Francis Pryor's Blog, page 21

The Compassion of Solitude

I can’t imagine how grim it must be to be a senior member of the Royal Family and always in the public eye. I think it’s the difficulty of getting away from people that makes life in the modern world such hard work. When I emigrated to Canada in 1969 I was newly-wed, and even with a young wife by my side, I, we, found the loneliness of being in a strange new city almost overwhelming. Toronto seemed the coldest, most hostile place on earth – that is, for about three or four months, before slowly we began to make friends. It was then that I learnt the difference between solitude and loneliness: the first is achieved, the other is thrust upon you. But once you have experienced loneliness you are better able to appreciate solitude.

So why am I suddenly waxing philosophical when I ought to be writing about Alan Cadbury or the planting-out of my potatoes – or indeed some new archaeological revelation? It’s because I spent yesterday travelling in the Fens, on lonely Fen roads with vast stretches of empty fen dykes and horizon-to-horizon Fenland skies with clouds and sharp showers, swooping birds and towering pylons; even the many wind farms on the horizon looked exciting. It’s a solitary landscape, if ever there was one, and I find it’s good for the soul. Landscapes can do this for me: they provide a counter-balance to introspection; they lift and focus, yet they don’t shift your thoughts from where they want to go. I can’t find it within me to think of landscapes as sources of history and the understanding of ordinary people’s lives alone; these are mere academic justifications.

No, there’s far more to landscapes than rational thoughts: I find them more involved – wrapped-up, even – with my own life and ambitions. It’s strange, but I don’t find I’m travelling through a landscape, so much as with one; to me, they’re companionable and almost intimate – and very supportive in one’s darker moments. That’s why I find solitude in such surroundings feeds compassion and sympathy; it doesn’t instil jingoistic pride in Britain, or disdain for foreigners; if anything it fuels compassion. And for what it’s worth, solitude can be enjoyed with someone else, provided he or she is aware. That, surely, is the key to a long-lasting relationship: the ability to allow one’s partner time and space for solitude. And it’s becoming so difficult in this age of incessant Tweets and texts and emails – most of which are merely about the process of staying alive – of earning a living. Solitude, on the other hand, takes you way beyond all of that. But to where? I wish I could tell you, but it’s something you must discover, for yourself.

Forget the Nuclear Winter: It’s a Nuclear Spring!

I was planning to write a nice considered blog about planting potatoes and broad beans – both jobs that I would normally do in mid- or late March – but it has been such a late season. The trouble with late seasons is that eventually they have to make up for lost time. And that’s what happening now. I’ve never been so busy out on the farm and in the garden, which is why my attempts to revive poor Alan Cadbury’s subscription statistics aren’t going that well (please help if you’ve been putting it off – we need all the pledges we can get!). I was talking to a fellow gardener yesterday, and he used that memorable and very descriptive phrase: a nuclear spring.

It’s like everything is going mad: the lawn is growing at a crazy rate. I refuse to cut it twice a week on principle (why use the fuel), but as a result even my powerful (17 hp) mower is having trouble coping. Two weeks ago, there wasn’t an asparagus spear in sight, but now my two beds resemble crowds of tiny commuters rushing to catch a train. And as for the broccoli… Again, two weeks ago we were having to ration what we ate, but now we’ve been stuffing ourselves with both purple and white, and even so, 90% of the new shoots are going to flower – and be wasted. Normally we would eat the lot. Even the chickens have gone mad, with all three hens laying an egg a day. And the swallows are building nests in the front porch of the house and in the barn, flying in and out with beakfuls of mud and straw. And there are dozens of newts frolicking in the pond.

I know what’s coming next: we’ll be praying for rain…

Purple (foreground) and white broccoli in over-abundance.

A routine harvest

Asparagus – in profusion

Writing About Writing: People

When I was a teenager I remember reading somewhere that an author – quite a famous one, I think – had to write. I can remember at the time I cringed. It sounded so precious and so pseudo-sensitive. Then, as the years have rolled by, I’ve found that I too, have to write. I’m not convinced that I have (italics) to, but the urge has grown pretty strong, nonetheless. I think it began back in 1989 when Peter Kemmis-Betty, who was then the Commissioning Editor for Batsford Books asked me to write-up Flag Fen as part of a new series of popular books he was doing in conjunction with English Heritage. That book appeared in 1991 and is still available, although in an up-dated and revised form. While I was writing I found myself heading-off in all sorts of unexpected directions and the manuscript I eventually provided was far too long, and required fairly drastic editing. But I’d had a whale of a time writing it.

