The peace I have arrived at, the peace that has arrived in me, that has ‘found’ me will not leave me for reasons of illness or misery.
Our origin is love. Our hearts are constituted out of pure love.
I came to this real understanding age 67, and I recognise this is peace that bypasses understanding.
Before I had awareness, love gave my conscious being form, much as a flame gives a candle purpose. I am now the guardian of my flame which I nourish and care for by the simple act of breathing!
Yes, all the time it feels fragile, the same way the feeling of ‘being in love’ is more delicate than any butterfly.
My experience of aliveness, though blissful, is constantly in a state of flux, connected to everything by vast rhythms and tides to places so far out of sight as to be unimaginable.
So when I try to define my life’s force in words, or dance, or music, it does not resist me, neither can it escape me, because it is me.
Oh! And it can sometimes turn towards me and light me with a smile of a beautiful person whose gaze I meet, and I am melted clean.
It may feel fragile, but fragile it is not! In everyday reality this peace I know in my heart and mind is as strong and as permanently present as gravity.
The peace is alive inside.
It is inextinguishable, simply because love is inextinguishable, and we are love.
One of the most valuable things about bicycle riding is that it gives masses of personal choice.
The range of choice is vast.
I can decide how carefully I oil, clean and maintain my bike. I can decide what clothing and additional gear to use for the road and weather conditions.
When to begin, 55 me, only me.
What most excites and occupies my attention, and hardly applies at all to everyday routine, is STAYING ALIVE.
When I am downed and I die playing a computer game, I regenerate and continue on carefree for as long as I like.
When out riding, I actively choose to live to ride another day.
Every metre of the way is the object of highly pleasurable, intense, tunnel vision concentration.
What is my wheel doing in relation to my chosen line of travel? What decisions do I need to make in various distance and time frames based on anticipatory riding? What are other highway users doing? More to the point, what are they likely to be doing up to and beyond normal expectations, which might affect what my bike and I are and will be doing?
My version of anticipatory riding imagines the scene of my own violent death every few metres. What I do right now involves my scanning all possible scenarios and strategies, from ordinary to extreme, to avoid getting snared in such a grisly disaster.
I will usually engage in this mental theatre of horrors before I saddle up. This is how I install and set up my personal life assurance policy for the trip ahead. Even if the weather is mild, I will wear something warm to help delay the onset of shock while lying in the road till help arrives.
Oh, and for life savers, I use my referee’s whistle dangling from my crash helmet. It clears traffic and pedestrians out of my path.
I remember to cast my Look Of Life. This vital head-turn reminds the driver behind that a person is in their controlled area.
And as I go, I paint on my face an expression that reads, “Heavily Armoured No Compromise”.
Look out for signs of the return of Springtime in your mind!
I ask myself, “What are my own signs of Spring?”
In my case, on the threshold of seven and seventy, I see a different way to view my crumbling. At this period, when I need to pay more attention to my body signalling it needs my help, and sometimes on a daily basis, I do find my old body is asking for favours and easements. These stop signs show me as always that everything is in a state of change.
These days, I have a clear choice. More choices open up to me, when I am viewing my thoughts the way I see clouds float by reflected in a river. Fewer choices are within reach, when I forget to remember emotional clouds aren’t made of concrete!
Do I fret and become impatient?
Fretting and impatience are markers of futile attention to detail in the past or the future. The time I take out to indulge in anxious thoughts or to stamp my foot in impatience, is time wasted. Not only is time-wasting a serious misuse of what I have, I don’t have nearly as much of it left to fritter away!
Or do I welcome these claims on my time?
Do I treat them as new unlived lessons to learn, and new prompts to teach me and guide me towards taking more interested and compassionate care of myself? At random intervals, my body returns unexpected sensations of pain. It signals that it’s no longer instantly and uncomplainingly able to obey my brain’s motor impulses.
All this newness I can take as a hark back to the earlier, far more surprising, and deeply delicious newness which enveloped me like a shining cloud back in the Year of my Life 2013. That is what I prefer to choose to be reminded of.
