RosieBell

Punctured in Swaledale

I had done the wettest cycle of my life in order to get to Keld in Swaledale.  My friend H., who is from Yorkshire and knows the Dales well, had recommended the village as quiet and with good pubs further down the Dale.  I was staying in Keld Bunkhouse, part of a campsite that includes a Mongolian yurt.  The Bunkhouse is a well-run hostel about a half mile from the village, with a pleasant vibe and a fantastic location.  Right by the front door  behind a low mossy wall one of the Swale waterfalls roars - and of course after the day of rain I had come through it was in full spate.  Also, after the rain, it was a startlingly sunny, breezy day. 

I had the bunkhouse to myself after the coast to coast walkers had left. I was staying another night in Keld and I strolled to the village, which is a few houses, holiday cottages, a church and a Countryside and Heritage Centre  giving some facts about the place (lead mining, sheep farming and tourism) and a quote from Auden, who loved Swaledale:- 

Lately, in that dale of all Yorkshire’s the loveliest,
Where, off its fell-side helter-skelter, Kisdon Beck
Jumps into Swale with a boyish shouting,
Sprawled out on grass, I dozed for a second.

Keld


Wall, Keld

As no doubt there was once a pub for lead miners, a church for sheep farmers there was now a leaflet for me the tourist, showing a walk to the waterfalls.  The paths were muddy but I picked my way round to see one, along the Swale that was pushing hard beneath its cliffs and then walked back to the Bunkhouse to sit by the one that roared by the door.  Waterfalls are hypnotic like open fires - there was  brown water like long fronds of kelp diving over and over, and I sat in the sun in a wonderfully contented state of physical tiredness.  Guys turned up in kayaks, paddled along the river, got out to inspect the fall and then gave up. That would not be white-water but death water falling with a Niagara force, though only a few feet high.




Waterfall, Keld

I  went to get my cycle for a short run to Tanhill.  I felt the tyres, and the front one was a little soft.  I pumped it up, but gave up the idea of cycling very far - I was tired anyway - and took the cycle along the road near the river to see the waterfalls - small but violent- the bits of tunnel left over from lead-mining, the cliffs and to feel the general quietness of the place.  An occasional coach passed by, very stupidly down the narrow steep hill, and the other tourists were kayakers and waterfall-watchers.

Tunnel

Every time I returned from viewing something to my cycle I would give the front tyre another feel.  What should have been serene enjoyment under rare sunshine was marred by a slight anxiety  (according to evolutionary biology a natural state for humans who once lived in fear of predators or starvation).  I had to face it - I would have to mend a puncture and I am very bad at mending punctures. 

I got back to the big shed place where my bicycle was housed and took off the front tyre.  I found a bucket, filled it and ran the tube through it - no bubbles to show holes.  I had a spare tube, and with the usual cack-handed tussling, got that on to the wheel.  I rammed the pump over the valve to pump it up, and then when I removed the pump, the end of the valve, the little piece that screws into a Presta , fell off.  So the tube was unusable. 

I had another spare tube and wrestled that on to the wheel.  As so often, when I do this, a last piece of the tube was not tucked under the beading but bulging out.  I tried a few times, got it properly in position, pumped it up, and then another end of a valve was rolling on the floor.

At this point I gave up and went to make some dinner.  Afterwards I put the tube with the slow-puncture leak back on, thinking I could keep pumping it until I found a bike shop.  I asked the owner of the site where the nearest one was, and he said there was one in Reeth, about 10 miles away, at the other end of Swaledale.  This sounded like an easy run, so I left the cycle and went to the pub with filthy blackened hands.

