Michael Graeme's Blog

Ah, these soft Sunday nights.
All Creatures Great and Small —
stout tweeds and the warm certainties
we imagine our grandparents knew.
Not mine. I think they would have laughed.

My father’s father could touch his toes
with his elbows, you know?
Not Yoga – a roof-fall in the mine
that near broke his back.

And my mother’s father?
Irish. The labouring kind.
Not easy, being Irish – any kind of Irish –
in the England
of All Creatures Great and Small.

So don’t get me started
on Downton Abbey.

Yet still, we seek it, don’t we?
This thing we think we know,
this thing we think we’ve lost.
It’s like an ache,
and we seek it always in the past.

Each generation, the same –
not realising it’s a hunger
for a way of being.
Not an era.
Not stout tweeds,
nor Peaky-Blinder pocket watches,
nor that warm patrician certainty.

Keep calm, old boy. Carry on.
England of the Blitz.
Is that what you want?
You’d seek it there?
A hair’s breadth from death.
And jackboots.

Or would you resurrect the ghost
of Lord Kitchener?
You know – Your country needs you –
finger pointing, accusatory.
Coward.
Pointing you back to a time, that first time,
the dawn of mechanised slaughter.
Lions led by donkeys.
Seek it there?

But what is this loss you mourn, exactly?
Might it not be something we deny,
even as we search for it in the pockets
of our dress-up forties weekends?
Could it be with us all the time –
through the nine to five,
the long commutes,
the over-spilling emails of the present?

Is it not a shadow, tapping on our shoulder –
a shade from the underworld,
black-clad, mourning a future
we can no longer imagine?

It visits each generation, the same.
Points the way –
but not to Kitchener’s slaughter,
to the future.

No, no…

You must never go looking back, it says.

Why nostalgia for the past is more a calling from the future

We’ve all felt it. I mean that strange ache for the past, for times we never actually knew. The triggers are many: TV shows, wartime stories, imagined versions of the home front in the 1940s, 1950s. It’s in the bric-a-brac of our junk shops, selling the things we remember in our grandma’s parlour, selling Nostalgia. Something in them feels warm, solid, reassuring. We look at the present day – rushed, loud, superficial, dangerous – and we feel we’ve lost something precious, something steady and certain, that we left it behind in our childhood perhaps, in grandma’s parlour, or further to a time we never knew at all.

But the truth is, the thing we’re missing was never in the past, so we’ll not find it by looking back. Nostalgia is a misdirection – not a lie, exactly – just a psychological misunderstanding. We’re not longing for a time and a place. We’re longing for a feeling.

But we’re losing our vocabulary for such things, so these unarticulated longings tend to collapse into historical fantasy instead. We imagine a return to the values of a different era would soothe the existential ache, the restlessness we feel now. But scratch the surface of any supposed golden era, and we find the same old hardships, prejudices, fears, dangers. We know this, yet we sanitise it. Our forebears, who lived through those times, would laugh at such cosy idealisations – as we would at future generations harking back to the 2020s as their own ideal era.

So, why does nostalgia feel so convincing? Well, why would it not, since the ache is real enough? It’s just that the story we make up to explain it is mistaken. What we really miss is depth – a sense that life has an inside to it, that it has a texture you can feel, an atmosphere you can breathe, and that it really, truly means something to be alive. We miss the feeling of being rooted, connected, held safe by something larger than ourselves. We miss a sense of belonging, and the dignity of an imagined slower time. These feelings are internal, insubstantial, but we literalise them as best we can, project them out into the world, where they find no purchase, so plunge them instead deep into that idealised past. But did you ever pause to wonder what it would be like instead, meeting those feelings head on by looking inward as they emerge and asking what they really mean?

The past can’t give us what we’re after, because it never had it in the first place. The real problem is not that life used to be better. It’s that we are losing our means of self-analysis, methods that can reassure us our lives right now possess the depth we’ve been seeking all along. But self-analysis takes time and a quiet room. It takes courage, even just the lack of embarrassment, to say to someone – you know I had the strangest dream last night. I wonder what it means.

When the British Empire moved into Africa, the tribes people said they stopped sharing dreams with one another, as was their long-held tradition. They said there was no longer any need for them, because the British knew everything. But too much literalism comes at the price of our souls.

It doesn’t help the way our attention is constantly broken, that in the absence of a way back inside our own heads, we surrender ourselves all too easily to the doom-scroll, to the bubble-gum of TikTok, to the sugar rush of social media, where our conversations are corrupted into polarised argument and slogans. We work too long in the day, and our dreams are erased by pills each night. Everything becomes literal, functional, efficient. Life loses its metaphor, its symbolism, and when things stop pointing beyond themselves that way, our imagination dries up, our souls become desiccated. Then the world appears insubstantial, because depth is soul.

So then this feeling we call “nostalgia” creeps up on us, not to deceive us, but to warn us. The ache we feel isn’t calling us backwards. It’s our soul calling us into a conversation with ourselves.

