MaxiRam revisited

This is MaxiRam Castle, code-name for the place where I worked in 2007 from February to August. Each noon I emerged for an hour-long walk and in those seven months, taking no days of leave, I combed the parks and roads and byways, in a sort of sacred ritual. It connected me with my primitive being, which is one with nature and finds itself reflected therein. Those walks were excursions into ecstasy, and that is why I tried to capture some of their flavour in the blog posts I published for the period.

Yesterday I went back to call on a friend*. We went to a new pub on the site of Peacock Farm, which appears in the middle ground of my picture above, taken last April. Its land had been purchased for the building of a hundred dwellings, now nearly complete. I’d been sad at the dilapidated state of the farm buildings, but they have been preserved and enhanced to produce a pub which celebrates bygone days in the famous English fashion, with the old ales too, and oaken rafters, and walls lined with old books, some of which were familiar to me from childhood: encyclopaedias of practical mechanics and the like.

We came back to MaxiRam and Clive went back to his office. For old times’ sake I went for a walk. I took my commonest route which reaches Mill Pond via so many spots I’ve photographed or referred to verbally, where I’d found blossoms, lichen, moss, horsetail, grasses, the “stairway to heaven”, Mill Park. I had even planned a book entitled Mill Park: one day, going around its Pond, so many inspirations crowded in that I thought they could fill a volume.

I certainly remembered, and as I draft this post, I can mentally revisit every path I took in those months, the incidents and the inspirations, especially with the help of the “wayfarer’s notes” I posted. A harmless hobby, and one that’s good for the health too. But to me it is much more than that, or perhaps just the same as someone else’s hobby, for how can I deny others the possibility of the ecstasies which I have known? Ecstasies which I don’t think I have ever been able to convey, whether in words or pictures. Perhaps all I have been able to describe is the accidental backdrop, a set of living scenery. The real action has always unfolded on the boards of an inner stage, an ongoing soap-opera called Vincent’s Life. Without these words they would erode and disappear. And yet these words are but feeble footprints on the landscape as lived.

Whilst I worked at MaxiRam the ritual daily walk served a vital purpose: to rediscover my roots as a primitive man. Like eating and drinking, it had to be repeated regularly. Yesterday it was merely nostalgic, and though the scenery was exactly as I remembered it, allowing passage of time and seasons, the revitalising magic had evaporated. The scenery had become wallpaper. It was like the countryside seen through the windows of a car, or a silent bell.

The swinging pub signs and crest show that Peacock Farm is a “tied” pub, supplied by Hall and Woodhouse, the Dorset brewers of Badger Ale. I ought to point out that that this new pub built from old components is no sentimental pastiche or travesty of the English Alehouse. It’s real. The waggon nonchalantly posed under the barn overhang is the genuine rotting article. Looking inside I saw that it had been botched up with various modern boards inside to stop it falling apart. But the use of such a piece of farm machinery to decorate an inn is a venerable tradition.

I am working on a new post, but it is of such potential profundity that some light relief is needed. Working title: “the God-question”. May have to be in several instalments. Well, God and the drinking of ale go well together: that is certainly the principle of Olde England, though the Non-conformists (Wesley brothers & George Fox for example) quite rightly worried about drunkenness and its effect upon the poor.

Once again I proved something I’d known in a puzzled way since my teens, something expressed concisely in a stanza by William Blake.

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the wingèd life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

* Clive Foster, who called himself by the codeword EvilC