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Markies - a Complete Dog's Dinner

29/10/2014

There's a pet-shop in the arcade. It doesn't sell pets. It's just a cubby hole crammed with treats and beds and food and toys. I went in the other day for some 'markies'. These are small dog treats, chewy on the inside, hard on the outside, vaguely resembling tiny bits of bone. Bobby's favourite after-dinner snack.

An elderly chap served me. We exchanged small town pleasantries. Then down to business. They buy sacks of these markies and make them up into bags themselves, as you can see.

I stood at the counter – a bit like in the 4 candles sketch – and asked for a 1kg bag. He took one from the shelf behind him, turned to me and holding it by the top, he flipped his wrist and brought the bag crashing down onto the counter. A right wallop. The counter vibrated. I gave him my money, picked up the bag and, turning it over, saw that his exuberance had broken all the treats on that side.

He gave me my change. Now I never normally complain about anything, but we had been getting along in a fashion, so I showed him the mess he'd made and said “Um, most of these are broken. Have you got another bag?” There was a long pause. No, much, much, longer. Then he let out a huge a Shropshire sigh, and turned around to find a replacement, what looked to be the last remaining. He turned back towards me with the bag. Which he proceeded to smash onto the counter in exactly the same manner. I looked at him. He looked at me. “Thanks,” I said, “cheers, bye.”

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Many on the Beach?

24/10/2014

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How about an antidote to yesterday's lower-key posting? For at heart I'm a giggler. I laugh easily. I hoot like an oversexed owl. I howl with laughter at things most others scorn. Miranda even. If you want a willing audience, I'm a slam-dunk.

On facebook my posting conjured up some old jokes from university days, and some comments on how gorgeous I looked then compared to how I am now. Let's concentrate on the former. School days, college days – they're made for laughing aren't they? Catch a bus or train and listen to how kids laugh. Uncontrollably, joyously, snottingly, about absolutely nothing, setting each other off like fireworks. That's the spirit in which this anecdote should be enjoyed.

It can't of course, you weren't there. And you're too old. Except the person who reminded me of it wasn't there either, he'd just heard it repeated ad infinitum. “Many on the beach?” he asked. A line Anne and I still use over 30 years later as our own private language whenever we either (a) see a canoe or (b) encounter a fantastic non sequitur.

Anyway, 1981, New Quay, Wales. The Saint David's University College's canoe club, which consisted of four older lads who were being paid to go through college by the British army, my two mates who both wanted to join the British army, and me - a hippy pacifist - which is probably a tautology, but certainly didn't make me fit in. And the Falklands hadn't even happened yet.

We were stretching our Spring canoeing legs with a paddle in the harbour; piss in wetsuit, check; Eskimo roll, check; dunk Crispin, check. Time for lunch. We leave the canoes on the beach, but keep our paddles for it's half-term and South Wales' urchins are about. And so it is we enter the fish and chip shop. In wet suits, dripping water and sand, helmets on and holding paddles. Colin, our leader, presumably full of military training, sets to work on making friends with the enemy. But he is plainly somewhat self-conscious about his appearance and the sideways looks we are garnering from the holidaymakers. Because, when the fish fryer greets him with the not unreasonable opening gambit of “many on the beach?”, Colin answers with verve and gusto “canoeing.“

I can safely say this remains one of the funniest moments of my life. No question. I can smell it, see it, taste it, like it was yesterday. And it's only been enhanced by all the re-telling. But guess what? I wasn't actually there. They'd left me guarding the canoes. True.

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To Dip or not to Dip

23/10/2014

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In One Dog and His Man I bemoan that Roger Deakin, in his brilliant book on wild swimming Waterlog, overlooks Shropshire entirely. Well, it turns out Shropshire has its own wild-water crazy man

(There's a photo in our downstairs toilet of me aged 20 in a 1980s 'selfie' with my dad and his third wife. It was taken in a log cabin in the deepest wilds of Wisconsin, a land of lakes where I swam daily. In the photo I'm wearing the Lampeter University Canoe Club's t-shirt - three cavemen, paddles and canoe and the tagline “Whitewater crazy men”. We weren't)

Not compared to Andrew Fusek Peters anyway. His book Dip contains details about twenty-odd wild swims in the Borderlands. There's three swims on the Long Mynd, plus Colemere, the River Clun, Ludlow Weir, Shelve Pool up on the Stiperstones, and places further afield.

The main difference between his book and Waterlog, which he acknowledges as his inspiration, is that somehow Deakin manages to make swimming on one's back through algae and dragonflies, cow slurry and sheep shit an idyllic saunter through the summer shade.

Peters' book, by contrast, is full of places where you can get freezing cold, mind-numbingly wet. Heart-stopping river bends, arse clenching waterfalls, scrotum tightening water-holes. The reason Deakin never got here is plainly because Shropshire's so fucking cold.

