A cold one this morning, and the little blue car refuses to start. Her battery’s drained after a long period of inactivity, and one I’ve largely shared. The roads are heavily salted anyway, so she’s better off in bed. I’m still precious about her, want her to last forever – just a shape in steel and plastic, but I invest her with soul. So, I put her on charge and take the Astra instead. “Astra” means “of the stars”, and is derived from Astraea, last of the immortals to walk the earth – this being at the end of the mythical Golden Age.
Collectively, of course, the year also opens in a sombre mood with news of skies falling everywhere, and it’s been hard to find a voice for that, but also because of it. Many of you will be feeling the weight of oppression, not knowing where we go from here, and neither do I. But Astraea teaches us that while there can be no return to that golden age, that is not to say all is lost. We always have a role to play in restoring, at least in part, the vision of the gods, even though we do not have their blueprint.
There’s a promise of hazy sun, temperatures not much above freezing, so we’re looking at just a short circular walk today, to get us going – a familiar route from Abbey Village, over to Ryal Fold. Last time I came this way was late-summer, and drought, the reservoirs empty. Now, they’re brim-full and shimmering silver in the mid-morning light. The Rake Brook is half frozen, and the water-board road slick with ice, though a thaw has set in along the verges, so we’re still able to make way without accidents. Always, there’s a raw wind here, coming down off the moors.
It’s good to be out again, just me and the camera. Nothing takes the eye yet, but I’m especially wanting to photograph a hawthorn tree in the meadows around Tockholes. I made its acquaintance last year, and felt there was something special about it. It’s hard to say what that is, other than a crack in the curtains of the mundane where a bit of light gets in. Afterwards, we’ll head over to Vaughn’s café for a brew, by which time we should be ready for a warm-up, before making our way back by Rocky Brook.
When we’re out in the landscape, like the West Pennine Moors, we overlay it with our imagination, which can be coloured by feelings arising from our unconscious. If we’re feeling oppressed, the landscape will take on a hard, uncompromising feel. We project onto it. Now, some say the camera never lies. We all know that isn’t true, especially in this age of AI, but a camera can also help us see with a clear eye what the oppressed mind cannot. It can see, and amplify whatever we choose to point it at.
It was the poet Hesiod, writing around the 8th century BC, who first spoke of this Golden Age, a lost mythical Arcadia, looked back upon with a profound sense of aching loss. Ovid picked up the same theme, writing in the early Roman imperial period – that we move through various epochs of declining value – from gold, to silver, to bronze, but always heading into an Age of Iron, the thing that’s going to bring everything crashing down, and rob the very soul from the world. Iron is hard, functional. And cheap.
The plantations are stripped bare just now, only the birch saplings lighting up the undergrowth like flames, where they catch the low, slanting sun. There is neither bird, nor squirrel stirring, and a sense of expectation in the silence. Then I hear a voice behind me, an unbroken string of words, gentle lyrical, deep toned, like an actor projecting. It’s a poem. A cyclist appears, head bent, but instead of being plugged into music, I realise he is listening to spoken verse. I step aside to let him pass, we exchange nods, he goes on his way. I try to catch some of the lines, but the woodland consumes them, renders them secret once more. A curious and slightly surreal moment.
While we shall never see the Golden Age again, we sometimes catch fragments of it, floating though time, coming at us in snatches: art of all kinds – these are its echoes. It’s in a muddy cyclist listening to poetry, and sometimes it’s in the way light falls on trees.
We never actually get to the Age of Iron, of course. It’s more a state of mind that myth teaches us is part of the human condition. It’s always on the horizon, moving out ahead of us. Thus, we are forever travelling from an imagined age of innate value (Gold) to one of a cheaper, soulless utility. This is not to say things do not get worse from time to time, that law does not become uncoupled from justice, that the freaks and the ghouls never assume the levers of power, for clearly they do.
Many feel this as an affront, and rush to resist it. We see it in our social media – expletive laden posts, castigating the oppressor. We see it on the streets in protest. We share our own pain, and the pain of those we know. But there comes a point when this is no longer productive, and indeed might be seen as simply surfing the tide of oppression, simply for clicks. At what point are we sincere in this, and at what point do we risk becoming complicit?
A lone tree is a thing of great charm. Uncrowded by neighbours, we see it in its natural posture, shaped by its locale, and the prevailing weather. Some have a dancer’s grace, expressive and lovely. Others looked startled, some noble, expressive of balance and stoicism. Hawthorn trees can speak of struggle, some of them taking on fantastic contortions, especially in such an exposed location. But this one maintains an air of dignity.
Astraea left us when a Rubicon was crossed, when she saw we were without hope, and he left for the heavens, where she became the constellation of Virgo. In myth, the oppressor was the hunter Orion. Once he took to the field, he killed everything in sight, and the gods had to act before the earth was laid to waste. It was Pluto, guardian of the underworld, then who sent the scorpion to deal the fatal sting. And, once struck by a scorpion, there’s no going back.
I don’t know if the scorpion has struck, but I think we feel something. There is so much bloodshed and suffering, as Orion wreaks havoc on many fronts. Our own Age of Iron, I suppose is characterised by AI and the digital revolution, fashioned, as it were, into the bow and the sling that furthers the hunter’s aim – terrifying weapons, mass surveillance, and the spread of disinformation.
But if the scorpion has struck, there will be an irresistible call for transformation, and an opening to something new.
It’s colder at Ryal Fold. Vaughn’s is pleasantly warm. The lady brings my tea and sandwich, calls me love. That’s another of those cracks in the curtain, where the light floods through: how we choose to relate, not just to loved ones but to strangers. Perhaps to strangers most of all.
The thing with poets, writers, artists – some of us at least, and especially as we age – is we feel such an affinity for Astraea’s approach, see the world as fallen, and would as soon withdraw. But we’re mortal, and therefore bound to the trials of the earth, and the slow workings of its many stories. How we best relate then is not by pointing out what is ugly, nor by beating our chests on social media. But as the times continue to fold back into darkness, we try to remember and seek out what is beautiful – those places where the light still gets in*.
