Author: Jim Hindle

The Haven

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

And so, the Spring is with us once again.  In just a few days the restrictions will ease, we will stumble into gardens, drink beer or wine or otherwise and many of us will choose to count our lucky stars.  We’ve come through a terrible time.  We don’t need reminders of what we have been through, the people we’ve lost, the bewildering attrition on our patience and reserves of fortitude.  During the winter’s high tide of cases we knew that for many – the nurses and doctors, the patients themselves, it must have been like a kind of white heat while all the rest of us could do was wait.  

But, the sun shines again, we venture out onto the greens, blinking and buoyant or simply taking it in; the seeming unlikeliness of it; the actual Spring, the tangible immanence of life restored to something much closer to normal.  Finding our feet on the way out of this may be like limbering up after a long convalescence.  After all, how do we expect to stride full tilt into a return to old ways after so much solitude, so many hours whiled away or spent in furious or steady enterprise?  It may take time: we should be patient with ourselves. 

In the meantime, is it too much, too soon, to wonder just how we go forward, to think on the things we have learned, how we choose to calibrate our lives; tempered or battered as we may be but still enduring or champing at horizons so newly redeemed?  It’s tempting now to holiday and surely many will do so.  But will we forget those little points of newly discovered significance upon our daily walks, urban or rural as they may be?  Will those young shoots, the weeds in the pavements, the actual woods help inform us as we step into our renewed freedoms, as we cast off the shackles of life lived indoors for so long?

If we can retain a little poise, we may be able to integrate our reflections of these last twelve months as life cranks up another gear or two.  We may be able to remember old and new acquaintances, fresh resolutions, priorities granted by the bedrock of life that sustains us, the knowledge in uncertain times when old securities are stripped away: the land herself still underpins the basics of our lives.  Without her we are almost literally at sea; her fate is ours just as sure as the dawn.

It’s far from an untimely reminder.  As we emerge from one crisis, we are called to engage once again with that much greater emergency, however slow burning – the future of the biosphere itself.  The greatest dangers here barely need stating; they are to be found first and foremost in ourselves.  We can wilfully ignore it all, perhaps because it seems so large and so intractable a problem, perhaps because we like to think that someone somewhere has it in hand and we need not exercise our own agency.  Or perhaps we feel so overwhelmed, so caught-in-the-headlights we don’t know which way we should turn, or we feel it is hopeless or we despair at humanity at large in our apparent heedlessness.  Or we stare at it all like a mountain we haven’t yet climbed and wonder if it’s still within our gift.

For many, it doesn’t need stating – those taking to the streets for the climate in some of the biggest protests ever seen in that distant summer of 2019 for example.  Or those living out a bitter winter in those many woodlands cut into and despoiled by HS2.  Anyone who’s ever been engaged in protest knows the sense of liberation it can bring – that, after the anxiety and soul searching of what’s to be done, action brings catharsis, even peace.

But, of course, to place yourself on any actual front, to witness face to face the destruction and perhaps, historically at least, the brutality of those charged with its execution, is no easy thing and many know only too clearly the toll it can take.  But such protests are a reminder, certainly, of everything at stake.  They can serve to make society that much more conscious, that much more determined to do what we can.

However much we may like to, we can’t all go off and set up in the woods, whatever the value of life out of doors.  But, as this last year has reinforced for so many, time spent in nature can bring a great boon and can certainly help should the going be hard.  And it can inform how we act, what we do.

One thing anyone concerned with the climate can do is get behind ‘Zero hour’; the campaign for the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, currently making its way through the ‘Commons.  The Bill is principally concerned with picking up where the Climate Change Act and the Paris Agreement left off; pressing for targets bolder than ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050; a target that has been described by Caroline Lucas as “calling for the fire brigade thirty years down the line”.  The campaign is principally calling for people to write to and lobby their MP’s to urge them to support the Bill (140 MP’s and Peers already do so).  But there is an almost infinite scope of other means to lend your support, from banner drops to holding public meetings and principally spreading the word however you can to help make the campaign one no politician can afford to ignore.

For those younger, or more inclined to get their hands in the earth, there are all kinds of tree-planting initiatives, including ‘The Children’s Forest’ project, affiliated with the Forest School Association and which I will be writing more about soon.  For now, it may be enough to say that it is rooted in envisioning a positive and bountiful future and to let that inform our actions, in this case creating abundant forests for future generations, borne first and foremost in our imaginations.

Perhaps that’s as much as we need to go on for a guiding light; we all know the pitfalls of despondency, denial and despair.  But if we can picture the world we would like, strive for it sinew and soul, perhaps that can give us not only the wind in our sails but can help to tangibly create a kind of harbour for our future, however distant arrival may be, however much work it will take.    

After Athelney

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So for a while now, several years infact, I’ve been working on a book about the Pilgrims’ Way in England.  Given one thing and another, it seemed wise and somewhat necessary, for me, to concentrate on something other than purely political writing for a while.  And pilgrimage in general has been a pretty major backdrop for me these last few years; its potential for healthy transformation felt like the best thing I could do in a world that has sometimes felt harder to understand, or at least second guess, than at any time I can remember.  The book’s in its final stages and I’ll certainly provide some notice here in the event of publication.