Throughout the mid-1990s, my time was totally taken up with the writing-up of two major excavations, first the Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Etton and then Flag Fen itself, which was eventually published in 2001. As soon as I had finished writing the massive Flag Fen volume for English Heritage, the timber circle at Holme-next-the-Sea turned up and this became the focus for a book about the Bronze Age that I had in fact already started. By this time I was in the process of acquiring a Literary Agent, the excellent Bill Hamilton of the old-established firm A.M. Heath and Co. Bill still handles my writing with quiet tact and diplomacy. It was Bill who oversaw my Seahenge book and arranged for it to be published by HarperCollins, for whom I then wrote the four-volume Britain series.

But back in 1997 I had begun to keep an e-diary, which eventually transformed itself into this blog. One day I’ll post a series of its entries (which I quoted in the Seahenge book, incidentally). That diary, and latterly this blog, helped me stay in practice as a writer and made it very much easier to start work on my detective story, The Lifers’ Club, which took me over two years to write and went through no less than twelve separate drafts, before Bill was at all satisfied with the end result. So don’t let anyone tell you that writing fiction is somehow easier than the supposedly factual stuff.

I’m sometimes asked about the people who appear in the book: ‘Is old Mike in it?’ My normal reply is a bit ambiguous: ‘yes, bits of him are…’ Then, depending on age and gender there’s a brief exchange, rich in innuendo,  about which particular bits. In actual fact, of course, whole people never appear, because as soon as they start to act independently, they do so in their own, particular way. To use a cliché, the character takes over; but the trouble is, this isn’t always consistent. Indeed, I had minor characters change their names, age and sex before I learnt the discipline of keeping a detailed cast list, complete with potted biographies.

Everyone who has read early drafts of the book has assumed that my lead character, Alan Cadbury, is based on myself, but some thirty years younger (for what it’s worth, he was born on January 2nd, 1971). He may have been, when I first had the idea, but he’s changed a great deal over the past two years. In fact I don’t carry a very clear picture of him in my head. In that respect he’s rather like my friends in real life, many of whom I’ve known since student days. Do I think of them as they are today, as husbands or wives, fathers, even grand-fathers, and mothers, or as boozy students sozzled on beer, or dope, and lying spark-out on the banks of the River Cam one sultry June afternoon in 1967? Or maybe a cross between all of them (God help us)? In other words, the pictures in my mind reflect the context of the thought, or the memory. And Alan Cadbury was in many places on many occasions and he certainly wasn’t always consistent. In that respect, he has more in common with Rebus than with Sherlock Holmes.

And that’s why I’ve tried to avoid detailed descriptions of him. Readers will discover bits (that word again!) and pieces about him as they read: for example, he has a beard; but then he might decide to shave it off. Who knows? I certainly don’t.

So is that what people mean when they say that characters ‘come alive’? I’ve always found that when I see a film about a book I’ve loved, that the main characters get replaced by the actors’ faces – and then rapidly replace my own pictures, and then equally rapidly die-out altogether. That’s why I won’t re-view pictures like Tom Jones, having re-read Henry Fielding’s magnificent original novel. I don’t know how I’d react if somebody wanted to make a film of The Lifers’ Club. In that highly unlikely event, I think I’d have to be prepared to lose my awkward, obsessive friend, because that’s what he has become, and instead picture the film’s leading actor.

Anyhow, we’re approaching 50% funding and I’m back at my desk. I’m also making very good progress with my non-fiction book for Penguin, which incidentally, has gained a great deal from the writing of The Lifers’ Club. Strangely Alan Cadbury stalks its pages behind the scenes, a ghostly mysterious presence. And if anyone tries to tell you that fiction and non-fiction can be easily separated, they are talking out of the back of their necks. Personally, I can’t tell them apart – and that’s something I offer future academic critics of my factual work on a plate, free of charge.

At Last: Late Spring Flowers

Lambing has finished and yesterday we gave the last batch their protective inoculations before releasing them from the barn and out to pasture. They still have open access to the shelter of the barn, should they need it, but they rarely seek it out. As a human, it’s easy to forget just how thick and warm the insulation of a young lamb’s fleece can be. So what now?

Well, I know what I ought to be getting on with: the stuff that’s now piled high in several toppling heaps of paper on and around my desk, which naughtily I removed for that picture in the Unbound blog, and which gained me the much-coveted (!?) DESK OF THE WEEK Award. So was that fraudulent? Did I do a Lance Armstrong? Can I live with my conscience? Only time will tell.