With apologies and respects of course to Leonard Cohen.
About 5 miles round, 235 feet of moderate up and down.
Sun and Moon in Leo. A misty dusk, first crescent rising over far hills as we make camp by the round eye of a nameless, reedy tarn. Why nameless? I suppose because it’s not always there, at least no one else seems able to find it, and if the very existence of a thing is contested, why bother naming it? Still, we gather water, fresh enough, and as the stars come out, we brew tea.
Darius removes his boots, lifts the insoles, lets them breathe. In country like this he says, it’s your boots that make the difference between heaven and hell, yet most travellers pay them little attention. Then he points out the brighter stars, orients us in time and season, gazes long at Mars, just rising, its reddish glow a reminder of the brutality of our excesses: the red mist, the call to arms, even our arrogant belief in the meaninglessness of things: moths fluttering in erratic flight, drawn to our flame, while bats hunt the moths, and an owl hunts the bats. An ouroboric cycle of one thing eating the other, until nothing remains.
All is silence. And Saturn with his book closed, and his gate shut firm, and all because we see no further than our nose. Maybe this time round we’ll tempt his indulgence.
It was, once upon a time, an anxious night, this first night of the moon, a fiery energy robbing us of sleep, and then that irresistible urge to be under way. I suppose this later mellowness is a sign of wisdom, or old age, or both, I don’t know. Darius smiles, silent watcher that he is, reading minds, and knowing more than he lets on.
Our first objective is visible in silhouette, though fast fading now into the black of a velvet night: The Hill of Noon, four days across the moor – and a prominent summit cairn to tempt our rushing at it. But how many have died on that one hill alone? How many have burned themselves out in the achievement of it, only to witness from the top other hills rising beyond, one after the other, ever taller, and each with its own crowning glory?
How many years was I in realising the cairns aren’t worth a damn? You cross the hill if you have to, use the cairns for navigation when the ways turn misty, but as things in themselves? There are better ways to channel that martial energy, and we’ll have need of it for sure if we’re to keep going, if we’re to complete this lunation. But Mars is a fool un-tempered – and he neglects his boots.
I trace a circle round the tent to keep the night ghouls away from my dreaming, then put out the lamp and await the dawn.
Patience comes not easily to youth, nor even at times to old age. But four days afoot and nothing but the same view ahead isn’t something impetuousness can mend. It’s a question I suppose of tuning in to the more intimate details: the moor all about is beautiful just now, and rewards a close attention – scent of heather, the burbling call of curlew as they circle, then the high twittering cadences of the larks. And, now and then, a grouse, chuck-chucking, and the grey ghosts of the men who stalk them.
Darius trails behind at times. When we first hooked up, I thought him too old for the journey, but I soon discovered he could walk all day, and all night if need be – all weathers too. Indeed during those less propitious times, when the wind’s blowing and the hail’s coming horizontally, stinging your face, it’s the steadiness of Darius that goes on ahead, undaunted, while I tuck in behind, meek and trusting. But with the weather so fair as this, and the promise of a clear crossing, it’s hard not to respond to that feeling of a spring in your step. There seems a crispness to the vision too, and a freshness to the air. How can one suppress the urge to make way, while the going is so good?
But I take his point. I too saw Mercurius on the ecliptic last night. Fleet of foot, always coming up behind you. Even in his brighter aspects he would not be beyond leading us up to our chests in bog.
Each night we set camp among the heather, and I draw my circle round the tent. Darius does not sleep, but vanishes into the night as my dreams come on. He knows of other places that fade in and out, farmsteads that vanished from the maps long ago, but which are still real to him, and provide welcome. I sometimes wonder if he will tire of my company in favour of his own kind, but come morning, he’s always there, brewing tea, frying bacon he has somehow conjured up in the night.
I never ask about his sources, and he never tells.
So, four days in the crossing, the final climb, and we pitch up on the summit, well away from the cairn. Ten feet tall and piled high with the inscribed stones of many a life’s labour, there is still a chance I will be seduced by it. And ahead of us now, the valley – just filling with a faint mistiness. And the light of course. Always the lone prick of light, and the ring around it, and the siren glow. But this is no Jack-o-lantern – none of those old tricks – but a warmth and a sweetness of welcome, and a cottage with roses round the door.
Darius sees me looking, senses my unease.
“We could always go around it,” I tell him. “No need to call. Is there?”
He shrugs. It’s my journey after all, but I know what he means. Sure there are many who have entered there never to be seen again, and some who emerged years later, mad as hares. Others with that bliss upon them men sometimes mistake for the kiss of angels, only to wake back in their tents at first slice of moon, and with a loneliness upon them like a raging thirst.
As the night comes on, we have the swelling moon, then Mars and Mercurius already in play. And now, above the cottage the lone light of Venus, a mirrored image among the stars. But unlike the stars she’s a steady light, sometimes false, sometimes true, sometimes a guide around the shoals and reefs. Sometimes a lure to doom.
Oh, I’ve lost myself there often enough, took what was offered for a lover, thinking it the only game. Consummation in a feathered bed and seeing in the dawn, propped against soft pillows with the sound of a woman singing downstairs. The song of the Fae. And each time she was happy to lead me that way, to hold me for ever. And for ever I would have let her.
Other times I let her go, only then to walk away in regret, to seek again her beauty and her caress. I have sought her traces on the hill-tops, one after the other, until I dropped to my knees exhausted by the love that comes upon me whenever I think of her.
A welcoming light in the deep valley, a lone woman, and a bed for the night? What man has not dreamed of such a thing? What man has not mistaken the divine, and made of it something profane?
Come morning, she meets me at the gate, older now – as I am older – but still possessed of an unsurpassed allure, at least to my eyes, since it is my eyes that seek it. And then that irradiation with the source of a profound love – life blood of the universe itself – catching in the throat, momentarily arresting breath. She smiles her welcome, but sees the change in me, and mirrors it. I look around for Darius, but he has melted away.
Some sections of the path he says, must be walked alone.
