Just wait!

The situation at Maynard Gardens persists, and although I’m about to move back in there, my doubts remain.

It’s basically becoming a free house for the shaved weirds Alex considers friends, and Gav is being drawn increasingly into their circle; he now sports a shitty mohican, and when Lee and I object to Alex’s mess or the filth of the ground floor, Gav comes out with liberal sentiments . . . “you don’t have to go into his room,” etc.

Alex has scrapped his move to Amsterdam—which was the only reason Pete and Lee let him move in in the first place, knowing that if he'd been in on Maynard Gardens from the start it would have quickly deteriorated into a Vicarage situation. Sarah lives at Maynard Gardens too now, along with an arrogant twat called Andy who has an insolent and haughty air. Another shaven headed friend of Gav’s has moved in as well, and when they’re all in the kitchen it looks like Auschwitz.

Gav’s room is awash with pebbles, lolly sticks and letraset. “I have been so abused” is painted on the wall.

We have been so amused—and annoyed—by your pseudery, your useless ideas and liberal ideals, your flirtation with all things Eastern, the Buddha, and Japanese symbols, your low level tables and ‘performance art’ sincerities . . .

Punk Habitat –– Mindless Pretence!

I detest them all.

So in a way, although I’m doubtful about moving back in, I want to, simply for reasons of gut indignation. I don’t want to let Maynard Gardens become another “anarchist squat.” Lee and I are talking about rehanging a door at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor, thereby sealing it off entirely.

All of this is bound to get to me eventually, so there’s some trepidation when I think about the future and the bleak winter months plagued in that place.

Barry rang this morning from his Dad’s restaurant in Debdenshaw. He and Ade seem committed to leaving the band, and B. considers their demo’ tape terrible. He is embarrassed by it, he says, and the more people he meets the more it is impressed upon him how crap Jason’s singing is.

And today Susie tells me Jason is going around with a copy of the demo tape in his pocket, getting angry at other bands and prophetically shouting, “Just wait . . ! “ 

The miner’s strike is now in its fifth month. I’ve scarcely mentioned the industrial troubles of this summer and spring, but that’s not because I’m ignoring them. I usually buy a copy of the Times to keep up.

Today, three thousand pickets tried to stop two Yorkshire miners from breaking the strike. Big battles with police result. There seems to be evidence of a very small trickle back to work. In Scotland, 105 miners reported for work, five more than yesterday. If the strike breaks now & the men start to go back then the entire dispute will have been lost. On Sunday, a demonstrator was killed by a plastic bullet as the RUC tried unsuccessfully to detain Noraid organizer Martin Galvin. Although they waded into the peaceful crowds with batons he managed to escape.

Life hasn’t been too gripping since I came back from Borley, and since then I’ve done little but mooch about here or wander around town, at a loss at what to do with myself. I suppose if I really applied myself I could go on holiday, to Europe at least, but something (dread familiarity) tells me I’ll stay here until my course over and done with.

I can’t wait until that day.

Bolt

Another day of blazing sun, countered by a chilly wind. The sea sparkled this morning, clear right to the sharp horizon, a demaraction between shades. I sat in my chair in the window reading and watching the sea and sky.

I went out for Gav’s birthday; he’s 23 and set out to spend the entire day drunk and out of his head. I met him, Alex, I. Tropp and a group of Alex’s punk-hippie friends in The Underground on Maynard Gardens, then to the Seven Sisters where we met a rambling old man whose mind was still in the world of 1940s wartime England. He kept looking at me and saying “Bomber Command.”

Ian full of contempt and ridicule.

As the day wore on, dissension grew between Ian and Alex/Gav, and it broke into an open argument as we gravitated to the beach, which was hot and glaring and full of holiday makers. I dragged along in their wake, never saying much and lay in the pebbles hiding my face from the sun and listening to their interminable bitching over how much Ian did or didn’t know about Buddhism.

