Category: Events

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photos.

Words of the day were obvs bound to be
Metaphor, Palimpsest, Serendipitous,
Inscription and Superscription,
On such a walk as this;
A train ride to Stonehouse
And then a walk through what once was Standish Hospital,
Now a Dystopian Derek Jarmanesque seeming film set,
A Victorian mansion built as a temporary home,
Becomes a Great War hospital,
Becomes a sanatorium,
Becomes an NHS hospital,
But now a building site in limbo,
Fencing all around the mouldering mansion,
The once-were stables,
The towering red brick chimney at the boiler house,
The Japanese knotweed infested lakesides,
The art deco sanatorium: its clean air and sunlight,
Long gone the way of all flesh;
We continued past streams and brooks and railway lines and bridges,
Past ridge and furrow and Revenants,
Past round barrows etched on the skyline,
Past churches and graveyards and lost villages
(And Standish, where the body of Edward the Second rested en route
From Berkeley Castle to Gloucester Cathedral),
To see the line of motorway and the cathedral of the Anthropocene:

‘We are Stroud travellers to an antique land,
Who saw two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the waters … near them, in the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is INCINERATOR, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level river stretches far away.’

On through sinuous paths through wide open fields:
Blackthorn smoking in the vaporous air,
And not just a profusion of spring flowers,
But also a profusion of names for the same flower,
Down there, by the gravesides:
Cuckoo pint, arum lily, lord and ladies;
Lady’s smock, or shall we call it cuckoo flower?
Then on past shaded, modest violets,
Scented wild garlic,
Alexander, primroses, bluebells,
Stitchwort, hemlock, honesty,
With tales of Tyburn Tree and conspiracy,
Lost Roman settlements and treasure,
Medieval moats and mottes,
Skylarks soaring and rooks calling to their parliament,
Past echoes of milk churns at long lost country platforms,
To sit beneath the milk-white pear blossom,
Here at the Beacon and Railway Hotel,
And the level crossing,
Penning these lines,
Before ascending to Haresfield Beacon,
And ramparts and ditches and bulwarks,
With Will Kempe morris dancing for Elizabethan company,
To reach a copse where Robin Treefellow hypnotised us:

Up on Broadbarrow Green
grazing my milch cow and two sheep
on the rough turf
my two feet on common earth.
The wind blows freely about the haw thickets
loosens smells of young green beech leaves
put in mind
of my life
hard grace from God
services and labour through the year.
I lend all myself to fending
off hunger.
Broadbarrow Green is the only earth
I can stand on without bending my back
in toil to my lord
no only my milch cow and two sheep
are my care up here.
Up where on ridge and edge
I can see below
Standish Manor
with open fields
that know my foot’s trudge
my aching bones.
So I speak their names
to send them to the clouds:

Stony Field
Lynch Field
Little and Great Combe Fields
Ridley Field
Odmarlow Field
Clayardin Field
Wayardin Field
Shutfurrow
High Field
Podley Field
Cooknell Field
Broadcroft
Great Harefield and Little
Charcroft Field
Moncraft Field
Marsh Field
Meadland Field
Breach Field and the Stopple.

I’d linger a while longer
on Broadbarrow Green.
For play and merriment
in bagfuls bids me shrug
the fields for a snatch in this heaven
and know that grace of being light footed again like my youth
when I chased Mabel about the lizzory trees.

Addendum: ‘In The Open Air‘ by Richard Jefferies published in 1885 –
‘There shone on the banks white stars among the grass, petals delicately white in a whorl of rays – light that had started radiating from a centre and become fixed – … Give me that old road, the same flowers – they were only stitchwort….’

By Clay Sinclair.

It has been said that football is a religion. It is true that for many, attending a match can seem like a religious experience. The blind faith that one day your team will reach the promised land (of the Premiership), the sense of belonging, the passion and the weird attire all replicate that of many religions. Even the killing of the opposition supporters has been known to happen, but thankfully not to Inquisition style proportions.

