BACK ON MI WOM BONK
We have just spent three delightful weeks back at my turangawaewae [Maori for ancestral hearths] in Cheshire and Lancashire. The trip also incoprorated North Wales - so it was a real pilgrimage to the almost forgotten cultural and political entity that bound together the original inhabitants of the North West, linking Cymru [Wales] with Yr Hen Ogledd [the Old North].
As a North Westerner by origin and a long-time sceptic of Heathrow Airport [which it seems is about to expand again to engulf the whole of western London], we flew into and departed from Manchester.
‘When I was a lad’ the smell of cow shit hit you as soon as the plane doors opened. Not any more – Manchester Airport is now glitzy, brassy and confusing enough to be anywhere. I could only smell aircraft fuel.
Like many of the Australians and New Zealanders with British backgrounds, I have a somewhat complex relationship with my Mother Country - all the more so in my case because I am a first generation emigrant.
But summoning consciousness through the fog of endless eons of sibilance, vibration, claustrophobia and immobility of long distance plane travel, I was still thrilled to watch the flight-path sat-nav track over the coast of NE Norfolk and then settle over Glossop and Macclesfield as we awaited our landing slot.
Catching the highly efficient light rail / tram into Piccadilly, I was stunned by the greenery. What once were blasted stretches of obsolescent industrial grime are now smiling bosky coppices. A few astute businessmen must have made an absolute fortune growing saplings for the planting programmes. And this seemed to be a region-wide phenomenon. Driving the M6 from Manchester to Carnforth we didn’t see a single mill chimney through the miles and miles of fringing trees.
The only place where this has not happened is Blackpool. Here clearly there is some kind of city by-law which prohibits anything green and growing. Lowry would be proud of the City Fathers for preserving a heritage of gravel, tarmac, brick and concrete at an inhuman scale – all that’s needed is to set some smoke billowing out of the top of the Tower.
Talking of Blackpool, I mentioned the word ‘fracking’ while getting some change for the kids in an amusement arcade and was treated to a tart lecture about earthquakes [and that to a Wellingtonian!]. It seems that the locals are not too keen on Cuadrilla’s shale gas exploration programme in the nearby countryside.
Mind you, the magnitude 2.3 earthquake on the Richter scale, that hit the Fylde Coast on 1 April 2011 followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 quake on 27 May would scarcely rate a mention in New Zealand.
But this is only a foretaste, as Cuadrilla Resources estimates that the shales beneath the Fylde may hold 5,660 billion cubic metres of gas – of which about 20 percent may be recoverable by “fracking" [involving hydraulic fracturing by pumping water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into shale rock, to release the gas it holds].
As the Maori proverb maintains: ‘Whatungarongaro te tangata toi tu whenua [As man disappears from sight, the land remains].
Not so much nowadays. It used to comfort us that, amid life’s turbulence and transitions, ‘the land alone endures’. But as we increasingly rape and trash landscapes, nature struggles to provide us with emotional sustenance - substituting solastalgia for solace.
And it particularly saddens me to learn that an unspectacular but perfectly ordinary piece of gentle farmland in Central Lancashire is being fractured for its gas. As my own ancestors toiled for generations on farms, fishing boats and workshops in Fylde and its nearby foothills, I feel an affinity.
[Pictures above of the view looking west from Lower Shorrocks Hey Farm towards Blackpool Tower and the nearby market town of Poulton-le-Fylde]
BOGGLED IN GOGLEDD
As Jane Merrick commented in the UK Independent on the perceptions of ‘Southern’ Tories like Baron David Howell of Guildford:
‘This is only anecdotal, but the “northern problem” seems to be a psychological one, and, admittedly, on both sides. One seems to have an atavistic distrust of the other. Northerners think the Tories are only interested in policies which benefit the south. A lot of Conservatives think the north is bandit country, that we are uncouth savages who don’t care about our countryside or cities.
‘Both perceptions are wrong, obviously.
