Dry County

The thunder had arrived late in the afternoon after a sapping accumulation of cloud and heat. From the moment they lifted their heads from the pillows that morning, the entire population of the City of Wells became aware that only a deluge would shatter the lethargy that had descended upon the town, wash it away with the dust. Moods swung, tempers rose and fell; those inclined to emotional instability sensibly closed the curtains and locked themselves in.

DCI Lefebvre couldn’t work through a storm, even the mere hint of one sent her into paroxysms of delicious anticipation. She was certain that there were fewer storms nowadays than when she was a child, just like snow. But the summers were undoubtedly drier, hotter, so her love of extremes was satisfied. It was a difficult balance to maintain. She would pull up in her car, switch off the engine and gaze lovingly over the bleached, parched fields around Priddy. The rain would change all that, restore fecundity and growth but even she knew it would take a monsoon to make good the soil/moisture deficit. She needed the storm, she could live with the risk, what would be infinitely worse would be the disappointment if it didn’t live up to her expectations. 

María Inés de la Cruz: Ruega por Nosotras Pecadoras (Pray for us Sinners), Libertad 2009 (my translation)

I'd set my class of teenaged English language students an essay entitled 'Party every night, party every day: You only live once so why bother with the tedious and the mundane? Discuss'.

I'd expected - hoped - they'd go along with my irresponsible hedonism but it soon turned out I was in a minority of one. A disturbingly mature sixteen year-old pointed out that if one does, party every night and party every day then the act of partying itself becomes tedious and mundane. Out of the mouths of babes and Italian teenagers; Nicola had a point and deep down inside I know he's right but I can't possibly bring myself to agree with him.

I've been applying Nicola's philiosophy to the current 'heatwave', well aware that at some point, probably sooner rather than later, it's going to come to an end - that is has to come to an end - but that doesn't stop me looking out over the increasingly-waterless Levels with in intensity of emotion that, at times, comes close to sexual ecstacy. And like an insatiable lover I want the heat and the sun to come at me harder, faster until every blade of grass is baked into to a frazzle, a la 1976.

Last weekend, as the mercury rose to heights not witnessed since 2006, I set out on a private pilgrimage to Castle Nerôche, then crossed the Levels from Ilminster to Somerton. More of that journey anon, suffice to say that the heady combination of heat and dust played havoc with my emotions and brought me, on a couple of occasions, quite close to tears. As is my custom, I approached Nerôche via a series of sinuous paths - it's not a hike to be rushed or the spell won't work - and the landscape, wild pasture, ancient woodland and farm buildings crumbling into disuse slowly revealed itself, layer after layer. 

With one black shadow at its feet,

         The house thro' all the level shines,

Close-latticed to the brooding heat,

         And silent in its dusty vines:

A faint-blue ridge upon the right,

     An empty river-bed before,

      And shallows on a distant shore,

In glaring sand and inlets bright.

       But "Aye Mary," made she moan,

            And "Aye Mary," night and morn,

           And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone, 
          To live forgotten, and love forlorn.

Every time I make this pilgrimage - and it can only be done in high summer - I worry it won't work, that this phantasmal Somerset will fail to materialise and I'll be left walking through the tedious and the mundane; just as worry that one day I worry I'll be waiting outside Las Amazonas and María Inés de la Cruz won't turn up. Each and every time I worry and each and every time my fears are unfounded. So maybe I was right and Nicola was wrong; another victory for sentiment over common sense.