Both Gav and Alex attacked him for his “egoism and pretentiousness,” Alex getting quite angry with him, while Ian kept on with his quiet yet insistently urgent defence: “Pretentious was a word I forgot about years ago” . . .. etc.

Then he left for home, so G., A. and I went to a sex shop where Gav bought a tiny silver bottle of Bolt—amyl nitrate—which we all sniffed. It made me feel as though my head was bursting. My vision began to speckle and I got yellow spots before my eyes and as these faded, they were replaced by a dull pain deep inside my head. It was hardly a pleasant sensation, and one that felt decidedly harmful, so after several snorts of the stuff I declined and stuck to the cider and wine. But I couldn’t shake off a semi-drunken mood of seedy self-neglect all afternoon, which is a mood I always fall into during daylight drinking bouts.

By early evening the brightness had slipped away and the sea looked blue and huge and still, with none of the dappled patches of shade and light I’d noticed earlier.

Self-remembering

Eight a.m. . . . still drowsy and shocked from the suddenness of waking up. Robert rocks and intones mantras in the back garden beneath the willow tree while I sit inside, blasted and heavy-eyed, feeling thoroughly stuck in the here and now.

“Don’t go out there, Robert’s doing his meditations,” says Dad, with a simple acceptance of what R. is doing—Robert’s just been rudely interrupted by the cheerful trivialities of the milk woman—and right now I too feel a need for some sort of ritualistic affirmation of a vow to myself. I tend to have a gut distrust of ritual ‘magic,’ but it’s necessary, a private proces . . .. This is a revival of the old ‘shaved head’ ideal, something that has to be done if I’m to ‘save’ myself.

Maybe the ‘power’ of Jesus is a symbolic form of self-salvation, a “reaffirmation to the self,” just as the demons and devils of the mediaeval mind were symbols—though real enough—of the evils of ‘spiritual neglect’? I need heuristic mental discipline—self analysis, self awareness, self documentation—like Gurdjieff’s ‘self-remembering.’ The arrow points in as well as out. I need to realise intentionality.

I’ve been intending to keep a record of dreams to see if any pattern emerges, and I also want to cull through the pages of this journal from the very beginning to discover everyday ‘peak experiences’ and to see if their frequency has increased. A direct mental influence of mind over an intentionality of perception is probably only possible by grasping the process/problem with every faculty of the mind and by living every aspect. I am so self-forgetful. It takes seeing Robert to make me remember. SELF-REMEMBER ←----→

This faltering thread of words is the only testament to my past life. “Are you still keeping that up? What are you going to do with it?” asks Robert, seeing me writing.

What am I going to do with it??

Say yes to everything

Robert came in the morning for the match. I was treated to a monologue on Buddhism and the need to say Yes to everything; this reminded me of The Outsider. “You can't be a true Buddhist until you’ve accepted rebirth,” says Robert, and claims he has.

I can’t accept that all beings—insects, animals, even humans—will be reborn in different form. If ninety-nine percent of humanity are ‘animal minds’ who live, eat, sleep and fuck for generation after generation without seeing, as Robert claims, then what of the other fraction? I suppose those who are aware of the impermanence of all things are the ones who see suffering as self-inflicted misery that results from an inability to see the world in its true perspective. All suffering springs from this lack of Yea-Saying qualities in the self and it’s like this because we ignore the flimsiness of the foundations on which we’ve built civilization: we deny our own mortality and forget that all material wealth and power and happiness is impermanent. “We look after the body but forget about the Mind,” says Robert. We fail to accept the fleeting nature of our existence on earth and we turn money and possessions into gods that smother everything, including the Mind.

The last year has changed Robert’s life. . . . How much longer can he continue in the confines of his job and marriage? It seems as though as he grows his material world becomes narrower and narrower until finally he’ll have to make a decision.

Perhaps Carol will grow with him too?

The weather was blustery and showery. Croft Perseverance were Athletic’s opponents. The ball just wouldn’t run for Athletic, and a couple of certain goals were denied by agonising off-the-line clearances by Croft defenders. Athletic had more chances in the first half and should’ve scored.

