Fire from the Madding Crowd

In England, holiday time draws to a close. Not just for the denizens of desks but for thousands of others who after the last Bank Holiday of the Summer at the beginning of this week, now face the long run downhill to Christmas.

Endings and beginnings, starts and finishes. The dawn of September can so often seem like a sad conclusion to the lazy, hazy days of Summer although I've discovered this year that I'm not the only one who feels a certain melancholy even after the passing of the longest day back in June, which seems so long ago already. Of course, strictly speaking, it's not over til the fat lady sings, or should I say until around the 21st of the month when the autumnal equinox really prepares us for the mists and mellow fruitfulness to come.
This year though, unrelated to weather or almanac, but intimately linked with mood and feeling, it seems as though the summer stealers have had a field day. The horrific events of July 7th and their consequences robbed us of some of the joyous highlights of the best season of the year, and even London's glee at securing the 2012 Olympics was violently blown apart by mindless maniacs intent on disproving that two wrongs don't make a right.

Even now, on September 2nd as pupils and students fill their backpacks with harmless pens,pencils and books ready for the return to a term of mind-planting, the merciless fools who would water seeds of hatred and maim and kill with the same innocent-looking bags are allowing their festering manifesto to find outlet again. This time it's through the posthumous release of a video supposedly recorded by one of the 7/7 suicide bombers. Foreign secretary Jack Straw is wisely treating this latest affront to deceny with the scepticism it deserves.

Meanwhile, 4000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, the richest and most powerful nation on Earth somehow seems rendered impotent in the face of the natural disaster which was Hurricane Katrina. The scenes on the news pictures these last 24 hours almost defy belief: can this really be happening in the land of the brave and the home of the free? What freedom is it that fails to bring thousands the basic necessities of life- food and water- for days on end while the federal government gives every impression of being totally unprepared for the devastation that ensued? Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico are hardly unique, yet the poor souls (and many of them are economically impoverished even in good times) who are now witnessing death, devastation and utter lawlessness on streets that once rang to the music of jazz have no voice left now to sing the blues, only breath enough for tears.

But New Orleans has jazz, it also has soul. Somehow in the midst of the latest apocalyptic events to engulf a small corner of the globe, the song of hope and joy can still be heard over the clamour of anger and desperation. Music is a universal language born as much in adversity as celebration and my hope and prayer is that New Orleans and its people will rise again from the miry pit of the 2005 floods with hope and a new song and, somehow, life from death.

Death's pitiless face has put in so many appearances this week, both in actual events and in memory. In Baghdad, hundreds died not from the usual horrors of insurgent action which have become so commonplace in Iraq, but from a stampede caused by the mad effects of a vicious rumour. These were pilgrims, Sunni Muslims endeavouring to celebrate one of their most holy festivals and ending their lives in a grim jumble of bodies and limbs. Once again, the sacredness of life has been stolen by the mindless actions of a few, just as it was for hundreds of precious, innocent little ones a year ago this week in the slaughterhouse of a Beslan schoolroom. From the ecstacy of celebration came the agony of destruction. Scores of young minds untutored in the horrific excesses of the so-called human race were brutally assaulted literally and psychologically by the bloody hand of terrorism once again.

How can people ever recover from these horrors? Can any mind, let alone the gloriously inventive,imaginative, creative powerhouse of potential which is the brain of the under-18 ever live and love again when life robs them so cruelly of what should be their birthright, a normal loving home and the security of schoolroom and family?

Remarkably, because we are made in the image of God, we can and do recover from even the most unimaginable of horrors. Events like we have seen this week, this season are not the place to launch into hunts for theological answers, as if these could be found like the treasure at the end of the rainbow. They are instead the time to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, where the compass needle points to love. For everything, there is a season. A time to laugh, a time to cry. A time to weep, and a time for every purpose under Heaven. This season of awfulness will have its end. What is sown in sorrow will be reaped in joy. Man wherever he lays his head will find rest and restoration.

It was with these thoughts in mind that earlier in the week, I sought to make the most of my last leisure of the summer, or at any rate a few brief days of respite from the 9 to 5. I certainly chose one of the best weeks to have off from the daily run up to Oxford Street, as the temperature on Wednesday topped 32 Celsius, or 90 Fahrenheit in old money. My brother and I chose that day to seek our fun in the sun down in one of my favourite English counties, which some say is the most beautiful of all of them. Dorset was our destination for a day out at the annual GREAT DORSET STEAM FAIR, which Matthew has been attending for many years but I have not had the chance to get along to before now.

After facing the usual expected though relatively minor hold-ups of the South's motorway system, we got to our destination at Tarrant Hinton around lunchtime, just in time for a very welcome pint of the sponsor's brew, Badger Best. Tanglefoot, their other justly famous product, is not the stuff for a lunchtime session, tasty though it is but rather strong at 4.9 per cent alcohol. Who should we just happen to encounter in there but a contingent of our local stationary engine buffs who were spending the week there. I'd say given the fact there were over seventy thousand on site that day, the chances of that happening were almost as improbably as Matthew bumpting into our cousin and his son at the same spot a few years ago!

The Great Dorset Steam Fair is quintessentially English and all the more a tonic to a jaded mind and body for all that. It's a reminder of our ingenious past,from the nation which managed to harness the elements by combining water with the black gold of coal and oil to produce the multi-amped mobile megabeasts which are the traction engines. Or rather, the road locomotives of Burrell, Fowler and Foster et al, not a firm of office-bound solicitors but the champions of mechanical power whose finest works have been preserved or restored for a new generation to enjoy more than a century after they were first assembled.

The fair is also a reminder that we are, still, essentially a nation under the plough. As a teenager, I found it hard to understand all the prophets of doom who complained about how much land was being lost to housing and other developments. The English countryside at harvest time, at any time, is still a wondrous sight, and the fields and hedgerows of Dorset are surely among the finest of examples. I've had a soft spot for this county ever since boyhood holidays on its coastline, now a World Heritage site as the Jurassic Coast. Years later, though struggling through literary criticism was a chore I'd rather ignore, the school set texts of Far from the Madding Crowd and later Return of the Native, only re-kindled the flame of desire for this historic corner of Wessex which Thomas Hardy so immortally capture in his works.

Somehow, there is something about these places and events which is an escape from the perils and the trauma of modern life, as restorative as a pint of liquid nutriment which is the brewer's masterpiece. It's something which we do so well, and with two heritage weekends giving the chance to visit some of the country's finest homes this month, maybe there's still something to sing about in September.