The White Horse Journal

Another World is Possible

2010-02-25T14:38:00.006Z

One day last November I walked up the hill that I grew up on, took the old track that ran along the ridge, full of flints, passed the woods I'd spent so many hours in long years back, looking up into the ash trees young and old. A mile or so further on along the ridge, I stopped and properly took things in. I was at the end of an old cut through the side of the hill. It was said to be Neolithic and hugged the contours, almost in deference to the hill itself rather than smashing its way through, an imprint but within a scale that seemed almost part of a natural order. It felt like the beginnings of winter; cold but not that cold, the hills all full of haze and mist, the greens and golds all given up to blues and greys and brown.

Somehow though it felt substantial in itself, like winter was a mantle that was somehow warm as well as rich. It spoke of fires and the smell of woodsmoke caught upon the street, of company and comradeship. Here in the lee of the hill you could hear the wind but barely feel it and it added to the sense of peace, of being somewhere removed from all the rush and non-stop headiness. The feeling of tranquillity was tangible in a way I had not felt for years and the sense of dual strength and gentleness surprised me. I thought again of Hardy, of his poem of the thrush, of hope and changing seasons.

Even the pylons snaking their way across the Downs seemed almost homely up here, momentarily, and I thought again of the last time I had lived here, one bitter winter with a badly broken collar bone and the burgeoning idea for a book about roads. I’d left behind me many friends in Nottingham, falling off the bike had marked a parting of the ways but the memory of all the times and friends I’d known still stood clear in my mind and in my dreams. Things had seemed to chime in in some strange sort of way whenever I’d gone up there. People were warm and expansive and it was clearly not for nothing that they called this the heart of the country.

But it was interesting in other, less obvious ways. It was part of the cradle of the industrial revolution, the river valleys there were once full of blossoming cotton mills, what happened in the Midlands and much further north helped determine the future of the world for centuries to come. But also, among the obvious accolade of stories of the Forest and its righteous outlaws, there was the story of Nedd Ludd and his followers, rising up against the wave of mills and their machines. With talk of a huge expansion of tree planting of the now somewhat nominal Forest, together with adverts for the future of industry in the region in the station as I arrived, I knew at once what my friend meant when he said important battles had been waged here, I knew that they were very much still going on.

There were many things that made their mark during the time I spent up there; sunlight on the water in the Spring, a quality to it that is even now hard to define, the water filling up a disused gravel pit, now made a lake on a nature reserve. There was also the company of good old friends, of promise for the future. But there was much more; the starlight on the bits of quartz-like pebbles on the track in the woods at the back of the old mining village some friends of mine called home. Hawks from the hill in sunset, the orange gold just showing through in bands beneath the clouds as if in token of what might lie in store.

And then there were the rooks; a vast and spreading army in the woods, tumbling through the clouds and scraps of blue and silver in the October sky over the green of the village, keeping vast council in the remnants of the Forest. It was like the coloured hoods of my friends and the black mantles of the rooks were almost synonymous, the heart of the woods in winter both brooding and benevolent.

These were friends from Newbury and the ties were strong as any family. On my first visit they were setting up a social centre and looking at a massive house to set up in. I had dreams of both places later, Betjamen checking them out from under a hat made from folded newspaper, the kitchens in the basement busy with the foundations of some kind of new world order. For years, for me, it was an anchor point, my point of home and the strongest connection to the counter culture I was still just about a part of. While I was no longer at that point particularly politically engaged, it meant a lot to be somehow in connection with it all, there seemed a continuity that was at least symbolic.

And though I have since returned to a corner of this southern county, I cannot help salute everything old friends still choose to represent, just as I watch the movement rolling on, evolving first into the anti-capitalist demos, later to the Climate Camps. Perhaps there is a danger in putting too much faith in protest as the one and only means to the way forward. It has a massive role to play but can never be the only answer. What’s really needed now more than anything is a greater acknowledgement that we are all in this mess together and must find our way beyond it bonded by the knowledge of the common problem; a world whose biosphere is on the brink, whose store of cheap energy that has placed our lifestyles on a kind of pedestal for so long is beginning to run dry.

Protest can sometimes be portrayed as counterproductive to the cultivation of this sense of shared predicament. But to deny the role it has to play is to underestimate the forces that have such a massive impact on our daily lives. We need to change direction en masse and protest can be the necessary nudge to those in high places who would not choose to do so otherwise. Its necessity is defined by its opposite; the mentality that says nothing is wrong even as we helter skelter to a day that will at the very least be a monumental challenge. Even if it achieves nothing but communicating the sense that we are sleepwalking and that we must wake up, protest can constitute an alarm call that we need as badly now as ever.

And so the knowledge of good people gives me hope, just as there is hope in the far flung places, a hope informed perhaps of nothing but endurance, of the places waiting for us to come back to them, to mark them on our wanders on a winter’s day, to take that feeling back with us and hold it dear, before we are enfolded once again by media and chatter or maybe just the steady warmth of common human company.

It is this that bolsters my expectations for what we are faced with, that - just as we must live with whatever the future may hold - there are many who can help to lead the way, whose vision is formed of far more than some list of endless anti’s; they hold the cradle of the way ahead, of what it means to show some faith in the kind of world we could still bring about. Beneath the glacial tip of vocal protest there is a groundswell that is growing every day; of taking responsibility for what we eat or otherwise consume, for what we grow, for how we engage in the political spheres on even microcosmic levels, for how we can help foster what remains or can be revived of our communities.

It is perhaps a longshot, the faith it shows is maybe bloodyminded. But it is an attitude, a stance that says we will not turn our backs on future generations, on what survives around the corner, on communities a thousand miles away threatened by eviction for mines that only feed our dependence on a sea of pointless crap. The feelings of conviction I am trying to describe are inspired by a sense of what lies on the line and a sense of hope for what may lie in store.

This is something Hardy may have understood and perhaps he would be have been heartened that there are those who have the opportunity to do more than mourn the passing of the days, who strive to hold onto the personal, onto what is immediate and real, as well as call in a vision of how things could hopefully still be.

Returning through the woods the other day, the rooks were also coming home, calling out in their massed numbers as they passed above the trees, speaking of journeys, of what was coming in, of fondness and belonging. Maybe you will hear them if you wander in the hollows and high places. Maybe their song will help to lift your heart, despite the trials of the times that we are faced with, maybe their chorus can stir us to meet the much maligned but somehow still decipherable promise that tomorrow holds if we can only listen to her call.

The Field

2010-01-26T14:56:00.004Z

This week they are trying Tony Blair and we all have cause to cast our minds back and think about the things that we have lost because of him. The tragedy is that it could have been so different, that there was so much expectation for a very different future waiting in the wings. Nearly seven years ago, I’d wandered on the Downs in the sun and savage wind of what was still a newly Millennial spring. Amid the cries of burgeoning war there was some strange, undeniable hope, like it was rising up from underground, like it was the spring itself, all the more apparently perennial for the carnage that we all so strongly willed would not come to pass.

For my own part I hadn’t had the easiest of winters but I’d read a lot and fallen back on the music, learned a few good tunes and now my luck was changing and I had some things I could be truly grateful for. So my thoughts that day were on the hope the coming summer held, on the new green vividness of all the hills around me as well as memories of happier times and how they now seemed to be coming round full circle. When I went back to the city, I carried a piece of chalk as a token for the returning warmth and what the future seemed to hold in store.

Things did not work out. Many things that happened in the next few weeks were not without their toll; spoke of the almost unbearable juxtaposition of destruction and love. Back home, a pile of newspapers were waiting with the savage details of the news. When I finally got the chance to read them they spelt it all out all too clearly: a burning city, the unknown dead and scores of children wrapped in bandages, the weeping mothers, the boy who’d lost his family besides both arms. There was sense of shadow over everything for our being at war, for our part in that bombardment. Meanwhile rocket attacks scurried over soldiers in Camp Dogwood and the days and nights were marked out by near misses and later by more severe calamities, crowds of angry Iraqis storming buildings, lives lost overnight as our own safe havens were overrun, to say nothing of what we had helped bring about for the people of the country.

There was a haemorrhaging of beauty and of life. Everything seemed biblical; nomads in the wastegrounds of Baghdad were not without horses amid the scraps of metal and the tiny fires and, despite the horror, it was like we were living in a tale that had not ended and whose roots went back for hundreds of years if not longer, like everything Iraq still had to offer, its cradling of civilisation, its older ruins, its roots, the courage of its people: all of this cried out for deliverance, for recognition, honour.

Love and war spoke equally at once. George Bush, as the poet Chris Preddle put it, rode into the Dawn upon a tank. Today, I wish with every piece of me that it will soon be over, the news of bombings still like body blows for any kind of hope. We should not forget the pain of those now living in Iraq when seeking to call to account the ones who led us there.

In that daunting early day just after the invasion there was a sense of how things could work out, the full extent of the utter lack of planning had not become clear, there was a sense that a nation willing to invest so much in bombardment would surely have some kind of plan in place for what came after. But that brief dawn before the sinking in of monumental mismanagement, of the level of corruption of an institution who simply never gave a fuck, that all too narrow window still seemed full of some promise. Repressed minorities were rising up and there was no shadow then of the ethnic tensions that would follow.

The legacy of all of this stretches over all of us and all of us have been sullied, or wounded or worse. A year later the US election loomed as the fate of Fallujah hung in the balance, televison pictures of massed ranks of tanks and APC’s lining the roads to the city and this was surely Armageddon made only too real. It was inconceivable that Bush would get in for yet another term and unbearable to keep track of such a closely run determination. And yet there was a counter force, the shopkeepers in the Midlands who seemed to hold some kind of secret, some galvanising force of spirit that met what would have otherwise been despair.

