It’ all a blur

Just read the following in Alex James’ Column in yesterday’s Independent:

No distance to run in the country

Run! Run! alone over open fields, all through the wooded hillsides, in secret along the narrowest trails, badger roads and deer tracks, half-dodging wet, scratching brambles, ducking branches. Leaping and swerving over dead tree trunks, with startled squirrels and scattering rabbits springing from nowhere. Dawn, dusk, noon, under the Moon and stars, run as far as you can. Run like the wind, run when it’s raining, run in the sun. Run, run, run – pnanting, blowing, steaming through the cool, soft greys and greens. Run for an hour, run for miles, without seeing anybody, heart pounding, flying weightless downhill, feet crashing through puddles, splattering the fluffy, caressing mud, careless and carefree. Free at last, exhilarated by body whirring at capacity, on limits, singing. There is nothing else: no distractions, just the steady rhythms, absolutes, of breath, heart and hypnotic footfall beating, one two, one, two…

There are no fat bass players of any significance.

Watercourses

I was going to write up yesterday’s run down to the River Avon and back up the River Trym, but I have written it up before, and I’ll probably write it up again.

Instead, I pondered on how many off road routes in towns run alongside streams. I suppose the risk of flooding discourages developers. Then a found the following poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I don’t normally get on with, because he tends to wear his religion on his sleeve. I particularly like the last four lines, which have a woodwosish flavour.

The darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew

As the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Yes I know he uses too many words that no one has heard of but I have to agree with the sentiment of the last quatrain, especially the last line.

The Song of the Woodwoses

Beware you quango-planners

You men in suits of grey

You faceless men in offices

Who care not what we say

Beware the curse of Woodwoses

Will haunt you till you die

And ghostly feet you’ll hear at night

Of wild men rushing by

 

In ancient days they bellowed here

Their eyes with passion burned

Uprooted trees and herded stones

In circles as they turned

And now they have returned again

To Avon’s Forest ring

To stamp their feet upon the earth

And make the ley lines sing:

 

The song of the Earth

 

The Earth has greater powers than you

You nameless suited men

Your Mother longs to suck your blood

And play your bones again

And dance again as once She danced

To make all life begin

To the rhythm of the drums She’s made

From stretched out human skin

 

© C.J. Bloor 2007