The Pumpkin Queen!

As a Christian I don't celebrate Hallowe'en... however, also as a Christian, I happen to follow a God who is very fond of parties!  (Don't believe me?  Find a Bible and check it out - the first recorded miracle of Jesus was to make some extra wine at a wedding that ran out.  Now that's the kind of miracle I think we'd all like to see more of :P)

To that end, I was helping out a party on Saturday for those that don't do Hallowe'en.  Lots of kids running about, sweets and goo everywhere, and at the end we had a Pumpkin Judging for those of us who had brought along a carved vegetable.  Now, I'd never carved a pumpkin before and possibly I got a little carried away on my first attempt,  This took me about an hour...

In the light: 

And in the dark

I didn't win the contest (there were kids playing!  Obviously we had to give the prize to one of them) but nevertheless I'm pretty proud.

On the make

So many birthdays right now!  I'm trying to make most of my presents and cards this year (partially for money reasons, but) mostly because the cards in the shops never seem quite cool enough, or say what I want them to say.  I find cards for boys are particularly difficult, as most cards seem to be aimed at women -let's be fair, we buy cards way more than men do- and our very decorative and girly tastes.  Lots of flowers, teddies, puppies etc, but the shelves for Man Cards are usually only a fifth as big and the options are pretty limited.  What if your brother/husband/boyfriend doesn't like golf/yachting/football/cars/beer/dirty jokes?  Mine don't.

All the Man Cards I like normally have a badge stuck to them with 'I AM 3 TODAY!' written on them.  I don't think I'm asking for the world, but this time round it seemed easier and far more personal to make a novelty card that my brother might actually chuckle at instead of giving him something generic.  Add to this fact that I was short on time and it had to be something pretty simply.  I ended up doing this...

I don't normally like collage much, but doing these big flat shapes was actually quite a good look, and saved on the hastle of trying to paint smoothly or smush a piece of card through a printer designed for copy paper!  And when you open the card Bats draws back his cloak to reveal...  A Cake!  Of course :)

Bolstered by that attempt I decided to get a bit weirder with the second card.  All I can do is promise you that this line makes complete sense if you knew the person I gave it to.

Let's be honest.  A Shakespearean badger would be quite difficult to beat in a battle of awesomeness.  You'd mention that you knew a good card trick, and then the badger would clear his throat and begin quoting Othello at you.

And here's one for a friend after a month's hard work towards her goal

I know these cards won't be winning prestigious art awards any time soon, but they were surprisingly fun to do for a girl who hates cutting out paper, and I liked the fact that they are cheesy and blatantly handmade.  It occurred to me that I could do a lot of cards like this.  I have a cheap set of animal cards that I lifted from somewhere and use for random notes and thank yous but they get a bit boring sometimes and the Frog gets used way more than the Orangutan ('cause really, what occasion do you have to give someone a card with an Orangutan on it?) but I can add things to them, cut out props or hats or captions of my own.  Much better!  

Rookfest

It's mid-October, and I am obsessed with Rooks.  They're everywhere right now, including my sketchbook!

Plus they have the best collective noun ever.  Crows may be a Mob, but Rooks are a Storytelling.  How's that for a name?

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled

I like things that are vast... but I also like things that are tiny and intricate in detail.

Last Saturday, after a weekend of cabin fever stuck in the office I went on a new walk.  I went to the canal and decided to see how far I could get in an hour... and I walked straight out of the town.  Past narrow boats, fishermen and locks in motion, past the bridges and, eventually, out into the middle of nowhere.  I reached the next village before my hour was up and I turned round.  As usual I took my camera and recorded what I saw, but my favourite picture wasn't one of my usual panoramics or skyscapes, but this one.  Click on the image to enlarge it.  It's worth it...

It's a tight-knit spiderweb, dew-jewelled under the shadow of a bush.  It almost doesn't look real to me, all those tiny drops lined up like that, only a little surface tension and the strength of a silken line I can barely see to stop them from falling.  I think it's amazing

Vision: Ely Cathedral

I want to tell you a story.

