The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 7

Posted on 30/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

He has the feeling he’s staring back in time, or at another part of time. And, as he stares, the white, blown carcass of a moon-like fish – a tench – stares back from the reed bed, its ripped flesh waving in a dense current.

Will Eaves – Murmur

Lockdown Day 7

She recalled, for the first time in years, she once read something about the shipping lanes of the estuary. Apparently, the main shipping channel between Parkgate on the Dee estuary and the Irish Sea was somewhere around here. For two hundred years it was a busy route; Cromwell supplied his army in Ireland along it and, in 1742, Handel sailed to Dublin from here to attend the first performance of his Messiah. But the sands of the estuary have shifted and now Parkgate was all but land-locked. The memory surprised her as it had been, until this moment, long-forgotten. How come I can remember all that, even the date?

‘Time is doing strange things,’ said the voice in her head.

 

 

Excerpt from Swimming Against the Stream, ©Bobby Seal
Picture of the Dee Estuary near Parkgate: a former riverside quay left land-locked by the encroaching marshes, ©Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 6

Posted on 29/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.
Pink Floyd – Time

 

Lockdown Day 6

She drifted on, absently moving her arms and legs in a gentle dance. Despite the water all around, Julie’s lips felt parched and dry and her head ached with the dazzle of the sun. She suddenly felt very vulnerable out here in the estuary. If she got cramp or just became too exhausted to stay afloat, she would die. Or what if a boat hit her? She didn’t exactly have a beacon on her head to warn them off. She gazed listlessly and saw, or perhaps imagined she saw, a twin-masted sailing ship cutting its way through the deep-water channel heading towards the open sea. Its prow sliced open the grey water to reveal the white that was within, leaving a wake of mixed grey and white particles behind it. She bobbed up and down for a few seconds as the wash hit her; it was a strangely pleasant sensation, she decided.

 

Excerpt from Swimming Against the Stream, ©Bobby Seal
Picture of Dee Estuary near Thurstaston, ©Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 5

Posted on 28/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

The river is within us, the sea is all about us

     T.S. Eliot – The Dry Salvages

Lockdown Day 5

Julie is one of the lost. Sitting on the train to West Kirby, alone and enveloped in her thoughts, as ever, she wonders if she is in fact already dead. It’s not the first time that this thought has occurred to her. What if there was a moment years ago when she passed on from this life but was not paying attention at the time? There were plenty of opportunities for the life within her to be snuffed out, could it be that she had unknowingly grasped one of them?

Excerpt from Swimming Against the Stream, ©Bobby Seal
Picture of Dee Estuary at West Kirby, ©Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 4

Posted on 27/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

So the lockdown continues and all my river wanderings must either come from memory or take place in the virtual world.

My other daughter, the middle one of three, is self-isolating too. She is pregnant and has been advised that she must do so. Luckily for her she has a job where she is able to work from home. She still goes running too, even at seven months pregnant. She was momentarily confused by the people coming out of their houses to applaud for the NHS as she ran past last night: ‘I’ve clearly lost all sense of date and time as I thought people were mocking me on my run. Yeah, I was thinking, alright I’m slow and big but I’m trying!’

I mentioned in Lockdown Day 1 that I’d almost completed the first draft of a book about a river journey from sea back to source. In subsequent lockdown days I might share some extracts from the draft here. Of course I do risk becoming like one of those trailers in the cinema where the 90 seconds they show you turn out to be the only good bits in the film.

Lockdown Day 4

 

Which brings me to the haunting complexity of London’s buried rivers. They’re not lost, not at all. Just because you can’t see a thing, as Ed Dorn points out, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. The rivers continue, hidden and culverted as they might be, to flow through our dreams, fixing the compass of our moods and movements. The Walbrook, the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, the Effra, the Neckinger: visible or invisible, they haunt us.

Iain Sinclair – Swimming to Heaven: The Lost Rivers of London

 

Picture of culverted River Clywedog at Wrexham, © Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 3

Posted on 26/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

So now, with my youngest daughter back from university, we have three of us at home under lockdown. But my wife, as a key NHS worker, still has to go out. Her patients need her, which is why she and all of those others carry on, despite putting themselves at direct risk of catching the virus.