The Shed was crowded because of the rain and a half-time brass band complimented the clichéd Northern backdrop of terraced houses and industrial wasteland up beyond Three Locks Road. Noticing this, a big contingent of Athletic supporters broke into a stentorian and ironic rendition of Dvorak’s “Going Home.”

Although Athletic outplayed Croft in the second half, they beat us by three soft goals in the last ten minutes, which brought typically fickle reactions from the fans—“You fuckin’ bastards!” etc., etc., this aimed at the Athletic bench. This annoyed Robert, and Athletic’s bad luck also angered a bewildered Dad who went on about it as though it were something which could be argued with. There is a smell of relegation in the air, and it will be a struggle to stay up.

Tonight Shelley rang from Watermouth; she, Stu and Shawn were at her flat and are on speed as I write this. She phoned through want of better things to do; she broke into occasional giggles and sounded as breathless and as full of beans as ever. I spoke briefly and awkwardly to Shawn who sounds to have had as empty and pointless a summer as I have. He hasn’t got a job and has alternated his time between home and Watermouth. He and Stu are down to look for flats for next term.

I put down the phone with mixed feelings, leaving them (no doubt) to pace the floor of Shelley’s flat all night. That world is so near, so ready to take my to its heart with open arms. Meanwhile I sit up here in Northern isolation and make plans to live and be in a way which is far removed from the hurly burly of the hard reality in Watermouth. Shelley’s call gave a premonition of how truly vain and fatuous are my hopes for a different way to the one of old.

This repetitious petty crap needed to come out. The feeling that I can’t continue in the habits of the past is coming home to me and it manifests itself in dissatisfaction with my University course. The last day or so I’ve been seriously contemplating a change to something like Art History. I don’t know how seriously my tutors’d take me.

But in truth this would be a superficial remedy and I get sick of saying ‘something more is needed.’. . .  But something more is needed. Another two years of what I’ve already had isn’t enough!

Hairsbreadth's deviation

I had predictable dreams in which I was pursued through Wollstonecraft Hall by a vampiric Lee. I didn’t get up until midday.

I rang Grant. He told me that he and Nik are producing a magazine. Grant will contribute the poems and Nik will illustrate them. They’re having around fifty printed and Grant wants to get in touch with Yorkshire Arts.

I spent the rest of the day playing records.

My inaction is dangerous; say it time and time again and never lose sight of this fact or I’ll never be rid of it. It's like a terminal illness or increasing blindness; I’ll have to struggle all my life to stave off this chronic apathy. I must keep my head above water. But, I don’t feel pissed off and I’m still cheerful. I just kick myself for wasting opportunity.

Rob and Carol arrived back from Conishead at teatime and brought an atmosphere with them; it felt like they’d been arguing. Carol still suffers pain from her mouth which isn’t healing.

Robert, predictably, was full of talk about the week just gone: “I could’ve stayed there for years.” Buddhism dominates his life to such an extent that I wonder how long it will be before he renounces the trappings of his teaching career and goes to Conishead permanently to live. I wonder if he appreciates the significance of his comment, for one day he’ll have to go, or give his beliefs up as a bad job, because it seems to me that you can’t compromise.

You have to go the whole way. I feel very restless.

The world stands complete

Robert and Carol called round this morning on their way for a week at Conishead Priory. Robert was looking forward to it a lot, but Carol seemed subdued; she's just had two teeth pulled at the hospital and is suffering with a swollen face.

They were soon off leaving me to an afternoon of idleness. Mum went to the hairdressers and Dad went on one of his much-grumbled-about trips to see Nanna B. The weather was hot and sunny once more.

At four I got a call from Grant . . . I held my breath . . . a fail in Economic and Social History, a fail too in Communications Studies, but a ‘B’ for English Lit. He couldn’t believe it and was ringing me in an inebriated glow of enthusiasm after going out for celebratory drinks with RJ and Jackie. “I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” he told me, and really did sound full of excitement and just general happiness.

