Monthly Archives: July 2020

Summer Work in our Valley

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It’s interesting how many cities and towns in the world have a bridge as their emblem. Building bridges is rather more socially positive than building walls! London’s Tower Bridge, San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge, Sydney’s Harbour Bridge all spring to mind. Italy has its fair share of bridges, particularly as the ancient Romans first engineered the arches used in so many constructions today. Top of the list must be Florence’s Ponte Vecchio but there are so many others that warrant special attention: Venice’s Rialto, Spoleto’s Ponte delle torri and, in our area, that gateway to the upper Serchio valley the Ponte della Maddalena, nicknamed the Devil’s bridge, which has to be one of the most extraordinary bridges in Italy. Dating back to the fourteenth century and built by command of that indomitable lady Matilda Countess of Canossa it connects the east and west banks of the river by means of three smaller arches leading up to a huge central arch almost nineteen metres in height and carries the Via Francigena or Pilgrim’s route towards Rome.

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The bridge needed a fair bit of maintenance including repointing its stonework and clearing the arch buttresses of a great load of branches brought down by the floods. We passed it the other day to find the Serchio much diminished in size, leaving large tracts of dry ground in and around the bridge. The buttresses, normally almost submerged by the river, were now visible to their full height.
Lifting machinery allowed the work force to access the underside of the bridge and I was truly glad that this wonderful structure reflecting the middle ages highest engineering skills is surely going surely to survive another century.

Summer is also a useful time for works in our own little home and, with the help of a local tiler, broken ‘coppe’ or curved tiles on the little roofs protecting our doorways were replaced in preparation for the autumn rains.

The tiler brought his dog with him and, after a little initial growling from Archie, our young rescue tom, the two animals began to tolerate each other.

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Today will be another day of African-style heat with temperatures touching forty degrees centigrade. I wonder how much more work will get done!

How Pardini Beautified Ponte a Serraglio

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The spread of summer events in Bagni di Lucca has been somewhat curtailed this year because of the world health crisis. However, there are still some very pleasant activities including a series of walks in and around the town and the surrounding villages organized by the De Montaigne foundation. This is the programme for the events which must all be booked. The walks themselves are free with a voluntary donation towards the upkeep of Bagni’s protestant cemetery.

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We joined one last week-end which took in some historic buildings by the Lucchese architect Giuseppe Pardini (1799-1884) who, in 1834, was appointed chief architect for the city of Lucca.

We started the walk from the gardens of villa Fiori, a formerly magnificent nineteenth century mansion, now virtually abandoned to the elements. Some work had recently been done on its roof. Unfortunately, during the recent storm, described in my previous post, a tall pine tree fell upon the building gravely damaging a part of the structure.

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Although now having a classical appearance, villa Fiori was originally designed in the neo-gothic style. Only the garden turrets now reflect the original architecture of the villa which is desperately seeking a white knight to rescue it from further neglect.

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At the price normally paid for a tiny bedsit in London’s Knightsbridge the villa’s fifty rooms are a real bargain!

We crossed the foot bridge, built in 2009, with our escort, Giulia, a very well informed twenty-three year old member of Bagni’s De Montaigne cultural association, and walked to the old hospital built by Russian count Demidoff as a thank you to the citizens of Bagni for having cured him of gout by drinking its waters.

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The villa Demidoff has been leased for some years to the Global Village which hosts various alternative well-being therapies. The former family mausoleum is now used for yoga sessions.

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Of course, we know these places well having first come to the area in 2005. However, the nice thing about visiting in a small group is that we can see familiar sights with fresh eyes. I get the same sensation when I show some of the beautiful locations this valley offers to friends from abroad.

A steep path led us up to one of the oldest of Bagni’s thermal establishments. The Terme di Bernabo’ date back to at least the fifteenth century although the present building is nineteenth century. Its foyer has exquisite ceiling decorations.

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We viewed the elegant marble baths with their rather less elegant modern taps.

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One bath particularly stood out for its elegance.

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The unfortunate thing about the Bagni Bernabo’, however, is that after their restoration ten years ago there was no-one to maintain and encourage visitors to use them. Hence they are, once again, showing signs of dilapidation. Our escort, nevertheless, did state that there was a possibility that they would once again be open for use by the public.

