Britain has been waiting for ages for a report on goings-on at Number 10 Downing Street during the COVID pandemic, involving our beloved prime minister, his wife and staff. It is sometimes referred to as Partygate. The person tasked with this enquiry is a senior civil servant called Susan Gray that nobody had ever heard about before. She is not related to the world famous blogger - John Gray. It will be interesting to witness how Johnson wriggles out of this one for here, hot off the press, is Ms Gray's frank and thorough report:-
I have blogged about "Singing Together" and "Rhythm and Melody" before. It was a nationwide music education project delivered via the good old BBC. In primary school classrooms up and down the land, children gathered to sing along to the radio. I still remember many of those songs and one I have been thinking about recently is "The Minstrel Boy".
It was written in the early years of the nineteenth century by an Irish songwriter called Thomas Moore. It was first published in 1813 - featuring in Moore's "Irish Melodies" project. The roots of this song are probably much older.
It is a wistful and evocative song that speaks of war, of bravery and of loss. It is a plea for liberty as much as anything and it comes as no surprise to learn that Moore visited America's southern states in 1806. In dreams I may sometimes see myself as that minstrel boy with my wild harp slung behind me.The song has been with me since 1963. Please listen:-
Saturday lunchtime. A perfect opportunity to mark Shirley's retirement with a special family meal out in the Ego restaurant at Dore Moor Inn - on the edge of the city.
The food was excellent and so was the service. As a starter, I had chicken liver and rosemary pate on toast with chilli tomato marmalade. For the main, I had rump steak with peppercorn sauce, fries, plum tomato and rocket. This was followed by a mini chocolate brownie with cream and a latte.
All thoroughly scrumptious and Little Phoebe behaved herself so well. No crying or screaming. Nothing like that. It was a perfect meal in a nice environment and yet...
At a right angle to us, in the bay window, there was another family that included an older teenage girl and a boy of about nine or ten. At first, we hardly noticed them but halfway through the meal period, one of them began playing a game on a smartphone. This game included music, voices and the sound of weaponry and it went on and on. And you know what - it wasn't the boy or the teenage daughter who was playing, it was the forty something mother!
Then one of these things happened:-
Either:-
A) I put my knife and fork down and stood up. After pushing my chair under our table I went to our neighbours' table and stood right next to the thoughtless woman with the smartphone.
"Excuse me," I said as she continued to play. "If you must play that game, please mute the sound as the noise is spoiling our lunch experience. You may not have noticed but we are sitting at the next table."
She looked up.
"I'm not hurting anybody am I?" she said.
Then her barrel-shaped husband piped up. "Keep your ****ing big nose out of things and sit down mate! There's no law about playing games in pubs is there you ****er!"
Well, as you can imagine, this coarse intervention caused my blood to stir. Not wishing to cause a scene, I invited the fellow into the car park where I boxed his ears. Upon returning to our respective tables, he urged his wife to turn off the irritating game as she dabbed at the trickle of blood that was emerging from the left nostril of his recently reddened nose.
Justice had been done.
Or:-
B) Upon noticing the game noise I continued to eat my delicious main course trying unsuccessfully to ignore the intrusive din. I kept quiet knowing that any complaint could be awkward and might lead to an angry scene, creating a memory I had no wish to connect with Shirley's special retirement meal. Discretion is often the better part of valour though it might be viewed by some as pure cowardice.
When the other family departed, I breathed a sigh of relief as Shirley and Frances confirmed that they had also found the game noise annoying. They both thought that the unwelcome noise had been made on a device by one of the children but sitting where I was I had been able to watch the mother as she played by looking in an adjacent wall mirror.
I watched as the departing woman passed by outside in front of the bay window - totally oblivious to the annoyance she had just caused during perhaps half an hour of gaming activity.
Throughout this ghastly pandemic, I have been following associated statistics with the aid of a respected reference website called "Worldometer". Figures are updated every day.
Digesting the numbers, I have often wondered how different countries gather their data. Even in developed western democracies there is no internationally agreed common method so that some countries may be over zealous in their calculations while others are rather lax.
Great Britain and Northern Ireland have the worst COVID death count in Europe - 155,317 dead as I write but this small country has a very large population at just under 68.5 million so a simple death tally doesn't give the full picture.