How many is one? Or say it like this, what’s the colour of one?
We all are wholly broken entities, we walk from here to there asking to be whole, wanting to construct wellness from our constituent undone parts, disfunctional, darkly dirty and lost like smoke looking for the fire of its origins.
The only reason we know we are entities is because we began as Ones. Our identity became conscious in a blaze of sound, colour, scent and touch at birth.
We were united with the sensory input with which we were saturated in such a way that we were at first unable to make any distinction between us and the world of senses we were sensing.
Later on came intimations of duality. We got the idea, again through first hand experience,
“I am not what that is”.
“I am I and that is not I. It is Other”.
Our oneness is conscious of experience as suffering or joy – hunger or satiety. By such terms, our oneness is all about polarities of intensity.
As adults, we are wracked by our acquired trauma or injury. We are damaged by our inability to make sense of episodes of damage sustained we cannot or wish not to recall.
Our longing for peace, love and happiness relates to our selves as newborn bundles of love. That was when we were blissfully undamaged, unaware of agencies capable of our damage or destruction.
As adults we spend time and devote our energy to achieving that experience of blissful oneness that was ours at the time of our birth.
In truth, we are all still purest innocent oneness. It is that so much has happened in the years since birth, we have stopped reminding ourselves of our innate purity.
Our notions of duality and the way we so readily devote much attention to our ability, albeit limited, to grasp at, acquire or alter our perception of the world of Other, these serve to remove our attention from the intense heat of welcome, magic and mystery to be found in our molten core – our innate oneness.
If we keep hold of the image we still continue as whole and clear, pure and clean as the day we were born, we will have hope and faith, those fabulous flammable fuels which will power us on our common goal, the journey back to wholeness, Oneness.
We can bring back to our heart and mind the Oneness of our origin, our common origin which indivisibly composed us from birth. For some it is easy. For most it is a lifetime’s labour. For an unfortunate few, death will end their search before they even get a tiny glimpse of eternal love.
Part of what has sustained me, repaired me, enlarged and enriched my life has been about acquiring the skills and tools for recognising the value and importance of self-healing. Healing facilitates and increases my ability to recognise and manage my own well-being. These things in general hold a significance in the living of life that is close to sacred. This form of healing compassion has been recognised as sacred throughout human history.
My journey is coming into the realisation that I only will grow and thrive in direct proportion to how much I can help others in their journeys of growth and self-love, even if I can do so only by not standing in their way.
This pretty village of “Old” Alresford is where the opening scenes might plausibly have been set in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on the infamous occasion of the beaurocratic and heartless Demolition of the Planet to make way for the hyperspace bypass.
… Alresford revisited …
Might have, I say, but were not. This was because of the Paraverse Holo in which Alresford and its environs continue to float in Tranquil Stability force-fields, thanks to the zealous efforts of the Sapient Pigeons, whose keen eye for a quick buck is the talk of the Western Spiral Arm virtual business community.
The Goodly Pigeons’ technical grip on the transcendental reality equations prevailing hereabouts preordained that this little local continuum remain untouched.
“For all eternity”, exactly as it says in the brochure.
The curiosity of visitors on foot like myself is sparked by the too, too obvious discontiguity between the near feudal bucolic population remnants in this “Hampshire” village; the curious depth of quiescent somnolescence exhibited by the oh-so-pretty waterfowl; and the incomprehensibly uncontrived, open-ended bonhomie of such folk as the sausage and tomato sauce sandwich dispensing staff at the Caff in West Street.
These last, and all their kith, live in perfect ignorance of, and side by side with the overlord holiday lets of the supermegarich retired Alien Galactic Orchestrators.
The Orchestrators were sold on the charms of this aboriginal “Hampshire” reservation. By and large, most migrated here from Hoag’s Object in Serpens constellation in our C15th and C16th.
Naturally, there has been a great deal of nesting activity with the indigenous populace over a period of time…
There is an indebtedness that arises in me from the recognition of successive blessings entering the arena of my life.
