Earlier today the route of a new high-speed railway line was announced by Network Rail. The journey time from London to Scotland would be brought down to 2 hrs 16 mins.
Now at first sight this is a fantastic idea. We have good friends in Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool, so this would make them feel that little bit closer. I hate flying anyway, but we would also be less likely to drive. We'd let the train take the strain.
But then I had a little think. We keep focusing on high-speed links, don't we?
Beeching did the same, concentrated on the profitable main lines and cut the branch lines that fed them (I have no idea if this is true, it's just what I was always taught).
When are we going to see the next new meandering country branch line open?
Adlestrop
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Edward Thomas
According to Wikipedia (currently):
"The railway station closed in 1966, however the local bus shelter contains a bench which was originally on the platform. A plaque on the bench quotes Thomas’s original poem which describes an uneventful journey Thomas took on June 23 1914 on an Oxford to Worcester express. He did not alight from the train but his poem has immortalised the village throughout the English-speaking world ever since."
I know that from one point of view this is a pseudo-romantic evocation of a fantasy world that never existed. But it does also serve to remind us how much we have thrown away. As does The New Adlestrop - a smashing map.
And of course there is:
All of which is just meant to be a reminder that speed isn't everything, and sometimes other aspects of the way we travel may be more important than the fact that we arrive quickly.
So, let's start the campaign to rebuild and re-open Adlestrop station and all of those other places... Then you can have your high-speed line...
End of very mild rant.
In any case, they probably won't build it. 2020 as the best estimate for the first bit? A Government review also in hand? Helpful to the environment? Huge capital sums required? I don't think so.
Oh well, I was getting quite used to the idea.
(While looking things up for this blog, I encountered / remembered the fact that Jane Austen is also linked to Adlestrop. She seemingly made several visits there to stay with her uncle who was the Church rector and there is a rumour that the house and grounds of Adlestrop Park were used for the setting of Mansfield Park. Amazing).
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Spain Tour 4: Campsite
Like any other I guess.
Lots of Dutch people.
Why? Does this come back to old Spanish empire questions?
A lot of Spanish families and groups also.
Small pool, right by the front door of our chalet (not in the picture).
And lots of trees...
Lots of Dutch people.
Why? Does this come back to old Spanish empire questions?
A lot of Spanish families and groups also.
Small pool, right by the front door of our chalet (not in the picture).
And lots of trees...
Monday, 24 August 2009
Picos Folgate
Driving up from the main Potes road to the village of Bes, from which the rest of the family have launched themselves on a guided walk. (‘It says it’s easy – or does that word just mean ‘lower’, as in, the walk is in the foothills?’). The temperature has climbed into the nineties in old-fashioned money; there are stunted trees I don’t recognise with succulent-looking leaves and more butterflies than I have ever seen, in a huge variety of colours and sizes. A lot higher than we are, the Picos de Europa show touches of snow just below their summits.
I switch on the CD player and the latest Madness fills the silence. They are a London band and The Liberty of Norton Folgate is a love letter to London. Possibly their best ever record – certainly for some time. At home, this album sounds richly allusive, yes - full of dark rainwashed streets and London characters in all their complicated lives and sinfulness - but also an affirmation. It reinforces a sense of the place where you are. However strange, it is about home. Here in the Picos however, it seems wildly exotic. NW5, Holloway and Chinatown seem fictional places; unlikely inventions in this bright, green and mountainous landscape. London in some way becomes like all of its fictional manifestations – an outlandish, rare place that teeters on the edge of impossibility.
I switch on the CD player and the latest Madness fills the silence. They are a London band and The Liberty of Norton Folgate is a love letter to London. Possibly their best ever record – certainly for some time. At home, this album sounds richly allusive, yes - full of dark rainwashed streets and London characters in all their complicated lives and sinfulness - but also an affirmation. It reinforces a sense of the place where you are. However strange, it is about home. Here in the Picos however, it seems wildly exotic. NW5, Holloway and Chinatown seem fictional places; unlikely inventions in this bright, green and mountainous landscape. London in some way becomes like all of its fictional manifestations – an outlandish, rare place that teeters on the edge of impossibility.
