On the move again - Brassington celebrates!

The builders are coming in next week so we're packing stuff in boxes again and getting ready for an onslaught of dust and disruption. We're going walkabout some of the time - holidays, camping out at friends and family, as well as coming back to look after the garden and oversee the work - so look out, we may land on your doorstep with suitcases and sob stories anytime soon! 

In the meantime the sun has come out and the village is celebrating. It's Brassington Wakes Week and it kicked off this weekend with a jumble sale trail, a brass band, plenty of drink taken, and an open air talk from a vicar about icons, which I misheard as acorns for a minute or two. He asked some of the people standing in front of the pub to name their icons/heroes which turned up an odd bunch: Elvis figured strongly, followed by Paul McCartney and, my favourite, in a limited field, Isaac Newton. I wandered off to take photographs and lost the plot a bit with the icon thing, although later I did begin to wonder who I'd have said if I'd been nobbled by the vicar. It would have to be a woman - if only to counter the male-only list provided so far: Germaine Greer, maybe. Mad as a box of frogs but smart and brave. Carol Ann Duffy. Jackie Kay. Doris Lessing. Virginia Woolf. Jessica Hynes. Many of my brilliant friends . . . on and on and on.  

The band was great - best when we were back in our garden with a glass of wine. 

Another of the week's events is a scarecrow competition which has a frighteningly high standard. This year's theme is . . . wait for it . . . yes you guessed . . . the Olympics! Some of them are really art installations which wouldn't look out of place in the Tate Modern. I've posted shots of a few below.

By the time the building work is finished, we'll have been here for a year but I won't be able to keep up the blog while it's going on so I've decided to sign off for three months. Back in the Autumn for a final sign-off, but in the meantime, two things I need to bring up to date. We finally decided to call the house Jackdaw Cottage in honour of the birds which 'chack chack' around us all day. And the raised beds, which we built in spring are now in full and magnificent production.  Slowly, slowly, this place changes us.    

 

 

Colourful World

In the few gaps between rain, clouds and a cold east wind, I've been out taking pictures. I'm doing a Digital Photography course with the Open University at the moment which has resulted in many of my photographs taking a turn for the worse as I try to work out the best exposure, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, depth of field etc, all by myself. This seemed like a good idea at the time but as, humiliatingly, the camera takes better pictures without the benefit of my interference, it may yet prove to a brief experiment before I slink back to auto mode, tripod between my legs.                                                    

The latest section of the course is all about colour: contrast, hue, saturation, variation.  The spring rains and a few rare sunny summer days have brought out the wild flowers around the village in magnificent abundance.  I've heard people raving about flowers in France and done a bit of raving myself but I've never seen such richness as in the fields and roadsides around Brassington and the Derbyshire Dales. 

 Sheep and cattle browse and doze amongst swathes of celandine, buttercup, speedwell, even orchids. Which brings me to another aspect of colour that only began to dawn on me as I wandered about the place looking for examples of the above-mentioned contrast, variation etc. The animals are all different colours! I may be wrong about this, city bumpkin that I am, but many of them seem to be bred, mixed and mingled for variation. White sheep have black lambs and vice versa. Brown cows have black calves, and this well-tackled bull is the only white beast in a field of black, brown and patch-coloured cows and calves.

In case you're wondering, this photograph of the bull was taken from a safe distance with the zoom lens, although he can barely rouse enough energy to turn his head when anybody passes so he's possibly had some of his masculinity docked or clipped or gelded or something. Possibly he's been displaced by artificial insemination and put out to grass - a future once promised to human males by a particularly militant feminist tendency - watch out chaps.  Whatever, I'll continue to give him a respectfully wide berth.

This variation in animal colouring may be obvious to people who know about farming but as living in a city doesn't throw up many opportunities for hob-knobbing with stock-breeding experts my ignorance is profound about the whys and wherefores although I can probably have a good stab at the hows. I wonder if the cattle and sheep notice skin colour, foreignness, difference?


The sun also brought out multi-coloured peletons of cyclists. It's the men who really go for it, I've noticed. No inhibitions among these chaps about colour co-ordination or the revealing qualities of Lycra.

Cycling gear seems to bring out their inner exhibitionist. Here's one who couldn't quite make it up the hill to Longcliffe but who's flashing a nice pair of calves.  

