Sometimes there is a kind of poetry in the arrangement of objects in a landscape, not seen, fully, before the finger presses them into personal history.
The symmetry, the visual song, is seen later, as here with ancient rocks, weathered and waiting; the out at sea lighthouse; and the distant volcanic dome, worn down into a bullet by millennia.
The arrangement is not created, but taken, like a poor child arriving in a sweet-shop and being offered three…
©Stephen Tanham, 2020.
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We had arrived late in the day, on the CalMac ferry from Ardrossan. Dinner in the hotel had seemed other-worldly, as though we and the other diners had just begun a magical adventure whose substance was to be the exploration and understanding of the island of Arran.
The rain storm thrashed the tall windows, and we looked out at the darkening, still unknown world.
After the meal and wine, we put on our most waterproof clothing – meagre, now, in the face of this Scottish August storm, and went out into the night. Brodick’s quayside curved away into the darkness, symbolic of the work we would need to do to find…
©Stephen Tanham, 2020.
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You might not think it from the photo, but the rain was beating down when I took the shot. Tess’ pose gives a clue. She’s fed up, too…
It’s the end of August, for heaven’s sake. But Storm Francis is trying to exterminate everyone north of Birmingham…
For once, the photo is not about the collie… The subject is the faded ‘summer sign’ on the walls of the Mad Hatter cafe overlooking Heysham Beach. I’ve always been a sucker for these. They take me back to my ‘shell seeker’ childhood, when a trip on the train to the seaside was a rare and wonderful thing. Simple sentiments – like the sign – were gems of wisdom, and, having spotted them, my brother and I would run back to mum and dad to pass on the message…
They seemed simpler times…
The Mad Hatter cafe is closed. It gave up on the washed out summer about the middle of August. Some businesses can just tell when there’s not going to be a reprieve.
Other cafes higher up the street in the centre of Heysham village were open – one even letting dogs in for their owners to catch a socially-distanced hot tea and possibly a toasted tea cake, rather than die of hypothermia.
The rain never stopped, all afternoon… torrential; as the latest ‘summer’ beating from the dreaded Jet Stream conspired to drag every low-pressure system in the Atlantic over the north of England and Scotland to dump its load.
Driving home, tea and tea-cake keeping body and soul together, the weather man came on the radio. “I’m afraid the north-west of England is very wet,” he said, with genuine sympathy. They don’t often put that much emotion into the bulletins. Training, of course. Wouldn’t want us leaping off (wet) cliffs to end it all.
We made it home. I could barely see on the M6, there was so much spray. Tess, having spent the better part of two half-hours (either side of the cafe) running into the sea to retrieve her long distance floaty ball, was soaked with salt-water. Arriving at the house, I was still so wet I didn’t bother putting my supposedly waterproof coat back on. I just pulled the sullen collie to the outdoor tap and hosed her down in my jumper. There would be a hot shower, shortly… Once Bernie had stopped laughing at the state of us both.
The shell seekers would have had ‘crumpets for tea’. I think it’s Thai chicken soup… which, under the circumstances, will do nicely.
©Stephen Tanham, 2020.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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The Entered Dragon (4) : the world within
by Steve Tanham
I know these posts, so far, have been intense. The picture painted by Carl Jung and his Jungian successors of our linked internal and external lives is a detailed and vivid one. We began by looking at the Shadow, that suppressed ‘mind’ of parts of our psychological self (psyche) that have been pushed, by conditioning, society and personal choice, from our everyday lives. Censored might be a good word to describe their fate… or exiled, perhaps.
By way of a more gentle read, this post will set the scene for the space in which the relevance of Jungian thought is unrivalled in all of psychology – the Unconscious.
The Shadow lives in the unconscious, but so do many other energy patterns waiting to play their parts in our life’s story…
The unconscious is very much present in our lives, and might be said to ride alongside us, in quiet presence… until it interacts, often without our knowing. We think of such things as distant, as though there is depth to the place of the unconscious. In fact, we can easily see how close the unconscious psyche is to our ‘normal’ state by reference to a simple example. Imagine I am playing a game of tennis. I swing my arm back to take the forehand to win the point, but just at that moment, a family member calls to me from the side of the court. My conscious attention is diverted to this ‘high-priority’ interrupt. The relative is simply delivering an unfortunately-timed hello, so, smiling in acknowledgment, my alerted attention is relaxed.
