Blea Tarn

by Pat Holt

Have you ever watched Countryfile – the BBC’s long-running TV series about the British countryside?If so, you will know that the programme usually opens with a breathtaking sequence of aerial shots, mostly taken in the Lake District. Alan and I used to watch this each Sunday, and I invariably gasped at the sight of a lone swimmer making his way across a beautiful lake. There were no other people to be seen; no boats, no buildings, just a perfectly unspoilt tarn, surrounded by mountains.

Every week, I said how wonderful it would be to swim in this glittering expanse of calm water. Each time, Alan nodded patiently, knowing how much I love wild swimming.

Early in 2014, in response to viewers’ requests, the Countryfile team decided to reveal the names of the locations used for the opening credits. So at last we knew the name of the lake: Blea Tarn, in a remote area just off the Langdale Valley.

Fast forward to 30 June 2014, and we were in the Lake District, staying at Rosthwaite in Borrowdale.

With some difficulty, Alan had planned a visit to Blea Tarn.

We were up at 5am and by 6.45 we were on our way by taxi to Keswick, where we caught a bus to Grasmere. There we met another taxi driver, who took us along miles of steep, narrow, winding lanes. He remembered the crew making the Countryfile film sequence and knew the area in detail, so he was able to leave us at the roadside in an out-of-the-way spot, quite close to the tarn.

It was still early in the morning and there was no-one else around. Bees were buzzing among the wild flowers, in the warm sunshine. Blea Tarn was still, quiet and even more lovely than on TV. We were both delighted.

Hastily, I changed into my swimwear, and struggled barefoot across the sharp shingle at the water’s edge. Before long, I was swimming out to the middle of the lake. I could hardly believe this was really happening. Alan was laughing, taking pictures and movies too.

The water was cool and the gleaming surface held a perfect reflection of the Langdale crags and the blue sky. The only ripples were the ones I made myself.

Alan had literally made my dream come true! This is one of the most wonderful gifts I have ever been given.

We were reluctant to leave this gorgeous place, but eventually we headed back to Borrowdale, crossing Stake Pass and walking along Langstrath Dale – an energetic walk of about ten miles.

I will always look back at this day as one of the best of my life.

Equality?

by Jenny Galuschka

The County Council had decided in its wisdom that each of its social services local offices should employ a voluntary work officer to recruit volunteers and work with the voluntary sector. North Dorset resisted as long as it could, but in vain. The Thatcher government had convinced itself that volunteers and voluntary organisations were an inexhaustible free resource and deepest blue Dorset was unlikely to see things otherwise.

Now here I was, on this late July morning in 1983, arriving to begin my tenure. As I walked through the heavy outer doors, one of the social workers was strolling down the stairs, obviously an emissary from his peers.

“You know, we don’t want you here,” was his greeting.

“Yes, I was told,” I briefly replied, and turned away from him to ring the bell for the receptionist. I think he slunk back upstairs.

This little episode says everything about why I never wanted to be a social worker. The interventions at their disposal focus on the individual rather than the institution, system or culture and they almost never have the resources to achieve all that they would like to do.

After a brief chat with the area director, I found myself allocated to one of the two teams, and in my first team meeting. At this time, my ignorance about what social services departments did, and why and how, was profound to say the least. Team meetings didn’t help a lot, because at that time they consisted mostly of a description of new referrals and their allocation to the different professionals in the team.

As well as social workers, there were occupational therapists, assistant occupational therapists and one officer who specialised in working with people with sensory impairments. The occupational therapy staff and the sensory loss officer could offer items of equipment to aid mobility and activities of daily living, as well as access to other agencies’ services, such as home adaptations and guide dogs. What others had to offer was, to me, more nebulous. Social work was apparently judged by whether the client had “moved”, although how that was judged or measured was far from clear. (We say “service users” nowadays, because the word “client” had acquired such stigma.)

In public, we talked about promoting independence and enabling people to live in their own homes but it didn’t take an awful lot of intelligence to work out that this was a politically correct way of saying that we wanted to spend as little as possible on residential and other support services. This is not to say that individual workers were less than caring. Their requests for volunteer support showed that they thought with compassion and imagination about their clients’ needs. I was gradually being accepted as having something to offer.

