It’s a story of how two tough mens’ paths tragically cross in the American Civil War resulting in the quest for revenge by one of them. It’s also a gritty, realistic Western in which the realism slowly and effectively gives way to allegory and metaphor as strange characters appear on an increasingly bleak and arid landscape to make clear that this is really about the pointlessness of wars, civil and international, like those in Ireland and Palestine.

Francesco Goya’s classic painting Fight with Cudgels (1821)  on the same theme shows two giants clubbing each other towards senselessness in their own mire.

One of the clever things about this film is the casting of two men (Pierce Brosnan and Liam Nesson who have each got sympathetic charisma. i.e. one likes them both. So who is right and who is wrong? Who the villain, who the hero? It took me the whole film to work out the answers.

The tag line for the film’s promotion is never turn your back on the past but the true message is rather different. It is that war is stupid, those who engage in it are ignorant, but the only way each generation learns the folly and pity of war is by doing it and learning the error of its ways…. Goya made his painting towards the end of his life, having lived through and survived the bloody Peninsular War. So as Goya’s image implies, and this film shows, war may never stop happening but we can each decide to be pacifist in all we do. Which is not easy for anyone, including me.

Links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479537

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qmfss/Seraphim_Falls (until 2/8/11)

Links: the first covers scythes and old-style hay making; the second explains the modern process which we see all over the UK about now (ie before the grasses flower).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe

http://www.ukagriculture.com/crops/hay_making.cfm

www.klm-mra.be

For some bizarre reason such books are often the opposite of what you’d expect for  a visual and exciting subject with very wide appeal. Example: the absolutely dreadful Canon Eos Digital Photography Photo Workshop by Serge Timacheff which does the nearly impossible – it combines poor picture selection, with poor picture quality, bad layout and impenetrable captions. Think that’s unusual? Don’t bother to buy this next one, just trust me: the Collins Complete Photography Course is as clunky as clunky gets and is so badly laid out that it is actually unreadable. A quick perusal of the photography section of any major book store will produce dozens more like these.

Why? There are two good reasons. First,  publishers make the dire mistake of having these books created by photographers rather than good book editors, on the dubious principle that techies must know how to create a book on their specialist subject. Usually, they don’t.  Second, photo selection is a skilled and highly creative business in  which art comes way before educational purpose. If,  like the Collins authors John Garrett and Graeme Harris, you work on the principle that images used must only illustrate the point being made (which sounds logical) you will end up with the equivalent of a restaurant which offers  unpalatable  ingredients rather than seductive dishes.

The Insight Guides are rightly famed for the brilliance of their imagery and the sharp layout of text and graphics all of which, in a great book, need to be offered in an integrated whole. It’s no accident that this new and impressive book is edited by someone who has  two decades of experience producing great travel books.  It’s evident from every page of this book that he has  exactly the corpus of editorial experience and archive materials needed to avoid techie-dom, to side-step clunkiness and do what should be done with such a rich subject: produce a celebration of imagery, colour, visual excitement and… yes… wait for it.. it’s coming… instruction that you want to act on. Result: exactly what is needed by a market full of people like me, who wander the globe with their cameras wondering why their images are  mediocre ; or,   as frustrating, occasionally taking really good ones only to  find they are  unable to maintain that standard with any consistency.

The solution, more or less guaranteed;  pay a modest £14.99  and take Tony Halliday and his team on holiday with you.  He’ll chat to you about the boring stuff – light, composition and the camera; he’ll explain the Rule of Thirds and Golden Section in a visual way you’ll instantly understand; and he’ll take the classic subjects – mountains, seascapes, city lights, peoples and safari and the rest, and shake life back into them for you. The image to the left, of Mt Valier in the French Pyrenees by the editor himself, is the kind of thing he believes that more of us could take if we followed the principles and techniques outlined in his book.

One reason I think this book moves the genre way beyond the simply  instructional  is that it also combines some fascinating photographic travel history (and the appropriate images) with a truly classic archive of great shots by the known and less well known. It’s really good to know in whose footsteps we tread as we raise our cameras to take another image. It might just help make our own better and more memorable.