My friends, lords and masters at Unbound have Tweeted that I need help to get back to my desk. Is this a hint, or a veiled command? I think we – I think I – should be told. But I feel bad that I haven’t informed Alan Cadbury that I’ve written a book about one of his exploits. The trouble is, I know he’s digging somewhere, but have no idea where. He can be very secretive when he wants. Anyhow, with the help of Twitter (which I know for a fact he follows), I’ll try to track him down over the next few days.

If the sheer mass of stuff were not daunting enough, the garden and its flowers are also demanding attention. Last week I planted my potatoes and yesterday my broad beans (and I’ll feature both of these in a Grow Your Own post shortly). I think it’s probably a bit late to cut hazel pea sticks, so I re-used the ones I set last year (and blogged about) and they weren’t too brittle and should be OK. Unlike many vegetables, peas and beans don’t mind being set in the same ground for two years running – although it’s not something I’d make a habit of.

A thick patch of Cowslips in the orchard

White Snakeshead Fritillaries and Cowslips in the meadow

The warm weather that began a week ago has suddenly accelerated everything out in the flower garden. Cowslips and Fritillaries have never looked better and the latter have benefitted from the almost complete lack of pheasants, who love to peck off their flower buds. This year none of the local commercial shoots released any hatched semi-tame birds – thank Heavens! It’s such a strange year: the latest snowdrops are still just visible as are a few crocuses, yet the main daffodils are still in flower and the primroses in the wood are finished. Every year produces surprises and in 2013 in our garden it’s the anemones (especially varieties of A. blanda) and the Celandines, of which the variety known as Brazen Hussy (Ranunculus ficaria), with early bronze-coloured foliage, was particularly fine. And as for the Summer Snowflakes (Leucojum aestivum, var. ‘Gravetye Giant’), I don’t think I have ever seen them as good. And of course all of these plants love wet conditions, and boy, have they had them!

My favourite Celandine: ‘Brazen Hussy’ being particularly brazen

Summer Snowflakes along a low wall

Close-up of the bell-like flowers of Summer Snowflakes

And now I must plant the second batch of green peas and mow the grass which is almost a foot high in places. Then I’ll move some more snowdrops and Hostas, before it’s too late. Oh, Sod my f***ing desk!

The Horrible Cruelty of Plants

Gosh! So my desk is now DESK OF THE WEEK! But most people won’t be aware that there’s a darker side to my desk. It concerns the plants above it, on the windowsill.  Now read on, and be afraid, be very careful…

(Pause. Deep breath. Adopts business-like, fresher tone)

Now I’ve always been horribly fascinated by carnivorous plants. Essentially they eat insects and small mammals to boost their nutrient up-take, as they grow in wet, and very poorly nourished soils – usually peats. And without that extra nourishment they’d soon perish. That, in a nutshell, is their botanical raison d’être. But to catch animals and insects they need to be very cunning. Some, for example the Venus Flytrap, have jaw-like leaves; others, like the sundews, have very sticky leaves. But the plants that fascinate me most are the pitcher plants, many of which are natives of America, being found in the swamps of places like Florida, California and Louisiana – and increasingly as escapees, in southern Ireland. The capacious, dangling pitchers of the genus Nepenthes are actually capable of trapping mouse or vole-sized animals. But these are hard to grow in Britain, so I steer clear of them. Instead I grow the large, vertical pitcher plant, Sarracenia flava, whose pitchers can be a metre in length.

This year my Sarracenia flava plant has produced seven pitchers and in a week or two’s time one or two flowers will appear. Their scent is pleasingly foetid.

My plants attract wasps, aphids, flies and other insects to the rim of their pitchers by exuding a slight smell of rotting flesh. When insects land on the pitcher, or its hood, they are attracted further into the plant both by the smell and by red veins, which look horribly like those of an animal. As they go deeper into the pitcher they come across a waxy zone with short, downward-pointing hairs, By this point it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape, and eventually the hapless prey falls into the lowest level of all, where a watery soup of digestive enzymes slowly starts to dissolves its body. It’s a far from a speedy end…

A close-up of the mouth and flared hood of the pitcher, showing the life-like red ‘veins’.

I have to admit I nearly gave up keeping pitcher plants (which maintain my office in a wonderfully insect-free state) after an experience back in 1980 when I was hard at work writing the third volume of my four reports on our excavations at Fengate, in Peterborough. I had several pitcher plants on the windowsill behind my state-of-the-art Apple II desktop computer, which I’d bought in 1978 or ’79 and which was one of the first microcomputers in British archaeology. But I digress…

Anyhow, I was tapping away at the keyboard late one evening, when I couldn’t help noticing that a wasp had landed on the hood of a particularly large pitcher. Fascinated, I watched as the creature followed one of the red veins downwards. I even stood up to view its descent down to insect hell, the better. And it was going there with barely a backward glance – like a banker sniffing out a fat bonus.

