Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie…

I was wandering in the town square in Ripon in the summer of 1973. I remember walking without any particular aim. I had time to spare. I was light and free.

I looked up and saw the verse carved into the frieze at the top of the Town Hall — an adaptation of the verse in the Psalm:

“Except Ye Lord Keep Ye Cittie Ye Wakeman Waketh in Vain.”

I knew the verse well enough, but the substitution caught my eye. The Town Hall had replaced watchman with wakeman. The word looked both familiar and out of place, like something that had slipped through a crack in time.

I later discovered that Ripon’s historic Hornblower — the Wakeman — would blow a horn at 9 p.m. each night to signal the start of the security patrol. But I didn’t know that then.

I stood for a while, looking at the inscription, taking in its message. Then I moved on. The square went on being a square. The day went on being a day.

But the detail stayed.

Ripon 1973

Summer light on the square. Stone warm underfoot. A bus purred at the kerb.

I walked without aim — air moving easily, the day loose about me.

High on the Town Hall frieze: Ye Wakeman waketh… letters cut like dry reeds.

Wakeman.

I stood a moment. The square held its shape. The day went on.

The word remained.

Sound in Movies: A Different Kind of Seeing

 

I saw the movie "Tuner" today, and one of the features of the film was the use of sound at certain times when the drama focussed around the Leo Woodall character in  his safe-cracking, and in other action moments.  We were hearing the action from the sounds in his head. This was interesting, and I recalled the role of sound in 'Rose of Nevada', which I reflected on recently. In that film,  oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape placed  a layer of distance between the viewer and the action. Use of sound in ‘Tuner’ was different.

In ‘Tuner’ the sound design functions as a form of subjective immersion. When the drama centres on Niki White’s ( Leo Woodall ) safe-cracking, or on moments of heightened concentration and danger, we are drawn into his  sensory world. External reality recedes and we hear what he hears and what his mind attends to. Small sounds become magnified, irrelevant sounds disappear; rhythms and mechanical noises acquire an almost musical significance.  

Rose of Nevada had the reverse effect.  I guess one way of putting this is that ‘Tuner’ uses sound to move us closer to experience, while Rose of Nevada uses sound to move us further away from it.

But in  both cases at least, we are reminded that sound is as important to any film, and  cinema is more than  a visual art. The eye tells us what is happening, but the ear helps us  to inhabit what is happening.

In Rose of Nevada, the unusual soundscape contributes to the feeling that the events are being recollected, half-remembered, or viewed through a veil of memory and myth. The distant dialogue and unreal acoustic space make us feel that we are  never entirely "there."

In ‘Tuner’, by contrast, sound compresses the distance between audience and character. Every click, scrape, and metallic resonance becomes charged with significance because we are experiencing events from within Niki White’s concentration.

So, in  both movies, sound is controlling our psychological distance. We should look out for the next award season: both movies will surely be listed for Best Sound?

Great Tew: Wall Paintings and a Priest's Apology

I took these photographs of the wall paintings at St Michael and All Angels, Great Tew. They belong, I understand, to one of the most important surviving groups of early 14th‑century wall paintings in Oxfordshire. They form part of a larger narrative cycle running along the south aisle wall, and the image shown here is one of the panels that fits neatly between the aisle windows. It depicts scenes from the Passion cycle.

At the right-hand end of what is effectively the lowest tier is the Appearance to Mary Magdalene — one of the clearest surviving images. Two small trees frame the scene, and Mary, on the right, kneels reverently before Christ, who holds the banner of the Resurrection.

Noli Me Tangere - Appearance to Mary Magdalene

There is a certain irony in the fact that the central image of the Resurrection has been largely lost beneath a later memorial tablet. When such monuments were installed, the existence of medieval wall paintings — often whitewashed after the Reformation or simply forgotten — was probably not suspected. And so this central and crucial image is now reduced to Christ’s foot stepping out of the tomb and a handful of tiny soldiers, one of whom, on the right, is seen leaning on his shield.

The Resurrection 

The memorial is to the Reverend Charles Dayman, M.A., who served as the Vicar of Great Tew from 1830 until his death in August 1844. His tenure spanned a transformative and highly turbulent era for both the local parish and the wider Church of England.