But while the head turns to acknowledge the arrival of the family member, the arm continues its arc. In what seems like a fraction of a second, I re-engage my consciousness with the court to find the ball, bouncing inside the baseline and winning the point.
I nod, sheepishly, at the person across the net. The opponent may have grounds for thinking I am showing off! What’s really happened is that my unconscious, ‘shadowing’ me and able to take over from its normally recessed position, has helped my body to complete the desired action.
Have you ever been lost in an extended creative thought on a car journey home and arrived at your dwelling with no active memory of the last mile? It’s not an ideal way to drive, but our ‘autopilot’ has got us home, safely, once our primary attention wandered…
From these examples we can see that our initial ‘dark’ picture of the personal unconscious may be far short of both its capabilities and its intentions… To get the whole picture, we need to begin with Carl Jung’s radical view (for a psychologist) of the place of consciousness in the story of the universe.
Jung was a religious man in the widest sense, though he often ridiculed the actions of the church. Today, we might call him a ‘mystical psychologist’, but, back in the early years of the last century, mysticism was little known outside of academic circles. His professional work led him to see the unconscious as the real source for all human consciousness. In the unconscious, he saw the origins of our capacity for all awareness, orderly thought, reasoning and feeling. In short, that the unconscious was the original mind of the human species; a matrix of energy that took millions of years to develop a body, then a conscious mind – a stage very different from just awareness…
Jung saw this as a creative force at work in all nature. He envisaged every element of our complex consciousness being born in the unconscious before reaching for the full ‘light’ of human consciousness. Indeed, it might be said that the latter stage created the human…
Put another way, the vast unconscious ‘self’ of nature has slowly made a part of itself conscious. He believed that mankind had a unique potential to carry the evolution of the universe forward – such was the preciousness of consciousness.
Each of us has the capability of reliving the entire history of life and its associated ascent to self in one lifetime. When we do this, we connect with that which gave us life and that which can take us so much farther than we know.
To do this requires that mankind understands this vision – gaining power and inspiration from it; and reconciling the unconscious with the conscious. Modern society created science; and science, having given us so much, superficially, has, tragically and unknowingly, cut us off from the very practices which facilitated integration with the reservoir of the unconscious, branding them superstition… Many of them may have been so, but their origin and essence was from a much deeper wisdom than we commonly possess, now.
The plan for our individual potential in this lifetime is contained in the unconscious. We need to work with our own unconscious to realise this. In the course of that work, we will find a vast reservoir of energy and insight waiting for us, just below the surface…
Having shown in the first three posts the power of one element of the unconscious – the Shadow – to affect our conscious lives, we must now venture deeper into the map of the unconscious and its interactions with what we consider to be ‘us’. In this place of liminal energy, we will find keys to our future.
Next week, we will look at the nature of what Jung called ‘the inner life’, and explore more deeply the relationship with our usually quiet companion who is capable of winning our tennis point and driving our car…
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, this is Part Four.
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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We sat, in end of day repose
To speak of evenings drawing cold
And grass with moisture in its folds
And share our wine with crows
➰
One, bolder than the rest
Climbed high, as if to rise and reach
A silver phantom, caught in sun’s
Descending rays out of the west
➰
Within the moment’s crest and hiss
What thoughts, I wondered, passed
As pictures, sounds and smells
Upon the waning summer’s kiss?
©Stephen Tanham, 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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#ShortWrytz : The house by the river
by Steve Tanham
We’re often in Kirkby Lonsdale. It’s the perfect dog-walk for Tess, our collie, who loves to chase the ball in its riverside park, then sniff her way along the riverbank as we enter the town by the steep steps that lead to one of the best views in the county – Ruskin’s View.
This part of the Lune Valley was a favourite haunt of the artist Turner who famously painted this view.
The town is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 and used to be the only river crossing of the River Lune for miles around, making it an important meeting point and marketplace. The market charter was granted in the 13th century.
The history of the town is written in its buildings, which date back to medieval times. The old river crossing ‘Devil’s Bridge’ being the best example.
The majority of its 17th and 18th century buildings still stand, making a walk through the town like being on the set of a Jane Austen novel.
