Going off the road

Posted on 11th June 2021 by Ian

In the early light of a June morning, my uncle was disturbed from his sleep

“Four o’clock in the morning, the cows in the field down the road started bellowing. Now I’m an age now when I like a bit of a lie-in; well, not get up at four o’clock anyway.

“I decided I had better go and find out what was wrong so put my overalls on over the top of my pyjamas and drove down the road. I got to the field where the cows were and there was a dolly bird in a cocktail dress standing in the middle of the field.

“She had driven straight through the hedge and had half a tree stuck to the underside of her car. She said she had misjudged the bend and had found herself in my field.

“Anyway, I opened the gate for her and she drove off without another word – still with half a tree stuck underneath it, with the right wing caved in and the right-hand lights gone altogether. I reckon she was afraid of being caught for drunk-driving for her to drive off so fast.”

(My uncle’s account of his encounter with the woman in the field included a number of adjectives that would be used by farmers but are probably not appropriate for polite company).

What was surprising was that the hedge still remained to have holes made in it; stories of cars going through it were common in childhood days.

On one occasion, my grandfather had fitted a new gate, together with new gateposts, a costly business when you are a small farmer. The following week, a man in an MG sports car had contrived to come round the bend at such a speed that he had demolished the lot. The miracle was that he had walked away uninjured.

On another occasion, there had been a knock on the farmhouse door in the early hours of the morning. A man stood on the doorstep and  said his car had gone through the hedge and was there a hotel nearby where he could stay. My grandfather told him that he would have a long walk and that he had better come in and sleep on the settee. A breakdown truck was ordered in the morning and the car towed away. (My grandfather used to offer similar hospitality to passing gentlemen of the road. “Alec,” my grandmother would say, “one day we will be murdered in our beds”).

Passing holes in hedges can prompt lengthy speculation on what vehicle might have made an unexpected exit from the road.

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School of hard rocks

Posted on 10th June 2021 by Ian

The school Duke of Edinburgh expedition takes place next week. The teachers supervising it are very different from Mr Light.

Mr Light taught science and P.E. and was the school organizer for the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme, all of which carried with them a degree of physical threat.

Science should have been the safest of the three activities he oversaw, had it not been for his propensity to occasionally throw whatever came to hand at inattentive pupils. His explanation of the components of granite will remain forever in the memory.

Holding in his hand a sizeable chunk of rock, in order that it be visible to the whole class, he was pointing out to us the signs of quartz or feldspar when without warning the rock left his hand and flew across the room. It ricocheted off the desk behind me before crashing into the notice board on the back wall and falling to the floor. A sizeable chunk of the surface of the formica topped desk seemed to have gone with the rock. Tony, the boy behind who had been talking, was momentarily struck dumb.

P.E. was benign most of the time, the exercise regime outside each morning, the Wednesday morning routine in the gym, but once a fortnight, on a Saturday morning, the sort of delicacy demonstrated in his hurling of rocks, was manifest in his organizing of the cross country runs. These weren’t the sort of soft stuff one sees now on athletics coverage on television, these were gruelling routes.

One route started at around a thousand feet above sea level, dropped sharply three hundred feet into a thickly wooded valley before rearing up to fifteen hundred feet where there was a footpath along the top of a very windswept ridge. Mr Light would sit in his blue Datsun in his sheepskin coat and scan the ridge with binoculars to count the runners, never seeing any hypocrisy in sitting in comfort while encouraging others to exercise.

It was the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme which could throw up unexpected surprises – most boys only did it because of the opportunities to go hiking. The bronze award expedition itself was only a fifteen mile hike with an overnight in open country, but Mr Light felt this meant two or three one day practices.

The first resulted in a route that was six miles more than planned when Mr Light broke from using compass directions and instructed a turn to the left when a bridlepath met a road. He should have said a turn to the west, descending in a southerly direction onto the road, a turn to the left was a turn east – three miles later the mistake was realized.

The second brought a near escape from being savaged by dogs set on us by an elderly bachelor farmer. Skirting the farm on a public footpath and beginning to climb away from the run down farmhouse, a figure appeared at the back door and began waving a stick. A pair of black and white dogs streaked up the hill. Realising the farmer meant business prompted a burst of speed uphill as the yapping dogs grew closer, suddenly a large pig appeared and ran at the dogs, the dogs turned and ran back down the hill tails between their legs. There was much breathless laughter and a noting that when one is being pursued by angry dogs, it is helpful to have a pig on hand.

Mr Light would have thought teachers now had gone soft.

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No aliens here

Posted on 9th June 2021 by Ian

“US officials can’t explain UFOs, but aliens not ruled out,” the RTE headline caught the eye. Such a story with have caught the imagination in teenage years when our neighbouring county of Wiltshire was said to be the UFO capital of England. Now the report that is to be released to the United States Congress seems likely to generate more heat than light, particularly as part of it is to remain classified.

The most famous story of an encounter with supposed extra-terrestrial life was more than  seventy years ago at Roswell in New Mexico. The United States Air Force reported that a weather balloon had crashed, a story that was accepted for thirty years, until the 1970s when a multitude of theories began to emerge.

