Those blue remembered hills…

It's often forgotten that Housman's blue-remembered hills were glimpsed by a narrator standing in Herefordshire, using the Shropshire hills on the horizon to reflect on lost - possibly homosexual - love.

Here's the Guardian's video about this beautiful (though Tory-infested) county's literary history, 'the nearest earthly place to Paradise', according to Wodehouse. I'd recommend small doses of Mary Webb, large ones of Lorna Sage (lived on the Welsh side of the border but educated in Shropshire). What the county lacks is true darkness - there's lots of rural romance but not a lot of grit. It's good to know that nasty Wycherley was from Shropshire though. And of course Philip Larkin's misanthropy was fuelled by a few years as librarian in Wellington.

Deliverance… in Shropshire

Some more pictures (rest here): click on them for larger version.

Men at C+A

I'm lichen' it.

Caer Caradoc and The Lawley

I'm a fungi to be around

and a little bit twisted.

Fill your boots

(with mud): the Map Twats headed off to the Long Mynd on Saturday. It was one of the largest groups we've had. The rain came down, the mud squelched, the wind ripped at our faces. In summary, it was brilliant.

I've put the day's photos here - there wasn't much in the way of glorious views across Wales and Shropshire thanks to the weather, but the area is beautiful in any conditions. We also met the wild ponies of the Long Mynd: I'd heard of them, but never caught sight of them. One appeared to be dead.

Click on these to enlarge them.

Dan blends in to the landscape

Why the long face?

On top of the world

In plain sight

Leave it - it's not worth it.

Baa humbug!

Snow joke

A few more pictures of the Shropshire countryside in winter and its birdlife- see the rest here.

Nuthatch?

Take-off

Shropshire lads

You may know that I'm deeply attached to Shropshire, the rural county home of - amongst others - Mary Webb, Wilfrid Owen the war poet and (if you like that kind of thing) Edith Pargeter, author of the Cadfael stories (medieval monk PI).

Let's not forget too that this hilly border land was where Captain Wentworth was sent to get him away from the action in Persuasion.

He had remained in Shropshire, lamenting the blindness of his own pride, and the blunders of his own calculations, till at once released from Louisa by the astonishing and felicitous intelligence of her engagement with Benwick.

Lawrence's 'St. Mawr' is set amongst the Devil's Chair on the mythically-rich Stiperstones Hills, and Emily Morgan, one of the possible models for Miss Havisham lived in Newport. Forster transformed Clun (a name which encapsulates Shropshire's Welsh aspects) into Oniton for Howard's End.

The Devil's Chair

Clun. At rush hour.

Nasty playwright John Osborne died near Clun too. Most importantly for those who - like me - find borders and liminal states interesting, is Lorna Sage, a Welsh academic from just over the border in Wales, who attended school in English Shropshire, and wrote a harrowing memoir, Bad Blood.

The villages of Homer and Wig-Wig (yes, really) inspired a children's book I haven't read.

Who isn't from Shropshire? A. E. Housman - author of A Shropshire Lad. The poem's a disguised lament for his repressed homosexuality, in which the distant 'blue-remembered hills' of Shropshire (viewed from Worcestershire) stand in for what might have been.

So not quite a backwater… The county even has its own Twitter feed!

The Gnomadic lifestyle

Hello everyone. I'm skulking indoors from the relentless searing heat (it's about 26C here), but I didn't skulk at the weekend. 


Instead, the Map Twats dressed up as Gnomes (woolly hat, pipe, waistcoat, belt etc) to travel to a beautiful corner of Shropshire (overlooking High Vinnals, near Ludlow) to celebrate Christine's birthday, and the formal unveiling of the caravan she and James won by writing this song. 

Princess

The Silverline Nova (c. 1980) is a work of unearthly beauty - decorated like a 1970s downstairs lavatory. It is also, under the layers of decoration, a bit of a wreck, despite the best efforts of its proud owners. 