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Spain Tour 3: Through the Gorge
The road from the Northern coast to the Eastern range of the Picos, where we were going to stay, is the N621.
At one point this road snakes through the incredible Desfiladero de la Hermida gorge. The N621 becomes a narrow two-lane road running by the Rio Deva; the gorge is similarly narrow and steep-sided for most of its 20-or-so kilometres.
Although overtaking seems plainly impossible, Spanish road signs still point out that you aren't allowed to. At a couple of points, equally unbelievably, you come across 'Road Narrows' signs.
And then it does.
Nevertheless, it is the main route to Potes from the North, and quite huge lorries can be seen trundling through the Gorge. At some speed.
Breathtaking and nerve-racking.
At one point this road snakes through the incredible Desfiladero de la Hermida gorge. The N621 becomes a narrow two-lane road running by the Rio Deva; the gorge is similarly narrow and steep-sided for most of its 20-or-so kilometres.
Although overtaking seems plainly impossible, Spanish road signs still point out that you aren't allowed to. At a couple of points, equally unbelievably, you come across 'Road Narrows' signs.
And then it does.
Nevertheless, it is the main route to Potes from the North, and quite huge lorries can be seen trundling through the Gorge. At some speed.
Breathtaking and nerve-racking.
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
Taupi
I've just found out that Albie Fiore died late in July (see the Guardian obituary for details). I didn't realise that he'd touched me in two (minor) ways. I really knew his name as the editor of The Fiend Factory in White Dwarf (and author of one or two other articles). To me, his was a name from the late '70s and early '80s. RPGs and other games. I suspect he was also technically the first person to accept and publish something I'd written.
The surprise is that he was also Taupi, the crossword compiler for the Guardian. (And Satori for the Times). Today there is a fine commemorative crossword by Enigmatist and Paul in the Graun. Well worth while, and not easy, even tho' one solution is given at the start.
The surprise is that he was also Taupi, the crossword compiler for the Guardian. (And Satori for the Times). Today there is a fine commemorative crossword by Enigmatist and Paul in the Graun. Well worth while, and not easy, even tho' one solution is given at the start.
Monday, 17 August 2009
Tennyson
Over the last couple of weeks or so the BBC has been full of Tennyson, as it's 200 years since he was born.
He's been one of 'my' poets ever since I 'did' him for O levels - say from when I was 15 in 1973. I wrote my first, proper, defensible essay on The Lotus Eaters, because somehow I just got it. I loved - or again, I felt I understood - Crossing the Bar, The Lady of Shalot, The Passing of Arthur, The Revenge, The Kraken, and so forth.
But, when I was fifteen or sixteen, mostly Ulysses - and just one phrase - 'I will live life to the leas'. Spoken by an old man, tired and careworn but still looking forward, reasserting his sense of self. And yet not uncriticised.
By 'A' level and degree, much later, Tennyson had almost disappeared - although I purposefully turned up and focused on the two great and terrible poems I'd missed back in the '70s - Maud and In Memoriam. Both require a lot of time and, well, a bit of a run up. Fantastic, but they take you through intensity - perhaps a little too much. So, in my heart stayed The Revenge, The Lotus, The Lady and Ulysses.
The BBC began with Ulysses:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
(Tennyson's "Ulysses" first appeared in Morte D'Arthur, and Other Idyls. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLII. pp. 67. This, however, was a trial book, printed but not published. The first publication of the poem occurred in Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In Two Volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII. pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. ))
Fantastic.
But I need to take a step back.
Quite precisely Tennyson is not my sort of poet. There is a subtle music, but no story and few linguistic fireworks. Or perhaps the pyrotechnics are purposefully muted. 'My' other poets are Chaucer, Donne, Wyatt, Hopkins, Chaucer, Eliot, Larkin, Marvell, Browning (despite Wilde's perfect insult), Herbert, Herrick, the Mersey Poets, Wendy Cope, and Chaucer. Tennyson, I think, stands out as different from these.
We remember him as baggy, not compressed, and often, understandably, maudlin ('the woods decay...'). He writes under heavy Victorian drapes.
