Seascape

Mostly sent down to the waves.
Seemed to stay there longer each day,
covered in sand, buried in play.
Seaweed for hair
if we wanted that.
A fine mesh of hand-crafted water channels we built, avoiding the fray,
shells over ears,
eyes pointed away.
A fine game of jumping just when it was about to break,
of plunging underneath for as long as we could take,
of seeing what we could dredge from the bottom only to shake in each others' faces.
And in a way, we were quite happy playing like that,
as if it were only us and the sea.

Further croissant-related missions

The other day, I went to Nottingham to chat with the guy who is the expert on what I was planning to do my Ph.D. on, and I was trying to be open-minded with regards the possibility of doing said Ph.D. in that very place. So, in the hour before our meeting, I took myself to his department's little cafe, purchased a coffee and a swirly danish pastry thing, and sat down with the only of his articles that I hadn't yet read. Now, I had intended to try out their croissant, as a pseudo-jocular-but-in-fact-very-serious method for evaluating the place's potential lurability. But there was no croissant. This left me in the awkward position of having to base a highly important evaluation procedure around a foodstuff in which I really do have no expertise. I was not particularly enamoured with the danish pastry - it was incredibly sweet, with outrageous amounts of icing and stickiness, and, unsurprisingly since it was not a croissant and was not aiming for this quality, had almost no fluffiness at all and could even have said to have been rather hard. I felt slightly unsettled.
There was, however, a sign in the cafe declaring the price of croissant.
So, I could make a judgement based upon the experience with the danish pastry, which is bound to produce a disproportionatley low score since such a thing is intrinsically inferiour to croissant.
Or I could make a withholding of judgement to some as-yet-undefined point in the future - on the grounds that the availability of croissant is usually dependable and I just happened to be there on a bad day - which future point may not even take place until the decision of the place of the Ph.D has been made, in which case the croissant really has been bypassed altogether leaving the decision entierely at the mercy of more conventional means.
I find this a most awkward and dissatisfying situation.


On a lighter note (oops, unintentional but harmless pun!), I have recently been surprised with a lovely croissant in B-Bar. On previous occasions, the B-Bar croissant has been quite dry and even a little tough, and has really presented no other option than to be submerged in coffee prior to consumption. Now, not one too make too hasty a judgement, and as one who works around the corner from B-Bar, I gave the place another chance. And the croissant was pretty much perfect. So B-Bar is unreliable but with great potential. I had not previously thought of factoring time into the croissant criteria.

The Croissant Diaries

Surely the most satisfying start to the day involves croissant. This is how it is for me at least. But some croissants are more conducive to a state of morning tranquility than others, and sometimes it seems important to keep a precise mental log of where success in this quest has been found.

Of course, above and beyond the intrinsic properties of the thing, context also matters.
For instance, my most formative and thus highly prized croissant experiences involve a cluster of siblings curled, sprawled and draped around my mother's bed on a Sunday morning, as Bach's cello suites or perhaps Vivaldi's Nula in Mundo Pax Sincera floats up the stairs, and the gentle light of the expansive East Yorkshire skies dances on the wide river Humber before curving in through the window. Here, the croissant in fact functions, on one level, simply as a medium for the imbibement of coffee, through the operation known as 'dipping'; or rather, the croissant is so intimately bound up with the drinking of coffee that to consider either one alone would be an injustice to the other. On another level, the croissant is merely a semi-arbitrarily chosen obligatory passage point for the occurance of a vitally important ritual gathering and bonding within the family. So the croissant's status is in fact both historically contingent and a partial sideline to another consumable. But nevermind all this. What I have said is, the croissant has a special place of importance for me because of two interrelated factors (family plus coffee), whereas what I meant to say in this section was, that the setting in which the croissant is consumed plays an important role in the level of enjoyment the same may bring.

But I wanted to talk about real croissant.

Now, you'd think that the Bread Man in the market would sell lovely fresh croissant. Indeed, that is what I thought too, but in fact they are a little dry and slightly doughy. In order to make up for this, in which the bread stand very nearly succeeds, the croissants come with all manner of distractions: apricot or apple and sultana filling, chocolate and almond and a swirly shape, chocolate and a twisty shape... but these frills seem to accentuate the lack of the rare treasure of the plain croissant.