In the autumn of 1984, I began the final half-credit course of my honours degree, “The handicapped person in the community”.This, together with the huge effort to implement the Mental Health Act, 1983, brought into sharp focus the fact that everything a social services department did was either required or permitted by an Act of Parliament. Anything else was “ultra vires” (beyond our powers) and hence illegal.

The exercise of our powers, however, was capricious. The attitude to inspecting a playgroup was laughably lackadaisical and beyond counting toilets never extended to suggesting that they could offer more or better activities. The registration of childminders was reactive, and child care for working mothers was virtually unobtainable in rural areas.

The same attitude applied to the registration of disabled people, the publication of information for disabled people and the duty to provide accessible premises for disabled people. When I pointed out that a disabled person would not be able to get through the front doors of the area office, the admin manager told me “Oh, we don’t get many disabled people here.”

The result of this laid-back attitude was that there was no strategic plan to identify and meet needs – this was before Community Care Plans became mandatory – and families were often in crisis before another agency triggered a referral.

The perspective of my colleagues was, “You can’t change society, so you have to change the individual to fit into society.” (The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act clearly meant to change society!)

This meant that they really didn’t like my hero, Vic Finkelstein, then a tutor in disability studies at the Open University, who even then was saying things like his 2001 statement that “society is disabling us and therefore it is society that has to change”.

His argument was that a medical model of disability located the problem in the individual and caused it to be seen as a personal tragedy. This model failed to take account of the fact that changes in attitudes and/or environement and resources could remove any barriers to an impaired person having a full and useful life. In a 2001 lecture he pointed to the examples of Admiral Lord Nelson and President Franklin D Roosevelt. Neither is ever referred to as a disabled, even though the first was a partially sighted amputee and the second unable to walk. (He suffered a paralytic illness at the age of 39.)

People with impairments, according to Finkelstein, become disabled because society oppresses them, This was a very challenging message for professionals with only a narrow range of interventions at their disposal, and neither the skill nor the inclination to engage with other agencies that should be helping, but weren’t.

At the level of community development, where I was able to carve out a professional space, promoting the well-being and independence of disabled people was also challenging; the younger adults (as opposed to older people) were all so different in their needs and aspirations, and the children and teenagers, despite the 1981 Education Act, were often away at residential schools during term time, or so severely disabled as to need very skilled medical and nursing care.

It wasn’t until I moved to a job at County Hall that I discovered that the County Council did have a service that addressed inequalities of opportunity in employment. This brought together both local and central government support. The local input was from employers who were willing to give disabled people a chance, and Dorset County Council staff who liaised with them. The central government support came from the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) which helped people feel less worried about giving up the long-term rate of Incapacity Benefit, and so being worse off if their bid for independence failed. DLA was not means tested and was not affected by employment.

There was also an employment support allowance, paid to the employer, which could be tailed off as the disabled person’s productivity increased.

The numbers placed each year were consistent, but seemed to me disappointingly small. Then there was a huge breakthrough for a group of mostly men, who learned IT skills at their day centre in Weymouth, and went on to get jobs and in some cases set up their own companies. I never did learn the full details of how they broke through the anxiety-and-discrimination barrier because the centre manager was very bitter about having “worked himself out of a job”, and so not available for interview. The men themselves may have been exceptional – I rather think they were – but unfortunately their example surely acted as a deterrent to other managers who might have enabled  other groups of people to acquire marketable skills, rather than serving as an example of good practice.

It did however give me an idea. It occurred to me that, contrary to the current views of the British Association for Supported Employment, it must be exceptionally difficult for some disabled people to move directly from never having worked to full time employment. I thought we could help by breaking this down into smaller steps which could include any mixture of training, work experience, voluntary work, job coaching and mentoring. With support from the European Social Fund, the council’s Community Employment Service, led by Mike Powley, (later made an MBE for his work in this field) set up a scheme called “Stepping Stones”.

This was both successful and popular, even with people who did not progress all the way to full time employment. For some, voluntary or charitable work represented an improvement in social opportunities and quality of life. And of course, we celebrated those who went all the way. Mike was made an MBE in 2003.