I think somebody may have entered the room, or asked me a question, because I was distracted for an hour or so. When I returned to my keyboard I was disconcerted by a very loud, intermittent buzzing. It was so loud I thought there was a fault with the dig bungalow’s electrics (which were dodgy, to say the least). Then I realised what was happening: the unfortunate wasp’s death agonies were being amplified by the pitcher. Soon all the diggers who hadn’t gone to the pub that night were standing around the plant, with ears cupped and eyes like saucers. Like me, they were all completely spooked-out.

The following morning it rained, so I returned to my report-writing. The buzzing was still as loud as ever, but the bursts were now less frequent, and shorter. Then I noticed something on the outside of the pitcher that made me feel uneasy. I looked closer and to my horror the poor wasp had managed to eat its way through the pitcher, but had got stuck at its neck (actually its thorax). So its wings were still making the buzzing sound, but its head could move slightly outside the plant, which gave the scene a horrible Spanish Inquisition sort of feel: the head could turn, while its body behind was being digested. Surely the ultimate in frustration? But this time I didn’t get the diggers in to watch – I thought it might be a bit much.

For about an hour I tried to work on the report, but my attention kept being caught by the bursts of buzzing, which were now becoming noticeably shorter and quieter. Then to my horror I watched as the head started to droop forwards. A ghastly nod. For a moment my hopes rose: maybe it was going to escape? But I should have known better, because a very short time later, it dropped off. I looked up from where the severed head lay on the windowsill, back to the pitcher, where drops of digestive juices were now slowly oozing from the hole left behind. Still, the buzzing had stopped – this time, for good.

My Pink Half of the Drainpipe: A Fond Memory of Viv Stanshall

I was going to use the song , My Pink Half of the Drainpipe as the title to the chapter on the 20th century in my Making of the British Landscape. Then I decided against it, wisely I think, as there was more to that century than the creation of suburbs alone. For the benefit of younger readers that song was created by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, whose lead singer, trumpet player and multi-instrumentalist was the late great Vivian Stanshall. It’s a wonderful song, too: satirical and yet self-mocking, rather like the man who sang it.

I first met Viv in 1976, very shortly after my first marriage broke up. I was doing what many men in my situation do: I was going a bit potty. But at the same time I was directing one of the largest excavations in Britain, at Fengate in eastern Peterborough, so I couldn’t let myself, or things in general, slip entirely. Looking back on those times, I’m amazed at how understanding and supportive my Fengate team was. In theory I was their leader, but in practice it was they who held everything together, and then gently nudged me back on course. And it only took a year.

I honestly don’t recall the actual moment I met Viv – and I think that’s right and proper – and besides, we were both probably out of our boxes. His marriage hadn’t yet collapsed, but his wife wasn’t around much, either, and his career was going through a rough patch, as well.  Looking back on those times, I suspect my situation was probably marginally better than his. Later, I’m glad to say, Viv’s career and life in general were to revive before his tragically early death, in 1995. In March (21st) of this year he would have been seventy.

My brother-in-law Nigel Smith sent me a link to a website announcing that at last a local authority had erected a blue plaque to Viv Stanshall. He’d have loved it. I can imagine what he’d have said: ‘You should have made it pink, dear boy – to annoy my father.’  His father was ex-RAF and very conventional and I wonder to what extent Viv’s wild eccentricity was a reaction to him. To connoisseurs of the eccentric, Viv was indeed the archetype, the gold standard, by which all others are judged. I’ve only met one other person as eccentric as Viv, but he is quite unaware of it – which makes it even more strange (he also wears grey suits or tweeds and is an ex-Mayor). Viv knew he was unusual and highly talented – and made the most of both.

He achieved national fame for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Da Band, and later as Sir Henry of Rawlinson’s End.  I first met him through a series of friends in the music business. And I shall resist the temptation to mention names, but many of them live around Chipping Norton and none are called Dave, Sam or Rebekah, not that any of them play music (that I know of). But I digress.

Anyhow, Viv liked archaeology and we hit it off as soon as we met. We’d come together several times before I suggested (probably in a drunken moment) that he should come and spend a weekend with me and my parents in Hertfordshire – I had returned to the parental pad after the aforesaid marital collapse. I thought he’d enjoy the sheer Englishness of the Pryor ancestral household. Anyhow, he agreed, and arrived at the 18th century manor house in time for a walk through the grounds and a few stiffening glasses of sherry.