Far from unmindful of everything at stake, I’ve set out on The Pilgrims’ Way and other, longer routes at various times during this preceding decade.  This particular Way takes in 120 or so miles through Hampshire, Surrey and Kent, begins in Winchester, ends in Canterbury and forms one of our most iconic pilgrimage routes on native soil.  I was partly drawn to it for this reason alone; to help highlight a route more immediate, more accessible than continental options, which holds many merits in its own right and which a greater interest in would help take pressure off other, more popular, pilgrimage paths.

It also occurred to me early on that the story of – and stories associated with – this given route deserved fresh attention; not least that of Thomas Becket, whose martyrdom (850 years ago this December) helped popularise the route back in the day, making it one of the most frequently travelled in Medieval Europe.  His story is tied up with Henry II of course and the tale of power and piety, both taken to extremes, makes for a fascinating tale.  But the story of the Pilgrims’ Way is also one of historical and cartographic myths, recounted as I make my incremental way along the many miles.  Was Becket as Holy as they say?  Or Henry that bad?  And was the route itself as popular as the Victorians tells us?  These questions and more rebounded in my mind as I began my research.  But one figure encountered along the way stands out as much as that of Becket.  Any visit to or treatment of Winchester cannot be complete without some kind of reference to the man.

Tomorrow, October 26th, is King Alfred’s Day; once a more-lauded date in our collective and not-so-distant past, a personality cult that was certainly in no way diminished by the extent of Victorian attention.  But he was popular down the centuries ever since his reign; a saviour of the Anglo-Saxon world and founder, in effect, of what we now know of as England today.  We can remember of course that England was a different place before the Normans came.  And, if Victorian sentiments in any way smart, we can remember that he was also – at one point – an underdog, faced repeated invasion at the hand of the Danes, endured constant threat and actual defeat for years.  His story is immortalised in G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Ballad of the White Horse’; a poem which – as preacher and poet Malcolm Guite reminds us, (and whose rendition of the poem can be found here) – provided psychological sustenance for many soldiers in the two world wars.  Both wars had been partly foreseen by GKC; both were partly products of a cult of violence, of that of the superman and of a nihilism the ballad was meant to offer some kind of antidote for.

As we gear up for one of the most apparently foreboding winters in living memory, can we draw some comfort from the story of this most iconic of our historical figures?  Compounded crises of Covid and climate change, to say nothing of Brexit, rebound upon our knowledge and imaginations and need no rehearsal here.  Is it valid then, at such a time, to think of Alfred beleaguered on the Isle of Athelney in the marshes of Somerset, his army reduced to little more than a bodyguard, resorting to guerrilla warfare, his fortunes at the lowest of ebbs? The poem opens with a careworn Alfred receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary who implores him to take heart, to have “faith without a hope” even at this point of nadir.

It’s a challenge as much as a promise.  And perhaps that challenge is as much as we need – to go forward out of a kind of bloody-mindedness when there are no promises, no guarantees.  Alfred was eventually successful of course, he led Wessex to victory over the Danes and won peace for a generation and the survival, and actual flourishing, of the Anglo-Saxon world; a world that, back in the marshes, had seemed on the brink of annihilation.

We don’t need some Viking – or indeed any other kind of – bogeyman to focus our minds; the ‘invisible mugger’, as some term the virus, does that for us.  And climate change?  There’s never been a point of greater focus, of greater attention paid to this ultimate threat to us all.  That alone gives me hope that, even if the scale of the challenge looks daunting, and probably has been nothing else for some time now, if we can act with unity we can tap into the great reserves of what can happen when people come together from the knowledge of this greatest of crises.

Some see Athelney as Holy ground as it stands in remembrance that even when things seemed at their most bleak, the fate of the country was buoyed by resolve and a vision; a hardiness under duress.  Chesterton’s account is mythic of course but while it may not be historically true, it taps into the spirit of the story, into the spirit of the tradition of the balladeers themselves.  As such it takes its place as one of the last great epic English poems.

Its title refers to that most iconic of our hill figures; the White Horse of Uffington, under whose eye Alfred’s first great victory over the Danes at Ashdown was fought.  Later in the poem we find him return to the horse, the scouring of weeds from its chalk symbolic of the value of vigilance in times of peace, renewing the spirit of the land and its people.  Perhaps we can be at such a point of renewal now; that our current trials can temper us, give us new impetus to look again at our priorities, take stock of what is truly of value or not.  Perhaps just as in the fires of the Second World War a new social contract was drawn up for the people, our efforts in this time can set a better course for the times ahead, where the earth herself is bestowed greater respect and protection, where the poor are lifted up from their duress, where we step forward into a greater equality, with a stronger belief in and vigilance towards our hard-won freedoms.

It’s easy to wheel out fine sentiments of course, just as we know that this winter may ask more of us than for perhaps any time in a generation.  But this is surely not the first time we have faced a common, formidable foe. We could do worse than remember the spirit that drove our various historical efforts; it may yet be the best teacher we have for how we can hold fast, overcome and withstand whatever this winter may bring.  And sometime, when this year is just a crazy memory and an excuse for endless anecdotes, may we all of us thrive, may we stand all the stronger, inspired perhaps by Alfred in his fought-for peace, who planted the seeds for a new wave of learning, bore out the time given to him and bestowed a better future for an age. At Athelney then, when the outcome was still far from certain, unsweetened by assurances, it was met with a will to continue, a faith tempered by reserves of that which can sustain us, a faith which can help us endure.   

