The golden bough

Above: more snow fell again today, the white revealing previously hidden aspects of the landscape. For instance, this photograph shows balls of mistletoe hanging on a beech tree. Seeing it like this was a revelation - I could suddenly understand the veneration of our Iron Age ancestors for this parasitic vine.

Mistletoe is known as "the golden bough" of European mythology. It produces white berries in the middle of winter (the seeds are spread by birds). Heavy infestations can ultimately kill the host tree.



Above: Sir James Fraser writes extensively about the cultural importance of mistletoe in The Golden Bough. This is one of the books that changed my life. It is important to read the full unabridged version of the work (in several volumes) but you might also want to keep a Wordsworth edition handy in the car - it is amazing value at £2.50 and being so cheap you can turn the corners down, write in the margins, stuff cuttings between the pages (at which point it becomes much more valuable to you than the multi-volume hardback edition).

London Labour and the London Poor (1)

One of books that changed my life is Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. It is a fascinating ethnographic examination of the working class and underclass in Victorian London. It makes me think about “the working poor” in London today.

I hope this photo essay will be the first in a series.

Obviously these are candid photographs, taken from “real life”, so if anyone objects let me know and I will take the image down.



Above: construction workers have uncertain job security. Employment is often on a casual basis. Henry Mayhew wrote “The first contractor, who does the least of all, gets the most of all; while the poor wretch of a working man, who positively executes the job, is obliged to slave away every hour…”



Above: street cleaners. Usually today they will be employed directly by borough councils and receive proper payment, including pensions. In Henry Mayhew’s day things were more casual and he write of the classes of street cleaners as being “scavengers, nightmen, flushermen, chimney-sweeps, dustmen, crossing-sweepers, “street-orderlies,” labourers to sweeping-machines and to watering-carts”.



Above: drainage workers. There is nothing glamorous about this job, but it is absolutely essential. Henry Mayhew helped expose the scandal of poor housing in Bermondsey without adequate drainage “any one who has ventured a visit to the last-named of these places in particular, will not wonder at the ravages of the pestilence in this malarious quarter, for it is bounded on the north and east by filth and fever, and on the south and west by want, squalor, rags and pestilence.”



Above: lighting engineer (Mayhew writes of the gas lamp lighters of Victorian London).



Above: Mayhew writes extensively about “barrow boys” and their unique culture.



Above: kitchen workers. Again a precarious occupation, now as in Mayhew’s time (the shouting and bullying of Gordon Ramsay would shock Henry Mayhew). Mayhew recorded the experience of kitchen and domestic servants into unemployment, destitution and thus into far worse means of existence.



Above: I am sure this is actually a highly-paid surveyor, but there was something about the way he went along the pavement daubing paint on cracks and potholes that seemed Dickensian.



Above: casual labourer eating a makeshift lunch (probably brought from home) while laying on the grass of a London square. These labourers have no rights and can be dismissed on a whim. In one of the richest cities in the world they subsist on a pittance.



Above: sandwich-board men. It must be humiliating to wear this advertising paraphernalia. Mayhew records “the Street-Advertisers viz. billstickers, bill-deliverers, boardmen, men to advertising vans, and wall and pavement sticklers”.



Above: the “shirking classes”. Whenever the sun becomes hot you suddenly see people in the middle of the working day, in urban areas, dressed as if they were on holiday. I don’t mean to judge these people, nor do I think they should be “forced” into working if they don’t want to - if they can get by on benefits good luck to them (but young idlers were around in Mayhew’s time and he writes: “without judicious treatment, the restraint may be entirely thrown off by the youth, and the labour be discarded by him, before any steadiness of application has been produced by constancy of practice”).

More on Henry Mayhew: http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/25

Take a walk along one of the lines

One of the advantages of having an anonymous site like this is that you can confess to things you would never admit to in everyday life. As someone once said, if you revealed everything about anyone, it would shock everyone. So at the risk of shocking you, I am now going to talk about my fascination with ley lines (which in “real life” would make me a pariah among serious historians, classified among the credulous conspirators and UFO watchers).

I read The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins at the age of ten. I saw it mentioned in a footnote, and something made me want to see it. It was long out of print, so I went to a public library and requested a copy (this was before the internet - now you can find any book within minutes). Weeks and weeks passed, and eventually I received a postcard saying it had come through. I remember the library assistant looking very doubtful about handing it over to me. Inside it was stamped “British Library” so they had had to get a copy from the national collection (at the time there must have been very few copies circulating - reinforcing its status as a work of scholastic heresy).

The theory that prehistoric sites are laid out in absolutely straight lines sounds completely bonkers. Except that when you look at an Ordnance Survey map and try it for yourself, you find that prehistoric sites DO have a tendency to line up precisely (and no, it doesn’t work with other categories such as schools or petrol stations). But what really makes it intriguing, is when you take a walk along one of the lines in the field - and find dozens of clues that support the theory.