It begins with a woman named Ethelthryth (Etheldreda), who lived nearly fifteen hundred years ago in East Anglia.  As the daughter of the region's king (England was still four separate kingdoms back then) she was given unwillingly to a lesser king of the Fen region around Cambridge, and her husband gave her the land around what is now the town of Ely as a wedding gift.

When he died she was married again to secure an alliance with the young King of Northumbria.  Despite her status as a wife she was determined to retain her celibacy, and when her husband tried to pressure her into changing her mind she ran away to her lands at Ely.  The dangerous marshes and waterways of the Fens surrounded the land there all the way around, turning it into an island and defending it from attack far more effectively than walls or ramparts ever could.  Armies had been lost in the Fens, and her husband did not care to have her back so much that he was wiling to overcome such obstacles.  Ethelthryth settled in the small town of 600 people and began to build her dream, a monastery of which she became the abbess.  She lived there until the end of her days, on June 23rd in the year 679 AD.

Ethelthryth's vision continued to thrive for 200 years, becoming one of the most prosperous monasteries in the country.  Then the Saxons (Vikings) began to invade the British Isles from the eastern countries of what is now Norway and Denmark, in search of lands more fertile than their own and new wealth and homes for their people.  Due to the protection of the Fens Ely was late to fall but in 870 AD they penetrated the waterways and the town and monastery was destroyed.  It is generally believed that only one church survived, hanging on at the edge of a broken settlement, barely remembered.  In 970 the land in Ely was rebuilt as a new monastery, constructed over the foundations of Ethelthryth's original vision.  Someone must have remembered her, and what she had done, as  a shrine was built to her on the site of her great endeavour.

Another 200 years passed before Britain was invaded again, this time from the south.  The Normans (French) came across the Channel in their ships in the year 1066 AD and gained control of Ely, destroying the church again.  But they had a new idea.  Shortly after arriving, in 1109 AD they began to build, not a church but a cathedral.

The semi-circular arches built by the Normans

This was a task that was to take over 100 years, spanning at least three generations of builders and countless craftsmen, the passing of two architectural styles and one nearly disastrous collapse as the weight of the freshly built West Tower began to sink into the waterlogged land of the Fens.  This tower, at 215ft in height, would have been the tallest structure most of Ely's inhabitants had ever seen, dwarfing even the tallest of trees and earning the cathedral the title of 'Ship of the Fens' for that way that it's soaring height rose out over the flat expanses of the Fen marshes and was visible from miles away, guiding pilgrims to worship like a beacon across the sea.

In 1236 AD the main structure of the cathedral was finally completed, although new visionaries continued to add to and alter it over the years, including the addition of the Octagon 'Lantern Tower' an hundred years later. 

The nave from the west

Finally the cathedral was finished, although life continued around it.  The Tudor king Edward VI had it stripped of all its riches, its gold, sculptures, items of ceremony, and demanded that the head be knocked off every statue, the stained glass windows be smashed, and the gaudily painted plaster stripped from every wall, leaving only the cream-coloured sandstone behind.  Only faint remnants of these decorations remain today.

Each of these niches once held the statue of a saint

The cathedral at Ely continued to stand, little-used and in disrepair, through the Reformation, the English Civil War and various attempts to modernise it, all of which failed to bring it back into general popularity.  Then, in the early 1800s the Victorians took an interest in Ely cathedral and the first of three major renovations took place, replacing the glass, painting the Lantern and returning the building to something closer to its original splendour.  

The Victorian Angels painted on the inside of the lantern

The view down from the Lantern

And across.  Some of the angel panels can be drawn back,
allowing you to see across to the other side of the Lantern

Since then Ely cathedral has once again been a functioning place of worship, as well an astonishing historical resource if you're a nerd like me! It's is very much a part of modern life in the region as well as a link to the past, and it is the past that interests me the most.