I suggest that the links to religion don’t stop there.

I have been reading a book recently by the psychologist Jordan Peterson and in his opening chapter he makes the comment “Chaos and order are two of the most fundamental elements of lived experience”. We order our lives in a way that can cope with the chaos that life throws at us, whether it is health issues, financial problems or the elements of nature that are doing their best to make life difficult.

I also follow Forest Green Rovers football club.

I have been following with interest their first season in the English Football League. The club are now known more for their cuisine than their football, as it prides itself on being the only vegan football club in the world. It has been a tough season for FGR and they have flirted this season with relegation and an immediate return to non-league football. But on Saturday they gained a much-needed win against local rivals Cheltenham Town. What pleased me most about this game was not the result but the little bit of mild hooliganism that the Forest Green ‘casuals’ expressed before, during and after the game. Now I’m pretty much a pacifist, can’t stand violence in any form, and am glad I can go to a football match and know I won’t get attacked. So why did I smile when I heard a group of lads had been causing disturbances in Cheltenham town centre, letting off green smoke canisters in the stand and invading the pitch to celebrate the winning goal?

The answer maybe lies in the ancient Taoist symbol of Yin and Yang. Jordan Peterson uses this imagery to help describe order and chaos. How both are needed for us to flourish and grow. A life controlled by order is dull, unimaginative, predictable and at worst, totalitarian. In contrast, lives dominated by chaos resemble a living hell and frequently lead to unhappiness, unfulfilled potential and even premature death. He writes “To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure.”

Football as a sport is a little Yin and Yang. There are two teams in opposition, wearing uniforms of contrasting hues and offer a divine combination of brutality and subtlety. I would argue that it is also the perfect symbol of order and chaos. The rules of the beautiful game are rather simple if you exclude the offside rule. But within that framework there are infinite possibilities of how a final score of 0-0 can be achieved.

As an example: I have two sons. One plays cricket and the other football. To stop me interfering with the children (with my unsolicited coaching advice), I take photos and send them to the parents, coaches etc… What I have noticed is that almost every photo in football is vastly more interesting than the cricket photos. Cricket is about rules, technique and has a clearly defined action area. Bowling crease, batting crease etc… The movements created by both batter, and bowler, are repetitive. The photos are therefore predictable and to be honest, quite boring. Whereas when I download my latest batch of football photos I am constantly surprised by the variety of shots. Bodies contorted in different shapes, player positions and combinations always changing and the ball never in the same place twice.

Is there a better sport that symbolises the perfect balance between order and chaos?

But the point I really want to make is what is happening to the fans, what is happening to football in England and what is happening at Forest Green Rovers.

If you look at these through the lens of order and chaos/ Yin and Yang it really starts to make sense. While the authorities have taken a little of the chaos away from what happens on the pitch with rules that reduce the chances of a broken leg or bruised ego, they are really the same as have always been. But the real changes in football have been for the fans. The biggest being the elimination of terraces for teams in England’s highest divisions. The terrace is naturally the place where chaos, creativity and passion thrive. It is from the terraces that conversations are entwined, that ideas are hatched and life is lived in flow.

But in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster the terrace is now perceived as a relic of the past.

There is a cost to this policy and is maybe symbolic of our ever controlling society and creeping totalitarian state. English football has become sterile at the highest level and I suggest it might not just be because of over inflated player wages, match tickets and media saturation. Could it be the elimination of the football terrace?

Is it a coincidence that Germany has some of the most passionate supporters? Germans are not perceived as people of the most emotional nation. Put them in a safe terrace, which all clubs have and passion happens. Flags waved are not those handed out by well meaning club owners. They are home designed and made, reflecting the organic enthusiasm the supporters have for their team. There are even smoke bombs, which add to the atmosphere.

Is it a coincidence that the passionate, creative supporters stand in solidarity on the terraces tolerating the worst views and often the lack of shelter from the elements?

