Month: April 2014

Much lettered at Much Wenlock’s Poetry Festival

These letters are knitted (I think I was responsible for the red ‘E’) and here they are adorning the cherry tree on the Church Green. This is the Wenlock Poetry Festival’s ‘Poetree’ (artistic licence rendered photo-wise) and, during this now annual April event, everyone may compose, or write verses from their favourite poem on a luggage tag and hang it on the tree for others to read.

This year the tree has joined in the general creativity by bursting into bloom. In previous years it has been quite bare.

The festival embraces the entire town, using venues at Wenlock Pottery, Methodist Church, the George and Dragon Pub, Tea on the Square Cafe, and The Edge Arts Centre. Besides the three-day programme of readings, talks and workshops with top British poets, there are verses to be found all over the place. Nearly all the shop windows host one, and they include works by local amateurs as well as the more famous.

And then there are the ten Dada Poetry Orienteering spinners (including 2 mystery ones) sited about the town. They comprise phrases culled from printed matter – from the Declaration of Human Rights to a tea wrapper. Visit some or all and, with random spins of the pointer, create an on-the-spot composition.

And when inspiration needs a further boost, then there are refreshments on hand, not only at the Poetry Café in the Priory Hall, but at the town’s ancient inns, and traditional tea rooms.

And here we come to the heart of the festival, the town’s famously much loved independent book shop, Wenlock Books. Its owner, Anna Dreda, has been the primary driving force behind the festival, enticing, Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s Poet Laureate, to be the festival’s founding patron. The festival is now in its fifth year, and involves the efforts of many dedicated volunteers who put in many months of work to ensure its continuing success.

And so for a small town of less than 3,000 people, we are astonishingly well-lettered, and much of this is down to Anna, who throughout the year (and quite apart from the poetry festival) lures young and old into her lovely shop to take part in reading groups, listen to stories being read, or chat with authors. Coffee and biscuits are ever on offer, and sometimes even a Tea and Toast Breakfast. Last year, too, Anna was invited to meet the Queen during a celebration of British contemporary poetry.

Anna Dreda.

Anna Dreda of Wenlock Books

Sadly, you have just missed this year’s festival, but now that you’ve glimpsed a little of what’s on offer in Much Wenlock, check out the festival website below and make a date for next April. But before you leave, a few more views of lettered Wenlock:

See you at the sixth Wenlock Poetry Festival 2015

Wenlock Poetry Festival

Wenlock Books

Go to Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge for more LETTERS

And see how her garden glows…

Sharing my garden’s glow – pass it on!

Ailsa’ Travel Challenge: Glow

Show My Face: Six Word Saturday

Panthera leo: top predator, or would that be us? Happy Earth Day!

“The earth is the mother of all that moves, and is the common bond between the generations that have been, are , and are to come.”

Kikuyu ethic

Happy Earth Day

Frizz’s tagged ‘P’ challenge

#earthday

Uluru on top of the world: one view, several perspectives

“Then the earth itself rose up to mourn the bloodshed—this rising up in grief is Uluru.”

Norbert C Brockman Encyclopedia of Sacred Places

This striking eruption of earthly sorrow is only one of the stories that the Anangu people of Australia’s Northern Territory tell about the origin of Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock). Uluru is a sacred place in their tribal land. It is now part of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which since 1985 has been jointly managed by the Australian Government and the Anangu people. In Brockman’s version of the origin story he says that back in the time of ancestral spirits, two tribes were invited to a feast. But on the way, the guests became captivated by a group of Sleepy Lizard Women and lingered at a waterhole where Uluru now stands. The party hosts took umbrage at their guests’ nonappearance and, feeling insulted, sang evil into the mud they were moulding until it sprang to life as the dingo. Next, a terrible battle broke out and all the tribal leaders were killed. The spilling of their blood caused Uluru to rise up.

Geologists will of course give another explanation. They will say that Uluru is an inselberg, literally an island mountain, a sandstone dome that is the sole remnant after the slow erosion of a mountain range. Tourist guides will tell you that it is Australia’s most famous natural landmark, that it rises over 300 metres above the flat desert scrub, that the tough trek to the top is 1.6 km, and the walk around the base over 9 kilometres.