What we’re missing isn’t behind us, not lost in time. It’s beneath us – under the surface of the life we’re living, and it’s all around us in the objects and the encounters of the everyday. That ache for nostalgia is not our past calling us back. It’s our soul wanting to be let in. It is the shadow of a future which might yet be, if only we would let it.

So the next time you’re indulging yourself with that nostalgic drama on TV, and you feel a pang of longing, try looking it in the eyes and asking it what it’s doing hiding all the way back there, and what you need to change in your life right now to make it real and visible again.

First of all, my thanks to all who commented on my last piece, enquiring after the health of Andrew. I’m pleased to say he’s responded well to some tinkering, cleaning and a judicious drop of oil. He seems very much his old self again. So, we settle him back into his place, let his ticking resume, forming a gentle background to the days. Well, not so gentle, actually. In fact, he’s quite a lively character, a similar rate of ticking to a wind-up wristwatch – which is quite brisk. If he were any louder, I don’t think my good lady would give him houseroom.

Some of us like a ticking clock, others can’t abide them. I suppose it’s down to whether you were brought up with one or not. Indeed, so sensitive are some of us these days to extraneous noise, there is a market for “silent” bedside clocks – not allowed even to tick softly once per second. We had an early version, which met with my good lady’s approval until I was foolish enough to point out it did tick – just once every fifteen seconds. Claims of insomnia ensued. Fortunately, the newer types are completely silent, so harmony is restored. But oh, how I love a ticking clock!

Perhaps the loudest ticker I have is Norman, banished to my study, back of house. He’s the older brother of my clocks, dating to the inter-war years, probably 1935. He’s typically, beautifully Art-Deco in style, boasts a full Westminster Chime and has the steady beat of a big brass pendulum. The guy I bought him off, some forty years ago, had completely restored him. That guy’s name was Norman.

Norman was a colleague and shop supervisor, though formerly a craftsman. He was originally multi-skilled and possessed an eye for precision. I reckon he would have been apprenticed during the early post-war period. Then, much later, as a manager, he kept returning to the tools for a hobby – restoring old clocks – since the tools, precision metalworking and making, were his calling. Which raises the question: is management a calling?

In my own later years, working in the engineering industry, it seemed the ambition of many youngsters was to be fast-tracked to project management, bypassing as much of the hands-on stuff as possible. Indeed, I encountered many a callow youth I had to be polite to, as one never knew if one would be working for them in a few years’ time. Very few I met possessed any affinity for tools, or indeed for deep technical work in general. Many could not communicate even basic geometry by drawing, or think in three dimensions, which had once been a prerequisite for an engineering position, and certainly for Norman and me. But the world, it seemed, had moved on. Laptops and spreadsheets were now the tools of the trade.

Norman was close to retirement when I knew him, a grand old silver-haired gentleman – old he seemed at least to me, though no older than I am now, which does not seem very old at all. At least, not to me. Others – those aspirant baby-faced project managers – might disagree.

But again: is management a calling? I don’t mean to downplay the importance of the administrative function, nor the management of projects. Indeed, in our post-industrial societies, it’s pretty much all there is, now, with anything below it strictly minimum-waged. Norman adapted well to his position though, had a reputation for being a fair-minded supervisor, occasionally grumpy, but generally well regarded by his men. And as I say, he shifted his calling into other avenues – took it home with him, to his workshop, his hobby-bench.

But no, as a generic term, I wonder if there is not something more evasive about the calling to management. For another thing I noticed was the mobility: responsibilities were not allowed to become burdensome, so roles were switched. In charge of one thing today, something else tomorrow. You never could pin a professional managerialist down. Norman, on the other hand, took forty years – a slow progression, a deepening, a Herculean shouldering of burdens, and an earned degree of soul.

We might say then a true calling requires weight. There is a kind of gravitational pull that draws a person down into the specificity of their work. A craft does this naturally: it binds you to materials, to process, to the stubbornness of the real. The medical and the teaching professions also do this in their own ways, and have suffered their own dreadful losses in recent times. But management – at least as it is commonly practised – seems almost to have purposely evolved to avoid such gravity.

Indeed, it possesses an airy, mobile, unburdened archetype. One is forever moving on, moving through the next post, the next reorganisation, the next initiative. Nothing is allowed to accumulate, and therefore nothing roots down. Norman, by contrast, let forty years of metal filings settle into his pockets like a ship’s ballast, aiding a steady course. He stayed long enough for the place, the people, even the temper of the machines to shape a character. That is what I hear in the ticking of his clock, now: not efficiency, nor ambition, but depth – something earned.

But like Norman – like me too, I suppose – that kind of workplace, that kind of world, is now largely a thing of the past, and we must let it go. Still, I listen, and I wonder if anything comes close to replacing it, for this is not nostalgia for a lost era; more for a mode of being. These old clocks, you see… they don’t just tell the time. In fact, they’re not about telling the time at all. Your phone will do that much better these days. No, it’s more I think the times they have known. As such, they become the keepers of our stories. And the best stories don’t just look back with fondness for something lost. They ask questions about our future.

Have a think about it. What objects in your own life carry the weight of stories? What do they say about the world we’ve lost – or gained?

