A walk in the Parked time Capsule Ham Hill

I recently re read Peter Handke's Slow Homecoming, in fact Im still reading it again, quite a book, it really affected me then and now its reawakening some dormant feelings.

I may need some coffee soon although I do have a bottle of water, this is the third library I've been to today, they are all quite busy with young students swatting for the school holidays. This is Croydon library, I wonder if I would ever feel intimidated by other people in such environments, if life were different. If I was alone, I am here alone but I think my confidence is not too dented today despite feeling slightly punch drunk in my over sensitive way which I have very little control over.I can easily imagine prevaricating just inside or insight of such a place. Today Croydon library is a little like a massive comprehensive school run by help centre staff, there's no disruption but the slight whiff of chaos, informality and dare I say anarchy helps me feel totally at ease. I have to join before entering, more a process than a ritual but a touch of the Groucho rule book that appeals. 
Being in Croydon is a balance between the glaringly urbane and the neutered rural, the sort of feral neutered rural that wanders aimlessly unless gainfully employed and even then, carrying the schedule around from place to place anticipating losing all track of time and winding up late for whatever it is that underpins such an existence.I don't work for anyone on a full time basis but I do depend on working around other people's schedules, I lack the god given right to demand, I look for pockets of doubt, I seek vacuums of stale air that I can refresh and claim for myself, I walk towards darkened doors that are poorly hinged and disheveled I look for asylum in spaces I might occupy without displacing others and I have been doing this all my working life and of course I can tell you with confidence that by assuming presence in a space one is inviting two, two either fuse or repel, I have latterly been repelled. Frequently. 

Ham Hill at Night

I returned to another century when I was repelled and infused into, what was quite literally a golden landscape, either by my own naivety and indiscretion I jettisoned myself of constraints and imposed order into a realm of sand coloured roads, hillside fields, hollow ways and because it was new to me I found it to be liberating, it was almost a decision, it was almost a decisive act, now that I can look back at it, it appears justifiable and efficient, a direct consequence of my own will being manifest but I was simply reacting to everyone else's demands, even then I understood that a cup of water cannot exist without the cup. The cup is filled, it is not the watery filling that seeks the cup in order to exist. 

And yet here I am on another road, I don't hitch hike for lifts anymore, I gave lifts at odd times but more recently there have been no requests, the thumb is now masked as though it is capable of more than it's physical attributes, it seems too direct to ask a total stranger for a lift in their personalised car or their even more personalised lorry, the curtains may not match my mood, they could have a little dog with them and I would distract them from their CD collection and texting between glimpses at the satnav, the microwave and inevitably the road. There's no going back but I'm taking you back to Ham Hill and West Chinock, to a moment among a dozen cats. A walnut tree and two folk musicians and their friends that came and went to Eastall Farmhouse. After my cup and water analogy I wish to offer an Egg Analogy, I was a shell less egg that got poured from Redruth to Yeovil along the A30 I sort of didn't hatch because I had no shell, I just absorbed everything as if I had hatched but I hadn't hatched. 
I took generosity and kindness for granted, I had always been given plenty unconditionally but I really should have waited to hatch before being so presumptious. 

I was reflecting on the condition of the today I now occupy, or at least part of me occupies, how my mood got distorted by influences beyond my control, mostly a dull, soft grey blanketed light that teetered on tearfulness but restrained outward emotion and concealed all articulation from open discourse, I politely asked the whereabouts of the lavatories, he removed his spectacles... the”loo” then,... “the what?” …”oh, the toilet”, I was smiley, co operative, he went back to his newspaper the Asian Post, I smiled inwardly and realised that this may not count. The weather was still pink and grey outside, such conditions allow clarity of vision but oh! the heavy load, what to do with the heavy load. I suppose I'm asking the gods to lead me across the fields as they did in west Chinock, away from the mutations of domesticity and creativity at Eastall Farm House and in beneath the Chiselborough hills of East Fields Farm, comparable independence, a moored caravan beside a little stream, a full time job pulling up Oxford Ragwort, counting sheep, lifting potatoes, silaging with tractor and trailer, friends came to fruit pick at nearby Norton Sub Hamdon, they picked blackcurrents until the money just didn't stack up then farewell back to Falmouth. John came through I was cruel, Rich came too, Scott and I lost a trailer load of spuds bobbing into a stream of suds. 