As I write these facts and figures, I feel myself becoming irritated. Surely they are not the point. I begin to see a little of why the Anangu people do not want people scrabbling all over the place. Come there, by all means, they say. But do not climb. Watch and listen. This is the place where several songlines intersect, and where many sacred ceremonies are performed. It is filled with great meaning and resonance.

Genetic studies have shown that Australia’s indigenous people arrived in that land some 50,000 years ago. In all that vast expanse of time, and until the arrival of Europeans, their cultural view was presumably uninterrupted. They lived a hunter-gathering life well fitted to a demanding environment. There were people living around Uluru 10,000 years ago. What to European newcomers appeared utterly undeveloped and primitive, was rich in metaphor and codes of conduct. And if I have rightly understood what the Anangu people say (see the links below), then physical reality, metaphor, and time itself are meshed as one. Past, present and future are all part of the becoming that began with the first ancestral spirits.

In the beginning, then, the earth was flat and featureless. Next came the spirit ancestors who took the forms of people and animals. In their wanderings across the surface of the world, they instigated acts of both creation and destruction. These brought into being the physical landscapes we see today. They are journeys of becoming, iwara or songlines, and through them was engendered the law, tjukurpa (chook-orr-pa). These are ethical pathways, ways of being and doing that honour the interconnectedness of all things; the relationships between plants, animals, humans and the land itself. The law is remembered and passed on by elders to the rightful inheritors through song, art, stories and ceremonies.

One can see, then, why the Anangu people might feel that the word ‘dreamtime’ does not do justice to the meaning of tjukurpa (law). To the European mind the term suggests something fey and otherworldly. Yet in the physical sense Anangu law is absolutely worldly; it is about showing responsibility towards the land and all living things; honouring existence. This, I would suggest, is the kind of moral geography that we ‘Rich-Worlders’ could do well to acquire—and PDQ? Our trail of destruction across the planet speaks for itself. Our presumption of being ‘on top’ in the civilization stakes is more than a little flawed. We forgot a few hundred years ago to leave only our footprints.

For more about Anangu culture go HERE and HERE and HERE

Weekly Photo Challenge: on top

Seasons’ Round in Nice, Cote d’Azur

“…there is less rain and wind at Nice, than in any other part of the world that I know; and such is the serenity of the air, that you see nothing above your head for several months together, but a charming blue expanse, without cloud or speck.”

Tobias Smollett Travels Through France And Italy 1764

Umbrellas beside the Promenade des Anglais, round-topped palms and the cupola of the Hotel Negresco against a china blue sky. Where else but Nice.

Nice is pretty much a year-round travel destination, a fact first discovered in 1731 by members of the English aristocracy. Lord and Lady Cavendish were the trendsetters in question, and from the time of their visit onwards, anyone who was anyone began to spend the winter season there. By 1860 there were 704 foreign families wintering in this way. Of these, 252 were English, and 128 were Russian. There were lesser numbers of well-heeled Germans and Americans. The arrival of the railway in 1864 further helped to boost upper class tourism, making it possible to leave London Bridge Station at 7.40 on a Monday morning, and reach Nice by Tuesday suppertime.

The benign climate and shiny bright days also made it popular with convalescents, the “pale and listless English women and listless sons of nobility near death” as French historian Paul Gonnet described them. Very soon then, and in response to this influx of moneyed people, Nice the fishing port transformed itself into Nice the fashionable resort for Europe’s elite.

Among that elite was an elderly Queen Victoria. She travelled under the name Lady Balmoral, although heaven knows why. There could have been no failing to notice her arrival, coming as she did in her own train, accompanied with up to a hundred staff, and her Scottish pipers piping her in. Full warning of her advent was further marked by the forward arrival of her bed. In 1895 and 1896 she spent her spring sojourn in The Grand Hotel, Cimiez just outside Nice. But for the next three years she and all her royal household would occupy, through March and April, the entire west wing of the Hotel Excelsior Regina Palace. This was a brand new hotel, built with the Queen specifically in mind, it being well recognized that Lady Balmoral’s continued patronage of Nice did much to boost local business and encourage tourism. By the end of the 19th century the city’s population reputedly increased by 80,000 during the winter months.