The bunkhouse was now full of all-women walking groups from the north of England who were fairly muddy.  It had been a fine day but of course the ground had been soaked from the day before.  As for the waterfall, even a day's fine weather had lessened its power

The next morning it was raining slightly.   I set out on my bike, and after going half a mile or so, the tyre had got too soft, so stopped and pumped it up. The road was a switchback, and I continued, stopping every quarter mile or so to pump again.  I pushed on a few yards then realised I could hear a distinct hissing from the tyre, and then suddenly felt that the laces on my right boot had wound round one pedal. After a scary second I stopped, and tried to unwind the lace.  But it wouldn't unwind, and I had to pull out my foot in its fresh clean sock from a nearly dried-out boot on to the wet road and unwind it.  I pumped again, started cycling and realised that this was not going to work, so a few hundred yards from the village of Thwaite got off and pushed the bike to a coffee shop attached to a hotel, where I asked if there was a taxi.  They gave me a number and in twenty minutes a young bloke turned up in a people carrier.  He was a nice chap with red hair, who had been born locally.  Said how pretty Swaledale was in the winter.  Said his usual gig was to drive people out who wanted a drink or to take children to school as the place is depopulating and the schools closing.  One little girl he picked up at 7:15 and brought home at 5pm  -a long day for a child.  I told him my destination was Leyburn and he said, You're going to find Fremington Edge a hard cycle.

As we went through Muker, Gunnerside and the rest on a gently rolling road beside the River Swale I thought what an agreeable cycle this would have been, even under patchy rain.

We got to Reeth, and at the other side of the village, in Fremington, was not just a bike shop but a cycle centre, with a cafe, accommodation, a place to wash your bike - a whole complex devoted to cycling hobbyists and mountain bikers. I despise  mountain biking - thrill seeking, skiers on wheels - but its popularity has really improved cycling infrastructure. Reeth is just a large village (pop 750)  and here was a bike centre with three mechanics.  One,  a woman (I'm always glad to see a woman mechanic so I can think my own ineptness is not sex-linked) changed the rubber lining of my wheel, pumped up my tube and then squeezed it against my face so I could feel the air from the hole, indicating that I must have been blind and/or stupid to miss it, fitted a new tube, saying that I should be using a Schrader tube, not a Presta, and pumped up the back tyre as well. 

Feeling  much happier with a functioning cycle that had had some expert attention I cycled back into Reeth, up its steep streets.  There was a big agricultural show on which I would have quite liked to go to but it cost £6, and I did want to go on my way so went to buy some bread.  On the village green a group of elderly guys were singing and playing guitars and double bass, while being filmed and microphoned by a couple of young media types.  (Note - age discrimination - the young do the filming, while the old are filmed).

They did a song about calling the musters for the Loyal Dales Volunteers, one of those bands of militia put together in case of a Napoleonic invasion.  Because there would be half a dozen guys called Thomas Alderson and a few more John Hirds they used to call the roll by nick-names.  They fitted the following names to a song:-
Grain Tom, Glouremour Tom, Screamer Tom, Poddish Tom, Tarry Tom, Tish Tom, Tripy Tom, Trooper Tom (all Thomas Alderson by name);
Assy Will Bill, Ayny Jack, Aygill Tom Bill, Becka Jack, Brag Tom, Bullet, Bullock, Jammie, Buck Reuben, Butter Geordie, Bowlaway, Brownsa, Jossy, Cis Will, Cotty Joe, Codgy, Cwoaty Jack, Curly, Dickey Tom Johnny, Docken Jammie, Daut, Freestane Jack, Gudgeon Tom, Hed Jack. Awd John, Young John, Jams Jack, Mary Jack, King Jack (all John Hird by name);
Katy Tom Alick, Kit Puke Jock, Kanah Bill, Knocky Gwordie, Lollock Ann Will, Matty Jwoan Ned, Mark Jammie Joss, Moor Close Gwordie, Nettlebed Anty, Peter Tom Willie, Peed Jack, Piper Ralph, Pullan Will, Roberty Will Peg Sam, Rive Rags, Skeb Symy, Slipe, Slodder, Swinny, Spletmeat, Strudgeon Will, Tash, Tazzy Will.

(Looking them up on the internet I'd say the singing group were the Fourum Folk). 