To get that I think you need to look at deaths per million. Britain's current figure is 2,269 deaths per million. However, there are eighteen other European countries with worse figures and the worst of all is Bulgaria with 4,819 deaths per million - more than double Britain's rate. Other countries with worse figures than Britain include Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Belgium, Poland and Ukraine.
Visitors from the United States might like to note that their death rate is currently 2,709 citizens per million with no less than eighteen states having a death rate of over 3,000 per million. The worst of all is Mississippi with 3,639 deaths per million. Canada's current death rate is 876 per million while Australia's is 136 per million and Germany's is 1,404 per million.
I have no reason to doubt Worldometer's statistics with regard to COVID but it would be interesting to discover how they gather the numbers and how different countries do their additions.
On a separate note...
Given the fact that Britain recorded 90,000 new cases yesterday as well as 277 COVID deaths, I remain perplexed as to why our government have just cancelled most restrictions. Is this connected with Johnson's popularity crisis and the tangle he finds himself in? I also wonder where Professor Chris Whitty has gone and where is Professor Patrick Vallance? In their roles as Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientist they appeared on television many times during the pandemic - carefully explaining things with honesty and integrity. It would be good to hear what they think now about the dropping of restrictions. In effect, have Johnson and his gang ceased following "The Science"?
Ten miles west of this keyboard, you reach The Derwent Valley. Once it was a river in its early stages travelling from the Pennine moors south towards Derby. But cities need water and so in years gone by The River Derwent was dammed - not just once but three times to hold back many millions of gallons Adam's ale. Three vast reservoirs were created - Ladybower, Derwent and Howden. When the ambitious engineering project was finally completed, King George VI arrived to plant an oak tree. That was on September 25th 1947.
Today I needed a good, long walk and for some reason hit upon The Derwent Valley which I have visited many times before. I parked Clint where the road ends by The King's Tree and set off on a nine mile circuit that took me almost exactly four hours. I walked the length of Howden and Derwent reservoirs then back up the other side.
At the point where I turned north, I noticed that water was lapping over the Derwent dam plunging down into Ladybower. In addition, I noticed that water board men were chopping and burning unwelcome undergrowth close to the dam's west tower. The rising smoke seemed to mingle quite dramatically with the clouds above and indeed with the excess water frothing over the dam wall.
Naturally, I snapped some pictures before carrying on. I was weary by the time I got back to Clint and very happy to guzzle water from the flask I had left in his boot (American: trunk). "What kept you so damned long?" Clint smirked.
Shirley in Turkey in 2008...She wanted to try paragliding from a mountain
Forty six years ago, a teenage girl came to Sheffield to begin her nurse training. Yesterday, her nursing career within The National Health Service reached its formal conclusion. I have been with her nearly every step of a career that she is entitled to look back upon with pride and happiness for I fell in love with her when she was just twenty years old. We married in October 1981.
These words were written in one of the cards she received yesterday at the health centre where she worked for the past twenty two years:
To Wonderful Shirley!
Just wanted to say thank you for everything!
When I started here two years ago I knew nothing about being a practice nurse. You took me under your wing and taught me everything I know. Thank you for your patience, getting me through my smear training, answering my random questions and texts on an almost daily basis. You are an inspiration and a fantastic role model and I feel so lucky that I have had you to mentor me. You will be missed by all the team and by me especially.
Enjoy your precious time with your beautiful granddaughter. She is lucky to have you - you're going to have a blast!
See you soon for a few proseccos.
All my love,
Laura xx
And so that is it. The end of an era. Shirley is going to take some time out before deciding if she has really left nursing entirely. Of course, she will have opportunities to cover for absent colleagues or to deliver vaccinations from time to time but at the moment she's not sure.
I am enormously proud of what she has achieved in nursing in different locations - from Accident and Emergency service in our main city hospital, orthopaedic ward nursing and then on to practice nursing - serving three different communities. Along the way, she worked very hard to attain a nursing degree and a Masters having begun as a basic State Enrolled Nurse (SEN). And you know what - she always loved it - every step of the way. She was doing something that was undeniably worthwhile within an organisation that she was always very proud to serve - The National Health Service. It was a fantastic journey and she leaves without bitterness or regret. No one can doubt that she did her best.
