Category: Thoughts

When VHS used to be a thing we had a tape of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We’d recorded it from a television showing and I think the iconically cool Motorola Razr was being advertised in the breaks.

I must have watched it a few times because a scene is burnt on to my mind. Indy has arrived at the entrance to the chamber where the Grail is kept. He knows there are booby traps, bodies are strewn next to him, and he’s just seen someone lose their head. In his hands are the diary notes of his father.

‘The penitent man will pass.’ He reads, muttering under his breath. He take tentative steps forward. ‘The penitent man will pass. The penitent man. Penitent. Penitent.’ He is shaking. The tension is huge. Then, suddenly, ‘KNEEL!’ He leaps forward and does an acrobatic roll. Circular saws slice through the air he was just in. Harrison Ford lives to fight another day.

Continue reading “Looking for the Holy Grail”

“I think,” I suggested hesitantly, “that that,” I gestured, “is Mont Blanc.” Me and my friend Ed had arrived in Chamonix on a train, having taken a break from The Pilgrimage in the Alps to visit the most iconic Alp of them all. We were sipping beers a few steps from the train station. The mountains loomed above us.

I was wrong. Depending on where you are in Chamonix, Mont Blanc does not always appear as the highest peak. I was seduced by a closer, smaller, rockier crop that due to an perspective error looked higher to me. In fact, Mont Blanc hunches on the horizon. It has a rounded, snow-capped peak that looks less threatening than those that surround it.

We looked at an information board which told us the names of the different peaks. There was Mont Blanc. Once I knew it, it did look more imposing. I could adjust for the perspective and it seemed very high indeed. I prepared myself for the moment of sublime ecstasy that Shelley’s famous poem describes. It did not arrive.

Continue reading “The Mountain as Altar: Shelleys and Mont Blanc”

I started writing this a pine forest near the small village on Ouhans in the Comté region of France. There was a storm in the afternoon with hail that burst into raindrops the second they hit you. Not for the first time, I had sought shelter in trees.

There is something about the forest that has always captured the imagination. It is both habitable and in-habitable. It is where the earliest humans, the hunter-gatherers, dwelt but ever since our turn towards cultivation we have felled the trees and required a different landscape.

Something about the forest, then, seems to reach into us and tap this primal instinct but simultaneously it is the location of the things which are frightening. Civilization is the opposite of the forest but art finds so much of its source in its density. The forest is wild.

Continue reading “To the Forest”

I have just finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Old Ways’. It is a captivating book that weaves brilliant insight about our environment into fantastic stories. It is about many things but a lot about how paths and the landscape form individual and collective imaginations. It is about how they evidence historic and pre-historic patterns of existence. ‘Paths are the habits of the landscape’, Macfarlane writes. Humans, just as rivers or glaciers, incrementally construct these pathways through repetition. It is a charming and beguiling way to read humanity’s interaction with its environment.

But there are countless instances of less gentle and gradual interactions with the land. For two days I have walked along a Roman road that cut into the horizon without a hint of natural meander. It paid no mind to gradient or terrain. It shot, martially, towards the vanishing point. It felt like treading along a two millennia old scar. The difference, I think, is in the contravention of natural pattern.

Continue reading “Is It The Land Which Will Remember?: Graves of the First World War”

For the first few days I have been walking through the edges of countries. Towards the end of my walk to Dover, exhausted, I noticed the land begin to drop away. The horizon became craggy and then sea.

Continue reading “Borders and their metaphors: traversing coastal boundaries”