FINISHED READING - Consolations & Essentials by David Whyte

After feeling enthused by watching an interesting You Tube conversation with David Whyte, I bought Essentials - a compilation of his poetry mainly, and Consolations - a series of short pieces exploring the meaning and ramifications of words. There is much to be admired here. The perceptiveness, the clarity of expression plus the desire to stretch our conceptions, to reveal another way that we could view aspects of human nature and understanding. There is usually a suggestion of a spiritual undertow to most of his poetry, and that spirit suffuses everything else too. In Consolations he extols - the virtues of hiding aspects of yourself - the usefulness of procrastination - that a genius is something we all have, its not just really talented individuals. His piece on the word Despair,whilst acknowledging its a difficult experience, also reminds us that it will pass, if you let it, resist grappling, fighting or wallowing in it. To just allow despair to gradually ease and transform itself. In all of his Consolations he is ever so gently challenging.

David Whyte is primarily known as a poet, but is also as an inspirational speaker, a social and spiritual commentator, plus being a consultant and lecturer on business leadership. Though it is clear he has trained in Buddhist practices, he writes in a way that is accessible to all comers, theist or atheist, and even those who don't really care either way. He tries to connect our lively most grounded experience to something that proffers a degree of palliative wisdom. Studiously avoiding the often trite sentimentality of self help and well being gurus. He is ploughing a particularly distinct and well developed furrow here. The writing in Consolations can sometimes feel like light therapy for the alternative thinking classes. His challenging or adjusting of perceptions occasionally veering into being a poetically infused version of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

You can definitely have enough of even such a very good thing. Don't get me wrong, there is much to be praised and enthused about in both these books. He does have incredible richly succinct reflections, all expressed in a simple paired back and unfussy way of writing, whether its prose or poetry. There is, however, something about the tone of the Consolations, which makes them feel as though they're all written on the same emotional level. Well adjusted, but perhaps leaning a bit onto the 'beige' side. I found myself eventually tiring of his style of writing. I think I wanted more oomph or grist in them. Something they seemed to indicate they might be capable of offering, but fell short of. In the end, they tended to blend into this huge glutenous lump of beautiful insightful stuff. That remained difficult to digest, even when I paced myself by deciding to read them aloud just one piece per day.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8  - Essentials

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8 - Consolations

QUOTATION MARKS - Joy by David Whyte

"Joy may be made by hard-won,
practised achievement
as much as by an unlooked for,
passing act of grace
arrived out of nowhere;
joy, to our consternation,
is a measure of our relationship to death
and our living with death; 
joy is the act of giving ourselves away
before we need to or asked to;
joy is practised generosity."

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte
Published by Canongate 2014

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - NO 4

A selection of extracts from recent entries in my Gratitude Journal.

• "I continue to marvel that I still have all my faculties post the HA!. I remain in relative good health both physically and mentally. My Mother's mind was as bright as a pin right up to her death, even as various physical ailments gradually rounded on her. Whilst my memory fails me from time to time, I do well. I am able to write a lot and to be creative in so many ways. I can plan my life and carry out that plan. All of which are a huge boon and to be thankful for. Yes, there are the ever increasing aches and pains, but they come and go dependent upon usage and weather. I can still be grateful that a lot of my ailments are not permanent losses, as yet."
  
  
• "One can only be grateful for what brings you joy, love and a sense of meaning. And you start to find and encounter these things everywhere."
  
  
• "To be grateful is to feel a simultaneous impulse to be generous. It is I suspect founded upon a sense of an unburdened love. You feel the flow of love for so many things that it cannot but be expressed in gratitude. Love and joy are like two sides of the same coin, with a similar volition to be generous with one's time, thoughts, feelings and actions."
  
  
• "I've been wondering about ingratitude. In my experience it is more often a studied resistance to either expressing gratitude or feeling one is expected to be grateful or coerced to be so. It exists in a reactive relationship with its opposite. It tries, and more often fails, to present itself as rational and reasonable whilst essentially not being either.....Ingratitude is like a form of metaphysical sulk."
  
  
• " This morning I'm feeling a bit bereft of gratitude. Its like looking for recognisible faces in a crowd, but not finding any."

ARTICLE - What's With All The Bowing?

