War Horse

This started out as a comment on Vlad's blog, but it got so long I thought I'd just write a blog entry of my own. It's a review of War Horse, which Vlad and I saw over the weekend. Vlad makes a number of good points on his blog that I shan't bother to repeat here. Go and read his review first, and my comments are a follow-up.

First of all, the nonsense about the boring horse that can't even jump I can almost forgive, because I assume that's in the original book and play.

What most annoyed me was the saccharine style Spielberg adopted for the pastoral scenes. I have a lot of admiration for Spielberg as a director despite his frequent lapses into schmalz, but this time he waaaay overdid it.

Take the lighting, for instance. It looked fake, like studio lighting, even in the external shots. Maybe that was a deliberate echo of the stage play, I don't know. But it gave the film an unreal quality that didn't seem to fit the inherent darkness of the material (I know it's a kid's book, but it's still dark).

Please leave me my horse, he fits so well with this pastoral idyll

The father of the hero (to the right in the above screenshot), a Devonshire farmer, was a drunken failure whose stubbornness almost reduced his wife and son to beggary. Now, if rural Devon had been made to look as grim and depressing as it probably was at the time, and less like a biscuit tin, maybe the appearance of this beautiful horse would have meant something. But the whole world looked so idyllic it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen. That's why I thought Ken Loach would have done a better job directing.

Eeee but tha's a beautiful bird, our Kes

Like Vlad, I was also irritated by the scene of the horse wrapped in barbed wire in No Man's Land. But I was mostly irritated because it was the most potentially interesting and believable scene in the movie. It's not unknown for units of men in the midst of war to form close emotional attachments to animals, as mascots or totems of good luck. So when a British and German soldier awkwardly joined forces to free the horse, and then tossed a coin to decide who gets to keep it, I was really drawn in, and I thought the scene was genuinely poignant and beautifully written.

It just happens that the surrounding two hours were crap.

River Browney

This river near my house is one of my favourite thinking places. It's a place I go to think when I need to think about things, for example what I'm going to have for lunch.

Stab boy

This disturbed me. On the front page of my Yahoo Mail, the main news headline was 'Life meaningless' without stab boy.


'Stab boy', otherwise occasionally known as Seydou Diarrassouba, was murdered in London last Monday, as the news article explains. His family shared their grief in a press statement:

"This is a very difficult time for our family and we would really appreciate to be given the chance to grieve privately and honour his memory. Whoever took his life took our backbone away.

"Seydou kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother."

After reading this heartfelt elegy from his distressed loved ones, the Yahoo news editor still thought that 'stab boy' was an appropriate way to commemorate Diarrassouba.

I mean, I know that his surname is unfamiliar-looking to most of the British public, but 'stab boy'? It sounds like the name of some kind of depraved super villain.

First of all, he was 18 years old, which makes him a man, not a boy. Also, if anything it should be 'stabbed'. Are we so eager for bite-sized news that we can't spare time for three extra letters which don't even add up to another syllable?

Normally the peculiarly succinct English of tabloid headlines is just another interesting adaptation of language to a specific media. This example stuck out because it seemed so heartless, especially when juxtaposed with the words 'life meaningless'. It sounds almost sarcastic. Imagine the family saying:

"Stab Boy kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother, Stab Boy."

This isn't print media, where every inch of headline costs money; surely the Yahoo news editor doesn't need to trivialise someone's existence for the sake of economy. How about 'Life meaningless' without Oxford Street murder victim? Or what about even using his actual name?

Roman movies

My bro just started watching an obscure collection of Italian sword and sandal movies from the 50s and 60s.

http://roman-movies.blogspot.com/

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 6

The best thing about B&Bs is the free full English breakfast you get in the morning. Well, technically it’s not free, but I like to pretend it is. It’s a good start to the day.


From Carlisle the walk is totally flat, and it gets flatter. It’s so flat, every bump above 5 feet seems like a mountain. On such bumps one finds villages huddled like desperate sailors on desert islands, usually including a medieval church built from Roman stone.


One of the last sections of the path follows the course of a 3-mile long dyke built to protect against flooding from the Solway. I think I saw more people along that stretch than anywhere else on the walk – it was a Saturday in July, so a lot of hikers were just starting the hike from west to east.


A mile or two before the end I stopped at a pub and had a steak and ale pie for lunch. When I first walked in the barman saw my rucksack and said, “Bloody hell, have you brought the kitchen sink an’ all?” So I replied no, that would be a stupid thing to take on a hike, and he was an idiot for even suggesting it.