So I hope, with the Chilcot enquiry, that Blair will really be given the grilling he deserves, for a start. We all know all too well just how he led us down the garden path, but some kind of official stamp could help us all come to terms with what our chief elected representative helped to lead us into, a chance to proclaim from the highest platform that we did not want this for a moment, a chance for some kind of real justice.

There can be no pleasure however much the man may squirm and it shall be interesting to see whether he is as unapologetic as his former spin doctor in chief. How does a man live with the knowledge he has been instrumental in sending ten of thousands to their deaths? The deception of unaccountability is on a par with that which led us into this, a chorus of bloody Halleluiah’s, a zeitgeist of a level of zeal coupled with a policy amounting to criminal insanity.

Whether this enquiry will or even can oblige in delivering somekind of just retribution in this respect remains to be seen. In the meantime we must carry on as best as we are able. Our every breath helps to determine the kind of world that lies ahead and knowing this gives us reason to continue; knowing that we all can make a difference, even if that difference is simply a matter of cherishing that which is dear while holding out the necessary hope that we can all someday put behind us the aftershocks of such an ill-conceived, barbaric use of force.

A Noon Day Star

2009-12-19T15:07:00.004Z

Waking yesterday was like a minor miracle; the world was snowbound, even quieter than normal around here, the muffling up of noise by the blanketing of snowfall left a world that was almost silent and somehow strangely charged. But last night, with the news, it is like sadness or dismay but some sound sense of things has not departed, the sense that things are at a woeful ebb but that more hope, more force of attitude will surely still return because it must.

Perhaps negotiations were destined to fail by the standards we had set for them, perhaps it’s better that we are not locked into some binding half-arsed settlement when the situation calls for so much more. The road to Copenhagen was a long one, which makes it all the harder that we have so little now to show for it. But this must still be just the beginning of a mettling of wills to bring about a treaty that is in any real way acceptable.

We all know what’s at stake, we all know the gravity of our collective situation. But our fate is not yet settled. What’s clear, what the summit shows above all else is that we must put faith in the power of the world’s people themselves to affect the course of history. Efforts by our governments are surely to be welcomed but even the most effective, binding targets are quite meaningless if they do not have the will of the people to support them. And the absence of such targets puts only more responsibility on our shoulders; as individuals and communities.

And besides all this, it seems our governments are bound by an economic model of constant growth that is as much of a problem as - and which in any case goes a long way to beget - any number of chimneys, any amount of oil of dirty coal. These things are twinned, go hand in hand; without a major shift of fundamental paradigms we are locked into a model of destruction that renders any summit little more than a frantic rearranging of the deckchairs.

The future comes up from the ground, from underneath our feet, and is borne out in the visions that we hold, is breathed to life by the extent that we can imagine something different, by the scope of our diagnosis of the ills that we sit side by side with and accept as normal or just inescapable. The system, or simply the dynamics of a global infrastructure built on oil and the long distance transport of all kinds of goods, determines what we must seek to overcome. Power, and heat, the means of keeping our machines in motion; these sources are a boon but so smoothly given it is hard not to take them for granted. We must face up to the cost of our daily consumption and the more we can provide for ourselves in ways that we can clock, the more we can wean ourselves off what is extraneous, then the more we can come to value the great gifts the world has laid at our door and which we daily work away at; beyond what we can actually afford, beyond all scale of what is human, of any sense of where the balance lies.

There are those who might welcome in what’s coming as some kind of cleansing, or who at any rate value the wild above our human ship, call it what you will; civilisation, dystopia or collective hallucination made real. And the scale of our various imbalances are not helped by the maths that state that there are more people than the earth can actually support, that we are eating into resources of all future generations. And yet we are all caught up in a dream and for the lucky ones amongst us it is beautiful; life, health, friendships, family, the thousand watersheds and markings out in life that make it meaningful. For many, any kind of wish to see it all come crumbling down seems simply intransigent or worse.

The reality though is that a major change is on its way, whether from a climate driven to the brink, or just our dwindling resources of all kinds and that the road will in every likelihood be at least rocky at times. Which simply makes it all the more imperative that we must prepare while there is time, that if we cherish all that is good about a culture, about what it means to lead good lives, to value our humanity, we must change our customs and our course to keep hold of what is meaningful. And, crucially, we may just about be able to achieve this if we can pull ourselves away from everything that no longer serves, from anything that goes beyond what is needed. And comfort is a human need, even if we may need to redefine how we come by it. The truly good things are generally not bought or sold and it may well be, if we can come together, that we will be richer - in time, in company - than many of us are with how things stand.

Meanwhile our governments will hammer out their treaties and I hope that doing so over the coming months and even years may go some way to addressing the most fundamental imbalances in the global economic system. I hope that justice can be agreed upon between North and South, just as I hope the southern hinterland within our northern nations can find a greater voice, that we can build a future based on individual awakening to responsibility for our every action, for our every pattern of behaviour. We need not wait for global politicians to forge the way ahead.

Here, around my flat, around the hills surrounding this old town, the snow lies thick and speaks of long established settlement, of peace. All is quiet and the feeling still persists that things can somehow still work out. Whether this will actually be so will depend on a shifting state of gears, of stillness waking up to motion, even to a storm of movement. But for now, the world is quiet and though the logic says we should be only too dismayed, the feeling of some promise is still with us, albeit battered, albeit even partially betrayed for the time being.

In a few days time the sun will shift, the days will grow again, we will stumble from our hangovers into another year, bright or harsh or coldly real but clearer and we’ll carry on because we each of us carry as great a potential for hope as any international gathering, because the future can be found in what we choose to carry in our actions, in our every intent, in the dreams we choose to keep alive because not to do so never was an option and every one of us holds power equal to the miracle of the noon day star enshrined by Buddhist philosophy, the miracle that lets us take our place upon this earth that we must now all hold as dear as any other relative.

Torch Bearers

2009-11-10T12:14:00.004Z

You could see it like a gash on the horizon, beginnings of embankments marked in white from all the Dorset chalk. It was only too familiar but far too sad to see by any measure; now it seems another road by yet another backward looking council is advancing at full tilt and all the trials of those who’ve tried to stop it have come to nothing. Like England is scarred now not by almighty programmes from on high, but piecemeal, prosaically, facilitated by a trough of ill advise or apathy.

Dorset County Council – the ones who’ve pushed this road from the beginning – state on their own website that Dorset’s coast and countryside is amongst the most varied and beautiful in England and is believed by many to be the County’s most important asset. Thanks to Thomas Hardy, its hinterland is of international renown and it is where that hinterland meets the coast, where the ridge that makes it way down from the heartland plateau of Salisbury Plain, that the full damage of the road becomes quite clear.

As I write the scar grows ever wider and a line of hills that stretches up past Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon on the Chilterns, a line that forms the backbone of the country, has now been desecrated for the sake of dubious expediency. The road had been proposed for nearly twenty years with high levels of local support, given that they were told that it would solve the town’s congestion even though, as Natural England stated in their objection at the road’s public inquiry; “[the scheme’s] advantages are limited and likely to be achievable in large measure by other means.”

The very need for the scheme was questioned by both The Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Woodland Trust. This was brushed aside by both the Council and the Planning Inspector however as if the presence of unquestionable congestion justified tackling this through increasing road space; a mock solution that had been discredited more than a decade ago. The adoption of such a psseudo solution today points to either an absolute absence of vision, endemic crookedness, sheer stupidity or perhaps simply the inability to convince a population that another road will not change anything, other than lock us in further to a pattern of environmental degradation and the cultural loss that comes with it.

There were other casualties besides the ridge. Two Mile Coppice - a patch of woodland and part of a SSSI - has now been carved up, effectively depriving the town of a much loved walking spot. It was the only remaining piece of ancient woodland within the Borough of Weymouth and Portland and, like all ancient woodland, had taken centuries to evolve. Compare this with the ‘mitigation’ package that somehow justifies the tearing in two of a nature reserve; the offer of the use of a piece of secondary woodland half a mile away, cut off from the town now by the road and containing only a fraction of the richness of the habitat, offered to console or otherwise entice the owners of Two Mile Coppice - The Woodland Trust - whose many objections at the inquiry were rebuffed with breathtaking simplicity by Dorset County Council. Amongst other things, the Council stated that the benefits outweigh the harm and that the secondary woodland could be an equal or greater resource, like pieces of land are theirs to carve up, like doling out one plot can justify the annihilation of the other.

And this, in echoes of other SSSI’s destroyed or damaged right across the country, has taken place despite national, regional and local legislation, including the Natural Environmental and Rural Communities Act and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. English Heritage at any rate did not object, were happy with a payout that enabled a survey of the barrows on the portion of ridge that soon would no longer exist.

There was also the dissecting of a local housing estate which - among the predictable disadvantages of forced relocation, division of community, noise and air pollution - meant that many well used cycle routes away from the main roads are now impossible to use. Other land destroyed, damaged or rendered semi-sterile by the noise and toxicity of passing cars includes Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Lorton Meadows Nature Reserve and an and area designated of Local Landscape Interest. Bincombe Valley and its peace has now been lost. Add to this the marring of enjoyment of well known and well used long distance footpaths; Wey Valley Walks, the Dorset Jubilee Trail, the South West Coast Path itself and it’s clear the building of this road is a full blown tragedy.

