This was today - a stream running through a wood in East Bedfordshire - on my way to join a friend's writing group in Cambridge. There was a small bank of celandine near the water. There was a blue line of hills beyond the trees. But actually it was darker, with far more ivy, and criss-crossed with an even denser lattice of twigs and fallen branches. Hardly had I started to understand it, than the rain began. I abandoned and headed back to the car. When I got home, I tried to remember how it had been. It had seemed like a stained glass window in reverse, with shards of colour separated by alternately light and dark lead. It looked like a road map of a city, but it very much wasn't. |
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Longhorn cattle on the Howbury park estate, just to the East of Bedford. Sudden shift in scenery. These impressive creatures looked at me quizzically as I stood by the roadside in the rain today.
In darkening the rocks and water, I have lost something of the mist, but the broken flow is, to my way of thinking, more convincing, and the scale seems more intimate.
People on the train to London. I went to meet up with friends. On my way I visited the museum of the Order of St John in St John's Lane. There's a fascinating display about the crusades - the background to the St John Ambulance service.
The connections with what's going on today in 'the Holy Land' were stark, including a quotation of a French priest who went there to take part in the religious wars nearly a thousand years ago: "We used to be Westerners; now we are Easterners. You may once have been a Roman or a Frenchman; here and now, you are a Galilean or a Palestinian." Fulcher of Chartres, 1108. And here's a quotation from Gesta Francorum about the behaviour of the French crusaders in the 'Holy Land': "Our men ... each seized his share of whatever goods he found in houses and cellars, and when it was dawn they killed everyone, man or woman, that they met in any place whatsoever." This has a sickening resonance with contemporary behaviours. |