The problem with the likes of Andrew is the times they find themselves in. They’re okay while they’re still ticking along – a little old-fashioned maybe, but there’s always room for nostalgia. The trouble starts when they become unreliable. Then, as often as not, they find themselves on the scrapper. It’s a pity because with only a little attention, a little love and care, they could be kept going nicely. It’s just that no one has the time for them any more, and the professional skills of care are becoming niche. So then it falls to the question of class and position, whether the likes of Andrew can get help or not. Were he your stately home type, your eccentric millionaire collector type, you could still summon the trades, and they’d be swooning at your feet, while naturally charging you an hourly rate to make your eyes water.

But my Andrew’s not that type. He’s more your old-fashioned parlour type, your crackly kitchen range type – Grandma’s house on Sunday afternoons, or counting the minutes on rainy Monday mornings before rushing out to catch the bus to work. So when that class of Andrew starts to struggle, it falls to amateurs like me to do what we can, and we’re a mixed bag. Sure, some of us have skills we’ve transferred over from another life, then some of us what we lack in skill we make up for with enthusiasm and curiosity. Others… well, the least said the better, for opening up the Andrews of this world and seeing what it is that makes them tick can be a dodgy business. Outcomes are uncertain – indeed, they can be fatal. For the Andrews, at least.

Regardless of class, you see, we’re essentially all built the same way – the same things can bring us down, make us fail, make us lose track or just plain stop altogether. When I first met Andrew, someone had already had a go at him – and not much time taken over it. It had stopped him in his tracks for a while, rendered him useless as a companion, so they’d chucked him out – tried to palm him off on a gullible passerby.

Yes, I could see he’d been misused. But we were of an age, he and I, and I reckoned I could do something with him, make something of him. Just a bit of attention was all that was wanted, nothing deep, nothing too meaningful, and he’d be right as rain for a while. We could be friends. So yes, I smartened him up, gave him a home and he’s been good company. But that earlier intervention was always hanging over us, like a cloud in the background, and I knew it was going to catch up with him eventually. I didn’t mention it as he seemed happy enough. I mean, why go poking about before I needed to, especially when I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d find, or even if I was up to it?

But sure enough, the time came, and there he was one morning, silent as the grave. I put it off for a good long while, before I dared broach the subject, but there was no avoiding it. I was going to have to see what more I could do for him.

We’d known each other for three years. When I first saw him he was lying on his back amid an assortment of clock bits, springs, wheels, pendulums, empty cases, screwdrivers, hacksaws, oily bits, rusty bits, broken bits and sad bits. Gingerly, I lifted him clear, brushed the dust off him, and checked for signs of life. He had a nice looking two-train movement, by Perivale, which meant a passing strike on the half hour, and he counted the hours at the top. He had a platform escapement, and I’d been interested in one of those for a while – expensive to replace, and hard to source – but his looked okay. His case was in good nick, but the glass had gone, and there was no key, so we couldn’t give him a turn to see if he was ticking.

Date? Late fifties to mid-sixties? So, yes, we were of an age he and I. Perivale’s Middlesex factory had links with Bentima, another English clockmaker, a milestone in domestic manufacturing (and not just clocks) – its rise, its decline and its final extinction.

His rear plate was thick with a gummy oil which didn’t bode well, but for the price, Andrew was worth a chance. Often, a good strip and clean is all that’s required in such cases. Why’s he called Andrew? It says so on the dial.

At home, I borrowed a key from Norman, another of my clocks. (All my clocks have names). And we gave him a cautious wind. He was hesitant at first, like someone woken up after a long sleep, then, in spite of that layer of sticky oil, off he went, and settled to a lively ticking. Goodness knows when he’d last run, but he seemed keen to make up for lost time. He kept good time, too, kept it for years, bonged when he should, and with a rich resonance.

Until now.

So, yes, sadly, the time has come to get some tools together. Time to open him up and take him to bits – no light intervention this one either, not like last time – more a serious strip and clean. Some parts, like that platform escapement, I’m better leaving alone – just set it to one side a bit, maybe clean up what I can see. The rest, well, there are a lot of wheels in there, a lot of pivots and bearings, all gummed up. We take photographs of how it should all go back together, then we don’t panic. Undo everything, clean it, oil it sparingly. Getting that rear plate back on will be a test of patience, and not a bit of luck. And of course with every screw undone, every part removed, it’s never far from my mind that after sixty or seventy years…

This could finally be the end of Andrew.

I thought I might have had the morning,
but the rain came on early,
beading heavily on the windscreen as I drove.
The wipers flicked it off, but in the pause,
the rain settled back more heavily than before.
And my spirit, only half awake, dissolved,
so I turned the car around.

I came home through my old home town,
seeming dark in this November light.
I passed the newsagents where, long ago
I bought my comics.
Gone for a tanning parlour now.
And the bus stop where I used to wait,
still sends a chill:

Ribble Buses to school,
daily exiled to the periphery of a small world.
And seeming not that much bigger now.
Oh, how they used to frighten me,
those schooldays.
Workdays too, if truth be told.

I view it with the feeling of a survivor,
looking back in anger
at a world forever grey,
dim-lit like this, and drizzling rain.

