Map Addict

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE LYKE WAKE WALK?

2015-08-01T09:00:00.001-07:00

The Lyke Wake Walk on a 1976 map, before Ordnance Survey was ordered to remove it

(an edited extract from my book The Wild Rover, 2011)

The northern equivalent of the word lich is lyke, and reading that, a distant recollection detonated. The Lyke Wake Walk was a name I’d not heard in years, and it instantly brought back memories of Blue Peter presenters grunting and grimacing their way across the invariably sodden North York Moors. In the late 1970s, it had seemed that every scout pack, charity group, rambling society, Rotary Club and TV beefcake was stomping through the heather from Osmotherley to Ravenscar. This, we were always told, was far more than a mere walk; it was an endurance test, a challenge like no other, for to qualify for membership of the exclusive club of successful Lyke Wakers, you had to complete the 42 mile trek in under 24 hours, usually necessitating overnight walking. Even better, and even darker, it was overlain with a neo-pagan patina of ancient ritual, for this was said to be an old coffin path to the sea, passing as it does the odd Bronze Age burial mound and stone cross. Some groups even upped the ante by dressing as undertakers and carrying a coffin. In my early teens, it had been the biggest, most famous footpath in the land, yet it had all but disappeared. To paraphrase another great relic of the Age of Beige, whatever happened to the Lyke Wake Walk?

The walk, sometimes claimed to be the first named long-distance path in the country, began in modest circumstances in 1955. Bill Cowley, a farmer from Swainby, between Middlesbrough and Northallerton, had written a piece in that August’s edition of The Dalesman magazine laying down the challenge of walking across the moors to the sea in one day. The idea had come to him in a flash, he said, earlier that summer when he’d climbed to the top of Glaisdale Rigg, the ridge between Glaisdale and its splendidly-named western neighbour, Fryupdale. From the lofty top, he’d suddenly imagined lines of the ancients trekking their way across the moor, from one weathered old cross, standing stone or ancient mound to the next. Cowley was an engaging and passionate Yorkshireman, always able to join the most insubstantial of dots into a seamless swagger of local pride. He’d gone to Cambridge, where he formed the Yorkshire Society, led a 1957 Yorkshire Himalayan Expedition and, since returning to farm his native patch, was active in the Yorkshire Dialect Society. No prizes for guessing what he would have picked as his specialist subject if he'd ever made it on to Mastermind.

At noon on the first of October 1955, Cowley and twelve others set off from Osmotherley and headed east, threading their way along sheep paths through the heather. The party camped at seven that evening at Hamer, and set off again at 3.30 a.m, reaching the coast at Ravenscar, midway between Scarborough and Whitby, at eleven o’clock the following morning. The Lyke Wake Walk, and its irresistible mystique, was born.

Word spread fast. In the early days, it was almost entirely local: the first log books of the walk, which were kept in cafes at either end for people to sign in their times and experiences, are full of entries by groups from places such as York Technical College, Middlesbrough GPO Telephones Division, a Stockton-on-Tees scout pack, the Apprentice Training Centre at ICI’s Wilton works, Selby Round Table and the Darlington Young Liberals. The unlikely sounding outfit of the East Yorkshire Mountaineering Club feature a few times. The few southerners who took it on fared fairly dismally, none more guaranteed to make a Yorkshireman crack a thin smile than a party from the London Region of the Youth Hostel Association, who, in 1961, curtly confessed to the log book that they “did not take magnetic variation into account – ended up in Middlesbrough”.

At the end of every year, Cowley would tot up the number of walkers who had completed the route and scribe the result into the log book. Keeping to the funereal theme, he called himself the Chief Dirger, and granted titles such as Anxious Almoner to his closest acolytes. Any man who completed the challenge in the requisite time could apply to become a fellow dirger, and to receive a black-edged ‘condolence card’ to prove it at a shilling a pop. 191 did it in the first three years, and then the numbers started to climb quite markedly: 112 in 1959 alone, 255 in 1960 and 790 in 1961. Over ninety percent of them were men. Women who’d completed the trek weren’t granted dirger status, and were simply called ‘witches’ instead.

There was a breezy levity to those early days. Bill Cowley himself did the route numerous times, including on skis during the Arctic winter of 1962-3. He sounded at his most spirited recording a trek in November 1961, when he and regular fellow dirger Campbell Bosanquet left Osmotherley just after midnight, arriving in Ravenscar at 2.40 the following afternoon, in time to catch the 3.16 train back for an evening cocktail party. En route, he records, they’d enjoyed ham sandwiches and coffee at 3.30 a.m., sausages and mushrooms at 8.15, “a pint of iced nectar at Beck Hole” at 10.45 and “another at the Flask (not quite so iced)” at 1.40. It was all a bit of overgrown schoolboy fun, but that couldn’t last.

A month before this crossing, the Lyke Wake Walk had been featured for the first time on television, when a crew from the BBC programme Tonight came to film it. Over the next decade or so, other TV crews, journalists and writers followed and soon, the Lyke Wake Walk was a national legend. Numbers swelled exponentially, peaking in the lighter months of May and June. In June 1975 alone, 3141 people completed the route, including Louis Kulcsar of Stockton-on-Tees, for whom it was the 110^th crossing (three of which were barefoot). He’s still doing it, and has now racked up around two hundred, the official record. It’s believed that 1978 was the peak year, when anything between twenty and thirty thousand completed the walk, the vast majority of them going west-east from Osmotherley, and most of them starting in the dead of night. The muttering of discontented locals, furious at being woken up almost nightly by excitable gangs of soldiers, scouts and Rotarians, became an inconsolable roar.