I'd been wanting to visit it for ages so I made the most of my trip, climbing both the Octagon Tower and the West Tower, where I saw how the Romanesque semi-circular arches of the Saxon building style gave way to the pointed Gothic arches of later building.  I witnessed the shored-up spaces that support the weight of the West Tower from sinking once more into the marshes.  I found the pale stripped stone of the pillars painted with light from the coloured window panes.  I saw the etched markings of the stonemasons by which they kept their accounts of the stone riven into the hidden turns of the winding stairs, and read the more recent scrawls of schoolboys who are now long dead on the sides of the Lantern.  I walked the leaden roof and saw the distant glint of Cambridge, about 15 miles away across the Fens, marvelling at the bravery of the men who were willing to climb to a height that only birds and angels inhabited in order to complete this monument to the glory of God and the wealth of a king.  On the highest spires are the most beautiful carvings that would never be seen by anyone on the ground, only by the proud craftsmen and God in his heaven.  I found it astounding.

West Tower from the roof of the Octagon Tower

And the Octagon from the roof of the West

View from the West Tower, to the edges of Ely, and beyond

I found graffiti signed as early as 1906 on the outside of the Lantern.
The Kings School is the boys school next door to the cathedral that Henry VIII established.
It still exists today.

What struck me most is that throughout the Cathedral's history is this continuing story of vision.  It took vision for one fifth-century woman to imagine her monastery, a home for her and dozens like her.  Vision for her to run for her freedom and vision to build and lead a community on the Isle of Ely.
When her monastery was destroyed the memories of it sparked a new vision, of a continuation of the church that survived two invasions and then one hundred years of building through years of harvest and famine, and of war.
There was vision in the eyes of the architect as he drew up his plans, and in the hearts and minds of those who contributed their money and resources to the half-formed dream of what could stand on that island.
That vision had to be passed on from father to son, master to apprentice, each man putting his faith in the knowledge of something that had not yet come to pass, but that he saw growing on the distant horizon with every dawn.  Each man throwing himself into the task and pulling his weight, and then passing it to his successor to run the next leg of the race, instilling the same dreams in him.
It took vision for the Victorians too, to see what the dilapidated building had once been, and what it could become again.  To invigorate it with their own dreams of a glorious monument for the past and the future.  And we now do the same, not always with cathedrals, but with our love and our faith and our lives.

They built for a hundred years.  I can't imagine spending more than a few months on anything.  But I guess that's what a hope really is.  We imbue our beings with a vision of how things might one day be, and bend our work towards those far off dreams that may only come to pass when the world has turned, and we are long dead, and our sons and daughters finally see our visions bear fruit.

On the way home I was treated to an amazing sunset, like those that have been seen over the Fens for hundreds of years, and will be seen for hundreds of years after me.  Suddenly I felt very small, but strangely content with it all.

Clever friends

Everyone's been so bustling away this summer, so I thought I'd share some of what other people I know have been getting up to, and some of the amazing results of their hard work:

First up is a dozen eggs, a branding and advertising partnership set up by my friend Fran Collins and fellow graphics graduate Joanne Lloyd, who did their graphics degree together.  I only checked out their website recently and was very impressed by the fun yet professional look they have going on there, and also by the portfolio of clients they're already getting together.  There are a couple of design pieces in there that I really like, including a logo incorporating a bicycle, and a website design that makes surgery look positively friendly.  That takes talent!

And while you're there, you might wander over to the shop and happen to see some of Amy Humphries' amazing needlework (all of which is modelled by her!).  She's hand-making and selling classy aprons and pinnies for the kitchen, and warm wheat sacks for the bedroom, all of which will be available from her website in 2012.  I first came across one of her cloth aprons in a friend's house and genuinely thought it came from a top-end shop, it was so beautifully made.  I'm now trying to think of something that needs sewing, just so that I can own something she has created.

The last item is an album, Songs that No One Taught Us, full of music from Alvin and Karl Allison, two extremely talented brothers my Dad knows from his college days.  They've been working on this for a while, but now it's all coming together and they'll be going on tour!  All the information on the tour dates and locations is on the Songs That No One Taught Us website, and if I can't get along to that I'm planning on getting hold of the album (plus I drew the cover for them, so I want a hard copy!)

