from Hannah's blog

Green Man Festival next week   - Yay!

Places

Up above Todmorden there is a rocky outcrop called Rive Rocks. They have sat there for ever - long ago there was a stone age settlement just below them and it got me thinking about places. It was a good choice, the view is lovely, and I guess long ago it was safer than in the valley.
What I love about the rocks is the skyline, watching the clouds roll across the moorland and tumble into the valley, it is a constant picture of change but a constant picture of familiarity, the interaction of change and stasis makes it a perfect place to sit and think.

Mai Won no2

There is something strange about noise. Spending a few days in the centre of
Hong Kong City is to experience noise on an all new level. Perhaps it is
because as a visitor I was acutely aware of the noise, different noises and
the more familiar, but I find myself coming back to the contrast that was
Mai Won and Hong Kong City, and the most noticeable contrast was noise. City
noise is fast noise, it is physically busy, overlapping and continual its
easy to get drawn along and you begin to miss things, numbed by its
presence. I find myself in city spaces working overtime to keep out the
noise. I seek out the quieter spots, the places where you can take a rest
from the relentless din and finding a quiet spot i can relax again,
reconnecting with myself instead of reacting to all the edges of sounds
around me. It might be the bookshop, or the cafe, or a little sidestreet,
anywhere that numbs the harshness of the city. Arriving in Mai Won this is
the biggest impression. Silence, or at least a recognisable form of noise. I
noticed birdsong, I noticed the water lapping against the harbour walls, I
noticed the sqeaky bicycle. The sounds intensify the possibility of other
sounds, you hear them more acutely.  That was it, noticing noise by being
selective, hearing sounds not as a cacophony but as individual pieces. I
begin to see a place I'd never seen before, a jungle place. The walk up the
hillside to Jenny's house is about a quarter of a mile, as you rise up the
hillside it gets progressively hotter and the air feels thicker, heavier.
Looking at the pictures of the day it reads like a sensory overload. In the
city the senses are working overtime to avoid the crushing force of sonic
overload, and then in the jungle a new sonic form, a new silence of natural
connections where silence asserts itself through the staccato of birds,
crickets and water and the breeze in the treetops. In finding a jungle I
found a piece of myself I had never found before, on the top of the mountain
looking down to the South China Sea I find myself thinking about the city,
can we build places which capture such silences and allow us to root
ourselves in urban spaces which generate an openness to our environment
instead of closing it out, ipods in our ears, deafened to our place, if we
lose that sense we are on the slippery slope to quietly lose them all and
succumb to hostile public spaces. Lets think about urban silences, spaces
for quiet, spaces to let silence assert itself once more. Mai Won was
responsible for these words, because it confronts you and asks you to
confront yourself. 

community revised?

Just a quick thought for the day...
Interesting to see the new government plans to facilitate community activity.
Just what does this suggest?
Community is a slippery concept, if community means relationship, then how can this be facilitated from outside as it is inherently self-driven? Is there not a danger of colluding with externally defined versions of community which by their very nature exclude other versions which can be perfectly valid and self-realising but not fit within the sanitised versions we might be offered as community from government? Something about it makes me uneasy, as yet I can't quite fathom out what that unease is about, but I'd welcome thoughts!

quote of the day

The planet Earth in its present mode of florescence is being devastated. This devastation is being fostered and protected by legal, political and economic establishments that exalt the human community while offering no protection to the non-human modes of being. There is an urgent need for a Jurisprudence (system of governance) that recognizes that the well-being of the integral world community is primary, and that human well-being is derivative – an Earth Jurisprudence”.

- Thomas Berry

and finally...

After two years in the planning we have finally launched our community beekeeping programme with two top bar hives and two huge colonies of bees safely landed. Here are some pictures of the lovely top bar hives with Helmut balancing the legs.
It was great to get such a big turn out in the pouring rain to see the bees dropped into the hives - and then to have a special glass of honey mead to celebrate!
Its also nice to have bees around again, its been a while!

Eco-Capability - preparing the ground for sustainable living

Conference Theme

How can we develop a curriculum content and pedagogy that helps new teachers acquire the attributes they need to be able to enable young people to ‘make a difference’? How can we mainstream this practice?

Author: Dr. Paul Clarke

Professor of Education, St Mary’s University College, Waldegrave Road, Strawberry Hill, London email: paul.g.clarke@camb-ed.com phone: 07950479553

Paper Title

Eco-Capability - preparing the ground for sustainable living

If you plan one year ahead, plant rice;

If you plan ten years ahead, plant trees;

If you plan a hundred years ahead,

educate the people.

Abstract

This paper will argue that a curriculum for sustainability can only arise through practical actions that are focused on ecological principles. To realize this we need to invest time and energy to establish basic operational conditions in our schools which foster such principles; these conditions are what I have called elsewhere an eco-capability (Clarke 2010). They are a framework for understanding and focusing our learning and action concerned with sustainable living. They will be informed by, and evolve through human activity and experience, but connect closely with natural systems and processes all aligned to growing food (Clarke forthcoming). The basic idea is designed around a set of modules that schools use that guide their actions to become sustainable. The modules set the ground which connect learning to energy, water, waste and land.

Our experience, arising from the Incredible Edible[1] (Clarke 2009) programme has taught us that the basic ideas of sustainable living need not be overcomplicated, indeed, they resonate with the everyday and encourage creative engagement, but they have to provide routes for profound change in organizational and individual behaviour. What is more complex, and remains a testing matter, is how to proceed and engage with a school community in a way that enables teachers to integrate ideas about sustainable living in the curriculum (Capra 2010).  We have found that learning and understanding about sustainable living comes from action, from doing things and seeing how sustainable living can be easily undertaken. Our approach is best experienced as a living, emergent, formative, evolutionary form of pedagogy. It has to relate and reflect the reality of where we live, and acknowledge that we are in the main living in far from sustainable communities.

Our central dilemma when it comes to mainstream education, concerns how closely to align with existing practice, and how far to push the boundaries to facilitate new thinking. Moving too far, too soon, can frighten people away from taking steps forward, but too much caution will not generate the necessary creative organizational turbulence to initiate any shift of mind or practice. Therefore how to position the sustainable living agenda in such a way as it maintains the vitality and creative impetus without compromising our radical ambition is a central concern for progressive eco-literate design.

Introduction - setting the context

As societies around the world begin to recognise that their relationship with the natural environment has to evolve if it is ever to be sustainable, the role of education becomes ever more critical as it moves to the centre stage. The trouble is, that if we turn to mainstream education across most developed nations we will find very little ecological learning takes place beyond some elementary ideas about how to grow a few vegetables in the schoolyard. Education has traditionally fragmented learning, creating subject disciplines that disintegrate rather than integrate knowledge. The ecologically capable learner engages with ideas differently, they combine ideas to form coherent, holistic ways of understanding. So there is a job to do to offer a coherent and cogent curriculum for sustainable living that does not end up as a bolt-on addition to existing curricula, or a set of fragmented experiences which fail to provide sufficient connection for learners to get the fundamental messages about sustainable living. What we need is a new set of capabilities and literacies concerned with deep ecology, and a set of steps for people to get there which connects hand, heart and mind (Sterling 2005). What is clear is that, as yet, there is an insufficiently connected and systematic response to the broad concept of sustainable living emerging from the school world. Clearly, a few vegetables in a schoolyard are insufficient on their own to enable a conceptual shift to happen, but they do serve as an important starting point upon which to build (Clarke 2009).

Interest in the natural environment as a facility for learning raises the need to think carefully about what we might learn, what we already know, but do not consider to be of value, and what do we need to find out about to make the connection between curriculum content and attributes which will help young people to understand and apply this new knowledge to make their own life choices in greater harmony with the world around them.

How much of the burgeoning interest in schools might be assigned to mandatory measures, rather than a particular organisational conviction remains to be seen. The emergence in the regulatory framework of carbon reduction measures will no doubt translate into required activity by every institution and household as nations strive to meet targets that have been set on the international scale. In the English context this is already taking shape both structurally and culturally. At a structural level, Local authorities and businesses are having to look closely at their internal schemes for reduction of their carbon footprint, and at a cultural level recent Ofsted reports have cited the importance of learning outside the classroom and its role in improving student achievement, standards, motivation, personal development and behaviour (Ofsted 2008). Without going so far as to ensure that both awareness and action are mandatory, the general direction that they have pointed towards in terms of best practice suggests that some form of knowledge, perhaps informed through the previous government gateways to sustainability, may provide a framework for action and modification of curriculum to guide and inform a transition of basic practice.

The importance of innovative community projects

Perhaps more important than the centrally prescribed ‘sustainability’ pedagogy, is the rise of community awareness on the issue of sustainable living. These many and varied projects are connecting local activism with new thinking about community and landscape, which amongst other things is generating public debate on daily habits and routines (Hopkins 2008, Clarke 2010). In my own case, my involvement in the Incredible Edible project has provided direct evidence of a rapidly expanding and demographically widespread interest in the way individuals and communities can take action to redefine themselves and re-orientate their activity towards more sustainable practices. The drivers behind these projects vary from personal beliefs and values, to simple economic necessity, but the prevailing focus is localism and redefining self and context. This localising and personalising of the bigger sustainability challenges enables people to participate and act, it encourages debate and questioning of existing ways of living, and in turn can be used within schools as a vehicle for reform and redesign of both curriculum practice and process.

Incredible Edible has evolved in a matter of a few years from a small-scale guerrilla gardening campaign, to an eco-lobbying force with connections locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. As it has developed we have recognised that an emergent methodological approach has been adopted, not particularly by deliberate design, but by circumstance. As we began to see that there was so much happening we also realised that to orchestrate all elements of the programme within one operational structure was a self-defeating job. Instead, we encourage creative participation and self-managing of discrete programmes within the project, and we contain the overall concept within a set of capabilities concerned with core ideas – actions to become sustainable (hand, heart and mind), energy, water, waste and land. Oddly enough, these simple ideas raise some difficult challenges for schools, who often want very structured approaches to be applied to fit alongside their existing arrangements. We see this, but question their logic, and encourage them to engage with the possibility of making connections as a route to learning. We are not interested in business as usual with a few eco-green additions, instead we are looking for a radical overhaul of how to live. To make the shift, we encourage teachers to see the programme as a series of interdependent and mutually supportive micro-projects, that way, they can adopt a strategy – from the small scale to the ambitious depending on their interest, and we encourage them to then begin to experiment using the bigger frame of Incredible Edible to provide a type of bounded zone that provides their experimentation with conceptual and operational justification for their activity, as it is endorsed by the broader local community and by connection to a much wider network of similarly minded organisations.

The pedagogic implications of these observations are important, we see any ‘eco-literacy’ or ‘eco-capability’ as essentially emergent forms of learning, emphasising process as a vital component of how to understand and interpret what is happening when we engage with the natural world. In the programme, schools are all experimenting with different ways in which they might engage young people and parents in practical activities which on their own appear relatively benign, such as growing food on an old playground, or planting an orchard, or learning jam making and pickling, or introducing compost heaps, or water harvesting strategies, but when they begin to accumulate we can see the emergence of a formula for sustainable living, connecting self to place, to soil, to water, to weather, to season and therefore making that important first step to connect to the natural. The resilient sustainable community is not, we suggest, something that has been pre-formulated and pre-defined, and this insight into design may be of great value as we proceed to try and make sense of how to nurture suitable sustainable capabilities within our school systems. Each remains unique, but each connects to a wider network of ideas and approaches which begin to illustrate and demonstrate a shift of mind, a change of cultural understanding.

Design

Our approach to eco-literacy might be seen therefore as a process of engagement and enquiry with critical local concerns, rather than a set of assumptions based on global circumstances, which may not be easy to connect with in our own school settings. For example, we can begin by looking at what we have and ask: ‘What does our city/neighbourhood look like with failed infrastructure?’ What does our city/neighbourhood do when 15% of its population are undocumented? What might our city/neighbourhood look like when a great number of its children get no formal education? What strategies might our city/neighbourhood adopt when its water resources begin to run dry? From such questions we are able to think about the  opportunities that exist in our environment around school which can provide responses to these questions. We can consider the approaches we might adopt, from the mandatory to the freeforming, we can see that different governance approaches will have different consequences. We can then move to the practicalities and consider what happens if we grow food in our small urban spaces. We learn that we have to know how to nurture that produce, we develop specific, contextualised understanding of soil, water, plants, light, heat and the ways they combine.

These simple starting points provide our students with a direct link to their environment and offer them a route to redefine their urban environments based upon what they discover, this is the first step to an eco-capability of retrofitting what we have to suit a new situation. The point being that cities, neighbourhoods and streetscapes are not going to go away in a hurry, they will be the places we live – sustainably or otherwise, and they will form the landscape which in turn will shape the mindscape of our citizens. As a result, we have to reconceptualise them so that they serve our needs and those needs of the planet, the small act of growing becomes a route map for this new literacy.

