Cuckoo song

Making use of the long evenings and the fine weather, we went out to Scorhill, our local stone circle. On Dartmoor, where blocks of granite erupt invitingly from every tor and tummock, it seems a bit superfluous to go to the bother of arranging them yourself, but Scorhill has a bleak grandeur all of its own. I get why they did it.

Now, it is the last obvious human touch before the forbidding expanse of the high moor, still snow-bleached despite the spring. When it was built, this would have been forest. Its construction marked the beginning of an unstoppable ecological change, a process of deforestation that bequeathed us the Dartmoor we know today.

While we were there, a cuckoo bugled in the distance until he was hoarse. His song made a descending minor third, rather than than the more usual major, a shift that gave it an extra sinister twist. For, like all his kind, he was a murderer before he even left the nest: savagery amidst the beauty.

Resurrection

According to Plutarch, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius a sailor by the name of Thamus heard a voice on the water proclaiming that 'the Great God Pan is dead!'

News of this seems yet to have reached Oxford, where strange graffiti started to appear during our final days living there.

Perhaps a coven of witches was trying to invoke the ancient Greek god of bees, goats, pastures, caves, wild places, panic and the regenerative forces of nature.

Perhaps some old acid casualty was trying to immanentize the eschaton through a rehash of Operation Mindfuck.

Maybe it was a piece of ontological anarchy or poetic terrorism, designed to shake up what has become a frighteningly self-satisfied neighbourhood.

And maybe it was just some bored teenager out tagging. It's hard to say.

But now we have moved to Dartmoor, a land so fecund, so utterly alive, that ancient gods, horned or otherwise, need no invocation.

Rather, it is they who invoke the Pan-ish parts of us. We find they were not dead after all.

The wisdom of pipers

This quote is from the current issue of Chanter, the magazine of the Bagpipe Society. As that organ might, ahem, be a bit specialist for most of you I thought I'd share it here. It's very beautiful, and comes from an unknown Greek, cave-dwelling, anchorite, tsambouna player (as interviewed by American traveller George Burchill).

'I sit and listen to the shadows in my cave and I play them. I sit at the mouth of my cave and I hear my flock and the birds and I play them. I hear the wind and the rain and the snow and I play them. I hear my bees when they take their honey and I play them. I hear the sun and the moon and the stars and the silence and I play them. I hear the mountain flowers and the silent bats at night and I play them. I hear my breathing and my heart and I play them. I hear the silence and the years passing and I play them.'

Magical Books

There's a fabulous exhibition on at the Bodleian Library in Oxford right now, called Magical Books. I can't recommend it highly enough.

My favourite exhibits included pages from the Rawlinson Necromantic Manuscript (I kid you not); Alan Garner's beautifully handwritten manuscripts; Tolkein's handmade facsimile of the Book of Marzarbul ('they're coming!'); and a medieval book of divination, the Prognostics of King Socrates, which included a pair of interlocked leather cogs, called a volvelle, used to generate random numbers.

Oh, there's some J. K. Rowling 'abilia too, if such things float your boat. On till September, and well worth the trip to Oxford.

Samsara

We took a load of stuff to the Car Boot sale yesterday. No sooner had we parked up than we were surrounded by a swarm of bargain-hunters yammering to know what we were selling.

'Got any air-rifles' asked a man in khaki trousers.

What the fuck? 'No, I haven't got any air rifles.'

'Militaria?'

'No.'

'Old photographs?'

'Er, no. Just give us a moment will you?' I turned just in time to see an old woman in the boot of my car holding up my raincoat.

'Oi! That's not for sale.' Get out of the goddamned car lady!

Eventually, with a certain amount of argy-bargy, we managed to get the stall laid out. And we did OK. £90. Not bad for a load of old tat.

But oh my, I found the experience depressing. Not because the punters were so rude (one well-to-do woman tried to haggle over a pound). I could cope with that. No, it's because eventually, sooner or later, all the stuff we're supposed to value, to aspire to own, to strive for, to display to the world as a sign of our worth, all of it ends up here at the Boot Sale. Ornaments. Books. DVDs. Music. Fashion. Computers. The lot. Today's must-have is just tomorrow's junk.

Take our telly. Ten years ago it was worth someone's time and money to drill the oil, refine it, make it into plastic, mine the minerals, smelt them into metals, manufacture the components, solder them all together and ship the result halfway round the world so that I could watch Doctor Who on a Saturday evening. Now, because everyone wants flat-screen TVs the size of a door, I couldn't give the it away (having had enough of Doctor Who, we're going telly-free). I had to take it to the tip.