Then I walked to the finish line, which is in Bowness-on-Solway, a village on the edge of the known world to which nobody ever goes for any reason at all, except walking Hadrian’s Wall Path. They’ve made a cute hut and terraced garden overlooking the windswept mudflats of the Solway Firth.


And then I went for a pint of Guinness in the village pub, where I saw a big cardboard cutout of a Roman.


And then I went home.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 5

Not much of the Wall survives above ground after Banks, but the walk follows its former course across pretty rolling meadows and babbling brooks, passing through occasional hamlets.

Shortly before the hamlet of Walton I came across some picnic benches and a sign pointing through a hedge to ‘The Haytongate Hut: Drinks and Snacks’.


Fearing a trap – my enemies are never far behind – I crept through gingerly. Luckily my enemies had not yet prepared themselves, for the place was deserted. I saw one hut filled with chocolate bars, crisps and refrigerated drinks. There was an honesty box and the inside walls were papered with post-it notes on which people had scrawled little messages of thanks or celebration or mutual encouragement.


I smashed the place to bits, pissed in the corner, ate all the free chocolates and used the wrappers to spell SUCKERS on the floor, and moved on.

After Walton the path veered off into some dark and damp woods. Deep in these woods was a farm offering bunkhouse accommodation. This is the sign erected by the farmer to lure weary hikers into his snare.


I think he needs to hire some advertising advisors. I'd been warned about this sign in advance by some other hikers who'd stayed at the bunkhouse (and survived) while walking the path in the opposite direction. The farmer had told them that he nailed dead crows to the sign "as a warning to the rest."

At lunchtime I lay down to rest under a tree in a graveyard. All in all it was rather a morbid day.


It always seems to happen that after about four days of hiking I start getting proper muscle strains, and this time it was my achille’s tendon that left me limping the last seven miles to Carlisle, stopping every mile or so to let the pain subside (I forgot to take anti-inflammatory drugs with me). I basically need to start doing longer hikes, going more slowly at the start, so I don’t always spend the final couple of days hobbling.


Carlisle is pretty; I went for a walk after I checked into the B&B but forgot to take my camera, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Carlisle cathedral is weird though.

The B&B owner was very nice. He upgraded me to a double room because the place was almost empty, and recommended a great curry house where I sat reading a book about Hadian’s Wall and stuffing my face.

Then I went back to the B&B and turned on the TV to be confronted with the early reports on Anders Breivik’s shooting spree in Norway. That wasn’t such a cheerful end to the day.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 4, part 2

Just after Greenhead, the path came to Thirlwall, a hamlet overlooked by a little castle on a hillock, built from robbed Roman stone, which made me mad. So I smashed the castle up. This is what it looked like after I was finished with it.

This bullshit story was on the 'information' panel for Thirlwall Castle, it's complete rubbish, there's no such thing as magic

I also found a cat which had been grafted onto a stone by some sick monster.


Past Gisland, the Wall runs in a tidy straight line down to the river Irthing, which it crossed over a substantial bridge whose massive foundations can still be seen.


On the far side of the steep valley stands Birdoswald fort. I was excited about Birdoswald because it has a museum and stuff. It also has a fake Roman shouting from a fake rampart.


Best of all, though, is the site of the granary in the fort, where excavators found evidence for a massive post-Roman timber hall. They marked the positions of the main posts with wooden bollards, as you can see here.


The information boards show what the granary was like in Roman times...


... and then what it was like in the Dark Ages.


The theory is that Birdoswald, after the Roman withdrawal, became the headquarters of a chieftain or petty king, one of the many local strongmen who must have exploited the power vacuum left by the empire.

I admit I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to the sub-Roman period. A few years ago I saw ‘The Not So Dark Ages’, a documentary by the prehistorian Francis Pryor, in which he knocked down a series of cunningly erected straw men to show that the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ were actually a vibrant and sophisticated era in British history.


The documentary included a stroll around Birdoswald, and the argument that things kept ticking along smoothly after the end of the empire. Pryor also used evidence of pollen analysis to argue that there was no mass re-forestation of Hadrian’s Wall, which would be one knock-on effect of population decline and reduced farming.