Stories now abound concerning what is supposed to have happened – a spacecraft with alien life forms is said to have crashed. There has never been evidence presented to suggest that the original story about the weather balloon was not true, but efforts to dispel speculation simply add to the conspiracy theories.

In a time of “fake news,” and a distrust of any authority or source that is associated with the “Establishment,” it has become impossible to argue with those who believe that the remains of an alien spacecraft are concealed at the air force base. There are  those who are convinced that their theories, however fanciful, have as much validity as assertions based on empirical research and rigorous evidence. To appeal to scientific or academic writers is to be accused of being in thrall to “experts.”

If research and evidence are not convincing, perhaps appeal to people’s own powers of logic can prompt thought.

UFOs are now described as “unidentified aerial phenomena.” If these phenomena are believed to be alien visitors, then there must be consideration of the reality of the space through which those craft must have travelled. If these craft have come through space to reach Earth, then logic should tell those who believe this has happened that the technological expertise of those travelling in them is infinitely greater than the technology possessed by those those of us here on Earth. Such is their technology that if such alien life forms should be inclined to communicate with us, they would already have done so, in an unambiguous way. If the putative aliens have not communicated, either they are not there, or they do not wish to talk.

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Big Brother’s birthday

Posted on 8th June 2021 by Ian

It was on this day, 8th June 1949, that George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Terminally ill, he died seven months later, an Orwell who lived into a ripe old age might have felt there was a depressing familiarity in the unfolding of history, that the trends in society were those that he anticipated in the post-war years.

It was with extraordinary prescience that Orwell wrote of the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of minds.” Big Brother was not worried how promiscuous they might be, and, through the activity of the Ministry of Truth’s Pornosec, provided pornography which many young men bought, believing themselves to be engaged in illicit behaviour.

Orwell anticipated a time when the majority of people would believe that being allowed to have sex with whomsoever they wished and having access to pornography would mean that they had freedom: Big Brother was not interested in curtailing such freedom.

The national security agencies charged with watching over ordinary citizens are hardly more interested in the activities of the overwhelming majority of us than Big Brother was interested in the activity of the proles. Authorities might paraphrase the words of Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans in which Paul argued that rulers held no terror for those who did right.

Surveillance in its various forms, it would be argued, is overwhelmingly no more a curtailment of freedom than a lifeguard on a beach is a curtailment of the freedom of sunbathers. Perhaps it is more the case that provided we are no more dangerous than the proles, no-one will disturb us.

The significant question to be asked is not whether surveillance takes place (and anyone who uses any of the social media or search engines like Google, will know from the advertisements that their content is being monitored), but what constitutes a threat to national security and who makes that judgement. Tales of scary men in the shadows watching every social post, text, email and web search do nothing to protect our freedom (Orwell would probably have suggested that such stories assist the development of Big Brother, diverting attention down sensationalist channels).

Individual freedom must include having the capacity to decide what it means to be free, and not having that decision made for us by agencies which are subject to neither open debate nor  scrutiny. Otherwise Orwell’s vision will be completely fulfilled.

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A hint of harvest

Posted on 7th June 2021 by Ian

Perhaps it had been wishful thinking, but there seemed a hint of a lighter colour in the field of winter barley, maybe not signs of gold, but certainly something paler than deep green. A search of the web revealed that winter barley is harvested in July, and that in 2018, some of it had been fully cut by the end of June, so the suspicion that the field was beginning to ripen was not unfounded.

The winter barley harvest probably passes unnoticed by most people; most harvests seem to pass unnoticed by most people. The movement of combine harvesters and tractors pulling trailers of grain and straw might cause annoyance to motorists, but otherwise the work in the fields is generally not regarded as connected with the daily lives of those who drive by.

Food security is assumed in our country. We might panic buy some items, as happened at the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, but no-one will face the prospect of hunger if the summer brings a bad harvest.

Life was not always so secure. The opening words of Ellis Peters’ An Excellent Mystery capture a sense of the quiet happiness brought by a harvest in time for Lammas Day, 1st August:

August came in, that summer of 1141, tawny as a lion and somnolent and purring as a hearthside cat. After the plenteous rains of the spring the weather had settled into angelic calm and sunlight for the feast of Saint Winifred, and preserved the same benign countenance throughout the corn harvest. Lammas came for once strict to its day, the wheat-fields were already gleaned and white, ready for the flocks and herds that would be turned into them to make use of what aftermath the season brought.  The loaf-Mass had been celebrated with great contentment, and the early plums in the orchard along the riverside were darkening into ripeness. The abbey barns were full, the well-dried straw bound and stacked, and if there was still no rain to bring on fresh green fodder in the reaped fields for the sheep, there were heavy morning dews.  When this golden weather broke at last, it might well break in violent storms, but as yet the skies remained bleached and clear, the palest imaginable blue.

A failed harvest in such times would mean a long and hungry winter, it would mean, if not starvation, then poor health through malnutrition and a lack of strength to contend with illnesses. Someone passing a field nine centuries ago and seeing the grain starting to ripen would have seen it as a significant moment.

 

 

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