And as the popularity of the walk grew, so did the hoodoo surrounding it. Despite there being no evidence whatsoever that this had indeed ever been used as a coffin path (and it seems unlikely that any funeral procession would carry the dead over forty miles), Bill Cowley’s imaginative take on history was given as hard fact, and repeated mantra-like across books, newspapers, radio and television. Merchandise, such as coffin-shaped cuff-links, ties and headscarves for the ‘witches’, flew off the shelves. Regular gatherings were called Wakes, with suitably morbid entertainment laid on. The highest accolade, allowing you to wear purple robes at Wakes, was as a ‘Doctor of Dolefulness’: to qualify, you had to have done at least seven crossings, one of which needed to be in the winter and one a solo unsupported trek, meaning no teams of thermos-bearing car drivers to meet you at appointed halts. Photos of the Wakes in the seventies show a curious mix of grizzled Yorkshire farmers, a few bald bank managers taking a walk on the wild side, some wiry fell runners and a generous sprinkling of bearded progrock pagans getting quietly wassocked on real ale. These took place against a backdrop of black candles, coffin-shaped menu cards and skull-painted drapes. With its coterie of hardcore fanatics and pedants, its pages of tightly-held rules and invented customs, the Lyke Wake Club started to look distinctly cultish.

It was increasingly obvious that Bill Cowley had created a monster, and the backlash came quickly. In the hot summer of 1975, a fire on the heather-and-peat tinderbox of Wheeldale Moor burned for a fortnight. As always, blame was swiftly, and on no firm evidence, lain squarely at the feet of walkers; calls were made for the Lyke Wake Walk to be banned outright. Richard Hamersley, Land Surveyor to the Duchy of Lancaster, slyly pointed out that “the route of the walk is not a statutory footpath, and serious thought will have to be given as to the legitimacy of this activity”. He was being disingenuous, for much of the path was on recognised rights of way, the remainder, mostly in the eastern half, on well-worn permissive tracks that had been used since anyone could remember. In Hamersley’s mind, there was no doubt who was to blame for the fire: “this week I collected no fewer than 69 cigarette ends in a half-mile random stretch of the route. If this is indicative of the whole length, there must be some 5,600 cigarette ends recently smoked along the walk. No wonder that during the recent dry weather a fire of this magnitude has occurred.” The following summer, 1976, was hotter and drier still, and an agreement was reluctantly brokered to suspend the walk for the duration of the drought.

The first winds of trouble only made the Lyke Wake Club retreat further into its poundshop Hallowe’en grotto. They put a proposal to the Countryside Commission that the route should be recognised as an official Long Distance Path (LDP), which was immediately rejected. Never mind, for it gave ample chance for the polishing of Yorkshire chips on square shoulders; the Chief Dirger himself denouncing the decision, and stating that it “reflects the typical Southern, bureaucratic attitude of people who would not recognize a walk if they saw one.” In fact, the Countryside Council had already plotted an alternative walk, the Cleveland Way, over much of the same ground, combining it with a final coastal flourish from Whitby to Filey. After the Pennine Way, this had been Britain’s second official LDP, opening in 1969. But that was dull and square, man, authority’s preferred route and not for the self-styled swashbuckling dirgers and witches of the Lyke Wake.

As now happens with Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk (which shares some of the route, and much of the spirit, of the Lyke Wake), the lack of official recognition only seemed to make it even more attractive to some. Numbers continued to grow, peaking at the tail end of the seventies. The walk was barely off the box, and it became by far the number one charity challenge in the country. It was these that killed the Lyke Wake more than anything, for they were often huge groups, walking five or six abreast, prompting a member of the local National Park Committee to say that “twenty years ago, the Lyke Wake Walk was just a sheeptrack. Now it is wide enough for two tanks to cross side by side.” Worse, every charity sponsored walk came complete with a sophisticated back-up support system of refreshment and medical teams, to be found bouncing around unfamiliar moorland lanes in minibuses all through the night. Increasingly often, an ambulance would have to join the throng. Sensing only a thin scatter of population, many walkers – already fired up with the shouty sanctimony of doing it all for charity – were oblivious to their devastating impact on the taciturn local community.

In May 1982, the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, never the most radical of organisations, set up a Lyke Wake Walk Working Party to investigate what should be done. The remit of the group was clear and stated at the outset, that “it is stressed that if a substantial reduction in use [of the Walk] is not achieved, the National Park Committee will have to consider complete closure”. Dr Roy Brown of the National Park heaped up the hyperbole: “within a few years the whole area will be a desert if something is not done quickly”. This is an interesting one, for while the track was undoubtedly eroding quite markedly in places, is this not exactly how our much-loved ancient holloways and green lanes were initially created? We wouldn’t have much to coo over now if our ancestors had been quite so squeamish.

The report concluded that numbers doing the walk must be reduced by half, at the very least. The Lyke Wake Club tried to do its bit by creating alternative routes, the Shepherd’s Round and the Hambleton Hobble, but they never really caught on, for people had bought into the myth of the Lyke Wake that the Club had so assiduously nursed and weren’t prepared to be fobbed off with sloppy seconds. Ordnance Survey was told to take the route off its maps, which they duly did. TV crews were turned away. Charity teams were discouraged, while those from the police, army and cadet forces – a significant proportion of the total – were firmly told to go elsewhere and find other challenges. Even Bill Cowley acknowledged the necessity for action, saying “I feel very sad that it has come to this, but it is the only way”. And it worked: almost instantly, the number of Lyke Wakers plummeted.

After the drastic cull of 1982, numbers started to rise again, and when, a decade later, the National Park Authority set up another working party to discourage overuse of the route, one of the most vociferous of the Lyke Wake Club’s officials fired off a tetchy letter to the Darlington and Stockton Times. In it, he told of an American tourist who’d written to the National Park to ask about the Lyke Walk Walk. The officer who’d replied had told him that it wasn’t on official rights of way and that “permission should really be obtained from the landowners”. He then went on to criticise the creeping mentality of council-approved waymarked routes, writing “for some reason, the vast majority of walkers seem to be unable to place one leg in front of the other unless the route has a fancy name, badge and completion certificate” – a very good point indeed, until you remember that it was the Lyke Wake Club that pioneered such things, and were still enthusiastically marketing them.