To return to Finkelstein’s social model of disability, this had become widely accepted and taught by the time of his death in 2011, and could hardly be contested in austerity Britain, But even when this horrible era of cuts and anti-disabled propaganda ends, equality will not just automatically come. We will have to work at it. To fail to plan for that is to plan to fail.

After the Rapture

My post on the facebook page of the Churches Network for Gypsies, Travellers and Roma read:

"Please does anyone have a photo of a Light and Life gathering that they would be willing for me to use in the book? The copyright has to belong to you. Thanks!"

Within a few minutes, this was the reply:
"Only this one, taken just after the rapture!😂"

Divine Providence

by Terry Hurst

Back  in 1997 I was working as a sales rep.One day I was driving towards Slough, nothing out or the ordinary just another day. Then to my surprise, someone said, "Turn right". I was alone in the car, the voice said again, "Turn right", so I did.

When I’d done so, the voice said, "Take the next right", so I did. I pulled over and turned the engine off.

I wondered to myself, “Am I hearing voices? Am I going dinelo (mad)?” The voice answered and said, " Turn the engine on, go to the end of the road and I will open your eyes for you, do not be afraid"

I felt calm yet excited, I turned the engine on and drove to the end of the road. I soon came to a bridge that went over the motorway. I crossed it to be led down a narrow hill. As looked down I couldn't believe my eyes...... about 200 trailers (caravans) a very large tent similar to a circus tent.
I parked up in the field realising this was a Christian event. In fact this was my first of many meetings with the Life and Light Gypsy church.

I stayed for two hours and had lunch with a few of the pastors.

One thing that convinced me that the Lord had indeed spoken to me was on seeing a converted transit van with a couple inside, When I went and spoke to them, I recognised them instantly. Three years earlier when I was the London north west district president of the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs I took a group of teenagers in a transit van to Southsea. We had a roof rack loaded with stuff. As I parked up we we were a bit worried in case it all got stolen.

A lovely couple kept an eye on it as I took the teenagers to the fair. Yes a lovely couple in a converted transit van!

Little did I know that we would meet in a field years later

God bless.

The Priest's Tale

by Reverend Roger Redding, MBE,
retired Chaplain to Gypsies, Travellers and Showmen

My introduction to the Gypsy Traveller world began in 1996 when I was selected for the post of Team Vicar in the Chalke Valley in the diocese of Salisbury. The parishes bordered the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset. I had been working in urban areas where there were large housing estates and vast parishes so arriving in rural Ebbesbourne Wake came as quite a shock. After about a month I began to wonder why God had chosen me for this isolated post. However it was at this point that I was invited to officiate at my first Romany funeral.

Mr Cooper had not travelled for many years but had bought a piece of land above Salisbury where he constructed a small site for his family to live.

I was invited by the family on the evening before the funeral to see the body into the family home where the deceased would lie in state. The family were in deep mourning and there were many relatives all gathered to pay their respects. I was ushered into a room where Mr Cooper was lying and was asked to pray for his soul and his family also.

I prepared to leave them to their watching when a Romany lady addressed me with the words—“You haven’t had much to do with Travellers have you vicar?” In my heart I heard a voice saying to me, 'That is all going to change from now on.'

Like most Traveller funerals it was huge with around 400 people attending and masses of wonderful flowers.

The family requested that their great friend Eli Frankham, a Gypsy counsellor, should be able to speak about Mr Cooper as a Travelling man. This was the first time that I had come in contact with a Traveller activist. Eli told me something of the spirituality of this much loved man. He was very generous of heart and if you admired anything that belonged to him he would insist that you take it. I am a Franciscan, so this kind of spirituality was of great interest to me. I began, over the following months to be drawn to studying this fascinating nomadic tribe of people.

One of my parishioners told me that there were Travellers who came to camp on the downs above Alvediston and that she would call me when they arrived. On new year’s day 1997 I received the call from Laurie Bissett to tell me that Dave Rawlings and his family had arrived on the drove road.

Romany musician and his wife
from an oil painting by Roger

I drove up just a little apprehensive as I had not encountered itinerant Travellers before. I approached a man who was cold shoeing a horse outside his Gypsy vardo. I asked if he was Dave Rawlings and he answered yes, I am but who are you? I told him that I was the local vicar and he said, “Good, my daughter wants to get married.”