Before arriving in Oxfordshire, Dayman was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially found clerical work as a curate at St. James’s Church in Dover, Kent, where he lived with his wife. 

He was formally instituted as the Perpetual Vicar of St Michael and all Angels in 1830. Dayman ran the parish at a time when religious nonconformity was surging in rural Oxfordshire. By 1834, just a few years into his tenure, Great Tew was reporting a massive spike in residents identifying as Baptists or "Ranters" (Primitive Methodists). 

Dayman spent much of his energy trying to retain his congregation against the draw of local cottage meetings. He took an active role in running the local school and his strict, structured educational regime was highly regarded by the regional gentry, who sent their children to Great Tew specifically to be tutored under his leadership.

Dayman’s family was profoundly impacted by the Oxford Movement.

I thought I might imagine how the Rev. Dayman might look on his own memorial today:

An Apology from the South Aisle 

Forgive me, Lord, for where my marble lies,
Blotting the ancient pigments of Your grace.
My passing breath they sought to solemnise.
With heavy hand, and blind to any trace,
The parish carved my name in polished stone,
Right where the medieval masters drew
The rising Christ, who broke the tomb alone,
To bring the dying world a life anew.
Yet here I stand, imposter before the grave,
My cold memorial blocking out the light,
A mortal man entombing Him who saves,
And hiding resurrection from our sight.
Dear Saviour, scratch away my proud decree;
Let Dayman fade, that we might look on Thee.

These survivals remind us how precarious medieval art can be. Parish churches were living buildings, altered and adapted to the needs of each generation. What remains is accidental and all the more precious for it. At Great Tew, the faint red lines still carry the energy of the original hand, working I imagine, from familiar models and with a sure sense of narrative and gesture.

For those who want to explore the cycle in more detail, an excellent and comprehensive review is available here , with fine, clear images of each section  

Into the Forest, Towards Oblivion: Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence

 Here I look at two 20^th century poems about death and dying.   Each deals with the subject  through images drawn from the natural world or from everyday experience. The poems are  are Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death. Both poems contemplate the end of life with unusual honesty, yet they arrive at very different visions of what awaits us. I explore the contrast.

The poems are here [ Valid June 15th 2026: Open in new tab]: The Ship of Death  and  Lights Out

Edward Thomas's Lights Out and D. H. Lawrence's The Ship of Death are poems that confront mortality without sentimentality. Neither turns away from the fact of death. But these poems express two very different visions of what it means to approach the end of life.

In Lights Out, Thomas guides the traveller to the edge of an "unfathomable" forest. Roads and tracks lead towards it, but at the brink they lose their certainty:

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

The roads of life appear to promise destinations and purposes. Yet at the forest's edge these distinctions dissolve. The traveller enters a realm beyond ordinary understanding.

Crucially, Thomas never tells us what lies within the wood. The mystery remains intact. The forest is 'unfathomable' because it resists explanation. Yet the poem is not troubled by this ignorance. On the contrary, its serenity arises from accepting it. The speaker declares, 'I desire to go.'There is no struggle against the darkness. The forest is entered willingly. The poem's power lies in its trust that not everything needs to be known. Death is imagined as a mystery into which one passes.

Lawrence's poem begins from a very different premise. Here death is not a mystery, but a destination repeatedly named. That destination is oblivion.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

The word appears more than once and stands at the centre of the poem's vision. Unlike Thomas's forest, oblivion is not unfathomable. Its meaning is stark. It suggests the extinction of consciousness, the erasure of identity, the end of striving and memory.  

Yet the drama of Lawrence's poem does not lie solely in its destination. It lies in the possibility that the destination is not always  finally reached. The poem's most striking moment comes with a sudden reversal:

Ah wait, wait, for there is the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life...

The adjective 'cruel' transforms the poem. The return to life is not welcomed. It is endured. The voyager approaches oblivion, only to be drawn once more into existence. Death itself is no longer the primary challenge. The challenge is recurrence. The voyage is undertaken, interrupted, and perhaps undertaken again.

This difference separates Lawrence fundamentally from Thomas. Thomas imagines a mystery entered into. For  Lawrence the destination has a finality, but it is the journey which carries the uncertainty.