I listened to them for a bit, then went and bought cheese and fruit cake and set off to Leyburn via Fremlington Edge, a notorious hill, or semi-cliff.  I had to push the cycle mostly under a cloudy sky and intermittent spits of rain then as I cruised down the other side through moorland, I heard gunshots. I was cycling alongside a huge military shooting range.  I did the few easy miles to the edge of Leyburn and was looking for signs when someone called, "Rosie - are you Rosie?" and a woman was leaning out of a car window.  It was the owners of the B&B which I had booked.  They had told me they would be out till 5pm as they were going to the agricultural show in Reeth, but having spotted me, said they'd lead me to their place.  I followed them to their farmhouse a little out of Leyburn and was glad to dump my gear and make some tea, eat the bread, Swaledale cheese and local fruit cake I'd picked up in Reeth  while sitting on a bed watching the lunch-time news.

I then cycled a steep down and up to Middleham to see Middleham Castle, the home of Warwick the Kingmaker.  Richard III had lived there and married Warwick's daughter Anne.  I have a vague interest in Richard III - I have read Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time which Christopher Hitchens called "a minor masterpiece".  It has dated - the comic Cockney chairwoman is especially wince-inducing - but I think what Hitchens meant that it is a beginner's guide to examining received opinion and drilling down to sources - an important skill for both academics and bloggers. 

The book opens with Alan Grant, a Scotland Yard detective, in hospital.  He has time on his hands so on seeing a photograph of Richard III he thinks that he doesn't look like a monster and murderer as portrayed by Shakespeare and children's history books.  He co-opts an American research student to look out the original evidence for the case against Richard, and he finds the source is Thomas More's Tudor propaganda derived from Cardinal Morton's (Richard III's enemy) account 

Hitchens says of this:-

Scouring the increasingly meticulous and assertive and well-sourced revisionist literature, I felt a sensation I had experienced only once before, while reading Josephine Tey's minor masterpiece, The Daughter of Time. As fellow addicts of this book will know, it begins with an acceptance of the standard view of Richard III—"Crookback Dick," the usurper, and the murderer of the Little Princes. Then, by slow forensic degrees, it demonstrates that every aspect of this story is an accumulation of lies and later courtier propaganda. The chronicle of Holinshed, the memoir of Sir Thomas More, the drama of Shakespeare himself—all are pitilessly uncovered as the merest conjury and fraud. Even for a reader who has no stake in Tudor spin-doctoring, the effect is a vertiginous one, with all the cargo in the hold slowly turning over. Is one to be left with no illusions? Is the whole pageant a cruel put-up job?

(They have found a body in a Leicester car park which is supposedly Richard's.  Now neo-Yorkists and Royalists are squabbling over where it should be given its final burial.)

Middleham Castle is a colossal ruin with walls high enough and thick enough to give you some sense of what it must have been like to have lived in such a huge fortress.   There's a sculpture of Richard III in white marble.  - rather arresting, with a monstrous form attached to his back. 

Richard III, Middleham Castle

The weather had now turned to short but violent showers.  I walked around Middleham which I had never heard of before. It is a very bright, painted expensive-looking village, famous for its race-horses and the signs on pubs and shops were either of Richard's white boar or horses' heads.  I went to look at the church and hard by it was a glossy, South Forks looking place, which was a big stable complex.  You could see the horses heads poking from their stalls and the stable boys.  I would have expected the fields to be full of galloping horses, but they are of course kept inside and taken out to be exercised.  Well, it explained the prices at the gourmet pub.

I returned to Leyburn and stopped off at the tourist info. The violent showers had passed, the sun had come out and there were a few hours of evening light remaining.  I asked the chap in the tourist info what I should do for an hour or two before dinner and  he recommended a walk along The Shawl to admire the view.  The Shawl is a a series of fields on the edge of one of those Dale drops, with the grand views of the kind that appear on the calendars of a Dales landscape of hills like oceanic waves, and rivers.  People were walking their dogs and children there.  So that until a pub, The Black Swan (very friendly), for dinner and then back to the B&B for telly and bed.

