Another World is Possible

One day last November I walked up the hill that I grew up on, took the old track that ran along the ridge, full of flints, passed the woods I'd spent so many hours in long years back, looking up into the ash trees young and old. A mile or so further on along the ridge, I stopped and properly took things in. I was at the end of an old cut through the side of the hill. It was said to be Neolithic and hugged the contours, almost in deference to the hill itself rather than smashing its way through, an imprint but within a scale that seemed almost part of a natural order. It felt like the beginnings of winter; cold but not that cold, the hills all full of haze and mist, the greens and golds all given up to blues and greys and brown.

Somehow though it felt substantial in itself, like winter was a mantle that was somehow warm as well as rich. It spoke of fires and the smell of woodsmoke caught upon the street, of company and comradeship. Here in the lee of the hill you could hear the wind but barely feel it and it added to the sense of peace, of being somewhere removed from all the rush and non-stop headiness. The feeling of tranquillity was tangible in a way I had not felt for years and the sense of dual strength and gentleness surprised me. I thought again of Hardy, of his poem of the thrush, of hope and changing seasons.

Even the pylons snaking their way across the Downs seemed almost homely up here, momentarily, and I thought again of the last time I had lived here, one bitter winter with a badly broken collar bone and the burgeoning idea for a book about roads. I’d left behind me many friends in Nottingham, falling off the bike had marked a parting of the ways but the memory of all the times and friends I’d known still stood clear in my mind and in my dreams. Things had seemed to chime in in some strange sort of way whenever I’d gone up there. People were warm and expansive and it was clearly not for nothing that they called this the heart of the country.

But it was interesting in other, less obvious ways. It was part of the cradle of the industrial revolution, the river valleys there were once full of blossoming cotton mills, what happened in the Midlands and much further north helped determine the future of the world for centuries to come. But also, among the obvious accolade of stories of the Forest and its righteous outlaws, there was the story of Nedd Ludd and his followers, rising up against the wave of mills and their machines. With talk of a huge expansion of tree planting of the now somewhat nominal Forest, together with adverts for the future of industry in the region in the station as I arrived, I knew at once what my friend meant when he said important battles had been waged here, I knew that they were very much still going on.

There were many things that made their mark during the time I spent up there; sunlight on the water in the Spring, a quality to it that is even now hard to define, the water filling up a disused gravel pit, now made a lake on a nature reserve. There was also the company of good old friends, of promise for the future. But there was much more; the starlight on the bits of quartz-like pebbles on the track in the woods at the back of the old mining village some friends of mine called home. Hawks from the hill in sunset, the orange gold just showing through in bands beneath the clouds as if in token of what might lie in store.

And then there were the rooks; a vast and spreading army in the woods, tumbling through the clouds and scraps of blue and silver in the October sky over the green of the village, keeping vast council in the remnants of the Forest. It was like the coloured hoods of my friends and the black mantles of the rooks were almost synonymous, the heart of the woods in winter both brooding and benevolent.

These were friends from Newbury and the ties were strong as any family. On my first visit they were setting up a social centre and looking at a massive house to set up in. I had dreams of both places later, Betjamen checking them out from under a hat made from folded newspaper, the kitchens in the basement busy with the foundations of some kind of new world order. For years, for me, it was an anchor point, my point of home and the strongest connection to the counter culture I was still just about a part of. While I was no longer at that point particularly politically engaged, it meant a lot to be somehow in connection with it all, there seemed a continuity that was at least symbolic.

And though I have since returned to a corner of this southern county, I cannot help salute everything old friends still choose to represent, just as I watch the movement rolling on, evolving first into the anti-capitalist demos, later to the Climate Camps. Perhaps there is a danger in putting too much faith in protest as the one and only means to the way forward. It has a massive role to play but can never be the only answer. What’s really needed now more than anything is a greater acknowledgement that we are all in this mess together and must find our way beyond it bonded by the knowledge of the common problem; a world whose biosphere is on the brink, whose store of cheap energy that has placed our lifestyles on a kind of pedestal for so long is beginning to run dry.

Protest can sometimes be portrayed as counterproductive to the cultivation of this sense of shared predicament. But to deny the role it has to play is to underestimate the forces that have such a massive impact on our daily lives. We need to change direction en masse and protest can be the necessary nudge to those in high places who would not choose to do so otherwise. Its necessity is defined by its opposite; the mentality that says nothing is wrong even as we helter skelter to a day that will at the very least be a monumental challenge. Even if it achieves nothing but communicating the sense that we are sleepwalking and that we must wake up, protest can constitute an alarm call that we need as badly now as ever.