The Great Re-Imagining

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Is this the time to look for compensation?  At least we finally can say it’s truly Spring.  Those that can will walk and listen to the birdsong and maybe even find a little peace; unlooked for or prayed for, unlikely but making a pure kind of sense.  God knows we need such moments.  A friend of mine watches a raven for how long he doesn’t quite know.  Others gather weeds along newly familiar paths.  I shelter from the suddenly seasonal sun, think about summer, feel a strange sense of assurance that might have nothing and everything to do with my own one temporal fate.

Will things be different after all of this?  Will the flights resume, the factories stutter back into some kind of life?  Bars, cafes, shops stammer open like nothing has happened at all and we’ll wipe away the salt of weeks alone or crammed in close confinement?  Gratitude right now seems pretty likely; a bloody-minded courtesy, acknowledging we still can breathe, we still can take in each day in the air like it was our first.

And somehow we must al of us come through; survivors, witnesses, beleaguered or hopeful and strong.  It’s no time for sweeping statements, triumphalist crows that we know when the end is in sight, or that this is all part of some grand scheme of nature, that there is reason for this other than some random roulette.  We can give in to terror, despair but we might as well be optimistic or look for very major silver linings.

It’s not some random fantasy to say there might be some grace in all this, or chance of it, if we can take the perspective that we might in the long run be getting thrown a line.  A frenetic world of global commerce, global travel has just hit the brakes.  We might as well enjoy the sudden peace.  We have a chance to stop and think, reflect on the lives we’ve been leading.  Can we imagine our way out of this?

Maybe we’ll be able to step forward into a world where just-in-time networks of supply and demand are replaced by something more resilient, that we can source and grow the goods we need a little closer to home, where we’re all weaning off a glut of luxury but still live well and maybe a little more honestly, not dependent on imports whose source we can’t name, where conditions of labour or livestock are hushed out of sight.  Maybe we’ll see a return of the domestic economy, hollowed out in the 20’s and 30’s where we’re all a little more self-reliant.  How many containers of latest electronics does the world really need? How much of our once-innate ability to source our needs at home or close to it are we happy to continue to relinquish?  How much do we really want to spend large parts of our working week in little boxes, hurtling their cargo to horizons whose value we’ve only too nearly forgotten?

No one would wish these times on another or any others we do not consider our clan.  For we are all connected now, connected in brightness and grief.  But we owe it to ourselves and one another, to every huddled in hospital beds and most of all to the children to see there are gifts here if we can only see them as such.  Somebody somewhere appeared to hit pause and now we can think and plan and even dream.  We can think on the state of the planet today, her all-too-clear signs of distress, how we can help her, the habits we can break, how we can renew our commitments (or make them at all if now new), how we can seek to redeem the unspoken bond we have broken, a rift that may have something to do with our current plight, as if collective survival rests in a natural corrective.

Whether we see the virus as a desperate manifestation of the will of the world to endure or something far more arbitrary in arguably besides the point.  Whatever the reason for it and whatever our thoughts, we can see that while no one would wish for the virus, it’s still giving us a chance.  The kind of world we all step into when the threat recedes may depend on the degree to which we can reimagine our world, reimagine our place upon it, how we serve it, cast away the things that hinder or obstruct.

We’re used at times like these to being told we are enduring a great trial, are being put to the test, tempered, told we must be strong.  And all of these are true.  We can pull upon the deep well of our inner reserves; our patience, compassion and will to endure.  We can show the extent of collective resolve, our ability to adapt and our strength in adversity’s face.  And we can meditate on that which can bring us all peace; our own peace of mind and that of those all around us; at times like these its necessity is only made clearer than ever.

But there’s another element as well; that we are being given opportunities, if we can see them.  The degree to which we make the most of them may depend upon our ability to walk with eyes open, to imagine and dream again, dream harder.  Our future remains a thing we can all of us shape.  We now have a chance just to stop and slow down and reflect how we do so.  We have a little time.  And perhaps time is all that is called for, for now, that all our haste and rush, our daily and global migrations, our obsession with temporal efficiencies has been for so long such a part of the problem.  We have the chance to remember to just be ourselves; an estrangement it’s high time to heal.

Wings

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The heat can hold a promise of a kind, load the dice or lift us up so that for at least the summer’s span we like to think that anything is possible, that dreams are there, infront of us, and all we have to do is dream ourselves. Storms can hammer home this sense and at other times serve as reminders: dream but don’t take time or opportunities for granted. Perhaps that stands for everything we face.

It’s as good a time as any now, if undoubtedly tedious for some, to state again the very obvious, the consequence of centuries dominated by the rise in of fossil fuels. This far down the line, we are so locked into their use that nothing short of a total paradigm shift in how we procure our needs is required. It goes deeper than simply how we get our energy. Our whole way of being is locked into an industrial system so seemingly servile that the huge infrastructural inefficiencies in how we travel, heat our homes and feed ourselves are often barely visible or normalised to the point we barely notice.