Reluctance to go to one of the Nadia's (the reluctance being due to a long-held suspicion against this slightly-too prosperous local bakery - how are there quite so many of them?) was recently overcomeby the writer on the grounds of its ridiculously convenient proximity to last year's house, and in fact the results were surprisingly good. They microwave it for you if you like. A difficult decision; overall the warmth wins out, but the microwaving process does somewhat deflate the thing into a flat state of greasiness.

Of the supermarkets, it would appear that Marks and Spencer remain ahead, although the new Sainsbury's organic croissants are extremely close competitors. The freshly baked Sainsbury's croissant is pretty good also. The other packaged Sainsbury's efforts have much to be desired, and even the Waitrose croissant, though excitingly large, doesn't have the all-important degree of lightness.

I think we can safely say there are two important factors to croissant success: lightness and butteriness. And fluffiness. Fluffiness so as to prevent the flaking into coffee upon dippage. Three factors, then: lightness, butteriness and fluffiness. Although, having said that, it is highly likely that fluffiness is the product of both lightness and butteriness, and thus is the all important factor. So, one factor: fluffiness. (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!)

Very recently, I tried the Presto croissant. This is really very impressive indeed. I can find little to fault in this croissant.

Funny side

Small boy, aged 3, 4, 5, who knows, standing on the square stone steps that bottom an obelisk war memorial as Saturday-morning people busy past, small boy saying earnestly
Daddy, look, daddy, this is the funny side.
Boy almost hugging the stone wall of the sides of the step, moves around the corner to his left, boy has just realised that
Daddy, this is, daddy this side is also the funny side; both of these sides are funny sides.

I don't know what the other sides were, because slowing down as much as had enabled this sight so far was already taking me dangerously away from the Saturday-morning-person categories and there was no need to cause a scene.

But what a discovery. Now every time I go down that street I know that those two sides there are the funny sides.

Astro

Today has suddenly switched into an astrology day. Sudden switches seem perfectly justifiable given the weather. So this is my birth chart.


It used to freak me out with that one line sticking straight through the middle. But secretly I quite like it. It says to me, focussed but with spurts of completely alternative input that maybe work to keep things balanced, but not too balanced that they're dispersed.
Actually when I did my own chart there were one or two more aspects (an aspect is an angle between two planets that is denoted particular importance, like 60 or 90 degrees say, and which is represented on the graphical chart with a line), but I think that was probably because I wanted a more exciting-looking picture. And it was exciting! On mine, there are two other lines coming from the moon (the only planet on the right-hand side of this chart), which join up to both ends of the purple line thus making a lovely isoceles triangle that the red line then bisects. The whole thing appears as a sail, and so looked rather nice. It also ended up being part of a larger configuration of aspects which basically works as a pointer to the planet on its own, in this case the moon, making that planet, its sign, its house etc particularly important in the interpretation of the chart as a whol. Alas, however, the computer program that churned this drawing one out thinks that the planets just weren't quite exactly where I had had them. I suppose it's no big loss. I am rather attached to that configuration actually. I must learn to move on. Such a pretty sail.

The Stone Bomb

Patrick Wright - cultural historian - is seriously cool, and here is a recent article on the first Anti-Air War Memorial that confirms it. Really, do read it!

Admiralty Compass Observatory

Below: 1917 picture of a workshop.
And now... some extracts from a 1932 article in a national newspaper about the (tremendous) ACO.
Note the tensionous jostling of rustic and high-tech imagery in the mens' room, and the (when seen detachedly) hilarious separation of gender, both literally (different rooms) and by association (painting, faces, gardens etc).
So, the journalist is being taken on a tour of the buildings....

“Then the workshops – the faint murmur of machinery and the rustling tick-tick-tick of lathe-belts passing round their pulleys. Men manipulating queer metal shapes from the complicated internals of gyros, men peering through magnifying glasses, men gently waving magnets near hesitating compass cards, each man with the blank, abstracted face of concentration.”

Next...
“Three girls in a room apart, touching the small cylindrical faces of aero compass cards with fine paint brushes tipped with radium paint.”