Any responsible and compassionate response to privileged heightened awareness of life in its very glory and in its quirky contrariness ought to be forged into a legacy for sharing.
My repayment of what I owe is on a simple table in the arena. It is covered by a pale cloth. It is set with humility. And the rich rare spices I am invited to choose when cooking the dish of gratitude taste as sharp as the coming in of death at my little life’s end.
This dancing icon is me. I first painted it on a T-shirt as seen here, in 2014. This solo flame sky riding dancer centaur is an image of my own soul.
From that time on, I have dedicated myself to a search for this genii, who seems to have just been summoned from a mythical magic lamp.
As these ten years processed by from the start of 2013, the Year of My Life, I accelerated and honed my daily journaling skills. The net result has been “Closer to thee my Self”.
My Soul reflection and I stand confident and clear cut in my sacred space, such that the flame dancer now answers to my call, and shows up with outrageous intimacy on my call
This is a bit on the heavy side. Does this mean I do “dare to eat a peach?”. Am I the toad blinking, discovered after a casual kick at some pleasantly rounded stone on the grassy verge?
For years I hear my inner chat tending more and more towards the cynical. Wars, oligarchs, mindless crushers of opposition, economic meltdowns, global warming, these are fortunately not mine to fret over as I start to make plans for a low-key 77th birthday party.
I feel sorry for my children. The course of their lives may well be changed or even diverted by the negative effects of these most modern and also ancient of macro-scale trends.
I often go to browse www.phys.org because it is a reliable, peer-reviewed source of fact and cutting edge news about the highest levels of noble endeavour.
The Princeton University research story about a near future with back to back hurricanes flipped my mind.
Enough is enough. I am not to be counted as another minor decorative sideshow on Social Media. Or if I am, then I want it to be known I have an unfashionable, deeply cynical stance on what the flickering years of my life will hold in store for me and my kind.
My colours are nailed to the mast. Love is all, yes, but I won’t pretend I don’t believe the End is Nigh. The unkempt, often raggedy Nigh Sayers on their soapboxes at Speakers Corner, London, never seemed credible to me, because of their parochial concerns.
My message is all about a radically new world order. My message is full of old man’s ‘I know it all and better than you’. I have at my disposal a heap of handy facts and ready-made actions which already have the stamp of incontrovertible fact, mass approval and therefore of authority.
As before, I plan to man my little EveryNow sideshow, with it’s frilly word banners and scrupulously well-chosen colour schemes. At the same time, I will be bold to go banging on like any old, mad, random merchant of doom.
I will exploit the idea of unexploded doom lying side by side with the rippling sidereal Daoist messages of universal beauty, manifesting as arising from and recycling back again through unbounded power.
I avow that through the adoption and harnessing of this same power Humanity Reunited (no! Not the football team) can realise planetary survival and salvation by mass actions bent to a brand new global common purpose.
A Princeton University study shows that areas along the US East Coast and Gulf Coast will likely suffer more intense damaging storms back to back due to Global Warming.
_ The purpose of politics, industry and the individual today is to reconfigure global humanity, so that all assets and all means of all peoples are diverted to work in unity of purpose to bring Global Warming under control.
_ The time is past due that we can continue to afford the luxury of self-centered pretty squabbles. Petty squabbles to be abandoned include wars, military confrontations, political rivalries with no reference to imminent catastrophic environmental degredation and destruction, giant costly engineering projects, space exploration, traditional competitive industries which squander their time, their material and human resources in the manufacture of goods of duplicate functionality.
_ All generations of humanity are at risk of extinction in a world where we cannot grow food, find drinking water, or live in structures safe from devastation by extremes of weather. We know it will be so, if we continue to ignore the bigger obvious picture of humanity in its entirety dying off on a planet we ourselves will have made uninhabitable, first through our actions, and then, tragically, through our lack of united remedial actions. ___”
Is it not the best of things to be seen fully clothed yet as entirely naked as newborn?
The brightness thereof overtops and shadow-shunts the sallow sight of self every, every time.
One day, it was the first full day of my life. I did not know it was, because I didn’t know my life was mine to know. And I did not know the knower of my life, though I did sense the curious presence of a newness so new, I could not yet know it was so near to me as to be within me.
Samuel Johnson’s dictum occurs to me. ‘When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life’.
What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed that we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.
Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.
I ask you this.
What characterises a person who is constantly expecting to learn new things on the road, and is more often than not ambushed by the surprising amount of all the stuff available to learn on the way, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?
One answer is a person such as this has to be in the condition of a serenely untroubled and always available openness. Also, there must be an absence of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.
It is a wild, open, wide open alertness, a feral immediacy of awareness of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.
By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of time in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.
I’m on foot, intent on my way to the bus stop, I’m looking intently out of a car window, I’m bicycling and I focus my intention on keeping upright, uninjured, staying alive.
These are some examples of the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.
By self-discipline over a period of years, by making self-conscious choices in the words I choose and in what I choose to do, the most precious thing I seem have acquired is a lack!
I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think “cat”.
I have been regularly making choices – namely choosing in the first instant to tune in to the Thisness of things. The closer to Thisness, the more the love, and the more there is to love. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.
And how amazing is this “feedback” !
If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, what then?
What happens?
What is happening, with no reasons asked or given, no frown of reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.
This is love, as axiomatic as the sun’s atomic heat, where the object of love and love itself blends into one and the same. Love and the object of love indistinguishably the same.
The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.
I picture myself in a place where I can access calm.
The picture is of an outdoor summer gathering. It’s a family festival of music making, circle dance, sacred chant, poetry, natural refreshments, compassion, companionship, and healing therapies for body and mind.
I picture marquees, coloured and plain, set in green parkland. My spirit is all levity, gratitude for ample abundance among friendly people of good intent.
Calm is important to my wellbeing. I believe in the calm induced by this welcome sunshine. I move to enter a wide opening into a dark and spacious marquee.
As I go in, no change happens. I am so calm like this, safe inside the lofty drapery of this tented space. Going out again I am all calmness when the sun shines on me.
My calm is mine to soak into my heart, here inside where I am calm me, and outside, where I am calm me.
The place where I found my will to surrender all of me into calm has lost its relevance. All I know is that my most sacred personal space, once empty, is full, is filled up and brimming with calm.
The charm of this peace with its home in my heart has the satisfaction of sweetness.
I picture where I am. I am inside where calm is and the sun is shaded. I am outside where the calm is and the sun shines. I choose to surrender to myself with sweet abandon in both places.
Calm is independent of location.
Describe to my eyes a smoke-ring.
My eyes see a toroidal shape. A doughnut. It is filled entirely with emptiness. My eyes notice this because it’s transparent. Like a bubble or smoke ring.
It curls around itself as it rises, making and remaking itself. Until, slowly, chaos disintegrates it. As it forgets its identity, I am returned, like a floating feather landing on earth, to my own.
My calm is a toroidal state. Its beauty, its fascination is that it is inside itself in mesmeric motion. Calm does not last. It is birthed in fragility. It withers because it exists unsupported at its centre – my centre.
The fractal nature of the intricate network which composes calm is subject in extremely sensitive ways to entropy.
Welcome Toroidal calm. Toroidal calm is the twin Sister-Brother of peace
Calm blesses my most sacred heart of hearts with positive energy from arrival to inevitable departure. Calm exists like a toroid, in light and in dark, in fullness and in emptiness wherever I am at, whatever I am doing, and for no apparent reason. Calm has no use for reason for its justification.
I go into and I go out of light and dark. Light and dark are flowing with the invitation of graceful infinite energy of calm. Just like a pretty ring of smoke, calm is ungraspable.
What is it that blinds me, eyes open, from seeing? Is it that first impression which wastefully draws my attention away from the place I will find the missing clue? Does my ape-brain delude me when it tugs me towards the big, the immediate, the blindingly obvious?
E=Mc² ! This is a wow-fact. Whose attention has not always been on the atom bomb fireball, the mushroom cloud, or the supernova diorama drama?
How many point nines on top of ninety-nine emphasise the percentage of emptiness over matter in an atom? Who’s not accepted the invitation to float in awe deep among the inner spaces within the confines of an atom’s planetary cloud?
Those tiny unconsidered scraps of matter in the atom are an expression of massive potential energy. Massive to near beyond comprehension.
I have fallen into the trap of seeing the fly on the wall, not the wall itself. These days if my attention is directed to a thing, I immediately search for its context. What is the thing embedded in? On what scale does it relate to all other things akin and not akin to itself?
For are not you and I, and all creation and all that is, made of this stuff that the wall is made of?
Is it time for us to show those unconsidered coalescences of matter a greater legitimacy, respect and attention, than to be noseying around in the spaces between the elementary particles. Do you align with particles? Do you feel more at home with space? What do you say?
Every single day, and specially when the day comes to an end, as it is about to in a few minutes for me, I am given an overwhelming sense of the utter magnificence of the privilege of just being one single alive person.
Millions that come before me are close enough to my head, that my ears hear their murmuration – if I wish.
Their voices are talking in thousands of dialects. The clatter of them creates a tapestry of fractal meanings I comprehend only with a visceral intuition.
What do they speak of? They speak of the billion ways to laugh out fear.
My breathey existence is here now, all but totally undetectable, invisible and inaudible under the skies beneath the arch of the Milky Way. This home galaxy observes in its majestic way. It leans in the opposite direction to me.
This is the silence of a hundred thousand Niagara Falls in my ears that no one can hear, not even me.
And am I one spark a-glow?
Am I deep at rest upon a planet-wide cradle of rock, air, water and magma?
Do I not circle and circle and swirl this my humanity with neither shield, nor sword – only love?
If it were true that we also did not care what the future may bring, we would not take notice of the cyclic nature of our existence, nor would we attribute enough importance to it to wish one another the best outcome that each would attempt to extract from that illusory place of wishfulness called the New Year.
I do care. I do take notice. And I attribute more urgency and importance even than do you yourself to your own successful outcomes in this twelvemonth starting.
We are all one, we share DNA, we survive the centuries and we thrive, not in turning our back on one another’s trials and tribulations, but because we wholeheartedly accept that we utterly depend on the successes of the myriad choices everyone makes that together form the networks of humanity which support me, you, everyone and everything.
The appreciation of the pure and mathematical fundamental principles which underlie the way living beings assume their form and ‘operate’ is one essential bridge towards a deeper understanding of my place in this experience of being alive.
At times I might veer off and begin to wonder, “Is Life math?”
Then I remember that neither one thing nor the other came first.
My consciousness arises from both.
In the moment I exist “EveryNow”, I am both alive and an ineffable part of life. I am both alive and I am being lived by life.
Who cannot be brimming with excitement at the unfolding potential of discovery where no two moments are alike, and the centre-stage constant is newness? This excitement is endless in the way of fractal endlessness.
It is the acknowledgement of, and the gratitude for the enjoyment of this very endlessness which is entirely sufficient and delightfully, finitely my own.
This is what gives rise to the chuckle of the enlightened.
I am as appreciative of this as it is humanly within my power. And I try to act accordingly.
Samuel Johnson’s dictum, When you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life, occurs to me.
What the Great Fellow glossed over is that he assumed we all receive life’s enjoyments as gifts from the external world – in his example it was London life.
Nowadays I can’t conceive of any momentary experience not enhanced by some sort of learning curve, all the way through my life to the end.
I ask you this.
What sort of person is it who constantly expects to learn new things on the road, and who is frequently ambushed by the surprising amount of stuff available to learn, provided that all senses are prepped and receptive?
One answer is it has to be a serenely untroubled and always available openness. It must be a lack of externally conditioned, self-obstructing barriers to a cat-like curiosity.
Have you noticed? When they both ramp up their attention, cats and artists have a thing in common: they narrow their eyes.
It is a feline, feral immediacy of sensory input, unfiltered by intellect, which is largely responsible for bringing me, my heart and my sacred spaces into contact with the EveryNow.
By now, after years of redirected attention to the minutiae of detail and to the absence of time in which details bathe, I have the capacity to hurl my awareness in there pretty much on demand.
Such is the sweeping nature of the changes that I have been overtaken by these last few years, since 2013, the Year of my Life.
By self-discipline, by making continual self-conscious choices over a period of years, I say the most precious thing I seem have acquired is a lack?
I lack the overlay or inlay of concept, of internally verbalised labels at the point at which my senses interface with objects in the world. Think cat.
I have been regularly applying choice. Namely, I choose in the first instant of sensory contact to tune in to the Thisness of things. My motivation to exercise this intensity of unblinkered enquiry has become habitual through a self-reinforcing positive feedback.
And how amazing is this “feedback” !
If I strive to melt Peter the Pilley away in order to let the fly, the flower, the star, the shining soul-light of my friend assume the entire arena of my awareness, then what?
What happens, with no reasoning, no intervening rationalisation obscuring the way, is that I am inescapably infused, like tea in boiling water, with love.
The essential truth, the nature, the living-beingness of everything is love. Oh, and peace-in-perpetual-motion as well, but more of that another time.
When I started my EveryNow blog in 2018, I began to reread and redraft every blog before publication to make as certain as I could they make sense to others and the ideas are offered naked and free of concealed meanings, obscure convoluted expressions, or other examples of my own muddled undisciplined thinking.
The application of this methodical analysis is pleasurable and stimulating, because results come thick and fast.
I tease out into the open the logical progression of my ideas, I replace fuzzy areas of meaning with highly precise alternative words or phrases. I turn passive verbs into the active voice. I use nouns in place of -ing suffixed gerunds. I simplify concatenated sentences by trying to reduce them to simpler shorter ones each with subject, verb, object. Shake-down like this lubricates meaning and clears understanding.
The main criteria I apply is to put myself in the ears and shoes of my readers. I test every phrase, sentence and sometimes every word against its possible receipt by me as if equipped with the ears and eyes of others.
I have good reason to take unusually potent delight in this role play.
Imagine me in my late teens and for most of my twenties. I was too self-conscious of the sound of my own voice, and even of my inner voice, to be able to comfortably remain in company or in companionship. As they left my mouth, the words I spoke returned not as an echo, but with an instant direct feedback. Words from me sounded disturbing, because I could only filter my understanding through my own understanding. I could not hear myself speak as others might hear me. If I imagined my words as they sounded to others, I would imagine a room full of heads swivel in my direction, effectively shutting me down.
I guess it might end up like this for a person in long-term solitary confinement. We are all of us first and foremost gregarious. The environments with the most damaging effects on our emotional and mental health are loneliness and physical pain. When there is only one voice to pay attention to, the inner voice compensates by taking precedence, because it substitutes itself for the lack of the company and conversation of other humans.
In my late twenties, various factors combined to reset to normality the harmonious and effective functioning balance of my attention between the significant and the trivial.
From the time around these healing, self-reconciling events, I can date the beginning of my reintegration with the world of life, love and productive work. I could say I rejoined society from which I had felt isolated, distanced, unable to comprehend. This marked the beginning of a sense of a gradually rising tide of joy and gratitude for life lived.
Before this it was living to love – amusing, mildly decorative, but shallow, ephemeral, lacking in lasting significance.
After this I was, and am, loving to live – broadly capable of sensing and reaching out into the search common to all human minds and hearts for spiritual, philosophical and essential meaning to the experience of being alive.
I see in this flower and in the faces of all flowers, condensations of nature’s beauty. I see clearly their powerful concentrated visible identities with no secondary or tertiary meaning or intention.