We cannot simply hope that renewables are our sole solution, that an overhaul of energy supply will save us all with just a small adjustment to our lives. The transition to their use is of course crucial and their take up and implementation should be done with all the alacrity we can muster. But it’s not the full picture. We are currently wedded to a system so centralised that nearly everything we consume is produced or transported with the use of cheap energy we barely ever see let alone think about. Our industrial ship that has carried so many of us so well for so long is increasingly revealing itself to be something of a leviathan. We still need to make real steps to move beyond it. And that means using a lot less energy per se, however we get it.

That’s the whole point of movements like Transition Towns – not a well-meaning talking shop but a practical initiative to bolster our communities in preparation for ideally heading off ecological and infrastructural energy limits. That’s the whole point of rising against a car culture where huge amounts of energy – accounting for a quarter of our country’s carbon emissions – are expended to push 31 million metal boxes along ever-expanding networks of tarmac. Or protesting the use of shale gas and tar sands that compromise the very bedrock of our ecological integrity, locked in as we appear to be to what should be considered obsolete options. And these are only some of the more manifest symptoms of a malaise created by generations of habit and habit-forming commerce built on the crux of cheap energy. In many ways, conditioned as we are, we barely register the signs as we drive full pelt towards a future of unnegotiable realities.

The cure is first and foremost psychological. We are so surrounded by distractions it often seems easier to ignore the whole thing. There’s the TV news, Spotify, smartphones, near-infinities of information. But the older, wider world is out there all the time, calling us back to our senses, reminding us of what it can mean to belong to the land. As time goes on that realm is seemingly all the more challenged as our anthropomorphic empire rumbles on. But it’s built into our evolution to find a better way of relating to it. And where we have choices, or willingness given a chance, we can all of us pick our priorities.

Today, where the climate and extreme energy is concerned, we face environmental malaise in a general and also very specific sense. This can only make our choices and priorities all the more stark. We need to aspire to an ascetic that looks beyond our industrial years, that takes on the great gifts of the last two centuries but which is still inspired and informed by that which came before it. We have to all of us want to live as lightly as we can upon the earth and no longer ignore hidden, systematic costs.

Finding our way beyond it may not be easy and there’s no escaping the gravity of that which we face. But perhaps it comes down to the wish to live with grace, to do as little harm as possible, to leave the lightest footprint that we can. And where we all need huge and rapid cultural transformation, our difficulties can still be seen as opportunities and catalysts for change.

The danger of course is to slumber along, to forget our new or renewed priorities, the value of the things we should hold dear. But the looming threat of fracking is surely a clarion call to wake up. We know that imperilling our water supplies is tantamount to suicide and this can only add to the sense of futility (at best) in an admittedly extreme manifestation of business as usual. Equally, as last winter’s weather shows (where the ‘Beast from the East’ was at least partly related to the displacement caused by record temperatures in the artic) the state of our climate ought be cause for alarm for us all. Our culture’s instinctive suspicion of alarm is not without place but that perhaps is half the problem. We have to shake ourselves out of our complacency with the sense that the move to change can still be worth it.

We need to imagine a better future, instil a greater code of honour in how we live our lives, in how we treat both one another and the planet itself, where the wider world does not come second to the glamour of consumer-led society. We need to rediscover and cherish our localities, the gifts at the end of the lane. We need a greater culture of respect. None of this is helped by market forces that – to give just one example – hollowed out the domestic economy in the 20’s and 30’s which had done so much to keep us self-sufficient and free from the shackles of dependence on factory goods.

Human nature can still win out over influences that would hold the world in chains. But it barely needs stating that none of this is a given or necessarily easy. If it seems hard sometimes to see the way ahead we should remember that we can be co-operative souls, capable of great endurance and overcoming all odds. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to look back on this time as a true turning point, the beginning of the end of our industrial dystopia. The imperative can only give us wings.

The First Hill in the World

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

In a lecture given in the Ulster Museum in 1977, Seamus Heaney said that there are two ways in which a place may be known and cherished; the lived, illiterate and unconscious and then the learned, literate and conscious. It was a tension that certainly preoccupied him. Perhaps it defined him as well; his ability to resolve apparent contradictions without necessarily ever laying them to rest. Heaney’s life was full of such tensions or at least was characterised by differing forces, territories and loyalties. Part of the Catholic community in Ulster, the sense of straddling boundaries was somehow always more ingrained for Heaney, right from the very beginning.

He grew up on a farm at Mossbawn, County Derry. A stream ran close to the farmhouse, dividing the townlands of Anahorish and Tamniarn, which belonged to two different parishes and which were themselves in two separate dioceses. Amongst other things, this resulted in learning – and needing to know – different catechisms for church and living in the Bellaghy district but being part of a different region’s football team. In his own words he was always “a little displaced; being in between was a kind of condition”.