And then, in the Magnetic Test Room...
“high French windows looking out upon the garden. Two women were bending over compasses on turn-tables, one a boat’s compass, one an aero compass. Had they been busied with embroidery the scene would scarcely have been more peaceful.”


Ha!

1925 was a good year.

Isn't this beautiful?

Photo-history of the aerocompass

This is the first decent aerocompass.

On hearing of pilots' compass-troubles Captain Creagh-Osborne, of the Compass Department, put a submarine compass in a bedding of horsehair to counter the effects of the aeroplane's vibration and took it up in Colonal Cody's plane. This was only a year after Cody's first powered flight and made Creagh-Osborne the first Naval Officer to fly. Yippee.

This little beauty is from 1915, when Creagh-Osborne was working in close communication with a few manufacturing firms. Their joint design has fancy new ways of dealing with vibration (rubber, springs, blah), a vertical and simplified reading card to make things easier for those pressured pilots, and an inverted pivot to make the card spin in a more groovy way.

Of course, the RAE (precursor to RAF) over at Farnborough wanted to have a go too, and came up with this rather inelegant effort, also in 1915. It has a much slower period (i.e. the needle oscillates much more slowly) than those of the Admiralty Compass Observatory; this was the RAE's solution to the wild behaviour of the needle when the aeroplane turns. Known as 'northerly turning error' this problem was due to the fact that when the aeroplane banks, the needle begins responding to the vertical component of the earth's magnetic field. We're not interested in that component. It really sucks. It means that when you turn towards the north the compass under-indicates the turn, so that you turn too far and may even enter a spin, and when you turn towards the south it over-indicates it so that you don't turn enough. The idea of the slow period compass is that it registers turns so slowly that these problems don't have time to take effect, and the pilot doesn't end up constantly over-correcting his course.

The ACO, however, began employing two Proper Scientists in about 1918. With a military-industrial-academic complex under full swing, what should appear but an aperiodic compass! This was really very cool. The needle didn't oscillate in a silly way when the plane had finished a turn, and yet responded quickly. By now the compasses also has a better way of dealing with the problems caused by flying at high altitudes. There the low pressure and temperature would cause the liquid to contract, and so result in the formation of bubbles, which screw up the movement of the needle system. At first they used expansion chambers; then Creagh-Osborne asked his manufacturing buddies to put in an airtrap, which was a little better. Really what they wanted to do was make the liquid out of pure alcohol, but then this would cause the paint inside to dissolve, so that a) the markings couldn't be read so well and b) little bits would get into the liquid. It really was tricky business.

From 1922, separate compasses for the plane's observer/navigator and its pilot were designed by the ACO. Above is a rather lovely observer's compass, complete with azimuth for taking bearings and serving as a bombsight, and the picture before was a pilot's compass. This 'observer' entity existed for a short, 50 year period and then dissappeared again, poor chap.

Then they had the Second World War, and all sorts of other stuff happened.

bombs <-> aeroplanes <-> people/mail

1919, Jan 16th:

"It is perfectly certain that we are on the eve of a tremendous development in commercial aviation... It is true that the machine designed for war is not the best type for commercial purposes, but it is equally true that the one designed to carry a large number of passengers or a heavy weight of mail or goods is quite capable of carrying a corresponding weight of bombs"

- Editor's comment, Flight magazine, the first journal of the aircraft community (hooray!)

Life drawing class

First to look around in furtive discovery: 80 degrees to the left, model the central pivot, a limply suspended woman emerges draped on the paper of someone who could not bring themselves to include the chair on which the model sat; 60 degrees to the right someone else draws four or five of the others in the class as they draw, cluster of people surrounding and nearly drowning out the model, and it's like the fascinated gaze at distant bird hides facing you from the darkness inside your own, looking out and in at the same time, stopping the slip into imagined invisibility. Determined denial of the situation's artificiality on my left and frenzied over-preoccupation with it on the right: ever-so-slightly closer to the latter.

Second to look at the model herself from my place, from behind and to the side of her, paper still blank, soft curve of cheek and glimpse of pleasantly perked-up nose but all blankly fading into unexpressive mouth and petering-away chin, charcoal in hand has no response, a whole body, tumbling down from the face, overwhelmingly present, sinking into chair, landing in solid flat confidence where the lower of her crossed legs settles on the floor and she had been told to leave on her shoes.