The evening meal  was going with a swing when I realised that Viv had been captivated by my mother, who was fully thirty years his senior. My mother was also very unconventional and had the charm of the Irish. Before the war she had been an accomplished artist, but that had ended when she met my father at the outbreak of hostilities. Then Hitler, bombs and mayhem intervened. Next I appeared on the scene. So her painting had taken a bit of a back seat. But she remained an artist at heart and never really fitted into our upper middle-class life in what was then still, just, truly rural Hertfordshire.

The meal was excellent, as was the wine. Afterwards, my father got rather unsteadily from his chair and poured Viv a glass of 1928 Hine vintage brandy. I had to make-do with Sainsbury’s Ruby port.  Then Pa retreated to his study, where (like every other evening of the previous ten years) he pored over his collection of watercolours by the artist Peter De Wint (1784-1849). Sixty minutes later he tottered up to bed, took two sleeping pills, and was then completely dead to the world for ten hours.

Meanwhile Ma, Viv and I did the washing-up in the kitchen, together with her secret supply of Crème de Menthe and a larder full of beer and cider. Two hours after dinner we all retired, by now I must confess, rather unsteadily. I climbed into bed and went out like a light.

About two in the morning, my dreamless slumbers were rudely awoken by the ear-splitting jangling of a powerful electric alarm bell and I could also hear a siren-like noise outside. All Hell had broken loose. I pulled on a dressing gown and went downstairs to the main hall, where all the lights were on. My mother, whose room was closer to the main alarm bell, had beaten me to it. Instead of confronting a ferocious burglar with a swag bag full of the family silver, she seemed to be having a perfectly amiable conversation with Viv, who was standing close by the dining room dresser holding a small glass of Hine ’28. It was as if I’d come across them at a Sunday afternoon cocktail party. It was all very decorous. Except for one thing, which I must confess surprised me, but my mother didn’t appear to have noticed. I don’t know, maybe it was just her native good manners, but the fact remains that Viv was standing before her, chatting about something – maybe the price of eggs –   stark naked. He wasn’t even wearing slippers!

I was gobsmacked. Then, as I stood on the stairs staring like a stuffed guppy, Viv passed by me with a full glass in one hand. He nodded politely, muttered something indistinct, but friendly, with ‘Dear boy’ in it somewhere; then my mother gave me a good-night peck on the cheek, as they headed back to their bedrooms. Next I heard the sound of my mother resetting the alarms, and quickly returned to my room.

I still sometimes wonder whether it had all been a dream. But the following morning a near- empty bottle of brandy on the dresser told its own tale.

A Festive Spring (With Gynaecological Rhubarb)

This cold weather has held everything back, except one or two of our ewes who have had prolapses. This normally happens in the last weeks before lambing and is a result of a shortage of space in the body cavity, too many lambs and bulky forage. When you first spot a prolapse, it looks terrible: red and very fleshy. But the ewe herself seems unconcerned and goes about her business of chewing the cud, as if she didn’t have half her insides starting to come out at the other end. The solution to the problem is quite simple and involves lots of warm, water and gentle hands. Once everything is safely back inside her, you insert a plastic truss, known in the trade as a spoon, which you then carefully attach to her fleece. Although we normally remove them when ewes actually starts to lamb, the spoons are designed to flip out and over when the lamb begins to appear. And they work well; we’ve certainly never had any problems with them.

Anyhow, we’d just been sorting out a prolapse and I was walking back to the house carrying a small bucket of warm water and various other bits and pieces, when my half-asleep eye was caught by something that looked like another prolapse. We’re very much on the alert for them in the final stages of the lead-in to lambing, so suddenly the adrenalin started to flow and I was about to call to Maisie for help (having small hands she does all the difficult internal work), when I remembered I wasn’t in the barn. And the prolapse was on the ground. I looked again: it was our floral rhubarb whose vast flower spikes and umbrella-like leaves are such a welcome sight in early summer. But now I can never look at those fat, glistening red buds in quite the same way again…

The red buds of ornamental rhubarb, Rheum palmatum ‘atrosanguineum’.

As it’s Easter, I’ve also included two more shots of ewes and lambs, but this time separately. At feeding time the ewes are voracious and the actual process of feeding them can be hazardous. Already this year they’ve had me off my feet once – and I’ll swear this is the reason that New Zealanders (with their vast flocks) are so good at Rugby. I try to make sure that most lambs are away from the troughs when feeding begins, as in the past I’ve actually had one or two killed (or injured) in the subsequent scrimmage. Lambs aren’t stupid and after a day or two they learn to stay away  while their mums are at the troughs – and it was then that I took the picture.