This only amplified later in his life; his loyalties tested as the civil rights movement he spoke out for gave way to the Troubles, his decision to move to the Republic, his later teaching in America. And he wrote in English, was offered a place at Oxford (though conflicted, he turned it down from a desire to stay close to, and give back to, his people and roots), was part of a literary world where the English and the Irish cultures met. He returned to teach in Belfast and was instrumental in a greater recognition of Northern Irish poetry in general, part of a tradition of poets from both communities; poets like Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague and John Hewitt.

Heaney was part of a world that reflected older literary lines; in particular the resurgent Irish identity of the Nineteenth Century that resulted in a new literature, set against an increasingly secular world where those like Sir James Frazer (and his Golden Bough) sought greater standardisation and the demythologisation of traditional beliefs and the places inspiring them. The new literature was part of a counter cultural movement that sought to reinstate the importance of the native tradition, of old places, old faiths, fairie lore and the legends whose entomological associations echo in the landscape even now; place names redolent with battles and saints, flights and homecomings and the steady pattern of an ancient way of life.

One of Heaney’s greatest acts of straddling different worlds was his relationship with landscape and the land itself, between the geological landscape and that of the mind. He wrote of this relationship as a kind of marriage. He thought that just as marriage is sacred, so too is this sensing of place. The landscape was “sacramental, instinct with signs, implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities.” For Heaney it possibly stemmed from a kind of almost formalised betrothal, bathing as a boy in a moss-hole, “treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened.” The poems of the bog, the bog oaks, the very bog people that formed such a rich seam in so much of his later work are surely touched by such an intimacy.

It’s with a profound sadness then, if with a sense of no longer being surprised, that I heard of plans to build a dual carriageway within one hundred metres of his childhood home of Mossbawn. The impact of the landscape and ecology there can only be imagined. That landscape helped inspire poems such as ‘Anahorish’ (with it’s ‘First Hill in the World’, and also the name of his very first school), ‘Broagh’ and the ‘tattoo’ of its vocal, low ‘O’, the Strand at Lough Beg, a poem dedicated to his cousin Colum McCartney, murdered in the Troubles that Heaney always treated with both care and a rare kind of grace.

The water pump in the yard at Mossbawn once marked the centre of his world. He drew on the experiences there for his early work – his first collection, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was published fifty years ago this week. It is full of descriptions of that way of life; his father ploughing with horses, the rituals of butter churning that could be from the sixteen-hundreds, his early disillusionments in ‘Blackberry Picking’ and in the title poem itself. They are borne out with an intense and almost cinematic detail, testaments to a very different life. He writes too of another juxtaposition as he watches his father digging, aware that he himself will now work – and dig – in another fashion.

These were the worlds that Heaney found himself both between and a part of above all the rest; his writing and the farming life, the old world that even then seemed somehow irreproachably unthreatened by modernity. But though he chose, or was destined for, a life that was at one remove from the rest of his family, he remained wedded to the land and the people he lived amongst, enshrining the culture and places of his original home. But he often lived in cities, understanding Kavanagh’s internal quarrel with “the illiterate self, tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil, and the literate self that pined for the ‘city of Kings/Where art music and letters were the real things’ ”.

It’s a quandary that in some respects affects us all today. But amid the pull and tow of cities and hills, farming and art, landscapes and the pressures of a modern world that it often seems only grows harder to understand by the day, we shouldn’t forget that we all of us have choices, that the division between the world we enshrine and that which we continually create – one way or another – remains a still malleable thing. It’s simplistic to say that roads don’t get congested or that new infrastructure doesn’t sometimes have a place. But cars remain one of the ultimate mixed blessings of our times. Surely we have it in us still to value the green and the good and not be subservient to tides of tyres and metal that hook us in with their convenience but stand to take away so much?

It’s a tragic situation that the love of so great a man; the landscape in which he grew up now stands to be desecrated (a word he himself used when he heard of the plans) by a literal inroad to a vision of modernity borne, at best, of an utter absence of imagination. In a world increasingly defined by manufactured needs we should all remember our options, look for every avenue for change, hold onto that which we value and love. Heaney’s work is a testament to those values, to a world that is carried in our culture and our hearts. Nothing can touch that. We owe him so much.

Human Tides

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Spring is here in England, a time of love and bloodyminded hope. But we know that away from the riversides, down from the hills, past the rows of the serial houses in their parallel and seemingly never-ending lines, only just over the thin band of sea, thousands of people are still enduring truly miserable conditions, holding out for the dream of some kind of better life, or simply driven by an instinct to survive.

We all of us know they are there, just as we all know of the numbers of refugees in Europe, of the cruel dynamics of distant wars and unrest. It’s wrong to think that people are simply not aware or bury their minds through not caring. It’s more like a kind of white heat of the knowledge of the massive human need. But even when we face up to the scale of the problem, we know we have a duty for the refugees. Shunting them out of public sight, spending resources on fences and ‘keeping them out’ is surely a rough denial of this charge. We must still respect and enshrine the need for human dignity and be clear that places of refuge in Europe should at the very least live up to the standards required of the most basic refugee camps. We should all push for a greater drive to address the situation, to make life better for the people so close to our shores, to accommodate those that we can.