Can't see the love for the hate

Here's a confession that'd get me expelled from any gathering of psychogeographers and academics: I can't stand London.
No, let me rephrase that. I hate London with a rage so intense it would shake the city to its foundations if I could tap its energy in seismic form.
It's not an urban thing. I love Mexico City with an equal passion; I tell my students that if you put your ear to the pavement you can hear its heart beating. The same goes for San Salvador and not just because it's where I first set eyes on the sultry shape and form of Maria Ines de la Cruz. I've spent many hours difting through the streets and suburbs of both cities, usually without aim but occasionally with a purpose, such as the evening I traversed downtown San Salvador and circuited the bohemian Colonia Centroamerica in search of the city's elusive gay nightlife - a sort of queer derive (there is, as a matter of fact, a 'strip' but you'd be hard-pressed to find it. And if you're a gay woman you're going to be very disappointed).
From the queer derive to the theological derive. Several years ago, whilst doing fieldwork for an MSc in Latin American politics, I spent the best part of a month criss-crossing San Salvador interviewing nuns and other religious leaders; a quest which took me to parts of the city rational enquiry couldn't reach. Even two bungled muggings - and they were shamefully amateur attempts - failed to douse my ardour; if anything the sense of danger they evoked only made the place more attractive.
I've been mugged in London too, as it happens; another botched job, in 1999, in Stratford, before the Olympics and urban regeneration were even a twinkle in Boris and Ken's eyes. I spent the best part of three years living in what might euphemistically be called the 'East End' but didn't really have the feel of the mythical East End. What I remember most about my time amonsgt the fun-loving criminals of what will surely, one day, be sanitised by the heritage industry then repackaged and resold as 'Kray Country', was my landlord and his partner dragging us along to Benjy's 2000 on the Mile End Road.
'Nuff said!
But the truth - perhaps the sad truth - is that whenever funds permitted I fled the city and sought refuge in the rolling hills of Dorset or the brights lights of Weymouth. I was like a woman on the run, though pursued by what I still don't know. 
As an itinerant tutor I have cause to visit London once or twice a year and, last month, on as part of journey entirely by rail (apart from the Dover-Calais ferry) from Bristol to Malaga, I crossed the city from Paddington to London Bridge in the early hours of the morning. Still the anger was there, still my mood shifted rapidly through the emotional gears until it was working at full-tilt outright hatred when I arrived at the phallic landscape of The City, just as dawn was breaking, cold and windy. I hate The Shard, I hate The Gherkin, I hate the Canary Wharf Tower - sorry 'One Canada Square', talk about unashamed, unadulterated conceit. 
From the monarchist nonsense of Buckingham Palace, the imperialist pomposity of Whitehall to the looming bulk of Thames House which is all eyes, eyes, eyes over those who pass beneath its ugly facade, all I see are the overblown relics of a failed state trying desperately to cling on to its faded glories. Does anyone still believe this hubris? London doesn't just take itself far too seriously, it demands those who visit it do so too; insists they pay homage at its shrines.
Too arrogant, too regular; too hard and angular. And too Protestant, aesthetically-speaking, at least. London, to me, lacks the curves and the kitsch of a Catholic city. It doesn't yield and I find myself stuck between a nook and a hard place.
I've probably got it all wrong, spend too much time seething and looking at the city through my own, probably gender-obsessed lens. I should just lie back and think of London, bask in its undoubted commitment to and belief in the personal and social tenets I hold dear: multiculturalism and diversity.
At about three o'clock in the morning I'm in the heart of The City, approaching Cannon Street Station (this, to me, the heart of the evil empire). I'm trying to remember the lines of The Wasteland; trying to conjure up TS Eliot's Unreal City:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Trying, also, to roll back the years to 1999 when I spent the best part of a year working in the head office of a major, multinational investment bank to fund my postgraduate studies which were increasinglt focusing on liberation and feminist theology. 
Talk about selling your soul to the devil.
For reasons I still don't understand I was trying hard to retrace my route from Mansion House station to my former place of work and getting increasingly frustrated. Then, in the midst of all this turmoil, an angel, of sorts, appears. He is driving a red London bus, a regular service, and has pulled up at a red light. He opens the door and asks whether I'm okay, whether I'm lost; tells me to hop on board and he'll drop me off somewhere more safe and suitable at this time of night. 
HIs isn't the only act of kindness I experience during those short, madragudal hours and I hate myself for hating the city so much. And I know full well that when I get to Paris Gare du Nord in a few hours time, and take a stroll across the city to Austerlitz, I'll love each and every square metre of the French capital, and for the very same reasons I hate the English one.
London. Can someone turn my hate into love?

New boots and panties

Talk about chalk and cheese; we make an odd couple, the unerringly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I. Whilst I loiter around La Villa Ramblanista in spandex trousers and a big, baggy t-shirt looking like a cross between Nena and Joey Tempest’s twin sister, she’s preening her thick black tresses and gazing at herself in the mirror, the spitting image of ... well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So you can imagine her surprise when I announced I was about to purchase a brand new pair of boots. And not just the cheap tat I usually buy; when I said I was forking out one hundred and ten of your English pounds she very nearly fainted. Then I said they were hiking boots; if looks could kill ...