Looking forward

I love the way the light shifts gold in September.  It's not the deep heat of midsummer, and the wind and the rain have started to set in, but the chill of October hasn't quite arrived yet.  Last Saturday morning I woke up to this (click to enlarge):

Of course there are other things coming up I'm looking forward to, such as this offering from Disney/Pixar, due out next year

If you're seeing echoes of Dreamworks' 'How To Train Your Dragon' well I am too, but mainly I'm just pleased to have a kick-ass girl in the lead role.  Admittedly she's still a princess but two out three is pretty original as far as the Disney Franchise is concerned.  The last time they did that well was with 'Mulan'.  And Merida is a red-head too!  So often those of the ginger persuasion are relegated to the best-friend or comic-relief roles (think Ron Weasley, who fulfils both).  Apparently this is Pixar's first lead female too, which would be admirable if not for the fact that Studio Ghibli has had dozens of them since the mid-eighties.  Don't believe me?  Let's recap:

Studio Ghibli
Laputa: Castle in the Sky - Sheeta (joint lead)
My Neighbour Totoro - Satsuki and Mei
Kiki's Delivery Service - Kiki, with side-characters Osono and Ursula also making the grade
Only Yesterday - Taeko
Whisper of the Heart - Shizuku
Princess Mononoke - San/Mononoke (NOT your average female love interest by any standards!)
Spirited Away - Chihiro/Sen
The Cat Returns - Haru
Howl's Moving Castle - Sophie (who is 80 years old for most of the movie)
Ponyo - Ponyo (joint lead)
Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty - Arrietty

Now, a few of these are technically princesses (Mononoke and Ponyo) but one is a metaphorical title rather than a social status, and the other has given up her princess-hood by the end of the film (plus, she is a goldfish, which I'm pretty sure exempts her from this) but the majority of them don't think too much about getting a guy and being lady-like and girly.  Either they're off questing or they have far better things to think about (Shizuku is working at being a writer, Kiki is setting up a business, Taeko is re-evaluating her life, Mononoke is... trying to assassinate someone) and what few men there are sort of fall into their lives as a bi-product of this.  Half the time they are either rejected or overlooked to boot.  None of these films ends in a wedding.  All in all this really appeals to me since there are surely more important measures of a girl than whether or not there's a fella about.  And damn it, I want to go questing too!  That sounds like so much more fun than sitting about waiting for my true love to drop from the ceiling.

Now let's evaluate the competition.

Pixar
errr...  I think Brave is it.  Don't say Tangled because that wasn't Pixar, that was Disney Animation.  I would add Disney to this list to help bump the numbers but every female lead I can think of is a princess or becomes one by the end of the film even if she is kick-ass.  Except for Lilo and Mulan (and even she wins her man)

Anyhow, somehow The Borrower Arrietty had managed to fly under my radar so I only saw it last week.



As usual it is exquisite work, full of the intricate hand-drawn animation that Ghibli is famous for, and the quiet spaces and gentle silences that are often passed over in Western cartoons in favour of action scenes, background music and montages.  Speaking of music, I'm thoroughly in love with the soundtrack too.  It was written and performed by French singer and celtic harpist Cecile Corbel, and adds an ancient fairy-like dimension to the incidental music in the film in particular, as well as the main theme song.  You can watch it in Japanese or English, and the jury's out on which is better.  I think you keep something nice in hearing the original language, but for those who find it hard to read on screen or pick up spoken intonation better in their own native tongue I have no objections.  The actors for the Ghibli translations are usually well chosen.

This article from the Guardian sums it all up pretty well, including a pretty interesting quote from Hayao Miyazaki himself about why exactly Ghibli enjoys it's female heroines so much.

Harvest home

Well summer is drawing to a close, the leaves are turning, the weather is cooling, even the smell of everything is different.  Harvesters are out in the fields and I'm collecting conkers, but what a summer it's been!  In the interests of trying to get somewhere on as a little money as possible, I adopted a Fuel-Only-Holiday scheme, trying to find ways of visiting new places with as little cost as I could, save that of travelling to reach them.