For many months I'd resolutely refused to bow when I approached a Buddhist shrine. I just sat watching the ritual proceedings until the moment arrived, where everyone else approached with seeming ease. As one by one they did a bow or prostrated, placed a flower offering, lit incense and a candle, then returned to their zafu. I remained a nervous observer, forever teetering on the edge - ' maybe I'll get up - Now! ' I was still trying to be clear in my mind why you did it, how you did it, the what and when of it. 

Why did I make bowing such a big deal? I guess it is like this for most people in any religious tradition. It feels a much more important thing than the minutiae of bowing might indicate. It is an act of devotion, it is a commitment, it is an expression of belief, and it is also done in public while everyone else is chanting a mantra, and probably scrutinising your every fumbling devotional move. Yeah, bowing freaked me out.  Nevertheless it remains important to work out for yourself what it means to you, and why you do it.

There can be a lot of bowing in any religious tradition, not all of it taking place within devotional contexts. Buddhists traditionally greet each other with a bow. Unlike a handshake that has its origins in proving you mean no one any harm by offering your sword arm, a bow in greeting is a mark of respect. Respect from one human to another, a recognition of meeting a fellow Buddhist practitioner, and as a salutation to the potential for Buddhahood that lies within everyone, however unconscious or conscious that may in fact currently be. If a bow is to someone who is senior to you, or is leading a devotional ritual you are taking part in, the bow becomes a recognition of the sacred role that they are performing. Bowing demonstrates and honours the difference between you and them within that ritual event..

At the beginning of some Zen services, you bow towards you meditation cushion that you are about to sit to practice upon, offering respect simultaneously to what you are about to do and where you are about to do it. But also because it was through meditation that the Buddha became Enlightened. With each period of meditation practice you re-embark upon a similar journey. Bowing dedicates any meditation time on the zafu to this endeavour. In this way a simple bow can become both an act of deep respect and an expression of your gratitude. Bowing is intrinsically a humbling action, imbued with a feeling of indebtedness to the object or person in front of it. In its purest volition it is founded upon gratefulness.

Bowing can so easily become something executed in an automatic and unthinking manner. The volition of respect or gratitude perhaps lapses. Bowing can become just part of a form of ritual expression that you blithely regularly execute. Not necessarily mindlessly, but certainly without heart. Lets just first acknowledge that this does happen. Somehow repetition can dull the edges of our awareness,. Bowing turns into an empty vessel. It is the same for any devotional practice that is done regularly. Our engagement with it can wear thin at times. In the future, when my outward commitment to Buddhism was more firmly established, I would occasionally have a 'faith wobble'. At such times I'd find myself executing a more hesitant half-hearted bow, in response to the quivering of my own doubt.

What often happens is not that your attitude to the ritual of bowing is deteriorating. It's that the depth of your faith can sometimes lag behind any outward expression of your commitment. You can get ahead of yourself, by sheer force of will.  Bowing can be synonymous with letting go of many things, of control, of one's ego, of one's pride, to name but three. It asks you to surrender yourself to the moment of bowing without thought of what you will gain from it, or paradoxically what you are trying to achieve or express through it. In this surrendering of your agency and your Self to Other, is where what is Other - Buddhahood or Enlightenment - may move to greet you. This is the point where letting go of any idea of consciously attaining anything through practice begins to kick in. Though there is often a lot of self conscious rehearsing before any surrendering is able to manifests itself. So lots of time, equanimity and patience is required

Lastly, bowing within a devotional ritual is a small individual action within a much larger collective volition. You chose to come to a place to perform this ritual together with others. It is often said that potential for Buddhahood arises most strongly within collective practice and rituals. The fact that you are all doing the same thing gives it added potency. Its never just you bowing, your individual efforts at practice that necessarily makes the decisive difference. Hundreds of voices chanting a mantra can have hugely more impact on you, than your lone voice on its own. Even as you bow to your shrine alone at home, thousands upon thousands of other people will be doing exactly the same thing as you at the same time. Bowing unifies you with a wider network of the Buddha's disciples in the present moment. But also calls upon over two millennia of lineage of ardent Buddhist practitioners. All of which makes bowing pretty mind blowing.