Why was it built? Who funded it? How did it come to pass that it was allowed to go ahead? As I’ve already mentioned, there was strong local support for the scheme among much - but clearly not all - of Weymouth's population. And - as also mentioned earlier - it reflects too the growing gap between local and national governmental thinking. This is partly a reflection of the engineering background of many County Council planning men, which fundamentally skews their entire mentality. It also tells of the kind of money that is still available for big schemes like roads and bridges, even trams on better years. Small scale and smart schemes - workplace and school travel plans, more cycle paths, car clubs – these things do not possess the same appeal for many councillors as large and slick construction contracts, are perhaps harder to sell as ‘doing something’, do not appear to carry the flame of ‘legacy.’ The big irony, considering the much promulgated Green Team Great Britain is that this road was partly funded, and largely justified by the 2012 Olympics, Weymouth hosting the yatching events for the occasion.

The coming disaster was acknowledged by the turnout of those already mentioned who objected to the scheme at the inquiry. But, in a saddening echo of the eighties and nineties, it was by then a largely foregone conclusion. There were others who stepped in, a man called Noddy who set up camp in an oak in Two Mile Coppice in the freezing cold of mid December, who was joined by others but by far too few. And yet they held the promise of what’s needed, of what in other times and places has come to pass and could still do so again. The flame at Two Mile Coppice was shortlived, but the ember of dissent the symbol of that protest holds could still be carried for what lies ahead.

It is tragic that at such a time, with the carbon impact of road transport only all too clear that a strong resurgent movement casts off as unfashionable or strategically second place the fight against the forces of road building. What makes Weymouth no less tragic, and which should make it stand as a bitter but vital reminder, is that we know we can fight – and win – against road building and on a national level, which should make taking on local councils relatively easy.

Thomas Hardy made the landscape of West Dorset famous in his time, a fame that lives today around the world. And it was a love for landscape that moved me and many more to join the protests against roads when we did. Global warming almost seemed abstract then against the all too real and visible butchery of hills that was taking place around us. For me the feeling still holds; not one issue over another because, in many ways, they are inseparable. The feeling holds not just through the corresponding tally of road transport to emissions, or the pathological degree of insulation from our natural surroundings when travelling in a car. The state of today’s and tomorrow’s climate is perhaps to some extent a reflection of how we treat our landscapes and our hills. The scientific consensus we now have over emissions is of course of indispensable value. But we should no be too quick to dismiss finer sentiments, the undersung feelings of belonging and connection, of living up to a feeling of greater responsibility.

As the saying goes, what we do to the land we do to ourselves. This is in no small part reflected in the writings of Hardy who was in his way somehow married to the land. His work speaks of lovers looking out for one another as one rounded a track on the side of a hill, reddle men making their way over down and heath for days like they were almost aboriginal in their intimacy with the ground below and all around them. Figures on the skyline fading with the light, stood on barrows that were in themselves like tiny, smaller hills upon the back of larger ones when you saw them from any kind of distance. He describes an intenseness of connection where a place is more than just personified. It is in it's way like a world, represents and actually carries a force, holds a character that encompasses the other lesser figures so that their passions reflect the feeling of the place that they inhabit, seem almost trivial by comparison or somehow lifted up and made a part of the wider scene. At his best, he evokes some sense of common blood, of common destiny running through both place and the people upon it so that the stories of love and betrayal, of tragedy and whatever scraps of redemption can be found in hearts of sadness seem somehow of a greater order, a pattern that cannot be totally defined but somehow sits there with us.

Hardy’s greatest poem, or at least the one that has stayed with me above the rest, was ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in which he describes listening to the bird, in the twilight on a December’s evening at the beginning of the twentieth century. It ends;

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Today, with the world Hardy knew and sought to preserve in collective memory seemingly vanished it is our charge to somehow constitute a move back towards something that resembles the best that it contained. There may still be hope for this, for the kind of world we still will have some say in, but not if more roads like Weymouth’s are officially approved and widely ignored. We must keep hold of our hills, cherish them in the full knowledge that life depends upon their preservation. They hold more than our past and sense of place; they keep our very future and hold the power to awake, even when - horrifically but nonetheless especially - they have been taken from us. Weymouth reminds us all of what there is to fight for. We should do so quickly, while there’s time.

The Ground On Which We Stand

2009-10-16T19:06:00.012+01:00

Where there is sorrow, there is often also gold if we can see it. After a summer punctuated by occasional feuds - leant a sense of grandeur by being described as riots - perpetuated by a predictably moronic few - the earth has opened up and where there was tension now we have treasure and joy. The recent trove in Staffordshire resonates on the highest levels with memories of life before the Normans, of what it means to be English, of a time when this Island was being redefined by conflict and influx and treaties and even periods of peace, all fuelled or abetted by artistry, the power of gifts, of loyalty, of hammering out some sort of steady future.

Traditionally, so much of what is wrong with our country, of what is wrong with our establishment has been layed quite firmly at the door of the Normans, their invasion helps define the things we think we lost. They are the fascist boot boys of our past; crop haired, warlike, thugs by any common definition that systematically came and put us down, kept us all under the thumb with their castles and doomsdays and tithes. They cut short a flowering of our newborn native English culture, swept it away and replaced it with a long lived imprint of oppression. They live on in the vestiges of original blue blood, in corpulent second chambers, in an old mentality that kicked off with the subjugation of our Celtic neighbours and wound up to a global empire, a mentality that sits still among the upper echelons of many of our institutions.

And, of course much of this is true – the brutality of their invasion left a scar that has never left folk memory. But there was also a degree of continuity; most of Norman systems of government rested on older foundations, even if they did decimate the English ruling class, even if the conquest was a savage travesty. But equally, the story of an Anglo Saxon golden age so beloved of radicals is, to some extent, the stuff of pure mythology. We still know relatively little of the centuries that helped found the English state. But Anglo Saxon rulers could be autocratic, even ruthless. And while much of the system of modern government has its origins in those times, it took many centuries of trials and revisions to make them democratic by any measure we would recognise. But the myths are still persistent; moot mounds in the Shires where almost everybody had a say - so long as you weren’t a woman, or a slave – more communal agriculture, outright land ownership for the peasantry, a place where dynasties and rulers grew up almost out of the ground, formed in the same morass that brought into being both the people and the language themselves. Pleasant myths in any case and not without foundation.

And as the more recent confrontations in Manchester only go to show, the issue of Englishness, of the English people, could not be more pertinent. Any brief look at websites now dealing with the Anglo Saxons will take you to those invoking the spirit of Old England, some of them interested in history, some in politics, some in race, sometimes all three. The appeal to some sense of roots is understandable, not least when the Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scottish have such strong cultures to fall back on as the political embodiment of the United Kingdom stands ready to dissolve, when for centuries English identity has been so bound up with that of Britain. In any case, there is a scramble now for identity and meaning here and this has been exploited by those who’d preach a line of racial purity, of the English as some kind of modern underdog in a world they can no longer understand.

It hardly needs saying that a look again at the centuries of immigration and intermittent struggle of the so called Dark Ages reminds us that we are, most of us, a people of mongrels and incomers, and that we were eventually united for all our diversity. But many far right pundits now would emphasise that while this country was formed of originally different peoples, they were at least all of Northern European stock, they were in any case bounded by cultures that had more in common than that which would set them apart. And this is wheeled out as some argument against the multiculturalism of today, as if we can draw such basic parallels with an age where the confines of the known world did little more than stretch beyond the Mediterranean. Even little more than a century ago, the common experience for many in this country was that the next valley and its villages was almost another land so that, even with a degree of shared European culture, the experience of integration in the centuries after Roman rule could not have been in any way less than the challenges we face today.

Whether we like it or not, the world has been changed almost beyond recognition by the last century and the slower grind of burgeoning modernity beyond it that helped to pave the way. Communication, travel of people and culture, of ideas, to say nothing of the legacy of Empire; it is nothing less than inevitable that the places we inhabit now reflect this. Yes, there is a growing recognition that population pressure in the UK is an issue we cannot afford to ignore. But we should never submit and give credence to anyone who would seek division along any kind of ethnic line. Times change and things move on; our culture should reflect that, not harken back simplistically to an era we really know so little about.

My mother is Irish and my father from the North and our family joined the bands of incomers upon our southern coast, growing up in the lee of tracks and hillforts formed by a people that may have gone to Cornwall or to Wales or who settled in among what became an Anglo Saxon culture. Dig a little and there are relatively few today in most parts of the country whose family have been there more than a few generations. Tensions often only arise among the working class - demographically less mobile and harder hit by the financial malaise, who feel most overlooked by tides of modern movement. New horizons come from either a degree of affluence or a willingness to run the risk of vagrancy; to fly or trudge or take some kind of chance, to follow work or markets or live as simply as a bird.

But for a great number of us, movement; either ours or our forebears, is the predominant reality. We are all part of something new while keeping hold of what is meaningful, “neither here nor there and therefore home” and truly home is what we choose to make it. Cultures are not mutually exclusive, they can inform and enrich one another; the Pakistani in Luton might remind us that we once all came from tribal cultures, the Indian family in Birmingham speaks of a common thread of culture if you go back far enough, of Indo-European mother tongues and migrations almost lost to history. Once, we were all farmers in our villages, told stories, prized our silver plate and heirloomed weaponry, held our myths as sacred. Beyond any extremes of creed we all share a common heritage; that we are of the earth and any new arrival here can tell us in a language beyond words of the richness of our roots.

Whether we feel those roots are predominately in the soil beneath us, or somewhere over the water or far beyond the sea, is perhaps besides the point. With time we all belong to the land on which we stand, even with the memory of other origins. But the world for now is in a state of flux, we are today connected in a way never seen before, both from the internet and global media and by what has become clearly connected fate; climate change knows no political or geographic boundary and war and bombs affect us all. We are all here together, we live together, we rise or fall together irrespective of ancestry or creeds. And perhaps a greater grasp of how much our history can mean can help us find some better understanding of those regions of the world where cultural continuity is still so highly prized. Perhaps it could lead us to some better sense of shared predicament and the will to find our way beyond it.