The views from the Bagni Bernabo’ are especially charming, even more so in the golden late afternoon summer sun; our walk had begun at 5pm to avoid the hottest part of the day.

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We stepped down to the valley floor and entered perhaps Bagni di Lucca’s most magnificent building and Europe’s first public casino, again designed by Pardini. The various rooms, including the sumptuous hall of the lilies (decorated by the same painter who did the ceiling frescoes for the Bagni Bernabo’), are familiar to us through the events they have hosted over the years. May these events return soon!

We crossed the river Lima via a bridge designed, again, by Pardini and reached one of the architect’s most ingenious buildings, the hotel de Russie.

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On an awkward triangular site the architect managed to produce one of the most sumptuous of the forty-odd hotels Bagni di Lucca once had. Giulia informed us that an American architect was inspired by Pardini’s effort to design the flatiron building in New York. Judge for yourselves…

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With this last building, which has both a famous (as writer Ouida’s favourite residence when she would come to Bagni) and an infamous (as a fascist interrogation and torture centre in the last war) association we concluded our Ponte a Serraglio walk. We shall certainly book more as they are such fun and very informative.

Benvenuti!

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We are back in Longoio at last. We were meant to be here in March but something called covid19 came along and we had to miss the bus…or rather the plane. Finally, after various cancellations we managed to get O’Leary to transport us to Pisa. The journey, despite our fears, was quite safe with a whole seat row to ourselves.

Landing in Italy we were immediately set face-to-face, or rather mask-to-mask, with a clearer and more distinctive approach to the health crisis. So many more people, officials and public, were donning masks, hand sanitisers were placed everywhere and public information notices were prominently displayed. I, somehow, felt safer although I think anyone would feel the same after leaving the worst affected borough in London, Brent, with over two thousand deaths so far.

The Italian summer does help. The temperature difference from our place in the UK and our place in Italy approached 20 degrees! Mediterranean cafe society, with its open air arrangement of socially distanced tables and chairs, is a palliative too.

We took the train from Pisa di Bagni di Lucca where our Panda 4 x 4 was parked. Trusty as ever it started, after lying idle for over four months, at the first turn of the ignition. Of course, I had disconnected the battery before leaving Italy in February.

We found our house in very reasonable shape. No major storm had damaged the roof and no surrounding trees were down. Most of our geraniums were again flourishing although the lawn left something to be desired; rain had been lacking.

 

Most important of all we found our quintet of cats, Carlotta, Cheekie, Corneglia, Nerina and our latest arrival Archie in excellent form and still able to remember us! This happy fact was clearly due to the efforts of two friends, one from Guzzano and the other from Longoio, who visited, cuddled and, most importantly, fed our feline family.
It’s been hot, though not intolerably so, since our arrival three weeks ago.

 

However, there has recently been one day when the heavens wreaked their wrath upon over us with the strength of a breached sky-dam: a typical ‘bomba d’acqua’ or water bomb, as they are called here, worryingly reflecting the alterations in weather patterns today. This is what I said about it:

“As I write a terrible storm is pouring its vengeance upon the normally blue skies of an Italian summer. The wind is angry upon the hill our little village is poised. The rain is pelting down at a rattling machine gun rate. It turns in an instance into hail. Hail just when the season is heading towards its warmest holiday patch,’ferragosto August the fifteenth. The whole earth is rumbling continuously. It’s almost like an earthquake (we’ve had a few of those here too…).

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There’s no respite. The soil breaks asunder. The birds and cicadas are no longer heard in this pandemonium of the elements. Like searchlights in a concentration camp flashes of lightning follow the incessant noise reverberating round and round our usually peaceful and verdant valley. If any wonder at the violence of the storm sequence in Vivaldi’s Summer from his ‘Four Seasons’ then here is the proof. The heavens are terrifying. The wind is blowing the branches and transforming them into the hands of supplicating victims begging for mercy. When will it end? When will the catastrophic interlude end?