Jackson Browne's very first album, sometimes known as "Saturate Before Using", reached the shores of this island in 1972 . My younger brother Simon suggested that I should listen to it and I was immediately entranced. Jackson's plaintive voice, his musicality and his poetic lyrics grabbed me straight away.
He has released fourteen more albums since then and I have twelve of them. With Simon, I finally got to see Jackson in concert at Sheffield City Hall in March 2009 and we were not disappointed. It was a fabulous concert from a guy who has now been there in the background of my life for almost fifty years.
One of the songs from the first album that has haunted me forever is "Song for Adam". I know every word and I just have to close my eyes to hear the recording. No need for a turntable, a CD player or headphones connected to a phone. I just go to the music library in my head and there it is, complete and sweet.
It is not about love, seeking love or losing love as many pop songs are. Instead, it's about friendship, memory, loss and puzzlement. It was inspired by news of the death of a Californian contemporary - Adam Saylor who travelled to India in the late sixties and died in the street below his hotel window. Did he jump or did he just fall? Nobody knows for sure though back in 2017, Saylor's father Dr John Saylor seemed pretty sure that it was suicide:
“He wound up in Bombay – Mumbai, now, it’s called. After a while, I think he got depressed. He wrote to me that he wanted to come back home, but he didn’t have any money. His girlfriend had gone back home, and he was stuck there.
So I sent him $600 for air fare, and a couple of weeks later I got another letter asking if I’d seen his note about wanting to come home, and asking for money. So, I sent him another $600, and I got a third letter wondering why I hadn’t responded. And just before Christmas, he jumped from the fourth floor of his apartment.
Someone had intercepted the letters and forged his signature on the checks. Adam never got them. I’m sure he was depressed, and he thought I had abandoned him."
Of course, there's a sense in which that background doesn't really matter. "Song for Adam" is a human song that most people can relate to without knowing any of the back story. Here it is with the opening lyrics so that you can sing along:-
Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well
He was alone into his distance, he was deep into his well
I could guess what he was laughing at, but I couldn't really tell
Now the story's told that Adam jumped, but I've been thinking that he fell
Together we went travelling, as we received the call
His destination India and I had none at all
Well, I still remember laughing with our backs against the wall
So free of fear, we never thought that one of us might fall
I sit before my only candle
But it's so little light to find my way
Now this story unfolds before my candle
Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
But I feel just like a candle in a way
I guess I'll get there, but I wouldn't say for sure...
"Boiling Point" is a drama and not a documentary. Released just before Christmas, this British film is set in a busy upmarket London restaurant with the central focus being Andy Jones, the head chef and part-owner of the establishment played by the brilliant Stephen Graham.
Written and directed by Philip Barantini who just happens to have much personal experience of working in restaurants, the film is very special in the sense that it consists of one continuous ninety minute take. There's no splicing or cutting to other cameras. It's just one camera roving around the restaurant, sometimes following Andy Jones or taking us to tables where demanding diners are seated.
In this sense it does have some of the characteristics of documentary film making. However, as I said at the beginning "Boiling Point" is a drama. It was carefully scripted and carefully rehearsed to give the impression of reality unfolding before our eyes. Stuff happens including angry tensions between the kitchen staff and front of house and the unwelcome visits of a top food critic and laddish social influencers who demand steaks even though steak is not on the menu.
It would be interesting to tune into what really happens behind the scenes in upmarket restaurants. I would like to think that most eateries are far more harmonious, orderly and much less dramatic than in the story that unfolded at "Jones & Sons" on that particular Mad Friday before Christmas.
On this grey day, I caught a bus into the city centre to watch the film on a big screen. Seeing good films on a television set in one's own home is just not the same. It is more enthralling to sit in a comfortable cinema seat in darkness with surround sound and full concentration. "Boiling Point" was well worth the effort.
We often use words or phrases without considering their history - how they came into being in the first place. However, I am sure that some of you will already be aware of where the term "on tenterhooks" came from. It is a useful expression that describes the tension we feel when waiting for resolution, a decision or an answer.
Back in medieval England, wool was key to England's prosperity and growing might. At Meaux Abbey in East Yorkshire, Abbot Hugh de Leven reported that the lands he oversaw were home to 11,000 sheep. Eastern towns like King's Lynn, Thetford, Lincoln and Norwich grew fat and populous on the back of wool. It was our most important export.
