It had been a strange few days of visiting old haunts where we used to go and play when he was just a young goat. The safe bits of dangerous places like the vast open sands of the Bay at low tide, the first few yards into the labyrinth of caves beneath the hills, the hidden valleys of the moorlands.
Somehow the reality of the past disappears when your parents die and the visible, living, connection is gone. The past then becomes just memory. There are friends and children but these have come later, they are not rooted in your live but more like offshoots and branches. It is odd that the past seems to me now more like a book and not a film or photograph album. It is written in text; a text that has to be re-imagined every time the book is opened, so unlike a collection of pictures the images are never the same. So the visit to Lancaster was not just about visiting old familiar places but more about visiting places for the first time and catching fleeting glimpses of something vaguely familiar and half forgotten, but never being quite sure about what it was no matter how hard I tried to recall the memory.
The final walk was on the hills behind Clougha Pike on the way to the Ward Stone. This is all grouse moor and was once the largests area of open country in England until an unsurfaced road (no planning permission needed) was made to allow the grouse shooters to reach the hides without having to walk more than a few feet from their Range Rovers. But the road and the WW1 bunker like line of hides still only covers a small part of the moors, and the view remains pretty much the same.
To the south lies the bowl of the Trough of Bowland and surrounding fells, to the north the Loon Valley, while east and west lie Ingleborough and the Pennines and the glittering expanse of Morecambe Bay.
We reached the watershed of the ridge, but didn't continue the last few hundred yards to the Stone, we sat a while instead and watched the sun set across the Bay.
This morning I read an online piece by Naomi Wolf about the growth of surveillance technology. The article was pretty much what you would expect from Naomi Wolf but I was surprised by the number of comments in favour of greater surveillance and expressing a fear of petty crime and, of course paedophiles. Paedophilia and sex crimes apart. (I cannot help but think that these have been deliberately politicised rather than being considered as psychological problems, so it is hard to discuss them objectively.)
I have come to feel that the petty criminal actually plays a valuable role in any healthy society. It is not pleasant, to say the least, to be mugged, burgled or threatened, but neither is it pleasant to break an arm or a leg playing rugby, hang-gliding or any other sport or activity with a risk of physical harm, or to experience any other nasty incidents that will inevitably befall us at some time in our lives.
A tolerance for a low level of petty crime is part of the price we pay for freer and less repressive government. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the poorer communities suffer a disproportionate amount of petty crime. I argue that it needs to be democratically spread throughout society.
No one should be able to afford to live in a community without an aggressive drunk or disaffected teenage graffiti vandal. I somehow feel that it is from putting up with these people that we learn the virtues of tolerance and simple kindness.
They sometimes need support and encouragement too.
So once a week go out of the house and leave the front door open and a can of spray paint on your doorstep.
I am less sure about the glorification of the big criminals and am certainly against romanticising the Kray Twins or Al Capone and such like, but political 'criminals' are different and one of my heroes has always been Sabate (El Quico) and despite everything I do have a soft spot for Salvatore Giuliano; though I suspect he was more a Jaques Mesrine than a Robin Hood.
Learning Cambodian is a slow process and I have only just managed to remember the words for but and train. I had thought that learning the word for train was a waste of time as there are no railways in Cambodia, but then I read that a new line of Royal Cambodian Railways may be opening in 2013 and came across the Bamboo Railway and discovered norries.
So for all the trainspotters who read these pages I end with this video.