One wing of the vast Hotel Excelsior Regina Palace, now apartments.

One of the things that most people know about Queen Victoria is that she was tiresomely dreary for years after Prince Albert’s death. When in Nice, though, she underwent a complete transformation, girlishly taking part in local festivities, driving around in a donkey cart that allowed her to explore byways too narrow for her carriage, inviting the scarcely respectable Sarah Bernhardt to put on a private performance, handing out presents to all and sundry. In fact she brought with her to France a trunk filled with watches and chains, pens, inkstands, portraits and cigarette holders. These she bestowed on all ranks – from hotel staff upwards, while keeping account of who had received what so she would not give anyone the same thing twice. On her death bed she famously said, “If only I were at Nice, I would recover.”

In the 20th century, the Cote d’ Azur became the haunt of the avant-garde: Matisse, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Chagall. In later life Matisse had a studio in the The Hotel Excelsior. But for travellers and tourists, the hotel to stay in was, and still is for that matter, Le Negresco.

It was built by Henri Negrescu (later Negresco), son of a Romanian innkeeper, and opened for business in 1913. In the first year the hotel made a profit of 800,000 francs in gold, but then came war, and Negresco turned the place into a hospital. He died, penniless, a few years later. His hotel, though, goes from strength to strength. Its past guests include Louis Armstrong, Salvador Dali, Princess Grace of Monaco, Queen Elizabeth II, Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Beatles, Ava Gardner, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Michael Jackson.

When we visited Nice a few years ago we saw no one famous in the bar or foyer. In fact it was all rather quiet. We decided to have dinner in the hotel’s very bizarre brasserie, La Rotonde. As you can see, it’s an inside-out carousel in overdone pink.

La Rotonde brasserie, Hotel Negresco

Every hour, parts of the decor come to life, fairground style, while a life-size figure of a girl in an ill-fitting smock and straw hat rotates in the centre of the dining room. We found it all rather perplexing, and the food was not good enough to distract us from feeling we were in the wrong place. In fact there were much nicer things to eat, or at least look at along the streets of Vieux Nice. And as it happens, most of them were round.

Easter Greetings Everyone

AILSA’S TRAVEL CHALLENGE: ROUND

A Word A Week Challenge: Round for more round posts

Nancy Merrill Photography

Snap Thoughts

It’s not what you look at that matters

Reference:

Michael Nelson 2007 Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera

Of Monumental Mysteries

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L P Hartley The Go-Between

So what’s the mystery here? No, not that strange woman in a Welsh felted hat doing tai chi. (Actually, I think I may be in the process of ‘grasping the sparrow’s tail’ Yang-style long form. I’ve rather forgotten). I remember, though, the icy winter’s day, and the absolute stillness, and the hazy blue views of Wales over the border from my Shropshire homeland, and the feeling that this circle of ancient stones was a special place; that it stirred in me the sense that doing tai chi here would be a good thing.

I have written before about Mitchell’s Fold Bronze Age stone circle, and you can find the witchy legend associated with it HERE. Historically speaking, little is known about the stones beyond the fact that they were raised some 4,000 years ago. The surviving fifteen stones form a rough circle, although there may have once been as many as thirty. The tallest survivor is said to have originally been one of a pair, and so formed some kind of gateway or threshold at the circle’s edge.

These henges are, on the whole, unfathomable. There is no knowing how the people, who toiled to build them, made use of them, or what their precise significance was in their daily lives. The elevated location of Mitchell’s Fold, with its sweeping vistas, suggests to us a sacred function. There are also possibilities that the stones’ particular alignment served as some kind of calendar, marking solar and lunar events. And, for more prosaic purposes, in a world without maps and SatNav, prominently sited megaliths may also have provided travellers with landmarks to keep them on course through the upland wilds. The Bronze Age was, after all, a time of intinerant smiths and artisans who covered great distances to trade their goods and services.

This is borne out by the fact that not far from Mitchell’s Fold, just over the Welsh border in Powys, is the Cwm Mawr Bronze Age axe factory. The distinctive looking axe-hammers that were made here have been found across Wales and England, their discovery demonstrating an extensive trading network. Nor is this henge an isolated monument in the immediate landscape. There are numerous cairns and two further stone circles nearby. This seemingly remote place, then, was very busy some four millennia ago.

