Shouting from my shed

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Meadows

 

[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]

“‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there,’ wrote J.” – Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane

The first thing I saw on my map for today’s grid square was a Unitary Authority Boundary. I had never heard of a Unitary Authority, nor had any idea of all the helpful things they do that I take for granted. The unitary authorities of England are those local authorities which are responsible for the provision of all local government services within a district. These functions are housing, waste management, waste collection, council tax collection, education, libraries, social services, transport, planning, consumer protection, licensing, cemeteries and crematoria. 

The first thing I took a photo of in my grid square was a concrete marker post tucked between a field and a fence pointing out that an oil pipeline ran beneath us and there was to be no digging. It gave me a number to call in an emergency and a few symbols and letters which probably mean something useful to those in the know. Again: something helpful for my life that I know nothing about. I like to think of myself as a free man, but actually I am so dependent upon thousands of people, my daily life totally entwined with the rigid structures of our society and economy. I was chewing this over having just read Freedom by Sebastian Junger. People love to believe they’re free, though, which is hard to achieve in a society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival. Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one –literally no one– refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone –including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government– depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.’

Still, I was free for the morning and all of my latest grid square lay before me. It was sliced in half by a busy road (that used to be a busy Roman road). North of the road lay mostly fields. South of the road lay a housing estate built on farmland in the housing crisis of the 1940s. The second world war caused a double whammy: German bombing inflicted widespread damage to urban areas while housebuilding came to a halt. The Beveridge report identified “squalor” as one of the five “giants” blocking the road to progress, but with money tight and construction materials in short supply, the pick-up in activity was slow. Aneurin Bevan, jointly health and housing minister, insisted council homes be built to high standards. (Totally off topic –even by the standards of this project in general– I am always fascinated by people who did not spend WW2 driving a tank or leaping out of aeroplanes, and how much ‘other stuff’ still needed to get done. William Beveridge (1879-1963) was a social economist who in November 1942 published a report titled, ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ that would provide the blueprint for social policy in post-war Britain. Beveridge had been drawn to the idea of remedying social inequality while working for the Toynbee Hall charitable organisation in East London. He saw that philanthropy was simply not sufficient in such circumstances and a coherent government plan would be the only sufficent action. By the outbreak of war, Beveridge found himself working in Whitehall where he was commissioned to lead an inquiry into social services. His vision was to battle against what he called the five giants; idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want. His ‘cradle to the grave’ social programme that amongst other proposals called for a free national health service alienated some politicians but it struck a chord with the public and this would influence Clement Atlee’s Labour Government to implement these ideas.)

I noticed from the date that it was 26 years and a day since I left school. Schools can hold such power over our lives, shaping us and defining us and how we see ourselves forever. My strongest memories in life are from school, between the ages of about 10 to 14. I can see, hear, smell and taste so much of those days, and the emotions accompanying the recollections are strong. By contrast, my memory these days is really bad. I make a real effort to enjoy ‘now’ as I often don’t get to enjoy the memory of it later. So whilst queuing to buy a cold drink in a petrol station I was interested to hear a lady in front of me say to the cashier, ‘I can’t do what I used to do. I’m coming up to 84 now.’ I didn’t have the nerve to blurt out, ‘Ah, but think of all the things that you can do.’

I sat outside the petrol station enjoying my cold drink in the sunshine and imagining how much the ghosts of passing Roman soldiers would have enjoyed it. There is no road in the English-speaking world more steeped in stories. It has been a Neolithic pathway, a Roman road, one of the four medieval royal highways, a turnpike in the age of coach travel and the traffic-choked ‘A road’ of today. It is a palimpsest, always being rewritten. The road’s origins are lost in the mists of prehistory, but it seems to already have been ancient already when the Romans straightened and paved. 

I walked through the housing development that backed onto the fields. The loss of landscape is always most apparent when you see buildings that back directly onto countryside. (I always hope, of course, that the loss of landscape comes with the gain of love and family and fulfilled dreams in those new homes.) On a quiet cul de sac sparrows jostled noisily in a pink rose bush. Petals fell amongst the squabbling. The field over the fence was planted with wheat, knee-high now and growing well in the recent heat. I saw a couple of rogue wheat stalks in one of the gardens of the houses I passed, the seed probably dropped there by a bird.