 

I was away in London over the Jubilee weekend and so missed the Brassington village celebrations but went to a wet and cheerful street event in Walthamstow. Lots of lovely colours there too.  I didn't see the Queen or the Thames but I did see a Jubilee tug of war and ate falafels, kebabs and gingerbread men. It felt like a very British day out which wouldn't have been the same without the rain. 

 

Coming back to the garden, the grass is a foot high and in our new raised beds, beans and courgettes and lettuces are growing fast.  Beautiful green!

Slow Walls and Sailing Beds

We're moving on with work on the house, garden and outhouses. When I say we, I have to be honest and say that the bulk of the real work has been done by Him Outdoors and Sandy, a local gardener from Wirksworth, recommended by a neighbour, who has weeded, pruned, shovelled horse manure like a racing demon, which it turns out she is, being a super-fit runner with huge reserves of energy and enthusiasm and we feel fortunate to have found her. We've been working (royal 'we' as above) on the lower flatter part of the garden, where we plan to grow fruit and vegetables.

H.O. has finished pointing the outhouse wall - he may be slow (his dad used to say he only had two speeds, slow and stop) but he does get a job done in the end. I'm afraid I'm a botcher and motcher as far as d.i.y. is concerned, all thumbs and hasty. More haste less speed, Heather, my mum used to say, rule number one - if a job's worth doing it's worth doing well. Sorry mum, should have listened to you. Still, rule number two, find a man/woman who can.

The wall looks beautiful.  

Sandy and R have spent the last week building raised beds out of sleepers.  This slow and fast business also turned out to be an interesting aspect of their methods of working together. She is also extremely thorough and conscientious, but even she was displaced a notch or two on the 'if a job's worth doing' spectrum by Mr Perfectionist Himself. Getting the sleepers exactly right took lots of gnashing of spirit levels and incomprehensible discussions about countersinking of screws. I kept well out of it.  



Dealing with this 'flatter' part of the garden has turned out to be a lesson in relative values. As the raised beds were being built it became clear that it only looked flat in relation to the rest of the garden, plus the hills around and that it was actually so sloped the sleepers had to be embedded into the ground at one end, in order to get a level surface. It took a bit of getting used to but now I think they look great, like wooden ships sailing down the garden.

Next jobs - laying the chippings, putting cordon wires on the wall, planting a plum tree, apple and pear cordons, gooseberries and rhubarb in the side beds and vegetables in the raised beds. I mostly do the growing so it's my turn next to get my hands dirty. Watch this space.

Six Months in Brassington

We've been in Brassington for six months now and over breakfast this morning me and him outdoors had a chat about how this moving t'country lark is going so far. Here's some of the pluses and minuses that we came up with.


Day by day the sense of strangeness and alienation diminishes - we're becoming familiar, orientated, not just in a landscape, a village, but in relation to the services and resources that make living manageable. Post boxes, post offices, bus timetables, cycle routes, bin collections, banks, cash points, cake shop, paper deliveries. Library, hairdresser, car repairs, doctors, gym, garden centres, building supplies, etc etc.  When you live in the same place for a long time all this stuff becomes easier and also gives a shape, a framework to the area you live in, these regular routes and well-known places become part of who you are, personal traces and tracks, like animal scent marks, smelling of home, normality, self.  It's surprising how much of this you can find out and establish in six months in a new place and this helps us feel more grounded.

I don't miss the city - closed in-ness, pressure of people, traffic, air pollution, constant background noise, people knocking at the door all the time to sell you energy or cable services. Anyway I can go back anytime - in fact I must have been back at least twice a month for the last six months, seeing friends and having meetings. R still misses the sense of being a Manchester man, he misses his political involvement and colleagues and being involved in a big diverse northern city. I've told him I'm happy for him to go back and spend a few weeks or even months there if he fancies a change! But it's all still early days . . . check back in another six months. We both miss living in our friendly cul-de sac with lovely neighbours, being able to pop round for a walk, cup of tea or a pint, we particularly miss Friday night drinks and meals with close friends.


On the other hand we've seen most of them here. Lots of visitors, walking together, sharing this place, more time rather than lots of times.  And there are people here too, kind neighbours, friendly people. There are lots of things going on, some obvious, some under the surface, most of which we don't have a clue about and so we watch, wait and keep our incomer noses clean.