Ewes at the troughs

When the mums are away, the lambs will play…

And finally, the Alan Cadbury saga continues.  Thank goodness the meter has started to notch up again. Hooray! And many, many thanks to everyone who subscribed and it’s great to see the names of old friends from the past, who I do hope will continue to stay in touch. I’m even starting to think about the next book of the Cadbury saga, but at the same time, I daren’t actually do anything about it. I know that if I start a new plot spreadsheet or time-line I’ll drift away from the Penguin book and that would be fatal. So discipline must prevail at all costs: one thing at a time Pryor! And I mean that…

Not Losing the Plot

I’m sometimes asked how I manage to combine sheep farming with writing. A follow-up question is often about the difficulty of getting back into the swing of writing, after a period away from it. I suspect both would be answered in different ways by different people. Indeed, as time passes I find I’m developing different ways of coping with what is essentially a modern phenomenon: the need to multi-task. With me, it’s lambing or filming or gardening, but I suspect there are very few people who have the luxury of doing just one thing – and as they’d probably be monks or nuns, I doubt if I’d be reading their books, anyhow.

Again this will vary from one person to another, but I find I need to stay in practice with my writing. Even if I’m away from my laptop for just a couple of weeks, the words won’t flow quite so fluently when I restart. Incidentally , although I find that words generally flow quite well, I do have to edit and adjust a great deal. In fact I reckon I spend twice as long moving text and re-shaping sentences, as I do actually putting words on paper. I also find that writing technical reports and heavy-duty academic papers very much easier, as a writing process, than my more popular books. And fiction is the hardest of all, requiring a great deal of discipline. And it isn’t just a matter of readability. Certainly academic papers are almost expected by journal editors to be full of jargon and obscure, clever-sounding, phraseology – and strange as it may seem, that sort of prose is easier to write. It requires less thought to describe a straight ditch as a ‘linear’ than to state clearly what its original purpose might have been (say a field, garden or road boundary). The public wouldn’t let you get away with such language out in the real world.

I won’t go so far as to say that you have to practise writing like a musician: eight to ten hours a day, without fail, but it’s certainly helps if one can spend an hour or two every day at the keyboard. As followers of this blog will know from that disgraceful incident with the poultry tea-cosy, I do most of my writing early in the morning, as I’m doing right now, after my Good Friday dawn inspection of the lambing pens (when, thankfully, everything was quiet). This blog has proved a very useful way of keeping my hand in, as it were (perhaps not the happiest turn of phrase for a sheep-farmer in the midst of lambing). In the past I used to keep an e-diary, which sadly has withered and died. Maybe I’ll post a few entries from it, here one day. All of these things help with the flow of language from me to the written page, but they can distract from larger projects, too. And such distraction becomes worse at busy times of the year, such as now.

So this year those few early mornings when I’ve been able to escape for a short time to the laptop, have been spent working on my current book for Penguin. It’s all about bottom-up change and how ordinary people have affected the course of Britain’s development. In a way it’s a prehistorian’s reaction to the increasingly top-town, over-politicised governance that is so characteristic of Britain in the early 21st century. I had a bit of a rant in the Independent blog and, indeed, here. Anyhow, I did a quick word-count and I’ve managed to add about 7,000 words since lambing began. Now I know that’s not much, spread across three weeks, but it helps; but more to the point: I haven’t lost what is becoming an increasingly complex plot, with a series of inter-weaving themes and sub-themes. Indeed, that’s one of the difficulties of writing popular archaeology, that you don’t need to worry about with the more technical stuff: popular books need to hook and retain their readers and you can only do this through stories and a strong narrative thread. Descriptions and facts are all very well , and obviously you  can’t do without them in non-fiction, but they shouldn’t become the entire point of the book. If that happens it becomes, for me at least, unreadable.  And believe me, it can be very easy to lose the plot, even over a short holiday of a few days. In fact sometimes it has vanished over-night and the dreaded writer’s block of the next morning (or two) can be ghastly. When that happens I’ve learned to turn my mind to something else entirely – quite often this blog. Eventually my themes and thoughts return, and often they seem to be better than before the ‘block’ . So there can be an ‘up’ side.

Lambing in 2012 happened when I was working on drafts 10 or 11 of my detective/thriller, The Lifers’ Club. And frankly it was torture: I have an Excel spreadsheet to help me navigate the complexities of the various plots and sub-plots and somehow it got out of step with the time-chart which was on a Word file. So I had Alan Cadbury be in Leicester when he’d told his father in the previous chapter that he’d be digging a graveyard near Boston. Rather like the multiple births that were a feature of the last lambing, things became hopelessly entangled. To make matters worse, I also had several good ideas which I tried to work into the narrative, not always very successfully. In the end I decided I had to make the time to spend three whole days sorting everything out. And it worked, although I was very bad tempered for the first day, when everything seemed like a vast cock-up.