Absent minded drift of charcoal here and there around that body before settling into a close-up focus on the strong back of that lower leg and the flat of that sandal shoe.

Then a long gaze in and out of focus right at the model gradually to realise that what is being seen could only be described by cascade. The eye pours and falls in downward-curved jumps and leaps: tumbles from a hold on top of the shoulder down the loose arm, tracks back up to beautiful ray of shadow following path of arm down back, stop-gap switches to her hand on the arm of her chair where arcs of fingers point gently to the floor even while gripping tightly, and crash-culminates in up-and-down splash over three floorbound slashes where narrow leg of chair stands between shapely, crossed legs of model, and so much momentum by now that it - the gaze - springs right up to the hook on the shoulder again. And all the while the face doesn't seem to enter into it.

So now I have fixed upon this idea, this waterfall of body and chair, but the next drawing still gets caught up with areas where too much working-in pull the eye to a static, over-informed rest. I am told this by she who wanders around quietly and engages with us intensely, and instructed sternly to let go of representation, to draw the raw idea not all of this stopping and starting. There follow a couple of hesitant attempts, forehead frowning, each time absorption and frustration both growing, but then flying charcoal flowing leaves me with a piece that seems too strident and aggressive to me, but seems actually to startle this teacher of ours.

A pulse of muted exitement: she seemed held up on a string for a moment, briefly lost in the drawing, as if feeling the faint connection with a sliver of magic that means something has been captured. Well, after that response, it seemed time to leave the A2 paper and embark upon a last half hour basking in the freedom of A1. The light outside had become dimmer, but even so, the way each subtle shift of shade was standing out so strongly on that body was partly that by now I had slightly become it. Drawing some-thing/one you have entered into like that can no longer be frustrating: there is only a contented dream-state. And so ended my first experience of life drawing.

Southwold's Cathedral

Character directionally variable, through a slow circling process.

And it looks better in watercolour...

Navigation by the stars

Just as twentieth century compasses had almost completely taken my world by storm, I found that sextants, more specifically bubble sextants, were being used for celestial navigation of aircraft right until the middle of the Cold War! Yes, that's correct: navigation in aeroplanes by heavenly bodies. Here is Commander Weems demonstrating, and here also is an early 1920s example of such a device. A skilled pilot was required to keep the plane steady whilst measurements were being taken, and on early commercial flights, the pilot would turn on a special light to convey to customers his wish for them to cease their centre-of-gravity-upsetting meandering and be still for a while. This system was mainly used over sea; pre-Second World War air navigation over land involved pilots trying to follow roads and railways, looking out for the occasional inscription of a placename on a roof, and occasionally taking a brief stop at a farm to ask the way. Of course, it all got a lot more high-tech during the war when black-outs made things somewhat tricky, and an innovative fervour produced rather more swish-looking sextants, a modification of sun-compasses termed an astrocompass, gyro-stabilised distant reading repeater magnetic compasses, compasses with bomb-sights attached...

These are my wonderful sibs. We're in the Yorkshire Moors near my dad and step mum's house. In a little while, the sun will set and light the heather in a blaze of gorgeousness while we ramble and joke and play in our special sibling way. For now, we're posing, which we don't all do naturally, but which we most definately tolerate once in a while for such a nice keepsake.
Note: isn't sib such a lovely word? It seems quite cuddly, like cub; quite playful, not formal. I like it.

It seems to me that this is the way to travel. There's definately something to be said for being upside down for a start, and the particular angle achieved by the head just here means the sight of people-filled, upwards-bound lifts is cut out, leaving only the downhill procession of empty carts. Empty carts making a steady, purposeful march amid the forest and sky really freaked me out actually. They seemed to fit in with their surroundings much better than anyone else.

Dennis Creffield

understands Orford Ness.

John Wonnacott

just hasn't quite grasped it.

Shower:
private stream;
nature in a small tiled room, purified glow from white reflecting walls, imagined extended scope from resonant echo;
ultimately dissatisfying.

Leon's laptop in Heidelberg:
vacillating but stationary!