More minuses -
No shop.
More car use - this is not a carbon neutral place to live.
No mobile signal in the village.

We're moving on with practical changes to house and garden. We gained planning permission from the council last week to build an extension and garden workshop plus changes to the inside of the house. We've cut down two overgrown trees - Leylandii - which were dominating the garden and obscuring light and views. R did one, helped by our neighbour C,  and the other bigger one, was taken down with speed and efficiency by two local men.


A big plus for me - one that I've been surprised by - is the joy of having an open perspective, (improved by the tree cutting):  wide sky, hills, distance. Just standing at the window or in the garden, because we're quite high up you can see much of the village with its chimney pots and roofs, the fields around, trees, grass, sheep, lambs, cattle, and to the south and west, the layered landscape of the Derbyshire dales. Like most people, I like the idea of a 'view' but this doesn't fully explain why it's so compelling to see a long way, the eye drawn upwards and outwards to the farthest point, trees silhouetted on the lineof the hill, the horizon, buzzards circling in the air rising above the village. One perfect spring day with hot air balloons sailing over the rooftops.

More pluses -

Walking. Walking. Walking.
Hills and steep garden and paths - makes us fitter.
No car alarms. Birds that sound like car alarms. Real weather.
Wirksworth - nearest small town, liberal, arty, energetic. Cafes, shops, farmers market, transition town, Arts festival.  
The Derbyshire Eco Centre
Two good village pubs - The Miners Arms and The Gate.
Jackdaws and Rooks.
Broadband - not superfast but fast enough.


And now that it's spring, the social calendar is hotting up. Jubilee hat-making for the over 60s in the village hall. (What is a jubilee hat exactly? Is this a national thing? Or just Derbyshire? Are we all supposed to wear hats?) We're booked in for a quiz with bar in the village hall on Friday.  And there's a village planning meeting next week, an Open Gardens event in June and a Wakes Week with its very own Wicker Man in summer.  See Brassington Burns.   Look out all us incomers.

The Equinox - Darkness and Light

Today is the equinox, the only twenty four hours in the year when the whole world has equal day and night, light and darkness. A hinge, a tipping point.

Last Sunday we walked a circular route around Brassington - a few hours along almost deserted lanes and paths.There weren't many people or cars about and so I'm tempted to write that it was quiet and calm but actually it was full of energy and noise. There was a palpable sense of tension and anticipation - as if the whole world was pushing at the door that opens between winter and spring.  The weather matched the mood, beginning with snow - ice-green grass, sugar-dust roofs - but then the sun came out, the snow was gone and as we set off up Hillside Lane daffodils were opening in the sunshine.

Half way up the hill behind the village Him Outdoors begins to sweat and swear - too many layers: shirt, fleece, jacket - god I'm hot, it's bloody warm, that sun - so some of the energy and tension as we set off is generated by him and me exchanging views about whether it's too cold or too hot, and whether coats should be taken off or on. Sadly we fit the stereotypical couple profile in the temperature department - I'm rarely too hot whereas a bit of sweating for him is a nightmare that cannot be tolerated. So he has to stop and remove a layer which involves removing other layers and unpacking and re-packing the rucksack. I'm of the 'can't be bothered'  school of outdoor clothing. I put a lot on and leave it on. I might undo the odd zip occasionally but all that layering and packing and unpacking rucksack business seems like an unnecessary faff to me.

We walk down the bridle path between small fields full of heavily pregnant sheep, many of which have given up trying to find grass and are having a lie-down, not surprising with big, ready-to-be-born lambs churning about in their bellies. The grass has only just started growing and tractors have been carrying hay bales to the fields for weeks, the hungry sheep baa-ing loudly whenever they spot one. As most of my knowledge about farming comes from listening to the Archers and watching Springwatch, I'm extremely sketchy about how it all works. I guess the sheep are gathered together so the shepherds can keep an eye on them as they give birth and although it's a benign scene, I imagine there must be a lot of anxiety amongst the farmers right now - snow, grass-growth, viruses. But the sheep are calm, patiently waiting.