Even the famous image of the 'little ship, with oars and food and little dishes' acquires a different significance in this light. At first these details seem reassuringly domestic. They bring the language of the comfort of ordinary life into a poem about death. Yet they do not soften the destination. Rather, they express sympathy for the traveller. The little provisions are not evidence that the journey is easy. They are evidence that it is difficult. The tenderness lies not in confidence about what awaits but in care for the one who must undertake the voyage.

Meantime, Lawrence's allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet are particularly revealing. Hamlet imagines death as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’ Lawrence presents a more unsettling possibility. His poem expresses the  anxiety is that the traveller may return before the voyage has finally achieved its destination. The repeated references to oblivion suggest that extinction remains the goal towards which the journey moves, yet the 'cruel dawn of coming back to life' introduces that possibility of interruption and recurrence.

The Hamlet echoes deepen the poem's darkness. Shakespeare's prince contemplates the possibility of ending life with a ‘bare bodkin’  yet hesitates at the uncertainty of what may follow death. Lawrence inherits something of that sombre atmosphere. The question is no longer whether death should be chosen; death is inevitable. The question is how one prepares for its arrival.

The result is a poem that possesses a stoic rather than a consoling wisdom. Lawrence does not ask us to trust a mystery. He does not promise that oblivion is benign. Instead he insists that the voyage awaits us and that preparation is necessary. This is where the contrast with Thomas is sharpest. Thomas finds peace in mystery. Lawrence finds dignity in necessity. The traveller in Lights Out walks willingly into the wood. The voyager in The Ship of Death builds his vessel because he must.

 

When Inclusion Becomes Erosion — Revised

 

Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.

I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods, and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals — illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.

This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about  in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities  about which many  folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.

There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture  and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.

In recent years I have found myself returning to this question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.

Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door, communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid has begun to dissolve.

This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government. They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable, and largely unseen.

In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.

This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.

The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.

Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray. 

Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing  vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.

We need a  recognition that compassion without competence is a brittle virtue.

In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here. 

A state that has hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between competing goods.

Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.

 

 

Bob Dylan, Faith, and the Language of Darkness

I was looking at two songs by Bob Dylan. The first is "Gotta Serve Somebody" from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming, which was one of 3 (I believe) issued during a time when he committed himself to a belief in Jesus Christ, in a charismatic, evangelical environment, and so made that leap of faith known to Bible believing Christians.  

Gotta Serve Somebody https://share.google/qdKHTmB00Y348j3hk

The second is Not Dark Yet from his 1997 album Time Out of Mind. Looking at the lyrics of these two songs, and also understanding from later interviews that Bob Dylan is still a man of faith, I thought I might explore the differences in the language and themes of these two songs, and think about Bob Dylan's development and use of lyrics in those intervening years, which might also reveal changes in his approach to his faith. This is what emerged.

Not Dark Yet https://share.google/npqK5oXCa3ujm09Bx 

Gotta Serve Somebody  is direct, declarative and prophetic. Its message is clear: every human being ultimately serves either God or the devil. The lyric proceeds with the certainty of a sermon. Social distinctions are stripped away, and the listener is confronted with a spiritual choice. The voice is authoritative, reflecting the confidence of a recent convert who believes he has discovered a fundamental truth about existence.

Nearly twenty years later, Not Dark Yet presents a very different voice. Here there is no proclamation, no doctrine, and no explicit reference to Christ or salvation. Instead, the song inhabits a mood of weariness and mortality. The famous refrain, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there," evokes aging, decline, and the approach of death. Rather than offering answers, the lyric dwells within a state of consciousness.

Some Christian listeners have viewed this change as evidence of a weakening of faith. From an evangelical perspective, life "in Christ" brings assurance, hope and spiritual renewal. The New Testament proclaims victory over death and despair through Christ's resurrection. If this is so, why should a believer continue to speak in the language of darkness? Why contemplate suffering rather than transcend it through prayer and trust in God?

This objection seems to me to raise an important question, which can only be answered by highlighting the distinction between faith and art. Faith enables a proclamation of truths and offers answers, and indeed lives within them. Art often seeks to describe experience in all its complexity, even when no resolution is immediately apparent.