Incredible Edible is therefore an example of the ways that people in their community of learners can take practical steps towards sustainable living. We know that people need examples, they want to be able to see how it might be done, and this means that schools can play a very important strategic role in educating not just young people, but their entire neighbourhoods. The use of the school yard as a food source is one powerful approach which Incredible Edible promotes. To rethink the physical landscape of the playground as a food-hub challenges us to experiment with existing space and put it to new use. This is a foundation piece of the approach we adopt – to get people to look again at their landscape, be it the playground, the street, the park or the balcony, they can all be seen as starting points for new thinking about sustainable living. In our case we use planters to enable growing on tarmac playgrounds, this raises questions – how can we water the plants, what happens out of school time, how do we know what will grow well here, can we create new ways of using old resources and waste to improve soil quality and perhaps generate greater warmth through greenhouses and sheltered growing. The simple starting point of food growing generates significant connections across the core issues of water, energy, soil and place and enables students and staff and parents to connect on a practical set of activities which in turn generate deeper questions about longer-term sustainability. In particular, when such practical activities are then considered on a wider cityscape. This comes in the form of new thinking about the shape, movement and spaces in what are rapidly being known as smart-cities. Instead of building new roads and tower blocks, we are asking how to retrofit cities so that they bring together the farm and the city, witnessing the convergence of urban and rural. This step from food for self, to food for all, emphasises the importance of sustainable living as a social as well as a technical consideration. As people live in the city they need to eat, and the more people that arrive in the next few decades in cities, the greater pressure there will be to meet their basic, in sustainable or unsustainable ways. If they are to survive then we have to make the former our default position. If carbon based energy availability emerges as the crisis issue of the next two decades as is being predicted, then our existing modes of moving food from the country to the city become ever more problematic as they are heavily carbon dependent. Instead, redesigning urban space so that it becomes a backbone for survival through the localising of food within urban space, provides a viable way forward and should therefore form a substantive element of any eco-literacy for our education system. Add to this the way that water can already be harvested within the urban environment and the modification to ensure distribution and redistribution begins to be a viable way of maintaining its use in the longer term. As we begin to connect to such a narrative, we begin to see that reshaping cities for long-term health and well-being of all natural systems is quite possible, it generates wealth and knowledge and maintains engagement of people within their social and community spaces in new and more convivial ways. We simply have to work outside of the predictable, a lesson we have learnt and continually adopt in Incredible Edible.

That is why growing food in the school yard is a good start, it is the first step on a journey towards full use-age of the city as a natural food-scape, and a direct link to the myriad of problems people face daily in their struggle to exist in cities at the present time as it enables and empowers, rather than deskills and disempowers the citizen. Schools more often than not have at least some play space, or some wall-space which can be adopted as a basic food-growing hub. This simple demonstration of the possibility of new uses for existing spaces has profound possibilities.

Conclusions

There are many ways of developing capabilities which serve to inform an eco-literate society. These are not exclusively the concern of schools as they are lessons we learn by living. However, schools play a critical role in preparing people to see the world in culturally acceptable ways.  In the past, these culturally acceptable ways included an acceptance that we can use the natural world as a resource for our sole use, to the exclusion of other living things and this was modelled through a defined curriculum. As we are leaning, this is no longer tenable nor practical, if for no other reason than we now understand that our own life is dependent upon a bio-diverse community which in its interdependence and emergent learning maintains and nurtures further life on the planet. It is therefore in our own self-interest to nurture eco-literate, evolving capabilities in learners, they follow lines of enquiry based on real time problems within their lived environment concerned with the stuff of life – water, land, energy and waste. Schools can participate in the development of a range of capabilities that will facilitate this learning. Through the curriculum they offer, and through the ways in which they utilise their resources, their buildings, their land and  how they use and dispose of waste they learn by doing the necessary things to respond to the changing landscape. We should ensure however, that this work remains naturally focused, which is why food growing is such a powerful connector, it serves as a guide to the necessary capabilities of observation, nurture, maintenance, conservation of resource, attention to solar energy, the cropping and preparation of food as a life source, and the cyclical properties of resources once used to form waste to enrich and maintain the soil.

This paper simply sets the scene for the venture of sustainable education, and leads to an idea of a sustainable school. The activity that is arising from this work will begin to illustrate in more meaningful ways what we might understand by progressive sustainable community.

References

Capra, F. (2010) Schooling for Sustainability: Making Teaching and Learning Come Alive. Lecture series at Berkeley, California, June 23–25, 2010

Clarke, P. (2009) Incredible Edible: Growing Community. IET publications. Todmorden

Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible: how to grow sustainable communities, Forum. Volume 52 Number 1 2010 pp.69-79

Clarke, P. (forthcoming) Our Great Work: Growing Sustainable Communities. Routledge. London

Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook. From oil dependence to local resilience. Green books. Totnes

Ofsted (2008) Learning outside the classroom. How far should you go? Report no 070219. Crown Copyright. London

Sterling, S. (2005) Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change. Schumacher Briefings.  Green Books. Totnes

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[1] Incredible Edible is a community food programme which was formed as a way of guiding community understanding about sustainable living through the focus of food, growing and connecting to the land. The author is one of the founder directors of the programme.

food miles - interesting piece from The Big Block of Cheese blog

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about food miles and the environmental benefits of local food. I hear about it from friends and on the radio. I read about in newspapers and on the Internet. Every environmentally conscious consumer, it seems, has fallen for local food and farmers’ markets. And when I tell them that I don’t buy into the local food logic, and that I believe global food is the key to sustainability, I invariably get some kind of suspicious, even dirty look. I watch them wonder: How could anyone deny that local food is our environmental salvation? How could anyone endorse the psychopathic, planet-murdering global food consumer lifestyle?

My reasons are hard to explain, and they rarely withstand the full onslaught of slick, local food slogans. This is probably a case of what my roommate would call “unsexy truths” – it’s nearly impossible to distill my logic into buzzwords and mantra. Local food advocates only need a handful of words to explain how global food economies require longer transportation networks and, as a result, have larger carbon footprints. This argument, the so-called ‘food miles’ concept, seems intuitive. It just makes sense.

The case for global food, on the other hand, needs more than a handful of words. It’s technical and full of complexity – there is no poetry in global food. It does not capture the imagination of the conscientious consumer, and quite often it will dull the passions of concerned citizens. This is unfortunate, for it will either exasperate the listener’s attention span or, worse yet, lead them to the conclusion that it is merely a desperate and sophisticated attempt to confound the no-brainer logic of food miles. To this I say: there are rarely no-brainers in subjects as complex as agronomy, ecology, and economics, and solutions rarely fit inside a greeting card. The truth is not always simple and sexy, but it can be beautiful in its complexity. And this beauty will not let itself be seduced by the lazy mind.

For the last fifteen years, food miles have been the load-bearing pillar of the local food movement’s architecture. The desire to slow the insidious progress of climate change by reducing food transport distances, and thus carbon emissions, have been a driving factor behind the resurgence of farmers’ markets and local food products in supermarkets. In the past few years, however, the utility of food miles as a measure of environmental impact has been increasingly called into question by agricultural and environmental scientists. New research continues to expose fissures in the food miles argument.

Broadly speaking, the food miles concept relies on three assumptions that are increasingly being proven false. First, food miles assumes that the distance travelled by an agricultural commodity is more relevant in assessing environmental impact than the mode of transportation used and the quantity transported. Second, food miles assumes that transportation from producer to retailer is the most significant phase, environmentally speaking, of an agricultural commodity’s lifecycle. Third, food miles assumes that energy efficiency and carbon intensity in production are constant across all geographies, terrains, and climates. This post will walk you through an explanation of how each of these assumptions rarely holds true.

In 2005, the British government’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) conducted a study of the environmental impact of food transportation in the United Kingdom to determine whether food miles would make a useful measurement for the government’s Sustainable Farming and Food Strategy. The results of the study are fascinating, especially the revelation that food miles, when crudely conceptualized, are almost meaningless and that when analyzed closely, the food miles travelled by global food commodities were actually less harmful to the environment than those travelled by local food commodities. How is this possible, you might ask? It certainly seems to run against common sense.

In fact, it is not too difficult to explain these findings. Put simply, the fuel efficiency and cargo capacity of different modes of transportation matters a whole lot more than the actual distance travelled. A container ship, for instance, can move one tonne of food over one kilometer with less harmful emissions than a light ground vehicle (DEFRA’s fancy terminology for a pickup truck). Global food economies have the most efficient modes of transportation (container ships, freight trains, and heavy highway trucks) as their backbone while local food economies rely exclusively on the less-efficient pickup trucks, minivans, and automobiles. In one startling example, the DEFRA report demonstrates that a British consumer driving 10 kilometers to purchase green beans from Kenya actually expends more carbon per-bean than during the transport of these beans by airplane from Kenya. Had these beans been delivered to the retailer from a local producer by pickup truck, the carbon expended would likely have been even greater.

Sure, a local food advocate might say, these behemoths of global transportation might be more efficient per-tonne per-kilometer, but overall they contribute more harmful emissions because of the sheer volumes they carry and vast distances they travel. They might have marginally smaller carbon footprints per-capita, but in absolute terms the carbon footprint of global transportation far exceeds the carbon footprint of local transportation. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it forgets that humanity’s total appetite will remain constant, if not grow thanks to raising levels of prosperity in the developing world. Reducing the importance of global modes of transportation would only increase the prevalence of less-efficient local modes of transportation. If we could wave a magic wand and replace the existing global food economy with local equivalents, it would eliminate the enormous carbon footprint of global food transportation. Unfortunately, it would produce an even large carbon footprint resulting from a veritable army of farmers in pickup trucks (many of which aren’t the most environmentally friendly vehicles). This argument has recently been made by David Owen in his new book Green Metropolis.

These findings certainly cast doubt on the relevance of food miles and the sustainability of local food overall, but ultimately they will likely become little more than a footnote in the rapidly growing anti-localization literature. Their relative unimportance results from the same factors that disprove the second food miles assumption, that transportation is the most impactful phase, environmentally speaking, of an agricultural commodity’s lifecycle. Recent studies criticizing food miles all point out that transportation accounts for a very small percentage of an agricultural commodity’s total carbon footprint. A 2007 study by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, for instance, found that over the entire lifecycle of the average agricultural commodity consumed in the United States, only 11% of green house gas emissions occurred during transportation. Furthermore, the stage of transport most derided by local food advocates, where commodities are delivered from producer to retailer across vast distances, accounted for only 4% of emissions. Clearly, the second assumption upon which food miles rests (that transportation is the most impactful phase, environmentally speaking, of an agricultural commodity’s lifecycle) does not hold true.

The real culprit is production itself, the stage of the commodity’s lifecycle that occurs before it even leaves the farm. The Carnegie Mellon study found that 83% of emissions occurred during the production phase, highlighting the importance of energy efficient and low-carbon intensity agricultural production. This is where the food miles concept makes another oversight. It fails to consider that longer transport distances are generally a beneficial trade-off for more efficient and less intensive production. Several studies have addressed this question in great detail, and their findings are very illuminating. These studies all point out that local variations in geography, terrain, and climate have profound impacts on the efficiency and intensity of agricultural production. A 2008 study from the University of Toronto found that strawberry farms in hot and sunny California produce, on average, 17 times more strawberries than their equivalents in Ontario. A similar study done by the Cranfield University in the United Kingdom found that 12,000 cut roses produced in Kenya’s favourable climate generated 6,000kg of carbon dioxide while their Dutch competitors required 35,000kg for the same quantity. The DEFRA study (mentioned above) found that British farmers generated 2,394kg of carbon dioxide during the production of a tonne of tomatoes while their Spanish counterparts generated only 630kg. Another study conducted by the Lincoln University in Christchurch, New Zealand came to similar conclusions regarding lamb, apples, dairy products, and onions. For example, the study found that 2,849kg of carbon dioxide are generated during the production one tonne of lamb in the United Kingdom while only 688kg of carbon dioxide are generated during the production of one tonne of lamb on New Zealand’s clover-studded slopes and the subsequent transport of the meat 18,000km to the UK by boat.

This is, essentially, the logic behind global agriculture and the reason that food miles are little better than a “marketing fad” (to quote Pierre Desrochers, author of the University of Toronto study). The distance travelled by an agricultural commodity is not more relevant in assessing environmental impact than the mode of transportation used and the quantity transported. Transportation from producer to retailer is not the most significant phase, environmentally speaking, of an agricultural commodity’s lifecycle. Energy efficiency and carbon intensity are not constant across all geographies, terrains, and climates.

That being said, do not get the impression that I am categorically against local food production. There are some cases where the local agricultural commodity will prove to be the most environmental. A Spaniard should eat Spanish tomatoes. A New Zealander should eat New Zealand lamb. A Californian should eat California strawberries. The important issue here, and this is one place where I can agree with local food advocates, is that consumers put more thought into the provenance of their food. It is one economic activity that is universal to all human beings, and conscientious consumption holds incredible power to remodel the world in which we live. We should all ensure that our consumption patterns will contribute to a sustainable future. Just don’t take for granted that local food is always the answer and that food miles really mean anything.

green path Asia - article from China Daily

Asia should stay on green path

By Fu Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-09 07:49

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Government officials, business leaders and media executives discuss how region should tackle common challenge of climate change

A top United Nations official has urged Asian nations to sustain the momentum of brisk investment in green economic growth and to avoid falling back on old developmental patterns in the post-financial crisis era.

At the 2010 Asia Forum on Reaction to Climate Change in Beijing on Thursday, from left: Zhu Ling, editor-in-chief of China Daily; Suwit Khunkitti, Thailand's minister of natural resources and environment; Zheng Guoguang, director of China Meteorological Administration; and Sun Cuihua, an official representing Xie Zhenhua, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission and China's top climate change negotiator. [Zhang Wei / China Daily]

"Asia is taking the lead globally in pumping a larger portion of stimulus money into a green recovery after the financial crisis. My concern is whether the momentum can be sustained," Nick Nuttall, chief spokesperson for the United Nations Environment Program, told China Daily on Thursday.

Nuttall said nearly all environmental ministers in Asia have shown great commitment to bringing in more radical measures to foster greener economies.

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"But the most important thing is how to make other cabinet members, especially the finance minister, realize the importance of this move and to turn this political commitment into action."

