General Election 2015

One of my neighbours here in Berwick is leaving nobody in any doubt about where their political loyalties lie. Their flat has another set of windows round the corner and there are Green party posters in all of them as well. Walking past them every day is starting to have a slightly brainwashing effect on me.

But I don't really mind that because it forms a valuable antidote to the cartloads of leaflets that the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives have been delivering to my mailbox. In fact the word 'leaflets' does not really cover it - some of them are disguised as newspapers.  So far the LibDems have the edge over the Tories both in sheer quantity of trees felled for the sake of winning my vote and in having the effrontery to send me a Christmas card. Their electoral machine was already fired up and running in December and at that time I had not yet learned to recognise a Derby return address as a warning sign that a letter comes from Clegg  Co., so I opened it eagerly in the expectation of finding a card from an old friend, only to find my local candidate Julie Porksen waxing lyrical about the happy family Christmas she was looking forward to and hoping I was doing likewise. I am sure that Ms Porksen would be saddened to learn that I hurled the card across the room and immediately became quite a lot less likely to vote for her.

But please don't think that the Conservatives are trying any less hard. This is their constituency office in Alnwick. The reason that their garden is looking so beautifully groomed may be that David Cameron honoured our constituency with a visit last week. I only found out about it after it had happened, so I missed the opportunity to avoid him. The Conservative candidate Anne-Marie Trevelyan is being promoted with the cringe-worthy slogan, 'take it from me, we need Anne-Marie'. Thanks to the party's strong support among the farming community, Mrs Trevelyan is beaming out at the voters from fields, hedges and caravan parks across the constituency.

Despite being thirty miles apart and usually behaving as if they were entirely unrelated to each other, Berwick and Alnwick are in the same parliamentary constituency. It is in terms of geographical area the largest in England, though it still has fewer residents than many. The constituency is named after Berwick, which I'm quite sure galls many residents of Alnwick ("we're the historic county town, you know!").  After the blip when it elected William Beveridge, it stayed solidly Conservative, but it turned Liberal again in 1973 after the MP of the day resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, and has kept on returning Alan Beith ever since, partly because he is a likeable and hard-working man and partly thanks to large scale tactical voting by people who would really rather vote Labour. Mr Beith - sorry, he's now Sir Alan - has decided that 2015 would be a suitable time to retire, and the Conservatives are certain that they can now take the constituency back, because the anticipated reversion to Labour by coalition-haters will cost the LibDems their majority. Hence the visit by the PM himself.

Labour have never bothered to seriously contest Berwick, but this year they have roused themselves sufficiently to send me one leaflet, featuring their candidate Scott Dickinson posing in front of the railway bridge over the Tweed in a manner rather too obviously calculated to indicate, 'I do actually know where Berwick is, you know'. Although distracted by the shocking standard of proof-reading in the leaflet (I do that for a living and I notice these things), I can't argue with their central point that last time we voted LibDem tactically to keep the Conservatives out and ended up with both of them in government, so this time why bother.

The Greens have not so far sent me any leaflets at all. Some of my friends report receiving a Green leaflet, so maybe they just don't have the personnel to cover the whole town, though I would have thought that the occupant of the multi-postered house shown above could have strolled around the corner to deliver a few. The Green candidate is called Rachael Roberts and I keep getting her confused with Rachel Reeves, a Labour MP who is often interviewed about economic matters. I imagine some other people do too, and who can tell whether this works for or against Ms Roberts.

UKIP have just got around to delivering their one leaflet. Their candidate,Nigel Coghill Marshall, is using a photo that doesn't do him any favours, but there's always something appealing about the sheer purpleness of the Kipper stuff. Mr Coghill Marshall sent me a nice email telling me about himself after I emailed all the candidates asking them to upload their CVs to the website Yournextmp.com, a project run by the Democracy Club. None of them have done that, and the other four never replied to me either. During the 2010 election campaign I scanned and uploaded leaflets for this project, but in 2015 I have opted out of that because if I try to keep up with all the Trevelyan and Porksen leaflets my scanner will probably catch fire.

Late in the day, a sixth candidate threw his hat into the ring. Neil Humphrey is standing for the English Democrats. They are apparently similar to UKIP but have split from them because they object to UKIP saying that they 'believe in Britain', rather than in England. Do try to keep up. The EngDems' main policy is the creation of an English parliament to balance the Scottish parliament, and they have targeted Berwick as a key constituency because of worries about what concessions the Scottish Nationalists may be able to extract in the next parliament. This is of course right up the street of this blog, so I hope that the EngDems are able to scrape together the cash to print a few leaflets explaining all this in more detail and put one in my mailbox.