Andrew Mitchell - Cycling Martyr

The nub of the Andrew Mitchell affair is that he is a cyclist.  He was told by the police that he was not allowed to cycle where cars and other wheeled traffic could  but would have to take the pedestrian route.  His anger was justified, and reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's anger because as a lady she was not allowed to walk on the grass in a Cambridge college  (see A Room of One's Own).  As I steamed with Virginia Woolf as she stormed away from the college, so I mentally swore at the policeman along with Andrew Mitchell.

Andrew Mitchell denied he used the word "pleb" but wouldn't enlarge on what he did say.  My theory is that he call the policeman "fucking petrolhead."  The police are petrolheads after all.  Their image of themselves at their most heroic are the car door slamming Sweeney or siren-blasting car chasers in every second Hollywood film. 

Andrew Mitchell - cycling martyr

In our car-and-driver dominated culture that would be a worse insult and far more politically dangerous than "pleb". Class insults are bad, race insults worse, but topping them all is outraging the sense of entitlement the internal combusters have. The only successful street, or rather road politics that occur, are blockades by lorry drivers against rising petrol prices. The government caves in at once, though it will ignore millions marching against a war in Iraq.  The rage that you most often see expressed in this country is road rage by the thwarted motorist, whose sense that he must have total, quick and easy access to every part of the country is as absolute as Charles I's to his divine right to rule.  The internal combusters are the great majority and cities are built and the countryside paved around their needs and desires. Foreign police i.e. grovelling to the repulsive Saudi Arabian government is a direct result of their requirements for oil. 

This of course has not been made explicit.  The tabloids have projected the affair as our heroic police being abused by an arrogant toff,  They won't make explicit to their readers that they are truckling to their pleasure at the thought of a cyclist forced to go pedestrian any more than they tell them that their fascination in three in a bed romps, dressed up as righteous morality and public interest, is simple prurience. The Labour party were happy to follow the populist line and take a chance to poke the Tories, but in fact Labour are bigger petrol eaters than the Tories who at least have  David Cameron and Boris Johnson on bikes.  (Ed Miliband  and Ken Livingstone are taxi and limousine men). They know who fills their petrol tank.

Follow the money?  No - follow the oil traces on the tarmac. 

Andrew Mitchell - the cycling martyr who fought back.  RE-INSTATE HIM AS TORY CHIEF WHIP NOW!

The Wettest Day

It's now fallen into autumn after we were cheated of a summer.  I did have a summer holiday in the last week of August, which I haven't yet written about.  I worked out a route cycling from Arnside on Morecambe Bay, the western side of Cumbria, through to the Yorkshire Dales, then made optimistic jumps on my road map and rang round guest houses and pubs with a finish at Berwick-upon-Tweed.  "So you're doing the coast to coast," people said. Yes, I suppose it looked like that, though certainly not by the shortest or easiest route.

I started at Arnside because a friend lives there.  It's an agreeable village, right by the estuary, with warnings of quicksand and a siren shrieking when the tide turns - the famous fast tide of Morecambe Bay.  My friend told me that the tides are so strong that sometimes a bore comes roaring up the channel. 

The weather forecast was bad, to get worse. I left Arnside at about nine and cycled north east along an arm of the estuary under grey skies, and then turned inland when there was a violent shower.  I sat it out under some trees then pushed along the B6254 trying to find the route east to Dentdale.  By 11:30 I had got to Oxenholme, almost to Kendal which was not the way I planned.  It was raining on and off and there was a pub, with a notice saying Open All Day.  "That means from 12," said the bar manager, but they let me buy a cup of coffee and he offered me some advice on the route. 