Going down the route of art, we find for example the literary critic Christopher Ricks who draws attention to the affinities between Not Dark Yet and John Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. Both works explore weariness, mortality, and the attraction of release from suffering. Neither arrives at a final conclusion. Instead, each remains suspended between life and death, hope and uncertainty. The power of Dylan's lyric lies partly in this refusal to define precisely what the approaching darkness means.

At the same time, Not Dark Yet can be understood within a religious tradition older and broader than post-Lutheran evangelicalism or the preoccupations of the English Romantic poets. The voices of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms all find expression in darkness, lament and questioning. These texts are not records of unbelief but of faith wrestling with the realities of human existence. They remind us that  life in the Spirit has always contained both confidence and anguish.

What emerges, is not necessarily a contrast between faith and doubt, but rather a contrast between two modes of spiritual expression. One mode emphasises certainty, redemption and proclamation. The other emphasises contemplation, mystery and the honest acknowledgement of suffering. The first finds its natural home in preaching and testimony. The second often finds its home in poetry and song.

This distinction helps explain why Not Dark Yet continues to resonate with listeners of many beliefs. The song does not argue for a doctrine. It gives shape to a universal human experience. In doing so, it occupies a space shared by biblical wisdom literature, Romantic poetry, and modern existential reflection.

The journey from Gotta Serve Somebody to Not Dark Yet may therefore be understood not as a movement away from spiritual concerns, but as a movement from proclamation to meditation. The 1979 Dylan speaks as a witness. The 1997 Dylan speaks as a poet. One announces a truth; the other explores what it feels like to live in the shadow of mortality.

Whether one views this development as a loss of certainty, a deepening of wisdom, or simply an evolution of artistic voice will depend largely on one's own understanding of faith. Yet the enduring fascination of these songs lies precisely in their ability to sustain a meaningful contemplation, inviting us to consider whether faith abolishes darkness or teaches us how to live within it.

Voyages Through Time: Rose of Nevada

 

Today I caught up with the movie Rose of Nevada.  I came away with that familiar feeling  with movies of this genre,  that a coherent meaning was obscured  from view. As  a consequence it was difficult to find sympathy for the characters and their relationships in each time frame. Without some kind of signpost we find ourselves using much of our mental and emotional resources just to piece together and grasp a narrative. 

I found myself finally able to accept this technique, but by then my feeling was disinterested detachment from character, and I looked more at the surface techniques, including the extraordinary realism around the storm. It is the kind of movie, such as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer or Memento, where time slicing is a vital part of the narrative. So, a second viewing becomes more enlightening and the experience becomes richer.

Such  films that fragment time ask us  to do significant intellectual work, but there is usually an emotional anchor that keeps us invested while we solve the puzzle.

 In Memento, it is Leonard's desperate search for meaning; in Oppenheimer, it is Oppenheimer's moral and psychological journey. Even when the chronology is fragmented, the emotional trajectory remains relatively clear.

Rose of Nevada seems less interested in such emotional identification. It works around atmosphere, memory and place. The characters often feel like discrete, disconnected figures in a folk tale or legend rather than fully developed psychological individuals. That may be intentional, but it comes at a cost. We expend  energy simply trying to establish "where" and "when" they are. For me at least, not a lot left over for  empathy.

So, "disinterested detachment" sums up my initial response. Maybe this mirrors the way the film is crafted?  I have learned after viewing (I tend not to read reviews before seeing a movie)  that the movie was shot without sound, and all the sounds – voices as well as all else, were dubbed in afterwards. Oddly distant dialogue, the slightly unreal soundscape, and the fragmented timescales all placed  a layer of distance between me and what was in front of me.

The storm sequence is perhaps the clearest exception to this direction of trvel in the film. Here, narrative uncertainty becomes irrelevant in these isolated action snapshots. The sea, the boat, the weather, the physical peril—these are immediate and comprehensible. Here, the technique adds to  the experience rather than obscuring it. I found these sequences, and the business of catching, gutting and storing the fish,  among the most compelling for exactly that reason.