The reason for all this was that I knew a lot of people going on holidays abroad and suddenly felt that I hadn't seen much of the world.  Of course I can't afford to cross the channel just at the moment, but then it struck me that even though I've lived in England my entire life, there's still so much of it I've not seen.  Thus began my quest!

1. Lake District
I've blogged about this already so I won't go on, but I always enjoy visiting the Lake District.  The land is so awkward and you're forced to work around it's lofty hills, soggy valleys, and fields of wandering sheep, but it's well worth the effort for somewhere so unchanged,  I find it comforting.

2. Bristol
In August was the first wedding anniversary of my sister Katherine and her husband Tom.  They've been married for an entire year! What a strange thing to think about!  The two of them are beginning to make a life for themselves down in Bristol, somewhere I have never been, and this auspicious date just happened to collide neatly with the annual Balloon Fiesta.  So I did a little research on where I should go, took myself down there, stayed in the beautiful spare room of a kind neighbour, and spent a long weekend on a self-guided walking tour of Bristol.  It took me an entire day just to get from the house to the city centre, as I got distracted by a rather fantastic museum (I love a museum) that I sent the entire morning in.  It had everything a curious girl could want, from a 10ft ancient Red Elk, a fossilised Ichthyosaur foetus and a skeleton from ancient Egypt, all the way through to a large collection of taxidermied animals, including a badger I was allowed to stroke, whom we affectionately named 'Jimmy'.

Jimmy the Taxidermied Badger

10 min sketch of Bristol University,
drawn with felt pen and rain.

I visited art galleries, local history museums (which I highly recommend), the cathedral, harbours and docks, an aquarium (although I didn't actually go inside it) walked down rows of old regency houses and gothic monuments, got very sore feet and had a thoroughly enjoyable time.  And all of this for free!

The Balloon Fiesta itself was fun, if perhaps something you would only see once as there is a limited amount you can do with a balloon - the Night Glow, for example, is really en masse Bristol karaoke with the flame throwers in the balloons keeping time with their flashes.  For about an hour.  Still, it was a fun experience and I'm glad I saw it.  I also got up at six in the morning to walk up the the downs above the city and watch the balloons take their morning flight...  Naturally that was the one morning they didn't go up, but to sit amid green grass and see the sun come up over a new place is no bad thing.






3. Greenbelt Festival
I returned to the west country, a little further north, to the Greenbelt Festival held on Cheltenham Racecourse. I've been to events like Momentum in the past few years, and Stoneleigh Bible week as a child, but this was probably my first 'real' festival.  And how does this fit with my Fuel-Only scheme?  Well, as with some other festivals, if you volunteer to help run an area of the festival they won't charge you entry.  On top of that Greenbelt gives its volunteers food vouchers, enough for at least one meal per day bought from the festival stalls.  The rest of the food I took came straight from my kitchen cupboard.  So I dusted off my First Aid certificate, which was fortunately still in date, borrowed some camping gear from my parents and got stuck in!

Me and my mates, plus a new first-aiding friend.  I'm 2nd from the right, in the hi-vis.

Sunday morning at the Main Stage

In the 'Tiny Tea Tent' with friends

Lost, are we?

On the one hand, yes it was 4-8 hours of work a day, but it was also a great way to see the festival.  As a First-Aider you need to be where the crowds are but also have room to err... aid someone, so I spent a lot of my time sitting in the pits at Main Stage, or sneaking into the late night venues.  My final night was spent round a fire pot with the folks who had been running the food stalls all week, with a hula hoop, guitar and tambourine to keep us company.  Singalongs ensued!  Of course there was the occasionally mad dash across the site when an emergency call came over the radio.