The country's keys, bowl, ladder up the side, pile in, weigh up, publish privacy, bowl over-turned, keys returned with caution, restored with warning: 'country in shock as privacy up 20.46% in last ten years!', event forgotten.

Orford Ness: gosh.

From the village of Orford, which stretches right down to the quay, the clustered military buildings on the other side of the River Ore seemed much closer than I had expected. How could it have been possible to keep the AWRE activities secret, especially given the far-reaching view from Orford’s medieval castle up on the hill? No wonder the locals have smothered the site in speculation for the past half-century. A quiet buzz of excitement filled our twelve-person boat on the first of day’s eight rides across to ‘the Island.’ The Trust’s booklet had primed us for “a landscape of unusual character with its sheer scale perhaps its most memorable feature” a landscape that “can be exposed, lonely, hostile and wild,” which held the promise of ornithological delights, and yet which housed all manner of military experiments, “some of which affected the course of world history” (16-7). In the flurry of local and national newspaper articles that appeared around the time of its opening to the public, Orford Ness was “weird, unsettling,” “sinister” (The Times 8/6/95; Guardian Weekend 24/6/95), and a place where “visitors will reflect on the incredible history of Orford Ness” and “will be fascinated but tantalised” by the sight of those AWRE laboratories nick-named the Pagodas (EADT 6/6/95). The site comes with high assurances and dramatic claims.

Before being released from the National Trust volunteers’ stewardship on stepping off the boat, we were told which birds we might see, where the trail marked out by the Trust would lead us and that we must not leave this trail. The first stretch of the path was banked high on the river side – flood protection – and opened out to marshland and the First World War airfield on the other. This bank cuts off the view back to the mainland, seeming to accentuate the effect of boat journey in transporting us to a different world entirely. We approached a cluster of low-lying, standardised, prefabricated buildings from the two world wars, mundane in appearance, but jostled by their incongruous companions: discarded, decaying metal and concrete structures.

Inside the buildings here on ‘The Street,’ museum displays ran through Orford Ness’ geomorphological and ornithological features, and the military uses of the site up until the early Cold War years. I found out that the shingle spit has been slowly growing southwards over the past five hundred years, obscuring more and more the once-thriving port of Orford. I found that the site has many different types of habitat – salt marsh, mudflats, brackish lagoons, reed beds, natural grassland and shingle – supporting many migratory birds from year to year. I saw a montage of aerial photographs of the site from the 1950s, learnt that during the First World War important early developments of aerial photography were made here, and felt the montage jumping backwards and forwards across that thirty-year gap as I watched. I read about the investigations into ballistics of bombs dropped from the Ness out towards the sea, about trials into self-sealing aeroplane fuselage tanks, about the simulated attacks on plane parts with various projectiles, and about the research and development of the aerial defence system which was to become known as radar. The site seemed to be a focal point for the country’s connectivity and mobility in war.

Back outside, walking away from The Street and over Stony Ditch onto the more seaward, shingle part of the Ness, all of this movement – the spit, the birds, the planes, the radar signals – seemed to drift uneasily in and out of the still silence as the landscape became increasingly barren. Either side of the Trust’s designated track, the flatness of the open expanse of shingle made a seemless transition to it, and the strangeness of the scattered concrete and metal forms were inviting me away from it. But the secrecy of the site’s military past works as fence posts from which the Trust hang barrier lines along the sides of the path, lines fed to the visitors as they step off the boat – lines about the danger of unexploeded ordnance, the protection of bird sancturaries – and the path becomes a tightrope.

Reaching the Bomb Ballistics Building, I encountered the strange experience of being in a museum about itself. Up on the top of this building, the telescope from WWII testing days is the only approachable object in the flat concrete square (there was another, a large green hulk of metal, whose purpose you can read about on the floor below, inside the building, but this hulk remains bolted closed). Earlier on, the white body of a low-flying plane had skimmed overhead, cracking open the present-day sky, pushing through it images of the site-in-action more firmly than had any of the still and silent buildings back in The Street. And now, as I bent to look through the abandoned telescope, its cross-hair slid uninterested over the castle, over the green pastures of the mainland, over the quaint boats in Orford Quay, longing instead to hook onto the plane that had passed out of sight.