So yes, a second viewing of Rose of Nevada  is for the best, though I think there is an important distinction with Rose of Nevada compared, say, to a  second viewing of Memento. Here, a second viewing (I haven’t tried it yet) should reveal how meticulously the narrative has been constructed. We expect the  puzzle pieces to click together, because that is the story, and the story lose ambiguity and brings a clarity by its end. With Rose of Nevada, I am not entirely sure that a second viewing would lead to that kind of resolution. Rather, it would just help me to stop worrying about the puzzle and attend to other things: the imagery, the sound design, the symbolism, the sense of Cornwall as a place haunted by its own past. And all that.

So , thinking on awhile, Rose of Nevada  has something in  common with modernist literature than with puzzle-box cinema. For example, reading The Waste Land for a second time – or even umpteen times -  does not necessarily “solve” it; instead, once we are  less anxious about understanding every reference, we begin to notice patterns, echoes and moods. The experience deepens without becoming entirely transparent.

That raises the question of what kind of satisfaction a film owes its audience. I suppose over these years of looking at  traditions around  modernism through art cinema and modernist poetry, we know that ambiguity and uncertainty are watchwords. But for me anyway,  ambiguity works best when there is still something solid to hold onto—character, emotion, theme, image, or story.

So for me,  Rose of Nevada is too ambiguous. It asks  too much of the audience before it has earned an emotional investment. It’s not just me saying  "I didn't understand it."  The film’s  artistic method and  ambitions compete with, rather than support, its human drama.

I will see it again: I am confident my opinion will shift, like those gutted fish on the trawler's deck!

 

Ambling in Clanfield

I spent most of the day today, from early morning until lunchtime taking a wander around the village of Clanfield. I had recently discovered a campervan service, repair and conversion business tucked away at the end of the long track-like road called Mill Lane. A fascinating find. 

One might call it an industrial estate, though unlike any I have ever visited. At the end of the lane, and into the complex, I was met with the extraordinary sight of several beat-up, half-cannibalised cars, all, or mostly, of high-end branding - Mercedes, BMW and the like. And in a large covered area, a couple of Rolls Royces, including the classic 'Silver Cloud', in states of disrepair. Cars such as these were built to defy time, yet here they were, reflecting time's passing as old barns or weathered gravestones

My reason to visit was less exotically interesting - I was here to get a repair done on my campervan. The campervan business was across a small wooden bridge over the stream called Broadwell Brook, among other enterprises including upholstery, welding, guttering and the like - a busy place.

I was met by Paul, an engaging guy who filled me with every confidence that the pop-top roof repair on my van was nothing like the terminally problematic issue I had feared. After a quick check on some details, Paul gave me a 3 hour window of opportunity to take a wander back along Mill Lane to  the main village of Clanfield, whilst he did the necessary work.

I enjoyed the 20 minute walk , and sought out the church, as is my wont when coming to any village. And as always with such church visits, St. Stephen's did not disappoint - it offered, as all churches do, the unusual and unique embedded in the familiar styles and layouts of these ancient buildings. 

St. Stephen Statue, Clanfield Church

Immediately engaging was a very eye-catching large figure carved in an angled niche in a corner of the tower. This was St. Stephen, carrying a pile of stones and maybe a book. Walking up to the South door entrance, I was met by a friendly lady who introduced herself as Ros, and she immediately alerted me to a pile of plaster on the entrance floor - the result of water damage finally doing its worst. Not easy to dawdle and enjoy the Romanesque tympanum over that South door! But my chat with Ros convinced me that another visit would be a good idea...there is much to see and enjoy in St. Stephen's. 

I learned from her that she was just tidying up after a group of Zen Buddhists had enjoyed a night's sleep on the church floor - using carefully-arranged kneelers as mattresses. It seems this is not an unusual occurrence for such folk on their spiritual treks along the Thames path and environs. 

My chat with Ros led me to share some local history knowledge, and she told me about a unique character called William Tayler, who hailed from the hamlet of Grafton, close to Clanfield. He went to London and entered into service in a household in Marylebone, London in Victorian times, and kept a diary which is published as The Diary of William Tayler (1837). This journal offers a candid look at the daily routines, gossip and hardships of a 19th century servant. It offers local historians a picture of the contrasting lives of the rural working class poverty in the Clanfield and Grafton area with the structured reality of the rhythms of urban domestic service.

Ros's parting gift to me apart from a gratis copy of an old leaflet describing the highlights of the church, was the recommendation to visit Blake's Kitchen in the village, and enjoy one of their signature cinnamon buns! 