And now my freedom,
though ever so timidly embraced.
I wonder why.
Should I not be more triumphant?
Yet still the spirit cowers,
clouds the vision, at least it does
on days like this.

Those of you who follow the Rivendale Review regularly will know I write fiction – both short stories and novels, also poetry. I generally don’t submit anything to the publishing mill – haven’t for getting on for twenty-five years. I post it all for free, mostly here, taking as my reward the comments and the occasional feedback or review, all of which I find immensely stimulating. And then there’s the work itself, an exploration of the inner world, the world of the imagination. It can be therapeutic – a balm for the troubled soul, but it can also take you places and introduce you to some fascinating concepts. In short, it’s an education.

That said, there are still paying markets for writers – just not as many as there were half a century ago. Most were killed off in the first wave, by television. Social media took another swipe at it more recently. I certainly wouldn’t ever dream of submitting a novel to the London presses ever again, but what about short fiction? What about poetry? What’s stopping me, really?

You’ll still find paper journals advertising online for submissions. Some of them have been around for a century or more, and have published big names. Most take submissions online or by email now. The easier ones utilise a thing called “Submissible”. So, it’s a simple thing to do, the work of a moment – you just stick your work into Submissible, click send, then wait two or three months for a decision. Yes… it really does still take that long.

So, I ask again: what’s stopping me? Is it that I’d rather just post my story online, then move on to the next thing, than have that particular thread of consciousness interrupted by a hiatus of months? Or is there more going on? This reminds me of something…

In another life, long, long ago, I was the member of an archery club. Though I was only ever a beginner, the club used to send archers to compete at county level. One of the topics these top archers used to talk about was the business of being “Gold Shy”. The gold in archery is basically the bulls eye, always a yellow colour, about six inches across and which these guys would try to hit from a hundred yards away. Gold shyness was a psychological block, a fear of success that would interfere with one’s aim.

Was my reluctance to aim at the publishing houses a nasty case of Gold Shyness? I decided to find out.

Back in the spring I wrote a short story called “When a Door Closes”. Dare I send it off to a really prestigious, well paying pro magazine – one that once published the likes of E.M. Forster, Robert Graves and D.H. Lawrence? I mean, you can’t get much more golden than that! But was my story good enough to be taken seriously? How do you know what editorial standards they’re working to?

Well, in the absence of a friendly commissioning editor, I asked an artificial intelligence agent. I fed it the story and asked it to mark my homework. In fact, I asked three – Chat GPT, Claude and Mistral. They all came back with an eight out of ten. Once I’d fiddled about with it, and covered the typos, which the AI’s also kindly pointed out, I managed to get it up to a nine.

But AI is known for being obsequious – except for Claude who sounds more like my grumpy old English teacher. So I asked Claude if my story stood a chance with that big name magazine, and Claude said yes.

I was still a bit hesitant. 25 years is a long time with your back turned to the conventional publishing world. Or was I really afraid of aiming for the gold? Afraid of what? Missing? Or hitting it dead centre? So, off it went. Zing! Three months later, and my first rejection slip (digital) in decades comes back at me. Naturally, had they accepted it, this would be a very different kind of write-up, and probably insufferable.

Anyway, I published the story myself, here, a couple of weeks ago, and moved on.

Gold shyness is a real psychological phenomenon, one that can blight the careers of top athletes. Why writers might also suffer from it may not be as clear, but I think it really comes down to how you measure success. One way of thinking about it is we can put it down to the personal daemon nudging our elbow at the critical moment. The daemon’s there to see us fulfil our destiny, but success in that regard comes in some unexpected shapes and sizes – not necessarily in trophies, literary acclaim or celebrity.

I still don’t really know if that story was any good, or if the AI was just buttering me up, like it’s known to do. Or, like they said in that rejection letter, the story wasn’t “right for them at this time”. And yes, we’ve all heard that one before. But here’s the thing: I’ve sent them another recently. I should hear back some time in the new year. Claude was particularly impressed with that one. But I’m playing a different game here. Putting that story on ice for three months is an act of patience, as well as a proof to myself I’m not gold-shy. It’s also an act of defiance, that I should have the audacity to be aiming at a high paying pro publication like that, and be damned. This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

Naturally, if a pub asks for a reading fee, or they want me to buy a copy… well that goes against the rules. What are the rules? Remember: A writer writes. A publisher publishes. Publishers pay writers. Writers never pay publishers. Anything.

When it comes back, I’ll see if I can remember what it was about and publish it here. But if you’re writing and self-publishing, it might be worth pausing and asking yourself why you don’t bother with the pubs any more. Is it that you’re fed up with the rejections, the long waits for a reply, the often pernickety formatting demands? Or are you intimidated by the pub’s literary reputation? In other words, are you gold-shy?

Thanks for listening.

The world feels out of synch today.
It folds in upon itself, and turns its back,
as I search in vain for brown shoelaces.

It offers me white or black, and flat –
these for training shoes, I suppose.
But I want cable, and quality, waxed,
for country brogues.

I search the town
until weariness sends me home,
shamed by the unreasonableness
of my flowery wants.

