Spun by Wonderment (above Hemel Hempstead)

JOURNAL ENTRY

13^th July, Saturday

“Loosestrife sets alight
The greyness of the day
With purple fire.

Chiff chaff squeak
Like rusty wheelbarrows
Among the dog-rose
And willowherb spires.

Maggie sniffs each stone
in turn of the snapped-back bridge
As we pass underneath it
With a thrash of white water.

The heron is back
And so are we.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

All day, the sky has weighed heavy with wadded sheets of stratus, dish water grey. A few spots of half-hearted rain fell first thing, but nothing came of it. And now, the wind has all but dropped and the steel-rimmed sky is shuttered tight. A hundred yards or so in front of us, the herons sleep - tall in the chaos of their tangled roosts. Below them, the Erica also sleeps. Nestled under a spreading ash. Listen, and you might hear her dreaming.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a chaotic and sometimes distressing old world, to you wherever you are, canal-side.

I'm so glad that you're here, I was hoping you could make it and have put the kettle on the stove and cracked open some more biscuits for the barrel. Why not come inside for a while? Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

The waters have been busy today. It’s getting into holiday season. All day there’s been the familiar little kick and slap against the bank to herald that a boat is on its way. Then the Erica lifts slightly – almost imperceptibly – as she tries to move in greeting towards the passing boat. In the afternoon, I re-tighten the lines, but no matter how taut the mooring rope, there’s always that slight movement of welcome when a boat passes. I know there are techniques to secure us more firmly to the bank. To lessen that movement further. But being secured so tightly to the bank is not really what I want. We like that movement. The Erica is a boat after all. It’s why we moved off the land. On a busier stretch or a river, then those precautions are sensible, particularly when the wash of speeding boats can cause damage. However, here, it’s nice to feel a little separate from the land, to loosen our and the Erica’s grip on the land. To float. In actuality, you hardly notice it. Often, it is only Maggie, that raises her head, becomes alert – ‘oh, okay. Boat is coming.’ Then ‘I wonder if we know them.’ Without Maggie, it is easy to become oblivious. It is just that this day (and in this location) it seems to have been particularly busy.

Lately, parts of the towpath have taken on the look of lush green corridors, that smell thick with damp and fertility. Walking along them is like walking through a cavernous holloway, starred white with bedstraw pin-pricks, and soft with meadowsweet’s flossy, honeyed, down. They are alive with a dance of butterflies – mainly ringlet and hedge-browns. Pastilles of self-heal hang like violet and burgundy red lanterns. The bull rush maces are beginning to brush and feather, their strong green sword-blades form a jungle for damsel flies – although I still haven’t seen too many dragon flies yet. 

There’s been news that two of the cygnets have been lost. I’ll know when we next get back. Apparently, the swan family have been away and had made their way below the lock. This is really out of their territory and I’m not sure why they did that. There are several miles of safe water to the north which is their normal stamping ground. Locks don’t form too much of a problem for adult swans. They can normally fly over them – if they have enough space to take off. However, that option isn’t open to the cygnets and they’ll probably have to swim through. That means sharing the lock with a boat – not good, even if the people operating the lock are aware and sensible. One of the adults with four cygnets managed to get through, but one adult was left behind. However, I heard later that the missing adult had been reunited.

On the last walk of the day, Maggie fell in. And what is more, in a section that had stinking thick glutinous grey mud. I have no idea how she did it. Right now, the boat is now fragranced with Eau de Canal Dog! In all honesty, while it is true that it is an interesting smell with multiple notes, but I don't recommend it!!   

But now the busyness of the day is fading and only the sound of sheep and leaf song of the ash and poplars can be heard. The waters are becoming still once more, save for the skate marks of water beetles and boatmen. Sticklebacks nibble the undersurface of the water. 

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

SPUN BY WONDERMENT

This week, the village junior school held its Leavers’ Prom. It’s something that makes me feel terribly old and out of touch. I seem to remember that we had a 5^th form Disco in the final year of my senior school. It was held in the main hall where we would sit in rows for assembly. A hollow, echoey affair, smelling of floor polish and school dinners.  I remember balloons and daylight edging around the thick curtain blinds giving a cheerless feeling – like a week after Christmas. We had all gone off to the sports’ changing rooms to slip out of our uniforms into our party clothes. Although, like many, I didn’t really have anything. Just some jeans that were so thick they felt like cardboard and a purple shirt with floppy butterfly-wing collars. We bobbed and jiggled, clutching brittle plastic cups of fizzy drink, not quite knowing what to do; and the PE teacher announced that there was a prize for the best dancer. But mostly, we all clung to the sides, like novice skaters at an ice-rink. We all sang ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ with abandon, savouring the risky lyrics and double-entendres in front of our teachers who we knew would soon no longer be our teachers. It's a strange and awkward transition this movement upward, from one prescribed role to another. It came easier to some than others. Chatting to teachers now as if they were friends (but still calling them ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’) and not someone who told you off for talking or wrote in red biro all over your work and imperiously marked you out of 10 or 20. It felt awkward and odd. Watching one of the girls dancing with my Physics teacher just felt wrong. Looking back after all these years, it still feels wrong but for completely different reasons – even though, even at the time, I was aware that he kept a healthy distance between them. This was the time of glam rock: T Rex, Slade, Mud, Sweet. The world was painted in floral swirls of orange and browns and violent purples. We ate little cubes of cheese and pickled onions on cocktail sticks, and Tizer and Cherryade fizzed sweetly up our noses.

