I could drink a puddle
Bits and bats
Courage
Sometimes I remember my job is a privilege. It won’t seem like much — yet another Zoom meeting — but this morning I spent an hour questioning a fisherman six thousand miles away who has spent his life trying to protect his local water, and who got shot for it. The water is the Tañon Strait in the Philippines, which is a protected seascape. On paper, the Philippines is brilliant at protecting its seas. Bottom trawling is banned everywhere (yay), commercial fishing is not permitted in “municipal waters,” three miles offshore reserved for artisanal low-impact fishing. But that is on paper. I get annoyed when people use the expression “lawless ocean.” It’s not lawless. There are endless bloody laws protecting the sea. It is the enforcement-less ocean, which is less catchy but more accurate. Norlan was shot in the back as he walked home from a village fiesta. He had spent years patrolling the sea in a citizen protection force. In 2008, his mentor Jojo was shot dead and Norlan says, “at that point I lost my fear.” He knew the man who paid to have him shot. Norlan is now in a wheelchair, not a very good one, and still doing his advocacy. Here is a video about him. A brave and good man, doing his bit.
Peace
I escaped book prison this week. I like book prison in a way: I like the concentration of it, the pressure, the way that sometimes combines to make me write sentences that I like. But my brother stays often at Dent Station in Dentdale at the top of Yorkshire, he invited me to go up for the night, and the cottage was free so I stayed on. Dent station is four miles from the village of Dent, and 1150 feet above the dale bottom. I stayed in the snow huts, worker’s huts built to protect men who had to move snowdrifts. The huts are now luxury accommodation, converted by my brother’s friend Robin Hughes. So is the main station building, where the ticket office is now a bedroom and the living room was the waiting room. Robin sold the station to the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle Line but kept the snow huts.
I love it there. The views are glorious, the hills call to me, and the best thing by far is the quiet. Pure quiet of a kind you don’t get much now, punctuated by chatty sheep and every so often, a train passing 100 metres from your bed. Also there is no wifi and barely any phone signal, which is also grand. I found though that even with patchy signal, as I sat on the patio and watched the sunset and listened to the sheep bleating for no reason that I could see, I needed to know urgently why sheep make noise. I learned that it can be:
to alert to a threat
if a sheep has been separated from the flock
if a lamb wants to rejoin its mother or vice versa
if a human is coming to feed them
if a sheep is in distress or pain
just because they feel like it
The snow huts are also available for rent, but don’t book them up, I want to go back there.
Before:
After:
Company:
Before the signal box was burned down for no good reason by the railway authorities (idiots), the signal man used to multi-task by also offering haircuts. It’s definitely a schlep up from the dale floor: the Coal Road hill, which I climbed once on a bike and once by foot and each was hard in its own way, is a one-in-four gradient. So maybe he had a queue of sheep-farmers wanting to be shorn, or very very fit villagers with overgrown hair.
Bric à brac
Jan Faulkner had a coil inserted, almost casually, when she went to be sterilized after having her fifth child. For the next eight years she was in crippling pain. She had to leave her job and become housebound. It was only when the coil was removed that she realised that was the source of her pain. Go figure: medicine treating women’s gynaecology with total nonchalance! I have lost count of the number of times GPs and nurses have insisted that I have a Mirena coil fitted. Each time I refuse and tell them why: I don’t want anything inside me that cannot be instantly removed when it goes wrong, which it will. I eventually insisted that a note be put on my record that they stop mentioning it. We think of men being the fighting sex, but women do their share, only we are fighting a patriarchal (not always: most of those GPs and nurses in my case were women) and arrogant medical establishment that still doesn’t believe women when they say they are in pain, or when they know their own bodies. I know women who have suffered horribly from men putting vaginal mesh in them and telling them airily that that would fix their incontinence. Or, dunno, make it far far worse. Anyway, good for you Jan, because she is gathering women for a class action case against Bayer, the manufacturer of this horrible-sounding coil (it involved inserting springs into the fallopian tubes to create scar tissue so eggs couldn’t get through). Sorry it’s behind a paywall.