POEM - Harvesting Couch Grass

Dawn was an apricot moose

this morning 

of the pinched shoulder 

if you read the outward signs

there was nothing wrong

nothing to bare being written

home about

but behind that sensationless 

'nothing to be seen here'

was one taught strung muscle

pulling at one's well being like

a child tugging at the seams of clothes 

it wanted attention

a sweet to be sucked on

more likely

a healing hand to smooth

it all away, and

though I am an elder

my Mother long long gone

I'm holding out just in case

she'll turn up 

unexpectedly 

knowing what to do

what salve to use

to make it go away

and if she found she'd reached 

the end of her knowledge 

would walk me down the hill 

to Doctor Lister's

surgery, and deal with it

her prolonged abandoning 

of that Motherly space

means I wallow

in a distinctly male strategem

of misapplied stoicism

as though bearing with it

was the tried 

and trusted cure all

for every bodily ailment

known to mankind, so

the impingement continues

the need to embody care 

for who I am

instead fertilises a harvest 

of couch grass

that no one can reap

pivoting into an

unfiltered masochism

whose feeble integrity lies

in an illusory fit

of will to power 

theosophy

Written by Stephen Lumb
January 2025

FINISHED READING - Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Manako Kajii is obsessed with food, writing a blog in which she describes her culinary adventures. She has a particular fetish for high quality butter. But Kajii is also a serial killer, having been convicted of a number of killings of her aged and supposed boyfriends. All of them, apparently lonely, who became obsessed with her via her cooking. But all is not so cut and dried, because its unclear how she killed, other than by feeding them extremely rich fatty foods. Did she have help? The implications of murder all seem too circumstantial otherwise.

Rika Machida is a journalist, the only woman in the news office of the paper she works for, she is ambitious. A good writer who needs to find a story through which she can make her name. She settles on Kajii, and arouses her interest in being interviewed by asking her for the recipe for beef stew. Gradually Rika gets drawn into a whole world of culinary misadventures of her own, through which she becomes intricately entangled in Kajii's life and manipulated by her  She starts to question whether Kajii might actually be innocent. Has she simply been found guilty of being an independent ambitious woman, who refused to play the games according to the rules allotted to women in Japanese society? As she becomes drawn into a dependent relationship with Kajii, she becomes increasingly untethered from her own life, her friends, and what she ultimately wants from it. Until Kajii betrays her, and her perceptions of her and of herself pivot radically.

Butter is an intriguing read. Its an extensive exploration of Rika and how she learns to be more true to her self. She does so through trying to understand who Kajji is, a woman who openly says she hates women and whatever they stand for. It has some sublime writing on the process of cooking and the feelings aroused by the eating of truly luscious food. Its a longish book whose focus and tone can shift quite unevenly. The first half of the book is focused on the growing entanglement of Rika with Kajii and with food, in the second half it becomes more like a detective novel and a psychological study of evolving clarity. I never felt I knew quite where it was going, which held my attention for sure. It wasn't til the end I realised that it was primarily about self realisation, mostly of Rika,, that she needed to come to a different and stronger understanding of who she was. As a conclusion this felt a bit half powered.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

SCREEN SHOT - Aftersun

Calum (Paul Mescal) is taking his 11 year old daughter Sophie ( Frankie Corio ) on a holiday to Turkey.  The holiday is documented via home movies and incidents viewed from Sophie's remembered perspective. Through it we see the adult Sophie's memories of her charming yet unknowable father. The film is peppered with a quickly edited slow motion disco scene where you see the Sophie looking for glimpses of her father in a crowded club, as an eleven year old, then an an adult. Her father coming suggestively in and out of focus. Quite often throughout the film Sophie sees her father slightly out of the frame, peaked at over or through something. These are just some of the visual beauties of this film debut by writer and director Charlotte Wells. Sophie is a girl on the edge of adolescence and is just awakening to being curious how older teenagers behave, and intimate relationships. The film expertly captures this halfway state between childhood and adolescence proper.

Initially this seems like just an ordinary holiday in a Mediterranean hotel. Calum is, however, not at ease with himself. There are hints of estrangement from his own family, that he never wants to return to Scotland. So much here is lightly suggested, because we are seeing things from teenage Sophie's recollection. Small things viewed from her adult perspective, have much more significance now. She has to ask her father twice what he did on his eleventh birthday, and begrudgingly tells her he had to remind his own family that it was his birthday. Sophie organises people to sing to him on his birthday, a scene followed by a back shot of Calum sobbing his heart out alone in the hotel room. A penultimate scene in the movie when they are both dancing to Under Pressure becomes unaccountably gut wrenching, as you can sense that this is a last goodbye. We are never told what happened to her father, nor why this particular holiday proved to be so significant. Its clear he has disappeared from her life at some point hereafter, we know not how or why and are left speculating. 