Our hostess

So 30+ people gathered with varying degrees of posh camping equipment. My tent was last used by German friends, so everything was beautifully folded and nothing was missing. I'm less organised, so managed to bring a camera with approximately 10 minutes of battery life. The result is that there are no pictures of the stunning ridge with views for 50 miles in every direction - Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and lots of Wales - or of the amazing sunset and orange moonrise. There are pictures of happy liberals, a deaf sheepdog (which amused itself by chasing the sheep away from their water trough), the caravan, and the buzzards which circled us hopefully and hungrily. I was woken around 5 a.m. by the sound of massive wings flapping around the remains of the barbecue. 

The blue remembered hills of Shropshire

In summertime on Bredon
  The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
  In steeples far and near,
  A happy noise to hear.

Here of a Sunday morning
  My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
  And hear the larks so high
  About us in the sky.

A.E. Housman, 'Bredon Hill'

Into my heart an air that kills
  From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
  What spires, what farms are those?
 
That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
  And cannot come again.
Housman, XL

The deaf sheepdog. Appropriately, Christine teaches sign. 

You can see more excellent photographs by Carolyn, here. Amongst other things, someone launched a Chinese lantern which flew glittering into outer space, or at least near, and a polymath called Matthew who makes fine plum jam and set up a moth box (a powerful light and box to harmlessly attract moths for study: some amazing fluttery things are out there).

Should I worry?

The central quad at The Hegemon is littered with Asbestos Removal vans. I'm tempted to point out that there are more poisonous ideas and people sickening us all, but that would be bitter, wouldn't it?

Oh, well. I escaped for lunch with the department's counterculture (Zoot and his sidekick) and some books have arrived in the post: Ritzer and Atalay's Readings in Globalization (a free inspection copy), Mike Salter's The Castles and Moated Mansions of Shropshire (for walking purposes) and two books by Homi Bhabha which I've read but never got round to buying, Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture - great postcolonial theory texts.

Let's move to Bridgnorth…

'Let's Move To…' is a regular feature in the Saturday Guardian magazine. It rivals, in its smugness, bourgeois insularity and moneyed hatefulness, the fashion pages.

And yet… today's feature is Bridgnorth, one of my favourite places, and one I'd move to like a shot, had it a train station or more than 4 buses a day (and had I the many hundreds of thousands of pounds needed to afford a cardboard box there). It's built on a dramatic sandstone outcrop falling sharply down to the River Severn. It has a steam railway line, a funicular railway, formerly inhabited caves (in one of which was born Francis Moore, of Old Moore's Almanack, a ruined castle, a town hall on stilts underneath which the market is held, and winding cobbled streets packed with cottages of the kind Lou (of The Quiet Life) would love (lots of pictures here). The rolling Shropshire countryside stretches for miles - it would be idyllic, were it not for the presence of thousands of Tory bastards.

Ho hum. Another reason to search for a rich heiress. My teacher's wage will never stretch to the humblest of abodes in deepest Shropshire. Though Christine seems to have wangled it - she and James have an idyllic abode.

An actual, honest to goodness, FRIDAY conundrum

This is the first one to fall on a Friday for weeks!

So: confronted with an alien visitor demanding entertainment, what would you show them as the best and worst features of the town or country in which you live?

The best things of Britain have to be cheese and Wales (or Shropshire). For such a small country with dishonourable history of poor food, British cheeses are varied and wonderful. The worst thing? The cities: polluted, filthy, uncared-for and atomised, actively hostile to their own inhabitants, and horrible on Friday nights, which is a shame as places like Manchester would otherwise be great places to live. Narrowing it down to Wolverhampton, the best thing about it is that it's easy to escape. The worst thing is the dreadful, dismal architecture and town planning: the inhabitants treat it badly because it encourages nothing better. I love the multicultural nature of the UK - but hate the British attitude to education and languages (roughly: they all speak in English really, why should we bother?)

A lot to love, a lot to improve. Your turn!

Thursday's version of Friday's Conundrum

Hello all. I'm skiving tomorrow. Cynical Ben, Neal, James and I are going walking on the hills around Macclesfield, armed with pies, but lacking Dan and his map skills. After that, Neal and I are joining James for a weekend of carousing and debauchery in the fleshpots of Chester. Or, we'll find a poky indie club in which to feel old. Either way, no blogging for a few days.

How was David Mitchell's appearance, by the way? I'm afraid I missed it.

