which was just as well, as R was homesick already for the Metrolink, the A5013 to the airport, the M60 to the Stockport B and Q, and strangely even for the Tile Solutions emporium; the car dealerships; the boarded up pubs and fifth-hand furniture shops and for all the rest of the clutter and muddle along the A6. Even the eternal roadworks and ram-jammed traffic in Hazel Grove took on a sweet nostalgic gleam. In Buxton, the weather turned spiteful: sideways rain and a gale blowing up.

The move went as house moves go - too much stuff, boxes piled to the ceiling, the important things you really need at the bottom of the pile; tiredness, fear, excitement, getting the kettle on and finding the biscuits. There were added complications:  the removal van not being able to get out of the lane to our house until one of our neighbours drove to Ashbourne, six miles away to get a set of car keys. Don’t ask. Also we’ve downsized but nobody seems to have told our stuff yet. Our sofa bed wouldn’t fit through the door to the sitting room. ‘No-way, never,’ said Gary the removal man, ‘it’s them thick stone walls, not in a million.’ So now it’s in the conservatory waiting for somebody to decide what to do with it. 





The neighbours were lovely. Kind and helpful: the one who went for the car-keys, our next door neighbours on both sides bringing us cake, a card, a photograph of our house as it was, invitations and introductions. Although we didn’t feel at home, they made us feel as though one day we might.

 

When the removal van had inched its way back to the main road and the kind neighbours had left us alone in the fading daylight we stood in the garden and looked out over the village at the view of the hill. The weather was Mancunian:  thick-bellied clouds rolling in from the west, rain sluicing down, visibility low.
You don’t get away that easily, said the city inside me.  

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