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When will we have our festive sunny season back? Why now! In an instant the irritated giants whose gnashing scared both the living and the dead have retreated. The clouds are parting to reveal a timid pallid blue and are shedding their menacing dark grey pallour. We can at last see and relive the harmony and the heat of this country’s summer without temerity, without dodging the lighting flashes, without hiding, like our cats, into the comforting folds of a bed. Yes this is Italy: a country that breeds extremes, that justifies them. For for every beam of golden light clearing its way through the azure skies there is the warning of the elements, For every invitation to love and caresses there is the terror of darkness, and violence breeds in the very heart in this land of fables and desires.”

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A Jurassic Park in London

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I alighted from perhaps the grandest suburban station in London: Crystal Palace. Those stylish colonnades, that refined brickwork, that spacious ticket office, those seductive arches!

The station remains the last gateway to a monument which, more than any other, reminds me of those lines in Edgar Alan Poe’s poem to Sappho:

The glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome. 

To which might be added the splendour that was British Empire – or at least it might have seemed such in the politically incorrect age of the Victorians.

This vast palace was made of glass and iron. It stood on one of the highest points in the capital with views towards the City to the north and Kent and Surrey to the south. It housed collections of objects from all parts of the empire: the world: the farthest pacific islands, the jewel in the crown that was India, the iciest parts of Canada. Handelian music resounded from huge choirs, visiting dignitaries, like Garibaldi, orated to crowds.

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Below the transcendental palace stretched wide Italian style terraces opening onto pleasure gardens where fountains played, guests lost themselves in a complex maze and couples romanced under leafy arbours.

Alas, the palace is gone, destroyed in 1936 in a massive fire seen over much of London.

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But the park is still there although fountains no longer play and the statuary has departed. Miraculously the dinosaurs on their geological islands in the south of the park survive to this day, unlike their Jurassic era forbears. They were, indeed, in danger of disappearing as a Facebook friend remarks: ‘I remember playing amongst the dinosaurs before they were renovated – it was all a great big jungle with broken dinos in there‘.

A series of sculptures designed and sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the direction of geologist Sir Richard Owen and inaugurated in 1854 the dinosaurs became a highlight when the palace moved from South Kensington, where it had housed the 1861 Great Exhibition, to Sydenham. They remain a highlight. Indeed, an old school friend notes ‘The first time I went to Crystal Palace Park I did not know about the dinosaurs. I nearly passed out with surprise!’ 

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I, too, remember my astonishment at seeing these monsters from a primaeval epoch for the first time. Crystal Palace park remains for me a haunt of memory and desire: the memory of bygone times with friends and desire for those intangible dreams of our childhood.

Its dinosaurs represent fifteen different genera of extinct animals not all of which are dinosaurs. (For example the giant Irish elk, one of which has unfortunately broken antlers).

They were realised with the early palaeontological knowledge of the Victorians and consequently many of them are scientifically inaccurate. For example, the Ichthyosaurus is shown as being crocodile-like. However, today it is considered to be more like a shark with dorsal fin and fish-tail.

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It doesn’t matter, however, if the monsters are examples more of nineteenth-century misinterpretation than of accurate representations of the extraordinary species that once ruled the earth: they are fascinating in their own right.

I left the monsters with their fearless company of waterfowl and headed towards the expansive Italian terraces made up of a lower and upper level.

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Pairs of sphinxes punctuate both ends of these elegant structures which formed the southern approach to the great palace and illustrate just how huge it was.

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I gazed upon the ruins of what had been and Shelley’s lines from ‘Ozymandias’ came to mind

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

From here it was a short walk to the bus terminal on the parade. Just in time to avoid being drenched from yet another torrential outburst of the skies!

PS I recollect reading an evocative description of a child visiting the Crystal Palace in Michael Sadleir’s novel ‘Fanny by Gaslight.’ Here is a passage from it:

“We wandered under the vast arcading of the Palace, staring at statues and costumes in glass cases and models of engines and triumphs of ornament in porcelain, gilt and ormolu. We went on the tiny railway and fed the ducks on the pond, and stared at the crowds.”

If I could time travel I might not wish to select Athens at the time of Pericles or Rome when Marcus Aurelius was emperor but rather the Crystal palace when Victoria was Queen.

