Hallowe'en

All Hallows Eve
And so 31st October comes around again. How will I be celebrating Halloween this year? Handing out treats to avoid being tricked? Bobbing apples? Dressing ghoulishly? Putting on Wiccan robes and taking part in Samhain rituals along with other pagans? Dancing naked round a fire in a forest, daubed in symbols to deflect evil demons?

Celtic beliefs, All Saints, All Souls, Hallowtide
Like most celebrations in the UK the origins of All Hallows Evening lie in our Celtic past: pre-Christian, pre-Roman, preAnglo-Saxon, preViking, preNorman, pre all the other invasions that make up our mongrel culture. The Celts believed demons, evil spirits and ghosts roamed the earth more frequently at the “turn” of the year when the leaves fell and it seemed as if nature was dying. In the 7th Century Pope Boniface IV created All Saints’ Day on November 1st and in the 11th Century Benedictine monasteries added All Souls’ Day on November 2nd spurred on by St Odilo of Cluny at Cluny Abbey in France. The three days (the Eve, the Saints’ Day and the Souls’ Day) became collectively known as Hallowtide and praying for the dead fitted in well with the pagan beliefs about spirits walking at that time of year.

American? Not.
There is a myth in England that we imported trick-or-treating from America, but strictly it’s a re-import because European immigrants introduced it to America in the first place. The practice was common in both Germany and Ireland – appeasing wicked spirits with sweets. Throughout Europe, in medieval times the Catholic Church encouraged congregations to go house to house on Hallowe’en asking for food in return for a prayer for the dead. (In unscrupulous parishes the priests would keep the food, whereas in more “Christian” areas the gifts were distributed again to the poor, or, on 3rd November, turned into a community feast.) Masks, costumes and pumpkins were all features of the attempts by pre-1500 folks to scare away the dead. The candle inside a pumpkin represented a soul trapped in purgatory; only later did pumpkins acquire carved “faces.” So America can blame Europe for all the trappings of Halloween. And we can blame the Celts for believing in demons and the Catholic Church for “inventing” Hallowtide to pray for the souls of the dead. (Of course we can still blame Capitalism for making it into a commercial money-spinning phenomenon, instead of its original pagan spirit-slaying manifestation.)

October November December
Goodbye to my birthday month, get ready to welcome the fully Autumnal month of November in preparation for that crucible of love & despair & excess & glitter & feast & fun & regret & peace & joy that is....

December....

Venus and Adonis 1592-3

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

Venus and Adonis
From the summer of 1592 onwards, plague was rife in London so all the theatres were closed to prevent the infection spreading through tightly-packed crowds. A small book was produced in 1593, which turned out to be the most frequently printed work by Shakespeare in his lifetime. Did he write it in 1592-3? Or earlier when he was at school studying Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the origin of the story? Or did he start it earlier and finish it when the theatres were closed? This important volume of poetry, Venus and Adonis, was printed by Richard Field, a neighbour of the Shakespeare family from Bridge Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Field had set up in London and had a reputation as a scrupulously honest printer with exacting standards. The first edition is printed beautifully.

Images of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, played by Tom Sturridge and Eddie Redmayne in different dramatisations. Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis to this patron.

“The first heir of my invention”
In the dedication to the poem Shakespeare presents Venus and Adonis as “the first heir of my invention” suggesting that either:

• it was the first thing he had ever written
• it was the first thing he had ever printed or
• it was the first thing he wrote that he hoped to make money from

Writing plays was not a lucrative business in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; Shakespeare made his money from being a shareholder of the theatres in which he worked and later from land-owning and property development. Poetry was one of the few ways writers could make money, especially in well-bound short volumes. Venus and Adonis sold like hot cakes. Young people apparently carried the book around with them and no less than 10 editions had been printed by the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, a remarkable number considering the level of literacy at that time. Only one original copy of the first print run survives in the Bodleian library at Oxford.

Rubens, Titian and de Ribera paintings

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie
The poem tells of the goddess Venus pursuing the young Adonis who would prefer to go hunting the boar. The language is playful, comic, erotic (see lines in sub-heading above) and ultimately moving. The most frequent motifs in the poem are those of hunting, lips and kissing; the build-up of tension between the pair is a model of the will-they, won’t-they convention in comedy. Unusually for the time, the woman is the main protagonist and Venus is a lusty huntress, reveling in her own sexuality, beginning and ending the poem and driving forward the entire story. One of the key themes of Venus and Adonis is making hay while the sun shines, or, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, or carpe diem or, as the Sonnets express time and again, “love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

The poem is written in six line stanzas with a controlled rhyme scheme (ababcc) so the poetry bounces along playfully but is crafted to within an inch of its life.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

"Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies"
Venus uses all her metaphysical wit to try and persuade Adonis to give her a kiss, even fainting at one point. She is assisted by Adonis’s stallion, which gallops off lustily to nuzzle a passing mare, thus giving an illustration to Adonis of how he could behave, almost like the comic sub-plot of a play. In the recent Greg Doran/Little Angel production of the poem at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the horses almost upstaged Venus and Adonis. At the end (spoiler alert) when Adonis dies bleeding from his boar-wounds, Venus’s grief is real and painful and the Venus puppet in the RSC production became expressively heartbroken. The poem was possibly a response to Marlowe’s unbridled and unbuttoned Hero and Leander poem, with Shakespeare’s narrative being more controlled and consciously poetic, but whatever the inspiration (a poetic exercise, a way of making money when the theatres were closed, a poetry-battle with Marlowe, a joyous act of creation) Venus and Adonis cemented Shakespeare’s reputation in his lifetime and contains many elements that define his canon, not least his exploration of love:

Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Elements of the poem reappear in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, not to mention the thematic connection with the Sonnet sequence and the other great narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece which can be seen as this poem’s tragic counterpart and which I’ll blog about in the future.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

Birthday 57 - Launching Book Two

Hirst Wood, Leeds-Liverpool Canal, Emporio Italia, Birthday Cake made by Sue and Brian

Numbers
11, 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 30, 40, 50…. they’re all birthdays marked with random “significance,” being round numbers or milestones of growing up. Why not celebrate 57? It’s the sixteenth discrete semiprime number, after all. There were (supposedly) 57 varieties of Heinz flavours. In the (much-missed) Joss Whedon series Firefly, there was a brigade called The 57th Overlanders. And in 2017 I achieved the mature age of 57….

Happy Birthday to Me!

Back to the grindstone
After this weekend I’ll be diving back into my dystopian trilogy, Rhenium Tales. I had a break during September and October to breathe, think, research and assess the wood rather than the trees. I feel ready and raring to go. Slash, burn, rearrange. Friends Sue and Brian have bestowed upon me priorities, snapshots and factoids about sailing in hot climates – in and out of the islands of an archipelago. Time to launch Book 2….

Birthday Breakfast, Lunch, Tea and Cake....

To Malham and Back

Birthday treat
As part of my 57th birthday celebrations, Sally took me to Malhamdale near the source of the River Aire. I’ve been before and I hope I’ll go again. It’s one of those places once seen never forgotten – whether you encounter it first on the big screen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – or whether like me you were brought here by Geography teachers in mass groups of teenagers to be amazed at the clints, grikes, limestone pavement, sink holes, rocks galore and the realisation that the planet is a heaving, living, destructive, beautiful force of nature.

Malham Cove
It’s at the top of Malham Cove that Harry and Hermione rest and try and figure stuff out. The colossal waterfall that once poured over the top of it is long gone, but the sight of the curving cliff, from below, from above, from the sides and from afar is a wonder of the Yorkshire dales. Enough to make a Muggle marvel. Priest Thomas West in 1779 described Malham Cove as like “the age-tinted wall of a prodigious castle.”

Malham Tarn
No less weird is walking to and around Malham Tarn, the glacial lake which seems to sit like a spooky infinity pool in a flat patch of desolate moorland. An atmospheric place to sit in the rain among the sheep shit and eat your sandwiches…. tasty. Charles Kingsley was inspired to write The Water Babies after visiting the Cove and Tarn – child chimney sweeps forever rejoiced.

Janet’s Foss
As a teenager Janet’s Foss was my first sight of a waterfall in real life rather than in the pages of an Enid Blyton book. And on this trip we happened to visit twice – the second day after torrential rain the night before and the bigger volume of water made the magical place seem like a completely new location. Does a fairy queen live in the cave behind the fall? Is the pope a Catholic?

Gordale Scar
And the other oft-visited place is the terrifying ravine, Gordale Scar. It’s somewhere to visit if you want to feel insignificant – a crack or chasm in the crust of the Earth with humans staring up at the immense cliffs. On our Geography Field trip – back in the 1970s – the teachers led us UP the Scar which is still possible when the two waterfalls are not heavy but at my age now – and having been a teacher – it just seems to be such a reckless, dangerous, impossible thing to have done. But I know I did.

Beck Hall Hotel
After two days hiking (well over 20,000 steps each day) it was gorgeous to come to rest each night at Beck Hall, a gorgeously-sited and whimsical place to stay over a clapper bridge. A fireside snug, jigsaw/games table, hearty food, welcoming staff, a comfy bed and the sound of Malham Beck running by all night, having poured down from the Scar, over Janet’s Foss, through Malhamdale and joining the River Aire to flow back home through Saltaire.

To Infinity and Beyond

Boldly going....

Bradford’s National Science + Media Museum
Guess what’s on display at the Science + Media Museum in Bradford? It’s the final parachute and the small (savagely-burned) Soyuz capsule that brought Tim Peake back to Earth in June 2016 after his six month mission to the International Space Station. The capsule is remarkable – it looks ancient, it looks small, it contained three crew members! You can take a selfie in an astronaut suit and (book to) experience a Virtual Reality descent to Earth wearing goggles, guided by Major Peake. The display has already been to London and will be going to York, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. If you can’t make it to Bradford (between now and November 19th), then try and catch it elsewhere. It didn’t take long to see everything in the display but it filled up my imagination for many days.

"The smells of Earth are just so strong"
Tim Peake’s mission covered a distance of over 100 million kilometres and orbited Earth around 3,000 times. The pictures he sent back for publication were incredible and made a mockery of the ephemeral political intricacies of the human race. Asked how he felt after landing, Maj Peake said: "Truly elated, the smells of Earth are just so strong, just so good to be back on Earth. I'll look forward to seeing the family."


Into the stars
I’m still on a breathing space break from writing my YA trilogy after finishing Book One Draft One but, if I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ll reveal that it’s set on another planet – over a thousand years into the future when Earth has had to be abandoned. I feel confident that I’m writing speculative fiction rather than fantasy because the Tim Peake/Soyuz display and follow up research convinces me that humans could survive on a number of planets in the universe. If we rechannelled the money we spent on arms and weapons of mass destruction to the exploration of outer space we would soon be giving our future destinations names. Maybe one could be called Rhenium like the planet in my book…