Meanwhile, back to the present. As I write, The Lifers’ Club has reached 42% of its target of 500 subscribers. Before lambing began it was increasing by 1% or 2% a day, but then it stayed around 41% for at least a week. So I’ve got to get off my bottom and get things moving again. I think my next target will be the local newspapers in the Fens. Let’s see what they can do, but I suspect it’ll take some time to get the momentum going again. So if you haven’t done so yet, please subscribe. In an ideal world I’d like to hit the target in May – ideally before I do Hay-on-Wye on Monday the 27th at 7.00, when I’m on the panel with the Unbound Live Road-Show (or some such).

In the deep mid-spring

These last few days have been as cold and unpleasant as any I’ve experienced. Three days ago we had 19mm of rain, so the garden flooded. The following night it froze hard, so heaven knows what damage was done to plant roots. Doubtless we’ll find out later. Mercifully I managed to get my shallots and maincrop onions planted before the cold snap set in – so that’s something. It’s a job I like to do in very early springtime.

And as for lambing, well all I can say is that it has been quite slow. Normally we’d be rushed off our feet by now, but here am I with time on my hands to write a blog post. It’s crazy (the weather, I mean, not this post).

In very cold weather, young lambs huddle up together in nests to conserve body warmth. Here are pictures of a couple: the first with young Emma’s badger-faced lamb, and the second with a ewe pawing (shouldn’t that be hoofing?) her lamb to get it to stand up and be fed. Sheep, like human mothers, can be very bossy, it would seem.

Emma’s badger-face lamb in a ‘nest’.

A ewe tries to persuade a lamb to leave the nest and be fed.

I was just about to put my camera away and return to the house when the peace of the barn was shattered by an ear-splitting cock-a-doodle-do!  I took this picture a moment later. The ewes and lambs seemed completely unaffected. But not me: I had to pick myself out of the rafters.

Our Maran cockerel surveys his domain.

The Long View: from the Floor

Introductory Note

This is the original version of the item I posted in the Independent blog. As ever, I over-wrote and then had to cut it back to 800 words, which is what they’d requested in the first place. Trouble is, I’m hopeless at counting words, or cost or beans. I suppose I’m just hopeless at counting. I think this version places more stress on the modern situation and the hopelessly elitist state of modern politics in Britain. I believe this is something we’ve got to address before too long. Now I’m not suggesting that if we don’t we’d find ourselves in the same situation as France in 1789, but I wouldn’t rule out an Arab Spring sometime in Britain, maybe in the next three or four decades, if politicians continue so haughtily on their present path. I do seriously believe they’re heading for a cliff (and not just a fiscal one) unless they change direction quite radically. People should remind them  that London isn’t the only place in Britain. Anyhow, see what you think. Time to read on…

The Long View: from the Floor

We archaeologists tend to spend most of our lives on our knees – which is not to say we’re a submissive bunch. No, far from it: most of my friends are rather assertive, and if they do fall to their knees on occasion, it’s through choice (I shall say no more). The point is, we work down there eight or ten hours a day and it provides us with our perspective, our view on the world, which is essentially bottom-up. It’s when objects, rubbish return to the soil that we start to get interested, and normally that’s towards the end of things. But we can only explain how they might have got there if we take a long-term view of life and of history, too. We’re not so much interested in events so much as processes. And this, too, gives us an unusual slant on the modern world, and its politics.

We work on the floor because that’s where rubbish tends to accumulate and rubbish is the meat and drink of what we study. But it isn’t simple, either. You might suppose that a king’s dining room floor would be crammed with loot: pearls lost from the corsets of passing courtesans; diamonds from off a duchess’s tiara or gold cufflinks from a fumbling princeling’s starched shirt. But of course it isn’t like that at all: royalty can afford to employ servants who would soon snaffle any rich pickings they found on the carpet. No, if you want finds you’d better sieve through the contents of the dustbins at 23B Acacia Avenue. That’s where the loot would be. As I said, you get to think about the world in a peculiar way if you see it from down below.

And that leads me to the point of this blog post: which is the book I’m now writing. And rest assured, this won’t be an advert. Now in case you haven’t heard all the ballyhoo I’ve tried to generate recently, the book I’ve just finished is an archaeological detective thriller. It’s set in the Fens and it features an archaeologist-cum-detective called Alan Cadbury. He’s a bit of an outsider, a loner, and an obsessive. So he’s nothing like me at all.