Charlotte Wells, is an extremely promising film maker, who was so fortunate to find a girl as naturally gifted as Frankie and obviously an actor of Mescal's caliber. Who does what he does best - suppressed emotion, staring self absorbed off screen, fleeting expressions almost thrown away, but all are tellingly significant. Aftersun is a movie with a quiet impact, unexpectedly grasping you and pulling you into its emotional undertow.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - No 3

Another edited selection from my gratitude journal from recent weeks.

• I'm grateful to a sense for time and the clock marking its passing, a constant reminder of how fortunate I am. That time, however fleeting, always offers you an opportunity to do things better or differently until the very last second or minute of your life concludes.
  
  
• Meditation can be challenging at the best of times, and it was today. When I'm tired or sleepy the practice becomes to embrace the tiredness, the unwilling heart that wants to settle or snuggle into itself. In those moments when focus and intention returns, however briefly, there is a sigh of recognition, as if to say - Ah! I remember you, I remember this. And you feel a short wave of gratitude, a bit like a reward for coming back to a different sense of oneself and your relationship with the world.
  
  
• Strangely grateful for being a bit of a grump this morning, it's a good teacher when read as an indicator that something needs addressing. I believe in finding a way to be grateful for feeling bad tempered and moody. You can't just be grateful for 'the nice cuddly stuff', which would be too one sided.
  
  
• Grateful for every thought, feeling, idea and experience, all are some form of gift. That these things may not be what they first appear to be. You can feel grateful for anything, you just have to find the right angle to approach it with. This can take some working out.
  
  
• There are insights to be had even from the most unpromising or resistant material. And, yeah, that can be something to be grateful for.
  
  
• To be fully awake to the world would in itself be a state of gratitude.

UNFINISHED READING - Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds - Various Authors.

I have found myself unwilling to finish this book, I've got two thirds of the way through, and abandoned all hope of it being as cutting edge and thought provoking as it likes to thinks it is. I gave up, because I think I have much better things to devote my precious reading time to.

Simple Comprehensible Illuminating Language is often replaced with Complex Hermeneutic Opaque Linguistics. Sentences compacted with closely argued sequences of specialist jargon, one compound term followed by yet another. If this is the densely tortuous language we are going to use regarding the meta crisis, then I do not hold out much hope for Pespectiva's work on - systems, souls and society - let alone humanity. 

This is the sort of thing the meta crisis really does not need, but unfortunately appears to be getting. Lots of serious over thinking, preoccupation with the minutiae and implications of words and grammer. Its full of ubiquitous special language for special people. Are they simply hiding their cluelessness behind a dense wall of words? Who is this meant for? Who will find this remotely helpful? Its the sort of thing only wealthy intelligentsia will say they fully understand, but probably are bluffing. 

Though we may well baulk at the slippery nature of truth, in the hands of right wing authoritarian proponents. They do however, speak plainly, eschewing alienating words or concepts to enhance the clarity of their speaking, and to connect. The left, or any other alternate viewpoint, if it is ever to revive it's fortunes, must first rediscover how to convey its ideas without the need of a specialist translator in socio-economic theory.

Its true, that any compendium of essays will inevitably be uneven in style and tone. Each author tackling their issue in a structurally different manner. And that is certainly present here. Some writers try to be so open you struggle to locate what their precise point is. Others become so tightly obscure you struggle to grasp if there is a precise point at all. Either of these, all of these, and everything in-between, can be found in Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds. It's a brilliant depiction of the contemporary zeitgeist. We are fucked, but can't find any helpful ideas or words to unfuck us.

As an assessment of the meta crisis and what the issues are, Jonathan Rowson's essay Tasting The Pickle is hard to beat. But there is also a sense things should really have been moving beyond overall assessments onto specific propositions or actions by now. Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds was published in 2021, four years ago and it already feels terribly dated. The title itself is an adaption from Zach Stein's book Education In A Time Between Worlds from 2019, so prompted by six year old ideas. Time and the meta crisis wait for no one, and its moving on at a pace we are not keeping up with, let alone getting ahead of. Unedifyingly this book tells us we don't know what to do, even as we are not doing it. 