Linked to the wool trade and the woollen industry, techniques were developed to process the raw material including new methods of spinning and weaving. Washing rough woven lengths of cloth was important because of the oils, muck and insect infestations they still contained.
Once this cloth was washed, it needed to be dried when shrinkage could be a problem. To avoid this, the drying cloth would be stretched on wooden frames called "tenters". Nailed into these frames at intervals were strong hooks onto which the cloth was attached and of course these became known as tenterhooks.
By the way, the term "tenter" is derived from a Latin verb that meant "to stretch" - the same root as "tension".
Leonardo DiCaprio as Professor Randall Mindy in "Don't Look Up"
I didn't read any reviews before watching "Don't Look Up" on Netflix last night. It was written and directed by Adam McKay with starring roles from Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. Significant supporting roles were played by Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Mark Rylance. The running time was 2hrs 25mins.
It seemed to me that the film didn't take itself too seriously. Central to it is the idea that a large comet is about to strike Earth with a power akin to the Chicxulub event on the Yucatan Peninsula sixty six million years ago. That was the collision that wiped out the dinosaurs and utterly changed this planet's evolution. Not a light-hearted topic I am sure you would agree but in the hands of Adam McKay and his troupe, the horrific vision is sheathed in a lot of dark humour. There's a kind of balance going on.
I liked the modernity of the film which pictures the world we inhabit as a place where social media and popularity matter more than impending doom or truth. Random Instagram images flash by at times - especially as humanity careers to the inevitable ending.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence's characters have a message that they need to give to the world but nobody wants to listen - not even The President of the USA who appears like a female version of Trump, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.
I enjoyed "Don't Look Up". It was fun but with some serious questions buried in there too. I hope that I haven't given too much away here...
Kate Dibaisky: Are we really about to tell the President of the United States
that we have just over six months until humankind, basically every species
Weather-wise, today did not live up to expectations just north of Barnsley. I was there to bag some more squares for the Geograph project. Okay, it didn't rain but sunshine was in short supply as I tramped through Staincross and Mapplewell.
I headed down a very treacherous, muddy path to The River Dearne yet thankfully avoided falling on my arse (American: ass or butt). Crossing the babbling Dearne, the mapped path heading south did not seem to exist so I had to improvise.
There were some raggedy horses looking sorry for themselves. They are probably owned by travellers or gipsies who often claim that they love their animals. Lord knows how long those sad horses have been surviving by the river without proper husbandry or stabling.
Clint and I suffered traffic issues both on our way to the location and on the way back. We found ourselves stuck on the M1 motorway for a full hour in the morning and meeting Friday rush hour traffic both in Barnsley and Sheffield on the way back. Of course these matters were connected. The lost hour meant that I finished the walk later than I had expected.
It is possible to create "photographs" with your eyes. No need for a camera because there isn't always a camera handy so instead you just have to make do with your eyes and the memory card inside your head.
This has been a significant week for Little Phoebe, our darling granddaughter. On Monday, Mama Frances had to go back to work after a full year of paid maternity leave. New arrangements had to be made for Phoebe's care.
Close by Frances and Stew's house there is a modern, well-staffed nursery and before Christmas it was arranged that she would go there for much of the working week. Full days on Mondays and Tuesdays plus Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings. Breaking up the week, she would spend all day Wednesday with Grandma and Grandpa (that's me) and all of Thursday morning too.
We looked after her this morning and then took her to the nursery at half past one. She was happy and had not moaned one iota in the morning. In fact, she had been a delight as per usual. Entering the nursery, she was dressed in her snow leopard coat with a happy smile on her face.
Then Shirley handed her over to one of the young women who works in the baby room. That's when I took the "photograph" with my eyes, I will remember the image for a long, long time I am sure. Suddenly, the happy face crumpled with some unspoken agony that verged on despair. Why were we leaving her there?
She looked at me and she looked at Shirley and reached out a free hand, her little face re-shaped with a kind of horror. But it was too late. We were off. The nursery had advised no tarrying or extra cuddles. We just had to go. She would be perfectly okay in their expert hands. Even so I am left with that haunting image - it felt as though we had betrayed her somehow.
