Steep Holme

In August just gone we took a trip to Steep Holm in the Bristol Channel. I thought -because I hadn’t been told otherwise- that we would be taking the old ferry that beached and then dropped its disembarking ramp onto the beach like a wartime landing craft. However, things have moved on. We would travel to the island by RIB with these guys https://www.bayislandvoyages.co.uk/.

The island has been in use for thousands of years, possibly since Neolithic times, definitely since Roman times (they got everywhere) … more here Steepholm Online and here Wikipedia Steep Holm. We shot some video and edited it together here Grims reality - Steep Holm there are other videos available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkrmaHjGQpc and here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHeqDlvIXCs

This is one of those days out that is worth it just for the boat ride. BUT there is so much more. The place has been of strategic importance for the Roman and the Vikings, and of course during the Napoleonic era, the first and the second world wars. In this regard, it’s not much different than Tilbury Fort in Essex, Brean Down across the bay on the mainland or every other small strategic fort or lookout post around our nation. Nowadays it’s a nature reserve and tourist attraction, and that if you like is a great way for an island fortified for war to continue into the future.

The above said, there are a couple of things that demonstrate how little regard we pay to the world live in (get out the environment drum and starts banging it loudly). All over the island, we saw small pieces of plastic, bottle tops, bags, bits of net, bits of ships ropes, balls (tennis mostly, but various others). We also found chicken bones in an unnatural abundance. I puzzled over this for a while. The lighter plastic could have blown in, but what about the big bits and the bones? We found out the source of this material at the scheduled 2pm talk and Q&A. Seagulls.

People moan about gulls. People moan about gulls too much. Think not what gulls do to you in their environment, but what you do them in theirs. Your discarded fried chicken box, your dropped wrapper. Collected innocently by scavenging birds and taken eleven miles out to sea to their reserve, their space to then contaminate their home.

I would recommend this trip to everyone with a love incredible views and the history of Britain.

First-light-of-the-cosmos

 One of those special interest articles that I have to read.

First-light-of-the-cosmos-a-signal-detected-from-epic-turning-point-in-the-universe

Grims-Reality the movie ... well, YouTube channel.

 Some of my friends (I have some), suggested that I create my own Youtube Channel. I did so years ago, but I never really followed it up (foolish in retrospect).

So here is an offering from this weekend, and over the next few weeks, I shall be releasing videos edited together from the archives that go all the way back to 2013 (I shan't put them all up it would take too long).

I aim in time to get a GoPro and start making stuff with better sound and picture quality. For me right now, I have little choice but to be productive in other ways. This will be one of those ways. 

Displaced.

1a: to remove from the usual or proper place. Specifically: to expel or force to flee from home or homeland. Displaced persons.

I am displaced, I am living in a camper van parked outside my son’s house in a village in the middle of nowhere relative to my usual home turf. Onboard I have a bed, a loo, cooking facilities and clothes space. Besides the facilities onboard the camper, I also have access to a very good games desk where I can set up my laptop and write or edit videos I shoot when I walk. I have access to Wi-Fi and a landline (in addition to all the usual facilities you would find in a one-bedroom ground floor flat).

 Relative to someone who has just fled Afghanistan, or a Syrian refugee living in a camp in Turkey I am enjoying the relative life of luxury. 

Perspective and counting your blessings are a good thing. 

There are buts. But I have a half share in a two-bedroom home some sixteen miles by road away. But I’m fifty-four and it’s not an ideal time to get to square ninety-nine on Snakes & Ladders board to then slide all the way back to number one, with a requirement to throw a six before you can move again.

I’m not sure I deserved the treatment I have received from my now ex-partner. Unless I have been having blackouts and don’t remember what passes or passed between us in the last few months since I stopped working. What my ex-partner has done feels entirely disproportionate. Again, I shan’t recount the details of thirteen years of a relationship, where each has supported the other at times of need, where each has made sacrifices of time, energy, money to support the whole (the partnership). I feel a sense of betrayal and hurt beyond words. I am stunned, my world is one of disbelief, incredulity and shock. The shock that someone you have spent so many years with through thick and thin, can, when you find your life wheels metaphorically spinning just discard you. Cut you off, lay you low, strip away your dignity and leave you questioning everything about yourself, and for what it’s worth everything about them. 