And so the knowledge of good people gives me hope, just as there is hope in the far flung places, a hope informed perhaps of nothing but endurance, of the places waiting for us to come back to them, to mark them on our wanders on a winter’s day, to take that feeling back with us and hold it dear, before we are enfolded once again by media and chatter or maybe just the steady warmth of common human company.

It is this that bolsters my expectations for what we are faced with, that - just as we must live with whatever the future may hold - there are many who can help to lead the way, whose vision is formed of far more than some list of endless anti’s; they hold the cradle of the way ahead, of what it means to show some faith in the kind of world we could still bring about. Beneath the glacial tip of vocal protest there is a groundswell that is growing every day; of taking responsibility for what we eat or otherwise consume, for what we grow, for how we engage in the political spheres on even microcosmic levels, for how we can help foster what remains or can be revived of our communities.

It is perhaps a longshot, the faith it shows is maybe bloodyminded. But it is an attitude, a stance that says we will not turn our backs on future generations, on what survives around the corner, on communities a thousand miles away threatened by eviction for mines that only feed our dependence on a sea of pointless crap. The feelings of conviction I am trying to describe are inspired by a sense of what lies on the line and a sense of hope for what may lie in store.

This is something Hardy may have understood and perhaps he would be have been heartened that there are those who have the opportunity to do more than mourn the passing of the days, who strive to hold onto the personal, onto what is immediate and real, as well as call in a vision of how things could hopefully still be.

Returning through the woods the other day, the rooks were also coming home, calling out in their massed numbers as they passed above the trees, speaking of journeys, of what was coming in, of fondness and belonging. Maybe you will hear them if you wander in the hollows and high places. Maybe their song will help to lift your heart, despite the trials of the times that we are faced with, maybe their chorus can stir us to meet the much maligned but somehow still decipherable promise that tomorrow holds if we can only listen to her call.

The Field

This week they are trying Tony Blair and we all have cause to cast our minds back and think about the things that we have lost because of him. The tragedy is that it could have been so different, that there was so much expectation for a very different future waiting in the wings. Nearly seven years ago, I’d wandered on the Downs in the sun and savage wind of what was still a newly Millennial spring. Amid the cries of burgeoning war there was some strange, undeniable hope, like it was rising up from underground, like it was the spring itself, all the more apparently perennial for the carnage that we all so strongly willed would not come to pass.

For my own part I hadn’t had the easiest of winters but I’d read a lot and fallen back on the music, learned a few good tunes and now my luck was changing and I had some things I could be truly grateful for. So my thoughts that day were on the hope the coming summer held, on the new green vividness of all the hills around me as well as memories of happier times and how they now seemed to be coming round full circle. When I went back to the city, I carried a piece of chalk as a token for the returning warmth and what the future seemed to hold in store.

Things did not work out. Many things that happened in the next few weeks were not without their toll; spoke of the almost unbearable juxtaposition of destruction and love. Back home, a pile of newspapers were waiting with the savage details of the news. When I finally got the chance to read them they spelt it all out all too clearly: a burning city, the unknown dead and scores of children wrapped in bandages, the weeping mothers, the boy who’d lost his family besides both arms. There was sense of shadow over everything for our being at war, for our part in that bombardment. Meanwhile rocket attacks scurried over soldiers in Camp Dogwood and the days and nights were marked out by near misses and later by more severe calamities, crowds of angry Iraqis storming buildings, lives lost overnight as our own safe havens were overrun, to say nothing of what we had helped bring about for the people of the country.

There was a haemorrhaging of beauty and of life. Everything seemed biblical; nomads in the wastegrounds of Baghdad were not without horses amid the scraps of metal and the tiny fires and, despite the horror, it was like we were living in a tale that had not ended and whose roots went back for hundreds of years if not longer, like everything Iraq still had to offer, its cradling of civilisation, its older ruins, its roots, the courage of its people: all of this cried out for deliverance, for recognition, honour.

Love and war spoke equally at once. George Bush, as the poet Chris Preddle put it, rode into the Dawn upon a tank. Today, I wish with every piece of me that it will soon be over, the news of bombings still like body blows for any kind of hope. We should not forget the pain of those now living in Iraq when seeking to call to account the ones who led us there.

In that daunting early day just after the invasion there was a sense of how things could work out, the full extent of the utter lack of planning had not become clear, there was a sense that a nation willing to invest so much in bombardment would surely have some kind of plan in place for what came after. But that brief dawn before the sinking in of monumental mismanagement, of the level of corruption of an institution who simply never gave a fuck, that all too narrow window still seemed full of some promise. Repressed minorities were rising up and there was no shadow then of the ethnic tensions that would follow.