Lev Parikian’s newsletter is charming. Last week (I think) he posted this video by Robert Loebel which I love, and which I sent to my friend Simon, who is writing a book about wind. Definitely watch it with the sound on. At Dent, the weather was gorgeous, but on the last day it was blowing a hoolie* along the station. I left my running shoes outside to dry and when I went back outside the wind had blown them 100 metres down the track.
*hoolie/hooly
definition by Susie Dent: “For those asking, the 'hoolie' in 'blowing a hoolie' may come from the Orkney Scots 'hoolan', a strong gale, influenced by the Irish use of 'hooley' for a very noisy party.”
Animal hero of the week : Ruswarp
On my penultimate day in Dent, I decided to go for a cycle ride. I planned a loop that went along Dentdale to Sedbergh, turned at Garsdale Head and dropped me back down to Dent Station via the Coal Road. I asked my brother whether the climb from Garsdale Head was as steep as the one up from Cowgill. “Oh no,” said my brother. “It’s a gentler incline.” Ha ha HA. No it is not. It was the Buttertubs of Garsdale and if you do not cycle or know the Dales that means it is very very steep. The kind of steep where you have to keep stopping to swear, and you have to learn very quickly that if your pedals are the clip-in cleats kind, it is a very bad idea to get your shoes out of your pedals on an incline. It doesn’t work. Luckily there was no-one to see me fall.
I had also run out of water almost, so stopped partway up the climb at Garsdale station and went searching. Excitement! A beautiful water fountain with what looked like a workable tap.
No. Dry.
But there were toilets with cold water in the taps (why please do some toilet providers only put hot water in the taps? Think of the runners and walkers and cyclists and people like me who will not buy bottled water). A sign said “not drinking water” and I laughed in its face. At that point I would have drunk a puddle. Which reminds me: there are swimming and running versions of famous fell running endurance rounds and they are excellent puns. The Bob Graham Round’s equivalent is the Frog Graham, and the Paddy Buckley is the Puddle Buckley. Brilliant.
Look, it’s got rambling in the title for a reason.
Yes, yes, what about Ruswarp?
On Garsdale station platform, Leeds-bound, there is a prominent statue of a dog. That is Ruswarp. (The word is pronounced “Russup” and is a village near Whitby.)
Ruswarp’s first moment of fame came when his pawprint was added to a petition protesting the closure of the Settle-Carlisle Railway. Ruswarp’s human was Graham Nuttall, a co-founder of the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle Line. Ruswarp’s pawprint was accepted as a valid signature as he was a fare-paying passenger on the line. The line was saved. Michael Portillo, a minister of transport during the protests, is usually credited with saving it, along with many thousands of protesters and the own goal of British Rail lying about how much it would cost to repair. £6 million for Ribblehead Viaduct! But Minister of Transport Paul Channon actually refused British Rail’s request to close it, in 1989.
The following year on January 20th, Graham (41) and Ruswarp (14) went walking in the Welsh mountains. They got day return tickets from Burnley to Llandrindod Wells. They did not come back. On 7th April, Graham’s body was found by a stream. Ruswarp had waited with his dead companion for eleven weeks. The collie was so weak, he had to be carried off the mountain, but he survived for Graham’s funeral at Burnley Crematorium. Olive Clarke of Preston Patrick wrote this:
The elderly couple who had Ruswarp in their care sat at the front and, as ever on public occasions, Ruswarp sat patiently and silently throughout the service, but as the curtains closed on the coffin there was a long muffled howl. It was uncanny, Ruswarp’s farewell.
Money was raised to build the statue, which was sculpted by Joel Walker. Ruswarp the statue now stands facing a bench on the opposite platform that is dedicated to Graham Nuttall. And Ruswarp is looking towards the hills, that he and his human loved equally.