Official figures show that more than 30 percent of China's stimulus spending has been injected into sustainable development, with the rate in South Korea surpassing 80 percent. Japan has also invested a huge sum in green industries.

Nuttall revealed his concerns at a panel discussion, titled Common Challenges and Differentiated Responsibilities for Asia, with Chinese experts and NGO representatives on Asia's role in tackling climate change on Thursday.

Han Wenke, president of the energy research institute of China's National Development and Reform Commission, said Asian countries should take an active, cooperative approach to both climate change negotiations and economic transformation.

"Asian countries, such as India and China, have already taken an active role in global negotiations and, as they continues, we should deepen such cooperation," Han said.

In the interim, he recommended setting up a regional mechanism to mitigate global warming while growing a greener economy. Expressing the hope that the whole of Asia will benefit from common development and growth, he said: "There should be a platform to help realize such a goal."

However, the panelists cautioned that challenges need to be overcome to achieve such a collective goal, as Asia comprises diverse economies with different cultures and at various stages of development.

"Compared to Africa, it is more difficult for Asia to have a single voice on climate change cooperation and this is a challenge," Nuttall said.

Lot S. Felizco, climate change policy head of Oxfam Hong Kong, said the diverse combination of economies in Asia dictates that each country take on different responsibilities, despite his wish that the whole of Asia join together in facing up to the challenges.

"The deepening of emission cuts in developed economies should be the key to the negotiations, though every economy has a role to play in reducing carbon emissions," said Felizco. "Each country has a different responsibility."

Pan Jiahua, China's leading climate change policy advisor with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Asia, as a group, has already started to play a global role.

"To make the role bigger, we must understand our own challenges in tacking climate change," said Pan, who recently discussed climate change with China's top leaders including President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

Listing the major challenges facing Asia, he said many countries are still in the early- or mid-stages of urbanization and industrialization, as a result of which their economies need to expand.

Meanwhile, Asian countries remain vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather conditions, such as typhoons, floods and droughts.

"In facing these challenges, we have to take the lead in the fight against global warming," said Pan. "And we are more ambitious than Europe and the US, which are talking more than they are doing."

China daily

Ark Eden: Mui Wo, Hong Kong

Ark Eden: Mui Wo, Hong Kong

When you think of Hong Kong what comes to mind? More often than not it will be the images of extraordinary density of buildings clustered on the island and creeping up each mountain slope. Every conceivable space in the city is taken up by human activity, commerce and industry. It powerfully demonstrates what human beings can do to influence the environment around them and provides a vision of the complex interrelationship of ideas, spaces and understanding that make up our cosmopolitan modern cities.

But there is another Hong Kong, equally as compelling and telling a complex story of age old connections, interrelationships and mutual dependencies that are every bit as compelling as those we have created. It lies all around the region, on the hillsides and within the islands, it is the rainforest and jungle of Hong Kong.

This week I spent a day on Mui Wo, with Jenny, the founder and inspiration behind the ArkEden programme. It takes a boat ride of 40 minutes to reach the island, leaving behind the intensity of the city the first thing you notice on reaching the jetty is the tranquility of the little community huddled on the edge of the waterfront. Instead of cars, there are bicycles, and footpaths, the noise comes from insects and birds instead of engines and air-conditioning units. We walked together along narrow lanes up and up into the jungle on the steep hillside. Leaving behind the village and working our way along a pathway that follows the contour of a small river with fish darting along in the clear water.

Forty minutes later, way, way up on the mountainside, deep into the jungle, we reach Jenny's home and the base for the programme. it is breathtaking, hot at 35degrees, humid, with cooling breezes that pushes air through the forest canopy the taste and smell of the jungle. There is an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder about the rainforest. The sheer abundance of exotic plants, the trees, spiders, the noises, all combine to bombard the senses to overload. We drink water from the stream and talk about our projects, Jenny asking about Incredible Edible, what we do, what we hope for, what we are learning, and me learning about how Ark Eden works to provide the people of the region with an opportunity to connect with a world which is all around them but also very distant from their daily lives. We walk the talk, on little pathways that weave around the massive forest, ducking under vast spiders webs, pushing aside huge leaves of banana trees and stopping to taste the fruits of plants which I have neither seen nor tasted before. The jungle is a natural food forest. Its abundance serves to feed and nourish the variety of life within it. Plants grow within and between each other in what at times looks like a great big dance of nature, beautiful complex connextions and colours that provide a dense tapestry of life. I am overwhelmed by this place.

Jenny has a wonderful relationship with the forest, built up over 25 years of living there. She shows how there is no need to do lots of the things we seem to need to do to understand our busy world, we just have to stop and observe to see what is needed. By being in this environment you simply connect with this simple idea, in every sense you witness here the power of nature. It is the most profound lesson that i have ever encountered of how we need to think our way forward and ensure that our living environment touches us and guides us to a different future. On leaving Mui Wo, and returning to the bustle of Hong Kong, I understand more than ever why our little project in Todmorden matters, it helps us to see and believe and trust in our natural world, if we can do that then we can make the right choices for a sustainable future.

www.lcafoundation2010.co.uk

Leeds College of Art Foundation Fine Art show is on this week - well done all involved its a wonderful show

for marcie files to download http://www.mediafire.com/myfiles.php

http://www.mediafire.com/?4ni2jnnkqmm

smart city

Currently reading and researching the concept of a smart city. The ‘Smart-city’ is a new blueprint for an urban typology that goes beyond the definition of Eco-city. A smart city integrates educational, agricultural, environmental, and most importantly, social sustainability as well as energy sustainability into the heart of the city, for its long-term future.’ (CJ Lim)
Some great stuff to explore here, will be reporting back in due course, its taken a while to find, but there is a thread here that looks golden!

Principles of Beekeeping Backwards

Bee Culture – July, 2001
- Charles Martin Simon
10 Principles truly from another side of beekeeping
I have established mystic contact with the spiritual core of apiculture, and now anything is possible. Some of you old timers might resonate with this statement, but most of you, I’m sure, will not have a clue. Many will be irritated by what you perceive to be my arrogance; but, you have it backwards. It is not arrogance; it is humility. I will attempt to enlighten but without – a technique gleaned from the gurus – giving up any trade secrets. That was a self-deprecating joke. I’m no guru. I view their antics with cynicism. What I am is a beekeeper with forty years experience and the ability to tell you what you’re doing wrong.
Our apicultural forefathers, those great men who defined the principles of modern beekeeping, Langstroth, Dadants, Root . . . why were they so extravagantly successful? The answer is simple: because they didn’t know what they were doing. They made it up, as it were, as they went along. That is the creative principle, and that is the way it works. Once the standards have been set and carved in stone, the pictures and diagrams and procedures etched into the books, we have then models to live up to, and we can’t do it. Everything that comes after primary is secondary, or less. It will never be the same. For us to succeed, we have to become primary. We have to view beekeeping with entirely new eyes, just as our great pioneers did.
The more I studied beekeeping, the less I knew, until, finally, I knew nothing. But, even though I knew nothing, I still had plenty to unlearn. For we can never, and I do mean never, reiterate the ideals of the books, of history. How did Langstroth manage all his colonies without power tools? Especially when he was totally disabled for months and months. How did he do it? Simple again. He was crazy. Crazy people can do phenomenal things. The other side of insanity is genius.
I realized early on that if I followed the rules as written, I would fail. And how could anyone who knows better choose to fail? But it did take me a long time to figure that out. I started out just like everybody else, trying my best to go by the book.
It took me 20 years to get up the courage to sell my extractor, after it had taken me ten years to save up enough to buy it in the first place along with a truck with a shack on the back to serve as a portable extracting room. I was so stupid back then. I thought it was about honey. I’d read all the books, especially Ormand’s, especially the part where he says, “Honey is money.” I bought it hook, line, and sinker.
But don’t get me wrong. I love Ormand. He’s my friend. Acknowledged grand master of the game, third generation beekeeper, author of two great books on the subject, holder of the world’s record in the GUINESS BOOK OF RECORDS for the most honey produced by a single hive in a single season with a single queen, 404 pounds, a record that held from 1957 – 1963, when it was broken only with the use of multiple queens. Ormand’s true, single-queen record will most likely never be even seriously challenged. But he doesn’t keep bees anymore. The unthinkable happened. It was not that he got too old. He is very old, but he still works in carpentry. What happened was the mites wiped him out.
Ormand played by the rules. Bought the miticide and followed the directions. I bought the stuff too. But when I was handling it still sealed in foil, I could taste it in my gums, and it tasted toxic, so I didn’t use it. So my bees died. But Ormand’s bees died too. Besides, we were hearing reports from all around the nation that it was not working. But “they” were insisting that we use it anyway, the implication being if we didn’t use it, we were part of the problem. But if we did use it, our bees still died. Year after year, I didn’t use it. Year after year, I’d start new swarms in the spring, only to have them die off in the fall and early winter. I didn’t quit only because I couldn’t. Then we heard the miticide was outlawed in Scandinavia.
Ormand listens to an inner voice. I respond to an inner impulse. It’s not that I am against detail work. After all, I’ve written and currently maintain ten books in print. I’ve rewritten them all countless times – am still rewriting – do all the work, editing, designing, printing, cutting, binding by hand. But something rubbed me the wrong way about foundation from day one. My inner impulse very definitely didn’t want me to use it. I learned how all right, used it for many years, even after I had unequivocally decided against it.
Then I invented my foundationless frames. I manufactured them by hand, with help from Ormand, because he appreciated the way they worked and wanted to be a part of it, and sold them all around the world for a few years, until the price of wood doubled, then tripled, and it ended up costing me more for the raw wood than I could sell the finished frames for. So I had to go out of business. But the point is, I paid the dues. I don’t avoid work just to be avoiding it. By the same token, I don’t do meaningless work just to be doing something. I’d rather do nothing than something meaningless.
The mass-productionization of bee culture is the single most damaging process in our world. The great pioneers of modern beekeeping created vast empires without knowing what they were doing. The motivating point was and always has been, how to get the most out for the least put in. Those great men had no idea what old fools they were, and how universally pernicious their principles would become.
Take the drone situation for example. They reasoned correctly that since it only took a few drones to fertilize the queens, this business of a colony supporting hundreds or even thousands of drones was wasteful. So great minds went to the drawing board and described a hexagonal cell base parameter based on worker-bee size, uniformly embossing foundation with this pattern, thereby rendering it more difficult for the colony to raise drones. A war developed between the colonies attempting to raise drones and the keepers attempting to subvert their natural inclination. The apotheosis of this process was reached with plastic worker brood foundation, making it impossible. But even then, the bees drew cross-comb and tried to raise their drones there. Human ingenuity and technology prevailed, and drone populations decreased, honey production increased, the practice was deemed brilliant, and worker foundation was simply another unquestioned standard of the industry.
The trouble is, varroa prefers drone brood. And when there’s a dearth of drones, the dirty rotten parasite has no choice but to migrate into the worker cells. Drone brood trapping became de rigeur in Europe, but, apparently too labor intensive for the United States. Some intelligent manufacturers offer drone brood foundation but it hasn’t caught on. The work ethic in this country is as follows: Do the minimum amount of work. What this means: just enough to keep from getting fired.
If I sound disgusted, it’s because I am. When everything you learned is wrong, you either change or go down with the ship. I pray for the courage to change. Even though I am an old man, I understand the value of not being set in my ways.
Although I didn’t like foundation from day one, it took me years to develop the fortitude to stop using it. And many more years after that before I was able to give up the pernicious addiction of extracting – years to give up the constant striving for “straight combs” that would lend themselves to the extracting process.
There are no straight lines in Nature, folks. Nature abhors symmetry. Sure, things look symmetrical, but they never are, not when you look close enough. Symmetry is a human interpretation, a desire, an illusion if you will. Appearance leading to idealization leading to the setting of hard-line standards is indeed a problem.
Fortunately I was clever enough, when the bees started dying off, to be able to orient my business to bee and yellow jacket removal. I became a remover as well as a keeper. So over the years of confronting wild colonies in all sorts of settings, I couldn’t help but learn a few things, about myself as well as about them. One of the main things I discovered was there was something in my mind always looking for straight lines. I came to believe it was a mental disease picked up from my teachers. To repeat for emphasis: You never find a straight comb in nature. I mean never. This should tell somebody something.
Charles Martin Simon’s Ten Principles of Beekeeping Backwards:
Principle #1: Work with Nature, not against Her.
Principle #2: Profit doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot if you’re dead.
Our forefathers postulated that bigger bees would make more honey. The bigger the bee, the more nectar and pollen she can carry. The bigger the cell, the more it can hold. And so forth. So they devised a larger worker cell size, and it became the standard.
Principle #3: Dead bees make no honey.
Anatomically bigger bees are metabolically slower bees, more prone to disease and predation. And the diseases did come. The industry standard is a sickly bee.
My encounters with feral bees have instilled in me a greater respect for bees and contempt for the way we usually deal with them.
I knew I was finished with beekeeping as we know it the day I read the publication of the great scientific discovery of the “housekeeping gene” in relation to survivability in regard to Varroa. That was exactly where my suspension of disbelief finally snapped, and I realized our industry is directed by madmen. They have been driven mad by the fear of death and simultaneously compelled irresistibly toward it. Death of our beloved bees. Death of our beloved industry. Death of ourselves.
The Asian bee, the historic host for the mite, the bee that has coexisted with it successfully for a million years, does not usually inhabit enclosures. It hangs out in the open. This leads to the conclusion that when the mite drops off, it falls into the void, which is a good place for it. The immature Asian bee spends less time in the cell, which gives the mite less time to do it’s dirty work. Those are the keys, not the “housekeeping gene , never mind what the “scientists” have to say. But I am not meaning to imply that this “gene” does not exist. I’m questioning its interpretation. Just as I question the interpretation of the “bee dance”. The traditional interpretation of the bee dance is destroyed categorically by the observation of one single factor: The human observer observes from above. The bee dances face to face on a lateral plane. What the bee perceives and what the human perceives are two entirely different things. I grant that the dance occurs. I do not grant that it communicates anything at all. It is a sharing of excitement. The knowledge of where the nectar or whatever is is deeper than that. The colony is a manifestation of generations integrated with the patterns of the environment. There is a great mind at play that humans are generally incapable of comprehending.
Another significant factor in the retardation of Apis melliflera is the chronic abuse perpetrated by the teachings of the art. Colonies left to their own devices have an entirely different consciousness than domesticated varieties. Domestic bees are constantly messed with. A colony is a unified Mind. When it is opened and manipulated, the thought process is jumbled. When it is smoked, it must turn its attention to other things. Stress is good. Stress is bad. It depends on the kind. Exercise is stress. Getting beat up is stress. One event can build self-esteem; the other can destroy it. But the effects are reversible, based on other conditions, the most significant of which being how the subject interprets the experience. There are many variables.
The skill with which one messes with a hive has a great deal to do with the effect the messing is going to have on the future. The master manipulator will do it so that the bees will never even notice anything happening. Indeed, they will proceed with their process as though nothing was happening at all. The quality, quantity, and kind of mentality of the manipulator have everything to do with this. Some beekeepers make bees nervous just by showing up in the proximity of a hive. Woe be unto those keepers and their bees if they light the smokers and crack the hive lids. Beekeeping should be licensed, and I should be the licensing entity. There would be very few beekeepers. Again I need to point out: This is not arrogance, it is humility. For I truly have your best interests and the best interests of the bees at heart.
Principle #4: Don’t fight it.
When I think of all the years I’ve spent fighting ants and all the techniques I’ve employed, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Right now I’ve got naked honey comb and open bowls of honey in my kitchen, and plenty of ants too, but they’re leaving the honey alone. How come? Because I don’t fight them. I feed them. There is a bowl of honey on the counter established for them, where they can come and get all they want. At first they were hitting it heavily, then they lost interest. Apparently, if they can’t have it, they want it. If they can have all they want, they don’t want it.
Principle #5: Beekeeping is not about honey.
Principle #6: It’s not about money.
Principle #7: It’s about survival.
Well, actually, it’s not about survival, since nobody survives. It’s about the quality of life while you’re alive. Do your best to make the bees’ life the best it can be and it will be the best it can be for you. Stop thinking “maximum production”. Substantially less than most is way better than nothing at all. Learn how to leave the bees alone. Benign neglect is the way. Provide them with appropriate cavities. Standard beehives, if they’re right, are acceptable habitations for bees, but don’t use foundation.
In addition to the size consideration, foundation is contaminated. Only the oldest, most used wax gets rendered into foundation. Old wax absorbs and retains contaminants such as pesticide. Go ahead, use frames. Frames do make it easier to perform manipulations. But actually, just the top bars are enough, at least for brood chambers. Further up the hive, you might want complete frames for the definition of the bottom bars, to maintain the space between the top of the frame below and the bottom of the frame above.
I have 15 hives as of this writing (December 2000), after years of having none at this time of year. How did I do It? I don’t know, and that’s the answer. As the years have progressed, I have tried more and more to keep them as close to wild as possible, to not mess with them. I do harvest some honey, pollen, and propolis, but I do it with a leave-alone attitude. I am hoping for their well being. Beyond that I am asking nothing from them, expecting nothing. If they are prospering I add supers. If they make extra honey, I take some. When my combs are crooked and stuck across several frames, I use bee escapes to clear the supers before removing.
I crush the combs and strain them through a system of perforated plastic buckets. I keep quite a few cut combs around to eat au naturel. The wilder, more funky combs may very well be the best.
I’ve been reluctant in recent years to invest money in equipment, because of the Varroa situation. Consequently, I’m using old equipment a normal beekeeper would have thrown out a long time ago – In fact quite a bit of it has been thrown out by normal beekeepers – and I’m liking it better and better the worse it gets.
I’m thinking about running hives without bottoms and up on stands this season, at least during the warm months, and considering designing a bottom board to catch and destroy mites.
Principle #8: Forget everything you ever learned and start observing what is really going on.
In regard to this last principle. One of the first injunctions I received starting out was to keep accurate records. But I realized that accurate records would be obfuscations at best. When you refer to a notebook describing the events of a hive to date, you will not see the hive as it actually is. The level of information that can be cataloged is not vital, has nothing to do with what’s going on with the hive in question, and prevents you from seeing what is.
Furthermore, I have observed that the harder you fight to keep your bees alive, the faster they die. Cut them loose, give them freedom, the freedom to die as well as the freedom to live, and they live better.
Principle #9: Leave your bees alone.
Principle #10: Leave me alone.
Sure, I’m crazy, and proud of it.