The Lion and the Unicorn Are Fighting For Our Taxes

This is the coat of arms over the gateway of the Barracks in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I was vaguely aware that something similar turns up on many official institutions of the British state, but never knew what it meant until I finally got around to looking it up after taking this photo. Apparently it's the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom. Somehow I've managed to avoid learning that for the last five decades, which I think means I've just failed my UK Citizenship test.

The Lion is a symbol of England and, through English domination of the Union, of the whole of Britain. I remember in history lessons at school looking at Victorian cartoons from Punch magazine that showed ill-advised foreigners daring to 'twist the tail of the British lion'. It is less well known that the Unicorn is an old heraldic symbol of Scotland. The reason it is chained is because this mythical beast has such dangerous supernatural powers, as we all now know from the Harry Potter books. It has nothing at all to do with Scotland not being free, but of course the symbol of the chain has now acquired a new resonance.

Thanks to an 'interesting facts about Scotland' item in the Scotsman newspaper, I now know that the old royal coat of arms of Scotland showed a shield supported by two unicorns. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 King James VI / I replaced one of them with the English lion to represent the Union. The version of the Coat of Arms now used in Scotland shows the Unicorn on the left (because in our culture where we read from left to right the left-hand position is considered to have primacy) and also wearing a crown. It does though still seem to be chained.

A popular piece of verse made famous by Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass joked that the Lion and the Unicorn looked as if they were fighting over the crown rather than jointly supporting it. Since independence for Scotland became a live issue that view seems most apt. The reason for adapting the line for the title of this post is that today is the first day of the new tax year. It has a special significance here on the border because the first steps towards letting Scotland set its own taxes come into effect this month. As of April 1st (yes, I'm sure everybody's made that joke) there is an entity called Revenue Scotland up and running. It will start off by collecting some existing taxes and get geared up ready to collect new or different taxes that the Scottish government may introduce under newly devolved powers.

I don't claim to understand all the details but I am inordinately excited about this. I confess that life on the border has seemed a little dull and flat since the indyref returned a No result. But if and when Scottish income tax becomes higher than the English kind, we can look forward to a flurry of activity again. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing and house buying and selling. I can tell that this prospect is really worrying some people because the campaign against the SNP by all the other parties contesting the general election is starting to get dirty. That's way better than treating it as a joke like they used to. I love this stuff! Bring it on!

Hail, Holy Light

Hail, holy light! Only a quotation from Milton can do justice to the joy those of us who live at these northern latitudes feel over the return of the sun in springtime. Today is officially the first day of spring, and I have now ceremonially washed my gloves and put them away in the drawer until the autumn. I'm holding off on parting with my woolly hat for a bit longer.

This afternoon was a gorgeous day of spring sunshine and I took this photo of the lighthouse at Berwick-upon-Tweed. We were amazed at the way the waves were breaking right over the pier. Today this was not because it was windy or stormy, as in the Craster post below, but just because the tide was exceptionally high. We were warned that it would be because of the proximity of the moon to the earth, related to yesterday's partial solar eclipse.

The eclipse was a fantastic experience. While London based broadcasters sulked in overcast conditions that rendered the sun invisible, we enjoyed a perfect clear, sunny morning. I was down on the quayside with a group of neighbours. As the moon began to move across the sun at about 9.25 am the seagulls seemed to become agitated and swirled around in a squawking flock. I was certain that it would take more than an eclipse to upset Berwick seagulls, the gangsters of the avian world, but I was wrong. At the point of maximum eclipse both the temperature and the light level  had noticeably dropped. The red tones of the stones of the Old Bridge were more pronounced than usual and the quality of the light resembled that before a thunderstorm. One of my neighbours went to have a look at the swans and reported that they had assembled on the slipway and gone to sleep, as they do in the evening.

I was kindly granted a look at the screen of a filtered camera one person had set up on the quayside, and sure enough there was a beautiful crescent sun at the point of 90% eclipse, the maximum visible here. Two people told me later that they had made pinhole cameras that gave an excellent view of the sun, but sadly I didn't think of that soon enough. What was really good was that when clouds passed over the sun as the moon was moving away, it was possible to look directly at the sun for a moment and see the silhouette of the moon very clearly behind the cloud.

I am rather regretting not taking a photo of the Old Bridge during the eclipse, but I'm not sure that the unusual lighting effects would show up in a photo. Instead here is one taken this afternoon, complete with a large clump of grass floating incongruously downstream, presumably dislodged by the high tide.