I hung around the porch looking at the rain which was falling hard, then realised that it was not going to let off, so I may as well carry on, and retraced my way a couple of miles, then took a road east up a hill, which forked to one dead end, and with another way that wasn't clearly marked on the map and led across lonely looking hills. I hadn't been able to get a cycling map for the area, and was using a big format motoring book map, scale 1 cm = 2km, which is not really detailed enough for good cycling.  Also, when I pulled this unwieldy thing out of my pannier, the rain fell on the pages and they were starting to dissolve.  Someone came along in a car - I asked them, but they were clueless - said that way led by the reservoir. It looked tricky so I gave up and turned back.

I had seen a National Cycle Network sign next to the pub at Oxenholme, pointing to Sedbergh.  So I returned that way, thinking that at least it would be easy to follow though it would add miles on to the journey.  The rain really had set in by now and I followed a rolling, but not steep route.  It was too wet to stop and eat my bread and cheese - I could only stuff the odd oat bar and chocolate down my throat. 

I got to Sedbergh around 2pm, just over half way on my journey.  I looked for a cafe with a wooden floor, went in and ordered soup. Water  made pools below me.  I was wet through - everything sodden - my waterproofs hadn't been able to stand up to the hours of heavy constant rain. . The cafe was steaming and full of holiday makers who were passing this rainy day over slow cups of cofee.  The sun came out for ten minutes and shone through the cafe windows then when I left the cafe it had gone and the rain fell in huge drops again.  Fourteen miles to Hawes, and another nine miles or so from Hawes to Keld in Swaledale. 

I had a choice of going by an A road to Hawes or along a B road through Dentdale.  The cycling principle of never using an A road sent me along Dentdale, by the river Dent which was roaring right next to the road and at some parts was brimming over, ready to carry me off in a flash flood.  There were no other cyclists, or anyone outside until I got to Dent itself.  It's a pretty cobbled town.  I cursed its cobbles and carried on.what would have been a thoroughly pretty road by the river and beneath the trees but all I could see was the rain. 

If I hadn't had a place booked  I would have stopped somewhere, but my accommodation was pre-paid for, and I was going to get there.  Though very wet I wasn't cold, the wind was mostly with me and not very strong and I was in oddly good spirits - perhaps because it was the first day of a cycling holiday, which I had been looking forward to and I had not got any exercise in Arnside. I really was not at all miserable this miserable day.

A viaduct rose up dramatically and there was a steep climb to go under it as it crossed above the road.  I was pushing up my first Dale hill, which was like the curtain wall of a castle.  I was over-laden, not very fit, and had to push the cycle most of the way, wishing the occasional farm tractor or van that passed me would offer me a lift.  The view was of wet moorland and rain, and then a steep drop down to join the A road, which I should have taken in the first place.  It wasn't busy, the gradient was easy, the light wind right behind me, and as it was covered with water I aqua planed at great speed until I got to Hawes.

It was about 5pm.  I had planned to stop in Hawes for a hot drink, but when I ceased cycling and went to the supermarket to buy a couple of things, I started to shiver.  I was too wet to do anything except to get where I could dry off.  I had about nine more miles to go, and in front of me was another Dale hill - 17% gradient the sign said - a Hawaiian surfer's dream of a wave it looked - and so I went up, half walking and half cycling, up into the cloud and constant rain on a high lonely road.  Then the long drop into Swaledale, the village of Thwaite, then on a switchback road for two miles until I got to the village of Keld, and the Keld Bunkhouse.  I rang the bell.  The owner came out, and said "We had given you up."  It was about 7pm.

He took me to the bunkhouse where there was a trio of walkers doing the Coast to Coast and a young couple on a weekend break.  One of the walkers offered me a brew. I hung my waterproof on the racks in the drying cupboard, went upstairs to change - everything was soaking except my bra.  I wrung out my socks, emptied my boots into the sink, made some food and then played Pictionary and Scrabble with these very friendly people who were staying there, all from the north of England.  The walkers had been falling in bogs all day and had got very wet and muddy. 

That was the wettest day cycling I have ever had.  You could have irrigated an acre of desert with the amount of water sticking to me.