I couldn’t help the cynical thought that flashed through my head: it’ll be no different for him when he goes to Gloucester. It wasn’t—and isn’t—for me. I can’t help thinking that, like me, he’s one of those people who cart the source of their own misery around with them, like a prisoner his chains. But, time for celebration; more than anything he’s relieved to finally have an escape route from the trap of his domestic situation. “What have you been doing?” he asks, and I truthfully answer “nothing.”

I got a second letter from Susie and felt ashamed at her comment on my comments about boredom in my previous letter. Seeing it written in black and white puts my own situation in sobering perspective. Fool!

Twelve days until September.

I read some war poetry by Sassoon and Graves, etc. I felt yet more shame that I can so blithely talk of ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ when I know nothing of true anguish. In a perverse way I would be curious to see how war would alter me as a person, but thrown into the cauldron, I'd no doubt be mewing pathetically for “mummy” and “home.” It was bad enough for me enduring the first few days at University, so God knows what new depths of self-pity I’d plumb if I was in a war.

I was really affected by Sassoon.

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change,
I thought how strange we grow when we’re alone
And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,
And blow the candles out and say good night.
Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.

I find it incredible to think that anyone can write a poem like “Before Action” by W. N. Hodgson, incredible that anyone can marshal and rationalise their thoughts so clearly in the face of so immediate and awful a death. He asks for strength to be able to bear the prospect of losing all earth’s “delights and glories” and does so in such a calm manner; surely there must’ve been tears and despair at the thought of becoming yet another member of “the unheroic Dead who fed the guns”?

I suppose that we ‘rise to the occasion’ in such circumstances. . . .

In the evening I watched a screen adaptation of The Magus, a book I’d intended reading over summer (but left my copy in Watermouth). It left me itching to read the book and I got an inkling of how big an impression the book had made on Patrick and why he felt as though he’d been ‘dunked in a bath of cold water.’ If the novel is anywhere near as thought-provoking as the film then it must be excellent. I must read it.

Patrick read it and drew parallels with his own situation, and then he acted. He quit the RCP. It was a big step when you consider his utter involvement with them. I remember how he struggled to convey his shattered complacency to us when we did LSD, and I could see it too, in a way, but gripped as I was by my LSD-self-consciousness and natural awkwardness, I couldn’t span the gulf which separated us. I couldn’t tell him that I understood too.

Out of the film’s symbolism, allusion, analogy and pantomime I drew out the ‘message’ that there's no message. Exploration brings you back to where you started and it’s all about looking at what there is to hand in a different way. The things around us are all there is, there’s nothing more, no ancient gods to be petitioned (gods who never replied anyway). No Yahweh, no Allah, no Horus or Isis or Zeus, just frightened people filling the Void with their reassuring figments to block out the emptiness and push it from the mind. There is no other way. These lives are all we have.

And when Mum says she spent a lifetime always planning for tomorrow and now that tomorrow is here, she feels desperately uncertain, unsure, and cheated somehow, I begin to understand why the world immerses itself in the commonplace and the known: “I have suddenly awoken in midst of this dream but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I have to go on dreaming in order not to be destroyed: as the sleepwalker has to go on dreaming in order not to fall.”

Mum puts her recent strangeness down to this realisation and says that “Sometimes I just want to scream at everyone and everything.” The other day she said she felt like putting on her coat and going: where is unimportant; it’s the act of going that matters. “It’s easier to philosophize at 19 than at 49” she says. It’s hard to accept that our lives have been built on sand and perhaps harder still to realise that this will go on and on and that I—helpless, unable to do any different—will also despairingly participate in this, knowing full well that the time will come when I too will be in Mum’s position.

Is my interpretation right, I wonder, or am I on the wrong track completely? Reading the book will get me deeper and tell me if I’m right and more of what Fowles really is getting at. Are we really “men moving in a mist”? I'm nineteen and I’ve ‘solved’ everything?