I read the book soon after reading Al Alvarez's diary of a man facing up to morbidity by swimming in Hampstead Ponds year after year (Peters also swims there in this book and acknowledges Alvarez's book). I also read it just after Richard Mabey's Nature Cure. Depression is a theme in all these books. Depression and a form of salvation through nature. It's probably crass but I couldn't help but feel that Peters' dips were a self-medicating version of ECT. Strangely though, having read all three books and adding them to my own thoughts, I was left with an opposite impression. What if nature and one's immersion in it was contributing to the depression?

I don't speak from any experience of clinical depression. Just from how I experience Shropshire from time to time. It's easy to disappear into yourself. For me, writing, or a compulsion to write, is like a form of madness. Far too much time spent alone. Voices filling the emptiness. If I spend too much time alone in my own company with my own thoughts, it does sometimes feel like the waters are closing over my head.

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The Trophic Cascades

14/10/2014

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As usual, I stumbled onto Facebook this morning to ease my way into the day, and to browse how many likes I'd received overnight (none) and so, over coffee I scrolled tediously through all the gunk and detritus of my friends' lives looking for something that mentioned me favourably or, failing that, a loris being tickled.

And then I saw a friend had posted something about wolves and Yellowstone Park, two things high on my list of things I've never seen but would quite like to if (a) the wolves were a long, long way away and (b) if Yellowstone wasn't an actual volcano, like the whole thing, ready to blow, like as soon as I set foot on it.

Anyway I pressed play, somewhat despite myself, for it was a video which is a shame because it's usually just clickbait and I can't be bothered to even wait through the advert, but I stuck with it because (a) it was voiced by my favourite Guardian rantmeister George Monbiot, and (b) because he said “trophic cascade” very early on, which sounds fantastic. Whatever it may be.

And four minutes later I knew, and so will you if you watch it (here).

Flipping heck, 08:56 and I've grown a new branch of understanding within my naturalistic soul, for aren't we all that river, bending to the unknown forces of higher predators. I sat back satiated. But underneath the link, Facebook had kindly spammed me with three related articles. One was a recent one in the New York Times, so I whizzed through that, for now I am a bona fide professor of all things trophic cascadean it's important to keep up with the latest research and, guess what, it's all a rural myth, apparently.

Fuck me, and it's only 9am. Knowledge, the Facebook way...

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Whither Shifnal

11/10/2014

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Shifnal is a service station. Actually, that isn't true. The services, the only ones on the M54, are officially called Telford Services. This could be seen as the ultimate snub to the town – too irrelevant to even be named in passing. That said, the exit is clearly marked Shifnal, not Telford, and I reckon most people driving past or stopping for a pee would know them as Shifnal services, and that's how they are known locally.

So Shifnal is a service station. And like so many other places across the country it's become known not as a place but as a staging-post. Indeed, the staging-post has become the place, the town itself remaining unknown and unvisited. You'll know of other examples depending on your itineraries – the grander motorways offer up the likes of Newport Pagnell, Strensham, Leigh Delamere. And for those of you who have reason to saunter down a motorway less travelled, Shifnal.

That the service station is a mile out of town isn't of vast import. That every year thousands of cars stop at the services on their way from there to there, bypassing here entirely is so unremarkable it's taken me seven years to even notice it. That, as regular as the seasons, the edges of the road opposite the service station are taken over by travellers with their cars and caravans, with their tethered dogs and horses, isn't a metaphor, but feels like it should be. As does Shifnal's rooted community's collective distaste for these travellers, something which makes me uncomfortable and restless.

Instead, notions of relevance, import and place can all be bundled up into one observation. Our overlooked and understated, our bypassed and unvisited, our simple little town doesn't have a Waitrose, but the service station a mile away does.

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Ho ho ho, Green Giant...

3/10/2014

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Anne was working late tonight. Yesterday, in preparation, she hunted down some stuff that I even I would be able to cook for us in tiume for her return, namely two steak and ale pies in their own little ramekins foraged from Waitrose, that cost little more than the average banking bonus. Channelling her inner Pru Leith, she decided this would go well with McCain's crispy oven chips and a microwaved cauliflower cheese. For she is all taste. All edge. All class.

But I hate cauliflower cheese. And I was in charge of the pass. Would Gordon “roar my gonads off” stand for this shit? No. No he would not. So, at the last minute, in the full heat of a fevered kitchen service, I went off-piste, showed some flair, a soupçon of élan. I grabbed a tin of the Jolly Green Giant, that safest of understudies, picked when ripe, tinned when sweet, plumptious, golden-yellow nuggets of sun, soon to be slathered in the melting butter of joy. Except, as I poured them into the pan, it turned out they were actually something called Palm Hearts. What are they? I honestly don't know. Why are they in the front of our cupboard? Why are they in a Green Giant tin? What the fuck?

Service...

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Markies - a Complete Dog's Dinner

Many on the Beach?

To Dip or not to Dip

The Trophic Cascades

Whither Shifnal

Ho ho ho, Green Giant...

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