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8

READING ALOUD - Bluebird by Charles Buckowski

 

I think the most disarming thing about the sort of man Charles Buckowski was, is that he liked to let you know he really didn't need your approval of him, nor the life he led, nor like the poetry he wrote.  He wrote because he needed to. For a large part of his life he worked for the Post Office, he came home, started drinking and wrote into the early hours of the following day. Underneath his carefully maintained bar fly reputation, bad temper and fights, lay this deeply damaged man. Read his autobiographical book Ham on Rye, and you are shown what having fucked up parents in your childhood can do to you.

Buchowski was frequently defensive or guarded, but in his poetry something wiser and kinder would occasionally be allowed to blossom. In the rough hewn conversational style of them, a perceptive insightfulness catches you unawares.  Here in this poem Bluebird he lets you glimpse one fragment of the sensitive fragile bird of the man, held captive by the controlling, alcoholic, life coarsened persona.  It shows you something, not just about the psychology of Buckowski, but of most men.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal January 2025

January 10th wears a shroud of significance, another month has passed. We've crossed the invisible threshold into another year, and now its six months since the HA! I do realise this is a milestone, but not sure how I'm expected to respond or feel about it. God, I feel so glad to be still alive. Grateful for this further opportunity to delve deeper into the experience of being alive. I appear to continue to be on the mend. Well, how would I know? I keep taking the pills, nothing untoward has happened, I guess that's proof of success. 

At the moment all this is a bit hard to discern. I am emerging out the other end of 'The Plague' coda to the heaviest of colds. You know, the one where the nose might've stop running, but what your left with is a constant wheezing cough, that sounds like your throat is lined with an impermeable glutinous gel, which in fact it is. This shows sign of improving one day, then worsens the next. Anyone would think this were a conditioned event!

My life, such as it was before the heart attack, well, it feels naive now. I existed on a constantly onward rolling horizon built on the dodgy foundations of misguided optimism. Yet now paradoxically, there is still the remnants of desire to go back to that era of perpetual forgetfulness of life being finite. To put it back to the top of the leader board of blind priorities, I am reticent to do that. I have far from fully processed the experience of how close the quick beats of my heart were to stopping. I look on incredulously at the possible return of the sunny optimism. I shake my head and mutter - have you not learned? I offer up praise to the stark reminder. Warily standing guard lest delusion takes hold again.

Life, my appreciation and thankfulness for it, has blossomed in an unexpected way since the HA! There is an aspiration at least to do whatever comes next differently. All without completely knowing what that might entail. Whatever I do, I don't want to slip back into absent mindedness, of how brief my time may be, even now. I want to keep the window open. The HA! was a premonition, an oracle of demise. But the date or the time of day is forever unknowable. I'm unconsciously operating on the basis of it not being now, tomorrow or anytime soon, even though I regularly remind myself it could be now, tomorrow, yeah, really soon. And in my own way, the urge to constantly return to express gratitude is one antidote to this. Just so long as I am grateful, then I remain fully alive to the vibrant possibility of the present. For that is all there is..

QUOTATION MARKS - Genius by David Whyte

" Genius is the meeting
between inheritance and horizon,
between what has been told,
what can be told
and what is yet to be told,
between our practical abilities
and our relationship
to the gravitational mystery
that pulls us on.
Our genius is to understand,
and stand beneath the set of stars
present at our birth,
and from that place
to seek the hidden, single star,
over the night horizon,
we did not know we were following. 

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte.
Published by Canongate 2015.

ARTICLE - Moorland Methodism

My surname is Lumb, its a name with ancient origins. Probably first appearing historically in early medieval times. Though I imagine it could well go further back, before names were even set into their formulaic conjunctions. Surnames as we now  know them slowly established how they would be formed, around Anglo Saxon times. Based on parentage, an individual's skill, place of habitation, or the quality of landscape, these were intended as the primary building blocks of an individuals public identity. You came to be known through a group of associations, that told others something about you and your personal and ancestral origins. It's initial fluidity as an individual designation, gradually assumed a stabler structure carried down through the generations as the title for a specific family.