So - the Thursday Friday conundrum. It's easy. What, if everything had gone your way up to this point, should you be doing now? Where would you be, with whom? I know Cynical Ben would be where he is, with Jo, but be a published author, but he's a spawny get, to use the demotic. The rest of us - not always so easy.

I, of course, would have received the Golden Boot after scoring enough to get Stoke City to the top of the Premiership and won the Champions League. Again.

OK, maybe not. I wouldn't have minded being a decent fencer, and I'd certainly like to be living in the Welsh mountains, overlooking the sea, or perhaps in Ireland or Shropshire, holding down a full-time post in English/Welsh literature. A book or two published, debt-free, and perhaps somebody there with me. As long as she didn't scratch my records or crease my spines. Not too much to ask, is it?

Alternatively, I'd like to have been running a moderate-sized country, consigning large sections of the population to camps for possessing hairstyles, using mobile phones as stereos, dropping litter, voting Tory, driving 4x4s and generally being objectionable. This is not a vision I have yet relinquished, by the way.

Evening all

I'm finally back from Caerdydd, tired and still enjoying the lovely rain. We came back via Abergavenny and Hereford then rural Shropshire, taking in rolling hills, small mountains, ruined abbeys and lots of beautiful architecture from every age. Though the knowledge that rural Britain is inhabited entirely by Tories gnaws away at me, I always feel a rush of joy when I reach those forgotten, unchanging landscapes along the borders.

What else happened today? I saw a red kite and lots of buzzards, and bumped into Mark Ramprakash in the car park. Though I'm a cricket fan, I didn't recognise him. Jen did: apparently he's been on some celebrity idiocy.

I've a little work to do tonight ready for the subject board - and it's election night. I'll not bore you with the details though. You can follow the whole misery live here.

Merch o Gaerdydd

Well, here I am in Cardiff. I'll resist the temptation to live-blog the UK School Games Team Managers' Orientation Day, as I'm not sure you could stand the excitement. There are a lot of tall, willowy, fit looking people in intimidating sports gear - Olympics this, World Championships that (I'm wearing my England Fencing hoodie, which is probably a bad choice in Wales). And there are swimmers, none of whom look like they're particularly aquatic, to put it kindly.

We came down in driving rain, through the most rural areas of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Wales - wonderful. Spring-summer brought out a rainbow of greens, the grey-honey stone was restful on the eyes, and every village had a name more evocative than the last - Stanton Lacy, Corfton Bache, St. Weonard's, Wormelow…

And now I'm in the poshest hotel I've ever been in. I feel like I'm messing the place up simply by sitting here!

Say Cheese!

I wandered around with a camera in Whitmore Reans, Gnosall and Norbury Junction (the Cheese Boat), and my parents' place in Shropshire over the weekend. Click the links for more photos (of yellowhammers, herons, cheese, map twats and sparrows) or on these shots for bigger versions. I like the urban one for the mix of sunset artificial lighting.

Reading conundrum

I always worry, when going away for a few days, how many books to take. I never get it right. I'm probably here in rural Shropshire for 3-4 days, so I thought 3 biggish books should be enough. Then I went to bed at 12.30 last night thinking I'd read a few pages of Mark Radcliffe's book. 2 hours later I'd finished it. Even though it's randomly unstructured and not particularly profound (Pooterish?), Radcliffe's essential niceness shines through, so it was worth reading. So that leaves two books (Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt and J. G. Farrell's Troubles, unless I rush out to the booksellers tomorrow. Perhaps I shall.

A Cold Sheep Was My Table

The Map Twats had a glorious day in Shropshire on Saturday. The wind was biting, the snow still lay round about deep and crisp and even, and the beer was good. Typically, the spot we chose to shelter for our lunch turned out to be the last resting place of a sheep - Dan noticed the ribcage sticking up, and John turned out to have been sitting on its skull. A dead-sheep theme is starting to emerge on our walks. Lots of photos here, including some of the natural ice-sculpture we found.

To top off a great weekend, Stoke drew with Liverpool, and we could have beaten them. If we'd scored a goal, that is. I wonder what Diego Maradona made of his first (I presume) visit to Stoke…