And so I wandered along to Blake's and enjoyed a coffee and bun as recommended. A fine place, with outdoor and indoor space, an on-site post office, and a friendly atmosphere. An excellent way to await the call from Paul, which duly came to let me know that the job was complete on my van. It was time to wander back along Mill Lane, check the job, grab the invoice and say my grateful goodbyes.

Blake's Cinnamon Buns

What to say about this visit? And why, really, have I narrated these details? In simple terms, I guess I might say the walk was a pilgrimage of sorts. This village, which yes, I've driven to through a few times, but which until this day I have never explored, was the birthplace of my father in August 1920. 

He was the 7th child of my grandparents, who went on to produce 3 more offspring. My grandfather was a cowman/farmworker, and by all accounts did not settle for long in each place where he found employment. By serendipity, the campervan business was here in the village, and I was glad to be drawn here for an enforced couple of hours. 

Here I was able to absorb the  contrasts and a sense of a place known by the likes of William Tayler. Here was a place which had not substantially changed in the 100 years between his time in Grafton, and the time of itinerant farmworkers in the early 20th century. And I was able to reflect on how those workers' cottages have now become desirable Cotswolds residences for folk with leisure time to enjoy coffee and genteel socialising. And how Zen Buddhists and the grandson of one such worker are blessed with the time to wander free and comfortable among the pathways his ancestors trod in a whole other world.

----------------------------------------------------------

Postscript ( June 9th 2026)

A review of the 1921 Census tells me that in that year:

Edwin ( b. Hatherop, Glos ) worked at Northcourt Farm

The Farm manager was a Mr F Bowden

His co-workers were:

•             Alfred Benfield  b. Grafton
•             George Shayler b. "Oxfordshire"
•             William Temple b. Clanfield
•             William Parrott b. Clanfield

Edwin lived at The Green in Clanfield. No house number/name is recorded.

He lived there with his wife Mary and children:

•                         Edwin Jesse b. 1910 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Pam   b. 1911 Hampton Gay
•                         Rupert b. 1913 Hampton Gay
•                         Alice b. 1914 "Oxfordshire"
•                         Percy b. 1916 Kencot
•                         Hector b. 1919 Bampton
•                         Kenneth b. 1920 Clanfield

... and the story continues.

Restored workers' cottages 2026 , The Green , Clanfield

The Green, Clanfield 2026

Northcourt Farm for Sale 2026: PDF Here (May 2026)

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea

I have just read "Alone on a Wide Wide Sea" by Michael Morpurgo, prompted by the enthusiasm of my Granddaughter. A children’s adventure novel certainly, but beneath that it is really a meditation on exile, memory, loss, survival, and the sea as both destroyer and redeemer.

Morpurgo’s novel draws on the real history of post-war British child migration schemes that sent thousands of children to Australia, often with terrible consequences.

The novel is divided into two linked journeys.

The first half tells the story of Arthur Hobhouse, an orphaned boy separated from his sister Kitty after the Second World War and shipped to Australia as part of a child migration programme. He arrives believing he is being given a new life, but instead finds exploitation and brutality on an isolated farm in the outback. 

Arthur survives through friendship and resilience. Morpurgo drives the narrative forward, describing a series of Arthur's life-events which captivate the imagination, and links us seamlessly to the second half.

The second half shifts to Arthur’s daughter Allie, who undertakes a solo voyage from Australia back to England. I will avoid spoilers, tempted as I am to share some magical moments which permeate this narrative. Suffice it to say that Allie's journey becomes both literal and spiritual: an attempt to reconnect broken family lines across oceans and generations.

What makes the book linger in the mind is not merely the plot, but its atmosphere of immense distances — emotional as much as geographical.

Morpurgo uses images of horizons, empty oceans, birds, stars, and weather. The title itself comes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the albatross motif consciously echoes that poem, which is a feature of the story. The sea becomes almost metaphysical: indifferent, beautiful, terrifying, and yet somehow healing too.

In this novel, the story of healing is sublimely told.

I reflect on two themes here: the story of the Cospatrick disaster which I researched with colleagues in 2024 for our local history group. And then my recent reflections on the life of H.W. "Bill" Tilman, whose many sailing adventures included the ocean around Cape Horn and the Atlantic, traversed also by Allie and described so dramatically and engagingly.