 As we carry on down the lane to Balidon, black clouds roll over the hills from the north. Two  horses, looking bizarrely like one eight-legged horse silhouetted against the sky, walk slowly along the brow of the hill.  The sun disappears and it's winter again. No snow, but cold, really cold. Even the horses have blankets on. I zip up. He gets his coat out of the rucksack again, I stand and wait and watch and we have the same exchange of views . . . about weather and coats and me having to hang around waiting . . . that we've been having for thirty odd years. The horses watch us for a while then disappear over the hill.

After a mile or two more, the sun comes out and we're hungry, so this time when he takes off his coat, it's to give me something soft and warm to sit on. He may be a faffer but he's a kind faffer. We hunker down in the lee of an old stone wall to eat our ham sandwiches and drink our coffee under a wide sky the fields and hills laid out before us like a gift. Another spring and here we still are after thirty odd years, together, alive, walking the hills, sitting in sunlight.

On the route back, in the road next to the Tarmac factory, the corpse of a dead hare, most of the flesh of its body eaten, the eyes pecked out, beetles and flies crawling in and out of its skin-stretched ribs, only the long ears still intact.

More fields full of fat ewes, crowded in, close to farmhouses and barns. But then, just as we climb up to join the High Peak Trail, I spot them, far over the other side of a field, near to the hedge. Five lambs. The first this year. March 18th.  



Back in Brassington, the lane leading up to our house, we walk under high trees with rooks hopping about the branches building nests, stealing twigs from each other's nests and caw-cawing loudly. Even birds bicker.    

How many chairs is enough?

Him outdoors makes furniture. Beautiful pieces with proper joints, no botching and no nails. He works slowly, far too slowly to ever make money at it even if he wanted to which he doesn't, but he says that to be slow and meticulous is a relief after a working life of rushing to meet deadlines with hardly ever enough time to fully see a job through. So he's made pieces for family, for friends and just at the moment he's making a dressing table for our daughter, hour after hour spent carefully shaping, cutting, joining, refining, in an attempt to finish it by what's beginning to look suspiciously like a deadline - her wedding in June.

I feel very lucky that Him outdoors has such skill and commitment. But there is a downside. I've discovered that fine furniture makers love to make chairs. Of course chairs are useful, necessary even, but you can have too many of them, particularly if you move from a house with biggish rooms into one with smaller and fewer  rooms.  We did get rid of some chairs, the old IKEA ones that we used to keep in the cellar, but we kept all the ones that Monsieur had made, obviously. You can't give away something somebody has spent months perfecting, can you? (Can you?)


Not only that, the other day when we were talking about what he might make when he'd finished the dressing-table, he mentioned a chair again. 'I like making chairs,' he said.


 It's a kind of obsession, a fetish, this chair business, not confined to my particular beloved, but apparently to many designers and makers, as well as people who study furniture, who write about furniture, its history and culture.

For example, there is a book - you may have seen it - called 1000 Chairs  and another called Fifty Chairs that Changed the World.  Excuse me for asking but how does a chair change the world? Seems a bit OTT to me but maybe I'd better read the book (not). Further to this, M'Lud, when we went on a short break to Vienna, turns out there's a chair museum - I kid you not - which consisted of rows and rows of hundreds, probably thousands of, well, chairs.  He went round it. Guess who didn't? This is a man who once hoped to oversee the fall of capitalism and now spends a considerable amount of his dwindling time examining chairs, many of which once supported the richly trousered and skirted bottoms of the Hapsburg Empire.

All this makes it hard to imagine that he will ever be willing to part with even one of his darlings. But you can have too much of a good thing. We're finding it difficult to move. 

I looked it up as you do - googled obsession with chairs - and sure enough, I found a world of chair fanatics out there: chair theories, chair philosophies, chair psychologies. “Why chairs?” writes David Byrne at Design Taxi  “Well, they have arms and legs and vaguely human scale and shape. They’re people—they hold you, support you, elevate you or humble you. They’re characters with lives and histories, aren’t they?” 

I look at this latest and most beautiful chair R made and do have to acknowledge that it has a presence, it holds out its arms to you, willing you to sit, to be comfortable. I could never let this one go.   

Writing - Not Writing

One of the ways I spend my time here is to come up to this room and write. On many mornings from 9ish to 12ish - not every day but many days  - I sit down at this table in front of the window, open the laptop or note book and . . .