It was loud and boisterous and I hated it from the shadowed edges of the room. Perhaps, I hated it because I had yet to learn that such noise and energy is sometimes needed, good even. Not just to cover the awkwardness of transition, but to celebrate it. I didn’t stay until the end. Picking up my briefcase from the usual pile of school bags jumbled in the corner of the hall, and slipped off into the early dusk. It’s a lovely feeling, that feeling of slipping away from noise and social expectation. The glass doors of the hall clanging shut behind me and the coolness of the air. The walk to and from school took me down the long climb of Coniston Road. Walking down it, you could gaze across the valley to the fields and house-lined roads and lanes opposite. The twin radio masts of Abbots Langley glowing red on the skyline. I don’t remember if I did on the walk home that evening, but I must have looked out across the roof tops, descending down into the valley, lined with cherry trees, that spat cherry stones and blood-red juice on the pavement. All the time, the thumping chaos of youth and the 5^th Form Disco receding from my hearing and consciousness; folding into the more familiar quiet of blackbird and thrush and the climbing gears of the 301 bus to Watford.

All this, however, seems a long way away from the scene that meets me at the top of the hill. Although my school boasted in being a progressive, new comprehensive school – replacing the old ‘Secondary Moderns’ that was as close as we ever got to a Prom. In fact, I am not sure I had even heard of a Prom. There were certainly no proms or even events to mark our move from junior school up the hill to the secondary school. The air thudded and was plundered by noise. A brutal rattle and bark of diesel compressors kept inflated an enormous bouncy castles and other fairground type games. A few strains of melody carried on pulsating drum beats and bass. The ever-present goal posts for football, pizza and burger stands, the smell of cooked onion. Some of the girls have clearly made an occasion of this and are dressed in flowing gowns, although most of the boys seem more carefree in their attire. A red rope, held up by faux gold posts, cordons them into the main entrance. But most are out here. On a fenced off portion at the top of a wave of hill high that looks out for miles upon miles of the vale below. To the left the Cotswolds, and slightly further away, there’s the jagged spine of the Malvern hills. On a clear day of glass-brittle light, you can even catch a glimpse of the foothills to the mountains of Wales. Cresting hill ridges that fade in their chalk-dust blues and mauves and subtle violets.

It’s out here that is where most people are. And why not? It is a fine, warm evening. Laughter. Excitement. Shouts. More laughter. Small gaggles of children, arm-in-arm, giddily wheeling around the clusters of children and grown-ups. A boy hands his phone to an adult standing beside the bouncy castle and springs disappearing mid-air into its pillowy embrace. Colour. Noise. Vibrancy. An energy that thuds against my skull. Maggie is more interested in joining in. Sniffing out dropped hotdogs and discarded burger buns.             

Together, we negotiate the little kissing-gate that opens on to the sheep meadow and thread our way through the mown grass to the hill top (such as it is), but still the noise and energy and movement follow, breaking the normal bell-cave of silence that pours through me each evening whenever I am here. The swallows still missile and dart between the field folds, skimming low, knee and ankle high. From above, they look like dolphins porpoising through tropical green oceans. The jackdaws ring the woods that bend low over the canal. But I cannot hear either, from up here. Even the sweet-earthy scent of dried grass is hard to capture.    

But I don't begrudge them this night. This night of noise and energy, and I certainly wouldn't deny them it. This seemingly small rite of passage, even if it is new and seems foreign to me, is important. The steps of our paths need to be marked and it is good that they are. They help us to navigate the paths of our past and make some semblance of sense from them, and, perhaps, even they even become part of the people that we are now.

Besides, this field, this hill, this world is big enough for us to accommodate each of our needs. I can share this moment of noise and raucous chaos. Is it really any different to the jackdaws, magpies wheeling and shrieking just below me? Anyway, this vale has heard (and seen!) much, much, worse. Warfare, strife, anger, hatred. This has been a busy landscape throughout history – charting the marching feet of war and armies. Slaughter. Murder. Death. And, in all that, this scarp on the long edge of plain, can still be a place of peace – the still-point in the noise of my existence. And not just mine, for I am not the only one that comes up here and looks out across the vale as the day turns and the shadows stretch long from the west and sunlight brushes the long grasses with gold, and, for a little while, is lost – or found.    