security - uncertainty - being governed

So we have an election, we have a result...
We are now being told that we cant tolerate this degree of insecurity - a decision must be made, the markets can't tolerate the uncertainty.
Well tough I say. To hell with the markets, what does selling a pork belly on a futures market help us with anyway?  I have managed to live all weekend very nicely and haven't felt the need for government security. I have actually had a wonderful weekend in the garden  - it was uncertain because the weather looked a tad wobbly at times, the plants were doing their thing though, and there was a family task to make a path.
So, no government,  lots of fun. I don't feel any less secure or uncertain as I have before. Bollocks to them all. I'd rather be governed by my dog.

radical food

THE most radical political act today is to grow one's own food and to share that knowledge with others.

Think about it. Our government is run by corporations. Corporations DO NOT want you to be independent and self sufficient. They don't make money that way. They need you to be enslaved to the endless wheel of acquisition and discard. You end your slavery when you begin to grow your own food. to recycle and to live on less. It's fundamental, primal and liberating

FRUIT

FRUIT takes up the challenge of elevating the ecological knowledge of consumers and encouraging a way of life that is friendly to the environment. We want consumers to be conscious of the entire life of a product, from production to utilization, and not just what they see in the stores. Consumers must be aware that every phase of a product's life influences the environment and ourselves. F.R.U.I.T wrappers, a website, and a traveling installation are part of an initiative to inform people about alternative food systems and local food movements. While cities are often seen as set aside from nature, we aim to investigate the agriculture which feeds urban dwellers. For Beyond Green, Free Soil will use oranges as a vehicle to explore the complex relationships that make up the worlds Food Systems.

san fran at its growing best - really interesting site and ideas for networking

http://gardenregistry.org/

take a look at this nice site - thanks to Alys for pointing me to it

cob nuts
http://www.kentishcobnutsassociation.org.uk/

The thin line

I have finished a story ive been writing on and off for a while see below

‘Our work is not only an affirmation - an affirmation of our deepest, instinctive awareness that the very texture of life is dependent more upon organism than upon mechanism. It is also protest.’

        Patrick Heron

 Monday 30^th June 2008

I am compelled to report this story just as my friends were compelled to undertake their lifelong work. It is written as a result of many years of reflection and no doubt refinement of the essence of our friendships and our time together. After so many years I pass on my observations by way of recognition of their friendship, and in deference to my own rather futile creative desires that I have finally come to accept are best when charged with the telling of the qualities and capabilities of others. In so doing I endeavour to overcome ego in exchange for exhortation. I do not anticipate anything from you as a reader, save the time it takes to connect with the printed word, and perhaps, in so doing, to connect with the time and the place and more to the point with the people with whom I was privileged to live out my many years.

In the writing of the work I have come to recognize myself, and to identify the qualities in my friends which at the moment of their exposure I was too slow, too unobservant, and too much of this worldly place to be in a position to touch their clarity and vision. More often than not, I was unable to connect at all with what they were trying to do and say, and it was only the result of careful reflection and reviewing of my many notebooks that I have crept towards any insight and understanding of their world. I was the one that drew the conversation back to the mundane, and needlessly stifled the blossoming of an insight with a request for a cigarette or another pint. It is a question for another day to ask whether this practical approach provided them with any real refuge from their struggle.

The passing of time has also etched away many of the details of the days and replaced them with something that resembles more a set of feelings. It may be a thick dollop of ochre, or a cobalt blue, or the smell of pipe tobacco, but in the main these impressions have come to replace the thin line of the special moments when canvas came alive, when rough marble became form.  Furthermore, the conversations migrate between faces, I am now less sure of who said what and when.  It matters not to me, indeed I think if anything the delineation between three people, close working colleagues inevitably blurs as ideas flow between them. So the work comes to me in unfinished pieces, and it is in such unfinished pieces I therefore report it to you.  If you are seeking sense and clarity of their lives, then perhaps it is not the story for you, if you seek an essence, then these episodes may offer some connection into a set of realities which, once upon a time, pushed that thin line to its extreme edge. You will see and hear me as the story unfolds, just as you will observe the comings and goings of others, but more than anything else I hope you will bear witness to our time together, a vibrant, troubled, questioning time that, through the lens of the present, and while it is still visible and familiar I can’t help feeling that it grows ever more faded and distant by the day.

 

Saturday December 13^th 1947

St.Ives.  From the top of the hill looking down towards the harbour the little town clings to a scant bit of hillside and pokes a defiant finger to the wild waves of Atlantic ocean.  The vast majority of the granite built cottages are limewashed, and even on a dull day like today they serve to brighten the scene and contrast with the dark sea that encloses the extremities of the eye. The bustling harbour serves as a central focus for much of the coming and going of the town.  Fishing and crabbing boats are stacked side by side along the unloading wall and are constantly drawing passers by to peer down and check the catch.  Fishermen busily attend to the nets, the rope trimming and any routine engine troubles.  Whilst the predominant dialect is that of West Cornwall, it is not unusual to hear Breton French spoken by many of the crab fishermen. Take a short walk from the harbour through the narrowest of streets bordered by tiny granite built cottages and you will find yourself on the other side of the town in the flash of a moment, facing out to sea and looking onto Porthmeor sands. Along the beach there are a series of fishing sheds, these are large scale and well built wood and granite structures looming up 30 feet or so from the beach where many of the pilchard fishing catch is processed by a small, resilient gang of women and their fishermen husbands.  On the beach there will be children playing and probably a dog running around in the shallows of the water.  Further out if you are lucky on a fine day in summer you might spot a dolphin leaping, and if you are not so lucky the seagulls will take the sandwich from your hand.  Not today though.  It is pretty bleak out there. The sea serves to increase the sense of isolation that this quietly industrious place gives off to the winter sky. Weathered faces observe me as I walk through town, occasional acknowledgement but mostly silent watching. These are hardened people, they scratch a living out of the sea, and a few manage small farms rearing livestock on the hillsides around the town. There is little excess money for frivolities, but, at the same time, there is a satisfaction gained from life in a tight knit community, a place that knows itself and its ways. A little further along the coast are tin mines, the communities that cluster around the mines have been here forever, again they are tough and proud and hard working and poor, making good money for other people who live elsewhere.

By the time you get to St.Ives on the train you know you have undertaken a real journey. It is a long way from anywhere metropolitan, it feels a long way from anywhere metropolitan. And perhaps, just perhaps that is why Ben and Barbara decided that it was to become their home, a place where they could draw, paint, and carve, a place where they could connect with each other and where they could raise a family. 

Diary Tuesday December 16^th 2008

We live in strange times. Places change, so do circumstances and people, some things seem to evade change. More often than not we fail to see this as we are caught up in our own and in other people’s realities.  At a time when the pervading worldview is one of unremitting progress and development, where time itself is simply an inconvenient impediment to ever more consumption, the simple idea of stasis is somehow mistaken for failure and lack of connection. I am considered backward because I do not look forward to a prospect of even more consumerism.  Backward because I don’t play to the tune of commerce. Backward because I relish slowness. Backward because I find solace in disconnect, solace in the awkward idea, solace in the unmanaged life. 

If we seek alternative truth about reality and we sidestep the mainstream routines of modern daily life it is with relief and pleasant surprise that we see the world can be, and often is stubbornly and perhaps heroically the same, save for some minor superficial shifts.  Ancient monuments, older rituals and routines interfere with the shock of the new, warping the reality of the now, slowing time to a crawl. It reassures.

Let me give an example – rocks. There are some huge granite rocks that sit on the top of the hill near Eagles Nest from which you can just catch a peek at the town. They dominate the approach to the crest of the hill, looming above as if they are watching. They look exactly the same to me than they ever have, although Patrick used to comment on how their form mutated in the changing light.  These rocks have been here an eternity and are defining features of the landscape, but they are also responsive as plants crawl around them, they nurture and protect from wind and rain, they accommodate the many visitors and then at night they loom menacingly like giants of another time who sleep deeply, darkly.

Light. Now there’s a much better example. Daylight. I have recently been thinking a lot about daylight. I got to wondering if light is as it always was, or if light changes in its intensity over time?  Patrick often commented on the intensity of the light in the studio.  And I’ve always maintained that there is a timelessness to the quality of the light in Penrith.  Holiday-makers coming and going every year or two see a change in the surrounding fields, hedgerows, beaches, coves and shoreline, but living in amongst it all I do not see so easily the gradual process of transformation, we simply live within the change, and it changes very, very slowly.  To see this with clarity takes a discerning eye, an eye that has uncoupled from the routine of daily life to engage in a different discussion with time and place.