I guess that the new routines will take some getting used to. "Good girl Phoebe! Good girl!"
Ten years ago I walked up onto the moors north of Howden Reservoir. There was not another soul around. Snow had fallen, snow on snow - and the air was sharp like broken glass. Up I climbed over hollows and clumps of heather concealed by the powdery whiteness.
I was heading for a stone outcrop that I had previously spotted from afar and had identified via Ordnance Survey mapping. It was and is called The Horse Stone.
It sits in splendid isolation with no other outcrops in its vicinity. I guess that at some time in the distant past somebody must have thought that it had the shape of a horse but I can't see it myself.
I moved carefully through the snow - sometimes sinking up to my thighs - and finally reached the outcrop that could easily have passed for an abstract sculpture. I wondered about our ancestors - people who inhabited those uplands. many centuries ago. Archaeologists have certainly identified signs of pre-Christian habitation and burial within a mile of The Horse Stone.
What would they have made of such outcrops? I can't help thinking that such places would have been venerated - places to meet and pay homage to natural forces. The people who lived in faraway times would have had no notion of the geological processes that created such strange, unearthly shapes. If only that stone could speak.
Standing there by The Horse Stone, I bellowed with all my might believing that nobody would hear me for, as I said before, there was no one else about even though I was only fourteen miles from the western suburbs of Sheffield and fourteen miles from the eastern suburbs of Manchester.
As usual on a Tuesday might, I saddled up Clint and headed for our nearest "Lidl" store on Chesterfield Road. It wasn't a big shopping expedition.
Annoyingly, none of the serviced checkout counters were operational so I had to put my purchases through one of of those irritating self-service checkouts. When it was all done and I had paid my bill with a contactless Visa card, I noticed that I had forgotten to put a single courgette (American: zucchini) through the till. It was still in my trolley.
I admit that for a moment, I was very tempted to sling that thing into one of my shopping bags and just walk out of the discount supermarket. But I didn't because I knew that if I had done that, the act of dishonesty would have preyed on me. Consequently I put the single courgette through the self checkout process and paid a further forty seven pence. It felt better to have done that.
That's the kind of bloke I am these days. I try my best to live honestly - no cheating and no lies. It feels better that way. I can sleep easily in my bed with a clear conscience.
In contrast, our country's prime minister seems to be full of lies. He lied about the benefits that leaving The European Union would bring to Great Britain and he lied about the drinks parties that happened in the very seat of government during the worst times of the pandemic when this country was in shutdown mode.
My mother would frequently retort, "I can't bear liars!". She would have been disgusted with this country's current political leader. Lying is as much a part of his character as his inability to say "sorry" and really mean it. For him, every pretentious "sorry" is qualified.
If he had an ounce of dignity he would have already resigned and gone off into the wilderness to write his bestselling memoirs. Hopefully, it won't be long before he is squeezed out like the last globule from a toothpaste tube. He's customarily lazy and self-obsessed and doesn't have the wherewithal to MBGA (Make Britain Great Again).
My good friend Tony is recovering from COVID. It laid him low so thank heavens he had been fully vaccinated. Now testing "negative" he felt well enough today to undertake a recuperative eight mile walk. We met in Howden this morning near Howden Minster with the ruins of a much older church in front of it...
Once again I was in flat country where rivers and an intricate man-made drainage system funnel water eastward into The Humber Estuary and from there into The North Sea.
This picture was taken from Howdendyke by The River Ouse. In the distance you can see the arc of The Ouse Bridge which carries The M62 motorway into East Yorkshire. It opened in 1976.
Before the motorway opened, moving south out of East Yorkshire was a tiresome affair. Vehicles had to use the swing bridge shown below. It is called Boothferry Bridge and it opened in 1929. I well remember queues there and how leaving that bridge often felt as if you had just left an island.
Below you can see the underbelly of the M62 bridge - taken as we walked along the river bank.
It was a pleasure to walk with Tony again. We plod along at the same pace and though we could converse for ever, we also enjoy periods of silence together. He had brought sandwiches which we ate while sitting on a bench in the village of Asselby.
That was a village my parents knew well because a short time after World War II, my father became the headteacher at nearby Barmby on the Marsh and as Asselby didn't have its own school, its children went to Barmby. My parents lived in the school house next door where they began to raise two little boys. I arrived in the next school house a year after they left there.