‘Anyone who has visited Northumberland, or County Durham, or North Yorkshire can see that Lord Howell is mistaken. If by “desolate”, Lord Howell means the outstretched beauty of the North Yorkshire Moors, or the dramatic coastline of Northumberland, then give me desolation over, say, the chocolate box villages and caramel-coloured manor houses of the Cotswolds, the favourite stamping ground of Mr Cameron and his friends.
‘Give me a place where I can walk to the next village without encountering another car, where I can buy a pint for less than £2, where the Hunter wellies are encrusted with mud, not gravel from huge drives, and where the peace is never spoilt by a helicopter ferrying Jeremy Clarkson to his new mansion.
‘The north-east – and, while we’re at it, the north-west, which firms like Cuadrilla believe to be an easy target for fracking – shows England in its unspoilt, geologically undressed state. I wonder where Lord Howell was thinking of when he referred to “beautiful rural areas”, if not the north? Because, with the greatest respect to the people of Guildford, whose town is associated with Lord Howell, and its surrounding countryside of Surrey, I want mountains and lakes, not a series of golf courses and gated homes.’
See:
And I find that my own comments are just a speck in a swelling ocean of backlash.
Try David Banks in the Journal, for example:
‘.... I offer the following Thought for the Day. . .
‘Resting on the seventh day, after his wondrous act of creation, God explained proudly to the Archangel Michael how his greatest work had created planet Earth, a world in perfect balance.
“For example,” he explained to the puzzled Archangel, “there is North America, a place of great opportunity and wealth, while South America is going to be poor.
“The Middle East will be a hot, arid spot while Russia will be cold and covered in ice.”
‘Michael, impressed by God's work, then pointed to another area. ”What's that?”
“Ah,” said God. ”That's the North of England, the most glorious place on Earth: beautiful people, seven Premiership football teams, impressive cities and the home of the world's finest artists, musicians, writers, thinkers, explorers and politicians.
“People from the North of England are going to be modest, intelligent and humorous and they're going to be found travelling the world.
“They’ll be extremely sociable, hard-working and high-achieving, and they will be known throughout the world as speakers of truth.”
I added a comment to Jane’s piece which runs:
‘As an expatriate from the North West who has recently holidayed in rural Cheshire, North Wales, the Lake District and the Forest of Bowland, with my Kiwi wife, I have been struck by her wide-eyed enjoyment of the scenery and response to the warmth and hospitality of the locals [overweight though many of them may be].
‘This is in contrast to our previous visit, when I took her on a biscuit tin lid tour of the picturesque South. Adrift in thatch and cob villages, she was constantly apprehensive about being jostled into becoming the Maid of Midsomer at a Fair and being killed in a case of mistaken identity by a cross-bow wielding Morris Dancer.
‘Once Australians and New Zealanders get over the fact that Laura Ashley also designed villages [with every nook nick-nacked, as applies also to interiors], they much prefer the North where they can spot a rogue Morris Dancer far enough away to bring him down with a mere or a boomerang.’
All good fun – but tinged with a bitterness that bodes ill for the survival of the UK as a cohesive political entity.
Several of the other commentators on Jane Merrick’s article suggested that it might be time for Northerners to consider joining Scotland in a quest for Independence – in essence the isolation of ‘Lloegyr’ [England south and east] from the rest of the British Isles.
A political regrouping, with a federation between Cymru, Yr Hen Ogledd and Albion would constitute an economy with a GVA of £412 billion per year [around a third of the GDP of the island of Great Britain]. It would rank around 20th in the international GDP stakes somewhere between Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Sweden.
And as for an impending Civil War to preserve the Union, a Northern prophet has already foretold the fall of the Old South as Guildford and Richmond-on-Thames succumb to barrages of black puddings and Lancashire bomb cheeses.
For more, read ‘Come Back With the Wind’ by Les Dawson, in which the threat of an embargo on whiskey sales to the South confirms secession. A timeless tale of ‘love, honour and alcohol’ in which ‘battle lines will be drawn, friendships and family ties tested and kegs tapped as the path to war approaches, albeit with a hiccough or two’.
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