Store Wars

2009-08-19T22:16:00.016+01:00

We all know that the thing it represents is out of both order and any kind of sensible proportion, and yet the law of economy at all costs, or the greasy wheels of convenience still pull in so many, nagged by a vague sense of guilt or blatantly not bothered, collaborating with the ones that oil the slope to cultural and environmental stickiness. Tesco is apparently in full force and nobody knows how to stop them. Well, not quite nobody. For the last three years a protest camp has been enduring some decidedly patchy weather in objection to a package of development.

First, the local council wants to widen and straighten an old road lined with ancient woodland. Then, there is the imposition of a massive housing estate in an already overcrowded part of the country. And finally, to add a scatological level of insult to these injuries there will be a spanking new Tesco, to add to all the others in the area already. But that's OK because they'll harvest the rainwater; they do care after all. So forget the lorries thundering through the local roads as this leviathan is constructed. Forget another carpark visible from Mars. Forget the impacts on local small businesses. The council have once again caved in to the pressures of a consortium whose overbearing style and scale are so far subject to no bounds.

There may be a political solution if enough people call for changes to the planning regulations to break the cartel of the major supermarket chains, if the politicians find the backbone then to bring them in. A change like that would go a long way to restoring faith in public office. Until then it has fallen to the strange but satisfying resurgence of on site protest culture. The protestors at Titnore Woods have endured snow, the copious summer rain and every other form of adversity that goes with life on camp in order to stand up for what should be fundamental; sound decision making at a local level, a respect for the little ancient woodland we have left, the believe that local business should be supported, not undercut by effective conquest on a global scale, aided and abetted by institutional weakness or a good old fashioned sickly dose of corruption and mendacity.

So now the stage is set; the good, the true, the outraged, bluerinsed, the allegedly unwashed; all lay in wait or are more mobilised. This sleepy seaside town that once played host to Haile Sellassie after his departure from Abyssinia, that holds rumours of undergound rivers, that guards the passage to some of the finest hillforts in the south of England, this place will see a struggle that should be repeated wherever Tesco rears another head, from the villages half hidden by the beautiful flat bleakness of the Fens to the tourist-heavy beachcombed towns of Thailand. It should help us all see their encroachments for what they truly are; a blatant slap in the face of any aspiration for a better future, any aspiration that values both community and environment. Tesco should be met with outrage and defiance at every turn. We should hold responsible every politician with a hand in their steady rise. And we should raise a storm of noise that calls for the changes to our planning laws that we so clearly need.

Down the road from the camp, another hillfort stands that looks out on the coastal plain whose flat and sometimes brown ploughed fields sit golden now for harvest. In the summer they used to put on Shakespeare in a hollow just outside the ramparts. The last time I was there, I met a local woman who had just come back from Scotland and who sang in Gaellic, so it was like the boundaries of both time and distance had somehow become blurred. Once, this was the edge of town, some final breaking free of a sprawl that would already have seemed neverending if you walked it all from a centre three miles off. Now another gap is filled in the steady dot to dot that marks out this portion of the Coastal Plain, Sussex's most fertile ground; always highly populated but now half buried beneath paving slabs and tarmac, this latest stretch set to be further corrupted by an all too familiar monster.

The diggers are already moving in and the traffic from the nearby carraigeway will now be augmented by that of those funnelled to and from the extra houses, to and from the not-so-super supermarket. There is still hope, but not if we don't realise the trouble that we're in, the threat to livelihood and life itself that these wide aisled and flouro-lit hangers in a war for our custom represent. Whether or not this particular batch of new houses meets any of the standards of that much used and abused word - sustainability - whether the road in question could be managed better or just simply left alone, the imposition of another superstore renders all of this obscene and vindicates the protesters in their every effort.

Once this plain was flooded with incomers from Saxony, all in their halls and sunken sheds. Not so long back a wave of commuters made its presence felt with row after row of mock tudor semi's. They came from all over Britain and quickly settled, half detached, in their fine and semi sterile dormitories. Now the sense of community will be rendered even more tenuous, a bunch of housing so far out, so ill served by any other means of transport that cars will be all but indispensable.

But it looks as though one hall at least is going up, a mass communal roof that speaks of feasts but holds no fire or kinship. It's toll is hidden and comes with a promise of service. But if we let it make itself indispensible, if we let it ruin our local businesses as well as the fields that it sits on, not to mention the farmers it chooses to keep on the breadline for now, it will surely turn, it will crank up the prices on a population with nowhere left to go to. The signs are written in the soil that change must happen soon. For the measure of that change, for a lesson in the integrity and unblinkered clarity that can serve to see us right, look no further than the people in the woods in Worthing.

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Please sign the petition calling for a Public Inquiry into the development at Titnore:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/TitnoreWoods/

The Time is Now

2009-08-13T13:39:00.007+01:00

Sometimes it’s easier to see, the sense of things in general clicking in to place, the will of both the planet and the people to survive. So here we are, in all our tribes, the ragged bands of Rastafaried drummers in the hills, the people nestled down in bungalows and high rise flats in flat or rugged counties, brewing tea. Flocks of lawyers all black suited sweeping through the streets from one bar to another, football fans like families reared on lager, fleets of lorry drivers living in the backs of cabs, cabbies on their final run, early risers in their silent floats, clinking down garden paths, postmen in their masses who might be samurai on Fridays. Northerners on trains between the rambling cities and their acres of milled glass, cheerily bending their vowels, while Cornish in the sun sit wisely drinking pints of beer and telling stories of a dream which is not dead. Expatriates and immigrants, carrying their corners of far countries. Emos, Goths and metallers, hatching dreams of a new England in a thousand midland factories. And all the hordes at festivals, caught in raptures of the crowds, mouthing words their friends can’t hear but catch the meaning of. The silent mass of gardeners, pruning thorns and keeping out an ear for reassurance on the radio. Scores of kids full of their future and a rising flame of hope to meet it with, like all the gangs and knifes and brutal day to day on the estates could somehow be turned round with nothing more than pure intent. And all our lives and all our thousand million quirks of fate, our occupations, preoccupations, the things that keep us going; somehow all these things and everyone of us must raise our expectations up, lift ourselves up with the shining of the sun, somehow we must all realise that here today there is a thing worth fighting for. Not questionable interventions, not bombing our way to an apparent better world, but a fight to live and act like everything depended on it.

There is a promise still of summer sun and everything to strive for. Who knows how long each spell will last but we must drink it in, remember it even when the clouds are with us. Even in the teeth of gales and weeks of drubbing downpours we must carry something of the sun within our chests. Time heals pain but now the time is on us and we must make our mark or stumble on into oblivion. There’s never been a more pressing need for change and we must all be united with the sense of it. There is one common purpose, one persistent goal the world should work towards. Our earth is at a tipping point and we must all do all we can to bring her back.

For too long we’ve been seduced by comforts and any form of distraction you could put a name to. We’ve been swept up in a trance of never ending progress, of constantly expanding economics that have no end in sight. Money without end or else a world of similar longevity. We cannot have them both. And everyone of us must engage in what it takes to bring our ship around, to act to the very best of our abilities, to wake up those too sullen or too cynical to see the challenge of the day that’s our inheritance. Challenge and a charge of force like fire, the willpower that’s needed, the wind in everybody’s sails to do their best. We are now under trial and will all rise or fall depending on the quality of our commitment.

So breathe in days like this when everything is with us, let them charge your soul. For we need every scrap and motherload of spirit we can muster, allied to the concrete change in our behaviour and our expectations of those who govern us. And really we all govern our collective destiny and need to act as one. We are all in our clans of common interest, in our separate states and continents but will never succeed in this if we cannot see the common quality of our task, the inescapably shared nature of our fate.

We should not need to rise against our nominated rulers, nor they feel driven to put down the ones they think may challenge them. We should be restrained in any situation of potential conflict. We should all strive for that which can still be negotiated on. But we must come together now, we all must speak as with one voice; speak of unity and passion married to the greatest clarity and vision for the road that lies ahead. It’s not enough to hope that all is safely in the hand of experts. Everybody has a part to play and we must do so every bit as fully as we can. But more than that we need to act together, patch up our sprawling communities, look for allies and unlikely common ground, be outspoken when threatened by indifference or compromises where they go too far. But never loose sight of the chance we have for salvaging what should never have been put in any danger but has been so inescapably through millennia of our long learning curve as human beings; that goal we cannot take our sights from; a world where life can still sustain itself, a world were life remains a source of joy.

Eden, Empire and Everything After

2009-07-08T10:39:00.019+01:00

One of the things that struck me most when reading John Michael Greer’s book; 'The Long Descent' was his thoughts on our collective mythologies and how, in particular, so many of our current political ideologies are based on our underlying subconscious assimilation of a Christian theology. Thus the doctrines of Marxism are at least in part a playing out of the central Christian myth; Eden is primitive communism, original sin is the invention of private property while the Coming of the proletariat is almost messianic, a New Jerusalem of the final return of Communism.

For the neoprimitivists, JMG argues that Marxist economics are replaced with anthropology. Here Eden is the hunter-gatherer societies of the paleo and mesolithic, the Fall is the invention of agriculture, the frequently forecast collapse of civilisation giving us apocalyptic transformation, with a return to hunter gathering for the surviving chosen ones.