Friendships are the same. The familiarity of a friend, a closeness where anything can be shared is a quality that develops over time not as a result of anything particular except the passage of time.  I’ve seen the flickers of change in the town, my town, in the countryside and in my friends over my lifetime.  Now, as I look back and they are gone, their memory continues to evolve and remodel my thoughts, and it is a slow-burn but it is there, playing with ideas, playing with my tapestry of life. Light bears witness to all of these subtle changes.  As it is certain that eventually all of our faces begin to wear the badge of time, even Pat and Ben’s, and my faded memory of Barbara, it is as certain that light remains a constant, like a fond embrace etched in the memory it repeats and reminds us of what is always present in a world which is ephemeral. The light seems to cut through the palette of the Cornish seascape and sears its grey-blueness into the eye of the beholder, it is startling, brazen almost.  And then there’s that nagging question, does it stay the same, in the same way, all the time, over time?

An afterthought…I suppose that awareness and appreciation of time is also something which comes with the experience of time. Whilst the transition in accumulated years is celebrated culturally through recognition of birth, teen-hood, adulthood and on into old age, it is perhaps the pointed shunt of the death of a parent, trusted friend or partner that raises the spectre of one’s own mortality most bluntly.  Forcing us to stop awhile and consider our place.  I do so now, but many years after the events, and as such my blurred recollection simply adds another dimension to the sun-faded, wind-etched days of the past.

Saturday December 16th 1972

It was Saturday morning in Porthmear.  I watched him as he stood in his studio in the early morning. Daylight streamed through the high roof windows down onto a bare wooden floor.  The whitewashed walls of the old pilchard factory enhanced and focused the intensity of the light into white angled beams that drove cathedral like pillars from the roof to the floor.  When empty it was a spacious room, with a frame of seven small rain smeared windows overlooking the beach and a huge glass canopy above, which illuminated the entire workshop. But this room was far from empty, it was full of paintings, some stacked and some huge and hanging on the wall racks and some evidently in various stages of drying.  It was a room that was also full with colour. The canvas warmly reflected colour into the studio so that each tone seemed to compete for any available space. Despite this cacophony of light and colour it was airy, bright and whilst the room was superficially tidy, with different areas seeming to have things allocated to them, a canvas stack here, a newspaper pile there, the pots of brushes and squashed tubes of oil paint interrupted any real orderliness with their random scattering on the floor and around the various pieces of work in progress. At a small low-standing table, a steaming cup of tea sat in a saucer, its trail of vapour weaving in and out of the smoke coming from a burning cigarette that balanced precariously on the saucers lip.  At its side was a copy of the London Review, and a copy of the Manchester Guardian, not today’s, but one from a week past with a large penciled circle highlighting a critical article on a recent exhibition of work by Matisse with a note in the margin and a book reference that would receive further attention at a later stage.  Neatly collected together to the right of the table sat a batch of letters, addressed in flowing hand scripted brown ink writing and ready for postage stamps.  The early morning post lay open on the centre of the table.  Nothing of any importance, a chatty letter from Harry that described in forensic detail his on-going argument about the installation at St. Matthews, and a request from Jeanette to attend an opening of an exhibition in town next week. Initially the idea of attending it played in his mind, hunched at an easel in the centre of the room, but the work soon overwhelmed his attention. 

In Patrick’s time it was a sable paintbrush that dabbed against the canvas. Same day, same place, but different time it was Ben that could be seen with a pencil in hand. The newly sharpened 6b moved with certainty across the thick canvas that undulated slightly with the gentle pressure.  As the lines wove together into a web of connection, the suggestion of fields and farm buildings emerged, starting from a triangle in the canvas centre and leading the eye from the rolling hillside towards a series of rooftops and chimneys, he etched a delineation from the natural to the man-made.  I watched, sitting in silence as I often did in the old leather winged armchair, puffing my pipe and weaving my own intricate layered patterns of smoke across the sunlight of the studio. Again and again he sharpened the pencil, returning to the canvas and adding minor detail. Eyes flicking from surface to some other memory and back to the surface of the canvas. As I watched him I began to track the gaze of his the eye as it came to a vase and windowsill framed in the foreground of the studio.  The hand that moved with the determination and assured touch of an architect, paused, the pencil was re-sharpened again with a small penknife and he looked at me, smiled. ‘Nearly there, nearly there’ he resumed his work, ensuring the lines carved out the requisite shapes on the canvas. 

Diary…

I was thinking about completion, how we somehow instinctively feel when something has reached its nadir, and what tells us that this is the case. I was thinking about Ben’s comments on leaving St Ives, on leaving Barbara and Patrick.  I was thinking how even the slightest adjustment to what had happened would have resulted in another line in time.  How the moments had converged in a set of events and how strange, when tracked backwards, the whole affair had been. Yet my memories of those times had themselves altered over time, and altered because of subsequent knowledge and experiences, altering everything except for some continually present features, light, tone, colour, form.  It was as Patrick often said, ‘an impression’, words don’t explain the feeling and remain inadequate in a way that colour can cut a mood. All else seems transient. I was thinking how fragile our moments together were, with each other. How the moments of connection and interlacing of realities generated their own delicate webs of memory which at the time went unnoticed and then later, after the event, in the deathly long endgame of end-living, we cherish and we regret the fickleness of our youth.  Our recklessness with the moment, our race through now to get to tomorrow. And so, I was touched by timelessness, by the fluctuation that is evident between carefully observed moments which, on any other day might go unnoticed and race past us lost in the blur of the ordinary. I was thinking about how, in Ben’s words, our work makes the ordinary extraordinary.  I was perhaps hoping for something more, feeling, as I always did, that I had missed the moment and that it was only afterwards that I finally got it, it finally made sense, and then, in that moment of clarity I realized I was alone, and that it had all gone, long ago, long gone and I was just a lonely old man reflecting back on another age.  Friendships of yester-year, smiles and conversations and ideas and observations which had through their work forged a capsule of time into a moment forever, and which I had let slip, time after time until ironically, I was all that was left in the flesh, but they were all I had in the mind and in my lonely present.  I had, as I ever did, missed the significance of the moment.

Morning 16^th December 1972

A long day. The slow, quiet, patient seconds tipped into minutes passed, ticking into hours.  Working in silence he composed a wall of colour across the screen.  His heart provided the drumbeat of the day, thoughts echoed in his head as he worked. 

Living as a stranger, me in my own world, you there beside. I in my chair, watching the hand create, watching the slow impending wave move across the white of the canvas. Me in my own world living – living as a stranger, watching it all slowly pass by, for way too long.

Patrick always spent hours on each crashing wave of colour, ensuring in one sitting that the requisite tonal quality had been achieved before leaving the work to dry, one sitting would sometimes demand eight continual hours of effort, often leaving him mentally and physically exhausted. As the day passed he regularly corrected the angle of the canvas against the prevailing drop of light coming from the ceiling canopy, ensuring, as best he could that there remained an even balance of paint across the huge canvas.

His attention to the detail of the line cancelled out his awareness of anything else in the room.  He had no idea I was there most of the time, talking to him, questioning, responding to his occasionally spoken thoughts and observations. Absorbed into this trance-like state he worked, as he always worked, easing from within to a connection to the world without.  Lines formed, reformed and finalised on the canvas, and time was cheated of a few of its precious moments inside the frame.  It was an image which many years later I would claw back into the present, and through it form a bridge across the years.

There was always a strong delineation between sea and sky. The deep blue-green of the sea contrasted with the faded paler blue sky.  The white frame of the windows captured this image perfectly simply.  Hadn’t Ben used the window frame regularly in his work? He wondered if the joiner who had installed these windows some time in the early 1900’s had it in mind when he had undertaken the work to create a series of seven moving canvasses.  Probably not, silly idea.  But it was a work of art in itself and he thanked whoever it was that had placed the windows for their forethought, although in times past they probably had little interest in the sea and more on getting the fish gutted and salted.  The windows were the right height and the right size and, on entering the room, they added a warmth and slight distraction from the otherwise blank walls. 

Strange that.  A pilchard factory without any lasting odour of pilchard.  Instead the heady aroma of terpentine, a warm, oily slick smell that buffeted the nose. It was always so in this room, even when Ben was working here.  His mind wandered across a set of well rehearsed, unresolved questions. What if Ben hadn’t left St Ives? What if Ben hadn’t suggested he dropped the writing and instead focused on his painting? His continued reflection on this long passed sequence of conversations played repeatedly on his mind, particularly he had noted, over the last few weeks.  So much so, that the current activity of the day seemed to be pushed aside and the past kept creeping into him, bringing as it always did that sense of powerlessness that events passed but unresolved at the time always seem to generate new, unrealiseable permutations in the here and now.

The thing was, it had been such a huge decision, and whilst at the time he had convinced himself that it was his decision, it was, in retrospect, nothing of the sort.  To that end Ben had won the argument, if that is what it was. He had the last say in a decision which was quite simply life-changing and that was a matter of concern.  Because the subsequent drive and creative release was so overwhelming it had taken a long time to reveal and crystallise as a thought that this was really one of the few things in life which he had not managed and planned and controlled.   Because it was so successful a move it had actually made it more pointed, the lesson of emergence had become a formative moment from which all other creative activity was to flow.

Decisions drove the morning.  Were minute-to-minute actions actually the result of serious deliberation, or, were they more of a lottery, a set of random issues which surprisingly connected in ways that were initially unplanned but in retrospect made greater sense?  It all seems so random, yet it becomes such order. Patrick wondered on to himself.  This thought intrigued him, the notion of endless random acts connecting together to accumulate into something of greater significance when viewed through the distance of time. Is what we do in some way predestined?  The observation had arisen because of a series of articles which had been recently published in both the broadsheets and the review journals which were exploring the epitome of modernism.  He wondered long and hard about resuming the writing and drafting a response, but pride stood in the way and although he would never admit it, he knew it.

Mid morning

I must have dozed off.  The dull clunk and associated ‘damnation!’ jolted me into the moment.  Anyway, the palette had fallen from his hand and to his dismay smudged all down the side of his new blue cotton trousers.  It lay on the floor, paint side down on the boards.  ‘I told you it was a mistake to wear new pants in the studio.’  He snorted back, ‘Meeting Barbara for lunch my dear, thought it would save some time to go direct form here.’ ‘She wouldn’t mind what you were wearing’, ‘not the point, I just wanted a change… oh crap, this bloody paint!’ He was trying in vain to wipe the smudge of cyan off the lower leg with a dry cloth.  ‘She’s got another commission you know, means she will need to be in London more often.  We have to sort out about the children, its going to balls up my Paris activity for a while unless we can get a nanny or something…damn, bloody ruined… anyway its good for her to get out of here for a while and reconnect with town.’

His head drooped down towards the floor. As it happened he knew, his thoughts seemed to be just as heavy, the darkness sometimes closed around him so quickly he felt like the sun would never rise again.  A weight of cloud, pushing into the mind. Bending to pick up the palette he recognised the small but significant sign of time working away on his body.  His knees were just that little bit stiffer, on returning to a standing position he had a touch of giddiness and had to stabilise himself against the back of the old armchair.  He drew a smile inwardly at himself, what he was once he was no longer.  Perhaps Barbara had seen that too.  He looked over towards me, eyes slightly glazed and watery.  ‘I’ll miss her you know, when I go.  I’ll miss her so very much you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I have moved on…’

‘Oh.’

Ben often wondered out loud when I sat with him.  He would ask me difficult questions that concerned why things were as they were.  He would recall the troubled feeling he got in the pit of his belly from the time when he reflected on times that they had spent together  - especially that period when he finally noted to himself that he had done all he could in St Ives. He likened the realization to a daubed wash of grey, drawn slowly and deliberately across the white of the canvas, starting as a dense blob and trailing off to nothingness. Early excitements, moments when they both recognised that their intense sharing of ideas, theories, observation and insight was pulling them ever closer like two charged magnets. So intense that it was like a fuelled passion - a passion that was now somehow drawing to a close, beginning to fade and in its place came a numbness.  The fusion had given way to familiarity – a familiarity which he felt was being daubed – blop after blop without pausing. Not necessarily unpleasant or dissonant, but a fuzziness which represented a new feeling of challenge and contest that was somehow unnecessary and unwanted but was creeping into their conversation and their demeanour every time they met. 

He remembered the feeling the first time he had walked along the narrow streets of Downalong, nodding a morning greeting to the fishermen who sat, arms draped over the stable doors and leaning against walls, chatting to their neighbours and burning their first clay pipe of the afternoon. It was a warm yellow time. Sun shone. His every step was charged with energy, his eyes were flicking everywhere, soaking the light, the angles and depth of field and locking these momentary observations away for future reference to be recalled onto the canvas.  Sharp, acute, curved. Those early days of learning to see.  That was the earlier intensity, and it had faded, this was the now, and it too was on the wane.  The realisation of this pattern in his connection with his work was at once liberating as it provided greater self clarity, and fearsome as it represented a step into another unknown - another period of seeking and connecting without any idea of direction. As he grew older, this fear grew greater, and yet it was more familiar. But the fear grew, it always grew. 

Evening

Across the bay the evening clouds were speckled with rose sunlight.  He sucked on his cigarette and exhaled, angling his head towards the ceiling windows.  Resuming his poise his gaze refocused on the line of the rooftops, the long, precipitous drop from the outer houses to the lush fields and then to the dark waters edge a few miles in the distance.  Across to the right, out of the corner of his eye he saw the fishermen hurriedly emptying the late afternoon catch and the small babble of locals negotiating a good price for a fish or two for their evening meal.  The small Morris lorry with iced box crates stopping every 20 yards or so along the jetty loading up.  His attention was drawn to the diminutive, pretty girl sitting on her own, watching the smallest of rowing boats and waving to a bronzed, tussle haired young man who was smiling and shouting something to her - his arms flailing.