We take tea in the garden, heady with a scent of rose and lavender. There are fine china cups and saucers, a past gentility, speaking of the warmth of family, of deep ancestry. She asks about my life, since last I walked this way, and I tell of what I can remember, which seems always a little less each time. It is as if maturity is more of a forgetting than an accumulation of anything, that each time we pass, we must travel a little lighter, and trust more in what we find along the way.
We talk long, and not once is there an offer of her bed, nor do I hint for it, though I know it shall be granted if I do. But my weakness now is only for her company, my sadness only for the counting of the suns, and the march of the moon through Leo to the cusp of Virgo. And then it’s the knowing I must leave her, and the knowledge there can be such love in the world, while the fates insist it be forever a mystery unresolved.
On the fourth day, she walks with me, up the hill, beyond the cottage. It’s greener here, not so wild as the moor. There are hedgerows and blackbirds, and though it was dawn when we set out and we seem not to have gone a mile, already there’s a gathering of dusk, and long shadows racing ahead, hurrying us to an end I am not yet ready to meet. Only her presence steadies me, fills me with a sense of the divine as she guides me along the meadow paths. Though the way be strange, from here I shall not need to draw circles around my dreams. From here, Venus alone shall watch over me.
From the hill top, we gaze down into a vale already steeped in darkness, and over which a moon is riding high, nearing full. Luna in all her silvery glory: The Valley of the Moon, and another four days afoot, travelling the long pass where the sun never rises, and where the way is as strange as dreams. She bids me go well, and I take with me her parting embrace, breathe it in, take it deep inside, to a place I might return in times of need.
The path leads down into a wide vale, the silvery night dominated by a moon, neither ominous nor kind, but radiant with a growing, ambivalent energy. I feel it probing, too, sensing my direction, my desires, that it might grant the dreams accordingly. I wish Darius were here, but he never walks this place, unless it is in my dreams, which I admit is somewhat confusing. But that’s the way it is here, a way that is both travelled, and dreamed at the same time. A vale of dreams.
Trees in the moonlight, second glanced, then gone; a stony path that is also a river to be crossed. It is not a place of living, more a grand stage set of possibilities, of dreams half dreamed and then abandoned. They are my own dreams perhaps, from the times I’ve passed this way before, and don’t remember – indeed that I may have been in a hurry to forget. Sometimes I even see the shades of my own longing, my own regrets whispering as we pass by on the trail. Oh, yes, it’s all here, all of it preserved, this rural suburb of the underworld, the edge of death, waiting to be acknowledged, to be owned.
And ruins, so many ruins. They cast gaunt shadows in the hard light, fortifications, long fallen, old libraries, former places of learning, and torn books, torn papers, all dusty now, faded writings of things forgotten, long before they were made sense of. We block it out, this place, and no wonder. But if we can open ourselves to even the smallest slice of it, there are guides who will see us through.
“A penny for your thoughts.”
It’s a little girl, wan faced, dressed in sombre mourning. She holds out her hand and in her palm there nestles, not a penny, but a silver coin – silver like the moon, the calling card of Mercurius. Should I trust her? How can one not trust the innocent?
“I was wondering if I was lost.” I tell her.
“Well, it depends where you’re going.”
“The trail leads through all this strangeness,” I tell her, as indeed it does – a flinty trail, sparkling as if scattered with diamonds. “Will you walk with me a little way?”
She takes my hand and we walk. I know her now. She is my own blood, and she is in mourning for me. I am comforted by it.
There is no dawn, no dusk to mark the days here, and there’s an elasticity to time: a passing day in a heartbeat, or an entire epoch in a footstep, marking the rise and fall of civilisations, indeed the drift of continents. And always the steady moon and its ambivalent energy, growing, swelling to full, then the first turn of an imperceptible attenuation.
Strangeness, acceptance, occasional jewels of insight – nothing revelatory, just glimmerings of something stirring, carried aloft by optimism, and the comfort of that little hand in mine.
At length, she stops and points ahead to where the darkness thins and the sun rises on a greening vale, and where a figure waits: Darius. And behind him, suspended in an azure sky, the faint disk of a stately Jupiter, and its own string of jewelled moons. I feel its blessing at once, and a sense of horizons widening. Darius greets me, and we walk on. I look back for the girl, but she has already faded into the dream, into myth – long years, decades, centuries gone.
Darius knows the drill. We make camp at the first welcoming glade. He brews tea, and I spend the day in meditation. And as I meditate, I unseal the package in which I wrapped that parting embrace of Venus, and soar a while upon its wings.
Unlike the Valley of the Moon, vale of dreaming, this place is so alive, so fertile with possibility. It is a deeply measured springtime of the soul. A kestrel hovers nearby, and a hare bounds across the way. A sparkling waterfall tumbles chuckling into a lively stream. After such darkness and longing, and deep, deep strangeness, things begin to feel possible again, and there comes over me a quiet sense of the sheer nobility of being.
Darius reminds me to take care of my boots – the difference between heaven and hell.
He’s telling me to remain grounded. He’s cautioning me that hints of paradise and divine blessings tempt hubris, and we still have a way to go. Four days, and another distant hill, the highest point of our journey, visible just now, but so often locked in cloud and belonging more to the sky than the earth, and there the refuge and the pillared shrine for offerings to the gods.
It comes to me then I might have made passage through the Valley of the Moon too quickly, for it is from the depth of dreams there come our most valuable insights. And by recognising them, acknowledging them, we offer them back in gratitude. But I can remember no dreams, unless all of it was a dream. Then I remember the coin the girl gave me, and retrieve it from my pocket.
Silver with the emblem of an eagle on one side, a thunderbolt on the other – these are the tributes to Jove, mark of the Unified Field, of all that is dreamed, and lived and loved into being. Things fall into place. We don’t know how, and it’s best not to question them.
The going is easy, the way is clear, the nights are warm. My dreams are of widening horizons, and an expansion of consciousness, so that everywhere I look I am. We climb the hill on the last day, as the moon prepares its transit from Pisces into Leo. I leave my token on the high altar, among all the others from the many pilgrims who have passed this way before us. Then Darius and I descend just a little way to the mountain hut, where a girl in Bavarian costume serves us beers, and a hearty meal.