Cowley died in 1994, aged 78. While his steady hand was on the tiller, there was still – just about – a sense that the Lyke Wake Walk was little more than boyish high jinks that had got slightly out of control. Some of his lieutenants though didn’t seem to share his easy-going sense of perspective, and furiously guarded everything about both the walk and the club. This came to a head as the fiftieth anniversary of the first crossing loomed in 2005, when a tight cabal of ‘senior members’ decided to call it a day and kill the club. A splinter group vehemently disagreed, and decided to launch themselves as the New Lyke Wake Walk Club. This was inaugurated at a dinner in the Queen Catherine Inn in Osmotherley on the first of October 2005, precisely fifty years since Bill Cowley’s first walk. Forty-two miles away on the very same night, at the Raven Hall Hotel in Ravenscar, the old Lyke Wake Club held its final Wake and disappeared from the map. Not entirely, though, for the commercial trading arm, purveyors of all that coffin-shaped tat, the “fancy name, badge and completion certificate”, plus a whole load more, continued and still trades today.

It was not an amicable divorce. The new group was regularly characterised by the old as being full of southern softies who didn’t understand the highly autarkic culture of the North York Moors. The ghost of Bill Cowley was regularly invoked in the spat, with both sides contending that they were acting as he would have wished them to. Claims and counter-claims streamed through the local papers and rambling magazines. Although hostilities have largely ceased now, and a few hundred people continue to tramp the route each year, there’s still an acrimonious whiff hanging over the Lyke Wake Walk; never has its mournful iconography looked more pathetically appropriate.

A LEAP OF FAITH...

2015-01-29T12:55:00.000-08:00

We hear a lot of chat about “a new kind of politics”, usually from hardcore tribalists who have absolutely no intention of doing it. But if we are to tackle the escalating disengagement of millions from the democratic process, we have to try things differently.

This thought has been uppermost in my mind in the last few days, as people have been discussing the informal collaboration between Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Green party. This has resulted in Plaid officially exhorting people in England to vote Green, even though it is a competitor party in Wales. Some people are questioning the wisdom of this as a strategy.

I fully understand people’s doubts, and as the Plaid candidate in Ceredigion, I’ve got more cause to think about it than most! After all, Ceredigion was where, in 1992, the pioneering alliance between Plaid and the Greens vaulted what had been the 4^th and 5^th place parties at the previous poll into first place, and Cynog Dafis’ historical win. Less joyously, once the alliance had ended, it was notable that the Green vote in 2005 (846 votes) was considerably larger than the majority (219) that the LibDems squeaked in gaining the seat from Plaid (and thus knocking out Simon Thomas, widely acknowledged as one of the greenest MPs we’ve ever had).

There had been some hope last year that a similar electoral arrangement could be reached for the forthcoming Westminster election in Ceredigion, but it was not to be. While many Green party members in Wales wanted to unite behind me as the Plaid candidate, more did not, and so a candidate of their own has now been selected. I’ve not met him yet, but I look forward to it. Although there are elements of the Green party in Wales (such as their apparent blind spots towards our cultural and linguistic sustainability) that cause concern, we have much in common and, now more than ever, need to co-operate.

So yes, I’m in the strange position of encouraging people across the border to vote for the very same party that is my direct competition in Ceredigion. It’s not ideal, but that, I believe, is the price to be paid for being sincere about wanting “a new kind of politics”. It is a leap of faith.

The 3 Plaid, 6 SNP and 1 Green MP in this parliament have worked together brilliantly, and have provided more effective opposition to this miserable government than hordes of Labour and LibDem backbenchers combined. Our three parties are clearly fighting this election on a common platform of saying no to continued austerity measures, for serious infrastructure investment and the scrapping of the Trident replacement, and for an absolute moratorium on fracking. Polls suggest that the Plaid-SNP-Green bloc will be both considerably larger in the next parliament and potentially holding the balance of power.

If that can happen, then we might begin to see some real change in the clapped out politics of the UK. If we can harness some of the energy and engagement of the Scottish referendum campaign and the anti-austerity forces of Greece, Spain and elsewhere, then anything is possible. Rest assured that we in Ceredigion Plaid will be going all out to capture every vote, and explaining to Green-inclined voters that I am the candidate they need to back as by far the best chance we have of turning the tide.

ON THE EDGE

2014-06-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

You can tell a lot about a place by examining its edges. Those liminal spaces, neither quite here nor there, are infused with the essence of identities that pulse from the distant centre. They are, however, far more than a faint homeopathic imprint of the personality of a territory, for the process is an alchemical one and conjures up a whole new identity all of its own, especially at land borders when two such edges rub together.

The England-Wales border is a well-seasoned example of the phenomenon. It is one of the most singular parts of our island, a furzey hinterland that manages to be both Welsh and English, and yet neither of them. It has always drawn me; spending three days last week walking in the Herefordshire borderlands has only deepened that respect and love.

The Mortimer Trail, with our extra few miles from the border added on

Two friends and I did the Mortimer Trail, a thirty mile walk between Kington, near the border on the A44, and Ludlow, the grand and gastronomic former seat of the Council of the Marches. It is a beautifully crafted route; you might even say ‘curated’ (if that didn’t make you sound like some blue-sky-thinking arse). On the map, the trail looked erratic and seemed to have little interest in reaching its destination. On the ground, all became clear. Destinations were secondary; the journey was all, as the path steered us thoughtfully around optimum vistas, telling angles and ever changing perspectives and moods. It was a route as carefully calibrated as poetry.

There is a lovely symmetry to it too. Whichever way round you do the Mortimer Trail, you start by rising out from the plains and being afforded a lingering look back at where you have come from. For us, starting at the Welsh-English border to the west of Kington, this meant looking towards home across the broad vales of the rivers Arrow and Lugg, to the sulky contours of the Radnor Forest and the cheeky peak of the Whimble. Wales looked dark and different.

At the other end, approaching Ludlow, there are fine, wide views across the gentler patchwork of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire. Between these two corresponding trailheads, you amble for many miles through what feels a little like a very green and lovely No Man’s Land. Hillforts, castle mounds, ancient tumps, turreted barns and fortified churches all whisper their dark secrets. The deep forests, both ancient and conifer, spin further webs of disorientation. There are a few straggled farms and loose, lonely hamlets. It is profoundly stirring, brooding terrain.