Crossing from the Bomb Ballistics Building to the lighthouse, the shingle shifted and slipped underneath me, and crunching and ripping through the silence it locked my attention into the space around my feet. I could easily have trudged all the way to the lighthouse like this, the shingle pulling me downwards and the Trust’s path pulling me forwards. But up on top of the Bomb Ballistics Building I’d seen the gentle shapes of the ‘Pagodas’ in the South, the delicately translucent aerials rising from the Cobra Mist site in the North, the rectangular buildings on the far side of Stony Ditch, the stark and pointed Black Beacon, the awkward protrusions of decaying AWRE laboratories from behind the shingle banked up beside them, the concrete scattered and rusted metal splayed on the shingle, the vastness of this shingle, and finally, the sea. Remembering all of this, I pulled my eyes up from my feet to try and take it in from ground level. But this was hard! The parallel lines of ridges in the shingle, ridges that converge on each other all too soon in seductive vanishing points, sucked my gaze along them instead. My feet were stuck to the Trust’s path and my eyes flung up and down the shingle.

Past the lighthouse, the shingle drops steeply towards the sea. Down here, none of what I had been trying to stare at up there is any longer visible. Down here, the sea roars; the silence on the flat shingle above a distant past, the crunching underfoot expanding outwards to meet the roar rushing inwards. Down here, the sea broods in grey-yellow-blue; the buildings on the flat shingle above a distant past, the glistening swells drifting upwards and downwards. This is where the National Trust volunteers recommend the visitors sit for lunch. Then, back on top of the bank, the Trust’s path to the Black Beacon leads you along the high tide line, demarcated by scraps of black seaweed, a lighter, a sandal, the obligatory piece of blue rope, half of a small blue ball. I got the impression that the debris from the sea and the debris of military-scientific research were calling to one another above my head, playing a game I wanted to join, but trudging through the shingle, I was too slow to keep up.

By now, I was reaching the old Police Watch Tower on the perimeter of the AWRE site, from which intruders would have been identified, and discrete red arrows pointed along its edge towards the Black Beacon. The Trust recommends the view of the inaccessible AWRE laboratories that can be had from the Black Beacon, and so I climbed to the third floor of this octagonal building and gazed through the narrow window on each of its sides in turn. Each window is flanked by a labelled line drawing of the view, so I know that this structure over here is laboratory 3, that the water there is the North Sea, and that that unlabelled heap of metal over there is to be ignored as irrelevant. After having felt so immersed in the shingle and the flatness, the height of this building and the apparent clarity of the diagram give me a relieving sense of distance from the landscape. Framed, the landscape seemed now to conform to an order, and from this distance, I even felt a sense of power over it. How is it possible to feel in control of a site that is essentially a collection of decaying rubbish?

Outside again, it was a hot day, and rushing swirls of heat haze seemed to prize the Pagodas away from the ground, to sever their connection to the shingle on which I stood, making them distant, untouchable, unreachable. Approaching further, I saw closer the banks of shingle piled against the other AWRE laboratories, saw the laboratories nestling into the shingle, crouching behind it in comfort from my intruding eyes, and I remembered that this is a Nature Reserve, that certain things are not to be disturbed. Approaching closer, I saw the banks further as burial grounds, as solemn memorials to the suffering of the Ness at the blasting hands of military science. One step further and the shingle shifted again, inviting me to climb up and roll down like a sand dune in a purpose-built playground.

Not all of the AWRE laboratories are off-limits: laboratory 1, the closest, invites the visitors in through a damp, quiet hallway with a glow of green at the far end. Putting off the moment when the green glow could come to life, I drifted into first one dark side room (and stood still, my adjusting eyes finding only emptiness) and then another (rubble on the floor, switches on the wall). Finally, nose against the fence, I met the outside inside as it came streaming between the roof’s bare beams, flooded past fluorescent lights limply floating, streaked down the walls in swathes of algae, fell onto fresh leaves freely sprouting, and slipped away into the pit on the right where bombs used to be subjected to a hydraulic ram.

A group adventure walking through the Yorkshire Wolds, soft chalk hills unobtrusive to sky, nation.