This story also belongs to the larger emotional history of British emigration — especially the severing of family ties through oceanic distance. The Cospatrick tragedy represented the Victorian age of migration: long sea passages, uncertain futures, and the terrible vulnerability of emigrants once they crossed the horizon. [ More about the Cospatrick is here ]

Here is a clip from a 1991 talk for the Wychwoods Local History Society. It is a moving account of the fate of one individual child at journey's end. 

There are several particularly striking parallels for those post-war journeys undertaken by Arthur in the novel: conditions in the 1870s, of course, were vastly different from those on post-WW2  vessels, but children were still travelling into the unknown with little agency over their fate, the sea functioning simultaneously as pathway and threat, the emotional violence of permanent separation from homeland and kin.

Memory preserved through small personal relics — in this novel, Arthur's talismanic key; in emigrant histories often letters, or keepsakes, discovered through research and enquiry over time.

In both the Cospatrick story and Morpurgo’s novel, one senses how migration was often narrated publicly as opportunity, while privately it could feel like abandonment, rupture, or exile, or worse.

Albeit in simpler language, Morpurgo writes about the the sea almost in the older literary tradition of, say,  Joseph Conrad  rather than modern children’s fiction. The sea is not merely scenery; it forms character and challenges assumptions. And we can see this operating in the stories of Tilman's expeditions, certainly.

Another interesting aspect  is how the novel treats memory across generations. Arthur’s memories are fragmentary and damaged — he barely trusts them himself by the end. Allie effectively becomes the historian of her father’s life, working with her family to trace her family story, piecing together identity through , travel, testimony, and objects. This resembles the work of local history societies in miniature such as ours: recovering broken human narratives from traces left behind.

Morpurgo’s prose is deceptively simple. Sure, we can classify him only as a children’s author, but books like this work because they understand that children’s literature of this quality can carry adult historical themes with skill and panache.

Two Small Figures: a History of Introspection

 

Here we are with some thoughts around two images I encountered over  half-century apart.  I came across the first image in  1967, when I was doing  German literature  at school. The course included Alfred Andersch’s novel Sansibar oder der Letzte Grund, in which the work of Ernst Barlach, his Lesender Klosterschüler — the Reading Monk — was a central image and important symbol. My copy of the book had the photo of the carving. I wrote about this here : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

The second encounter came recently, while revisiting the BBC documentary series Art That Made Us, which opens with the Anglo‑Saxon “Spong Man,” discovered in Norfolk. I enjoyed the co-incidence that  Norfolk was my domicile for many years, and that earlier blog piece on Barlach had been written there. The BBC documentary’s brief glimpse of the Spong Man prompted me to think some more about the clear and instinctive parallels which these figures present.

Two Figures, Two Worlds

At first glance, the Spong Man and Barlach’s Reading Monk belong to entirely different cultural universes. One is a small clay figure from the 5th or 6th century, found on top of  a cremation urn in an early Anglo‑Saxon cemetery. The other is a modernist sculpture carved in 1930, shaped by the artistic and political tensions of interwar Germany. Yet both are seated human figures gathered into themselves, their postures expressing a timeless interiority, in spite of the 1,500 years between their creation.

The Spong Man was unearthed at Spong Hill, Norfolk — the largest early Anglo‑Saxon cremation cemetery known in England. Its date places it in the turbulent period following the end of Roman rule New migrant communities were establishing themselves and religious life was a mixture of ancestral practices and emerging influences.

The posture is simple: elbows on knees, hands raised to the cheeks. Whether guardian, mourner, or ancestral presence, the figure conveys a moment of inward attention. The rough modelling does not disguise – but actually enhances -  the emotional clarity. It expresses a  capacity to turn inward to find solace  in times of uncertainty.

Ernst Barlach’s Lesender Klosterschüler belongs to a very different moment of transition. Created in 1930, it reflects the spiritual searching and political unease of the Weimar years. Barlach’s simplified forms and inward‑turned figures stood in opposition to the rising ideological rigidity of the period. His work was later denounced as “degenerate,” removed from public spaces, and in some cases destroyed.