Darius is quiet. Yes… he’s always quiet but to varying degrees and meanings, and his meaning now is one of caution.
“I know,” I tell him. He nods. He knows I know. But I am always heady with altitude here and he knows also my habit of running ahead of myself, of spoiling things at the last minute, thinking I understand something, and then losing it all when the tables are turned and nothing left to hold onto. None of this is for understanding. It is simply the path we must walk.
I sleep on clean sheets that night, and in the morning look out from my balcony upon the vale below. It is already aglow with the sun, and a growing sense of clarity in the true nature of things and in the feeling I am beginning at last to grasp some meaning in my journey. Yes, that’s the nature of the Vale of the Sun, and though it seems to smile upon us, glowing promises of revelation from every hillside and meadow, something in the memory of my parting embrace with the beauty of Venus grants perspective.
It is a reminder the eternal patterns are of such abstraction they are beyond cognition, that the only abiding truth we can hold and name is that which we already carry. Love, yes, but without object, and characterised by a sense of melancholy and deep longing, the engine of the heart-mind, the motive energy behind all things.
Darius bides with me as we travel the vale. The sun is a revelation, painting all things with such richness I pray I shall always remember the world as being this way. And the nights come fresh and warm, and we sleep out on cushions of aromatic heather, waking each morning to the sound of bees buzzing around our heads.
Four days, and the way comes down at last to the rickety old town where no one speaks our language, and where the ways are many, and all the signposts have been removed. And somewhere across this place, the gate. And Saturn with his book.
Darius already feels it. It catches up with me more slowly, as the memory of previous journeys filter through. We find a pavement cafe and sit down, make ourselves understood by gesture that we are in need of coffee. The waiter, a jovial man with an elaborately curly moustache and a white apron, cracks a joke, gestures to the sky – something about the weather, I suppose. Then he goes to fetch our coffee. It is a shy waitress who brings it, but not coffee. Instead, she brings tea in a silver pot, and with fine china cups that put me in mind of that timeless heart to heart at the cottage of warm welcome. And in the mirror polish of the teapot, I see a caricature of myself, an eyebrow raised. Even when you know it’s coming, it never fails to surprise.
Darius shrugs. I smile, thank the girl, and we drink the offering of Mercurius in good humour. The devil in all revelation comes when we take ourselves too seriously. The moon is in Sagittarius now – just a few days before she goes back into the dark. We have made good time at least. I hold my cup out to Darius by way of a toast and we chink them together.
The waiter appears once more, cracks another joke, gestures again to the cloudless sky. And though we do not understand, we laugh with him, for that’s his way and he has an infectious good humour. Laugh with him, and at yourself, and he remains your friend. Rail against the madness of it, and he will darken, and then this labyrinthine town of tight little alleyways and stairways, and spiral ways to nowhere, will swallow you down forever.
Darius attempts a gesture: meaning which way to the gate? The waiter smiles and nods and points. It could be another trick, but we drink up and follow his directions anyway.
The gate is not a gate at all, but one of those old works’ clocking machines, and a grand old clock tick-tocking, with a yawning aperture for your ticket, which I don’t think I’ve got, but naturally Darius, guardian of the way, produces it from his pocket. Old Saturn turns out to be a sleepy man in a post office uniform. He sits in a booth by a turnstile. I put my ticket in the slot and the clock punches me out. Then I push through the turnstile, and into the street of awakening, where I parked my car so long ago now I can barely remember.
Time of departure and arrival, another circuit of the moon, from dark to dark again. I sleep well that night and dream deep, something different about me, though I can’t say what. So many nights and days the same old thing, until once more I wake to starlight by that nameless reedy tarn, and the scent of Darius frying bacon, reading the sky and reminding me about my boots.
The Archivist is probably not the title we’ll end up with. But it works for now. It is a working title. After an autumn of consolidation in terms of ideas, and a few short stories punted out into the wilds, we wake up to find we’re already about a quarter of the way into the next novel. All of which suggests it either has sufficient energy to reach the finish line on its own, or it will explode into uncontrollable chaos at some point in the New Year.
It’s also a sequel to my last story, Beyond Saturn’s Gate. We pick up on some of the themes in that story, seeking to explore them a little further – like how should a poet record the sunset of the western world. Do you shake your fist at it, or settle back quietly and archive the good bits, as they come to a close? But it’s proving interesting in other ways, like trying to write a story a reader can pick up without having to read the previous book first. I’ve never done this before. Usually my characters have had enough of me by the end of a story and want to be left alone, but the current cast has turned up for another production. Well, most of them.
This raises certain problems, like how do you précis incidents from your previous story that have led to already established relationships in this one, without excessive exposition? How do you reference previous plot developments that have led to a present state of affairs, without interrupting the flow of a new story? How do you explain the absence of characters who have no role to play in this story, yet were such a big part of the last? The readers of the new story won’t notice or care, but if they’re following on from the last, they might want to know.
All of this grants us an insight into the difficulties other writers have faced, and the skills they’ve had to deploy. But it’s also interesting, trying to work the puzzle of it. If you’re an indie writer and haven’t attempted it yet, it’s well worth giving it a go.
So, Richard Hunter is still dreaming, still trying to live as a poet, still fathoming his relationship with the Reverend Amanda, and the mysterious Miriam Doyle. Along the way, his inner guides manifest as a talking portrait of his art teacher, and a curiously human-like non-human intelligence called Alice, both of whom attempt to keep him on the straight and narrow. And into this milieu arrives an American refugee, a billionaire subject to sanction, separated from his fortune and his business empire, having run afoul of the incumbent regime.
But the story opens with the journal of the obscure Yorkshire poet Elias Hartgrave in 1836, and his vision of a pagan river goddess. This drops Hunter straight back into the realms of myth and magical thinking. Which is fine until he discovers lots of others are having similar dreams, two hundred years later – in fact, just about everyone but him. Is the river goddess ignoring him on purpose? Is that the only way she can get him to take notice, and do something? But do something about what?
