Back. By popular demand?

Hello everybody. How were your Christmases (those of you who mark Christmas at all)? I've had a long break from blogging by my standards - over ten days, and I'm not going to resume normal service until next week probably. It's not that I've weaned myself off getting angry and opinionated over the holiday: more that I've had the computer switched off. I've quite enjoyed being almost entirely unsociable too. I've virtually no friends in the area (or indeed anywhere else, I hear you cry) so there's little pressure to engage in social bonding rituals.

Instead, I've been working on a couple of book chapters every day, though possibly not quite hard enough. We shall find out in a week or so on the deadline.

One of the books I'm writing about is George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, an account of his 1854 journey round that country, mostly on foot. He can sometimes be quite funny and he's interested in other people's quirks, but on the whole I think he'd be a massive pain in the arse. The purpose of the journey seems to be to demonstrate to everybody in Wales exactly how much more he knows – about everything, but particularly the Welsh language – than everyone in Wales. He doesn't like English people unless they are (as he fondly imagines he is) 'Saxons': he reckons it all went wrong for England when the Normans turned up. He likes the Welsh for still speaking their language, but every meeting he has with anyone is an opportunity to demonstrate his superiority. It gets very wearing. Other obsessions are religious sectarianism: he hates Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Calvinists, Lutherans and anybody who isn't C of E. But he hates Catholics and the Pope more than anybody. Irish Catholics are the lowest of the low – Borrow takes every opportunity to mock and trick the 'wild' Irish. Particularly tasteful episodes are those in which he tells freed slaves that they'd be better off in chains, the time he blackmails an Irish fiddler into playing the offensive supremacist song 'Croppies Lie Down', and the occasion on which he poses as a priest and makes some devout Irish travellers grovel to him.

Still, he's very learned and he knows exactly what people from The Dark Place are like:

'He is what they call a Wolverhampton gent... a person of little or no literature'.

A sentiment with which I find it hard to disagree. Have I missed the Black Country this Christmas? In a word, no. I've barely left the house, but have eaten eggs from my mum's hens (two of whom were murdered by my sister's cat, also here for a holiday, a safari in its case), read Goethe, Arthur Ransome and Alastair Gray's astonishingly brilliant 1982, Janine. I'll be posting some gloriously bilious quotes from that book sometime next week.

About the only time I left the house, I took some decent sunset photos from Mow Cop, the folly castle on a crag which famously became the birthplace of Primitive Methodism. Some pictures here. I've been on Twitter quite a lot thanks to my mother's wi-fi but kept the laptop off until tonight.

So it's been a great holiday. Lots of reading, no exercise, good food, no sirens, gunshots or murders under my window. As you can imagine, I'm really looking forward to work next week. Especially as I'm wholly unprepared…

Mow Cop a load of this 3

Final ones from Mow Cop. Then I'll post the ones I took at my mother's yesterday. Click on them for bigger versions.

I don't actually like insects much, but I'm really pleased with these shots. 

Bees are great. Shame we've managed to kill even them off.

Rooftop decoration

Mow Cop from Newchapel or Whitehill

Mow Cop a load of this 2

Some more pictures. I'm getting better at this photography lark.

These bullocks really didn't like us. They reminded me of Reservoir Dogs

Neither did the small brown birds. They kept hovering over us, cheeping obscenities

I just liked the effect of this mirror

Mow Cop a load of this 1

I returned to Mow Cop this weekend, for a gentle walk. It's a great gritstone outcrop on the Staffordshire-Cheshire border, with a folly on top. It was also the focal point of Primitive Methodism, the straight-edge, political, hardcore version. They merged with the other Methodists again in 1932.

If you like pictures of flowers, cows, small brown birds reed buntings and corn buntings or skylarks, and radio telescopes, here's where you should click. As usual, click on these pictures for a larger version

Jodrell Bank

All fields have baths. It's a rule

Donkeys are great. I had donkey salami once. Delicious.

I rushed out without hat, long sleeves or Factor 50, and consequently am horribly sunburned, all over my arms, face and neck. I'm normally really careful - serve me right. I shouldn't have sat there for several hours trying to snatch photos of swallows, swifts and other birds which were too fast for me. We did almost stamp on a very angry grouse though. That gave it plenty to, er,  grouse about.

A breath of fresh air

(picture from homepages.nildram.co.uk/.../ picsurroundbidd.htm)
So how are you all? I've been away from my Mac for a couple of days, and mighty liberating it is too. Unfortunately, I've been away from the pool and too close to chocolate.

Alongside my good chum Hannah, I visited Mow Cop, a weird, wonderful gritstone peak with views as far as Wales, Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope, Liverpool and, er, Stoke. Not only is it a natural wonder, it's significant in Methodist history as the centre of the Primitive Methodist connexion - Hugh Bourne and somebody else held open-air pray-a-thons by the folly at the top. They were also called Ranters, presumably by those who remembered the Civil War Ranters sect a hundred and fifty years earlier. The village still has a Wicker Man air, perched precariously on the slopes, a different chapel on every street and fewer genes than families.

But before you dismiss the Primitives (and other Methodists) as just another branch of an odd Eastern religion which got taken up by an empire as a method of holding itself together, remember this: these chapels instilled democracy into the working classes. They elected their own leaders, or rejected leaders altogether. Men, and in the case of the Primitives, women, honed their speaking skills in the Big Seat, learned the power of concerted action, and in many cases went on to found trades unions and lead the Chartist movement. Michael Foot claimed that his brand of socialism owed 'more to Methodism than to Marx'. I think that's a shame, but one can't deny the central role of these churches in forming an independent, democratic, working-class.

Gentler pursuits today - Trentham Gardens, a former mansion house abandoned by the Duke of Sutherland in prewar days when Stoke declined as a fashionable resort, and now revived. Saw monkey, but not otters.