. . . but it's really hard to talk about what I do here. Hard, these days, to think about writing, to face difficult thoughts and feelings about what I do and to share them with you, whoever you are. Far easier to look out of the window and watch the jackdaws arguing in the tree outside.These days this writing business is painful and to be honest, a lot of the time, I'd like to give it up. No more  sitting here alone struggling to make something out of nothing for hardly anybody to read. But then I think, if I didn't do this, who would I be? What else would I do? 



It's not that I'm bad at it. I can write a reasonable sentence, have a good vocabulary etc. etc. And words, stories, ideas, language, books - apart from  people, these are the things I've always loved best. And it's not that I haven't been published - nothing earth-shattering - but I've had quite a few stories and articles in magazines and books. I've won prizes, I taught writing for years and have edited and written books on writing, a second edition coming out next year . . . but still . . . 

It's not that I'm lazy - or that I don't actually write. I write lots - I've got notebooks and computer files stuffed full of stories, novel drafts, small and long articles, notes on writing, on life and the universe. Most of it never sees the light . . . and here I am again making more words - writing this - to myself, to you. It's hard to stop.

I feel like that character in a Samuel Beckett play who says I can't go on. I must go on . . .

In the tree outside the window the jackdaws have gone but there's a little flock of goldfinches flitting around the branches - beautiful busy little birds. See - I can do alliteration too. What more does a writer need?

For the past few months I've been writing this blog about being here in this village - the shock of the move, walking, countryside, weather, the flora and fauna which is all very well. There are only so many times you can write about fungi and sunshine, jackdaws and trees - unless you're a serious nature buff, which I'm not.

So I've decided, for at least some of the time, to write about what is at the centre of my life here - writing and not writing. There's this idea around that 'being creative/ being a writer/artist' is somehow rich and delightful. Quite a few people have often said to me how they'd love to do it themselves if only they didn't have to work at their job, do housework, look after their children. I used to think it myself, years ago, decades ago. But here I am now dreaming of a non-creative life - wishing I could just settle for simpler easier things, like baking a cake, planting a tree, watching the birds coming and going. 

I don't know yet whether this desire to stop is a negative, but temporary phase, a symptom of winter and some difficult family times. On the other hand it could be a healthy recognition of limits, a liberation. Maybe I just need the guts to call it a day and find more productive and pleasurable things to do with my precious and diminishing time. 

Not just a pretty face?

As you may now be sick of reading, Brassington is a beautiful Derbyshire village in a lovely setting. It sits with its back to the north, facing south and west. Most of the houses and walls are limestone and there are plenty of gardens and trees as well as the green hills to soften the edges. But it's not just pretty and it hasn't always been so clean and calm. The landscape around is littered with the signs of a very different kind of life and work. The last lead miners worked here right into the 19th century and there is evidence of continuous mining here from long before the Romans. The spoil heaps and stopped-up mine shafts - now mellowed by a grassy skin - are all over the fields and hillsides but beneath these soft green mounds the earth is honeycombed with climbing shafts, turns and galleries.  So, it's an unusual and fascinating landscape but beautiful today. Walking over it I try to imagine what it might have looked  like when the mining was in its heyday: the dangerous ground littered with hazards, waste everywhere, fires burning, smoke, lead polluting the land and water, men having to make a living from hard, dangerous work. Not beautiful at all.

The other 'non-pretty' aspect is that there are a number of quarries and factories close by, out of sight of our house and the village but still a crucial part of the area and its economy. When you move to the country from the city there's a natural tendency to want everything to be non-citified - but that's obviously a false division. After all, the country is full of city stuff - industrial products: cars, electricity, washing machines, computers, mobile phones (even if they don't work here!). And the city is full of 'country' stuff - milk, vegetables, wood, wheat, oats, etc (even if most come into the city in huge lorries, and some farming processes are as close to industrialised as dammit.) Most of us these days know this, we're sophisticated modern folk after all with few illusions, but still the dream of escape from one and into the other persists - either into the pastoral rural idyll - or into the sophisticated city full of art, culture and entertainment. Of course much of the escaping is one-way: from country to city.  Brassington village and the area around it had a much bigger population in the past served by shops and services, most of which no longer exist - in those days people worked in the area they lived. And many of the people who live here now are not 'natives' but incomers, either people who came here to work, retired people, or commuters to nearby towns. I was at a village social event and a local man said to me rather grumpily that there were lots of 'incomers' now and that everything had changed since his childhood. I had a pang of guilt for a moment - until I thought about Chorlton, full of incoming people, many of them from country places all over the world - probably plenty of Derbyshire escapees among them! And Chorlton, Manchester, most places in fact, have changed enormously since my childhood too. Modernity powers on. Is this a good or bad thing? Answers on postcard please. Whatever, it's probably unstoppable. Fair swap mate, I felt like saying to the grumpy bloke at the party, but didn't. Incomers better keep their mouths shut, for a time at least. 