Diary..

Morning December 29^th 1967

...I find this all the time.  All the time, all the time, there is a persistent, nagging, drawing pull like a tide which draws us away from clarity in what we do.   Any day, of any working life, we face it, it saps our energy, our soul, our spirit, as we compromise again and again and again to ensure that the food hits the table and the colleagues are not offended and the job gets done.  But it comes at a cost, a suffocating, soporific cost that accumulates, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day until slowly we begin to lose the thread.  The thread which we diligently grasp through our formative years and infuse with hope and possibility, uncertain, delicate but willing it unfolds as time passes and only very few maintain the focus, perhaps through good fortune, perhaps through craft, perhaps through diligence and sometimes through simple genius of circumstance.  It doesn’t really matter what it is, what matters is maintaining the clarity, to keep seeking the truth of it. We do it because we have to. It was what Patrick told me on that last occasion we met, it was an assured and insistent message that he offered, a vindication of why he had devoted time, his time, his life to his work - ‘Our work is not only an affirmation - an affirmation of our deepest, instinctive awareness that the very texture of life is dependent more upon organism than upon mechanism. It is also protest.’

Not understanding fully, at the time, I have kept it with me and in my subsequent years I have seen the sense in what he said. The preoccupation of the day to day upon mechanism, the relentlessness of ritually living and finding, by doing the days one after the next that I am slowly losing my connection with the rough texture of life and falling prey to those who would rather polish away the unevenness for fear of the difference it brings – if I let go, free fall into the possibility of whatever comes and peeling off the barrier layers of mechanism which help to detract the intensity of organism then I become in my thoughts and deeds  unruly, unmanaged, dislocated, a differently visioned and patterned organism.  But I fear this place, it is lonely, dark place and it is misunderstood by the present times.

Ben sat watchfully.  His unease was palpable, he knew he would not be staying here for much longer, and while he was here he wanted to be sure that he made best use of the opportunities available.  He was restless, disturbed by his sense of unease he wondered what was troubling him so much and yet was not revealing itself to him.  His day was bleak, cold and work remained unfinished.  Dislocated, a feeling of dislocation. It makes one uneasy because the pattern is not evident. It will come, but only through waiting, and sometimes, just sometimes, I can’t wait, it is too torturous.

Diary…

Saturday July 13^th 1974

Protest. It was midsummer. Midsummer 1958. Yes that was it.  Ben had moved off to Switzerland and had left him the studio.  The studio.  Ben’s studio. Bit of a mess really, loads of work that he had decided to be rid of and then forgot to do so.  The canvasses still piled against each other against a wall, some stuck together, others jutting into each other. Ben’s legacy, Ben’s world encroaching still on his own, his eye watching back from the canvas where it once had trained. It had been a disconcerting time, what with the ignorant reviews of the Redfern exhibition and the move into Ben’s shoes in Porthmeor.

Midsummer then and midsummer now.  What difference had those years made except for the obvious?  What differed? Why? 

The town had changed, and was now bustling with tourists, not fishermen,  people coming down from Bristol and Birmingham and Manchester on the train, people who wanted nothing more than to sit on the warm sand and eat ice-cream, chips and paddle in the sea.  Their seasonal arrival brought a colourful festivity to St Ives but also marked his gradual withdrawal from the rituals he attended to during the rest of the year. Wandering the small cobbled streets and chatting to familiar faces, dropping in to Barbara’s for afternoon tea had become a less common summertime habit. It was as if the summer holiday season brought with it the outside world, and with that came another light, another more confusing array of tones which interfered with his concentration and muddled his intentions and actions. The other world which this part of West Penrith seemed to escape from so successfully out on the moorland above Eagles Nest, the creeping commercialisation of every aspect of life.  The town was changing, it was being discovered over again by a new generation, it was being wrapped differently to service a new generation of consumers, looking for gratification from product and less inclined to want to delay the senses and seek out the deep texture.  It has changed, and is changing, he told me.  My work is shaped by me and my work is shaping me, but it is also shaping and being shaped by other pressures, is it enough any more, does it still protest? Does the spirit still live here, or has it become another product?

I had a response to the question the very next day. I was in the sitting room reading the paper, mid morning. There was a knock on the door.  Everyone else was out, I declined the chance of a lift to the studio in preference to do my letters and such like.  Anyway, a young woman, smartly dressed in black beret,  polo neck jumper and black skirt and boots stood at the door, and a few steps behind her a tall young man.

Hello.  You are the famous painter Patrick Heron?  It was a statement of fact more than a question.  Can I help you? We were driving by and I just happened to mention… the tall man stepped forward, and I thought I have to meet him then! She finished his sentence, her accent was difficult to place, perhaps French but more Eastern European, he was most certainly English. I liked this strange pair, it was at once an unusual thing to have guests who invited themselves and yet it seemed so sensible, just passing, through we would drop in and say hello and have a look at what you are doing.  Well you had better come in then.

We had breakfast tea, sitting in the bay window overlooking the garden. He already knew a good deal of me and my work and was most apologetic that they were intruding.  She however was effusive, walking around the sitting room asking this and that, where did I exhibit, what did the family think of my work, what informed my ideas, why did I choose to live in such a remote place? I was amused by them, lightened by the youthful vigour of enquiry and interest,  a keenness to see things and to make sense of them. After an hour they left, smiles, thanks, handshakes, a kiss to each cheek.  It was a delight. A white backround and a rainbow of rich dazzling garden. It was a delight.

Over those years the community of artists with whom Patrick had shared, learnt and consolidated his sense of colour had dwindled and the attention of the art world had moved on, like a flock of birds to another town, another theme, another sale and another fashion.  It was the seventies. Market driven art was now in full swing, and the plethora of agencies, associations, promoters and consultants who attached themselves to the circus were to him a distraction of the first order.  In the case of many, their ignorance of art which was fuelled and enhanced by their pursuit of profit only served to heighten their irrelevance and disconnect to him. Some however, maintained a dignity and carried a gravitas which provided scope for him to be able to guide and locate his work in a way to maintain an income with integrity. Pragmatically he accepted their necessity but it was a distraction, one that presented problems of its own as recognition and financial success arising from sales grew.  Sales were good and interest in his work was fully established and had a momentum of its own. Commissions were regular and gratifying, the expansion of contemporary art in public places was perhaps a positive sign of the times. As the country grew more prosperous it grew more interested in public displays of artists work, which in turn drove the market for such work, which in turn he felt, distanced the art from the people rather than drew them closer. The dislocation of the modern view from popular culture never worried him in the slightest, but the danger of no protest was a persistent concern. He felt that his retreat from writing was complete and with it came a sense of not having to be so at odds with himself, not having to provide a continual commentary for some anonymous other but this resulted in an enhanced emphasis on the work, the ‘urgency of the brush’ as Ben had stressed to him, over the ‘urgency of the pen.’  Instead, (and this was irritating as Ben had also suggested it to him), he was beginning to see his work in a new way and with considerable clarity and the need for written expression diminished as a lexicon of colour, plasticity and depth took its place.  Perhaps the distraction of writing had generated the duality of views, (Ben’s words not his).  It still grated though, he always thought that he knew himself better than Ben gave him credit.  Just that when people are close to you they choose to interpret what you are and how you are in their own shadow, mythologizing and deifying and ignoring and denying all facets of being a person amongst people.

Midsummer brought with it other transitions than that of the seasonal turn to holidays.  A growing realisation that one’s work was accumulating and generating a momentum of its own, somehow independent of self, and as a result the wave of directions it opened up were in danger of engulfing the eye, reducing the clarity and diffusing the intentions.  Being famous, the celebrity within a circle in the know... or recognising and accepting the reality of being recognised as significant in the field brought no consolation, it was a troubled place  - just another troubled place amongst many perhaps.

Diary…

You have to choose to improve. The act of creating something from scratch is a mystical process.  Never sure what or where the eye will take upon the artist has to uncouple form the constant needs of the outside world to produce and to learn to listen, to tap into the quieter places that move the spirit.

Patrick stood facing the ocean on the warm golden sand.  He had been walking along from one end of the beach to the other following the trail of debris left from the high tide mark.  Occasionally a pebble, or a piece of sea-bleached wood caught his eye.  He had followed the line etched by the tiny black pebbles which formed a thin line delineating dry from wet sand.  The juggling of the edges between dry and wet sand seemed to have a tension between them which defined two different yet connected worlds, and it was the interface of these two worlds of sand that joyfully intrigued and entertained. Solid blocks of yellow which on closer inspection were mottled daubs, grains against a larger canvas, tectonic plates clashing but delicately poised between each other. Worlds in tension, worlds intention, fate.

1958. Ben had been worried, deeply worried for a long while.  In the end, depressed and frustrated he had made arrangements and left town.  It had been a period of profound and creative thinking and powerful argument between himself and Patrick, as Ben pushed him more towards atmosphere in his work, towards a new frontier and away from the writing and commentary.  ‘It is a distraction that you can live without’ he told Patrick, ‘there are plenty of critics, but leading edge painters are few and far between - devote time to your craft, push the edge of seeing, but bloody well work at it.’  Ben had a way of observing the work which encouraged him in turn to be more courageous and determined, but he knew he had to see him leave town before he could find himself fully in colour.  The friendly competitiveness that Patrick felt for Ben was perhaps that of youth watching age.  Ben was already an international name, exhibiting widely and receiving commissions and invitations on a regular basis.  He had mastered line, and like Matisse, was employing new technique to older tried and tested resources. Patrick, quite a few years his junior, was to Ben, a prodigious talent, who was in need of some guidance and nurture. In a genuine sense he aspired for the young painter.   Patrick found this at once an encouragement and something with which he needed to manage with a degree of caution - he wasn’t to be squashed.  He was his own man.  Too much heeding of his mentor and he became referential, too little and he realised he would not gain from the immense opportunity that their friendship provided in both practical and spiritual support.  To make a living as an artist was not an easy choice, it demanded considerable self-belief, and whilst this abounds in youth, it also seemed to spawn equal amounts of self-doubt which was evident in Ben and Barbara’s relationship with their work, and with each other.  The feature of this tension, choice, had been a regular point of discussion between the two men over many a drink.  When we look back, our lives make sense, when we look forward the idea of sense is not always prevalent - only worry, nagging self-doubt and disconnected possibilities.

He knew that with Ben away overseas he would have lost the regular contact, the challenge of his insight and the clarity of his observation which served as both a corrective and a guide, but that was not for public consumption and certainly not something that he wanted to tell Ben.  Patrick was more than aware that his ease of transition had prompted personal tremors and doubts, just as the mumblings of the St Ives artists set indicated a wider suspicion of acrimony, he steeled himself for a rocky ride through to the Autumn ahead.   The clouds of anxiety were in sight, but not yet imposing on the intensity of the light.

The sky is a system, connecting the heavens to the sea. It generates a surface image which I have always loved.  There was a mystery to the connection of one to the other which is difficult to evoke on the surface of a canvas, not as a symbol, but simply as a connection of two forms, on a single plane, two colliding banks of colour.

‘My exploration has, for many years now, been one of a journey into the continent of colour.  I recognise in me the compulsion to examine the unexplored and the undiscovered, even though as yet I am not there I feel its place, its presence.  The possibilities of colour exude from every moment I paint. I find that I draw great energy and enjoyment from the experiences it offers me and recent work has pushed deep into the examination of contract of weight, warmth, coolness and vibrancy. I keep coming back to the vibrancy, the intensity of juxtaposed violet and green! Certainly anywhere, anytime, in the garden, on the moor or in the studio it never ceases to enthrall me.’ (Private diaries)

Porthmeor beach was splendid at this time of day, as the red evening sun fell heavy and drunk into the wide blue ocean.  He soaked in the warm colour, eyes half closed it seemed to burn into his very being, rejuvenating and energising his spirit. The heat that had absorbed into the sand throughout the sun-drenched day surged back to the surface and was caught by the breeze in little flurries and flickerings of warmth. If you stood still and concentrated hard it was not unusual to feel the pulse of the earth below your feet.  The waves tipping and turning on the beach crested in white spray and peeled across the sand with a comforting wash into the still dry white sand.  He loved this spot, situated close to the studio.  It brought him tranquility and a sense of balance.  On days like this it was one of the finest places to be. 

Diary…

Fluidity had been a feature of the day, confined fluidity, as it was held within the rigidity of the canvas that was in preparation.  This day had been complex and mostly unresolved but now it mellowed as the evening came down on Porthmeor.  Did mechanism come from such fluidity though? Ought I be aware of method determining form? What was it Barbara had said, ‘watch your watching, and see your seeing because no one else can or will do it for you.’

I looked around me. On my own at Porthmear. Three huge white canvases leaned against the studio wall.  Each had been stretched, primed and left to dry, they caught the evening sun that glowed warm against the stark white of the walls.  A further canvas was hung on the wall at waist height.  This canvas was still wet, as your gaze moved over it the thin drape of the colour glistened in the late evening sunshine and reported back to the eye a series of shapes interlinking yet separate, clashing as ochre met olive green. 