Tony and I got back to Howden Minster at 3pm and sat in a cafe for half an hour, sharing a pot of tea. I think that circular walk in the January sunshine will have been just the tonic he needed.
The tower of Howden Minster seen over allotment gardens
Our lovely granddaughter Phoebe Harriet was one year old today. How those twelve months have flown. All the photographs in this blogpost were snapped by Phoebe's mama.
To celebrate her special day she went to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park but here she is round about 5pm with the birthday cake that her grandma made in front of her.
The picture below was taken just after Christmas with four generations in view. Phoebe with her father, grandmother and great grandfather.
And finally, here's a typical view of our birthday girl. She is generally placid and easy-going though at the moment she has two more teeth coming through so she has been a little grumpy the last couple of days.
Over the past year, Phoebe has been the most wonderful distraction from the misery of COVID. Each day she brings sunshine and joy into our lives and to watch her developing has been a true privilege.
I should have written about "The Tourist" before. After all, I finished watching it ten days ago. Using the BBC i-player, I got ahead of the television schedule and watched the six one hour episodes in six days. That still seems like cheating to me.
Written by Harry and Jack Williams and directed by Chris Sweeney, "The Tourist" is set in a dusty part of rural Australia. The central character - known at first as "The Man" - has been in a dramatic road accident which has robbed him of his memory. He has no idea who he is or why he is even in Australia.
There are a handful of killings in the show and as I have indicated before, I am not a fan of killings - they often seem gratuitous but in this instance I was prepared to let them pass for the greater dramatic good.
"The Tourist" is craftily put together with quirky humour and many eye-catching details. It travels backward and forward in time and is visually appealing with intrigue round every corner.
The performance of Danielle Macdonald as probationary police officer Helen Chambers was as charming as it was comforting. Her positive spirit and naivete stood in contrast to the ruthlessness of characters played by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Alex Dimitriades and Damon Herriman.
I do not wish to give too much away so I will just finish here by saying that I found "The Tourist" to be really entertaining and it held my attention throughout. You never quite knew what to expect and I loved the dusty Australian settings that helped to give the drama substance and believability. Maybe you would like it too.
Today, unbroken sunshine was promised from dawn to dusk. It was time for another country walk. I chose the flatlands north of Doncaster and parked Clint near Hatfield and Staniforth railway station. Above, a pizza business, a barber's and a fish and chip shop on Broadway in Dunscroft.
Below, Lock House Farm north of Barnby Dun. You can see the farm through the trees.
Below is the track to Botany Bay. In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century a fashion arose in rural England for naming properties after exotic far away places. It was not a widespread habit but nonetheless it remains noticeable. I have walked by farms called California, New York, Gibraltar, North America and Crimea and I am sure that if I turned my mind to it I could identify many more such lonesome properties with names that similarly look beyond the reality of the here and now...
Now I have arrived at Kirk Bramwith. Its lovely little limestone church with its unmistakable Norman door was certainly operational during The Black Death. In these flatlands there is no stone. You see hedges rather than stone walls for field boundaries but somehow the people of long ago managed to transport tons of magnesian limestone to this remote village. It beggars belief.
As I was walking to Barnby Dun's even more impressive church - dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, I turned to observe the stubbled field I was crossing and was immediately wowed by the sun's dramatic illumination...
I got back to Clint at three thirty having walked pretty solidly for four hours - covering eight or nine miles.
"Did you enjoy that then?" he asked with a hint of sarcasm as I tossed my boots into his boot (American: trunk).
"Yes I jolly well did!" I retorted, sounding rather like David Niven at a cocktail party in The Hollywood Hills.
Hugonis de Leven was the fifteenth abbot of Meaux (Melsa)- a Cistercian abbey in the heart of East Yorkshire. He was most probably born around 1300 and was claimed by The Black Death in 1349, ten years after his appointment. Little is known of him - especially as the five pages about his abbacy in "Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, a Fundatione usque ad Annum 1396" by Thomas de Burton (d. 1437) were ripped from the original manuscript long ago.