That conditions at the camps at Calais and Dover are a searing indictment of Europe’s ability to provide what should be a given is equally a token of the burden on us all. We can’t afford to look away or hope the problem will just disappear without sufficient engagement on our part. Perhaps too we are aware that in this age of climate change, wars for resources and tensions in the Middle East – some of which go back for a century in the face of the great Western-led carve up of traditional borders, as well as more recent colossal mistakes – we will have to learn to come to some kind of greater provision for the mass movement of people. For as much as the challenge is daunting, it is the global South, as Caroline Moorehead wrote recently, that is facing the larger part of this crisis. It may well even be that this wave of immigration could be part of the answer to the West’s problem of a top-heavy and aging population.

What’s clear is that old certainties and clinging to a sense of former order do not address the realities of the times we are in. If that seems in any way a stretch we must still be informed by our wishes for compassion and a decent provision for those who have placed themselves at our mercy. We cannot revert to what has been termed a new brutality. We must find ourselves fit for these extraordinary events.

Perhaps that’s why the recent Dubs amendment has caught so much of the public mood; from the sense that for some children at least we can make a real difference in the face of what can seem insurmountable odds. The numbers remain undefined and it’s down to us all to now make our voices heard amidst local authorities who carry the responsibility to find homes and places for these children, whose drive will determine the numbers we all can take in. It may seem a small thing given the scale of the challenge but it is at least a start and a sign of what can be done when people engage with the issue – however tawdry the political process itself may at other times seem.

We all of us know of the almost intolerable burden of seeing, reading and hearing about the refugees, of the silent press of an invisible force of expectation, of the will and the need to do something in the face of almost incomprehensible statistics. We all need to know how to go on. Perhaps our best hope is to never forget all those over the sea, to never let ourselves think this is someone else’s problem, that the migrants are driven by forces that do not concern us, that humanity is still somehow tiered and we can afford to push away the pixilated numbers on our screens.

These times should be a wake up call such as we have not seen since the end of the Second World War. That era, marked with such uncertainty but also a resurgent human spirit ought to be able to help to spur us on. We can still have our dreams of what humanity can look like and are being called upon to demonstrate them now. The Dubs amendment may be a drop in the ocean but it’s one that still shows what we can do. Let’s build upon it for the sake of all those unaccompanied children in Europe and further afield, whose fate stands as such a stark accusation and which scours us all with the knowledge of the need we have to act.

Twenty Years On

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

This January marks the twenty year marker since thousands of people from all round the country converged on the Hampshire, Berkshire border for an often gruelling campaign against the Newbury Bypass in particular and new roads in Britain in general. It’s a familiar story by now, or at least ought to be; what can happen when people come together to protest, of how far both sides are prepared to go when a line has been drawn in the sand, of the hope and bitterness, of the inspiration and grinding attrition of states of muted and mutual conflict.

It had gathered a sense of near inevitability by that point; the culmination of years of campaigning and of the desire to push through what was then one of the biggest road building programmes in the UK’s history. There is much you can say, looking back. Certainly the timeliness of doing so probably speaks for itself, with the latest resurgent road building programme; everything that was fought for stands in peril once again; the landscapes and the hope for a manouvre away from ongoing car culture and all its implications for the climate.

That can be banged on about indefinitely and there’s clearly scope and a case for doing so while we are faced with such retrogressive policies. But, if that case ever seems predictable or reductionist, there’s a lot to be said for that time that was about more than simply a battle with the state. If we came to protest, we also came from an instinct simply to gather itself; to live on the land among like minded people and to find as we did a sense of a very real kinship. We came to escape urban life, to make the most of a chance just to live as a people, back in a place we could truly call home.

It was one of the defining, and sometimes tragic, aspects of the time then that people who felt so keenly connected with nature answered their heart’s calling to put themselves right at the front, to fight against and witness what was being done to this country for the sake of apparently insatiable demands for burgeoning infrastructure. Evictions, ongoing actions and more traditional forms of protest all both inspired and took their toll and there are many I know who, while they’d never have had it be another way, left sufficiently scarred just to want to move on.

At the same time, many felt moved to join ongoing movements; against genetic modification, against global free trade and all its repercussions, seeking to cut off the head of the beast rather than fight piece by piece the tentacles each new road represented. At times, along with many more, I’ve sought a return to those kind of days. And they certainly hold a currency of experience and example for anyone protesting now; against new roads or fracking or dubious nuclear deals.

But, while it might sound naïve, there’s a sense too that these protests shouldn’t really be necessary at all. There’s a sense that people shouldn’t have to put their lives and health on the line due to the culpability of governments. That direct action is still a necessary stopgap when official policy seems out of kilter (at best) if not an example of the very worst a state can do (and in this sense the ongoing campaign against fracking couldn’t be more important), there’s also a feeling at times that there is potentially a wider game; that of the potential for mass behavioural change, for the catalysts of a newfound environmental consciousness that need not be necessarily allied to protest overall. Though when lobbyists and corporations still threaten so much, the role of protestors is clearly as needed as ever.

But for my part at least, direct action is no longer an option. The stress of evictions, the minimal food and grinding months of attrition all conspired to mean that activism is a thing I cannot now repeat. And many more find that frontline campaigning can still be too emotionally and psychologically fraught. But while protest is currently crucial, we can remember too that wider stories can persist; of waking up, of how we lead our lives, of how we see to and relate to the world, of what it can feel like to live close to the earth, whether as part of creation or something more immediate; to see her as the relation she is, not some tableau of resources for the taking.