I think not.

So what is happening at Forest Green? The well-meaning owner with genuine ambitions to change the world for the better has invested his millions in to his local football club which not long ago had a fan base of a few hundred. The club is doing well and is used to promote green issues, environmental sustainability and veganism as some of the solutions to help humankind. Meat and milk of the traditional variety are not available in the ground.

While this does exert further control over the supporters, Forest Green fans of the more passionate variety congregate in the South Stand terrace. This is where the rebellion festers. This is the area the manager fears when things are not going well and it’s where all passion emanates on match day. Healthy chaos and rebellion are on the terraces of The New Lawn and long may it continue.

My fear is that this creativity will be crushed by those who wish to sterilise football even further to placate the authorities who wish to control all aspects of the game.

Yin and Yang football please, along with a few smoke bombs.

They met by a sacred oak tree:
The Celtic-British church delegates,
And Laurence and Augustine from Rome;

A sacred oak near to a great river near here:
At Cricklade on the River Thames perhaps,
Or Arlingham on the River Severn;

The wind soughed through the branches
Silver light stippled the water,
A coracle cast its steady shadow,
In the year of our Lord,
603.

A millennium and more later,
A scintillant refulgence,
A dazzle of artful light;

There, in Saint Laurence’s in Stroud,
Fractals of illumination,
Stained glass manuscripts;

The numinous and the mundane,
Paradise lost but regained,
Heaven and Earth conjoined,
In the year of our Light,
2018.

A celebration of our world,
Music, song and spoken word too,
A spectacle of the senses;

And over there, by the altar,
The Venerable Bede and Caedmon,
Smiling gentle smiles of approbation.

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photos – www.deborahroberts.biz

Well that was a walk, that was,
For we explored boundaries,
Spatial, temporal, linguistic, social, spiritual, rational,
By exploring Jon Seagrave’s Stroud map of the subjective,
Of the emotional and the affective,
Rather than the conventional topography:
The boundary between landscape and experience;

We explored the archaeology of industry:
Rusting capstans and a forgotten railway turntable,
John Seagrave was talking of how the turntable
Could accommodate one wagon at a time only,
For the winch down to the gasworks,
And, oddly, in true time-shift fashion,
I noticed a notelet recently dropped
On the ground nearby:
‘DO NOT DOUBLE STACK’;

Pleased by this coincidence of time and space,
This damp leaf typescript revenant,
Our quickening pace took us back
To 1920s guides to London walking,
Gordon Maxwell and HV Morton;
We planned a Captain Swing memorial walk,
Along the old Tetbury branch line,
To the Trouble House Inn;
We talked of walking the 1839 Newport Rising.

We dropped down Time’s wormholes n so many ways
At the Roman villa at Woodchester,
Where Robin Treefellow transported us
With his fictive account of a servant’s life there,
Druid mistletoe shrouding the lime trees;

We walked an ancient track-way,
Courtesy of Bob Fry,
Up a fern filled holloway,
Over iron brown stained springs,
To a Neolithic long barrow,
And subsequent Saxon meeting place,
And boundary marker for the Hundreds,
Where Stuart Butler led us through a linguistic boundary,
To the world of the sacred and the profane;
We toasted Faunus with spoons and wine,
Our libations and offerings to the god,
Bubbling and oddly foaming in the soil’s fissures,
While sky larks ascended with a song;

We discussed how wood anemones could be a palimpsest,
A signpost to forgotten woodland and forest,
As we descended to Selsey Church,
And William Morris stained glass windows,
The early spring light, lustrous,
Streaming over the snowdrops.

We discussed our next two walks,
Both Romano-British in outline,
Sapperton, Oakridge, Bisley and Stroud;
Painswick, Stroud and Rodborough,
With readings from The Mildenhall Treasure,
To entertain and inform,
And studies of Roman maps –
Details to follow.

But as for today,
That was a walk that was,
A magical mystery tour through time and space and language:
That was a walk that was.