“The world stands complete and has achieved its end in every single moment.”

Shaheen is cool

I signed on in the morning and on the way back, Dad and I stopped to wander down past Cardigan Park. The white walls of the ground were quiet and smelled of dereliction. At one end of the ground a demolished wall let us see into the ‘stadium’ (ha ha) and out across the weed-strewn Easterby End and onto the luxuriously green pitch. “Shaheen is cool,” says the graffiti on the wall.

In the afternoon, Andrew and I went to see Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life at the Farnshaw Odeon. It was OK, not as funny as their efforts of old, and as to solving the riddle of life's meaning, I suppose they got quite close: sex, food and death, with a lot of pointless bits in between.

After tea, we watched a programme on Beeb 2, Iran: The Revolution Betrayed. The overthrow of the tyranny of the Shah’s regime was followed by the usual in-fighting between the various factions, resulting in the ascendancy of the Mullahs, Iran's most powerful authoritarian group, who now exert a more terrible power than the Shah ever did. We sat in our comfortable armchairs and watched an interview with an imprisoned and tearful sixteen-year old, a victim of rape. Two hours after the filming, he was shot.

The Iranian revolution rolls on with the fanaticism and blindness from which it sprang. Just as in Russia, the conspiratorial, elitist subversion of a revolution creates a conspiratorial, elitist and authoritarian state. ‘My Party Right or Wrong.’ Look and learn, RCP! (but look at me! Sitting on my complacent bourgeois backside and patronising a world’s revolutions in one breath!).

I sometimes think there's something wrong with me. I’ll turn into a bitter old crank one day. The TV fills me with disgust at adverts and programmes alike, raging against grey-suited newsmen, government officials, everything, anyone. . . . “You’ll never become a Buddhist,” says Andrew, half-smiling, half-serious, after one of my regular tirades against all and sundry, tirades which start as a joke but which always have a grain of sincerity to them.

Peace of mind is far away.

[Audio version]

Pinball wizard

I’m sitting alone in the caravan, it’s mid-evening and it’s growing gloomy. The sun has just set behind the hills above Kearshaw. Purple clouds tinged with dull red are framed between the silhouettes of the wall behind the caravan and the leaves of an overhanging sycamore.

Everyone else has gone to the pub for the evening. I declined for no real reason apart from a general desire to laze about here, plus I was aware of these pages calling me.

We’ve been on a longish walk today. For once the weather suited me perfectly and as we tramped up the road from our field towards Forefield I felt as full of zap as I’ve done all week. It was a windy day and the sun and clouds played constantly across the lone bulk of Pinshaw Hill across the valley.

We could see Thwaitegarth and Stonesdale, two small insignificant grey smudges on the long shoulder of the hill which was stained with the colours of shale and heather. That great hump of rock rising majestically from the valley was impressive and reinforced how small and limited the valley bottom actually is. Calverdale is narrow and when you're down in the fields most of the high hills are lost behind the nearer horizons that frequently only extend up as far as the topmost fields.

From time to time the sun broke through and warmed us for a while but it was a weary slog until we reached the summit of the road. Once there we branched off across the moor and Calverdale opened out below us, the white streak of the stony path we walked on up above Gilsey visible against a gloomy grey hillside.

Up and up we trudged, across terrain littered with rubble and patches of shingle, passing small cairns until finally we reached a fence which marked the boundary of Greetsdale. Last year Mum and Dad were caught up here in a fierce thunderstorm and the area is notorious for lightning strikes that often kill sheep. Just beyond the fence we stumbled across two tiny ponds and Dad and I explored them, finding several discarded dry skins of dragonfly larvae still clinging to the tips of the reeds. We also found several frogs and both larval and adult newts. 