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Where Princess Pocahontas Rests

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There’s a parody sketch by that vintage English comic, Peter Sellers, which refers to Balham as ‘the Gateway to the South.’ In grand terms the announcer presents the ancient crafts of this not especially distinguished London suburb, one of which is ‘to carve the little holes in the top of toothbrushes’.

If there is doubt cast on Balham’s claim to fame as a ‘gateway’ then there is no such uncertainty regarding Gravesend, the river-side town to the south-east of London. For much of its history it has been the gateway to London itself and, after a period of decline when the port moved down stream, Gravesend has now become a key location for the Thames Gateway project which aims at developing the economy of the Thames estuary region.

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A part of this regeneration has been to restore Gravesend’s historic centre which, as I remember, had become woefully rundown.

The old town’s high street has a number of characteristic clapper-board buildings with specialist shops and restaurants.

The street ends with the restored pier from which one embarks on a passenger ferry to Tilbury across the Thames.

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When I took the ferry last month it was a dour and very windy day and the Thames became a little choppy.

We have disembarked before at Tilbury, on the ‘Waverley’, the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world.

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This memorable journey produced the following poem:

 

WAVERLEY

The pistons pursue their unceasing act

of love and the steamer’s bold prow furrows

through grey-green waters while an east wind blows;

stork-like forts loom ahead: the deck is packed.

Side-paddles ruffle estuary water

in flecks and glints; flat Essex horizon

combines with sea in leaden unison.

You are the River’s beautiful daughter

and come from a truer age and sea-lochs

bordered by lush hills and craggy ridges.

The City is now your servant: bridges

open to you above the shuttered docks.

All hail with blasts and cheers in one consent

for through you we re-live childhood content.

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This time I looked up at a gigantic cruise liner moored there. No sign of any passengers, however. I wonder where they had all gone.

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Along the riverside, but hidden by an embankment wall, was Tilbury fort the location for Queen Elizabeth I’s stirring speech against the Spanish Armada:

“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm”.

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I returned to Gravesend and walked to the railway station passing the elegant eighteenth century church of Saint George.

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It contains the burial place of iconic native American princess Pocahontas of the Powhatan people who saved the life of John Smith the founder of the colony of Virginia.

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Pocahontas later married John Rolfe and sailed to the UK where she was presented to the Royal Court with much pomp and interest.

On her return to her native land Pocahontas became ill at Gravesend and sadly died there at the age of just twenty one

The statue of the princess is a cast copy of the original in Jamestown, Virginia by William Partridge and was presented to Gravesend as a token of anglo-american friendship in 1957.

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Thinking about all those statues which have recently raised disputes about whether they should still be standing I thought that Pocahontas will be there in front of Saint George’s church for as long as freedom and equality are prized. She was a person who valued all humans whether they be red, white or black. However, I wonder what Pocahontas would have thought of her nation today.

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Yielding to the Yeading

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I love spending time poring over London’s classic ‘A-Z’ street atlas. There’s so much to discover in its pages, so much to imagine and so much to plan for future exploration.

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Last month I was intrigued by a sliver of a park shown near Rayner’s Lane underground station. I decided to investigate Roxbourne park.

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Situated in the south west part of the London Borough of Harrow, the park is traversed by a rivulet, the Yeading brook. I forsook the park’s broad manicured lawns to follow the rivulet’s course.

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The Yeading brook is a tributary of the river Crane which, in turn, is a tributary of the Thames reaching it at Isleworth. Originating in Pinner, the Yeading follows a meandering course through North Harrow, Rayners Lane, Ruislip and Hayes where it joins up with the river Crane.

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It’s possible to follow these rivers through a continuous path as shown in this sign I came across in the park. A journey through the Crane valley is on my agenda for future walks.

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I found Yeading brook remarkably unspoilt. With its lovely willows and mossy banks it seemed worlds away from the busy roads which surround the park.

A nature reserve protects its varied wild life.

There’s even a special place for bees:

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Roxbourne park has a variety of facilities including a miniature (one foot gauge?) railway located at the Field End Road side of the park. One can usually enjoy train rides on it during the summer on Sunday afternoons; I look forwards to this opportunity once the present health crisis is over.