Poor María, she never will understand. She’ll never understand the unrequited love a Ramblanista has for her hiking boots; she’ll never quite comprehend why I’m so reluctant to part with my now decrepit pair of Karrimor boots – seventy quid from Great Western Camping in Dorchester – that have been laced to my feet for more than a thousand of your English miles, along the Camino de Santiago and beyond. Listen, if she had her way they’d be out with the refuse, awaiting collection by the oxymoronically-titled Somerset Waste Partnership. 

The old boots - can you feel the love?

So I never let them out of my sight, not even now I have a go-faster pair of boots, purchased from the lovely shop assistant at Wells Outdoors – get yourself a website and start tweeting, Mr Wells Outdoors!

You know what they say about the sudden manifestation of children destroying an ideal relationship? We might say the same about my new boots. It didn’t help when I joked about wearing them in bed because the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz knew perfectly well I was only half-joking. When my boots and I returned, yesterday, from our inaugural stroll together – along the thin tongue of higher ground which separates West Sedge Moor and Curry Moor – she retreated to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her shouting ‘you’d better make your mind up, Juanita – it’s the boots or me’.

She’ll calm down. Strange thing is that although she took the gin with her, I didn’t really care. I sat myself down on the sofa and spent the remainder of the evening ogling my new boots.

The new boots - if these don't get your lovejuices flowing nothing will

Wet

Floods. Suddenly everyone’s talking about them; suddenly everyone’s an overnight expert on saturated soil and aquifer recharge. Suddenly everyone’s an amateur geography tutor.

The River Brue on Saturday - obligatory Tor in background photo

La Villa Ramblanista has been spared the worst of the inundations, though the stream that runs past our backyard burst its banks and flooded the public schoolboys’ playing fields causing the wannabe rugger-buggers to go without on Saturday. But neither María Inés de la Cruz nor I like to miss out on the next big thing so we decided to step out into the soggy Somerset landscape and see for ourselves what all the fuss was about.

A bridge over relatively untroubled water

We spent most of Saturday evening preparing ourselves for the encounter, aided by several large gin and tonics. María read from One Hundred Years of Solitude in her mellifluous Salvadorean tones; the chapter where it rains in Macondo for four years, eleven months and two days. I showed her an episode of The Young Ones – Flood: just about sums up the gaping difference in our respective cultural aspirations. I don’t think María really got to grips with The Young Ones but when I said I spent a couple of years living in the suburb of Bristol where it was filmed she bombarded me with personal questions. She has something of an obsession with my youth, keeps asking me whether I really had a picture of Jon Bon Jovi on my bedroom wall and wants a detailed description of the contents of my wardrobe. ‘You’ll just have to wait for the publication of Death by Eyeliner, my shocking autobiography’, I told her and she sulked for the remainder of the evening.

Not for us it ain't! These three words don't feature in the Ramblanista vocabulary

But I digress. By the time we’d got back from mass and argued about whether we’d go north, south, east or west – maps, of course, are for wimps – it had gone noon and the clouds were already rolling in; just as well we got a lift to North Wootton with the landlord and landlady of La Villa Ramblanista. At least we managed to agree on a strategy; it wasn’t a day to be squelching off across the waterlogged fields so we stuck to tracks and roads. Just as well, the rhynes were full and parts of the moor were under fifty centimetres of water.

Geology porn: Yeovil Sands in holloway on Pennard Hill

But the truth is that the reality didn’t really match up to the hype; they had it much worse around Taunton and Langport. Now don’t get me wrong, as an itinerant geography tutor I’m offering accused of getting off on other people’s misery, of having an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of tsunami death tolls but you know what they say about Japan being the best place to be when an earthquake strikes? Well you might say the same thing about the Levels and flooding. It’s almost as if some omnipotent deity created them for that purpose and that purpose alone; the moors lie only a metre or so above mean sea level and the structural geology tilts the strata in such a manner that only the construction of man-made drainage channels such as the Huntspill River and a network of pumping stations keeps the sea and the floodwaters in some form of abeyance. In any case, times change, even in the sexy but staid world of land management and wetlands, once the bane of the drainage engineer, are back in fashion.

Random quaint Westcountry signpost porn

A bit like the nineteen-eighties, I suppose. María listened patiently but her eyes only lit up when I started to talk about clyses. When she found out they had nothing to do with intimate sexual pleasure but were, in fact, sluice gates, we decided it was time to head back to the Cathedral City.

She led, I followed, isn’t it always thus?

María thought this sign read 'Roads liable to grow breasts'. She spends far too much time in my company.