The Cromwellian Green Man

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This is the carving on the lintel over the main door of the parish church in Berwick upon Tweed. It is an example of the type of figure known as a 'green man', that is, a man's face surrounded by foliage. These are apparently quite common on churches, much to the delight of Neo-Pagans who see them as an indication of the survival of pre-Christian belief long after Europe was nominally Christianised.

This one is evidently little known, judging by the fact that all the Google results for 'green man Berwick' were about a pub called The Green Man in Berwick Street, London.  The thing that always seems strange to me about it is that Berwick church is an extremely rare example of a church built during the Cromwellian period, that is the decade or so between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 when hard-line Reformed Christianity was the power in the land. The original design of Holy Trinity church conformed to strict puritan principles: no steeple, no bells, no stained glass, no altar. Graven images of any kind were anathema to these strict Protestants. So why then put a Green Man over the door ??

I have found a great little website that explains all things to do with Green Men. It suggests many interpretations: that such images may have been purely decorative, with no remembered symbolic significance; that they may have been identified with the devil and placed over church doorways as a warning to worshippers; that they may have been perceived as Christian because of the tradition that the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made from wood from a tree descended from the Tree of Knowledge that was the downfall of Adam and Eve; and of course that they really were a lovingly retained symbol of folk practices related to the cycle of the seasons.

During my four years as a rather mature research student I went to a lot of conferences on religious studies, and developed a love-hate relationship with the modern pagans who attended them in quantities. Most of them were very pleasant and interesting people and I sometimes miss them. On the other hand the shiny-eyed enthusiasms and sweeping unscholarly statements that some of them were prone to frequently exasperated me, and put me off taking an interest in pre-Christian religions for a long time. I have now mellowed somewhat, and am prepared to take pagan survivals seriously again, though I still have issues with anything involving the 'collective unconscious'.

In fact I have mellowed so much that I have just re-read my old Pelican of  Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, a classic work by H.R.Ellis Davidson, born Hilda Ellis in 1914 and far removed from the scholar-practitioners who abound in academia nowadays, but very sympathetic to the loyal followers of Odin and Thor who witnessed the replacement of their ancient faith by Christianity. By the time I had finished this book I was quite convinced that the centrality of the crucifixion in the iconography of European Christianity has a lot to do with the centrality of the story of Odin hanging on a tree in order to acquire mystical wisdom in the faith which it slowly and with difficulty replaced. There are Old English poems whose imagery blends the two traditions of cross and tree almost inseparably.

So I am now open to suggestions about ancient symbols of foliage too.  I do have a nagging feeling that the use of this symbol on a church built on such severe puritan principles may weaken the argument that it was a genuine pagan survival and reinforce the view that it was intended to be either purely decorative or actively diabolic. Unless of course it was put up at a later date as an ostentatiously anti-puritan gesture. I think I need to do some more research. But I'm sure that lots of readers will be keen to help me with that.

Challenging Weather at Craster

Discovering that it is possible to digitalise transparencies has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for blogging. I'm posting this old 35 mm slide just because it's such a great picture. It shows the harbour at Craster on a stormy day with the waves breaking impressively over the wall.

Definitely the kind of day when the emergency services put out stern warnings against standing on the harbour wall just to gawp at the view, but no committed photographer has ever cared much for health and safety. Certainly the one who took this, my late father John Housby, never did and nor did his camera club buddies. I have a photo of him gleefully standing on a cliff edge on the wrong side of a sign that says 'danger, do not go beyond this point', taken by one of the said camera club buddies. Maybe I'll digitalise and post that one some day.

Craster is a small fishing village in north Northumberland. It did not have a harbour at all until the family in the local 'big house', who have the same name as the village, had this one built as an act of philanthropy in the early years of the 20th century. Imagine what it was like having to launch a fishing coble straight out into the open sea. Challenging.  The village has its own history site here.

In the distance on the left side of the picture is Dunstanburgh Castle, a ruin so picturesque that it has become the greatest visual cliche in Northumberland and has accordingly been banished from my blog, but I'm prepared to let it just sneak into the corner like this. As I related in my post on interesting local place names, the name Craster is derived, according to Stan Beckensall's handy guide, from the Old English craw-ceastre, meaning a fort inhabited by crows. Looking along to the ruined castle it still seems a very apt name.  During my childhood visits to Craster we always had a cuppa in a local cafe called The Choughs. According to the RSPB website, the chough is indeed a bird of the crow family but it is no longer found on the north-east coast. Shame.