Sculptures of home, made on site

My seat

I enjoyed Greenbelt mainly for the variety of topics covered by it's tagline of 'Combining Faith, Justice and the Arts'.  This meant that there was of course music played for you (lots of it) but also music you could take part in.  I found myself putting on a full performance as part of the very first Greenbelt Scratch Band, which played to an extremely high standard considering that we'd never seen each other or the music or the conductor in our lives before and had perhaps 7 hours practise in total.  There was also comedy, spoken word, storytelling, poetry, food (so much food!), theatre, acrobatics, crafts, dancing (again, for you and by you as well!) film, politics, theology, meditative areas, writing, workshops for national projects, international awareness and social justice, debate, and a lot of hard questions thrown across large crowds by people who wanted to live on the wobbly edge of faith and life rather than settling for the more familiar and reassuring habits of the mainstream, and a huge number of other topics that I could never even begin to cover.

Somehow I get the idea that I\ve only just begun to plumb the depths of Greenbelt, and having met several people who have going for over 20 years and are still returning, I may have to go back.

4. Ely
Updated tomorrow, once I've been.  For the past few months I've had a hankering to head closer home in Norfolk, and to see Ely's cathedral and the Fens.  So on Monday I go!

Lake District: Day 4-8

Day 4
Muncaster Castle today - because who doesn't love a castle!  I certainly do - including the World Owl Centre with some amazing owls.  I mean, I knew there were a lot of kinds of owls in the world, but still not this many.  There were noble owls, noisy owls, intimidating owls, owls that looked like Muppets, owls that had clearly been coloured in by a children's craft class.  Loads of fun.

Clapped for a performer who can do an escalator (a diabolo move that is insanely easy but very effective on unknowing crowds) but who did have some amusing jokes, and toured a haunted castle, bumping into the owner too.  Later that night is Uno gone mad, ruleless Scrabble and some very weird dance moves.

Day 5
Half hour car ride to Whitehaven and the sea.  It's good to see the greeny-blue deep again, stretching out from the little town harbour to the horizon.  Leicestershire is a land-locked county and I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd seen the sea.  I like things that make me feel my proper size... the ocean, the sky, vast landscapes.

Had lots of fun in The Beacon museum with my sister, stroking plastic dinosaurs, tying sailors knots and playing Roman (Roman!) draughts.  Fish and chips with the Grandparents and then home for a pub quiz.  We came 5th, which was actually a pretty respectable position.

Day 6
Today was the challenge, the big one, Scafell Pike - England's highest mountain at 978m of walking straight up.  And up, and up.  Me, Mum, Dad and Emma - my youngest sister- made it to the top in 3 hrs 15 mins, and then 2hrs 30 mins more to get back down again.  I was spared the backpack in case my leg cramped up like it did when I attempted Scafell last year.  My right foot has always turned out and now that I'm older it seems to be making a different to how my weight is distributed on that leg, particularly when I'm carrying something heavy.  But with only my own weight and a walking stick to even it out I made it to the top! 

It's weirdly like walking up the flight of stairs in your house and then back down again... and then doing that repeatedly for 6 hrs.  But the satisfaction when you reach the top is well worth the effort.

Day 7

Recouperation day.  In a house containing four flights of stairs.  The longest walk I took today was down to the end of the garden, where you can slip through the fence and down the hill to the Santon river.

Day 8

Today was the journey home, but I took a different route to avoid the Liverpool and Manchester traffic jams.  Instead I took the A595 north and then cut clean across the country on the A66 from Cockermouth (where the big floods were in 2009) and Penrith, over the empty stretches of the Pennine hills to Middlesbrough to make my way down the eastern edge of Britain.  It's over a 4hr drive but now I've more or less circumnavigated the upper half of England, which is a good thing to be able to say.

Now, off to put the laundry in :)

Lake District: Days 1 - 3

Day 1
Yesterday I travelled up over the A595 from the Midlands to Santon Bridge.  You know you're in for a fun time when the A-road you're on roams and loops like a country lane, up over the passes with the Lakeland mountains to the right and the gleam of the sea on your left. But today, after an easy morning, we have gone out to Wastwater, the deepest of all England's lakes at 79ft.