Lockdown Day 3

My older daughter and her family live quite close and have been self-isolating for two weeks now. Just over a year ago, when they lived in the UAE, her youngest child had a stroke at the age of just two years. They moved back to the UK and my grandson has been having some amazing care from the NHS for the condition which caused his stroke. Four weeks ago he had an operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital to increase the blood supply to his brain and, hopefully, prevent any further strokes.

The effect on them as a family has been profound, from a very comfortable lifestyle in the UAE they now live in a small rented flat and survive on my daughter’s earnings as a supply teacher. Even that erratic income has now ended as they have been advised to totally self-isolate for at least twelve weeks to protect her little boy.

And yet the human spirit is so resilient: my daughter is enjoying home-schooling her two children and told me on WhatsApp the other day how lucky she felt to live near open countryside where she and the children can get out to enjoy their daily fresh air and exercise.

Her daughter, my grand-daughter, was six last Friday. We visited and stood several metres distant in the yard outside their flat while she opened her presents. They went inside then for cake and games, without us. At bedtime she told my daughter that it had been the ‘best birthday ever’. Yesterday, when I delivered some supplies to them and I spoke to the kids who were at the first floor window, I noticed that my grand-daughter had stuck a rainbow picture she had drawn and coloured to the kitchen window facing outwards with the message ‘We Are OK’ written across it. It is this spirit that gives us hope for the future.

If I close my eyes and let my mind wander, I can step outside our present cares and walk the wild Cairngorms with Nan Shepherd:

Here and there in the moss a few white stones have been piled together. I go to them, and water is welling up, strong and copious, pure cold water that flows away in rivulets and drops over the rock. These are the Wells of Dee. This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.

Nan Shepherd – The Living Mountain

 

Picture of River Alun near Rhydymwyn, © Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 2

Posted on 25/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

When Boris Johnson evokes cod-Churchillian wartime metaphors in place of any semblance of wise leadership when formulating our national response to COVID-19 and Emmanuel Macron repeatedly declares that ‘we are at war’ with the virus, we know we’re in serious trouble. ‘War’, both real and metaphorical, is a useful flag of convenience for the  leader who is high on ambition but low on principles to hide behind. A way to strengthen his or her position and undermine any opposition; to make a grab for unassailable power while scrupulously maintaining the status quo for society as a whole.

But with queues and shortages and restrictions on travel it does sometimes feel that we are on the home front in some not very distant war. The impact on my own family circle has been enormous, and I am sure that is reflected millions of times over throughout the world.

Lockdown Day 2

 

My youngest daughter managed to get back from university just ahead of the lockdown and sees no prospect of going back before October. Most of her UK friends had already left but, of those from overseas, some are stuck in this country with little prospect of a flight home, while those who did make it have no guarantee they will be able to get back even when the university reopens. Worst of all is the situation for a young woman from my daughter’s course who is stuck in a third country and neither able to travel to her home nation nor back to the UK.

Some words from Aidan Andrew Dun, the Voice of King’s Cross, to console our hearts. Just a snippet, but take care, his words are strongly brewed:

Into the paradise of the wasteland he plunges.
The Fleet River sings of her pure genealogy,
her ancient sources in the seven springs of Kenwood.

Aidan Andrew Dun – Vale Royal

 

Picture of River Dee near Broughton, © Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 1

Posted on 24/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

In that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.

Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude

Rivers have always played an important part in my life. I’ve lived near them, walked by them, photographed them, written poetry about them and, in the case of a particular river and a journey to its source, I am close to completing my first draft of a book about one.

Despite the title of this project being The Flow of Time, I find the suggestion that the flowing of a river is a metaphor for the unfurling of time is a little too simplistic. Time does not progress in a strictly linear fashion. Indeed our human the notions of time, suggested Albert Einstein, are illusory. Time is flexible; it is a relative concept.