Back on the road, I enjoyed the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy traffic. A new row of big houses has recently been built between the busy old Roman road and the wheat fields that were woodland when the Romans came this way, carving through forests in the name of convenience and development and progress. The houses were big and shiny and verging on what I classify as ‘footballers’ houses’, not having much of a vocabulary myself for explaining different house types. In one garden was a placard campaigning against the green belt grab that proposes to build almost 4000 homes in fields around the area. This neatly summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build new homes: a family was enjoying their new home, but understandably did not want all the neighbouring fields to be turned into homes for other people. Similar to the housebuilding halt of the 1940s, the financial crash of the 2000s led to housebuilding to slow to its lowest levels since the 1930s. I don’t like woodland being turned into housing estates. But nor would I like not to have a home.

I turned down a farm track and cycled out along the wheat fields. I passed a fly-tipped safe; stolen, no doubt, but still unopened. I imagined the thieves’ frustration as they dumped it in this field. The verges were flush with meadow foxtail, ribwort plantain, salsify and buttercups. From a high point of 70 metres above sea level I could see for miles. The land is so low and flat that a wooded hill climbing up to 100 metres a mile or two to the north looked exotic and wild. The homes that looked over this view were somewhat uniform, though large and pretty nice. I would love to have a long view over woodland and hills. Larks sang overhead, sounding as pretty damn delighted with the summer days as I felt.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the main road, things were very different. It was a large, sprawling housing estate, concrete and tarmac all around. Grass grew through the cracks of a neglected basketball court, and the ring had been ripped from the backboard. As usual some streets were slightly richer and some slightly poorer. Some were slightly newer, some were slightly older. Some homes were well-cared for, some were unkempt. It was homogeneous but different, and it was all identical to every mid-sized post-war housing estate across Britain. I could be anywhere, I could be everywhere, I could be nowhere. I pedalled past a primary school where the smell of school dinners gave me an instant sensory flashback to my own memories of mashed potato and plastic trays. It was writer Marcel Proust who coined the term “involuntary memory”, the curious phenomenon of a memory triggered by a smell, a taste, or even a sound. In À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), Proust famously describes his sensory déjà vu, which he experienced after tasting the tea-soaked crumbs of a madeleine. Just one taste of the sweet, buttery French cake mingled with lime-blossom tea was all it took for childhood memories to come flooding back. 

Smell and memory seem to be so closely linked because of the brain’s anatomy. Smells are handled by the olfactory bulb, the structure in the front of the brain that sends information to the other areas of the body’s central command for further processing. Odours take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory. 

I passed a pub offering three shot for £5 (flashback to uni) and a row of shops which health and housing minister Aneurin Bevan would surely have disapproved of had he seen this estate being built. Out of nine shops, only one sold any fresh food at all. The options for shoppers here were: a convenience store and Post Office, a greasy spoon café, fish and chips, fast food, a nail bar, an off license, a barbers (with sunbed and VIP room), a Chinese, and a kebab shop.

Fast food is nothing new, of course.

The story of the humble chip goes back to the 17th Century to either Belgium or France, depending who you believe. Oddly enough, the chip may have been invented as a substitute for fish, rather than an accompaniment. When the rivers froze over and nothing could be caught, resourceful housewives began cutting potatoes into fishy shapes and frying them as an alternative. Around the same time, fried fish was introduced into Britain by Jewish refugees from Portugal and Spain. The fish was usually sold by street sellers from large trays hung round their necks. Charles Dickens refers to an early fish shop or “fried fish warehouse” in Oliver Twist (1839) where the fish generally came with bread or baked potatoes. Who first had the bright idea to marry fish with chips remains the subject of fierce controversy and we will probably never know for sure.

Some credit a northern entrepreneur called John Lees. As early as 1863, it is believed he was selling fish and chips out of a wooden hut at Mossley market in industrial Lancashire. Others claim the first combined fish ‘n’ chip shop was actually opened by a Jewish immigrant, Joseph Malin, within the sound of Bow Bells in East London around 1860. Outlets sprung up across the country and soon they were as much a part of Victorian England as steam trains and smog. By 1910, there were more than 25,000 fish and chip shops across the UK, and in the 1920s there were more than 35,000 shops. These days, fish and chips are no longer king of the takeaway. Burgers, fried chicken, pizza, Indian and Chinese dishes all now outsell fried fish.

A few England flags hung from windows around the streets. The Euros football championship has begun, but there does not seem to be the usual mania and over-optimism that these events usually generate in the English. Perhaps the past 18 months has knocked the optimism out of us. I for one have found it hard to dream of grandiose plans having been locked down for so long. My dreaming and exploring has been reduced to this single map, which in turn has expanded my mind and led me in directions I never even imagined. Nonetheless, I didn’t feel motivated to photograph these streets today. It was normal life –not bad, but perhaps not good–, just completely normal. And when you are looking for contrasts and points of difference, such uniform normal-ness felt hard to grab onto.