As a Prehistory undergraduate, also in times long past, I spent three years in Sheffield University lecture theatres looking at images of barrows, chambered tombs, henges, hillforts, cist burials, urn cremations and other ancestral relics. This being the era of slide projection, the photographs were often shown upside down and back to front; it became a standing (or otherwise) joke, looking at remains from an inverted position. The fact is though, however you looked at them, their intrinsic meaning could not be divined. All that might be said is that these mysterious constructions were of immense importance to our forebears. We know this because of the great effort involved in their making; these were people who, by our standards, had very limited technology.

And so here is another example of megalithic mystery. This is the late Stone Age (Neolithic) Lligwy burial chamber on Anglesey in Wales. Excavation in 1908-9 uncovered the remains of 15-30 people, along with pottery that provided the dating evidence. It is estimated that the capstone weights 25 tonnes. This is truly mind-boggling. How did people without cranes lift this monstrosity onto the supporting stones? How many people did it take? Wasn’t the population in prehistory supposed to be small?

Of course experimental archaeology has demonstrated that much may be achieved with the cunning use of tree trunk rollers and various simple pulley devices combined with muscle power. But even so, the Lligwy burial chamber is surely a triumph of human will over an absence of hydraulic lifting gear. In this era people had only stone tools.

So yes, the past is a foreign country, and people did do things differently there, and in ways we cannot possibly know. And if I learned anything from three years of studying Prehistory and Archaeology it was not to judge people by their limited toolkit. These people were as intelligent as we are, maybe more so, since there was a greater need to apply it at all times.

Our current understanding of these monuments may be fragmentary, wrong-headed even, but shouldn’t this be all the more reason to keep these ancient places safe? At this present time in England our heritage is daily under threat from a government that wishes to build its way out of recession. Worse still, current laws allow developers to take local authorities to judicial review if their planning applications are refused.

To avoid incurring huge costs to the public in legal representation, local authorities are now being pushed to grant planning permission in close proximity to unique monuments. At present, in Shropshire, the setting of 2 major sites is under threat: Old Oswestry Iron Age hillfort, and the post-Roman Offa’s Dyke. Why this is happening is of course absolutely no mystery at all. The past has cachet. It is a highly sellable ‘commodity’. Let’s sell it off, why don’t we?

Valuing the Past: How much for Old Oswestry Hillfort?

Open to Offa’s: yet another piece of Shropshire’s heritage at risk in The Heritage Journal along with many other excellent articles

Weekly Photo Challenge: Monument

The Human Rights Warrior

FRIZZ’S TAGGED ‘O’ GO HERE FOR MORE ‘O’ STORIES

The Forgotten Angel of Rwanda: Capt Mbaye Diagne

It is twenty years since the terrible Rwandan genocide. Here is a story from African Heritage blog about an extraordinary African hero, the UN captain from Senegal, Mbaye Diagne. He saved a thousand lives and lost his own.

African Heritage

I still remember the day the Rwandan genocide started. I was just in “4eme”, and the images of the genocide on TV made me cry at night! What could I do, me… a simple school child in Cameroon, except watching on television and praying for someone or something to stop this butchery! Well… among all the heroes mentioned in books and documentaries about Rwanda, a fellow African heard my cry, a Senegalese UN soldier who was in Rwanda decided to act… with no guns, no arms, and no authorization from the UN, he decided to take destiny in his hands…. He is almost forgotten when people talk of Rwanda: few ever mention the act of bravery from this African soldier stationed there.

Yes… I am talking about the young Senegalese captain Mbaye Diagne who was working for the UN in Rwanda. From the first hours of the genocide, he decided to take…

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No More Dining at these New York Diners

“We simply don’t want to live in a world without old-school staples like rounded coffee counters, shiny stools, leather booths, jukeboxes, prefabricated stone or steel exteriors and black-and-white photos of “famous clientele” hanging on the walls”

Best of Gothamist

Manhattan Diner Upper West Side 2008

Big Nick’s Upper West Side 2008

I’m posting these photos as a farewell to two New York diners. Being a bit of a food faddist (organic, unprocessed, no GMO), I never expected to like these places so much. Perhaps it was the sense of community that struck me most. Big Nick’s closed its doors in July 2013, after fifty years in the business. Sad. Though I have to say, some of the decor on these shots looks as if it hasn’t been ‘refreshed’ in all that time. The rather smarter Manhattan Diner, where we had breakfast while staying in Upper West Side’s Hotel Belleclaire, was just across the road from Big Nick’s, on the corner of Broadway and 77th. It was forced to close a few years ago to make way for development.