There's another aspect to the industrial remains near Brassington, pointed out to me by a visiting artist friend, who opened my eyes to the richness and strange beauty to be seen if you just look properly.  Some of the objects left by older processes have the quality of monuments or sculptures. These four towers are just off the High Peak Trail and very close to us. The trail was once a railway and the structures may once have supported an aerial conveyor carrying quarried or mined materials. This convergence of colour, rock, stone, history, field and light is both lovely and poignant. 

Also next to the trail is a factory which processes and manufactures quarrying products and which is still in operation. This photograph shows the same short-lived light on  the side of the factory building. When my friend pointed it out I saw for the first time a complex beauty in these silver and gold corrugations overlaid by patterns of shadow.

Thinking about it now, maybe these images offer a hint to me of what I might need to learn, how I might learn to see  - beyond crude city/country oppositions - to make a life that can include both. 

Ageing Fast and Slow

I don't like the word retirement. It has connotations of quietness and  conclusion - things slowly coming to an end, a vague peacefulness descending, like soft snow settling onto a quiet landscape. It's a word that goes with slippers and firesides, with teapots and scones, a woman sitting beside a hearth, a book in her lap, thinking over her life - all the things she did, all she might have done.

It's an image of post-work and ageing that many of my generation understandably, often vehemently, reject. Many of the people I know, in their 50s and 60s, including Him Outdoors, are still running over mountains, cycling up Everest, trekking to the South Pole in bare feet as well as growing businesses, travelling the world, solar system, universe, while juggling grandchildren and finding the Higgs-Boson particle. ( I  exaggerate - but only a little.)



Of course it is good to refuse to lie down, to try out new things, to keep the body fit and set new challenges, but there's also be a hint of denial in all this speed and busyness. If yer keep dodging, the bullet won't git yer. And although I can't compete with that exhausting lot, I'm also trying to dodge my own bullet - blogging, studying on an Open University course, writing, moving from one of the flattest cities in the country to a hilly house in a hilly village in Derbyshire just at the age when some people think you should be pricing stair lifts.  Do not go gentle into the slipper-y slope of retirement, I tell myself . . . rage rage against the dying of the knee joints.


My main physical activity is walking - I go out lots of days either on my own or with him outdoors. It's supposed to be fast, aerobic- type walking, but recently it's slowed down a lot. This is mainly because of  the Open University course I'm doing - Neighbourhood Nature - which helps you to learn about aspects of the natural world in your neighbourhood - the clue's in the title. I also take photographs. So now the walks involve a lot of stopping, looking around, click clicking, starting again and then stopping again. Which is fine when I'm alone but when my nearest and dearest speed freak is with me, it causes some agitation. Last time we went out he was heard muttering to himself:  Is this a walk or a picnic? And if it's a picnic where's the bloody food?  

But this slowness has yielded up treasures - abundance, diversity, colour. I've added a small gallery here.

 
Who would have thought that these cold months could produce so many colours, and that stone walls, half dead trees, fields and skies could produce such rich abundance in winter light?

Yet nature isn't only slow. Earth, sun and moon, stars, comets, race around each other, the whole universe explodes, expands in all directions. These words and pictures have been almost instantly transformed into electronic signals. Light moves at 186,282 miles per second.

Still the body ages - fast and slow! So keep on running, trucking and trekking. But keep looking as well. 

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See more about the OU Neighbourhood Nature

See  Carl Honore speaking In praise of Slow 

And if you fancy a fast way to slow down try the One Minute Meditation   (Oh the irony!)