For my money, I still feel we're at the door in this point of our history of something truly significant; with so much at stake it could hardly be otherwise. But if we choose to adopt or continue with a Christian worldview, whatever dressing of philosophy we may choose to place over it, then we could do worse than to do so consciously and benefit from the many centuries of that religion's philosophy. But the most common polar expectations of what we face from here on in are often inherently limited and are partially informed by a simplifed interpretation of a Christian mindset; a continued Utopia of never ending progress or else some apocalyptic vision of catastrophe.

The likely answer of what’s coming, something that JMG spells out pretty convincingly, probably lies somewhere in between these polar visions. A scaling down of our dependence on resources and cheap energy that takes place over decades, even centuries, seems quite likely. The picture painted is still harsh and uncompromising but ultimately far more hopeful than an outright and almost overnight crash of civilisation.

Dreams and memories and stories can help to steer us through even when things seem at their most dark. We need those dreams as keenly now as ever. JMG argues that a degree of flexibility holds the key in finding those that serve us best; the many centuries of recorded history, the scenarios suggested with increasing clarity by archaeology, not to mention the great wealth of the stories of our traditional cultures - we can be guided by this wealth and breadth today, not be stuck in some loop of single narratives. The key thing is that whatever stories we tell ourselves, we need to hold onto the visions of that which can keep us together, which can help to see us through.

The situation which comes most strongly to mind for me, not least for its strong parallels with our own situation now, is the retraction of the Roman empire, a process that itself, all told, took the best part of a generation. Whatever your views of the Roman occupation (and they did some great and truly dreadful things) the point here is that when the empire began it’s slow decline, whatever bloodshed it was founded on, it was seen by many as a thing worth holding onto. Now I'm no big fan of empires; even the notion that they helped, or can help, to maintain peace and order is largely false, apart from in their most sheltered interiors. But as a parable of what we now may face, I cannot help but somehow be inspired by the story of the Roman empire's spirited defence. Imperfect systems often have their compensations, may offer more to everyone intact, not purged by ideology or brutal circumstance. They may hold the promise of the benefits of continuity and opportunity for ordered and constructive change. The challenge that we face today is one of instigating some kind of revolution, even if it may be one primarily, or intitially, of consciousness, of everyone awakening to a call. But tomorrow there may be as much of a challenge in holding onto the best of what we already have, of managing the inevitable transition in the most productive way.

And the example of post Roman Britain can at least be instructive if not inspirational. While towns and cities contracted and in many cases disappeared, while the continental legions left, the structures of administration carried on and when they too dissolved, people often held together and co-operated largely for the sake an idea, the long held memory of being part of an united world. Rome meant many things to many men but at its best meant more than simply grandeur. It brought both learning and philosophy, besides the more commonly trumpeted feats of engineering. For sure, the lifestyles of the super rich within it were all too opulent while, on the continent at least, the peasantry were crippled by harsh taxes. But the Romano British of the West, staging a long and dignified retreat, were a people changed by their exposure and may have felt a bond of gratitude for what they had inherited.

It was a seriously troubled time but a degree of continuity persisted, even when new kingdoms and new rulers emerged from the morass; many of them chose to style themselves upon this dream of previous culture, however idealised that image may have been. They saw themselves as the inheritors of something meaningful, something that gave their government a certain strength, that lifted them up above the mere matter of survival, a light that offered something more than blood.

The systems that we live under today we know have many faults, not least the crippling situation of many national economies paying tribute to the current global hegemony in a curious echo of Roman client kingdoms. And yet holding onto many of our existing social and political structures, seeking with all our power to reform them seems a way ahead that holds less suffering than some heady sweeping all away. And by this I mainly mean our national and local democratic institutions; with the obvious exception of the UN and so many NGO's, the great monolithic global mechanisms that have dominated international development for so long are clearly on a very shaky moral footing. It may be in the long run that for many nation states the continuity I speak of will be a struggle to maintain, a legacy in no small part to other, later empires. In which case, holding onto the basic sense of shared ideals or at least some common thread of human decency, of a sense of personal responsibility is nothing less than vital. But such scenarios will hopefully be far from universal. To my mind the model of some stepping down to a culture that is in itself no less in substance though far less energy intensive, of some degree of unity persisting both locally and on a national and global level, a drawn out transition that helps to clear the way for something new while retaining the best of our inheritance; this feels like an ideal that can, potentially, do us all a monumental favour.

A Roof of Stars

2009-06-10T20:10:00.016+01:00

Prompted recently by thoughts of others on the wild and the domestic I thought it might be worth sharing some thoughts - or feelings - of my own. Both these states have their pull, even if we are now most of us largely encased in our brick buildings. But to anyone who's known the road, or slept for a night or more in the thick of the woods and enjoyed it, the outdoor life has a magnetism of another magnitude, something that calls us with a passion that can almost be blind in it's strength, that is almost irrational in the way it can keep us following a feeling that may be too intangible to properly express.

And it has it's ramifications now at a time when we are all addressing how we live, when grinding tectonic plates of millennia of culture come to bear in how we see our future, in how we can imagine our way forward as to how we lead our lives. It's easy, if you take the stance of the primitivist, to cast a finger at the roots of settled populations; farming replacing nomadic styles of life, permanent dwellings replacing a life lived on the hoof, with only the simplest of shelter. And some would say that's what we should be going back to, what we shall surely return to when all our cities lie in ruins and this great golden age or near dystopia has finally exhausted itself.

And maybe that would all be for the best, that the world would have the time to heal itself after all our pillaging, that we would be back in our rightful place. But we are all of us now caught up in an interconnected world and any major fall could very likely be accompanied by massive human suffering. Perhaps there is an element of the inevitable, up to a point, though it's true by any guess that what lies in store cannot be predicted with any sense of surety. What should now be quite clear is that we have to turn the ship of civilisation into the current of some very different phase. We have to fundamentally reconsider every element of how we lead our lives, of how our businesses operate, how we travel, what we eat, the relationship of North and South and East to West. We have to have a sense of equal wealth between the nations.

It would be nice to wave some magic wand, to declare our world at peace and it's true that life is good for many here in England. But we should not avert our gaze from those corners of the planet where the simple act of survival is becoming harder and harder as the machine that we're locked into fuels increasing conflicts as the fight to wrest resources carries on. It throws a stark relief on our own lifestyles, where our baubles of sleek and apparently indisposable technology exact a heavy toll in other lands.

Our Western lives today are often light-years from the daily furrowing of countless centuries of agricultural subsistence, just as the steady, sometimes gruelling rhythm of a farmer's life bears so little resemblance to life lived on the hoof, or certainly in a far simpler fashion. For us the transition has taken shape over millennia. But now the circle threatens to turn on it's own tail and all the wolves are coming home to roost, accusatory or simply weighing up the ledgers of the years. Our consumptive patterns of existence bear with ever more effect on people who have kept to a far older pattern of life. They are paying dearly for our comforts and things are surely not the way they ought to be.

This was going to be a fairly esoteric piece on life in houses and the call of the wild, of the green hills and the sun calling us out when four walls threaten to hold us in. But the realities outlined above are somehow far more bony. But perhaps there is some way ahead in looking once again at our immediate environment and habits. I'll spare the platitudes on how we could all wean ourselves away from new electronics. I'll take as read the knowledge that we should all be sourcing food closer to home or growing it ourselves. And it goes almost without saying that we should all keep the new things that we buy to a bare minimum. But perhaps there's something else that life out of doors can teach us, even if it's just an open door or window, even if it's just feeling that breeze off the hills, remembering the smell of wild flowers, living life as fully as you can, walking like you never want to stop, recapturing the pull of the horizon, of the fat moon on a charged and tranquil summer's night.

So much of what we do, what we fill our lives and faces with is a compensation for something all too often missing. Perhaps if we can pull the wild back in our lives we'll be rewarded, with suddenly no pressing need for never ending media, for pounding concrete to the shops. It is still true to say when all else has been said that the good things are often free and largely harmless, the world still offers us rich pickings for our souls, gifts from the Gods abound with every step and home can be a hearth with the very heavens for a roof, that satisfaction is both knowing what's enough even as our cups can overflow with the deep riches that are is always being offered us, that are our heritage and legacy, that we must honour and preserve.

And by this I don't mean the hard foundations of resources that mean survival and basic dignity for one or opulence for someone somewhere else but those simple priceless things that make life worth the while when we realise that we have enough; companionship, integrity and mutual respect, high times and adventure and somewhere to call home we can come back to - even if that home resides simply within us - as well as the ceaseless beauty of new life and of the natural world we have around us.

It may be naive to think that both our current culture and the ones of those so clearly under threat can somehow be resolved. Perhaps a fall is ultimately necessary, if not unavoidable, perhaps a lasting harmony can only come out of the ashes. But at my most idealistic I'd like to think we are still capable of drastic change and while that chance remains; however slim, it must be worth the struggle. But it may well be that we will face catastrophe by degrees; not some dropping off a sudden cliff of doom, nor sustaining a model we know cannot continue. We may face decades of forced shifting to something less intensive, as the energy runs short, with all the massive repercussions that will bring.

Whatever the outcome, trying to steer things around now can only help us in the future, the gear shift will be less severe. But we need truly monumental change; we need to rediscover respect for every little piece of matter that we have an impact on, for every watt of energy we use. And scaling down our lifestyles will require a sacrifice no mainstream politician dares to seriously propose at present. We must develop the sense that this sacrifice is not only necessary but can also be a form of liberation, that our great goal is to set a standard of using less at every turn, a new ideal that we can all aspire to. And it has to first and foremost come from our own will, our own desire to change.