No, soon the music will stop and the air compressors will stop and the inflatables sag and collapse. Soon the line of cars will thread their way back to the road, and this hill will once more listen to swallow call and jackdaw.

And so, I don’t mind them being here. The interruption – however, raw and jarring. But I do wonder if it is worth all the noise and effort and the gifts of excitement that they bring with them, sort of misses something too. Watching from afar, I am persuaded that I may be right. As the evening progresses, one or two small figures break away from the thronging movement, to stand at the fence, looking down at the valley below. They stand, leaning on the fence, solitary, but far from alone and, although I cannot see it, I know that they have become embraced in an even greater world that beckoningly stretches out in front of them. In those moments, something was happening for them, which it failed to do for me, the noise, the chaos, the colour had faded away and they were left in a world that was waiting for them.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Wasn’t it only a month or so ago, I watched an Indian family drive up in a couple of cars. For a while, they chattered amongst themselves around one of the tables. Then slowly they gathered in small groups together - silently gazing in rapt attention as the sun slipped behind a ridge of cloud and then disappeared below the horizon, leaving the air soft with insect wings and warm. It struck me so forcibly that this experience was both so utterly individual and yet collective and shared. Spun by the wonderment of the worlds spread out below them. It’s a powerful thing.

There’s a line, a phrase really, that runs through one of my favourite James’ songs, ‘Waltzing Along’: “May your mind be set you free (Be opened by the wonderful).” ‘Be opened by the wonderful’. It’s a phrase that keeps percolating through my consciousness a lot. I like that. The wonderful – when and wherever we find it, it does open us up as a dandelion opens to the morning sun. It changes us.

I used to be a member of a church youth group. At the time I am thinking of, it was really little more of a very loose band of friends. We were a disparate group. Our ages ranged from about 13 to 20 something and we all came from very diverse backgrounds and had extremely varied interests. One thing we used to do in summer was walk from the church up to Roughdown common above Apsley. It’s well named. It has (or had, I have not been back for around 40 or so years) rough, almost unkempt feel to it. It’s an area of chalk land edged by woodland (silver birch and beech, I seem to remember) and scrub on the edge of the Chilterns. Steep banks fringed with long coarse grasses, like sedge and quaking grass. The rough-hewn feel is probably due to there having once been a quarry here – now overgrown. Apparently, the navvies when digging the Grand Union canal, had their encampment here. The canal runs through Apsley. Mum used to find orchids and rare botanical finds here. It is now a designated area of Special Scientific Interest. Then, it was a place we’d walk up to. Sometimes someone would bring a ball, bouncing it along the street pavements until we began to climb the lane, over the railway bridge – where we would always stop to wait to see if a train would come, and on up to the common. But none of us were particularly interested in sport and so it was often just left to the side. We’d find spots on which to sit on precipitous tufts of bristly grass and chat in small groups while gazing out over the streets of Hemel Hempstead below us. As views go, I have witnessed far mor picturesque; rolling bucolic pasturelands or rugged waterfall-laced mountain slopes this was not. Urban sprawl of concrete, tarmac, ribboned with roads, and something else. Something intangible. Something rather wonderful that caught the eye – the richest tapestry of life. The sounds of the streets would rise up to greet us. Cars, sirens, brake lights flashing red, traffic lights endlessly shifting colour. But this was nothing to do with beauty, or with urban versus the rural, or the natural against the human-made. This was beyond that. Beyond the fields of good and evil where judgement hangs on the pivot of a sword. It was good to be up there. With friends. The lilt and flow of conversations. Laughter. Scuffles. And then it always happened. That moment when conversation began to ease and there we would be, this strange and disparate little group of young people at the edges of adulthood, falling into silence in the velvet of the evening, watching the lights come on across Hemel Hempstead.

I am sure you have also experienced these moments. I always used to try to describe them as time in which you lose yourself to the moment, but I now see that that is not quite correct. They are moments when we find ourselves – when we live and are aware of the world with every sense in our body. Moments when we know ourselves to be riding on the rolling crest of the everlasting now. Moments when we are opened by the wonderful. Enfolded and dizzy with the depth of our existence. Spun by the wonderment. Perhaps this is what Kai Murano in The Monk and the Butterfly was describing when he wrote:

[READING]

Those times have rooted themselves so deeply within the core of who I am, I still dream of being there; amongst the spiky grass, in fading light, on Roughdown Common watching the lights of Hemel Hempstead. I have a feeling that, in some way, in some form, each member of that family who stood along the fence watching the world turn soft with gold will also find the wonder of that time will live on when all the petty details around it fall away.

And perhaps, perhaps, despite the trappings and the frenetic entertainment and noise – as fun as all those things no doubt were – for some, at least, there was a far greater rite of passage. One that has no need for red rope and faux golden posts to lead them into. Standing momentarily at a fence, high above a vale with the Cotswolds and the dusky Malvern spine, and finding yourself alive and spun by the wonderful.

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG