roads of stone

The sun is out again in London, after an unusually cool spring. It’s been a cold winter across much of Europe and North America, too. But the year is turning now, as it always does eventually.

Cooler weather will come and go. Floods, droughts, disasters, snowstorms and heatwaves, too. That is the nature of living on the Earth. You’ll see reporters referring unusual weather events to climate change, but that’s largely misleading, and it’s misinformed as well.

So let’s not get confused. That is only weather, and it’s not the same as climate. Reports like those just serve to confuse the public.

The urgently pressing fact is that climate change is real. And it’s happening.
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The rain is falling softly beneath a grey and weeping sky.

Dull, wet, oppressive sinks the afternoon, through a rising restlessness I can’t define. Puddles beneath my feet. Familiar streets chiding my every turn.

Northeastwards from here in Epsom, the city stretches wide. Twenty miles to London Bridge, and as many reaching out beyond. The megalopolis, looming heavy in the rain.

I pull the cap down above my face, and strike a steady rhythm towards the Friday traffic. My shoes are pattering on the pavement, the sound of my breathing counting out the flow of time. Moments passing, each with thoughts unopened and memories wiping clean.

London’s suburbia was surely built for days like these. Unwelcoming, pointless hours spent just existing, nowhere.

Far from the madding crowd, and yet unconnected with the primaeval landscape. No joyful hedgerows here, no rolling contours to stretch the mind. No thrill of city either, nor vibrant urban night ahead.

Just greyness, stretching out in all its mediocrity. City tears, weaving weary paths across the empty afternoon.
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I was in Haute-Savoie last week – part of the ancient kingdom of Savoy – that mountainous corner of France set around Mont Blanc and south of the Swiss city of Geneva. The name Savoy comes from the latin sapaudia, or fir forest – an origin still heard in the French word sapin (fir tree).

Long an independent duchy, the area was occupied by Napoleon’s troops from 1792-1815. After a period as part of Sardinia, Savoy was annexed by France in 1860.

The region has strong associations with Piedmont in Italy, and with French-speaking Switzerland (Turin and Geneva are both much nearer than Paris). The local dialects reflect old mountain French with a smattering of Italian.

But the food doesn’t reflect Italy or France. Savoie is a stronghold of Alpine cuisine. Don’t expect delicate French dishes – this is the home of solidly calorific monster feasts to fuel any long day on the slopes.
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What can we do to help the people of Africa?

Should we visit, as tourists? Is it enlightenment, or voyeurism, when tour companies arrange sightseeing trips to the ghettoes of Nairobi?

The problems are so massive that it’s easy to admit defeat - to assume that if governments can’t sort the problems, then aid agencies and individuals don’t stand a chance.

I don’t share that view. There’s a lot we can do, and here are some suggestions.

Visit Africa, if the opportunity arises.
Take an open mind with you. In world terms, we are fantastically wealthy. And wealth carries with it the responsibility to help others less fortunate than ourselves. It’s too easy to cite safety and convenience as reasons for shying away – if a billion people are living in desperate poverty across an entire continent, surely the least you can do is make yourself aware of it ?

By visiting, you will be investing some of your own money into the local economy, and that’s a very good start. Once there, I guarantee you’ll see things differently. You wouldn’t be human if the sight of hardship, starvation and disease didn’t change you into a more thoughtful person.
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“Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground”
- The Tempest, Act 1, Sc.1

“Full fathom five thy father lies” - The Tempest, Act 1, Sc. 2

The sky is falling all around me as the winter afternoon is fading. Down, down we glide, towards the North Atlantic. Three thousand miles of unforgiving sea are all behind us and ahead lies just a pinprick of green holding out against the blue-grey vastness of the ocean.

The rain lashes against the windows as our wings bank on the approach, the landing lights looming nearer in the dusk. A rugged landfall, but now we’re safe.

Outside the airport and across the causeway, a deluge is raging in sheets across the road, the palm trees swaying wildly in the storm. The evening washes itself wet and windswept upon the shore. Keep reading →

There’s a brick building at the end of the street where I grew up. I run past it every time I’m in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Today, it’s just an empty shell.

After more than seventy years, a new Royal Shakespeare Theatre is being built inside the framework of the old one.

It’s a constraining decision, architecturally - which limits the capacity and design of the new theatre, whilst still destroying the marvellous art deco foyer within. Just think - for £110 mm we could have had a Sydney Opera House instead of a revamped old blockhouse with only 1,000 seats - a third fewer than before.

Looking across the river now, I can see empty space where the heart of the building should be.

And in a way, that’s just how it was in 1970 when I saw my first Shakespeare play here - Peter Brook’s famous ‘White Box’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, famously staged inside a chasm of blank white walls.
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Winter drags in February. The lengthening evenings seem to pack a scary sharpness in their chill, and there’s an unexpected bleakness in these brightening days which makes me yearn for spring.

But it’s not the weather really. It’s my lack of patience for this place, which palls now with every passing week.

The soulless office above the shopping mall entombs me on shivering days like these. Days when inertia sucks the lifeblood of enthusiasm out from in me. Hours spent waiting for the gloom to lift and fall. Days when I don’t feel like running, and I wonder how I ever did.

The crocuses in Epsom Park smile indulgently as I pass on my winter’s route towards the dry Chalk hills above the town. They remind me.
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It was a chilly evening in early February when the Managing Director called us all together. He paused a moment, glanced at the expectant faces all around him, and then he started.

Business is tough, he said, and we’re doing what we can. But finally, we’ve reached that moment when we’ve got to let some of you go.

A hundred of us stood there then, looking at each other, at the floor, and at the winter’s dusk outside.

There was silence. Some more explanation was required, and some more honesty was needed. And, to his credit, Mitch provided it. As ‘this company is going down the toilet’ talks go, it was pretty fairly done.

We’d had problems with one of our installations in the North Sea, he told us. We all knew that already. In the big money business of finding oil and gas and getting them to the beach, failing on either of those priorities was never good.

An asset team would miss its targets, and there’d be no bonuses or payrises for anyone ahead. Such is business, in any organisation. But this time, it was worse.

It’s the oil price, he said. February, 1999. Keep reading →