The interesting comparison is perhaps Browning, who is sometimes frankly bizarre. He's very different, and yet also generates those quotable nineteenth century lines. But it's Tennyson who is carved into the floor of the Great Court in the British Museum.
Oh, I agree it would be easy to demonstrate in an essay how every poet I list above is very similar to Tennyson. Something about epic sensibility or semantic confluences. But that isn't the point. Tennyson feels different.
So, anyway, the BBC lead on Ulysses. And it was for me absolutely smashing. I remembered it and felt reinvigorated.
So I felt I ought to include a favourite I discovered much later:
JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER
To—
There on the top of the down,
The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue,
When I look’d at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,
This, and my love together,
To you that are seventy-seven,
With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,
And a fancy as summer-new
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.
But of course, this isn't really like Tennyson, is it?
So may be it doesn't count, or maybe he wrote across a far wider range than we now remember.
He's been one of 'my' poets ever since I 'did' him for O levels - say from when I was 15 in 1973. I wrote my first, proper, defensible essay on The Lotus Eaters, because somehow I just got it. I loved - or again, I felt I understood - Crossing the Bar, The Lady of Shalot, The Passing of Arthur, The Revenge, The Kraken, and so forth.
But, when I was fifteen or sixteen, mostly Ulysses - and just one phrase - 'I will live life to the leas'. Spoken by an old man, tired and careworn but still looking forward, reasserting his sense of self. And yet not uncriticised.
By 'A' level and degree, much later, Tennyson had almost disappeared - although I purposefully turned up and focused on the two great and terrible poems I'd missed back in the '70s - Maud and In Memoriam. Both require a lot of time and, well, a bit of a run up. Fantastic, but they take you through intensity - perhaps a little too much. So, in my heart stayed The Revenge, The Lotus, The Lady and Ulysses.
The BBC began with Ulysses:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
(Tennyson's "Ulysses" first appeared in Morte D'Arthur, and Other Idyls. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLII. pp. 67. This, however, was a trial book, printed but not published. The first publication of the poem occurred in Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In Two Volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII. pp. vii, 233; vii, 231. ))
Fantastic.
But I need to take a step back.
Quite precisely Tennyson is not my sort of poet. There is a subtle music, but no story and few linguistic fireworks. Or perhaps the pyrotechnics are purposefully muted. 'My' other poets are Chaucer, Donne, Wyatt, Hopkins, Chaucer, Eliot, Larkin, Marvell, Browning (despite Wilde's perfect insult), Herbert, Herrick, the Mersey Poets, Wendy Cope, and Chaucer. Tennyson, I think, stands out as different from these.
We remember him as baggy, not compressed, and often, understandably, maudlin ('the woods decay...'). He writes under heavy Victorian drapes.
The interesting comparison is perhaps Browning, who is sometimes frankly bizarre. He's very different, and yet also generates those quotable nineteenth century lines. But it's Tennyson who is carved into the floor of the Great Court in the British Museum.
Oh, I agree it would be easy to demonstrate in an essay how every poet I list above is very similar to Tennyson. Something about epic sensibility or semantic confluences. But that isn't the point. Tennyson feels different.
So, anyway, the BBC lead on Ulysses. And it was for me absolutely smashing. I remembered it and felt reinvigorated.
So I felt I ought to include a favourite I discovered much later:
JUNE BRACKEN AND HEATHER
To—
There on the top of the down,
The wild heather round me and over me June’s high blue,
When I look’d at the bracken so bright and the heather so brown,
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you,
This, and my love together,
To you that are seventy-seven,
With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven,
And a fancy as summer-new
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather.
But of course, this isn't really like Tennyson, is it?
So may be it doesn't count, or maybe he wrote across a far wider range than we now remember.
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Notation
Man is a language-making animal.
This statment is not just meant to assert in some tautologous way that she uses language to communicate. Indeed, it usually intends the coining of new words, such as street slang or specialist jargon. It is also true, however, that people do invent complete new languages – and not solely in the way that Tolkien did. Languages communicate, and any time we find a wholly new and complete way to convey an experience, practise or activity, we arguably create a new language - albeit one in which only certain things can be said.