Once the meeting place of three railway lines, the former Titley Junction station slumbers away in quiet fields

Even though it looks like the essence of timelessness, change has come, of course it has. A few locals we bumped into delighted in pointing out their parvenu neighbours behind security gates and lakes of Farrow & Ball. The bankers, and their bonuses, have burrowed their slippery way into even this old Marcher rock. Ludlow was the catalyst (but still mostly the exception). The handsome but earthy town that I knew as a child has long since traded in its cack-crusted overalls for two hundred quid jeans and some hand-stitched brogues. Yet the other trailhead, Kington, remains little altered, and distinctly recognisable from this description by John Hillaby in his 1968 walking classic Journey through Britain:

Kington is a little, squashed-up, narrow-streeted market town on the Welsh frontier where they sell cartridges and sheep dip, fertilizer and men’s flannel underwear.

The Welsh frontier! It’s a far meatier word than the rather mealy-mouthed ‘border’, and it fits the flavour of the dusty little towns on the savannah, against their backdrop of Wild West hills. Think of Kington, Knighton, Presteigne, Bishop's Castle, Clun, Longtown, even Montgomery and Hay, as frontier towns, and they suddenly make a new kind of sense. This is a frontier, and it has been for two millennia. It is not some folksy quirk for the tourist board, a relic with no significance to the modern world; it is very much a demarcation between distinct countries, landscapes, histories and cultures.

This midsummer pilgrimage has helped me ponder the murky waters of the question I’m getting asked a lot these days: “so you’re standing as a Plaid Cymru candidate – you must believe then in Welsh independence?” Walking along and through the edges of both England and Wales has reaffirmed to me that yes is my unequivocal reply. Yes to Wales owning its own resources and making its own choices. Yes to England doing likewise. Yes to Britishness (a glorious fact of geography) but not its bastardised cousin, UK-ness. And yes to a new age of neighbourly comradeship, a coming together in this potent countryside, a eye-to-eye meeting - at last - of equals. I can understand the doubts, when placed in the context only of the version of the world that we have grown up with, but if you take a longer look, the bottom line is that there is a line. We cannot wish it away – and neither should we want to. It is far too deep, far too powerful, and far too beautiful, for that.

"BURN, YOU BASTARD, BURN!"

2014-02-03T03:44:00.000-08:00

[an extract from my 2011 book, The Wild Rover]

A newspaper image of the 1937 fire

Growing up in 1970s Worcestershire, by far my favourite outing was to Witley Court, less than ten miles from home. Originally a medieval manor, it had been added to by successive owners, eventually becoming one of England’s most extravagant stately homes in the late Victorian age, when it was owned by the Ward family, the Earls of Dudley. Witley was famous for lavish living, for parties where royalty, aristocracy, politicians and celebrities mixed in the orangery, the parterre gardens or draped themselves over the sides of the massive ornamental fountains. Two hundred staff oiled its wheels, and it took fifty tons of coal a day to keep the monster warm.

Even more than most stately homes, Witley’s progress mirrors that of the country at large. The Wards’ fortune was eaten by its opulence, and after the Great War, the much battered family put the estate up for sale. It was bought by the epitome of new money, Kidderminster carpet baron Sir Herbert Smith. From humble beginnings, he’d risen to become the most powerful man in my home town, where he was known as “Piggy”, thanks to his portly stature and shaved head. Though he loved life as lord of the manor, he was ill-prepared for the costs, and ran the house and estate into the ground, skimping on maintenance and keeping only a skeleton staff. Like an earlier Nicholas van Hoogstraten, he caused fury by blockading all the footpaths that ran across the estate.

On 7^th September 1937, a fire broke out in the basement of the court, quickly spreading to the ballroom above. Thanks to Sir Herbert’s economies, the fountains lay unused, and the reservoir that fed them was almost empty. Not that it would have helped had they been full, for the water pumping equipment had rusted up. The staff battled valiantly to save furniture and pictures, but it was too late. In 1939, with the country on the brink of war, Smith sold the house to a demolition contractor, who stripped it of all its finery, leaving it as a roofless shell.

It was in that state that I first encountered Witley Court, with a few further decades of plundering and weather-beaten decay etched into its gaunt frame. It excited me like nowhere else, from the moment you passed one of the lodge houses on the main road and bumped your way up the rutted track, the skeletal ruin growing ever larger on the skyline. Back then, you just nipped over the fence and had free run of the place, up crumbling staircases into the bedrooms, down into the dark, mouldy cellars, galloping along the broken balustrade of the grand terrace steps, even jumping into the vast, wrecked fountains. And there always seemed to be crows.

One day, at the age of about twelve, I had persuaded my dad to take me there, ostensibly to walk the dog. Standing in the ruins was an elderly lady, muffled up against the cold. We got chatting, and it transpired that she had grown up in Great Witley, the nearby village once transplanted out of view by the lords of Witley Court and where most of the house’s army of staff had lived. On the night of the fire, she said, villagers – few of whom would still have been employed at the Court, thanks to Sir Herbert Smith’s swingeing economies – came out into the street to watch the flames dancing in the sky. They cracked open bottles of beer, and chanted “burn, you bastard, burn!”.

An 1880 engraving of the Court in its lavish heyday

She said it in such a deadpan way, a look of resigned indifference on her face, but the shock electrified me. It was partly hearing a little old lady swear, but there was more to it than that. To the twelve year old me, history was dates and kings and battles and the invention of the spinning jenny. It was cause and effect, question and answer, a smooth, smug progress through the ages to the zenith of civilisation that was, we were regularly assured, late 1970s Britain. For the first time, I got a glimpse of the real story behind the textbook, and it both confused and thrilled me.

[To see the gothic dereliction of Witley in the 60s and 70s, look at the original promo video shot there for Procul Harum's monster 1967 hit, A Whiter Shade of Pale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PmisbzxwoQ. It was never used at the time, because it interspersed footage of Witley with that of the Vietnam war. The BBC refused to show it, and so the group had to shoot a new video in London.]

