Tag Archives: literature

In the footsteps, and wake, of the Swallows and Amazons


Coniston Water with Bank Ground Farm in the foreground, and the village and the Old Man Of Coniston behind.
(Click images for larger versions.)

Coniston Water, in the English Lake District, is one of my favourite places on Earth.  That’s partly because it’s so beautiful, and partly because it brings back so many memories of happy childhood holidays.  

My parents had an elderly caravan which we would often tow 300 miles or so from Hertfordshire, and a favourite spot to park it was at Pier Cottage, the small site roughly in the middle of the photo above on the far side of the lake.  On the roof of the car, we would have either our little Mirror sailing dinghy, or a couple of kayaks.  Sometimes we even managed to get a couple of bicycles in the caravan too.  Most pitches there have a little bit of shoreline, and the distance from the van to the water was about 10 metres.  

I remember early one slightly misty morning, my brother and I balanced our bowls of cereal on the front of our kayaks, and paddled out to have breakfast in the middle of the lake, which we had pretty much to ourselves.  

I am fortunate to have had a very happy childhood filled with great experiences, but this is seared into my memory as one of the best moments.  Other fun activities available from the caravan door included walking around the lake (about 12 miles) or climbing the Old Man of Coniston: the hill in the background (about 2500ft).  Only much later did I realise that my parents also probably encouraged such activities so that they could have a bit of time to themselves!


Looking southward down Coniston Water.

I still return to the Lake District most years, but last month, for the first time since my childhood, we were once again taking a sailing dinghy to Coniston. This time it was our Tideway 12, named Shingebis. We weren’t, however, camping; we were staying at Bank Ground Farm, on the eastern side of the lake.


Bank Ground Farm

The farm is famous for being “Holly Howe” in the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome — also an important part of my childhood — and we’ve been rediscovering the books as adults… chiefly through the unabridged audiobook versions expertly narrated by Gareth Armstrong.  When we’re on a long journey, especially towards a nautical destination, they help make the motorways much more enjoyable, and instill a suitable sense of adventure in our travels!

So, on this trip, we were in a very Ransomesque mood, in which I will unashamedly indulge for the remainder of this post, with apologies to those who have not grown up with the same enthusiasms!  If you explore the books as an adult, you need to remember that they were written for youngish children, about a century ago, and approach Swallows and Amazons as you might The Railway Children or The Phoenix and the Carpet.  If it seems a little tame to you, then try my favourite, We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea, which is a wonderful adventure with real jeopardy.

(And if you’re unfortunate enough only to have seen the dreadful 2016 film version, then reformat your brain, install a new operating system, and start from scratch.  It is universally agreed among the cognoscenti that the 1974 film, starring Ronald Fraser and Virginia McKenna, is greatly superior.)

Swallows and Amazons, like many of the later books, is set on and around a ‘lake in the north’, which is a blend of Coniston and Windermere.  We were meeting up on Coniston to sail with our friends from the Tideway Owners’ Association (TOA), most of whom share our enthusiasm for the books, so we could revel in our escapism!

The Walker children arrive at ‘Holly Howe’ and are staying there when their adventure begins.  At the start of the film you see them running across the field, down to the lake, where, once they have paternal approval, they are able to set sail for their adventures in the Swallow.  We were staying in a small lodge next to the farm, which is at the top of that same field, and took the same route down to the pontoon where we moored our own boat, Shingebis, for the week, next to the boathouse that once housed Swallow.  


Rose and Shingebis at Bank Ground Farm

Many of the places, and vessels, and some of the people mentioned in the books were real, though often given new names in their fictional form. Amazon, for example, is based on a boat originally named Mavis, which can still be seen in a local museum.  But this blurring of fiction and reality is quite fun if you’re interested in finding the locations. An excellent introduction, and a good present for any Ransome fans, is Christina Hardyment’s “Arthur Ransome & Captain Flint’s Trunk“.

Anyway, if you’re setting sail from Holly Howe, one of the first things you have to do, of course, is go and visit ‘Wild Cat Island’, which is actually a blend of Blake Holme, an island on Windermere, and Peel Island, towards the southern end of Coniston.  The famous ‘Secret Harbour’ is definitely on Peel Island though, and is just as described.