In ten years time you’ll be looking through this book and planning the next journey and the pictures thereof with pleasure. Your Canon and Collins books will linger only as a bad dream in which you threw them out of a train window in Peru to return them to the environment from which the paper wasted in making them  should never have been wrested in the first place…

Link: www.insightguides.com

Cover price is £14.99; but it’s £8.89 on Amazon (or was when I checked).

One of the very odd things about that private members bill was the weird way all the members debating it in the chamber disappeared completely from the camera records of the debate for… two hours; as if that was not enough of a time peculiarity the subsequent Hansard report of the proceedings noted that those who voted against voted two hours prior to those who voted for yet the tellers told the tales as being two hours minus the one before plus the two after making it three less one which (of course) is two; and everybody subsequently had tea in the Commons Tea Room at four which would have been six if it had not been two. By a bizarre coincidence the debate took place on April Fool’s Day (the same date as this post) two years ago less one recurred, depending on your point of view. But back to the point…

BST, or to give it its official and slightly mysterious name, Greenwich Daylight Saving Time (GDST) was introduced in 1916 to aid industrial and agricultural production by ‘increasing’ daylight hours for workers. There have been various temporary changes and experiments since but GDST remains. This link sums it all up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time

The reader comments that followed Yeo’s article – you can read them here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/26/british-summertime-change – run through most of the arguments for and against. My own particular beef is my difficulty of adjusting mentally and physically from one time zone to another, which is effectively what such sudden changes in clock settings require. As a creature of habit, and a lover of the slow processes and cycles of nature, I would prefer no shifts at all. I wish I had the self discipline and bloody-mindedness required to simply ignore government time and stay with ‘natural time’ which is… what?
For me it can be any time standard, provided that once the clocks are set to it they stay where they are – except, that is, for going round and round and reminding us all that while our own personal river of time is getting shorter with each passing year.
It’s about this time every year that I briefly toast the memory of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who in February 1894 died when a bomb he was carrying up the hill towards the Greenwich Observatory exploded too early. It emerged that his plan was to blow up the Greenwich Meridian and thus, he seemed to think, disrupt the whole world and possibly time as well. Fantastic! I like to think…

            Yesterday I went on the course which took place in a non-descript building in Swindon, six other speeders attending, with two trainers taking us through what the rules are, the connections between speed and accidents, how to be a better (ie slower) driver and so on.

            One of many interesting points made during this really excellent three hours was that it is difficult,  perhaps impossible, to change people’s habitual driving styles which are often learnt from their parents. Another was how rarely people check out changes in the law after they have passed their test – a test incidentally which the instructors suggested was pretty low standard.

            The best that could be hoped for was that we, the speeders, would leave the session more aware of the needs of, and the risks to, others in the road, particularly pedestrians. It seems – which surprised me – that most accidents happen in 30 mph urban areas because that’s where the vulnerable pedestrians are – children, old people, shoppers.  It also seems that activities like drinking water, hands free phones, Satnav adjustments, changing a CD often involve drivers taking their eyes off the roads for two or three seconds. That’s six to ten car lengths. That’s time enough to cause  injury or death to someone.

            Listening to this I remembered an incident as a twelve year old when I stepped in front of a lorry on the way home from school. My French master pulled me back onto the pavement and saved my life. Thinking about it yesterday I realized for the first time that had I died then six children, two grandchildren, and the imagined worlds of eighteen novels would not exist; and you wouldn’t be reading this. You can debate  the same question for yourself supposing  you had died at twelve.

            ‘Ah, but that’s hypothetical,’ you might say. ‘You didn’t die…’

            True, but every day something like seven people do die on the roads and that’s not hypothetical. It’s every day. Meaning that every day, as I drive my car, I might be the one who wipes out the young lad who had he lived might have fathered six lovely children, grandfathered two adorable grandchildren and penned eighteen novels…

            Now that has made me think.

I’ve never been a fast driver, nor a reckless one.

            I’m courteous to other drivers, as to pedestrians.

            Aggression is not part of my driving style.

            I’m a nice chap.