MEN ARE FROM MARS...

2014-01-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

So many in Welsh lit over yrs have cited Nigel Jenkins as someone who had inspired, helped, been kind to them. That, friends, is success: these wise words from Kathryn Gray plopped into the muddy swirl of my Twitter timeline earlier today. I nodded in silent agreement, though the thought did flit across my mind that it seemed a faintly random sentiment for a wet, workaday Tuesday. The sucker punch truth that it was a 140-character obituary only dawned a few tweets later.

At 64, Nigel was too young to go. The fire still roared within; it burst out in his poetry, prose, politics, lecturing, psychogeography and music; it combusted all around him and brought light and merriment; it scorched even through the hallowed chambers of the Encyclopaedia of Wales, a project that ate seven years of his life as one of its editors, and which he wearily nicknamed ‘Psycho’. His inability to stand the sickly cant of sanctioned public discourse brought untold admiration from many of us, but brickbats galore too, none more piously hurled than when his furious eulogy to ‘Viscount No’, George Thomas (“The Lord of Lickspit / The grovelsome brown-snout and smiley shyster”) landed him on the front of The Guardian and booed on the letters page of the Western Mail for months on end. As ever, he was proved entirely right on that one.

How green was my bile…and how true

The last time I saw Nigel was at a hugely convivial event in Aberystwyth rugby club to mark Planet magazine’s fortieth birthday. There was music, poetry, prose and speeches from a glittering cast that included Ned Thomas, Jan Morris, John Barnie, Gai Toms, Jasmine Donahaye, Damian Walford Davies and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. As compere of the evening, I’d come up with the idea of ascribing a different planet to each performer, a conceit that became distinctly strained on occasion (Jan Morris, suffering an injured foot, hobbled up to the stage after my introducing her as Mercury, fixed me with a baleful eye and murmured “well, I certainly don’t feel very Mercurial right now”).

While some were highly tenuous fits, there was no question which planet to give to Nigel: Mars, the red planet, named after the Roman god of war, the near neighbour that’s fascinated us for generations, famous for its eruptions, its volcanoes and its elliptical orbit. I cringe to recall this now, but my last words before bringing Nigel to the microphone were “so, is there life on Mars? There certainly is!”

And now there isn’t. The sky is a far darker place without him.

[Here is Nigel filmed reading one of his loveliest poems, Snowdrops, written about and for this time of year: http://www.nigeljenkins.com/aa_film/film008.htm]

2014: NEW YEAR,OLD FEARS

2014-01-02T13:35:00.000-08:00

As a young child in the 1970s, I well recall being regularly bored and mystified by the never-ending fascination with ‘the war’. Adults seemed to go on about it all the time, hurrah-for-our-boys black and white movies filled the TV schedules, and even sitcoms knew that jokes about Jerries or Japs were surefire substitutes for proper humour. It was all so long ago, I remember thinking – won’t they just shut up about it?

Now I realise that the passage of thirty years is but the blink of an eye (as my recently rediscovered record collection rather disconcertingly demonstrates). Furthermore, at the outset of 2014, the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, I think we need to look back and learn a great deal more about the 1914-45 period, because we are in grave danger of repeating its mistakes. I say 1914-45, as we need to take the whole period bookended by the two world wars, for the twenty year lull between them was very much unfinished business that reached its grim, almost inevitable conclusion in Hitler and the Holocaust.

It is a horrible irony that 2014 is likely to be a year in which people soberly commemorate the centenary of the Great War, while simultaneously voting in droves for various shades of tub-thumping bigotry in May’s European elections. Across the whole continent and beyond, such sentiment is gaining ground, fuelled by idiot politicians and a craven or timid media.

Birkenau extermination camp, Poland

In the run-up to Christmas, I was fortunate to have two trips abroad, one to Berlin and one to Kraków in Poland. Both hammered home the dangers that we seem to be sleep-walking back into, especially on the latter trip which included a day at the Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi concentration camps. Nothing can prepare you for the experience, and the sheer numbers who died there. We reeled from there back to Kraków, where I picked up a copy of the local English language newspaper. It told me that Nick Griffin, leader of what’s left of the BNP, had recently been in town and warned a rally that “powerful Zionists want to destroy us. We, the nationalists, must stand together to fight for a white, nationalist and radical Europe”. Was it 2013 or 1943 outside?

We can mercifully dismiss Griffin as a truly crap (and fading) demagogue, but the rally at which he spoke was an offshoot of another organised by Poland’s Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość), who hold about a quarter of the seats in parliament and form the official opposition. Griffin’s rally was mainly a showcase for a belligerent fringe movement called the National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski), whose slogans include the ever-catchy “gas the queers” and “there will be a baton for each queer face”.

The Holocaust did not emerge fully-formed from thin air. People had to be broken down into submission to a political ideology that turned them into acquiescent murderers. The key part of that process is always the same: others have to be comprehensively dehumanised. And it is always the same ‘others’ – gypsies, gays, Jews, people with disabilities – that get picked off first. It was then, and it is now (with Muslims latterly added as the scapegoat group recycled from even earlier times).

It might seem crass to place on this gruesome spectrum the beer’n’fags populism of UKIP, the Groundhog Day hysteria of the Mail and the Express or even the default media inflation of daft young lads into holy warriors and terrorists. I believe that they all belong there, however. When researching my last book, I was gobsmacked to see how close the parallels were between now and the 1930s, even here in Britain. Not just in the obvious rise of fascist thuggery and quisling politicians, but in the prevailing mainstream, which chose to wish away the warnings and faff around instead with its new gadgets, its folksy pastimes and its obsession with home’n’hearth. Today, as then, we seem addicted to the soft poison of nostalgia.

