Friends like these (20.9.86)

There may be regions more grand, more awesome, perhaps even more beautiful.  But there can be nowhere on this earth where every stone and feature of the landscape is as known and loved as the Lake District.

Its size helps.  Within an area less than ten miles square is contained every conceivable combination of rock and water.  Being part of England, even this inaccessible region has been lived in and named.  And what names.  The Skiddaws, Scawfells, Glaramaras and Harrison Stickles; the thwaites, tarns, forces and gills.  Only in Britain could you find this rich tapestry of Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, seeming like some primitive language, the names of things as they really are. 

Returning there again is like visiting an old friend.  Each feature is at once dearly-remembered yet fresh in the discovery.  The scale of the place is such that you can grasp in a very direct and physical way how this world fits together.  You can map it out with your feet, just as the first cartographers would have done as they came to terms with the world.  And so in the Lake District you can experience anew the sheerly physical sense of existence.

It is partly this return to the basics, the elemental, which attracts so many faithfuls back to this region.  That and the extraordinary harmony of the elements.  From whatever perspective, the local details and the distant forms seem part of the same composition; there are no jarring discords, no breaks in continuity, except for the odd scrofulous patch of forestry. 

This harmony is particularly evident in autumn, when the hills break out into an a blaze of muted shades: the dark greens, ochres, purples, ruddy-browns, greys, yellows, blacks.  The scale is such that surface details which carry the subtle variation in colour begin to blur in the middle distance until they attain a kind of vibrating glow in the background.  The Lake District becomes a paradigm of gradated textures.

And yet though a rich and rewarding friend, the Lake District can shift into an unfeeling enemy in minutes.  The weather among the hills is capricious, and as fickle as a woman.  One moment there is sunshine, the next a thick malevolent mist descends.  Mist on its own is nothing amidst the signposts of civilisation.  Atop a barren hillside, surrounded by seemingly identical rocks, it can look like a pall. 

Although the region is circumscribed, and therefore never far as the crow flies from habitation, the time on the ground can be great.  And for anyone in danger or injured, too great as night descends.  As time draws on, decisions must be made about how many times a path will be sought, whether that gully is worth ascending again and again in search of some cairns.  Eventually you may have to concede defeat and descend wherever.  Thus we sought a path to Angle Tarn then on to Seathwaite; we found neither, though we searched for over an hour.  We ended up in Great Langdale, a few miles but an hour's taxi drive from home.  As we arrived at safety, we ruefully acknowledged that some friends ask a lot.

(25.9.86)

Index

Meditation on a Christmas card

Books could be written about the sociology of Christmas cards.  Just as Christmas itself has been annexed by consumerism, and cut off from its roots, so the business of Christmas cards has widened in import until it now stands as a microcosm of late twentieth century life.

For example sending cards has become a surrogate for the extended nuclear family’s earlier rituals of bonding.  We no longer assert the tribe by gathering but by remembering, an act commemorated by a token missive sent second class once a year.  It is a pledge; it says “you are of our group.”  For non-family members, this ritual can attain even more significance.  To be sent a card and not to have sent one is not only a gross solecism, it is a signal defeat in the lists of social jousting.  Hence the convoluted schemes of bluff and double-bluff as prospective recipients attempt to second-guess their friends’ and colleagues’ intentions.  Without such precautions they are forced to send cards to everyone.

When the card list has been drawn up, it is then necessary to choose the right card.  With the burgeoning of choice, this is no easy matter Once upon a time pictures of mangers and angels would have done; today we are embarrassed by religion.  It shows our Christmas up for the shoddy materialistic display it has become.  It is no accident that commerce prefers to call it by the anonymous and sanitised name of “Xmas”.

Usually some blameless winter scene is chosen.  This is certain to be safe, since the image nearly always depicts snow, by now an almost mythical accompaniment to Christmas.  As a mere fantasy scene, we are well-equipped to deal with it; our response are automatic and infallible.

Unfortunately most card manufacturers have tumbled this, and produce minor variants of the same.  So the next factor comes into play: vanity.  A few years back, the charities hit on the plan of competing with purely commercial concerns by producing their own Christmas cards, but with a special added ingredient which made them unbeatable.  This was the warm glow purchasers felt at the base of the heart, secure in the knowledge that not only were they fulfilling social obligations by buying and sending the dratted things, they were also market out as magnanimous.

And so the great race began.  Receiving a Christmas card became an act of abetting: by taking  you acknowledged that others had given.  Your only defence was to retaliate.  A hierarchy evolved, though one that nobody would admit to.  Cards supporting donkey sanctuaries inevitably scored less than those helping the aged.  Leper colonies notched up the points, but anything to do with children tended to romp away.  After all, Christmas is a time for children, as we are constantly reminded by toy manufacturers.

The net result of this classical Darwinian evolution is that what was once a charming, personalised gesture has become a frantic competition.  To make the New Yorker in us all feel totally at home, this contest even has “parameters” by which we are judged: timing, quantity and quality.  This, then, is my Christmas card – because it lacks all of them.

(20.12.86)

See also Moody Sonnets – Happy Christmas

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