Ben had often talked about the light on the walls, how it enchanted and inspired him in the early evening.  I recalled how, some twenty years earlier they had sat on this same spot and spoken at length about the work of Matisse.  Both shared an admiration for his use of line and colour, indeed, both had drawn inspiration from one or the other aspect of his work and carried it directly into their own compositions. I always felt more attuned to his use of colour and felt that there was always a slight uncertainty of angle and of intent which Ben had missed in his analysis.  My sensitivity to the matter of working with my elder had perhaps in retrospect blurred my opinions, I had been wrong. The trouble was that I had avoided acknowledging that I was wrong.  Ben had read Matisse like a book.  I know now and I regret that we didn’t carry our shared devotion and study of him much further.

Routines...

I have a black and white routine, it reminds me of things which otherwise I fail to do and so if I do these things I feel more secure.

Before traveling, find the correct bag, make sure that tickets and passport are secure yet easily accessible. Always place my wallet in the small zip-up section of the hand luggage.  I had caught this habit from Barbara and Patrick.  She was religiously methodical in her preparation for any new piece. In particular it was the observation of the marble before any work began. Endless slow revolutions like a witch circling the cauldron. I mentioned it her once and she was not amused. ‘How else can I know what I am working with?’  God how I struggle with her, the disconnection between us is palpable.  How did Ben manage to put up with it for so long?

Colour routines

The brush was first dipped in meths, then the pot of colour, in this case ochre, was stirred with another brush.  The meths added to slightly thin the mix, and then slow, meticulous layers of ochre were added to the canvas in a gently advancing wave of colour across the shapes that had been outlined in a thin line of pencil.  The movement was relentless, from brush to pot to canvas where the brush evened out any sign of surface plasticity and indentation and unevenness of colour.  As the work progressed there was an occasional return to earlier parts of the canvas where a slight omission had occurred and the paint was showing too much movement, these undulations were eradicated and the solid wall of colour continued.  Eventually, after two hours of sustained effort, the first of the ochre shapes was completely realised, raw on the canvas.  The moment had then arrived to stop and to replace the brushes in the meths and to step back from the work and consider.  He stood five or so paces away and looked carefully at the work, his left arm crossed his chest and his right hand tucked under the chin.  The undulating line at this point crashed against the white of the canvas in its naked state.  The impression was evident already, but the colour was as yet not the overwhelming feature, more so was the contrast of ochre to white which enabled him to consider carefully the clarity of the line and the overall tension that it was likely to achieve. A clash that razed the canvas.

His eye wandered meticulously from left to right, drawing along an imaginary edge, then reverting back and redrawing, etching the delineation between the burnt amber and green to come later.  Feeling across the canvas the numerous plates of colour jostled for position in his mind, edging forward he led the thin line of pencil from top to centre in one long defined movement cutting apart the canvas from the deeper green to come from the ochre already there he saw the required line, recorded the next step and retreated back to consider what was now further defined.

Patrick was amused at my story.  I had dreamt that afternoon as I sat in the corner of the studio that Matisse was here in the room with us, as an old man, nearly blind, watching from the torn leather armchair leaning forward on a cane topped with silver - watching with interest, nodding and grunting to himself.  When I turned to ask him what he was looking at he was gone, the armchair was empty, just an imprint left in the cushion - retaining the memory of his form.  In the presence of angels my dear chap. Stay off the pop until the evening and you may sleep more soundly.

Exhausted from the work, a relentless journey of colour and time, he saw for the first time the whole that had been planted onto the canvas, and he knew it was time he stopped for the day.

Saturday August 13^th  1966

Across town, a few streets away from Porthmear Beach, Barbara sat on a wicker chair and studied a white marble slab.  Kids. They are driving me fucking crazy, how can I work?  Her face, hair, hands and sleeves were covered in a fine white marble powder. Her day had involved a series of encounters with the block woven with a frequent revisiting of the scattered pages of notes and drawings which were strewn across the small coffee table and scattered on the floor.  First impressions would suggest a tempered fling had left the papers where they were, but these would not be accurate.  Instead, the papers had been placed there carefully in sequence, and although the light wind had caught the corners of one or two of them and flicked them slightly askew, they remained a record of actions followed and actions as yet to come.  She sat awkwardly, crossed legged and head in hands. Her questioning of her own work had led her to reconsider the line that the earlier attempt at the piece had left unresolved.  Intuitively she was uneasy of the shape that was emerging from the block, the geometry was not quite there and her resulting frustration with the material and her own efforts to see into it left her exhausted and disillusioned with the work.  She scribbled a few lines in the uppermost page of the remaining notebook on the table and pulled the pages on the floor together and put them carefully to the side of the current journal. She tied the string pull together across the covers and as an afterthought she added a scribble on a new note that it was time to call Harry to get the details of the exhibition, she also noted a short shopping list for the forthcoming trip to London. She hadn’t been up to town for what seemed like an eternity and the prospect generated mixed feelings. She caught herself taking a deep breath, it woke her from her wanderings and she looked again over to the marble.  The hollowed pool on its face was reminiscent of the beach walk long in the past when Ben had taken her to a newly found cove full of the most rocky sentinels.  ‘No form in nature is ever accidental, they all reveal structural realities and so it is in her recent work’ Ben had echoed Patrick’s published commentary in the New York Review on her work as he circled around her waving his arms like a huge swan.  Always lecturing, silly old bastard, why is this such a struggle most of the time, when he is in this kind of mood I am at my happiest moments? She looked again at the stone in front of her, at best she thought to herself, when delicate, taut, airy and logical, geometrically logical. Focus, focus, focus. The piece still showed face, and she knew intuitively that this was to be, it was going to work, the new line of the marble hollow began to show itself as the evening sunlight caught the wall of the studio.  The silhouette outlining the form.  It was there, but not yet there.  She returned to chip away. Trance like.

December 13^th 1963

My father died yesterday.  I can still hear his voice.  I can still see him in the garden, heaving heavy stones across from one part of the garden path to another. I can still sense the energy he held within, and then, as I sat with him and his breathing changed week by week moving from calm intake to great heaving efforts to fill the lungs and then the final gasping moments. His hand squeezing mine and he was gone. Time stood still then, and perhaps has done with him and me forever. I still cry sometimes when I think of him.

A stranger sat across from me in the café on the harbour front. We exchanged glances, and then he asked me if I was here on holiday. No, I work and live here.  Strange, my reply, I reflected later, I work and live here. Why? He was down as part of a government sponsored review of regional funding. As he ordered another pot of tea he informed me that his father had just died. It was his first trip away from home since this had happened and he was surprised how lonely it had made him feel. I listened.  I didn’t divulge that I was in a similar emotional state, I just listened. He told me of his children, completing their examinations to study law at Oxford, he told me of his wife, who didn’t want to live in the south and lived at the family home in Morpeth, Northumberland.  He told me of travels, to Asia and the middle east where the changing world was also touching and reforming earlier civilizations. When asked about his thoughts on St Ives he was evasive I thought.  ‘These are monumentally important times’ he rasped, his cigarette smoke puffing out as he spoke.  ‘When we look back in twenty five years time, and see the changes happening now we will wonder how we ever managed to live life in this squalid country like we did, with all its greyness and post war hesitancy.  With a little conviction, as a nation, we can reinvent ourselves.  But people have to move with it, you know’ he eyed me over his horn-rimmed glasses, ‘take this place for example, do we really think that fishing is going to keep the economy alive and kicking? Who is going to do it to start with? Fishermen I proffered.  He sipped his tea and added more sugar. I looked around the café.  Surprisingly busy for a Tuesday afternoon. What do you do for a living down here then? I hesitated, the emphasis on ‘down here’ gnawed somewhat. I represent people’s ideas, particularly creative people who are very busy creating things and don’t always have the time to involve themselves in the drudgery of selling their work and meeting clients.  So you are an agent? Yes, I am an agent. An agent of fortune. Perhaps even an agent of change, just like yourself.  I explore ways of seeing the world through pieces of art which many people find challenging and sometimes difficult to see.  I tell them how to see. Once they can see, they can tell others.  They go off and they pollinate those who can afford to purchase what my clients create, and that my dear, is how we all, together, manage to make a squalid living, exploiting situations so that one or two special people are able to follow a road which most of us will never even recognize as being a road until one day, when they are gone, and all we can do is look at what is left and ask ourselves where on earth did that come from?

 

December 13^th  1947

Ben was annoyed.  He had received yet more clippings sent anonymously to him from someone at the Manchester Guardian in the early morning post which had irritated him all day and played on his mind.  So what if the abstract expressionists were not getting a mention, so what if they didn’t get it in their stuffy English way?  He could see that there was energy and space, and all that soft colour in abundance in the new American work.  Shit. So what was new? If they couldn’t connect to his work that was their problem not his.  What was the point of an agent anyway? What was he meant to be doing? Yet it deeply troubled him, to the point of interfering with his entire day and for that he was well and truly pissed off.

He put down his pencil.  Looking out of the smallest of the windows he could make out the black hillside which led the eye down to the rocks where yesterday he and Barbara had strolled, picking pebbles and admiring the waves crashing.  He rose and pulled on his jacket.  Checked for cigarettes and a handful of change and went down to the ground floor.  More post had arrived. What was it with the postal service? The randomness of delivery times challenged his sensibilities.  Leaving the door on the latch he pulled it towards the frame, it snagged on some gravel and refused to close, he tugged it harder and finally it clicked into the frame he stepped out onto the cobbled street. 

St Ives always had a way of catching him off his guard, and this evening with him in a grim mood was no exception, for, as his gaze moved down the row of tiny cottages his eye was caught by a reddish orange glow on the whitewashed house-fronts and he warmed inside.  It was there for a fleeting moment and then gone as the sun finally dipped below the horizon out on the ocean.  Whilst he loved the place he always had a melancholy feeling about it.  This time he felt that he was in his last summer in the little town, he put the thought aside. Seagulls cackled and swooped above him, and the breeze brought with it the scent of old fish from the harbour.  The greyness of the day seemed to fall away from him.  He sauntered down to the front, where most of the days boats had already tied up. Any sign of fishermen and the catch were long gone.  One lonely figure was still out in a small rowing boat, messing with nets, otherwise the place was empty except for gulls. He caught sight of the young man he had seen waving to his girl earlier.  He watched him at work, drawing the nets towards his body in long, rhythmical sways of his arms, noting the ease with which his hands played over the nets checking for the odd sign of any damage. There was a flow in his work that made him look like a dancer on a stage.

Late morning

When I sit and look at the work I often find that I am taken aback at what I see.  My eye doesn’t seem to connect with what I thought I had been doing just a few moments before to the point of no recognition or connection with the marks I make.  Occasionally I can see where I was, and what I was after, but for so many of these efforts I find myself back at the beginning, I reconcile myself that this is a state which will perhaps never be fully resolved and so I will preserve my energy for another attempt.  Sometimes however, I just long for the clarity to come fully through, from the moment of connection with the canvas to the moment I stop and look and see what I have created.  The flow is an energy which is so difficult to fully master, the eye and the mind and the connection of that which is to that which I feel are at best arbitrary, at worst torturous. (Diary entry: 1957 Zennor)

Evening

Across the bay the evening clouds were speckled with rose-red sunlight.  Another cigarette was cherished and lingeringly exhaled.  Resuming his poise his gaze refocused on the line of the rooftops, the long, precipitous drop from the outer houses near the harbour to the waters edge.  He thought again about the days work, sitting in the studio on the easel.  Was it too busy? Was there enough space? Should I leave out more? He saw the fishermen hurriedly emptying the days catch, gutting the flesh of the fish and throwing the remnants overboard. Here and there the small babble of folks negotiating a price for a fish or two for their evening meal.  The lorry with ice-crates stopping every 20 yards or so and loading up. 

At dinner that evening Ben was revisiting a story which had appeared in the paper he had started reading at breakfast.  He paraphrased the story for Barbara, adding occasional additional details to embellish and entertain as he recounted the entire tale as it were a stage play.  Apparently this place, L’Ile Bouchard is a small town in north-western France, on the River Vienne.  (We went there, remember? Its that small tributary of the Loire, twenty miles south of Tours and about ten miles east of Chinon?) Anyway, there in the parish church of St Gilles, from the 8th until yesterday, there have been a series of apparitions of the virgin Mary. The first apparition in the church at L’Ile Bouchard took place on the afternoon of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. At about one o’clock in the afternoon a little girl called Jacqueline Aubry, aged 12, her sister Jeanette, aged 7, and their cousin, Nicole Robin, aged 10, were on their way back to school after lunch in the Aubry house, when, at Jacqueline’s suggestion they stopped at the church of St Gilles to pray. 

Barbara sat herself on the arm of the sofa, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other and listened attentively. Ben continued. They went to the altar of the Virgin and began to say a decade of the rosary; but they were not quite half way through when Jacqueline saw a beautiful Lady before her, all in white, with hands joined in prayer and a rosary over her right arm. To the left of her was an angel holding a lilly, eyes fixed in contemplation of the Lady.

The children reported later that the Lady smiled at them and then nodded. Jacqueline whispered that they must tell other people what was happening, so they ran out together and saw a school friend, Laura Croizon, aged 8, and her 13 year old sister, Sergine. They grabbed their arms and dragged them to the church, the five girls made their way towards the altar, as they got there Laura cried out that she could see a beautiful lady and an angel.  Sergine, though, saw nothing, and the others had to describe the scene for her. ‘That would be you darling’ laughed Barbara, ‘with me describing it in all its glory…go on.  ‘The altar of the Virgin had a stained glass window featuring Our Lady of Lourdes to its left, and a statue of Our Lady of Victories directly above it. The apparition was situated several feet off the ground in the corner between the altar and the window.

