FLIGHT, SECRET SOCIETY, POSSIBLE LOCATIONS FOR RETREAT
[OR DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF HOME?]
If you fly from Edinburgh to terminal five Heathrow you’ll first swing west towards Glasgow and the Clyde river, darting out its tributaries in to the north West and up towards Loch Lomond. You can see the tenements as they spread out like arteries on the built landscape – you can even see the great western road too as it makes its way in to the sun. Before long though your altitude lifts slightly and the clouds before you are your new turf, thick and bulbous as if they were a floor for walking on: the plane then heads due south with an easterly wind taking you over Anglesey, Snowdonia and the forest dunes and beaches of Northern Wales. The rock pools and wild horses are too small for the naked eye to see from this height but you know they are there: it was only last year you walked upon those very beaches listening, watching and breaking away at speed for every sound that was made – you explored those beaches every nook every cranny and found nothing but retreat.
Snow tipped peaks then take you beyond to the Irish seas, to more land mass and a city or two still left to visit – they will always be there though, there is time for that. On the opposite side of these peaks hidden from view and masked by insurmountable height lies a retreat, a retreat from morose endurance: a retreat in to mildness, sublimity and naked comfort. This retreat you look at in an in-flight magazine as an alternative holiday destination bent upon ‘finding one’s soul’. This magazine is in your hands as you pass over Wales and head further south towards Bristol, Bath and Oxfordshire. The picture in the magazine though spells California, a Pacific bowl state that seems so far away, yet your aircraft could take you there in a flash if you had sway over the pilot. It is time you seduced the pilot then, or time that you let the hills roll from your head and accepted your real destination.
South Sheffield is predominantly steadfast as its height faces south and slightly east in to the downs of North East Derbyshire. It has its very own rosy red nosed and pot-bellied form of freemasons, who use pigs in annual meetings to relinquish older, no longer needed, members of their secret society, making room for new ones. The other half of the pig is then sold to the family they choose to approach a year after for use in ceremonious duties – if a purchase is made the head of the family is considered for membership the following year. The group retreat in to secrecy and withhold out of date ideas about justice and servitude: their houses are often too big for them - or get too big when their wives either die in time or leave them to cider driven ruin - old rooms without locks are rendered useless, dusty without any lasting function. The society holds its annual get together on a weekday for no other reason but to affect the performance of its members at work (or during retirement activities) the following day. This is a test for if they cannot ignore their pickled state and ‘carry on as normal’, they are dismembered just as the pig is cut in to its many named pieces for consumption without afterthought. It is a well known fact that the group meet every year in early March, it is known to them that this is a well know fact, therefore the location of their meeting changes with each year. Cider, in the form of patronage is sourced from the very northern tip of the west country, and, brought back by the gallon, is the water of choice for this well seasoned bunch.
Occasionally, if the chosen family cannot afford to buy or refuses to buy, the group sell the other half of the pig to whoever will pay the most for it. These are people who are apparently not chosen, just people who name the highest price – it usually goes for around one hundred pounds. Around a year ago upon my return from retreat in Anglesey I was staying with family near to Sheffield, I bought half a pig in its many fractional guises from a man in the local pub. They say the more you pay to take the meat off their hands the more they reveal about their society. What is written above is all that I know.
I begin to think of retreat, rooms for retreat, other sides of an earth for retreat, pages in books for retreat, Derbyshire downs for retreat, unfathomable mountainous lands for elevated retreat, the mind as retreat, the home its bounds and well practiced ritual of pseudo-housewifery as secret retreat. Secret retreat: lack of function without reason habitual avoidance as retreat. Retreat is also wholeheartedly fictional: these landscapes we explore and the names we learn to then navigate them, become something of film sets built on location. In these film sets we ramble, climb, swing, swim and jump from rock to rock – in them we find our ideas discordant with anything fabulous. Instead they are as still as the deer and her family of calves, naked beneath the pylon across the field, as you hide among the grass like a actor acting to hunt.