Lumb Bank

Lumb is a name not found much outside of the Pennine region between Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is even a village named Lumb on the borderlands of these two counties. Lumb has other surnames to which it is related, where the silent 'b' at the end has been completely lost. So you will also find Lumm, Lum. One particular variant - Lund, clearly reveals Lumb's linguistic origin as Scandinavian.  So whether Lumb or Lund, it is a word intimately associated with land. It contains within it a designation of a specific place. Lumb means a dwelling or dweller with a clearing by a pool or water source. Once upon a time an ancestor of mine took a piece of land, cleared it of trees and undergrowth with an aim to cultivate it. Its likely the surname Lumb is also linked to the word Lumber, as a term to denote fallen or felled trees. All this information is contained within one simple four letter surname, a word with origins in a time far beyond written history.

The Pennines as a landscape consists of craggy granite outcrops and coarse peaty moorland. Arable cultivation here would have been challenging, if not impossible. It's more likely my ancestor was clearing land in order to raise animals on it. All varieties of livestock, but mostly sheep and goats which coped better with the rugged terrain, the cold wind and torrential wet weather.

X is Uncle Brint taken in a workshop

My family inhabited the moorlands for centuries, either on a small holding or as farm workers. Only moving into the Pennine towns in the late 19th century. Within the living memory of my Father's generation, one wing of the Lumb family still lived on in one of the moorland villages. Everyone in the family referred to them as ' Uncle Brints lot' as though they were this entirely other species of Lumb. Which maybe indeed they were, an anachronistic remnant of a previous way of life. Brinton Lumb waa the brother of David Lumb, my Grandfather. The latter someone I never met because he died in his mid 50's before I was born.

Farm work could never be just the raising of sheep on the moorlands. It also meant butchering, selling meat and taking fleeces into the local market. And over the centuries they'd learned various bits of 'piece-work' - how to spin the wool into yarn, to dye and weave it into cloth, all done in house or within the village. A cottage weaving industry of this kind providing the only real possibility of gainful employment for women in the area. 

Halifax was the nearest large town to where my ancestors lived. In 1779 the town built a cloth hall, where all the local cloth makers, could bring their yarn or 'pieces' of cloth to sell to merchants. The Piece Hall, as it's now known, is a unique Grade 1 listed building. Much larger and unlike any other cloth hall in the West Riding. It is a vast classically colonnaded courtyard with small rooms on three levels that people could hire to trade from or trade too. 

The Piece Hall as it is now

As a building it represents the high point of sheep rearing and weaving in the Halifax District, and of the Agricultural Revolution itself. When new technology such as the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle loom arrived there had been local Luddite riots. Only wealthier farmers were able to afford to upgrade to these newer, faster machinery.  Setting up local weaving halls to make high quality woven fabric for half the cost and manufacturing time. With significantly less man power required. 

Depiction of a 'Luddite' riot

This revolution in the weaving industry however, would not stay in the hills. The next stage of mass manufacturing developed in the industrialised northern towns. This brought about the collapse of an already fragile rural economy. Hand woven cloth could never compete, so moorland women lost their livelihoods. Rearing sheep was not enough on its own to make a living out of.  Farmers lost both their land and workforce, as both automated weaving machines and people moved into the towns. A little over a century after it was built, with the rapid decline of small scale cloth making, the Piece Hall was convert into a wholesale vegetable and fruit market place

Halifax in the late 19th early 20th Century

So my family, as moorland dwellers, were not alone in eventually moving into Halifax to find employment. This migration from moor to town began in the 18th century. ending in a late flourish in the last decades of the 19th. This displacement either to a more hostile urban environment, or poverty and unemployment for those who stayed trying to find work in the moorland hills, had a huge consequence. Increased job insecurity, being matched by harsh alienating living conditions, brought on depressive states of mind. In turn this meant men in particular took to drinking, opioid use and gambling to excess, in order to cope, drown their sorrows, or to numb the psychological pain. Industrial towns and cities became synonymous with drug addled destitution and riotous debauchery. 

That non conformist chapels began to spring up all across the West Riding of Yorkshire from the mid 18th century onward is not coincidental. It was in response to the perceived spiritual needs of an increasingly lost and dissolute generation. Most Christian non conformist movements emerged into prominence in response to this economic and spiritual crisis. 