The world is not in the mood for me today,
as I am not receptive to the abundance
of its offhanded alternatives.

I shall order some from Ebay, instead.
Free delivery from the digital void,
mid-wifed by a battered van,
a data-matrixed package
dropped without ceremony
through the letterbox.
No longer the treasure
of a need met
by a world with soul.

A little sunshine illuminates autumn, renders its colours luminous, dazzling, magical. Such days are to be treasured, of course, but there are also days like these: you crack open the car door and the first thing that hits you is the scent of leaf mould and damp earth. It’s mushroomy and moist, and the autumn gold resists a kicking by clinging heavy to the ways. To put it mildly, we’ve had a lot of rain this week, and the sky looks like we’re not done yet. The brooks are running, and the falls are falling. But it’s still beautiful. Dream-like.

The little blue car delivers us to Hall Avenue at Rivington. It’s a busy midweek. I count three coaches parked up awkwardly. I’m wondering if we’re now included on the “See Britain in a Week” package tours: next stop, thirty seconds in Grasmere. But then I hear the euphoric sounds of schoolkids set free, excited voices muffled by the woodland. It’s amazing how many people a forest can absorb and still afford each of us a sense of privacy.

The light is poor, of course, so we’ll have to see how it goes with the camera. We’ve picked rather a slow lens for the day, but if we click the ISO up a notch we should be okay. The yellows and golds, of course, eclipse the dull skies.

No new ground today – just a familiar walk, a zigzagging meander up through the terraced gardens. I’m still not firing on all cylinders. Never am at this time of year. Some walkers are born Range Rovers, effortless cruising to the top. I’m more your Morris Minor (Cabriolet version) – chugging along in a cloud of exhaust smoke, and hitting bottom gear early on. We don’t always get to the top either, but when we bail out we like to think we do it with a kind of antique stylishness.

Anyway, we’ll not be pushing our luck too much – just three or four miles on autopilot, an eye for the colours, take some pictures, meander back down to the Barn for a coffee, then home. Coming up on five years retired now (have I mentioned that before?) and things still aren’t wearing thin. Familiar ground, yes, and walked a hundred times, but like this, on a whim, midweek, mid-morning — may I never take it for granted.

Still dreaming of work, though I usually take it as a proxy for something else now — the characters standing in as symbols for the particular emotions they aroused back then: frustration, despair, intimidation, anger, loathing. Some of the more tyrannical and driven characters I can remember have been turning up in Hawaiian shirts, full volume, dancing like they’re trying to make up for lost time. Some are dead now. Work and tyranny were all they knew. I hope they found peace, though I doubt they would know what to do with it. God bless them.

Mushrooms, fallen trees slowly rotting back to atoms. A light wind sends cascades of gold through the forest’s gloom. The dream of autumn recurs and we welcome it with open arms. Full moon tonight (at time of writing) – halfway through the lunation – lunation 319, if you’re counting by Meeus, or 1272 if you prefer to go by Brown – and yes I know most of us don’t do either, and it is a little eccentric. But dreams can overwhelm once you get into the habit, so I hold them in chapters and title them by the moons. And the dreams respond, loosely – there’s never a precision with the dreaming. But if anything, it disproves the old rationalist misconception that dreams are just unprocessed garbage. There is an intelligence behind them, a depth to the soul. At the minute it’s been telling me not to hold myself too much to the old standards of rationalist doubt, that at my time of life it doesn’t matter what others think. That it’s a time for deepening rather than seeking the social safety of conformity.

Slippery underfoot — wet leaves, wet gritstone pavings. Puddled ways, the sound of falling water from the ravine. As always, there is the feel of a lost citadel about the terraced gardens — a lost era certainly, but much of what we see is not much more than a hundred years old. It’s had a chequered history since it passed out of the hands of Viscount Leverhulme, fallen into ruin several times. But since the Terraced Gardens Trust took it over with a huge grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, there has been a transformation — so many of the old structures, once dangerous, are now restored, and the vast area of hillside and zig-zaggy terracing maintained by an army of enthusiastic volunteers. In otherwise dark times, when all the pointers are pointing down, it’s done me good over the years to come up here and see what can happen when things are pointing the other way.

We reach the Japanese Lake – always a pleasant pot, especially when the falls are running. Here we settle a while, break out a nutty bar. A rambler’s group emerges from the woodland and spreads out to take in the air of repose. They remind me of the group I invented in my angry novel “Winter on the Hill”, and called themselves the “Autumn Tints”. The memory links back to earlier writings, essays and poems all inspired by this area.

We wind up in the autumn of 2003:

There’s little left but ruins now,
Of glory days gone by,
And images in sepia,
Of gardens in the sky.

Paved walkways and pagodas,
And a house upon a hill,
A place to gather up one’s thoughts,
And measure out one’s fill,

Of dreams and schemes and visions bold,
To change the lives of men,
Improving what had gone before,
With the flourish of a pen.

But what a man can render up,
In mortar and in stone,
Does not always last for ever,
Once the visionary’s gone.