Above: this church was built on an ancient site high up on one side of a valley. As you may know, St Augustine in his mission to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons, specifically instructed churches to be built on the old pagan sanctuaries as a sign that the new faith had supplanted the old (and the Anglo-Saxons had often adopted “high places” that had been religious sites since prehistoric times). The blocked doorway had previously been for the sole use of the lords of the manor, who would come up in a procession from their manor house down in the valley. When the last of the family died out (seventeenth century) the door was blocked up and never used again. Anyway, from the blocked door you can walk across the churchyard (a round churchyard, which is a sign of an ancient burial ground) to the edge of the valley. A straight path leads the way, and at the boundary of the churchyard is a low wall with a convenient gate in it.



Above: the view from the churchyard gate looking down into the shallow valley. The manor house was directly ahead. If you enlarge the photo (click on it) you can see the stone spire of another church on the horizon, in a dead straight line from the blocked up doorway (you might be thinking “so what” but to me uncanny discoveries like this are genuinely thrilling).



Above: further on, this particular old straight track is marked by a gap in the boundary of the cornfield, then hedges going up the side of the valley (hedgerows are often of great antiquity) with another gap at the top of the hill - exactly as Alfred Watkins predicted.



Above: if you root around in second hand bookshops you can sometimes find copies of this magazine which gives details of many tracks that have been walked and documented. Unfortunately the magazine is defunct. Modern literature that deals with ley lines is usually complete rubbish and goes off into mysticism instead on concentrating on the physical remains on the ground that can be examined.

The Old Straight Track is one of the books that changed my life - it first got me interested in archaeology, and a huge part of my life has developed from that interest.

Kim Blacha's Song of the Day is Carrickfergus by Charlotte Church.

Music that creates distinct cultures

I’ve been doing a fair amount of walking recently, enjoying the change of winter into spring. Yesterday I borrowed Kim Blacha’s iPod to listen to on a three-mile walk to get the newspaper (rather than using the car and adding to my carbon footprint). Actually I didn’t formally borrow it – I just picked it up and gave it back to her afterwards.

Listening to someone else’s iPod gives you all kinds of insights into what sort of person they are. I made up my mind to listen to everything as it came up, even tracks I would normally skip through (Never Forget by Take That, Eternal Flame by the Bangles, some drivel by Jamiroquai). A lot of the music was fairly predictable for Kim Blacha – How To Save A Life by The Fray, Looking For Love by Karen Ramirez, Lovefool by Cardigans. I thought Who Knew by Pink was quite moving and listened to it twice. But I was stopped in my tracks (I literally stopped to check what I was listening to) by Branka Parlic playing Metamorphosis 2 by Philip Glass. This particular noise outclassed everything else on the iPod.

Later I looked at Kim Blacha as if seeing her for the first time.

Later still I listened to Branka Parlic playing Gnoissienne No 1 by Erik Satie.

We know that every distinct culture in the history of the world has produced music, but I think research should be done on music that creates distinct cultures (this is obviously happening on the popular level with the link between fashion and particular bands, but I think there might also be more subtle connections that are being missed).

I once read Image Music Text by Roland Barthes and didn’t understand a word. I read it again (after some prompting by a friend) and began to get glimmers of understanding. I then read it a third time and it became one of the books that changed my life.

Looking like an idol from a south Pacific cargo cult

Sunday afternoon Helen B asked people over to see various cult movies. We watched The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Surf Nazis Must Die, The Last Days of Disco. After three films I felt I had had enough and went home.

Completely on my own in the evening listened to Crossing the Bar, Radio 3’s programme about the poetry of Tennyson. I listened to it in the big sitting room via the television (you can get most of the radio stations via Sky). It’s more comfortable than the dining room where the radio is located.



Tennyson’s poetry is deeply unfashionable, so it was a surprise to find this programme. It also included one of his mono-dramas that I was not familiar with. For some reason I felt guilty listening to the programme, like Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 taking refuge in the fragments of old lyrical culture (and rejecting the prescribed establishment canon).



Once you know about Tennyson’s poetry you start to see references everywhere. Crossing the Bar is a short poem about dying. Tennyson portrays it as a gentle slipping away from moorings under the Evening Star.

I studied Tennyson for A-level English Literature. This was one of the books that changed my life. I saw the world completely differently after I had read Tennyson.

My favourites include: Ulysses (has to be read in conjunction with The Lotus Eaters and Choric Song), Break Break Break, Tithonus (After many a summer dies the swan…), Now sleeps the crimson petal, Lady of Shalott, Morte d’Arthur. In Memorium A H H is Tennyson’s masterpiece. Maud is alternatively a paean to unrequited love and a keening evocation of regret.

The effect of learning huge chunks of Tennyson by heart is that it entered my subconscious where it has had a profound effect upon my process of thought. Lines come unbidden into my mind. The distilled Tennysonian feelings and emotions have become my feelings and emotions.

The poem Maud initiates strong feelings, and not just in English Literature students. The character Maud was based on a real person, Rosa Baring, who became the object of Tennyson’s youthful obsession. True to the poem, Rosa Baring lived in a red brick Hall with a “high hall garden” (actually a raised terrace – I’ve been there).

I once visited a village show and went into the church where there was an exhibition. I saw a floral representation of Maud (see above) looking like an idol from a south Pacific cargo cult. In the silence of the church, the dappled sunlight streaming in through the gothic windows seemed to make the image come alive.