Environmental responsibility starts with every one of us, removed from any sense of ‘us or them’. It can help spark campaigns but can also fuel another sense; what it means to live well and as lightly as we can. Remembering stories can light up our times, but history more often bears echoes of itself rather than perpetuating more exact repetition. People can learn from what happened at Newbury but I also do not doubt that they can be every bit as imaginative and pioneering as anyone involved in the nineties. Ideally there should be no need for division down partisan lines, just as surely as we all have to see our way beyond the machinations of the poorer aspects of the modern world.

Inspiration can take root in many forms. Perhaps what’s needed more than ever is the currency of enabling greater benevolent change, of how a people can be when we hear the call of our hearts as well as that of the planet. In truth of course there’s never really been a separation – the lie that there has been has helped shape so much of our world. Remembering this unity is perhaps the most important, and still urgent, task that we face.

Take Them In

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

By Jim Hindle, Dec 17 2015 03:04PM

All over the country, people are winding down and clocking off, the lights of pubs and restaurants loom large as we try and put another year behind us, as we look to the new one ahead. But it hardly needs saying of course that others are keen in our minds; all of those driven by wars, part of the huge tide of humanity that have been moving north since at least this last spring and, further south, for much longer.

It can be hard to know how to respond. We can throw money at the problem, as our government have with more than £800 million allocated to refugee camps in the Middle East. But we know too they are effectively ignoring manifestations of the issue much nearer to home, namely the camp that has sprung up and swelled on our border, just over the Channel at Calais. Just reading about the conditions at such camps is harrowing. Peter Sutherland, the UN special representative on migration said after visiting Calais in the Autumn that it would take him some time to recover from the shock of seeing the reality on the ground there, while Leigh Daynes, director of Doctors of the World, who has experience in Haiti, described it as “a humanitarian emergency of the first order.” The numbers of refugees in the place have almost doubled since those statements were made.

It barely needs rehearsing but, lest we forget, it’s worth noting what those conditions actually mean. Around six thousand men, women and children are camped out in summer tents and tiny, knocked-together shanty huts, largely dependent on the one meal a day provided by volunteers, prone to gastric and respiratory infections and scabies, where water sources are contaminated by human faeces, where the sense of any order can be aggravated by gang culture, where it is hard to get warm in the damp and the cold and people stoke fires with plastic.

It maddening to contemplate that – so close to us – ordinary people, who left what once were good homes and jobs are facing a European winter without the very basics of adequate shelter and warmth. And maddening too that so many in authority seem so intent on ignoring the problem. “Let’s not encourage them,” goes the thinking, “let’s not pave the way for thousands more by the signals we send.” And so the people there are classified as regrettable statistics the UK is unwilling to do anything about.

It’s a duplicitous policy at best, as made clear by the fact we have spent some £15 million on fences for the tunnel and ferry terminal at Calais, effectively a huge sign to keep out. Meanwhile there has been next to no support from the British or French governments, not even to provide the basic conditions you might expect to find in refugee camps. There are some 40 toilets, or one for every 75 people; way short of the one for every 20 cited as necessary for emergency situations in refugee camps by the UNHCR. Children are arriving unaccompanied and many are subject to illness and infection due to the camp expanding over what was the old unofficial latrine.

Volunteers and a few charities are attempting to pick up the slack but it’s a huge task with not enough co-ordination and it’s clear we are failing the people camped there. Where are the resources that such a humanitarian crisis should ensure? Is this the new reality for people fleeing war, persecution and hunger all over Europe; a cold shoulder and indifference from on high? A drawing up of borders for lack of political will? A hope that somehow the problem will go away if only we ignore it long enough, manage expectations and keep the trucks rolling to and throe untroubled?

It would be easier to understand if it didn’t seem so casually harsh, if it didn’t take its place amid an austerity where the poor should be silenced and brushed under the carpet so long as shopping and drinking goes on for the rest of the population. The migrants in Calais are part of the new destitute, part of a cold calculus of winners and losers, where sympathy from governments is hard to find.

Are we really prepared to accept this? Can we really stomach looking on as people slowly fall apart before our eyes? Can we take no lead from the time of that last great migration in the wake of the Second World War when millions of refugees were given succour by international aid and the will of Western countries, buoyed by victory but staring at a financial landscape no less sobering that the one we face today?

In the absence of such help we know that we must do what we can, as everyday people, to help. But let’s not forget that our governments ought to show responsibility here as well, beyond meagre steps to take in a few thousand a year. We cannot continue to ignore such tragic conditions only one short stretch of water away. This country has been made up of waves of immigration down the years and we should not look the other way when so many people need help. At the very least we should be helping ensure a standard of living expected for refugee camps.

These are the times of great crisis and we will be remembered in history by the caliber of our response. As ever in Britain in these times it seems, it falls to the people to act while a ruling elite bathes in the spoils of electoral carnage. We can do better as a country and we should expect those in Parliament to respond to these times with a greater compassion. That isn’t high-minded thinking; it’s a cry for basic human dignity. It stands as a test for us all.