In the open flower is the face of existence, thisness, the Tao. With no axe to grind and no message to convey, the flower is composed in its entirety of the Gentleness of Being
I believe in the truth of what I see and say with all the fibre and iron will of my entire being.
And as I say it, I feel the absence of the intensity of my feelings as I am describing them, because my utterance, like the rose, is “I AM”, purely and simply, no more no less.
Without being asked, the pink flower contains all answers to more questions than exist in the known and unknown skies.
I can see in its impermanent magnificence the rose is a Library of Alexandria before that devastating fire
I remember so well playing in my red wool swim trunks among the “Stooks”.
This was in the lush arable Vale of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where the locals called these fresh harvested corn bundles Stooks. With the Bucks burr, the vowel was lengthened into a sliding diphthong /əʊ/, like the vowel sound in “know”.
Our Hazel Cottage is listed in the Domesday Book [1086 AD]. Mud and wattle walls nearly a yard thick. A bread oven in one wall. A barn extension where a donkey was housed. Until the early 1960s, we, like the few other thatched cottage residents in this tiny No Through Road hamlet set around cow pasture, had no running water, no mains gas and no electricity.
Hazel Cottage, Sedrup Green, Hartwell, Bucks. Listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 AD
I was one little lad with sandals. The standing corn stubble scratched and made tiny bloody incisions in our ankles. We cheerfully ignored the discomfort.
Peter Pilley, Sedrup 1954
I and a couple of friends, children of the farm labourers, tried to heave these sheaves of sisal bound corn together to make a cosy “den”. It was hot work in the early 1950s summer. I must have been very young, because the stooks were almost too heavy to lift!
Gilly Osborne, Peter Pilley, Wendy Miller, ‘Splendid’ Graham. Sedrup Farm in the background
My mother was an accomplished painter in oils. Hanging on our wall today is her painting. I know that field well. I cherish it for its powerful childhood memories. It shows a field of such stooks after the huge great big noisy clattering harvester binder had passed.
The next group of farm workers would come with pitchforks to heft the stooks up onto a flatbed cart drawn by tractor.
Literally as happy as the day is long
At the impressionable age of 8, I was invited to climb up into the iron seat of a red painted Massey Ferguson diesel tractor. I was shown how to keep the clutch depressed while the engine was idling. On the shouted signal, I was to let the clutch engage to let the wagon crawl to reach the next group of stooks. I corrected myself after a couple of juddering stalls.
My being coopted as driver was not simply a benevolent treat. No one watched over me to see I did it right, or to be “nice” to a kiddie. I released an extra pair of hands to load more sheaves. I guess this was one way the local children got a taste of “real” farm work.
I remember to this day (after 69 years) it was supreme fun. The next time I would be driving a motor car would be around a field at school in 1963. My Mum, when she heard about it, became quite anxious after the event. When we kids came home for tea from frolicking in the corn fields, our Mums had to pick from our skin the tiny long thin black Harvest Bugs. The bugs were biters, though gentle ones.
Happy-go-lucky summer 1954 Hazel Cottage in the background
Sometimes we’d take home leftover lengths of baling twine. In 1965, I had my first car. It was an old Austin A40 in a shocking state. I named it Gertie. I bought it from a schoolfriend for a fiver. I was able to securely re-attach its faulty windscreen using a few yards of this excellent baling twine!
New Austin A40 – Mine was black, and an old banger
In the 1960s, the machines were Balers. They left heavy rectangular blocks of compacted straw strewn over the stubbly fields. They made up into impressive haystacks which looked like houses or castles.
My Dad and I in wellies‘Splendid’ Graham wicket-keeper. Wendy Miller fielding Peter. Her cottage in the background. A giant elm tree, too.
Haystacks composed of stooks were also huge. They had the charming look of an unkempt dog.
Haystack of stooks dwarfs Peter P
More recently, and less picturesque, corn is harvested and the straw is compressed into giant cylinder shapes. They are left covered completely in black polythene all solitary on their empty fields.
The View at 72+ 