The town was a finalist for the High Street of the Year Award in 2016. Kirkby Lonsdale was voted as the ‘Best Place to Live in The North West’ in 2019
My favourite building is the Old Mill at the end of the Mill Brow descent. Devastated by the floods of 2015, the owners rolled up their sleeves, wrung out the carpets and started again. I always have to stop and photograph it, each mood is different. It’s located between the river and the sheer wall of the plateau on which the town is built, so the merciless river rises straight into its driveway when it floods.
Somehow, its the perfect symbol of everything that’s good about Kirkby Lonsdale – authentic and enduring. There’s a new multi-million pound house next door. The new house is beautifully designed, but the old mill exudes character by comparison.
I expect I’ll go on photographing it whenever the light or the season changes.
The River Lune, here, is also beautiful. Always different- sometimes very violently. It’s a place you can stand and marvel that so much liquid can flow past without ripping the world apart.
It’s great to photograph in black and white, too – particularly close-ups.
©Stephen Tanham, 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness.
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The Entered Dragon (3) : beauty and the beast
by Steve Tanham
Continued from Part Two
The dream continues…
We are frozen, the dragon and I. He cannot be seen, as he is mirroring my every move, behind me. My fingers explore the tip of the spear, the only movement left…
I press the sharp tip into the skin of my right thumb. There is a slowing of time as the ancient metal pierces the flesh. Then I can feel the tiny warmth of blood dripping from the wound.
“Don’t…” comes the hissing red voice from behind my head. “Please don’t…”
The holding of values must be ranked as one of the highest achievements of civilisation. From the perspective of religious morality, each human is born with a challenge: to choose which side of their nature to supply with attention and therefore energy – the man or the beast.
But the Jungian psychologists discovered it was by no means that simple…
Within mankind are represented all the kingdoms of matter and life. We are made from supposedly inanimate matter at the atomic level. Biological life, based – apart from viruses -entirely on cells, is an organisation of that matter into self replicating structures. Over billions of years, these became plants, then animals, then humanoid bodies.
Sophistication through evolution produces higher levels of creature intelligence, but we do not lose the supposedly lower aspects of our physical being. As the brain and mind mature, the choice of internal government is ours, just as it is within society.
Something is trying to express itself through increasingly higher levels of organisation. Concordant with that should be an external level of civilisation that mirrors the sophistication of the inner, creative urge.
But we experience, at both the individual and societal levels of our lives, continuous challenges to our ideas of society. These cyclic challenges are not based upon forces separate to those in the individual human psyche. What we see in darker ages, such as the one we are living through, is a collective externalisation of the shadow within each individual being.
Examined in this way the legacies of deceit, populism and authoritarianism are simply an externalisation of the darker side of our psyche. Within darkness like attracts like, for its nature is weak and it seeks collective strength against what it knows to be superior yet repressing higher intelligence.
“I’ll show them!”
This is the true arena of events within which we as a species have always struggled. It may be necessary that each ‘third generation’ fights once again for the values of good, truth and vision. Values, like any organic fruit, decay over time when the source of their vitality ceases to pulse.
The Jungian model of the psyche, which includes the shadow, is of great value in understanding what happens within an individual life and within the life of that person’s country.
It would seem that humans as a species are forced to live within a continuous paradox. Individually, we seek to better our circumstances and provide for our families. Collectively, our animal-derived focus on success and individual supremacy produces a society with an increasing lower tier who struggle to survive in a medium where the nutrients are syphoned off to furnish luxury at the top.
‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.
Can Jungian thought suggest answers to a life of paradox? In looking at this we come face-to-face with our own past. The age of science has worked wonders for the physical side of our lives, but has emasculated folklore and tribal practices that were exactly designed to balance the individual and collective forces of chaos generated by a suppressed and unheard shadow.
The answers lie in the functioning of consciousness. We have seen that what we call the subconscious or unconscious is simply that from which we have withdrawn attention. Few people, for example, study their dreams, and yet dreams are the other half of our lives. This does not mean that we should fret and go without sleep, simply that a parallel sleeping consciousness – a kind of night eye – exists within our being which can gain great insight into the truth of what is happening to us in our day world.
This night eye may be much closer to the creative forces of nature than we have ever envisaged.