As far as I can tell, Birdoswald shows pretty clearly how far things declined in the sub-Roman period. The elite were no longer able even to maintain the stone buildings around them, let alone build new ones. Instead they lived in the crumbling shell of a far more technologically advanced civilisation. When one granary building collapsed, they moved into the neighbouring one; only when that one also collapse did they erect their own timber hall.


As for the pollen analysis, from the documentary itself it looks to me like the fifth century saw a massive increase in alder woodland on Hadrian’s Wall, and a mirror-image reduction in heather and grassland, while by the sixth century very few cultivated grains were turning up in the samples. But then I’m not an expert in pollen analysis.

Basically I’m of the opinion that after the withdrawal of Rome from Britain, the population dwindled, the economy contracted, agriculture returned to near-subsistence levels, and the former British provinces fragmented into tiny warring polities which hardly deserve the title of ‘kingdoms’. I do get irritated by post-Roman apologists who seem reluctant to concede that the end of the empire led to a systemic collapse across the board.


Anyway, once I’d finished kicking over the gay little wooden bollards and spray-painting ROMANS RULE on the walls of the fort, I walked the few remaining miles to a campsite at the hamlet of Banks, where I accidentally camped in someone’s back garden.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 4, part 1

From Steel Rigg westwards was probably my favourite section of the Wall, although the fact that the weather turned nice may have been a factor. Also, I saw far fewer people, at least until I reached Greenhead.

Looking back to the east from Steel Rigg

At the highest point of the Wall (not very high)

Milecastle 42 is another ingeniously situated fortification, accessible from the north only up an impractically steep bank. There is no reason for this at all, except for asinine military planning. In this capture from Google Earth you can see the Wall running down the ridge from the top left, and the rectangular milecastle near the bottom.


If the engineers had shifted the milecastle just 50 yards to the right, the gate would have been placed in the convenient cleft where the modern lane runs. But the boneheads obviously didn't do this. I suppose this strict, inflexible level of regimentation helps explain both the success and the ultimate failure of the Roman empire...

Just before Greenhead is the best-preserved section of the Wall, which in places survives above head height. It's the most amazing thing in the world.

Hadrian's Wall

The so-called 'Great Wall' of China

I didn’t have time to stop at the Roman Army Museum near Greenhead, but at noon I did pause at a visitor centre, where I was stalked by a chaffinch who wanted my ice cream.

Hadrian's Wall Path - Day 3, part 2

From Housesteads the Wall climbs and dips along the ridges towards the west: over Cuddy’s Crags, Hotbank Crags, Highshield Crags and Steel Rigg. I’ve walked this section on a bright, windy day, when the moors feel vast and open, and broken cloud-shadows glide swiftly over the folds of the land.

From an earlier trip, when the weather was less shitty

Today, though, cloud was everywhere, and everywhere was damp. Not that it mattered, with so much of interest to see. At milecastle 37 you find the arch of the northern gate with its springs still in place, as well preserved as any on the Wall.



A little farther the path takes a sudden dip into Sycamore Gap, where you see what is now popularly known as the Robin Hood Tree. This spot, as Hollywood has taught us, was once part of Nottinghamshire.


Scramble up the path on the other side of the gap, and there is a fine view of milecastle 39, whose north gate leads directly to a sheer drop from the crag. This makes the gate useless from a practical point of view, but it does demonstrate the strict by-the-book mindset of the Roman engineers, who insisted on placing their milecastles at precisely regular distances. There’s an even better example of this peculiar sort of military madness farther west.


And coming to Steel Rigg, here is a fine view of one of the turrets originally built between the milecastles. The turrets were systematically demolished by the Romans later in the second century, presumably because they were no longer considered necessary for the functioning of the Wall.


I left the path at Steel Rigg and finished my third day at Once Brewed youth hostel. I wanted to stay here mainly for nostalgic reasons, as I stayed here with Dunk thirteen years ago (almost to the day) during our Land’s End to John O’Groat’s bike ride.


I arrived two hours before the hostel opened, so I sat and drank more tea and hot chocolate in the neighbouring visitor centre. In my bunk room were two oldish men, also long-distance walkers. One of them was doing the Pennine Way, but had just decided to quit after two weeks of continual rain. Unluckily for him, the weather decided to improve the next day...

Garden gnome

Sotheran bought me a paint-it-yourself garden gnome for my birthday, so I painted it myself. I think it's turned out a lot better than the shit he usually produces.


I once went to Gräfenroda, the village in Germany which invented the garden gnome. True story.