            I wouldn’t harm a fly.

            But the hard fact is that ‘inadvertently’ as I put it at the top of this post I drove at 37mph in a 30mph zone. As the trainers pointed out, that’s 25% faster than I should have or, put another way, the equivalent of 85 mph on a motorway.

            Makes you think doesn’t it? It certainly makes me think.

Final tips from the trainers…

            Drive up to the speed limit, not at it.

            Plan journeys ahead, not once you start.

            Have water, tissues etc easily to hand but, if you can,  pull over every time you want to do anything in a car other than drive it.

            Finally, always leave early not late if an important appointment involves you driving a car.

            …and remember most of those drivers who kill those seven people a day are just like you and me: they wouldn’t hurt a fly, they’re nice chaps and chapesses and they think that 37mph in a 30mph isn’t much over the limit really, is it?

            I hate to admit it, but  it  is. Way over the limit.

            Did the course work? For me, it did. I’m more aware and that makes me a lot more culpable if I ever break the speed limit again. I can never again say I didn’t know…

LINKS: Two good links on this subject are www.dft.gov.uk/think – the government departmental website which is the internet portal for driving safety and awareness in all its variations; and the excellent Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents site www.rospa.com which has very good material on driving and its dangers. Be warned … if you google ‘speed awareness courses’ you get some  spoof sites which, in fact, are touting other sites which are the opposite of what they seem, seeking to show you how to avoid speed traps, fines and so on. Rather nasty. However Greater Manchester Police, which offers these courses locally,  has a good, simple site which explains the courses well: http://www.drivesafe.org.uk/index.php/home/speed-awareness  Some ferreting around may turn up something in your area.

I was first taken to the Ashmolean nearly sixty years ago by my mother who wanted me to see its greatest treasure – the Alfred Jewel. This is the exquisite gold and rock crystal creation which was placed at the head of a pointer used to read manuscripts and which has the words Aelfred me heht gewyrcan worked into it. They mean ‘Alfred had me made’ and most authorities agree that the object belonged to King Alfred himself.

In those days the Ashmolean was a marvellously old fashioned, fusty, dusty, echoey place and I remember being led through its scary shadows and Egyptian mummies to look at the jewel, which I could only see by standing on tiptoe. It was – it is – a marvellous creation and though rather younger than the glass and metal sphere which lies at the heart my  Hyddenworld quartet, I have no doubt that it was during that first visit to the museum in 1952, and seeing the jewel, that the seeds for Hyddenworld were sown. Certainly my love of old artefacts and the stories they can tell was born then.

Today the dust and the shadows have gone and the Alfred Jewel, like all the other objets, is to be found by way of  pristine stairways,  open plan spaces, plate glass stronger than steel, perfectly lit displays of everything-and-its-aunt under the sun,  and a dizzying central atrium until you finally reach it and sigh. It is reduced  now to just another soft-lit relic on the hit-list of the photocopied sheets which parties of school children tote around on their tick-box educational tours of this museum as all of them.  Which is when the ‘but… but… but…’ doubts begin to bubble up in your mind.

I HAVE OFTEN asked myself – in fact every single time I go to a museum – what they are for and why most of them offer such an unsatisfactory experience. But none has ever confronted me with those questions so brutally as the New Ashmolean now does.  I walk around, I marvel at the artifice of the displays, I read the captions general and particular and I ask myself  why they leave behind such a sense of poverty in mind and spirit; and why I feel I have been exposed to much but learnt very little, if anything at all.  The answers are not so difficult to find.

First, we learn very little by simply looking at them. Real learning is experiential, not through a glass darkly, and it is impossible to make any real sense of a roman coin, an exquisite piece of Japanese netsuke, or a great Tibetan bell, without spending the first, toggling the second (they are used as toggles for clothes) and  hearing the third ring out. Not allowed: look, don’t touch. Look but never know.

The curators can tell you what they know, they can surround an object with context, they can produce flow maps to show where something came from, they can perform the equivalent of exhibition looping the loops, but they cannot impart real experience or even their own.  You could say, ‘Ah! But look at the effect on you, William,  of that first visit to the Ashmolean!’