By this time we were all ravenous so a few hundred yards further on we sat ourselves on a partially overgrown slag heap to eat, and spent a good natured, light hearted and ridiculous ½ hour before walking back. We had a good view down into Greetsdale itself, a bleak and sinuous little valley amid heather and a wide flat dreary expanses of brown moor. Down at the head of the valley we could see an old railway carriage being used as a sheep shelter, and last time Mum and Dad were down there they found a wooden sled, built to be dragged behind a horse.

We retraced our steps through a chaos of old mine workings and turned right along the edge of the Calver valley. Robert and I lagged behind talking and for a little while I forgot the tiredness and weary stumbling of my boots.

Robert argued strenuously in favor of pacifism and opposes “lobbing bricks and splitting heads open.” As so often happens, I was pushed back on my heels, falling quiet and turning my eyes earthwards.

-- “You watch your mates who are in the RCP and see how much unhappiness and annoyance they leave behind them,” suggested Robert.

I immediately thought of Susie’s open dislike of the RCP, Shelley’s cool reserve, and Pete’s uneasy parrying of Carl Cotton’s sarcastic comments. I thought also of Barry’s claim that Universal Utopian Happiness would be attainable if only we could fulfill mankind’s material needs. I at least had the confidence to shoot that one down in my own mind. Robert said that he before he came across Buddhism he felt like a pinball being flicked helplessly to and fro from desire to desire and thought to thought. I could identify only too well with this familiar feeling.

I am that pinball at this moment, and have been for the past few months. I’m all at sea, rudderless, rolling from this to that, drifting onwards without a gleam of hope. All my past thoughts, opinions and decisions are insubstantial groundless cries, and the more I hear, the worse it gets, the more desperate I feel. The only things I’m certain of are mortality and how an appreciation of this can alter peoples’ perspectives in ways that are ‘meaningful’ and constructive. Any real political change only happens on the inside. I should use these truths as the foundation for my own new beginnings.

When Robert talks about pacifism I feel ashamed at my own loose agreement with the use of force as an instrument of change. When I read about Reagan’s moves in central America in the 'papers, his branding of the independent Roman Catholic Sandinista regime as a Communist threat, and Thatcher’s nauseatingly predictable defense of this policy, I’m filled with vengeful desire for retaliation.

To what extent is it justified to assassinate those leaders who, as a direct result of their personal decisions, threaten defenceless people? On a moral level, I suppose the answer is ‘not at all.’ “You make yourself as bad as the people you oppose once violence is used,” says Robert, but what good is a moral victory if you’re being beaten, humiliated and trodden on? He believes pacifism is effective eventually, and he uses the impermanence of everything to back this up, arguing that non-pacifists always fail to acknowledge this point and therefore fail to realise that violent change is fruitless.

But doesn’t this reduce everything to senselessness—even morality? Isn’t this just a morbid crumbling into hopelessness?

There’s got to be some personal standard set I suppose or we would all just disintegrate into gibbering despair.

Cloud of unknowing

I had another poor night and woke up amid soaking sheets. I felt clammy and thoroughly out of sorts.

Everyone else was up making sandwiches, packing flasks and preparing for our hike. We set off in the cars to Gilsey and parked near the cottage where we stayed last time. Everything had stayed as it was; it's as if this place will endure forever.

We took the track up the eastern side of Gilsey Beck and sweated through bracken-choked woodland until we came out at an area where the beck widens and is bordered by wide grassy meadows at either side. Here, the grey refuse from lead mining is piled into small slag heaps. We stopped for a little while before pushing onward up the Beck. The lethargy of the previous day still seemed to dog me, weighing down my feet and deadening my responses to everything.

Finally we reached the ruined shell of an old lead mining office and Andrew took my photograph, just like 1980 when we were last here: I posed again in an identical stance, leaning against the same wall like before. Inside the structure, weathered carvings were scored into the stones, the dates and initials of people long forgotten. Across the narrow steep valley we could see another, more complete ruin staring back with empty windows.

We rested at the head of Gilsey Beck and ate our sandwiches. While everyone else went off up another little valley which led off into the hills, I fell asleep on the grass, but soon began to feel uncomfortable in the hot sun. I was disturbed a few times by inquisitive sheep.