The answer may rest in our hearts; we have to rediscover a love for the land that we live on, to let this inform our actions towards her. And we need to build compassion for everyone around us; what may be on the horizon will require massive amounts of shared responsibility towards our neighbours, we need to build the sense that we are all in this together and that our best hope lies in a collective response. But also there is just the simple courage to look squarely at our situation, not run from it or pretend that challenges don't lie ahead. We must be solid in our resolve that whatever there may be in store, we can all be prepared to rise to the occasion.

Another Shade of Green

2009-05-09T19:01:00.009+01:00

The other day there was a fight in my home town, not the kind of running brawl up the hill that would stir me from my sleep when I still lived there and would often be over in minutes. And not exactly like the kind of massive scraps that kicked off between the mods and rockers in the fifties. This was another faction altogether and something much nearer to home, in several senses; the anarchists were out in force again. As ever it was a relatively small group in an otherwise peaceful demo but, predictably enough, they were the ones who made the news, the papers here running a story about ambulance workers being showered with bottles, with other stories about the public literally running scared, attacks on property almost too routine to mention, the counter culture press all too euphoric.

Fights with the cops are nothing new and their precedent goes back of course much further than the recent G20, when the police brutality was rightly reciprocated with an outcry from the people and the press. The current state of play has roots in the G8 demos of the nineties, which helped inspire the anti-capitalist demos of J-18 in 1999 and the Maydays of 2000 and later. And it could also be said that the anti-globalisation movement was partly or largely inspired by the anti-road campaigns and Reclaim the Streets free parties that grew up just a few years before.

But something seemed to change in the nineties, like a certain force had been unleashed and ran full tilt unto its logical conclusion. And for many that conclusion was to attack the problem at its root; to take on the City itself, to try and literally smash it. The trouble is that the best conclusions are not always logical ones, that reacting like this, however deserving the target may be, was a kind of glorified stunt, albeit on a massive scale, whatever the intention. The violence that took place on those protests did little more than make it easier for the police to drum up new legislation. And many who had been involved until that point melted away to less confrontational ways of doing things, leaving the field clear for those with fewer scruples, or informed by the conviction that trashing things and fighting the police was nearly always fully justified. While it should be stressed that the vast majority of those who stayed involved remained quite shrewd and continued to act with both the spirit and principles that had mostly always been defining features, there was a sense of the direction being influenced by a very vocal element, that many, myself included, turned away from a difficult debate, let our sense of self determination be subsumed by those with a different agenda, or at least a different sense of means. At any rate, it is interesting to read the interview with one of the editors of Do or Die who states that their more radical perspective within the movement won: “this resulted in lots of people dropping much of the non-violent pacifist ideology, moving more towards an anarchist position and supporting sabotage actions.”

And now we’re at a near brick wall, where the kind of action that ten years ago might have been tolerated is pre-emptively shut down. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, perhaps the police would have always taken this line given the chance, caught on the hop as they were at first by the new tactics of resurgent direct action. But direct action always carried both massive promise and a charge of the unknown, was always undefined, was something to be reckoned with but with no telling where it would end, of where it’s limits lay.

The reason I write this now is that not doing so would be to turn my back on many I still know who are affected, indirectly or otherwise, every time anybody decides to throw a bottle or a brick, every time criminal damage is justified as some first and final port of call. The police have grown too powerful by far, there’s no denying that. But they are in part reacting to a movement in this country that may have partly lost it’s way some years ago and - ever since Gleneagles and especially with the rise of Climate Camps – has been well under way to claiming it back, only to be jeopardised by an old school way of doing things, by that small but sharp insidious minority whose mantra is antagonism.

As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s often a case not of just what we do, but how we choose to go about it, and justifying not only violence but any kind of hate, of passion or conviction taken to extremes does nothing but fuel further the wheels of reciprocal action that every one could do without. The clearance of the Climate Campers from the Square Mile after events outside the Bank of England only goes to show that we are all the poorer from the actions of those who see aggravation as a means of bringing change; police actions become clouded with the excuse that some demonstrators somewhere were violent, that the force had somehow been worked up. While the TSG may have been far more calculating right from the beginning, and while their actions may have been given the green light from high up levels before the G20 protests had even begun, aggravation only plays into their hands, makes it easier for them to act how they see fit.

There’s a balance to be struck of course, there’s the sense that effective actions can often be full on. But it’s worth never letting ourselves forget that those we face are humans just like us, wherever their attitudes or their superiors’ attitudes are, that there’s a fine line between squaring up and intimidation, that we are all to some point or another compromised by the system until the system changes or gives way and that witchhunt-like mentalities can often do more harm than any good.

I say this too because the only way that those involved will succeed in carrying the day is to build bridges, to go forward as a strong and growing movement - if one people is for now too much to ask. Aggression will only turn people away and anyone protesting has to keep in mind that cheek is worth it’s weight in gold but can run the risk of seeming underhand if they choose to act without a sense of their own integrity. As Bob Dylan said; “if you live outside the law you must be honest.” And everybody needs to retain a basic respect for the dignity of those that they may face. They may or may not deserve it but how we choose to act to others determines the degree of our own dignity and whether or not we inspire anyone to follow in our steps.

A mass movement is needed now as never before but it must be one that acts with balance or will do nothing but lock itself into interminable and escalating rounds of confrontation and justify the cranking up still further of repression from the state. Even if the use of force is viewed by some as justifiable in the sense of not giving ground to the police, the reality is that if we choose to play the game like this, the State will always have the upper hand, will always have more force at its disposal, conveniently made legitimate. The only power that therefore has any hope of turning round the day has to therefore be a peaceful one, of the testimony of numbers, of both these things allied to practical action.

Sadly it seems the black block anarchists - whatever colour or name they may go under - will never really get it; the tactic of fighting the police, the conviction that this is both justified and worthwhile has become so entrenched and unassailable in certain quarters that speaking out against it almost seems pointless. For some it's just a natural intransigence, or myopia induced by rage. For others it comes from following unheeding a path that has already been set into play. But there are those I know who are more calculating, even in the depths of nihilism; they have seen a future and it's bleak and they slowly pick their way towards the hastening of bringing down humanity's predominance. And surely things must change but there has to be a way ahead that allows at least the chance of a return of our culture to some kind of balance with the earth, of our economy into something practical and sane.

I should say too that anarchy itself can hold great hope as something to aspire to; it can at least inform how we all act, whether or not we see ourselves as part of a wider society. At its most fundamental level anarchy is about accepting personal responsibilty for what we do. I would assert that following a violent path - through choice and not neccessity - for the sake of a mentality that only further fuels a confrontation that serves no one, carries nothing of the deep responsibility that anarchy ought to be about.

As for the demonstrations, it is both fitting now and necessary to challenge the powers of the police, the Camps turn their attention to the City and the months to come will surely be nothing if not interesting. But people must at every turn be on their guard against following doctrines of conflict that offer neither hope nor any kind of peace. I wouldn’t tolerate a violent man within my family and we should not respect a difference that goes against our most intrinsic values.

Engines of War

2009-03-12T16:36:00.026Z

I could hear them first, a sound like a train in the distance, suddenly becoming impossibly loud. And then there was the old knowledge that these were our engines of war, sent by far off ministries to practice here in these wet valleys of west Wales. It bought back memories of years of aerial surveillance, of being the focus of harriers skimming the top of the trees above my bender when living in some woodland in the borders. Now I was back, having been doing a reading nearby and the planes were a reminder of my former life, the world we're in today and also something older.

It was hard not to consider that the planes were maybe sent originally from England, scouring the air among these British mountains and that once some parallel of the very real if distant war we’re now engaged in was played out in these hills, or hills not far away, long centuries ago; Marcher Lords raiding across the border to keep a relatively poorly armed adversary in check. For two hundred years after the Norman invasion there was bloodshed in this land; the Welsh could not drive out the English who in turn could not exert enough control to completely subdue their apparent enemy.

Today the ones we fight may seem as far removed from us as the Welsh once did to medieval English minds, may seem to many in our number as deserving of the harshest treatment we can serve on them; our troops are now the buffer that will keep them from our towers and our towns. But years roll on and casualties pile up and now we call in planes just like the ones that tore above my head the other week, a riling fly by or benign dry run that in another place, for some innocent bystander would mean death.

Is this how we win hearts and minds? Is there any memory now of the notions that we entered this war with? Those trumpeted and fantastic ideals that promised everything even as the US troops, following the lead of their former Chief Commander, ploughed straight ahead with alienating ordinary Afghans, house arrests and bolshy convoys casting off the goodwill that there was, while money was diverted into salaries of NGO’s amid a desperately poor population, or else to tribal chiefs of shifting loyalties, or white elephant projects of infrastructure on another level entirely to priorities of those scratching the barest of livings from what little soil there is.

So now there’s a new plan, the emphasis will shift to some extent and yet it’s hard to say just how the war will ever be resolved. As we all know all too well, the history of intervention in the country points to the potential of something other than short lived, if not perhaps on the same scale as the centuries of intermittent strife we had in Wales. And all the while our forces stumble on, bolstered with bloody mindedness if nothing else, some great game or prolonged tragedy that we believe we cannot turn from.

Whether or not you think this is a conflict we must continue to engage in, what cannot be denied is the responsibility to hold our representatives to the honouring of blameless human life. The fight there has been a brutal, sometimes thankless task and making our presence in any way beneficial has been neither easy nor in any way uncomplicated by conditions on the ground. But if this war is to achieve anything at all, even by the narrow standard of keeping streets safe in London and New York, then we have to give an equal respect to life in Central Asian villages. To do anything less is not only morally bankrupt but counterproductive to the point where we have to ask just what it is we're doing there. We have to find a way ahead that does more good than harm. Abiding by the Geneva conventions would be some kind of start.