To which I reply, it was my mother who took me, held my hand and explained one on one what the jewel was, why it is so precious, what a miracle it is that it survived, why pointers were needed to read old manuscripts, who ‘Aelfred’ was. .. and then, taking me outside into Beaumont Street where my godfather used to work as an accountant, and she worked as a secretary, said, ‘but never forget, this is where it all happens now.’

Years later I asked her what she meant. What happens? ‘Life,’ she said, as dismissive of museums as she was of Academe.  No  wonder I have doubts. The second of which is my dislike of seeing things behind glass, or in a pool of light, which quite obviously don’t belong there but back where they were first purloined from. Bells are the best example because clearly a bell is dead that cannot ring.  Nor has a runic gravestone from Norway  any place at all in the Ashmolean. It should be where it was first placed and if I had my way it would be on the next plane to Oslo.

As I and my partner are, in a truly miniscule way, patrons of the New Ashmolean (you can find our names among many more etched on plate glass on Level 3), we were invited to one of several previews of the new museum. Something very, very remarkable happened which underlines these thoughts and ought to happen routinely in  every museums in the world.  As a PR exercise the curators of each section of the museum were dragged out of their closets and made to  stand around and about their particular gallery and answer questions from us punters. They looked rather uncomfortable, preferring I imagine the comfort zone of their secret work and places. We talked to various of them and suddenly, once they were prodded and poked sufficiently to emerge from their shells,  their galleries came alive.

Now they’ve all gone, back into their cubby holes, down corridors to which we have no access, snuffling about in the trough of wonderful objects upon which the rest of us can never properly feed and, when the dark days of February turn even the brightest displays gloomy, flying off gratis to conferences in  Delhi and Me-he-i-coh or however it’s pronounced, to swarm like busy well fed  bees with their curator fellow bees  and plot the creation of yet more new museums which will exclude us from the real experience of the objects they preserve.  If you doubt me take a close look at the photos in this link, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/8347232.stm which shows some New Ashmolean interiors as perfectly  - and as lifelessly – as the objects displayed there. That’s the problem.

What I’d really like to see is every museum curator in the land forced to spend a day of every working week in the gallery for which he or she is responsible answering questions from ordinary folk and letting  us handle objects which were never meant to be preserved for ever but made to be used, enjoyed and finally discarded.

Not as easy as it might seem since, unlike any other cathedral that I know in the British Isles, this one is protected by bowler-hatted proctors who firmly direct would-be visitors away from the main gate to a far distant one where they must pay an entrance fee. I explained I was Oxford-born, carried a Bodleian Library Readers ticket and that cathedrals are public access. The proctor said it meant my crossing the private  ground of the college and what was my business?  Unless, he added rather darkly when I stayed silent, I was going in to pray? He let me through.

The skull, which is halfway down the nave on the right, proved to be a momento mori or reminder we all die, in the form of an Angel of Death. It was   part of an early 18^th century memorial to Henry Aldrich (1647 – 1710) who was Vice Chancellor of the University in 1692 and died in the city in 1710.

I LOOKED AT the angel and he looked at me and I thought that was the end of it, photograph taken, inscription noted down, mission accomplished.  I was wrong, someone had decided I hadn’t got the message: maybe the proctor, maybe the Angel, maybe they were one and the same. Because,  wandering on, I reached a chapel devoted to military memorials. In a mahogany case was the  Book of Remembrance of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, whose pages are  turned daily in memory of the fallen. I  rarely look at such books because one doesn’t know or have connection with the people listed. But on this occasion I felt very strongly drawn to do so by a feeling  as powerful as an unseen iron hand gripping my arm and leading me there.

I somehow knew before I looked that my surname would be there, and it was, the first on the page: HORWOOD, Albert Dennis, killed in Germany on 24^th March 1945.  These days it does not take long to follow up such clues on the internet. Within moments of getting home I found that Albert’s  brother was… William J Horwood. I was christened Julian William but because I write as William my initials are often reversed by others in official documents and I become William J Horwood, like Albert’s brother…  The second unsettling  thing was that Albert was killed in action in the Reichswald Forest, very near a place I had been looking at in my Times Atlas earlier in the day as  a location for use in  Hyddenworld: Summer.