We cannot hope to examine the shadow of a society without first understanding our own. To do this we must know it and then make peace with it. Once we have achieved that the power of its friendship is immense.
Does this mean that we have to release its chaotic wildness into our world? Thankfully not. The processes of the subconscious do not differentiate between our waking and unconscious existences. The way we regain the conscious and positive friendship of the shadow is to ‘dance’ with it. Dancing can be any creative act which allows it to exist in an un-persecuted state. Actual dance, theatre movement, poetry, visual art are all examples of a kind of ritual which opens the harmonic door to the other half of our being.
Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud parted company because their understanding of the unconscious became fundamentally different. Freud considered the subconscious to be largely concerned with the energies of sex. Jung saw the subconscious as the gateway to the spirit… and the history of non-dogmatic spirituality would agree with him.
The temples of the ancient world were focussed on loosening the intellect and giving the ‘other half’ of us life; and opening the gate to spirit in the process…
Next week, we will look at the nature of the paradox in which mankind lives, and ask if we must be eternally trapped between its twin polarities, or whether their inescapable presence is the gateway to something else…
Other parts in this series:
Part One, Part Two, This is Part Three
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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My Own Trumpet
by Steve Tanham
I’m not very good, nor comfortable, blowing my own trumpet…
Writers on the internet know this feeling well: we are urged to promote our presence, yet our inner nature knows what sort of people talk about themselves all the time…
This is particularly true if your main activity is of a teaching nature within a spiritual discipline. The road to understanding the ego – the lower self – is one of self-observation, with many cringing and disbelieving moments as the truth unravels.
Sue Vincent, Stuart France and I created short versions of our spiritual history for the Silent Eye website some time ago. We were aware there were more tech-savvy ways of doing this, but lacked the expertise to stand ourselves in front of a video camera and have ago. I remember from my ‘corporate’ days in the IT industry how difficult video was to work with. It’s the kind of medium in which a lack of experience and professionalism shows up immediately… and people switch it off; because we’ve all got used to the well-produced product.
When it comes to sound, it’s easier, but, again, wholly reliant on the experience – and sympathetic depth – of the person doing the interview. The human voice conveys a million nuances, all of them detectable by the listener in ways that filter through into our consciousness as ‘mood’ or ‘quality’. The mind has to learn to condense at an early stage; if it didn’t, it would literally go mad.
Enter Gary Vasey. Dr G. Michael Vasey, to be precise, for he holds a PhD in geological sciences. He’s one of those ‘polymaths’ who’s good at everything, yet manages, beneath his occasional Yorkshire gruffness, to remain kind and warm in his interactions. He’s the co-author, along with Sue Vincent, of The Magical Hexagram. His other blogs and books cover magic and mysticism… and he has more than a passing interest in ghosts and ghost stories.
Like Sue, Stuart and myself, he has followed a variety of mystical and magical paths in his life. He lives in the Czech Republic, but likes to come back to visit his mum and siblings when he can. Gary has attended a few of our ‘Mystery in the Landscape’ weekends, and knows us well.
Gary is also a singer/songwriter and a skilled sound recordist. The era of the Podcast has been key to his ability to promote his songs. Recently, Gary has widened his Podcast work to include interviews with some of the people he’s got to know over his several decades in the world of the magical and mystical.
Gary had already created a podcast interview with Sue, and wanted to do one with me as the founder of the Silent Eye. A short time ago, we convened across a Skype link to carry out the interview: subsequently turned into a podcast in his studio. To be honest, I was a little apprehensive, which sounds daft when I look back on the hundreds of talks I have given to audiences of various sizes over the past thirty years. I needn’t have worried.
Within minutes, and with little prompting, I was relating my early years of being victimised by the local church and school headmaster in the tiny village where I grew up; then passing on to a childhood in a Rosicrucian family, before becoming a leading figure in one of many organisations that eventually led to meeting up with Sue Vincent and Stuart France and the creation of the Silent Eye…
But why read it, when you can make a cup of coffee, put your feet up and spend a gentle and undemanding half-hour listening to the podcast? With, hopefully, an occasional smile, the odd tut and a wry thought of ‘I know just what that feels like…’
If it’s not a very human and unpretentious story, then I’ve got it wrong.