John Wesley Open Air Preaching

John Wesley came first to the West Riding, and Halifax in particular, around the same time as The Piece Hall opened, the late 1770's. No longer a young man, in his seventies, he nonetheless made repeated preaching tours across the West Riding, until his death in 1791. It would have been quite a feat for a man of his age, to travel around the Pennines, a frequently steep rugged and unforgiving terrain.  The 1780's to 90's were a time where Britain was unsettled by the possibility of the French Revolution spreading across the channel. The West Riding was considered one likely flare point for social unrest.

The Methodism he preached was initially met with suspicion and sometimes hostility. The speaking tours did, however, progress from being held in middle of the street to local homes and meeting halls. Eventually small Methodist chapels, built by local converts, began popping up across the West Riding 

Heptonstall Methodist Chapel up alongside the moors

His message, whilst always a biblically inflected one, also preached prohibitions, of taking personal control of the drug, drinking and gambling habits that were plaguing communities, large or small. That this chimed with the zeitgeist of its time is evident in the growing religious predominance of Methodism across the Pennine moorlands and industrial conurbations.

Both sides of my family were chapel going Methodists. It's hard to establish how far back the Lumb family and Methodism went. Probably much more than the three generations I know of. What is certain is that things generally changed slowly in the moor side hamlets and villages. So once you became a Methodist you generally would stay loyally Methodist.

West End Methodist Chapel that my family attended

When you moved from the moors to an industrialised town, you'd have to initially take work where ever you could. If you had weaving or dyeing skills you might have found it easier to get work in the weaving mills. Otherwise it would be whatever work you could find. If you had initiative you might be taken on as an apprentice to learn an entirely new trade. 

My Grandfather supported his wife and eight sons and daughters, through his trade as a specialist painter and decorator. Applying surface effects such as wood grain onto doors and Anaglypta. I imagine this would have required him to be taken on as an apprentice, in order to lean these skills of the trade. Because through this he would eventually be independent and self employed. 

This desire was informed by the Methodist ethos of self education and improvement, benefits requiring hard work and moral rectitude. Instilling an imperative to take the initiative, to control and drive your own future forward. The firm prohibitions of Methodism's earlier days mellowed over the centuries.The strength of the strictures on alcohol and gambling no longer required to be so severe. The gross consequences of the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were becoming settled, more bedded in. People began to feel more accustomed to urban life and relatively affluent. Hence this more liberal and tolerant tone emerged, that instilled an 'everything in moderation' principle. 

That life principle and moral prohibitions were certainly still in the air of my parental home during my childhood. Plus a respect and tolerance for difference, another quality that is perhaps of more cutting edge importance when living in an urban context, than when subsisting in small close communities on a moorland edge. Methodist chapels in the Pennines are often simple solidly built, unfussy buildings. There is a part of me still that appreciates the pared back essentialism of a Zen Buddhist interior, because it bears echoes of the Methodist chapels of my youth. Another part reacts against it, by wanting its more extravagant catholic baroque opposite. I love bleak wild countryside, the moorland heaths of my childhood, which has echoes in the broad flat salt marshes of North Norfolk. All of these may be examples of ancestral flashbacks to a landscape and long forgotten lifestyle. One that my ancestors thrived in for countless generations. Until, of course, they no longer could.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 122 - The Pernicious Arrival of Slimy Goop

 After a couple of years of forgetting, we finally had our chimney cleaned. Hence we have been enjoying the intimacy of a real fire over the Winterval. I have had a lot of wood off cuts to burn, so there has been much rifling through shelves and bins in my workshop. Come the Spring I want to have an almighty clean up and chuck out in my workshop. By the end of which I'm hoping it will be less congested with a much simpler layout. In the meantime I've been indulging in a bit of therapeutic arson.

I have not been in my workshop much this year, for the obvious reason. All of which has meant I was quite surprised recently to discover a rat was in the process of setting up its winter home. Every time I opened the workshop door I saw it, fleeting in a relaxed scurry disappearing into the eaves. Its nonchalance, made it all the more alarming. I could see where it was getting in, so I bought a small bag of ready made cement and blocked up all visible points of entry. It appeared to be nesting between the eaves and troughing, venturing into the workshop to use it as its appointed poo and pee palace. Rats, they are such fastidious creatures.