This extraordinary day was to be the start of a wonderful friendship. Dave opened the doors into the Traveller community and introduced me to some amazing people.

Within a year of meeting the Rawlings family I had spent time living on the road with them and become involved with the Great Dorset Steam Fair.

As time went by I came to know of the real suffering of the Travelling people and also gained an insight into their deep spirituality.

I remember Dave saying to me once, “ You know the story in the new testament about the kingdom of heaven having many mansions? Well I look at it like this, I am one of those mansions, a dwelling place for God’s spirit.” That to me was a very special insight into Traveller spirituality.

The thread of nomadic spirituality runs right through the bible form Abel to Abraham, Moses and to Jesus himself who was the ultimate nomad.

I often felt that I was being ministered unto rather than being the one ministering.

It has been a great joy to live and work with my adopted nation and to share in their joys and sorrows.

I would like to offer you God’s blessing as you continue to read on.

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
The rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Traditional Gaelic Blessing

Dokumenti!

by Esmond Chorlton

The police car, lights flashing, seemed to come out of nowhere. I was concentrating on trying to avoid becoming terminally lost in the maze of roads that is Katowice, a big industrial town in the south of Poland and the last thing I was going to be doing was speeding. They had already caught me twice for that. I was nabbed on my second visit in 1991 and then again in 1996. It was now 1997 and I was determined to avoid the hat trick.

In my defence, it is not easy to tell what speed you should be doing in Poland. There were no motorways at that time and you spent most of the time travelling cross-country on long roads with hundreds of little villages strung out along them. Outside of villages you can travel at 90 kmph (about 56 mph). At the entrance to each village or town there is a sign with a little urban silhouette and the name of the place, usually featuring an unfeasible number of ‘z’s and ‘k’s. You immediately have to slow down to 60 kmph (about 37 mph). Just as well there’s a sign because it is not always obvious that you are in a Polish village. There could be acres of fields with only a house or two, then maybe a shop, more fields, a few more That works fine - unless of course there is a hay wagon parked in front of the sign, or you are distracted by a combine harvester lumbering towards you taking up 90% of the road or the village drunk doing the same, or you are just plain mesmerised by the unending rolling countryside. Then you can find yourself hurtling into town at a death defying 56 mph and there are no indications you should be going slower. They don’t do lampposts a lot in the Polish countryside.

They do radar though. Back in the 90s the Polish state had hit upon a new way to fill the national coffers. They found villages with edges that looked just like the identical open fields on the other side of the small sign. Then they stationed a couple of police armed with a radar gun carefully out of sight round a

bend of behind a tree. They would point their radar gun at the passing traffic and if you were over 60kmph they would jump out and wave a little lollipop shaped stick at you. This was their signal to pull over while they extracted heavy on the spot fines from you.

The first time it happened to me I hardly spoke any Polish at all. ‘Hello, goodbye, I don’t understand’ and ‘Please don’t feed me any more food’ were the limit of my bilingual ability. If you’ve ever had Polish hospitality you’ll know why I needed the last phrase. The cop who had stopped us immediately headed over to my wife, Chris in the passenger seat.

He gave an almost comical double take when he realised she had no steering wheel, in front of her but recovered himself and sauntered round to my side. I wound the window down. He said something to me that is a mystery to this day so I smiled sweetly at him, selected the appropriate phrase and gave him my best Manchester Polish.

“Nie rozumie, mate”. I said, I don’t understand. I could see he was struggling not to arrest me on the spot for mangling his beautiful native language but he said something else equally mysterious. Chris is bilingual so she started to tell me what he had said until I gave her a warning jab with my elbow.

“Still nie rozumie mate.” I said.

“Dokumenti” he said. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand that, so I opened the glove compartment and gave him the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else I could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as he was to me.

He looked at the passports and realised he could not even pronounce my name. Oddly enough I understood him when

he handed me the documents back and told me to get out of his sight before he changed his mind.

