out of place, out of time

"But where are you from?", she asked.

You realized it was a mistake to talk in the interval but she did have sparkling green eyes...

"Err..who can say? From here or hereabouts, I guess". When 'When are you from?' might have been a better question, you think to yourself. What do you have but fragments. Fifteen minutes. And you want to construct a whole world out of that? I haven't got the time to explain. The background ordinariness of the world, the sheer, utter necessity of it, of worldliness, of "bridges" (Simone W).

"But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic, unprofitable, businesses is inevitable..But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that bids us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost"
---G.Bowley, on the decline of farming in England (Prospect magazine)

Perhaps the most valuable, the most useful, skill we can impart to our children now is precisely that of being able to ‘slow things down’, of being able to identify, in the fast-moving kaleidoscope of images and impressions which surround us and press on us from every side, those things which are significant. Significant, I mean, in that they enrich our life experience, are not ephemeral, have more than entertainment value. It seems to me that those of us who are old enough to have been reared and educated in what was in some respects a much simpler world, a book-based world, before the Internet, before Big Brother, when the only take-away food was fish and chips and people mended socks rather than throwing them away, when the shops remained shut on a Sunday-those of us who are that old are privileged. Because we had fewer distractions, and society in general had different values, we have resources and motivations which are harder to acquire these days. And yet, and yet-thank goodness there are some young’uns among us who are somehow managing to navigate a way through all the dross and emerge as thoughtful, intelligent people capable of discrimination and independent thought. Some of them are even here in cyberspace!

Celia Eddy.

I was reminded of this whilst walking with some friends through Chess Valley. Ideal companions in that they don't talk too much. Too much of a city-dweller to have any real nostalgia for a sense of rootedness to the land. But there's something to be said for continuity, shared traditions, living in a common world. (Steady now, b, you're showing your age). But here's the dope: walking through this quaint little part of England we couldn't name a tree or a shrub or a flower for the life of us. Not a particularly 'Asian' thing, you think. Must get Roger Deakin's Wildwood. Then again, that's just a book, not a lived relationship to a specific habitat.

There is a very real sense in which England's gone-just as every other place is 'gone' for you.

Andrew Sullivan: 'A society without some relation to the transcendent can become simply boorish and myopic. But, again, I see the merits of secularism more clearly now. It takes constant exposure to American fundamentalism to feel relieved by the prosaic dismissal of the spiritual by the English...

Anglicanism was always about the blurring of doctrinal difference, the aversion to looking into others' souls, the modesty of a limited spiritual imagination...the C of E as a bulwark against religion.'

The old ways, the old ways. Jesus, there's only a thin lifeline, a rickety old raft that's your family and a few things scattered here and there.