Ham Hill looking at the Blackdown Hills in the west with West Chinock slightly off frame on the extreme left.

Alone then in the crepuscular summer evening, weary from harvesting, dust clung skin begging to be bathed fresh, letters from home, Dads called Jim, where am I ? The guy I work with is very steady, his name is John, he's from Crewkerne, I like Crewkerne it feels Cornish, like Lostwithiel. John tells stories of his youth, he has a wife and children and an amazing Ford Anglia he used to have a Triumph motorcycle he says that he thinks I'm a modern gypsey. I learned something brilliant from John, we were to shift some straw bales from the trailer to the stack, he said that I should place a bale on the elevator each time he took one off the other end and if we did that as he described we would finish at twelve “dinner time”, it was Saturday morning and we only worked the morning, anyway his guidance included giving him time to "tie" each bale in place before reaching for another, I got completely carried away with the placing of bales on the elevator, he signalled me a couple of times, I thought he was signalling “great work” sort of a signal, I plonked the last bale onto the elevator, johns face was like thunder. “We beat the clock” says I, “at my expense” says John, it was now ten to twelve and we would not go early just because I got carried away. I should have listened to his wise words, he took his job seriously and knew exactly what to do, I was a passenger getting misty eyed at the sight of badgers and buzzards and the sun going down on the Blackdown hills, always so evocative but debilitatingly sad as I would watch between the A303 and the A30, I was in a no mans land looking at the sun setting in the west and it made me consider how far I had come, if anywhere. 

Walking to East Coker from East Chinock one Sunday, I met the women who work on the potato lifter, they find me funny, they are lewd I'm fascinated to hear them talk about Lobsang Rampa and evidence of rock paintings referring to Jesus, they live in the village but I do not have their multi dimensional aptitude for confidence, it's Sunday and there's still a semblance of ritual around the church, then as perhaps now I'm too naïve to appreciate T S Elliot's poetry but now it's become entangled in my memory, a sense of misplace in the name Burnt Norton as if I now relegate my memory of this period as very inward looking even though outwardly I innocently relied upon my invisible egg shell to hold me up, I cared little and knew little but I outwardly ripened like a green Brambley until my knee came a cropper with a Fordson tractor and a railway sleeper ending up in Yeovil General Hospital. 

Ham Hill Memorial

As I now stand in the Weald of Kent looking across the M25 and the maroon tinted haze rising from Brighton and Gatwick, I'm no longer an egg, so what the hell am I ? by this time I'm surely a fried egg, half baked, boiled no shell required, not being led by my tadpoles anymore, is that what romance is? Romance is not so one dimensional, I read science fiction then, Philip k dick, Ursula le guin, lots of sham-shamen, Carlos Castaneda then, I was very impressionable especially where kurt Vonnegut is concerned, later I would wholly embrace and reject Hemingway after accepting the technique of a direct quality, of his story telling, later on more Americans.
Now my life is truly pagan, officially the earth is my church, like all good churches, mine is cold and empty, facing closure, slightly damp and not really part of mainstream society. Everyone in this church is here for themselves, their heads are full of history, they use the history like fan heaters in cold offices, aimed at the cold part of the body, there's no collective urge for communal warmth, there's no coming together in order to load the haystack. Euphemistically, walking across the M25, southbound to the pagan sun, the M25 is a circular road. It really isn't a road it's a noose, you either slip your noose or you prepare for the inevitable, today is different. Yesterday's cloudy pink is replaced by crackling sunshine and cool, Cool shadows where the winter still haunts and the buds remain unconvinced. Croydon library where the youths do play, they read and write between the earphones, swotting, flirting, having fun while the escalators run and run, they help each other and they’ll break away, one day they will break away.

West Chinock - If you find a Gothvos Greenstone feel welcome to place it somewhere of your choosing - leave it in position, photograph it and send words and photo to jonathan_polkest@hotmail.com