One of my recent purchases from Oddballs was an ‘Encyclopaedia of Ball Juggling’ (Charlie Dancey, 2005). As is often the case in publications about juggling, this is full of cartoons, jokey exhortations and personal opinions. (It does however try for a measure of comprehensiveness).
Flicking though the book in the shop, I discovered the new world of juggling notation. In essence, it’s a language, as I suggest is any comprehensive system of descriptive notation. This one is used to describe what a juggling trick involves. I was fascinated by the diagrams and numbers, and the detailed explanations.
So I bought the book.
The book is careful to say that few if any people can learn a manoeuvre from a notation, but that it can be useful to explain the sequence of moves that make it up. The notation is a systematic communication of precisely what is involved.
Whatever.
I now find myself deep in the world of Ladder Notation, Siteswap, Causal Diagrams and the mighty Mills’ Mess State Transition Diagram (MMSTD):-
Each of these solutions tries to get across something of the character of a trick from its own perspective. None of them seem easy to understand or to use – I have to work through the examples very slowly, mumbling under my breath. And with my tongue stuck out.
(As an aside, I suspect there may be a similarity with those notations used to describe dance steps. I have a memory of a children’s story – Blyton or Crompton? – where the hero suspects the new visitor in the village is a spy when they come across his ballet notation. They assume it is a secret code. That is certainly how Siteswap feels sometimes).
I’m fascinated by these systems, and would love to use them. However, possibly because there seem to be a fair number of mathematician jugglers, the notations do seem quite subtle to grasp. I'm struggling at the moment.
Thankfully, I can revert to all of the little cartoons of jugglers doing specific tricks in the book. I feel more at home with them and they do seem to know what they are doing. And nowadays there are lots of really helpful videos and DVDs. And finally, software is becoming available that connects the friendly diagrams and the notation together. So that's all right. It just doesn't seem to stop me dropping stuff...
This statment is not just meant to assert in some tautologous way that she uses language to communicate. Indeed, it usually intends the coining of new words, such as street slang or specialist jargon. It is also true, however, that people do invent complete new languages – and not solely in the way that Tolkien did. Languages communicate, and any time we find a wholly new and complete way to convey an experience, practise or activity, we arguably create a new language - albeit one in which only certain things can be said.
One of my recent purchases from Oddballs was an ‘Encyclopaedia of Ball Juggling’ (Charlie Dancey, 2005). As is often the case in publications about juggling, this is full of cartoons, jokey exhortations and personal opinions. (It does however try for a measure of comprehensiveness).
Flicking though the book in the shop, I discovered the new world of juggling notation. In essence, it’s a language, as I suggest is any comprehensive system of descriptive notation. This one is used to describe what a juggling trick involves. I was fascinated by the diagrams and numbers, and the detailed explanations.
So I bought the book.
The book is careful to say that few if any people can learn a manoeuvre from a notation, but that it can be useful to explain the sequence of moves that make it up. The notation is a systematic communication of precisely what is involved.
Whatever.
I now find myself deep in the world of Ladder Notation, Siteswap, Causal Diagrams and the mighty Mills’ Mess State Transition Diagram (MMSTD):-
Each of these solutions tries to get across something of the character of a trick from its own perspective. None of them seem easy to understand or to use – I have to work through the examples very slowly, mumbling under my breath. And with my tongue stuck out.
(As an aside, I suspect there may be a similarity with those notations used to describe dance steps. I have a memory of a children’s story – Blyton or Crompton? – where the hero suspects the new visitor in the village is a spy when they come across his ballet notation. They assume it is a secret code. That is certainly how Siteswap feels sometimes).
I’m fascinated by these systems, and would love to use them. However, possibly because there seem to be a fair number of mathematician jugglers, the notations do seem quite subtle to grasp. I'm struggling at the moment.
Thankfully, I can revert to all of the little cartoons of jugglers doing specific tricks in the book. I feel more at home with them and they do seem to know what they are doing. And nowadays there are lots of really helpful videos and DVDs. And finally, software is becoming available that connects the friendly diagrams and the notation together. So that's all right. It just doesn't seem to stop me dropping stuff...
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