Same shit, different day

This is, by the way, another reason I’m a candidate for Plaid Cymru. Those who know little of the party might assume it’s a Welsh UKIP, but that’s very far from the truth. Plaid has always been a firmly internationalist outfit, rooted in Welsh radical and pacifist traditions. Its first MP, Gwynfor Evans, was a lone voice in the 1960s House of Commons against Britain arming the Nigerian government in Biafra; his vocal opposition to the Vietnam war was informed by going there to find out for himself. Its MEP since 1999, Jill Evans, leads the European Free Alliance (EFA), who are in a joint block with the Greens in Brussels.

I’m sorry to those many now dead relatives to whom I moaned when yet another war film flickered on to our telly all those years ago. Now that we’ve lost nearly all of them, the generation who knew wartime as young adults, it feels to me that we have lost something anchoring us to the bitter reality of its first-hand experience. And as our anchor slips away, the danger is that we will once again career off into the same blind alleys that brought such terror to our continent.

The EU is far from perfect, but its creation as a response to the horrors of two wars is something we should never lose sight of. We must make it work for us all. As the famous George Santayana quotation has it on the wall of one of the blocks in Auschwitz, “the one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again”. Let 2014 be a year when we learn once again our common history, and make an iron resolution not to repeat it.

Auschwitz

MP MP?

2013-05-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Slightly unexpectedly, I’m in the running to be adopted as the Plaid Cymru candidate for Ceredigion at the next UK general election. This might seem like a strange career move, but it is something I am deeply committed to, and even quite excited about.

The political tectonic plates are shifting fast these days, and at every level: global, European, British, English, Scottish and Welsh. Yet the level of debate in this country about these seismic shifts is derisory. Politicians and media alike seem content to stir the disenchantment, while offering neither useful analysis nor any real alternative. Unsurprisingly, this is leaving people thoroughly exasperated and with a growing sense of rage – the ‘plague on all your houses’ response, a.k.a. ‘politicians are all the bloody same’.

But they are not. Really, they’re not. There are genuinely decent, honest people in almost every party (some more than others), but it is in Plaid Cymru that I’ve found by far the greatest concentration. Ever since I first encountered Plaid, as a member of the NUS national executive twenty-five years ago, I’ve been impressed by the vision, erudition and commitment of its members, and their ambition for Wales – and the world beyond. Although lazily derided as “the nationalists” by opponents, Plaid is firmly internationalist, progressive and co-operative in its outlook. When I moved to mid Wales thirteen years ago, I joined Plaid immediately, and have worked on their behalf, with varying degrees of success, at every election since.

Aberystwyth Mon Amour

When Leanne Wood was elected as Plaid leader just over a year ago, it was clear that there were some exciting times ahead. I’ve known Leanne for years, and have always been inspired by her passion, her integrity, her absolute commitment to social and economic justice and – rare indeed in a politician – her utter lack of ego. To her, the idea of a self-governing Wales is not an end in itself. It is a beginning; the much-needed chance for Wales to work out its own priorities, on its own terms, and to go for them.

After twenty years of writing and broadcasting about Wales, and of studying in depth its history and culture, it is impossible to come to any other conclusion than that no Westminster government, of any political persuasion, is going to look out for us. Wales will always be an adjunct or an afterthought. Policies designed for the overheated economy of south-east England are never going to succeed here.

This logjam has to be broken. Here in Wales, we have all three of the UK main parties in power: the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Westminster, Labour in Cardiff Bay. As they bicker and squabble amongst themselves, egged on by a breathless, blinkered media, it is hard to see much difference between any of them. And as they do so, our economy totters, our high streets start to look like rows of rotten teeth, cuts scythe through our cultural landscape, our hard-won health service lurches from one crisis to another, and our communities feel increasingly beleaguered.

I’m keen to be part of building Plaid Cymru towards becoming the government in our devolved Senedd. We so desperately need that to happen. So why am I taking a tilt at a seat in Westminster?

Well, that’s because one of the ingrained problems facing Plaid is getting any attention on the other side of Offa’s Dyke. Despite having been represented in parliament since 1966, and despite having three MPs (i.e. three more than UKIP!), you’d barely know of their existence from the London media. And yet, with the Scottish referendum next year and the ongoing Euro-ructions, the constitution of our country is facing changes bigger than anyone alive has ever witnessed. We need to start having grown-up conversations about this, and Plaid is keen to play its part.

Cei Newydd / New Quay last summer, when I walked the Ceredigion Coast Path

To that end, I think that I could be a good ambassador for Plaid, and for Wales, in Westminster. I want to help take on the kneejerk assumption, routinely heard in every debate on, for instance, the Scottish referendum, that to be an advocate of a different constitutional settlement, you have therefore to be inherently ‘anti-English’ in some way. My life and my writing both give lie to that one. It is perfectly possible to love both England and Wales, love them with a passion, but also to believe that an eighteenth century structure, one created explicitly for gung-ho imperialism, is not the best way of running either.

Although I’ve settled just outside the constituency near Machynlleth, Ceredigion feels very much like the right place for me to try this. It’s where I first moved to when I came to mid Wales thirteen years ago, where I first joined Plaid and where I learned Cymraeg. Like all mid-Walians, I rely on Ceredigion for healthcare, leisure, shopping, education, research, culture and recreation. It has the one of the highest proportions of self-employed people of any constituency in the country, is home to two universities and the National Library, and has always been a cauldron of entrepreneurship, quiet radicalism and profound cultural expression.

Of the dozens of TV travelogues I made for HTV, many of the best were in Ceredigion, from a noson lawen in Tregaron to a night camping with my dog by the lonely Teifi Pools; from a tootle along the coast road in that beautiful 1950s bus you see parked in Llanon to sailing into Aberaeron on a wooden Edwardian ketch. The thought of representing this very special part of the world excites me enormously.

Filming Great Welsh Roads, with my late, lamented co-presenter Patsy, at Llyn Brianne

It’s going to be a tough fight though. Ceredigion provided the most sensational result of the 1992 general election (and a rare flicker of joy on such a depressing night), when Cynog Dafis went from fourth place to win it for an alliance of Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. When Cynog went instead to the infant National Assembly, Simon Thomas won the ensuing by-election for Plaid, and held it in the 2001 election. The LibDems (it had been a Liberal seat since 1974 before Cynog) nicked it back by a few hundred votes in 2005, but then in 2010 upped their majority to a meaty 8,324.