There’s so much to discover in London that, as is said about Rome, one life is not enough. The metropolis’s walks are great for those like me who are beginning to feel that walking those considerable differences in height as found in Italy, for example, is becoming increasingly tedious. At least at the end of my walk there was an elegant example of one of the fine thirties art deco stations designed for the London underground and, in particular, its Piccadilly line, by that great architect Charles Holden.

The Paths of Glory Lead but to the Grave

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In the current organising of my photographs I came across this one showing the tomb of the writer Ouida (Louise de La Ramée) in Bagni di Lucca’s English or Protestant cemetery.

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Ouida’s tomb was restored in 2013 under the aegis of the Montaigne Foundation with a major contribution from Prof. Tony Bareham in memory of his wife. Tony Bareham sadly died earlier this year.

These are photographs showing the decay inflicted upon some other graves before their refurbishment.

There are two distinct schools regarding the preservation and restoration of cemeteries. One prefers to leave the repositories of the dead to natural dilapidation and decay: the other believes that tombs should be restored as far as possible to their original condition.

I remain in two minds about this; surely decay is an essential part of death?

Bagni di Lucca’s Michel de Montaigne foundation, presided over by their indefatigable director Marcello Cherubini, believes that cemeteries and the memorials to their occupants should be restored whenever possible to a quasi-pristine condition with their surfaces cleaned of eroding mossy growth and their rusting railings repainted. Since the first decade of this millennium the foundation has carried out this project with regard to the historically valuable (but aren’t all cemeteries historically valuable?) English, or Protestant, cemetery in Bagni di Lucca. I’ve written extensively in my posts about this piece of land where, to quote Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The soldier’, there’s “some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.”

Here is a selection of them:

2013

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/chrysanthemums-for-the-end-of-an-era/

2014

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/faded-crythanthemums/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2014/10/08/a-rosy-relationship/

2015

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/urn-burial-in-bagni-di-lucca/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/john-gibson-and-the-protestant-cemetery/

2016

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/a-cello-elegy/

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/paths-of-glory/

2017

https://longoio3.com/2017/09/03/new-life-to-bagni-di-luccas-cemetery/

2019

https://longoio3.com/2019/09/04/a-commemoration-of-a-great-lady/

I love wandering about in cemeteries, not only in the discovery of the last resting places of those persons who have immeasurably enriched our lives but also because they contain valuable natural oases, especially in London. Truly in the midst of death there is life.

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Here are some further posts on the theme of cemeteries.

2019

https://longoio3.com/2019/03/02/dalla-morte-alla-nuova-vita/

https://longoio3.com/2019/06/12/16413/

https://longoio3.com/2019/07/19/la-madrina-ritrovata/

2020

https://longoio3.com/2020/05/08/one-tree-hill/

I conclude with my meditation on a tomb in a well-known Parisian cemetery. I leave you to guess whose tomb it is.

 

CIMITIÈRE DE MONTMARTRE

*

I may only make love to you

for barely an hour;

on your slopes a cemetery holds

sweetheart’s decayed flower.

*

Wandering among the city

of the yet-living dead

by a rejected poet’s tomb

an exile’s tear is shed.

*

Cats bask among grass-covered urns –

keepers of vanished souls –

debris of inspiration while

basilican bell tolls.

*

Master of the funeral mass,

camellias from the south;

where are the lover’s ardent lips

that kissed your juice-filled mouth?

*

Bodiless you glare accusing

outside is life’s city;

you wrote about it supremely,

nothing left but pity.

*

In the warm unseasonal sun

clasped we bid them adieu –

the remains of those that were loved –

and our own lives renew.

Where’s My Flight?

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I wonder how many people know why there’s a small jet plane on the ‘rotonda’ of the gyratory system accessing the autostrada from Lucca’s Viale Europa? The aircraft, a Piaggio-Douglas PD-808 multi-purpose jet was donated to Lucca by the Italian air force.

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If one manages to reach the central island displaying the PD-808 without getting run over by the busy traffic there’s a plaque which states “To the pilot Carlo del Prete and the aviators from Lucca”.