Western culture. We dig up the Earth's resources, shuffle them up a bit, then bury them again in a more toxic form. I know this isn't news and that the gurus have been banging on about this for millennia, but at the car boot sale it really struck me how pointless it all is (and that's before we tot up the impact on the environment). Where's the stop button? I feel ashamed at my complicity.

So afterwards we went to the woods to see the bluebells (and some early purple orchids). Sanity at last.

Two bridges

Two bridges to hoy us over the gap between Oxford and Devon. The first, courtesy of College Cruisers:

The second, a present to myself of a collection of short stories by that most quintessential of Oxford authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, illustrated by Alan Lee, famously a Dartmoor resident.

Did I say two bridges? Two Bridges is, of course, a Dartmoor village, so I suppose really that makes three.

And as I'm using 'bridge' metaphorically, and the word metaphor is itself a metaphor, derived from the Greek meaning 'to carry over', I should really say four. Four bridges.

I'll stop there - this is what happens to your brain when you start stuffing the detritus of your entire life into boxes.

Quadrivium

In the late Middle Ages, students at Oxford were put through a syllabus known as the quadrivium. They studied arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry, the better to know God through the perfection of his (neo-Platonic) universe.

I came to Oxford in 1991 to study for a doctorate in Ecology, but being something of a medieval soul I tarried and kept to a quadrivium of my own. I couldn't tell you whether the universe is perfect or not (though it seems pretty good to me), but I've read a lot (not nearly enough!), and now that I've learned that the most important things can't be said in words at all it's time to graduate.

After twenty-odd years in Oxford, and nearly ten in our cramped little flat, it's time to look out of another window.

At the end of the month we're moving home, to Devon, to a village on the edge of Dartmoor that will be very familiar to readers in this neck of the blogosphere.

Oxford is a hard place to leave. I did it twice before and both times came running back with my tail between my legs. The third time will be for keeps. And so I've spent the last few weeks visiting my favourite haunts, saying good bye.

I shall miss the Bodleian Library, where I've been able to read any book I wanted, where I've pored over ancient manuscripts (William Stukeley's diaries no less), and where I've spent hours gazing into the middle distance.

I shall miss Blackwells, one of the great bookshops of the world, where I've frittered away more time and hard-earned cash than I care to mention.

I shall miss New College cloisters at the very heart of Oxford. A temple of peace (until the Harry Potter fans arrive).

I shall miss Oxford's other side, the gargoyles, grotesques and misericords who poke their tongues out at the agelasts, providing a necessary counterbalance to all that erudition.

Mandrake plant in the Botanic Gardens

The best that can be said about the Oxfordshire countryside is that it is inoffensive (no wild hills here) but over the years I've grown to love its gentle beauty.

I shall miss its folk customs and the calendrical rituals we've invented around them, like our May walk to see Eynsham Morris do their thing.

I shall miss the Catweazle Club, Matt Sage's enduring creation, where I've been playing for seventeen years and where I cut my teeth.

Photo by Richard Markham

I shall miss the wonderfully vibrant session scene, where I learnt to play my instruments (thanks, it must be said, to the forbearance of my elders and betters) and where I've had some extraordinary nights of communal music making.

I shall miss the canal and the Gyptians, more hardy than I, who live and work upon the cut.

I shall miss the wonderful alternative community - my tribe. I shall miss my friends terribly.

I shall miss my work colleagues, long-suffering all, and I shall even miss my students. But I shan't miss the traffic, the tourists...

...the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the astronomical rents, the bland, stultifying homogeneity of the new-rich-commuters in their seven-bedroom new-builds and gated communities...

...the ever-lengthening reach of London.

But enough of that. Most of all, I shall miss the spirit of old Oxford itself, those moments when you round a corner and you're stopped in your tracks by all that age and beauty. 

No wonder that Tolkein, Lewis, Pullman 'n all flourished here. The never-never otherworldliness of Oxford suffuses my music too. I've thrived on it. I found my wife here (in truth, she found me) and it's fair to say that I found myself too.

The poet Robert Graves put it like this in his Oxford Addresses on Poetry. 

'Oxford' he said, 'happens to own a peculiar báraka, or blessedness - a kindly, non-doctrinaire, generous spirit, unmatched anywhere else in the world. Enjoy it, maintain it!'

As I prepare to graduate, I trust that's exactly what I did.