Expecting the apocalypse

Before 1914, virtually the only quantities measured in millions, outside astronomy, were populations of countries and the data of production, commerce and finance. Since 1914 we have become used to measuring the numbers of victims in such magnitudes: the casualties of even localised wars (Spain, Korea, Vietnam) – larger ones are measured in tens of millions – the numbers of those driven into forced migration or exile (Greeks, Germans, refugees in the Indian subcontinent, kulaks), even the number massacred in genocide (Armenians, Jews), not to mention those killed by famine or epidemics. Since such human magnitudes escape precise recording or elude the grasp of the human mind, they are hotly debated. But the debates are about millions more or less. Nor are these astronomic figures to be entirely explained, and still less justified, by the rapid growth of the world population in our century. Most of them occurred in areas which were not growing all that fast.

Hecatombs on this scale were beyond the range of imagination in the 19th century, and those which actually occurred took place in the world of backwardness or barbarism outside the range of progress and "modern civilisation", and were surely destined to retreat in the face of universal, if uneven, advance. The atrocities of Congo and Amazon, modest in scale by modern standards, so shocked the Age of Empire – witness Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness – just because they appeared as regressions of civilised men into savagery. The state of affairs to which we have become accustomed, in which torture has once again become part of police methods in countries priding themselves on their record of civility, would not merely have profoundly repelled political opinion, but would have been, justifiably, regarded as a relapse into barbarism, which went against every observable historical trend of development since the mid-18th century.

After 1914 mass catastrophe, and increasingly the methods of barbarism, became an integral and expected part of the civilised world, so much so that it masked the continued and striking advances of technology and the human capacity to produce, and even the undeniable improvements in human social organisation in many parts of the world, until these became quite impossible to overlook during the huge forward leap of the world economy in the third quarter of the 20th century. In terms of the material improvement of the lot of humanity, not to mention of the human understanding and control over nature, the case for seeing the history of the 20th century as progress is actually more compelling than it was in the 19th. For even as Europeans died and fled in their millions, the survivors were becoming more numerous, taller, healthier, longer-lived. And most of them lived better. But the reasons why we have got out of the habit of thinking of our history as progress are obvious. For even when 20th-century progress is most undeniable, prediction suggests not a continued ascent, but the possibility, perhaps even the imminence, of some catastrophe: another and more lethal world war, an ecological disaster, a technology whose triumphs may make the world uninhabitable by the human species, or whatever current shape the nightmare may take. We have been taught by the experience of our century to live in the expectation of apocalypse.

The Age of Empire by Eric Hobsbawm

The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex by Mark Kermode

Mark Kermode has seen about a hundred films to my one, but as his opinion of the one we've both seen coincides with mine, I naturally find him an intelligent film critic.  The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex is a collection of  essays - on the economic facts behind block blusters; the baseness of the selection process for the Oscars; the awfulness of going to the flicks today where 90% of the commercial thinking goes into flogging popcorn; the hideousness of 3D, and diatribes about very bad films, especially Sex and the City 2.  He's broadcasting his opinion of this "ghastly and putrid and vomit-inducing" film in this YouTube clip:-  

 

When I first heard this I had imagined Mark Kermode was a small "l" liberal provoked into a tumbrel moment but he says he's an old Trot, so seeing the Sex and the City 2 as the nadir of American capitalism and imperialism comes naturally to him.

There are also engaging anecdotes of how he started life as a film critic when a boy scribbling pages about Dougal and the Blue Cat (the film spin off of The Magic Roundabout) then maturing to Blazing Saddles - in order to relive the experience.  One bout of entertainment went a long way in those pre-internet, DVD and even video days.

On block busters - he sees them, in corporate speak, as an Opportunity not a Threat to good film-making. To make money - and they almost always do - they have to include a big star, great special effects and a newsworthy budget (he makes the point that the 100 million plus dollars spent in themselves are an audience draw - if it's that expensive people go to see what the pricey buzz is about).