Those of you into jazz will have spotted that the opening photo is not a trumpet at all, but a saxophone. It is mine. I’m not very good at playing it, yet… but it’s on the list….
Below is the link to the podcast… And please tell your friends if you think they’d be interested. Thank you!
The links:
Direct link to the Podcast with Stephen Tanham (37 mins). The link is in the first line of the text click here
Or past this link into your browser.
Podcast with Sue Vincent: click here.
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2020.
Stephen Tanham is a founding Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, which offers a not-for-profit home study programme covering three years of inner and outer exploration of the self, leading to a deeper knowledge of our personality and the links to its more powerful originator, the Soul.
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Human: Dont get any ideas!
Misti: About what, Father?
Human: About diving on my feet!
Misti: it’s the way they wiggle…
Human: It’s called fear!
©Stephen Tanham 2020
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The Entered Dragon (2) : dancing with shadows
by Steve Tanham
This time the dream is different. I know the dragon is there, but can’t see it. But I can see the heavy spear on the ground in front of me…
I bend to pick it up. Something moves behind me, something heated and red, but no matter how fast I turn or twist, I can’t get a glimpse of it.
Until I touch the tip of the spear… then, I feel the presence behind me still itself.
In triumph, I will my body to turn… but it won’t. My hand is held rigid to the very tip of the spear and my body flexes out in immobility behind it.
“Mmmm?” says the dragon, behind me, revealing itself by sound, alone. But now there is a feeling of consideration, of weighing up the options, though they are few. The immediate threat is gone, but so is the ability to change anything.
My fingers explore the tip of the spear, the only movement left…
——-
He was about a foot taller than me. Rugged and athletic, but dim. He hated that I wasn’t…
It would have taken three of us to subdue him, but that wasn’t an option; not at age twelve. He was captain of the school football team and he and his mates made our lives miserable. In the large playground of the secondary school he loved to slam into you from the side while you weren’t looking, causing muscle damage and a big bruise and resulting in having to limp to the bus stop to get home that evening.
And he loved to spit in your face… I remember that, vividly. Somehow that was worse than the pain.
He was a thug, and, I suspect – unless he got into the armed forces – remained that way. After I got transferred to a grammar school in the next town I never saw him again. On my final day in the old school, the form teacher organised a football match for all the tough guys and let the rest of us go early. I suspect they had been tipped off about plans to beat me up on that last journey home.
Unsurprisingly, I was conscious of what civilisation was from an early age. It was a place where the majority stopped the thugs, where there was respect for the individual being different, as long as they contributed to the society. It was a place of caring and consideration. In short, it was a place where something invisible called ‘values’ mattered. They didn’t earn you money, though money could buy you a place to live where the risk of living near to a large thug was minimised.
When I got a bit older, my uncle, who had emigrated to California, spoke about the American’s right to bear arms. He said it helped the good guys defend themselves and the neighbourhood. I asked what happened when the bad guys had guns, too.? Was the answer that the rich folks had better guns?
If we’re lucky enough, rich or poor, to be brought up in a loving home, then we have a series of expectations placed on us at an early age. “Nice children don’t to that, Stephen!”. The love of our elders binds us to adhering to this code. Eventually the code of expectation locks itself into our lives and becomes how we live… mostly.
The problem is all those wild things we came into the world inclined to do are still there… down in the supposed vault where we keep this ‘other side of us’ locked away. A metaphor of light and dark is used both in spirituality and in early psychology – the time before WW1 when Carl Jung introduced his ideas on the ‘self’ to the world. Dark forces were certainly at work, then…
Carl Jung’s ‘Analytical Psychology’, to give it its full name, was the first modern science of motivation and behaviour to recognise the significance and breadth of this dark force in our lives – and in our societies. The name he gave it was the Shadow Self... usually known as just the Shadow.
Our reasonable assumption might be that, given we had locked the bad bits of us into our internal vault, never to be seen again, we might expect they would function as prisoners. And this they do – ragged, desperate and deadly. But, instead of being hidden ‘down there’ they have found a way to be ever present in our lives, hidden in plain sight, so to speak.