Quick sketch of Great Gables from Wastwater

That said, it looks deceptively narrow when you gaze across it.  We paddled a bit, chasing tiny fish into herds, and watched brave folk on dingies and would-be swimmers mess about in the cold water.  We see dogs, a wedding, and a chance for a quick drawing with a 10-pack of petrol station colour pencils.  The shifting colours of the mountains are, naturally, impossible to get down no mtter how hard I try.
My youngest sister and I are living in a little side cottage while the rest of my family, including grandparents, take up the main house.  Fine by me as it puts us nearer to the walk that leads down to the green Santon river under the trees.  The holiday so far is beginning to take on a distinctly Roman-British feel with my current reading list including Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and The Lantern Bearers, a book on the geology and history of my home county East Anglia, of which the current chapter covers the rise and fall of Rome in Britain, Dad's recent return from walking Hadrian's wall with my uncle, and the prospect of Roman ruins later in the week.  It's all coming together.

Day 2
Another easy morning, then continued the Roman theme with a visit to the ruined Bath house at Ravenglass.  We tried walking out the paths of the soldiers from Hardknott Fort as they would have entered, changed in the sight of their statues and gods who niched in the walls, and sat around scraping the grime and sweat off themselves with thin metal strigils.  Strange to be standing in the same place of hundreds of men before us, tracing the paths of their ghosts going about their everyday patterns.  We are not so far apart from our past as we like to think we are.

Went on the little steam train through to Boot village and looked over the old mill there.  On the way my sister tried to take pictures of passing sheep while my Grandma told me about her two evacuations during the Second World War, when she was just a girl.  The first time she was sent away and then brought back, but in the final year of the war she was evacuated again.  It strikes me how lucky I am to be able to hear about these things first hand.

We ground flour with a millstone and turned the handles of mechanisms long lost to history, the mangle, the winnower.  I wonder what happens if we ever forget the old times, and how we used to be.  The people who worked these mills were us, just a little earlier, and yet it's so easy to forget they were ever part of our lives.  All the same, I feel somehow that as long as these little nooks in the hills survive, and there are quiet, wild places in the world some of it will get through, we might be alright.

I've been reading... The Eagle of the Ninth

I'm subtitling this 'This Curse of the Bromance'.  Contains spoilers

 I fell onto Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth after watching and very much enjoying the recently released movie adaption The Eagle.  Sutcliffe wrote a short series of book during the 1950s which are all based around the invasion, occupation, and hurried departure of the Roman Empire from Britain.  The Eagle of the Ninth is the first in the series and follows a young Centurion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, through his first command on the dangerous frontier of Hadrian's Wall and subsequent dismissal from the army following an injury.  Marcus has spent his entire life working towards a military career in order to regain the lost honour of his family following his father's shameful defeat in battle, and is forced to consider a new life as a crippled civilian.  Hearing that the bronze Eagle standard used by his father's former legion has been spotted in the hands of the northern barbarian tribesman, he resolves to try and steal it back with only his British-born slave Esca for help.  Either version of the story makes for a good Swords-'n'-Sandals adventure with a more personal touch, and although it won't win any Oscars I found it very enjoyable.  I'd highly recommend either the book or the film, but that's not really what I want to talk about.

The main point of this blog comes from when I sat down to watch the movie with my housemate.  I'll need to give you an idea of the two main characters first and the book and the film are set out slightly differently, mainly because of their different audiences and times of writing, so bear with me and I'll be fast:

Book version:
Book Marcus is quite different from Film Marcus. He's more enlightened (almost too enlightened to be realistic in some ways) about the nature of a slave. He saves Esca mainly out of sympathy and frees him before the quest even starts, so the story here really is mainly about the search for the Eagle. There is never any question that Marcus and Esca are on the same side, and even towards the British tribes who currently hold the Eagle Marcus has no real enmity, saying that if the tribesmen are able to keep the Eagle from him they are welcome to it. His aim in finding it is not to regain his honour so much as to prevent it becoming a trigger for further bloodshed. Still, the companionship between the two is central - in contrast to the film in which no women appear, in the book you meet a grand total of one woman, which was very much the way of the times. Men and women had different functions in society and operated in very different worlds, rarely seeing much of each other until a marriage was decided upon, and even then the union was often financially or socially driven. Esca needs less explaining as he is roughly the same in both the book and film: prickly, reserved and determined to cling to the sense of honour that is all he has left to him after being snatched away from his former life. I think this idea of being honour-bound is very interesting and something we've lost in our culture, but that's a pondering for another day.

Film version:
In the film Marcus subscribes very much to the view of Roman law and sees his slave as nothing more than a piece of property.  While he and Esca are able to work together well enough, the course of the movie revolves around the testy relationship between the two of them.  Esca, honour-bound into Marcus' service after the Roman saves his life on a self-pitying whim, rails inwardly against the master who represents the nation that killed his family, invaded his home and forced him into slavery.  In the meantime Marcus drags them both relentlessly through the Scottish Highlands in the hope of bringing the pride and glory of Rome back to his family, and cannot comprehend how anyone could despise the empire he has dedicated his life to.  At the start neither of them understands the other at all but by the end of the journey each has come to recognise that neither of their nations is purely good or evil, and their forced reliance on each other turns into a strong and trusting friendship that is tested when Marcus finally frees Esca from his enslavement and Esca in turn helps him defend the Eagle rather than running to safety himself and leaving his former master behind.

The Main Point:
The point of all this back-story is that I jokingly described the film to my friend as a "bromance" (that is, a slang term for a very close but non-sexual relationship between two men, such as between brothers - hence the "bro" in bromance.  If you're not sure what that looks like, think of the friendship between Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings, JD and Turk from Scrubs, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.  For some reason there doesn't seem to be a female equivalent).  It's true that The Eagle is a bromance, if only by necessity due to the lack of women, but mainly because of the depth of the friendship that evolves between Esca and Marcus.  But for some reason my friend has taken this to mean that the two main characters are gay, and cackles with laughter every time she finds a line in the movie or passage in the book that she feels backs this up.

If that's how she wants to see it then that's down to her (although if she did turn out to be right surely it ought to be worthy of a neutral shrug rather than hysterical giggling), but I think it does a great disservice to men in general to immediately assume that two male characters are sexually or romantically attracted to each other simply because they care about each other.  The author would be extremely unlikely to write two gay main characters into a book for teenagers and get it published (one of her adult books does allude to a relationship between two male characters, but it is very underplayed).  Additionally both the twenty-something-year-old actors and the director of the recent film have said that the characters weren't written or played gay, so where is this idea coming from that they are romantically involved?  Why is it that the behaviours they read as a bond between brothers are being read by others as signs of a sexual attraction? 

Much of it may be just the way our social conduct has changed over time.  Since 'coming out of the closet' has become more common and accepted over that last few decades there seems to be a pressure on both men and women to define their sexuality in a way that wasn't there before, and so any behaviour that could be interpreted ambiguously has been cut down, such as in this case showing signs of strong affection for another man, even if that affection is platonic.  So of course, any time we see those rare signs of affection they are jumped on, and mountains made out of molehills.  The excellent Charity Bishop has noticed a similar trend in female duos, with fans clamouring for relationships within the space of a few episodes.

It may be partly the fault of us women too.  We go on and on about how men are so much more insensitive than us and can't express their emotions that I'm afraid we're all actually starting to believe it -even to expect it.  Being masculine apparently now also implies being callous, crude and emotionally shallow, and so if any man does decide to be vulnerable with his friend it is seen as being far too forward or feminine compared to what is socially acceptable.  The trouble is, I don't think that's the truth at all.  I firmly believe that all of us, men and women, are capable of much more
humanity than that in the way we act towards each other, and that it's not the potential for sex but our belief in the value of other human beings that drives us.

The ability to be emotionally open or close with another person doesn't make you a wuss or determine your sexuality, it shows courage, trust and strength of character on both sides!  To assume that any man who genuinely cares about his friend must want to be involved with him romantically is demeaning to the great and noble hearts of the men around us, and if we don't want them to lose that ability to care then we'd better stop laughing at them for it.

So guys, it comes down to this.  I believe that you are capable of great kindness, selfless genorosity, and emotional depth.  And it appears there may be scant few of us left that think so.  Don't let us down.