Or so the story seems to want to go at the moment.
All of which is to say, we’re going to have a busy winter, and a coming spring. So, as we drift through this strange interregnum between Yule and the New Year, I’d like to wish you all well, and encourage you to keep faith with whatever projects light you up – be they writing, walking, painting, reading… oh, and try not to mind the headlines too much, as we brace for whatever 2026 might have in store for us.
But most of all, a big thank you, once again, for reading me, for your conversation along the way. And those of you I follow, thank you too for sharing with me the world from your perspective – always stimulating and wholesome – easily the best writing on the Internet.
Best wishes then to all, and I’ll see you on the other side of midnight.
December’s getting on a bit now, the solstice approaching, and with it my sixty-fifth milestone. I’m not sure how old I feel, exactly, though certainly nowhere near so old as that. But then age, and older age in particular, is something that carries a lot of mythic weight. Our western, materialistic society does a lot to avoid mention of it, contemplation of it, even sight of it. We deny it, even seek to cure it as if it were a disease. Our tech-utopians are convinced we’re within reach of immortality, that it is just an AI discovered pill away. And why not, for was there ever anything more revolting to youth than the disintegration of the mind and flesh into the uselessness of old age?
But my sixty-fifth doesn’t feel much different to my forty-fifth, though I hope I’ve deepened a little since then, and therein perhaps lies the clue to ageing. Since the flesh has done the best it can, with what it was genetically given, and has at last begun to reveal its limits, inwards is the only place left for us to expand. So, the writings have shifted in tone, drawn closer to an acceptance of those things I cannot change, perhaps to the role of archivist of our late-world dynamics, collector of symbolic aphorisms – jewels rescued from the dung heap of apparent chaos. I pick them up from where they have been trodden into dirt, wipe them down, hold them briefly to the light, see them sparkle. Then I slip them into my pocket for safe-keeping.
The weather settles in, mostly wet and windy, hardly conducive to taking the camera for a walk. And on those occasional brighter days, I am taken so much by surprise, by the time I have got myself together, the light is already slipping away. Such are the winter months. And then there are the practical domestic problems like how to get one’s washing dry, and why is the boiler taking so long to warm the house?
Then, my good lady, feeling under the weather, finds herself in need of Ibuprofen, so I take the car out, drive across the plain, to the budgetary revelation that is our relatively new Aldi store. It’s already mid-afternoon, the day has settled breathless, cold air over an earth warmed and wet. A pale, spectral mist begins to rise.
There is something ethereal, something mysterious about the way mist behaves. Of course, the science is so well understood, the Met Office can predict it days in advance. Yet to watch it, or be about in it, is to feel something of a connection with the earth, a sense of its aliveness. Then, add to this a low sun, and one’s senses begin to tingle.
There’s a lot of flu around at the moment, which is perhaps why I arrive at Aldi to find the shelves cleared out, and not a box of Ibuprofen to be had. I buy wine and fatty treats instead, and return home, with just forty minutes to sunset. Thus, it looks like the day is run, but the light is taking on more and more the appearance of something magical.
So we make haste, grab the camera, pull on the boots, and set out across the low-lying meadows and ditches of the plain. The mist is patchy and moving, some meadows clear, bathed in the amber of a winter sunset. In other places, the way is dense with fog – fingers of light and shade streaming through the coverts and hedgerows. There is something elemental about it, a blurring of the confusion of peripheral detail. The world narrows, becomes intimate. Personal.
Although I’ve managed to pick up the technicalities of photography over the years, I tend to forget them in the heat of the moment. Thus, a photograph that works is more often a combination of luck, and impulse. Many’s the time I think I’ve got a cracking shot, only to realise the camera is set up all wrong. But then the shots I think unpromising turn out to be the ones I like the most. So, of maybe thirty photographs, I come away with three that I shall archive, memories of a misty afternoon, December 2025, jewels held briefly to the light to see them sparkle. Then slipped into the pocket for safe keeping.
We see the sun down, capture the moment as it’s embraced, set gently to rest by a distant ash. The time of dusk is brief, darkness coming on when we return home. The village is lighting up for Christmas, twinkle light around doorways, garden trees festooned. And there are gnomes on doorsteps holding little banners beseeching Santa to “stop here”. I used to believe in Father Christmas. There’s no shame in it. The world disabuses us of so many magical things along the way, but we would be foolish to stop believing in magic altogether.
WordPress reminds me I’ve been writing on here for seventeen years, now. It’s just a pop-up, triggered by an algorithm, not a real accolade, but it gives one pause all the same. It was just after the crash in 2008, when I penned my first piece here. I was sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of my local town, surveying the wreckage – shuttered shops, and a feeling of entering a long winter. My investments – not substantial by any means – had lost 25% overnight. Over the years, they’ve worked their way back but, if anything, the old town is worse now than it was then. The potholes deepen, and the shops cheapen. We are approaching two lost decades, and every day there is still a sense of accelerating decline. Socially, economically, politically.
This is, if you like, the background music to our days in England. And it’s not great. But if you turn your back on the town, on the economic forecast, on the politics, there is still much by way of beauty. I hope I’ve managed to capture that in my jottings here, perhaps increasingly in more recent years, even as the pace of our decline in other respects gathers momentum. My “Out and About” pieces do try to spit in the eye of the daily doom-scroll. My home county, Lancashire, is not the most blessed for dramatic landscape, compared with say neighbouring Cumbria, or the Yorkshire Dales, but I hope what is does possess, I have tried to present to the world as worthy, and certainly loved.
The Rivendale Review was rather slow to gain traction. Early pieces were written as if into a void. But slowly, a small number of you decided to engage, judged me perhaps harmless, and I have treasured your company along the way. What I write is sometimes strange, eclectic, and certainly not of the “hot-take” or “breaking news” variety. But I suspect there are more of us in that vein than we suppose. We are all of us eccentrics at heart, all of us unique, struggling against the pressures of conformity. It’s just that some of us are less guarded about granting it expression.