I was feeling a little discouraged by the boring streets and the litter strewn everywhere (although I did enjoy reading a flyer promising that ‘God loves you and has A good plan for your life’). Between a wooden fence and a pavement strewn with fast food rubbish was a thin strip of tangled weeds; barley, dandelions, nipplewort, common mallow humming with pollen-dusted bumblebees, and many plants I did not know. ‘Is tasteless food eaten without salt, or is there flavour in the sap of the mallow?’ asks the Book of Job in the Old Testament, for mallow is edible if not delicious. During the siege of Jerusalem, when convoys of food could not reach the city, residents of Jerusalem went out to the fields to pick khubeza [mallow], a wild green which is high in iron and vitamins. The Jerusalem radio station, Kol Hamagen, broadcast instructions for cooking it that were picked up in Jordan convinced the Arabs that the Jews were dying of starvation and victory was at hand.

A garden snail slithered slowly across a plastic bottle of Mars drink. Snails have been measured at speeds of 0.048 kilometres per hour.  This is significantly slower than a sloth (0.24 kilometres per hour) or a giant tortoise (0.27 kilometres per hour). The fastest speed achieved by a snail in the Guinness Gastropod Championship, held over a 13-inch (330-millimetre) course in the O’Conor Don pub in central London, is only 0.0085 kilometres per hour. This record is held by a mollusc called Archie, which took 2 minutes and 20 seconds to cover the course.

So discovering a beautiful, empty, seemingly-wild common and nature reserve tucked behind the housing estates was a welcome surprise and a treat.

 

I walked for an hour around the wonderful chalk meadows without seeing another person or any litter. There were areas of grassland, scrub, and hawthorn woodland where old hedgerows had grown and spread. I learned the names of tufted vetch and hairy vetch; orchard grass; common soft brome and wild clover. A yellow meadow of Autumn Hawkbit. What wonderful names! And all without me even leaving the footpath. I heard blackcaps and blackbirds belting out their summer anthems. A sign-board informed me that 29 species of bird had been identified here. I’m not sure I can even list 29 birds. My paucity of knowledge, the paucity of wildness and nature in this crowded concrete post-war estate – both those things have been immediately rocked and challenged by discovering this tiny scrap of nature here, only about as large as 20 football pitches.

At this time of year, boring old grass (a phrase that would insult agrostologists, for sure) switches from being that flat green stuff covering lawns, covered in poo in parks, or covered in rain as you swish down an overgrown footpath. Suddenly I remember that the grass family, or Poaceae, is one of the largest families of flowering plants, with more than 10,000 species. Common members of this family include species of turf grass and meadow grass. Even bamboo and sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) are grasses. Plants in this family have flowers that are typically wind-pollinated and have leaves that are long and narrow with parallel veins. It may come as a surprise that the grass family is also the plant family most responsible for feeding humankind. Cereals such as wheat, rice, barley, oats, rye, corn, millet, and sorghum are all in this family, and feed not only humans, but also livestock raised for food. Rice, Oryza sativa, has been cultivated in Asia for over 8,000 years. One of the most well-known members of the grass family, corn or maize (Zea mays) is one of the top three cereals of the world, along with wheat and rice. Indigenous to Central America, corn has been cultivated for at least 7,500 years. Besides being delicious eaten fresh this time of year, this grass is used as a flour, a thickening agent, a sugar, an oil, and most often food for livestock. 

Grass is extremely important to most people’s lives, whether they know it or not. For one thing, grass is a major food source all over the world. Rice, corn and oats come from grass plants, for example, and most livestock animals feed primarily on grasses. In some parts of the world, people use grass plants in construction (bamboo is a grass, for example), and wherever it grows, grass plays a vital role in curbing erosion. Grass is also used to make sugar, liquor, bread and plastics, among many other things.

Grasses also have flowers. The small flowers in most grass species are known as florets. Florets grow together in small groups called spikelets, which collectively form inflorescences. Flowers produce the spores that pollinate other flowers, which produce seeds. With any luck, some of the seeds will grow new healthy grass plants.

Apart from glimpses through trees of the busy, built-up area and some kids’ graffiti on the sign boards (‘Jesse West is going to get his shit rocked by Eliza Valicy’) I felt as though I was walking through an older Britain and a wilder Britain. The footpath meandered through knee-high grass and sunny wildflowers, through shaded hawthorn woods, and gave me an expansive feeling of hope and freedom.

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Comments

  1. dexey Posted

    Did you report the abandoned safe to the police?

    Lovely pictures again.

    Reply

 
 

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