However, the ebbing and flowing of water, its branching out and coming together again, has long been used by writers and other artists to explore time, the cycle of life and our individual and collective memories.

Lockdown Day 1

So now, with this country and a large chunk of the rest of the world in lockdown, I’ve had to abandon The Flow of Time as the ongoing photographic project I originally conceived. However, as a river-obsessive, I have a large back catalogue of river pictures and a stock quotes about rivers,  many of them about rivers and time. Making use of these. I will continue the project in another form.

In my first sleep
I came to the river
And looked down
Through the clear water –
Only in dream
Water so pure,
Laced and undulant
Lines of flow
On its rocky bed
Water of life
Streaming for ever.

Kathleen Raine – The River

 

Picture of River Dee near Farndon, © Bobby Seal

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The Flow of Time: An Important Message

Posted on 23/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

My name is Bobby Seal and this has been my blog for over eight years. I use psychogeography as a tool to interrogate urban and rural landscapes and a range of artistic responses to such places. I work from home and share a house with a frontline NHS employee and, by the nature of her work, we are resigned to the fact that she will catch the COVID-19 virus sooner or later. Equally, it is likely that I will catch it too.

Other than my wife’s essential work and her home to work travel, we are both now self-isolating, in effect acting as if we already have the virus. We are doing this to protect our family, friends, neighbours and people in general, particularly the more vulnerable members of our community.

It saddens me that, for the time being, I can no longer spend time with family and friends. Nor can I do many of the things I enjoy: going to the theatre, cinema, libraries, exhibitions and live music. I have had to put my voluntary work on hold to protect my colleagues and our clients and may even have to end my morning run, despite the streets being pretty empty at the time I go out.

The Flow of Time is project which excites me. I started it a month ago and it is due to continue for a year in total. However, central to the project is a week-by-week photographic record of a particular place, a bend in the river, and the thoughts and feelings that visiting this place provoke in me. However, to reach this quiet bend in the river, whichever direction I approach it from, I  have to pass through often quite crowded public outdoor spaces. With sadness, but to help protect others, I have decided to suspend this project for the foreseeable future.

River Week 1

The Flow of Time will, however, continue in another form in the next few days, so please keep visiting my blog to catch up on how that is going. In the meantime, if you or any member of your household has any potential COVID-19 symptoms or are you  in one of the vulnerable groups, as defined by our NHS, please exercise strict self-isolation. Meanwhile, everyone else needs to practicing stringent social distancing.

Let’s all look out for each other. Keep healthy and keep safe. With love.

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The Flow of Time: Week 4

Posted on 17/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

Watching the water flow past a bend in the river. The same place, the same time of day, every week for 52 weeks. A year in the life.

Week 4

Week 4

The shops are stripped of all essential goods, the streets are quiet and the hospitals wait expectantly. Do not move, do not mix; stay at home and await further instructions. Ignoring all this, keeping her distance, the river flows ever onward.

Before the stream comes the spring, before that comes the aquifer, before the aquifer the rain, before the rain the cloud and before the cloud the sea. Forever circulating, the whole thing a constant cycle.

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

Langston Hughes – The Negro Speaks of Rivers

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The Flow of Time: Week 3

Posted on 10/03/2020 by Bobby Seal

Watching the water flow past a bend in the river. The same place, the same time of day, every week for 52 weeks. A year in the life.

Week 3

Week 3

 

A gloom of gathering cloud – I blink to adjust my eyes to the fading light. Slowly I turn away from the sodden grass of the source and make to start my journey back to the village. As I walk I feel a drop of rain striking my head, and then another and another. Looking up I see a dark cloud passing over, west to east. I smile at the cloud, but it does not look my way.

I’ve never really held with this notion of tracing a river from source to sea. To understand a river one must take as one’s starting point the place where it ends, and then wind backwards to where it began: a spring, a rock, a cloud. Only then will one come to realise that the start and the end are one and the same.

 

I carried my dead in a net, a clattering catch of bones, of promise, of might-have-been

Katharine Norbury – The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream

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