Tilly stops off for a drink in the Secret Harbour.


The view south from Wild Cat Island.

If you carry on to the south end of the lake, you get to ‘Swainson’s Farm’, which really was owned by a family named Swainson who were friends of Ransome’s.  And here’s where the mapping between factual and fictional geography gets a little blurred, because this is where the Amazon’s boathouse is, and the river that ought to flow into the lake actually flows out, but it does take you to Allan Tarn, which fans will know as ‘Octopus Lagoon’.


Down the Amazon River to Octopus Lagoon.

The Amazon’s crew, of course, lived at “Beckfoot”, which, to the extent it exists at all, is probably at the far end of the lake, and possibly actually on Windermere.  One can’t take these locations too… ahem… literally!

When we returned to the lake, we dropped our anchor in a little bay for a picnic lunch, and then headed back to Holly Howe.  There was almost no wind, and so we were adopting a technique I call e-sailing.  This is analogous to riding an e-bike, and involves making use of natural power with some assistance from a battery — in our case, to get us over each glassy patch of still water to the next spot where the light wind was ruffling the surface.  This was just as well, since the lake is about 5 miles long and it would have been a long row!

~

A couple of days later, we continued in the footsteps of Ransome’s characters.  Hidden up in the woods on the east side of the lake is an old stone hut, which you would never stumble across unless you knew where to look.  It featured in The Picts and the Martyrs as the ‘Dog’s Home”, where Dick and Dorothea had to camp for a week and a half to avoid being seen by the Amazons’ Great Aunt.  Though the surrounding clearing is now somewhat overgrown, as Nancy observed a century ago, “It hasn’t tumbled down yet”.

We then went in search of locations from Swallowdale.  At the south end of the lake, we crossed the ‘Amazon river’ we had previously explored by boat and reached the little hamlet of Water Yeat, where we parked and walked up a lovely road past the prettily-situated Greenholm Farm.  The road became a track, and eventually took us to Beacon Tarn.  We know from Ransome’s notes that this was where Roger caught his trout in the book, and so became ‘Trout Tarn’.  Nearby, there was a vary plausible candidate for the ‘Lookout Rock’.  In the distance we could see the peak of The Old Man of Coniston, which I have climbed many times.  The children in the book christen it ‘Kanchenjunga’, and they set out from Swallowdale across ‘High Moor’ to climb it.  We took the more relaxed option of sitting beside the tarn enjoying a picnic, but as we did so, some of our more energetic TOA friends had just reached the summit. 


The Ship’s Dog at ‘Trout Tarn’, with ‘Kanchenjunga’ in the distance.

A true location for the little valley named ‘Swallowdale’ has never really been established.  It is meant to be on the beck flowing out of the tarn, but no such spot exists here.  Ransome once said, tantalisingly, that all the places in the books exist somewhere, but this he must have transported from another location.  Still, as readers will know, one of the primary attractions of Swallowdale was that it was almost impossible to find!

~

The following days held more sailing and walking with friends, and, given that the Lake District is one of the rainiest places in Britain, we got to the end of our trip astonished that we’d had an entire week there in September without any precipitation and, in fact, requiring the application of a considerable amount of sun cream!  We’d also had a splendid time exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction, between childhood and adulthood.

As we fastened the cover over Shingebis on her trailer, ready for the drive home, raindrops started to fall, and the entire journey thereafter was in a downpour: a curtain through which we passed as we left that magical world and returned to reality.

But we can easily go back again in the future.  Perhaps even just by picking up a book.

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Ye Olde Wordle

Rose and I have long enjoyed playing Wordle – we do it each evening after dinner, taking alternate lines, and then move on to do the same with Quordle.  (Quordle needs a bit more screen real-estate, so I recommend a decent-size iPad at least.)

Anyway, I was pondering the idea of more literary variations.  Suppose you had a Wordle where the only words allowed, both as guesses and answers, were in the Complete Works of Shakespeare?  Even if you’re well-educated, you would probably need a few more lines to solve it, but it might be fun!

I’ve done a quick analysis, and there are just under 3000 different 5-letter words in the Gutenberg plain text file of the Complete Works.   That’s more than there are in the normal Wordle game, though I haven’t stripped out proper nouns, so it’s probably a comparable vocabulary.