There where crows announced Countless days and still nights Were made unquiet by Hungry waves Gorging on the coast Of Holderness, We prospered And The Lord was munificent. Cognizance came of blackness Moving cross foreign lands Then reaping London Like a scythe And we, glad to be alive, Praised The Lord of Mercy. How came The Pestilence To Meaux None doth know But by the first snow Death had taken half of us To paradise. Wise Hugh writhed in his cot As I nursed him Spared and steered by The Lord. We sank his pustulous vessel Into the chancel By Adam de Skyrne Who were’t abbot In my father’s time And flung quicklime Into the hole, Proffering prayers for The Lord
to attend In sure anticipation of The End.
Nameless victim of The Black Death at Thornton Abbey, North Lincolnshire
Another cheery blogpost for mid-January. With The Black Death in mind, let us go a-rambling once more but walking boots are unnecessary...
In the 250 years between The Norman Conquest of England and The Black Death, many great abbeys were established. Populated by monks, they were not all about worshipping and serving God. They possessed huge swathes of good farmland. In squeezing rents from tenanted farmers, the abbeys prospered.
The control that these Roman Catholic abbeys exercised was a legacy of the Norman invasion which would later drive King Henry VIII to destroy them. They had a very good run. 450 years of enormous financial and political control as kings and queens looked on.
I was born and grew up in a village called Leven - located right in the heart of The East Riding of Yorkshire. On the outskirts of our village was a stone pillar known as White Cross. It marked the original boundary of lands that were under the control of a nearby monastic settlement - Meaux Abbey. Though White Cross endures Meaux's stones were carted away long ago.
Established in 1150, the abbey grew and prospered. As well as the resident abbot and his monks, lay brethren lived within the abbey precincts. It was five miles from my home and the fertile lands in its possession reached east to the North Sea coast and down to The Humber Estuary.
In 1339, the fifteenth abbot of Meaux Abbey was appointed. He was called Hugh de Leven so I imagine that he had a special connection with my home village. Maybe, like me, he was also born there. In 1349 when The Black Death arrived at Meaux Abbey, Hugh de Leven died along with half of the other residents. The plague also tore through local farming communities. Suddenly, the abbey's power and wealth nosedived.
Crops were not harvested or sown and animals were not tended. Many ploughmen had died along with monks who would have collected the rents. Prosperity often survives in a delicate balancing act but The Black Death had tipped that balance into chaos. Not just at Meaux but across the nation.
Plaque by the quay in Melcombe Regis, Dorset
In lightly researching The Black Death with the kind assistance of Professor Google, I have been surprised about how little contemporary art or literature reflected what went on. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his famous "Canterbury Tales" near the end of the fourteenth century , well within living memory of "The Pestilence". He was most likely born in London in the early 1340's so though he was a survivor, The Black Death would have certainly struck down members of his immediate family.
The world was much changed for Chaucer's generation but there is surprisingly little reference to the plague in "The Canterbury Tales". Only in "The Pardoner's Tale" do we get a hint of the deadly pandemic - "He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence...".
Here's an illustration from a manuscript created during the height of the plague in Tournai, Belgium:-
Burying the dead would have been both problematic and scary. So many gravediggers, priests and coffin makers had passed away and the fatalities seemed innumerable. In major European towns and cities, mass graves were dug. Some of these have been studied by forensic archaeologists in modern times, allowing further understanding of the horror and the woe of a plague that killed over 25 million people in Europe alone - over a third of the continent's total population.
Inside my brain a seed has been planted. I would like to write a poem in memory of those tragic times and in honour of the people who died. One day soon I hope - unless the current plague gets me first... Thanks for reading.
1349 was the year that The Black Death reached Yorkshire. By that time, the deadly plague that had spread around Europe and Asia was progressing via aerosol infection - human to human - rather like COVID 19. People were dying like flies. There were no vaccination programmes and hardly anybody wore masks. It was thought that the plague was being spread by rats or fleas that lived on their fur but such theories were redundant for, no matter how it began, it was now riding on the exhaled breaths of infected people.
The population of England in 1348 was an estimated 4.8 million. Three years later in 1351 it had fallen to 2.6 million Can you imagine that? In such a very short time our population had been reduced by half. Families were decimated. Whole towns and villages were emptied. Graveyards were filled to overflowing. Death was everywhere making our current pandemic seem like a walk in the park. It was the same in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. In fact every European country felt the terrible shadow of The Black Death.