The second time was a lot more difficult as the cops were a shady looking pair and we didn’t trust them one little bit. They wanted 300 zloty on the spot. Not only did we not have the cash, we suspected it would end up in their pockets rather that the Ministry of Transport’s coffers. They offered to drive one of us into the town to get some money. That would have been a bit of a feat on a Sunday night before cash machines had hit Poland. Chris proceeded to do the most magnificent roadside strop in Polish, slapping her forehead and beseeching heaven, ranting on about how her father was waiting for us on the other side of Poland, he had fought the Nazis for the likes of them, and this was all the thanks he had to have his daughter ripped off.

One of them looked at our passports and noticed that he could understand one word, Chris’s Polish middle name ‘Jadwiga’ . He nudged his mate and showed him saying “She’s Polish”. This seemed to change their attitude and we ended up giving them what little cash we had on us and thought we had got away with it lightly.

Anyway, this was now and I was sure I wasn’t speeding; in fact, I was driving very carefully through the Katowice maze looking for the turnoff for Krakow. The police car window opened and a little lollipop was waved at me. As I pulled over I wondered whether it was the car that was the problem. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time but we had wanted a new car. The best option for us was a new shiny black Lada Samara. That was fine, it wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it was reliable and we got 80 odd thousand miles out of it before we traded it in. For a Skoda.

Anyway it wasn’t the lack of trendiness or the reliability that was an issue here. The newly constituted Russian mafia had found that Poland was a vast repository of free spare parts for their national car, the Lada. Free because they stole the cars

and just drove them over the Russian border to be broken up for parts, or sold on. The border was only about three hours away from where we were but we knew that our car would be very unlikely to be nicked simply because the steering wheel was on the wrong side. Not because that would make it easily identifiable but because we had seen the horror on the faces of Poles at the thought of driving a car with a steering wheel on the right. We were fairly confident that horror would be matched by their Russian neighbours, however larcenous.

Driving an English car around Poland at the time was sometimes a hazardous occupation. No one had ever seen a right hand drive before and the kids just staring open mouthed through the back window of the car in front of you could be very distracting. You could almost hear their parents telling them not to be silly; cars didn’t have steering wheels on the right. If Chris was checking where we were, people would jump out waving because they thought the driver had the map spread out all over the wheel while she read it intently, completely ignoring the road. Whole bus queues of heads turned as one as we drove past. Drunks swore to take the pledge.

So, Russian car thieves didn’t really cause us any sleepless nights I wasn’t in the best state to meet the police. We had been staying with Chris’s cousin Teresa and her husband Zbiszek in a little town in the South West of Poland for a few days. They had taken us to a new bar that had just been converted from a shop. We had a couple of beers and I had wanted to go to the loo. Chris insists I was tipsy. I insist I wasn’t but that might be because I had absorbed the Polish attitude that drinking anything that isn’t vodka doesn’t really count. The tiny toilet had been built into the corner where the stairs were. As I opened the door I found that they had tiled the whole place, floor, walls and ceiling with white tiles. I have a slight visual disability and find it difficult to judge distances in some circumstances. This was one of those circumstances.

There was a step up into the toilet and as I took it I failed to see that the newel post from the stair case above projected diagonally into the corner of the room. They had helpfully tiled the sides and bottom of it so the whole thing just blended into the walls and ceiling for me. The tiles met in an extremely sharp ceramic point that scored across my forehead leaving a four inch gash which immediately started to pour blood. I couldn’t have been in better company to injure myself. Chris’s cousin is a nurse and her husband was an ambulance driver at the time. They gave me immediate first aid and then drove me straight to hospital where they fast tracked me through A&E and introduced me personally to the doctor who stitched up my forehead without delay - with bright blue thread. It was certainly eye-catching. I looked like I’d just come off worst in a razor gang dust up.

Although I was not in the best shape to meet the Polish police, the same could not be said for Chris. We had been on diets before the holiday and were looking particularly svelte. Also, we tended to dress up a bit for Poland because people dress more smartly in the towns than they tend to in England. There is a Polish saying “Pawn everything. Show off.” What we didn’t realise until we got to Poland and the family pointed it out, was that Chris bore a fairly close resemblance to the wife of the Polish President. We had wondered why people looked at her a bit strangely but we kept getting really good seats in restaurants so we weren’t looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The other person in the car was my father in law. After my mother in law died in 1995 we took him back to Poland each year to see the family as he still had two sisters alive. Like a lot of his generation who had years of poor nutrition before and during the war particularly, he had dentures. He had just got a new set before we set off for Poland and they were causing some trouble. As soon as we arrived he asked me to go to the chemist. He was a native Pole and Chris is bilingual but somehow it was me who had to go to the chemist – it was good practise for my Polish I was told.