 

Who was Del Prete? Born in Lucca in 1897, he became a cadet at Livorno’s naval accademy and joined Italy’s Royal Navy serving on submarines during World War One. He took part in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s daring incursion against the Austrian navy at Buccari where his submarine escorted the poet’s legendary MAS 62 torpedo boat preserved at the ‘Vittoriale’ by lake Garda.

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After the war Del Prete got interested in aviation and qualified as a pilot in 1922. Transferring to the newly created Italian Royal Air force he became a navigator. In this role Del Prete organised and took part in various pioneering long-distance flights. The most important among these was the 1927 ‘Four Continents’ flight from Italy to Africa, across the Atlantic to Brazil and other South American countries, the Caribbean, the United States and back to Rome.

In 1928 Del Prete and his colleague Arturo Ferrarin undertook fifty one laps on a Savoia-Marchetti S64 between Ladispoli and Anzio breaking three world records. In the same year they flew the South Atlantic to Brazil where they were fêted in Rio de Janeiro and where there is a monument commemorating the flight. Unfortunately Del Prete crashed on a demonstration flight in the same year and was badly injured. Despite having a leg amputated to avoid infection the pioneering aviator died a few days later; he was posthumously awarded Italy’s highest honour for those serving its air force, the Gold Medal to Aeronautic Valour.

Lucca has not only remembered Carlo Del Prete with the Piaggio-Douglas jet but also by naming a street after him. It’s the one which runs externally along the walls from Porta San Donato to Porta Santa Maria. Furthermore, if any of you are curious about a giant eagle in Piazza San Pietro Somaldi it nests on the house where Del Prete lived.

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Bagni di Lucca has its aviation hero too. In 2017 I attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque to Mario Calderara, Italy’s first licensed pilot, on the façade of the Villa Gamba.

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A private invitation from Pietro, the highly personable descendant of the Gamba-Calderara family, enabled us to visit the gardens and the piano nobile of the villa, otherwise strictly closed to the general public. Pietro showed us some valuable blueprints of his ancestor’s airplane designs.

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The full name of the villa is Gamba-Calderara and Mario Calderara (1879-1944), one of Italy’s greatest pioneer aviators, lived there. Calderara was the first Italian to get a pilot’s license in 1909 and was the builder of Italy’s first flying boat in 1911.

Mario, like his fellow Lucchese Carlo del Prete, joined Livorno’s naval academy where he graduated as midshipman in 1901. He became fascinated by the problems of flight and avidly studied the Wright brothers’ pioneering efforts. In 1907 Calderara reached a height of over 50 feet on his biplane towed by a ship. In 1909 he piloted his first unassisted heavier-than-air fight at Buc in France.

The big breakthrough occurred when Calderara invited Wilbur Wright to Rome. Wright gave Calderara some flying lessons and, consequently, Calderara’s flights increased in length.

In 1911 Calderara built a flying boat, the largest in the world and managed to fly three passengers on it in 1912. In 1917 he became one of the founders of the RAF’s Italian equivalent.

(Mario Calderara is another feather in the cap of those greats who have established Bagni di Lucca as a centre of excellence. For example, our town was the first in Italy to have electric street lighting, the first one to found a Scout troop, the first to pioneer hydro-therapy, the birthplace of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ (as well as the place where most of the maestro’s ‘Girl of the Golden West’ was composed. It’s great that Bagni di Lucca is now also remembered as the home of one of Italy’s greatest aviation pioneers and co-founder of its air force).

Carlo del Prete and Mario Calderara make us reflect on the miracle of heavier-than-air flight and how we have become used to, indeed dependent on it, at no time more than the present when so many of us are stranded in some non-Italian part of the globe still waiting for that elusive flight to appear and return us to the ‘Bel Paese’!

My Final Home

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During my recent walk along part of London’s Green Chain walk, linking open spaces and parks in South East London, on one of the hottest days this year I entered the cooling shades of Bostal Woods whose name derives from the same root as the Italian for woodland: ‘bosco’.

Exiting from the verdurous gloom I found myself before the impressive gateway leading into Plumstead cemetery.

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Opened in 1890 the cemetery contains memorials to those who lost their lives while working at the Woolwich Arsenal and a section devoted to the War Dead.