An old grizzled shepherd descending from the hill tops with his white panting dog talked to us about his memories, as a six-year old, of this “fine, wild country.” Mum told him about our deer sighting and he wondered if perhaps it had escaped from a deer herd at Steadbeck Lodge: "I've only seen two my whole life.” He bade us goodbye and limped off up the track behind us with his dog.

It was a long wearying tramp back along the opposite side of the Beck. We followed the dusty straight track as turned up above Gilsey, and plunged down into the village on aching feet. We got back to the caravan at about four.

The evening was sunny, marked by a typical piece of Robert philosophizing and a silly argument between Mum and Dad after Dad tipped the cooking oil away. He felt humiliated in front of us all and sulked off on his own down the road while Mum sat sleepily in the caravan with a long face.

After the plates had been cleared away we got into a general discussion. Robert asserted that death gives life meaning and that it’s only because we lose sight of the inevitability of aging and mortality that we adopt shallow, transient attitudes. “Death could come next week or next month; people don’t appreciate that.” He pointed me out as a perfect example of this thoughtless attitude with my lounging and lethargy—(Robert:“I do it too!”)—and I felt my face colouring and heat springing into my cheeks.

But Robert doesn’t know how my thoughts go. I acknowledge these facts which condemn us all. For a moment too an old familiar sensation caught hold of me, a feeling of helpless not knowing, a sort of sudden desperate realisation that I’m not sure of anything and really am ‘all at sea’ as far as certainties are concerned. It’s a feeling I really didn’t expect to experience here. But what's the use of talking like this when I give myself up to sloth so consistently, so willingly?

Andrew and I wandered off after this, and we stood in the corner of the field gazing across at the adjacent mound. “I hate the mysticism and sentimentality attached to these places,” said Andrew quietly. Poor old practical Andrew. To him it's all just fields and trees and moors, which in a way I suppose it is, and nothing else. I can see why he says what he says, but I also appreciate the mystery of this place.

We went for a walk up the Forefield-Stonesdale Road, in the direction of Forefield. It was a soft evening, a hint of sun tingeing the stone walls, and Andrew had to go back because he’d forgotten his camera, so I stood and waited for him, leaning on a gate gazing across a field. As I did so, an old wellington boot-clad baggy-suited figure came clumping down the road towards me, and as I gave him a glance he turned, staring at me with hostile eccentric eyes.

When Andrew came back we climbed up and up, getting quite good views over towards Sleightshaw and the dark silhouette of the moor beyond. He took a few photos of the dark seething clouds rolling in before we had to sprint down the road amid a terrific downpour.

Back in the caravan we huddled in dim fluctuating gas light. Outside the sky echoed and shook to the thunder: in the enclosed valley, the reports of the thunder were much shorter and more concentrated Rob and Carol set out in the torrential rain for a walk along Blea Gate but we stayed behind watching the lightning fork all around. Mum, as usual, began to get worried at Rob and Carol’s absence, but after an hour or so they returned having just seen a family of deer quite near the caravan.

Robert was full of the “eeriness” of the area.

Realms

A continuation of the boredom and inaction of the past week. Dad and Andrew watched a vintage car rally in Farnshaw while I slumbered peacefully until nearly afternoon. Later, Dad, Mum and Nanna P. went out for a run in the car up to Oughterdale and I listened to records while Andrew unpacked.

Gripping stuff.

I’m pissed off, needless to say. The decision to come home, so easily taken, seems now to assume the magnitude of a major blunder. I’m so fucking bored up here in this world of narrow horizons and happy family neutrality. A fatherly blast this morning on the subject of hanging gave me a foretaste of the prejudiced angers to come.

Three months of this! I can’t see a way to get enough money to go abroad; the first week of July is gone already, and I feel destined to wallow here in hopelessness until the end of September. Steve called round yesterday to give me a couple of tickets for the Former Students disco on Monday at Harvey’s which at least will be a chance to see everyone. Harvey’s is going to be closed down because some poor bastard was kicked to death there in January. Steve is still as straight as ever. Some things never change (says he).