That’s a lot of votes to overcome. But Plaid did it before; when they first won the seat in 1992, they’d taken just 16% the previous time. In 2010, Plaid won 28.3%. More to the point, we’ve had the sorry sight of the LibDems in government, so we are all too familiar now with what their smooth words look like in practice. It’s not pretty. If I win the nomination (to be decided over the next month), then I will relish taking them on their appalling record as part of this hollow, cynical shambles of a government. I cannot wait.

HEFIN ON EARTH

2012-11-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

I don’t know whether either would thank me for the comparison, but an afternoon spent interviewing John Hefin and David Meredith reminded me most of trying to referee Statler and Waldorf, the two cantankerous old gits in the balcony on The Muppets. It didn’t help that we were holed up in a ghostly pub in Ponterwyd, the proper boondocks of inland Ceredigion.

The interview was for one of my ITV Wales travelogues, Great Welsh Roads. This edition was filming the A44 route into Aberystwyth, and I was keen to do an item about the Elvis rock, that infamous landmark at the county border. Over the years, there have been several Elvis rocks, but the original dated from spring 1962 and the Montgomeryshire by-election, following the death of the area’s Liberal MP since 1929, Clem Davies. Plaid Cymru, never yet elected anywhere, had put up that fine specimen of Welsh literary priesthood, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, as their candidate. Down in Aberystwyth, that distant seaside gap in the hills, two ardent young nationalists had an idea…

“We borrowed David's father’s car, smuggled a couple of pots of paint and a brush into its boot, and then crept out of town after the pubs had shut and up to Eisteddfa Gurig”, John told me. This was the border with Montgomeryshire, and the Aber Two thought that if they painted a big slogan somewhere to fire up the Rev Ffowc Elis’ chances, he would be practically lowering his backside onto the green benches of San Steffan. “We went back home that night, so cocky and excited. We were absolutely convinced that we’d done all that was needed. He was as good as home.” Not quite how it turned out. As has been the case on most occasions since in the mwynder Maldwyn, Plaid limped in fourth.

The provenance of the Elvis rock had been a bit of a mystery – legend even – for decades, and I was thrilled that John and David had finally agreed to fess up after so many years. The original intention had been to film the interview by the rock itself, but it’s a cheerless, inhospitable place at the best of times, and that cold October day was far from that. So we’d decide to film footage of the rock and the road, and then retire to the George Borrow Hotel in Ponterwyd for the interview. We were all freezing; coffees and brandys were quickly downed. I thank the brandy for the appearance of Statler and Waldorf, for John and David, as soon as they sat down and relaxed, mateamorphosed into one of the funniest, and most natural, double acts. It still stands out as my favourite ever interview, though I doubt that my editor, who had the impossible task of slicing down the rambling hilarity into broadcastable bite-sized chunks, would have felt quite the same.

Like all good comic duos, there was the jester and the straight guy. David, in all his lugubrious magnificence, was the erudite clown, mugging to me and acting out the absurdity of painting a slogan on a lonely rock in the middle of the night. When he had raised himself to near crescendo, John would quietly cut in with a contrary memory or an arch observation, which had us all in fits of laughter. They riffed so beautifully off each other, and could affectionately bicker for Cymru.

The punchline to the story was all John’s. “Well, you see, I was a good grammar school boy, brought up in the Queen’s English, so when it came to painting ELIS on the rock, it never occurred to me that it didn’t have two Ls.” ELLIS it was, until some time shortly after when the middle L was deftly overpainted into a V, and the Elvis rock was born.

Like every encounter I ever had with John, I remember it with pinpoint precision. My boyfriend, who met him separately on three or four occasions, said the same just now. That was John. He had such a luminous presence about him that you savoured every moment in his company, knowing that it would continue to nourish you long after you’d said goodbye. He was genuinely interested in seemingly everything, and just as genuinely modest about his own multiple achievements. To a zealous convert like me, John Hefin was the embodiment of all that made me fall in love with Wales: wit, wisdom, warmth, passion, a depth of culture and breadth of thinking, and an apparently bottomless pit of creativity.

I last saw John at the Hay Festival in early June this year. He was obviously not so well, but he was still so full of life that it did nothing to dent my hope and belief that he’d go on for ever. Elin and he were spending a couple of days at Hay, “going to everything. It feeds me for the whole year,” he said, grinning with boyish delight. As we parted, we shook hands, and held it for ages. “Come and see us sometime soon, won’t you?” he said. Yes, of course, I said. I am so very sorry that I didn’t.

Nos da John, a diolch am bopeth. Cysga’n dawel.

THE JOY OF SIX

2012-09-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Monday morning, the head still whirling from a weekend of utter joy (amongst other intoxicants): the inaugural Festival Number 6 at Portmeirion. Out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing ghostly flashes of yellow stockings striding by, as Clough Williams-Ellis pounded his trompe l’oeil manor, thrilled to see it come to such exuberant life.

Take Sunday as a dipstick into my oily sump of fun. It kicked off with a reading by Jan Morris, who fluttered as she sat down “well, I never expected to be performing at a rock festival at the age of eighty-six” before blasting a capacity audience into the stratosphere with an elegant, witty memory-monologue about Portmeirion itself, Clough, the jet set who made it their second home and the joy of Welshness. On the same stage, tucked in by the swimming pool above the shifting sands of the Dwyryd estuary, surf rockers Y Niwl took it up a notch and glided us into the day.

