I could insert this bit as a header, I think they are called, but it isn't important enough to annoy you with on every page so I will continue to write as if this was a book running in one direction while fully aware that is a blog running in the other. The sequence isn't really that relevant as the closest literary analogy is not Cobbett's “Rural Rides”, though I have nicked the title, some of the rage and the topic, the closest analogy is Hunter S Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with the obvious difference that instead of a 300lb Samoan Attorney for company, I set off with a 500lb pony called Obama whose breed I refuse to discuss on the grounds that concentrating on such details is racist.
And the vehicle isn't a "fireapple red convertible" but a Saddlechariot and trailer tent of my own eccentric design.
But being me, I am contemplating taking the angle grinder to the trailer tent and seeing just how much weight I can lose. Current weight, 110kg target weight 50kg.
But before we get into technical vehicle details, and ignoring for the moment "Fear and Loathing" let's get back to Cobbett. And I am heading back with Obama to Brecon's brilliant secondhand bookshop to pick up another copy of "Rural Rides. My first secondhand paperback copy has only done about 100 miles and its back is broken, and shedding pages fast. While I can quote "Fear and Loathing" from memory, I have only just started reading Cobbett and need to go back to the book to get the quotes something approaching right.
Cobbett rode through southern England between 1820 and 1830 commenting on the crops as a farmer, on the soil and the rocks beneath as a farmer and a traveller, on the rookeries because he liked them, on the churches because he despised their senior management while remaining a good Protestant whose support for Catholicism has opened my eyes to its virtues, but on the people, he commented because he cared. He had served time in the army supporting his country, and in prison supporting the people of his country, and in parliament doing the same.
His comments on politics and placemen, City gambling and feathering one's own nest, would fit today's newspapers without editing and would slide past unobserved as totally accurate, totally modern, but his concern for the rural population is out of date.
I have been out and I have looked. It's too late, they are extinct.
Go out into the country, and find the rural population. Cave dwellers in their houses stuff the villages and the roads are full of mobile, highly mobile, caves which whistle through lanes like moles which travel their tunnels hoovering up the worms that have got in and found there is no way out of the moleskin polished floor and sides of the tunnels.
Obama and I have got as far as Symonds Yat, only 40 or so miles as the crow flies, and day after day, (you forget that out of your highly mobile and seriously lethal mobile caves, that from Brecon to Symonds Yat is 6 days travelling) I notice the total lack of people in the country. Parliament debates the right to roam, they should make it compulsory. Before anyone starts any nonsense about the impact of walkers and cyclists and riders and horsedrawn vehicles, get out there and look. I will stand by my statement that the majority of the people I saw outside their houses or cars or narrowboats in the rural areas between Brecon and Symonds Yat, were Polish (I guess, I thought I was hearing a welsh community at first, but I don't think the Welsh community relies on gangmasters to keep them working, and i say Polish because I can't spell half the eastern european countries) asparagus pickers, and they were all in one field. That is over 50% of the total outdoor human population of the 100 square miles at the least, that I must have looked over as Obama and I amble our leisurely way.
It is one of the strangest sights of the trip, an eight row asparagus harvester, with crazy all wheel steering, a driver and a couple of overseers wandering round on the 8 row platform, and below the platform harvesting arms, that move with human grace and skill cutting the asparagus. Then you realise that under the platform are pods to hold a man lying prone per row and the arms are human. Mechanised man is with us. An 8 man Cyborg crawling across the face of England to supply luxuries to the rich, and the labels will say English grown, and the diners will sit back in their luxury and think they are supporting English farming and English farming communities. (This isn't a rant about immigrant labour, the friendliest greeting I got in Brecon was from a charming Taxi driver whose name is unpronounceable and that is by Welsh standards, and I will dig out his photo with Obama in the very first week of his training and put it up. I welcome ANY human being in the English countryside without any sort of concern over minor details like nationality.)
But at least these pickers are outdoors, they are the people in a landscape without figures. I stopped to photograph them, not because they were Polish, or because they were asparagus pickers, but because they were people, and in the English countryside people are sufficiently weird you stop, take the vehicle off the pony, dig around in your trailer for the camera and photograph them in driving rain because “Wow! There are people!”
This is a desert island and in Cobbetts day it wasn't, but he warned us, he said what was happening and although we were taught about him at school, I didn't read him.
Now I am reading and re reading, to see where we went wrong.
Cobbett commented on people and he commented on rookeries. In my 100 miles of rambling from Brecon to Libanus one way and to Symonds Yat the other I have only seen 4 rookeries. We have driven the rooks from our countryside which destroys one of the sights and sounds of England, the rooks coming home to roost against an evening sky. When Cobbett rode across Englandd he commented endlessly on the people he saw, the people he talked to, the people he saw all around.
Today he would rage at what has been done to the rural population he loved, who worked the land, and understood it, understood the soil and the crops and the weather, who put their own food on their own tables, though that was already dying as the Great Wen sucked the lifeblood of rural England.
Today he would see what he prophesied in full flower. A desert island. It is deserted. If you don't believe me, come and walk with me and Obama.
But all is not gloom and desperation. There are little pockets of life. With any desert when you sit quietly and contemplate the emptiness and the sterile beauty, signs of life appear.
Unless I get distracted by Obama's horrid habits, I will return to this and tell you about the hidden pockets of rural life, and where to find them, and join them, and help them grow, and maybe the rooks will come back too. I'll even tell you where my favourite rookery, under the Wellingtonia is located, but of course since this is a blog and you are reading in the opposite direction to my writing, you haven't reached that bit yet.
This is rather fun, if I am writing in one direction, and you are reading in the other do we meet in the middle or get further and further away from each other?
No comments:
Post a Comment