The legacy of all of this stretches over all of us and all of us have been sullied, or wounded or worse. A year later the US election loomed as the fate of Fallujah hung in the balance, televison pictures of massed ranks of tanks and APC’s lining the roads to the city and this was surely Armageddon made only too real. It was inconceivable that Bush would get in for yet another term and unbearable to keep track of such a closely run determination. And yet there was a counter force, the shopkeepers in the Midlands who seemed to hold some kind of secret, some galvanising force of spirit that met what would have otherwise been despair.

So I hope, with the Chilcot enquiry, that Blair will really be given the grilling he deserves, for a start. We all know all too well just how he led us down the garden path, but some kind of official stamp could help us all come to terms with what our chief elected representative helped to lead us into, a chance to proclaim from the highest platform that we did not want this for a moment, a chance for some kind of real justice.

There can be no pleasure however much the man may squirm and it shall be interesting to see whether he is as unapologetic as his former spin doctor in chief. How does a man live with the knowledge he has been instrumental in sending ten of thousands to their deaths? The deception of unaccountability is on a par with that which led us into this, a chorus of bloody Halleluiah’s, a zeitgeist of a level of zeal coupled with a policy amounting to criminal insanity.

Whether this enquiry will or even can oblige in delivering somekind of just retribution in this respect remains to be seen. In the meantime we must carry on as best as we are able. Our every breath helps to determine the kind of world that lies ahead and knowing this gives us reason to continue; knowing that we all can make a difference, even if that difference is simply a matter of cherishing that which is dear while holding out the necessary hope that we can all someday put behind us the aftershocks of such an ill-conceived, barbaric use of force.

A Noon Day Star

Waking yesterday was like a minor miracle; the world was snowbound, even quieter than normal around here, the muffling up of noise by the blanketing of snowfall left a world that was almost silent and somehow strangely charged. But last night, with the news, it is like sadness or dismay but some sound sense of things has not departed, the sense that things are at a woeful ebb but that more hope, more force of attitude will surely still return because it must.

Perhaps negotiations were destined to fail by the standards we had set for them, perhaps it’s better that we are not locked into some binding half-arsed settlement when the situation calls for so much more. The road to Copenhagen was a long one, which makes it all the harder that we have so little now to show for it. But this must still be just the beginning of a mettling of wills to bring about a treaty that is in any real way acceptable.

We all know what’s at stake, we all know the gravity of our collective situation. But our fate is not yet settled. What’s clear, what the summit shows above all else is that we must put faith in the power of the world’s people themselves to affect the course of history. Efforts by our governments are surely to be welcomed but even the most effective, binding targets are quite meaningless if they do not have the will of the people to support them. And the absence of such targets puts only more responsibility on our shoulders; as individuals and communities.

And besides all this, it seems our governments are bound by an economic model of constant growth that is as much of a problem as - and which in any case goes a long way to beget - any number of chimneys, any amount of oil of dirty coal. These things are twinned, go hand in hand; without a major shift of fundamental paradigms we are locked into a model of destruction that renders any summit little more than a frantic rearranging of the deckchairs.

The future comes up from the ground, from underneath our feet, and is borne out in the visions that we hold, is breathed to life by the extent that we can imagine something different, by the scope of our diagnosis of the ills that we sit side by side with and accept as normal or just inescapable. The system, or simply the dynamics of a global infrastructure built on oil and the long distance transport of all kinds of goods, determines what we must seek to overcome. Power, and heat, the means of keeping our machines in motion; these sources are a boon but so smoothly given it is hard not to take them for granted. We must face up to the cost of our daily consumption and the more we can provide for ourselves in ways that we can clock, the more we can wean ourselves off what is extraneous, then the more we can come to value the great gifts the world has laid at our door and which we daily work away at; beyond what we can actually afford, beyond all scale of what is human, of any sense of where the balance lies.

There are those who might welcome in what’s coming as some kind of cleansing, or who at any rate value the wild above our human ship, call it what you will; civilisation, dystopia or collective hallucination made real. And the scale of our various imbalances are not helped by the maths that state that there are more people than the earth can actually support, that we are eating into resources of all future generations. And yet we are all caught up in a dream and for the lucky ones amongst us it is beautiful; life, health, friendships, family, the thousand watersheds and markings out in life that make it meaningful. For many, any kind of wish to see it all come crumbling down seems simply intransigent or worse.

The reality though is that a major change is on its way, whether from a climate driven to the brink, or just our dwindling resources of all kinds and that the road will in every likelihood be at least rocky at times. Which simply makes it all the more imperative that we must prepare while there is time, that if we cherish all that is good about a culture, about what it means to lead good lives, to value our humanity, we must change our customs and our course to keep hold of what is meaningful. And, crucially, we may just about be able to achieve this if we can pull ourselves away from everything that no longer serves, from anything that goes beyond what is needed. And comfort is a human need, even if we may need to redefine how we come by it. The truly good things are generally not bought or sold and it may well be, if we can come together, that we will be richer - in time, in company - than many of us are with how things stand.