On my final day of living in the borders a decade or so back, the jump-jets weren't in evidence for once. Lazy drones of microlites and the gentle sounds of other light aircraft filled the sky, the sun shone through and days of heavy winds had finally died down. There seemed some sense of peace at last and even the distant sound of chainsaws in the woods didn't do much to disturb me. But this was all before the towers fell. So may we somehow see those days of peace again, hold onto the feeling of it, somehow spread it out. But I won't forget the visceral sensation of coming so close to the scream of those engines in the air above me, only just clearing the trees, just as I can only imagine what it must be like when that sound could spell out hideous injury or something far more sickeningly final.

The Hill and Harmony

2009-01-21T21:50:00.018Z

If there’s any hope the road will not be finished, something very major has to happen soon. For now at least the stars and sheep keep court upon and high above the grass, where they say the spirits singing can be heard on certain nights. But soon it seems the toxic glow from off a fifty acre interchange less than one mile from Tara’s central complex will mask the sky while cars disturb the peace and maybe too the sound of voices real or half imagined.

There has to somehow be some balm for all of this. Many people came together over the fight for the Hill: it might not have gone the way that had been hoped for but the fight itself should never be forgotten or devalued. If those involved can hold some sense of unity in this dark hour then that strength can still be called upon to fight the other new developments surrounding us. And the road may still have got this far whatever was thrown against it, just as the protests at Newbury, Twyford, Stanworth and Solsbury were always doomed to fail in stopping those specific schemes but won the wider war. And everything that Tara represents is carried still, in our hearts and in our deeds; her voice can still ring clear throughout our every action.

We live now in a cruelly battered world – there’s no denying the deep sorrow in what we have inherited; countries torn apart by war or subject to the worse the elements or false economies can throw at them. And the road through Tara-Skryne, should it be finished, will stand as testament to monumental institutional corruption and all that is wrong with a mindset that places no value on natural or cultural legacies; on the treasures of our common history, on all that is green and good in the world.

We must go on. Yes, what has already befallen the landscape in the wider Tara complex and what may yet be to come is almost too tragic for words. But we must somehow find the spirit to go forward despite the devastation just as other nations now are picking up the pieces of a world gone off the rails, though not for good. People round the world have been moved to rally on behalf of Tara and what she represents and we can use that spirit now to go ahead and fight for every other sacred place, for every forest, hill and river, for the beaches and the life within the sea, for those suffering from poverty or oppression, for the sake of sharpening a blade of the spirit against the hydra-headed nooses of despondency, despair, apathy and wilful ignorance.

And we will surely need it with the world in the state that it’s in. What’s happened in this wet and fertile cornerstone of Europe can set our faces in the direction of a new determined struggle, forged both from the flames of recent hardship and the very necessary breath of the spirit to survive. Our will can be the crucible that transforms tragedy to fury to a kind of righteous fire that may yet see us delivered to the better world it is our charge to bring about.

Are these only words? Just recently the decision was made to direct port infrastructure in North Dublin away from the ancient passage-tombs of Bremore, something that can be viewed as a direct result of the campaigning against the M3 – no developer wants to face the kind of demonstrations that Tara’s valley has been witness to. Bremore is proof that everything that people did for Tara has by no means been in vain.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Some action points for Tara;

+ Please send concerned emails to the Friends of World Heritage, who are affiliated with the World Heritage Foundation, and ask them to get involved in helping ensure that the Tara World Heritage Site does not have a motorway inside or beside it: worldheritage@unfoundation.org

click here for more about Friends of World Heritage

+ Please Sign the new Save Tara UNESCO petition

Tarawatch are now entering the final phase of the campaign, which is centred around the proposal by the Minister for the Environment, to make Tara a UNESCO World Heritage Site, by placing it on Ireland's Tentative List.

They are working with a number of experts to make a comprehensive submission to the 'Independent' Expert Advisory Panel, set up by the Minister. This apparently is not a consultation process, but a cover-up, making it imperative to both make ourselves heard, and mobilise. While some people have genuine concerns about Tara being a UNESCO site, there are simply two options (1) sit back and do nothing, and let them make Tara a UNESCO site, with the M3 passing through it - or (2) force the authorities, and developers to respect the site and the rules, and re-route the M3 before UNESCO designation.

+ New Tara facebook site.

and myspace

+ petition for the reburial of ancient remains excavated during construction of the M3.

Gaza

2009-01-07T18:28:00.006Z

The justification apparently remains, however disproportionate the response; Hamas will revert to their old ways unless they are removed from power root and branch or, as is looking increasingly likely, have been virtually wiped out. And there’s no denying the provocation; 300 Hamas rockets were fired into Israel between December 19th and the 27th last year and the point is not just the casualties these and other attacks inflicted – about a dozen killed since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 - but the effect of terror on so many more whose houses lie within range.

But you don’t have to dig too much deeper to see the wider picture; 1,700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military attacks in the same three year period, 22 of them during the latest six month ceasefire. And throughout this ceasefire, the Israeli blockade of Gaza only got steadily worse. Way before November, Gaza’s tap water had largely become unfit to drink, the sanitation system was close to breaking point, chronic malnutrition was on the up, fuel for cooking was hard to come by and there was a serious shortage of essential medical supplies.

While none of this in any way justifies violence is it really that surprising if, under these circumstances, many in Gaza feel driven towards it? Viewed like this, the question of who is provoking who takes a very different turn. The dogma and actions of Hamas have done little for the Palestinian people but does that justify in any way what has been delivered on an entire population’s head? The blockade on Gaza had started in earnest even before Hamas were elected in, and their rise to power speaks of the desperation of a people as much as any other motivations, a kind of haemorrhaging of sense under grevious conditions, or a scarcity of any other options, given Fatah’s apparent corruption.

And, with the events in Gaza now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Israelis themselves have no desire for any kind of two state solution. There are moderate voices of course but it’s all too easy to conclude that those holding power at the moment do not want anything other than a very finite solution to the Palestinian problem. Perhaps that’s extreme but as the slow starvation of an entire population with the blockade only goes to show and as the shelling of the UN shelter yesterday merely hammers home, there is a display, at the very least, of a monumental disregard for Palestinian life.

And reading one of the blogs from someone within Gaza now, to put it very mildly, does nothing to disprove this. Two nights ago, a - relatively - quiet shift for a Red Cross ambulance crew turned out to be thanks to the Israeli forces allowing no more than 20% of civilian casualties to receive treatment. By anyone’s standards, this is a pretty twisted accolade in a mounting list of war crimes. And now they are shooting at medics.

As I write, the Isaeli army have surrounded the cities and may move in at any moment, with even greater loss of life predicted if they do so. But perhaps the Israelis can still prove the world wrong, or at least show some shred of restraint. What is clear is that if a peace deal stands any chance of endurance it must not only guard against violence from either side but also allow those in Gaza their basic human rights; to live their lives with honour, with adequate food, fuel and medical care, with the freedom to move and the freedom from fear that should be a given for any population on this earth. Without that, there will be no end to the rockets, a state of affairs that might after all suit some of Israel's current leaders more than they'd ever admit.

Poverty Knocks

2008-12-21T22:19:00.003Z

Austerity and a New Aesthetic

With the fortunes of the global market looking more and more bleak by the day, we are all waking up to a world with far less money to be had. And even if the current trends are gradually redeemed, if not reversed, the long term situation with the oil reserves makes it highly probable at least that, when all the turmoil settles down, we will never again in the West enjoy the levels of material comfort that we have today. To many, this seems unimaginable and there is a general tendency to think that the problems will be temporary, however harsh and that sooner or later we'll climb back out. Which we probably will but I doubt that, in the long run, we'll remain where we are now; the old world fading out, something far less certain rising in its place. We have been in an economic bubble for a generation and it will probably take a generation to get over it. Certainly life in a less affluent era seems inconceivable to many; we have grown accustomed to so much. It looks like we are in for a very heavy dose of cultural cold turkey.

But it's interesting where things meet, where hopes for a better future overlap with seemingly bleak current circumstances; what happens from here on in, however ugly it could get, might be what saves us in the long run. Some very fundamental values are unexpectedly coming home to haunt us; having enough to eat, a roof over our heads, being able to keep warm, and even these are slipping through a lot of people's grasp. And while the lessons may be harsh, they could also bring the shock to our senses we so desperately need if we're to steer ourselves clear of the wider climatic disaster.

At times like these, perhaps it's as well to look at some positive implications of the crisis and there are certainly things to be grateful for. This in no way denigrates the very real suffering that many are now going through but we are perhaps less likely to be contributing to climate change the less money we have. Most of us would now think twice about buying stuff at the higher end of the scale; electronic goods, new sofas, refitted kitchens, new cars; there will be less upgrades of every description, one or two more hand-me-downs, a greater chance of valuing what we already own. But thrift is now almost a dirty word; a pride in prosperity has led us to some very sticky waters. And why wouldn’t it? The human story perhaps for all our history has been one of striving for improvement in our circumstances. Perhaps the only set of circumstances that can alter this are the unnegotiable terms of pure necessity.

And ours is a double-edged kind of richness; so many of us are like hamsters on the wheel, struggling to keep up with mortgages and expectations. Contentment can be elusive as we so rarely have the chance to sit and take stock, or we seek to buy our way to satisfaction, or into other's hearts. By way of contrast, to take the example at the far end of the scale, hunter gatherers - where they are not being driven from the face of the earth - enjoy a very different kind of wealth; rich in social depth and quality, rich with time to enjoy their friends and family, their tribe. I don’t suggest for a moment that we in West can make some of mass transition to this way of life any time soon. But there are courses in between and those who still enjoy the privilege, albeit a precarious one, of carrying the mantle of a supposedly more primitive lifestyle can help us set our compass, can inform us in steering our own way back to something that can carry us in the long run. Tribal peoples, perhaps above all else, enjoy an emotional immediacy to their surroundings of such a pitch that it can be almost impossible for us to comprehend, cooped up in our boxes, half fearful of the outdoor world. So perhaps, all things considered, a shake up has been somewhat overdue.