Glancing through them, though, I think there might be challenges.

When Henry VI says,

Her sight did ravish, but her grace in speech,
Her words yclad with wisdom’s majesty,
Makes me from wondering fall to weeping joys,
Such is the fulness of my heart’s content.
Lords, with one cheerful voice welcome my love.

for example, we know what the bard means, but he never uses the word ‘yclad’ anywhere else — I expect, frankly, he just invented it to maintain the pentameter — and I can’t guarantee that I would have guessed it before line six in the Wordle grid. I just don’t use ‘yclad’ often enough in day-to-day conversation.

So perhaps it’s a foolish idea.  

 

Instead, while we’re on the subject of words beginning with the letter ‘y’.  I shall content myself with pointing out an interesting fact about the title of this post, which is probably blatantly obvious to any linguistic scholars amongst my readership but, for the rest of us, might just help impress friends at the pub. 

When you see signs like ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’… have you ever wondered why it’s always ‘Ye’? Where does the ‘Ye’ come from?

Well, in fact, it never really was ‘Ye’.  It was ‘The’, but ‘TH’ was often written using the ‘thorn’ character originating in Old English, Old Norse and languages of similar vintage, now almost obsolete unless, I gather, you are writing in Icelandic.   A capital thorn normally looks like this: Þ, and a lower-case one like this: þ, but there are lots of variations, and in some scripts if looks more like a ‘Y’.  

A Wikipedia page gives these pleasing examples of Middle English abbreviations (and apologies, especially to those receiving this by email, if these don’t format well for you!):

  • Middle English that– that
  • Middle English thou – thou
  • Middle English the– the

With the advent of the printing press, a thorn character often wasn’t readily available and so a ‘y’ was substituted, as in this Blackletter example of an abbreviated ‘the’:

EME ye

And from there, it was but a short step to seeing signs wishing to convey a feeling of antiquity being written as ‘Ye olde…’.

 

 

 

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Hippy fruit

“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!”

Most of my readers, I’m sure, will be familiar with this question, but if you happen to live far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy, you may have trouble with the vernacular and so appreciate the helpful notes provided in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.

And if you don’t know why the towel is significant… well, there’s probably no hope for you. Better stick to your own planet.

Everyone else, though, will appreciate the importance of that most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, so why, I ask myself, did my iOS spellchecker have so much trouble today with the simple phrase ‘sass that hoopy frood’?  It offered me hippy fruit and hoppy food and generally had as much trouble as a Nutrimatic machine trying to make a decent cup of tea.

Surely, all computers should incorporate the works of Douglas Adams in their basic training?  Come on Apple, you’re missing a trick here, especially since Douglas was one of your biggest fans.  What did you use? The Encyclopedia Galactica, for heaven’s sake?

I’m pleased to say, however, that ChatGPT is an improvement, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian Siri in having some idea of what’s going on in the universe.

Result of asking ChatGPT "Hey, you sass any hoopy froods?"

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Who’s a pretty Polly?

As is generally well known now, ChatGPT and similar LLM systems are basically just parrots. If they hear people saying ‘Pieces of eight’ often enough, they know it’s a valid phrase, without knowing anything about the Spanish dollar. They may also know that ‘eight’ is often used in the same context as ‘seven’ and ‘nine’, and so guess that ‘Pieces of nine’ would be a valid phrase too… but they’ve never actually heard people say it, so are less likely to use it. A bit like a parrot. Or a human.

And when I say they know nothing about the phrase actually referring to Spanish currencies… that’s only true until they read the Wikipedia page about it, and then, if asked, they’ll be able to repeat phrases explaining the connection with silver coins. And if they read Treasure Island, they’ll also associate the phrase with pirates, without ever having seen a silver Spanish coin. Or a pirate.

A bit like most humans.

The AI parrots can probably also tell you, though they’ve never been there or seen the mountain, that the coins were predominantly made with silver from Potosi, in Bolivia.

A bit like… well… rather fewer humans. (Who have also never been there or seen the mountain, but unfortunately are also not as well-read and are considerably more forgetful.)