So I checked in my dictionary, went to the chemist and later proudly handed him a nail file and a tube of the Polish equivalent of Bonjela. After that, every so often on the back seat of the car while we were driving across Poland, he would take out his denture, nail-file off a bit that was causing him gyp, squirt it with Bonjela and stick it back in. I tended to use my side mirrors a lot.

Chris’s dad also had macular degeneration so although he did have some peripheral vision he was registered blind. We had a difficult journey across Germany. When they originally designed the autobahns, they were only wide enough for the odd Panzer column heading to the border. They were completely inadequate for the constant stream of massive lorries, motor homes, BMW motorbikes and the odd Trabant or Wartburg left over from before the Wall came down, that now trundled down them day and night. It was becoming difficult for the Porsches and Mercs to travel at 150 mph down the outside lane. This was clearly unacceptable so that year the Germans decided to put an extra lane on their autobahns. This entailed long delays while they blew up bridges, cleared away rubble, put in contra flows, closed off lanes and generally put the whole autobahn system in chaos just as we were crossing Germany from west to east. It also entailed, every time we got stuck in a jam, a loud voice coming from the back seat “Why we no go?”

Of course he could not see so he didn’t know why we had stopped. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that every car as far as I could see was stationary, neither did I. This was made worse as traffic started to move because it is an iron law of driving that if you are in queues, every other queue moves while yours stays stock-still. For some reason you discount the times that you are moving and they are not, but that was little help when the next question was “Why they go? Why we no go?” The first time I just said “I don’t know” and ”We’ll catch up in a minute” but somehow it seemed inadequate around the twentieth time and it certainly didn’t do anything for my already high stress levels. In fact they were only relieved by the fact that the exits on German autobahns are all marked ‘Ausfahrt’; a source of childish but constant amusement.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Katowice. The police car pulled up in front of us and a grim faced policeman got out and strode towards us. With a careful look at the passenger side he came to my window as I wound it down.

“Dokumenti” he demanded. No ‘prosze’ or ‘pan’ I noted, the polite please and sir that you get everywhere in Poland. Chris handed me the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else she could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as they were to his colleague years ago. My Polish was a bit better though. “What is the problem” I asked him in imperfect but understandable Polish – well everyone understands ‘problem’, it’s international even in my lousy accent. He didn’t answer but continued to riffle through the hieroglyphs on the pages we had given him, pausing only to peer into the car to compare the pictures in the passports with our guilty looking faces. I asked him again “Jaki jest problem?” He looked at me with mild disgust and said “Nie ma problema”, strode off back to his car and took off into the traffic without so much as a backward glance , or look in his mirror as far as I could see.

I turned to Chris, a bit shaken and said, “What the hell was that all about? I wasn’t speeding, why did he stop us?” Chris looked at me strangely and said “Why did he stop us? You mean why did he stop a mafia car with its steering wheel on the wrong side being driven towards the Russian border by a desperado with a massive slash across his forehead stitched together in bright blue thread, with the President’s wife apparently in the driving seat but reading a map while an old bloke files his teeth in the back seat shouting ‘Why we no go?’ I really can’t imagine.”

.

Connections

by Clare Fisher

I love how things connect, don’t you? Late summer, nearly autumn. I was in Southern France with my dear friend Sally. She and husband Andy live in a hamlet of some 100 souls, called Hounoux, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their home is atop a knoll, and from the gardens you look down on the tawny sun-bleached landscape – for forty miles towards the Med to the east and round to the rise of the mountains, far to the south. We were chatting on the lower terrace of their suntrap of a garden.

Birds are my passion so I usually have my eyes on the skies, particularly here at Sally’s where all sorts of exotic birds come to visit – golden orioles, spotted flycatchers ,buzzards and sparrowhawks galore, and if I’m lucky,bee catchers with their turquoise, orange and lime green plumage. Sally indulges me and rejoices with me when we spot someone unusual.

