vinculafido

  Green I’m not a painter. Far from it – a teacher at my Primary school once delivered her termly verdict on my ‘art’ with the devastating/amusing put-down ‘messy but improving’ . If I were to try my hand at painting today, I guess the same would be said, undoubtedly with the coda: ‘but not a lot’ . Nevertheless, I like watching Sky TV’s annual ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’. A group of contestants is often asked to grapple with a scene that’s mostly green, and it’s always interesting. Because, of course there isn’t a single green, as my six-year old self might have naively thought, but an astonishing range of colours with a family resemblance such that we’re able to refer to them by the same adjective.   And in this spring, right now, the whole Dulux colour chart of green-ness is on display, fresh, enlivening, calming in equal degrees. Today I’m glad of the green, because my mood is sombre. Sue’s Nana, Hilda Woods, would have been 125 today, and in this county of airfields...

  Honington St. Nicholas The drive up beyond Grantham this morning in the company of Nicky Campbell and his Radio   5 phone-in guests is depressing. Two subjects are aired. The much-heralded ‘Co-op Live’ mega-arena, due to open in Manchester a fortnight ago, has been cancelling gigs because the venue isn’t ready. In the course of Nicky’s morning conversations, it becomes apparent how much has been invested by the potential punters at Olivia Rodrigo’s scheduled performances, now no more. Heartbreak has been visited on families, and considerable money lost (some of it beyond the scope of re-imbursement). One family has been using the diarising of such events as a key part of the strategy for curing a thirteen year old’s anorexia.   A lone dissenting voice texts to say something to the effect of ‘Get over it. This is such a first-world problem…’. Campbell seems angered. ‘Have you no heart, man?’ he hollers at the unidentified contributor. Is the anger real or manufactured ...

  Waiting for the rain to clear, I sit in Grantham’s Costa and look across the square at Isaac Newton.   The shopping centre itself is named after him, and so is a pub and a primary school. Quite right too.   He was a pupil at the King’s School before he went up to Trinity Cambridge. His home was at Woolsthorpe Manor, not so very far away. Woolsthorpe is now a National Trust property, complete with an apple tree which may or may not have inspired the notion of ‘gravity’. There’s a contemporary-sounding twist to Newton’s experience. He returned to Woolsthorpe in 1665, interrupting his Cambridge studies. It was the plague year, so one can imagine he was entering a kind of self-imposed lockdown, away from coffee houses and the communal life. I suppose each Christian, perhaps each person , could be placed on some kind of x-y grid in terms of their beliefs about the relationship between religion and science. Do the two fields of activity occupy the same space for us? Or in a...

  I’ve worn the same winter boots ever since I started the first of my long pilgrimage walks in 2016, but now they’re showing the first signs of falling apart. If I had to ford a stream of more than two inches in depth, I’d be shipping water.   This is a worrying moment: it could conceivably be a great boon to have the extra grip a new pair of Berghaus would give me, but equally well, there’s no telling whether blisters will start appearing where there weren’t any before. And then there’s the expense, of course… I park in Great Gonerby’s Long Lane, and at its end take the downward-trending path beside horsey fields to cross some stiles and emerge on Belton Lane. This road is busy, and a bridge across the main railway line is narrow and hump-backed, requiring exceptional care since there’s no verge. It’s been an untidy morning under cloudy skies, and now there’s drizzle in the air. My spirits are low.   The onward path takes me across the fairways of a golf course, and...

  The Gorilla.  Where the Grantham canal meets its nemesis - the A1! The gradient of the lane away from the canal towards Barrowby appears slight, but is illusional. As you begin to breast the wold, what looked insignificant now makes the walker blow, or at least this walker.   To be fair the guy in singlet and shorts who was running it ahead of me seemed not to slacken his pace at all.   Inside the village limits a man is picking litter.   As I pass I say thank you, because even if Barrowby has been a three-time winner of ‘best-kept village’, it’s a horrible, unrelenting, painting-the-Forth-bridge sort of a job.   He doesn’t reply, not even a grunt. Well, he may have been deaf, or thought me sarcastic or condescending. Or I wonder, maybe he’s doing a different kind of ‘community service’, and really doesn’t want to be there at all, except it’s preferable to a few days in chokey or a large fine. All Saints’ church is locked, and as I sit on the bench to...