Ben took a sizeable swig of his wine and placed it back on the coffee table. Barbara stood up and stretched her arms. Wait, don’t go, said Ben. There’s more to this, much more. Barabar sat down again leaning against his shoulder. When they were questioned the girls described a beautiful Lady, surrounded by a golden light, wearing a brilliant white dress edged with gold, and a blue sash, and carrying a white rosary. Her veil was a white of a different hue and fell down to near her feet, while the girls could see her striking long blond hair falling down the front of her body, in two parts, to her knees. Her smile was wonderful, and they thought her to be aged about 16 or 17.

Then there is the angel, surrounded by an intense white light, who was kneeling on his right knee, and wore a rosy-white robe, also edged with gold. Like the Lady he had blue eyes and blond hair. In his right hand he held out a lilly stalk, while his left hand was placed upon his heart. He had white wings, also trimmed with gold, whose feathers shone and moved slightly in a “breeze” the children could not feel.

Once the girls had explained all this to Sergine, the Lady disappeared, and they all made way their way out of the church. Jacqueline and Jeanette rushed home to tell their mother, but she didn’t believe them. Well would you? He turned the page of the paper. So, it goes on, once back at school it says that the news spread very quickly, Jacqueline recounts all of what has happened to one of the sisters, Sr. Marie de L’Enfant Jésus, that she had seen a beautiful Lady in the Church, but wondered who she might be—was she the Blessed Virgin? The Sister believed instantly, but feared the reaction.

So enters the parish priest, Fr Clovis Ségelle, and the head teacher, Sr. Saint-Léon de la Croix.  They came into the school yard just then, and they were not impressed by the reports. Fr Ségelle said that Jacqueline must have been seeing double through her thick glasses - because of her poor vision and chronic conjunctivitis, Jacqueline did have to wear glasses and continually wipe her eyes.

Jacqueline explained that the other girls had also seen the Lady, and so Fr Ségelle and Sr. Saint-Léon decided to question them separately. Each gave the same account, and as school began again, Jacqueline spoke once more with the head teacher, who dismissed her curtly, while managing to give her the impression that she should have stayed in the church if the Lady was really so beautiful. Jacqueline took up this idea, and lost no time in fetching the other girls and leading them back to the altar of the Virgin, where they were delighted to be beckoned again by the smiling Lady.

As they knelt before her, though, her expression became extremely sad as she slowly uttered her first words: “Tell the little children to pray for France, for her need is great.” Jacqueline, still not sure who the lady was, then whispered to Jeanette and Laura to ask the Lady if she was their “Maman du Ciel.’  They did so, and the reply was “But of course I am your Maman du Ciel!” Jacqueline then asked about the angel. The Lady looked at him, and he turned towards the girls and said: “I am the angel Gabriel.” 

Mary then turned back to the girls and asked for their hands to kiss, bending low to reach the hands of Jacqueline and Nicole. But the other two girls were much smaller and could not reach high enough. Jacqueline took them up, one after the other, and lifted them up at arms length, as though they were practically weightless.

All four testified to the solidity and warmth of Mary’s hand and the touch of her lips. Before disappearing in a cloud of silvery dust, she asked them to return that evening at five o’clock and the next day at one o’clock. After the girls left the church, they noticed a shining white oval on their fingers.  Look how the light pours out of me Jacqeline observed. But before they got back to school these traces, which they did manage to show to a local woman, had faded.

Jacqueline and Nicole spoke of what had happened, and after class they were separated and asked to write out accounts of their experiences, which were matching in every detail. Once the girls got home they found their parents were not inclined to believe them, and only Jacqueline was able to return to the church, for the rosary and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament in honour of the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

Mary appeared and beckoned to her, but as she debated whether to go forward or not, looking back toward Sr. Saint-Léon for permission, assuming that she too could see the apparition, the bell rang for Benediction, and when she looked back the apparition was gone. But once the Blessed Sacrament had been returned to the tabernacle, Mary reappeared.

The next day, it says Tuesday 9 December, at one o’clock, all four girls assembled in the church, and so the general pattern for the week’s events was set. They knelt by the Virgin’s altar and began to pray Hail Marys, when suddenly a shining golden sphere, about three feet across, came out of the wall and unfolded itself as a rectangular curtain of silvery light, on which the rocky grotto stood out in relief.

Mary’s long golden hair, which had so impressed the girls on the first day, was now hidden underneath her veil. The angel was kneeling on the other side, while the words on the rocks had changed. Now they read: “Je suis l’Immaculeé Conception.”

The girls were then joined by a certain Madame Trinson, who owned a shoe shop in the town. Mary, with a grave expression, showed the girls the golden cross of her rosary, and asked them to kiss it. Jacqueline and Nicole both stood up to do this, and Madame Trinson was amazed to see Jacqueline repeat her feat of the previous day, lifting up the two younger girls as though they were dolls, as light as a feather, in order that they too could kiss the golden cross. The metal was cold to their lips and they were penetrated with a sense of Mary’s grief.

The Virgin then made an extremely slow, sign of the cross. It took two minutes to complete, and the girls copied her movements, with Madame Trinson looking on in astonishment. Barbara mimed the sign to herself, listening intently. Once this was over Mary said that she would tell them a secret that they could reveal in three days, and with great emphasis said: “Pray for France, which in these days is in great danger.” I guess she means because of the possibility of civil unrest. Then she asked that the priest come at two o’clock, with the children and a crowd, so that they could all pray. She also asked for a grotto, and that her statue and that of the angel should be placed in it, promising to bless them once this was done. With that the apparition disappeared.

Fr Ségelle, however, refused to come at two, and so Jacqueline, Jeanette and Laura, with about twenty other children, and thirty adults, assembled in the church. After they had said a batch of Hail Marys, the Virgin and the angel appeared as before, out of the golden ball. She asked for hymns and prayers, before telling them to return each day at one o’clock, until everything was over. At five-thirty Fr Ségelle informed the archbishop of the day’s events. That same day, to general surprise, the Communists decided to call off their general strike.

Then on that third day, last Wednesday, one hundred and fifty people waited in the church for the next appearance of Mary. Suddenly the Virgin was present, and again she requested a sung version of the Hail Mary, before asking the girls to kiss her hand. The crowd, like Madame Trinson, were amazed to see the frail Jacqueline repeat her feat of lifting the two smallest girls.

Then Jacqueline’s mother called out to her daughter requesting a miracle so that all would believe, to which Mary replied: “I have not come here to perform miracles, but to tell you to pray for France. However, tomorrow you will see clearly and you won’t need to wear glasses any more.”

Then Mary told the girls that she was going to tell them a secret, which they must promise not to reveal. They agreed to this, and, after the secret the Virgin asked them to return again the next day at the same time, before disappearing into the golden ball. This apparition had lasted about a quarter of an hour. As in the case of other authentic apparitions, the girls could not be persuaded, by any means, to divulge the secret.

Naturally enough, the people wanted to know what the answer to the request for a miracle had been, and the girls related that Mary had said that from tomorrow Jacqueline would see clearly and not need glasses. At five o’clock, Fr Ségelle interviewed Jacqueline, and poured scorn on the idea that her eyes, which were really in a dreadful condition, could possibly improve overnight.

Jacqueline’s parents were in something of a quandary; because they were non-practising Catholics, and her father had been embarrassed by remarks concerning his daughter, and become angry. But the transparent sincerity of his eldest daughter had struck him deeply, and now they would have to wait and see what the morning brought.

When Jacqueline woke up, she was able to open her eyes without any difficulty and had normal vision. She called to her parents in delight, who were overjoyed at seeing their daughter’s eyes cured so miraculously. Her father rushed to get Fr Ségelle, who exclaimed on seeing Jacqueline: “So it’s true that She has descended among us!” The priest immediately contacted the archbishop and was told to be present at the next apparition.

So we get to Thursday the fourth day and the story stops, the reporter says that any future activity and events will be in further correspondence.

Barbara looked at him as he folded the paper.  I’ll get in touch with Georges and see what he knows. Its strange how I find these stories very unsettling. I don’t really know what I think about it. Ben looked at her slowly and took another drink. I know, I know, but it is a great story isn’t it, can you imagine being there, how weird that would be, why would they make something like that up?  Oh I can imagine only too well, just think what a field day the press vultures would be having if that type of thing was happening here?  That’s what I mean, its unsettling because I don’t know.  I just don’t know. And I feel unsettled because I don’t like to feel I need to know, I don’t feel I need to have an explanation even though I kind of want one.  Most of life is discovering and then when I’m faced with something really off the edge I don’t want it like that. Odd. Ben continued. Anything is possible, the face in the mirror may be mine, but it may be another’s. He smiled. It is like a welcome to modern life, this kind of story cuts across a way of seeing makes a doorway to another place, I find it unsettling, curious but unsettling.

Barbara picked up the newspaper and began scanning the article all over again. Ben got up from the table carrying his plate and went to the kitchen.  The cat with no name was back in the house, sauntering in as if it owned the place it pirouetted in the middle of the floor and then proceeded to sniff under the kitchen dresser.   Ben watched it with an amused and distracted silence, he enjoyed its daily interruptions into their life, unannounced it arrived, acted out its part and then disappeared again into the bustle of the town, their own little visitation.  He left Barbara sitting on the arm of the sofa, paper in hand, absorbed.

I am standing on rocks by the coastline south of Zennor.  Barbara had taken me there to look at the enormous sea sculptures which stood at the waterfront like a tribe of giants facing out to sea.  Waves slapped and cracked loudly against them and the seaweed wove a tapestry of sub-aqua fury in the foaming rock pools.  After a while the relentless to and fro of the water on the rock seems to transfer from the cacophony of thunderous booms into a background symphony, below the immediate awareness but ever present. Observing this I mention it to Barbara, how something as overwhelming on first arrival slowly recedes as other preoccupations emerge.  She says nothing, listening carefully to me but not responding and silently turns her face back out to the sea.  I follow her gaze towards the horizon, the wind buffeting my jacket in unpredictable twists and turns.  What do you believe in? She asks. What do you really believe in? 

I find myself lost for words.

7.45pm

I could answer you now if you were here but you have gone, long gone.  I believe in organism not mechanism, I believe in the creative spirit, I understand what Patrick was trying to tell me, but I understand too late.  It is merely a way of looking that has driven me here, to this place, to this way of seeing, to this texture of reality.  Through it I am both one and I am lost.  It puzzles me to see others who are free to wander through life without the endless question.  How peaceful that must be, how carefree.  That would be my answer Barbara, but I never was one to rush to a response. I am sorry it has taken me so long, so very long. A lifetime.  I believe in organism, not mechanism, I saw it in you, my friends, dawn from deep within and brought to the forefront of your life and work, I watched it ebb and flow, I watched the turmoil of its impact on each of you, I watched because it was all I could ever manage to do.  I could only believe in what I saw through your works, I could never realize it in my own actions because I couldn’t ever seem to make the connect, take the final step to touch it in the raw. That is my answer to you.

Now

Did you read that piece in The Times on the apparition at L’lle Bouchard? I must have dozed off. I did remember it though.  I remember Ben telling me the tale as we drank beer in the Sloop by the harbour. I remembered the sensation of security that the cloistered seats provided, I remembered the taste of the bitter, and the darkness and smokiness of the place. Ben was alive with ideas, possibilities for new work which engaged him in fertile discussion, which of course led to more beer, but at the same time the excess of alcohol seemed to leave him struggling with himself in a way that I never saw with Barbara. Self-doubt riddled him to the core, and drink would open that to the world.  I did see the article, I read it after you had mentioned it to me, out of curiousity, of course.  It troubled me, it made me feel insecure.

I was walking along Porthmeaor beach, looking back towards the hillside towards the Tate Gallery.  The wind was cutting into me, it as cold. I regretted the idea of having gone to St Ives at this time of year.  I was too old for the cold winds, it played havoc with my rheumatism.  More to the point it made me melancholy. Lonely.

A few observations…  it is so quiet, compared to summertime.  Not just the for lack of people, but also the for the lack of energy that people bring with them which seems to feed the noisy seagulls who have apparently gone off to find better sources.  There is an eery silence and slowness to the place.  The silence. It is overwhelming,  I stop.  What is it that is so disconcerting?  I sit on the bench overlooking the harbour. Tears are dripping down my cheeks following the contours of my wrinkled face.  My polka-dot handkerchief mops them. What is it about these people that I have found so compelling for so much of my life?  Why might a place have such a pull for people, so much so that they commit so much of their lives and their energy to that place? 

We are fickle beings.  The news of yesterday has no bearing on the news of today and it falls between the cracks of fading memories.  (Diaries 1957 Zennor)

My life comes down in the end to connections and failed connections, it has been a search for clarity which leads to truth and a search which found me more often in dark places.  There are no doubt a million ways one can get there, but the critical thing is clarity and it is a rare gift to hold and sustain.  These people had clarity, and through them I have lived a good life, frustrated by the slowness with which I put it all together and in awe of how they managed to cope and still maintain that clarity.  The way Patrick got there was through colour.  As I see it Ben got there through line and Barbara got there through form.  So there we have it, in a nutshell, clarity leading to truth, a timeless reality.  My final thoughts as I sit, frozen, old and tired on the seafront of the harbour, many winters have passed since I saw them all, I wonder if I will see them again?

Together and apart we see this so clearly, so completely that it aches within us.  We form, reform and then we die, leaving, when and where we can, a moment, a timeless moment of clarity and togetherness.  (Diaries, 2007 Zennor)

‘the white ocean-reflected light, which almost bleaches things in its diffuse radiance’ [5] 5. Patrick Heron : Five Types of Abstraction - Ben Nicholson. The Changing Forms of Art, 1955