So she was equally excited when, “Oh look Sally, to the east! That’s one big fella – likely a raptor of some kind.”

“Might be one of our eagles. Andy says he sees them a lot, but I always seem to miss them.”

It held the air. A distant form, flowing closer.

Then, “Look, look Sally, there’s another, no there are one - two - three – four - FIVE of them!”

The distant forms revealed themselves. Definitely eagles, but what sort?

“More Clare. There are more! Andy! Andy! Come and look!”

In all twelve eagles flew from the eastern haze into our view. They rode the air currents, not a wing flap between them. All too quickly, they followed the flow round our knoll on their migration to their over-wintering grounds in Southern Spain. But before we lost them from sight, their turn to the sun revealed them for what they were. The sun caught their ‘landing lights’ and we knew them for Booted Eagles. Booted Eagles have a patch of white feathers on their shoulders, and as they fly, this startlingly white patch flashes in the sunlight and hence the name ‘landing lights’.

Much rejoicing in Hounoux. Eagles, Eagles! A significant bird. The king of birds. He catches the sun, he rules the skies. His legends match with King Arthur.

Twelve. Twelve! On returning home I set about that number. Twelve: an abundant number, the first of the abundant numbers, for its factors (2 6 3 and 4) add up to more than its cardinal value. Twelve: a number which signifies completeness: the twelve months of the year; the twelve signs of the zodiac in so many cultures. Twelve is also significant in many world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism. In antiquity the Twelve Olympians formed the principal gods of the pantheon; the Norse god Odin had twelve sons. King Arthur is said to have subdued 12 rebel princes. (And much more of course.)

And then. I belong to a Druid Grove in the New Forest and I was enthusing about my sighting of twelve significant birds, when lo and behold, it turned out that the grove was about to celebrate its twelfth year. Would I do a write up for the newsletter giving my personal connection to the twelve eagles and the twelve years of the grove.

So at the Winter Solstice 2016 the Grove had completed its own twelve year cycle. Winter Solstice: twelve years before, first light of Sunday 27^th December 2004. The newly nascent grove gathered to celebrate its first ceremony at Burley, up the hill and into the trees there: the founding group of druids opening the way for the twelve years to follow, each susurration of the seasons, each turn of the year marked and honoured.

I looked up that date to see what the natal chart foretold for the grove that day in December, little dreaming what I should find.

Energy. Force. Magnetism. Power. Vitality. A burst of energy had been travelling for 50,000 light years and on the morning of 27^th December 2004, as the grove celebrated its first ceremony together, that wave enveloped the earth. In that brief instant, came a wave of power equivalent to the light from our own star, the Sun, shining for half a million years. The source of the power was a magnetar: SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way, 50,000 light years away. A magnetar, I learned, is a vast star, collapsed and condensed, which was, nevertheless, not quite massive enough to become a black hole. Magnetars have a magnetic field 1000 times more powerful than ordinary pulsars. When their crust twists and the magnetic fields attempt to realign themselves, it is like our tectonic plates shuddering and moving. But on a cosmic scale. The death zone of their tsunami, the ensuing shock wave stretches for several light years (!)

In this force field our grove had its beginning. The energy burst came from the region of Sagittarius – the archer. The flight of the arrow projecting our minds towards new horizons, expanding our awareness, entering new environments, absorbing new facts and points of view, expanding our consciousness and becoming aware of the basic laws of nature. We are forever on a quest to search for meaning, with faith in our ideals and holding always to our fundamental principles.

Visualise the bow shape on this cosmic scale arcing from the magnetar to Earth: how like the Rainbow Bridge, allowing energetic shifts and reality switches. This arc may have been in existence for but a moment in space-time, but its power remains for us to access as we seek entrance to another world.

The media reports of events surrounding Magnetar SGR 1806-20 relate its destructive power and danger – it knocked out satellites and electronic systems on Earth – but I found this event amazing, exciting, affirming. While those with other view points might quiver and quake at the power and might of this magnetic burst, I like to think we can celebrate our place in the Cosmos and align ourselves with the wonder of nature’s forces.

Connections. I love them.

With thanks to Google and Steven Forrest: The Inner Sky.