Early in 1349, the population of prosperous Norway was probably 400,000. In the summer of that year, The Great Pestilence was imported from England and it spread like wildfire killing half the population in just two years. Afterwards, it took three hundred years for Norway's population to return to pre-plague levels. In the intervening years, the proud and independent country had become part of the wider Danish empire - subjugated and beholden to the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.
In Yorkshire, priests who sought to comfort grieving families themselves became very susceptible to The Black Death. They died in such numbers that many churches were without presiding priests for years after the pandemic had subsided.
The people who lived or died in 1349 were just like us. They had hopes and dreams and memories. They laughed and they cried. They shivered and they sweated. Try as I might I simply cannot imagine what daily life must have been like as the Christmastime of 1349 approached. Who would attend the annual feasting and who would be left to even prepare the feasts? Fear must have throbbed in every heart. Maybe folk wondered why God was allowing the slaughter to continue and was he even there at all?
1349... a momentous year. One that should never have been forgotten. I think I will say more about The Black Death tomorrow. To me at least, it was a fascinating period in our history.
Just back home from "The Hammer and Pincers". The Sunday quiz was cancelled - allegedly because the "Red Tooth" quiz company didn't send any questions this week. Frankly, I don't believe it and besides it would be easy to create twenty five general knowledge questions. I wonder if the landlady really gives a damn.
No quiz meant that I had to spend two and a half hours drinking beer and conversing with my Sunday night quizzing chums. There's Mike who was seventy last October, Danny who will be seventy in July and Mick who will be sixty five in the spring. He's the spring chicken in the team. I will be sixty nine in the autumn - if I make it that far.
We spent a little time reflecting on the business of ageing. All three of my chums have daily pills to take for various ailments and conditions. Fortunately, I don't take any medication at all. No pills for me. I guess I am lucky that way.
Recognising that "The End" is just up ahead, I told them that I want to make sure that any books I read from now on should be worth reading. I don't want to read any crap. They could understand the point that I was making. Time is precious and it is running out. Maybe COVID has emphasised this.
We also spoke about hearing in noisy locations. Increasingly I find it difficult to hear people in noisy places - even when they are sitting right next to me. The muffled background bass seems to take over. There are only so many times you can say, "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" In a way, it was reassuring to discover that the lads knew exactly what I was talking about.
I don't think about growing old and then dying very often. I just get on with my life, taking each day as it comes. Graveyards tell us that these journeys we are on will all reach the same destination but what a grim life it would be if ageing and death became our foremost mental preoccupations. As Dylan Thomas said, let us "rage, rage against the dying of the light".
It all seems like a dream now. No sooner were the Laughing Horse Blogging Awards done and dusted for another year than I got wind of the fact that I had won a prestigious Australian blogging award - the inaugural -"Is That Bull Charging" Award.
It was all very hush hush. In order to gain access into Australia I had to prove my COVID vaccination status. Unlike that Serbian tennis player - currently imprisoned in a Melbourne fleapit - I was able to show that I have had two Astra Zeneca shots and a Pfeizer booster jab.
The "Is That Bull Charging?" Awards were presented at a prestigious, luxury hotel in the south Sydney suburb of Narwee - close to the Bottlemart Off Licence.
Prizes were presented by Mr Brian Booth - a famous Australian cricketer in the 1960's. He spoke at length about this Yorkshire Pudding blog - referring to the special contributions that earned it "Overall Winner" status. Services to particular topics that were mentioned included - rambling, Hull City FC, The Arts, Princess Phoebe and historic contributions to veganism.
When I started to climb onto the stage at The Narwee Hotel, I had every intention of delivering the thank you speech I had prepared on the flight from Dubai. However, I am sorry to say that I tripped on the steps and cracked my head on the edge of the stage.
I finished up in the Westmead Hospital and when I gained consciousness the next morning, who should be mopping the egg-shaped lump on my brow but Kylie from the blog she calls "Eclectica". She told me that I had missed a really great night at The Narwee Hotel where revellers had partied deep into the early hours.
Later that day, I was back at Sydney Airport heading home which is what that Serbian tennis player should be doing right now. He might have won dozens of tennis tournaments but he has never won an "Is That Bull Charging?" prize for blogging! Eat your heart out Novak!