Meanwhile our governments will hammer out their treaties and I hope that doing so over the coming months and even years may go some way to addressing the most fundamental imbalances in the global economic system. I hope that justice can be agreed upon between North and South, just as I hope the southern hinterland within our northern nations can find a greater voice, that we can build a future based on individual awakening to responsibility for our every action, for our every pattern of behaviour. We need not wait for global politicians to forge the way ahead.

Here, around my flat, around the hills surrounding this old town, the snow lies thick and speaks of long established settlement, of peace. All is quiet and the feeling still persists that things can somehow still work out. Whether this will actually be so will depend on a shifting state of gears, of stillness waking up to motion, even to a storm of movement. But for now, the world is quiet and though the logic says we should be only too dismayed, the feeling of some promise is still with us, albeit battered, albeit even partially betrayed for the time being.

In a few days time the sun will shift, the days will grow again, we will stumble from our hangovers into another year, bright or harsh or coldly real but clearer and we’ll carry on because we each of us carry as great a potential for hope as any international gathering, because the future can be found in what we choose to carry in our actions, in our every intent, in the dreams we choose to keep alive because not to do so never was an option and every one of us holds power equal to the miracle of the noon day star enshrined by Buddhist philosophy, the miracle that lets us take our place upon this earth that we must now all hold as dear as any other relative.

Torch Bearers

You could see it like a gash on the horizon, beginnings of embankments marked in white from all the Dorset chalk. It was only too familiar but far too sad to see by any measure; now it seems another road by yet another backward looking council is advancing at full tilt and all the trials of those who’ve tried to stop it have come to nothing. Like England is scarred now not by almighty programmes from on high, but piecemeal, prosaically, facilitated by a trough of ill advise or apathy.

Dorset County Council – the ones who’ve pushed this road from the beginning – state on their own website that Dorset’s coast and countryside is amongst the most varied and beautiful in England and is believed by many to be the County’s most important asset. Thanks to Thomas Hardy, its hinterland is of international renown and it is where that hinterland meets the coast, where the ridge that makes it way down from the heartland plateau of Salisbury Plain, that the full damage of the road becomes quite clear.

As I write the scar grows ever wider and a line of hills that stretches up past Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon on the Chilterns, a line that forms the backbone of the country, has now been desecrated for the sake of dubious expediency. The road had been proposed for nearly twenty years with high levels of local support, given that they were told that it would solve the town’s congestion even though, as Natural England stated in their objection at the road’s public inquiry; “[the scheme’s] advantages are limited and likely to be achievable in large measure by other means.”

The very need for the scheme was questioned by both The Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Woodland Trust. This was brushed aside by both the Council and the Planning Inspector however as if the presence of unquestionable congestion justified tackling this through increasing road space; a mock solution that had been discredited more than a decade ago. The adoption of such a psseudo solution today points to either an absolute absence of vision, endemic crookedness, sheer stupidity or perhaps simply the inability to convince a population that another road will not change anything, other than lock us in further to a pattern of environmental degradation and the cultural loss that comes with it.

There were other casualties besides the ridge. Two Mile Coppice - a patch of woodland and part of a SSSI - has now been carved up, effectively depriving the town of a much loved walking spot. It was the only remaining piece of ancient woodland within the Borough of Weymouth and Portland and, like all ancient woodland, had taken centuries to evolve. Compare this with the ‘mitigation’ package that somehow justifies the tearing in two of a nature reserve; the offer of the use of a piece of secondary woodland half a mile away, cut off from the town now by the road and containing only a fraction of the richness of the habitat, offered to console or otherwise entice the owners of Two Mile Coppice - The Woodland Trust - whose many objections at the inquiry were rebuffed with breathtaking simplicity by Dorset County Council. Amongst other things, the Council stated that the benefits outweigh the harm and that the secondary woodland could be an equal or greater resource, like pieces of land are theirs to carve up, like doling out one plot can justify the annihilation of the other.

And this, in echoes of other SSSI’s destroyed or damaged right across the country, has taken place despite national, regional and local legislation, including the Natural Environmental and Rural Communities Act and the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. English Heritage at any rate did not object, were happy with a payout that enabled a survey of the barrows on the portion of ridge that soon would no longer exist.

There was also the dissecting of a local housing estate which - among the predictable disadvantages of forced relocation, division of community, noise and air pollution - meant that many well used cycle routes away from the main roads are now impossible to use. Other land destroyed, damaged or rendered semi-sterile by the noise and toxicity of passing cars includes Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Lorton Meadows Nature Reserve and an and area designated of Local Landscape Interest. Bincombe Valley and its peace has now been lost. Add to this the marring of enjoyment of well known and well used long distance footpaths; Wey Valley Walks, the Dorset Jubilee Trail, the South West Coast Path itself and it’s clear the building of this road is a full blown tragedy.