Maybe the most valuable thing we can hold onto isn't something that can be easily be defined, something that perhaps we've lost sight of with all our ipods, dvds, plasma screens, surround sound, media stacking, our ability to seize whatever we might want with just a few clicks, the imperative to acquire just for the sake of justifying extra income. The point perhaps is not to utterly demonise these things out of hand, but when they become over-riding, a first port of call that defines our sensibilities, our lives, then perhaps we've lost something vital somewhere down the way.

The other extreme of course now stares us starkly in the face – austerity. Sober, abstemious, austerity looms before us like some old paternal monolith of near genetic, postwar memory. We writhe away from its bitter implications, its denial of high times, of entertainment, its scouring of any kind pleasure to be had in life. But there is a counter argument of course, however hard it might be to broach; any attempt to describe it doomed to sound like lecturing, a scree slope of sanctimony, where any stance is seen as posturing, where the merest observation castigates us as do-gooders, where – above all – no one has the right to raise their voice as we are all implicated and the highest minded are invariably the biggest hypocrites.

And yet; the sense of something higher still remains for all our failings, like some scrap of human kindness remembered in the greyness of November. And do we ever remember, or are we willing to believe that life stripped away from excess can be the doorway to some other kind of wealth? Perhaps there is another kind of austerity, one that perhaps entails a change in our perspective as much as our habits, where one leads into the other without any need for denial, or where at least the new world offered up is not without its call, albeit in a wholly different way.

If we called it a shift in our ascetic compass then we could perhaps discard the need for any moralising. It concerns our relationship to the world itself, not just in terms of what we do or don't consume but in the sense of how we'd like our world to be, the kind of place we'd like to work towards. And here environmental considerations and the stark realities in the looming shortage of resources can – potentially – tie in with the utmost harmony with this vision of how things could be.

I make the following suggestions somewhat tentatively; they are the merest attempts to circumscribe some feeling, some instinct which I may have the clarity and opportunity to describe in more detail at a later date. But imagine, or try to entertain, a world where wood, for instance, plays an ever more important role again, both in terms of fuel and structures, managed on a sustainable and traditional footing. Imagine a world where highly processed goods of every description become less and less common, outside of fields like medicine, where more and more daily items are produced closer to home, and are less removed from their natural state; some satisfaction returning to regional characteristics, craftsmanship, a flowering of cottage industries. Where technology is valued for the miracle that it is, not some inroad to a consumerist dystopia where apparent obsolescence feeds an ever growing mountain of discarded wonders formed from precious materials and precious energy in their manufacture, deposited on some unsuspecting third world hinterland. Where lighting can revert to more natural forms if not needed for reading or work; the warmth of lamp and candlelight, or any simply softer form being once again discovered as the means to a far richer world. Where streets are no longer rendered sterile by people making journeys at great speed that in their heart they know they have no time for. Where localities thrive as they take on their true place as more than dormitories and through roads. Where the whole mode of transport shifts to something either slower or more sociable, a thing with more respect for places and our journeying spirits. If horses ruled the world again, both on track and field; can we dare to even picture that?

None of this is meant to deny for a moment the great gifts of modern technology but equally, so much of what was once good about the way that we lived has been cast to one side in the name of nothing but inevitability. The challenge is to rediscover the joy and wealth of reconnecting with some sense of elemental harmony in the things we have around us and in the way we relate to the world; a state of affairs that even a century ago was so widespread as to be largely taken for granted.

Perhaps we'll even become less dependent on technology to fulfil our every wish for entertainment. The worlds that we can carry in our minds hold all the richer currency; we've almost lost the art of remembering and sharing stories, have forgotten what it means to make a song or poem our own. Too many of us are unfamiliar with the stories and sagas that connect us over thousands of years to the people who once held our place, and who knows what it means to bring the best of those stories to life?

Cities will remain, industry won’t disappear any time soon but the sense I wish to communicate with all of these specifics is that a simpler, more frugal world can be the door to something truly beautiful; not some stark utilitarian place that has no time or room for the things which can enrich our souls. And visions can keep us together, can affirm our sense of what humanity means as the things we've grown accustomed to are taken from our grasp. The times ahead could be like coming home, if we can only see where we want to be going, one illusion taken from us, a dream of wholeness planted in its place.

As the old saying goes, what we do to the land we do to ourselves; if we can enter into a deeper relationship once again with the places around us, beneath our very feet, then perhaps we can feel more keenly the need for harmony between our lives and that of the country that sustains us.

So this gives some sense I hope of the ascetic I'd seek to propose. And yes these are just dreams; no one can say with any certainty what lies in store, and there are perhaps many ways that things could go from here. But if we can cultivate some sense of the world we’d like to see, then we would have at least something to navigate by. And the world that waits, despite whatever challenges may lie upon the way, could still be a rich one, richer by far then the many pyrrhic victories the industrial world has left us. It isn't some utopia; many of these things require work, a mettling of our spirits towards the elements, towards a little more spartan way of life. But we can still enjoy the good things; beer and wine and music, company and warmth and dancing, good medicine, the chance to travel and to learn but they need not come at such a heavy cost; the simple pleasures are perhaps the greatest after all, they can connect us to something deep within ourselves and can only grow all the richer for it.

I see the world ahead, though not without perhaps considerable hardship, as one of potentially great beauty, something that could at least ameliorate the changes we shall all have to adjust to and which may yet make our world a place that once again rings true with some kind of more natural order. But first we must see our way past the paradigm that keeps us in check, that masks the fire within our blood, keeps us on the wheel and makes us seek our compensation in the lies that have grown up around us and which are daily offered to us on a plate, so that our eyes and ears - our very hearts - are choked with it, we are crippled by despondency, or confusion, while the new world, the world we've lost but not perhaps for good lies waiting like a track behind the hill, a patient lover who knows we have it in us to come back.

A Rose for Basra

2008-12-10T18:33:00.001Z

So now, for us at least, the end would appear to be in sight, though it will never be forgotten and the legacy may haunt us for a generation. You could almost be forgiven for thinking it was over already, judging from the tailing off of coverage, the reports that the troop surge was having some success. And the worst is hopefully behind us, but it speaks volumes that what passes for any kind of peace now is purely relative. Hundreds die in Baghdad every month, graveyards are overflowing, thousands of children roam homeless, open sewers still cover the streets after five years of occupation and what peace remains is only held in place by mile upon mile of concrete walls.

It was bad enough in the build up and in the near incomprehensible savagery of the initial bombardment, but there was the assumption that those in control had at least some idea of what they were about, that shortly peace and order would be restored; a terrible peace founded on tens of thousands of deaths but a peace regardless. The full magnitude of the institutionalised stupidity only became clear piece by piece, a combination of hope and disbelief staving off the common acknowledgement of the dawning nightmare. But you still hoped, as the reports of bombings multiplied, that one day soon there'd be an end to it. And what would we sing when it was over? How would we remember the dead? How on earth in a hundred years would we ever atone for our part in it all?

And to have our country involved was almost the worst thing about it, even if there still seemed some chance of honourable conduct in those very early days, if you could blank out for a moment the RAF's part in the bombardments. Pipers lead the APCs into Basra, Scottish and English flags shone in the desert sun and you hoped, even as the papers filled with the dead and mutilated, that somehow it would all come right, that this hour was meant for peace and even a biblical sea of blood could not blow the world so entirely off its former track. So long as it all ended soon.

It was paradoxical to the point of the obscene right from the start, or what was so clearly already the end, marching on Fairford airbase the day the B52's and stealth bombers took off. Like Love had raised the stakes; the West Country hippies throwing a party by the gates, the anarchists seeming in the right for once for trying to stir up a fight. Policemen danced, gunships drowned out the speakers, their anti-tank cannons gattling invisible hate. Nobody got through. It was first day of spring, Gloucestershire threw out it charms as though England in the sun was all the more urgent for the horsemen and the hour. It was the first time I found myself in a place I'd already dreamt about and Fairford church opened its arms in revelation, just as I remembered it. Before, there'd been a flood, a fight on the meadows and soldiers being swept away. Today it was all horrific beauty and something in me broke, for what I was trying to carry.

How to lay a balm on this, this country we have broken, tit for tat blood-letting like political psychosis, a haemorrhaging of respect for human life, a desert full of involuntary martyrs? Is it enough to say we never wanted it, we railed against it, that we will never forget the men that lead us into it? Is it enough to say we will not look away? That our poor hearts go with yours that we've so hideously abused? England had a heart once and perhaps it can still serve us, somehow see us clear of the butchers, remind us of the people we once were, give us the leaders that will never let a thing like this ever take place again. And it's all our part to make the reparations that we can.

Blood pours down the Tigris, helicopters scour the temple sites while here the diplomats are shuttled over the disbelieving hills, four thousand families wait for the return of boys from a war that they never believed in, or tend their broken bodies, just as another casual hundred bury their beloved in Baghdad and it's hard not to wonder now if anything that anybody says or does will ever be enough. We have just a clutch of prayers for a cruelly battered world, a bloody minded hope for a new day and the rest of our own days to somehow restore peace, to bring about some promise of the world, if we can remember or bring ourselves to believe it, if it's still to be found in the sand. And we have no other option but to try.