"If you spend enough money, bag an A-list star and pile on the spectacle, the chances are your movie will not lose money (unless it's a comedy), regardless of how smart of dumb it may be.  . . an intelligent script will not (as it is widely claimed) make your movie tank or alienate your core audience.  Even if they don't understand the film, they'll show up and pay to see it anyway - in just the same way they'll flock to see films that are rubbish, and which they don't actually enjoy.  Like Pearl Harbour."

(Pearl Harbour, the movie, has the weakest, wettest, love story ever devised to insult you, the audience member.)

"The idea that creative risk must be limited to low or mid-priced movie-making (where you can in fact lose loads of money) while thick-headed reductionism rules the big-budget roost is the opposite of the truth."

Mark Kermode does love movies and does love his job as film critic even if it means seeing everything including all the Saw series.  He talks of the annoyance critics cause film makers who denounce them as elitist snobs, when they are not quoting them out of context to ramp up their movies.

"the difference between film criticism and pub talk.  Pub talk can be all opinion and nothing else; film criticism, if it is done properly , should involve opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and . . entertainment. . .

To illustrate these essential elements, here are five short reviews of Saw 3D, each adding another key ingredient:

1) Opinion
Saw 3D is rubbish.

2) Opinion and description:
Saw 3D is a horror film that is rubbish.

3) Opinion, description and contextualisation:
Saw 3D is the seventh episode and the first stereoscopic instalment in a long running horror series, and it is rubbish.

4) Opinion, description, contextualisation and analysis:
Saw 3D is the first stereoscopic instalment in a series that began life as a tortuously inventive low-budget chiller but which as descended over the course of six sequels into gory, boring torture porn which is rubbish.

5) Opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and entertainment.
It took the once-inventive but increasingly depressing Saw series seven movies to resort to the hackneyed headache of 3-D, but despite the promise that this is "The Final Chapter" (just wait until the sums say otherwise) you keep wishing those protruding spikes would leap a little further out of the screen and puncture your eyeballs to ensure that you never have to watch rubbish like this ever again."

(The movies marketeers extract "inventive" from that paragraph and mount it on the marquees.)

Kermode is a total cineaste, a lover not just of movies but of movie theatres; of the smell of celluloid and the look of reels from the pre-digital age, which always jumped at the same point; the actual physical appearance of a strip of film with frames missing because the projectionist had snipped a piece showing a female naked bottom for a souvenir.  He's the vinyl lover - even the shellac lover - groaning at the CD and I-Pod and lamenting that the skilled projectionist has been replaced by a button pusher.

He's good fun and good company. If you want to spend an easy 10 minutes look him up on YouTube on any film and he'll come out with something worth listening to.

Edinburgh's Environs

Over the weekend we had beautiful weather - sunny, windless, almost cloudless.  Before sunrise I could look out to the promise of a clear, bright, still day, as if it was perfect summer. Of course it is well into autumn, and being awake at sunrise is not just for dairy farmers and insomniacs.

On Sunday I dragged Carl out for a cycle - his choice of route, only I wanted to see some woods with the trees changing colour.  Carl lives on the south east side of town, and has a good cyclist's knowledge of East Lothian and Midlothian.  He led the way along partly official cycling routes and then some muddy tracks and back roads until we got to the scrappy edge of the green belt, between Edinburgh proper and the bv-pass.  As far as I'm concerned this is cycle-through territory, to be endured until you hit the proper countryside.   We ended up at  the edge of Danderhall, an ex-mining village.  I looked at the map and saw serious A roads and the impossible by-pass, and that we had still barely left the city streets.

We were opposite some big ornate wrought iron gates that were locked. We went a little further along and found a farm gate that was open and then we were on a public path - as unadvertised as possible - that went through farmland and suddenly we were opposite a perfect Robert Adam house -not one of his grandiose palaces like Hopetoun House, but neat, small-scale ashlar classicism, and looking as fine as possible under the sun as it faced us square on.  It's Drum House and belongs to the Somerville family, who go way back and turn up in Walter Scott's Tales from my Landlord.