Why was it built? Who funded it? How did it come to pass that it was allowed to go ahead? As I’ve already mentioned, there was strong local support for the scheme among much - but clearly not all - of Weymouth's population. And - as also mentioned earlier - it reflects too the growing gap between local and national governmental thinking. This is partly a reflection of the engineering background of many County Council planning men, which fundamentally skews their entire mentality. It also tells of the kind of money that is still available for big schemes like roads and bridges, even trams on better years. Small scale and smart schemes - workplace and school travel plans, more cycle paths, car clubs – these things do not possess the same appeal for many councillors as large and slick construction contracts, are perhaps harder to sell as ‘doing something’, do not appear to carry the flame of ‘legacy.’ The big irony, considering the much promulgated Green Team Great Britain is that this road was partly funded, and largely justified by the 2012 Olympics, Weymouth hosting the yatching events for the occasion.

The coming disaster was acknowledged by the turnout of those already mentioned who objected to the scheme at the inquiry. But, in a saddening echo of the eighties and nineties, it was by then a largely foregone conclusion. There were others who stepped in, a man called Noddy who set up camp in an oak in Two Mile Coppice in the freezing cold of mid December, who was joined by others but by far too few. And yet they held the promise of what’s needed, of what in other times and places has come to pass and could still do so again. The flame at Two Mile Coppice was shortlived, but the ember of dissent the symbol of that protest holds could still be carried for what lies ahead.

It is tragic that at such a time, with the carbon impact of road transport only all too clear that a strong resurgent movement casts off as unfashionable or strategically second place the fight against the forces of road building. What makes Weymouth no less tragic, and which should make it stand as a bitter but vital reminder, is that we know we can fight – and win – against road building and on a national level, which should make taking on local councils relatively easy.

Thomas Hardy made the landscape of West Dorset famous in his time, a fame that lives today around the world. And it was a love for landscape that moved me and many more to join the protests against roads when we did. Global warming almost seemed abstract then against the all too real and visible butchery of hills that was taking place around us. For me the feeling still holds; not one issue over another because, in many ways, they are inseparable. The feeling holds not just through the corresponding tally of road transport to emissions, or the pathological degree of insulation from our natural surroundings when travelling in a car. The state of today’s and tomorrow’s climate is perhaps to some extent a reflection of how we treat our landscapes and our hills. The scientific consensus we now have over emissions is of course of indispensable value. But we should no be too quick to dismiss finer sentiments, the undersung feelings of belonging and connection, of living up to a feeling of greater responsibility.

As the saying goes, what we do to the land we do to ourselves. This is in no small part reflected in the writings of Hardy who was in his way somehow married to the land. His work speaks of lovers looking out for one another as one rounded a track on the side of a hill, reddle men making their way over down and heath for days like they were almost aboriginal in their intimacy with the ground below and all around them. Figures on the skyline fading with the light, stood on barrows that were in themselves like tiny, smaller hills upon the back of larger ones when you saw them from any kind of distance. He describes an intenseness of connection where a place is more than just personified. It is in it's way like a world, represents and actually carries a force, holds a character that encompasses the other lesser figures so that their passions reflect the feeling of the place that they inhabit, seem almost trivial by comparison or somehow lifted up and made a part of the wider scene. At his best, he evokes some sense of common blood, of common destiny running through both place and the people upon it so that the stories of love and betrayal, of tragedy and whatever scraps of redemption can be found in hearts of sadness seem somehow of a greater order, a pattern that cannot be totally defined but somehow sits there with us.

Hardy’s greatest poem, or at least the one that has stayed with me above the rest, was ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in which he describes listening to the bird, in the twilight on a December’s evening at the beginning of the twentieth century. It ends;

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Today, with the world Hardy knew and sought to preserve in collective memory seemingly vanished it is our charge to somehow constitute a move back towards something that resembles the best that it contained. There may still be hope for this, for the kind of world we still will have some say in, but not if more roads like Weymouth’s are officially approved and widely ignored. We must keep hold of our hills, cherish them in the full knowledge that life depends upon their preservation. They hold more than our past and sense of place; they keep our very future and hold the power to awake, even when - horrifically but nonetheless especially - they have been taken from us. Weymouth reminds us all of what there is to fight for. We should do so quickly, while there’s time.