These diners were much loved and served neighbourhood locals and visitors 24/7. Perhaps they did not offer the healthiest menus in the world, and dishes were served up with mega-portions. But fresh fruit and yoghourt at the Manhattan Diner made a delicious breakfast, to say nothing of their frittata. And all the coffee you could drink and huge glasses of iced water, and that feeling of being part of NYC even though we were strangers…

FRIZZ’S ‘N’ CHALLENGE

Misty Mountains of East Africa

Kilimanjaro rising behind the Chyulu Hills, Ukambani, Kenya. Photo taken from the Mombasa Highway during the December short rains.

Mount Kenya from the plane window, looking over the European-owned wheat farms of Laikipia

It is one of history’s bizarre anecdotes, that one of these two old volcanoes was once given away as a birthday present. But before I reveal how this happened, please take a look at the map. Head for the centre.

Here you will see that Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro and Kenya’s Mount Kenya lie pretty much on the same north-south axis, albeit a couple of hundred miles apart. In an earlier post about Denys Finch Hatton’s burial place in the Ngong Hills (to the left of Nairobi on the map) I quoted Karen Blixen’s description of how one sunset, she and Denys had witnessed a simultaneous sighting of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. This must have been something to see, for these mountains can be frustratingly elusive when it comes to showing themselves. One moment you can be looking them full in the face; the next they have dissolved into a clear blue sky as if they were never there. You blink and wonder how this could have possibly happen. It is doubtless a quantum physics thing, but in the absence of more scientific explanations, the phenomenon anyway seems quite mystical. It is not surprising, then, that local people have long regarded these mountains as sacred places that may, from time to time, be visited by the Creator.

But to return to the mountainous birthday gift.

If you look again at the map you will see how the border between Kenya and Tanzania makes a sudden kink to encompass Kilimanjaro. This daft piece of map-making is testimony of a tussle in colonial expansionism (Britain versus Germany) and the kind of queenly megalomania that thought it perfectly reasonable to take possession of someone else’s mountain and then make a gift of it to a fellow monarch, a personage whom she rather despised even though he was a close relative.

I’m sure you will have guessed by now that we are talking of Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. One can only presume that someone who also called herself the Empress of India would think nothing of the sharing out of stolen mountains. I dare say she thought it made up for the fact that she had bagged the territories now known as Kenya and Uganda when Wilhelm had wanted them too. Perhaps she also thought that giving Wilhelm the taller of the two would also help to placate him. If she had stopped to consider the fact that Kilimanjaro was only a dormant volcano, she might have had second thoughts. It was altogether too ominous a gift.

In the end the whole land-grabbing deal was ratified in the Heligoland Treaty of 1890, and the map-makers then duly drew a line straight through the middle of Maasai territory coupled with the requisite detour round Kilimanjaro. They called one side British East Africa, and the other German East Africa. Meanwhile the locals, who comprised very many different ethnic communities, were largely unaware how far they had been scrambled, or indeed scrobbled, to borrow a term of dastardly rapine from John Masefield and The Box of Delights. They were soon to find out. On the British side it began with the setting up of forts along the proposed line of rail for the Uganda Railway. This 600-mile line from Mombasa to Lake Victoria would be the means by which the Empress of India would get her troops (mainly Indian ones) swiftly to the source of the Nile. Why she would ever need to do this will have to wait for another post. Suffice it to say that this project was substantially dafter than the giving of mountains as birthday presents. Even at the time people thought so. In Britain they called it the Lunatic Line. In East Africa the invaded called it the Iron Snake.

Glimpse of Kilimanjaro on the flight from Zanzibar to Mombasa

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge