Circumnavigating the Cornubian Batholith

 

The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey by Tim Hannigan (Head of Zeus, 2023)

Tim Hannigan's Route

This is a book which I’ve long been looking forward to reading, and, now that I have turned its last page and closed its covers, it’s a book which didn’t disappoint. In fact, it is a book which I’m tempted to begin re-reading immediately. While he was writing it, I watched Tim Hannigan posting updates on his progress as he penned The Granite Kingdom on Twitter. Tantalisingly scanning the list of chapter titles which he posted several months before it was published, I could tell that this book would touch upon an array of topics which have both intrigued and challenged me over the years: Bordering; Merlin’s Magic Land; Piskey-Led; Coasting; See Your Own Country First; Rebel Country; Looking for the Light. As the book-blurb on the inside of its dust jacket describes: “Few areas of Britain are as holidayed in, as rhapsodised over or as mythologised as Cornwall … it is a region densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how do they all intersect with the real Cornwall – its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity?”

 

 

As anyone who is familiar with Tim Hannigan’s The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys In Search Of A Genre (Hurst, 2021) will know, Hannigan is an academic who writes about travel writing with admirably accessible flair. Travelling in companionable prose with him is always a joy, and in this book particularly so, because here we are on his home turf. But writing a travelogue about one’s own homeland, as Hannigan acknowledges, is perhaps a more challenging task than writing as an outsider. Most travel writing has a kind of ‘through the looking glass’ quality to it. The whole point of the travel writer’s self-appointed task is to act as the outsider looking-in, providing an interpretation of ‘the other’ for readers who (it is tacitly assumed) are similarly placed at one remove from both the place and people described. But writing as an insider looking both within whilst also attempting to present an outward-looking personal interpretation for insiders and non-insiders alike could very easily become a tautological trap set in a hall of mirrors, yet Hannigan manages to remain aware of this inherent difficulty at all times. Hence, he acknowledges his own scruples, and his at times instinctively defensive reflex in seeking to assert his non-Englishness in certain situations, rather than trying to hide it or gloss over such matters. Particularly when he encounters other people during his travels through the county/duchy with whom his interactions prompt reflections upon Cornish nationalism and questions of native identity. ‘Cornwall is not England,’ is an often-encountered assertion here, and as such this gives the book its central underlying theme. What does it mean to be (or to claim to be) Cornish? – Where exactly does Cornwall begin and England end? – How closely can Cornish nationalism align to the allied spirit of fraternal ‘Celtic’ nativism which is found in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and even Brittany as a region with its own language which has died out and is now being revived, along with all the attendant trappings of the recently invented St Piran flag, Cornish tartan, and other emblems designed to highlight its sense of distance from generations of Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultural appropriation?

 

Gala Day, by Stanhope Forbes

It's an intriguing proposition when Hannigan reflects that, despite being born and raised in West Penwith, his ancestry has roots outside of Cornwall. As he states, “this shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter, but if I’m writing about Cornwall and Cornishness, I have to mention it.” – However, it does matter in the sense that Cornwall has long been a place out of kilter with the rest of the UK. Today, shamefully, it is one of the poorest regions not only in the country but also in western Europe too. As Simon Reeve has poignantly illustrated in a recent BBC television series focussing on the country’s farthest southwestern region, people living in Cornwall face huge adversity most obviously in employment and the housing market. Recent decades have seen a boom in property sales to wealthy outsiders who have bought holiday homes which have essentially hollowed out local communities, turning picturesque villages into affluently neglected ghost towns out of season. It’s little wonder that outsiders are resented by some locals. On the one hand, tourism is the industry which has supplanted the dwindling or extinct traditional industries of fishing and tin mining, which most people Romantically associate with Cornwall. In this respect, Cornwall has confounded itself in the fact that the very thing which now sustains Cornwall is also the thing which is slowly killing it. One can’t help wondering how such a detrimental trend might be reversed?

 

My family might well have been seen as part of this problem (hence one avenue of my interest in this book). My parents along with my aunt and uncle began holidaying each year in Cornwall long before I was born. My grandfather even cycled to Land’s End with his friends back in the early 1930s. But it was a small advert in Dalton’s Weekly in the early 1960s which began this collective pattern of family pilgrimage. For many years, before the recent boom in the annual invasion of “the bucket and spade brigade” (as one local Tory MP famously disparaged it in the late 1980s), throughout my childhood, we hired two sail lofts on the west pier of Newlyn harbour from the same local family, whom we came to know well through two generations. I even have very clear memories of watching Tim Hannigan’s dad’s distinctive fishing boat, the Heather Armorel, coming and going beneath our window. We were later given the opportunity to buy the sail lofts (as well as other cottages we subsequently stayed in), but my family always resisted doing so. We always thought that there was something very wrong in the idea of a property standing empty for the majority of the year simply so that we might own our own patch of paradise for those two spare weeks of the year when we could get down there.

 

The Heather Armorel entering Newlyn harbour

Consequently, we were always very aware of both the harmful effects and the negative perception of incomers. But on the other hand, it was a duality which we realised had to be reconciled in as positive and as equitable a manner as was possible. I spent so much time there each summer that Cornwall is as much a part of my identity as my native Middlesex. And there are parallels of self-perception here too in the erasure of an old Anglo-Saxon County which still actively seeks to assert its identity several decades after its County Council was dissolved and it was subsumed into the homogenising boroughs of northwest London. Questions of identity do matter, and perhaps ironically, we later came to learn that we do in fact have Cornish ancestry – with forbears hailing from the Cornish village of Menheniot – so perhaps we aren’t the invasive interlopers we always feared we were. Every summer, I used to play in and around Newlyn harbour with the local kids, we even visited out of season at Christmas too, and several generations of my family have their ashes scattered on a particular cliff along that rugged coastline of West Penwith which forms Hannigan’s personal ‘Granite Kingdom.’ The salt sea air, the scent of gorse, and the sun-baked lichen of those granite-cleft coastal paths, along with the less clement weather of squalls and drizzling thick fog, are as much a part of me as all the other places which have come to feel like home throughout the course of my life. Cornwall remains a place for me to return to whenever I need to recharge my physical and emotional batteries, a testament to how we ground ourselves and all that makes us who we are in an acute sense of place. As such, there is a lot which I can relate to in this book.

 

The West Cornwall Experience (c.1980s)

There is much to like and much to be learnt from the pages of The Granite Kingdom. Hannigan expertly weaves into his long walk a lot of careful research and insightful analysis, reflecting upon both familiar and perhaps less well-known tales of local folklore, from King Arthur to Jan Tregagle; the standard tourist-titillating tales of smugglers, wreckers, and pirates; as well as the observations made by Hannigan’s literary predecessors, in works by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, D.H. Lawrence, and Daphne du Maurier. He also looks at the so-called ‘artist colonies’ which flourished in Newlyn and Lamorna, and which continue to characterise St Ives (for better or worse) to this day, as well as the ‘Rick Stein phenomenon’ that appears to define a lingering air of unrealised expectancy in Padstow – something which Hannigan as a former chef in the kitchens of Cornwall’s tourist high season can comment upon with firsthand knowledge and experience. He also reminisces and riffs upon the ‘anthropological’ intrigue which he felt the tourist brochures and TV adverts of the 1980s conjured in his mind as a child whose grandparents ran a guesthouse in Penzance – with its elastically-stretched parallels between the Cornish and Italian Rivieras! – representing the curious exoticisation of what was for him especially just the everyday reality of life lived in his home county. And all of this is deftly told with both eloquent erudition and good humour.

 

Essentially, what The Granite Kingdom demonstrates is how all locales are shaped both by insiders and outsiders alike. There’s no stopping the waves of change which sweep in and out of the eras like tides which shape and define the landscapes we perceive to be our own homelands, especially in the British Isles. In walking a meanderingly meditative (and many a pasty fuelled) route through Cornwall, from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home of Morvah, Hannigan guides us through his own unique view of, and engagement with the history, folklore, and geology, as well as the physical and cultural topography of a Cornwall which as a writer he aims to reconcile within himself as much as for the reader who accompanies him on what is a very personal journey. One reviewer has very astutely and accurately described this multi-facetted, gem-like book as “an inland journey, both introspective and expansive.” – It’s often said that the point of travelling is best realised in homecoming; hence, if this book represents a new direction in an erstwhile familiar genre of travel writing, I think the kind of homeward route which Hannigan sets out to explore in The Granite Kingdom should be a welcome one for others to take and emulate. 

On The Cliff, by Eleanor Hughes

Study of a Fisherwoman, by Stanhope Forbes

I would like to thank Tim Hannigan and Jade Gwilliam at Head of Zeus Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of The Granite Kingdom.

~

Also on 'Waymarks'

From Coast to Carn Euny

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

What is Place?

Between the Tides, by Walter Langley

The Shoal Fisher, Newlyn (Penlee House Gallery & Museum)

Abney Park, Stoke Newington - A 'Memento Mori'

 

Clissold Park

Yesterday I took a break from my academic writing projects, and, making the most of the wonderfully clement weather, I hopped on the Number 73 bus, heading to Stoke Newington. I lived in ‘Stokey’ for five years from 1997, and I think this was my first visit back there since at least 2004. All-in-all, it really was a perfect day. I spent a nostalgic afternoon wandering around Clissold Park, where I used to like sitting on one of the benches by the ponds, reading in the early summer evenings after work. I was glad to see the Public Library is still there, but most of the shops and restaurants along Church Street have changed since my day; except for one or two, like Church Street Bookshop, Rasa, The Blue Legume, and, happily, the wonderful old pubs.

 

A Perfect Day - Stoke Newington - 1998

Stoke Newington seemed a lot busier than I generally recalled it, although this was probably due to the wonderful weather. A not too crisp, cold clear blue sky made it feel a lot like Spring had truly begun at last. I noticed crops of crocuses and snowdrops were out in many places, adding a welcome dash of colour beneath the still bare branches overhead. Claustrophobically shying away from the slow foot-shuffling crowds, I ducked into Abney Park Cemetery, and proceeded to get happily lost in the verdant woodland, drinking in that dank fecundity of the air with the ground softly springy underfoot. There seems to be a lot of restoration work going on around the entrances on both Church Street and the High Street, plus the long derelict, pigeon-haunted chapel in the centre of the cemetery appears to be in the process of being exhumed from years of ruin and neglect.

 

Church Street, Public Library

After emerging from the pleasant quiet of this labyrinthine Gothic woodland, I wandered up Cazenove Road to Springfield Park, with its wonderfully dizzying vista looking down to the River Lea where it meanders lazily alongside Walthamstow Marshes. Crossing the bridge to Springfield Marina, I found multitudes of people once more. All of them, out for a stroll like me. Ambling along the gravel track, passing under the ‘Avro Arches’, heading past flowering hawthorn bushes towards the next footbridge where I crossed and doubled-back along the opposite shore. Passing the many-patroned Anchor and Hope pub, then climbing back up the steeply raked hill to the pond at the top of Springfield Park once again, before making my way back down to Stoke Newington. Here I idly wandered around some more. Retracing my former well-trodden and much familiar routes through the backstreets, passing the house where Joseph Conrad once lived on Dynevor Road when he was lodging in London between ships, and where it is said he later took inspiration for the characters of the Verloc’s in his novel, The Secret Agent (1907), from his landlord and landlady.

 

High Street

Back on the High Street, I was taken aback to see the road had been closed off completely. It was filled with a monstrously huge structure made from scaffolding. I later found out that back in January part of one of the old Victorian terraces of shops had collapsed into the street. Thankfully, no one was hurt at the time, but everyone living and working there has since had to be rehoused, or have had their businesses suspended, while Hackney Council attempts to shore up the building. I used to live on the High Street, just next to the Police Station – opposite the derelict Vogue Continental Cinema, and so I knew and was known by several of the shopkeepers; but here again, most of the shops and restaurants from my day have long since disappeared, as has the building in which I used to live. Looking into the whitewashed window of the launderette, where I often spent my Saturday mornings, I read a notice pinned to the door announcing its final closure in June 2022, thanking its many customers over the years. It had outlasted my patronage by twenty years. I used to love its smell of soap powder and warm-linted tumble dryers. The lady who used to run it had a comfortingly warm smile too. There was a friendly camaraderie among the many familiar faces who called the High Street home back then. I remember one time, after a power cut one evening, an old boy who came into the little supermarket next to the Methodist Church had everyone in stitches; telling everyone how he had been sitting on the toilet when the lights went out, and how for the best part of an hour he’d had to sit there with his “arse getting cold without even a cigarette lighter” to help him pass the time in reading a newspaper until the lights eventually came back on!

 

The Old Police Station

Looking back, those five years seemed to be filled with many magical memories such as the ones which were now coming flooding back to me. Wandering around those streets, it was a wonderfully nostalgic way to wile away an afternoon. But my connection to this place goes deeper than my five years living above a shop on the High Street. More than a hundred years ago, many of my forbears on both sides of my family lived in Stoke Newington and Green Lanes too. One of my great grandfathers worked for the Metropolitan Water Board, and my great grandmother died while they were living in Stoke Newington. I was reminded of this whilst ambling around Abney Park Cemetery. I’ve not been able to find out where she was buried, and I have always wondered if she might have a grave somewhere hereabouts. Abney Park is crammed with gravestones, each one representing the memories of numerous lives lived only to be forgotten. Reclaimed by the greenery in the sacred grove of one of London’s “magnificent seven” Victorian cemeteries. I’d often got lost in here back in the days when I called Stoke Newington home, and today was no different. Just when I realised I’d lost my bearings, my eye was caught by a name on one of the tombstones nearby. It wasn’t the name of my great grandmother, but it was a name which was familiar to me. No longer a common name today, it was shared by an old lady whom I’d known when I was young. We used to be bellringers together at the church back in the part of northwest London where I grew up. As I read the inscription on this headstone, I realised that the following day – today (20 February 2023) – would be the centenary of the death of the woman laid to rest here.

 

Abney Park Chapel

There are many famous people buried in Abney Park, but there are many more besides who were ordinary folk much like you and me; known only to those who knew and loved them in their day. Eleanor Rigby-like, I wondered who was this particular woman? – There was no indication of how old she was when she died, nor if she and her husband had any children, though it did record the fact that he survived her by several decades and was eventually buried with her at the age of 72. ‘Reunited’ as his inscription said. There was something about the name, the style of the leaded-lettering, and the serendipity of my happening upon her grave just one day short of a century since she’d died. I wondered if anyone might come and visit them both tomorrow, but the grave didn’t look like it had been tended in a very long time. And so, thinking about this – and about my own great grandmother who had died locally – whilst I wandered around Stoke Newington, reevoking memories of my own times gone-by living just a few streets away, I later penned a poem to this lady whom I did not know as small a centennial remembrance.

 

MEMENTO MORI

 

Her name in elegant script read – Cissie,

‘Dearly Belov’d’ of husband’s memory;

She died more than thirty years before he.

Laid to rest in Abney’s cemetery,

Where I did come upon her grave by chance.

My eye happened to catch her name askance,

Her headstone hugged on one side by a tree;

On the other, a tendril of ivy

Clung to the green-shaded slab; one among

All the many whose names are now unsung.

All except for William’s dearest one,

Whom, here today, happily I did see,

Close to the hundredth anniversary

Of her death: tomorrow as it will be.

Time’s passing, a century less one day,

This headstone assures tomorrow Cissie

Will be remembered now at least by me.

In elegant script, her memorial

Merging with Abney’s green arboreal;

‘Ici Repose’ since nineteen twenty-three,

I write this verse in remembrance of one

Who lived, was loved, and yet is now long gone:

Sadly missed, – Cecily Mary Picton,

A name unknown, and yet unforgotten.

Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington – 19^th February 2023.

 

Abney Park Cemetery

You can view a photo of Cissie’s headstone taken in 2007 here on Flickr.

And you can listen to a fascinating talk about the forgotten poets who are buried in Abney Park Cemetery here on Abney Park’s equally fascinating website.

 

Likewise, there’s a great video diary following John Rogers on one of his walks around several of the areas I’ve mentioned above, which you can watch on his YouTube Channel here. I’m a big fan of John’s rural and urban ‘psychogeographical’ videos, I highly recommend them.

Amir Dotan's Stoke Newington History Website, also highly recommended.

 

 

High Street Entrance to Abney Park Cemetery

 

Also on ‘Waymarks’:

Family Trees – Retracing My East End Roots

 

“Here Lies One Whose Name is Writ in Water”

 

Visiting Joseph Conrad’s Grave – Canterbury

 

Albion Road

A Distant View of Harrow

 

Again I behold where for hours I have ponder’d,

As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay;

Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wander’d,

To catch the last gleam of the sun’s setting ray.

 

 

Lord Byron and I have something in common. We both went to school on "the Hill." That is, Harrow-on the-Hill. Except he went to the School, whereas I went to a small Sixth Form College located a little further down the road in the grounds of an old Dominican Convent. But, like Byron before me, the Hill remains “a favourite spot” – associated in my mind with a time of very happy friendships. That time was some 30 years ago now, but those friendships have lasted through the decades, and only just this summer, we managed to meet up once again on the Hill for a reunion at The Castle pub on West Street.

 

High Street, Harrow-on-the-Hill, c.1950s

The Hill is one of those places which time never seems to change or alter. It looks much the same today as it did when I was at Sixth Form in the early 1990s, just the same as it does in old black and white photos from the early Twentieth Century, and the same as it appears in even earlier drawings and engravings dating back to Byron’s day. Harrow-on-the-Hill stands like a verdant island oasis rising out of the surrounding sea of suburbia on the edge of London, made all the more distinctive by the tall church spire which reaches out of the green swathe of trees which seem to engulf the Hill. Travelling north on either of the mainline railways departing from Euston or Kings Cross-St. Pancras, Harrow-on-the-Hill can be seen as clearly as if it were a beacon. Long after I’d moved away from Harrow, whenever I travelled on these routes out of London, I’d always make sure I sat on the left-hand side of the train carriage to ensure I saw that familiar view of my old hometown passing by in the far distance.

 

High Street, Harrow-on-the-Hill, 2021

From the top of the Hill, looking out in the other direction, it is possible to get some wonderful views of London to the southeast – I remember a window on one of the staircases in my college building which framed a lovely view of faraway London, with the Telecom Tower as the most recognisable landmark at that time. From ‘The Viewpoint’ on the crest of the Hill in St. Mary’s Churchyard, looking west, there’s an open view all the way to Windsor somewhere on the broad horizon. A brass plaque in the form of a topographical map is set on the top of a kind of look-out-point built of stone on which you can stand and strain your eyes as you try to make-out Windsor Castle – something which I have never managed to do (and, to be honest, I have no idea if it is actually possible).

 

The Viewpoint, however, is far more famous for a sight you’ll see if you turn your back on Windsor and look towards the Church itself. Here you will notice a low table-type tomb built of brick, supporting a cracked stone slab, and protected by an ornate iron cage. This is the Peachey Tomb. Although it is also more popularly known as ‘Byron’s Tomb.’ But this name is somewhat misleading, for it is not his tomb in the sense that this is the grave where he lies buried. Rather, it is ‘Byron’s tomb’ in the sense that this is the spot where the poet says he used to enjoy idling the hours away during his schooldays in the early 1800s. This is the place where he liked to watch the sunset while lying on top of this tomb beneath an elm tree. Indeed, it is a scene which he sketches out in two poems that featured in his first published book of poetry, Hours of Idleness (1807). These were poems which he wrote when he was 18 and 19 years old, around the same age I was when attending Sixth Form. In one of the poems, he imagines, at the end of his life, his body being buried in a humble grave here in Harrow churchyard.

 

Oft have I thought, ’twould soothe my dying hour,—

If aught may soothe, when Life resigns her power,—

To know some humbler grave, some narrow cell,

Would hide my bosom where it lov’d to dwell;

With this fond dream, methinks ’twere sweet to die—

And here it linger’d, here my heart might lie;

Here might I sleep where all my hopes arose,

Scene of my youth, and couch of my repose;

For ever stretch’d beneath this mantling shade,

 

The opening lines from this poem, written by Bryon while sitting atop the tomb – as the poem’s title attests – were later carved in marble and set with lead-lettering as a memorial to Byron which stands at the foot of the Peachey Tomb. The stone was placed there in 1905 by the son of Sir George Sinclair Bart, a schoolfellow of Byron’s, in memory of his father and the poet’s friendship. I am not sure when the iron cage was placed over the tomb, but, so the local story goes, this cage needed to be installed because the spot became a place of pilgrimage for overly ardent Byron fans during the heady days of “Byronmania,” because the tomb was suffering from people emulating the poet by clambering onto it and lolling about on the top, or even more destructively deliberately chipping off pieces to take away as mementoes.

 

My friends and I used to come to this ‘favourite spot’ quite a lot. We’d sit on the benches here during college breaktimes, as well as passing by when en route at the end of the college day, heading back down to Harrow town centre, where we’d then kill time wandering around the shops before reluctantly parting and making our separate ways home. And a couple of years before I went to Sixth Form, I stayed for a weekend in the Vicarage of St. Mary’s Church during the religious studies prior to my Confirmation. The room I stayed in had a window which looked out over the same view as that seen from the Viewpoint, just a short stone’s throw from the Peachey Tomb itself. All of which meant the Hill was a place I came to know intimately during my teenage years, much as Byron must have done.

 

Byron's name, Harrow School

There are other traces of Byron too, which can still be found lingering about the Hill. Perhaps the most direct association is the carving of his name into the wooden panelling of the old School Room. This particular piece of graffiti looks a lot neater than the rendering of his name which is scratched into a stone pillar in the dungeon of the Chateau de Chillon on the Swiss shores of Lake Leman, which is said to have been inscribed by the poet himself while he was wandering through Europe during his years of self-imposed exile, when his scandalous love life compelled him to leave England.

 

Thomas Phillips, George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron (1788–­1824) in Albanian Dress, 1834

A more poignant monument linking Byron to Harrow Churchyard, however, is the one located low to the ground beside the door of St. Mary’s South Porch. This is a small plaque commemorating Byron’s daughter, Allegra. She was born ten years after Byron wrote his poem beneath the elm tree here in the same churchyard, envisaging his own internment there some day. Instead, it was his young daughter with Claire Clairmont who was laid to rest here in 1822 in a very humble grave, so humble in fact that only its rough location – somewhere near the porch door – is known. Allegra’s grave remained unmarked until the Byron Society erected this plaque in 1980. At the time of her burial, Allegra was denied a memorial, allegedly due to the fact she had been born illegitimate, but the real reason was perhaps much more likely due to the Church Authority’s aversion to Byron’s infamous immorality. Hence, he knew they would never permit his body to be laid to rest there when the time eventually came.

 

Allegra was just five years old when she died, and although Byron had sent for her – her mother mistakenly believing Allegra would have better prospects if she was raised by her famous father – he neglected his daughter severely. First passing responsibility for her care onto his friends, who were at best indifferent to her, and then subsequently sending her off to a series of convents in remote parts of Italy, where he wouldn’t have to see or think about her. It’s thought she died from typhus or malaria. Her unexpected death shook her father to the core apparently. Guilt and grief became transmuted. He had her small body sent back to England, where he paid lavishly for her little coffin to be conveyed in a fancy horse-drawn hearse from the London docks to Harrow. Where Allegra was buried in this ‘favourite spot’ of his own youth, meaning that in some sense a part of him does lie here in Harrow churchyard. It’s a sad story. But perhaps Allegra’s death embodies the innocence, both hers and her father’s own, which Byron had so profligately cast aside: “Deplor’d by those in early days allied, / And unremember’d by the world beside.”

 

St. Mary's, Harrow-on-the-Hill, 1921

From The Viewpoint, St. Mary’s Churchyard continues down the slope of the Hill. Filled with tall and imposing Gothic Victorian headstones, there are many interesting graves and memorials to be found hidden away here. It is a quiet and tranquil haven for birds and wildlife. Wandering beneath the tall trees this summer, though, I was struck by how unkempt and uncared for much of the churchyard seems nowadays. A lot of the graves appear to have succumbed to the depredations of time and the elements in the 30 years or so since my college days, when I used to pass through the old place more regularly. At long last, outrun by time it seems, the names of many of those who lived here long ago, and who have long since been laid to rest here on the Hill, are no longer remembered by those ‘dearly beloved’ inscriptions which have slowly eroded from their moss covered and ivy-swathed memorials. It seems strange to think how a poet’s words and a poet’s fame can remain as something more permanent than words and names which were intended to endure, wrought in stone, forever. I suppose, as the Romantic poets knew and lamented only too well, all things must pass in time. Though they change, places persist, while memories fade.

 

It was during my time at Sixth Form College, here on the Hill, while studying for English A-Level, that I first read the Romantic poets. We studied John Keats, but I remember reading Byron too. I can still recite Byron’s She Walks In Beauty by heart even today. It is definitely one of my favourite poems. Studying the Romantics certainly helped to instil a love of literature which in later years lead me on to delight in the wicked humour of Byron’s epic, Don Juan. One of the things I most enjoyed at Sixth Form was being a member of the creative writing club, which wasn’t quite Dead Poet’s Society, but something rather like it given the small size of the college and its beautiful grounds. I genuinely enjoyed Sixth Form, despite the fact that I found A-Levels pretty hard-going – tougher in fact than my subsequent studies at university, both as an undergraduate and as a postgrad. I suppose it was a combination of time and place, but most especially people – my friends and fellow students were what made my two years at Sixth Form College so special. Hence, the same as Byron, I feel a deep and abiding affection for the Hill because of the warmth derived from the memories I retain of it.

 

Beyond the graveyard of St. Mary’s Church, there is a wide expanse of green grass which hasn’t changed at all. This green space, where as kids we used to go tobogganing in winter, is crossed by a narrow path which starts at the foot of the Hill beside St. Anselm’s Primary School (named after the beatified priest who first consecrated St. Mary’s Church in 1094). The path runs across the side of the Hill to West Street. In the mornings I often used to walk this path to college from the bus station in Harrow on the days when I didn’t cycle to Sixth Form. It was always a nice way to start the day, getting a breath of fresh air while listening to the wind soughing through the branches of the tall trees surrounding the church, whatever the season and whatever the weather. But it was even nicer to walk this path once again on a sunny afternoon this summer. A true homecoming, long awaited. Making my way up to The Castle once more, to meet with my old college friends, and to feel all those years simply melt away.

 

Oh! as I trace again thy winding hill,

Mine eyes admire, my heart adores thee still,

Thou drooping Elm! beneath whose boughs I lay,

And frequent mus’d the twilight hours away;

Where, as they once were wont, my limbs recline,

But, ah! without the thoughts which then were mine:

How do thy branches, moaning to the blast,

Invite the bosom to recall the past,

And seem to whisper, as they gently swell,

“Take, while thou canst, a lingering, last farewell!”

 

 

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

The Visitor of Chillon

“Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ In Water”

Byron's Elm & Church Terrace, Harrow - c.1910

Hotel Quarantine

 

'Welcome to the Hotel Quarantine' - A Pilgrimage during a Pandemic

Life under “Lockdown” – A London to Tokyo, via Yokohama Diary #8

 

A global pandemic is not the most ideal time to emigrate. But life goes on. By increments we are all, hopefully, progressing inch by inch closer to a new normality. After the last year and a half, I couldn’t imagine life becoming any more dystopian. Surreal memories of finding myself to be the only pedestrian walking through a deserted Canary Wharf, the heart of London’s financial district eerily devoid of traffic, in the middle of the day in the middle of the working week was weird enough, invoking recollections of disaster movies, such as 28 Days Later and I am Legend.

 

Checking in for an international flight, just a few weeks ago, in a near empty Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport comes perhaps a close second. Everyone, at all points of the process, strangely anonymised, wearing face masks. Everyone ritually disinfecting hands as they pass by a succession of sentinel hand-sanitizer posts, as though genuflecting at the Stations of the Cross, embarking on some bizarre Sci-Fi-like modern pilgrimage – perhaps fleeing from (or towards?) Armageddon. Normal questions about hazardous articles in luggage now taking second place to questions about the state of your health and requests to see the sheafs of certification concerning Covid-19 tests and other medical declarations, as required by the Governments at your intended destination.

The weeks leading up to my departure were a recurring nightmare of fears: fears that I might have overlooked a crucial piece of necessary bureaucracy; fears that I might not get the certificate attesting to my double-jabbed vaccination status in time; fears that I might not make it to my “72 hours prior to travel” Covid-19 test because, of all the weekends on which I’d chosen to fly – inevitably – this one was one of those weirdly normalised London weekends when the entire Piccadilly Line was closed for never-ending engineering works; fears that I might get a positive test result, thus voiding all my plans and intentions entirely, not to mention the vast expenditure of it all. By comparison, the formalities of actually getting a visa and the attendant documentation required for the granting of resident status in Japan when the Embassy finally reopened back in May seemed a doddle. Hence, the moment I placed my boarding pass on the scanner and the security gates magically parted seemed unreal in the extreme.

Stopover in Anchorage, Alaska - 2004

Fortunately for me, my previous career, having spent the last 20+ years ferrying international touring exhibitions around the world for the British Museum, was ample preparation for all of this oddness. I’ve spent a large proportion of my time navigating my way through unusual situations in airports across four different continents. I’ve also spent many hours waiting in such places, having wrangled with many different visa systems and the associated processes which enable an air traveller to get from A to B with the correct permissions, stamps, finger prints, facial scans, metal detector checks, airway bills, customs paperwork, and the like. The key to the whole scenario is to keep a nimble eye on what is happening and being prepared to act quickly at the required moment should anything appear to be in danger of going awry; that, along with a hefty portion of patience, knowing that more often than not these long-haul journeys will inevitably be punctuated by interminable stretches of waiting, the long hours in which you are powerlessly held in thrall to the system which you are simply passing through.

 

Sitting in the Departures Hall, I couldn’t help reflecting on many of the strangest journeys I’ve made, such as: circumnavigating the globe from London to Tokyo to London, via Anchorage Alaska; or, crossing the equator for the first time after a 24-hour stopover in Hong Kong on the eve of the first umbrella protest. I’ve done some decidedly long journeys too. I once flew from London to Beijing, where I stayed less than 24 hours, before flying back to London, only to fly from London to Seoul just a day or two later. But I think my longest single journey was flying from Tokyo to Mexico City, via Krasnoyarsk, Frankfurt, and Chicago (a strange scenario which means I have entry stamps in my passport for both Chicago and Mexico City issued on the same day).

 

En Route : LHR >> HKG >> SYD >> MEL - 2014

Flying over the Ukraine in a cargo plane the day before flight MH17 was blown from the sky was a sobering experience (TV News reports the following day, speculating that it had “probably been a mistake shooting down an airliner” and that “they were more likely aiming to shoot down a cargo plane instead”, seemed to overlook the crucial fact that cargo planes have people on board too!). I was once on a flight which was struck by lightning as we were crossing the English Channel. I saw a white flash swiftly pass through the cabin like an ethereal ghost hurrying to the rear of the plane (I did briefly wonder at the time, if, like the Highlander, this might have made me immortal?).

 

On several cargo flights I was lucky enough to sit in the cockpit with the pilots during take-off and landings in different airports, such as: Mexico City, Chicago, Krasnoyarsk, and Taipei. One of the best was Hong Kong. Watching as we weaved between clumps of clouds which were flickering with summer lightning like incandescent candyfloss. With Victoria Harbour passing by so close below, it felt like if I reached out I’d be able to touch the tall buildings, all of them lit up brightly, sparkling in the dark warmth of the night.

Loading Cargo at Incheon, South Korea, 2011

I’ve also spent many an hour sitting in airports as they have slowly emptied of passengers with all the shops closing down for the night. It’s quite an eerie and sometimes unnerving experience. You hope that your contacts won’t forget you, or that when the time comes you won’t miss meeting your aircrew. There was one occasion in Luxembourg when we met a pilot and his co-pilot, who were both happy to find they’d have some company on their flight. It was only after we’d been chatting for about ten minutes that we discovered they and we were flying to different destinations entirely – thus we very narrowly avoided following the wrong aircrew onto the wrong flight! – If this had happened, once on-board, I’m sure the aircrew would have checked their paperwork more closely and realised we weren’t meant to fly with them before we got underway; but the delay this unintended misdirection would have caused would probably have meant we’d have missed our intended flight because the aircrews of cargo planes don’t tend to hang around for late running passengers – as I found out once, just in the nick of time, when clambering up the ladder to board a cargo plane which was just about to close its door and get underway!

 

In some ways though, it’s a real joy to pass through a near empty airport. The place feels less fraught. There’s less of that nervous jockeying to get a spot on the shuttle train between the terminals. Less stressing over squeezing into the lifts crammed with unwieldy baggage trolleys. There’s more time to step back and assess, to realise that you are heading in the right (or wrong!) direction. And the queues for the loos are mercifully shorter or non-existent. The shop staff in the Duty Free shops, if they are still open, look decidedly bored. My flight to Japan had been delayed by four hours which meant we were either the last or last-but-one passenger flight to depart Heathrow T5 that night. The passengers on my plane were all well-spaced out across the rows of seating, as 'socially distanced' as the cramped Economy Class cabin would permit. First and Business Class were both almost entirely empty. Everyone wore face masks throughout the duration of the flight, only taking them off briefly to eat.

 

I’d read about the exacting processes to be expected on arrival in Japan, and this information turned out to be accurate. It was a long gauntlet which needed to be run as each part of every traveller’s paperwork was checked thoroughly and then double-checked again at desk after desk. Unlike at Heathrow where the Covid-19 test was a nasal swab which made my eyes water involuntarily, here at Haneda we had to spit into a test tube – a process which feels a lot less invasive and a lot less uncomfortable, but each passenger was ushered into a small booth in which to spit more discreetly. The tedious paperwork processes actually alleviated some of the long wait for this test to be processed, but there were still long interminable stretches of waiting too. On the whole the few children who were travelling with their parents were remarkably well behaved; only a few whined quietly at their parent’s elbows due to a very forgivable combination of boredom and extreme tiredness.

 

Once our test results were returned (happily mine was still negative) we were led through to Immigration, which rather comfortingly was dealt with far more informally than usual. Stewards remained close at hand throughout to direct us travellers at all points with friendly deferential but decisively firm instructions, marching us back and forth along a beguiling maze of ribbon-barriered corridors. Once all my paperwork was at last in order and with my residence permit now reassuringly in hand, I passed through the last of all these checks where a Customs officer looked at my passport and then, returning it, looked up over his facemask and said warmly “Okaeri nasai” (Welcome home) instead of the usual “Yokoso Nihon” (Welcome to Japan).

 

But I wasn’t home just yet. My fellow passengers and I were then marshalled down to a bus, where we were in for another long wait. Eventually though, the bus moved off into the night. Winding through the near empty streets it took us to a hotel in Yokohama. Again, here in the lobby, another long process of form filling ensued and instructions were relayed and affirmed. Once again, the staff were faultlessly polite and friendly throughout. I was issued with a thermometer and a boxed meal. I was then led to my room on the 28^th floor, where at 3am – a full seven hours after landing, and almost 24 hours total in transit – I was able to collapse into bed with no further obligations until I awoke later that morning.

 

For the next 6 days I was required to live in this small hotel room like a monk in his cell. Isolated, no going out whatsoever. A meal box (Obento) delivered three times a day: for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With a bottle of water each time (no alcohol was allowed). My daily rituals required taking and reporting my body temperature to reception each morning, and answering the random spot checks on my location demanded by the Japan Government’s panopticon-like mobile phone App, which also wanted to know how I was feeling each day. My own phone was too old to support the App, so I had to rent a rather expensive one expressly for this purpose from the Government, to be returned on the first day of my eventual release from quarantine. I didn’t regret the expense too much though, because the staff very helpfully set the whole thing up for me (which, watching them, I feared would have been well beyond my Luddite-like capabilities had it been left solely up to me), and also because, unlike for anyone arriving in the UK, here in Japan the cost of bed and board in the quarantine hotel was borne entirely by the Japanese Government (Arigatou, Nihon).

 

Akarenga Soko & the Hikawa Maru, Yokohama

The hotel was much more comfortable than I had been expecting. Plus, opening the curtains when I woke up later that morning, I found I had a wonderful view of the seafront at Yokohama, overlooking the landmarks of Akarenga Sōko, the red brick warehouses built by Western traders in the nineteenth century, plus the old NYK Hikawa maru ocean liner. I’d walked along that promenade many times before with friends and family, but for now all I could do was watch it from my solitary confinement in my hermetically sealed room. I had six days to seek spiritual satori, and to sleep off my jetlag. Keeping myself busy with my PhD studies, messaging my family and friends, meditating upon the transience of the boats coming and going from my window’s high vantage.

 

NYK Hikawa Maru - Yokohama

I joked via social media with my former colleagues at the BM who asked how I was coping with life under quarantine, saying that all of my life for the last twenty years – spending most of my time living for long periods in hotels – was the perfect preparation for this. It was in fact my moment. As if, all my life, I’d been in training for exactly this – as though this was my own personal Olympics. A lot of people had asked me before I left the UK if I might get to see any of the Tokyo 2020 Games when I reached Japan, and I’d replied: ‘probably not.’ But from my hotel window I could see one of the venues, Yokohama Baseball Stadium, lit up at night with a sprinkling of spectators in the stands. At Haneda Airport too, I’d seen the Cuban and Moroccan Olympic teams arriving. The TV was wall-to-wall with seemingly non-stop coverage, exclusively focussed on the team of the host nation. There was absolutely no escaping the Olympic Games, just as I’d experienced previously in Britain in 2012, and in China in 2008.

 

Yokohama Baseball Stadium - 'Tokyo 2020' Olympic Games

The monotony of life in my hotel room wasn’t too bad though. After the prolonged periods of living alone through the last two ‘lockdowns’ in London, long periods of solitary study were now a routine normality for me. Reading books and articles, updating my bibliography, or watching history documentaries (such as my perennial favourite, John Romer’s Testament) helped to pass the time. The view from the window was an unexpected pleasure too. I’d assumed I’d end up with some non-descript view of an office block wall or something similarly dull, but watching the maritime activity in the harbour as well as the sunrise each morning was wonderfully relaxing. Outside it was clearly baking hot during the daytime. The air con system kept me from roasting when my room caught the full blaze of the midday sun. But, by day five I was getting a little desperate for some fresh air and the opportunity to stretch my legs properly. The thing that surprised me the most though was the bento box meals – no two of them were ever the same! – They were delivered three times a day. And there was never any choice. You ate whatever you were given, and, even though I was asked what allergies I had on arrival, I was simply told not to eat those things if they appeared in the boxed meals(!).

 

Breakfast 'Obento'

Covid-19 tests were taken early in the morning on days three and six; once again, mercifully, they were the spitting into a test tube kind, the same as at the airport. ‘Holiday camp’-like tannoy announcements reminded you each meal time to wear your facemask and to be careful not to lock yourself out of your room when you opened your door to take in your bento box which had been hung silently on your door knob. It was an odd way too live, strangely Sci-Fi in many respects – but I still can’t decide if it was more like something out of the imagination of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, or Stanley Kubrick. It was a kind of ‘Silent Runnings’ meets ‘The Andromeda Strain’, I suppose – with visits on test days from a group of medical personnel swathed head to toe in anonymising PPE.

 

The result of my final test came via the hotel telephone just after lunch. I was still negative. I’d already readied my luggage in optimistic anticipation of this moment, and so I was out of the room an instant later, riding the lift down to the lobby. Handing back my thermometer, my luggage was stowed under the bus as I quickly climbed aboard. Ten minutes later the bus was rolling rapidly through the streets, heading back to the airport, crossing the suspension bridge over Yokohama harbour which I’d spent so much of the last few days wistfully viewing from the close confines of my tiny room in the quarantine hotel. My family met me at the airport – the first time I’d seen them in over a year and a half – a happy reunion full of hugs, grins and happy tears. We then drove home, as I was still not allowed to use the public transport system. Finally reaching home I still wasn’t free, I had 8 more days of quarantine ahead of me. Life in ‘lockdown’ once again, but this time on the other side of the globe in a city where the infection rate was rapidly rising. Mercifully for me, however, there was now more space for me to move around in, plus a balcony on which I could stand and at last breathe fresh air once again. And, of course, most important of all, I could now relax in the long-missed company of my nearest and dearest. Watching the sunset together behind the beautiful silhouette of sacred Mount Fuji.

 

Sunrise over Yokohama

Though I was now home at last, I was still under surveillance – required to report my state of health each morning and answer the random spot checks on my current location which either came in the form of push-notification ‘pings’ or actual phone calls. These phone calls were either AI operated video calls in which I had to stare into the camera with my background clearly visible while my phone’s silent mechanical eye recorded for 30 seconds. I’ve no idea if these visual recordings were checked by people or computers, but I waved politely cheerful from time-to-time just in case it was an actual living breathing human being who had to watch back half a minute’s worth of footage of me staring at them like a bug-eyed goldfish stuck in a glass bowl. The other kind of phone call came from an actual person, speaking either in Japanese or English, asking me where I was and if I was unwell. Nevertheless, these video calls were oddly ‘big brother’-like because I could see myself, but the screen I was talking to was completely black, so I could not see the caller. This always reminded me of the scene in both the old 1953 and more recent 2005 film versions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in which the Martian’s cobra-headed mechanical eye snakes around the basement of the building in search of hiding humans. Mercifully, these calls were always fairly quick, but it was the uncertainty of when they might call which became somewhat wearing if not quite so unnerving as a probing alien mechanical eye. Each day I’d receive several locator pings and an AI recorded phone call, and usually a human operator phone call as well. This meant the phone needed to sit by my side at all times during the day, though calls and pings rarely ever came much before 8:30am, or later than 6pm. Such dystopian surveillance seemed politely civilised in this respect, but I was very glad to get shot of the infernal device as soon as I could when the 15 days of quarantine were done.

 

The thin line of Mount Fuji traced on the haze of the horizon

On my first day of freedom, proving the old adage that ‘only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, I went for a stroll on the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo. “The mercury topped somewhere around 36°C”, as the over-dubbed TV News channels here like to say. But it was a real relief to stretch my legs at last. I noticed that everyone here in Tokyo is wearing their facemasks. This isn’t so unusual. You often see people on the trains here wearing them throughout the year. It’s long been the custom in Japan for those with a bit of a sniffle to wear them, mostly out of politeness more than anything else. So this wasn’t unusual, but what was different now was the fact that people were wearing them at all times, even whilst walking down empty streets. An entire metropolis anonymised. And, though there were still plenty of people out and about, there did seem to be fewer people commuting – but it would take a keen eye to spot the difference, because the trains were just as crowded as the pre-pandemic rush hour on the Tube in London. Tokyo might currently be under ‘a state of emergency’, but on the face of things, apart from wearing facemasks at all times, life in the city seems to be going on much as it always has. A less perceptible pandemic than in the UK perhaps?

 

I thought it only proper that the first place I visit should be the local Shinto shrine. To say ‘hello’ to the local Gods. Here though there were subtle indicators that all was not well with the world. The chōzuya, the place where you should ritually cleanse your hands and mouth when entering the shrine, was dry and without its attendant utensils. Instead, stood sentinel beside it was one of the now ubiquitous hand-sanitizer stands found at every point of entry and exit in our daily lives. Plus ringing the bell to attract the Gods’ attention when praying at the shrine was now no longer allowed. One just had to hope that the ritual three hand claps would suffice to attract their favourable hearing. While I was there a few other visitors came and went, throwing their coins, clapping their hands and saying a silent prayer each. I’m sure all of us each made the same request alongside whatever else we were hoping for divine assistance with – that request being, of course, an end to this interminable pandemic soon.

 

The Buddhist Temple next door was almost entirely deserted. I saw just one other person coming and then going; a young girl who evidently had gone to pick her younger sister up from the nearby kindergarten, both of them, hand-in-hand, returning home. It was nice to sit for a moment under the dappled light shed by the dense canopy of green maple leaves overhead. But it was really far too hot to linger long. The loud rhythmic noise of the cicadas rasping, rising fast and falling slow all around me. I couldn’t help reflecting how the pandemic and the periods of ‘lockdown’ and quarantine I’ve had to live through over the last year and a half has slowed life down a lot. Though these times have been punctuated by periods of almost frenetic activity, attempting to catch up with the world as it continues to turn. Life’s tempo is undoubtedly all out of kilter, but I hope we learn from these experiences of upheaval and uncertainty, so that when life does return back to some sort of normality we can improve upon the way we lived before – so that we can all live in a new world made fresh once again. A world hopefully with more balance, with the good things in life shared more equitably, and a greater emphasis on care and calmness.

 

I hope, too, that sooner rather than later, I can stop writing these pieces, because I really don’t want to write any more entries here in this seemingly never-ending ‘lockdown diary’ of mine. But, such is life, sadly – shikata ga nai, ne.

Also on 'Waymarks'

On Top of the World

First Crossing the Equator

Transporting Treasures

Behind the Scenes - 25 Years at the British Museum

'Lockdown' Diary