We went on past the farm where red hens were running about.  There were only a few people walking.  I think only the very local would know of this path, which came out near Gilmerton, a dodgy part of town.  To me that meant we had not yet escaped the city, however along the road a little way we stopped and pushed our cycles through scrub and thorn up an embankment on to an old railway line - sadly not tarmacked or even gravelled or left as mud but with the tracks removed and the ballast remaining - an uncyclable surface as far as I'm concerned.  Carl had warned me I would not like riding it - but he too couldn't stay on his bike so we mostly walked this, for a stretch of four pylons that were standing in the ripe barley, until we could see a tunnel and tarmac on the other side.

The tunnel was covered with graffiti - which is nothing odd - but a lot of it was quite good.  Not just slogans, and words, but some attractive pictures, the colours very strong.  There were some particularly good faces that were a bit Vettriano like, though sadly some lesser artists had half covered them with inferior works.  Producing these  seemed quite a challenge for surreptitious spraying.  I was very sorry I hadn't brought my camera. 

And it did seem incredible that the artists would come out this distance to do the graffiti - but on the other side was a good tarmacked path, where we passed a few people walking, as we went past scrap yards so evidently it would be guys from the local villages.  However, they were definitely better quality than your average urban graffiti, possibly because their makers could work without interruption.

The path became lovely, crossing a deep glen at one point, and then we came out and we were right by the Rosslyn Hotel for lunch, a very pleasant eating place in Roslin.  Since Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code Roslin attracts tourists to the carved chapel where the are clues to the Code, and there were plenty of Americans and Germans who once would not have bothered with an excursion to the village from Edinburgh. 

After lunch we cycled down the very steep road through Roslin Glen, which is as heavily wooded as I wanted to see, but still green - a little too early for the full October colours - we need a few more frosts.  I kept on exclaiming at the day - there was a chill but you could feel a warm sun, as bright as summer, but with the long autumn shadows in the mid-afternoon.  So a couple of miles of this and then we were back at the edge of Edinburgh and the spread of new-built suburbs.

Carl consulted the map again and found another path, this one pretty much pure mud and so my wheels were well gummed up when we hit the road.  We got to Dalkeith and cycled through the woods in the country park.  This is horse country, and what with riders hacking on glossy backs, one on a Clydesdale as big as en elephant and huge Limousin (?) cattle browsing, among the trees of the park it was a pastoral painting.

 Carl said he had the idea of another short cut, but we had been cycling for about 5 hours, it was getting late, and we didn't want any more mud, so after the usual pot hole dodging of this back road from the country park and with the low sun was doing strobe lightings through the hedge - October suns hit a cyclist's eyes and I have lost the visor of my helmet. - we hit familiar streets and were back by Carl's estate.

I was really impressed with Carl arranging this magical mystery tour containing the unexpected brilliance of the Adam  house and the grafittied tunnel , as on the map this terrain looks completely hostile to cyclists - all A roads and the by pass and stretching suburbs.  Sustrans could do a little tarmacking and signposting and joining up to fill in the cycling network in Edinburgh's environs, though that would take away our sense of being in the know  - like when the obscure band you have been following goes viral.

I cycled the 5 miles back to my place, calculating that while we had done about 25 odd miles together , I tacked on an extra 10 miles going from Murrayfield to near Portobello and make from it a quite respectable 35 miles cycle.  It was 6:15pm when I got home and the sun was setting.  No more cycling after work - not that I've managed many in this appalling wet summer - until late March now. 

Satin and Gold - National Poetry Day

I read this as a teenager and can still quote it verbatim:-

Escapist's Song - Theodore Spencer

The first woman I loved, he said,
Her skin was satin and gold.

The next woman I loved, he said.
Her skin was satin and gold.

The third woman I loved, he said,
Was made in a different mold.

She was deeper than me, and said so;
She was stronger than me, and said so.

She was wiser than me, and proved it;
I shivered, and grew cold.

The fourth woman I loved, he said,
Her skin was satin and gold.