Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Matt and I were at the BFI this evening watching Winstanley, an excellent 1975 film about Gerrard Winstanley’s Digger commune of 1649. It’s the 360th anniversary of the Diggers this year.
The Diggers were agrarian anarchists inspired by Winstanley’s writings and actions, it was just after the Civil War, Charles I had been executed, and England must have felt pregnant with political possibilities. Winstanley argued that the earth “was meant to be a common treasury for all, not a private treasury for some”, and he inspired a very practical egalitarian communal living, stressing the value of hard work and self sufficient dignity over accepting social inequality and charitable handouts.
His philosophy was thoroughly rooted in christianity, but with a good focus on the “republic of heaven”, heaven created in the here and now by the common people, as opposed to a far off heaven promised by the priests and landowners as a reward for a lifetime of poverty.
Priests lay claim to heaven after they are dead, and yet they require their heaven in this world too, and grumble mightily against the people that will not give them a large temporal maintenance. And yet they tell the poor people that they must be content with their poverty, and they shall have their heaven hereafter. But why may we not have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too, as well as you? … While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they not see what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living.
This sparse, black and white film portrays this short lived and very English revolution really well. What is particularly striking is the weather. There is lots and lots of rain, and mud and dirt, and hard work. I came away with a strong sense of a movement that was rooted in the cold wet realities of the English climate, nothing glamorous or romanticised about it, pulling together in poverty and hardship to build these communes on scrubby patches of common land, facing the clean wealthy disdain of the propertied and professional classes.
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Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Went walking yesterday on a section of Dan’s North Downs walking expedition: Chilham to Canterbury. There was Alex, Jenny and Mike, Rob and Barbara, Gemma and Lloyd from Alex’s house, and their friend Jessica, and Teresa. It was great fun. Out east of London, the weather was chilly, but crisp and sunny, not soggy or snowy. Great walking weather.
I made wassail, hot spiced ale, in a thermos, and we stopped for lunch and wassail in a traditional orchard, where some of us climbed trees.
The land of Kent is so English, it’s all apples and hops and Norman conquests. We passed a few oast houses, and had dinner that night in a pub in Canterbury, the Thomas Beckett, with lots of dried hops hanging from the ceiling.
The next day we explored the old Norman castle and marvelled at Canterbury Cathedral, the motherlode of all Anglicanism. It is huge and amazing, as awe inspiring as the great Norman cathedrals of the north, up in Durham and York.
We finished off a lovely weekend with cream tea before tottering on to our trains back to London.
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Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
All New Year’s Day has been covered with frost and mist down here in Devon! Minus three degrees, an outrageous temperature in the south of England!
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Leonardo and Francisco are staying in our flat and feeding Mouse over the holidays. We got them out to Devon for the last couple of days, and Matt drove us on a little sightseeing tour of Somerset.
We went to see the amazing little ruined fourteenth century castle at Nunney, on the eastern fringe of the Mendips. It is quite tiny, more like a house in the form of a castle, though with massive towers on each of its four corners and a cute perfectly maintained rectangular moat. It’s bitterly cold down here at the moment, so the moat was beginning to freeze.
Then to Wells to see the famous cathedral, with its compact arches and detailed statues. Wells Cathedral really exemplifies Somerset architecture, in which grand buildings are rendered on a very compact scale. I remember the hamstone cottages that look like miniature stately homes in the villages near Montacute House. If the inspiration for the hobbit shires resides anywhere in England it is surely here. How different Wells Cathedral feels from the massive lofty Norman cathedrals of northern England.
We drove up and down Cheddar Gorge and marvelled at its really rather impressive sheer limestone cliffs. It’s as if you have suddenly been transported from gentle England to the foothills of the Alps, before being deposited back in the Mendips as quickly as you left. The entrance into the gorge on the south side is massively crowded by lots of tacky tourist tat – hostels, restaurants, shops – it feels a bit like one of those Alpine villages that feed on the motorists on their way in and out of Switzerland. We went into a shop and Leonardo and Francisco loaded up on shortbread and cheddar cheese for presents.
We ventured into the wild expanses of Exmoor and stopped at the Tarr Steps, the lovely old solid stone foot bridge across the River Barle. It’s thought to be medieval, though some think it may date back to prehistoric times. Mind you, the ancient bridge was washed away in the freak storm of 1952 apparently so it had to be rebuilt. I was wondering if they reused the stones, or if they had to get new ones. Otherwise, is it really the same bridge? There would still be the platonic ideal of the same bridge in there somewhere I suppose.
We went right up to the Bristol Channel coast to Lynton, perched up on the cliffs, to have a very indulgent Devonshire cream tea, then wended our way along the coastal road to Porlock, where the road is the steepest in England and descends so fast down from the moor that your ears pop by the time the car reaches the bottom.
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Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Matt and I went for an afternoon walk on Hampstead Heath today, it’s so lovely and sunny this weekend. We shunned our usual eastern hunting grounds and headed west, through the more magnificent areas where you can just about imagine how the mighty old forest of Middlesex must have felt before the humans conquered it, over to the West Heath. We admired the mushrooms growing round the Pergola, wishing Martin was there to tell us whether they were edible, and then plunged quite accidently into the cruising zone.
It was quite eerie, as it was a sunny Saturday afternoon and suddenly there was a man just standing by the side of the path, quite still, grim and stern. We passed by and then there were four or five men, some in denim or leather, all wandering through the woods in different directions, silent, it was like a low budget zombie movie. It was much less friendly than I always imagined it might be, everyone seemed to be on their guard.
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Monday, April 28th, 2008
Spent Sunday with Dan H and the walking gang: Teresa, Peter, Emily, Mike, Kate B. I brought Fares along too, who could only talk to us in Arabic or BSL, so that added a fun linguistic learning dimension to the day.
This section of the North Downs route intersected every so often with the M25 and M23, so you get the contrast of these ancient farmed chalk hills with their old pilgrim’s route and then the almighty concrete juggernaut of the motorways cutting through them.
We crossed the motorways twice, and the view from the bridges of the endless stream of roaring traffic cascading along was pretty magnificent in its own way. From above the noise really blasts you, and the warm fumes rise up around you, before you retreat from the bridge to the quiet of the countryside again.
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