I used a section of this photo for the cover image of my first attempt at writing fiction to self-publish. I wanted to have a go at evoking the feeling of a small coastal village when the summer tourists have gone and the winter storms have arrived, and I ended up writing a short story set in a fictional village that is a cross between Craster and Seahouses. That has been quite well received and I am now working on publishing more short stories. I'll put the link on this blog when it's live.

The Kilted Magi

A very Happy Christmas to all my readers!

For my Christmas post this year I have something a bit different for you. This is a photo of a sculpture in the parish church of Kirknewton, a small village in North Northumberland. (I should confess that it was taken by my late father and not by myself.) You can see that the modern plaster on the wall has been carefully shaped around the figures to preserve this very old relief carving of the Adoration of the Magi.

It is recognisably a depiction of the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to the Baby Jesus, who sits in his mother's lap. The detail that makes it so interesting is that the Wise Men are wearing, not trousers, nor anything known to have been worn in first century Persia where they reportedly came from, but the type of garments that the local congregation here in the English-Scottish Borders were apparently familiar with, now usually referred to as kilts. Every serious book on the history of Scotland that I've read says that our modern idea of a kilt is mostly a Victorian invention and that the Scottish Highlanders in centuries past simply wore a piece of plaid cloth loosely wrapped around themselves. This sculpture seems to provide evidence that similar styles of dress were adopted by men further south as well.

The work probably dates from the 12th century, according to the great Nikolaus Pevsner. The Northumberland volume of the 1950s 'Queen's England' series refers to it vaguely as 'Norman'. Both of them describe it as artistically very crude, which may be true but is kind of missing the point about why it's so appealing. It is a powerful image from the history of Christianity in Northern Europe.

Noah's Flood: Once Again Topical

It has been raining a lot recently. I mean, a lot. On days when the rain never stops living on a river estuary loses some of its appeal. All I can see is water in every direction – water in the river, water on the ground, water in the sky. Water dripping off my sleeves in the library and making the books soggy. Water making the garden path so slippy that I skidded when fetching the wheely-bin back in and would have fallen if the bin hadn’t acted as a handy zimmer-frame.

I have started taking climate change more seriously recently, partly because there seems to be no doubt that the winters are warmer and wetter than they were when I was a child. There is something to be said for having less snow, but constant rain is not much fun either. It is a commonplace on days like this to joke that perhaps we should be building an ark. So when I came across this picture while sorting out my old photos, I thought, Hmm ... Maybe there is some useful knowledge to be gleaned from this.

The photo shows a performance of the Benjamin Britten opera Noah’s Flood, or rather, Noye’s Fludde, staged in St Michael’s church, Alnwick, in the late 1960s, starring the great bass-baritone Owen Brannigan as Noah and your correspondent as a mouse. That’s me at the far right of the front row, with the plaits. All the other mice have kept their masks in the correct position and are behaving in a suitably mouse-like fashion, while I seem to have tilted mine back, the better to stare at the audience. I remember that I was sulking about not being cast as one of the cool animals. Everybody wanted to be a giraffe or an elephant, who had impressive papier-mache heads and not just a rubbish mask. You may also have noticed that there are more than two mice. Basically, any member of the Sunday School who hadn’t succeeded in being cast as a decent two-by-two animal was pacified by being allowed to be a mouse. This was justified on the grounds that any bodged-up wooden ship would have been full of mice anyway without needing to march them aboard in pairs. We had to scurry up the aisle of the church at the back end of the procession into the ark, squeaking 'Eek eek!'  Darling, the indignity of it all.

Apart from my papier-mache envy, the only thing I can now recall about this performance is how much my arms ached. The conclusion of the first half of the show was a stirring rendition by the entire cast, mice included, of Eternal Father, Strong to Save, a hymn traditionally sung by seafarers and those who love them that implores God to protect ‘those in peril on the sea’. To add to the dramatic effect we all had to hold out our hands in an attitude of supplication for the entire hymn. Mr Brannigan was naturally a consummate professional and stood rock steady throughout, but some of the animals were distinctly wobbly well before the end.

In addition to his career in classical music, Owen Brannigan became well known for his recordings of traditional folk songs from Northumberland and Tyneside. We used to have one of them in the house when I was a child. I really must try to track them down in digital form. I only discovered recently that Owen Brannigan was born in Annitsford, then a small village in the south of Northumberland but now incorporated into Cramlington New Town, and sang in the church choir there as a boy.  A dear friend of mine who died much too young is buried in the churchyard at Annitsford. It always makes me happy to find such connections in my life.