I am not easy to live with, I like things a certain way, but generally, that worked for Amanda and I because it meant that I kept house (even when I was working, I did the majority of the housework) I like tidy, I like to be able to open the door to anyone and not feel self-conscious that home may not be up-to-snuff. I/we created a beautiful home, with two very distinct gardens, and if you think of home as a machine for living in, then indeed the machine I created (I say I because that’s where most of my spare time and cash has gone over the last seven years) is a very efficient machine. And yet now, it has literally been ripped away from me arbitrarily by someone to who I gave my all. I gave up my independence, I gave up my own home, I put my fate in the hands of another and I have now paid a terrible price.

I find it difficult to comprehend. I find it quite troubling. I loop over the same thoughts time and time again. I slipped on ice in January, I was in a terrible job in an environment of idiocy, of shared information being a loss of power, of martyrdom to work for the sake of self-flagellation on the part of my boss (a very odd life lived for work, while around him people just took it for granted that he would pick up all the slack, while outside from what you were privy to, his children's life were starting to manifest the effects of an absent dad). Compounding the injury over six weeks as I was forced to sit on a chair broken by the previous incumbent in the role. This has resulted in an injury that has barely improved in eight months (though the first six to ten weeks were exceptional). I am now left with variously, sciatica, peripheral neuropathy, legs, abdomen. And from the neck, wear and tear it seems like more of the same in the face, arms, and chest. Bodily spasms are common once I lie down, and particularly when one straddles the border between wakefulness and sleep, resulting in not drifting off to the land of nod, and of course on occasion waking to a body spasm.

Trying to rationalise anything at the moment is a fraught business. I like order, I like a plan, a routine and structure. Not because I’m OCD, but because life is short, can be messy and uncomfortable. So, managing the little inconveniences means that you can have more `headspace’ for the upsets and travails. Until something like this happens and then, as Jordan Peterson points out in Twelve Rules for Life, you are thrust headlong into chaos.

I am there, I am on the very meniscus of chaos facing squarely into the unlit future second by second, day by day. That sounds dramatic. But it isn’t, in the knowing of it. However, it is a tough place. You can turn and look back, but that’s the past that can’t be undone. When facing forwards, it’s like a blank, and or sometimes a kaleidoscope of paths with no way to determine which if any is correct … or if the path you choose is just one you have travelled before, just in a different time frame (a path of repeated mistakes). To mitigate the effects of the unknown and to maintain a sense of self-worth, I have started to do things immediately and reactively, to write here, to make short videos when I take the dog out. I fill my days writing one or both of two novels I started years ago. I still swim three times a week, and thanks to my son having the first car I bought him, I can do that at a greatly reduced cost of driving my own car. I’m doing housework and cooking, and trying very hard not to sink into a sort of `How the fuck? Why the fuck? When the fuck?’ did my life path end up on the current trajectory?  While simultaneously spinning the plates of: How do I maintain body and soul into a more meaningful and fruitful future? 

I have been forced to simplify my life, pare back to absolute essentials, view everything through the lens of conservation of cash and energy, in the sure and certain knowledge that a few miles away across Bridgwater Bay are my houseplants, my small collection of art, my tools, clothes furniture and all the trappings of a normal life. I don’t want to abandon those things; I don’t want to think that I am never going to occupy four walls again. I don’t want to think that my now ex-partner is so impatient so intent that she is going to destroy my things … but … I must acknowledge that on the last eleven days performance I am concerned. 

Chaos. What I have learned by the serendipitous utterance of these words watching a film just a few days ago; You can let it destroy you, you can let it define you, or you can make it make you stronger. 

I found this little plaque on a chair along Burnham-on-Sea seafront on Friday morning as I sat waiting for traffic to die down, so I could have a clear run home and avoid the school-run and rush hour.



So here is Google translate version: 

... between This immensity my pensioner drowns And my shipwreck is sweet, in this sea.

Clearly, this is poor. Hey-Ho I wasn't expecting much. Below is a link to the Wikipedia article that contains three translations.

The Infinity by Giacomo Leopardi

And here is my favourite translation.

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

When I saw the plaque facing straight out to sea, the horizon, the hills of Wales to the north and the Quantock's and Exmoor to the south I knew it would reference life and death, and loss and the unknown and obviously the expanse of the sea. I knew it would be something I get and feel exactly as written.

Never underestimate or dismiss poetry, there is always something to discover. And the thing most often discovered, is that people have been feeling the same things, about places and events and the tides of life for centuries. We have a common thread running through time. That commonality down generations and spanning continents, and cultures allows you to empathise across time, and in that empathy comes a greater understanding of the human condition. 

You are not alone in your travails, and everything you can experience has been experienced by someone else, somewhen else, somewhere else.