The Ground On Which We Stand

Where there is sorrow, there is often also gold if we can see it. After a summer punctuated by occasional feuds - leant a sense of grandeur by being described as riots - perpetuated by a predictably moronic few - the earth has opened up and where there was tension now we have treasure and joy. The recent trove in Staffordshire resonates on the highest levels with memories of life before the Normans, of what it means to be English, of a time when this Island was being redefined by conflict and influx and treaties and even periods of peace, all fuelled or abetted by artistry, the power of gifts, of loyalty, of hammering out some sort of steady future.

Traditionally, so much of what is wrong with our country, of what is wrong with our establishment has been layed quite firmly at the door of the Normans, their invasion helps define the things we think we lost. They are the fascist boot boys of our past; crop haired, warlike, thugs by any common definition that systematically came and put us down, kept us all under the thumb with their castles and doomsdays and tithes. They cut short a flowering of our newborn native English culture, swept it away and replaced it with a long lived imprint of oppression. They live on in the vestiges of original blue blood, in corpulent second chambers, in an old mentality that kicked off with the subjugation of our Celtic neighbours and wound up to a global empire, a mentality that sits still among the upper echelons of many of our institutions.

And, of course much of this is true – the brutality of their invasion left a scar that has never left folk memory. But there was also a degree of continuity; most of Norman systems of government rested on older foundations, even if they did decimate the English ruling class, even if the conquest was a savage travesty. But equally, the story of an Anglo Saxon golden age so beloved of radicals is, to some extent, the stuff of pure mythology. We still know relatively little of the centuries that helped found the English state. But Anglo Saxon rulers could be autocratic, even ruthless. And while much of the system of modern government has its origins in those times, it took many centuries of trials and revisions to make them democratic by any measure we would recognise. But the myths are still persistent; moot mounds in the Shires where almost everybody had a say - so long as you weren’t a woman, or a slave – more communal agriculture, outright land ownership for the peasantry, a place where dynasties and rulers grew up almost out of the ground, formed in the same morass that brought into being both the people and the language themselves. Pleasant myths in any case and not without foundation.

And as the more recent confrontations in Manchester only go to show, the issue of Englishness, of the English people, could not be more pertinent. Any brief look at websites now dealing with the Anglo Saxons will take you to those invoking the spirit of Old England, some of them interested in history, some in politics, some in race, sometimes all three. The appeal to some sense of roots is understandable, not least when the Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scottish have such strong cultures to fall back on as the political embodiment of the United Kingdom stands ready to dissolve, when for centuries English identity has been so bound up with that of Britain. In any case, there is a scramble now for identity and meaning here and this has been exploited by those who’d preach a line of racial purity, of the English as some kind of modern underdog in a world they can no longer understand.

It hardly needs saying that a look again at the centuries of immigration and intermittent struggle of the so called Dark Ages reminds us that we are, most of us, a people of mongrels and incomers, and that we were eventually united for all our diversity. But many far right pundits now would emphasise that while this country was formed of originally different peoples, they were at least all of Northern European stock, they were in any case bounded by cultures that had more in common than that which would set them apart. And this is wheeled out as some argument against the multiculturalism of today, as if we can draw such basic parallels with an age where the confines of the known world did little more than stretch beyond the Mediterranean. Even little more than a century ago, the common experience for many in this country was that the next valley and its villages was almost another land so that, even with a degree of shared European culture, the experience of integration in the centuries after Roman rule could not have been in any way less than the challenges we face today.

Whether we like it or not, the world has been changed almost beyond recognition by the last century and the slower grind of burgeoning modernity beyond it that helped to pave the way. Communication, travel of people and culture, of ideas, to say nothing of the legacy of Empire; it is nothing less than inevitable that the places we inhabit now reflect this. Yes, there is a growing recognition that population pressure in the UK is an issue we cannot afford to ignore. But we should never submit and give credence to anyone who would seek division along any kind of ethnic line. Times change and things move on; our culture should reflect that, not harken back simplistically to an era we really know so little about.

My mother is Irish and my father from the North and our family joined the bands of incomers upon our southern coast, growing up in the lee of tracks and hillforts formed by a people that may have gone to Cornwall or to Wales or who settled in among what became an Anglo Saxon culture. Dig a little and there are relatively few today in most parts of the country whose family have been there more than a few generations. Tensions often only arise among the working class - demographically less mobile and harder hit by the financial malaise, who feel most overlooked by tides of modern movement. New horizons come from either a degree of affluence or a willingness to run the risk of vagrancy; to fly or trudge or take some kind of chance, to follow work or markets or live as simply as a bird.

But for a great number of us, movement; either ours or our forebears, is the predominant reality. We are all part of something new while keeping hold of what is meaningful, “neither here nor there and therefore home” and truly home is what we choose to make it. Cultures are not mutually exclusive, they can inform and enrich one another; the Pakistani in Luton might remind us that we once all came from tribal cultures, the Indian family in Birmingham speaks of a common thread of culture if you go back far enough, of Indo-European mother tongues and migrations almost lost to history. Once, we were all farmers in our villages, told stories, prized our silver plate and heirloomed weaponry, held our myths as sacred. Beyond any extremes of creed we all share a common heritage; that we are of the earth and any new arrival here can tell us in a language beyond words of the richness of our roots.