People may shrug their shoulders at such coincidences and  dismiss them as chance. Until it happens to them, with the Angel of Death close up and personal. Then  they, too, might  feel that they have just experienced their own strange momento mori.

A fall of snow is a sudden hushed delight so overwhelming in its transformation of the world about us that we rush to take pictures of it, as I did in mid-January. But the sense of wonder lasts only as long as the snow is virginal, which isn’t long. Soon it becomes a freezing, inconvenient, dangerous blight that over-stays its welcome.

Then as swiftly as it came it turns to drips from trees and gutters, puddles underfoot, soggy cardboard boxes left outside until, in a blink of an eye, it’s gone both in reality and, almost, memory. In fact few things become a distant memory as fast as snow.

The photographs we took vanish almost as completely as the substance itself, no more than binary traces in Random Access Memory, which we never access again.  Or, for those who can still remember film, pictures of snow in years gone by are consigned to packets of photographs, shoved in boxes, and left to congeal in the darkness of cupboards and attics where only dust continues to fall.

Our memory too, whether individual, familial or communal, is astoundingly short-term. If it was used as a diagnostic test of our functional competence we would fail.  I am talking about historical memory about fundamentally important things like who we are, where we came from and the obstacles we overcame to arrive where we are now.  We lose the memory of these things so fast, both individually and collectively, that it’s awesome: what was once so important vanishes from our lives as if it never was.

For example, none of us would exist at all but for the life-long struggles, loves, tribulations and brief triumphs of our great grand-parents. But ask most people who theirs were, what they did, where they lived and they usually do not know.  Or if they know something it reduces a life to a single short sentence, probably inaccurate. My maternal great grandfather George Robinson ‘went to America’ – that’s all I know.  His paternal counterpart is lost to me entirely.

Most of us know only little more about our grand-parents and when we do it’s in the form of inaccurate snippets of places, years, names, maybe occupations. Rarely lives.  It’s horrible to admit, but our children know,  really know, very little about us.

It will not take long for us to cease to exist, as if we have never been.

I live near a very large cemetery, so funeral processions go past my door regularly. Occasionally I pop across the street to observe the burials, it being free, open to the public, and full of character and interest for a novelist. But once the day of burial is past the floral tributes die, soon piled in a distant corner of the cemetery where they cannot so easily be seen; and the cemetery visits become less and less frequent, except for a few who cling on to memory, unable or unwilling to let go.  Until they too die and the graves begin to get covered in lichen, begin to rest in peace.

I am not Jewish but I like to visit that section of the cemetery because there are no floral tributes, no jam jars filled with dead flowers and dirty water, no faded ribbon. Just, here and there, a few pebbles, piled like a cairn in a mountain wilderness.

There was a fashion in earlier centuries for the creation of church memorials which reminded the living of the how transitory life is, by depicting the deceased in thin, skeletal form, or with a skull as part of the monument. There’s one ten feet up in the nave of Oxford Cathedral I often find staring at me.  Do I know his name, or what he did, or even if he was a he? I don’t, but in homage to him and the many forgotten ones like him, I’ll find out next time I attend a service and post the information here where… naturally… it will soon be forgotten once again.

Often, if we return to those images we took so impulsively, we find things we didn’t notice at the time.  Like the felled trees in my image of snow in Wytham Wood, near Oxford, which I only see now for what they are: something transitory too, though longer than snow in a temperate climate. But not by much!

From the geological view of things, neither lasted any time at all. If you imagine time since the beginning of prehistory to be that of a game of football, the period up to recorded history is the full ninety minutes; recorded history is extra time; our own lives no more than the blast of the final whistle. Unlike us, however, snow will come back again and again, and again. Each time it will briefly transform the world, and maybe our graves and places of memorial as well, to the delight of those who follow us. As for our great-grandparents, we may not know much about them but we do know this: if they lived their lives where snow once fell, they too knew its virgin beauty and saw it disappear with the sands of time.