Now I know it’s customary for authors who lead double, fiction and non-fiction, creative lives to pretend that the two are entirely separate and that one doesn’t influence the other. But I’m afraid that doesn’t apply to me. My detective – and maybe this is because I’ve been a bit too focussed on him – has affected the way I’ve been seeing my other, factual, work. My fictional hero lives near the bottom of the social pile and takes his perspective on life from the floor, or the soil. He is no more capable of putting himself in the Prime Minister’s shoes than Mr Cameron is of trowelling through a Neolithic cess pit. Don’t get me wrong: both jobs take skill and application, but they aren’t exactly inter-changeable. I haven’t said it in print, but I can reveal here (for the very first time…) that Alan Cadbury feels very sorry for Her Majesty the Queen. As Alan sees it, she had no choice: it wasn’t a case of: ‘fail your exams and you won’t go to the Grammar School’; no, it was: ‘fail your exams and you’ll still end up on the Throne’. And then the rest of your life will be spent in the most conspicuous goldfish bowl on earth. And look what that did to Princess Diana, poor thing.

Alan’s upside-down view of life has rubbed off on me, of late. So in my latest book (which I’ll finish sometime in the autumn) I’m fascinated by the extent to which we ordinary folk can govern ourselves without the top-down help of Big Men and leaders ‘up there’. And as a prehistorian, I have been given a unique handle on all this. Because before the Romans arrived (in AD 43) and gave us writing, we had to live our lives without written records. There were no bureaucrats, no civil servants and no politicians. Government was local and was firmly embedded within the community and its families. If you’re a chief or leader and you get big-headed, the family and the rest of the tribe would soon sort you out. It was an effective system and it gave us stunning monuments, like Stonhenge. It also oversaw the creation of the British landscape, our first road system, together with the foundation of many villages and towns, even if some of these were not fully urban, in the modern sense.

Put another way, bottom-up, family-based, political systems worked for tens of thousands of years and the proof is out there in the landscape. I’m not suggesting we should turn back the clock, but why have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater?  Why have we abandoned localism entirely? Indeed, the fact that we have a politician, Mr Pickles, ostensibly devoted to the subject, proves my point. The spin-doctors and PR men are aware of widespread, rumbling, public discontent. But Mr Pickles’ Department is just a one-off: an event – a ‘sticking plaster’ to use a cliché – whereas the under-lying problem is part of a far deeper, longer-term process. And a pernicious process, at that.

So why have we gone over to a system of governance that is so ‘top-down’ that all the current party leaders can boast of having no experience of ‘real’ jobs?  It puts me in mind of those countless French Kings called Louis who ponced around ineffectively, but expensively, at Versailles. No, all any of our current major party leaders have done, is politics. But that’s not real work: it’s more like the casino bankers they’re so often compared with. You can say what you like about men like Michael Heseltine and John Prescott, they may not be perfect, but they’ve both cut the mustard out here in the world of real people, away from Westminster Village.

I think our obsession with top-down leaders even extends to my own subject. I’ve never known such a fuss made about a burial, and just because it was revealed that the stiff below the Leicester car park was Richard III. He was a celeb. So that’s alright then. Alan Cadbury despised the modern cult of celebrity and I agree with him. And why? Because I see it as a genuine ‘opium for the masses’. It’s almost straight out of Brave New World. The world of celebrity – political, social, sporting, entertainment – whatever – is  being controlled and manipulated to serve the interests of what anthropologists would label as ‘the controlling elite’: a combination of politicians and media magnates in London. And their objective?  To ensure that the ordinary people of Britain don’t think too much or too long about their deteriorating circumstances. Meanwhile the rich will continue to get richer and society will become ever more polarised into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.  ‘Them’ and ‘us’. So did it come as a surprise that politicians and journalists were in cahoots? Of course not. Will Leveson change anything? You must be joking! We’re talking about a long-term process here. And as we saw with Mr Pickles’ Department, the much vaunted Leveson enquiry is merely an event, albeit one that was imposed by the anger of the general public, rather than slimy spin-doctors.

No, the only way we will ever see real, fundamental change will be when power begins to devolve back to where it belongs: to the people who do the actual work, who generate real sustainable wealth. And can we continue to grow our way out of trouble, as politicians, trades union leaders and economists would have us all believe? Of course not. Those years came to an end, I suspect, a decade or two after the last war. I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t been living beyond our means for a very long time indeed. And if you doubt my word, ask an ordinary person living in India, China, Africa or South America: see what they’d say.  And if you want a truly ‘bottom up’ perspective on Britain and the western world, they’re the people you should be asking, not me.