Whether we feel those roots are predominately in the soil beneath us, or somewhere over the water or far beyond the sea, is perhaps besides the point. With time we all belong to the land on which we stand, even with the memory of other origins. But the world for now is in a state of flux, we are today connected in a way never seen before, both from the internet and global media and by what has become clearly connected fate; climate change knows no political or geographic boundary and war and bombs affect us all. We are all here together, we live together, we rise or fall together irrespective of ancestry or creeds. And perhaps a greater grasp of how much our history can mean can help us find some better understanding of those regions of the world where cultural continuity is still so highly prized. Perhaps it could lead us to some better sense of shared predicament and the will to find our way beyond it.

Store Wars

We all know that the thing it represents is out of both order and any kind of sensible proportion, and yet the law of economy at all costs, or the greasy wheels of convenience still pull in so many, nagged by a vague sense of guilt or blatantly not bothered, collaborating with the ones that oil the slope to cultural and environmental stickiness. Tesco is apparently in full force and nobody knows how to stop them. Well, not quite nobody. For the last three years a protest camp has been enduring some decidedly patchy weather in objection to a package of development.

First, the local council wants to widen and straighten an old road lined with ancient woodland. Then, there is the imposition of a massive housing estate in an already overcrowded part of the country. And finally, to add a scatological level of insult to these injuries there will be a spanking new Tesco, to add to all the others in the area already. But that's OK because they'll harvest the rainwater; they do care after all. So forget the lorries thundering through the local roads as this leviathan is constructed. Forget another carpark visible from Mars. Forget the impacts on local small businesses. The council have once again caved in to the pressures of a consortium whose overbearing style and scale are so far subject to no bounds.

There may be a political solution if enough people call for changes to the planning regulations to break the cartel of the major supermarket chains, if the politicians find the backbone then to bring them in. A change like that would go a long way to restoring faith in public office. Until then it has fallen to the strange but satisfying resurgence of on site protest culture. The protestors at Titnore Woods have endured snow, the copious summer rain and every other form of adversity that goes with life on camp in order to stand up for what should be fundamental; sound decision making at a local level, a respect for the little ancient woodland we have left, the believe that local business should be supported, not undercut by effective conquest on a global scale, aided and abetted by institutional weakness or a good old fashioned sickly dose of corruption and mendacity.

So now the stage is set; the good, the true, the outraged, bluerinsed, the allegedly unwashed; all lay in wait or are more mobilised. This sleepy seaside town that once played host to Haile Sellassie after his departure from Abyssinia, that holds rumours of undergound rivers, that guards the passage to some of the finest hillforts in the south of England, this place will see a struggle that should be repeated wherever Tesco rears another head, from the villages half hidden by the beautiful flat bleakness of the Fens to the tourist-heavy beachcombed towns of Thailand. It should help us all see their encroachments for what they truly are; a blatant slap in the face of any aspiration for a better future, any aspiration that values both community and environment. Tesco should be met with outrage and defiance at every turn. We should hold responsible every politician with a hand in their steady rise. And we should raise a storm of noise that calls for the changes to our planning laws that we so clearly need.

Down the road from the camp, another hillfort stands that looks out on the coastal plain whose flat and sometimes brown ploughed fields sit golden now for harvest. In the summer they used to put on Shakespeare in a hollow just outside the ramparts. The last time I was there, I met a local woman who had just come back from Scotland and who sang in Gaellic, so it was like the boundaries of both time and distance had somehow become blurred. Once, this was the edge of town, some final breaking free of a sprawl that would already have seemed neverending if you walked it all from a centre three miles off. Now another gap is filled in the steady dot to dot that marks out this portion of the Coastal Plain, Sussex's most fertile ground; always highly populated but now half buried beneath paving slabs and tarmac, this latest stretch set to be further corrupted by an all too familiar monster.

The diggers are already moving in and the traffic from the nearby carraigeway will now be augmented by that of those funnelled to and from the extra houses, to and from the not-so-super supermarket. There is still hope, but not if we don't realise the trouble that we're in, the threat to livelihood and life itself that these wide aisled and flouro-lit hangers in a war for our custom represent. Whether or not this particular batch of new houses meets any of the standards of that much used and abused word - sustainability - whether the road in question could be managed better or just simply left alone, the imposition of another superstore renders all of this obscene and vindicates the protesters in their every effort.