Next year I'm planning to step back a bit more from Cottonwood Home. I'll continue being Hubby's general pattern cutter, but reduce what I personally make. I want to concentrate more time on developing an art practice. I'd like to work at breaking a few personal conventions my creativity has got set in. As it is, the progress of osteo-arthritic inflammation in my hand joints has meant I can no longer execute work requiring fine brush detail. So I've been forced by this handicap to become looser and less controlling of my finish in execution.

A recent small experiment

Another One

All of which is I believe is good. I'm also moving away from using gouache, which has been my chosen medium for decades, and gradually getting to grips with the possibilities of acrylic paint. All of which means there's been a need to improve the quality and colour range of acrylics I have. I've acquired lots of student grade acrylics over the years, which are not that great once you actually start to work with them. Unfortunately with artist materials the cheaper they are, the less you'll be able to do with them. Quite often when folk say they don't get on with a particular artist medium, paint quality is often, in my experience, a major factor.  So I'm in the process of upgrading mine. There have been Christmas present requests for particular Liquitex colours. Its many years since I ran my own art shop. I was I thought, used to how expensive artists quality paints are. However, its nearly thirty years since I had my shop in Diss, and prices have inevitably dramatically risen. Some quite basic colours are now over twenty quid a tube, which is phew, wipes brow of sweat and hyperventilates. 

recent purchases

Christmas has been spent at home with Hubby. We've tried this year to reduce the heart unhealthy quality of some aspects of Christmas food consumption. Pudding and cake this year were the smallest we could buy. Reducing salt and fat content whenever we could. All of which I think we did quite well with.. Just before Christmas the car sprang a dramatic coolant leak, so went into the garage for its remedy. We didn't really need it over the Christmas break, picking it up from Holt the day after Boxing Day. Thankfully it wasn't too expensive a repair

Holkham Church in the mist

So we were able to go to Holkham Hall for a walk on the Saturday. We were wandering in the mist and dank fog that hung over the country during Christmas. It was dam cold, but bracing shall we say. The fog so thick buildings and churches were not visible until you were almost upon them. The North Norfolk coast has a particular evocative quality when shrouded in mist. It reminds you of the creepy atmosphere of a M R James ghost story, shadowy and ethereal.

I also start out the coming New Year with a replenished book stack, which should see me through to the Spring. My early morning routine I've changed recently. I'm trying to read more, and view You Tube less. Currently I'm reading a poem by David Whyte, and a short chapter from his book Consolations, everyday. After meditating I usually write in my Gratitude Journal, which I'm finding particularly beneficial. I've also set a time limit on my smart phone use of two hours a day, which I am finding is a good discipline.  

After celebrating New Year in Nottingham, we decided, on the spur of the moment to come back via Lincoln. To break the journey home, but also to check out what new fabrics Fat Quarter had. We came away with three which we are keen to try this spring in our craft business, a couple of mid century modern designs and a seaweed inspired pattern called Tides. I love the Cathedral Quarter of Lincoln. Its the only city I know whose retail hierarchy is banded according to its topography. Top end retail and tourist perch on the escarpment around the cathedral, national chains at the bottom of the escarpment, beyond the railway bridge nail bars, tanning salons, Asian supermarkets and more scruffy and dubious looking tertiary retail outfits. 

This time we didn't venture far, only half way down Steep hill. I didn't want to push my heart never mind my luck, by doing more. Since our return we have been trying to chill out, in full knowledge that at the beginning of next week we will need to start pulling out self assessment tax together. It is one of those time consuming but essential tasks we spend a large part of January sorting out. 

Whilst in Nottingham I picked up one humdinger of a cold, which was well on the ascendant by the time we'd reached Lincoln. Since then, I've had the full flood from my nose of murky ponds of greenish phlegm. Today, this same phlegm is forming a semi occluding value around the top of my wind pipe, which has kept me awake coughing most of the night and during the day. I've been coughing so much all the muscles in my torso ache every time they erupt into the air from my throat. This is clearing up, but slowly. In recent years since Covid, its been more typical for me to have a very persistent viral chest cold. Which are harder to treat by virtue of them not being a true cold. This is the first really old fashioned cold I've had in a long time, and my god I don't remember producing such vast quantities of slimy goop from and orifice before.