Landscapes

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Probably one of the more major repercussions of the recent Tory electoral catastrophe is the apparent green light it gives the government to plough ahead with their gargantuan resurgent road building programme. By way of a reminder, that means the continuation of some 238 schemes; more than 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 link roads and 56 widened roads. All in all that’s some 772 miles of new or widened roads. It’s a reversion to old Tory form, given apparent legitimacy by a panicky response to our economic situation where any kind of fiscal stimulus is seen as the only way forward.

Too bad then that the weight of evidence is stacked up against the long-term efficacy of building our way out of congestion. And too bad that figures show that levels of traffic may have actually been plateauing these last ten years if not on a steady decline. But that hardly seems to matter in the new paradigm of Conservative consensus. Let’s just build our way out of recession, whatever the logic or evidence may actually be.

Many people I know would rather not drive were it not for the exorbitant costs – and frequent overcrowding – of public transport. A unique opportunity of potential behavioral change is being lost by at best indifference but in all likelihood a cynical rejection of a genuine chance for a true modal shift.

Though of course while that’s true, it cannot all be laid at the feet of the government. While a probable still-sizable majority of folk own and frequently travel by car, it can be argued that procurement of roads is simply responding to popular demand. For most people in the UK, regular car use is a fact of life. For families in particular or for most living anywhere particularly rural, they’re often a seemingly unalterable crutch if not actually outright indispensable. Their advantages in getting people exactly where they need to be at any given time, their capacity for shifting stuff as well as people apparently give them a huge upper hand.

That’s the logic of car use; an undeniable one for so many. But their plush if pathogen-laden interiors insulate people in more ways than one. Not only is the immediacy of the natural world removed from us as if by a veil or the displacing effect of rapid movement, but the true costs of the roads that facilitate car use are equally hidden. Not just the landscapes and communities marred or removed but fiscally too; the cost of roads are rendered obscene at a time of supposed tightening of belts. It has been estimated that each metre of new road costs in the region of £25,000. And that at a time when, as we all know, other vital services in local councils are being cut to the quick; real, vital services that make a huge impact on people’s daily lives here and now.

It would be easy to say this was tragic. Tragic because we could be at a genuine crossroads for major changes in how we get about. Not some throwback where cars are got rid of altogether, but shifts in overall behaviour where car ownership is no longer some kind of mechanised Holy Grail for individuals and families alike, where lift sharing and car sharing clubs can truly take off, where trains are affordable and spacious, where we cultivate a different sense of distance, a different sense of respect for the places we pass through.

If it wasn’t for the prospective loss of so many places you could say it was more like a very black farce; at least as far as governmental policy goes. In times of financial hardship a clear choice has been made along ideological, not practical grounds. It has less to do with the grinding pressure of congestion and everything to do with car manufacturing, oil and road building lobbies. It’s just a happy accident for them that so many of us are suckling on the petrol-headed teat.

And the roads themselves; vanguards of development, offering a dream of easy freedom. For another few years till another is needed, steering the masses away from hard choices, fostering an easy way of doing things, taking us further to escape what we’ve done to our immediate locality. They lock us in to six-laned roads, to half-lives on the motorways where everything is flat and air comes stalely through the vents.

Who wouldn’t be free of all this if we actually believed we had a choice? A choice that might not always be as gratifying or easy as jumping in the driving seat at any given moment. But one which offers another kind of freedom; freedom from the drudgery of roads, from the financial yolk of keeping a car on the road, a freedom to be able to really look at and travel benignly through the landscapes and places around us.

Otherwise we only enforce on the wider world the landscapes already within us. If we are wired to machines every hour of the day, if our heads and souls are so full of a never-ending media, if we are so transfixed with affairs of the day or the latest app or who in the public eye is saying precisely what about precisely who and all the while the world at our windows is crying out to bring us all closer and home to our natural gifts, our natural inheritance just to be out in creation – is it any wonder that, if we cannot hear that call, then all the moors, the woodlands and the ancient fields seem a little bit more abstract as we weigh their cost; expendables to modern life, pleasant irrelevancies that mean little to economies of luxury and pace while all the while we let ourselves grow poorer by degrees, the world suffers and one day we wake and find ourselves surrounded by a wasteland, crying out how was it that we let it come to this?

We all of us have choices still, whether as individuals or as part of our society itself. For many, car use remains alluring and undeniably convenient. But it’s clearer than ever it comes at a huge cost. Perhaps it comes down to that which we consider most important; our landscapes and communities, the wildlife we should act as stewards towards, or an open road, however temporary, the ability to pass unhindered down the screeslope of prediction and provision. We cannot wish some all-or-nothing, either-or where every journey amounts to an irredeemable castigation. But choices remain and we cannot continue to deny that new roads ultimately serve no one; they may help cut congestion for a time but we all have to pay a long-term price. We have to ask ourselves what kind of country we really want to live in. Will we be remembered as a generation that sacrificed so much while propping up policies discredited decades ago? Finding our way into a different future is largely a question of will. It’s a real sorry state of affairs then that our current government seems so intent on building the last things we need.