The theme of the first day was unity and disunity.
The group met a large road; a road too large to cross, cars running East and West all at once. There were those who thought the bridge over the road far in the distance was the obvious solution, even though our path was due to continue North wihtout any such detours.
And there were those who were impatient. Impetulently, in a lull in traffic, they crossed the road; they found it easy to cross, they revelled in how easy it had been.
They thought the others would follow, they thought this was the best method of persuasion. The others walked to the bridge.
A flashback to childhood arguments flared up five seconds into a fleeting phone call between me and my bridge-headed brother. Enraged frustration flared so fiercly that the phone call no longer seemed possible, did not last long enough to allow communication of the others' plan, a plan for a short-cut from the other side of the far-away bridge to a later point in the path we had been following, following in unity.
Disunity followed; followed both forks at once, followed us waiting for their return from the bridge to the true path, followed them not returning to us from the bridge on their new path. The true impass the first phone call, fixed assertions, fuming siblings; the true bridge the second phone call, the gentle malleability of the new mediators, with their mutable meandering towards a new and mutually reached meeting point.
Now we all meander.

The theme of the second day was balance.
The group was in harmony. It rejoiced in its unity because it was no longer innocent . It sought to further characterise itself, allotting roles to its members and themes to its days. Nick became the shepherd of the group, and cheif in charge of optimism. Dick, the risk and safety officer, from whom permission for any proposed venture must be obtained. Saffron, the magical elf, in charge of stamping Dick's documents. Charlie, the philosopher king, ready to balance the pragmatism of the safety officer. Anne, chief in charge of maintaining diversity within unity. Sophia, the reader of maps. Lisa, the writer of speeches for Anne, was chief in charge of public relations for all members of the group. And finally, Rich, the planner, became known as god.
The group had joked of making a social contract. This seemed to be it.

The themes of the third day were ups-and-downs, formlessness and death.
Heavy sky fell on trudging feet.
As the group rolled on, flat to the ground, thick clouds pressed down, and rolling hills pushed them up towards and wrenched them away again, they found a dizzy cycle.
Death on the sides of the roads.
As they all saw it, crowded round it, peered down on it, the philosopher king diagnosed: death on the ground.
A special detour to a village with a highly spoken-of tearoom, the group peered through the gap between the sky and the ground towards the village, the stop, the coffee, the rest, the warm aroma. But the tearoom was closed, the village useless. Only a damp bench and a lovesick cockeral. Instead of a triumphant 'cock-a-doodle-doo', the dying note of 'cock-a-uhhhhh' expressed: "Without you, I am... no. To me, you are... no. I compare thee to a summer's... no, no good. I wish... no. You... oh god," and so on. But after the village had passed, a released trigger propelled clouds into receding sky!
After the village, new vigour expelled mud clogged in throat and eyes!
After, light voices pattered on the ground, dipped in and out of dappled sounds.
They rushed ahead; we called them back.
They stopped at a gate to see who would go first, watched and waited and on they burst.
They tripped over each other; we let them.
After, light voices at our feet lay scattered around, slid over each other to rest and
meander.
This was the first day that Lisa fell over with laughter. The fall was not dramatic; it was a topple. Lisa toppled over with laughter.
The grass didn't mind; it had never seen anything quite like it. It replayed it to itself: the voice and the words and the way they had weaved their way into her walking path; the stop and the pause and the slow, gentle; the loss of control and the long, drawn out; the others turning around and still she hadn't quite; and then there she was.

The themes of the fourth day were repetition, crossing boundaries, aches and cakes, grumpiness


The theme of the fifth day was reevaluation, life and ways of being.
The group reached its collective climax. The themes from the previous days were seen in new lights, and a set of maxims were made: sleep in squalour, dine in company, walk slowly, sit quietly, and die alone like a dog.
This was the day that Sophia fell over. It was dramatic; a collapse. Earlier in the day, she had found how to walk in the land rather than on flat gridded paper, had become indifferent to the map she had clutched, had pretended not to hear when they asked who would be taking it, had watched how the others approached the role, had let it go. But now, walking with the chalk grass hedge soil: the sudden sight of a blank hole, a swift silent seeping into no role. The group pored over this stillness on the ground, poured into it a new role, and when she was convinced, she got up.

The theme of the last day was fine, final.