That said, I still write under a pseudonym, Michael and Graeme being my first and middle names. This began as a way of deterring trolls from finding their way to my front door. But I note the UK Gov is now clamping down on such anonymity – demanding proof of age and, by implication, identity. This is rolling out now on other platforms – Substack being the only other I frequent. I’m not sure how this will work out in the future. It’s a trivial matter anyway for any government to discern our real ID by looking up our network address. But the Internet is increasingly leaky and simultaneously under attack by ID thieves, and I would not like to think of myself being digitally cloned by pirates. Under normal circumstances, I might have another twenty years of useful ramblings in me but, given the pace of change, and corruption, can we even imagine a world twenty years from now?
All of that said, I shall admit at this point to an unspoken deceit. The Rivendale Review, at WordPress or anywhere else, was never meant to be a thing in itself, but only a link to my longer writings, to my fiction, to my novels. We’re up to sixteen so far – from the Singing Loch to Beyond Saturn’s Gate – heavens, an entire universe and twenty years in the crossing.
The stats tell me a modest number of you do link over and at least view my novels on D2D and Smashwords, even if you do not actually read them. Which kind of sums up my primary aim – nothing overstated here, but hopefully of some value.
If the UK Gov does eventually find a way of killing off Michael Graeme, and the Rivendale Review, by demanding too much of me, I trust you’ll still be able to find him in some other quiet backwater, flogging his poems and his fiction for free, and that you’ll still drop by and say hello.
Rolex Oyster Precision – 1225 Calibre – Circa 1982
It’s something of a curiosity these days, how I find myself still in possession of a Rolex Oyster wristwatch. I bought it over forty years ago, so this is not as elitist as it sounds. It cost around the equivalent then of what a higher end Seiko would now, and appealed to a similar market – the sporty, outdoor person, the adventurer, the military man, who needed absolute reliability under tough conditions. It was still a lot of money to splash out but, in real terms, that watch is now worth twice what I paid for it, should I ever come to sell it. With most watches, you can’t say that.
But the Rolex brand today is different to what it was, aimed squarely at a different demographic. And you can’t just go to the store window and pick one out, like I did. There’s a long waiting list – sometimes years. And there’s a pecking order. You can’t go for a top of the range piece from the outset. It’s a bit like buying a Ferrari. You have to start lower down, work your way up, build a “relationship” with the dealer. It’s become an ecosystem, a badge of social ranking. These days, I only wear mine for weddings and funerals.
Meanwhile, I’ve also owned a string of work watches that seem to punctuate periods of my life. That’s another thing about owning a luxury brand – you don’t wear it when you’re fixing the car. You buy another watch for every day, which kind of defeats the original premise. So it’s the beaters that probably mean more to us because, when we handle them, they bring back memories of the times we knew. With the Rolex, all it tells of is – well – weddings and funerals.
Addiesdive “Explorer” Automatic – PT5000 movement
My current every day beater is an Addiesdive, a Chinese homage to the Rolex Explorer. It cost a hundred quid, and has a technically superb automatic hi-beat movement. It says I’m fond of stories of times I never knew – it was an Explorer Ed Hillary is rumoured to have worn on Everest in 1953. It also says I’m drawn to a rugged reliability, and to understated design. But most of all, I think, it tells us in whose hands the future lies, and it’s not with western bling.
There are websites that idolise high-end watches, pieces costing tens of thousands, and the celebrities and world leaders who wear them. And we wonder, is the person trying to elevate themselves by association with the brand? Or is it the brand seeking elevation from the person? Who knows? Then there’s the inverse of that, the world leaders who make a statement of their egalitarianism by sporting a seriously budget time-piece.
Much was made of Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York, a very wealthy man, yet who sports a digital Casio. This is a fine piece of understated technology, yet well within the pocket of most ordinary working people.
But we’re missing something else here, that the wearing of watches for everyday purposes, like catching the train on time or counting down the hours of the shift, is in decline. Most people get the time from their phones now. But if we were to make a guess so far, in answer to that opening question, if our watches do indeed say anything about us, it might not actually be true.
The luxury watch of course can claim the virtue of being built to last a lifetime – indeed several lifetimes. There are hundred years old Rolex watches still ticking, and much sought after. Even broken ones will be rescued from oblivion and lovingly restored. By contrast, your budget watch, banged out by the million, is generally discarded after a few years, most likely when the battery runs out. My Addiesdive should provide a few decades of reliability, so will likely see me out, but were it to falter, it would not be worth the cost of repair – which is another story. On the other hand, getting a Rolex fixed is like having your car serviced. It’s expensive, but more or less obligatory.
However, all this talk of meaning and status assumes a watch’s value lies solely in what it communicates – quality, craftsmanship, price tag, memories, aspiration. But what about watches that carry no pedigree, no marketing mythology, and no scarcity? What about the ones no one writes about, the ones no one bids on at a collector’s auction, or waits years to own? That’s where I found my curiosity leading me, recently – to the very bottom of the watch market and to another question: if luxury watches are made to tell stories we want others to believe, what does a watch say when it has no story to tell at all?
A quick search on budget watches turns up the SKMEI brand. Their factories in Zhaoqing Guangdong, have been churning out seriously cheap watches for a quite some time now, watches of all types – digital, analogue, even mechanical automatics. With an employee base in the low hundreds, yet deliveries in their millions per month, we’re looking at some epic levels of automation here. No waiting on orders for a SKMEI. They can likely ship entire batches in a matter of days,
The SKMEI 1894 50m LCD (non-original strap)
I imagine them fitting more into what was originally the Timex space – you know, “my first watch was a Timex“. You don’t give a kid a Rolex, then send them out to play. You give them something that looks good, but it doesn’t matter if it gets smashed or dunked.
The cheapest SKMEI I could find on eBay was the 1894. It goes for as little as a fiver. I paid eight quid for it, including postage. I wasn’t keen on the strap it came with – a kind of soft rubber, to which I’m allergic – so I bought another, a budget NATO type band, and I paid more for that than the watch.
