Friday 12 August 2011

Preston to Windermere


Brief note here. This is the most beautiful part of the journey. Steep fallings away, water everywhere, louring sky, everything tinged with dark under high grey cloud. Aberdeen Anguses, caravans, dense green foliage, the bank rising then dropping to reveal hills and mounts.

On second leg of the journey a plump young blonde woman with a young son sits over the aisle. She is constantly barking at him though he is no trouble. 'Play your game! 'Shut up!''Just eat!'. She is reading a magazine. I wonder what expressions he will be using once he is bigger and stronger. But that's too quick a judgment. After forty minutes or so she becomes very tender, takes him on her knee. From fierceness to caresses. Capable of both in an instant.

Reading papers (riots, looting, faces, disgraces) and Richard Mabey's 'The Unofficial Countryside' which must be the predecessor to 'Edgelands' just with more nature. Mabey is a lovely writer and scholar. (Now passing sheep - this must be official countryside.) You can tell real feeling in writing. It is never general or full of high sentence/ It savours words and applies them, precisely.

Farms of grey stone. Great mammary hills. Enclosed spaces. Hedges snaking up and down, like lines drawn in chalk. Heather. It is darkening all the time, the clouds growing spongier. Now at Oxenholme. Enough for now - also keeping an eye on the cricket.



5 comments:

Cormac O'Leary said...

'You can tell real feeling in writing ' So so true - this piece reminds me of Hopkin's wonderfull prose sketches of rural England -
deft and light but capturing place.

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Gwil W said...

Grim news from an island in Budapest in the Magyar Nemzet. A loan shark seems to be the main suspect.

George S said...

Magyar Nemzet is a fascist rag. Is it a Jewish loan shark? I am still in Wordsworth country, consorting with mountains and a land all but bereft of wifi.

Gwil W said...

I think someone reported that the main culprit was a Serb. I don't know what his religion is. Story was given out that at least 4 people were buried alive. I expect you've got to the facts by now.

I think Wordsworth's grave is in a lovely shady spot. Better there than elsewhere, the so-called Poets Corner.
Betjeman's hole is in a lovely spot too. Have you been there? It's in the sand dunes, practically on the golf course, near Padstow. Sometimes the sands bury the church to its neck.