Since so much human learning and output comes from reading, watching and listening to things and then repeating the bits we remember in different contexts, we are all shaken up when we realise that we’ve built machines that are better than us at reading, watching and listening to things and repeating the bits they remember in different contexts.

And this leads to Quentin’s first theorem of Artificial Intelligence:

What really worries people about recent developments in AI is not that the machines may become smarter than us.

It’s that we may discover we’re not really much smarter than the machines.

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Ulysses

I mentioned to my wife recently that I was having another go at reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Rose, who is extremely well-read and knows it because her rather large collection of degrees includes an English Literature one, gave a monosyllabic response.

“Why?”

“That”, I replied, “is a question I ask myself with each page I turn.”

I need to tread carefully here, because I have some very good friends who love Joyce, and Ulysses in particular, but the book is most famous for dividing opinions, so I hope we can remain friends! Many of us are grateful, though, that Virginia Woolf was so dismissive of it, because it shows we are in good company:

“Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships…”

Now, I admit to not having got very far with it yet (though I have also read and heard recitals of various extracts over the years). But while there are some books where I will occasionally jump to the end of the page to skip a dull section, Ulysses is, I think, the first where I can get bored in the middle of a paragraph and decide that it isn’t worth finishing.

It’s not that I dislike a challenge in my reading. I adore Shakespeare and, I suspect, read more poetry than the average bear. I even like cryptic crosswords. But all of those give you some reward for your persistence, in a way that this, so far, has not.

I suspect that Joyce, like many influencers after him, had just realised, after some fairly lacklustre books like A Portrait of the Artist, that shock and divisiveness are the best ways to go viral. It’s just too bad he didn’t decide to make it enjoyable as well.

Many years ago, I saw a review of the 700-plus-page tome: “Man walks around Dublin. Nothing much happens.” You could make similar claims about, say, Under Milk Wood, but that is, in my opinion, greatly superior. And much shorter. I think I might have enjoyed and appreciated Ulysses as poetry if Joyce had kept it to, say, about a dozen pages.

D. H. Lawrence was marginally more forgiving than Woolf:

“Ulysses wearied me: so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental”

I would agree: it is very clever in places, and Joyce certainly gets top marks for originality, but that can be an overrated characteristic, I think, in literature as in music or art; sometimes there are good reasons why nobody did it this way before now!

So I’m going to make a comparison which probably isn’t often made amongst the literati: Ulysses reminds me of Austin Powers. I saw that movie soon after it came out — on a plane, I think — and it annoyed me because every fifteen minutes or so I would decide it was too stupid to waste my time on, and be about to turn it off, and then something very funny would happen. I would laugh out loud, and keep watching for another 15 minutes. In that way, I may even have made it to the end; I forget.

Ulysses, after pages of boredom, brings up something to make the corners of my mouth curl slightly upwards… and then goes back to obscure tedium again. I fear that ratio won’t be enough to keep me going as far as Virgina Woolf, who famously gave up on it at page 200. Most of us only have about 4000 weeks on this earth, and there are so many enjoyable ways to spend them that I doubt I will squander many more on Joyce. But we will see.

I’m reading an electronic version (partly because neither of us has yet deemed it worthy of the bookshelf-space a paper copy would consume), and e-books have the interesting characteristic of making it harder to tell how far through them you have progressed. But I’m going to suggest that most paper books fall into one of two categories. There are those where at some point you think, “Oh, that’s sad, I’m getting near the end!” and there are those where you think, “Good God, how much more of this is there?”

‘Nuff said.

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From the divine to the ridiculous?

I’m enjoying Remembrance of Things Past, but my expectation of completing the whole thing has been somewhat reduced by my calculating that it’s more than one-and-a-half times the length of the Bible.

Fortunately, Marcel Proust is a much better writer than God, but I fear that may not be sufficient…

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Twaintieth Century

After a hundred years in a vault, Mark Twain’s autobiography is soon to be published. Memo to self: remember to achieve something significant enough in your life that anyone will be interested in reading about you a century later…

It sounds, though, as if the renewed interest in him may be a mixed blessing, which reminds me of a little poem I learned as a child:

Lives of Great Men all remind us
As we o’er their pages turn
That we too may leave behind us
Letters that we ought to burn.

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