A walk up into the village’s central piazza, by now cowering under curtains of rain, and to the undercover stage at the back of Castell Deudraeth. We were after seeing Jerry Dammers do a DJ set, but arrived in time to catch a chamber quintet playing Mozart, followed by the sublime soundscapes of Rae Morris, a wild-haired elf from Blackpool, who, following a quick google, I now know to be only nineteen. Cow. Mr Dammers bumbled on stage next, all hat and no teeth, and cranked an aching, damp, middle-aged crowd to fever pitch with steamy dub, ska, reggae under a unexpected patina of pure camp. A quick detour to catch comedian Marcus Brigstocke rant about Jimmy Carr, George Osborne and the Daily Mail (yay! Guardianista bullseye!), and it was time for home. Had we been able to stay, there was plenty more, culminating in a set by New Order, that, judging from the reaction on Twitter, was actually rather good.

Ah, Twitter. Festival Number 6 was a multiple shuddering Twittergasm. I spent large parts of Saturday afternoon being thoroughly entertained by Grace Dent, Stuart Maconie, Andrew Weatherall, Caitlin Moran and John Niven in various conversational combinations on the main piazza, and the number of people live tweeting the references being made to tweeting fused into a perfect circle of digital onanism. “Twitter good, Facebook bad!” we were told, and a thousand thumbs flew across virtual keyboards in silent agreement. When, just before sunset on Saturday, the sun finally broke through to illuminate the far side of the estuary in a buttery glow and a perfect rainbow, you could barely see it for the wall of iPhones capturing the scene. For a moment, I was worried that Instagram might explode.

A truly brilliant weekend, and a huge hats off to the organisers. To pull off a first festival this good was a hell of an achievement. Portmeirion was born to host it, and even in the horizontal north Wales rain, it shone like the jewel that it is. My one caveat, and it’s one that echoes a few other festivals held in Wales, is that the Welsh content of the festival was shoehorned slightly awkwardly into the proceedings – a token off-peak stage here, a (delightful) male voice choir there. The organisers hail from Manchester, and it showed throughout. No criticism of that, for Manchester and the north-west of England have much to say, and it’s always good to hear. But the joy of this festival was that it felt like all kinds of dialogue was going on – musical, political, cultural, social. For many English visitors, it was the first time they’d come across any real Welsh culture, the stuff that barely ever crosses Offa’s Dyke. This was a festival full of the finest people from both sides of the border; things could get really exciting with a little more exchange of views and swapping of culture, to everyone’s mutual enjoyment and benefit. As Gruff Rhys sang from the Welshie stage on Friday night: “paratown am chwyldro, achos ni yw byd” (“get ready for a revolution, because we are the world”). By god, I hope he’s right. So let’s talk to each other and make it bloody happen.

(PS – my favourite Portmeirion anecdote: when filming one of my HTV travelogues, I was lucky enough to interview the late Micky Burn (1912-2010), poet, playwright, aesthete, Military Cross holder, enthusiastic bisexual and last living Colditz survivor. Even at the age of 95, he was wonderful company. Since the 1940s, he had lived just below Portmeirion on the estuary and become part of the glittering set that frequented it. He recounted a tale from the early 1950s when a gold Bentley full of wealthy Londoners had got a little lost trying to find Portmeirion. In nearby Penrhyndeudraeth – a slate-quarrying village of chapels and coal smoke – they’d spotted an old boy hobbling down the street. They slowed down in order to ask for directions. “Excuse me my man”, said one of them through an open window, “would you be so kind as to tell us the way to The Village?” The old boy crouched down and peered in through the car window. In an accent as thick as Gwynedd rain, he carefully said, “The Village is far from God”, and then shuffled off into the gloom.)

2012-08-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

YOU CAN JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

A friend recently sent me a photo from a branch of Waterstones, of my book The Wild Rover nuzzling up against Stuart Maconie’s Never Mind the Quantocks. Both are ostensibly about walking, but even so, surely there is more than one way to suggest that? No, it would seem, for the covers are nearly identical, and both from the pen of the same designer. Two different publishers paid her for what is basically one design. And a terminally wet one at that.

I hate that cover. I’ve hated it from the minute it was first shown to me, at a meeting deep in the gulag HQ of HarperCollins, my book’s publishers. I’ve begged for it to be changed, literally begged and begged until I felt like crying (not a good look in a business meeting). I’ve bombarded them with alternatives, cajoled graphically-minded mates to do the same and been promised by the publishers that they’ll think about it. They didn’t.

Decisions on such matters are like the old school trade union block votes at the Labour party conference. As the author, I’m the Worshipful Guild of Piano Tuners, listened to, politely applauded but with my puny couple of votes quickly ignored. Then along comes Fiona from Marketing, the Transport & General Workers Union of the meeting, with her 4.6 million block votes. Fiona from Marketing loves the cover, so she wins, every time.

Fiona from Marketing loves the cover because it’s just like all those nostalgia-soaked we-love-Britain books, designed to evoke warm thoughts of 1950s Shell Guides and saluting AA men. It’s been the default design for books about Britain for years, and so, they think, why change a format if it’s still selling? And if the content is as wistful as the cover, then it’s a fair argument. The reason I hate those covers is that they paint me into the same pastel-hued corner, next to the Keep Calm memorabilia and Union Jack tea-cosies, and I don’t think that’s what I write. Of course, Fiona from Marketing has never actually read any of the content – not that that makes a widget of difference to the outcome.

So I’m left with a book of which I’m hugely proud, packaged in a cover that makes my eyes hurt. It’s not a good combination. It’s not good for readers either. Those that buy the book expecting another cuddly cornucopia of eeh-bah-gum landscape loveliness are generally disappointed. Sometimes they’re even angered by my politics, my opinions, my language or any reference at all to my sexuality, and then leave huffy reviews all over the internet. Worse, those that would actually like the book take one glance at the cover and go no further. It’s very nice to be sharing a shelf with the redoubtable Mr Maconie, but I wish we both looked as if we had a little more lead in our pencils. And that they were different pencils.

2012-03-31T04:45:00.000-07:00

Watch this space...

Mike, Jane and Taff pose for the cover of an OS map

Hello and welcome to Mike Parker's new blog.

You can look forward to Mike's musings on maps, walking, life in Wales, dim but loveable dogs and trends in flat cap fashion, just as soon as he's worked out how to log on to Blogger.
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