Once this plain was flooded with incomers from Saxony, all in their halls and sunken sheds. Not so long back a wave of commuters made its presence felt with row after row of mock tudor semi's. They came from all over Britain and quickly settled, half detached, in their fine and semi sterile dormitories. Now the sense of community will be rendered even more tenuous, a bunch of housing so far out, so ill served by any other means of transport that cars will be all but indispensable.

But it looks as though one hall at least is going up, a mass communal roof that speaks of feasts but holds no fire or kinship. It's toll is hidden and comes with a promise of service. But if we let it make itself indispensible, if we let it ruin our local businesses as well as the fields that it sits on, not to mention the farmers it chooses to keep on the breadline for now, it will surely turn, it will crank up the prices on a population with nowhere left to go to. The signs are written in the soil that change must happen soon. For the measure of that change, for a lesson in the integrity and unblinkered clarity that can serve to see us right, look no further than the people in the woods in Worthing.

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Please sign the petition calling for a Public Inquiry into the development at Titnore:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/TitnoreWoods/

The Time is Now

Sometimes it’s easier to see, the sense of things in general clicking in to place, the will of both the planet and the people to survive. So here we are, in all our tribes, the ragged bands of Rastafaried drummers in the hills, the people nestled down in bungalows and high rise flats in flat or rugged counties, brewing tea. Flocks of lawyers all black suited sweeping through the streets from one bar to another, football fans like families reared on lager, fleets of lorry drivers living in the backs of cabs, cabbies on their final run, early risers in their silent floats, clinking down garden paths, postmen in their masses who might be samurai on Fridays. Northerners on trains between the rambling cities and their acres of milled glass, cheerily bending their vowels, while Cornish in the sun sit wisely drinking pints of beer and telling stories of a dream which is not dead. Expatriates and immigrants, carrying their corners of far countries. Emos, Goths and metallers, hatching dreams of a new England in a thousand midland factories. And all the hordes at festivals, caught in raptures of the crowds, mouthing words their friends can’t hear but catch the meaning of. The silent mass of gardeners, pruning thorns and keeping out an ear for reassurance on the radio. Scores of kids full of their future and a rising flame of hope to meet it with, like all the gangs and knifes and brutal day to day on the estates could somehow be turned round with nothing more than pure intent. And all our lives and all our thousand million quirks of fate, our occupations, preoccupations, the things that keep us going; somehow all these things and everyone of us must raise our expectations up, lift ourselves up with the shining of the sun, somehow we must all realise that here today there is a thing worth fighting for. Not questionable interventions, not bombing our way to an apparent better world, but a fight to live and act like everything depended on it.

There is a promise still of summer sun and everything to strive for. Who knows how long each spell will last but we must drink it in, remember it even when the clouds are with us. Even in the teeth of gales and weeks of drubbing downpours we must carry something of the sun within our chests. Time heals pain but now the time is on us and we must make our mark or stumble on into oblivion. There’s never been a more pressing need for change and we must all be united with the sense of it. There is one common purpose, one persistent goal the world should work towards. Our earth is at a tipping point and we must all do all we can to bring her back.

For too long we’ve been seduced by comforts and any form of distraction you could put a name to. We’ve been swept up in a trance of never ending progress, of constantly expanding economics that have no end in sight. Money without end or else a world of similar longevity. We cannot have them both. And everyone of us must engage in what it takes to bring our ship around, to act to the very best of our abilities, to wake up those too sullen or too cynical to see the challenge of the day that’s our inheritance. Challenge and a charge of force like fire, the willpower that’s needed, the wind in everybody’s sails to do their best. We are now under trial and will all rise or fall depending on the quality of our commitment.

So breathe in days like this when everything is with us, let them charge your soul. For we need every scrap and motherload of spirit we can muster, allied to the concrete change in our behaviour and our expectations of those who govern us. And really we all govern our collective destiny and need to act as one. We are all in our clans of common interest, in our separate states and continents but will never succeed in this if we cannot see the common quality of our task, the inescapably shared nature of our fate.

We should not need to rise against our nominated rulers, nor they feel driven to put down the ones they think may challenge them. We should be restrained in any situation of potential conflict. We should all strive for that which can still be negotiated on. But we must come together now, we all must speak as with one voice; speak of unity and passion married to the greatest clarity and vision for the road that lies ahead. It’s not enough to hope that all is safely in the hand of experts. Everybody has a part to play and we must do so every bit as fully as we can. But more than that we need to act together, patch up our sprawling communities, look for allies and unlikely common ground, be outspoken when threatened by indifference or compromises where they go too far. But never loose sight of the chance we have for salvaging what should never have been put in any danger but has been so inescapably through millennia of our long learning curve as human beings; that goal we cannot take our sights from; a world where life can still sustain itself, a world were life remains a source of joy.