Sometimes a dream is just too big,
For other men to grasp,
So all we’re left is ruins,
Of a dream that didn’t last.

I’m not sure about it now. There’s been a lot of water over these cascades since then. The original vision of Leverhulme, his grand northern retreat, and these gardens by Thomas Mawson had an all too brief yet rather magical flourishing. But the material world is ever ephemeral. Like the years, things come to harvest, and settle back once more to autumn. But autumn brings the dream time, and if you’re settled and in the right frame of mind, the dream of this place goes on.

Let’s be generous and say we’ve made it as far as the shoulder of Castle Knott. The summit’s still a good quarter mile away, and another two or three hundred feet of ascent. But the day’s actual objective, Calf Top, lies a mile beyond that, its form as yet unseen, I presume, hidden by this shaggy bulk of Castle Knott. It sounds dramatic, but it’s more of a squat moorland hill, with a meandering quad track leading to the top. There’s not much to recommend it as an objective, then, and certainly not worth killing ourselves for. As for Calf Top, is it worth pressing on?

We let the walking pole dangle loose from the wrist by its strap, and the wind takes it out to a generous angle. It’s probably gusting up to forty miles an hour here. It’ll be stronger and colder, the higher we climb. We crouch low and consider the options, though a little voice tells us the decision has already been made.

A wild upland of endless moor, there’s no shelter here – not a rock or a tree – no respite from this thuggish wind. To the south and east, the hill falls away into Barbondale. Beyond that, marching across the Dales, there looks to be some weather coming in – possibly hail mixed in with it. And the wind’s driving it all in our direction. As for us, there’s nothing left in the legs, and the long climb so far, over one false summit after another has sapped the will. On a better day it would be a good place settle down, to rest, take some nourishment, let the strength and spirit catch up, then carry on. But not today. Today we bail.

We left the car down at the village hall in Barbon – the most perfect little village. Then we came up through the manicured parklands of Barbon Manor. On reaching the farm at Eskholme, and beyond the intake walls, the path rises seemingly near vertical, making for the little crown of a cairn on Eskholme Pike. That short, steep section betrayed all too soon the paltry number of hills we’ve climbed this year. It’s all right, totting up the miles in our little black books, but if we’re not climbing hills, they’ll let us know how soft we’ve become, as soon as we step out on one.

So, it’s back to the Pike, the wind roaring at our backs, helping us along while trying to snatch our hat off. Here, we catch some shelter among the crags, hunker down and rest a while, break out the flask and the energy bars. From here, we gaze out across the broad, verdant valley of the Lune, towards the hills of South Lakeland. The sky is a blue-grey slate, sliding by in great wind-blown slabs, breaking into fantastic textures overhead. Below, the trees shed the last of their leaves in showers of red and gold.

It’s not cold, now we’re out of the wind, and with the path pointing down rather than up, we can relax and better appreciate the energy in the day, knowing the hard work is done. The battle is over — neither won nor lost. It’s simply good to be out in the air, on a fell, even if it’s given us a good hiding.

And then, as we sit here, we’re reminded how most walks are about gaining a sense of perspective, as much as they’re about reaching a summit — my walks, at least. The summit is more something to christen the day, but it’s always best to bend by the path whichever way it chooses to meet us. We don’t always get the best views from the top anyway.

I suppose we could trace this idea back to Francesco Petrarca, known to history as Petrarch – in a sense the first recorded fellwalker, and to whom we pay tribute. Fair enough, he reached the summit, walking up Mount Ventoux in Provence that day – in the early spring of 1336. But rather than climbing it because “it was there”, he framed it more as a moral and spiritual exercise. In his account he reflects on the vagaries of human ambition, vanity, and the relationship between the self and God.

They thought he was mad for doing it, but not because of any physical danger – it was more that a man leaving the ordinary path to climb a hill just to see the world from above was considered an act bordering on hubris – at least to the medieval mindset. Yet Petrarch’s climb captured something of the changing spirit of the age. Indeed, his telling of it helped reshape both culture and history, ushering in the Renaissance– a great flowering of humanist art and spirit.

One of the things to come out of the Renaissance was how artists started placing people in their landscapes: no longer as outsized saints and sovereigns dominating a flat world, but as figures set more faithfully in space and light – human life in its proper proportion to the world. It marked a shift of perspective, yes, but also a shift in consciousness and perception too.

And yet, in other ways, you wonder if we haven’t begun to slip backwards – the world becoming flat again, figures inflated against backgrounds, out of all proportion, our souls traded for clicks and the search for an interior life considered next to madness. It’s a curious juxtaposition – all these techniques of vision at our disposal, yet a creeping perspective that no longer reveals the world’s depth.

And so, back to us here on Eskholme Pike…

It’s actually quite pleasant, out of the wind, the clouds rushing by. Down below, the Lune flashes silver through autumnal trees. Sure, we didn’t make the objective but we can see plenty from here. Perspective isn’t always a summit cairn; sometimes it’s just sitting on a rock, catching your breath, and the world wide open at your feet.

Thanks for listening.