To their immense joy, there is no prison at all, just the light and dark. The light is the light of understanding created by consciousness. The dark is the withdrawal of that consciousness in a deliberate act; like the horrible childhood practice of ‘sending someone to Coventry’ – cutting them off from conversation and acting as though they weren’t there. It’s not just children of course. Its a standard management technique when a senior bully wants to get rid of or undermine a subordinate…
‘Subordinate’ – there’s a name from the dark side if every there was one…
But back to our prisoners who aren’t really in prison, just ignored. By repeatedly learning to take away consciousness and interaction from them, they become ‘dark’. We learn to make them disappear.. except they are still there. Moreover, they are the key to a vast reservoir of our energy, and our ‘aliveness’ and so our world becomes paler and thinner, until, usually in middle age, we begin to question the validity of how we have lived our well-behaved lives.
But what of the dark ones?
If these dark creature were weak, it wouldn’t be a problem. But they’re all a foot taller than we are and like spitting in our faces… And they’re not at all passive.
The prisoners know that if they were to appear as we knew them when they were sentenced, they would be locked and bolted down even harder. So, they use a technique where they project themselves onto our world instead of onto our faces. They are so powerful that they can take over another person in our lives and wear them like a mask…
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. We create our world in the first place. Those flavours of courage and fear, like and dislike, anger and pleasure, all go to colour a world perceived as ours. The fact that something untended in our depths has the capacity to change key parts of that ‘willed’ world is entirely logical.
This is all very scary… And so it should be, though we are working towards a deeply positive ending to this.
The above process of conscious and subconscious works within each individual, but more powerfully within our carefully controlled and regulated societies. To counter this requires the fine tip of a heavy spear… And a different way of viewing the self-created dark ones.
In the next post, we will examine the nature of these matured dark creatures and the essential relationship they have with our emotional, mental and spiritual health…
Other parts in this series:
Part One, this is Part Two
©Copyright Stephen Tanham
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit teaching school of modern mysticism that helps people find a personal path to a deeper place within their internal and external lives.
The Silent Eye provides home-based, practical courses which are low-cost and personally supervised. The course materials and corresponding supervision are provided month by month without further commitment.
Steve’s personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com.
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I am crow, on summer’s breeze
Glimpsed in love with beating wings
Within the bright sun’s leaving.
➰
My feathers’ strong and hollow shafts
Are filled with air you breathe
And softly lit in our reflected passion.
➰
Remember this when dark and sodden bird
Looks out, short day’d from tree of Ash
Asking nothing of your walk of logs to fire.
➰
Raise then your shuttered gaze
And for a moment hold my own
Before you pass into your tree-flamed cave
➰
No-one sees behind the crow’s black looks
For writers do not live in winter trees
Freed here, in heights of soft blue union.
➰
Write it narrow now, before we both forget
As autumn winds engage our throats.
And winter’s ice, our memories.
➰
©Stephen Tanham 2020
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit school of mystical living.
Email us at rivingtide@gmail.com
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We were walking Tess, our collie, along the estuary shore at Arnside. We had seen the stripey sails of the boats from the local sailing club and wanted a closer look. There was something odd about a passing seagull. I smiled, sure of my evidence for once…
“Tide’s going out,” I said.
My wife, Bernie, responded immediately. “Nope…”
She was born in Heysham, across the bay from the estuary here. Living by the sea throughout her childhood and into her teens gave her an uncanny ability to ‘just know’ the state of the tide.
But I had a secret weapon – logic! The seagull that had caught my attention had floated by on the water backwards; headed towards the open sea, but facing inland.
Case closed, I reasoned.
But fellow blokes will know that to be so certain of anything in the presence of one’s wife is an insecure business… I glanced at the seagull, stealthily, not wishing to give away my source of certitude. It was still facing inland but being carried out to sea. No doubt about it – I was right!
“Look at the edges of the water,” she said. “There, the water is flowing the other way, the outflowing river in the middle channel is fooling you..”
Just then the klaxon went off… There are dangerous tides in these parts. The klaxon warns anyone using the estuary that Morecambe Bay’s vast and swift tides had turned and were racing inland – in this case, sweeping up the edges of the estuary at Arnside. During high tides, there is even a ‘bore’ – a small, single wave that continues up the local rivers for some distance.
Crushed, I turned to look at Bernie, who was looking at me and smiling. Beyond her, the mystery seagull had acquired a chip. We’d just had chips…
©Stephen Tanham 2020
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