If you’re going budget, and you want a watch to last a while, it makes sense to keep away from anything with moving parts, so a digital display is your best bet. Also, it’s better to go for cases made of plastic – metal budget watches tend to consist of nickel alloys with a plated finish. These are pretty enough, fresh out of the box, but prone to corrosion from salt and sweat on the wrist. After a couple of years, they look a mess. A bit of water resistance is also a plus, and the 1894 is rated at 50m.
So, the 1894 ticks all the boxes. The display is minimalist, quite modern in appearance, though it doesn’t match up to the advertising pics, being rather dim and lacking contrast in interior light. In good light, though, it’s perfectly fine. That it comes with standard lugs and pins means it’s easy to change the strap. I’ve had it a few days now, and it’s not lost a second, unlike the Addiesdive and the Rolex, which both gain around five seconds per day.
You might wonder why I’m off on a tangent here, and it’s perhaps for no other reason than I wanted to give this humble watch a little love. It’s unlikely to feature on the wrist of a celebrity or a world leader, or in the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. But, unlike its more prestigious cousins, while it’ll never tell much of a story, it won’t tell lies either, or feed the fantasy of a lifestyle that doesn’t exist. It just tells the time, and it does it very well.
So after all of that, the truth is watches don’t say anything about us at all. A Rolex can imply wealth where there is none, an Addiesdive can hint at adventures the wearer only dreams of, while an eight quid SKMEI keeps time more honestly, and accurately, than both. What the 1894 tells us is that a watch doesn’t need an entire mythology to justify itself, and that the most straightforward object reveals something more authentic and relatable than a curated identity. In a world obsessed with social signalling, that might just be the most meaningful thing of all.
A cold but clear forecast tempts us outdoors but, arriving at Rivington, we find it overcast. Then, as we zig-zag up through the Terraced Gardens, we enter an eerie drifting murk, interspersed with cold showers. Hawthorn berries stand out, bright spots of red on bare trees, the berries themselves hanging with silver beads of dew. And birch saplings, the only boldness on days like this, copper leaves aflame against dark mossy backgrounds, light the way.
I suppose I must have shot the equivalent of a roll of Ilford HP5. And most of it wasted – expensive stuff, too. Except it was nothing of the sort, being purely digital, so nothing actually lost. There are photographers who still use film, of course – and monochrome at that. It has a counter-cultural feel to it – defiantly analogue in an era of digital. I’m sometimes tempted back there myself.
Not a lot of light today, so we click the dial up to 400 ASA, keep the aperture around F5.6. But do we really need any more pictures of the Terraced Gardens, the Pigeon Tower and Rivington Pike? Have we not done it all to death a million times over? I don’t know – there’s always something a bit different – weather, light, mood, then maybe a chance encounter sending your thoughts spinning off in fresh directions. And I just like being out with the camera.
Were it a clearer day, you’d see the Middlebrook retail park down in Horwich, from here. Further out, through binoculars, you might pick out the Trafford Centre, car parks all rammed. That’s the culture we’re living, I suppose. But there’s nothing to say you have to join in with it. The little blue car delivered me here, after all. Not there.
The summer houses, the bridges, the pergolas, all emerge from the mist like remnants of a lost citadel. There aren’t many people about but, as I’m making my way, I’m asked directions by a couple of old guys wanting to get to the Italian Lake. Their eyes are full of nostalgia. They speak about hippy festivals here in the ’70s, reminding me that, yes, Rivington had its own kind of Woodstock, towards the tail end of the counter-culture.
I was too young at the time – just leaving school – for all that free-love and psychedelia, not that I would have known what to do with it. But where did it all go, I wonder. All that energy. Oh, I remember they had the pearl-clutchers fainting, and the red-tops in a fit – but nothing new there. And then it all just disappeared.
I suppose they were rebelling against a post-war world that many of them saw as increasingly inhuman. They were looking to become free souls, rather than cogs in a machine, and they wanted an education aimed at cultural awakening rather than just more conformity. It didn’t work, but at least they had a go. The ’80s were just around the corner, the machine grew as if on steroids, and we all fell headlong into it.
Of course, the things the hippies railed against are just the same now, with some others thrown in, things we could never have dreamed of back then. But the main difference, I suppose, is one of intensity. Back then it came at us through the television in the evenings, the tea time news, the papers. The rest of the time, you were more or less left alone to be yourself. Now it comes at us constantly, so there seems hardly any time even to think about escaping it. Stick your head above the parapet, protest too loudly, and it’ll find a way to assimilate you, monetise you, market you, and generally absorb you back into homogeneity.
We’re plugged into it – not just exposed to its outputs, but feeding it our selves all the while. The old culture – the one the hippies despised – was still something you could step away from, drive into a field, attend a festival, or join a commune to at least find solidarity with others who felt the same way. This one follows us around, learns our behaviour, and adjusts itself so well, we don’t even know it’s there.
Trees are different in the mist. They emerge from it, isolated from their more distant fellows. Trees you’ve walked past a hundred times and paid no heed to suddenly seem dramatic in their expression. Why don’t we see things like that all the time? All that’s changed is a bit of light and shade, a bit of weather. But then we’re all vulnerable to the environment, the way it colours our mood. It does us good to step out of it as often as we can, see what thoughts emerge, what shy poetry.
Perhaps that’s the only way it can be now. There are no barricades to mount any more. No free love to be had among the bushes here on summer solstice nights. Resistance is barely perceptible, and much lonelier. We quit Amazon, cancel all our streaming services, buy local. But all the goods on display are shipped halfway round the world anyway, because that’s just the way it is. And the phone in our pocket still tracks our every move, having long ago persuaded us we’d feel vulnerable if we left it behind. We try to just skim the headlines, resist drowning in them, let the world run at its own pace. I write poetry, fiction, essays but publish it online, where the machine scrapes it for its own unpoetic purposes. Small acts of rebellion for sure, and seeming futile, but there’s still a dignity in them.
The terraces are slippery in the wet. The hill must have been locked in mist and cloud like this for days. And the chill is finding its way through the seams of my jacket. We’ll take a few last shots for what they’re worth, and call it a day, grab a brew down at the tea-room. So we circle round to the Italian Lake, and here we meet up with our old hippy friends again. In this light, they have the mythic bearing of grizzled warriors from another era. They give me the thumbs up – found their way all right.