“I looked back, and my gaze turned inward” – Petrarch

I used to find my work interesting. It was about making things with computers and other complex machinery. It was specialised, unusual, technical – came out of research we did around the millennium, employing the computers of the day to the very hilt of their abilities. That got easier of course as the machines evolved, became faster, smarter. Meanwhile, outside of the little back-room where I worked, the company evolved too, over the years – became more corporate. It expanded, shrank, expanded, shrank again. Departments disappeared, new ones were invented, reorganisations swept the ranks like stormy squalls. But, unlike the computers, and for all of its self important re-shuffling, it didn’t seem to grow in capability – indeed quite the opposite. On the surface, what I saw was a drift towards offices that were vast open spaces, everyone sitting at an identical machine, typing emails, filling spreadsheets, time-sheets, booking meetings. But what they were actually doing – I mean delivering – grew more and more opaque.

I’ve always wondered about that, I mean the way the corporate machine eventually seemed to hold us all captive, immersed in this bullshit. Me? I’d started to feel – somewhat arrogantly – like I was the only one doing anything real – something that went into a box and got put on a wagon and shipped out at the end of the day. But otherwise, that back-room suited me – the isolation, I mean. I’ve always been comfortable in my own company. It’s not a path I’ve consciously chosen, more one that seems to have chosen me. As others submitted meekly to capture, to immersion, suffocation, I allowed myself to gravitate to that little basement back-room, wedged between other forgotten functions like the janitors, and the maintenance men. And there, I felt I could still breathe.

In theory I had a line manager, but I was just a name on his spreadsheet and so long as my head didn’t pop up on his radar, I never heard from him. The radar swept for employees who had insufficient funding to cover their time. I always had plenty of funds. Although what I did was unusual, my services, my little widgets, seemed to be in quiet demand. At any rate, I alwasy seemed to muddle through. Requests came in by email. I’d do my thing, and deliver the goods. I could go weeks and not see anyone at all – just clock in, tend my machines, then go home again.

But then this one time I came into the back-room of a morning, coat still dripping wet from the rain outside, to find a couple of guys logged on and huddled over my machines. Like I said, my set-up was special, unusual. I’d adapted those machines to serve a unique purpose, though they’d still do the more mundane corporate functions, and that appeared to be what these guys were up to.

I didn’t recognise them. They were from another office, another part of the country, visiting. There was a hot-desk policy in play by that time, which was working out a bit like musical chairs. I was usually okay of course, my machines being special purpose. Things must have been particularly tight up in the offices for these guys to wind up poking about in the basement for seats.

I explained to them I couldn’t work until they’d finished, and they replied that they’d likely be all day, and since hot-desk was first come first served, and what they were doing was important too, or so they said, I was out of luck. They came off as a bit arrogant, even a bit offensive. So I laid it on and told them I hoped they’d logged me off properly, otherwise they’d probably lost the company a month’s work. This wasn’t true of course, and anyway, they weren’t having any of it, said if that was the case, it was my fault for not logging myself off like I was supposed to.

So I put my coat back on and prepared to leave them to it – go have a coffee in the canteen or something – when one of them started rooting in my desk drawers. I don’t know what he was after, but I explained I had personal stuff in there, and I’d appreciate it if he didn’t go rooting, but he came back with the corporate line that we weren’t supposed to have items of a personal nature on site – I mean even the kids weren’t allowed Smurfs on their desks any more.

The only remaining salvo at my disposal was a little black book which I took from my pocket. I asked both their names and wrote them down. I didn’t make a fuss about it, or tell them why – that I was going to report them up the line or something – because I wasn’t. I could see it unsettled them. Funny that. Even in this age of hyper-surveillance you get blase about the spy in the machine, but no one likes to think of their names hand-written, in a little black book in someone’s pocket.

Naturally, I was puzzled by the intrusion. I mean, contrary to what they claimed, they weren’t doing anything of any importance. Most likely they were costing the company money – travel and hotels and such – and here they were holding me up, so I couldn’t deliver anything either. But I was fine, I had a funding code to cover diversionary activities. So, I could just go sit in a corner of the canteen, drink coffee and pretend to shuffle papers, while actually writing poetry. You couldn’t get more diversionary than that could you?

Poetry was my hobby – though hobby’s perhaps too small a word for it. Naturally, it wasn’t permitted on company time, but better than staring into space, and easy enough to pretend I was doing something legit. Protocol perhaps demanded I’d better pass word up the line that some random bods were hogging my machine, but then I needed a machine to do that, and all were taken. We were at a Kafkaesque impasse, then. So, yes, I wrote poetry.

Were I a different kind of guy, my ego in hock to the corporate libido, I would have been obliged to get angry at the disruption. But I viewed these itinerant hot-deskers more as a kind of virus infecting a system by now so sick, it couldn’t see that most of its functions had been taken over by performative box-ticking. So few of us actually made anything any more, I mean seriously added value, and we had to carry these jokers as well. But the real mystery? None of it seemed to matter. The company didn’t collapse under the weight of its own absurdities. And then you look around and the same might be said for much of what was going on in the wider world of work, too. Nobody was making anything. We were all just staring at screens, pushing digits.