In Andersch’s novel, the Reading Monk becomes a focal point for the moral imagination. Each character sees something different in the figure — spiritual inheritance, intellectual freedom, resistance to oppression. The sculpture’s bowed head and gathered posture represent an enduring stillnes. More about this is in my earlier notes in  : Der Lesender Klosterschüler

Despite their differences, both sculptures rely on posture as the primary means of expression. Their inwardness is conveyed not through facial detail but through the geometry of the body: the Spong Man forms a compact loop of thought, the limbs enclosing the head. The Reading Monk forms a downward arc, the robe and bowed head creating a sheltered space of concentration.

Both figures simplify the human form to reveal an interior life. Each came into being at at time of cultural instability — one after the collapse of Roman Britain, the other on the eve of totalitarianism.

Notes:

The comparative observations on posture and inwardness draw on  publicly available information from:

- Norfolk Museums Service for archaeological information on Spong Hill

- The British Museum (which holds the Spong Man) for basic object detail

- The Ernst Barlach Stiftung (Foundation) for biographical and catalogue information on Barlach

H.W. 'Bill' Tilman Remembered

I have just returned from a fine event arranged with great tenacity and dedication by Nick Parker, my good friend and friend to many. Appropriately called "The Tilman Experience" , the event was a 50th anniversary commemoration of Major H. W. 'Bill' Tilman’s final departure aboard his Bristol Channel  Pilot Cutter 'Baroque'.  The programme proved to be a memorable and  enjoyable weekend experience. 

The event brought together former crew members (including Nick himself, John Shipton and Bob Comlay), admirers of Tilman’s achievements, and friends old and new, in a spirit of companionship, shared remembrance, and adventure.

The event, May 15th to May 18th, centred around the Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter 'Letty', with two separate southbound and northbound passages out of Barmouth. Former Tilman crew members,  accompanied one or both of these trips, offering participants a rare opportunity to share first-hand recollections of sailing in Arctic waters during Tilman’s later expeditions.

On Friday evening, the programme at the Dragon Theatre in Barmouth provided both historical depth and personal reflection. I was glad to have been able to attend the evening with my wife. A talk by Bob Comlay after Nick's introductory remarks (in Welsh and in English) kicked off the evening . Bob traced Tilman’s remarkable life, from the trenches of the First World War to the Himalayas, wartime operations in Europe, and his celebrated Arctic and Antarctic voyages aboard Mischief and Sea Breeze. 

Bob was one of a very select few who travelled on two separate voyages with Tilman, and so was well-placed to capture Tilman’s characteristic simplicity of approach, summed up in the famous observation that “any worthwhile expedition can be planned on the back of an envelope". Bob also shared some of the letters Tilman had written to him which demonstrated a no-nonsense approach to recruitment planning.

The interval allowed attendees to mingle socially while viewing exhibits of traditional navigation and photography from the pre-GPS era, alongside reprints of Tilman’s books. The second half - which sadly I could not attend - featured John Shipton’s perspective on Tilman through the experiences of his father, Eric Shipton. This was  followed by warmly received recollections from surviving members of Tilman’s crews from the Baroque years between 1971 and 1975.

Saturday’s sailing aboard Letty gave participants a practical sense of the type of vessel and seamanship associated with Tilman’s voyages, while Sunday’s minibus excursion to Bodowen, Tilman’s former home above the Mawddach estuary, provided a fitting conclusion to the weekend. 

The kindness of Bodowen's current owner, Chris Harrison, in welcoming visitors to the house was greatly appreciated. His hospitality extended to a fine buffet spread, cocktails in beautifully presented goblets and a souvenir gift for all. I was pleased to join the several participants who completed the weekend with a guided walk from Bodowen back to Barmouth via the Panorama, enjoying fine views of the estuary and coastline that Tilman himself knew well.

Barmouth at the conclusion of the Panorama walk

Throughout the weekend there was a strong sense not only of commemorating an extraordinary explorer and seaman, but also of celebrating the enduring fellowship, curiosity, and spirit of adventure that Tilman inspired in others. The occasion combined history, storytelling, sailing, landscape, and friendship in a way that would probably have bemused Tilman himself, but was nevertheless a humble and fitting tribute to his memory.

Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter (Impression)