So here we are, eh? Pressed up against the rails waiting for the main feature to start, though, yes, it might already have begun. Hard to tell now, isn’t it? I mean the signal from the noise. Then that hard rain hammering down and my umbrella, sadly broken, trodden into rags by this careless crowd. Yet still, I raise it, click the button, and it unfolds bravely, for all its wounds, still big enough, I’d say to restore a little faded dignity. And you there at my elbow, shivering and unsure, might you not inch a fraction closer? It’s true, what I have lacks all perfection, but what little it is, it pleases me to share with you.
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For more on the origins of this poem, link to my Substack here.
Ah, these soft Sunday nights. All Creatures Great and Small — stout tweeds and the warm certainties we imagine our grandparents knew. Not mine. I think they would have laughed.
My father’s father could touch his toes with his elbows, you know? Not Yoga – a roof-fall in the mine that near broke his back.
And my mother’s father? Irish. The labouring kind. Not easy, being Irish – any kind of Irish – in the England of All Creatures Great and Small.
So don’t get me started on Downton Abbey.
Yet still, we seek it, don’t we? This thing we think we know, this thing we think we’ve lost. It’s like an ache, and we seek it always in the past.
Each generation, the same – not realising it’s a hunger for a way of being. Not an era. Not stout tweeds, nor Peaky-Blinder pocket watches, nor that warm patrician certainty.
Keep calm, old boy. Carry on. England of the Blitz. Is that what you want? You’d seek it there? A hair’s breadth from death. And jackboots.
Or would you resurrect the ghost of Lord Kitchener? You know – Your country needs you – finger pointing, accusatory. Coward. Pointing you back to a time, that first time, the dawn of mechanised slaughter. Lions led by donkeys. Seek it there?
But what is this loss you mourn, exactly? Might it not be something we deny, even as we search for it in the pockets of our dress-up forties weekends? Could it be with us all the time – through the nine to five, the long commutes, the over-spilling emails of the present?
Is it not a shadow, tapping on our shoulder – a shade from the underworld, black-clad, mourning a future we can no longer imagine?
It visits each generation, the same. Points the way – but not to Kitchener’s slaughter, to the future.
Why nostalgia for the past is more a calling from the future
We’ve all felt it. I mean that strange ache for the past, for times we never actually knew. The triggers are many: TV shows, wartime stories, imagined versions of the home front in the 1940s, 1950s. It’s in the bric-a-brac of our junk shops, selling the things we remember in our grandma’s parlour, selling Nostalgia. Something in them feels warm, solid, reassuring. We look at the present day – rushed, loud, superficial, dangerous – and we feel we’ve lost something precious, something steady and certain, that we left it behind in our childhood perhaps, in grandma’s parlour, or further to a time we never knew at all.
But the truth is, the thing we’re missing was never in the past, so we’ll not find it by looking back. Nostalgia is a misdirection – not a lie, exactly – just a psychological misunderstanding. We’re not longing for a time and a place. We’re longing for a feeling.
But we’re losing our vocabulary for such things, so these unarticulated longings tend to collapse into historical fantasy instead. We imagine a return to the values of a different era would soothe the existential ache, the restlessness we feel now. But scratch the surface of any supposed golden era, and we find the same old hardships, prejudices, fears, dangers. We know this, yet we sanitise it. Our forebears, who lived through those times, would laugh at such cosy idealisations – as we would at future generations harking back to the 2020s as their own ideal era.
So, why does nostalgia feel so convincing? Well, why would it not, since the ache is real enough? It’s just that the story we make up to explain it is mistaken. What we really miss is depth – a sense that life has an inside to it, that it has a texture you can feel, an atmosphere you can breathe, and that it really, truly means something to be alive. We miss the feeling of being rooted, connected, held safe by something larger than ourselves. We miss a sense of belonging, and the dignity of an imagined slower time. These feelings are internal, insubstantial, but we literalise them as best we can, project them out into the world, where they find no purchase, so plunge them instead deep into that idealised past. But did you ever pause to wonder what it would be like instead, meeting those feelings head on by looking inward as they emerge and asking what they really mean?
The past can’t give us what we’re after, because it never had it in the first place. The real problem is not that life used to be better. It’s that we are losing our means of self-analysis, methods that can reassure us our lives right now possess the depth we’ve been seeking all along. But self-analysis takes time and a quiet room. It takes courage, even just the lack of embarrassment, to say to someone – you know I had the strangest dream last night. I wonder what it means.
When the British Empire moved into Africa, the tribes people said they stopped sharing dreams with one another, as was their long-held tradition. They said there was no longer any need for them, because the British knew everything. But too much literalism comes at the price of our souls.
It doesn’t help the way our attention is constantly broken, that in the absence of a way back inside our own heads, we surrender ourselves all too easily to the doom-scroll, to the bubble-gum of TikTok, to the sugar rush of social media, where our conversations are corrupted into polarised argument and slogans. We work too long in the day, and our dreams are erased by pills each night. Everything becomes literal, functional, efficient. Life loses its metaphor, its symbolism, and when things stop pointing beyond themselves that way, our imagination dries up, our souls become desiccated. Then the world appears insubstantial, because depth is soul.
So then this feeling we call “nostalgia” creeps up on us, not to deceive us, but to warn us. The ache we feel isn’t calling us backwards. It’s our soul calling us into a conversation with ourselves.
What we’re missing isn’t behind us, not lost in time. It’s beneath us – under the surface of the life we’re living, and it’s all around us in the objects and the encounters of the everyday. That ache for nostalgia is not our past calling us back. It’s our soul wanting to be let in. It is the shadow of a future which might yet be, if only we would let it.
So the next time you’re indulging yourself with that nostalgic drama on TV, and you feel a pang of longing, try looking it in the eyes and asking it what it’s doing hiding all the way back there, and what you need to change in your life right now to make it real and visible again.
The Rivendale Review 