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There is also a memorial to Gunner Alfred Smith who received the Victoria cross for saving a fellow soldier.

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(Headstone donated by the Cooperative society in 1986)

This took place when the Camel Corps was on its way to relieve General Gordon who was besieged in Khartoum.

(Memorial to the Camel Corps in London’s Victoria Embankment Gardens)

The British forces encountered the Mad Mahdi’s rebel dervishes in January 1885 and, despite being outnumbered by 1,600 to 15,000 men, defeated them. Unfortunately, when the Camel corps reached Khartoum to rescue General Gordon they were two days too late: Khartoum had fallen and Gordon and his garrison had all been slaughtered.

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The cemetery is beautifully laid out in former parkland with a gently hilly contour bordered by dense woodland.

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In its centre is a chapel built in flamboyant Gothic style.

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A scattering of sycamore, beech and oak trees punctuate Plumstead cemetery’s extensive area.

It is in this cemetery that, some time ago, my wife Alexandra purchased a grave plot for the two of us.

I cannot think of any place more lovely in this part of London where we have lived and worked for many years. On the day of my visit I was completely alone, the searing heat was made more bearably by soft breezes from the woods, the views over London were superb and the wild grass growing between the mossy tombstones waved and glistened in the setting sun.

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SOWERS OF THE SYSTEM

I can face you here and kiss your red lips

pouting with death’s sensual desire. I touch

your golden waterfall of hair, the tips

of your nipples – I now love you so much!

I’ve had enough of our modern image

with its isms and lack of indulgence.

Only your weald of symbols will assuage

my thirst for the meaning of when? and whence?

The vast words: despair, destiny and hope,

time and judgement, the sea of lost mankind –

witnesses to your omnipresent scope –

are dyed with the last sun’s hues in my mind.

They mantle me in the casts of the night

and point to the celestial city’s light.

FLP

A Farm at Pinner

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There are very few working farms left in London. There used to be one owned by the Coop at Woodlands near Shooter’s hill in South East London but this ceased production some years ago. Luckily it has been resuscitated as a farm entirely staffed by volunteers and we were present and assisted at its re-foundation.

Another urban farm is that at Pinner which is apparently going through some problems – and it’s not due to the pandemic. The property of Harrow borough its 230 acres are leased to dairy farmers who own over two hundred Frisian cows. However, there is a scheme for the council to take back the farm and turn it into a nature conservancy. Unsurprisingly this has caused a lot of upset from who wish to see the farm continuing in its present form.

I decided to investigate Pinner farm during the amazingly Mediterranean spell of weather the UK has been having with temperatures touching thirty degrees centigrade. Alighting from Headstone Lane Overground station

 

I took a road which led past Harrow’s garden centre, happily, despite everything, still thriving.

The road changed to a bridleway with signs indicating the direction to Pinner village. On the way I passed the farm. I found it half-way between a tidy and a dilapidated state with one house completely abandoned. I cannot vouchsafe for the cows as they were grazing distance away from the field boundary.

The bridle path was almost without any tree cover and, under the baking sun, it was a very useful preparation for any escape to southern Europe.

King George V avenue’s dual carriageway interrupted my walk but the bridleway continued on the other side. It led up an incline until reaching a bench marking the entrance to the houses on Wakeham’s Hill. A little further on I turned into Church Lane and was pleasantly surprised by a number of several fine residences including a particularly elegant mansion dating back to Charles II and his Nell Gwyn.

The Gothic tower of Pinner church welcomed me at the end of the lane. Amazingly the fourteenth century church, which is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, was open to the public. I entered into its cool interior, which was partly cordoned off because of the pandemic, and enjoyed the very special atmosphere of a traditional English parish church realizing that for almost four months I’d been denied these sensations.

Among the graves in the church yard there’s a very odd tomb in the form of a stone pyramid which was erected by the eighteenth century botanist John Claudius Loudon in memory of his parents.

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Thence my way entered a very deserted Pinner High Street (described in my blog at) from which a passage led into Sainsbury. Here I obtained some essentials including a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a cheese and chive spread and some cream crackers. The store’s exit of the store led to Pinner station, the Metropolitan line and thence home ward bound after a really satisfying leg-stretcher of a walk.

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