Thorough dissatisfaction, lack of imagination, total lack of confidence.

Robert rang. He and Carol went to York on a Buddhist course over the weekend and met a Tibetan monk who lives in America. They also went to Neil’s house.

A dewdrop, a bubble, a dream

Robert strikes me as being consistently sad and down at heart. Maybe this melancholic streak (which he’s inherited from Dad) accords with Buddhism’s acknowledgement of mortality and destiny in death. I have it too but it’s often overridden by the everyday joys of youth. It’ll emerge in time I suppose, abiding and permanent.

I’m scared of getting old. My life now is full of zap (no matter be it bad zap, still zap all the same) and I don’t want to lose the great sweeping tides of feeling and end up middle-aged in mind and outlook. As Carol and I listened to Roxy Music’s first album today, she told me that inside she feels just the same as she did in 1972 when she was 18. Dad too has often said that inside he feels just like he did when he was my age. I can’t believe I’m almost nineteen. It doesn’t seem so long ago since I was the kid who regarded nineteen-year olds as adults.

Now I'm part of that world too.

I planned on going back to Egley, but just as I was shoveling down  food so I could catch the last bus, Mum and Dad showed up, fresh from Badon. They had a good time and visited Avebury, Silbury Hill, Castle Coombe etc. Andrew got a 2.1 degree, much higher than the 3 he’d expected.

It was a fine evening, so Mum, Dad and I walked down through Saxton village. The sky was clear, the green peaceful tree-topped hills were bathed in warm light, a scene marred only by the raw scars that mark the new bypass that has cut straight across the little path that used to lead up past the farm and into the grass and woodland beyond. We paused at the pub for a pint, overshadowed by cool green trees, before continuing on past the village and out along the road towards the roundabout.

Mum picked wild daisies and I ribbed her by telling her that she was committing a crime. This semi-jocular banter continued all evening.

Red dust world

I went round to Uncle Kenneth’s in the morning. Cousin Ian and his friend Adrian were there and Ian spent the next hour showing off to me: he’s a pretty objectionable little kid. Soon after, Kenneth, Shirley, Nanna P., Nicola and Jan arrived and we all ate dinner and I unwillingly had conversations about Uni. etc.

I got wind of a possible job as a labourer on a building site with one of Kenneth’s mates.

Kenneth gave me a lift into town and I caught the five-past one bus to Dearnelow. It was a dragging drive through sunlit Stainwike, Alverhouse etc, and in Dearnelow city centre the breezy pedestrian precinct was swarming with kids and teenagers. I felt even more of the hostility here than I’d sensed in Easterby.

I caught the 468 bus to Saxton and rolled up at Rob and Carol's mid-afternoon. Carol was in the kitchen, Robert cleaning out his fire-bellied toads and green tree frogs in the front room. He seemed very quiet and subdued.

He took his Buddhist precepts last Sunday: this means he's now a fully fledged Buddhist, and he seems deeply committed, often going to Conishead Priory or to Bishophill on retreats: he told me about his monk-friend Neil, who I can tell he admires—even loves—for his simplicity and wisdom.

Rob showed me his altar, which is now upstairs in the small front bedroom above the front door: when he opened the door I was greeted by the sweet heavy smell of incense, and Rob made me take off my shoes before entering. The tall altar is topped with a pale Buddha in the lotus position and draped with exotic-looking, colourful cloth, and in front of the Buddha are small bowls with offerings. Robert’s meditation cushions on the floor in front.

He told me he's convinced of the correctness and crystal clarity of the path he’s taken.

I spent the rest of the day idly, while Robert sewed some red and yellow book covers (one of the conditions he has to fulfill on taking his precepts), or read a Buddhist text. I flopped about in indolence, watching TV or reading.

In the evening I went out and bought some fish and chips before coming to bed.