So there I sat. The canteen was quiet at that time of a morning – just the chef and kitchen people, back of counter, preparing lunch. These were still your “doing” sort of people, and I felt a kinship with them. At the end of the day they could point to what they’d done – so many meals served, so many plates washed. Others would drift in for coffee refills, nod their vague acquaintanceship, then drift back up to the offices, a kind of zombified look about them. And I wrote my poem.

It was blank verse thing. At the back of my mind there was still that old school insistence poetry should rhyme – no fair tennis without a net and all that – but blank verse lets you get your thoughts down quickly – sense impressions, visitations from the imagination. That always felt more important to me, and you could tidy it up later, look for rhythm, even rhyme if you still wanted it.

The thing with a poem is, it’s like an inner part of us wants to see itself expressed in words. And that was odd because it’s such a literal thing, while much of the pointlessness I saw in the day to day lay precisely in the way we took everything so literally: why the spreadsheet had become more important than the data it recorded, that the data had become more important than the values it expressed. Value, real value, lay somewhere else. It wasn’t literal, yet still sought expression, risked corruption at the hands of the profane. It was for the poet to realise that, and protect it.

I took lunch in the canteen when everyone else piled in, then took a walk down to my back-room to find the hot-deskers still hard at it, doing nothing. I asked if they’d be all day, and was met with the snippy reply that they’d take as long as was necessary. Sure, when a company reaches that point where it’s no longer making anything, it becomes a haven for arseholes. Arseholes don’t last long when the key performance indicator is: did you deliver that box out the door?

My wife thought I was joking when she asked me, over dinner, if I’d had a good day, and I’d replied yes, that I got a decent poem out of it. But then she realised I was serious and asked me if I was happy turning up every day like that, trying to maintain the light in my eyes, while the lights were going out everywhere else. I told her it was just the nature of things, and anyway, thinking about it in the quirky way I had always gave me something to write about. But she had a point.

Then, that night, I had a dream – well, it was half dream, half total recall. I was back at primary school – so I could only have been about nine or ten, and I was about to join the football team on the mini-bus to go play another school. I wasn’t that great at football, and I was only picked to play that day because the number one striker – we’ll call him Bruiser – had bunked off school, so they were a man down. Then, as we were boarding the bus, he turned up, albeit without his boots.

I could see the way the teacher was thinking – he was a competitive man, so even a kids’ inter-school football league was life or death to him. Some people are just like that, aren’t they? He knew, and I knew, if I played they had a less than even chance of winning. If Bruiser played, they were going to win for sure because Bruiser took no prisoners.

Now I didn’t care if I played or not, but it seemed pretty obvious to me the way everyone else was thinking – the teacher and my so called team-mates – and it puzzled me they couldn’t see how easily I saw through their hemming and hawing. They got around to it eventually of course, which just left the question of Bruiser’s boots, which is when I saw the teacher looking at my feet.

Sure enough, Bruiser fitted neatly into my boots, and off they all went. Did they win the game? Don’t know – never asked. I got to go home on time, but without my boots. When I got them back, they were scuffed to blazes, and my dad went and played hell with the teacher. I was sorry about the boots because my dad wasn’t made of money. But other than that, I didn’t mind and had quite enjoyed playing in the garden instead of standing there freezing my nadgers off on a muddy pitch.

So anyway, still feeing a bit weird after that dream I turned up bright and early next day, and there they still were, my pair of hot-deskers, camping out in my little back room. And they had a look on their faces as if to say you’ll have to get up much earlier than that to catch us out. So I spent another day in the canteen, and got another poem out of it, this one about the value of touching grass, a kind of echo of the dream. You can’t put that into a spreadsheet, can you? What it’s like to touch grass.

In the end I gave it a week, to see if anyone would come and fish me out of that canteen, ask me what the hell I thought I was doing. But they didn’t. Come Monday my hot-deskers had finally moved on. I wiped their fingerprints off my screens, and settled back, ready to catch up. But I could still feel their sickly presence in the air. Something had changed. Even the little bit of work I did, and which I’d drawn some satisfaction from over the years, just didn’t seem important any more. So I went home.

That was years ago. And, so far as I know, no one’s noticed I’m missing

Touching Grass – a meditation

I used to make things.
Now, I walk the meadows,
touching grass.
Both real and imagined.

Palms down, fingers splayed,
I snag the waist-high drooping heads –
the texture of rabbit’s tails, and crow’s foot.

Such vast landscapes these,
places of presence, and past.
Imagination too, of course,
like the sheep cropped fields,
dewy-sweet, that lick my boots, now,
to a varnished glaze.

And those fresh mown swards,
scented of all the homes I’ve ever known,
where, eyes gently closed,
I am returned to other versions of myself –
boy and man,
callow youth and would-be sage.

Yet it was once the all of me,
to fashion, to shape and change,
to alter this world in my own image.
But it’s only here lies
the more authentic reality,
and a nameless soul-meaning,
in the feel, imagined and otherwise…

Of the touch of grass

Copyright © Michael Graeme 2025

Header image by Nightcafe Studio, additional PP in GIMP. This story was not written by AI.